Trevelyan wheeled around, stopping short again. Mackenzie was still looking away.
"Well?"
"And, for God's sake, be careful!"
XIV.
It was one thing to help fight the scourge with Mackenzie in the military hospital, crude as it was, where things were carried on with a certain nicety and regard to military discipline that was stronger than even the demoralizing dread of the hour; but it was another matter to fight it, and crush it, and stamp it out, alone, in the midst of half a hundred panic stricken natives, who knew neither military discipline nor paid proper attention to the precautionary measures of the disease.
Trevelyan had never possessed the quality of conciliation; it had been either one side of the line or the other. He had always reduced things to their smallest denomination at once, with no intermediate measures. And the quality became now a practical and living thing, as he forced the natives to bow before him in obedience, and brought order out of chaos.
It was not altogether the exact application of the military organization learned at Woolwich, or the inspiration of the rally he had dreamed of, that would fire his men, he told himself grimly, as he worked among these people, but it answered for it, and it brought them into subjection to his will.
He held them in control, as the pilot holds in control the ship he steers, guiding it through the madness of the gale, and they never dreamed of mutiny, because they feared him more than they feared the cholera.
And by and by when they saw that he held the scourge in check, his hand upon its throat, they fell down before him in all the pitifulness of ignorance and superstition, as before a being mightier than they had ever conceived of, worshiping him. But they were at his feet always.
Mackenzie, shrewd and silent-tongued, took in the situation at a glance, when he rode over for an afternoon, a fortnight later, to see how Trevelyan was getting on.