's.
He was in a gulf of blackness that writhed with the spirits of torment.
He fought them and cried out against them, and his fighting and his
cries brought the look of death itself into the eyes of the girl who
was over him. He did not hear her voice nor feel the soothing of her
hands, nor the powerful grip of Bateese as he held him when the
critical moments came. And Nepapinas, like a machine that had looked
upon death a thousand times, gave no rest to his claw-like fingers
until the work was done--and it was then that something came to drive
the arrow-shooting devils out of the darkness that was smothering
Carrigan.

After that Carrigan lived through an eternity of unrest, a life in
which he seemed powerless and yet was always struggling for supremacy
over things that were holding him down. There were lapses in it, like
the hours of oblivion that come with sleep, and there were other times
when he seemed keenly alive, yet unable to move or act. The darkness
gave way to flashes of light, and in these flashes he began to see
things, curiously twisted, fleeting, and yet fighting themselves
insistently upon his senses. He was back in the hot sand again, and
this time he heard the voices of Jeanne Marie-Anne and Golden-Hair, and
Golden-Hair flaunted a banner in his face, a triangular pennon of black
on which a huge bear was fighting white Arctic wolves, and then she
would run away from him, crying out--"St. Pierre Boulain--St. Pierre
Boulain--" and the last he could see of her was her hair flaming like
fire in the sun. But it was always the other--the dark hair and dark
eyes--that came to him when the little devils returned to assault him
with their arrows. From somewhere she would come out of darkness and
frighten them away. He could hear her voice like a whisper in his ears,
and the touch of her hands comforted him and quieted his pain. After a
time he grew to be afraid when the darkness swallowed her up, and in
that darkness he would call for her, and always he heard her voice in
answer.

Then came a long oblivion. He floated through cool space away from the
imps of torment; his bed was of downy clouds, and on these clouds he
drifted with a great shining river under him; and at last the cloud he
was in began to shape itself into walls and on these walls were
pictures, and a window through which the sun was shining, and a black
pennon--and he heard a soft, wonderful music that seemed to come to him
faintly from anot