y stand in a
spot convenient for seeing without being seen. In ten minutes he was
standing at the bar asking for a drink.

"Whiskey!" he cried. "Straight."

It was given him, but as he set the empty glass down on the counter he
saw lying before him another of the steel springs, and was so confounded
by the sight that the proprietor, who had put it there at my
instigation, thrust out his hand toward him as if half afraid he would
fall.

"Where did that--that _thing_ come from?" stammered John Graham,
ignoring the other's gesture and pointing with a trembling hand at the
insignificant bit of wire between them.

"Didn't it drop from your coat-pocket?" inquired the proprietor. "It
wasn't lying here before you came in."

With a horrible oath the unhappy man turned and fled from the place. I
lost sight of him after that for three hours, then I suddenly came upon
him again. He was walking uptown with a set purpose in his face that
made him look more dangerous than ever. Of course I followed him,
expecting him to turn towards Fifty-ninth Street, but at the corner of
Madison Avenue and Forty-seventh Street he changed his mind and dashed
toward Third Avenue. At Park Avenue he faltered and again turned north,
walking for several blocks as if the fiends were behind him. I began to
think that he was but attempting to walk off his excitement, when, at a
sudden rushing sound in the cut beside us, he stopped and trembled. An
express train was shooting by. As it disappeared in the tunnel beyond,
he looked about him with a blanched face and wandering eye; but his
glance did not turn my way, or, if it did, he failed to attach any
meaning to my near presence.

He began to move on again and this time towards the bridge spanning the
cut. I followed him very closely. In the centre of it he paused and
looked down at the track beneath him. Another train was approaching. As
it came near he trembled from head to foot, and, catching at the railing
against which he leaned, was about to make a quick move forward when a
puff of smoke arose from below and sent him staggering backward, gasping
with a terror I could hardly understand till I saw that the smoke had
taken the form of a spiral and was sailing away before him in what to
his disordered imagination must have looked like a gigantic image of the
coil with which twice before on this day he had found himself
confronted.

It may have been chance and it may have been providence; but whichev