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d been telling him about his wild Welsh ancestors and the things they had believed. Sometimes he thought Craddock believed them too, or half believed, at least when he had been drinking.
He'd got to know Craddock pretty well in the months they had worked together, but he realized that even yet he knew only the surface Craddock, that another man entirely lived in abeyance behind the companionable front which the Welshman showed him, a man with memories he never spoke of, and stories he never told.
This experimental station, far up the Jutahy, was a curious contrast, with its asepsis and its plastics and its glitter of new instruments, to the jungle hemming it in. They were on assignment just now to find a specific for atypical malaria.
In the forty years since the end of World War II, nothing yet had been discovered any safer than the old quinine and atabrine treatment, and Raft was sifting the jungle lore now to make sure there might not be some truth in the old Indio knowledge, hidden behind masks of devil-worship and magic.
He had hunted down virus diseases in Tibet, Indo-China, Madagascar, and he had learned to respect much that the witchdoctors knew. Some of their treatments were based on very sound theories.
But he wished the drums would stop. He turned irritably from the window and glanced once more at Craddock, who was humming a Welsh ballad under his breath. A ballad full of wild, skirling music about ghosts and fighting.
Craddock had talked a lot lately--since the drums began--about ghosts and fighting. He said he smelled danger. In the old days in Wales men could always scent trouble in the wind, and they'd drink quarts of uisquebaugh and go out brandishing swords, ready for anything. All Raft could smell was the reek of disinfectant that filled the little hospital.
And all the wind brought to him was the sound of drams.
"In the old days," Craddock said suddenly, looking up from the sterilizer and blinking through steam, "there'd be a whisper in th