ter to anyone.

He had lain for hours unconscious till those awful chills had awakened
him. Doubtless he had been left for dead among his dead comrades. He
wondered why he was not dead. He had a distinct recollection of being
shot through the heart. And the bullet had gone out at his back. He
vividly remembered that also--the red-hot anguish as it had torn its way
through him, the awful emptiness of death that had followed.

How had he escaped--if he had escaped? How had he returned from that
great silence? Why had the dread Door shut against him only, imprisoning
him here when all the rest had passed through? There seemed to be some
mystery about it. He tried to follow it out. Death was no difficult
matter. He was convinced of that. Yet somehow Death had eluded him. He
was as a man who had lost his way in a fog. Doubtless he would find it
again. He did not want to wander alone in this valley of dry bones. He
wanted to get free. He was sure that sooner or later that searing,
red-hot bullet would do its work.

For a space he drifted back into the vast sea of unconsciousness in which
he had been submerged for so long. Even that was bound to lead somewhere.
Surely there was no need to worry!

But very soon it ceased to be a calm sea. It grew troubled. It began to
toss. He felt himself flung from billow to billow, and the sound of a
great storm rose in his ears.

He opened his eyes suddenly wide to a darkness that could be felt, and it
was as though a flame of agony went through him, a raging thirst that
burned him fiendishly.

Ah! He knew the meaning of that! It was horribly familiar to him. He was
back in hell--back in the torture-chamber where he had so often agonized,
closed in behind those bars of iron which he had fought so often and so
fruitlessly to force asunder.

He stretched out his hands and one of them came into contact with the icy
cold of a dead man's face. It was the man who had shot him, and who in
his turn had been shot. He shuddered at the touch, shrank into himself.
And again the fiery anguish caught him, set him writhing; shrivelled him
as parchment is shrivelled in the flame. He went through it, racked with
torment, conscious of nought else in all the world, so pierced and
possessed by pain that it seemed as if all the suffering that those dead
men had missed were concentrated within him. He felt as if it must
shatter him, soul and body, dissolve him with its sheer intensity. And
yet somehow hi