But in the night the Sweeper arose and exhumed the Pudding and ate of it right heartily. And through the night of sorrow he groaned. And at dawn he died. This is the truth.
* * * * *
Dinner that night was a silent meal, if meal it could be called. No man dared speak to his neighbour for fear of what his neighbour might reply. The only reference to the Pudding was made by Augustus, who remarked, as a servant brought in a dish of roasted maize-cobs, where the Pudding should have come—chicken-feed where should have been Food of the Gods—“I am almost glad poor Murie and Lindsay are so ill that they couldn’t possibly have eaten any Pudding in any case. . . . Seems some small compensation to ’em, don’t it, poor devils. . . .”
“I do not think Murie will get better,” observed Lieutenant Bupendranath Chatterji. “Fever and dysentery, both violent, and I have not proper things. . . .”
The silence seemed to deepen as everybody thought of the two sick men, lying in their dirty clothes, on dirty camp-beds, in leaky grass huts, with a choice of bully-beef, dog-biscuit, coco-nut and maize as a dysentery diet.
Whose turn next? And what sort of a fight could the force put up if attacked by Africans when all the Indians and Europeans were ill with fever and dysentery? Heaven bless the Wise Man who had kept the African Army of British East Africa so small and had disbanded battalions of the King’s African Rifles just before the war. What chance would Indians and white men, who had lived for months in the most pestilential swamp in Africa, have against salted Africans led by Germans especially brought down from the upland health-resorts where they lived? . . .
“Can you give me a little quinine, Chatterji?” asked Augustus. “Got any calomel? I b’lieve my liver’s as big as my head to-day. I feel a corner of it right up between my lungs. Stops my breathing sometimes. . . .”
“Oah, yees. Ha! Ha!” said the medical gentleman. “I have a few tablets. I will presently send you some also. . . .”
Next morning Augustus came in last to breakfast.
“Thanks for the quinine tablets, Chatterji,” said he. “The hospital orderly brought them in his bare palm. I swallowed all ten, however. What was it—twenty grains?”