There was a final detonation and a last chorus of screams. Maehoe came back. He saw Gleason, full of courage now, firing vengefully at fleeing figures. Maehoe went inside the house. A moment later Gleason heard him blubbering.
Henderson had heard the shooting and the screams. The sound had penetrated even his delirium. He had gotten up and tried to come out with a revolver in his hand. He hadn’t quite made it. Maehoe was lifting him back to his bunk.
Fifteen minutes later Maehoe came out again, wearing his immaculate white drill jacket and his gee-string and nothing else except a cheroot between his teeth. He was sobbing softly to himself and his eyes were fixed. He took a double handful of dynamite sticks from the box and went on down into the bush, his gnarly, lean brown legs astonishingly prominent below the white jacket.
Five minutes later Gleason heard a dynamite stick go off. Screams followed it. Ten minutes more, and another went off. And then, for an hour, at odd and irregular intervals there came the crisp, crackling detonations of dynamite, curiously echoed among the tree trunks. Usually, after an explosion, there were howls and outcries.
Then Maehoe came back. His white drill jacket was stained with blood. He limped a little, and there was a monstrous bruise on one temple where a flung club had nearly downed him.
He looked at Gleason with dumb agony in his eyes, in the sort of dull apathy which comes over a bushboy after he has gone into a frenzy akin to hysteria, has done a lot of damage, and has accomplished nothing.
“Fella marster go die plenty damn quick,” he said dully. “No got one-fella mane ni ha’a mauria. No fetch ’em stuff puru puru. Fella marster go die plenty damn quick.”
He went into the house with dragging steps, leaving Gleason biting at his finger-ends. Maehoe thought Henderson was dying because there was no doctor and he hadn’t been given the stuff from the bottle—quinine. The dynamite and his hysterical hunting of his fellow bushboys had been for the purpose of working off the rage and despair that filled him.
And Gleason, with the hair raising on his head, began to wonder what Maehoe would do when Henderson died. He would blame it all on Gleason for preventing his giving Henderson quinine. And Gleason began to feel a rather horrible fear.