I haven’t got the nerve.” He walked away and began helping his men round up the mules that had broken their picket-thongs during the daybreak attack. Garnet lay on a blanket he had spread for her in the shade of a big rock. Oliver had taken off the half-breed girl’s tourniquet, and had washed the wound, telling her that Texas would give her a bandage later. Texas was the one who always attended to wounds. Garnet wondered what he wanted Texas to tell her. She raised herself on her good elbow. Her left arm was throbbing, but she tried not to mind it. The camp looked like a field of battle. The Diggers were gone, but there were some of them who would never go anywhere again; their corpses lay here and there on the grass, crumpled black things that she hated to look at. She had read in sentimental books about dead people who looked peacefully asleep, but now that she had seen dead bodies she knew that they did not look asleep at all. They just looked dead. There was no other word for it.
