In The Desert

It was an hour before dawn, and Tyson was kneeling on the floor of his
tent, doing something to the body of a sick man. He had turned the narrow
place into a temporary ambulance. Dysentery had broken out among his
little troop; and wherever there was a reasonable chance of saving a
man's life, Tyson carried that man from under the long awning, pitched in
the pitiless sunlight where the men swooned and maddened in their
sickness, and brought him into his own tent, where as often as not he
died. This boy was dying. The air was stifling; but it was better than
what they had down there among those close-packed rows, where the poor
devils were dying faster than you could bury them--even in the desert,
where funeral rites are short. And as he stooped to moisten the boy's
lips, Tyson swore with a great oath: there was no water in the tin basin;
the sponge was dry as sand, and caked with blood. His own tongue was like
a hot file laid to the roof of his mouth. The heat by night was the heat
of the great desert, stretched out like a sheet of slowly cooling iron;
and the heat by day was like the fire of the furnace that tried it.

He went out to find water. When they were not interrupted by the enemy,
he might be kept at this sort of work for days; if it was not this boy it
would be another. The care of at least one-half of his sick and wounded
had fallen to Tyson's charge.