But his mind that could will life or death, still pulsed on.  He saw the two whale-boats land on the beach, and the sick, on stretchers or pick-a-back, groaning and wailing, go by in lugubrious procession.  He saw the wind making on the clouded horizon, and thought of the sick in the hospital.  Here was something waiting his hand to be done, and it was not in his nature to lie down and sleep, or die, when any task remained undone.

The boss-boys were called and given their orders to rope down the hospital with its two additions.  He remembered the spare anchor-chain, new and black-painted, that hung under the house suspended from the floor-beams, and ordered it to be used on the hospital as well.  Other boys brought the coffin, a grotesque patchwork of packing-cases, and under his directions they laid Hughie Drummond in it.  Half a dozen boys carried it down the beach, while he rode on the back of another, his arms around the black’s neck, one hand clutching a prayer-book.

While he read the service, the blacks gazed apprehensively at the dark line on the water, above which rolled and tumbled the racing clouds.  The first breath of the wind, faint and silken, tonic with life, fanned through his dry-baked body as he finished reading.  Then came the second breath of the wind, an angry gust, as the shovels worked rapidly, filling in the sand.  So heavy was the gust that Sheldon, still on his feet, seized hold of his man-horse to escape being blown away.  The Jessie was blotted out, and a strange ominous sound arose as multitudinous wavelets struck foaming on the beach.  It was like the bubbling of some colossal cauldron.  From all about could be heard the dull thudding of falling cocoanuts.  The tall, delicate-trunked trees twisted and snapped about like whip-lashes.  The air seemed filled with their flying leaves, any one of which, stem-on could brain a man.  Then came the rain, a deluge, a straight, horizontal sheet that poured along like a river, defying gravitation.  The black, with Sheldon mounted on him, plunged ahead into the thick of it, stooping far forward and low to the ground to avoid being toppled over backward.

“‘He’s sleeping out and far to-night,’” Sheldon quoted, as he thought of the dead man in the sand and the rainwater trickling down upon the cold clay.

So they fought their way back up the beach.  The other blacks caught hold of the man-horse and pulled and tugged.  There were among them those whose fondest desire was to drag the rider in the sand and spring upon him and mash him into repulsive nothingness.  But the automatic pistol in his belt with its rattling, quick-dealing death, and the automatic, death-defying spirit in the man himself, made them refrain and buckle down to the task of hauling him to safety through the storm.

Wet through and exhausted, he was nevertheless surprised at the ease with which he got into a change of clothing.  Though he was fearfully weak, he found himself actually feeling better.  The disease had spent itself, and the mend had begun.