Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/301



EW people are endowed with that exquisite balance of the faculties which restores full consciousness at once when a profound sleep is broken by some rude dissonance, such as a shot in a room upstairs. Angus Valorous was not one of them. When the crash, or smash—it was not by any license of descriptive fancy a crack—of Windy Moore's gun struck his sleeping senses, Angus sat up on his canvas cot with the stiffness and celerity of machinery, his mind straddling, it might be said, over the chasm between consciousness and sleep.

Angus sat that way a moment, wildly dishevelled, staring, mouth open; sprang from his bed, dashed to the middle of the office, where he turned round and round as if unwinding himself from the trammelling coils of some insidious thing that held his senses prisoner. He brought up presently with his shins against the cot, his balance in some measure restored, where he stood looking and listening, in posture of ludicrous strain, up the stairs.

"Wha's yat?" said Angus, thick with sleep and that