“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Ken said, beginning to pull Sandy away. “I doubt if he planned to take any pictures at all.”
CHAPTER IV
BOOBY TRAP
The cuckoo stuck his head out of the old wall clock to announce that the hour of seven had arrived. But nobody in the Allen house that evening bothered to listen to him.
Tiny Mom Allen, in a rustling new housecoat, appeared unaware of even the wild litter of crumpled paper wrappings and ribbons that surrounded her. In her lap lay the iron box, and her fingers were already busy fitting together the bits of velvet with which she was lining it.
Pop was smoke-screening the room with a handsome new meerschaum that Richard Holt had brought him from Europe, and happily leafing through a huge new world atlas that had so far provided an answer for every question he could contrive.
Bert, resplendent in a British tweed sports coat, swung his new golf clubs one by one, in reckless arcs that threatened every window and every piece of bric-a-brac in the house.
Richard Holt was trying out a new portable typewriter, a lightweight model especially designed for globe-trotters like himself. “It even spells better than my old one,” he had announced.
Ken, after an hour’s experimentation, was still finding new gadgets on the chronometer his father had bought for him in Switzerland. It was a stop watch and completely waterproof, and it told the date and the phases of the moon as well as the hour of the day.