He stood beside David, with the pail of water in his hand, and as David bent over the basin Henry was behind him.  He had drawn something from his pocket, and was edging up close.  As David dipped his hands in the water he looked up into Langdon’s face, and he saw there a strange and unexpected change—­that deadly malignity of last night.  In that moment the object in Henry’s hand fell with terrific force on his head and he crumpled down over the basin.  He was conscious of a single agonizing pain, like a hot iron thrust suddenly through him, and then a great and engulfing pit of darkness closed about him.

CHAPTER XXV

In that chaotic night in which he was drifting, David experienced neither pain nor very much of the sense of life.  And yet, without seeing or feeling, he seemed to be living.  All was dead within him but that last consciousness, which is almost the spirit; he might have been dreaming, and minutes, hours, or even years might have passed in that dream.  For a long time he seemed to be sinking through the blackness; and then something stopped him, without jar or shock, and he was rising.  He could hear nothing at first.  There was a vast silence about him, a silence as deep and unbroken as the abysmal pit in which he seemed to be floating.  After that he felt himself swaying and rocking, as though tossed gently on the billows of a sea.  This was the first thought that took shape in his struggling brain—­he was at sea; he was on a ship in the heart of a black night, and he was alone.  He tried to call out, but his tongue seemed gone.  It seemed a long time before day broke, and then it was strange day.  Little needles of light pricked his eyes; silver strings shot like flashes of wave-like lightning through the darkness, and he began to feel, and to hear.  A dozen hands seemed holding him down until he could move neither arms nor feet.  He heard voices.  There appeared to be many of them at first, an unintelligible rumble of voices, and then very swiftly they became two.

He opened his eyes.  The first thing that he observed was a bar of sunlight against the eastern wall of his room.  That bit of sunlight was like a magnet thrown there to reassemble the faculties that had drifted away from him in the dark night of his unconsciousness.  It tried to tell him, first of all, that it was afternoon—­quite late in the afternoon.  He would have sensed that fact in another moment or two, but something came between him and the radiance flung by the westward slant of the sun.  It was a face, two faces—­first Hauck’s and then Brokaw’s!  Yes, Brokaw was there!  Staring down at him.  A fiend still.  And almost unrecognizable.  He was no longer stripped, and he was no longer bloody.  His countenance was swollen; his lips were raw, one eye was closed—­but the other gleamed like a devil’s.  David tried to sit up.  He managed with an effort, and balanced himself on the edge of his cot.  His head was dizzy, and he felt clumsy and helpless as a stuffed bag.  His hands were tied behind him, and his feet were bound.  He thought Hauck looked like an exultant gargoyle as he stood there with a horrible grin on his face, and Brokaw....