Part 63

"It has!" cried Carr with a hideous laugh as a point of bluish-white fire tipped the tentacle for an instant. "You're tied fast to something feminine! Probably a flossy typewriter--or a burlesque actress--somebody you're fitted for, anyway!" He clapped on his monocle, and glared gleefully at the stupefied young man.

"That will teach you to enter my premises and hold my daughter's hand when she is drawing innocent pictures of Cooper's Bluff!" he shouted. "That will teach you to write poems to my eighteen-year-old daughter, Drusilla; that will teach you to tell her you are in love with her--you young pup!"

"I am in love with her!" said Yates, undaunted; but he was very white when he said it. "I do love her; and if you had behaved halfway decently I'd have told you so two weeks ago!"

Mr. Carr turned a delicate purple, then, recovering, laughed horribly.

"Whether or not you were once in love with my daughter is of no consequence now. That machine has nullified your nonsense! That instrument has found you your proper affinity--doubtless below stairs----"

"I am still in love with Drusilla," repeated Yates, firmly.

"I tell you, you're not!" retorted Carr. "Didn't I turn that machine on you? It has never missed yet! The Green Mouse has got you in the Mouseleum!"

"You are mistaken," insisted Yates, still more firmly. "I was in love with your daughter Drusilla before you started the machine; and I love her yet! Now! At the present time! This very instant I am loving her!"

"You can't!" shouted Carr.

"Yes, I can. And I do!"

"No, you don't! I tell you it's a scientific and psychical impossibility for you to continue to love her! Your subconscious personality is now in eternal and irrevocable accord and communication with the subconscious personality of some chit of a girl who is destined to love and marry you! And she's probably a ballet-girl, at that!"

"I shall marry Drusilla!" retorted the young man, very pale; "because I am quite confident that she loves me, though very probably she doesn't know it yet."

"You talk foolishness!" hissed Carr. "This machine has settled the whole matter! Didn't you see that spark?"

"I saw a spark--yes!"

"And do you mean to tell me you are not beginning to feel queer?"

"Not in the slightest."

"Look me squarely in the eye, young man, and tell me whether you do not have a sensation as though your heart were cutting capers?"

"Not in the least," said Yates, calmly. "If that machine worked at all it wouldn't surprise me if you yourself had become entangled in it--caught in your own machine!"

"W-what!" exclaimed Carr, faintly.

"It wouldn't astonish me in the slightest," repeated Yates, delighted to discover the dawning alarm in the older man's features. "You opened the receiver; you have psychic waves as well as I. I was in love at the time; you were not. What was there to prevent your waves from being hitched to a wireless current and, finally, signaling the subconscious personality of--of some pretty actress, for example?"

Mr. Carr sank nervously onto a chair; his eyes, already wild, became wilder as he began to realize the risk he had unthinkingly taken.

"Perhaps you feel a little--queer. You look it," suggested the young man, in a voice made anxious by an ever-ready sympathy. "Can I do anything? I am really very sorry to have spoken so."

A damp chill gathered on the brow of Bushwyck Carr. He did feel a trifle queer. A curious lightness--a perfectly inexplicable buoyancy seemed to possess him. He was beginning to feel strangely youthful; the sound of his own heart suddenly became apparent. To his alarm it was beating playfully, skittishly. No--it was not even beating; it was skipping.

"Y-Yates," he stammered, "you don't think that I could p-possibly have become inadvertently mixed up with that horrible machine--do you?"

Now Yates was a generous youth; resentment at the treatment meted out to him by this florid, bad-tempered and pompous gentleman changed to instinctive sympathy when he suddenly realized the plight his future father-in-law might now be in.

"Yates," repeated Mr. Carr in an agitated voice, "tell me honestly: do you think there is anything unusual the matter with me? I--I seem to f-feel unusually--young. Do I look it? Have I changed? W-watch me while I walk across the room."

Mr. Carr arose with a frightened glance at Yates, put on his hat, and fairly pranced across the room. "Great Heavens!" he faltered; "my hat's on one side and my walk is distinctly jaunty! Do you notice it, Yates?"

"I'm afraid I do, Mr. Carr."