All in vain!
The black man beyond the panel seemed to have the strength of a Samson and be possessed with a fiendish desire to crush the life out of the boy.
There was a buzzing sound in Frank’s head, and it swiftly swelled to a roar. A blood-red mist swam and swayed before his eyes, and through this he saw the exultant faces of Ali Mustaf and Ben Ahmet grinning.
Frank felt that he must tear those iron hands from his throat or he was lost, and he made frantic efforts to do so, but the frightful pressure had robbed him of his strength, and his efforts were like the struggles of an infant.
Then it seemed that many lights flared before his vision, rockets burst into scintillating stars of ten thousand colors, and all the universe was whirling through a fiery sea of space.
The roaring in his head had swelled to the thunder of a Niagara, and then died to the soft murmur of a lapping brook. He seemed to hear tinkling fountains, delightful music and sweet voices calling, calling, calling——
Frank sat up. All was dark and dank about him, with a musty, underground smell. He drew his breath with difficulty, and there was a terrible pain in his throat and neck, which now and then sent a dagger dart to the very top of his head. He knew something had happened, and he felt that he had been injured, but his senses were confused, and he could not remember.
He put out one hand. It touched a slimy wall of stone. He felt beneath him. Wet ground there. He put out the other hand. Nothingness.
Then he heard some one breathing heavily close at hand, and the sound—harsh, rasping, blood-chilling, like the gasping of a strangling person—seemed to turn him to stone for some minutes. He sat there, listening to that horrible breathing, fully convinced that a mortally wounded human being was dying near at hand.
As he sat thus, with a rush, memory returned. He knew he had been led into a trap by treacherous Azza. He remembered holding off the two old Moors until he had been seized by an unseen assailant, and then——