"Patient awake?" I asked.
"No," said Miss Ottley. "What an objectionable smell of tobacco!"
War to the knife evidently. I stood up. "When you need me shout," I remarked, and strolled off, puffing stolidly. But I saw her face as I turned, and it was crimson, perhaps with surprise that I could be as rude as she, perhaps with mortification that I had dared. If ever a girl needed a dressing down it was she who stood in the pylon staring after me. I squatted in the shadow of a rock and spent the afternoon stupefying over-friendly flies with the fumes of prime Turkish. She shouted just before sundown. Her father was delirious, she said. I found him raving and tearing at his bandages. He was haunted with an hallucination of phantom cats. The whole cavern, he declared, was filled with cats; black as Erebus with flaming yellow eyes. I shooed them away and after some trouble calmed the poor old man. But it was going to be a bad case, that was plain. Luckily the cave temple was, comparatively speaking, cool. I spent the evening disinfecting every cranny, and quietly dispersing the suspicious dust of vanished centuries. When I had finished it smelt carbolically wholesome and was as clean as a London hospital, even to the ceiling. Miss Ottley sat all the while by her father's cot, and occasionally sneezed to relieve her feelings. I had very little sympathy for her distress. I said to her, "You will take first watch, I'll sleep in the pylon. Call me at midnight." Then I placed my watch on the edge of the sarcophagus and went out. She said nothing. I woke at dawn. She was sitting like a statue beside her father's bedside. Her face was grey. Sir Robert was asleep, but breathing stertorously. I beckoned her out to the pylon. "See here, Miss Ottley," I said, in a cold rage, "I'm not going to beat about the bush with you. I told you to call me at midnight. Kindly explain your disobedience."
"I am not your servant to obey your orders," she retorted icily.
"No," said I, "you prefer to serve your own prickly pride to behaving sensibly. But let me tell you this—your father's life depends on careful nursing. And that is impossible unless we apportion the work properly between us. You'll be fit for nothing today, and my task will be doubled in consequence. A little more of such folly and you'll break down altogether. You are strung up to more than concert pitch. As for me—I am not a machine, and though I am prepared to do my best out of mere humanity, I don't pretend to do the impossible. Nor shall I answer for your father's life if you force me to nurse two patients single-handed."
She looked me straight in the eye. "Very well, sir, I shall henceforth rigidly obey you."
"You must," I said and strode into the open. When I had prepared breakfast, she did not want to eat. But I had only to frown and she succumbed. Afterwards I made her lie down, and she slept through Sir Robert's groaning. It was a hideous day. The patient grew steadily worse, and so great was his strength, despite his diminutive size, that our struggles wore me out at last and I was obliged to strap him down. By nightfall he was a maniac, and his yells could be heard, I make no doubt, a mile around. And the worst of it was that my stock of bromide was gone. I had to dose him with morphia. But I had not to speak to Miss Ottley again. She woke me out of a delicious sleep at a quarter to the hour. She was quite composed, but as pale as a sheet.
"My father is going to die, I think," she whispered.
I went in and looked at him. He was straining like a tiger at his bonds. "Not to-night, at any rate," I observed. "He has the strength of six. You go straight to bed!"