Ross was starkly amazed by his muttering patient. Cup upon cup of whiskey and quinine he poured down the gaunt man’s throat; the man drank it like water, avidly, without visible effect. He seemed to soak up the raw red liquid as a sponge soaks up water. It seeped down his throat and was gone.
“My Lord!” exclaimed Ross at last, awed despite himself. “The man ain’t human!”
Thady Shea was human; although invisible, the effect was there. Through the hours of darkness his sonorous voice rose and filled the shack. He spoke of things past the understanding of the watching Ross. He used strange names—names like Ophelia or Rosalind or Desdemona; at times passion shook his voice, a fury of resonant passion; at times his words trembled with grief, his rolling words quavered and surged with a vehemently agonized utterance, until the listening Ross felt a vague ache wrenched into his own throat.
About midnight, Thady Shea fell asleep. It was a deep, full slumber, a slumber of stertorous breathing, a sound and absolute slumber, a drunken slumber. Thady Shea lay motionless except for his deeply heaving chest. His hands, face, and body were glistening wet, were wet with perspiration that streamed from him, were wet with salty sweat oozing from his fever-baked flesh. Fred Ross turned out the lamp and climbed into a bunk in the corner.
“That ends it,” he said, drowsily. “He’ll sweat out the fever and sleep off the whiskey, and wake up cured. Can’t beat whiskey! Cures everything!”
Upon the following morning Ross returned from his chores to find Thady Shea still lustily snoring, the fever gone. He got breakfast and departed to his work, leaving the coffee ready to hand. From time to time he came in from the nearer end of the flat to inspect his patient. He was a big man, a rough-tongued man, a deep-hearted man.
Thady Shea wakened to an uncomfortable sensation. He dimly and vaguely recognized the sensation; he was bewildered and frightened by it. He had felt that uncomfortable sensation many times in his life, always on the morning after a night spent with the jorum.
He tried to sit up, and succeeded, only to close his eyes before a blinding wave of pain. A headache? It went with the other symptoms, of course. He had no remembrance of drinking. Indeed, he had a fierce remembrance of having meant never to drink again. Where was he and how had he come here? His last memory was of trees, and the ancient helping him as he sank down. He looked around; the strange room bewildered him.
He was maddeningly conscious that his body, his soul, his whole being, was a soaked and impregnated thing, soaked and impregnated with whiskey. His body cried out for more whiskey, his soul writhed within him for more whiskey. His haggard gaze fell upon a cup, on a chair at his bedside. He reached out and picked up the cup. It was half full of bitter whiskey, and a bottle of powdered quinine explained the bitterness.
Even then, Shea hesitated. He hesitated, but he could not resist. No living man could have resisted the fearful outcry of body and soul upon such an awakening. It was no mere craving. It was a tumultuous, riotous, lawless eagerness—a fierceness for whiskey, an awful tormenting passion for whiskey such as he had never before known. That was because of the flood that had seeped and soaked through his whole being. The raw red liquor like thin blood had permeated all his body tissues and nerves, as water permeates the sun-dried earth, leaving it not the hard white earth but the brown soft mud. The earth dries again and cracks open, calling avidly for more water. So with Thady Shea’s body and soul.