THE CLOCKWORK MAN By E.V. ODLE AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF ALFRED RUDD" [Illustration] LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD. */ _First published April 1923_ _Printed in Great Britain_ "Consciousness in a mere automaton is a useless and unnecessary epiphenomenon."--Prof. Lloyd Morgan. TO ROSE ISSERLIS CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. The Coming of the Clockwork Man 1 II. The Wonderful Cricketer 24 III. The Mystery of the Clockwork Man 40 IV. Arthur Withers thinks Things out 63 V. The Clockwork Man investigates Matters 84 VI. "It is not so, it was not so, and, indeed, God forbid it should be so" 105 VII. The Clockwork Man explains Himself 131 VIII. The Clock 150 IX. Gregg 168 X. Last Appearance of the Clockwork Man 191 CHAPTER ONE THE COMING OF THE CLOCKWORK MAN I It was just as Doctor Allingham had congratulated himself upon the fact that the bowling was broken, and that he had only to hit now and save the trouble of running, just as he was scanning the boundaries with one eye and with the other following Tanner's short, crooked arm raised high above the white sheet at the back of the opposite wicket, that he noticed the strange figure. Its abrupt appearance, at first sight like a scare-crow dumped suddenly on the horizon, caused him to lessen his grip upon the bat in his hand. His mind wandered for just that fatal moment, and his vision of the on-coming bowler was swept away and its place taken by that arresting figure of a man coming over the path at the top of the hill, a man whose attitude, on closer examination, seemed extraordinarily like another man in the act of bowling. That was why its effect was so distracting. It seemed to the doctor that the figure had popped up there on purpose to imitate the action of a bowler and so baulk him. During the fraction of a second in which the ball reached him, this secondary image had blotted out everything else. But the behaviour of the figure was certainly abnormal. Its movements were violently ataxic. Its arms revolved like the sails of a windmill. Its legs shot out in all directions, enveloped in dust.