That idea was simply to turn around, go back to the village, and tell him about it. I knew what he’d do. He’d raise his eyebrows, as if to say: What? A little matter like that? Nothing could be easier! Then he’d set his hand to his chin, and frown, and say: “But there are certain complications that make it interesting.” Then he’d dismiss me and go off to think about it while I’d go and have a yarn in the taproom or polish the Cabinet or mend the Flying Devil (and he was an artful little perisher if ever I saw one. He had a spring up his posterior that was held in by a catch, and he leapt out of the Cabinet like a firework. But he had a mind of his own, that little…I remember once in Basle, we was performing—)

Oh, very well. Where was I?

Looking for the doctor, that’s right.

So I turned round and went back to the village—and what did I find? An uproar! A riot! Shouts of Fire, and crowds milling about the streets outside the Jolly Huntsman. Not that they’re streets like they understand the meaning of the word in Basle, or Geneva. In Geneva, when you say “street,” you mean street. Here, they said “Street,” and they meant lane or track. So I latched on to a fellow from the inn, a useful sort of man with a full bottle in his hand, and asked him what had happened. I wasn’t exactly worried, you see, about Doctor Cadaverezzi, because he’d have been able to escape from Noah’s Flood itself if he’d had a mind to; but all the same…

“You oughter bin there!” says this fellow. “The Devil hisself come up out the floor!”

“Go on,” says I, eyeing his bottle.

“All smoke and sulfur, all springs and horns and whiskers—and that little girl what stood there in the middle of it, a Princess, she was! You oughter seen it!”

A Princess? I thought to myself. He never had no Princess in the Cabinet when I last saw it.

And a fat little lad with a feather in his hat nods solemnly and says, “Oh, yes, I seen him, I seen the Devil, he was there all right, beckoning to Doctor Cadaverezzi with a long sharp finger—and then a trapdoor opened in the floor—I seen it—and all red light and smoke poured up out of it—and the Devil carried Doctor Cadaverezzi and the Princess off to Hell, laughing fit to bust—”

“But what about this fire?” I said.

“The whole place was blazing!” says the little fat lad.

“No, it weren’t,” says a thin mournful fellow dressed in green. “It were only smoke.”

“It were the smoke of Hell itself,” says the man with the bottle….