Adventure stories; Automobile travel -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"I just will not have it!" reflected Aunt Agatha defiantly. "I
certainly will not. And I'd have been here yesterday if Mary hadn't
insisted upon my spending the night with her. Well do I remember how
Carl installed himself here last year with a Japanese servant and
invited that good-looking Wherry boy to come and scratch the furniture.
I don't suppose Carl invited him for that purpose," added Aunt Agatha
fairly, "but he did it, anyway. I can't for the life of me see why it
is that young Mr. Wherry is perpetually making scratches where his feet
rest. And I'm sure he left his footprint on the piano and thundered
through every roll on the player, for they're all out of place, and the
Williston caretaker heard him, though like as not it was Carl for that
matter. He's a Westfall, and he'd do it if he felt like it, dear
knows! Though I must say Carl detests bangy music."
Still rambling, Aunt Agatha, having fussed considerably over the
extraction of the key, halted in the hallway, appalled by the utter
loneliness of the darkened rooms. Beyond in the library a clock boomed
loudly through the quiet. Somewhere upstairs a dull, choking rasp
broke the soundless gloom. Aunt Agatha began to flutter nervously up
the stairway.
"It's Carl of course!" she murmured in a panic. "I just know it is.
I've never known him to even gurgle--much less snore in his sleep.
Like as not his windows are still boarded up and he's suffocating.
Only a Westfall would think of such a thing."
Puffing, Aunt Agatha halted at her nephew's door. That and the one
adjoining were locked. There was a den beyond. Making her way to a
door of which Hunch was ignorant. Aunt Agatha opened it and gasped.
Fully clothed, a man whose feet and hands were securely bound, lay
muttering upon the bed, his jargon incomprehensibly foreign.
"God deliver us from all Westfalls!" wept Aunt Agatha. "Carl's
kidnapped an immigrant!"
With unwavering determination in her round, aggrieved eyes, she swept
majestically to the bed and shook the sleeper severely.
"My good man," she demanded, "what do you mean by lying here on a lace
spread with your feet tied and your head scarred?"
Jokai of Vienna stirred and moaned. Aunt Agatha fumbled for her
smelling salts and administered a most heroic draft. Sputtering, Jokai
awoke from his restless stupor and stared.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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