it will do you any good to tell me your troubles, I am ready to listen to them."
"Thank you," said Banaotovich in a trembling voice. "I've done nothing that they can put me behind the bars for. But I—I——"
He stared at me sternly.
"But I've done worse things," he said solemnly, "than some poor fellows that have been strung up by the neck and choked to death!"
I laughed, a little nervously. "Tell me your story, if you like," I said, "and let me decide just how black you are. But I haven't a great deal of apprehension. We're all of us poor miserable sinners, as far as that's concerned. I could tell you things about myself——"
Banaotovich was not listening to me at all. He had fallen suddenly into a fit of black brooding. After a minute or two, he looked up and asked sharply:
"Do you remember Wolansky?"
Wolansky was the Greek professor who had threatened to vote against Banaotovich when he was finishing his course at the Gymnasium.
"Of course," said I. "And I remember well how he abused you that last year. If there ever was a cantankerous old scoundrel, Wolansky was just that identical individual!"
"Maybe," he said absently; then after another pause:
"Do you remember that Wolansky died suddenly, just a litle while before the end of the school year?"
I nodded. "I imagine that was a great piece of good luck for you," I said.
"Yes," said Banaotovich. "If he had lived, I should never have had my diploma. As it was, I finished with honors. If Wolansky hadn't died when he did, I'd have been ruined. Don't forget that—ruined!"
I was puzzled at his insistence. "Yes, you would have been seriously handicapped," I agreed. "Ruined is the word, perhaps."
Banaotovich's face was purple with wine and some strange kind of suffering. "Do you remember another thing?" he said thickly. "Do you remember an old Hindoo who had a dark little hole away back of the shops and the beer depot and the livery stables between the Old Market and the river?"
"The old fellow that had love charms and told fortunes and helped people to health and wealth and happiness?" I said in a tone of slightly forced cheerfulness. It was hard to be cheerful with those somber eyes boring into you. "Yes, I remember him, all right. I wanted to go and see him once, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, but Father told me that meddling with the black art had sent more people to hell than it had helped. And Father was so terribly earnest about it that he frightened me. I never went. As a matter of fact it was only a passing fancy, and I soon forgot all about him."
"That Hindoo," said my old schoolfellow thoughtfully, "knew things about the secret forces in the universe that made him almost a god. And he taught me things that the wisest philosopher in the world doesn't suspect. Still, your father may have beeen right. I think it very likely that what he taught me may send me to hell!"
I shivered. I looked up nervously to make sure that the way was clear to the door. I began to suspect that my friend Banaotovich, though he was certainly not a criminal, might be a dangerous lunatic.
My vis-à-vis rubbed absently at a protuberance on his left side. I had noticed it when he first came across the room to speak to me. A deformity—I was sure it had not been there when he was a boy—or perhaps a tumor or some such thing as that.
