"I don't think so," Mrs. Dean replied. "I could hardly rouse him enough
to give him the medicine, and even then he didn't seem to know me."

"I'll be in about midnight," said the physician, as he again took leave,
"and I'll send a professional nurse, a man; this is likely to be a long
siege."

"Send whatever is needed," said Mr. Underwood, brusquely, "the same as
if 'twere for the boy himself!"

"And, Mrs. Dean," the physician continued, "if he should have a lucid
interval, you had better ascertain the address of his friends."

It was nearly midnight. For hours Darrell had battled against the
darkening shadows fast settling down upon him, enveloping him with a
horror worse than death itself. Suddenly there was a rift in the clouds,
and the calm, sweet light of reason stole softly through. He felt a cool
hand on his forehead, and, opening his eyes, looked with a smile into
the face of Mrs. Dean as she bent over him. Bending still lower, she
said, in low, distinct tones:

"Can you tell me the name of your people, and where they live?"

In an instant he comprehended all that her question implied; he must
give his own name and the address of the far-away eastern home. He
strove to recall it, but the effort was too great; before he could
speak, the clouds surged together and all was blotted out in darkness.

_Chapter IV_

LIFE? OR DEATH?

Hour by hour the clouds thickened, obscuring every ray of light, closing
the avenues of sight and sound, until, isolated from the outer world by
this intangible yet impenetrable barrier, Darrell was alone in a world
peopled only with the phantoms of his imagination. Of the lapse of time,
of the weary procession of days and nights which followed, he knew
nothing. Day and night were to him only an endless repetition of the
horrors which thronged his fevered brain.

Again and again he lived over the tragic scene in the sleeping-car, each
iteration and reiteration growing in dreadful realism, until it was he
himself who grappled in deadly contest with the murderer, and the latter
in turn became a monster whose hot breath stifled him, whose malign,
demoniacal glance seemed to sear his eyeballs like living fire. Over and
over, with failing strength, he waged the unequal contest, striving at
last with a legion of hideous forms. Then, as the clouds grew still more
dense about him, these shapes grew dim and he found himself, weak and
trembling, adrift upon a sea of darkness whose