Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/319

 Yet she was compelled to stop and rest, from time to time, for her position was a strained one and her body was tired. She continued the abrasion of the cotton fiber pinioning her arms, however, until her neck-cords seemed ready to crack. Then she rolled wearily over, face downward, and rested. Then she began a series of muscular twists and tugs, worrying at the swathings that bound her hands behind her. She noticed, as she tugged and worked, an ever increased sense of relaxed tension. So she continued her labors, more frenziedly than before. And it suddenly came home to her that her campaign of attrition had actually severed the rope that held her deadened forearms in their painfully unnatural position.

She sat up, at this discovery, warning herself to be cool. But her body was stippled with nerve-quivers as she worked at the loosened strands still about her arms. When they were quite free, and the blood was tingling and needling once more through her numbed finger-ends, she sat there for several luxurious moments, reveling in the thought of that release. The one thing to complete her happiness, she felt, was a glass of water. For by this time she was inexpressibly thirsty.