“The light is commencing to dawn,” announced her brother. “Sherlock Holmes, the famous author, who wrote Conan Doyle!”
A blank expression overspread the girl’s face, to be presently expunged by a slow smile.
“You are perfectly horrid!” she cried. “I’m going in to dapper up a bit for dinner—don’t wait.”
She danced through the living room and out into the patio toward her own rooms.
“Rattle, rattle, little brain; rattle, rattle round again,” her brother called after her. “Can you beat her?” he added, to the others.
“She can’t even be approximated,” laughed the colonel. “In all the world there is only one of her.”
“And she’s ours, bless her!” said the brother.
The colonel was glancing over the headlines of an afternoon paper that Eva had brought from the city.
“What’s new?” asked Custer.
“Same old rot,” replied his father. “Murders, divorces, kidnapers, bootleggers, and they haven’t even the originality to make them interesting by evolving new methods. Oh, hold on—this isn’t so bad! ‘Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stolen whisky landed on coast,’ he read. ‘Prohibition enforcement agents, together with special agents from the Treasury Department, are working on a unique theory that may reveal the whereabouts of the fortune in bonded whisky stolen from a government warehouse in New York a year ago. All that was known until recently was that the whisky was removed from the warehouse in trucks in broad daylight, compassing one of the boldest robberies ever committed in New York. Now, from a source which they refuse to divulge, the government sleuths have received information which leads them to believe that the liquid loot was loaded aboard a sailing vessel, and after a long trip around the Horn, is lying somewhere off the coast of southern California. That it is being lightered ashore in launches and transported to some hiding place in the mountains is one theory upon which the government is working. The whisky is eleven years old, was bottled in bond three years ago, just before the Eighteenth Amendment became a harrowing reality. It will go hard with the traffickers in this particular parcel of wet goods if they are apprehended, since the theft was directly from a government bonded warehouse, and all government officials concerned in the search are anxious to make an example of the guilty parties.’