Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/226

200 endurance, and the hospital held no sympathy in its smallest crevice. The coolie was an old man and badly hurt. Opium had made him impervious to customary doses of morphine, and after he had been drugged in quantities to kill four men, he was no nearer rest. From a far corner of the temple the wounded coolie wailed an unending

"Ay oh"—"Ay oh"—"Ay oh!"

Soldiers rose in their blankets and made uproar with cries of—

"Kill him!"

"Smother the brute!"

"Give him an overdose!"

"Now, ain't this an outrage!"

"Hi, there, One Lung, give us a rest, for God's sake!"

"Throw him out in the yard."

Daylight brought to Saunders infinitely grateful respite from a world through which he had fled from flaming dragons that shrieked, as if in torture:

"Ay oh"—"Ay oh"—"Ay oh!"

The grip of his delirium weakened in a few days, and the surgeon called him a "mild case." At the end of a week,