Claimed (Sci-Fi Classic). Francis Stevens

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      He reached the boulevard, and turned into the broad avenue leading to the house. Not wishing to arrive altogether breathless, he slackened pace.

      The Robinson mansion stood well back, with a clear lawn sweep from front to boulevard. Several windows were lighted up, and Vanaman observed with surprise that one of the large windows on the ground floor was broken. Almost the entire plate-glass pane had been smashed out.

      Had there been an accident? A bomb-throwing, perhaps? Over the phone a woman’s voice had merely informed him that Mr. Robinson needed the immediate care of a physician, and the woman had hung up before he could ask any questions.

      Almost running again, Vanaman invaded the stately portico, where the front and vestibule doors both stood wide open, as if prepared for his arrival. Before he could lay finger on the bell a young woman came hurrying into the reception hall beyond. Seeing him standing there, she seemed to take his identity for granted and beckoned imperatively.

      “Come in here, doctor,” she called across the hall, and straightway vanished again through some portieres at the side.

      He started to remove his hat, discovered that he had left it at home, and followed the young woman. It was she, he knew, who had telephoned. The peculiar, drawling sweetness of her voice was unmistakable.

      A minute later he stood in Robinson’s private study, where he found the old man, clad in an elaborate Chinese embroidered dressing gown, stretched out on a lounge. As he entered, Vanaman noted that it was a window of this room which had been broken. The young woman who had met him — Miss Robinson, the old man’s niece and mistress of his household she proved to be — dismissed the several agitated servants who were hovering about and gave Vanaman a clear field with his patient.

      Though as yet he had hardly taken time to glance at her, subconsciously Vanaman admired the young woman’s unflustered, almost languid and yet efficient manner. Experience with hospital nurses had taught him which kind of a woman could be relied on in an emergency and which could not.

      A brief examination informed him that despite the ghastly lividness of his hawk-like old face, Robinson was alive, though how long he might remain so was another matter. Uneven respiration and a heavy, frantically jumping pulse told their story.

      “Is it — a stroke?” asked the young woman’s voice behind him.

      “I don’t know,” said Vanaman frankly. “Can’t tell yet. Hot-water bottles for his feet, please, and an ice pack for his head. Have you any alcohol in the house? I’m going to give him a hypodermic.”

      He was directing the young woman in exactly the short, crisp sentences he would have used with a nurse, and she obeyed with equal intelligence and dedication. Soon the best treatment possible for the case was being administered, and Miss Robinson herself cleansed the old man’s arm with absorbent cotton dipped in alcohol while Vanaman got his hypodermic ready. He had declined to let the patient be moved till his jumping heart should quiet a little.

      “Has he had many attacks like this?” queried Vanaman, as he withdrew the hypodermic needle and pulled down a richly embroidered sleeve over the scrawny arm.

      “Not any,” said Miss Robinson.

      “No? I should have said — H— m! What happened here to-night?”

      In his absorption in the patient Vanaman forgotten that broken window. Now he remembered it, and also observed for the first time that one side of the room, that near the window, was in considerable disarray. A chair had been overset, the rug lay in folds as if plowed up by struggling feet, and scattered over it were many bits of shattered porcelain, remnants of a five hundred dollar Satsuma vase, though Vanaman could not know that.

      “We had a thief here — I think,” said Miss Robinson. “At about eleven o’clock I left my uncle seated beside that table. I took a book to my room with me and sat up reading. Frisby, our butler, says that at half past eleven the doorbell rang, and when he went to the door there was a man there.

      “He was a rough and common-looking fellow, almost a tramp. He gave Frisby a card and said to tell my uncle he wished to see him about the green box.

      “Frisby left him standing outside and carried the card to my uncle. The card is there on the table now. You can see that it is from Jacob Lutz, the curio dealer on Forest Street. I remember that my uncle said something of expecting a man whom Mr. Lutz was sending around. Frisby says that my uncle seemed to hesitate, and grumbled some complaint because the man had, come so late in the evening. Then he told Frisby to let him in.

      “My uncle is accustomed to dealing with rough men — in spite of his age he still does a good deal of active superintending at the engine works. I don’t think he was ever afraid of anything or anyone in his life, and Frisby was not surprised when he was sent away with instructions not to hang about listening. He left the stranger and my uncle alone together here in the study.

      “It must have been about half an hour later when I heard Uncle Jesse shouting, and then a great smash and crash which I suppose was the window breaking. Of course I ran down-stairs at once. When I came in here —” She paused, seemed to hesitate oddly for a moment, then finished abruptly with: “There was no one here but my uncle, and he was lying senseless on the floor.”

      “And his visitor?”

      “The man had tried to steal that — that green box on the table, I think. Uncle Jesse had it clasped tight in his arms when I came in. His shouts and the noise they made in struggling over it must have frightened the thief so that he smashed out the window pane and escaped. I— can’t tell you any more than that.”

      Vanaman stared at her with an intentness almost rude. He was thinking of two things at once, as a man sometimes does. One thought was of amazement that he could for nearly an hour have worked with and been ably assisted by the most exquisitely beautiful woman he had ever seen, and yet scarcely have been aware of the fact until now.

      She was dressed in a gown of dull-blue, with innumerable illusive, filmy folds; her hands and arms were perfectly shaped, but slender and delicate to fragility; her face had a flowerlike loveliness, and her hair was literally wonderful. Though brows and long, thick lashes were dark, her hair was almost snow-white. There was a great quantity of it, soft and fluffy and silvery as moonbeams, and it completed the delicate, exquisite fragility of her whole appearance.

      Vanaman’s other thought was that the exquisitely beautiful one had been on the point of telling him something and then changed her mind about it. The intelligence of a good doctor is necessarily not unlike that of a good detective. Both are born to follow obscure clues, seek out hidden meanings, and find absorbing interest in the intricate riddles provoked by the lives of their fellow-beings.

      The same instinct which, used for diagnosis had won Vincent’s high praise at the hospital, told Vanaman now that for all her languid manner, rather weary, slate gray eyes, and the perfect self-possession which enabled her to tell the brief story she had related without wasting a word, Miss Robinson was suffering from an excessively high nervous tension.

      Anxiety caused by her uncle’s condition? Perhaps. Or it might be — What had Miss Robinson seen happen in this room of which she had started to tell him, decided not to tell him, and the memory of which caused the pupils of those gray eyes to expand so darkly when she thought of it?

      “You СКАЧАТЬ