That's the way of niggers.

I didn't find our till he got to wakin' me up nights with his tossin' about an' groanin' in his sleep .-- There! What'd you call it?
Cancer or tumour--no two ways about it, eh ?" But the quick eye of Walter Merritt Emory had not missed, in passing, the twisted fingers of Kwaque's left hand.

Not only was his eye quick, but it was a "leper eye." A volunteer surgeon in the first days out in the Philippines, he had made a particular study of leprosy, and had observed so many lepers that infallibly, except in the incipient beginnings of the disease, he could pick out a leper at a glance.

From the twisted fingers, which was the anaesthetic form, produced by nerve-disintegration, to the corrugated lion forehead (again anaesthetic), his eyes flashed to the swelling under the right arm-pit and his brain diagnosed it as the tubercular form.
Just as swiftly flashed through his brain two thoughts: the first, the axiom, _whenever and wherever you find a leper, look for the other leper_; the second, the desired Irish terrier, who was owned by Daughtry, with whom Kwaque had been long associated.

And here all swiftness of eye- flashing ceased on the part of Walter Merritt Emory.