Part 2

But Vetter believed he was all powerful, and the events of the last five minutes had given him extra proof. So he grinned and nodded a farewell and pushed the girl--shaken and shivering now--before him and left us. For all the world it was like a king or something dismissing his attendants. Vetter’d only wanted us for an audience, and now the show was over.

But Cary was raving. He turned to the doctor, his fists doubled, wanting to go and half kill Vetter. And I wasn’t any too peaceable myself. Not heroism, you know. Just ingrowing dislike of Vetter. He didn’t act like a white man should.

“We can’t interfere,” said the doctor coolly, “only when we’ve got proof that will stick in the teeth of Vetter’s say-so. And we haven’t.”

There was a little noise. A queer little noise, like a sick man coughing. Then a little thud. Then nothing. The doctor looked grim.

“I think we’ve got it now,” he said, with his mouth twisted wryly.

He put his hand in his pocket and went streaking to where Vetter had gone. I thought I heard the murmur of his voice. Then he came back. He was smiling, but most unpleasantly.

“You were mistaken,” he said pleasantly, “if you thought you heard me talking to anybody. Vetter is sick. Very sick. Cary, go to the boat and get my medicine-case. And you,” he said to me, “you tell the sergeant in command of the soldiers that Vetter is sick with fever brought on by excitement, and there mustn’t be any noise. Not even challenges. And certainly no shooting. Not under any circumstances.”

We went. The doctor’s face was curious; grim and queerly amused. But I knew he hadn’t found exactly what he expected when he chased Vetter. I knew just what had happened the minute he let me in the room. There was nobody in the room but Vetter. The girl had disappeared. The doctor made me help him, and it was an unpleasant job.

When Cary came back, the doctor kept him busy on errands to the soldiers. He kept the soldiers busy, getting hot water hotter and cold water colder and generally occupied with duties that certainly weren’t guard-duty. And bringing sheets and pillows and one thing and another. Cary, at the door, always growled that he’d no taste for trying to keep Vetter alive. Cary was sentimental about a pretty girl.

The sun had just risen when the doctor stopped. We came out of the sick-room and he told me to tell the sergeant the news. I went and broke it as positively as I knew how. Vetter was dead, of fever with complications. And the sergeant shuffled uneasily and said that the gunboat would be due in a week more.

I went back, and Cary was staring at the figure on the bed that we’d drawn a sheet over. There were one or two suspiciously wet spots on the floor, but Cary didn’t notice them, or think that they looked as if we had been scrubbing there.

He stared at the figure. Then he tiptoed over and drew back the sheet from the face. Curious to look at a man you cordially disliked, when he’s past being disliked any more.

“What was the matter with him?” asked Cary.

“Fever,” said the doctor.

I felt very weak and sick from the reaction from what we’d had to do, but I grinned feebly.

The doctor handed Cary a package that was wrapped up in part of a sheet; he wanted it dropped overboard in deep water. The handle stuck out of it, and the handle was that of the kris the young Malay with the hawk-like eyes had been caressing while he sat with Buro Sitt on our boat deck.

“M-my God!” said Cary, shaken and sick. “He--he----”

“He died,” said the doctor firmly, “of fever. A special sort that always follows paranoia. I’m a doctor and my report will stand, if we get him buried before the gunboat gets here. Fever, Cary, fever.”

And his report did stand. I heard later that the next Political to take Vetter’s post made shocked reports of how Vetter had been mistreating the natives. He had Grossly Exceeded his Authority, and all that sort of thing. Every effort would have to be made to restore the loyalty to _la belle France_ that Vetter’s actions would have undermined. That meant, of course, scrupulously fair treatment thereafter.

But it struck me as rather humorous that the doctor met Vetter’s successor later on and listened for half an hour to hair-raising accounts of the evil deeds Vetter had done.

“_M’sieur_,” said the new Political, excitedly, “it is incredible that he was not _assassiné_! That he died naturally, of fever, _c’est incroyable_!”

“Oh, not at all,” said the doctor. “That’s the price one pays for not taking things in time. Vetter had paranoia, and he didn’t do anything to cure himself. His ‘fever’ was the inevitable price of his neglect.”

In my mind I was contrasting Buro Sitt, with the price that had been set on his honor as a man, and the greater price set on his faith with his people. But just then a young doctor laughed at the doctor’s ignorance in speaking of Vetter’s death as the price he paid for not trying to cure his paranoia--which is usually nothing more or less than a swelled head, or the belief that one is lord of creation.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the February 10, 1926 issue of Short Stories Magazine.]