For the first month or more, everything went smoothly. Never before had Sonny baba had such attentive listeners to the great truths he expounded as a preliminary to his other work; never before had he felt that he was really on the right tack, really had his opportunity of a fair hearing. The letters he wrote home to his aunt who, fond woman, had faithfully followed, as woman can do, every step in the career of her darling with unswerving confidence, filled that excellent creature with sheer, unalloyed delight. She told all her circle of friends that her nephew had fulfilled her dearest wishes in going in for the medical mission, which was undoubtedly the only way of getting at the poor, dear natives.
And Sonny, in less emotional fashion, felt this to be so true that he worked as he had never worked before. A sort of feverish desire to utilise every opportunity, to lose no occasion for preaching the great Gospel of Peace came over him, and he spared himself not at all, after the manner of his kind.
So that sometimes returning tired out in evening from some long tramp, it was a relief to find the old swash-buckler ready with kid pullao or "rose chikken,"[[16]] and to see the tea-kettle swinging over a fire of twigs. Sometimes after they entered the tract of forest-land near the foot of the hills, the indefatigable old poacher would produce a stew of black partridge; and once Sonny, coming home to the tiny tent late at night, found his henchman keeping an eye on roast pork, and at the same time utilising the flame-light in giving a suspicious clean to the biggest surgical knife--a queer picture seen by the fire, leaping and dancing up into the shadows of a mango grove.
But one evening Sonny came home with no appetite for dinner, and half an hour afterwards he was blue and shivering in the cold fit of ague.
"If the Huzoor would take some of my pills," said Dhurm Singh wistfully; "look at me! nothing touches me, and, lo! am I not three times as near the grave as the Baba-sahib?"
There is no need to describe the scorn which this suggestion met. As for the pills, where would the old sinner be but for the quinine contained therein? This was nothing but a chill, an isolated attack. He would take an extra dose of the specific and be done with it.
But the third day, suddenly, in the very middle of an eloquent appeal he felt goose skin going in thrills down his back, and five minutes after the only sound he could make was the chattering of his teeth.
"If the Huzoor," began Dhurm Singh, but was checked by the frown on the master's face; for the lad had grit and fire in him.
Neither of these, however, avail much against a tertian ague, and it was not long before Sonny baba in the half-querulous, half-hysterical stage before the hot fit merges into perspiration, confided with tears to the old swash-buckler that it was no use. He was an accursed being. From the very beginning had it not been so? And then he retailed garrulously many and many an incident of the past three years, forgotten by his retainer, in which something had occurred to mar the smooth working of good luck. Something as often as not, it struck the listener, to be referred to his own share in the business. To the speaker it was otherwise. He was not fit for the work; he was of no account, and now when at long last the time had come, when he felt that his hand was on the plough--
"It is time the Baba-sahib took his quinine," remarked Dhurm Singh sagely, unsympathetically. "If the Huzoor will give the keys of the chest, this dust-like one will bring the medicine--dhurm nâl." The last words came softly, half to himself, and an important, self-satisfied smile broadened the open face as he made his choice among the bottles. "Lo! there it is," he continued, laying two pills in the burning hand before passing his one arm under the burning body, "but the Huzoor must have faith. Without it medicine is but a bad taste in the mouth. He who believes shall be saved."