The doctor was sitting in his calm, grave way, listening to the disjointed words––like dry nuts dropping on the ground––from the shriveled lips of Clinker; but as he abstractedly put his fingers in the box, and turned his eyes languidly as he pushed down the lid, he gave a bound from his chair––with the box clutched in his left hand––giving a jar to the room and table that even made Clinker believe the forty-year earthquake had come before its time.
Standing there, with his tall, majestic figure, like a statue of bronze, his right arm poised with clenched hand aloft in a threatening attitude, his dark, grizzled locks bristling above his head, the black eyes flaming with an inhuman light, as if prepared to crush, with the power 260 of a god, the pigmies around him, he said, in a deep low voice, which made the glasses ring and shudder,
“Who owns this bawble?”
“It belongs to a Colonel Lawton who has been staying here!” exclaimed Piron, quickly and hurriedly.
“What sort of man?” came again from those terrible lungs, without relaxing a muscle of his frame.
“A square-built, tallish fellow, of about feefty, with greenish-blue eyes, a black wig, and a glorious sapphire ring on the only finger of his left hand!” roared Burns and Stewart together.
Again came the jar of the earthquake to make the building, table, glasses, and all shake, as Paul Darcantel strode with his heels of adamant out of the sala and to the veranda; then a bound, which was heard in the room; and after five minutes’ stupid silence Banou appeared.
The buckra gentleman had torn rather than led his master’s barb from the stable, and scarcely waiting for a saddle, had thrown himself like an Indian across his back. There! his master might hear the clattering of the hoofs up the steep.
“The mon’s daft––clean daft, mon!” “Be me sowl, it’s the only pair of eyes I iver wouldn’t like to look at over me saw-handled friend, Joe Manton!” “He’s taken the box with him,” crackled Clinker.
But that was the last that Paddy Burns, or Stewart, or Clinker ever saw of man or box. Piron rose and listened to the sound of the receding hoofs from the veranda; and when he resumed his place his lips were sealed for the night. He saw, however, and the rest of them heard a good deal about the man and the box in time to come.