“All right,” Ken interrupted, to Sandy’s amazement. “This doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere. I’ll agree to leaving here now—after all, we have to get up to the museum, anyway—if you’ll agree to coming back here about noon. Then, if Barrack does work here, we ought to be able to pick him up again. Maybe—”
“I told you I’d agree to anything,” Sandy said, starting toward a lunchroom sign he had spotted a block away. “Anyway, by noon we’ll have the information from Lausch and maybe you’ll be willing to call this whole thing off. This is supposed to be our Christmas vacation, remember? I—”
“You’ll feel better when you’ve had some breakfast,” Ken assured him.
They did feel considerably better, although Sandy was still mumbling dire forebodings about frostbite in both feet, when Lausch opened his office door to them an hour later.
“Good!” The little art expert beamed. “Sintelli has just sent back your box, and the answers to all your questions. But come in. Come in and sit down near the heater. You must be cold if you have walked here from my friend Holt’s apartment.”
“Hah!” Sandy said under his breath. “If that’s all we’d done—!” But at a glare from Ken he broke off and moved toward the chairs Lausch was pulling into place for them.
“First,” Lausch said a moment later, smoothing out a sheet of notes on his desk, “you wanted to know if the box is really old.” He smiled at them over his glasses. “It is—definitely. Sintelli didn’t make any spectroscopic tests of the metal, but he said that wasn’t necessary. He is quite certain that the box was made not less than three hundred years ago.”
Ken gulped. He was aware of a convulsive movement on Sandy’s part—the beginning of a vast guffaw that Sandy nobly controlled.
“I see.” Ken gulped once more, and turned his head to avoid Sandy’s glance. “What else?”
“You wanted to know if the box is valuable,” Lausch went on. “And in this case,” he said, cheerfully unaware of Ken’s reaction to his first statement, “I’m afraid you will find the news not so pleasant. Sintelli says this box is in excellent condition, but that even so it is not worth more than fifteen or twenty dollars in American money.”