"I tell you, at a quarter past twelve last night, I was standing under the church clock you heard, talking to Mr. Leigh, and as they keep all public-house clocks five minutes fast, that's the time you say you saw him. I never found you out in a lie to me, Stamer. I'll tell you what happened. You got beastly drunk and dreamed the whole thing." "What, got drunk in half-an-hour? 'Tain't in the power of liquor to do it. Mr. Timmons, I swear to you I had nothing to drink all yesterday but that small lemon. I swear it to you, so help me----, and I swear to you, so help me, that all I say is true, and that all I say I saw I saw with my eyes, as I see you now, with my wakin' eyes and in my sober senses. If you won't take my word for it, go down to Chelsea and ask the landlord of the Hanover--that's the name of the house I was in." The manner of the man was earnest and sincere, and Timmons could not imagine any reason for his inventing such a story. The dealer could make nothing of the thing, except that Stamer was labouring under some extraordinary delusion. Timmons had never been to Leigh's place before and never in the Hanover. If he had not been with Leigh during the very minutes Stamer was so sure he had seen Leigh working at his clock, he would have had no hesitation whatever in believing what the other had told him. But here was Stamer, or rather the hearsay evidence of the landlord of the public house, that Leigh was visibly working at his clock and in Chetwynd Street at the very moment the dwarf was talking to himself in the open air half-a-mile away. Of course five minutes in this case might make all the difference in the world, and there is often more than five minutes' difference in the time of clocks in public places; but then Stamer said Leigh was together the whole quarter-hour from midnight to a quarter past twelve! There was something hideous, unearthly, ghastly, about this deformed dwarf. The chemist or clockmaker, in the few interviews which had taken place between them, had talked of mysteries and mysterious power and faculties which placed him above other men. There was something creepy in the look of the man, and something horrible in the touch of his long, lean, sallow, dark-haired, monkeylike fingers. The man or monster was unnatural, no doubt--was he more or less than mortal? Did he really know things hidden from other men? To make up for his deformities and deficiencies had powers and faculties denied to other men been given to him? John Timmons did not believe in ghosts, but he did believe in devils, and he was not sure that devils might not even now assume human form, or that Oscar Leigh was not one of them, habilitated in flesh for evil purposes among men.