“What the devil is the matter with you all?” he rasped, with a curious idea that he had to shout to make his voice heard above the deafening thunder of many cataracts in his brain. Then, as in a dream, he seemed to hear Wilmerding saying to Carfax, almost savagely: “Ease him down and we’ll carry him. Can’t you see he’s gone off his head?” XXIX Beyond the Gap It was a full fortnight before the Hesterville physician, driven at breakneck speed to Coalville in Wilmerding’s roadster on the night of woundings, pronounced Tregarvon out of danger and in a fair way to recover from the broken head. Whatever the lapse of time may have meant for others, it had little significance for the man who tossed and rolled in his bed in an upper room of the Ocoee office-building. Dim pictures there were of people coming and going; of grotesque attendants lifting him about, these sometimes parading as liveried Merkleys with Uncle William heads, or the reverse; of faces, affectionately sorrowful, hanging over him, now hopefully, and again with sharp anxiety in eyes which were never completely recognizable. But for the greater interval, what with thundering brain cataracts to attend to, and a thousand dancing lights which had to be wheeled in vanishing spirals, checked, stopped, and wheeled the other way around precisely three hundred twirls a minute, he was so pressed for time as not to be aware of the lapse of it. Hence, when he finally opened eyes of full consciousness upon the walls and ceiling of the familiar room, he was sadly out of touch, his latest clear recollection being of a cloud-banked night, of a glade in the mountain-top forest, and of two great white eyes of artificial light staring down upon a cot-bed bier supporting a blanketed body. At first he thought he was alone in the bare-walled upper room, but at his earliest conscious stirring Carfax came to stand beside the bed. “That’s better--much better!” said the golden one, noting the turning-point improvement at once. “You certainly had us guessing, old man. Our only comfort has been in the fact that you could eat and didn’t seem to be losing too much flesh. Have the wheels stopped buzzing?” “They weren’t wheels; they were lights and waterfalls,” said the sick man meticulously. “All right; call ’em anything you like, so long as they’re gone. We had one doctor, a specialist from Nashville, who gave us a fit of seasickness; said you’d live, and be all right physically, but that you would most probably never recover your reason. Nice cheerful prospect for the friends and relatives, wasn’t it?” “How long have I been knocked out, Poictiers?” “Two solid weeks.” “My mother and sister--has anybody written them?” “Sure! Elizabeth has been writing them every day or so. They wanted to come down, of course, but we decided that it wasn’t best. You were getting all the care you could stand.” “Then Elizabeth hasn’t gone home?”