“Have you ever done so?”
“I have.”
Ronald looked reflectively downward to his boot-toe, but seemed to find nothing there—except a boot-toe.
“I say, my friend,” he spoke at last, “haven’t you got a pin you can stick in me? I’d like to know if I’m dreaming.”
“I can convince you better than by pins,” replied Herr Lebensfunke. “Let me see that hand you hide so carefully.”
Ronald Wyde slowly drew it from his pocket, as reluctantly as though it were a grudged charity dole, and extended it to the old man. Its little finger was gone.
“A defect that I am foolishly sensitive about,” said he. “A childish freak—playing with edged tools, you know. A boy-playmate chopped it off by accident: I cut his head open with his own hatchet, and made an idiot of him for life—that’s all.”
“I could do this,” said Herr Lebensfunke, pausing on each word as if it were somewhat heavy, and had to be lifted out of his cramped chest by force; “I could draw your entity into that magnet, leaving you side by side with this corpse. I could dissect a finger from that same corpse, attach it to your own dead hand by a little of that palpitating life-mass you have seen, pass an electric stream through it, and a junction would be effected in three or four days. I could then restore you to existence, whole, and not maimed as now.”
“I don’t quite like the idea of dying, even for a day,” answered Wyde. “Couldn’t you contrive to lend me a body while you are mending my own?”