Page:Wilson - Bunker bean.djvu/113

Rh overwhelmed me at first; you are so self-willed, so dominant, so ruthless. The name, the name!" He cried the last words commandingly and snapped his fingers at the delinquent control. "There! I seem to hear"

"Never mind that name," broke in Bean hastily. "Let it go! I—I don't want to know it. Go on back farther!"

Again the professor's look became trancelike.

"Ah! What a relief to be free from that blood-lust!" He breathed deeply and his eyes rolled far up under their lids.

"What is this? A statesman, still crafty, still the lines of cunning cruelty about the mouth. The city is Venice in the fourteenth century. He is dressed in a richly bejewelled robe and toys with an inlaid dagger. He is plotting the assassination of a Doge"

"Please get still farther back, can't you?" pleaded Bean.

The seer struggled once more with his control.

"I next see you at the head of a Roman legion, going forth to battle. You are a tyrant, ruling by fear alone, and with your own sword I see you cut off the heads of"

"Farther back," beseeched the sitter. "I—I've had enough of all that battle and killing. I—I don't like it. Go on back to the very first."

Patiently the adept redirected his forces.

"I see a poet. He sings his deathless lay by a roadside in ancient Greece. He is an old man, feeble, blind"