repetition which went on like a mechanical thing without a voice in the back of his head. He had a feeling of dizzy sickness, as he had felt once when a little boy in a swing. What was the sense of a man feeling that way over a little hole through his shoulder? There wasn't a damn bit of sense!
He leaned on his hands against a bale of hay, and shook his head, and shook it, like one in a horrible nausea of useless retching. It would not clear. It whirled, and seemed to sink and rise, sink and rise, like something on water, something detached from him, not belonging to him at all. A troublesome head, a foolish, pain-shot head, with that hammer-beat in the temples, that dancing glare, as if he looked at things beyond a fire, in his eyes.
Bill sat down again, his back against the wall of hay, feeling weak and miserable. The pain he could bear, and that floating detached feeling of his head he could endure, but thirst was growing into a hideous torment that he could not bear much longer. He tried to get away from the longing for water, running over his hundred-times repeated plan for getting out of there after dark.
He would go cautiously to the door, lying flat, and look out and listen. If they moved a foot he would hear them, if they breathed within a rod of him he would know. Then out, a quick stoop, a silent dive under the car, taking care of the rods, which came low in the center across the beam, and out on the other side, making a dash for the boarding-car and water.
At each rehearsal of it now he hurried over the pre-
