The dim light began to creep into the darkened brain at last. Norton's eyes opened wider and the long arms felt their way on the floor until they touched a rug and then a chair. He tried to think what had happened and why he was lying there. It seemed a dream, half feverish, half restful. His head was aching and he was very tired.
"What's the matter?" he murmured, unable to lift his head.
He was whirling through space again and the room faded. Once before in his life had he been knocked insensible. From the trenches before Petersburg in the last days of the war he had led his little band of less than five hundred ragged, half-starved, tatterdemalions in a mad charge against the line in front. A bomb from a battery on a hilltop exploded directly before them. He had been thrown into the air and landed on a heap of dead bodies, bruised and stunned into insensibility. He had waked feeling the dead limbs and wondering if they were his own.
He rubbed his hands now, first over his head, and then over each limb, to find if all were there. He felt his body to see if a bomb had torn part of it away.
And then the light of memory suddenly flashed into the darkened mind and he drew himself to his knees and fumbled his way to a chair.
"Married? Married already!" he gasped. "O, God, it can't be true! And he said, 'married an hour before you dragged me away in that campaign'"—it was too hideous! He laughed in sheer desperation and again his brain refused to work. He pressed his hands to his forehead and looked about the room, rose, staggered to the bell and rang for Andy.
When his black face appeared, he lifted his bloodshot eyes and said feebly:
"Whiskey——"
The negro bowed:
"Yassah!"