NCERT Book Class 10 English (Foot Prints Without feet) Chapter 3 The Midnight Visitor

The Midnight Visitor
3
Ausable, a secret agent, is expecting to get
a very important report. Another secret agent,
Max, threatens him with a pistol, demanding
the report. Does Ausable outwit him?

READ AND FIND OUT
• How is Ausable different from other secret agents?
• Who is Fowler and what is his first authentic thrill
of the day?

AUSABLE did not fit any description of a secret agent Fowler had ever
read. Following him down the musty corridor of the gloomy French
hotel where Ausable had a room, Fowler felt let down. It was a
small room, on the sixth and top floor, and scarcely a setting for a
romantic adventure.
Ausable was, for one thing, fat. Very fat. And then there was his
accent. Though he spoke French and German passably, he had never
altogether lost the American accent he had brought to Paris from Boston
twenty years ago.
“You are disappointed,” Ausable said wheezily over his shoulder.
“You were told that I was a secret agent, a spy, dealing in espionage
and danger. You wished to meet me because you are a writer, young
and romantic. You envisioned mysterious figures in the night, the crack
of pistols, drugs in the wine.”
“Instead, you have spent a dull evening in a French music hall
with a sloppy fat man who, instead of having messages slipped into
his hand by dark-eyed beauties, gets only a prosaic telephone call
making an appointment in his room. You have been bored!” The fat
man chuckled to himself as he unlocked the door of his room and
stood aside to let his frustrated guest enter.
“You are disillusioned,” Ausable told him. “But take cheer, my young
friend. Presently you will see a paper, a quite important paper for