“And how did you come to Chicago?” She addressed the chest. “You have no address on you. No, not one! I scoured you clean. You have only a dragon on your cover. Did some one steal all those priceless things? And were they afraid at last to claim them in America?”
Once again she recalled the circumstances under which she had bought the box. Both she and Florence had long haunted auction houses. Once she had bought an ancient gypsy god.
“And did that cause me trouble!” she exclaimed in a whisper. “Oo, la, la! But it was great fun, and very mysterious, too.
“And now there is this box.” She kicked the thing with her toe. “It was lost in the express with no label on it, the auctioneer said.
“I made a bid. A Chinaman raised me. I bid again. Once more he raised. There was murder in his eye. And then—” She paused for breath. “Then some officers in plain clothes came and carried him away.
“Poor fellow! It is hard when you wish very much to buy a package so mysterious, and you cannot.
“But then,” she added after a moment, “perhaps it was to him not so mysterious after all. Possibly he knew what was in the chest.
“Ah, well, we will keep an eye out for that one with the long ears. And if we find him? What then?”
Unable to answer this question, she crept into her bed and fell asleep.
Next day she spent three hours alternately laughing and crying over Sandburg’s life of Lincoln called The Prairie Years.