Claimed (Sci-Fi Classic). Francis Stevens

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СКАЧАТЬ You’ve saw all the things in this room a thousand times if once. Set, can’t you?”

      The young woman had been wandering up and down her uncle’s study, inspecting the pictures, taking a book from a shelf and replacing it, or laying an appreciative finger on the crackled glazing of an old vase, a bit of real Satsuma. Now, her slate-gray eyes more bored than usual, she strayed languidly back to the table.

      There was a box set on it — an oblong, bluish-green box, about a dozen inches long by half as many wide, highly polished, but severely simple of workmanship. Its sole decoration was a single short line of characters belonging to some foreign language, which had apparently been incised across the top with an engraver’s tool and the lines filled in with scarlet enamel.

      The old man, whose finger-nail slowly followed these characters, as if by doing so he might trace their meaning, was as perfect in his way as their draughtsmanship. He was a perfect specimen, that is, of the hawk or predacious type in the genus homo. It was night, and the rays of a hanging lamp brought out his face in bold lights and shadows.

      The curved beak of a nose, thin-bridged and cruel, thrust out between bristling white brows. Could his face have been turned inside out, the lips might have become visible. Normally they were not, having been compressed and sucked inward till the mouth was a straight line that opened as an oblong aperture. Steel blue eyes, unspectacled and keen as a hawk’s, dwelt with a curiously hungry avidity on the box and its inscription. His nails were horny, yellow claws. His thin shoulders leaned with a suggestion of hunched wing-shoulders.

      Altogether, Mr. J. J. Robinson did well as a hawk, but as an old man he was not quite pretty.

      His lack of pulchritude, however, was not bothering Leilah. Like the things in his study, she had “seen him a thousand times if once,” and to her he was only Uncle Jesse, her guardian since babyhood.

      “It would be wonderful to use as a jewel-casket,” she observed in her silky, drawling voice.

      The old hawk shook his head impatiently.

      “Don’t I tell ye it can’t be opened? They’s no catch for hinges. Nothing but this little fine hairline crack around the middle of the sides to show it’s a box at all. If ‘twasn’t for this here red writing on the cover ye couldn’t even tell which is top and which is bottom. I tried to get it open this afternoon, and the cussed penknife slipped and made a scratch — H— m! That’s funny!”

      “Why, I’d have took oath — Say, Leilah, cast your eye round the edge of this here. See any mars or scratches?”

      He did not pass the box to her for inspection, nor did Leilah reach out to take it, She knew too well how he hated any one but himself to touch the treasures of his collecting fever, particularly while they were still newly in his possession. As he slowly turned the box around, however, held edgewise under the lamp, she looked it over as requested.

      “There are no scratches,” she announced at length.

      “Well, then! But I’d have swore the knife-blade made a scratch an inch long where she slipped. Are my eyes going back on me at last? Wait a jiffy,” he ordered.

      He laid the box down and, rising, went into the large library, off which his study opened, for though by no means a general reader, Robinson had a splendid assortment of subjects germane to his collecting hobby. A moment later he was back with a reading-glass.

      “Lutz phoned me that he was sending around the man who sold him this box,” he observed, again seating himself. “A sailor, Lutz said, and that he was promising to let me know its real history and what the writing means. He ain’t arrived yet, but —”

      The old man broke off abruptly. He had been about to turn the box edgewise and search for that missing scratch under magnification of the lens; now he checked himself, scowled, and looked up at his niece with a gleam of steel-blue eyes.

      “Why was you meddling with this while I was out of the room, Leilah?” he demanded angrily.

      “I didn’t touch the box. Why should I?” She looked languid surprise.

      “Well, them! But ye must have. I left it lying top uppermost. Now it’s lying bottom up. Then ye say ye didn’t tech it!”

      “But I really did not,” drawled Leilah, the bored eyes brightening to dawning annoyance. Uncle Jesse’s fussiness had been increasing of late till at times even she, toward whom he had always shown tolerance not bestowed on the rest of the world, found it hard to get on with him.

      Her uncle’s hawk-brows drew closer together and with a kind of half-articulate snarl he reversed the box, so that the scarlet inscription was again uppermost.

      “All right! All right!” he snapped. “But next time just you keep your hands off, Leilah. Understand?”

      Making no reply to the insinuation, she turned languidly away.

      “I think I’ll say good night, uncle.”

      “Good night,” he retorted shortly.

      Leilah left him sitting there, the reading glass gripped in one horny claw, glowering at the green box like some fierce old priest indignant over a holy relic that has been defiled by the touch of a hand not his own.

      When John Vanaman, M. D. was roused shortly after twelve that night by a jingling phone at his bedside, he woke alertly, sat up willingly, and unhooked the receiver without a sign of that reluctance which work-weary physicians are prone to feel for inconveniently late night-callers.

      Dr. Vanaman, in fact, was not in the least work-weary. His bedside phone was a nice, shiny, new instrument, as unworn by use as the rug and other furnishings of his little consulting room and parlor below stairs, or the gleamy brass of his nameplate outside. He was as interested and inwardly excited over this midnight call as a young girl receiving her first proposal of marriage. Yet he managed to keep the quiver out of his voice and answer with steady, nay almost stern dignity.

      Three minutes later, however, his pajamaed figure hurled itself out of bed with regard for haste, rather than dignity, and as he literally plunged into his clothing the faint smile on his lips might have been deemed heartless by one who had “listened in” along the line and learned the nature of the call.

      But a doctor — particularly a young doctor — is only human. That his very first patient after opening his office in Trentmont should be the richest man in town was a piece of luck welcome as unexpected. The true explanation of his being called in this hurried manner to attend old Jesse J. Robinson, owner of the great Robinson Brothers Engine Works, at Kennington-on-the-Delaware, and a millionaire thrice over, did not occur to Dr. Vanaman. The romance of somewhat impetuous youth informed him that from this night on the entire Robinson menage were his patients on the recommendation of — oh, some unknown friend, perhaps, who knew how he had worked under Vincent, the great specialist at the Belmont Hospital, and what Vincent had said of him.

      As he gave his rebelliously upstanding crop of reddish-brown hair some half-dozen swift subduing brush-licks, it was a pleasant, frank, inherently hopeful face that returned his gaze from the mirror. Intelligent, too, with very bright brown eyes and a mouth and chin that promised clean-cut, determinate action in circumstances of crisis. Energy, with plenty more in reserve, was expressed in every motion of his active young body.

      As he had plunged into his clothes, so Dr. Vanaman hurled himself down-stairs and into the outer night. He had no car and he gave a thought СКАЧАТЬ