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