What She Heard

NZ Truth, Issue 1152, 29 December 1927, Page 5

What She Heard

plain wooden framework, with wooden laths or slats underneath to support the mattress.

At something like four o'clock in the morning of the fourteenth, as previously mentioned, Mrs. Walschleger was awakened by a loud tramping sound overhead, mingled with fearful, piteous appeals for help and the sounds of a deathly struggle.

Getting: up out of bed. she ascended the crazy step -ladder which connected the rooms downstairs with those above. When she had gained the top, she hurried across to the door behind which, she felt, tragedy was taking its ugly form. She seized the door-handle, turned it — but the door was locked on the inside. She was impotent to prevent poor old Andrew Josey from being done to death by an unknown assailant.

She beat upon the door with her hands, entreating "someone" to open the door, but received no response save the horrible scuffle of human feet and the gasping of two men one, probably, unable to do more than cling to the frame of his assailant; the other apparently belaboring the old man with some weapon and attempting to free himself from the clutching fingers of him he intended to kill.

Meanwhile' Mrs. Walschleger beat in a frenzy upon the door, but without effect, iind at last she decided that the sole remaining hope was to' call the neighbors before the murderer accomplished his fell purpose. Fearing tragedy to be in the making, and sensing all the elements of a combat which could have only one meaning, she descended the ladder and — despite her age and its physical limitations, and without waiting to properly clothe herself — she walked as quickly as she could to where Edwards, an octogenarian neighbor, lived about a quarter of a mile away. Thirty minutes must have elapsed before Edwards and Mrs. Walschleger returned to the house. But not a sound now name from the house itself and the feeling of growing horror in the minds of the two old people became swiftly confirmed. Ed.ward.s hurried as best he could to the Brooklands homestead and when (