“No danger, eh?” he said. “There never is any danger for me. I am as hard to kill as the Wandering Jew. I am quite clear in the head now, Mary; so you may leave me with the doctor.”
Mrs. Heatherstone left the room—rather unwillingly, as I thought—and I sat down by the bedside to listen to anything which my patient might have to communicate.
“I want you to examine my liver,” he said when the door was closed. “I used to have an abscess there, and Brodie, the staff-surgeon, said that it was ten to one that it would carry me off. I have not felt much of it since I left the East. This is where it used to be, just under the angle of the ribs.”
“I can find the place,” said I, after making a careful examination; “but I am happy to tell you that the abscess has either been entirely absorbed, or has turned calcareous, as these solitary abscesses will. There is no fear of its doing you any harm now.”
He seemed to be by no means overjoyed at the intelligence.
“Things always happen so with me,” he said moodily. “Now, if another fellow was feverish and delirious he would surely be in some danger, and yet you will tell me that I am in none. Look at this, now.” He bared his chest and showed me a puckered wound over the region of the heart. “That's where the jezail bullet of a Hillman went in. You would think that was in the right spot to settle a man, and yet what does it do but glance upon a rib, and go clean round and out at the back, without so much as penetrating what you medicos call the pleura. Did ever you hear of such a thing?”
“You were certainly born under a lucky star,” I observed, with a smile.
“That's a matter of opinion,” he answered, shaking his head. “Death has no terrors for me, if it will but come in some familiar form, but I confess that the anticipation of some strange, some preternatural form of death is very terrible and unnerving.”
“You mean,” said I, rather puzzled at his remark, “that you would prefer a natural death to a death by violence?”
“No, I don't mean that exactly,” he answered. “I am too familiar with cold steel and lead to be afraid of either. Do you know anything about odyllic force, doctor?”