I am giving you the straight steer." "And if he don't come back ?" Oppenheimer, asked.
"Then the laugh will be on him, I guess, Jake," Morrell answered.
"Unless, maybe, it will be on us for sticking round this old dump when we could get away that easy." And here the conversation ended, for Pie-Face Jones, waking crustily from stolen slumber, threatened Morrell and Oppenheimer with a report next morning that would mean the jacket for them.

Me he did not threaten, for he knew I was doomed for the jacket anyway.
I lay long there in the silence, forgetting the misery of my body while I considered this proposition Morrell had advanced.

Already, as I have explained, by mechanical self-hypnosis I had sought to penetrate back through time to my previous selves.

That I had partly succeeded I knew; but all that I had experienced was a fluttering of apparitions that merged erratically and were without continuity.
But Morrell's method was so patently the reverse of my method of self- hypnosis that I was fascinated.

By my method, my consciousness went first of all.