“Do you mean,” I exclaimed, startled at the suggestion, “that the fate of the bird had any connection with the accident to your kite?”
“Accident isn’t precisely the right word,” replied Hall. “The two things are as intimately related as own brothers. If you should care to hunt up the kite sticks, you would find that they, too, are now artemisium plated.”
“This is getting too deep for me,” was all that I could say.
“I am not absolutely confident that I have touched bottom myself,” said Hall, “but I’m going to make another dive, and if I don’t bring up treasures greater than Vanderdecken found at the bottom of the sea, then Dr. Syx is even a more wonderful human mystery than I have thought him to be.”
“What do you propose to do next?”
“To shake the dust of the Grand Teton from my shoes and go to San Francisco, where I have an extensive laboratory.”
“So you are going to try a little alchemy yourself, are you?”
“Perhaps; who knows? At any rate, my good friend, I am forever indebted to you for your assistance, and even more for your discretion, and if I succeed you shall be the first person in the world to hear the news.”
XII. BETTER THAN ALCHEMY
I come now to a part of my narrative which would have been deemed altogether incredible in those closing years of the nineteenth century that witnessed the first steps towards the solution of the deepest mysteries of the ether, although men even then held in their hands, without knowing it, powers which, after they had been mastered and before use had made them familiar, seemed no less than godlike.