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Soon they became accepted familiars of Our Square. Despite the general conviction that they were slightly touched, we even became proud of them. They lent distinction to the locality by getting written up in a Sunday supplement, Willy Woolly being specially photographed therefor, a gleam of transient glory, which, however it may have gratified our local pride, left both of the subjects quite indifferent. Stepfather Time might have paid more heed to it had he not, at the time, been wholly preoccupied in a difficult quest.

In a basement window, far over on Avenue D, stood an old and battered timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face. Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club. Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime which he had long been building up. (She had loved, best of all, harmonic combinations of the clock bells.) Every day he would halt in front of the place and wait to hear it strike, and its owner would peer out from behind it and shake a wasted fist and curse him with strange, hoarse foreign oaths, while Willy Woolly tugged at his trouser leg and urged him to pass on from that unchancy spot. All that he could learn about the basement dweller was that his name was Lukisch and he owed for his rent.

Mr. Lukisch had nothing special against the queer old party who made sheep’s eyes at his clock every day. He hated him quite impartially, as he hated everybody. Mr. Lukisch had a bad heart in more senses than one, and a grudge against the world which he blamed for the badness of his heart. Also he had definite ideas of reprisal, which were focused by a dispossess notice, and directed particularly upon the person and property of his landlord. The clock he needed as the instrument of his vengeance; therefore he would not have sold it at any price to the sheep-eyed old lunatic of the pushcart, who now, on the eve of his eviction, stood gazing in with wistful contemplation. Presently he passed on and Mr. Lukisch resumed his tinkering with the clock’s insides. He was very delicate and careful about it, for these were the final touches, preparatory to his leaving the timepiece as a memento when he should quietly depart that evening, shortly before nine. What might happen after nine, or, rather, on the stroke of nine, was no worry of his, though it might be and probably would be of the landlord’s, provided that heartless extortioner survived it.

Having completed his operations, Mr. Lukisch sat down in a rickety chair and gazed at the clock, face to face, with contemplative satisfaction. Stepfather Time would have been interested in the contrast between those two physiognomies. The clock’s face, benign and bland, would have deceived him. But, innocent though he was in the ways of evil, the man’s face might have warned him.

Something within the clock’s mechanism clicked and checked and went on again. The sound, quite unexpected, gave Mr. Lukisch a bad start. Could something have gone wrong with the combination? Suppose a premature release…. At that panic thought something within Mr. Lukisch’s bad heart clicked and checked and did not go on again. The fear in his eyes faded and was succeeded by an expression of surprise and inquiry. Whether the inquiry was answered, nobody could have guessed from the still, unwinking regard on the face of the victim of heart failure.

By and by a crowd gathered on the sidewalk, drawn by that mysterious instinct for sensation which attracts the casual and the idle. Two bold spirits entered the door and stood, hesitant, just inside, awed because the clock seemed so startlingly alive in that place. Some one sent upstairs for the landlord, who arrived to bemoan the unjust fates which had not only mulcted him of two months’ rent with nothing to show for it but a rickety clock, but had also saddled him with a wholly superfluous corpse. He abused both indiscriminately, but chiefly the clock because it gave the effect of being sentient. So fervently did he curse it that Stepfather Time, repassing with Willy Woolly, heard him and entered.