d hand in his. "It seems too hard to believe. Ned! Ned! you can
hear what I say?"

There was no reply, and the boy looked wildly from one to the other.

"Oh, father," he cried, as he saw their grave looks, "is he dying?"

Sir John was silent, and Jack caught at the doctor's hand.

"Tell me," he cried. "But it can't be so bad as that. It would be too
dreadful for him to die."

"He is very bad," said the doctor slowly, "but I have not given up all
hope. It is like this, Meadows. The poison is passing through his
system, and in my ignorance of what that poison really is, I am so
helpless in my attempts to neutralise it. Even if I knew it would be
desperate work."

"Then you can do nothing?" cried Jack in agony.

"I can do little more, my lad, but help him in his struggle against it.
The battle is going on between a strong healthy man and the insidious
enemy sapping his life. Nature is the great physician here."

Jack uttered a piteous groan, and still knelt by the couch, holding the
poor fellow's hand, watching every painful breath he drew, and noting
the strange change in his countenance, and the peculiar spasms which
convulsed him from time to time, but without his being conscious of the
pain.

As Jack knelt there it seemed to him that it was in a kind of confused
dream that he heard his father's questions and the doctor's replies, as,
after some ministration or another, they walked to the end of the cabin.

Then the captain came down softly.

"The enemy's coming out to sea," he said, "and making north; they'll be
in a fix if the wind rises, for they are clustering in their canoes like
bees. How's the patient?"

"Bad," said Sir John.

"Tut--tut--tut!" ejaculated the captain. "I am sorry. But you'll pull
him through, doctor?"

"If I can," said Doctor Instow coldly.

"That's right. I have been so full up with my work that I seem to have
taken hardly any notice of him. Wound through his arm. You have well
cleansed it, of course?"

"Of course, and injected things to neutralise the poison."

"Ah!" cried the captain, angrily, "it takes all one's sympathy with the
miserable savages away when one finds that they fight in so cowardly, so
fiendish a fashion. I was ready to be sorry for them when I was
crushing their boat. But this makes me feel as if one ought to lose no
opportunity for sweeping the venomous wretches off the face of the
earth. They have no excuse, you see. It is our lives or