ent and choice of
words--though still fluent in cursing--far surpassed in purity any
speech I had heard from him in health.

"And there was something else about it. . . . While the gutter ran
Houndsditch, the man was a cur, cowering and yelping out terror under
strokes of a whip-lash. When it shifted accent, he lost all this and
started to _threaten_. Something like this it would run: 'Gawd!
Oh, Gawd, he's after me again. . . . See his rosy eyes follerin' like
rosy naphthas. . . . Oh, Gawd, hide me from this blighter. . . . Look
here, damn you! I'll trouble you to know who's master here.
You will halt where you are, you Foe, and not wag a tail until I give
you leave. That's better! Now, if you will kindly state your
business at that distance I'll state mine. . . . Is that all?
Quite so: and now you'll listen to me, and maybe reconsider yourself
. . .' That, or something like that, is the way it would go.

"I had a sense all the while, Roddy, that he was almost slipping
through my fingers, and I fairly dug in my nails to hold him to life.
On that point my conscience is clear, anyhow. No man ever had a
doctor to battle harder for him, or a more devoted nurse.

"Well, I pulled him through, and nursed him to convalescence.
I thought I knew something of the peevishness of convalescents: but
Farrell beat anything I had ever seen, or heard, or read of. By this
time I was worn weak as a rat with night-watching and day-watching:
but of this he made no account whatever. He started by using his
greater weakness for strength, and he went on to dissemble his
growing strength, hiding it, increasing it, still trading it as
weakness upon my exhaustion. He came back to life with a permanent
sneering smile, and a trick of wearing it for hours at a stretch as
he leaned back on the cushions I had painfully made for him of
plaited flax and stuffed with aromatic leaves, daily renewed. . . .
Yes, Roddy, as a doctor I played full professional service on him,
and piled it up with every extra kindness one castaway man could
render another. . . . And the devil, as he recovered, lay watching
me, under half-closed eyes, with never a sign of gratitude, but, for
all my reward, this shifty sneer.

"There came a day when his new insolence broke out with his old hate.
'You Foe,' said he, 'I reckon you're priding yourself on your bedside
manner, eh? . . . I can't keep much account of time, lying here.
But, when I get about again, I'll have