“Name the twelve Apostles.”
For the first time the learned seer displayed signs of uneasiness. After some stumbling, however, he completed the list.
With a twinkle in his eyes, the preacher inscribed a second question, “Name Joshua’s captains.”
Prof. Click cleared his throat, ran his fingers down his beard, moved uneasily in his chair, and at length, while a smile began to spread over the room, shook his head.
“But I am thinking of them—hard,” declared the minister, chuckling.
The professor was again about to shake his head, when suddenly he paused, then replied boldly, “Shem, Ham, Hezekiah, Hittite, Peter, Goliath, Solomon and Pharaoh.”
It was during the shouts of merriment following this ridiculous response that Kate’s mystification began to dissolve. Glancing again toward her brother, she saw that, despite a show of laughing, there was an uneasiness in his face similar to that shown by the professor. And when presently she saw him cast a covertly longing eye toward a pile of Bibles in the next window, she turned back to the platform, silently laughing. She thought she had discovered the source of the “thought waves.”
The success of the brazenly invented answer to the last question, meantime, had quite restored the professor’s confidence, and as the minister went on, he continued to respond in the same ridiculous fashion, claiming, on the minister’s protest, that he was only reading the thought-waves as they came to him. And finally the pastor laughingly gave it up.
At the next, and final, “demonstration” mystification of another kind came to the observant Kate. Rising to his feet, the mind-reader announced that he would now inform a few of the “stronger thinkers” before him the subject of their thoughts; and both in his manner and tone Kate noted an unmistakable nervousness. Glancing toward Jack, she saw that his face also was grave, and with a stirring of apprehension of she knew not what, she waited.
“The first thought which reaches me,” began the professor, “is from Miss Mary Andrews. Miss Andrews thinks her pretty toque is on straight. It’s not quite. I think one pin is coming out.”