of
evolution. I help it along, that's all."

He took the little slab of gold from me, brooding.

Abruptly he hurled it at the wall. "Gold!" he cried wildly. "But who
wants it? I need _help_, Virgie! If gold will buy it from you, I'll
pay! But I'm desperate. You'd be desperate too, with nothing ahead but
a sordid, demeaning death from young age and a--"

I interrupted him. "What's that?"

It was a nearby raucous hooting, loud and mournful.

Greco stopped in mid-sentence, listening like a hunted creature. "My
room," he whispered. "All my equipment--on the floor above--"

I stepped back, a little worried. He was a strange man, skinny and
tall and wild-eyed. I was glad he was so thin; if he'd been built
solidly in proportion to his height, just then he would have worried
me, with those staring, frightened eyes and that crazy way of talking.
But I didn't have time to worry, in any case. Footsteps were
thundering in the halls. Distant voices shouted to each other.

The hoot came again.

"The fire whistle!" Greco bayed. "The hotel's on fire!"

He leaped out of my room into the corridor.

I followed. There was a smell of burning--not autumn leaves or paper;
it was a chemical-burning smell, a leather-burning smell, a
henyard-on-fire smell. It reeked of an assortment of things, gunpowder
and charred feathers, the choking soot of burning oil, the crisp tang
of a wood fire. It was, I thought for a second, perhaps the typical
smell of a hotel on fire, but in that I was wrong.

"Demons!" yelled Greco, and a bellhop, hurrying by, paused to look at
us queerly. Greco sped for the stairs and up them.

I followed.

It was Greco's room that was ablaze--he made that clear, trying to get
into it. But he couldn't. Black smoke billowed out of it, and orange
flame. The night manager's water bucket was going to make no headway
against _that_.

I retreated. But Greco plunged ahead, his face white and scary.

I stopped at the head of the stairs. The flames drove Greco off, but
he tried again. They drove him off again, and this time for good.

He stumbled toward me. "Out! It's hopeless!" He turned, stared blindly
at the hotel employees with their chain of buckets. "You! What do you
think you're doing? That's--" He stopped, wetting his lips. "That's a
gasoline fire," he lied, "and there's dynamite in my luggage. Clear
the hotel, you hear me?"

It was, as I say, a lie. But it got the hotel cleared out.

And then--

It might a