“Wish you’d please git out, sir. Tire’s done come off.”
Lockwood swung out. He had one foot on the step and one on the ground when there was a silent and ferocious rush upon him out of the darkness. Something fell like thunder upon his skull. Fire flamed over his brain, and vanished suddenly in black darkness.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LAST CHANCE
Of what happened immediately afterward Lockwood had no knowledge.
It seemed that almost whole days had passed before he half started up in semilucidity. He could move neither his hands nor his feet. It was still dark. He could hear the thud and wash of engines and waters, and he imagined himself still on the river steamer. He smelled the heavy, decaying odor of the swamps. His head ached terribly, and seemed swollen to enormous dimensions. He could not think nor collect himself, and he relapsed into dizzy unconsciousness.
But when he recovered intelligence there was light in his eyes. He lay on his back; there was a ceiling of pine boards above him. Still dreaming of the river boat, he tried to move himself, and found that his arms were tied fast at the wrists, and his legs at the ankles.
He turned his head sideways, growing dizzy with the slight movement. He was in a long room, perhaps ten feet by twenty. Opposite him a couple of bunks were built into the wall, empty except for frightfully tattered rags that might once have been called blankets. At each end of the room was an open door, where the sunlight shone in, and he had a glimpse of green thickets, and he smelled swamp water. Outside the door human figures moved indistinctly.
Now he knew where he was. He was in a house boat, probably the boat he had grown familiar with on the bayou; though how he had got there he could not at the moment imagine. His head was too painful for thought; he lay back, crushed down with unspeakable defeat and weakness and despair.
The door darkened. A big figure came in, and Lockwood saw a face brought close to his own—a bearded, brutal face, with a great bluish stain or scar on the forehead.
“Done woke up, air ye?” said Blue Bob.