on was an empty stomach, and his next a heavy head
into which the puzzle of his position entered by laborious steps. He was
not in bed. He was not at school. He was not even under the shrub he now
remembered in a mental flash which lit up all his adventures overnight.
He was wandering ankle deep in the dew, towards a belt of poplars like
birch-rods on the skyline, and a row of spiked palings right in front of
his nose. He had walked in his sleep for the first time for years, and
some one had fired a shot to wake him.

Slow as these automatic discoveries had seemed, they had been in reality
so swift that the report was still ringing in his ears when he who must
have made it sprang hideously into being across the palings. A hand
darted through them and caught Pocket's wrist as in a vice. And he looked
up over the spikes into a gnarled face tinged with fear and fury, and
working spasmodically at the suppression of some incomprehensible emotion.

"Do you know what you did?" the man demanded in the end. The question
seemed an odd one, but a very slight foreign accent, not to be reproduced
phonetically, corresponded with the peculiarity of tense, reminding Pocket
of the music-masters at his school. It was less easy to account for the
tone employed, which was low in pitch and tremulous with passion. And the
man stood tall and dominant, with a silver stubble on an iron jaw, and a
weird cloak and hat that helped to invest him with the goblin dignity of a
Spanish inquisitor; no wonder his eyes were like cold steel in quivering
flesh.

"I must have been walking in my sleep," began Pocket, shakily; further
explanations were cut very short.

"Sleep!" echoed the other, in bitter unbelief.

Pocket felt his prime quality impugned.

"Well? I can't help it! I've done it before to-day; you needn't believe
me if you don't like! Do you mind letting go of my hand?"

"With that in it!"

The scornful tone made the boy look down, and there was the pistol he had
strapped to his wrist, not only firm in his unconscious clasp, but his
finger actually on the trigger.

"You don't mean to say I let it off?" cried Pocket, horrified.

"Feel the barrel."

The tall man had done so first. Pocket touched it with his left hand.
The barrel was still warm.

"It was in my sleep," protested Pocket, in a wheezy murmur.

"I'm glad to hear it."

"I tell you it was!"

The tall man opened his lips impulsively, but shut them on a second
im