A low, distant rumble of thunder denoted a new gathering of storm. Five minutes passed, and then the lightning flashed across the firmament directly overhead. A crash like the splitting of the heavens followed, and the rain came down as if it poured through the slit.

The violence lasted hardly more than five minutes, after which the downpour abated a little of its fury. But a steadier, quieter precipitation continued, with the swiftly moving center of disturbance already far across the sky.

The rain in his face, and the brisk puff of newly washed ozone in his heavily moving lungs, aroused Garrison's struggling consciousness by slow degrees. Strange, fantastic images, old memories, weird phantoms, and wholly impossible fancies played through his brain with the dull, torturing persistency of nightmares for a time that seemed to him endless.

It was fully half an hour before he was sufficiently aroused to roll to an upright position and pass his hand before his eyes.

He was sick and weak. He could not recall what had happened. He did not know where he was.

He was all but soaked by the rain, despite the fact that a tree with dense foliage was spread above him, and he had lain beneath protecting shrubberies. Slowly the numbness seemed to pass from his brain, like the mist from the surface of a lake. He remembered things, as it were, in patches.

Dorothy—that was it—and something had happened.

He was stupidly aware that he was sitting on something uncomfortable—a lump, perhaps a stone—but he did not move. He was waiting for his brain to clear. When at length he hoisted his heavy weight upon his knees, and then staggered drunkenly to his feet, to blunder toward a tree and support himself by its trunk, his normal circulation began to be restored, and pain assailed his skull, arousing him further to his senses.

He leaned for some time against the tree, gathering up the threads of the tangle. It all came back, distinct and sharp at last, and, with memory, his strength was returning. He felt of his head, on which his hat was jammed.

The bone and the muscles at the base of the skull were sore and sensitive, but the hurt had not gone deep. He felt incapable of thinking it out—the reasons, and all that it meant. He wondered if his attacker had thought to leave him dead.

Mechanically his hands sought out his pockets. He found his watch and pocketbook in place. Some weight seemed dragging at his coat. When his hand went slowly to the place, he found the lump on which he had been lying. He pulled it out—a cold, cylindrical affair, of metal, with a thick cord hanging from its end. Then a chill crept all the distance down his spine.

The thing was a bomb!

Cold perspiration and a sense of horror came upon him together. An underlying current of thought, feebly left unfocused in his brain—a thought of himself as a victim, lured to the park for this deed—became as stinging as a blow on the cheek.

The cord on this metal engine of destruction was a fuse. The rain had drenched it and quenched its spark of fire, doubtless at some break in the fiber, since fuse is supposedly water-proof. Nothing but the thunder-storm had availed to save his life. He had walked into a trap, like a trusting animal, and chance alone had intervened to bring him forth alive.

His brain by now was thoroughly active. Reactionary energy rushed in upon him to sharpen all his faculties. There was nothing left of the joyous throbbing in his veins which thoughts of his tryst with Dorothy had engendered. He felt like the wrathful dupe of a woman's wiles, for it seemed as plain as soot on snow that Dorothy, fearing the consequences of his recent discoveries in the Hardy case, had made this park appointment only with this treacherous intent.

All his old, banished suspicions rushed pell-mell upon his mind, and with them came new indications of her guilt. Her voice on the telephone had been weak and faltering. She had chosen the park as their meeting place, as the only available spot for such a deed. And then—then——

It seemed too horrible to be true, but the wound was on his head, and death was in his hand. It was almost impossible that anyone could have heard their talk over the 'phone. He was left no alternative theory to work on, except that perhaps the Robinsons had managed, through some machination, to learn that he and Dorothy were to meet at this convenient place.

One struggling ray of hope was thus vouchsafed him, yet he felt as if perhaps he had already given Dorothy the benefit of too many reasonable doubts. He could be certain of one thing only—he was thoroughly involved in a mesh of crime and intrigue that had now assumed a new and personal menace. Hereafter he must work more for Garrison and less for romantic ideals.

Anger came to assist in restoring his strength. Far from undergoing any sense of alarm which would frighten him out of further effort to probe to the bottom of the business, he was stubbornly determined to remain on the case till the whole thing was stripped of its secrets.

Not without a certain weakness at the knees did he make his way back to the path.

He had no fear of lurking enemies, since those who had placed the bomb in his pocket would long before have fled the scene to make an alibi complete. The rain had ceased. Wrapping the fuse about the metal cartridge in his hand, he came beneath a lamp-post by the walk, and looked the thing over in the light.

There was nothing much to see. A nipple of gas-pipe, with a cap on either end, one drilled through for the insertion of the fuse, described it completely. The kink in the fuse where the rain had found entrance to dampen the powder, was plainly to be seen.

Garrison placed the contrivance in his pocket. He pulled out his watch. The hour, to his amazement, was nearly ten. He realized he must have lain a considerable time unconscious in the wet. Halting to wonder what cleverness might suggest as the best possible thing to be done, he somewhat grimly determined to proceed to Dorothy's house.