nst
his, prove that I could exclude, when I wished, the haunting thoughts to
which my mind had been a prey.

"The Sheik, then," said I, after a block or two. "It was he who ushered
me into this affair. It shall be he who may say an end to it."

In the light of what followed, this sentence, murmured half aloud as I
walked, has many times caused me to wonder at the prophetic voice with
which we sometimes carelessly address ourselves.

I found the museum, except for the red-nosed attendant and the pale pink
girl in the ticket window, deserted. The accursed automaton, I feared,
would be closed for business, and therefore it was with satisfaction
that I noticed that the coin slot was open, and that, having dropped in
my tribute to genius, chess, and machinery, I heard the squeak of the
moving mechanism and the brown, jointed fingers of the figure scraping
across the board.

I cannot believe that the Sheik was playing his best game. At the end of
a half-hour, when the machinery stopped to notify me that another coin
was due, I had a decided advantage in position. Before another fifteen
minutes, during which we both played rapidly, had gone, the issue was no
longer in doubt and I stopped.

"Ha!" said I, aloud. "You will not wink at me this time. Is there any
other game you can play better than you play this?"

The automaton was silent.

I cannot say what impelled me to suggest it, but I drew a piece of paper
and a pencil out of my pocket and said, "Can you write?"

The door in the chest of the Sheik flew open then for a moment as if to
expose his heart to me. Though I had put no coin into the machine, I saw
the levers and gears start to move again, the door of that pulmonary
cavity was closed and the brown fingers jerked their way forward.

"Not only can write, but is anxious to do so," I remarked, as I extended
the pencil and laid the paper on the chessboard.

For a second or two I waited, as the hand of the mechanical creature
wrote a few words: I remember that during those seconds I heard a clock
somewhere striking six. I did not make any attempt to see beforehand
what he had chosen to inscribe, for I assumed that it would be some
empty answer to my bantering remarks. At last the pencil dropped upon
the board and rolled under one of the cross-legged creature's red
Turkish slippers, the whirr of the mechanism stopped abruptly, and I
picked up the writing.

Having read the scrawl once I believed myself out of my