.

"Who _can_ that be? I wonder if Taddy's there to guard the house! If
anything should happen to them bonds!"

Out of breath as she was, she quickened her pace, and trudged on,
flushed, perspiring, panting, until she reached the house.

"Thaddeus!" she called.

No Taddy answered. She went in. The house was deserted. And lo! the
carpet torn up, and the bonds abstracted!

Mr. Ducklow never would have made such work, removing the bonds. Then
somebody else must have taken them, she reasoned.

"The man in the chaise!" she exclaimed, or rather made an effort to
exclaim, succeeding only in bringing forth a hoarse, gasping sound. Fear
dried up articulation. _Vox faucibus hoesit._

And Taddy? He had disappeared; been murdered, perhaps,--or gagged and
carried away by the man in the chaise.

Mrs. Ducklow flew hither and thither, (to use a favorite phrase of her
own,) "like a hen with her head cut off"; then rushed out of the house,
and up the street, screaming after the chaise,--

"Murder! murder! Stop thief! stop thief!"

She waved her hands aloft in the air frantically. If she had trudged
before, now she trotted, now she cantered; but if the cantering of the
old mare was fitly likened to that of a cow, to what thing, to what
manner of motion under the sun, shall we liken the cantering of Mrs.
Ducklow? It was original; it was unique; it was prodigious. Now, with
her frantically waving hands, and all her undulating and flapping
skirts, she seemed a species of huge, unwieldy bird attempting to fly.
Then she sank down into a heavy, dragging walk,--breath and strength all
gone,--no voice left even to scream murder. Then the awful realization
of the loss of the bonds once more rushing over her, she started up
again. "Half running, half flying, what progress she made!" Then
Atkins's dog saw her, and, naturally mistaking her for a prodigy, came
out at her, bristling up and bounding and barking terrifically.

"Come here!" cried Atkins, following the dog. "What's the matter? What's
to pay, Mrs. Ducklow?"

Attempting to speak, the good woman could only pant and wheeze.

"Robbed!" she at last managed to whisper, amid the yelpings of the cur
that refused to be silenced.

"Robbed? How? Who?"

"The chaise. Ketch it."

Her gestures expressed more than her words; and Atkins's horse and
wagon, with which he had been drawing out brush, being in the yard near
by, he ran to them, leaped to the seat, drove into the road, took Mrs