had been set up. There wasn't much of it left intact.
The two tall, flat cabinets which had been at each end of the table lay on the floor, battered and crushed by the feet of the firemen. The copper hoops that had arched over the table now sagged every which way. The two long, slender vacuum tubes were broken, and the delicate, close-packed grids and filaments which the glass had housed were hopelessly fused together.
And on the table, as on a bier, lay the man who had assembled this strange contrivance. Old Sledge, his body charred and stark, a sacrifice to his monomania. The man who foolishly claimed he could read the future.
I went to the charred desk and stooped over the heap of ashes that had once been a foot-thick bundle of manuscript. One comer of one sheet remained.
"Chapter Nine, Future Hist"
That was all.
No, it was not quite all! The wall between this room and mine was more damaged than any other wall, indicating that the short circuit had started the fire within a few feet of where my bed was placed. . . .
I have done very little work since that night. I have done little of anything—but think.
What happened in old Sledge's room before the fire? Did his heart fail as soon as he started the current coursing through his body on leaving me that afternoon? Did that current then slowly build up so that, by the time I retired, it was intense enough to reach my bed and give me, too, the power to live for a short while in the future? Was my fragmentary interlude of torture on a hospital bed a true glimpse into my future?
Impossible! Nonsense!
Sledge was mildly insane. His "invention" was a meaningless tangle of wires. My experience of seeming to lie dying of burns from some inexplicable accident was only a dream, a nightmare brought on by the smoke in my room and the crackling of fire near me. It must be that. It must be!
Because, if it isn't, I have been given my death sentence: that I shall die in agony before next year is out.
But such thoughts are absurd. Assume old Sledge's mechanism could place one into the future. Assume the mechanism, without its master's control, could radiate enough of its mysterious power to drag me into the time-to-come. Is it logical to suppose that, of the many other hours that might have been revealed to me, my death-bed hour should chance to be hit upon? No! . . .
Ten days ago I got a letter from my Uncle John in Boston. "While going through an old dispatch box," he wrote, "I came upon this watch of your father's. I don't think you ever saw it—he died when you were so small—but I send it to you in the same mail, under separate cover, as a keepsake."
The watch is an old-fashioned gold one with a hunting-case. On the front of it is a hunting-dog, in red gold, standing with lifted forepaw in a spray of green-gold grass.
I must have seen the watch when I was a child, and have forgotten it till subconscious memory resurrected it in my odd dream. For it was all a dream, of course. I repeat that. I'm not going to die horribly on the day before Christmas of this year. I'm not! The whole thing is a fantasy born in the sick brain of a man who fancied he was a supreme inventor. Old Sledge was mad, I tell you! Mad! . . .
Today is August sixth. General Coppers closed at forty-one and one-eighth.
