without warning, rose swiftly to a piercing, falsetto shriek, and ended like the snapping off of a radio.
"Immediately afterward the telephone let loose the most fearful uproar I have ever heard. If you have ever torn wooden packing-boxes to pieces with your hands—you know, fruit crates and the like—and if you can imagine those sharp, rending, splitting sounds magnified and multiplied a millionfold, then you have a faint idea of what I heard aver those telephone wires that night. Only it wasn't a box I heard being ripped to pieces; it was a house.
"In the midst of that uproar the phone went dead.
"How I got into my clothes and over to Fothergill's house I don't remember. I was half mad with fear—fear of the unknown, I suppose; my brain wasn't really functioning. But I got to what was left of Fothergill's house. . . .
"That house lay—flat on the ground. It had been burst wide apart, out- ward, in all directions! Great torn slabs of walls and roof lay all around. Just a moment; I've kept the newspaper clipping."
He got quickly to his feet—a tall, racehorse-slim man with prematurely white hair—walked over to his car and came back with a wallet in his hands. He opened the wallet, extracted a worn and yellowing rectangle of newsprint and handed it to me. I took it gingerly—it was brittle, almost, as a long-dried leaf—and read it aloud.
SAVANT DIES IN MYSTERY BLAST
New Hartford, Conn., Aug. 11—Robert B. Fothergill, 41, unmarried, and an archæologist of international repute, met instant death at about 2:30 a. m. today when an explosion of terrific violence and undetermined origin totally demolished his summer home on the Little River road, two miles from this village.
Fothergill's body was found by Doctor James Bowen of New York City, Fothergill's nearest neighbor and the first person to reach the scene. It had been hurled a distance of over three hundred feet, and examination of the body by Sheriff Ward Donovan and Coroner Arthur White revealed that Fothergill had suffered multiple fractures of the arms and legs, a crushed chest, and a broken neck.
Doctor Bowen revealed that he had been talking on the telephone with Fothergill at the approximate time the blast occurred, that the line abruptly went dead, and that, becoming alarmed, he dressed and walked to Fothergill's home and discovered that the tragedy had already occurred. He states that he heard no explosion, but rather a loud crackling sound. His statement is borne out by neighbors, who declared that the sound resembled "a large box being broken open." Police are inclined to the theory that the blast itself may have been relatively soundless.
Lena Hayes, night telephone operator here, confirmed Doctor Bowen's statement that Fothergill had called him immediately prior to the blast, and that the blast itself terminated the conversation. The telephone, torn from the wall by the force of the explosion, was still clutched in Fothergill's hands when he was found. State Police are investigating. . . .
There was more, but nothing pertinent to this narrative. When I had finished reading the item, Doctor Bowen carefully returned it to his wallet. He had been standing as I read; now he sat down again, and the three of us, oddly evading each other's direct gaze, stared at the triangle of green turf between our feet. Fred Winn began tapping his fingernails on the arm of his lawn-chair.
"The clipping describes it pretty accurately," Doctor Bowen said suddenly. "Fothergill was thrown three hundred feet—well over three hundred feet. His body was smashed—and hor-
