the second pole of the connection."

"But," she began faintly, "how can this mad experiment have anything to
do with saving my boy?"

He waved impatiently at her evident denseness. "Do you not understand?
It is so I will save Allen, your son. I shall first switch our egos, or
souls, as you say. Then switch the bodies. It must always take this
sequence; why, I have not ascertained. But it always works thus."

Mrs. Baker was terrified. What she had just seen, smacked of the
blackest magic--yet a woman in her position must grasp at straws. The
world blamed her son for the murder of Smith, a man Professor Burr had
made use of as he might a guinea pig, and Allen must be snatched from
the death house.

"Do--do you mean you can bring Allen from the prison here--just by
throwing those switches?" she asked.

"That is it. But there is more to it than that, for it is not magic,
madam; it is science, you understand, and there must be some physical
connection. But with your help, that can easily be made."

* * * * *

Professor Ramsey Burr, she knew, was the greatest electrical engineer
the world had ever known. And he stood high as a physicist. Nothing
hindered him in the pursuit of knowledge, they said. He knew no fear,
and he lived on an intellectual promontory. He was so great that he
almost lost sight of himself. To such a man, nothing was impossible.
Hope, wild hope, sprang in Mary Baker's heart, and she grasped the bony
hand of the professor and kissed it.

"Oh, I believe, I believe," she cried. "You can do it. You can save
Allen. I will do anything, anything you tell me to."

"Very well. You visit your son daily at the death house, do you not?"

She nodded; a shiver of remembrance of that dread spot passed through
her.

"Then you will tell him the plan and let him agree to see me the night
preceding the electrocution. I will give him final instructions as to
the exchange of bodies. When my life spirit, or ego, is confined in your
son's body in the death house, Allen will be able to perform the feat of
changing the bodies, and your son's flesh will join his soul, which will
have been temporarily inhabiting my own shell. Do you see? When they
find me in the cell where they suppose your son to be, they will be
unable to explain the phenomenon; they can do nothing but release me.
Your son will go here, and can be whisked away to a safe place of
concealment."

"Yes, yes. What am I to