CHAPTER XI
CAPTURE OF DAVID THE JEW
“Now, girls, I want you to tell me what we’re going to do,” said Aunt Lucy, looking over her spectacles at Janet and Bessie, while her needle continued to ply in a jerky fashion. “Your father, Janet Moore, says he is waiting here in Mekran to get an audience with the high jumboree of this forsaken country about that nonsensical railroad; and your father, Bessie Warner, says we are staying here because we can’t get away. Now, I want to know what it all means.”
They were sitting in the cool and spacious upper chamber of a square white house which had been mysteriously placed at the disposal of the Americans the evening of their arrival in Mekran. It was comfortably furnished, with no less than a dozen native servants to wait upon them, their meals being bountiful and prepared with exact regularity. But no one about them had any knowledge of the English language, nor did any person in authority appear whom they might question by signs or otherwise. It almost seemed as if they had been established in this place by some fairy godmother who had then gone away and forgotten all about them. Their personal baggage had arrived with them, but there were no stables connected with the mansion and their entire caravan had disappeared.
“I think,” said Janet, answering their chaperon, “that we are all as much puzzled as you are, Aunt Lucy.”
“Puzzled!” exclaimed the old lady, indignantly; “why should we be puzzled? Aren’t we free American citizens, and haven’t we enough money to pay our way back to New York if we want to go?”
“It isn’t that, dear,” said Bessie, soothingly. “We have both the financial means and the inclination to leave Mekran. But Kasam seems to have wholly deserted us, and we don’t know what has become of our horses and dromedaries and tents and other things. Even the Afghans who were employed to guard us have disappeared.”
“I always had my suspicions of that Kasam,” declared the old lady with a toss of her head; “and he turned out exactly as I thought he would. He’s stolen the whole caravan, under our very noses, and he’d have stolen you, too, Janet Moore, if I hadn’t kept an eye on him. Stolen you and put you into some harem or other, and dressed you in pink silk bloomers and a yellow crepe veil, like those creatures we saw passing the house the other day in stretchers.”
Janet smiled, and Bessie burst into merry laughter.