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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