For what seemed to be an interminable time after the final breakdown of his physical strength David Carrigan lived in a black world where a horde of unseen little devils were shooting red-hot arrows into his brain.  He did not sense the fact of human presence; nor that the divan had been changed into a bed and the four lamps lighted, and that wrinkled, brown hands with talon-like fingers were performing a miracle of wilderness surgery upon him.  He did not see the age-old face of Nepapinas—­“The Wandering Bolt of Lightning”—­as the bent and tottering Cree called upon all his eighty years of experience to bring him back to life.  And he did not see Bateese, stolid-faced, silent, nor the dead-white face and wide-open, staring eyes of Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain as her slim, white fingers worked with the old medicine man’s.  He was in a gulf of blackness that writhed with the spirits of torment.  He fought them and cried out against them, and his fighting and his cries brought the look of death itself into the eyes of the girl who was over him.  He did not hear her voice nor feel the soothing of her hands, nor the powerful grip of Bateese as he held him when the critical moments came.  And Nepapinas, like a machine that had looked upon death a thousand times, gave no rest to his claw-like fingers until the work was done—­and it was then that something came to drive the arrow-shooting devils out of the darkness that was smothering Carrigan.

After that Carrigan lived through an eternity of unrest, a life in which he seemed powerless and yet was always struggling for supremacy over things that were holding him down.  There were lapses in it, like the hours of oblivion that come with sleep, and there were other times when he seemed keenly alive, yet unable to move or act.  The darkness gave way to flashes of light, and in these flashes he began to see things, curiously twisted, fleeting, and yet fighting themselves insistently upon his senses.  He was back in the hot sand again, and this time he heard the voices of Jeanne Marie-Anne and Golden-Hair, and Golden-Hair flaunted a banner in his face, a triangular pennon of black on which a huge bear was fighting white Arctic wolves, and then she would run away from him, crying out—­“St. Pierre Boulain—­St. Pierre Boulain—­” and the last he could see of her was her hair flaming like fire in the sun.  But it was always the other—­the dark hair and dark eyes —­that came to him when the little devils returned to assault him with their arrows.  From somewhere she would come out of darkness and frighten them away.  He could hear her voice like a whisper in his ears, and the touch of her hands comforted him and quieted his pain.  After a time he grew to be afraid when the darkness swallowed her up, and in that darkness he would call for her, and always he heard her voice in answer.