Vaguely he groped about in his brain for facts. The sensations that come to one just before he falls asleep are, more often than not, awaiting him when he awakes. Johnny’s had remained with him. They were earth sensations, solid earth, a place close and stuffy, and stone, solid stone, not shifting sea.
But there was now a strange rocking and shuddering, no mistake about that. There it was again! Zowie! What a lurch!
“Like a ship at sea in a storm,” he told himself. “No, not quite. More like a ship stuck fast on a coral reef, being beaten to pieces by the waves.”
The thought was startling. Again he attempted to sit up. This time he succeeded.
Light streamed down upon him, moonlight broken into little squares.
“Bars,” he thought. “Prison bars!”
Yes, now he remembered. This bed, not a bed at all, merely a broad ledge of stone left by the prison masons in lieu of a bed. Strange sort, these Central American prisons!
Then, as if to refute all this, there came again that horrible rocking shudder.
Struggling to grasp reality, Johnny’s eyes, roving the dark spaces about him, arrived at the crisscross iron bars of the window. To his vast astonishment he saw those iron bars, in a solid mass, literally torn from the masonry.
“I don’t know where I am,” he told himself, “but I won’t be there very long.”