But we urged another—a last—delay, say till noon; and they gave way, but warned us it would be useless.
The heat that day was awful. No breeze, no relief—only dead, oppressive heat, reflected to and fro the steel-blue sky and the hard-baked earth.
The fires were out—we had cooked nothing that day—and the camp looked dead and deserted. One or more of us would always be with Soltké; the others would be lying in the shadow of a tree or under a waggon. We had some faint hope that the district surgeon would turn up, but not before the morrow, and, knowing Soltké’s condition, that seemed useless, so that our only real chance was with Munroe.
As we lay there, dismally and hopelessly waiting, we were suddenly startled by a most peculiar and unnatural bark. The two dogs also jumped up and ran out on to the road. We could see nothing except that Munroe had gone. The noise was repeated, and the dogs growled, and every hair stood up on their backs.
“Great God! look there!” came from Donald.
Following his glance, we saw, low down amongst the thick buffalo grass, the wild, haggard face of Doc Munroe. His shock red hair half covered his eyes, which glittered and glared like a lioness’s. As we stood he barked again, and made a jump out to the margin of the grass. He was mad—stark, staring mad—with delirium tremens! In one of his hands, half hidden by the grass, we could see a Bushman’s friend, and the bright blade seemed to catch an ugly gleam from the man’s eyes and reflect it malevolently back on us.
Munroe was a big man, and, although ruined in health by years of hard drinking, would have been a very ugly customer while the mad fit lasted; so we just stood our ground, ready to take him any way he wanted to come. After a minute or two he seemed to feel the effect of four pairs of eyes looking steadily at him, and the wild beast died out, and his body, which had been as rigid as a “standing” pointer’s, became visibly limp and nerveless. He got up heavily, with a silly, hysterical laugh, and stood meekly before us, looking as foolish and harmless as a human being might. He sidled over towards Donald Mackay, keeping as far as possible from Gowan, whom he clearly distrusted, and looking furtively about, as though others besides us might hear him, he said, with a sickly smile and in a thin, uncertain voice:
“I was playin’, Donald, old man, only playin’. You know me—old Doc Munroe. You weren’t frightened, Donald, eh? He! he! I like to bark, ye know. I like it, and who’ll stop me if I like it, eh? You could see I was playin’, old partner. You knew it, didn’t you?”
The man was wretchedly weak and shaky, and as he continued to look about anxiously, he wiped the heavy drops of cold perspiration off his colourless face with the dirty strip of kapalaan which did service for a pocket-handkerchief. He sidled up closer and closer to Donald, and watched with growing intentness and terror the place from which he had just emerged. Mackay quietly imprisoned the knife-hand, but Munroe never noticed that, and only clung closer to him, and began to mutter and cry out again, quivering with excitement and terror, which grew on him, until he shrieked to Donald to save him, and to “knife him over there”—pointing to the tree beneath which he had hidden. Key took the proffered knife, and, walking quietly towards the tree, began to hack it in an unenthusiastic manner; and the relief that this seemed to give Munroe would have been ludicrous but for the desperate hopelessness it brought for poor Soltké.
It was no longer possible to keep up our well-intended fiction about the doctor requiring rest, for Munroe’s maniac laughter and shrieks of terror became so frequent and awful that they must have startled one half a mile away. He became so violent that we were obliged to take him down to the spruit, and to tie him down there in the shadow of a high bank, with one of the niggers to look after him, and an occasional visit from one of us to see if all was well.