CHAPTER V

FLORENCE GAZES INTO THE CRYSTAL

She was alone with the crystal—or was she? She could not be sure. Which is more disturbing, to be alone in a room where a half-darkness hangs over all, or to feel that there is someone else in the room?

Only yesterday she had been seized by a clutching hand and ushered out of that room. Where now was the owner of that hand? She had no way of knowing. One thing was sure, that had not been Madame Zaran’s hand. Those fingers had been long, slim and bony. Madame’s were not like that.

“But I must concentrate!” She shook herself vigorously. “I must gaze at the crystal.” As she focussed her attention on the crystal ball, she became conscious of two gleaming green eyes. These were small but piercing. They belonged to the bronze eagle that, hovering over the ball in this dim light, seemed to have suddenly come alive.

“Bah!” she exclaimed low, “what a bother sometimes an imagination may become! It must be controlled. I shall control it!” she ended stoutly.

In the end she did just that and with the most surprising results. Settling back easily in her chair, feeling the cool darkness of the place and heaving a sigh, she fixed her eyes dreamily upon the crystal ball. For a full five minutes there was no change. The ball remained simply a faintly gleaming circle of light. Then, ah, yes! a change came. The ball lost some of its distinctness. It turned gray and cloudy. Pin points of light like shooting stars appeared against the gray.

This continued for some time. Then, of a sudden, warmth came over the girl as she saw that gray turn to the faint blue of a morning sky. Leaning eagerly forward, she waited.

“Yes! Yes!” Her lips formed words she did not speak. The lower portion of that blue turned to gray and green. She was looking now at rocky ridges half overgrown with glorious trees—spruce, birch, and balsam. Beneath this were dark, cool waters. Above, fleecy clouds raced across a dark blue sky. On the water were no boats, in the forest no people. She was gloriously alone.

“Oh!” Florence breathed, stretching out her hands as if to gather it in.

Now there came another change. Fading away as in the movies, half the trees became bare and leafless. The rocks, the grass and all the barren branches were bedecked with snow. The surface of the water glistened. “Winter,” she whispered. Then, as a strange emotion swept over her, she cried, “Where? Where?”

As if frightened away by that sudden sound, the vision vanished and there she sat staring at a glass ball that was, as far as her eyes could tell her, just a hard glass ball and nothing more.

“How strange!” She pinched herself. “How very strange!”

But now a change was coming over the room itself. It was slowly filling with a dim light. She made out indistinctly a broad, black, dead fireplace, and above it on the mantel a great green dragon with fiery eyes.

Then with a sudden start she sat straight up. On the opposite wall, against the midnight blue velvet, a shadow had appeared, a very distinct shadow of a man. Or was it of a man? The nose was long and sharp. The chin curved out like the tip of a new moon. It was a terrifying profile.

“The—the Devil!” She did not say the words—only thought them. At the same time she seemed to hear her dead aunt say, “All this fortune telling business belongs to the Devil.”

“Well? How about it?”

Florence could not have been more startled by these words had they been shouted in her ear. They had been said quietly by Madame Zaran. She had returned. And in the meantime the sinister shadow had vanished from the wall.

“I—why, I—” With a sort of mental click the girl’s mind returned to her vision of water, forest, and sky. “I saw—”

“Wait! Do not tell me, not now.” Madame held up a hand. “Ah, you are one of those who are fortunate! It is given to very few that they shall see visions in the crystal ball on the very first time of their trying. You will go far. You must come again and again.”

Madame’s hands were in motion. Florence fancied she could see those claw-like fingers raking in piles of crisp new greenbacks.

“But I may be doing her a grave injustice,” she reproved herself.

“I shall return,” she found herself saying to Madame Zaran.

“Perhaps tomorrow?”

“Perhaps tomorrow.”

Scarcely knowing what she did, the girl let herself out of the room, caught the elevator, and next moment found herself in the bright sunlight, which, after all that midnight blue darkness and air of mystery, seemed very strange indeed.

“Now for Sandy and his glass box,” she thought to herself when her mind had become accustomed to the world of solid reality about her. Sandy was her youthful red-headed reporter. Sandy was her “ghost writer.” She supplied the material of her own column, “Looking Into the Future.” It was Sandy who pounded it all into form on his trusty typewriter. His “glass box,” as she laughingly called it, was an office on the sixth floor of the newspaper office building that looked down upon the city’s slow, easy-going river.

Sandy was not at all like the river. He was up-and-coming, was Sandy. The instant she came into his glass box he bounced out of his chair.

“Hope you’ve got something good today!” he cried. “Big Girl, we’ve got a real thing here. Knocking ’em cold, we are. Look at this!” He put his hand on a wire basket filled to overflowing with letters. “All for you, all fan mail. And the things they want to know!” He laughed a merry laugh. “Old maid wanting to know some charm for attracting a man; a mother wanting the name of a crystal-gazer who can see where her long lost boy is; men wanting a fortune teller that will give them tips on the stock market. Funny, sad, tragic little old world of ours! It wants to gaze into the future right enough. They—

“But say!” he broke off to exclaim. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

“Do I?” Florence’s eyes brightened. “Well, I’ve got a real story this time. I—

“Wait a minute!” Florence broke short off to go dashing out of the glass box, then started gliding on tiptoe after a girl who was hurrying down the long narrow corridor.

“It doesn’t seem possible,” she whispered to herself. “But it’s true. That’s the girl I saw in that room of midnight blue velvet, the one who saw moving figures in the crystal ball. And here she is hurrying along toward Frances Ward’s desk. I’ll get her story. I surely will. I _must_!” she murmured low as she hurried on.

She was mistaken in part at least. There are some people whose stories are not to be told at a single sitting. The girl hurrying on before her was one of these.

Frances Ward it had been who found Florence her latest opportunity for work, mystery and adventure. As Florence thought of all this now, a great wave of affection for the gray-haired woman swept over her.

Frances Ward was old, perhaps past seventy. Her hair was frizzy, her dress plain and at times almost uncouth. Her desk was always covered with a littered mess of letters, paper files, scribbled notes and pictures. “A poor old woman,” you might say. Ah, no! Frances Ward was rich—not in dollars perhaps; still she _was_ not altogether poor at that—she was rich in friends. For Frances Ward was, as someone had named her, “Everybody’s Grandmother.” She called herself, at the head of one column, “Friend of the People.” This, in a great busy sometimes selfish, sometimes wicked city, was Frances Ward at her best, the Friend.

Because of this, the mysterious young girl whom Florence had only the day before seen gazing into the crystal ball and apparently seeing most mysterious pictures of her early life, was now calling upon Frances Ward for advice.

As Florence reached the door of Mrs. Ward’s office, she heard the mysterious girl say, “I—I am June Travis.”

“Oh!” There was a note of welcome in the aged woman’s voice. “Won’t you have a chair? And what can I do for you?”

Frances Ward did not so much as look up as Florence, after slipping by her, seated herself before a narrow table in the corner of her office and began scribbling rapidly. This was not Florence’s accustomed place. But Frances Ward was old. She understood many things.

“Well, you see—” the strange girl’s fingers locked and unlocked nervously. “I—I read your column al—almost every day. It—it has interested me, the way you—you help people. I—I thought you might be able to help me.”

“Yes.” Frances Ward bestowed upon her a warm, sincere smile. “I might be able to help you. Will you please tell me how? You see—” she smiled broadly. “I am neither a mind reader nor a fortune teller, so—”

“No!” The girl shuddered. “No, of course you’re not. But just think! It is partly that, about fortune tellers, I wanted to ask you. Do you believe in them, crystal-gazers and all that?”

“No—” Frances Ward appeared to weigh her words. “N-no, I’m afraid I don’t, at least not very much. Of course, some of them are keen students of human nature. If they can read your face, understand your actions, they may be able to help you to understand yourself so as to meet with greater success. But—”

“Do you believe they could make you see people in the crystal ball—people that you have not seen for years and years?” The girl leaned forward eagerly.

“I should say that would be quite unusual.” Frances Ward smiled. “I should like to witness such a feat. I should indeed.”

“Perhaps you can!” June Travis exclaimed. “I saw it only last evening, saw it with my own eyes. I saw my father, whom I have not seen for ten years—saw him distinctly in the crystal ball!”

“You seem quite young.” Frances Ward spoke slowly. “You must have been a very small child when your father—” she hesitated. “Did he die?”

“No! Oh, no!” the girl exclaimed. “He—he just went away. But he didn’t desert me. He left money, plenty of money, for my care. That—that’s why I am so anxious to find him now. It’s the money. There is quite a lot of it, and I shall soon be sixteen. And then—then I shall have to manage the money all by myself. And that—that frightens me.”

“Money. Plenty of money,” Florence was repeating to herself in the corner. Strangely enough, at that moment she seemed to see the shining crystal ball. About the ball, with wings that carried them round and round in ever widening circles, were bank notes. Ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred dollar bills, they circled round and round. And, swinging wildly, clawing at them frantically but never catching one, was a hand, the Tiger Woman’s hand, the hand of Madame Zaran, the crystal-gazer.