While The Billy BoilsSearch“It happened,” said the doctor, “in a hospital out back,He’d been brought to us delirious, found along the Menzies track;Yet he looked, when placed among the convalescent and the sick,The remnants of as fine a man as ever swung a pick.In addition to a sunstroke, he had typhoid at its worst,So I don’t mind here confessing he seemed hopeless from the first;But he lingered like a limpet clinging to its native spot,And a month went by and still no screen was drawn around his cot.
“Expecting that the breath of Death each day would quench his spark,‘Name unknown,’ we’d marked his entry, ‘six-foot high, complexion dark.’Till one night old Dan, the wardsman, who’d been sitting up on watch,Heard him rambling in a dialect which Dan assumed was Scotch.Next day delirium left him, in another he could speak,Though his general break-up told me he’d a limit of a week.And one sultry summer evening when the western sky was red,He backward turned life’s pages as I sat beside his bed.
“He was Scottish, as I’ve mentioned, he proclaimed the fact with pride,He’d a mother living lonely far beyond the busy Clyde;He himself had been a soldier and had spilt his rich young blood,Where the rifles buzz and splutter and the bullets scream and thud.He’d been in the gallant Gordons and from Cairo to the CapeHad fought his country’s enemies of every hue and shape.Fought and won, and fought and blundered, now below and now on top,From the siege of Alexandria to the rout of Spion Kop.
“And now he lay a-dying and the red sun sinking lowIllumed his ashen features with its soft and rosy glow.There was one thing that he longed for ere he turned to crumbling clay,He’d a last and longing wish to hear the well-loved bagpipes play,He had heard the stirring pibrochs speed the Gordons in their fights,It had borne them through the fire zone as they swung up Dargai’s heights,Its plaintive lamentations caused a nation’s tears to wellWhere full five hundred gallant Scots and warrior Wauchope fell.
“That night the goldfields warden, who a set of pipes possessed,Came to cheer the heart that feebly beat within that weary breast,While the silent campship listened as the piper’s chant and croonChanged from Burns’s Song to Mary and the Banks of Bonnie Doon.The sick man’s face lit up with joy as loud the pibroch rose,As it rose when Bruce of Bannockburn had triumphed o’er his foes.While again he saw the trenches where the Boer and British bled,As the hidden piper softly wailed the dirges for the dead.”
The doctor finished speaking, and his audience sitting round,Preserved a silence sorrowful in sympathy profound.“And did his soul,” one listener asked, “its Maker seek againAs the piper’s music died away in dolorous refrain?”“Not exactly,” said the doctor, “for he’s well and strong to-day,And has gone to cheer his mother in the Highlands far away.But no more, if I can help it, will that music cure be tried,For, although HE stood the bagpipes, ALL THE OTHER PATIENTS DIED!”