“Oh, Marse Gem, is you kilt?” Pomp, who had suffered no injury save fright, rolled to his feet and came on the run, his kindly old black face all distorted with grief.
Indeed Gem Renaud did look like one dead. He hung slumped sideways, half fallen out of his chair. His drawn face was ashen, his hands limp and cold.
But, though Lee searched frantically, he could find no sign of gunshot wound or oozing blood. Together he and Pompey laid the long figure out at ease on the floor, sponged the face with a wet handkerchief, and rubbed hands and wrists. At last old Gem Renaud opened his eyelids with a slow, tired movement. Then he motioned Lee to prop him up into sitting position.
“Just fainted—heart not so good! This shooting—must have been that old fool, Johnny Poolak—taking another shot at the glass wheel—”
“Sh-shooting at the wheel?” stammered Lee. “What for?”
“What for? For superstition mostly,” old Gem Renaud’s black eyes snapped angrily, “and some for meanness, too!”
As Great-uncle Gem regained his strength, he told about this Poolak, the half-wit, full of fool religions and imbued with all the superstitions that ignorant people hold to. The rest of the uneducated squatters here in the village were about on this level too. Once, long ago, when Renaud had been experimenting with his crude electrical devices, a cyclone swept the fringes of the town. Immediately the ignorant villagers coupled the crystal wheel with the disaster, and Poolak, bent on destroying the source of evil, took a shot at the “lightning maker.”
“Evidently,” went on Gem Renaud, “old Poolak has noted your work out here and thinks you’re all set to bring on another cyclone and so has taken another shot at the contraption. If you’ll dig out the bullet that’s imbedded in the wall beyond our wheel of glass, I’ll wager that you’ll find it’s a silver bullet. Silver is the only weapon to down witchcraft according to all the old superstitions, you know.”
That night, before he went to bed, Lee slipped down to the old storage room. There, by the light of a candle, he pried with his knife blade into the wall just beyond the crystal wheel. And sure enough, the bullet that he dug out was not made of lead, but of silver. A rough lump that old Poolak must have molded for himself, melting down a hard-earned twenty-five cent piece, most likely! The silver bullet on his palm gave Lee Renaud a queer sensation, a feeling that he had stepped very far back into a past peopled with eerie fears and superstitions.
The next day Lee moved the whole apparatus of the glass wheel into an unused room on the second floor of the dwelling house. It was safer up there. A fellow didn’t have it hanging over his head that a pious old ignoramus was liable to shoot up one’s affairs again with silver bullets.