But what of him in the cellar? What of the husband discarded, and the friend betrayed?
He was busy—tremendously BUSY. He did not even close Saturdays at one o’clock. He was busy every daylight hour he could steal. He was busy far into the hours when just men sleep, and bad ones go a burgling.
Over and again he might have been heard to say in terribly tense tones,—“He’s no illusion. He’s no spook. He’s a fact,—a cold, scientific fact. He lives by natural law as much as I do. Therefore he’s controlled by natural laws. He’s therefore susceptible to chemical changes by the proper application of those laws. If so, he’s subject to these changes whenever and wherever scientific processes are brought to bear against him. Since an astral man is a—Something,—why, something can get at him. Something, somewhere in nature’s laboratory, must have the potency to seize him, to paralyze him.”
And Bill would continue his monologue,—“Though neither brickbat nor billiard cue is efficacious in the matter of astral substance, it doesn’t follow that the proper projectile may not be found and successfully administered. Now,” he would reason, “an astral body, like a physical one, must have certain natural, specific modes of growth, development, rejuvenation, resistance, persistence, disintegration, and dissolution; and I,—ha, ha,—I shall find this secret. Nature must and shall disclose its secret of the reduction of the astral to its original essence.”
Then the Honorable William K. would laugh a high, weird laugh that echoed in hollow cadences among the jars and bottles of his laboratory.
Then, perchance, for the moment elate, he would whistle a few bars of “I’m a lookin’ for dat niggah an’ he mus’ be foun’.”
And the awful merriment of the Mayor was more suggestive than his unpleasant language.
Over the great iatro-chemist, Paracelsus, the old German chemists, and over the discoveries and formulas of Basil Valentine, the druggist of Kankakee continually pored. Deep into the mysteries of chemical philosophy he delved. Not to his wife, but to Tyndall, Maxwell and Daniel he turned for society; not, however, until he had absorbed the “Genesis of the Elements,” by Crooks, did he show the excitement and enthusiasm of the man who gets what he goes after.
There came a day, or rather an evening, when the discarded husband rose up and called himself a “Cracker-Jack.” He shook himself with the abandon of one who finds himself master of a situation.
For days after this Bill Vanderhook was singularly jocular. He was polite to Imogene. He even indulged himself in a bit of joshing with the Mystic.