"Did you think," went on Grattan, "that you could, single-handed, take the ruby from me by force?"
Matt was silent.
"Or did you think you could talk me out of it?"
"I hadn't much of an idea what I could do," said Matt. "It was just barely possible you'd be generous enough, when you learned the circumstances, to give or sell the Eye of Buddha to Tsan Ti."
Grattan curbed the old sailor's fresh inclination to laugh with a quick look.
"What are the circumstances?" he queried.
"Tsan Ti has received the yellow cord. If he does not recover the idol's eye in two weeks, he must destroy himself."
"Young man," said Grattan, "I have been two years planning to get my clutches on the Eye of Buddha. I have haunted Canton, feasted my eyes upon that priceless splash of red in the forehead of the idol in the Honam Joss House until the itch to possess it fairly drove me mad. But the temple was too well guarded, the priests too many, and the walls too high. It was only when I learned of the balls of Ptah and their powers that the feat looked at all feasible. In order to see these balls of Ptah for myself, I made the long journey from Hongkong to the ruins of Karnak on the Nile."
Taking the buckthorn cane under his arm, Grattan stepped across the room to a table near the bench where Bunce was sitting. On the table rested a small box with a strap handle. Grattan opened the lid of the box, and from a nest of cotton picked one of the shimmering glass balls. He handled the ball gently, and a glow came into his eyes as he held it up.
"A quantity of these balls," he proceeded, "were unearthed a year ago from among the ruins of Karnak. They are of Egyptian glass, thousands of years old, and each of the big beads has blown into its surface the praenomen of Hatasu, a queen who is conjectured to have lived more than fourteen hundred years before our era. A party of workmen discovered the balls, and chanced to break one of them." Grattan paused, turning the shimmering sphere around and around in his hand. "All the workmen," he went on, "were thrown into an unconscious condition, and it was in this manner that the peculiar properties of the balls were discovered. Why they are called the balls of Ptah I don't know, and what they contain that has such a peculiar effect on living beings, no one has ever been able to discover. But I heard of them, stole a dozen, and tried one on the museum guards in making my escape. It answered the purpose," he went on dryly. "If it had not, I would have been caught."