Page:Taylor - In the Dwellings of the Wilderness.djvu/88

 the infernal greed of a fool of an Affej, it's lost. What's going without your dinner a time or two, when a thing like that is in the balance?"

But the fool of an Affej still held the centre of the stage, and was minded to make the most of it. Deane caught him one evening, purloining wax wherewith to plug up a gruesome gash, after the manner of desert surgery, and bound up the wound himself in proper style. So that Ibraheem, feeling himself sadly illused and outcast since the day of his disgrace, became grateful, and—always in his painful English—informed him that the night before a workman had disappeared, not returning with his gang at sunset, and that the man who had seen him last was in the camp, very sick.