. . As I've said, we stuck it out on that island
for two years, and a little over, hating one another as two lonely
men will come to hate, on island or lighthouse, even when they don't
start on a sworn enmity. Oh, you must have been through it to
understand! . . . We even quarrelled--and came almost to blows--over
the day of the month; though God knows what it helped either to be
right or wrong, and, as it happened, we were both wrong by a
fortnight or so."
"And then Farrell took ill.
"It was a kind of fever he caught while duck-snaring in the lagoon.
He'd start off there for a long day with his dog, the two practising
cleverness at the sport. I always felt somehow that, when his grief
came, it would come through the dog. . . . Well, he took a fever
which I couldn't well diagnose, to say whether it was rheumatic
or malarial. It ran to sweats and it ran to dry skin with
shivering-fits, the deuce of a temperature, and wild delirium.
"I nursed him, of course, and doctored him, keeping the fever at bay
as well as I could with decoctions of bark--quassia for the most
part--and fresh juice of limes.
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