Now, Carter gathered from a casual inspection by two damp matches that ben Hossein's thigh was pretty bad, but he had not made allowance for the toughness of a water-drinking, spare-eating Moslem. When he came back with a parrafin lamp, followed by White-Man's-Trouble, who carried a bowl of warm water and other things, and commenced his amateur surgery, he was amazed, and he was sickened. Like most traders in the West Coast factories, he had acquired through almost daily practice a certain deftness in cleansing and repairing wounds; but here in the thigh of this great muscular Haûsa was a grid of gashes whose untended horrors went far beyond all his previous experience. The fact that the man had not bled to death, or died of shock at the first impact, and the further fact that he had withstood the attacks of all the abominable live things that preyed thereafter upon his open flesh, were a wonderful testimonial to his constitutional toughness; and the detail that in spite of his fortitude he went clammy and limp when Carter commenced dressing the wounds, was only what could be expected. But it seemed that five days had elapsed since the man had been brought in and left, and during that time the other merchants outside the fort, with the ordinary callousness of Africans for one another, had neither brought him food nor reported his calamity. On the other hand, they had stolen his goods and gone their ways, otherwise non-interferent. And as a consequence the man was three parts starved when Carter found him and had his vitality perilously lowered. Carter had, perhaps, as has been stated, much of the West Coast trader's callousness for the native, but he certainly had all of the surgeon's interest in a patient. After he had dressed the wounds he tried his best to bring his patient back to consciousness, and then for the first time only did he realize how near to the Borderland the man had crept. He sent White-Man's-Trouble flying this way and that on his errands, and with all the limited knowledge in his power fought Death for the Haûsa's life till the fatal hour of dawn was well past. And so he was found by Miss O'Neill at 5 A.M., white, shaken and black-eyed, attired in stained and sodden clothes, squatting in a miserable hutch that reeked of iodoform, and welcoming with joy Ali ben Hossein's ungracious return to a world he had so nearly left. Miss O'Neill regarded him for awhile with a pinched lip, and then "I think you are perfectly disgraceful," said she. "At least you might have let me know what you were doing, so that I could have come to help part of the time."