The cloth had fallen off and Lang breathed deeply, gathering his forces. It was only ten seconds. Carroll turned back, picked up Lang’s defenseless arm, and he felt a penetrating prick.
“A hypodermic!” he thought, with dismay.
He shrieked again at the top of his voice, but he felt the numb influence of the drug passing through his veins, deadening his will to live. In spite of his resolution he grew limp; the sense of struggle blurred, grew dreamy. Consciousness passed out of him.
CHAPTER XI
THE UNWILLING TOURIST
Lang awoke with the pain of an aching head and a sick stomach. He was in a bed that swayed beneath him; at first he fancied himself back on the Cavite. He heard trampling and loud talking, and a lacerating sound of discordant music.
He opened his eyes; there was a ceiling two feet above his head. He tried to heave himself up, failed and sank back dizzy, but the glimpse he got brought him immediately struggling up again, full of stupefaction and bewilderment.
He was lying fully dressed in a dingy bunk, one of a double tier of bunks that seemed to surround a rather large room. The low, dirty-white ceiling was crossed by iron beams. In the imperfect light he saw heads emerging from the berths, human figures moving, there was much talk and tobacco smoke, and at the other end some one played shrilly on a mouth organ.
Within six feet a ragged, brown-faced man was violently sick. The air was foul. To Lang’s dizzy mind it seemed that he had descended into Hades. He got somehow out of the bunk, his head swimming, incapable of comprehending where he was or how he had got there.
A negro in a white jacket was sweeping up banana peels from the floor, and Lang clutched his sleeve.
“What’s this place? Where am I?”