He
might then have explored. The sound ceased entirely for a moment, and,
now that he was quite awake, he remembered that the hospital attendant
was no longer with him. Then the sounds must have been made by the
striker or the hounds. Blakely had no dogs of his own. Indeed they
were common property at the post, most of them handed down with the
rest of the public goods and chattels by their predecessors of the ----th.
At all events, he felt far too languid, inert, weak, indifferent or
something. If the striker, he had doubtless come down for cool water. If
the hounds, they were in search of something to eat, and in either case
why bother about it? The incident had so far distracted his thoughts
from the worries of the night that now, at last and in good earnest, he
was dropping to sleep.
But in less than twenty minutes he was broad awake again, with sudden
start--gasping, suffocating, listening in amaze to a volley of
snapping and cracking, half-smothered, from the adjoining room. He
sprang from his bed with a cry of alarm and flung himself through a
thick, hot veil of eddying, yet invisible, smoke, straight for the
communicating doorway, and was brought up standing by banging his head
against the resounding pine, tight shut instead of open as he had left
it, and refusing to yield to furious battering.
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