Mr. Crusoe dropped asleep near daylight, and when he woke up he was
rational—that is, for him. He had some fever, and was very weak, and
said that he must have some medicine.
We had the ship’s medicine-chest, and I went to it and got some salts
for him, for that is about the only medicine sailors ever get, but Mr.
Crusoe wouldn’t take it. He said he should do just as the grandfather
did when he had a fever or something else; so he sent me for some
tobacco and a bottle of rum. He put the tobacco in a tin can and poured
a pint of rum over it, and told me to warm it on the fire, and to stir
it up every now and then. When it was good and hot Mr. Crusoe drank
about half a tumblerful of it, and I expected to see him die within the
next ten minutes.
He didn’t die, however, but he was the sickest man you ever saw. I took
the tobacco away from him, for fear he would take some more of it and
finish himself, but he was too sick to do anything of the kind.
That night he was worse than ever, and I had to hold him nearly all the
time to keep him from getting up and going out to shoot cannibals.
Towards morning Mr. Crusoe was more quiet, and I accidentally fell
asleep, and when I woke up he was gone. It gave me a terrible fright,
and I rushed out to look for him. His gun was gone, so that I knew that
he had taken it with him; and I thought that he had probably gone to
look for cannibals, and that I would find him near the place where we
had seen the picnickers.
I did not come across him on the way to the beach, and when I reached
there he was not in sight. I went to look at the remains of the fire
where the picnickers had been cooking, and I was looking on the sand to
see if they had dropped anything, when I heard a rifle-shot, and the
bullet came whizzing by my ear. In a few seconds another bullet came
along; and as I knew that Mr. Crusoe must be firing, and that he was a
pretty good shot, I dropped on the sand and pretended to be dead.
Presently he came up with his rifle and stood close to me, looking at
me. I still pretended to be dead, but he didn’t seem to be quite sure
about it, for he put his rifle close against my ear, and would have
blown my brains out if I hadn’t caught it in my hand and jumped up.
As soon as he saw I was alive he tried his best to get the gun away from
me, and when he found that he could not do it, he dropped the gun and
tried to draw a revolver from his belt; but I was too quick for him, and
threw him down and tied his arms with his own belt.
Mr. Crusoe struggled hard and talked at the top of his voice, but I
could not understand a word he said, any more than if he had been
talking Chinese. He was as crazy as he could be, and I am sure that he
believed me to be a cannibal, or else he would not have shot at me.
I tried to coax him to get up and walk home, but he would not do it, so
I had to tie his feet together and hoist him on my back and carry him
home. He kept on raving all the time, and when I got him home I had to
lash him in my bunk.
I saw at once that he was so sick that he needed something more powerful
than salts, and of course I wouldn’t give him any of his dreadful
tobacco-tea. All the medicines in the medicine-chest had the right doses
marked on them, so that the captain couldn’t make any mistake in giving
them to the men. For instance, one bottle was marked, “Dose, one
teaspoonful,” and another, “Dose, five drops.” The powders were all
marked after the same fashion, so I was sure that I couldn’t serve out a
dose that would kill Mr. Crusoe.
As I didn’t know what medicine would suit his case best, I resolved to
begin and give him a dose of everything in the chest until I could hit
on the right thing. Of course I couldn’t tell whether he needed bottled
medicine or powders, so I began by giving him a dose out of bottle No.
1, and then a powder two hours afterwards. You see, I knew that medicine
ought to be taken every two hours, because that is the way they gave me
medicine once when I was sick in the hospital in New York.
It was hard work to make Mr. Crusoe take his medicine, and I had to wait
till he opened his mouth, and then put a stick between his teeth to hold
his mouth open till I could pour the medicine into it. This generally
succeeded, though sometimes I would spill most of the medicine, and have
to give him a second dose.
That day and all the next night I gave him his medicine regularly, and
we worked along through six different bottles and six different powders.
None of them seemed to do him much good, however, and two or three times
in the night he was so sick that he couldn’t hold on to his medicine but
a very few minutes.
[Illustration:
“I WAS TOO QUICK FOR HIM, AND THREW HIM DOWN.”
]
When morning came I was pretty sleepy, having been on duty so long, but
I remembered that Mr. Crusoe hadn’t had anything to eat for a long time,
and must be getting hungry. At the hospital they used to give me a sort
of soup called gruel until I was nearly well, and then some ladies came
one day and gave me a lot of flowers and some chocolate. I didn’t know
how to make gruel, and we hadn’t any chocolate, so I picked a lot of
wild flowers and gave them to Mr. Crusoe, but I don’t think they did him
much good. So I thought I would take the risk of giving him some fried
pork and some canned peaches. He took the peaches, but he wouldn’t look
at the pork, so I finished it myself.
He kept in about the same condition for three days, and then he seemed a
little better. This was just after he had taken a dose out of a big
square bottle, so I hoped I had found the right medicine. The next time
his medicine was due I gave him another dose out of the same bottle, and
as the powders were beginning to run low, I gave up serving them out.
But I hadn’t found the right medicine yet; for a little while after he
had taken the second dose he became just as if he had been hit on the
head and stunned, and his hands and legs were cold. I gave him some
brandy, which brought him to, and made up my mind that the kind of
medicine that is in square bottles was not good for him.
So I went back to my old plan of giving him a dose out of each bottle;
and as I had found three boxes of pills in the bottom of the chest, I
gave him one of each kind, making three altogether, every two hours;
that is, half-way between the doses of bottled medicine. Then I
remembered that plasters were good for sick people, and as there were a
lot of plasters in the chest, I put six on him in different places. I
meant to take them off at the end of twenty-four hours, but when I tried
to get them off they wouldn’t come, so I had to leave them on, and it
was about two months before he was able to get rid of them.
Mr. Crusoe was sick so long that I had to give up watching him all
night; so I used to give him a double dose of medicine at bedtime, and
then let him sleep the rest of the night. In spite of all my care, he
didn’t seem to get any better. He was crazy all the time, and never
seemed to notice that I was taking care of him. But I felt sure that the
right medicine must be in that medicine-chest, and that if I stuck to it
long enough I would find it. I was a little afraid, however, that he
would starve to death, for he wouldn’t eat a thing except canned peaches
and canned lobster.
At the end of two weeks he was so weak that he couldn’t turn himself
over, and I was able to take off his lashings, for he couldn’t get out
of bed alone, much less do me any harm.
Though I say it myself, I did everything I could to help him. One day I
remembered that when I was in the hospital they used to read books to
sick people; so I found the captain’s book on navigation, and after that
I used to read to Mr. Crusoe about an hour every day. I read him all the
problems in plane sailing, parallel sailing, Mercator’s sailing, and
oblique sailing, and a great deal of the tables of logarithms. The
tables really helped him, I think, for he sometimes went to sleep while
I was reading them.
Two or three times I thought I had found the right medicine, but I
always found out by giving Mr. Crusoe three or four doses of it that it
didn’t fit him. Before the end of the third week all the powders, nearly
all the pills, and about half of the bottled medicine was gone, and I
was afraid that if he was sick much longer I would have to put him on an
allowance, and only serve out half doses of medicine.
All this time I kept a bright lookout for picnickers. I fastened the
ship’s ensign, union down, to the top of the big tree on the hill, and
built a big bonfire on the hill ready to light as a signal to any vessel
that might sight the island in the night. But no picnickers and no
vessel came, though if Mr. Crusoe had let me make signals for vessels
from the time we first came ashore, I am sure we should have been taken
off very soon.
I was getting so anxious about Mr. Crusoe that I wanted to try
everything that I could think of that might help him. I had sometimes
seen a man’s arm, when he had sprained it, rubbed with medicine, and as
Mr. Crusoe’s brain was all wrong, I thought that perhaps he had sprained
it by thinking too hard about his grandfather. I tried rubbing his head
with medicines, hoping that it might do his brain good; and as medicines
can’t hurt you when they are only rubbed into you, I used to mix half a
dozen medicines together and rub Mr. Crusoe’s head with the mixture. But
one day I happened to rub him with a medicine that turned his hair
bright blue, and then made it all fall out. Either that or some other
medicine made his head very sore, so I had to give up rubbing him before
it really had time to do much good.
Doctors sometimes give baths to sick people, and sometimes they even
make people take hot baths. But I think that is dangerous, for I was
once shipmate with a man who told me that he knew a man who got into a
hot bath, and all the skin peeled off of him, and he died.
As I had tried everything else, I tried carrying Mr. Crusoe down to the
lagoon and dipping him in the water. At first he didn’t like it, but
after a little he quite took to it, and would let me carry him down and
dip him without saying a word. For all that, it didn’t do him any
good—nothing did; and though he must have taken four gallons of bottled
medicine, and I don’t know how many pounds of powders, he was no better,
as far as I could see, than he would have been if he hadn’t had a drop
of medicine.
Mr. Crusoe had been sick eighteen days, when one afternoon, about four
o’clock, I saw a sail. She was a brig, and was just hull down on the
horizon and standing to the northward. I hurried up to the top of the
hill and lighted my bonfire so that she could see the smoke of it. I had
kept a tin can full of kerosene in the middle of the bonfire, so that it
would blaze nicely whenever the kerosene caught fire, as it was sure to
do almost as soon as the bonfire was lighted. Of course I didn’t expect
the brig to see a blaze in the daytime, but burning kerosene makes a
tremendous black smoke, and I felt sure that the brig would see the
smoke.
I couldn’t stay on the hill and watch for the brig, for it was the time
of day when I read to Mr. Crusoe, and I never was one to shirk any duty
that belonged to me. However, I suppose I did read a little faster than
usual, and as soon as I had finished I ran out to see the brig. She was
about where she was when I saw her first, only a little more to the
northward, but she wasn’t the least bit nearer the island.
I got together a big pile of wood and kept that fire going all night,
and watched for the brig. It was perfectly certain that the people on
board of her would see the flame even if they hadn’t noticed the smoke;
but when the day broke the brig was out of sight, and I never saw her
again.
I didn’t like being abandoned with a sick man on my hands, but there was
no use in grumbling about it; and then I thought that if the captain of
that brig could stand the recollection that he had refused to come to
the rescue of a shipwrecked sailor, not to speak of Mr. Crusoe, I could
stand being left on the island a while longer.
Unless I made a mistake in my calculations, Mr. Crusoe had been sick
just four weeks when he woke up in the morning feeling a great deal
better. His head seemed to be all right, for he spoke quietly and
pleasantly, and said, “Would you please get me a little something to
eat?” I was perfectly happy, for I saw that he was out of danger, and
that he was perfectly rational, or at least as much so as I had ever
known him to be.
I would have given something to know what medicine it was that had cured
him; but it so happened that the last time I had served it out there
wasn’t quite enough in one bottle, so I added a little more medicine
from another bottle, and of course I couldn’t tell which was the
medicine which did the work.
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