“I satisfied myself that I had not been; however, I had arranged to have you take him, in return, a small moving-picture hand-camera that he had confided to be his heart’s desire. In exchange, he will surrender to you a large envelope which will contain, disguised in heavy documentary-looking papers, the art-glass.” Grover smiled amusedly.
“And if you have any matches or duplicates in your stamp collection, you might get intimate enough to trade for some of his foreign over-stock of stamps.”
“I’ll take a batch of duplicates,” agreed Roger.
His taxi, depositing him at the address given by Dr. Ryder, waited.
The Smith chap, he found, was intensely interested in collecting, and had a fine collection of stamps; in fact, he spent most of his small earnings as a dishwasher, on philatelic prizes.
He and Roger grew intimate and compared notes, exchanged stamps, and chatted about the Tibetan expedition Smith had joined as a young man, several years ago, he claimed.
He told about a Devil Dance, a religious rite, he had seen, wherein all the devils and evil spirits were represented by disguised and horrible-looking men, who chased a wildly terrified human soul, as a boy represented himself to be in the pantomimic dance. Exhausted, unable to escape, at last, he was supposed to be destroyed.
“It is supposed to show how we are chased by temptations and all,” Toby Smith explained; and he told of the Tibetan huts and other nomadic possessions of the ever-moving grazers, and other interesting sights. Then he gave Roger the heavy, sealed packet—Roger felt the lump supposed to be the gem. Putting it in his coat with his stamp envelope, Roger took his leave a little regretfully. Smith had been an interesting person to talk with.
However, he concluded, he would, as he had promised, help with the new and mystifying hobby of taking “movies.”
The taxi—he had forgotten about it—was gone.