Pentecost was an instantaneous observer, requiring no time exposure, so that there had hardly been a pause when he turned to speak to Haworth. But Haworth wasn’t there. He had followed into the room after Pentecost, but had slipped to one side and was now wandering back and forth along the wall toward the further end. He appeared to have forgotten the other’s presence, and his eyes shifted about, giving him the look of one tortured by some harrowing thought or memory. In a few moments his restless glance accidentally fell on Pentecost and he came to a sudden stop and stood staring at him.

“Oh—you!” he muttered, half to himself.

“Quite right,” said Pentecost.

“Well, what is it?” the young man asked, moving toward him.

“Perhaps I ought not to have intruded like this.”

“As you have,” came back the hollow voice out of the gloom, “why don’t you tell me what you want?”

“It’s a matter of some importance to us and I thought it might be to you. I represent a firm——Great God! what’s the matter?”

For as Haworth approached him out of the shadows at the far end of the room and the light from the front window fell on his face, Pentecost saw it distinctly for the first time, and the eyes that looked out at him from the drawn and almost distorted features might have been those of a drowning man.

“Matter?” the young man repeated.

“Why—yes. Are you—are you feeling all right Mr. Haworth?”

“You said you came about something important.”

“Yes—I did—but perhaps you——”

“If it’s money I owe you take anything you want and go away—that’s all—go away!” Saying which, Haworth turned and started walking restlessly about the room as he was doing before.

“Not at all—not at all! There’s nothing like that! It’s just the other way—I’m going to put a few dollars in your pocket if you’ve got anything I can use.”

Haworth, halfway down the room, swung round with a look of such fearful and desperate avidity that Pentecost saw at once it was a case of money. The young fellow was in some dire extremity—some feverish need that mere destitution, even to the point of starvation, wouldn’t explain. Couldn’t be a more favorable situation for business. Easy to drive him to the wall and get one of his inventions for a block of stock—in other words, for nothing.

“I represent a firm of promoters—New York—Harker & Pentecost.” He took a card from his pocketbook. “We’re always looking for novelty—something different from anything that’s been on the market before.”

Mr. Pentecost paused, but the young man said nothing, and he went on: “It came to us a short time ago that you had some extraordinary inventions here and if——”

“There’s nothing you’d want,” Haworth interrupted.

“But perhaps—if you’d allow me to see what——”

“There’s no use in that! They come—hundreds of them—just want me to let them see. Then they’re sorry, but there’s nothing of practical use. That’s it—always nothing practical—always—always!” He moved away.

“It’s nothing to me whether the thing’s practical or not!”

Haworth stopped and stood looking at him.

“I’m not looking for carpet sweepers,” Pentecost went on, “or fireless cookers or any of those things that people are tired of reading advertisements about. The thing I’m after is novelty—something absolutely new and unheard of—something impressive in its operation so we can exploit it and give it a chance. Now it struck me from what I heard, that your work would perhaps be just the kind——”

He was halted in the midst of his talk by the way Haworth was staring at him. It wouldn’t have surprised him to get an indication on the fellow’s face that he’d just thought of one of his devices that would be what was wanted. But that wasn’t it. For soon he saw that the young inventor was studying him—figuring out what sort of a character he really was. Those strange and troubled eyes were fixed on him with an intense scrutiny that penetrated below the surface.

To divert this rather too close attention to himself, Pentecost spoke with more emphasis than before.

“I see you’ve thought of something, Mr. Haworth.”

There was no verbal response to this, but a barely perceptible motion of his head while still gazing intently at Pentecost, might be taken to mean that he had.

“Anything near what we’re looking for, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope it’s something unusual,” Pentecost said, cheerfully; “some novelty that’ll make ’em talk.”

“It will do that.”

“What made you say just now that you hadn’t anything I’d want?”

“This is something else.”

Pentecost was inclined to think the fellow had illusions. Anyone could see there was something wrong with him.

“Well, bring it along,” he suggested. “Let’s have a look at it.”

The answer was a slight negative head-shake.

“Too heavy?”

“It’s built in.”

“Where?”

“Under here—in the basement.”

“I see. Something to operate in a home. What does it do?”

“I want you to come down.”

“Certainly, Mr. Haworth. Lead the way.”

Notwithstanding that Pentecost felt convinced that the young man had signals set for some sort of brain storm and that he himself knew a thing or two about basements in relation to crime, the notion of not going down there when the distracted inventor suggested the idea, didn’t come within miles of occurring to him. He had a hunch there was something here for him—something extraordinary, too—and he was going after it.

Haworth moved nearer. “Mr.——What did you say your——”

“Pentecost.”

“Mr. Pentecost, I’ve decided to tell you everything.”

“The best thing you could do Mr. Haworth.”

“I find you’re the person I’ve been looking for.”

“You’re very kind to say so. Shall we go down and have a look at it?”

From Haworth’s last remark, Pentecost feared that after all he was hopeless.

“I’ll get the key.”

“Secret, eh?”

“Yes.”

“No patent?”

Haworth shook his head.

“What about the people you’ve shown it to?”

“There are none.”

“And you haven’t told anybody?”

“No.”

That sounded better. The chap had some sort of sense, anyway. But not the sense to patent it. That was too bad.

“The key’s upstairs.” And he started toward the entrance hall.

“Could we switch on a light here, Mr. Haworth? It’s a trifle overcast.”

“I’ll tell Mrs. Temple to light a lamp,” the young man answered from the door, and he hurried out.

So they’d cut off his current, Pentecost reflected—for he’d noticed electric fixtures about. Although hardly late enough for twilight, there was much the same thing in this vast and gloomy room with its dark walls and tree-shaded and vine-overgrown windows. Pentecost wanted to see what—if anything—was going on here. Something made him feel that whatever it was might be turned to his advantage.

Soon after Haworth left the room, Pentecost saw in the dimness the frail figure of a woman coming toward the table from the further end. Mrs. Temple, probably—the one he’d spoken of. He saw from her unsteady gait and bent figure that she was old and somewhat decrepit, and the momentary clicking of the lamp chimney against the glass shade as she took it off told of her trembling hands.

The old woman had reached home with her modest packages of food only a few moments before, and was greatly relieved as she passed down the flagged footpath to the kitchen, to catch a glimpse of Mr. Haworth through a side window of the living room; for it was evidence that he had recovered sufficiently to come downstairs. An instant later she saw that he wasn’t alone. A strange man—at least a stranger to her—was standing near the table and appeared to be watching the young fellow intently as he moved about. Then it came to her that he must be the doctor. Who else could it be? He certainly had the look of one with his close trimmed beard—and watching Mr. Haworth like that.

After getting the lamp shade and chimney off, Mrs. Temple groped about and found a match somewhere; but instead of striking it she straightened up—so far as she could—and after a glance at the door spoke in a low voice.

“You’re the doctor, ain’t ye?”

“No, madam,” Pentecost answered.

Mrs. Temple stared blankly at him, seeming for some reason to be astonished. “You ain’t?” she finally said.

“Certainly not. Are you feeling ill, madam?”

“Me?” looking at him in a surprised sort of way. “No!”

After an instant she again bent over the lamp and lighted it, regulating the flame by the little brass disk at the side. Pentecost saw her thin, withered old hands trembling under the light.

“Perhaps it’s Mr. Haworth who isn’t well?” he ventured.

The old woman looked at him. “You ain’t blind, be ye?” she asked.

“Not exactly, madam,” with a trace of a smile. “I saw he wasn’t looking quite right——”

“It’s a great sight more’n not lookin’ right!” Then she turned to him suddenly. “What’re you doin’ here?” she demanded sharply, yet keeping her voice subdued.

“I came on business.”

“Well ef it’s money you’re after you can talk to me. He ain’t in no condition to be pestered; you ain’t got much jedgment about ye ef ye can’t see that.”

“But my dear madam, I assure you——”

“Sh!” She was fussing with the lamp as Haworth came in.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, seeing her bending over it. “Won’t it work?”

“Yes,” she said, stooping and looking under the shade.

“I guess it’s liable to go now.”

“I want to take it downstairs, Mrs. Temple——This way, Mr. Pentecost.” The latter followed him across the great bare hall, to a door under the branching stairway on the left, and through this to a back hall at the further end of which the basement stairway descended.

Mrs. Temple stood motionless at the table where they’d left her. Strange as it may seem when you realize the briefness of the time, this decrepit old woman, bent and knotted with rheumatism, her hands tremulous with the palsy of age, had conceived a deep and implacable distrust of the man she had just heard addressed as Mr. Pentecost. She didn’t reason about it or ask herself why—that wasn’t her method. She simply accepted it and was determined to do what she could.

Ever since Haworth had built the small room in the basement some weeks before, he’d been working feverishly day and night on what she supposed to be one of his inventions, seeming so desperately bent on completing the thing, and for the last day or two plunged in such dreadful despair, that the poor woman was beside herself with anxiety. She’d often seen him through times of such absorption in his work that he would have starved if she hadn’t kept after him with food, but there’d never been anything so terrible as this and she couldn’t find out what was the matter.

And now had come this sinister-looking creature (though to save her life she couldn’t have said what was sinister about him) enveloped, it seemed to her, in an atmosphere of cunning and intrigue so dense that she could feel it, and Mr. Haworth had taken him down into the basement—most likely to that secret room he’d been working in so desperately—where the fellow was undoubtedly arranging some infamous plan or deviltry involving him.

Haworth, as soon as the door of the roughly planked room was closed on them, had stripped away the sheet that covered his mechanism from view and had begun to describe to Pentecost what it was intended to do. He was in the midst of this when Pentecost suddenly stopped him with a quick motion of his hand.

The lamp with its green shade stood on the top board of a stepladder, throwing a weird light on the two men facing each other in silence.

Haworth, recovering from his surprise (for he hadn’t heard anything) started to speak, but Pentecost shook his head emphatically, and after a moment’s pause whispered: “I hear someone!”

There was another pause. “You think somebody’s listening?” Haworth asked in a subdued voice.

“What I think cuts no figure. This is where we take no chances!” And Pentecost suddenly threw open the door.

The light struck on old Mrs. Temple as she was going in through the door of Haworth’s workshop nearly opposite. She’d caught a word or two about some one listening and noted the sudden lowering of their voices just in time to turn back and get into the shop.

“Oh, Mrs. Temple!” Pentecost called in the most ordinary tone. “I’m on the hunt for a drink of water. Maybe you’d get me some, if it isn’t too much trouble?”

The old woman reappeared at the door with a bunch of chips and shavings in her hands. “It ain’t no trouble,” she mumbled without the faintest trace of embarrassment, and limped along to the stairway. Pentecost watched her labor up the stairs, then turned to Haworth standing in the door of the planked-up room.

“That old dame of yours is right on the mark,” he said in an undertone. “Came out of there with a bunch of shavings.”

“Yes—my shop. She gets them for the stove.”

“So I inferred,” said Pentecost. His admiration was because she’d managed it so deftly and said nothing about it. An amateur would have mentioned the stove. Just as well to keep an eye on that old lady.

She soon came back with the water. Pentecost took it from her. “Awful sorry to trouble you,” he said, “—and all those stairs to climb.” He took a sip of water. “You won’t need anything more down here perhaps?”

“Anything more?” she repeated in a puzzled way.

“Kindlings, for instance?”

“Not if the fire goes, I won’t.”

“I’m trusting, then, that it’ll do that.”

They stood looking at each other for an instant. Then the old woman turned and went hobbling off into the shadows of the basement and could be dimly seen toiling up the stairs.

A moment before she disappeared Pentecost said to Haworth, speaking distinctly but not raising his voice, “It’s a remarkable invention, Mr. Haworth—one that, handled properly, would make money; and I’d like to talk business with you.” Then, setting down the glass of water, he asked if he could have something out of his workshop.

“Of course,” Haworth said, hardly understanding. “What is it?”

“A piece of board five or six feet long—a light one about the size of a lath.”

They found a piece of narrow half-inch stuff, and Pentecost stood it against the wall, slanting across the path of anyone walking through the passageway in the darkness. He balanced it so that a touch would send it clattering down.

“Mrs. Temple wouldn’t listen, if that’s what you think,” Haworth said as they went back to the room.

“Of course not,” agreed Pentecost as he carefully closed the door. “Go ahead with it,” he whispered, “but keep the soft pedal on. Basement’s safe enough, but there’s a room above.”

“Yes, but Mrs. Temple would never——”

“I know—I know. She’s all right. Hell of a pity you don’t know what talent you’ve got in the house! Go on now. What the devil is all this?”

And thereafter had anyone been at the rear end of the room on the left (which was the one above) or even in the basement itself, only the faint droning tones of conversation could have been heard, with occasional clanking and grinding sounds suggesting the revolution of geared wheels. No words could have been distinguished and the fact that toward the end of the interview, after Pentecost’s voice had been going on in a subdued but earnest murmur for quite a time, it was suddenly stopped, as though something had shut him off in the midst of a sentence, and that then, for several minutes following, there was absolute silence, could only have mystified without in the least enlightening anyone in a position to overhear.

In reality there was no mystery whatever, and the whole discussion between the two in that basement room was simple and straightforward. It was only that while Mr. Pentecost was in the very act of telling Mr. Haworth that there were various reasons why it was impossible for his firm to take on this remarkable idea of his for exploitation, there suddenly came to him—flashing through his mind in the characteristic way he hit on such things—a most ingenious scheme or operation that could be worked in connection with this device of Haworth’s—and in fact with nothing else; a scheme that appealed to him by reason of its extraordinary possibilities for shrewd maneuvering and complicated trickery and strategy, and because it was dangerous, cold-blooded, and terrible.

It came crashing in on him in the very midst of his declining to have anything to do with the Haworth invention—even while he was advising Haworth himself to let it alone—and naturally brought him to a stop that was near to being a jolt. The rest of his sentence remained unspoken. He sat motionless, his mind flooded with his new idea, a blank to everything else. And when Haworth, who had taken his refusal as final, at last muttered something about going upstairs, he rose from the wooden box on which he was sitting and followed.

Haworth, in the room above, set the lamp down and stood staring into vacancy.

Pentecost hunched himself up in a chair where he sat with his dark half-closed eyes fastened on the young inventor. He was figuring on what the chap would be likely to do under certain circumstances—the most effective method of taking care of him should he prove an obstacle—the safeguards he could use.

He was as certain that he’d purchase the rights for handling and exploiting the Haworth machine—but doing so in his own way—as he was that he saw the young fellow there before him. It was a chance he’d been looking for ever since he left Chicago. He’d pay anything necessary. But of course he knew how to manage so that the said “necessary” would be an insignificant figure.

Haworth began to walk up and down the room. Pentecost watched him for a while.

“What seems to be the matter?” he finally asked.

The young man stopped in his tracks and looked at him.

“I thought you said you wouldn’t take it.”

“I’m not the only man on earth.”

“It’s the time—the time!”

Pentecost regarded him from under his drooping eyelids.

“You’re looking for a bunch of money?” he asked.

“Yes—oh yes!” And Haworth turned and began to move about.

“Look here,” Pentecost called out to him after a while. “Just to satisfy my curiosity, put an index to it!”

“Index?” Haworth stopped and faced him.

“What amount?”

“I don’t know. A lot—thousands—I must have thousands.”

“How many?”

“All I can get—twenty. No, wait! More! Thirty—forty——”

“The fool that would give you that isn’t born yet.”

“How do you know? Wait! I’ve thought of something! I’ll go to the moving-picture men. They’ll take an interest—they’re bound to—the pictures are part of it—and they pay great prices—they pay thousands!”

Moving-picture men! And the distracted young fellow was capable of doing it. Might get something out of them, too, if he happened to strike a crooked concern.

“I don’t suppose you could wait a few days,” Pentecost mumbled in an uninterested sort of way. “There’s a bare chance I’ve thought of—though I doubt if it’s as good as the pictures at that.” (Of course he couldn’t appear to block the picture game. The price would go up on him—or would if the chap knew anything.)

“For yourself?” Haworth asked, eagerly; for he’d got it firmly fixed in his mind that this man was the one choice on earth for the carrying out of his idea.

Pentecost shook his head. “No,” he said, “but I’ve got a partner. I’ve known him to take a fling at something on his own account—if he took a fancy to it.”

“Where is he?”

“Pittsburgh—on business. He might be able to get here by Friday.”

“Five days!”

“Good man for you, too. Just his line. Done this sort of thing before.”

“But you don’t know he’d take it! I can’t wait five days and then have him say no! I’ll try the pictures. There was a man here last week—wanted to take me working at the lathe—said he’d read about me in a paper. I know where he is. I’ll find him to-night!”

There could be no doubt that the fellow would do as he said. He hadn’t the faintest idea in his system of what a “bluff” was. And the fear of losing this rare chance for ingenious chicanery drove Pentecost into the execution of what is popularly referred to as a “climb down.” Although able to camouflage this performance so that it did not appear in that unpleasant light, he had, before leaving the old Cripps mansion that evening, virtually guaranteed that his firm would take over the entire exploiting rights in the Haworth mechanism, and had agreed to pay for the same in cash, upon the signing of the contract, an amount which should be “satisfactory” to the young inventor. As to this payment he asked for a delay of fourteen days so that he could sound the market, the idea of the thing being so utterly unique that it was impossible at this time to estimate the exact figure they could pay. And as he needed every moment of the fourteen days option—as you might call it, and this being Sunday and so late anyway that nothing could be accomplished, he asked that the time allowed begin on the following day—Monday—at noon, bringing its expiration on Monday the 30th of August at the same hour.

With talk like this—which, as you see, bound him to nothing—in combination with the young man’s earnest desire that he should be the one to undertake the exploitation, Haworth was persuaded into this fourteen days delay, being made confident of receiving a large amount of money at the end of that time. Pentecost said he would bring Harker there to draw up the contract, on his return from Pittsburgh, and then this promoter of hazardous and extraordinary villainies rose to take his leave, slipping a bunch of bills on the table as he did so, with the explanation that what he’d got—though not in legal form—was really a fourteen-day option, and as option money he was leaving a couple of hundred. There was nothing of kindliness or rescue work involved in this; Pentecost had sized up Haworth well enough to know that acceptance of money would make him feel in honor bound to wait the fourteen days—bound firmer, indeed, than if he’d signed documents. A wary move, certain to prevent the young fellow, in a possible fit of desperation, from taking his astonishing idea to a motion picture concern.

The delay he’d asked for was absolutely necessary to Pentecost for the carrying through of the complicated campaign mapped out in his mind. Advance planting of a most unusual character and covering a great extent of territory was required. In addition there was the matter of Haworth himself—the chances—the safeguards—for he was a risk beyond computation. He had insisted on the payment being made to him in cash at the expiration of the fourteen days—if the firm decided to purchase the rights. It looked like a big bunch of money dropped in his lap and no anchor to it—an impossible situation. Of course the fellow would have to be taken care of. The way to do it was the problem. But Pentecost very well knew he’d have a solution—and an adroit one—before morning.

He boarded the midnight train for New York fifteen minutes before leaving time, and at once went to work on his intricate scheme.