knot. He fainted.



Chapter VII. Joan Disobeys

What he next knew was a fire of agony that wrapped his whole body and
consciousness flashed back on him. Strong arms lifted him up, up; above him
he sensed the eyes of his torturer, dim in moonlight, and he beat his
clubbed left fist into that face. After that he knew he was being dragged
onto a saddle, but a wave of pain rushed up his side and numbed his brain.
Thereafter his senses returned by fits and starts, vaguely. Once he felt a
steel cable that girdled his waist and breast and held him erect, though
his head flopped back and forth; once his eyes opened and above him
glittered the bright field of stars towards which he drifted through space,
a mind without a body; once a stab of torment wakened him enough to hear:
"Easy Satan; watch them stones. One more jolt like that will send him clear
to--" And the voice glided into an eternity of distance. Yet again he swung
tip from the pit of darkness and became aware of golden hair around a
woman's face, and a marvelous soft, cool hand upon his forehead. Her voice
reached him, too, and made him think of all things musical, all things
distant, like the sounds of birds falling from the sky and though he
understood not a syllable, a sweet assurance of safety flooded through him.
He slept.

When he woke again, it was from a dream of fleeing through empty air
swifter than the wind with a wolf-dog looming behind him out of space, but
presently he found that he was lying in a bed with a stream of sunlight
washing across a white coverlet. A door at his right swung open and there
in the entrance stood the wolf-dog of his vision with a five-year-old girl