The officer--for such Fred deemed him to be--smiled grimly, but made no comment upon this speech.
"You must be taken to the hospital in the city, where they will set your broken bone," he said. "Meanwhile you will pardon the discourtesy of covering your face."
A word of command was given, and a light cloth laid over the reporter's head. He was then placed gently upon a stretcher and carried on board some kind of a vessel. Before long Fred heard the clamour of a wharf crowd; then felt himself lifted again and borne through the streets of a city which he knew must be Port Arthur, up a rather steep hill, to a building where he was deposited on a cot beside two other men. The cloth was now removed, and the first object which met his eye was the kind, good face of a young woman, on whose arm was bound a strip bearing a red cross. With a feeling that he was in a safe refuge he meekly took the medicine held to his lips and fell into a deep sleep.
Between his sleeping and waking, the collar-bone was set that afternoon. Fred only remembered a confused sense of gentle hands and rough voices, of the smell of chloroform, of a general battered and "want-to-cry" feeling; and, at last, of utter abandonment of restfulness. The next morning he was weak and a little feverish, but he felt like a new man. In three weeks, the surgeon told him, he would be about again. Fred made use of his first returning strength to cable to the _Bulletin_ and ask for instructions. The censor passed the message without cutting. The reply was terse: "Remain Russian army."
The time passed pretty heavily with the disabled correspondent, during his convalescence at the hospital. From the window of his room he could look down on the harbour and see the Russian war-ships. His two room-mates, Japanese officers from one of the stone-laden hulks sunk in a vain attempt to block the channel in Hobson fashion, had been sent to prison soon after his arrival.
From time to time he obtained scraps of information from other patients, from the hospital surgeon-staff, and from his gentle little nurse, Marie Kopofsky, a native of Moscow. Not "at the Czar's command," but of her own free will, she had volunteered, as had hundreds of Japanese women on their side of the sea, to nurse the sick and wounded at the front, under the banner of the Red Cross.