about the secret forces in the universe that made him almost a god. And
he taught me things that the wisest philosopher in the world doesn't
suspect. Still, your father may have been right. I think it very likely
that what he taught me may send me to hell!"

I shivered. I looked up nervously to make sure that the way was clear to
the door. I began to suspect that my friend Banaotovich, though he was
certainly not a criminal, might be a dangerous lunatic.

My _vis-a-vis_ rubbed absently at a protuberance on his left side. I had
noticed it when he first came across the room to speak to me. A
deformity--I was sure it had not been there when he was a boy--or
perhaps a tumor or some such thing as that.

"I kept very quiet about what the Hindoo taught me, because I knew most
people felt about such things much as you say your father did. And I
wanted to get on in the world. But I had an idea the Hindoo could help
me get on. Perhaps he _has_----"

And he stared gloomily at space.

"Perhaps he has. And perhaps he hasn't."

He brooded. Then he took up the thread of his story.

"Wolansky nearly drove me to suicide. I read and studied and crammed,
day and night. I tried everything I could think of to overcome the man's
antagonism. I crawled in the dust before him like a whipped cur! Nothing
did any good. And when I saw he hated me and was determined to smash me,
I began to hate _him_, too. I came to hate him worse than I hated the
devils in hell. There was a time when I had to hold myself back with all
my strength to keep from sticking a knife into him or braining him with
a chair. But the Hindoo and I made some experiments with telepathy, and
I discovered that there are other ways of killing a man besides stabbing
him or giving him poison.

"I learned how to make a man in front of me on the street turn around
and look at me. I learned how to make _you_ dream about me and come and
tell me the dream the next morning," (when he said that, I jumped, for I
remembered having done exactly that thing!). "I learned how to bring out
a bruise on Wolansky's face although he lived on the other side of town;
so that he went around asking people how he could have bumped his
forehead without knowing it. And at last I went to bed one night, set my
mind on Wolansky, and said over and over to myself a thousand times:
Die, you dog! You've _got_ to die! I _order_ you to die!

"I said it over till I fell into a sort of trance. It wasn't sleep,