The fever had burned out, and there was nothing
for him to do but gather strength. Joan had taken the cook in hand, and
for the first time, as Sheldon remarked, the chop at Berande was white
man's chop. With her own hands Joan prepared the sick man's food, and
between that and the cheer she brought him, he was able, after two days,
to totter feebly out upon the veranda. The situation struck him as
strange, and stranger still was the fact that it did not seem strange to
the girl at all. She had settled down and taken charge of the household
as a matter of course, as if he were her father, or brother, or as if she
were a man like himself.
"It is just too delightful for anything," she assured him. "It is like a
page out of some romance. Here I come along out of the sea and find a
sick man all alone with two hundred slaves--"
"Recruits," he corrected. "Contract labourers. They serve only three
years, and they are free agents when they enter upon their contracts."
"Yes, yes," she hurried on. "--A sick man alone with two hundred
recruits on a cannibal island--they are cannibals, aren't they? Or is it
all talk?"
"Talk!" he said, with a smile. "It's a trifle more than that. Most of
my boys are from the bush, and every bushman is a cannibal.
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