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Updated: June 28, 2025
Their shouts could be plainly heard by the besieged; their rifles cracked sarcastic greetings from the forest; bullets whistled gay accompaniments to the ceaseless song: "Allah is great! Allah is good!" No man in the despised house of Taswell Skaggs slept that night. The guard was doubled at all points open to attack.
"I think I'll listen to it, Jackie," replied Mr. Skaggs, quite soberly. As the outcome of this midnight proposition, Taswell Skaggs and John Wyckholme arrived, two months later, at the tiny island of Japat, somewhere south of the Arabian Sea, there to remain until their dying days and there to accumulate the wealth which gave the first named a chance to make an extraordinary will.
While all this was being threshed out by the persons most vitally interested in the affairs of Taswell Skaggs and John Wyckholme, events of a most unusual character were happening to one who not only had no interest in the aforesaid heritage, but no knowledge whatever of its existence.
To what uses Taswell Skaggs and John Wyckholme could have put this vast, though splendid waste, the imagination cannot grasp. Apartments fit for a king abounded; suites which took one back to the luxuries of Marie Antoinette were common; banquet halls, ball rooms, reception halls, a chapel, and even a crypt were to be found if one undertook a voyage of discovery.
She died six months later. But, before doing so, she made a will in which she left the entire estate to her daughter, effectually depriving the absent husband of any chance to reclaim his own. Taswell Skaggs was in Shanghai when he heard the news. It was on a Friday. His informant was that erstwhile friend, Jack Wyckholme.
Two days and nights crept slowly into the past, and now the white people of the château had come to the eve of their last day's stay on the island of Japat: the probationary period would expire with the sun on the following day, the anniversary of the death of Taswell Skaggs.
They now had nothing in common with Taswell Skaggs; Skaggs is not a pretty name. Mr. Britt afterward spent three weeks of incessant travel on the continent and an additional seven days at sea. In Baden-Baden he happened upon Lord and Lady Deppingham. It will be recalled that in Japat they had always professed an unholy aversion for Mr. Britt.
I could do no more than deliver him into the hands of his enemies. Would that be fair?" "But he is a thief!" "No more so than Taswell Skaggs and John Wyckholme, who unquestionably cheated the natives out of the very treasure we have seen carried away." "Admitting all that, Mr. Chase, you still forget that he has stolen property which now belongs quite as much to Lady Deppingham and Mr.
Inasmuch as he was more than eighty years old at the time, it would seem to have been a most reprehensible miscalculation on the part of the Grim Reaper to have gone to so much trouble. But that is neither here nor there. Taswell Skaggs was dead and once more remembered.
The death of Taswell Skaggs was stimulating, to say the least, inapplicable though the expression may seem. He attained the end of a hale old age by tumbling aimlessly into the mouth of a crater on the island of Japat, somewhere in the mysterious South Seas.
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