“Locusts! Emeralds! Diamonds!” echoes the stranger in amazement. “Scott, but the poor chap’s clean off his chump—clean off it! What on earth am I to do with him, or with myself either for the matter of that?”
“Not a ‘stone’ on the place!” goes on the speaker, in a mournful tone. “I’ve fossicked high and low, and there isn’t one—not one. Ah, but—the Valley of the Eye! Come, friend. We will start at once. You shall make your fortune. Dirk! Dirk!” he shouts, passing the wondering stranger, and gaining the doorway.
A withered old Koranna, clad in a mangy sheep-skin kaross, who has just finished penning a flock of Angora goats in one of the kraals, comes running up at the summons. At sight of his master his parchment visage assumes a look of deep concern.
“Die Baas is reegte zick!” (“The master is properly ill.”) he says, turning to the stranger.
“I should rather think he was,” assents the latter, who, although his acquaintance with colonial Dutch is extremely limited, has no difficulty in grasping the old fellow’s meaning. “Stones, locusts, Valley of the Eye! Pho! The sooner we get him to bed the better. I say, Old man,” he breaks off persuasively, laying a hand on the shoulder of his unconscious host, “you’re not quite the thing, you know. Come along and turn in. I’ll give you a hand at getting your togs off.”
The other looks at him vacantly, and seems to comprehend. He suffers himself to be led into the inner room quite docilely, and there and then to be assisted into bed. Once there, however, the blood rushes to his face, and he begins raving horribly, though his violence finds expression in speech rather than in action.
The stranger sits at his bedside carefully watching him.
“Not mad—only fever,” he remarks to himself at the close of one of these paroxysms. “Bush fever, I suppose, and plenty of it. He’s got a pulse like a steam hammer, by Jove!”
He has. Not for nothing has that unwonted giddiness, those shooting pains in the limbs, attacked him a few hours earlier. By nightfall Renshaw Fanning is in a burning fever, raving in the throes of delirium.