"This?" St. Cloud queried.
Henry Quainfan nodded.
"For I've got an idea-if I may say so, the most wonderful of ideas. We've got some stiff work ahead of us now, Morgan, I fancy. If I hadn't been a blockhead, I'd have seen it before!"
"Fifth state of matter-maybe," proffered St. Cloud.
"Perhaps," smiled Henry Quainfan. "And how would you like it in the fourth dimension ?"
"Lead on, Macduff!" exclaimed the other, smiling that dark St. Cloudian smile.
DONE
"SIMPLY had to break away!"
Thus spoke St. Cloud as he took a seat before my fireplace. And indeed his dark features bore the impress of that intense application which had followed (for these many days now) the inception of Quainfan's idea.
Night had just closed in, black and stormy. The wind was growling and roaring and flinging the rain angrily against the windows,
"Great Jupiter Ammon!" St. Cloud exclaimed. "This thing will bowl me over yet. How on earth does he stand it?"
I wondered that myself.
"How is it coming on?" I asked. His hand made a cabalistic sweep.
"Oh, it's coming on! It's coming!" said St. Cloud. "The only thing is this: where is it going to end?"
He turned his dark look upon me, "This is a mysterious business, Rider," said he gravely. "Henry has done things over there to make a fellow's hair stand on end!"
"It's like that?" I exclaimed.
"Worse!" declared St. Cloud. "It's uncanny some of it. Creepy! You wouldn't believe me if I told you some of the things I've seen over there."
I made an interrogative exclamation.
"I know you wouldn't, Rider," St. Cloud declared. "You'd think I was losing my wits."
A strange expression settled on his face, and for a time he sat brooding in silence.
Of a sudden he made a wild gesture. "But it's all Greek to me, Rider! I'm in the dark-Cimmerian darkness. I'm there, I see it done, I even help do things; but I know no more about it, or to what it tends, than I know about the way the ladies on Venus do up their hair,"
The touch of levity in his manner vanished, vanished as suddenly as it had come.
"At times, Rider," said he, "I am afraid."
"Afraid?"
"Afraid," he nodded. "And I say it without shame."
"Of what?" I asked him quickly. "That's it. I don't know of what. But I've seen him do it."
I looked at him inquiringly, but he only gazed at me with a curious expression in his dark eyes.
What was it, I wondered, that he wanted to tell me?
"The mystery in your words," I observed, "would incline one to the belief that there is, after all, something in these wild tales that are going around, and have even got into the press."
"And there is," said St. Cloud, "Of course, the most of it is sheer nonsense, but there is foundation for some of it just the same. For instance, there's that gull story."
I nodded.
"I was going to ask if there was anything in that."
"There is. That's one of the stories there is something in."
"Brooks was telling me about it the day before yesterday," said I. "You know, there was something rather curious in his manner when he mentioned Henry Quainfan; he seems to think that
Henry is a danger to the community- indeed, that he has leagued himself with some of the powers of darkness. He was amusedly indignant; was Brooks, about these mysterious happenings. He said something about tax-payers and dangers to the community concomitant to the presence in it of scientific investigators though I'm afraid Brooks didn't use quite so flattering a term as that."
"And the gulls?" queried St. Cloud.
"It was like this. His wife, Brooks said, had her eyes on them at the very instant that it happened-though I must say that Mrs. Brooks in the role of a gullologist is itself something of a mystery-but the birds had attracted her attention by the peculiar sharpness and rapid sequence of their cries. There were two of them, and they were wheeling swiftly in sharp circles, about two hundred feet up, and-Brooks laid great stress on this they were directly over the laboratory."
"Only partly correct," remarked St. Cloud. "For I saw that episode myself. The gulls were by no means directly over the laboratory, and there were three of them, not two. But then what?".
"Of a sudden a greenish flame, dazzling with darting tongues of phosphorescence that's the way Brooks described it-shot up out of the laboratory. It did not reach the gulls, however, but something as terrible did: where each afraid." gull was appeared a sudden puff of flame-"
"Green, I suppose," smiled St. Cloud.
"Brooks didn't say as to that. But there came two puffs of flame, and presto! the gulls had vanished-not even a feather remained!"
"Much moonshine," smiled St. Cloud. "As I said, there were three gulls; one of them, though, wasn't touched at all. However, the two others did vanish, but not precisely in the way that Brooks describes. There weren't any puffs of flame. Also, no flame shot up out of the laboratory, though naturally Mrs. Brooks thought that it was a flame. It was a stream of light-a sword of fluorescence."
"But the gulls?"
"Oh, they disappeared all right-vanished from before your very eyes!"
"But where to?"
"I don't know, Rider. Where the flame goes, I fancy, when it disappears. "Since things like that happen, it's no wonder that people are-beginning to talk."
"It's no wonder at all, Rider. And I haven't seen all the things that Henry has done. Then there's Nettleton's fantastic yarn, and that falling eagle, and the "
"I saw that eagle," I said.
"Dead as a door nail when he came down, wasn't he?"
"As Archaeopteryx."
"And marks on him that were a puzzle to the wisest head?"
"I heard at least twenty explanations, and there wasn't a one of them that would do."
"You know," said St. Cloud, "it's no wonder people are beginning to imagine things and to feel uneasy."
"What," I asked, "does Henry think about that? Or does he know?"
"Oh, he knows. Somebody put the matter to him-more strongly it seems than Brooks did to you. Only last night Henry remarked that he would cart the laboratory far into some desert in the West or some mountain fastness some place where he could at least watch a cathode stream without giving people the nightmare-only-"
"Only what?"
"Only he had something else in mind-a remarkable journey of some kind, he said."
"A journey," said I. "This is becoming interesting."
"Henry's words implied that it would be interesting," said St. Cloud, "mighty interesting. But as to how, where, why, when or what-well, I haven't the slightest idea when it comes to that."
