“I’ll just tell you what first set me hustling Bluecaster, and then perhaps you’ll chip in with your little lot. Over the pond I ran up against a queer sort of lie-slinger making a living out of telling folks’ futures when he wasn’t getting nabbed by the police. He was the real goods, too--I’d stake the whole Thweng outfit on it--though I’m not saying he didn’t feather-stitch the futures a trifle, just to make them look pretty! But that was when there were dollars on the game; he got none out of me. But he digged in my hotel when he had the cash, and the night before I sailed for England he fetched me up on the stairs. He said: ‘You’re clearing--pulling out for England, ain’t you?’ I told him he’d guessed it in once. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you just keep those eyes of yours skinned! There’s the gosh-dangdest trouble you ever struck coming for you out of the west. There’s some sort of mighty curiosity, wriggling like a snake, that’s getting ready to jump its contract; and water; and dead, wet, woolly things. I can’t see them--it’s so plum dark--only feel them when I reach out. There’s a crack like a gun over the sea, but you’ll not hear it when it comes, though you’ll get cold scares many a night, waiting for it! And where there was road there’ll be water, water big enough to drown a house, water and wet, woolly things----’ I told him to come off it when he started again on the wet woollies--he was giving me the jim-jams!--and I let him know pretty straight that I thought he was in for the blue devils, but he was too slick in earnest to take me up. He said he couldn’t fix it plainer, but I’d find it shine up brisk enough when the clock struck. ‘It’ll beat hell!’ he said. He told me I could see it for myself, if I’d practise a spell, that I’d the power as good as he had. I got him to show me how”--he laughed rather uncomfortably, looking away--“and I guess I know what the wet woollies are, anyway! He told me what farm I’d fixed on, after a deal of teeth-grinding and eye-rolling--it’s a bit of a twister for the psychic tongue, you’ll admit! and then he said: ‘There’s somebody else knows the last card in this deal--somebody in England.’ That’s what he told me, Mrs. Whinnerah, and I want to know! ‘There’s a woman over there powerful scared’”--he eyed her searchingly--“‘a woman scared clean out of creation----’” The faintly-ironic lips opened at last. “Ay? An’ did he tell you as our bull-calf had slipped shuppon an’ was lakin’ wi’ yon steam-engine o’ yourn?” Brack’s superiority broke on a curse as he tore out to the car. The concrete facts that the bull-calf had smashed his off-lamp and horned fancy patterns on his paint did not lessen his chagrin at his mental defeat. He turned irritably on the calm old woman watching from the porch.