His basket-ball skill, that had enabled him to make goals by the tosses that seemed impossible with antagonists all around him, he summoned to help in his crisis.
He had noticed in the second floor office window, the work basket some woman had put aside, full of samples she had brought in from the wrapping machines.
With a deft flexing of muscles and a quick eye-glance to make sure of distance, wind and other factors, as hands stretched to snatch his packet, Roger gave it the well-rehearsed basket-ward toss. He saw it, as baffled, disconcerted youths looked up, fly in a clean trajectory to lose momentum just above the basket. It seemed to hover in the air. It dropped into the basket. It stayed therein.
As if trying to recover a loss caused by such quick thinking, the ringleader wheeled and raced into the building, evidently to ask for the envelope thrown up by a boy at play.
Roger, as the rest hesitated, pushed through, and hurried for the lab. The others broke and fled.
“Tip,” Roger greeted the handy man as he entered, “I’m going to phone the people next door to hold an envelope full of stamps I threw into one of their baskets to save it from a gang of rowdies. Will you go and recover it, please? I have to deliver a more precious pack to my cousin.”
Tip brought back the stamps, quite safe.
And, also quite safe, their strong-box held a scintillating, vivid, thousand-faceted emerald, flashing its sun-fires of refracted light; as it had done when in the forehead of the Buddha it had symbolized, the all-seeing, all-ways-looking Eye of Om!
Chapter 9
THE VOICE IN THE SILENCE
“Had your sleep out?” Grover shook his cousin. “It’s almost eight and Aunt Ella has the bacon on.”