ve it that he _did_ actually go to
sleep; that he slept--perhaps for a minute, perhaps for twenty seconds,
or only for one second, but he recollects distinctly the violent
convulsive start of awakening. He remained lying still for a while, and
then he arose muddy from head to foot and stood there, thinking he
was alone of his kind for hundreds of miles, alone, with no help, no
sympathy, no pity to expect from any one, like a hunted animal. The
first houses were not more than twenty yards from him; and it was the
desperate screaming of a frightened woman trying to carry off a child
that started him again. He pelted straight on in his socks, beplastered
with filth out of all semblance to a human being. He traversed more
than half the length of the settlement. The nimbler women fled right and
left, the slower men just dropped whatever they had in their hands, and
remained petrified with dropping jaws. He was a flying terror. He says
he noticed the little children trying to run for life, falling on their
little stomachs and kicking. He swerved between two houses up a slope,
clambered in desperation over a barricade of felled trees (there wasn't
a week without some fight in Patusan at that time), burst through a
fence into a maize-patch, where a scared boy flung a stick at him,
blundered upon a path, and ran all at once into the arms of several
startled men. He just had breath enough to gasp out, "Doramin! Doramin!"
He remembers being half-carried, half-rushed to the top of the slope,
and in a vast enclosure with palms and fruit trees being run up to a
large man sitting massively in a chair in the midst of the greatest
possible commotion and excitement. He fumbled in mud and clothes to
produce the ring, and, finding himself suddenly on his back, wondered
who had knocked him down. They had simply let him go--don't you
know?--but he couldn't stand. At the foot of the slope random shots were
fired, and above the roofs of the settlement there rose a dull roar of
amazement. But he was safe. Doramin's people were barricading the gate
and pouring water down his throat; Doramin's old wife, full of business
and commiseration, was issuing shrill orders to her girls. "The old
woman," he said softly, "made a to-do over me as if I had been her own
son. They put me into an immense bed--her state bed--and she ran in
and out wiping her eyes to give me pats on the back. I must have been a
pitiful object. I just lay there like a log for I don't