As his rescuer came nearer, he could hear the boy screaming, a harsh,
inhuman scream of rage and fear and madness combined. Jerky words amid
the screams told of his terrors,

"They're eating me! Their claws are all around! Their eyes! Their eyes!"

But still the strokes were directed wildly at the air, and never a blow
fell on the little red horrors at his feet.

"Ol' Doc, he say debbil-tree make um act that way," muttered the negro,
as he ran, "pickney he think um crabs big as a mule!"

Stuart, fighting for his life with what his tortured imagination
conceived to be gigantic monsters, saw, coming along the beach, the
semblance of an ogre. The pupils of his eyes, contracted by the poison
to mere pin-pricks, magnified enormously, and the negro took on the
proportions of a giant.

But Stuart was a fighter. He would not run. He turned upon his new foe.

The negro, reckoning nothing of one smart blow from the stick, threw his
muscular arms about the boy, held him as in a vice, and picking him up,
carried him off as if he were a baby. The boy struggled and screamed but
it availed him nothing.

"Pickney, he mad um sartain," announced the negro, as he strode by his
own hut, "get him Ol' Doc good'n quick!"

Half walking and half running, but carrying his burden with ease, the
negro hurried to a well-built house, on a height of land half a mile
back from the coast. The house was surrounded by a well-kept garden, but
the negro kicked the gate open without ceremony, and, still running,
rushed into the house, calling,

"Mister Ol' Doc! Mister Ol' Doc!"

At his cries, one of the doors into the hall opened, and a keen-eyed
man, much withered, and with a scraggly gray beard, came out. The negro
did not wait for him to speak.

"Mister Ol' Doc," he said, "this pickney down by de debbil-trees, they
got um sartain. You potion um quick!"

The doctor stepped aside from the door.

"Put him in there, Mark!" he directed. "Hold him, I'll be back in a
minute!"

The negro threw Stuart on a cot and held him down, an easy task, now,
for the boy's strength was ebbing fast.

The doctor was back in a moment, with a small phial. He dropped a few
drops into the boy's mouth, then, stripping him, put an open box of
ointment between himself and the negro.

"Now, Mark," he said, "rub that stuff into his body. Don't be afraid of
it. Go after him as if you were grooming a horse. Put some elbow-grease
into it. The ointment has got to soa