Kate Meredith, Financier

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

"Not in my pocket, O Ali ben Hossein, for I am not a djinn. But there is a medicine chest up at the factory, and within it is a bottle of crystal, blue in color, in which are tabloids which bear the giaour name of perchloride of mercury. They and the aniline green may take a bit of finding, but presently when I've got a solution made, and tinted to a True Believer's taste, I will return here and work upon you that cure of which I am sure that the Kaleef Abdul would approve if he'd a thigh as bad as yours, and had ever heard of an antiseptic dressing. So see to it that you don't slip through the gates of Paradise whilst I am gone. D'you understand? The houris won't look twice at a Haûsa with a leg as worm-eaten as yours."

Now, Carter gathered from a casual inspection by two damp matches that ben Hossein's thigh was pretty bad, but he had not made allowance for the toughness of a water-drinking, spare-eating Moslem. When he came back with a parrafin lamp, followed by White-Man's-Trouble, who carried a bowl of warm water and other things, and commenced his amateur surgery, he was amazed, and he was sickened. Like most traders in the West Coast factories, he had acquired through almost daily practice a certain deftness in cleansing and repairing wounds; but here in the thigh of this great muscular Haûsa was a grid of gashes whose untended horrors went far beyond all his previous experience.

The fact that the man had not bled to death, or died of shock at the first impact, and the further fact that he had withstood the attacks of all the abominable live things that preyed thereafter upon his open flesh, were a wonderful testimonial to his constitutional toughness; and the detail that in spite of his fortitude he went clammy and limp when Carter commenced dressing the wounds, was only what could be expected. But it seemed that five days had elapsed since the man had been brought in and left, and during that time the other merchants outside the fort, with the ordinary callousness of Africans for one another, had neither brought him food nor reported his calamity. On the other hand, they had stolen his goods and gone their ways, otherwise non-interferent. And as a consequence the man was three parts starved when Carter found him and had his vitality perilously lowered.

Carter had, perhaps, as has been stated, much of the West Coast trader's callousness for the native, but he certainly had all of the surgeon's interest in a patient. After he had dressed the wounds he tried his best to bring his patient back to consciousness, and then for the first time only did he realize how near to the Borderland the man had crept. He sent White-Man's-Trouble flying this way and that on his errands, and with all the limited knowledge in his power fought Death for the Haûsa's life till the fatal hour of dawn was well past.

And so he was found by Miss O'Neill at 5 A.M., white, shaken and black-eyed, attired in stained and sodden clothes, squatting in a miserable hutch that reeked of iodoform, and welcoming with joy Ali ben Hossein's ungracious return to a world he had so nearly left.

Miss O'Neill regarded him for awhile with a pinched lip, and then "I think you are perfectly disgraceful," said she. "At least you might have let me know what you were doing, so that I could have come to help part of the time."

Carter blinked at her for a moment with tired brown eyes and then pulled himself together. "I beg your pardon for not doing as you wished. But I didn't know that you were interested in niggers, if there was no chance of making a dividend out of them. I rather looked upon this as an out-of-office-hours job; as a piece of private amusement of my own, in fact, and so I did not dare to repeat it."

"Well," said Kate, seating herself beside the sick man, "perhaps I was hateful to you after supper, indeed I'll admit that I was. But you are being far more hateful to me now, and as that should tickle your vanity as a man, perhaps you'll be generous enough to call it quits. Trouble, will you kindly take Mr. Carter back to the factory and give him a large dose of quinine and all the hot, scalding tea he will drink, and then put him to bed, and see to it that there are no insects inside his mosquito bar."

"I fit," said the Krooboy. "An' I got bottle of White man's medicine dat I pinch from dem Cappie Image. I give dem Carter a drink of him."

"You will do nothing of the sort. Dem Cappie Image patent medicine plenty bad ju-ju for Mr. Carter. So you will do exactly as I ordered you. Ah, and here's Laura. Now, my dear, if you don't want the man to whom you're engaged to die before you marry him, you'd better look after him and his health very narrowly. There, get away out of this, the pair of you, and make up your silly quarrel, whatever it may be."