tled it through the air and rapped it down on my
crown. I was in amaze. Never had so absurd a thing happened to me. He
was wide open, and I could have run him through forthright. But, as I
said, I was in amaze, and the next I knew was the pang of the entering
steel as this clumsy provincial ran me through and charged forward, bull-
like, till his hilt bruised my side and I was borne backward.

As I fell I could see the concern on the faces of Lanfranc and Bohemond
and the glut of satisfaction in the face of de Villehardouin as he
pressed me.

I was falling, but I never reached the grass. Came a blurr of flashing
lights, a thunder in my ears, a darkness, a glimmering of dim light
slowly dawning, a wrenching, racking pain beyond all describing, and then
I heard the voice of one who said:

"I can't feel anything."

I knew the voice. It was Warden Atherton's. And I knew myself for
Darrell Standing, just returned across the centuries to the jacket hell
of San Quentin. And I knew the touch of finger-tips on my neck was
Warden Atherton's. And I knew the finger-tips that displaced his were
Doctor Jackson's. And it was Doctor Jackson's voice that said:

"You don't know how to take a man's pulse from the neck. There--right
there--put your fingers where mine are. D'ye get it? Ah, I thought so.
Heart weak, but steady as a chronometer."

"It's only twenty-four hours," Captain Jamie said, "and he was never in
like condition before."

"Putting it on, that's what he's doing, and you can stack on that," Al
Hutchins, the head trusty, interjected.

"I don't know," Captain Jamie insisted. "When a man's pulse is that low
it takes an expert to find it--"

"Aw, I served my apprenticeship in the jacket," Al Hutchins sneered. "And
I've made you unlace me, Captain, when you thought I was croaking, and it
was all I could do to keep from snickering in your face."

"What do you think, Doc?" Warden Atherton asked.

"I tell you the heart action is splendid," was the answer. "Of course it
is weak. That is only to be expected. I tell you Hutchins is right. The
man is feigning."

With his thumb he turned up one of my eyelids, whereat I opened my other
eye and gazed up at the group bending over me.

"What did I tell you?" was Doctor Jackson's cry of triumph.

And then, although it seemed the effort must crack my face, I summoned
all the will of me and smiled.

They held water to my lips, and I drank greedily. It must