One pair of pale, rather ugly eyes in the crowd were illumined with pure hero-worship. "That's 'im," explained their owner, nudging a big man in shabby white drill, who was shouldering a deliberate way through the press.
"The Colonel—and ain't 'e a Regular Oner! Them along of 'im—with the red shoulder-straps and brown leather leggin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o' the Staff, they are. An' them others in khâki with puttees—syme as wot I've got on—they're the Medical Swells. Military Saw-boneses—twig? You can tell 'em, when you're near enough, by the bronze badges with a serpint climbin' up a stick inside a wreath, wot they 'ave on the fronts o' their caps an' on their jacket-collars, an' the instrument-cases wot they carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a bit in the know about these things, being a sort of Service man meself."
Thus delicately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid additions had certainly been made to the martial outfit of the previous day. The tweed Norfolk had been replaced by a khâki jacket, evidently second-hand, and obligingly taken in by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's stripe, purchased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as the consequence of over-indulgence in liquor and language, had one to sell, had been sewn upon the sleeve. The original owner had charged an extra tikkie for doing it, and it burned the arm that bore it like a vaccination-pustule on the fifth day.
"Being a sort of Service man meself," repeated W. Keyse. He twitched the stripe carelessly into sight. "C'manding orficer marked me down for this to-day," he continued, with elaborate indifference, "along of a Favourable Mention in the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much—little turn-up with a 'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned out to be a spy."
In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he recognised the face under the Panama hat worn by the big neighbour in white drill, and blushes swamped his yellow freckles. The owner of that square, powerful face, no longer bloated and crimson, but pale and drawn, was the man who had stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's saloon-bar on the previous day, where Fate had stage-managed effects so badly that the heroic leading attitude of W. Keyse had perforce given place to the minor rôle of the juvenile walking-gentleman. "Watto!" he began. "It's you, Mister! I bin wantin' to say thank——" But a surge of the crowd flattened W. Keyse against the green-painted iron railings surrounding a municipal gum-tree, and the big man was lost to view. Perhaps it was as well that the acquaintance made under conditions remote from respectability should not be renewed. But W. Keyse would have preferred to thank the rescuer.
The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a moment, to the disappointment of the ceremony-loving Briton and the Colonial of British race, to say nothing of the Kaffirs and the Barala, who anticipated a big indaba. The little party of officers in khâki walked up the gravel-drive between the carefully-tended grass plats to the stoep where the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, with the matron, house-surgeon, secretary, and several prominent members of the Committee—including Alderman Brooker, puffy-cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of a night's rest—waited. Military Authority saluted Civic Dignity, shook hands, and the thing was done. Inspection followed.
"The warr'ds, said ye?" The Chief Medical Officer, a tall raw-boned personage, very evidently hailed from North of the Tweed. "I'm obliged to ye, ma'am," he addressed the flustered matron, "but the warr'ds an' the contents o' the beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance—at least, whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion we'll tak' a look at the Operating Theatre, and overhaul the sterileezing plant, and the sanitary arrangements, and maybe, after a gliff at the kitchens, there would be a moment to spend in ganging through the warr'ds. Unless the Colonel would prefer to begin wi' them?" He turned a small, twinkling pair of blue eyes set in dry wrinkles upon his Chief.
"Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall ask five minutes more grace in the interests of the friend I spoke of, Dr. Saxham; with whom I made an appointment at the half-hour."
"You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that wrote 'The Diseases of Civilisation,' are ye, Colonel? I mind a sentence in it that must have been a douse of cauld watter—toch! vitriol would be the better worr'd—in the faces o' some o' the dandy operators. 'Young men,' he ca'ed them, as if he was a greybeard himsel', 'young men who, led to take up Surgery by the houp o' gains an' notoriety, have given themselves nae time to learn its scienteefic principles—showy operators, who diagnose wi' the knife an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and no' to assist her.' And yet Saxham could daur! 'I shall prove that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out exceesion,' he said, or they say he said in the Lancet report o' the operation on the Grand Duke Waldimir—I cam' across a reprint o' it no' lang ago—when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi' the sweat o' mortal terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He cut a hole in the Duke's stomach, ye will understand, in front o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller intesteene, spliced the twa together wi' a Collins button, and by a successful deveece o' plumbing—naething less—earned the eterr'nal gratitude o' the autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the Nihilists. All that, seven years ago, an' the thing is dune the day wi'oot a hair's-breadth difference. For why? Ye canna paint the lily, or improve upon perfection. Toch!... Colonel, that man would be worth the waitin' for, if he stood in your friend's shoes the day!"