And while Alan Massey's various arts operated Dick Carson passed through a series of mental and physical evolutions and came slowly back to consciousness of what was going on.
At first he was too close to the hinterland to know or care as to what was happening here, though he did vaguely sense that he had left the lower levels of Hell and was traversing a milder purgatorial region. He did not question Alan's presence or recognize him. Alan was at first simply another of those distrusted foreigners whose point of view and character he comprehended as little as he did their jibbering tongues.
Gradually however this one man seemed to stand out from the others and finally took upon himself a name and an entity. By and by, Dick thought, when he wasn't so infernally-tired as he was just now he would wonder why Alan Massey was here and would try to recall why he had disliked him so, some time a million years ago or so. He did not dislike him now. He was too weak to dislike anybody in any case but he was beginning to connect Alan vaguely but surely with the superior cleanliness and comfort and care with which he was now surrounded. He knew now that he had been sick, very sick and that he was getting better, knew that before long he would find himself asking questions. Even now his eyes followed Alan Massey as the latter came and went with an ever more insistent wonderment though he had not yet the force of will or body to voice that pursuing question as to why Alan Massey was here apparently taking charge of his own slow return to health and consciousness.
Meanwhile Alan wired Tony Holiday every day as to his patient's condition though he wrote not at all and said nothing in his wires of himself. Letters from Tony were now beginning to arrive, letters full of eager gratitude and love for Alan and concern for Dick.
And one day Dick's mind got suddenly very clear. He was alone with the nurse at the time, the sympathetic American one whom he liked better and was less afraid of than he was of the stolid, inexorable British lady. And he began to ask questions, many questions and very definite ones. He knew at last precisely what it was he wanted to know.
He got a good deal of information though by no means all he sought. He found out that he had been taken desperately ill, that he had been summarily removed from his lodging place because of the owner's superstitious dread of contagion into the miserable little thatch roofed hut in which he had nearly died thanks to the mal-practice of the rascally, drunken doctor and the ignorant half-breed nurse. He learned how Alan Massey had suddenly appeared and taken things in his own hands, discovered that in a nutshell the fact was he owed his life to the other-man. But why? That was what he had to find out from Alan Massey himself.
The next day when Alan came in and the nurse went out he asked his question.
"That is easy," said Alan grimly. "I came on Tony's account."
Dick winced. Of course that was it. Tony had sent Massey. He was here as her emissary, naturally, no doubt as her accepted lover. It was kind. Tony was always kind but he wished she had not done it. He did not want to have his life saved by the man who was going to marry Tony Holiday. He rather thought he did not want his life saved anyway by anybody. He wished they hadn't done it.
"I—I am much obliged to you and to Tony," he said a little stiffly. "I fear it—it was hardly worth the effort." His eyes closed wearily.