Magic or Not? by Edward Eager

Author:Edward Eager [Eager, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

terically. "Kidnapers!" she cried. "McTavish! Call the men! Call the Madam! Set the dogs on them!"

A man came running with a rake. He gave a whistle and more men appeared, with two great Baskerville-looking hounds. The man with the rake caught the side of the boat and pulled it against the dock.

"You needn't bother," said Lydia, with frigid dignity. "I can land perfectly well."

But nobody heard her because quite a crowd had collected by now and everyone was talking (or barking) at once without seeming to make any sense whatever. The word "kidnapers" was frequently heard.

A richly dressed lady came running from the house and joined the group. She was just about the prettiest lady any of the four children had ever seen. As Kip said afterwards, movie stars weren't in it with her. And the girls agreed that that was putting it mildly.

But right now her lovely face was distorted with emotion, and sounds of a peacock-like nature issued from her marble throat as she beheld the boat and its contents.

"What have you done with my baby?" she cried.

The four children regarded the muddy, damp, leafy, one-shoe-off-and-one-shoe-on heir and had to admit in their minds that they might have returned him in better condition.

"They stole him!" cried the woman called Fussy before anyone else could answer. "Dirty, common children they are! They stole him while my back was turned!"

This was too much for Lydia. Dirty she might be, but common never. "The idea!" she said. "We saved him from a den of iniquity, that's all!"

"And brought him back to his ancestral acres," added Kip.

"By magical means," put in Laura.

"Your back must have been turned a good long while," said James. "We were in that drugstore twenty minutes at least and never saw hide nor hair of you."

"Oh, the horrid fibbers!" cried the Fussy woman. "I may have passed the time of day with a friend, but I wasn't gone thirty seconds."

At this everyone began talking at once again. The dogs, which as James put it later seemed more basking than Baskerville, added to the confusion by wreathing around people's legs, barking happily.

A man came up to the group. He was as handsome as the lady was beautiful and as richly dressed. At first his face looked drawn and worried, but as he listened it relaxed, and when he spoke, Laura thought she saw a smile starting at the comers of his eyes.

"Just a minute," he said. "I suggest we could discuss this better on dry land and indoors. And with only the immediate parties concerned present."

The child Harold was handed ashore, not without a determined struggle on his part to remain in the boat, and borne off an unwilling prey to the ministrations of the Fussy woman, though Laura thought the Fussy woman looked as if she would rather have stayed. The crowd of men dispersed, taking the dogs (still barking) with them, but first tying the boat to the dock. James and Laura and Kip and Lydia followed the lady and gentleman into the house and through a plant-ridden hall to the living room.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.