No help comes,
however, and all you know is that thousands of people are kicking you,
and you are being smothered.
Somebody else seems in trouble, too. You can hear his faint cries coming
from underneath your bed. Determining, at all events, to sell your life
dearly, you struggle frantically, hitting out right and left with arms
and legs, and yelling lustily the while, and at last something gives way,
and you find your head in the fresh air. Two feet off, you dimly observe
a half-dressed ruffian, waiting to kill you, and you are preparing for a
life-and-death struggle with him, when it begins to dawn upon you that
it's Jim.
"Oh, it's you, is it?" he says, recognising you at the same moment.
"Yes," you answer, rubbing your eyes; "what's happened?"
"Bally tent's blown down, I think," he says.
"Where's Bill?"
Then you both raise up your voices and shout for "Bill!" and the ground
beneath you heaves and rocks, and the muffled voice that you heard before
replies from out the ruin:
"Get off my head, can't you?"
And Bill struggles out, a muddy, trampled wreck, and in an unnecessarily
aggressive mood - he being under the evident belief that the whole thing
has been done on purpose.
