He made a deliberate effort to thrust down the uncanny strangeness of his experience, to forget it. But he couldn't, quite.
It was not the mere fact of the voices that was so weird. The brain heard strange things in dreams. It was the alien, somehow husky quality of that first voice that still shook him.
Nelson lit a clay oil-lamp. Its flickering rays and the growing light of dawn showed nothing unusual hi the bare, squalid little room. He put on his uniform-jacket and went through a door into the common-room of the deserted inn. Three of his four fellow-officers were in the room.
Two of them, the big Dutchman, Piet Van Voss, and Lefty Wister, the spidery little Cockney, were snoring in their bunks.
Nick Sloan, the third, stood shaving in front of a tiny steel mirror, his big body easily balanced on firm-set feet, his flat, hard brown face looking coolly over his shoulder at Nelson.
"I heard you yell in there," Sloan said. "Bad dream?"
Eric Nelson hesitated. "I don't know. There was something in the room. A shadow—"
"I'm not surprised," Sloan drawled unsympathetically. "You were pretty stiff last night."
Nelson was suddenly resentfully aware of the contrast of his disheveled figure and tumbled blond hair with Sloan's competent neatness.
"Yes, I was drunk last night," he said harshly. "And I'll be drunk again tonight and tomorrow night also."