The Doubter’s variety of revelation during double consciousness is not all certified by the man who dreams he becomes Cave Man Thomas. It is not quite Y. M. C. A. enough. CHAPTER IV HISTORY OF THE MICHAELS FROM 1920 TO 2018 As news spreads of The Prognosticator’s Club, and of the remarkable tales and visions that are unfolded there, new men and women come to us, with the word that they, too, have a dream, persistent and recurring, of the Springfield of the next century. One such is Joseph Bartholdi Michael—whose father’s story belongs here in our narrative. While many of the blacksmith shops of Springfield have slowly changed to garages, there is one in especial that has resisted the tide in a formidable way. It is the shop located on the southeast corner of Fifth Street and Capital Avenue. This place has kept most of the fancy horse-shoeing trade of the city in 1920. The aged proprietor-patriarch, “The Iron Gentleman,” still does the heavy part of the work. He has,—with their own help, indeed, put three sons and three daughters through college, handsomely. He has trained his sons to his business and the extraordinary secrets of his shop, of which the whole tribe are inordinately proud. In early youth he discovered the process of hammering out the old Damascus blades, and vastly improved upon it, and struck off a new type of sword for the world, and his work has remained in undeviating pattern and quality ever since. At his simple forge he hammers out those wonderful swords in plain sight of the passer-by or the detective from Europe. They cannot grasp the secret. He named his gift to the world, “The Avanel Blade.” It is waspish and supple, all-conquering in body and soul. Sideways it can be wound like watch spring steel, or even a coil of narrow ribbon. Edgewise it can cut more human flesh and bone than the heavy guillotine, it can cut straight through an iron or granite block of any thickness, as though it were cutting snow. In its standard form it is longer than the longest cavalry sword. It is the assumption of the strange old “Iron Gentleman” that it will be used mostly by women, his descendants, and in battle for this land. Legend has it that the blade is named for a sweetheart who died in his youth. Certainly there is no living Avanel. He and his sons and daughters, all of them trained to his trade, have shod the horses of the notables of the country round, of more than one president of the United States, and of innumerable forgotten candidates for the presidency who began their careers by ostentatiously going to his humble shop.