went to sleep. But in the morning I found Captain D. staring-eyed and
strung nearly to madness, trying feverishly to calculate how seven dogs
drinking on an average of three hours apiece could have finished by
morning. When Harold Hill innocently asked if he had slept well, the
captain threw the remaining but now extinct firebrand at him.

One of the safari boys, a big Baganda, had twisted his foot a little,
and it had swelled up considerably. In the morning he came to have it
attended to. The obvious treatment was very hot water and rest; but it
would never do to tell him so. The recommendation of so simple a remedy
would lose me his faith. So I gave him a little dab of tick ointment
wrapped in a leaf.

"This," said I, "is most wonderful medicine; but it is also most
dangerous. If you were to rub it on your foot or your hand or any part
of you, that part would drop off. But if you wash the part in very hot
water continuously for a half hour, and then put on the medicine, it is
good, and will cure you very soon." I am sure I do not know what they
put in tick ointment; nor, for the purpose, did it greatly matter. That
night, also, Herbert Spencer reached the climax of his absurdities. The
chops he had cooked did not quite suffice for our hunger, so we
instructed him to give us some of the leg. By this we meant steak, of
course. Herbert Spencer was gone so long a time that finally we went to
see what possibly could be the matter. We found him trying desperately
to cook the whole leg in a frying-pan!




XXII.