He was still rambling on when the Krooboy returned, and by that time the fever was burning dangerously high. It was not running its normal course. He had undergone abnormal exertion, and the resulting fever was correspondingly fierce. White-Man's-Trouble came in out of the warm moist night outside, with some liquid in a cracked teacup. The patient refused to know him, and so the Krooboy picked him up in his enormous arms and got the liquid down his throat by drenching him as a nurse might drench a fractious child. Carter coughed and spat, but the dose was down, and in three minutes it had started its work. In five minutes it had laid him out, and then White-Man's-Trouble carried him into the next room and laid him on a bed. Then from a bag he produced materials and did with them what will not be set down here.... And after that he groped around inside the mosquito bar, killed what insects were lodged there, pulled down the netting, and tucked it accurately round the mattress. Then he took up his matchet again, spat in his great right hand to get a good grip on the hilt, lay down on the mat before the door and went to sleep. The room pinged with mosquitoes; a leopard roared persistently from the bush at the back of the factory, and a rat somewhere up in the rafters gnawed at a sounding piece of board with irritating persistence. Moreover, of course there was the probability of the Okky men coming to the factory at any moment for that much talked-of massacre. But none of these things disturbed White-Man's-Trouble. He suddenly wished for sleep, and therefore to sleep he promptly resigned himself. All thoughts of anything beyond that immediate desire were blotted out from his simple brain. The patient might awake, and rave, or want assistance; but that did not matter. Nothing mattered beyond his wish there and then for sleep. The beautiful unreliability of his tribe was strongly present in White-Man's-Trouble. CHAPTER V EVENTS AT MALLA-NULLA Mr. Smith had been away from his creature comforts for a spell of twenty hours, and most of that time had been spent on the thwart of a dancing surf boat in the embraces of a dank sea fog. He had been divorced from food, stimulant and tobacco smoke for all that time--the surf boat had been twice upset in getting off, and drowned all the matches--and as a consequence his temper was vile, and his language was sulphurous. He was barely thankful when he came back to the beach again and found Malla-Nulla factory neither burned nor looted; he was openly ungrateful when he found that the last of the stock of limes had gone mouldy, and realized for the moment a Coast cocktail was beyond the limitations of art. As a consequence Mr. Smith romped up and down the untidy mess-room in a state bordering on frenzy, and in his own especial polyglot reviled the unknown K. O'Neill as the _fons et origo mali_.