He turned once more down the dimly lighted path. His heart gave a quick, joyous leap. Near a bench was a figure—the figure of a woman whose grace, he fancied, was familiar.
Her back was apparently turned as he drew near. He was about to whistle, if only to warn her of his coming, when the shrubbery just ahead and beside the path was abruptly parted and a man with a short, wrapped club in his hand sprang forth and struck him viciously over the head.
He was falling, dimly conscious of a horrible blur of lights in his eyes, as helplessly as if he had been made of paper. A second blow, before he crumpled on the pavement, blotted out the last remaining vestige of emotion. He lay there in a limp, awkward heap.
The female figure had turned, and now came striding to the place with a step too long for a woman. There was no word spoken. Together the two lifted Garrison's unconscious form, carried it quickly to the shrubbery, fumbled about it for a minute or two, struck a match that was shielded from the view of any possible passer-by, and then, still in silence, hastily quitted the park and vanished in one of the glistening side streets, where the rain was reflecting the lamps.
CHAPTER XIV
A PACKAGE OF DEATH
A low, distant rumble of thunder denoted a new gathering of storm. Five minutes passed, and then the lightning flashed across the firmament directly overhead. A crash like the splitting of the heavens followed, and the rain came down as if it poured through the slit.
The violence lasted hardly more than five minutes, after which the downpour abated a little of its fury. But a steadier, quieter precipitation continued, with the swiftly moving center of disturbance already far across the sky.
The rain in his face, and the brisk puff of newly washed ozone in his heavily moving lungs, aroused Garrison's struggling consciousness by slow degrees. Strange, fantastic images, old memories, weird phantoms, and wholly impossible fancies played through his brain with the dull, torturing persistency of nightmares for a time that seemed to him endless.
It was fully half an hour before he was sufficiently aroused to roll to an upright position and pass his hand before his eyes.