I laid him on his bed and prized his goat-skin clothes off, and covered him up with blankets, for luckily he had had sense enough not to burn up our bedclothes. Then I cooked him a good hot supper, and before very long he was asleep. But he kept moaning and tossing in his sleep, and I could tell by the feeling of his hands that he had a fever. So I sat by the side of him all night, which was easy enough, since I must have slept two or three hours that afternoon.
CHAPTER XIII.
Mr. Crusoe dropped asleep near daylight, and when he woke up he was rational—that is, for him. He had some fever, and was very weak, and said that he must have some medicine.
We had the ship’s medicine-chest, and I went to it and got some salts for him, for that is about the only medicine sailors ever get, but Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t take it. He said he should do just as the grandfather did when he had a fever or something else; so he sent me for some tobacco and a bottle of rum. He put the tobacco in a tin can and poured a pint of rum over it, and told me to warm it on the fire, and to stir it up every now and then. When it was good and hot Mr. Crusoe drank about half a tumblerful of it, and I expected to see him die within the next ten minutes.
He didn’t die, however, but he was the sickest man you ever saw. I took the tobacco away from him, for fear he would take some more of it and finish himself, but he was too sick to do anything of the kind.
That night he was worse than ever, and I had to hold him nearly all the time to keep him from getting up and going out to shoot cannibals.
Towards morning Mr. Crusoe was more quiet, and I accidentally fell asleep, and when I woke up he was gone. It gave me a terrible fright, and I rushed out to look for him. His gun was gone, so that I knew that he had taken it with him; and I thought that he had probably gone to look for cannibals, and that I would find him near the place where we had seen the picnickers.
I did not come across him on the way to the beach, and when I reached there he was not in sight. I went to look at the remains of the fire where the picnickers had been cooking, and I was looking on the sand to see if they had dropped anything, when I heard a rifle-shot, and the bullet came whizzing by my ear. In a few seconds another bullet came along; and as I knew that Mr. Crusoe must be firing, and that he was a pretty good shot, I dropped on the sand and pretended to be dead.
Presently he came up with his rifle and stood close to me, looking at me. I still pretended to be dead, but he didn’t seem to be quite sure about it, for he put his rifle close against my ear, and would have blown my brains out if I hadn’t caught it in my hand and jumped up.