This one got twenty grains of quinine
in water.
"This man carries no load to-morrow," was the direction, "but he
must not drop behind."
Two or three surgical cases followed. Then a big Kavirondo rose
to his feet.
"Nini?" demanded F.
"Homa-fever," whined the man.
F. clapped his hand on the back of the other's neck.
"I think," he remarked contemplatively in English, "that you're a
liar, and want to get out of carrying your load."
The clinical thermometer showed no evidence of temperature.
"I'm pretty near sure you're a liar," observed F. in the
pleasantest conversational tone and still in English, "but you
may be merely a poor diagnostician. Perhaps your poor insides
couldn't get away with that rotten meat I saw you lugging
around. We'll see."
So he mixed a pint of medicine.
"There's Epsom salts for the real part of trouble," observed F.,
still talking to himself, "and here's a few things for the fake."
He then proceeded to concoct a mixture whose recoil was the exact
measure of his imagination. The imagination was only limited by
the necessity of keeping the mixture harmless. Every hot, biting,
nauseous horror in camp went into that pint measure.
"There," concluded F., "if you drink that and come back again
to-morrow for treatment, I'll believe you ARE sick."
Without undue pride I would like to record that I was the first
to think of putting in a peculiarly nauseous gun oil, and thereby
acquired a reputation of making tremendous medicine.
So implicit is this faith in white man's medicine that at one of
the Government posts we were approached by one of the secondary
chiefs of the district. He was a very nifty savage, dressed for
calling, with his hair done in ropes like a French poodle's, his
skin carefully oiled and reddened, his armlets and necklets
polished, and with the ceremonial ball of black feathers on the
end of his long spear. His gait was the peculiar mincing teeter
of savage conventional society. According to custom, he
approached unsmiling, spat carefully in his palm, and shook
hands. Then he squatted and waited.
"What is it?" we asked after it became evident he really wanted
something besides the pleasure of our company.
"N'dowa-medicine," said he.
"Why do you not go the Government dispensary?" we demanded.
"The doctor there is an Indian; I want REAL medicine, white man's
medicine," he explained.
Immensely flattered, of course, we wanted further to know what
ailed him.
"Nothing," said he blandly, "nothing at all; but it seemed an
excellent chance to get good medicine."
After the clinic was all attended to, we retired to our tents and
the screeching-hot bath so grateful in the tropics. When we
emerged, in our mosquito boots and pajamas, the daylight was
gone. Scores of little blazes licked and leaped in the velvet
blackness round about, casting the undergrowth and the lower
branches of the trees into flat planes like the cardboard of a
stage setting.
