Shorthouse still talked of his adventures, in some Eastern country now, and less connectedly.  These adventures, real or imaginary, had quite a savour of the Arabian Nights, and did not by any means make it easier for me to keep my hold on reality.  The lightest weight will affect the balance under such circumstances, and in this case the weight of his talk was on the wrong scale.  His words were very rapid, and I found it overwhelmingly difficult not to follow them into that great gulf of darkness where they all rushed and vanished.  But that, I knew, meant sleep again.  Yet, it was strange I should feel sleepy when at the same time all my nerves were fairly tingling.  Every time I heard what seemed like a step outside, or a movement in the hay opposite, the blood stood still for a moment in my veins.  Doubtless, the unremitting strain told upon me more than I realised, and this was doubly great now that I knew Shorthouse was a source of weakness instead of strength, as I had counted.  Certainly, a curious sense of languor grew upon me more and more, and I was sure that the man beside me was engaged in the same struggle.  The feverishness of his talk proved this, if nothing else.  It was dreadfully hard to keep awake.

But this time, instead of dropping into the gulf, I saw something come up out of it!  It reached our world by a door in the side of the barn furthest from me, and it came in cautiously and silently and moved into the mass of hay opposite.  There, for a moment, I lost it, but presently I caught it again higher up.  It was clinging, like a great bat, to the side of the barn.  Something trailed behind it, I could not make out what. . . .  It crawled up the wooden wall and began to move out along one of the rafters.  A numb terror settled down all over me as I watched it.  The thing trailing behind it was apparently a rope.

The whispering began again just then, but the only words I could catch seemed without meaning; it was almost like another language.  The voices were above me, under the roof.  Suddenly I saw signs of active movement going on just beyond the place where the thing lay upon the rafter.  There was something else up there with it!  Then followed panting, like the quick breathing that accompanies effort, and the next minute a black mass dropped through the air and dangled at the end of the rope.

Instantly, it all flashed upon me.  I sprang to my feet and rushed headlong across the floor of the barn.  How I moved so quickly in the darkness I do not know; but, even as I ran, it flashed into my mind that I should never get at my knife in time to cut the thing down, or else that I should find it had been taken from me.  Somehow or other—­the Goddess of Dreams knows how—­I climbed up by the hay bales and swung out along the rafter.  I was hanging, of course, by my arms, and the knife was already between my teeth, though I had no recollection of how it got there.  It was open.  The mass, hanging like a side of bacon, was only a few feet