"Yes--but I couldn't understand--only a little bit--just a word or two."
"Well, what was it?"
"I heard 'acid' three times, then I heard a long, moaning sound, then--then--I heard 'No. 8 hat.' I heard that twice."
"No. 8 hat," repeated the warden. "What the devil--No. 8 hat? Accusing voices of conscience have never talked about No. 8 hats, so far as I ever heard."
"He's insane," said one of the jailers, with an air of finality.
"I believe you," said the warden. "He must be. He probably heard something and got frightened. He's trembling now. No. 8 hat! What the----"
V.
When the fifth day of The Thinking Machine's imprisonment rolled around the warden was wearing a hunted look. He was anxious for the end of the thing. He could not help but feel that his distinguished prisoner had been amusing himself. And if this were so, The Thinking Machine had lost none of his sense of humor. For on this fifth day he flung down another linen note to the outside guard, bearing the words: "Only two days more." Also he flung down half a dollar.
Now the warden knew--he _knew_--that the man in Cell 13 didn't have any half dollars--he _couldn't_ have any half dollars, no more than he could have pen and ink and linen, and yet he did have them. It was a condition, not a theory; that is one reason why the warden was wearing a hunted look.
That ghastly, uncanny thing, too, about "Acid" and "No. 8 hat" clung to him tenaciously. They didn't mean anything, of course, merely the ravings of an insane murderer who had been driven by fear to confess his crime, still there were so many things that "didn't mean anything" happening in the prison now since The Thinking Machine was there.