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 holdhim 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.
As soon as he saw I was alive he tried his best to get the gun away from me, and when he found that he could not do it, he dropped the gun and tried to draw a revolver from his belt; but I was too quick for him, and threw him down and tied his arms with his own belt.
Mr. Crusoe struggled hard and talked at the top of his voice, but I could not understand a word he said, any more than if he had been talking Chinese. He was as crazy as he could be, and I am sure that he believed me to be a cannibal, or else he would not have shot at me.
I tried to coax him to get up and walk home, but he would not do it, so I had to tie his feet together and hoist him on my back and carry him home. He kept on raving all the time, and when I got him home I had to lash him in my bunk.
I saw at once that he was so sick that he needed something more powerful than salts, and of course I wouldn’t give him any of his dreadful tobacco-tea. All the medicines in the medicine-chest had the right doses marked on them, so that the captain couldn’t make any mistake in giving them to the men. For instance, one bottle was marked, “Dose, one teaspoonful,” and another, “Dose, five drops.” The powders were all marked after the same fashion, so Iwas sure that I couldn’t serve out a dose that would kill Mr. Crusoe.
As I didn’t know what medicine would suit his case best, I resolved to begin and give him a dose of everything in the chest until I could hit on the right thing. Of course I couldn’t tell whether he needed bottled medicine or powders, so I began by giving him a dose out of bottle No. 1, and then a powder two hours afterwards. You see, I knew that medicine ought to be taken every two hours, because that is the way they gave me medicine once when I was sick in the hospital in New York.
It was hard work to make Mr. Crusoe take his medicine, and I had to wait till he opened his mouth, and then put a stick between his teeth to hold his mouth open till I could pour the medicine into it. This generally succeeded, though sometimes I would spill most of the medicine, and have to give him a second dose.
That day and all the next night I gave him his medicine regularly, and we worked along through six different bottles and six different powders. None of them seemed to do him much good, however, and two or three times in the night he was so sick that he couldn’t hold on to his medicine but a very few minutes.
“I WAS TOO QUICK FOR HIM, AND THREW HIM DOWN.”
“I WAS TOO QUICK FOR HIM, AND THREW HIM DOWN.”
“I WAS TOO QUICK FOR HIM, AND THREW HIM DOWN.”
When morning came I was pretty sleepy, having been on duty so long, but I remembered that Mr. Crusoe hadn’t had anything to eat for a long time, and must be getting hungry. At the hospital they used to give me a sort of soup called gruel until I was nearly well, and then some ladies came one day and gave me a lot of flowers and some chocolate. I didn’t know how to make gruel, and we hadn’t any chocolate, so I picked a lot of wild flowers and gave them to Mr. Crusoe, but I don’t think they did him much good. So I thought I would take the risk of giving him some fried pork and some canned peaches. He took the peaches, but he wouldn’t look at the pork, so I finished it myself.
He kept in about the same condition for three days, and then he seemed a little better. This was just after he had taken a dose out of a big square bottle, so I hoped I had found the right medicine. The next time his medicine was due I gave him another dose out of the same bottle, and as the powders were beginning to run low, I gave up serving them out. But I hadn’t found the right medicine yet; for a little while after he had taken the second dose he became just as if he had been hit on the head and stunned, and his hands and legs were cold. I gave him some brandy, which brought him to, and made up my mind thatthe kind of medicine that is in square bottles was not good for him.
So I went back to my old plan of giving him a dose out of each bottle; and as I had found three boxes of pills in the bottom of the chest, I gave him one of each kind, making three altogether, every two hours; that is, half-way between the doses of bottled medicine. Then I remembered that plasters were good for sick people, and as there were a lot of plasters in the chest, I put six on him in different places. I meant to take them off at the end of twenty-four hours, but when I tried to get them off they wouldn’t come, so I had to leave them on, and it was about two months before he was able to get rid of them.
Mr. Crusoe was sick so long that I had to give up watching him all night; so I used to give him a double dose of medicine at bedtime, and then let him sleep the rest of the night. In spite of all my care, he didn’t seem to get any better. He was crazy all the time, and never seemed to notice that I was taking care of him. But I felt sure that the right medicine must be in that medicine-chest, and that if I stuck to it long enough I would find it. I was a little afraid, however, that he would starve to death, for he wouldn’t eat a thing except canned peaches and canned lobster.
At the end of two weeks he was so weak that he couldn’t turn himself over, and I was able to take off his lashings, for he couldn’t get out of bed alone, much less do me any harm.
Though I say it myself, I did everything I could to help him. One day I remembered that when I was in the hospital they used to read books to sick people; so I found the captain’s book on navigation, and after that I used to read to Mr. Crusoe about an hour every day. I read him all the problems in plane sailing, parallel sailing, Mercator’s sailing, and oblique sailing, and a great deal of the tables of logarithms. The tables really helped him, I think, for he sometimes went to sleep while I was reading them.
Two or three times I thought I had found the right medicine, but I always found out by giving Mr. Crusoe three or four doses of it that it didn’t fit him. Before the end of the third week all the powders, nearly all the pills, and about half of the bottled medicine was gone, and I was afraid that if he was sick much longer I would have to put him on an allowance, and only serve out half doses of medicine.
All this time I kept a bright lookout for picnickers. I fastened the ship’s ensign, union down, to the top of the big tree on the hill, and built a big bonfire on the hill readyto light as a signal to any vessel that might sight the island in the night. But no picnickers and no vessel came, though if Mr. Crusoe had let me make signals for vessels from the time we first came ashore, I am sure we should have been taken off very soon.
I was getting so anxious about Mr. Crusoe that I wanted to try everything that I could think of that might help him. I had sometimes seen a man’s arm, when he had sprained it, rubbed with medicine, and as Mr. Crusoe’s brain was all wrong, I thought that perhaps he had sprained it by thinking too hard about his grandfather. I tried rubbing his head with medicines, hoping that it might do his brain good; and as medicines can’t hurt you when they are only rubbed into you, I used to mix half a dozen medicines together and rub Mr. Crusoe’s head with the mixture. But one day I happened to rub him with a medicine that turned his hair bright blue, and then made it all fall out. Either that or some other medicine made his head very sore, so I had to give up rubbing him before it really had time to do much good.
Doctors sometimes give baths to sick people, and sometimes they even make people take hot baths. But I think that is dangerous, for I was once shipmate with a man whotold me that he knew a man who got into a hot bath, and all the skin peeled off of him, and he died.
As I had tried everything else, I tried carrying Mr. Crusoe down to the lagoon and dipping him in the water. At first he didn’t like it, but after a little he quite took to it, and would let me carry him down and dip him without saying a word. For all that, it didn’t do him any good—nothing did; and though he must have taken four gallons of bottled medicine, and I don’t know how many pounds of powders, he was no better, as far as I could see, than he would have been if he hadn’t had a drop of medicine.
Mr. Crusoe had been sick eighteen days, when one afternoon, about four o’clock, I saw a sail. She was a brig, and was just hull down on the horizon and standing to the northward. I hurried up to the top of the hill and lighted my bonfire so that she could see the smoke of it. I had kept a tin can full of kerosene in the middle of the bonfire, so that it would blaze nicely whenever the kerosene caught fire, as it was sure to do almost as soon as the bonfire was lighted. Of course I didn’t expect the brig to see a blaze in the daytime, but burning kerosene makes a tremendous black smoke, and I felt sure that the brig would see the smoke.
I couldn’t stay on the hill and watch for the brig, for itwas the time of day when I read to Mr. Crusoe, and I never was one to shirk any duty that belonged to me. However, I suppose I did read a little faster than usual, and as soon as I had finished I ran out to see the brig. She was about where she was when I saw her first, only a little more to the northward, but she wasn’t the least bit nearer the island.
I got together a big pile of wood and kept that fire going all night, and watched for the brig. It was perfectly certain that the people on board of her would see the flame even if they hadn’t noticed the smoke; but when the day broke the brig was out of sight, and I never saw her again.
I didn’t like being abandoned with a sick man on my hands, but there was no use in grumbling about it; and then I thought that if the captain of that brig could stand the recollection that he had refused to come to the rescue of a shipwrecked sailor, not to speak of Mr. Crusoe, I could stand being left on the island a while longer.
Unless I made a mistake in my calculations, Mr. Crusoe had been sick just four weeks when he woke up in the morning feeling a great deal better. His head seemed to be all right, for he spoke quietly and pleasantly, and said, “Would you please get me a little something to eat?” I was perfectly happy, for I saw that he was out of danger,and that he was perfectly rational, or at least as much so as I had ever known him to be.
I would have given something to know what medicine it was that had cured him; but it so happened that the last time I had served it out there wasn’t quite enough in one bottle, so I added a little more medicine from another bottle, and of course I couldn’t tell which was the medicine which did the work.