This second disappointment was more than I could endure. Turning upon
the doctor with undisguised passion, I hotly asked:
“Who has taken it? Describe the person at once. Tell what you know about
the box, I did not finish the threat; but my looks must have been very
fierce, for he edged off a bit, and cast a curious glance at the officer
before he answered:
“You have, then, no ailing friend? Well, well; I expended some very good
advice upon you. But you paid me, and so we are even.”
“The box!” I urged; “the box! Don’t waste words, for a man’s life is at
stake.”
His surprise was marvelously assumed or very real.
“You are talking somewhat wildly, are you not?” he ventured, with a
bland air. “A man’s life? I cannot believe that.”
“But you don’t answer me,” I urged.
He smiled; he evidently thought me out of my mind.
“That’s true; but there is so little I can tell you. I do not know what
was in the box about which you express so much concern, and I do not
know the names of its owners. It was brought here some six months ago
and placed in the spot where you saw it this morning, upon conditions
that were satisfactory to me, and not at all troublesome to my patients,
whose convenience I was bound to consult. It has remained there till
to-day, when----”
Here the officer interrupted him.
“What were these conditions? The matter calls for frankness.”
“The conditions,” repeated the doctor, in no wise abashed, “were these:
That it should occupy the large table in the window as long as they
saw fit. That, though placed in my room, it should be regarded as the
property of the society which owned it, and, consequently, free to the
inspection of its members but to no one else. That I should know these
members by their ability to open the box, and that so long as these
persons confined their visits to my usual hours for patients, they were
to be subject to no one’s curiosity, nor allowed to suffer from any
one’s interference. In return for these slight concessions, I was to
receive five dollars for every day I allowed it to stay here, payment to
be made by mail.”
“Good business! And you cannot tell the names of the persons with whom
you entered into this contract?”
“No; the one who came to me first and saw to the placing of the box
and all that, was a short, sturdy fellow, with a common face but very
brilliant eye; he it was who made the conditions; but the man who came
to get it, and who paid me twenty dollars for opening my office door
at an unusual hour, was a more gentlemanly man, with a thick, brown
mustache and resolute look. He was accompanied----”
“Why do you stop?”
The doctor smiled.
“I was wondering,” said he, “if I should say he was accompanied, or that
he accompanied, a woman, of such enormous size that the doorway hardly
received her. I thought she was a patient at first, for, large as she
is, she was brought into my room in a chair, which it took four men to
carry. But she only came about the box.”
“Madame!” I muttered; and being made still more eager by this discovery
of her direct participation in its carrying off, I asked if she touched
the box or whether it was taken away unopened.
The doctor’s answer put an end to every remaining hope I may have
cherished.
“She not only touched but opened it. I saw the lid rise and heard a
whirr. What is the matter, sir?”
“Nothing,” I made haste to say--“that is, nothing I can communicate
just now. This woman must be followed,” I signified to the officer, and
was about to rush from the room when my eye fell on the table where the
box stood.
“See!” said I, pointing to a fine wire protruding from a small hole
in the center of its upper surface; “this box had connection with some
point outside of this room.”
The doctor’s face flushed, and for the first time he looked a trifle
foolish.
“So I perceive _now,_” said he, “The workman who put up this box
evidently took liberties in my absence. For _that_ I was not paid.”
“This wire leads where?” asked the officer.
“Rip up the floor and see. I know no other way to find out.”
“But that would take time, and we have not a minute to lose,” said I,
and was disappearing for the second time when I again stopped. “Doctor,”
said I, “when you consented to harbor this box under such peculiar
conditions and allowed yourself to receive such good pay for a service
involving so little inconvenience to yourself, you must have had some
idea of the uses to which so mysterious an article would be put. What
did you suppose them to be?”
“To tell you the truth, I thought it was some new-fangled lottery
scheme, and I have still to learn that I was mistaken.”