sobbed. "Just drying
them out and turned on the furnace to help dry them. You left like that,
and I got frightened. I ran to a neighbor's. The explosion and fire
started not five minutes later."

Sickly, I thought of the naphtha Stoddard had piled near his boiler. I
didn't say anything, though, for I knew he was thinking of it also.

He dropped the guns and cartridge boxes, and in a tight, strained voice,
while putting his arms comfortingly around his wife, said: "That's all
right, Laura. It wasn't your fault. We'll have another house like this.
So help me God, _just like this_!"

* * * * *

It has been six months now since Stoddard's architectural eyesight
burned to the ground. He started rebuilding immediately after that. I
turned over all the drafts my company made from his first crude "plans,"
and he handed them to the supervisor of the construction company he
bought out. You see, he took every dime he owned, sold out his insurance
business, and has gone into the building game in dead earnest.

He explained it to me this way.

"I couldn't go on having house after house built and torn down on the
same spot, Kermit. It would break me in no time. This way, with my own
company to construct the house every time, I'll save about half each
time."

"Then you're going to build precisely the same house?" I demanded.

His jaw went hard, and he peered from behind his spectacles with the
intense glare of a fanatic. For once he didn't look like Mr.
Suburbanite.

"You know damned well I am," he said. "And until it is _precisely_ the
same as the first, I'll keep tearing 'em down and putting 'em up again.
I don't care if I have to build a thousand to do it, right on this
spot!"

Of course I knew what he meant by precisely the same. And I wondered
what on earth the odds were he was bucking. Through chance and a mad
combination of angles, that time and space door had appeared the first
time. But it might have been hanging on the tiniest atom of a fractional
difference.

Stoddard has already finished his second house, and although it _looks_
exactly like the monstrosity I first built for him, it can't be
_precisely_ like it. For he didn't get the gray shrouded door when he
poked a hole in the attic ceiling and looked up into the second crazy
belfry. All he saw was the belfry.

Tomorrow he starts tearing down to build another, and pretty soon people
are going to be certain he's crazy.

A