Chapter Forty Two.
A Vain Appeal.
It was one morning when Mark lay fairly collected and able to talk, and the first objects his eyes lit upon were the two blacks seated together busy crushing up some succulent leaves, which they worked between a couple of stones till they had formed them into a thick green paste. This done, the little fellow brought other leaves, covered one with the green paste, and then as Mark watched him he placed this woodland-plaster on the fleshy part of his companion’s leg and secured it in its place with some long, grassy, fibrous growth which Mak had chewed and twisted into a kind of string.
This done, the black lay upon one side with his teeth at work preparing some more rough bandage, while the pigmy formed another plaster, which was in turn secured to the black’s left arm.
As Mark lay there feeling too helpless and weary to move, he watched in turn the surgical applications of the pigmy, as he attended to bad cuts that had been suffered by Buck Denham and Dan.
Mark did not know it then, during those next few days, but he realised afterwards that it was due to sheer weakness that with the knowledge of the terrible defeat, and that his father and friends were either killed or taken prisoners, he could lie there so calmly watching what was going on.
There was much to see in the coming and going of the two blacks, who brought the food and the water they drank, while Buck Denham and Dan, badly as they were hurt, never wearied in their attentions. His cousin too was constantly at his side, ready to attend to every wish. At other times he sat gazing at him with an imploring expression of countenance as if begging not to be reproached for a catastrophe that he laid upon his own shoulders.
“Who’d have thought it, Buck?” said Mark, one day, as he lay helpless, listening to the trickling water of the spring in the thick patch of forest that had been made their camp.
“Thought what, sir?” said the big driver, as he emptied the last scraps of tobacco from his pouch into his homemade corn-straw pipe.
“That that little black would be so grateful for what the doctor did.”