a point where a pow-wow
is a shrieking necessity. I have done one of two things: I've unearthed
the most devilish plot that ever existed, or else I have stumbled into a
mare's nest of fairly heroic proportions."

By this time he was reasonably sure of his audience. Bromley, still
rather pallid and weak, squared himself with an elbow on the table.
Blacklock got up to stand behind the assistant's chair. Ballard thrust
his hands into his pockets and frowned. The moment had probably arrived
when he would have to fight fire with fire for Elsa Craigmiles's sake,
and he was pulling himself together for the battle.

"I know beforehand about what you are going to say," he interjected;
"but let's have your version of it."

"You shall have it hot and hot," promised the playwright. "For quite a
little time, and from a purely literary point of view, I have been
interesting myself in the curious psychological condition which breeds
so many accidents on this job of yours. I began with the assumption that
there was a basis of reality. The human mind isn't exactly creative in
the sense that it can make something out of nothing. You say, Mr.
Ballard, that your workmen are superstitious fools, and that their
mental attitude is chiefly responsible for all the disasters. I say that
the fact--the cause-fact--existed before the superstition; was the
legitimate ancestor of the superstition. Don't you believe it?"

Ballard neither affirmed nor denied; but Bromley nodded. "I've always
believed it," he admitted.

"There isn't the slightest doubt of the existence of the primary
cause-fact; it is a psychological axiom that it _must_ antedate the
diseased mental condition," resumed the theorist, oracularly. "I don't
know how far back it can be traced, but Engineer Braithwaite's drowning
will serve for our starting point. You will say that there was nothing
mysterious about that; yet only the other day, Hoskins, the locomotive
driver, said to me: 'They can say what they like, but _I_ ain't
believing that the river stove him all up as if he'd been stomped on in
a cattle pen.' There, you see, you have the first gentle push over into
the field of the unaccountable."

It was here that Ballard broke in, to begin the fire-fighting.

"You are getting the cart before the horse. It is ten chances to one
that Hoskins never dreamed of being incredulous about the plain,
unmistakable facts until after the later happenings had given him the
superstitious