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About halfway between Sopoor and Baramula the wind increased to a gale and obliged me to take refuge under the bank. I dined with Macnamara and his wife at 8 o'clock, the weather moderated and we proceeded to Baramula. SEPTEMBER 3rd. At sunrise I obtained coolies, and turned my back on the happy valley for ever.
"I'll cut the price of the kiss on those dirty fingers from a dervish joint," muttered Macnamara to himself, as he took his place that evening at the Khalifa's door. One thing Macnamara was determined on. He would never pray in a Mahommedan mosque, he would never turn Mahommedan even for a day. The time had come when he must make a break for liberty. He must have money.
Whether the election week might have sufficed his appetite for wonders I know not; but he was peaceably taking his departure from the west on Saturday last, when Phil Macnamara met him, and pressed him to dine that day with a few friends at his house.
I remember wakin' up and seeing Stalky asleep with his head on old Rutton Singh's chest. He slept twenty-four hours. I only slept seventeen, but then I was coming down with dysentery." "Coming down? What rot! He had it on him before we joined Stalky in the fort," said Tertius. "Well, you needn't talk! You hove your sword at Macnamara and demanded a drum-head court-martial every time you saw him.
Slipper rides purty easy, and he's a purty big man." "All right, Ike," said The Kid. "Remember every minute is precious. Here, Mac," he continued, turning to Macnamara, who stood looking in at the door, craning his neck to see and hear what was going on, "slip around to the side door and tell Mr. Macgregor that I want him right away."
When the Khalifa replied that he would accept the convert into the true faith at once, Slatin then said to Macnamara: "Come now, my man, I've promised that you will become a Mahommedan it's your best chance of safety." "I'll see him on the devil's pitchfork first," said Macnamara; but he did not change countenance. "I'm a Protestant and I'll stand be me baptism."
Henceforth things went better, for Osman Wad Adam was an Arab with a sense of humour, very lazy and very licentious, and Macnamara's Arabic was a source of enjoyment to him in those hours when he did nothing but smoke and drink bad coffee. Also Macnamara was an expert with horses, and had taught the waler, which Osman Wad Adam had looted from Khartoum, a number of admired tricks.
Macnamara wished many a time that he could take to the desert with the waler; but the ride that he must ride to Wady Halfa was not for a horse. None but a camel could do it. Besides, he must have guides, and how was he to pay guides?
"Sat on my cot smokin' a cigarette, and makin' me laugh till I cried. Macnamara bundled the whole lot of us down to the plains next day. We were a walkin' hospital." "Stalky told me that Macnamara was a simple godsend to him," said Dick Four.
The discharges, according to the experiments of Thiersch, Burdon-Sanderson, and Macnamara, are not virulent and poisonous for the first twenty-four hours; on the second day eleven per cent. of those who swallow them will suffer; on the third day, thirty-six per cent.; on the fourth day, ninety per cent.; on the fifth day, seventy-one per cent.; on the sixth day, forty per cent.; and after that the discharges have no effect the bacteria die, and the poison becomes inert.
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