“If he goes luny now that’s the end of him,” said Emerson in a repressed, tense voice. “We must not let him get excited. Nick, you’d better stand there and keep him quiet, if you can, and pour water over his face and head and put a little in his mouth sometimes.”
Tuttle carried the water for their use, two pailsful at a time, and Mead kept his body well drenched. Ellhorn stooped over the hammock and continued his coaxing talk, drawling one sentence after another with slurred r’s and soft southern accents. With one hand he patted the patient’s head and shoulders and with the other he dashed water over his face or trickled it, drop by drop, into his mouth. After a while they gave the half-conscious man some weak tea, took off his wet clothes and put him to bed. There they looked after him carefully, giving him frequent but small instalments of food in liquid form and an occasional swallow of water. After some hours they decided he was out of danger and would recover without an illness. Then Nick Ellhorn mounted a horse and rode away. When he returned he carried a burden tied in a gunny sack, which he suspended from the limb of a tree and carefully drenched with water many times before he retired. The next day he anxiously watched the bag, keeping it constantly wet and shaded and free to the breezes. And in the afternoon, with a smile curling his mustache almost up to his eyes, he spread before Wellesly a big, red watermelon, cold and luscious. With delight in his face and chuckling in his voice he watched the sick man eat as much as Emerson would allow him to have, and then begged that he be given more. To get the melon Ellhorn had ridden fifteen miles and back, to the nearest ranch beyond Mead’s.
“I never saw a man look happier that you-all do right now,” he said as he watched Wellesly.
“And you never saw anybody who felt happier than I do with this melon slipping down my throat,” Wellesly responded. “I feel now as if I should never want to do anything but swallow wet things all the rest of my life. By the way, did one of you fellows stand beside me a long time yesterday, coaxing me to lie still?”
“Yes,” said Nick, “it was me. We had to make you keep quiet, or you’d have gone luny because we wouldn’t give you all the water you wanted to drink. It would have killed you to drink the water, and if you had yelled and fought yourself crazy for it I reckon you’d have died anyway.”
“Well, I guess you saved my life, then. For if you hadn’t kept me quiet I’d have fought all creation for water. The notion took hold of me that I was a helpless baby and that my mother was beside me, turning a crank and making it rain into my mouth, and that all I had to do was to lie still and listen to her voice and hold my mouth open so that the drops could trickle down my throat. Lord! How good they did feel! That was how I happened to lie still so contentedly.”
“Nick could quiet a whole insane asylum when he gets on that Blarneystone brogue of his,” said Emerson.
“ONCE HE CAME UPON HUMAN BONES, WITH SHREDS OF CLOTHING.”—p. [179]
All that day they did not allow Wellesly to do much talking, but kept him lying most of the time in the hammock, in the shade of the cottonwoods, where he slept or luxuriously spent the time slowly swallowing the cool drinks the others brought to him.