a quiver. The next twenty-four hours as easy as the last. He's
a wooz, I tell you, a perfect wooz. If I didn't know it was impossible,
I'd say he was doped."

"I know his dope," said the Warden. "It's that cursed will of his. I'd
bet, if he made up his mind, that he could walk barefoot across red-hot
stones, like those Kanaka priests from the South Seas."

Now perhaps it was the word "priests" that I carried away with me through
the darkness of another flight in time. Perhaps it was the cue. More
probably it was a mere coincidence. At any rate I awoke, lying upon a
rough rocky floor, and found myself on my back, my arms crossed in such
fashion that each elbow rested in the palm of the opposite hand. As I
lay there, eyes closed, half awake, I rubbed my elbows with my palms and
found that I was rubbing prodigious calluses. There was no surprise in
this. I accepted the calluses as of long time and a matter of course.

I opened my eyes. My shelter was a small cave, no more than three feet
in height and a dozen in length. It was very hot in the cave.
Perspiration noduled the entire surface of my body. Now and again
several nodules coalesced and formed tiny rivulets. I wore no clothing
save a filthy rag about the middle. My skin was burned to a mahogany
brown. I was very thin, and I contemplated my thinness with a strange
sort of pride, as if it were an achievement to be so thin. Especially
was I enamoured of my painfully prominent ribs. The very sight of the
hollows between them gave me a sense of solemn elation, or, rather, to
use a better word, of sanctification.

My knees were callused like my elbows. I was very dirty. My beard,
evidently once blond, but now a dirt-stained and streaky brown, swept my
midriff in a tangled mass. My long hair, similarly stained and tangled,
was all about my shoulders, while wisps of it continually strayed in the
way of my vision so that sometimes I was compelled to brush it aside with
my hands. For the most part, however, I contented myself with peering
through it like a wild animal from a thicket.

Just at the tunnel-like mouth of my dim cave the day reared itself in a
wall of blinding sunshine. After a time I crawled to the entrance, and,
for the sake of greater discomfort, lay down in the burning sunshine on a
narrow ledge of rock. It positively baked me, that terrible sun, and the
more it hurt me the more I delighted in it, or in myself rather, in that
I was