in a dance, and just as he got hold of one and reached
for another, the first would slip away from him. He began to get the
best of them after a time, and he had an uncontrollable desire to say
something. But his eyes and his lips were sealed tight, and to open
them, a little army of gnomes came out of the darkness in the back of
his head, each of them armed with a lever, and began prying with all
their might. After that came the beginning of light and a flash of
consciousness.

The girl was working over him. He could feel her and hear her movement.
Water was trickling over his face. Then he heard a voice, close over
him, saying something in a sobbing monotone which he could not
understand.

With a mighty effort he opened his eyes.

"Thank LE BON DIEU, you live, m'sieu," he heard the voice say, as if
coming from a long distance away. "You live, you live--"

"Tryin' to," he mumbled thickly, feeling suddenly a sense of great
elation. "Tryin'--"

He wanted to curse the gnomes for deserting him, for as soon as they
were gone with their levers, his eyes and his lips shut tight again, or
at least he thought they did. But he began to sense things in a curious
sort of way. Some one was dragging him. He could feel the grind of sand
under his body. There were intervals when the dragging operation
paused. And then, after a long time, he seemed to hear more than one
voice. There were two--sometimes a murmur of them. And odd visions came
to him. He seemed to see the girl with shining black hair and dark
eyes, and then swiftly she would change into a girl with hair like
blazing gold. This was a different girl. She was not like Pretty Eyes,
as his twisted mind called the other. This second vision that he saw
was like a radiant bit of the sun, her hair all aflame with the fire of
it and her face a different sort of face. He was always glad when she
went away and Pretty Eyes came back.

To David Carrigan this interesting experience in his life might have
covered an hour, a day, or a month. Or a year for that matter, for he
seemed to have had an indefinite association with Pretty Eyes. He had
known her for a long time and very intimately, it seemed. Yet he had no
memory of the long fight in the hot sun, or of the river, or of the
singing warblers, or of the inquisitive sandpiper that had marked out
the line which his enemy's last bullet had traveled. He had entered
into a new world in which everything was vague and unreal except t