be his in case of complete recovery.  If he failed through negligence—­and here the expressive gesture and the gurgle were repeated—.  The sentence had not needed completion.  The matter was sufficiently elucidated.  The man was a born healer as has been recorded but even if he had not been he would still have felt obliged to move heaven and earth so far as in him lay to cure Dick Carson.  Alan Massey’s manner was persuasive.  One did one’s best to satisfy a person who spoke such Spanish and made such ominous gestures.  One did as one was commanded.  One dared do no other.

As for the servants whom Alan rallied to his standard they were slaves rather than servants.  They recognized in him their preordained master, were wax to his hands, mats to his feet.  They obeyed his word as obsequiously, faithfully and unquestioningly as if he could by a clap of his lordly hands banish them to strange deaths.

They talked in low tones about him among themselves behind his back.  This was no American they said.  No American could command as this green-eyed one commanded.  No American had such gift of tongues, such gestures, such picturesque and varied and awesome oaths.  No American carried small bright flashing daggers such as he carried in his inner pockets, nor did Americans talk glibly as he talked of weird poisons, not every day drugs, but marvelous, death dealing concoctions done up in lustrous jewel-like capsules or diluted in sparkling, insidious gorgeous hued fluids.  The man was too wise—­altogether too wise to be an American.  He had traveled much, knew strange secrets.  They rather thought he knew black art.  Certainly he knew more of the arts of healing than the doctor himself.  There was nothing he did not know, the green-eyed one.  It was best to obey him.

And while Alan Massey’s various arts operated Dick Carson passed through a series of mental and physical evolutions and came slowly back to consciousness of what was going on.

At first he was too close to the hinterland to know or care as to what was happening here, though he did vaguely sense that he had left the lower levels of Hell and was traversing a milder purgatorial region.  He did not question Alan’s presence or recognize him.  Alan was at first simply another of those distrusted foreigners whose point of view and character he comprehended as little as he did their jibbering tongues.

Gradually however this one man seemed to stand out from the others and finally took upon himself a name and an entity.  By and by, Dick thought, when he wasn’t so infernally-tired as he was just now he would wonder why Alan Massey was here and would try to recall why he had disliked him so, some time a million years ago or so.  He did not dislike him now.  He was too weak to dislike anybody in any case but he was beginning to connect Alan vaguely but surely with the superior cleanliness and comfort and care with which he was now surrounded.  He knew now that he had been sick, very sick and that he was getting better, knew that before long he would find himself asking questions.  Even now his eyes followed Alan Massey as the latter came and went with an ever more insistent wonderment though he had not yet the force of will or body to voice that pursuing question as to why Alan Massey was here apparently taking charge of his own slow return to health and consciousness.