Chapter 939 The Water
When he saw that Roxanne wanted to have a look at his stomach, Benny removed his arms without a fuss. Roxanne caressed Benny’s forehead. Her eyes were filled with distress.
However, after examining the two children, Roxanne still could not arrive at a diagnosis. As time passed, the children’s pain became increasingly severe.
Roxanne felt immensely helpless and powerless at that moment. She blamed herself for having brought the children out to camp but failing to watch over them properly.
Her guilt and distress were plainly written all over her face. Archie noticed his mother’s mood and approached her quietly. “Mommy.”
His voice pulled Roxanne out of her reverie, and she forced herself to calm down. Then, she said, “I brought a medical kit with us. Can you go get it from the tent and bring it here?”
The children were in excruciating pain, and yet, Roxanne had not managed to locate the cause of it. At that moment, she could only do her best to ease their symptoms.
I’ll give them some pain medication first! I can’t go wrong with that!
Archie reappeared in a few minutes with the medical kit, which he placed on the ground next to Roxanne.
Roxanne shook several painkiller pills into the palm of her hand. She fed one to each of the two sick children and sat back to wait for it to take effect.
“How are you two feeling?”
She could only think of two possibilities for the cause of their sudden illness. One was that the kids had overexerted themselves while playing and caught a cold. The other was that they were somehow infected by a bacterium out here in the wilderness.
However, this did not explain how Archie had somehow escaped the same fate.
In fact, Archie was not exhibiting any symptoms at all.
Archie frowned and patted his stomach. “My tummy hurts a bit, but only a little bit.”
As he spoke, he gestured at Roxanne with his hands, showing her that he really was not in much pain.
Suspicion flitted across Roxanne’s face. Her eyes drifted to Benny and Estella again.
It had been five minutes since she had administered the painkiller. However, the two children showed no signs of any relief from the pain.
Estella was in so much pain that she had ceased writhing about. She was curled against the edge of the tent as a sheen of cold sweat covered her small face.
Seeing the children’s pain, Roxanne was so distressed that she could hardly breathe.
“Mommy…” Archie called out suddenly.
Roxanne’s heart clenched as she turned to look at him.
With his brows tightly pulled together, Archie looked solemn. “I think I know why Benny and Essie are sick!”
“What is it?” Roxanne’s expression shifted into one of hope.
She thought that he wanted to tell her what they had been up to while she was gone.
To her surprise, Archie ran into the tent and returned holding their water cups instead.
Roxanne watched in bewilderment as Archie sniffed the insides of the cups.
As he had expected, the cups had a strange smell— the same smell that he had tasted in the water earlier.
Although his siblings had drank all the water in the cups, the strange smell remained.
Archie thrust the cups under Roxanne’s nose. “Mommy, take a sniff.”
Roxanne knew what he wanted her to do.
She leaned in and inhaled deeply. When the scent hit her nostrils, her complexion turned pale.
Although she was reluctant to admit it, the facts were very different from what she had speculated earlier.
All three of the water cups had the same strange smell.
“Maybe my stomach isn’t hurting so much because I only had one sip of the water,” Archie said speculatively.
He had just swallowed the first sip of the water when he sensed that something was wrong, so he had spat out the second mouthful immediately.
However, Benny and Estella had finished all the water in their cups.
If the source of their stomachache was indeed the water, then it made sense that Benny and Estella would be suffering worse than Archie.
Roxanne was convinced by Archie’s sound reasoning.
