第14章 WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG(3)

that is, unnecessarily.I realized that you was in danger.Ithought I'd warn you.Honest, that's the game.Of course, if you wanted to give me anything for my trouble, I'd take it.

That was in my mind, too.But I don't care whether you give me anything or not.I've warned you any way, and done my duty."Mr.Ward meditated and drummed on the surface of his desk.Dave noticed they were large, powerful hands, withal well-cared for despite their dark sunburn.Also, he noted what had already caught his eye before--a tiny strip of flesh-colored courtplaster on the forehead over one eve.And still the thought that forced itself into his mind was unbelievable.

Mr.Ward took a wallet from his inside coat pocket, drew out a greenback, and passed it to Dave, who noted as he pocketed it that it was for twenty dollars.

"Thank you," said Mr.Ward, indicating that the interview was at an end.

"I shall have the matter investigated.A wild man running loose IS dangerous."But so quiet a man was Mr.Ward, that Dave's courage returned.

Besides, a new theory had suggested itself.The wild man was evidently Mr.Ward's brother, a lunatic privately confined.

Dave had heard of such things.Perhaps Mr.Ward wanted it kept quiet.That was why he had given him the twenty dollars.

"Say," Dave began, "now I come to think of it that wild man looked a lot like you--"That was as far as Dave got, for at that moment he witnessed a transformation and found himself gazing into the same unspeakably ferocious blue eyes of the night before, at the same clutching talon-like hands, and at the same formidable bulk in the act of springing upon him.But this time Dave had no night-stick to throw, and he was caught by the biceps of both arms in a grip so terrific that it made him groan with pain.He saw the large white teeth exposed, for all the world as a dog's about to bite.Mr.Ward's beard brushed his face as the teeth went in for the grip on his throat.But the bite was not given.Instead, Dave felt the other's body stiffen as with an iron restraint, and then he was flung aside, without effort but with such force that only the wall stopped his momentum and dropped him gasping to the floor.

"What do you mean by coming here and trying to blackmail me?"Mr.Ward was snarling at him."Here, give me back that money."Dave passed the bill back without a word.

"I thought you came here with good intentions.I know you now.

Let me see and hear no more of you, or I'll put you in prison where you belong.Do you understand?""Yes, sir," Dave gasped.

"Then go."

And Dave went, without further word, both his biceps aching intolerably from the bruise of that tremendous grip.As his hand rested on the door knob, he was stopped.

"You were lucky," Mr.Ward was saying, and Dave noted that his face and eyes were cruel and gloating and proud.

"You were lucky.Had I wanted, I could have torn your muscles out of your arms and thrown them in the waste basket there.""Yes, sir," said Dave; and absolute conviction vibrated in his voice.

He opened the door and passed out.The secretary looked at him interrogatively.

"Gosh!" was all Dave vouchsafed, and with this utterance passed out of the offices and the story.

III

James G.Ward was forty years of age, a successful business man, and very unhappy.For forty years he had vainly tried to solve a problem that was really himself and that with increasing years became more and more a woeful affliction.In himself he was two men, and, chronologically speaking, these men were several thousand years or so apart.He had studied the question of dual personality probably more profoundly than any half dozen of the leading specialists in that intricate and mysterious psychological field.In himself he was a different case from any that had been recorded.Even the most fanciful flights of the fiction-writers had not quite hit upon him.He was not a Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, nor was he like the unfortunate young man in Kipling's "Greatest Story in the World." His two personalities were so mixed that they were practically aware of themselves and of each other all the time.

His other self he had located as a savage and a barbarian living under the primitive conditions of several thousand years before.But which self was he, and which was the other, he could never tell.For he was both selves, and both selves all the time.Very rarely indeed did it happen that one self did not know what the other was doing.Another thing was that he had no visions nor memories of the past in which that early self had lived.That early self lived in the present; but while it lived in the present, it was under the compulsion to live the way of life that must have been in that distant past.

In his childhood he had been a problem to his father and mother, and to the family doctors, though never had they come within a thousand miles of hitting upon the clue to his erratic, conduct.Thus, they could not understand his excessive somnolence in the forenoon, nor his excessive activity at night.When they found him wandering along the hallways at night, or climbing over giddy roofs, or running in the hills, they decided he was a somnambulist.In reality he was wide-eyed awake and merely under the nightroaming compulsion of his early self.Questioned by an obtuse medico, he once told the truth and suffered the ignominy of having the revelation contemptuously labeled and dismissed as "dreams."The point was, that as twilight and evening came on he became wakeful.The four walls of a room were an irk and a restraint.

He heard a thousand voices whispering to him through the darkness.The night called to him, for he was, for that period of the twenty-four hours, essentially a night-prowler.But nobody understood, and never again did he attempt to explain.