.
The lamp which Bateese had lighted was fastened to the wall close to
him. It was of polished silver and threw a brilliant light softened by
a shade of old gold. There were three other lamps like this, unlighted.
The far end of the room was in deep shadow, but Carrigan made out the
thing he was staring at--a piano. He rose to his feet, disbelieving his
eyes, and made his way toward it. He passed between chairs. Near the
piano was another door, and a wide divan of the same soft, green
upholstery. Looking back, he saw that what he had been lying upon was
another divan. And dose to this were book-shelves, and a table on which
were magazines and papers and a woman's workbasket, and in the
workbasket--sound asleep--a cat!

And then, over the table and the sleeping cat, his eyes rested upon a
triangular banner fastened to the wall. In white against a background
of black was a mighty polar bear holding at bay a horde of Arctic
wolves. And suddenly the thing he had been fighting to recall came to
Carrigan--the great bear--the fighting wolves--the crest of St. Pierre
Boulain!

He took a quick step toward the table--then caught at the back of a
chair. Confound his head! Or was it the big bateau rocking under his
feet? The cat seemed to be turning round in its basket. There were half
a dozen banners instead of one; the lamp was shaking in its bracket;
the floor was tilting, everything was becoming hideously contorted and
out of place. A shroud of darkness gathered about him, and through that
darkness Carrigan staggered blindly toward the divan. He reached it
just in time to fall upon it like a dead man.

VI

For what seemed to be an interminable time after the final breakdown of
his physical strength David Carrigan lived in a black world where a
horde of unseen little devils were shooting red-hot arrows into his
brain. He did not sense the fact of human presence; nor that the divan
had been changed into a bed and the four lamps lighted, and that
wrinkled, brown hands with talon-like fingers were performing a miracle
of wilderness surgery upon him. He did not see the age-old face of
Nepapinas--"The Wandering Bolt of Lightning"--as the bent and tottering
Cree called upon all his eighty years of experience to bring him back
to life. And he did not see Bateese, stolid-faced, silent, nor the
dead-white face and wide-open, staring eyes of Jeanne Marie-Anne
Boulain as her slim, white fingers worked with the old medicine man