“Rustlings had preceded me as I had moved through the house; they do in Oriental houses, you know, Doctor, just as they do in the forest, wherever furtive beings hold their existence. Now, I moved too rapidly for these rustlings, and in the kitchen I flushed some frightened Dyak servants—three women and an old man.
“‘Take me to your mistress,’ I said to one of the women, and I said it kindly, but I do think I have never seen more fright on a woman’s face. After all, Doctor, to witness the horror of some one else is far more gruesome than the thing itself, is it not?”
I thought of the look I had once seen in the eyes of a man whose shoulder had been carried away by a piece of shrapnel, as he had glanced down and seen his wound.
“Nothing is more contagious than dread,” I murmured.
“So I discovered a few moments later,” muttered Leyden. “The woman led me to a hut a hundred yards behind the bungalow—a well-furnished hut; I think it may have been the mission hospital—and there I found the daughter, the deaf-mute——”
Leyden’s voice had dropped until it was almost inaudible. I could not see his face in the dark, but I shivered.
“Of course,” he went on, in a careless sort of way, “I could talk with her, for, although my ten modern languages and some twenty dialects all are spoken with the mouth, there is one dialect which is universal—and that is spoken with the eyes. We had a little conversation in this tongue, and then I sat down beside her and patted her hands and made her actually smile. They are simple folk—those on whom the hand of God has been heavy in this regard. Perhaps they are above these mundane things—but at the time I did not look at it in this way. Instead I went back to the bungalow and waited in some impatience for the return of Lynch and McAdoo—and, will you believe it, Doctor—just at this time, when I needed myself the most, these accursed plasmodia malariæ, or whatever kind of species of fission-fungi it may be, began to start their segmentation, and segregation, and proliferation in my blood vessels, and I could feel the delirium creeping up my spine to my brain, just as some poor devil of a Passamaquoddy might have felt the fifty-foot rise of the Fundy tide creeping up his spine when some coterie of tribal enemies had staked him out on the flats at low water—except that in his case it was cold and in mine it was red-hot!
“I had not long to wait, however. Back they came, McAdoo sullen but studious, and Lynch smiling and talking as if he were the honored guest. I noticed that his holster was unbuckled, however, and while he had been away I had entertained no fears for his safety—because, you see, I had heard no shot. Our co-operation was really quite admirable!
“‘Lynch,’ said I, and it seemed to me as if my voice came from a very great distance—the fever, Doctor, not emotion, I beg you to believe; I was never more composed mentally in my life. ‘Lynch,’ said I, ‘will you and Mr. McAdoo kindly come into the library—there are some matters which I wish to discuss with you both.’ It was growing dark then, so I clapped my hands, quite softly, but a servant flittered out of the shadow like a bat. The tension was high in that bungalow that night.
“‘Bring lights,’ I said in the vernacular.