A moment afterwards he had entered the block-house, and, with one grim nod to me, proceeded with his work among the sick. He seemed under no apprehension, though he must have known that his life, among these treacherous demons, depended on a hair; and he rattled on to his patients as if he were paying an ordinary professional visit in a quiet English family. His manner, I suppose, reacted on the men; for they behaved to him as if nothing had occurred—as if he were still ship’s doctor, and they still faithful hands before the mast.
“You’re doing well, my friend,” he said to the fellow with the bandaged head, “and if ever any person had a close shave, it was you; your head must be as hard as iron.—Well, George, how goes it? You’re a pretty colour, certainly; why, your liver, man, is upside down. Did you take that medicine?—did he take that medicine, men?”
“Ay, ay, sir, he took it, sure enough,” returned Morgan.
“Because, you see, since I am mutineers’ doctor, or prison doctor, as I prefer to call it,” says Dr. Livesey, in his pleasantest way, “I make it a point of honour not to lose a man for King George (God bless him!) and the gallows.”
The rogues looked at each other, but swallowed the home-thrust in silence.
“Dick don’t feel well, sir,” said one.
“Don’t he?” replied the doctor. “Well, step up here, Dick, and let me see your tongue. No, I should be surprised if he did! the man’s tongue is fit to frighten the French. Another fever.”
“Ah, there,” said Morgan, “that comed of sp’iling Bibles.”
“That comed—as you call it—of being arrant asses,” retorted the doctor, “and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough. I think it most probable—though, of course, it’s only an opinion—that you’ll all have the deuce to pay before you get that malaria out of your systems. Camp in a bog, would you?—Silver, I’m surprised at you. You’re less a fool than many, take you all round; but you don’t appear to me to have the rudiments of a notion of the rules of health.”
“Well,” he added, after he had dosed them round, and they had taken his prescriptions with really laughable humility, more like charity-school children than blood-guilty mutineers and pirates—“Well, that’s done for to-day. And now I should wish to have a talk with that boy, please.”