“And that was all,” Mr. Newman went on.  “At the sting of the lash, as though some one had turned a switch, the daylight went out—­to the sound of that gross animal laugh.  There was again the frozen dark, the solitude—­the chill—­and I heard you saying, as from another planet, across great gulfs of space:  ‘Drink some of this!’ Only—­”

“Yes?”

“It’s like a memory of something that actually took place.  I ought to have a weal just below my eyes where the whip took me-it wasn’t five minutes ago.  I remember the dusty smell of that white road-and how the thing that hung on the signpost was-some-how-ugly and nasty.  It’s awfully queer, Carrick.”

“Yes!” Carrick sank his hands in his pockets and walked away to the shadowy far end of the room.  Mr. Newman sat in thought, flavoring the vivid quality of his vision, with his underlip caught up between his teeth.  The great room was silent for a space of minutes.

“I say!” Carrick spoke from the other end of it.

“What?”

“That signpost you saw-it wasn’t a signpost, you know.”

“What was it, then?”

“It was a gallows,” said Carrick, “with a man hanging on it.”

There was a pause.  “Eh?” said Mr. Newman, and rose from his chair.  “Carrick, what exactly did you do to me?”

“I sent you back a hundred years,” Carrick answered, in a measured voice.  His excitement got the better of his restraint and his voice cracked.  “Part of the-what was it you said you were, Newman?” he cried, on a note of shrillness.  “I tell you, man, you’ve proved a hundred things you never dreamed of-theories of mine.  You’ve proved them, I tell you.  I’ve dipped you back into the past as I dip my hands into water.  What you saw was what happened; it was you-you, man, a hundred years ago.  Oh, why did I stop at a hundred?  A thousand, a dozen thousand years would have been as easy.”

He came down the long room almost at a run.

“Newman,” he said, taking the elder man by the arm with a swift, feverish hand; “we’ve got ’em, all those old diploma-screened fools that call us quacks-Zinzau, Berlier, von Rascowicz, Scott-Evans-we’ve got ’em.  We’ll make ’em squeal.  Before I’ve done with you, we’ll see what the earth was like when it was in the pot, being cooked.  You shall be a batwinged lizard again, and a cave-dweller, and a flint man.  We’ll turn you loose through history-our special correspondent at the siege of Troy-what?”

He broke into high, uncontrollable laughter.

“The Wandering Jew,” he babbled.  “We’ll show him!”

Mr. Newman heard him with growing wonder, but now he shook his arm loose.

“Get yourself a drink,” he said.  “You’re raving.  I want to talk to you.”