ut me across here," he said thoughtfully. "It--it hurt.
Awfully!"

Carrick nodded.

"And that was all," Mr. Newman went on. "At the sting of the lash, as
though some one had turned a switch, the daylight went out--to the
sound of that gross animal laugh. There was again the frozen dark,
the solitude--the chill--and I heard you saying, as from another
planet, across great gulfs of space: 'Drink some of this!' Only--"

"Yes?"

"It's like a memory of something that actually took place. I ought to
have a weal just below my eyes where the whip took me-it wasn't five
minutes ago. I remember the dusty smell of that white road-and how
the thing that hung on the signpost was-some-how-ugly and nasty. It's
awfully queer, Carrick."

"Yes!" Carrick sank his hands in his pockets and walked away to the
shadowy far end of the room. Mr. Newman sat in thought, flavoring the
vivid quality of his vision, with his underlip caught up between his
teeth. The great room was silent for a space of minutes.

"I say!" Carrick spoke from the other end of it.

"What?"

"That signpost you saw-it wasn't a signpost, you know."

"What was it, then?"

"It was a gallows," said Carrick, "with a man hanging on it."

There was a pause. "Eh?" said Mr. Newman, and rose from his chair.
"Carrick, what exactly did you do to me?"

"I sent you back a hundred years," Carrick answered, in a measured
voice. His excitement got the better of his restraint and his voice
cracked. "Part of the-what was it you said you were, Newman?" he
cried, on a note of shrillness. "I tell you, man, you've proved a
hundred things you never dreamed of-theories of mine. You've proved
them, I tell you. I've dipped you back into the past as I dip my
hands into water. What you saw was what happened; it was you-you,
man, a hundred years ago. Oh, why did I stop at a hundred? A
thousand, a dozen thousand years would have been as easy."

He came down the long room almost at a run.

"Newman," he said, taking the elder man by the arm with a swift,
feverish hand; "we've got 'em, all those old diploma-screened fools
that call us quacks-Zinzau, Berlier, von Rascowicz, Scott-Evans-we've
got 'em. We'll make 'em squeal. Before I've done with you, we'll see
what the earth was like when it was in the pot, being cooked. You
shall be a batwinged lizard again, and a cave-dweller, and a flint
man. We'll turn you loose through history-our special correspondent
at the siege of Troy-what?"

He