Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the change of light, he shouted exultantly, in a voice his British friends would not have recognized. The shining to the southward was, beyond all doubt, the sea, and the white blurs among the palms could represent only factories! Turning, he shook his fist at the forest with childish solemnity.
"Tell Amadu to turn that gun away from him, Monday. It might go off, and I be no fit to lose him," he said in coast jargon. "I don't care what your color is, you are fine fellows too much, both of you, and now we'll go on while we have strength left to reach them factory."
How much his followers comprehended did not appear. The man he called Monday grinned from ear to ear, the other slung his rifle, and they went on, staggering at their best pace toward the sea, though Dane had a vague impression that, with one arm beneath either shoulder, the two ragged Africans dragged him most of the way. Some time later a blindingly whitewashed factory rose up before them against a background of tossing spray and equally dazzling sea, and Dane made shift to reach its outer stairway unaided. An elderly man and a lady who sat on the shady veranda rose at the sight of him. Making an attempt to raise his battered sun-hat, he lurched up the stairway. The attempt was not successful. The sun-hat fell over the balustrade, and he saw it long afterward, painted green and blue, upon a Krooboy's head. Clutching at the topmost rail, he steadied himself by it.
"Unexpected pleasure to see you here, Miss Castro," he said. "Salutations, Dom Pedro! Sorry to arrive in this fashion; not quite myself to-day."
The elderly man shouted, clapping his hands, the lady moved toward the newcomer; then factory and palm trees went round and round before him, and Dane, loosing his hold, went down with a crash.
What happened next he did not remember, having only a hazy recollection of tossing in burning torment for an interminable space, during which at intervals somebody held a glass filled with cooling liquid to his lips, while now and then gentle hands, whose touch was soothing, raised his aching head. Still, he fancied that at times a white face bent over him, and once, when the dim light of a calabash lamp beat into his eyes, that waves of dusky hair drooped close above his forehead, and that he caught, and held fast with all his strength, the cool fingers that slipped into his own. They seemed to draw him back out of the black abyss into which he was sliding; and, he surmised afterward, they actually did so.
Attacks of malarial fever, however, are usually brief; and not long after his arrival Dane lay, clothed in neatly mended garments and more or less in his right mind, beside an open window of Castro's factory. The words "more or less" are used advisedly, for the malaria leaves a strange lassitude behind it, and the sufferer often takes up the burden of life again, as it were, reluctantly, and with somewhat clouded brain. The sea breeze had set in fresh and cool, but the man lay limp and dejected, scarcely troubling to breathe it in, while a haggard English surgeon from a neighboring British colony sat near by watching him with an irritating curiosity. White men recognize the bond of color in West Africa, and the surgeon had remained to fight hard for the life of a stranger when passing that way. Also, where all dwell under the shadow in a land where the veneer of civilization wears thin, and the primitive passions show through, the Briton casts aside much of his normal reticence.
"Tolerably bad, was I not?" asked Dane; and the surgeon answered frankly.
"You were. In fact, on two occasions, I concluded you were going to beat me. Wouldn't even take a draught from—me, and one might compliment you on your determined obstinacy."
"I'm much obliged," Dane said slowly. "That's not quite all I mean, but it's the best I'm capable of just now. I don't know who you are, or why you did so much for me."