The days and nights were very long just then.
Clarence came to see me often. His occupation was gone. Cecily did not leave me at all at first. I believe our good fellow wondered if we should ever require him to hunt again. He did not know the proverb, “Once bitten, twice shy,” but you could see he felt it.
One evening, when I was convalescent, Clarence brought one of the men to us with inquiries as to the best way to cure him.
“What is the matter?” was naturally the first question, as we were not the human Homoceas our men seemed to take us for.
Our servant had been chewing—must have been—a piece of thorn, and a particularly spiky insidious bit had stuck itself well in the back of his throat, near the left tonsil. It would seem an easy enough thing to pull out, but it was the most difficult of operations. We could not make any very prolonged attempt at dislodgment because every time we tried to touch the bit of thorn the man either shut his mouth with a snap and bit us, or pretended he must be sick forthwith. It was very laughable, but a little worrying. We tried nippers, a vast pair, that filled the mouth to overflowing and hid the offending thorn from sight, We tried blunt scissors, which Cecily said would not cut because they could not, and might be relied on to act the part of nippers. Of course they did cut, when they weren’t needed to, the roof of the patient’s mouth, and matters grew worse than ever. The light was wholly insufficient, and we could hardly see at all. The candle lamp never shone in the right direction, and we laughed so—the two Somalis were in such deadly earnest. I do not think any harm would have resulted if the thorn had been left where it stuck until the morning. But no! The men said if the thorn were left the throat would swell, and if the throat swelled the patient would choke, and if he choked he would be dead. The cook produced some of the doughy bread he was past-master in concocting, a sticky mass to act as panacea, and our thorn-stuck henchman swallowed a lot to the detriment of his digestion. No use. The thorn would not be levered out. Then—brilliant idea—try a hairpin! Comic papers have it that a woman can go through the world with a hairpin as a tool for everything, and come out victorious. I have never seen one put in the list of a hunter’s requirements—a great oversight. Take my word for it, a hair-pin does the work of ten ordinary implements. The rounded end of one hooked round the offending thorn ejected the cause of all the trouble, and peace reigned in the camp.
