“Yous come on now, eh?” he said gently, regarding Tom with an anxious expression of countenance.
“Well, well,” replied our hero, getting up with a sort of desperate energy, “let’s push on; I can at all events walk till my legs refuse to carry me, and then it will not be I who shall have given in, but the legs!—eh, Mafuta?”
Smiling languidly at this conceit, Tom walked on, almost mechanically, for nearly twenty miles that day, with scarcely any shelter from the sun.
At night he reached a native village, the chief of which considerately let him rest in an old hut. When Tom flung himself down in a corner of this, he felt so ill that he called his servant and bade him fetch the package which contained his slender stock of medicine.
“Open it, Mafuta, and let’s see what we have left. I’m resolved to make some change in myself for better or worse, if I should have to eat up the whole affair. Better be poisoned at once than die by inches in this way.”
“No more kineen,” said the Caffre, as he kneeled by his master’s side, turning over the papers and bottles.
“No more quinine,” repeated Tom sadly; “no more life, that means.”
“Not’ing more bot tree imuttics, an’ small drop ludnum,” said Mafuta.
“Three emetics,” said Tom, “and some laudanum; come, I’ll try these. Mix the whole of ’em in a can, and be quick, like a good fellow; I’ll have one good jorum whatever happens.”
“Bot yous vil bost,” said Mafuta remonstratively.