Though Hal knew it not, already the curaré was at work, the curaré whose terrible effect is this: that it paralyzes every muscle, first the voluntaries, then those of the respiratory centers and of the heart itself. Yet he could think and feel. Curaré does not numb sensation or attack the brain. It strikes its victims down by rendering them more helpless than an infant; and then, fingering its way to the breath and to the blood, closes on those a grip that has one outcome only.
Hal Briggs, who had so gloried in the strength and swift control of all his muscles, who had so wrought evil and violent things, trusting to his unbeatable power, now lay there, chained, immobile, paralyzed.
He thought, after a few vain efforts to move:
“I must be badly cut to be as weak as this. I must be bled almost to death. I’m going to die. That’s certain!”
Still, he was not afraid. The soul of him confronted death, unterrified. Even while his laboring heart struggled against the slow instillation of the curaré, and even while his lungs caught sluggishly at the air, his mind was undaunted.
He wanted light, but there was none. A velvet dark enveloped everything—a dark in which the creaking fabric of the Kittiwink heaved, plunged till it rolled his inert body back against the shell of the craft, then forward again.
“I got some of them, anyhow,” he reflected, with strange calmness. “They didn’t get away without a lot of punishment. If they hadn’t knifed me, I’d have cleaned up the whole bunch!”
A certain satisfaction filled his thoughts. If one must die, it is good to know the enemy has taken grievous harm.
Still, what, after all, did it matter? He felt so very languid, so transfixed with that insistent pain in the right lung! Even though he had killed them all, would that have recompensed him for the failure of all his cherished plans, for the loss of the life that was to have meant so wildly much to him?
He felt a warm oozing on his breast, and knew blood was still seeping. His lips tasted salty, but he could not even spit away the blood on them. Curaré is of a hundred different types. This, which he had received, had numbed his muscles beyond any possibility of waking them to action. A few vain efforts convinced him he could not move. So there he lay, suffering, wondering how any loss of blood—so long as life remained—could so paralyze him.