The violence lasted hardly more than five minutes, after which the downpour abated a little of its fury. But a steadier, quieter precipitation continued, with the swiftly moving center of disturbance already far across the sky.
The rain in his face, and the brisk puff of newly washed ozone in his heavily moving lungs, aroused Garrison's struggling consciousness by slow degrees. Strange, fantastic images, old memories, weird phantoms, and wholly impossible fancies played through his brain with the dull, torturing persistency of nightmares for a time that seemed to him endless.
It was fully half an hour before he was sufficiently aroused to roll to an upright position and pass his hand before his eyes.
He was sick and weak. He could not recall what had happened. He did not know where he was.
He was all but soaked by the rain, despite the fact that a tree with dense foliage was spread above him, and he had lain beneath protecting shrubberies. Slowly the numbness seemed to pass from his brain, like the mist from the surface of a lake. He remembered things, as it were, in patches.
Dorothy--that was it--and something had happened.
He was stupidly aware that he was sitting on something uncomfortable--a lump, perhaps a stone--but he did not move. He was waiting for his brain to clear. When at length he hoisted his heavy weight upon his knees, and then staggered drunkenly to his feet, to blunder toward a tree and support himself by its trunk, his normal circulation began to be restored, and pain assailed his skull, arousing him further to his senses.
He leaned for some time against the tree, gathering up the threads of the tangle. It all came back, distinct and sharp at last, and, with memory, his strength was returning. He felt of his head, on which his hat was jammed.
The bone and the muscles at the base of the skull were sore and sensitive, but the hurt had not gone deep. He felt incapable of thinking it out--the reasons, and all that it meant. He wondered if his attacker had thought to leave him dead.
Mechanically his hands sought out his pockets. He found his watch and pocketbook in place. Some weight seemed dragging at his coat. When his hand went slowly to the place, he found the lump on which he had been lying. He pulled it out--a cold, cylindrical affair, of metal, with a thick cord hanging from its end. Then a chill crept all the distance down his spine.