When he recovered consciousness it was quite dark, and it took him some minutes to remember what had happened and where he was. The fall had been so sudden that there had been no time to see anything, and the c***k he received on the head from one of the logs—for he had no doubt as to what had put him out of action—had settled any immediate anxiety on the point. He sat up, feeling rather giddy, and felt his head tenderly, but he was relieved to find that the injury was not so severe as he had expected, although a nasty lump under a sticky cake of hair told him that the skin of his scalp had been broken.
He looked around in the dim starlight, and saw that he had been tipped out with the logs into a deep gully, which was straddled by a trestle bridge. Luckily he had almost rolled under the
