September 20 Tuesday – Sam’s notebook entry of Sept. 21 related a dinner tale of this evening:
Sept. 21, ’98. Last night Countess Wydenbruck-Esterhazy & Count Richard Coudenhove came to dinner,
brought further news of their friend the Counts XX (name not spellable) & son. It is now 6 or 7 days since they brought the first news. It is a most remarkable case. The father & son were stag-shooting. At 9 in the morning the father fired at what he took to be a stag in the deep forest & a gillie ran in to get the result. He came flying back very pale & said “Gnadiger Herr, he is dead.” “The stag?—I expected it.” “No, your son.” The Count ran to the place & found the young man (24 years old) sitting motionless with his hand to his face. The father took the hand away & saw—these details. The ball had entered under the jaw, turned upward, destroyed the cheek, carried away the eye & the upper corner of the forehead & a bunch of brain “the size of an apple” was “hanging out.” The young man was not dead, but spoke up & said he was not in great pain!
Gamekeepers were mounted & sent flying across the country for a doctor & for ways to convey the patient to the castle, & to bring his mother. It was a remote place. The mother arrived after 3 or 4 hours; the doctor later. The patient was in the woods & on the way home altogether ten hours; & the real work of patching dressing & bandaging the wound began at 7 in the evening!
These particulars Countess Wydenbruck received by letter from the father two days later. She got another letter yesterday, with this news: the young count is doing very well; talks, & can see by holding the lids of his remaining open with his hand; has not suffered much pain; says he can smoke, now, & has asked for his pipe!
His father had a shotgun emptied into his own side some years ago, at close range, making a wound as big as a saucer. It is a hard family to kill [NB 40 TS 40-1]. Note: Sam did not relate whether this conversation was given over the table or afterward.
September 20-25 Sunday – In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria. Sometime during this period Livy wrote for Sam to Tabitha Greening (“Puss” Quarles) in Palmyra, Mo. Sam was busy, she explained, and they were “very sorry to learn that times go so badly” for her. Livy had often heard Sam talk about her and the Quarles family, and of the “pleasant times that he used to have” at the Quarles farm, so Tabitha’s name seemed very familiar to her. Ten dollars would be sent every month, just as Sam’s mother used to do; Franklin G. Whitmore would be mailing it [MTP].
Also, during this week, Sam wrote to Franklin G. Whitmore, directing him to make the above ten-dollar payment to Puss monthly, beginning with Oct. 1 [MTP].