was
improved at all in my condition. I told Jim I guessed I would lay down
and wait for the ginger tea. Pretty soon the horse doctor came in with a
tin cup full of hot ginger tea. I took one swallow of it and I thought I
had swallowed a blacksmith's forge, with a coal fire in it. I gasped and
tried to yell murder. The horse doctor explained that he couldn't get
any ginger, so he had taken cayenne pepper, which, he added, could knock
the socks off of ginger any day in the week. I felt like murdering the
horse doctor, and I felt a little hard at Jim for playing French mustard
on me, but when I come to reflect, I could see that they had done the
best they could, and I thanked them, and told them to leave me alone
and I would go to sleep. They went out of the tent and I could hear them
speculating on my case. Jim said he knew I had diabetis, and lung fever
combined, with sciatic rheumatism, and brain fever, and if I lived
till morning the horse doctor could take it out of his wages. The horse
doctor admitted that my case had a hopeless look, but he once had a
patient, a bay horse, sixteen hands high, and as fine a saddle horse
as a man ever threw a leg over, that was troubled exactly the same as
I was. He blistered his chest, gave him a table-spoonful of condition
powders three times a day in a bran mash, took off his shoes and turned
him out to grass, and in a week he sold him for two hundred and fifty
dollar. I laid there and tried to go to sleep listening to that talk.
Then, some of the boys who had heard that I was sick, came along and
inquired how I was, and I listened to the remarks they made. One of them
wanted to go and get some burdock leaves, and pound them into a pulp,
and bind them on me for a poultice. He said he had an aunt in Wisconsin
who had a milk sickness, and her left leg swelled up as big as a post,
and the doctors tried everything, and charged her over two hundred
dollars, and never did her any good, and one day an Indian doctor came
along and picked some burdock leaves and fixed a poultice for her,
and in a week she went to a hop-picker's dance, and was as kitteny as
anybody, and the Indian doctor only charged her a quarter. Jim was for
going out for burdock leaves at once, for me, but the horse doctor told
him I didn't have no milk sickness. He said all the milk soldiers got
was condensed milk, and mighty little of that, and he would defy the
world to show that a man could get milk sickness on condense