He pressed the handles. What had seemed a flattened fine of wooden strips suddenly began to elongate. They now saw that it was composed of a series of lightly jointed pieces of wood, diamond-shaped.
When the handles were pressed, the joinings stretched out into diamonds and then flattened again as the contraption stretched out farther and farther— a foot, two feet, six feet, eight — like a rigid snake. H.M. pressed the handles the other way, and it drew back again into its small, compact shape.
"I first thought o' this little joker," he went on, "on Thursday, when we were talkin' about the trick of driving a pin into the arm without pain.
"The lazy-tongs is used by conjurers; and, of course, fake spiritualists. While they're in one place, they can stretch it out in the dark and make things move across any part of the room. Thus a ghostly luminous hand floats in the air, and so on.
"I deliberately mentioned a lazy-tongs in front of Masters on Sunday, in connection with those two roarin' fake spiritualists the Davenport brothers, to see if he'd tumble to it. But he didn't.
"And then — oh, love a duck! — I began to be pursued by lazy-tongs. They haunted me. The rose-trellises in your garden here are shaped like lazy-tongs. Hubert stood in a forest of 'em, and talked to us. Then I sat down at the telephone in Agnew's office; and there, starin' back at me, was a telephone on a foldin' steel framework, to push out or push back, with exactly the same principle.
"I'm haunted, I am.
"Hubert made one of 'em for himself. On the end of it (see) is a little spring that'll fit over any object it touches and hold it tight.
"He stood outside the window, peepin' through a chink in the curtains. When Mrs. Fane was told to shoot her husband, and every eye in this room was burnin'ly concentrated on that spectacle, the lazy-tongs slid in through the curtains.
"It caught the dagger, twelve feet away, and snaked back with it. Good old Hubert put the real dagger, which is hardly heavier than the rubber one, lightly attached to the end so that a touch on the table would release it.