“If I can,” said Doctor Instow coldly.
“That’s right. I have been so full up with my work that I seem to have taken hardly any notice of him. Wound through his arm. You have well cleansed it, of course?”
“Of course, and injected things to neutralise the poison.”
“Ah!” cried the captain, angrily, “it takes all one’s sympathy with the miserable savages away when one finds that they fight in so cowardly, so fiendish a fashion. I was ready to be sorry for them when I was crushing their boat. But this makes me feel as if one ought to lose no opportunity for sweeping the venomous wretches off the face of the earth. They have no excuse, you see. It is our lives or theirs. We are inoffensive enough surely; and they would have gained by our presence if they had been friendly. But they’re nearly all alike.”
“Have you seen cases like this before?” asked the doctor.
“Oh yes, several.”
“And after a few hours’ struggle the strength of the poison dies out, and the sufferer recovers?”
The captain glanced in the direction of Jack, and seeing that his attention was apparently entirely taken up by the sufferer, he said in a low tone—“Yes, sir, the strength of the poison died out, but the wounded man died too;” and every word went through Jack like some keen blade, and for the moment he drew his breath with as much difficulty as the man before him.
“In the cases I saw there was no doctor near at hand, and we who attended the poor fellows could do no more than try to draw the poison from the wounds and burn them out. But it seemed to me that the poison acted like the bite, of a snake, and altered the blood, while at last the symptoms were like those I have heard of when the patient has lock-jaw.”
“Tetanus,” said the doctor gravely.