plainly as if the red-faced man had
shouted. Hicks advised him to be a man, to show courage for once, to
risk something, and then reap the reward forever afterward. "Take your
motorcycle, ride to the aviation field before daylight, file that wire
half through, and fate will take care of the rest."

But Owen lacked the nerve. He feared that he would be seen sneaking
onto the field at night or at daybreak. Hicks replied that the field
was deserted at this hour. Owen then insisted that the aeroplane would
be guarded, and even if it were not locked in its hangar the first rasp
of a file on the wire would call the attention of some one on guard.
No, it was too much, Owen could not do it. Instead, he made a counter
suggestion that Hicks should undertake the task, since he was so
certain of its success. For his part the secretary agreed to divide
all that the estate might be made to yield him.

Owen, like everybody else, had seen many strange things in dreams, but
never had he known of any character in a dream admitting or even
suggesting that he was a dream. Yet this was just what Hicks did.

"I would, Owen. I would do it in a minute if I were talking to you.
But this isn't me at all. I'm only a dream, in, reality I'm sound
asleep in a hotel on upper Broadway, where I am dreaming that I am
talking to you. Tomorrow morning I'll remember enough of this dream to
make me go down to the aviation field with a sort of premonition that
Pauline is going to be killed in an aeroplane."

"How did you know about that wire and that she is going to fly
tomorrow," asked Owen.

"I don't know that," said the phantom Hicks frankly in his empty
voice. "There is a third party in this and I don't know who he is or
much about him, except that he is not a living being. He seems to be
somebody from the past, a priest of some old religion I ought to have
studied about when I was at school. I don't know what his motive is,
but he is with us. He wants her killed for some reason. He brought
this dream of me to you so I could explain.

"You needn't worry about the man on guard over the aeroplanes. That
man won't wake up, no matter how much noise you make."

"How do you know?" Owen asked.

"He knows," replied Hicks, "because he has transferred the effects of
your morphine from your astral body to his. That's how he knows. You
ought to know, too, because you have taken almost enough of the drug to
kill you tonight, and yet this