But we regret to state that, notwithstanding these small but disinterested attentions, K. K. K., Esq., murmured, and the very day upon which he was transferred to hospital sumptuousness, confronted his yellow-visaged enemy with a challenge to do his worst. That individual hesitated, and objected that the combat would prove an unequal one; but soon seeing that any explanation which might be rendered would be construed into a possible desire to avoid defeat (and becoming the least bit enraged in view of such an uncommon defiance), began his dispositions.
And now the battle of the giants raged in good earnest; and as there was a kind of Pindaric grotesqueness about it which could not fail to attract observers, it became first the hospital talk, and then the subject of no inconsiderable amount of by-betting, with the odds in favor of “Yellow Jack.” One week from the period of his inoculation, the victim had developed the most picturesque outside that it is possible for any man to possess east or west of the Malayan dominions, and inwardly, a type of the black vomit that would have set an undertaker’s teeth on edge. The doctors, examining their watches at a safe distance, thought that he could not last twenty-four hours, and the subject of the disorder, transferring an abandoned kerchief to the rear of his shirt front, gave himself but half that time. But doctors, though controlling the other features of the business with tolerable accuracy, are not always infallible as to “time when.” It was three days before a coffin was ordered, and pending the half hour required to produce a fair example of pest-house carpentry, Karl Konstant struggled back to shore with the announcement that he had changed his mind, and a sarcastic appeal to his medical attendants “not to weep.” The “box” was found to square the dimensions of a stiff in a neighboring ward, who had accomplished the stormy voyage in forty-eight hours, and into it he was jammed, and committed to the cartman with an injunction to drive fast.
K. K. K., Esq., was now billed “for five days, only with a new cast and entire change of scenery,” the latter part of this announcement referring to an abandoned hut on the river shore, one mile below the city. The doctors, despairing of the disease, declared that the stench in his body would suffocate him in twenty-four hours (extending the time as above, to avoid accidents), and dismissed him to an aged negress, with instructions to draw on the city for boneyard supplies. Situated in this quiet retreat, our hero could lie “heels uppermost,” and number his waning breaths, or hearken to the death-rattle in his throat, without aught to molest or make him afraid, and controlled by that sweet imperturbability of temper so necessary to perfect rest amid such scenes. He had enjoyed his new lease of happiness two full days before it was thought necessary to apply to his city correspondents, and as there was some delay in forwarding the stipulated articles, it is needless to say that when they arrived the subject had “limbered up,” and the cartman found it necessary to imitate his example, and drive back a sadder man.
Five days came and went, and still Karl Konstant Kain lingered above ground, viewing the shadows go up and down on the pine box destined for his remains (a standing menace of this character now occupied one corner of his apartment), and realizing that his symptoms grew hourly worse. His old friends, the doctors, feeling some anxiety, came to examine into the matter, but after a careful diagnosis of the patient, they left with very marked abridgments of countenance and their pills. Under the circumstances, they felt that pills would only hasten the sad event. And, indeed, their prognostications seemed not ill-founded. Six hours later, a fearful coma seized his struggling anatomy and held it fast, and in a few minutes, at farthest, the last mournful rites would be in order. The pulse had become quite motionless, the suppressed breathing grew momentarily fainter,—and, aha! hold a light, nurse.
What a moral is pointed in that much quoted sentiment referring to the “fate of men and empires.” ’Twas but a drop of water trickling from the rain-drenched roof, and yet it had power to call a human being to life.
K. K. Kain, Esq., now sat bolt upright in his straw-bed and demanded—shall we write it—would it be politic—in a word, would it be accepted as true? In such an emergency there is no alternative left to the undissembling chronicler of fact, nor do we seek one. K. Konstant Kain demanded gruel, and indeed from this moment conceived such an attachment for gruel, that it was with difficulty that their separation could be accomplished for any considerable portion of his waking moments. Nor can it be denied that gruel aided his convalescence and his complexion as nothing else but tolerably regular doses of Blooming Cereus could have done. (This joke is paid for, and on that ground it is hoped there will be no objection to it.) In two weeks, time gruel stood him on his two legs and bade him “view, the landscape o’er.” In three it had brought its magician’s art to bear on his sunken cheeks, and converted the yellow rose of Texas into a lively peach bloom. And in the short space of one month it had so far rehabilitated his battered hulk, that he was enabled to receive a deputation of citizens with a purse of Mexican coin, and a “gruel” request to convey himself across that border. It is needless to say that Mr. Kain accepted the doucéur and stood not upon the order of his going.
Arrived in that sun-burnt clime, one of his first acts, according to the Texas journalists, was to involve himself in a railroad smash-up, with a loss of his dexter leg and a head, but as he was shortly afterwards advertised to appear in a Greaser circus combination as a tight-rope performer, it is apprehended that some of the facts were suppressed. Terminating his engagement in debt to the managers, he reached the city of New Orleans by “hook or crook,” or both, and more of the former, and a good deal of the latter, and was last heard of as one of the inmates of the famous pest-house of that city. How he escaped from this institution, and resumed his peripatetic career, would doubtless make a very pretty romance, but we must be pardoned, if we assert that we know no more about this konfounded, krooked konundrum than does the reader, and drop our quill.