he laboratory he confronted a
strange spectacle. The room was like a garden in the region where
might be burning flowers. Flames of violet, crimson, green, blue,
orange, and purple were blooming everywhere. There was one blaze that
was precisely the hue of a delicate coral. In another place was a mass
that lay merely in phosphorescent inaction like a pile of emeralds.
But all these marvels were to be seen dimly through clouds of heaving,
turning, deadly smoke.

Johnson halted for a moment on the threshold. He cried out again in
the negro wail that had in it the sadness of the swamps. Then he
rushed across the room. An orange-colored flame leaped like a panther
at the lavender trousers. This animal bit deeply into Johnson. There
was an explosion at one side, and suddenly before him there reared a
delicate, trembling sapphire shape like a fairy lady. With a quiet
smile she blocked his path and doomed him and Jimmie. Johnson
shrieked, and then ducked in the manner of his race in fights. He
aimed to pass under the left guard of the sapphire lady. But she was
swifter than eagles, and her talons caught in him as he plunged past
her. Bowing his head as if his neck had been struck, Johnson lurched
forward, twisting this way and that way. He fell on his back. The
still form in the blanket flung from his arms, rolled to the edge of
the floor and beneath the window.

Johnson had fallen with his head at the base of an old-fashioned desk.
There was a row of jars upon the top of this desk. For the most part,
they were silent amid this rioting, but there was one which seemed to
hold a scintillant and writhing serpent.

Suddenly the glass splintered, and a ruby-red snakelike thing poured
its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled and
hesitated, and then began to swim a languorous way down the mahogany
slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over
the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with a
mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down
into Johnson's upturned face.

Afterwards the trail of this creature seemed to reek, and amid flames
and low explosions drops like red-hot jewels pattered softly down it
at leisurely intervals.

[Illustration: "In the Laboratory"]

VIII

Suddenly all roads led to Dr. Trescott's. The whole town flowed
towards one point. Chippeway Hose Company Number One toiled
desperately up Bridge Street Hill even as the