This done, he went to the chest, and got out a couple of handkerchiefs.
His stay in that torrid clime had taught him much, but he had never thought of applying a little physical fact to the purpose he now intended. For he knew that if a bottle or jug of water were surrounded by a wet cloth and kept saturated, either in a draught or in the sun, the great evaporation which went on would cool the water within the vessel.
“And if it will do this,” Dyke thought, “why will it not cool poor Joe’s head?”
He bent down over him, and spoke softly, then loudly; but Emson was perfectly unconscious, and wandering in his delirium, muttering words constantly, but what they were Dyke could not grasp.
In a few minutes Tanta Sal re-appeared with the bucket of cool spring-water.
“Baas Joe go die,” she said, shaking her head as she set it down; and then, without waiting to be told to go, she went round to the back, and began to pile up fuel and fan the expiring fire, before proceeding to make and bake a cake.
Meanwhile, Dyke had been busy enough. He had soaked one of the handkerchiefs in the bucket, and laid it dripping right across Emson’s brow and temples, leaving it there for a few minutes, while he prepared the other. The minutes were not many when he took off the first to find it quite hot, and he replaced it with the other, which became hot in turn, and was changed; and so he kept on for quite an hour, with the result that his brother’s mutterings grew less rapid and loud, so that now and then the boy was able to catch a word here and a word there. All disconnected, but suggestive of the trouble that was on the sick man’s mind, for they were connected with the birds, and his ill-luck, his voice taking quite a despairing tone as he cried:
“No good. Failure, failure—nothing succeeds. It is of no use.”
And then, in quite a piteous tone:
“Poor Dyke! So hard for him.”