fill you full of lead, get out of here and get out now! If I
have to do it to you, there's no scientist this time to bring you back.
When you go out you'll stay out!"

"Don't worry," he grimaced back to me, waving a mass of bones that
should have been a hand contemptuously at me, "I'm going. I'm headed for
Shelton." He stalked the length of the floor and shut the door behind
him. The beast had gone.

"The dirty liar!" I cried. "I wish--yes--I wish I had an excuse to kill
him. Just think of that being loose, will you? A brute who would think
up such a yarn! Of course it's all absurd. All crazy. All a lie."

"No. It's not a lie."

* * * * *

I turned to see who had spoken. Hammersly's voice was so unfamiliar and
now so torn in addition that I could not have thought he had spoken, had
he not been looking right at me, his glittering eyes challenging my
assertion. Would wonders never cease? I asked myself. First this
outrageous yarn, now Hammersly, the "sphinx," expressing an opinion,
looking for an argument! Of course it must be that his susceptible and
brooding brain had been turned a bit by the evening we had just
experienced.

"Why Hammersly! You don't believe it?" I asked.

"I not only believe it, Jerry, but now it's my turn to say, as he did, I
_know_ it! Jerry, old friend," he went on, "that devil told the truth.
He was hanged. He was brought back to life; and Jerry--I was that
scientist!"

Whew! I fell back to a box again. My knees seemed to forsake me. Then I
heard Hammersly talking to himself.

"Five years it's been," he muttered. "Five years since I turned him
loose again. Five years of agony for me, wondering what new devilish
crimes he was perpetrating, wondering when he would return to that
little farm to swing his ax again. Five years--five years."

He came over to me, and without a word of explanation or to ask my
permission he reached his hand into my pocket and drew out my revolver,
and I did not protest.

"He said he was headed for Shelton," went on Hammersly's spoken
thoughts. "If I slip across the ice I can intercept him at Black's
woods." Buttoning his coat closely, he followed the stranger out into
the night.

* * * * *

I was glad the moon had come up for my walk home, glad too when I had
the door locked and propped with a chair behind me. I undressed in the
dark, not wanting any grisly, sunken-eyed monster to be looking i