ni?" 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 tro