ce were before me and already questioning the assailant, Mrs.
Farrel, a fiery tempered young Irish-woman. When I entered the room
she was repeating half-hysterically her explanation that Drayle had
killed her husband in the laboratory that morning.

"'Right before my eyes, I seen it,' she shouted. 'Harry was standing
on a sort of platform looking at a big machine like, and so help me he
didn't have a stitch of clothes on, and I started to say something,
but all at once there came a terrible sort of screech and a flash like
lightnin' kinda, in front of him. Then Harry turns into a sort of
thick smoke and I can see right through him like he was a ghost; and
then the smoke gets sucked into a big hole in the machine and I know
Harry's dead. And here's this man what done it, just a standin' there,
grinnin' horrid. So something comes over me all at once and I points
Harry's gun at him and pulls the trigger!'

"Even before the woman had finished I recalled what I seen one
afternoon in Drayle's laboratory many months before. I had been there
for some time watching him when he placed a small tumbler on a work
table and asked me if I had ever seen glass shattered by the
vibrations of a violin. I told him that I had, but he went through the
demonstration as if to satisfy himself. Of course when he drew a bow
across the instrument's strings and produced the proper pitch the
goblet cracked into pieces exactly as might have been expected. And I
wondered why Drayle concerned himself with so childish an experiment
before I noticed that he appeared to have forgotten me completely.

* * * * *

"I endeavored then not to disturb him, and I remember trying to draw
myself out of his way and feeling that something momentous was about
to take place. Yet actually I believe it would have required a
considerable commotion to have distracted his attention, for his
ability to concentrate was one of the characteristics of his genius.

"I saw him place another glass on the table and I noticed then that
it stood directly in front of a complicated mechanism. At first this
gave out a low humming sound, but it soon rose to an unearthly whining
shriek. I shrank from it involuntarily and a second later I was amazed
at the sight of the glass, seemingly reduced to a thin vapor, being
drawn into a funnel-like opening near the top of the device. I was too
startled to speak and could only watch as Drayle started the
contrivan