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perhaps, that Tom Preston might have reconsidered and decided to give me a little extra time. Or even that some unknown benefactor had come forward to pay the bill and save the phone for me.
    But I knew now that it had been none of these things. For this phone was not the phone that Ed had disconnected.
    I reached out and took the receiver from the cradle and put it to my ear.
    The businesslike voice spoke to me. It didn’t say hello, it did not ask who called. It said: “It is clear, Mr. Carter, that you are suspicious of us. We can understand quite well your confusion and your lack of confidence in us. We do not blame you for it, but feeling as you do, there is no use of further conversation. Talk first to Mr. Sherwood and then come back and talk with us.”
    The line went dead again. This time I didn’t shout to try to bring the voice back. I knew it was no use. I put the receiver back on the cradle and shoved the phone away.
    See Gerald Sherwood, the voice had said, and then come back and talk. And what in the world could Gerald Sherwood have to do with it?
    I considered Gerald Sherwood and he seemed a most unlikely person to be mixed up in any business such as this.
    He was Nancy Sherwood’s father and an industrialist of sorts who was a native of the village and lived in the old ancestral home on top of the hill at the village edge. Unlike the rest of us, he was not entirely of the village. He owned and ran a factory at Elmore, a city of some thirty or forty thousand about fifty miles away. It was not his factory, really; it had been his father’s factory, and at one time it had been engaged in making farm machinery. But some years ago the bottom had fallen out of the farm machinery business and Sherwood had changed over to the manufacturing of a wide variety of gadgets. Just what kind of gadgets, I had no idea, for I had paid but small attention to the Sherwood family, except for a time, in the closing days of high school, when I had held a somewhat more than casual interest in Gerald Sherwood’s daughter.
    He was a solid and substantial citizen and he was well accepted. But because he, and his father before him, had not made their living in the village, because the Sherwood family had always been well-off, if not exactly rich, while the rest of us were poor, they had always been considered just a step this side of strangers. Their interests were not entirely the interests of the village; they were not tied as tightly to the community as the rest of us. So they stood apart, perhaps not so much that they wanted to as that we forced them to.
    So what was I to do? Drive out to Sherwood’s place and play the village fool? Go barging in and ask him what he knew of a screwy telephone?
    I looked at my watch and it was only four o’clock. Even if I decided to go out and talk with Sherwood, I couldn’t do it until early evening. More than likely, I told myself, he didn’t return from Elmore until six o’clock or so.
    I pulled out the desk drawer and began taking out my stuff. Then I put it back again and closed the drawer. I’d have to keep the office until sometime tonight because I’d have to come to it to talk with the person (or the persons?) on that nightmare phone. After it was dark, if I wanted to, I could walk out with the phone and take it home with me. But I couldn’t walk the streets in broad daylight with a phone tucked beneath my arm.
    I went out and closed the door behind me and started down the street. I didn’t know what to do and stood at the first street corner for a moment to make up my mind. I could go home, of course, but I shrank from doing it. It seemed a bit too much like hunting out a hole to hide in. I could go down to the village hall and there might be someone there to talk with. Although there was a chance, as well, that Hiram Martin, the village constable, would be the only one around. Hiram would want me to play a game of checkers with