Puzzle of the Silver Persian Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    “Yes?”
    “Loulu, I don’t know what’s got into you.”
    “Don’t you?” asked Loulu Hammond. She chose a string of Técla pearls.
    “Loulu, if you think that I and that round-heeled Fraser girl—I mean, if you want to know where I was the night that you all played peekaboo on deck, why don’t you ask me?”
    “I’m not interested,” she said softly.
    “Well,” he plunged on, “I was shooting dice in the doctor’s office, with Waite and the Purser and the mate!”
    “I saw Gerald headed for the bar with a dollar bill a moment ago,” she interrupted. “Perhaps I’d better go and prevent him from killing himself on candy.” She closed the stateroom door behind her, leaving her young husband to mangle his collar in sulphurous silence.
    In the next stateroom Miss Hildegarde Withers was sadly surveying the wrinkles in her one evening gown of plum-colored crêpe de Chine. Someone beat a furious tattoo on her door, and the school teacher, still weak from her days in the grip of the sea, started violently.
    “Wha-what is it?”
    The door opened, and the Honorable Emily poked her head in. Her face was a mask of worry.
    “Have you seen him?” she demanded. “I’ve looked everywhere. I thought he might have slipped through your door and gone to sleep under the berth…”
    The two women had a nodding acquaintance due to the fact that their staterooms opened off the same short corridor. Miss Withers regained her composure. She had not seen much of her fellow passengers, but she was quick to understand.
    “Why,” she inquired, “do you imagine that your nephew would slip through my door and go to sleep under my berth?”
    “Not my nephew!” said the Honorable Emily impatiently. “Tobermory, my Persian cat. Is he here?”
    Both women looked under the berth. There was no Tobermory. “When I came back to my stateroom just now I found the door ajar and Toby gone,” went on the worried woman. “There are many nephews, but only one Tobermory. He’s traveled all the way to the World’s Fair with me, and now that we’re almost back home…” She bustled out of the place, deaf to Miss Withers’ sympathy.
    The school teacher shook her head and resumed dressing. Except for her short stay on deck in the noon sunshine today, this evening was her first appearance on board. She looked forward to the dinner, having had nothing but sketchy and unappreciated lunches on the voyage, which resulted usually in increased qualms and in crumbs on her bedclothes. But she wished it were not a gala dinner. Such things bored Hildegarde Withers, bored her to tears.
    However, no one was to be bored at the captain’s dinner that Friday night. The passengers entered the dining saloon to a welcoming din which rose from the table next the wall where the unlucky Mrs. Snoaks attempted to cope with the younger generation. Gerald Hammond, his fattish face alight with joy, blew interminably upon a particularly horrible tin horn, while with one hand he spun a discordant clacker, and with the other wielded a pin against the balloons in the hands of his milder companions. Yet there was nothing importunate about the demon Gerald. He let one chubby girl of four blow her balloon until it reached the proportions of a watermelon before he stabbed it and sent her into convulsions of tears.
    At the doctor’s table the group gathered slowly. Dr. Waite, in his best dress uniform, was the first, as always. The Honorable Emily, in a ludicrous pink taffeta gown, came next, adjusting her eyeglass and loudly bewailing the passing of Tobermory.
    “He’ll turn up!” the doctor assured her.
    But the Honorable Emily was not so sure. “Toby has been trying to get off the ship ever since we sailed,” she announced. “If I were superstitious, as of course I’m not, though I did have a Scotch grandmother…”
    Loulu Hammond, still the Medici virgin, sank into the chair which was held for her by two eager table stewards. She surveyed the