Bones, smiling indulgently, soothed her.
"Nothin' catchin', dear Miss Patricia Hamilton," he began.
"Please don't be stupid," she said so fiercely that Bones recoiled. "Do you think I'm afraid of catching anything? Is it dangerous for Mr. Sanders?" she asked her brother.
"No more dangerous than a cold in the head," he answered flippantly. "My dear child, we all have fever. You'll have it, too, if you go out at sunset without your mosquito boots."
He explained, with the easy indifference of a man inured to malaria, the habits of the mosquito—his predilection for ankles and wrists, where the big veins and arteries are nearer to the surface—but the girl was not reassured. She would have sat up with Sanders, but the idea so alarmed Hamilton that she abandoned it.
"He'd never forgive me," he said. "My dear girl, he'll be as right as a trivet in the morning."
She was sceptical, but, to her amazement, Sanders turned up at breakfast his usual self, save that he was a little weary-eyed, and that his hand shook when he raised his coffee-cup to his lips. A miracle, thought Patricia Hamilton, and said so.
"Not at all, dear miss," said Bones, now, as ever, accepting full credit for all phenomena she praised, whether natural or supernatural. "This is simply nothin' to what happened to me. Ham, dear old feller, do you remember when I was brought down from the Machengombi River? Simply delirious—ravin'—off my head."
"So much so," said Hamilton, slicing the top off his egg, "that we didn't think you were ill."
"If you'd seen me," Bones went on, solemnly shaking one skinny forefinger at the girl, "you'd have said: 'Bones is for the High Jump.'"