A large man sitting before the fire, a man Johnny had never seen until that night, turned and looked at him in a strange way. "Sure I'm going back. I'm to help them!" "Help them at what?" Drew Lane was curious. "Don't know." Johnny's brow wrinkled. Had Johnny been a little wider awake and a little more alive, he would have realized that the young detective and Joyce Mills were humoring him as they might a drunken man. "He was hit on the head in that alley--I found him and brought him here," Drew was saying to himself. "He's slightly cuckoo from that terrible bump he got. All this stuff he's talking is sheer nonsense. He's delirious. He'll come round all right." Joyce Mills was thinking much the same. Not knowing their thoughts, Johnny rambled on: "We put some wires and things in a place nearby. Two queer ones live there, a long one and a short one. One carries a knife up his sleeve." "Nice friendly sort." Drew grinned. "Was he the fellow that hit you?" "Hit me?" Johnny's hand went to his head. "I--I doubt that. It--it was a different place." "Of course," he added thoughtfully, "they might have followed me all that time. But why? I hadn't done anything to them--not yet." "Not yet? Are you going to later?" Joyce Mills gave him a look. "Something tells me I am. Fellow gets hunches, you know that. That old professor interests me and so does that 'House of a Thousand Eyes.' He said there'd be danger. But who cares for danger?" Once more his hand went to his head. "They--they didn't get me, not yet. But if I find that fellow who hit me with that iron bar--and I _will_ find him, don't doubt that--when I find him, well--" He did not finish. "Did you see him?" Drew asked eagerly. "Not out there in--" "In the 'Wild Garden of Despair'?" Drew laughed low. "That's what they call West Madison Street. You didn't see him there, did you?" Drew was beginning to believe that Johnny was all right in his head after all. "He's the only one I didn't see." Johnny's tone was thoughtful. "All the same, I have a notion I've seen him right enough. Unless I've got him all wrong, he sat beside me in that auction house and prodded me in the ribs, telling me to bid on a package I had no notion of buying." "Did you buy it?" "Sure did." Johnny told of his experience in the auction house, then of the battle in the "Garden of Despair." "Perhaps you're right," Drew said slowly when the story was told. "The fellow who talked you into buying that package may have belonged to the gang that beat you up in that alley. Package was gone right enough when I found you. You're sure there was nothing in that box but a broken lamp?" "I wouldn't swear to that." Johnny dropped back to his place on the cot. "I didn't untie it; just explored it with my hands."