A desire to help another alone induces me to communicate with you. One of my men is very ill with some sort of fever. Under all the circumstances, I cannot stop to nurse him myself, as otherwise I should like to do, having, you remember, asked your kind leave to shoot, and made arrangements to start at dawn. Perhaps if you have time you will visit him and give him some medicine; if you do not, I fear that he must die.
R.L.
Summoning the recovered dragoman who was to be left behind to see to the camels when they arrived, he bade him take this letter to Zahed as soon as the shooting expedition had started in the morning, and if he were questioned, to say that his comrade was very sick, but that he did not know what was the matter with him.
“If only he would catch the plague!” muttered Dick to himself, between his clenched teeth. “No one could blame me, and he might—no, that would be too muck luck.”
Before daybreak, having been informed that the man was apparently no worse, Dick rode away with his attendants.
Rupert duly received the letter, and about seven o’clock ordered his mule, and started for the place where the man lay.
“Whither go you?” asked Mea, who met him.
Her voice was anxious, for she feared that he was about to visit Edith.
“To see a sick man up yonder at Learmer’s house.”
“So! It was reported to me that he started at dawn to hunt buck for some days on the mountain slopes. Why does he not doctor his own sick, he who told me that he understands medicine?”