You'd be surprised, now, how few of 'em could
take a stroke to save their lives. Leastways," Mr. Adams confessed,
"that's _my_ experience."
"I beg your pardon."
"Ben's impulsive. I over'eard him tellin' you to stick fast to him;
but, all things considered, that's pretty difficult, ain't it?
Never you mind; _I'll_ see you aboard the tender."
"Aboard the tender?"
The Major stepped back a pace as the fellow's absurd mistake dawned
on him. "Why, you impudent scoundrel, I'm a Justice of the Peace!"
But here a rush of the driven crowd lifted and bore him against the
gallery rail. A hand close by shattered the nearest lamp into
darkness, and the flat of a cutlass (not Bill Adams's) descending
upon our hero's head, put an end for the while to speech and
consciousness.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE "VESUVIUS" BOMB.
He awoke with a racking headache in pitchy darkness; and with the
twilight of returning consciousness there grew in him an awful fear
that he had been coffined and buried alive. For he lay at full
length in a bed which yet was unlike any bed of his acquaintance,
being so narrow that he could neither turn his body nor put out an
arm to lift himself into a sitting posture; and again, when he tried
to move his legs, to his horror they were compressed as if between
bandages. In his ear there sounded, not six inches away, a low
lugubrious moaning. It could not come from a bed-fellow, for he had
no bed-fellow.
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