“Not a bit of it!  Depend upon it, the beast is bewitched.  Even to my eye it looks as though it were, and to a trained eye like yours, Pugh!  You’ve been looking for the devil a long time, and you’ve got him at last.”

“I—­I wish you wouldn’t make those remarks, Tress.  They jar on me.”

“I confess,” interpolated Brasher—­I noticed that he had put the pipe down on the table as though he were tired of holding it—­“that, to my thinking, such remarks are not appropriate.  At the same time what you have told us is, I am bound to allow, a little curious.  But of course what I require is ocular demonstration.  I haven’t seen the movement myself.”

“No, but you very soon will do if you care to have a pull at the pipe on your own account.  Do, Brasher, to oblige me!  There’s a dear!”

“It appears, then, that the movement is only observable when the pipe is smoked.  We have at least arrived at step No. 1.”

“Here’s a match, Brasher!  Light up, and we shall have arrived at step No. 2.”

Tress lit a match and held it out to Brasher.  Brasher retreated from its neighborhood.

“Thank you, Mr. Tress, I am no smoker, as you are aware.  And I have no desire to acquire the art of smoking by means of a poisoned pipe.”

Tress laughed.  He blew out the match and threw it into the grate.

“Then I tell you what I’ll do—­I’ll have up Bob.”

“Bob—­why Bob?”

“Bob”—­whose real name was Robert Haines, though I should think he must have forgotten the fact, so seldom was he addressed by it—­was Tress’s servant.  He had been an old soldier, and had accompanied his master when he left the service.  He was as depraved a character as Tress himself.  I am not sure even that he was not worse than his master.  I shall never forget how he once behaved toward myself.  He actually had the assurance to accuse me of attempting to steal the Wardour Street relic which Tress fondly deludes himself was once the property of Sir Walter Raleigh.  The truth is that I had slipped it with my handkerchief into my pocket in a fit of absence of mind.  A man who could accuse me of such a thing would be guilty of anything.  I was therefore quite at one with Brasher when he asked what Bob could possibly be wanted for.  Tress explained.

“I’ll get him to smoke the pipe,” he said.

Brasher and I exchanged glances, but we refrained from speech.

“It won’t do him any harm,” said Tress.

“What—­not a poisoned pipe?” asked Brasher.

“It’s not poisoned—­it’s only drugged.”

“Only drugged!”

“Nothing hurts Bob.  He is like an ostrich.  He has digestive organs which are peculiarly his own.  It will only serve him as it served me—­and Pugh—­it will knock him over.  It is all done in the Pursuit of Truth and for the Advancement of Inquiry.”

I could see that Brasher did not altogether like the tone in which Tress repeated his words.  As for me, it was not to be supposed that I should put myself out in a matter which in no way concerned me.  If Tress chose to poison the man, it was his affair, not mine.  He went to the door and shouted: