There was not much in the immediate outlook conducive to a calm spirit and peaceful repose. Such sleep as Rawlins had that night was crowded with strife and battle. The subconscious man inside him seemed allied with the enemy, for his sleepless imagination contrived dreams which harassed him by scenes of perils having neither beginning nor end, leaping from one to another like broken fragments of flame.
In all of them he was trammeled by some unseen force that made him impotent against his tormentors. When he shot in desperate defense of his threatened life, it was only a weak fizzle, the smoke dribbling from the muzzle of his gun as from a cigarette; when he battled bare-handed, punching for all that was in him, Hewitt, or the variations of Hewitt which all his enemies assumed, stood unmoved. No matter how much steam he put into his punches, his fists seemed to float gently against jaws and ribs of leering Hewitts as if he moved in a vacuum which affected nobody else.
If he had been a man who put any stock in visions, Rawlins would have packed up a day ahead of the date set for him to go. He was up at dawn, heavy, unrefreshed, feeling as if sand had blown into his eyes, distrustful of the truce Hewitt had set. He expected them to appear any moment, with destructive designs
