I had shrunk back and now stood a little to one side of the doorway and in shadow.  If Moxon had looked farther than the face of his opponent he could have observed nothing now, except that the door was open.  Something forbade me either to enter or to retire, a feeling—­ I know not how it came—­that I was in the presence of an imminent tragedy and might serve my friend by remaining.  With a scarcely conscious rebellion against the indelicacy of the act I remained.

The play was rapid.  Moxon hardly glanced at the board before making his moves, and to my unskilled eye seemed to move the piece most convenient to his hand, his motions in doing so being quick, nervous and lacking in precision.  The response of his antagonist, while equally prompt in the inception, was made with a slow, uniform, mechanical and, I thought, somewhat theatrical movement of the arm, that was a sore trial to my patience.  There was something unearthly about it all, and I caught myself shuddering.  But I was wet and cold.

Two or three times after moving a piece the stranger slightly inclined his head, and each time I observed that Moxon shifted his king.  All at once the thought came to me that the man was dumb.  And then that he was a machine—­an automaton chess-player!  Then I remembered that Moxon had once spoken to me of having invented such a piece of mechanism, though I did not understand that it had actually been constructed.  Was all his talk about the consciousness and intelligence of machines merely a prelude to eventual exhibition of this device—­only a trick to intensify the effect of its mechanical action upon me in my ignorance of its secret?

A fine end, this, of all my intellectual transports—­my “endless variety and excitement of philosophic thought!” I was about to retire in disgust when something occurred to hold my curiosity.  I observed a shrug of the thing’s great shoulders, as if it were irritated:  and so natural was this—­so entirely human—­that in my new view of the matter it startled me.  Nor was that all, for a moment later it struck the table sharply with its clenched hand.  At that gesture Moxon seemed even more startled than I:  he pushed his chair a little backward, as in alarm.

Presently Moxon, whose play it was, raised his hand high above the board, pounced upon one of his pieces like a sparrow-hawk and with the exclamation “checkmate!” rose quickly to his feet and stepped behind his chair.  The automaton sat motionless.

The wind had now gone down, but I heard, at lessening intervals and progressively louder, the rumble and roll of thunder.  In the pauses between I now became conscious of a low humming or buzzing which, like the thunder, grew momentarily louder and more distinct.  It seemed to come from the body of the automaton, and was unmistakably a whirring of wheels.  It gave me the impression of a disordered mechanism which had escaped the repressive and regulating