A man with a bloody knife was bending over a human form stretched on a bloody and, it seemed to the boy, a greasy table.

Another was helping the big man.

They were cutting the bullet out of Watts McHurdie, who was lying white and unconscious and with flies crawling over him, half naked and blood-smeared, on the table.
The boy screamed, and the man turned his head and snarled through his clenched teeth that held the knife, "Get out of here--no--go get me a bucket of water from the creek." Some one handed the boy a bucket, and he ran where he was told to go, with the awful sight burned on his brain, with the sickening smell in his nose, and with the drone of flies in his ears.

When he came back the firing had begun again.

The surgeon was saying, "Well, that's all that's waiting--now I'm going for a minute." He grabbed a gun standing by the table and ran toward the front; he did not take off his blood-splotched apron, and the boy fled from the place in terror.