“Where do you feel badly?” he asked.
Then for the first time it occurred to Billie to wonder how he happened to be addressed in English.
“It must be a friend,” he thought. So he replied in a voice that sounded most strange to him: “In my head. It seems too big for the rest of me.”
“No wonder,” said his companion—whether
nurse or jailer, Billie was trying to determine. “You struck right on top of it when you fell off the rock.”
It was the first time that Billie had thought of the rock; but at the word, the happenings of all that had gone before came back to him.
“Now I remember,” he thought. “I must have fallen right in the middle of that bunch and they have brought me here—wherever this is. That must have been Don Rafael who was in here; but why are they all talking English?”
It was a bigger problem than he felt like answering, so he just lay quiet as he felt a cooling lotion applied to his head and a pleasant but very pungent odor filled the room.
“I think I’ll go to sleep if you don’t mind,” he finally said and he closed his eyes.
It did not seem to Billie that he had slept more than fifteen minutes when he again opened his eyes, but as he learned afterwards he must have slept nearly twenty-four hours. The strange man still stood beside him, holding in his hand a dish of steaming soup, while at the foot of the bed stood Don Rafael.