"Years? Years? I know naught of your white man's years, but this I know—it happened during the rains before the dark-eyed white men gave way to the blue-eyed white men."
Interpreting this as referring to the departure of the Spanish troops, he gently pressed her for further details. But she was finished.
It was dawn when the doctor rose. Groaning in the agony of the fat man who wakes stiff from the discomfort of an unaccustomed hard bed, he sat up, then forgot his miseries in a new worry as he saw Terry asleep under the open window, wrapped in his saddle blanket but without the protection of a mosquito net. He cursed, stopping midway in his vehement outburst to cock his head at the absurd angle in which men think their ears function best. As he heard the ominous drone of the insects his experience had taught him to fear more than wild beasts, he scrambled to his feet with amazing celerity.
A light sleeper, Terry awakened and lay regarding him quizzically, enthusiastically dissecting the stream of invective the doctor poured upon him for sleeping without his net. Suddenly sensing the responsibility the doctor felt in having summoned him to the village, Terry explained his lack of a net.
"Doctor, I gave my net to the chief's wife: she—she is about to become a mother, and she had none."
"Hell's bells! What Bogobo woman isn't about to become a mother?" he stormed, refusing to concede the justice of the act. "'She had none'—and probably didn't use yours!"
He was facing the window, past which the chief, arrayed in all his half-naked splendor of beads and brass, sauntered with an air of confidence quite different from his terror of the past week.
"There goes the chief, Terry, all fancied up like a bathroom on a German liner! But he has no pants—why don't you give him yours? He 'has none'! You make me—"
He stormed on and on. Terry, still wrapped in his blanket, sat before him looking up with an absurdly rapt air as of a student at his master's feet. Merchant stopped to swab the thick perspiration from his face, laughed at Terry's humbugging pose, and desisted. Terry slipped on his shoes, buckled on the leather leggings he had used as a pillow and picking up his saddlebags went out to clean up at the river.
Finding on his return that the doctor was again genuinely disturbed over his exposure to the disease, he sought to divert him. He sneezed violently, and as the doctor listened with professional interest he followed it with a series which mounted in volume and vigor. Merchant eyed him solicitously.