The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Medici Boots, by Pearl Norton Swet

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Title: The Medici Boots

Author: Pearl Norton Swet

Release Date: June 1, 2010 [EBook #32639]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Weird Tales August-September 1936.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

The Medici Boots

By PEARL NORTON SWET

_The amethyst-covered boots had been worn by an evil wanton
in medieval Florence--but what malefic power did they carry
over into our own time?_

* * * * *

For fifty years they lay under glass in the Dickerson museum and they
were labeled "The Medici Boots." They were fashioned of creamy
leather, pliable as a young girl's hands. They were threaded with
silver, appliqued with sapphire silks and scarlet, and set on the tip
of each was a pale and lovely amethyst. Such were the Medici boots.

Old Silas Dickerson, globe-trotter and collector, had brought the
boots from a dusty shop in Florence when he was a young man filled
with the lust for travel and adventure. The years passed and Silas
Dickerson was an old man, his hair white, his eyes dim, his veined
hands trembling with the ague that precedes death.

When he was ninety and the years of his wanderings over, Silas
Dickerson died one morning as he sat in a high-backed Venetian chair
in his private museum. The Fourteenth Century gold-leaf paintings, the
Japanese processional banners, the stolen bones of a Normandy
saint--all the beloved trophies of his travels must have watched the
dead man impassively for hours before his housekeeper found him.

The old man sat with his head thrown back against the faded tapestry
of the Venetian chair, his eyes closed, his bony arms extended along
the beautifully carved arms of the chair, and