Not one word of this talk entered the consciousness of Gentleman Geff.
Nine days he lay in this condition, and then there passed over him a change.
He seemed to himself to be groping feebly out of nothingness into vague consciousness of horror; but what the horror was, or what he himself was, he did not even think. The first effort to do so sent him back into the state from which he had come.
After a few hours he came again out of utter oblivion into some faint consciousness of himself.
But who was he? Where was he?
All was dark and still around him. Then came faint intelligence, with imperfect memory, which mingled dreams with distorted facts. He remembered faintly what he would have called “a row,” but where, or under what circumstances, he could not find; he thought it was a drunken brawl over cards in a gambling saloon, and some one had crushed in his brain and killed him.
Yes, that was it! He had been killed last night in a drunken brawl over cards, in a gambling saloon, and now he had come to life——
Where?
In that dark lower world, without sun, moon or stars; without air, water or vegetation; that world of horror and despair of which he had heard in childhood, but in which he had never believed, and where he must wait with thieves and murderers and miscreants like himself until the general judgment day; and after that——
What?