The Aztec Treasure-House by Thomas A. Janvier

After all, the life that I thought was lost, and had but little sorrow for the losing of it, slowly came back to me again. For a good while before I recovered consciousness fully, I understood a little of what was going on around me by sounds which, no doubt, were loud and ringing, yet which seemed to me to come faintly from a long way off. They plainly were the sounds of fighting -- of weapons rattling together, of shouts and yells and death-cries -- but I did not associate them with our present battling, but thought that we still were in the canon, and were still fighting those wild Indians by whom poor Dennis was slain. And I knew that I had been hurt badly; for in my head was a throbbing pain so keen that it seemed like to split my skull open, and my stomach was stirred by most distressing qualms, and my weakness was such that I could not ease the sore muscles of my body by moving by so much as a hair's-breadth from the cramped position in which I lay.

It seemed to me a vastly long while that I remained in this dreary condition of half-consciousness, with no certain knowledge of anything save the pain that I suffered; and then I felt some one touch me, and a hand laid upon my heart; and this touch so far roused me that I heaved a long sigh and slowly opened my eyes. For a moment I did not know the face that I saw bending over me; nor was this wonderful, for in place of its usual ruddiness was a death-like pallor, that was the more marked by contrast with the blood that trickled down over it from a great gash across the brow whereby the bone was laid bare. But there was no mistaking the voice that called out: "He's alive, Rayburn! " and added, "I don't see what right he's got t' be alive, either, after a crack like that. I guess studyin' antiquities must everlastin'ly harden an' thicken a man's skull!"