"I'm really out of my head," he thought, and the next instant, "or, it's
all a dream, and I've been only a dream from the beginning."
A century afterwards, he opened his eyes and saw a face bending over
him, which seemed as if it were of gossamer, so vague and shadowy it
looked beside the images of his delirium. An excited and eager humming
was in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was the voices of
human beings or the loud music of the bees in the meadow. From his
waist down he could feel nothing, not even the crawling of the gigantic
insect, but the rest of his body was a single throbbing pain, a pain so
intense that it seemed to drag him back from the gulf of darkness into
which he was drifting.
"Can you hear?" asked a voice from out the hum of sound, speaking in the
clear, high tone one uses to a deaf man.
Another voice, he was not sure whether it was his own or a
stranger's--repeated from a distance, "Can I hear?"
"Did you see who shot you?" said the voice.
And the second voice repeated after it: "Did I see who shot me?"
"Was it Abner Revercomb?" asked the first voice.
He knew then what they meant, and suddenly he began to think lucidly and
rapidly like a person under the mental pressure of strong excitement or
of alcohol.
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