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.

He was sick and weak. He could not recall what had happened. He did
not know where he was.

He was all but soaked by the rain, despite the fact that a tree with
dense foliage was spread above him, and he had lain beneath protecting
shrubberies. Slowly the numbness seemed to pass from his brain, like
the mist from the surface of a lake. He remembered things, as it were,
in patches.

Dorothy--that was it--and something had happened.

He was stupidly aware that he was sitting on something uncomfortable--a
lump, perhaps a stone--but he did not move. He was waiting for his
brain to clear. When at length he hoisted his heavy weight upon his
knees, and then staggered drunkenly to his feet, to blunder toward a
tree and support himself by its trunk, his normal circulation began to
be restored, and pain assailed his skull, arousing him further to his
senses.

He leaned for some time against the tree, gathering up the threads of
the tangle. It all came back, distinct and sharp at last, and, with
memory, his strength was returning. He felt of his head, on which his
hat was jammed.

The bone and the muscles at the base of the skull were sore and
sensitive, but the hurt had not gone deep. He felt incapable of
thinking it out--the reasons, and all that it meant. He wondered if
his attacker had thought to leave him dead.

Mechanically his hands sought out his pockets. He found his watch and
pocketbook in place. Some weight seemed dragging at his coat. When
his hand went slowly to the place, he found the lump on which he had
been lying. He pulled it out--a cold, cylindrical affair, of metal,
with a thick cord hanging from its end. Then a chill crept all the
distance down his spine.

The thing was a bomb!

Cold perspiration and a sense of horror came upon him together. An
underlying current of thought, feebly left unfocused in his brain--a
thought of himself as a victim, lured to the park for this deed--became
as stinging as a blow on the cheek.

The cord