ch, a shadow upon the mist, taunting me. I followed him at an
undeviating distance, firing, reloading, and firing again. I was no
longer conscious of my progress. The fingers that pressed the triggers
of my pistols had no sensation in them, and in my imagination were
parts of a monstrous mechanism which I directed. My legs, too, felt
like stilts that somebody had strapped to my body, and, instead of
cold, a warm glow seemed to suffuse me.

And while my helpless body stumbled along its route my mind was back in
New York. This was my apartment on Tenth Street, and Jacqueline sat
behind the curtains. I had dreamed of a long journey through a
snow-bound wilderness, but I had awakened and we were to start for
Jamaica by that day's boat. How dear she was! She raised her eyes,
full of trusting love, to mine, and I knew that there would never be
any parting until death.

We sat beneath the palms, beside a sea that plunged against our little
island, and the air was fragrant with the scent of orange-blossoms,
carried upon the wind from the distant mainland. We were so happy
there--there was no need to think or to remember. I slept against her
shoulder.

Somebody was shaking me.

"Get up!" he bellowed in my ear. "Get up! Do you want to die in the
snow?"

I closed my eyes and sank back into a lethargy of sleep.

CHAPTER XI

THE CHATEAU

I had an indistinct impression of being carried for what seemed an
eternity upon the shoulders of my rescuer, and of clinging there
through the delirium that supervened.

Sometimes I thought I was on a camel's back, pursuing Jacqueline's
abductors through the hot sands of an Egyptian desert; sometimes I was
on shipboard, sinking in a tropical sea, beneath which amid the marl
and ooze of delta depositions, hideous, antediluvian creatures, with
faces like that of Leroux, writhed and stretched up their tentacles to
drag me down.

Then I would be conscious of the cold and bitter wind again. But at
last there came a grateful sense of warmth and ease, followed by a
period of blank unconsciousness.

When at last I opened my eyes it was late afternoon. Though they
pained me, I could now see with tolerable distinctness.

I was lying upon a bed of dried balsam-leaves inside a little hut, and
through the half-open door I could see the sun just dipping behind the
mountains. Besides the bed the hut contained a roughly hewn table and
chair and a bookcase with a few books in