Read Ebook: Hour of Enchantment A Mystery Story for Girls by Snell Roy J Roy Judson

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Ebook has 1443 lines and 43517 words, and 29 pages

"Glass, I suppose." Absent-mindedly Florence drew one of the white spots that glistened in the light across the crystal of her watch. Then she sat up quite abruptly.

"Dumb! Now I've scratched my crystal and it will break. Jeanne! Don't ask me to buy another chest. No need to buy trouble. That, at least, you may get free."

"But see!" Jeanne snatched the curious dagger from her. "If it indeed scratches glass, then truly it is a diamond. And see! There are one, two, three, four--oh, how is one to count them? There are many jewels, and they go round and round the handle."

"Diamonds?"

"Yes. Surely! They are diamonds. And the red ones are rubies. Half belong to you and half to me. For see, we bought the box together, the box with the dragon on the cover.

"Truly!" she cried, dancing across the sand, waving the dagger over her head. "Truly this is for me the hour of enchantment!

"Listen!" The little French girl's voice changed abruptly. She held up a hand.

"The enchanted hour!" Her tone was solemn.

Once again she swung her hands high. Next instant a sharp cry escaped her lips. The three-bladed knife with all its jewels was gone. Some one half concealed in the darkness at her back had snatched it from her.

It was the stout Florence who sprang to her feet and, but for Jeanne, would have dashed away in mad pursuit.

But Jeanne prevented this. She leaped forward just in time to seize her friend about the waist.

"No! No! My friend, you must not! You will be killed! He has a knife!" she exclaimed in a hoarse whisper. "He has that dagger with three blades! You--you have nothing!"

"I have my two hands!" Florence continued to struggle. "He is small, only a little Chinaman. I--I saw him. I'd break his back if he did not give me the knife!"

"But think!" Jeanne loosed her hold as Florence ceased to struggle. "It is only a dagger, a dagger I found in a box, and we paid so little for that box."

"Only a dagger with a hilt encrusted with jewels!" Florence dropped to her place beside the dying fire.

"Rich for a moment," she sighed, "then poor forever.

"But I'll know that man if I ever see him again," she added hopefully. "He had the longest ears of any person I ever saw. He wore an orange-colored cap, and there was a bit of bright glass--oval-shaped it was--shining from his forehead. And those ears!" she exclaimed. "Who could mistake them?"

"We will find him. Truly we must!" Jeanne spoke with confidence. "This is the enchanted hour. My enchanted hour!"

And now, twenty-four hours later, shooting down, down, down, a hundred, two, three, four hundred feet, Florence was in pursuit of that very long-eared Chinaman. From his belt had shone the jeweled hilt of the three-bladed knife.

"It's ours!" she muttered low to herself. "Jeanne's and mine. I'll get him yet!"

But would she?

As she boarded the down-going car, the girl's mind flashed through the incidents leading up to this strange chase, and then came bang up against a problem with no certain answer. Should she leave the car at the two hundred foot level, the spot from which the cars of the Sky Ride went flashing away into the night, or should she ride to the ground level?

Following instinct, when she reached the Sky Ride level she darted from the car. At once she caught her breath. There was the long-eared Chinaman.

The instant she saw him he was on the move. There was no mistaking the look in her eyes. She meant to have that three-bladed knife. He made no mistake about that. Imitating a monkey, a spider and a snake all in one, he managed by curious contortions to make his way past the waiting rocket-car and out upon the cables that carried the cars on their exciting journey.

At once the place was in a panic.

"A car from the other side will come and crush him! He will fall! He'll be electrocuted!" came from the crowd as men fought for a spot where they might view the impending catastrophe.

But no catastrophe occurred--at least not at once. Standing with the air of a tight rope walker, which indeed this long-eared one must have been, he unfolded his large yellow silk umbrella; then, apparently all unconscious of the shouting throng, he turned and walked the cables as another person might walk the street.

"If another car comes--" Florence came near to wishing she had stuck to her resolve and made it a night of pure pleasure.

No car came from the other side. A quick-witted guard had stopped it in the nick of time, by a phone call.

So the little yellow man in a long yellow jacket with a three-bladed knife in his belt balanced himself with his yellow umbrella and proceeded blithely on his way while an ever increasing sea of faces gazed upward.

Great searchlights began playing upon him. Like fingers they pointed him out. Ten thousand, twenty, fifty, perhaps seventy thousand pairs of eyes were fixed upon him.

Not one of all these people, save Florence, knew what it was all about. "Is this one more feature, a grand surprise in this the grandest of all shows?" This is what the thousands were asking.

Other questions occupied Florence's mind. What did the man mean to do? Did he know himself? How was it all to end?

The suspense continued. It is well that it did. The first few hundred feet of this curious person's sky walk was over the solid earth. Beneath him was the gasping multitude. Jammed together in one solid mass, not one of them could have moved had this sky walker come hurtling down from those dizzy heights.

He did not fall. Instead, with all the grace of a fine lady out for a promenade, he moved along the cables that, being all but invisible in the night, made him seem to walk on air.

"If he were only over water!" Florence spoke without meaning to do so. "Then there would be some chance."

"At two hundred feet?" some one doubted.

All the same, Florence waited and hoped. "Now he's a third of the way to the place above the lagoon," she assured herself. "Now half--now two-thirds.

"Now!"

She caught her breath. Something was happening. The man was seen to teeter.

"If he falls--" She set her lips tight. "If he does, if he falls and kills some one, I shall never forgive myself. A knife!" She all but said it aloud. "A knife with a diamond-studded hilt--what's that to a human life?"

But the man had regained his poise. He was tripping along as before.

"He--he's almost there," she sighed, as a low prayer escaped her lips. "He--he must be over the water. Thank--thank God!"

Did he plan it, or was it the work of Fate? Perhaps no one will ever know. Be that as it may, just as he reached a spot above the center of the lagoon the man was seen once more to waver.

This time he did not regain his poise, but with a movement that seemed half a leap, half a fall, launched himself into mid-air.

Florence closed her eyes. She opened them at once to find the Chinaman still going down.

"How--how remarkable!" she breathed.

"It's the umbrella," some one at her side volunteered. "It's made for that purpose, like a parachute."

She did not give the information that, as far as she could tell, the man had entertained no notion of making that unusual journey.

She continued to watch while the Chinaman plunged downward. With his fall checked by the umbrella, he had, she believed, a fair chance for a safe landing.

"And then?" Some spirit inside her appeared to ask the question. "Why, then," she answered the spirit, "I'll be after him!"

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