Then The Rat turned round. He had a shrewdly reasoning mind.
"That sounds as if you could get anything you wanted, if you think about it long enough and in the right way," he said. "But perhaps it only means that, if you do it, you'll be happy after you're dead. My father used to shout with laughing when he was drunk and talked about things like that and looked at his rags."
He hugged his knees for a few minutes. He was remembering the rags, and the fog-darkened room in the slums, and the loud, hideous laughter.
"What if you want something that will harm somebody else?" he said next. "What if you hate some one and wish you could kill him?"
"That was one of the questions my father asked that night on the ledge. The holy man said people always asked it," Marco answered. "This was the answer:
"'Let him who stretcheth forth his hand to draw the lightning to his brother recall that through his own soul and body will pass the bolt.'"
"Wonder if there's anything in it?" The Rat pondered. "It'd make a chap careful if he believed it! Revenging yourself on a man would be like holding him against a live wire to kill him and getting all the volts through yourself."
A sudden anxiety revealed itself in his face.
"Does your father believe it?" he asked. "Does he?"
"He knows it is true," Marco said.