When, at length, a two days’ rain had drenched the fevered city to coolness, Dick Colton drew a deep breath and said: “Now I’ll go to sleep and sleep for a week.”
But the drugs which for so many weary days had filled his entire attention declined now to be evicted from his thoughts. Disposing themselves in neatly labelled bottles, all of a size, they marched in monotonous and nauseating files before his closed eyes, each individual of the passing show introducing itself by some outrageous and incredible title utterly unknown to the art and practice of pharmacy. To think upon sheep jumping in undulatory procession over a stone wall, so the wisdom of our forebears tell us, is to invite slumber. To contemplate misnamed medicine bottles interminably hurdling the bridge of one’s nose, operates otherwise. From the family doctor Colton had carried his vision to Montauk Point with him.
Now, on this cool September midnight he rose, struck a light, and found himself facing two neat, little, beribboned perfume jars, representing the decorative ideas of little Mrs. Johnston, the hostess of Third House. It was too much. Resentment at this shabby practical joke of Fate rose in his soul. Seizing the pair of bottles, he hurled them mightily, one after the other, into outer darkness. The crash of the second upon the stone wall surrounding the little hotel was rather startlingly followed by an exclamation.
“I beg your pardon,” cried Colton, rather abashed. “Hope I didn’t hit you.”
“You did not—with the second missile,” said the voice dryly.
“It was very stupid of me. The fact is,” Colton continued, groping for an excuse, “I heard some kind of a noise outside and I thought it was a cat.”
“Where did you hear it?” interrupted the voice rather sharply. “Did it seem to be on the ground, or in mid-air?”
Colton’s frazzled nerves jumped all together, and in different directions. “Have I been sent to a private lunatic asylum?” he inquired of himself.
“Lest my manner of inquiry may seem strange to you,” continued the voice, “I may state that I am Professor Ravenden, formerly connected with the National Museum at Washington, D. C., and that your remark as to an unrecognised noise may have an important bearing upon certain phenomena in which I am scientifically interested.”
Dick Colton groaned in spirit. “Here I’ve told a polite and innocent lie to this mysterious pedant,” he said to himself, “and of course I get caught at it.” He leaned out of the window, when a broad, spreading flare of lightning from the south showed, on the lawn beneath him, the figure of a slight, compactly built man of fifty-odd, dressed with rigorous neatness in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, and carrying a broken lantern and a butterfly net. His thin, prim and tanned face was as indicative of character as his precise and meticulous mode of speech.