“It’s a fortunate thing Beryl did not succeed in shooting that villain Kuliso,” he said at last. “Not that he didn’t richly deserve it, but—I don’t like to think what the result might have been. The law is a very hard-and-fast customer to deal with.”
“Yes. I pointed that out to her at the time. But what could I do?”
“Nothing—simply nothing. If I had been there I might have done very much the same sort of thing as she did.”
“What’s this? Our patient seems to have taken a jump forward,” said Pentridge, entering at that moment. “Not been making him talk a lot, have you, Brian?”
“No fear. I’ve been doing all the talking,” was the answer. “Only telling him about things.”
“Let me congratulate you, Holt, on the abnormal thickness of your skull,” laughed Pentridge. “Otherwise a shattered egg-shell would have been the word instead of a tidy bout of brain fever, not to mention a well-delivered assegai jab beneath the fifth rib.”
“You seem to have patched me up, though, to some purpose,” I said. And after a few cheery remarks he left me, with a parting injunction to Brian not to let me talk.
But after that I made no more “jumps forward.” On the contrary, I was going back. I grew listless and seemed to feel no interest in anything, and my prevailing thought was that it was a pity I had returned to life at all. I even expostulated with Beryl for her attention to me. Pentridge was puzzled.
“I can’t make it out at all,” I overheard him say one day during a whispered conversation with Beryl. “We ought to have had him on his legs again by now; but he seems determined to cheat me, and that in the wrong direction. Has he anything on his mind, do you know, Miss Matterson?”
“Well, in point of fact, I think he has,” she answered with some hesitation. “Of a business nature, he gave me to understand. Of course, I am telling you this in strict confidence, and only then because it might be a guide to you in the treatment of his case.”