“I don't think but what we shall. There's nowhere he can fall down to hurt himself, nor yet drown himself, but our dam; and he has not gone that way. But”—
“But what?”
“If we do find him, we must take him back to Cape Town, before he does himself, or some one, a mischief. Why, Phoebe, don't you see the man has gone raving mad?”
CHAPTER XIX.
The electrified man rushed out into the storm, but he scarcely felt it in his body; the effect on his mind overpowered hail-stones. The lightning seemed to light up the past; the mighty explosions of thunder seemed cannon strokes knocking down a wall, and letting in his whole life.
Six hours the storm raged, and, before it ended, he had recovered nearly his whole past, except his voyage with Captain Dodd—that, indeed, he never recovered—and the things that happened to him in the hospital before he met Phoebe Falcon and her brother: and as soon as he had recovered his lost memory, his body began to shiver at the hail and rain. He tried to find his way home, but missed it; not so much, however, but that he recovered it as soon as it began to clear, and just as they were coming out to look for him, he appeared before them, dripping, shivering, very pale and worn, with the handkerchief still about his head.
At sight of him, Dick slipped back to his sister, and said, rather roughly, “There now, you may leave off crying: he is come home; and to-morrow I take him to Cape Town.”
Christopher crept in, a dismal, sinister figure.
“Oh, sir,” said Phoebe, “was this a day for a Christian to be out in? How could you go and frighten us so?”