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“And what’s your particular poison for him?” asked Dicky, with his eyes on the Cholera Hospital a few hundred yards away.

“I don’t know. If he’s punished in the ordinary way it will only make matters worse, as the Mudir says. Something’s needed that will play our game and turn the tables on the reptile too.”

“A sort of bite himself with his own fangs, eh?” Dicky seemed only idly watching the moving figures by the hospital.

“Yes, but what is it? I can’t inoculate him with bacilli. That’s what’d do the work, I fancy.”

“Pocket your fancy, Fielding,” answered Dicky. “Let me have a throw.”

“Go on. If you can’t hit it off, it’s no good, for my head doesn’t think these days: it only sees, and hears, and burns.”

Dicky eyed Fielding keenly, and then, pouring out some whiskey for himself, put the bottle on the floor beside him, casually as it were. Then he said, with his girlish laugh, not quite so girlish these days: “I’ve got his sentence pat–it’ll meet the case, or you may say, ‘Cassio, never more be officer of mine.'”

He drew over a piece of paper lying on the piano–for there was a piano on the Amenhotep, and with what seemed an audacious levity Fielding played in those rare moments when they were not working or sleeping; and Fielding could really play! As Dicky wrote he read aloud in a kind of legal monotone:

The citizen Mustapha Kali having asserted that there is no cholera, and circulated various false statements concerning the treatment of patients, is hereby appointed as hospital-assistant for three months, in the Cholera Hospital of Kalamoun, that he may have opportunity of correcting his opinions.

–Signed Ebn ben Hari, Mudir of Abdallah.

Fielding lay back and laughed–the first laugh on his lips for a fortnight. He laughed till his dry, fevered lips took on a natural moisture, and he said at last: “You’ve pulled it off, D. That’s masterly. You and Norman have the only brains in this show. I get worse every day; I do–upon my soul!”

There was a curious anxious look in Dicky’s eyes, but he only said: “You like it? Think it fills the bill, eh?”

“If the Mudir doesn’t pass the sentence I’ll shut up shop.” He leaned over anxiously to Dicky and gripped his arm. “I tell you this pressure of opposition has got to be removed, or we’ll never get this beast of an epidemic under, but we’ll go under instead, my boy.”

“Oh, we’re doing all right,” Dicky answered, with only apparent carelessness. “We’ve got inspection of the trains, we’ve got some sort of command of the foreshores, we’ve got the water changed in the mosques, we’ve closed the fountains, we’ve stopped the markets, we’ve put Sublimate Pasha and Limewash Effendi on the war-path, and–“

“And the natives believe in lighted tar-barrels and a cordon sanitaire! No, D., things must take a turn, or the game’s lost and we’ll go with it. Success is the only thing that’ll save their lives–and ours: we couldn’t stand failure in this. A man can walk to the gates of hell to do the hardest trick, and he’ll come back one great blister and live, if he’s done the thing he set out for; but if he doesn’t do it, he falls into the furnace. He never comes back. Dicky, things must be pulled our way, or we go to deep damnation.”

Dicky turned a little pale, for there was high nervous excitement in Fielding’s words; and for a moment he found it hard to speak. He was about to say something, however, when Fielding continued.

“Norman there,”–he pointed to the deck-cabin, “Norman’s the same. He says it’s do or die; and he looks it. It isn’t like a few fellows besieged by a host. For in that case you wait to die, and you fight to the last, and you only have your own lives. But this is different. We’re fighting to save these people from themselves; and this slow, quiet, deadly work, day in, day out, in the sickening sun and smell-faugh! the awful smell in the air–it kills in the end, if you don’t pull your game off. You know it’s true.”