"Remember, too," I said, "that this man can do you no harm unless you intrude yourself upon his superstitions again. Leave the country immediately; depend upon it, he is following you."
"That's not possible," said the American, "for I am following him. Until I come up with him I can do nothing, and my existence is not worth a pin's purchase."
I shuddered, and we parted. My mind told me that he was right, but my heart clamored above the voice of reason and said, "You could not do it, no, not to save a hundred lives."
Ah, father, how little we know ourselves—how little, oh, how little! When I think that he shrank back—he who held life so cheap—while I—I who held it so dear, so sacred, so god-like—Bear with me; I will tell all.
I met the American at intervals during the next six days. We did not often speak, but as we passed in the streets—he alone, I always with my loquacious interpreter—I observed with dread the change that the shadow of death hanging over a man's head can bring to pass in his face and manner. He grew thin and sallow and wild-eyed. One day he stopped me, and said: "I know now what your Buckshot Forster died of," and then he went on without another word.
But about ten days after our first meeting in the slave market he stopped me again, and said, quite cheerfully: "He has gone home—I'm satisfied of that now."
"Thank God!" I answered involuntarily.
"Ah," he said, with a twinkle of the eye, "who says that a man must hang up his humanity on the peg with his hat in the hospital hall when he goes to be a surgeon? If the poet Keats had got over the first shock to his sensibilities, he might have been the greatest surgeon of his day."
"You'll be more careful in future," I said, "not to cross the fanaticism of these fanatics?"
He smiled, and asked if I knew the Karueein Mosque. I told him I had seen it.