Adventure Magazine Cover — page 90: what you’re looking at

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MA's iy if ee — Sorcery and Everhard 89 such a letter as you wrote to the Paris police?” He answered quick as a flash; and as he answered I drew the little black bag from my pocket, and did not pause to pour out the gems, but slit the bag, so that the flam- Ing Stones cascaded from the black silken prison and fell, bouncing and tumbling, with a myriad facets blinking and breaking and tossing the sunlight. They clattered on to the table, a bewildering assortment of large and unflawed stones, every kind of precious stones excepting pearls. Hurgronje, I learned, did not care for pearls; he felt they were nothing but an animal growth, not stones at all. Which idea illustrates beyond suspicion of a doubt that he loved gems for themselves, above and beyond their monetary value; for there are few things more costly than well- matched pearls. Lord Bob lurched forward and sat stupe- fied. He looked up at me and tried to talk but it was like a man strangling. For a time his throat was contracted so that he simply could not articulate; and he worked at his throat with his fingers as if in pain. I went to the sideboard and brought back a glass of brandy that he gulped; then he dropped the glass to the floor and put out his hand. Tears oozed from his eyes; his face was almost scarred, so bitterly was he shamed at the venomous way he had taiked to me. Words were not needed: and few of them passed between us, for at no time had he hurt me, but rather by all he said and every moment of his attitude had increased my respect for him. In a few minutes he was himself, a rather excited Lord Bob though; and his nimble fingers played among the gems, touching this one, pushing that one aside, uttering a comment here and an oath there. With surprizing dexterity he shoved all the set gems—the rings and collar and pin I had taken the night before—to one side; and of these he made a division, pronouncing one ‘group “phony.” He was an expert in gems, as a man would have to be to estimate success- fully the value of stones worn by women who were to be lured into Hurgronje’s ex- tortionate séances. He grouped three large emeralds, and said that these very stones had been worn by the Parisian dowager; and vowed that he could have told those stones anywhere. I told him how I had come to run counter to Hurgronje in New York, and why; though more by accident than design I did not mention Madame Kraschenin’s name. I told him that by chance I had run across Remy Cantello, who suspected him of hav- ing been in Paris. And I was just about ready to risk telling him of Zoronna— though I feared he would have a tempera- mental outbreak and accuse me of defaming a sweet, pure character—when the tele- phone rang. It was Zoronna. As he listened his attitude changed. He tried to say something, but apparently she would not pause to listen. And she cut off, leaving him there with a dead receiver. He put up the receiver and turned toward me, and I knew that something was very seri- ously the matter. “Now what’s up?” I demanded in utter exasperation. “I—I—I don’t know,” he said fum- blingly. “Zoronna’s just said she must see me—but can’t till night, and that as I value her life not to let you out of my sight, and not to believe a word under any circum- stances that you tell me.” “Too, too bad,” I said, and added, a little enigmatically perhaps— “You didn’t by any chance let her know beforehand that I would be out of your sight all of last night, did you?” He stared at me uncomprehendingly, then quietly: “T don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I told her vesterday that I would be away all of last night—-out of town.” CHAPTER IV ORONNA SYMONDI was the pivot on which everything seemed to turn. She was mysterious, and, I thought, dangerous. [ had thought so from the first glimpse of her graceful, alert body, sheathed in silk; from the first glance of her queer, cryptic, fascinating eyes, shadowed, as if symbolically, by the long black lashes. Lord Bob was troubled, and impatiently watching the clock go round. But it seemed to me necessary that I should meet her first and have a little interview and maybe learn something. I knew better than to try to tell him what I suspected of EOmicbooks: co