Mrs. Graham came upon a tramp just outside her house and was forced to enter the kitchen followed by the evil man. Desperately she did something and said something that finally scared him away. What did she do? What did she say? Was her story about her husband’s experiment true or false?

    Loosening the dirt round a flowering shrub, she did not see the tramp（流浪者）who appeared silently from behind the tall hedge（树篱）.
     “Hey, lady,” he said roughly, “how about getting me a glass of water?”
     For a second or two after her start of surprise, the girl remained motionless; then rising slowly, she looked up and down the road. There was not a car in sight, and there were no neighbors within shouting distance in this lonely part of town.
     “Wouldn’t you rather get it yourself?” she said. “The kitchen is right through that side door; you’ll find a tumbler（平底玻璃杯）on the sink.”
     “You go ahead,” said the man hoarsely. “ I’ll be right behind you, so don’t try runnin’ off.”
     In the kitchen she picked up a tumbler to fill it, cringing（怯退）away and moving out of range as the tramp moved toward her. “Look,” she said desperately, “aren’t you hungry?”
     The dirty, whiskery face broke into an unpleasant grin, and the tramp swung open the refrigerator door. One grimy paw（肮脏的手爪）went in and emerged with a roast chicken, which he tossed on the table of the breakfast nook. Then he squeezed his heavy bulk（肥胖的躯体）into the tight space beside the table and began wolfing down the chicken.¹
     “What are you going to do?” asked the girl in a small voice. “Are you going to — to kill me?”
    “Now, Mrs. Quilty,” said the patrolman at the police desk, “just calm down and tell Sergeant（警官）McLaughlin here the whole story, including how you happened to be watching that house through the opera glasses when the tramp showed up.” ²
     “Well,” said Mrs. Quilty defensively, “I guess a neighbor has a right to watch what’s going on, and I just happened to be looking over at the Grahams’ when I saw this terrible-looking character skulk（潜行）along the hedge and then follow Mrs. Graham into the house. Well, I wondered if she wasn’t in some trouble there, and I said to myself, ‘Madge Quilty, you’d better go over and see for yourself if that little girl needs some help.’ So I ran over and looked in the kitchen window — the one that’s all covered with vines（葡萄藤）: they couldn’t see me at all but I could see and hear everything.”
     “And what was happening when you got there?” said the sergeant.
     “Well,” she continued, “there was this dirty old tramp tearing a chicken to pieces, and little Mrs.Graham was standing in the middle of the room looking absolutely scared to death, poor lovely dear. All of a sudden she reached up to a handle on the wall over the stove, and pulled it down — it’s for a ventilator（通风机）, I think; I have one very much like it. But little Mrs. Graham made as if she was doing some great thing by pulling that lever; then she says: ‘Now pay attention to me, and don’t move till you’ve heard what I have to say, or you’ll get an electric shock.’
     “ ‘You play any tricks and I’d just as soon finish you off right now,’ growls（咆哮）the tramp.
     “ ‘It’s you that will be finished if you don’t listen,’ says Mrs. Graham. ‘That lever closed an electric switch that put a high-voltage current across the front of the breakfast nook, and if you get too close to it you’ll be fried like an oyster（牡蛎）.’
     “Why, it was the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Mrs. Quilty, “and I expected him to laugh, but he hesitated, and Mrs. Graham really got her story going. ‘I don’t want to hurt you if I don’t have to,’ she says. ‘My husband teaches electrical engineering at the university, and he rigged this thing — you’re safe as long as you sit quietly.’
     “ ‘You’re gonna be sorry you said that,’ says the tramp — it didn’t take him long to decide she was lying! He put his hands on the table and started to get up.
     “ ‘Wait!’ Orders Mrs. Graham. ‘I mustn’t let you get a shock, because it might damage your brain cells and confuse our experiments.’
     “ ‘Whaddya mean, experiments?’ says the tramp.
     “ ‘Our experiments in the laboratory down in the basement. I might as well tell you now, so you’ll be able to cooperate: that’s why we need a man to work on—the animals we’ve been using just don’t understand, and they don’t cooperate.’
     “Well, then she went on with this absolutely weird（古怪的）story about her husband’s theory that electric currents in the body give people superhuman strength when they’re scared, and she says they need a human being to experiment with because the animals they’ve been using haven’t sense enough to get scared when they want them to. Officers, I tell you, that little woman had me shivering the way she told it, although I know she was only trying to frighten him.
     “Then she tells the tramp she and her husband decided a murderer would be best, because he’d be headed to the chair anyway, and it would just be a different way of getting the electricity applied, so to speak.³ ‘You can’t think how happy you made me,’ she says, ‘when you told me you were going to kill me, because to me that makes you every bit as good as a real murderer, even if you aren’t one already.’
     “She was losing his attention now because she was talking over his head, but she wasn’t out of ideas⁴ — there was a big June bug in the windowsill, and without him noticing, she managed to give it a good squirt（喷射）from a bug bomb that was standing near it, and then she picked up the bug and tossed it on top of the rail in front of the breakfast nook. You know the awful way some bugs wiggle after you’ve sprayed them? Well, the June bug was wiggling（摆动）like that when it hit the rail — it landed on its back and lay there and began to arch（弯成弓形）itself and move its legs in that terrible way.
     “ ‘There, see!’ says Mrs. Graham. ‘The high voltage even affects that bug, though he must be ten inches away from it. Just look at that poor thing! Oh, Charles will be simply wild when he finds we have you to work on tonight. He’s been getting so discouraged with the animals.’
     “ ‘Whaddya doin’ with the animals?’ says the tramp. ‘You give’em a little shock and see if they jump? Things like that?’
     “ ‘Dear, no.’ Says Mrs. Graham. ‘It isn’t as simple as that. We cut right through the muscles to different nerve centers, then attach tiny clamps（夹子）right to the nerves, run wires from the clamps to amplifiers（放大器）, and watch the dials to see what voltage（电压）is produced by different emotions. And Charles always takes movies. Just think, you’ll be the first man in history to have his electrical spasms（痉挛）recorded on film!’ ”
     Apparently the full significance of Mrs. Graham’s words finally penetrated the tramp’s thick head about the same time that the unhappy June bug went into its final spasm.⁵ As the frightened tramp watched, the insect’s back arched until it seemed it must break itself in two; then the legs slowly straightened out to their full length, vibrated（颤动）an instant, and were still.
     The resulting reaction in Mrs. Graham’s visitor certainly furnished a practical demonstration of man’s ability to perform superhuman feats while under high emotional stress. As Mrs. Quilty related it, the tramp suddenly took off, rocketlike, cleared the supposed electrical barricade（屏障）by at least a foot, landed in a crouching position, and described an involuntary half roll that brought his shaggy head sharply against a hinge of the refrigerator.⁶ Rising unsteadily but quickly, he uttered an apelike cry and dived toward sunlight and freedom, plunging（向前猛冲）through the screen of the kitchen door as he went.
     “Well, Mrs. Quilty,” said Sergeant McLaughlin, “I suppose that was when you ran back to your own house and called us?”
     “No, I waited a minute to see if little Mrs. Graham was going to be all right. ‘Who knows,’ I thought, ‘the poor dear might faint and need me to revive her.’ But she went right to the telephone to call her husband, which wasn’t surprising, of course; except as soon as he came on the line, she said, ‘Charles, Charles: oh, you’re going to hate me! I had an absolutely perfect one, and he got away!’ ”

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