Some weeks later, when a tall, dark-haired youngster, who had made the twenty-mile trip to Tilton on horseback, slid the tiny box with the bit of stone in it across the jeweler’s counter, the Mr. Brant, of Brant-Golden, undid the wrappings rather diffidently, emptied the contents into his hand with a careless flip—then indulged in a shout and a sort of Indian-dance leap that jounced his pince-nez clear off his dignified nose.
“Why—er—ah! An ancient Egyptian balas-ruby, cut octahedronal!” He balanced it on his palm, turned it so that the facets caught the light, now pale rose, now deepening to orange. “Don’t see one in a hundred years over here. Must be the stone Jan Bartlot was telling me about. Say, young man, I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it!”
Lee Renaud opened his mouth—shut it. He was too surprised to say anything.
“Eight hundred, then, if it’s real!” Mr. Brant mistook Lee’s silence of pure surprise as negation of his first offer. Then, as if afraid the strange ruby might melt in his hand, the jeweler dashed into his testing room.
The balas-ruby was real, a semi-precious stone. It was the peculiar ancient Egyptian glyph, or inscription sign, cut into its back that gave the stone its triple value.
His head still reeling with amazement, Lee rode back to the Cove with a check in his pocket—the first eight hundred dollar check he had ever seen in his life.
He had not dreamed that Captain Bartlot was making him such a gift. The money was a wonderful boon. Not all of it went into radio experimentation, however. A part of the sum re-roofed Great-uncle Gem’s leaking old mansion. Another part went to Lee’s mother back in the North Alabama city of Shelton. And there were still some funds left to invest in the costly experimental material young Renaud had longed for. He pushed on continually with his work of trying for distance, trying to amplify the weak sounds that traveled from far places on the mighty push of electrically generated waves that needed to be magnified and regenerated before the human ear could hear them.
Great-uncle Gem was wrapped up in Lee’s work. Every experiment held his keenest interest.
“Gadzooks!” snorted the old gentleman. “This radio business has added ten years to my life. I was just drying up and aging for the lack of interest in something.”
Night after night, old Gem sat before the radio Lee had built for him, keeping in touch with the world without moving out of his armchair.