I sank back among the cushions of the couch rather resentfully. "Well, at least you can go on and tell me," I said.
"Certainly. There are cranks of all degrees, as you know. It was your luck to fall into the hands of one of the king-pins of the confraternity—Dr. Ferdinand Gonzales, alias Moses the Second.
"He wanted a new subject for his experiments upon the physical regeneration of the human race, and he caught you in his drag-net. It was a close call for you, old chap."
"I don't understand."
"You have been starving to death for ten days, and yet eating three meals a day right along. Nothing peculiar about that, eh?"
"It WAS rather curious stuff. It looked like isinglass."
"Perhaps it is. All I care about is the fact that the food you have been eating doesn't contain a particle of nourishment for the human system. But Moses the Second imagined that he had invented, or rather rediscovered, the one perfect nutriment for the race—nothing less than manna."
"Manna!"
"Don't you remember the manna in the wilderness, the children of Israel, and the forty years they fed upon it. Dr. Gonzales, who was really a fine chemist before he went dotty, got the idee fixe that all human ills were due to improper food. He tackled the problem, at first scientifically, but later on he had a vision that he was really the reincarnation of the Prophet Moses. Moses and manna—the connection is obvious and the secret was soon in his possession. He manufactured the stuff in his own laboratory and lived on it himself—at least to the verge of physical extinction. Then he went gunning for subjects, and you know the rest. The rubbish fills you up without nourishing you, and what you lived on was really stimulants alone—the wine and coffee."
"But will you tell me—how did you chance to find—"