bout it, the clock upon the landing discovered the moment
was ripe for striking ONE. So!--Ping! And I was as grave and sober as
a judge, with all my champagne and whisky gone into the vast serene.
Feeling queer, you know--confoundedly QUEER! Queer! Good Lord!"

He regarded his cigar-ash for a moment. "That's all that happened," he
said.

"And then you went to bed?" asked Evans.

"What else was there to do?"

I looked Wish in the eye. We wanted to scoff, and there was something,
something perhaps in Clayton's voice and manner, that hampered our
desire.

"And about these passes?" said Sanderson.

"I believe I could do them now."

"Oh!" said Sanderson, and produced a penknife and set himself to grub
the dottel out of the bowl of his clay.

"Why don't you do them now?" said Sanderson, shutting his pen-knife with
a click.

"That's what I'm going to do," said Clayton.

"They won't work," said Evans.

"If they do--" I suggested.

"You know, I'd rather you didn't," said Wish, stretching out his legs.

"Why?" asked Evans.

"I'd rather he didn't," said Wish.

"But he hasn't got 'em right," said Sanderson, plugging too much tobacco
in his pipe.

"All the same, I'd rather he didn't," said Wish.

We argued with Wish. He said that for Clayton to go through those
gestures was like mocking a serious matter. "But you don't believe--?"
I said. Wish glanced at Clayton, who was staring into the fire, weighing
something in his mind. "I do--more than half, anyhow, I do," said Wish.

"Clayton," said I, "you're too good a liar for us. Most of it was all
right. But that disappearance... happened to be convincing. Tell us,
it's a tale of cock and bull."

He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and
faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for
all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an
intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his
eyes and so began....

Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings,
which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the
mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this
lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions
with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he
said, when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together,
Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one litt