IN AND OUT

BY EDGAR FRANKLIN

Frontispiece by PAUL STAHR

New York
W. J. Watt & Company
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1917, by
W. J. WATT & COMPANY

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

The girl weighed, perhaps, one hundred and twenty pounds, and handling that amount of weight was a mere joke to Wilkins

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER I. The Great Unrecognized]
[CHAPTER II. Theory's Victim]
[CHAPTER III. Opportunity]
[CHAPTER IV. The Reluctant One]
[CHAPTER V. The Wee Sma' Hours]
[CHAPTER VI. Johnson Boller Proposes]
[CHAPTER VII. The Butterfly]
[CHAPTER VIII. Scorned]
[CHAPTER IX. Crime?]
[CHAPTER X. The Web]
[CHAPTER XI. The Other Lady]
[CHAPTER XII. The Crash]
[CHAPTER XIII. In the Box]
[CHAPTER XIV. Concerning Three Groups]
[CHAPTER XV. Thick and Fast]
[CHAPTER XVI. The Lie]

IN AND OUT

CHAPTER I

The Great Unrecognized

Up in the ring, the long-nosed person who had been announced as Kid Horrigan was having things much his own way with the smaller person billed as the Bronx Tornado.

It was the wont of Kid Horrigan to step forward lightly, to rap the Tornado smartly on the bridge of the nose, and thereafter to step back as lightly and wait until the few wild blows had fanned the air and the Tornado had returned to his meaningless and somewhat bewildered crouch.

Thereupon, in almost preoccupied fashion, the Kid stepped forward once more—and when he had done it again and again the performance began to grow monotonous and, down in Box B at the ringside, Johnson Boller yawned aloud.

The yawn finished, he leaned over wearily and addressed Anthony Fry.

"If that little wheeze had the pep of a dead mosquito," said Johnson Boller disgustedly, "he'd take that big stiff when his hands are up like that and slip him an uppercut that would freeze him solid!"

Anthony Fry's intellectual features relaxed in a faint smile.

"He's had several chances, hasn't he?" he mused.

"Several? He's had fifty! He gets three a minute and—well, look at that!"

"Yes, he missed another opportunity then, didn't he?" said Anthony. "Curious!"

Johnson Boller's cigar rolled to the other side of his mouth and he hunched down farther in his chair.

"And nine more rounds of it to go!" he sighed.

Anthony Fry merely smiled more pensively and nodded, removing his nose-glasses and tapping his teeth reflectively—and, among other things, causing the red-faced, partially alcoholized trio behind them in Box B to wonder what he was doing at a prize fight anyway.

As externals go, there was some ground for the wonder. Anthony Fry at forty-five was very tall, very lean in his aristocratic way, and very, very dignified, from the crown of his high-held head to the tips of his toes. In dress he was utterly beyond criticism; in feature he was thin, austere, and impressive. At first glance one might have fancied him a world-famous surgeon or the inscrutable head of the Steel Trust, but the fact of the matter was that Anthony, these fifteen years gone, had inherited Fry's Imperial Liniment, with all that that implied.

It implied a good deal in the way of income, yet even among his friends Anthony did not care to have the liniment phase of his quietly elegant existence dwelt upon too insistently. Not that he regarded the business—run by a perfect manager and rarely visited—as a secret shame exactly, but unquestionably Anthony would have preferred that his late father and his two dead uncles, when starting their original pursuit of wealth, had corraled the world's diamond supply or purchased Manhattan Island at a bargain.

Just now, perhaps, Anthony's more striking features were emphasized by the nearness of Johnson Boller, one of his few really intimate friends.

Johnson Boller's age was just about the same, but there the similarity between them stopped short.

Johnson Boller was plump, one might almost say coarse. Where Anthony walked with slow dignity, Johnson swaggered. Where Anthony spoke in a measured undertone and smiled frigidly, Johnson thumped out the words and laughed with a bark. About most things except food he was inclined to be gloomy and pessimistic, and this evening the gloom within was even thicker than usual, because Johnson Boller's wife had left him.

She was a new wife and his first—a beautiful and spirited wife, all of fifteen years younger than Johnson Boller. She was in love with him and he with her, tremendously—and now she was gone. After only six months of unalloyed happiness in the five-thousand-dollar apartment on Riverside Drive, Mrs. Johnson Boller had left for her annual visit of one month to the sister whose accursed husband owned great chunks of Montreal, Quebec, and insisted on living on one of them.

One vast hour Johnson Boller had roamed the vacuum that had been their ideal home; then he had packed his grip and gone to stay with Anthony Fry, in that utter ultimate of everything impeccable and expensive in the way of bachelor apartments, the Hotel Lasande—and even the sight of the fight tickets, when Anthony's invaluable Wilkins had returned with them, had failed to bring more than a flitting smile to Johnson Boller.

Now they were watching the second preliminary bout, and could he but have traded one thousand of these bouts for a single hour with his beloved Beatrice, Johnson Boller would have gladly.

"In the main," said Anthony Fry, "that absurd little chap up there typifies my whole conception of opportunity."

"Huh?" Johnson Boller said.

"The chance for that fatal uppercut is there—it was there a minute ago and it will be there a minute hence, and probably two minutes hence. Our Tornado hasn't seen it yet; he may go to the end of the ten rounds and never see it, and yet, unless this Horrigan chap changes his tactics, it will be repeated again and again. Would he see it if the bout ran twenty rounds?"

"How the dickens should I know?" Johnson Boller muttered.

"I'd be quite willing to wager," Anthony smiled thoughtfully, "that he would see it!"

Johnson Boller surveyed his friend narrowly. It was obvious that Anthony's attention had strayed from the alleged battle—and small wonder! It was equally obvious that Anthony's mind was wandering off into the abstract; and not infrequently these little journeys—provided they went not too far—were quite entertaining.

Johnson Boller, therefore, with an impulse he was to regret bitterly in the very near future, gave a prod to discussion by smiling in his own unhappy way and saying:

"What's the idea, Anthony? You're wrong, but—what is it?"

"My idea," said the proprietor of Fry's Imperial Liniment slowly, "is merely this, Johnson: that the whole proposition of the man who is a dire failure, the man who is a tremendous success, is vastly exaggerated."

"Meaning?"

"That failure does not of necessity imply incapacity or ineptitude—or success any tremendous capability, in many cases, for that matter. Taken by and large, we are all made of much the same stuff, you know. The trouble lies in the failure of the plain, average, reasonably stupid citizen to recognize opportunity's one solitary knock!" Anthony smiled, growing himself more interested by the second. "Now, if opportunity were but decent enough to knock twice, at least double the number of striving humans would recognize her nearness and grasp her. If she could bring herself to knock three times, say, our successes would be tripled. If——"

"And if she knocked a thousand times in succession, everybody'd be a millionaire," Johnson Boller suggested.

"Something like that," smiled Anthony. "The chap who does know opportunity, recognizes her mainly by accident, I honestly believe. Now, if we could but take each man and place opportunity before him and hold her there until he fully understood that she was present, the word failure would be omitted from the dictionaries a generation hence."

Anthony Fry winked rapidly, which in itself was rather a bad sign because it indicated that the theorizing portion of his cultured brain was growing quite rapt. At another time, very likely, Johnson Boller would have heeded the warning and turned Anthony's attention gently back to the fight; but to-night Boller sought refuge from the haunting loneliness that Beatrice had left behind.

"I don't agree with you!" he said flatly.

"Eh?"

"Nix!" said Johnson Boller. "Any guy who can come face to face with a regular honest-to-goodness opportunity, Anthony, and not know her inside of one second, could have her tied to his right leg for two hundred years and never know she was there."

"You really believe that?"

"Oh, I know it!" said Johnson Boller. "I have several millions of years of human experience to prove that I'm right."

Anthony leaned closer, causing the largest of the red-faced trio behind to growl senselessly as he was forced to shift for a view of the ring.

"Let us assume, Johnson, the individual A," said Anthony. "A wished to become a lawyer; he had his chance and missed it. We will assume him to be peculiarly stupid; we will say that he had opportunity for the second time—and again failed to grasp her. Can you think that, deliberately led up to his third opportunity of becoming a lawyer, A will turn his back for the third time?"

"Certainly," said Johnson Boller, without thought and solely because Anthony's precise driveling interested him a little more than the affair of the ring.

"Pah!" Mr. Fry said angrily.

Just here Mr. Horrigan slipped while making his —nth jab at the Tornado's nose—slipped and fell upon the Tornado's fist and thereafter reeled about for a few seconds. Johnson Boller emitted his first real laugh of the evening; Anthony Fry, who had not seen the incident, failed even to smile.

"It would be interesting," he said crisply, "to select a subject, Johnson, and try the experiment."

"What experiment?"

"That of learning just how many times opportunity must be presented to the average individual to secure full recognition of her presence and her beauties."

"Wouldn't it?" mused Johnson Boller absently.

"I mean, to reach haphazard into the six millions that go to make up New York, to pick just one individual and segregate him, and then show him—opportunity! To take him aside, where there is nothing else to distract him, and thrust opportunity in his very face—the opportunity, whatever it might be, that he has always desired. It seems to me, Johnson, that watching that experiment might be distinctly worth while!"

"Aha!" yawned Johnson Boller.

"So, therefore," Anthony said placidly, "we will find our subject and make the experiment."

This time, and with a considerable jar, Johnson Boller awoke to the fact that danger was at his elbow!

He sat bolt upright and stared at Anthony Fry, and in the queerest way his flesh crawled for a moment and his hands turned cold, for he knew that expression of Anthony's all too well. Intent, wholly absorbed, that expression indicated that, however ridiculous the proposition might be, its fangs had fastened in Anthony's very soul!

This was the expression which recalled—oh, so clearly—the dread time when Anthony Fry had become obsessed with the idea that crime is a matter of diet and external impression, when he had secured the two yeggmen and established them where he could watch and feed them; when, eventually, he had been forced to pay for their crowning crime or go to jail as an accomplice!

This was the expression that brought back the period in which Anthony had cherished the theory that music's true germ lay in the negro race, properly guided and separated from all outside influences and—well, this was the expression, fast enough, and Boller's throat tightened. He had not even found words of protest when Anthony pursued:

"And upon my soul! See how the thing has been prearranged for us!"

"What?"

"Look here, Johnson," the owner of Fry's Liniment hurried on, quite excitedly. "Have you noticed how packed the house is to-night?"

"What? Yes, and——"

"Every seat in the place is sold—except this one seat in our box!"

"What of it?"

"It's fate!" chuckled Mr. Fry. "It is fate and nothing else, Johnson. Out of all the millions in New York, one man—absolutely unknown to, unsuspected by, either you or me—is coming to take this seat, doubtless for the star bout."

"But——"

"To that man," said Anthony, "I shall offer opportunity!"

"What d'ye mean? Money?" Johnson Boller asked incredulously.

"It will involve money, doubtless; I can afford a little."

"Well, you go and poke a handful of bills into a man's face and all you're going to prove is that——"

"I have no idea of doing anything of the sort," Anthony said impatiently. "What I purpose doing is simply this: I shall——"

Johnson Boller had recovered from the first shock. He drew a long, deep breath, and, leaning over to his old friend, placed a firm, strong hand on his knee and looked soothingly into his kindled eye.

"Listen, Anthony!" said he. "Don't!"

"Eh? You've no notion of what I mean to do," Anthony said briefly.

"No, but I can guess enough to dope it out pretty well, and—don't do it!" Johnson Boller said earnestly. "This theory stuff is all right, Anthony; I like to sit and chatter about it as much as you do. On the level, I do! I like to talk with you about these things, and wonder what would happen if this was thus and the other thing was otherwise. But when you come to pulling it on a perfect stranger at a prize fight, Anthony, try to remember that everybody may not understand you as well as I do."

"My dear chap!" Anthony laughed.

"Don't laugh; I know what I'm talking about," Mr. Boller went on, feverishly almost. "You wait till we get home, Anthony, and we'll talk over all this about opportunity and get it settled. For the matter of that, I can see now that you're dead right!" Johnson Boller said, and there was something almost pathetic in his voice. "You're dead right, Anthony! All you have to do is to stick opportunity before a man long enough and he's bound to chuck a hammerlock into her and slam her down to the mat for keeps! So that's settled, and we don't have to do any experimenting with human subjects. Or if you do have to have a live one to work on, wait till we get home and we'll take Wilkins, Anthony! That'd be better, anyway."

He paused, eying his old friend with deep anxiety. Anthony Fry, having thrown back his head, laughed heartily.

"Johnson," said he, "the whole trouble with that poor old head of yours is that it is absolutely without the power of visualization! It knows the wool business; it makes thousands and thousands of dollars out of the wool business; but to save its very life it cannot reach out into the abstract!"

"It doesn't want to reach into the abstract!"

"Well, it should, because it will grow more and more stodgy if it doesn't," Mr. Fry said complacently. "Good gracious, Johnson! Coming to life! Just consider what may be coming to this seat!"

"I don't dare!" Johnson Boller said honestly.

"An old man, perhaps—one who fancies his opportunities all past and done for. What more vitally interesting than thrusting opportunity upon such a man, Johnson?"

"So far as I'm concerned, anything under the sun and——"

"Or perhaps a middle-aged failure," Anthony rambled on. "A man just past the age when hope is richest—a man who has seen his chances come and go. I don't know, Johnson, but I rather believe that I'm hoping for a middle-aged man."

"Yes, one that's weak enough to gag before he can yell for the police," Johnson Boller grunted. "Now, Anthony, before you——"

"Or best of all, perhaps, an average young man," smiled the experimenter. "That would really be the most interesting sort of subject, Johnson—just a plain chap, not fully matured, not soured by disappointment nor rendered too sophisticated by contact with the world. On the whole, I really hope that a young man is coming!"

And now, for a time, Johnson Boller said nothing at all. There was always the chance that Anthony might work it out of his system in talk—there was the other chance, growing rosier and rosier by the minute, that the odd chair had not been sold at all.

It was rather queer, when one considered that seats for this particular star bout had been at a premium for a week, but it was nevertheless the fact that the preliminary arguments were over and the announcer spinning his megaphoned tale for the big battle, and the seat still unoccupied. To Johnson Boller it even hinted at the existence of a special Providence designed to watch the doings of such as Anthony Fry.

The minutes were wearing along, too. The cheering was done with and the megaphone had left the ring. Seconds and trainers were climbing down through the ropes, and the principals were listening boredly to the final words of instruction. And now the gong had struck and they were at it—and still the odd chair in Box B remained unoccupied.

"Opportunity!" mused Anthony Fry. "The Great Unrecognized!"

"Eh?"

"The Great Unrecognized," Anthony repeated complacently. "Not a bad term for her, eh?"

Johnson Boller made a last survey of the neighborhood, permitted himself a sigh of relief, and grinned broadly at his old friend.

"Great term, Anthony!" he agreed genially. "He isn't coming!"

"He'll be here yet," Anthony smiled.

"Not now," Boller chuckled. "No man gives up ten or fifteen dollars for one of these seats and then stays away for any reason save death. Your victim was hit by a motor-truck on the way here—and at that he may be getting off easier than if you'd caught him and tried some psychological experiments on him."

And here Mr. Boller stretched and removed his cigar, so that his grin might spread from ear to ear.

"It only goes to show you, Anthony, that there's some power watching over people like you and governing their affairs, that is past our understanding. Now, if that poor unknown devil had ever turned up and——"

He stopped short.

In Anthony Fry's eye the blue-white fire of enthusiasm glinted out suddenly. Half rising, Mr. Fry gazed down the vast place, and then, with a smile, sat back again and eyed his friend.

"Something's wrong with your power, Johnson," said he. "Here he comes now!"

CHAPTER II

Theory's Victim

Johnson Boller looked. And, looking, the pleased grin which had so lately suffused his features faded out swiftly—because the unknown really seemed to be with them.

Far down the mob, an attendant of the place was indicating their general direction to a shortish man in a long storm-coat; and now he of the coat had nodded and was pushing his way down the narrow aisle toward them, staring at the sea of faces as he moved along slowly and seeming a little uncertain in his movements.

"Anthony!" Johnson Boller said suddenly.

"Well?"

"Don't speak to this guy! I don't like his looks!"

"Bah!"

"And this gang behind us is doing everything but watch the fight," Mr. Boller whispered on. "If you try anything funny on this fellow that's coming, he's likely to put up a yell of some kind—and once a fight starts in this box these three behind are coming in."

"Johnson, don't be absurd," Anthony smiled. "Get over in the odd seat; I want the chap next to me so that I can have a good look at him."

"Will you remember that I said you were going to start trouble?" Johnson inquired hotly.

"I'll remember anything you like, only get over into that odd seat," Mr. Fry muttered, as the stranger came closer. "Ah, he's hardly more than a boy."

"Yes, he's a young thug!" Johnson Boller informed him in parting. "He's a young gang-leader, Anthony—look at the walk! Look at the way he has that cap pulled down over one eye! Look at——"

Anthony Fry, obviously, would have heard him as well had he been seated on the steps of Colorado's State capitol. Intellectual countenance alight, the mildly eccentric Anthony—really the sanest and most delightful of men except when these abstract notions came to him—was wholly absorbed in the newcomer.

Rather than stare directly he turned toward the ring as the young man in the long coat crowded into the box and settled down with a little puff, but one who knew him as well as Johnson Boller could feel Anthony's eyes looking past his lean right cheek and taking in every detail of theory's prospective victim.

Not that he was a particularly savage-looking creature on closer inspection, however. The cheap cloth cap and the shabby long coat—heavy enough for a typhoon when there was the merest suggestion of drizzle outdoors—gave one that impression at first, but second examination showed him to be really rather mild.

He seemed to be about twenty. His clothing, from the overcoat to the trousers and the well-worn shoes, indicated that he came from no very elevated plane of society. His features, which seemed decidedly boyish among some of the faces present, were decidedly good. His hair needed cutting and had needed it, for some time, and he was tremendously interested in the star bout. Elbows on the rail, cap pulled down to shade his eyes, the youngster's whole excited soul seemed centered in the ring.

So at a rather easy guess Mr. Boller concluded that he was a mechanic or a janitor's assistant or an elevator boy or something like that. The buyer of his seat, finding himself unable to come at the last moment, had given the kid his ticket and he was having the time of his life.

Johnson Boller hunched down again with a sad little grunt. He had meant to enjoy this star bout; only a week ago, in fact, before the Montreal horror loomed up, he had been considering just how an evening might be snatched from the happy home life without disturbing Beatrice—who, ignorant of modern pugilism, disapproved prize-fighting on the ground of brutality. And now it was ruined, because Johnson Boller's next half hour would have to go to the devising of means by which Anthony could be steered from his idiotic experiment, whatever it might be in concrete form.

Anthony meant to offer this youngster opportunity—how or in what form Anthony himself doubtless did not know as yet. But he did intend to speak to him and, unless Johnson Boller's faculty for guessing was much in error, he meant to lead the youngster hence, perhaps to feed him in a restaurant while he talked him full of abstract theory, perhaps even to take him home to the Lasande.

But whatever he intended, it wouldn't do. Johnson Boller really needed Anthony this night. He needed Anthony to listen while he talked about the absent Beatrice, and recalled all her beauty, all her fire, all her adorable qualities; he needed Anthony at the other side of the chessboard, over which game Johnson Boller could grow so profoundly sleepy that even Beatrice en route to Siam would hardly have disturbed him. And he needed no third person!

Toward the end of the fifth round, however, Johnson Boller grew painfully conscious that he had as yet concocted no very promising scheme. Indeed, the lone inspiration so far included whispering to the kid that the gentleman on his other side was mildly insane and that flight were best, should the gentleman address him; but Anthony persisted in leaning so close to the youngster that whispering was impossible.

Also, it occurred to Johnson Boller that he himself might be taken violently ill—that he might clutch his heart and beg Anthony to lead him to the outer air. There was little in that, though; the chances were more than even that Anthony, if his enthusiasm as to the victim still persisted, would request the youngster's assistance in getting him out.

And the enthusiasm seemed enduring enough. They were in the tenth and last round now and Anthony, with his strange smile, was turning to the young man and—ah, yes, he was speaking:

"Pardon me!"

The boy started with undue violence and stared at him, drew back a little and even looked Anthony up and down as he said:

"Speaking to me?"

"I am speaking to you, young man," Anthony smiled benignly. "May I speak to you a little more?"

This, very evidently, was a sensitive boy, unaccustomed to chatting with really elegant, palpably prosperous strangers. The startled eyes ran over Anthony again and a frown came into them.

"What's the idea?" he asked briefly.

"There is a very large idea, which I should like to make clear to you," Mr. Fry went on smoothly. "I should like to have a talk with you, young man—not here, of course, but when the fight is over—and it will be to your considerable advantage——"

"I don't want to buy anything," the canny young man informed him.

"And I don't want to sell you anything," Anthony laughed, "but I do wish to present to you a proposition which will be of much interest."

This time, possibly not without warrant, the boy shrank unmistakably from him, hitching his collar a little higher and his cap a little farther down.

"It wouldn't interest me," he said with some finality. "I'm—just a poor lad, you know, and I haven't a cent to invest in anything."

"But you have an hour to invest, perhaps?" Anthony smiled.

"Nope!"

"Oh, yes, you have," the owner of Fry's Imperial Liniment persisted. "It is for no purpose of my own, save perhaps to justify a small contention, but I wish you to come home with me for a little while."

"What?" said the boy.

As Johnson Boller observed, sighing heavily and shaking his head as he observed it, the young man was downright scared now. An older citizen would have spoken his candid thoughts to Anthony Fry, doubtless, and chilled him back to reason; but this one drew away from Anthony until he bumped into Johnson Boller, turned hastily and asked the latter's pardon and then gazed at Anthony with eyes which, if not filled with terror, certainly held a quantity of somewhat amused apprehension.

He shook his head determinedly and seemed to be seeking words, and as he sought them a new element entered the situation. The red-faced person just behind Anthony Fry, having gazed suddenly from the youngster to the maker of theories, lurched forward suddenly and spoke:

"Let that kid alone!"

"Eh?" Anthony said amazedly.

Johnson Boller leaned forward quickly.

"Stop right there, Anthony!" he hissed. "Don't answer him!"

"Why on earth shouldn't I answer him?" Anthony snapped.

"You keep out of it, young feller!" the red-faced one told Johnson Boller, and one saw that his honest rage was rising fast. "He's gotter let that kid alone!"

"Well, confound your impudence, sir!" Anthony began. "I——"

"None o' that stuff!" the total stranger said hotly. "You cut out picking on the kid or I'll step on your face."

And here his redder-faced companion leaned forward and demanded thickly:

"Woddy do ter kid, Joe? Huh? Wozzer matter—huh? Wozzer trouble 'th you—huh?"

Johnson Boller was on his feet and in the aisle, perturbed and still able to see how the unexpected had been planned for his especial benefit.

"This is where we get off, Anthony," he said briefly, "I could smell it coming. Come along."

"Is there going to be a fight here?" the boy in the chair between asked, with a quantity of eager excitement.

"If I know the signs, ten seconds hence this spot is going to look like a detail of the Battle of the Marne," said Mr. Boller. "And you want to get out of it quick or you'll be hurt, kid. You scoot right down that way, the way you came, and get clear of the crowd before it starts."

He pointed. He waited. But the boy did not start.

Who, in the calmer afterward, shall explain just how these gunpowder situations develop, grow instantaneously incandescent, and explode?

The atmosphere was one of physical battle; the red-faced gentlemen were filled with alcoholic spirits; yet who shall say just why the red-faced man, his friend stumbling against him, gained the impression that Anthony Fry had struck him a coward's blow from behind? Or why, with a roar of incoherent fury, he aimed a dreadful punch at Anthony himself, standing there quite collected if somewhat paler?

That is what happened, although by no means all that happened. The unfortunate spot came three seconds later when Anthony, side-stepping the alcoholized jab, threw up his hands to fend off the jabber's whole swaying person—threw them, all unwittingly, so that his right fist settled squarely on a red nose, drawing therefrom a magic spurt of blood!

After that, for a little, nothing was very clear. Three sets of fists began to hammer in Anthony's general direction; three throats shouted—and three hundred took up the shout.

Men came tumbling toward Box B and into it. A large person in bright blue shirt-sleeves, with a derby on the back of his head, received the third blow intended for Anthony and returned it with interest, just as that startled person was jammed against the rail.

From three different points, high-held night-sticks were pushing through the surging crowd; and Johnson Boller, looking quickly at the storm center, counted no less than eleven separate couples pounding one another, and smiled as he jerked Anthony bodily over the rail and hissed:

"Come on, you poor lunatic! Come on!"

"Johnson, upon my soul——" Anthony began.

"Never mind your soul! Get your body out of here before the cops find it and club it to death for starting this rumpus!" Mr. Boller cried agitatedly. "Look at that sergeant, Anthony! He's got his eye on you and he's fighting his way over here! Now, you scoot down there, kid! Move! Quick, before——"

"No! Come with us, boy!" Anthony said, somewhat disconcertingly.

"What for?" the boy inquired. "I want to watch this."

"You stay and watch it by all means!" Johnson Boller smiled quickly. "You're perfectly safe, youngster; I was only fooling. Now you come this way, Anthony, and——"

Anthony, unperturbed, laid a kindly hand on the youngster's shoulder.

"You'd better come with us, my son," said he. "They'll run you in for a witness and you may be locked up for a week unless you have friends to get you out."

This time he had startled the young man. Wide eyes turned and stared at him and there was a distinct note of fright in the voice that said:

"What do you mean? Arrest me?"

"Of course, if you stay here," Anthony said. "Come with me and I'll take care of you."

And then Johnson Boller had caught his arm and was dragging him away; and Anthony, catching the willing arm of the boy, was dragging him after. Around the side of the ring they sped, where an interested group of fighters and trainers watched the mêlée; and, veering, on through a small side door and into the night.

"Here's where the taxis wait," Mr. Boller said quickly. "Now, you beat it straight down the street, kid, and——"

"We'll take this one," Anthony interrupted, as he jerked open the door and thrust his bewildered charge inward. "Tell the man to take us home, Johnson."

Johnson Boller complied with a grunt, slamming the door viciously as he plumped into his own seat. The kid, prospective victim of Anthony's latest notion, was still with them—and he seemed contented enough to be there for the present. The possibility of arrest had jarred the youngster more than a little, and he hunched down on the little forward seat and breathed quite heavily. And now Anthony's deep, kindly voice was addressing him with—

"You'll come home with me for a little while, youngster?"

Mr. Boller drew a long, resigned breath and prepared to back the boy in every objection his doubtless normal mind should offer—but they chanced to pause by an arc lamp just then and he caught the boy's expression.

It was really a queer thing to see. No fear was there at all now, but only the overwhelming, innocent curiosity of youth, mingled with an inscrutable something else. One might have called it a daredevil light, breathing the young craving for adventure, but Johnson Boller, with an unaccountable shudder, felt that it was not just that.

To save him, he could not have named the quality; he sensed it rather than actually saw it, but it was there just the same—an ominous, mocking, speculative amusement that had no place at all in the eye of an elevator boy when looking at the wealthy, dignified Anthony Fry. The boy's fine teeth showed for a moment as he asked:

"Pardon me, but what's it all about? Why under the sun should I go home with you?"

"Because I want to talk confidentially to you for an hour."

"You're not judging from these togs that I'm a criminal, are you?" the boy grinned, and it seemed to Johnson Boller that the tone was far too cultivated for the clothes.

"What?"

"I mean, you don't want any one murdered, or anything of that kind?"

Anthony laughed richly.

"By no means, my dear boy. As to what it is all about I'll tell you when we get there. You'll come?"

"I think not," the boy said frankly.

"But——"

"Nix! I don't know why, but I don't like the idea. I think it's a little bit too unusual. Who are you, anyway?"

"My name is Fry, if that tells you anything," smiled its owner.

"Fry?" the boy repeated.

"Anthony Fry."

"Eh?" the youngster said, and there was a peculiarly sharp note in his voice.

"He makes Fry's Liniment," Johnson Boller put in disgustedly, yet happily withal because it was plain that the boy would have no part in spoiling his chess game and the little chat about Beatrice. "He has a lot of theories not connected with the liniment business, kid, and he wants to bore you to death with some of them. They wouldn't interest you any more than they interest me, and you're perfectly right in refusing to listen to them."

"Umum," said the boy oddly.

"And now I'll tell you what we'll do," Johnson Boller concluded quite happily. "You tell me where you live, and when the man drops us I'll pay your fare home. Some class to that, eh? Going home in a taxicab after sitting in a ten-dollar seat at a big fight! You don't get off on a jamboree like that very often, I'll bet!"

"No," the boy said thoughtfully.

"So here's the little old Hotel Lasande where Mr. Fry lives," Mr. Boller finished cheerfully, "and where shall I tell the man to set you down, kid?"

He had settled the matter, of course. Never in this world could the little ragamuffin resist the temptation of returning to his tenement home, or whatever it was, in a taxi. Johnson Boller, rising as the vehicle stopped, laid a kindly hand on his shoulder.

"Now, you sit over in my seat and stretch your legs while you ride, kid—and here! Have a real cigar and feel like a real sport! Don't you know how to bite off the end?"

"I—I don't want to bite off the end yet," the boy muttered.

"Sink your teeth in it. Now I'll get you a match."

He felt for one, did Johnson Boller, and then ceased feeling for one. That sudden low laugh of the young man's was one of the oddest sounds he had ever heard; moreover, as the Lasande doorman opened the door of the taxi, he caught the same odd light in the boy's eye—and now he, too, had risen and pulled the disreputable cap a little lower as he said:

"I won't smoke it now, thanks. I'm going upstairs and listen to Mr. Fry for a while, I think."

CHAPTER III

Opportunity

The Hotel Lasande deserves a word or two. In the strict sense it is no hotel at all, being merely a twenty-story pile of four and five—and even seven and eight—room bachelor suites of the very highest class. Moving into the Lasande and assuming one of its breath-stopping leases is a process not unlike breaking into the most exclusive sort of club. One is investigated, which tells it all. The Lasande, catering to the very best and most opulent of the bachelor class, has nothing else beneath its roof.

Silent men servants, functioning perfectly despite their apparent woodenness, flit everywhere, invisible until needed, disappearing instantly when the task of the moment is done. There are dining-rooms for the few who do not dine in the privacy of their own apartments, and there is a long, comfortable lobby where, under the eagle eye of the clerk in the corner, only tenants or guests of tenants may lounge.

Into this latter area came Anthony Fry and Johnson Boller and the boy, and as the peculiarly intelligent eyes of the latter darted about it seemed to Mr. Boller that their twinkle turned to a positive glitter.

It was absurd enough, it hailed doubtless from the nervous loneliness within himself, yet Johnson Boller felt that the youngster was a downright evil force, swaggering along there, tremendously conscious of his own importance! He should have been sedate and subdued, to put it mildly, yet he grinned at the impeccable night clerk from under his cap and sent his impudent eyes roving on, to alight finally on the big chair near the north elevator.

"Who's the party with the big specs and why the prolonged stare?" the youngster asked irreverently.

"Eh? Oh, that's Mr. Hitchin, a neighbor of mine," Anthony smiled.

"He's an amateur detective, kid," Johnson Boller added significantly. "He knows every young crook in town. He's coming here to give you the once over."

"I should worry," murmured the self-possessed young man.

"Johnson, don't be idiotic," Anthony said, as he laid a hand on the boy's arm. "I'll have to introduce you. What's your name, my lad?"

"Eh?" asked the unusual boy, staring hard at Anthony.

"Your name! What is it?"

"Well—er—Prentiss," the youth admitted.

"Is that your first name or your last name?"

"That's just my last name," the boy smiled. "First name's David."

"David Prentiss, eh?" Anthony murmured with some satisfaction, for it had a substantial sound. "Well, David—er, Hitchin, how are you? Mr. Hitchin, my young friend, Mr. David Prentiss."

The boy's hand went out and gripped Hitchin's heartily enough. Mr. Hitchin held it for a moment and peered at David—and one saw what a really penetrating stare he owned.

It bored, as a point of tempered ice, wordlessly accusing one of murder, counterfeiting, bank burglary and plain second-story work. Frequently deep students of the higher detective fiction grow this stare, and Hobart Hitchin was one of the deepest. But now, having pierced David in a dozen places without finding bomb or knife, the stare turned to Anthony and grew quite normal and amiable.

"Prentiss, eh?" said Hitchin. "Not the Vermont branch?"

"New York," David supplied.

"Mr. Prentiss is staying with me for a little," Anthony smiled as they moved toward the elevator again.

"Staying with you, eh?" Hitchin repeated, with a careful survey of David's well-worn storm-coat; and added, with characteristic bluntness: "Working for you, Fry?"

"My guest," Anthony said annoyedly; and then the car came down and the door opened and they left Mr. Hitchin, but the boy cocked an eye at Anthony and asked flatly:

"What was the idea of that—staying with you? I'm not staying with you."

"You may decide to stay for a little."

"Not me," said David.

"We shall see," Anthony chuckled. "This is our floor."

Wilkins—the priceless, faultless Wilkins who had been with Anthony for sixteen years—opened the door and, even though he were Wilkins, started a trifle at the sight of David and his cap. He flushed for the start, to be sure, as his master moved into the big living-room with his superb dignity, but when he had taken cap and coat and examined the suit beneath, Wilkins shook his head mentally. One shock had come that evening in the knowledge that Johnson Boller, whom Wilkins did not approve, was to be with them—but this young ruffian!

"Make yourself at home, David," Anthony smiled. "We'll shed our coats and find our smoking jackets."

Johnson Boller with him, he moved to the corner bedroom, to face his old friend with:

"Well, what do you think of him?"

"He's a bad egg," Johnson Boller said readily. "I don't like his eye and the way he swaggers would get him six months in any court in town. Say whatever it is the devilish impulse prompts you to say and then fire him before he pinches the silver."

"Bosh!" Anthony said testily. "The boy's awed and self-conscious—the swagger is assumed to cover that, of course. I mean what, in your decidedly inferior judgment, is his fitness as a subject for experiment? Will he know opportunity when she is first set before him or will it be necessary to present her repeatedly?"

Johnson Boller laughed harshly and stared hard at his old friend. Under certain conditions, even the empty apartment on Riverside Drive might not be so bad.

"Say!" he demanded. "Are you going to keep that little rat here and argue with him till he admits that he recognizes whatever opportunity you're going to thrust at him?"

"Essentially that."

"Well, if it's an opportunity to earn an honest living, he'll never see it—and if the chatter takes more than an hour I'm going home!" Johnson Boller snapped. "I'd have stayed there if I'd known you were going off into the abstract, Anthony. I wanted to talk to you and have a little game of chess and a bottle of ale and——"

Anthony smiled serenely.

"And the mere fact that a train of thought, only slightly unusual, has entered your evening, has upset your whole being, hasn't it? Well, it'll do you good to hear and watch something different. This boy will see opportunity before I'm done with him, Johnson, and the longer it takes the sounder my general hypothesis will have been proven."

Curiously enough, David had lost much of his grinning assurance when they rejoined him. The impudence had left his eye and the boy seemed downright uneasy. He started and rose at the sight of them, and his quick, nervous smile lingered only a moment as he said:

"I think I'd better be going after all, Mr. Fry. It's pretty late and——"

"Just a minute or two, and perhaps you'll change your mind," Anthony said quietly, as he dropped into his pet chair. "You'll permit a personal question or two, David?"

"I suppose so."

"Then—how old are you?"

"Twenty."

"Ah! Parents living?"

David nodded.

"And in rather humble circumstances, perhaps?"

This time David glanced at him keenly, queerly, for an instant—opened his lips and shut them again and ended with a mere jerk of a nod.

"How about schooling, David? You've been through high school?"

"Er—yes."

"And have you a profession?" Anthony pursued.

"No, I haven't any profession?" the boy muttered.

"But you're working, of course?" Mr. Fry asked sharply.

"What? Oh, yes," said David.

"At some mechanical line?"

"Oh, yes," David said.

"In just what line, then?"

And now, had Anthony but been watching, some of Johnson Boller's suspicions must have seemed justified. There was no question about the way David's very intelligent eyes were acting now; they darted furtively, wildly almost, from side to side, as if the boy were seeking escape. They darted toward Anthony and away from him and back to David's shabby suit and worn shoes.

"I'm a—plumber's helper!" the boy said gustily.

"Wait a second, kid!" Mr. Boller put in. "Let me see those hands!"

"Well, they—they haven't had time to get roughened up yet!" David said quickly. "I just went to work yesterday."

"The boy's lying, Anthony!" Mr. Boller said bluntly.

"I don't lie, Mr.——"

"Boller," Anthony supplied. "And please don't badger the boy, Johnson."

"I'm not badgering him," said Johnson Boller; "only that kid's hands look more like a society queen's than an honest workingman's."

"They may be hands designed for better things. David! Tell me, are you quite satisfied to be a plumber's helper, or was it the only thing you could find in the way of employment?"

"It was all I could find," David muttered, glancing at the door. And then, with his quick smile, he rose again. "I'd like to sit here and answer questions, Mr. Fry, but I'll have to run along and——"

Anthony beamed at him over his glasses, fidgeting there with the impatience of youth, standing on one foot and then on the other. Anthony turned and beamed at the bookcase beside him, and selecting a volume, beamed at that, too.

"David," said he, "will you be seated long enough to hear a little poem?"

"What?"

"It is a very short poem, and one of my favorites," Anthony mused, and his stare at David grew quite hypnotic. "Ah, here it is—a little, wonderfully big poem by the late Senator John Ingalls. It is called—'Opportunity.'"

"Aha!" David said rather stupidly.

"And now, listen," said Anthony, clearing his throat.

"Master of human destinies am I!"

He paused and sent the hypnotic smile drilling into David.

"'Master of human destinies!'" he repeated. "That, in itself, means a very great deal, does it not?"

"I guess so," David muttered dazedly, and, however briefly, Johnson Boller almost liked him for the look he directed at Anthony's bowed head.

"Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait,
Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate
Deserts and seas remote, and passing by
Hovel and mart and palace, soon or late
I knock unbidden once at every gate!"

"Once," concluded Anthony, "at every gate. Once, David!"

"Yes, I've heard that poem before," said David, who was examining the rug.

Johnson Boller laughed in a rich undertone. Anthony flushed, and his voice rose a little as he continued:

"If feasting, rise; if sleeping, wake before
I turn away. It is the hour of fate
And they who follow me reach every state
Mortals desire, and conquer every foe
Save death...."

The owner of Fry's Imperial Liniment looked over his glasses and discovered that David, having poked open the door of the little-used cellarette with his foot, was looking in at the bottles with mild interest.

"'Every foe save death!'" Anthony rapped out. "Did you hear that, David?"

"Yes, of course," David said hastily. "Do you know what time it is, Mr. Fry?"

"No! Hear the rest!" said Anthony.

"... But those who doubt or hesitate,
Condemned to failure, penury, or woe,
Seek me in vain and ceaselessly implore;
I answer not and I return—no more!"

Almost reverently the book closed.

"Have you quite assimilated the full meaning of that little poem, David?" he asked gravely.

"Er—yes."

"Quite?" Anthony persisted.

"Why, I guess so," David said, eyes opening again. "Yes, I know I have—only don't look at me like that and——"

"Then hear the rest of what I have to say," Anthony went on quickly and impressively, "for now we come to my reason for bringing you here. David, you are poor. You are without a profession—without a business of your own. Your brightest hope at present is to become a plumber."

"Say——" David began.

"I should have said, your brightest chance," Anthony corrected. "But your ambition, David, is altogether different. Your ambition is to become—what?"

And now, before the penetrating, hypnotic eye, David seemed, not without warrant, to have grown downright frightened. He glanced swiftly at Anthony and at the door.

"I don't know," he said breathlessly. "What's the answer?"

"Well, what do you want to become? A doctor? A lawyer? A teacher? An electrician? A journalist? A clergyman? A painter? An architect? A mining engineer? A civil engineer? A——"

It was plain to Johnson Boller that the situation was getting beyond David's doubtless nimble, doubtless criminal, mind. The boy held up an unsteady hand and stayed the flow.

"That's it!" he said hoarsely. "A civil engineer! You got it out of me, didn't you? And now I'd better go and——"

His quick, scared grin showed all his teeth, and he nodded in the most ridiculous fashion—really much in the fashion one might nod at a hopeless lunatic when agreeing that, as a matter of course, he is the original Pharaoh. His mental state fairly glowed from him; all that David wanted was to leave the Hotel Lasande.

David, in short, was doing just what ninety-nine per cent. of the human race insists on doing; even at the hint of opportunity, he was trying to face about and escape. But more than that, David, obviously one of the lower classes, was treating Anthony Fry with a tolerance that was more than mere disrespect. He was causing Johnson Boller to chuckle wearily over his cigar—and in spite of his purely abstract interest, Anthony's color grew darker and his voice decidedly sharper.

"Sit still," he commanded, "and listen to me. David, up to this evening you had no real hope of attaining your ambition. In fine, opportunity to make the goal was not yours. Now opportunity is yours!"

"Is it?" David said throatily, albeit he did not resume his seat.

"Because this is what I mean to do for you, David; I mean to take you out of your present humble situation and educate you. I mean to have you here to live with me."

"What?" David gasped.

"From this very evening!" Anthony said firmly, and also astonishingly. "I shall outfit you properly and supply you with what money you need. I shall have you prepared for the best engineering college we can find, and entered there for the most complete engineering course. If you are helping in the support of your family, I shall pay to them a sum equivalent to your wages each month—or perhaps a little more, if it be essential to removing all anxiety from your mind. You follow me?"

David merely clutched the edge of his coat and gulped, staring fascinatedly at Anthony.

"I am reasonably wealthy, and I shall bear every expense that you may incur, David. When you have graduated, and everything that can be taught you has been taught you, I shall establish you in proper offices and use my considerable personal influence to see that you are supplied with work, and again until you are self-supporting I shall bear all the expense. In short, David," Anthony concluded, "I am holding opportunity before you—opportunity to do, without trouble or worry or delay, the thing you most desire. Well?"

Even Johnson Boller was mildly interested, although only mildly, and with a deprecatory smile on his lips. He knew exactly what the boy would do, of course, but it had no connection with Anthony's crack-brained notion.

David would grab with both hands at this kind of opportunity and settle down to a life of ease, and the chances were that he'd get Anthony to sign something that would cost him thousands when he had waked up and lost interest in the opportunity proposition.

To Johnson's sleepy and suspicious eye David looked like a crafty little devil, if one ever walked.

Yet after a silent thirty seconds opportunity, in her gaudiest and most conspicuous form, had made no visible impression on David Prentiss. His bewildered eyes roved from Anthony to Johnson Boller. Once he seemed about to laugh; again he seemed about to speak; he did neither.

And the clock struck twelve.

And had a bomb exploded between his poorly shod feet, the effect on David Prentiss could hardly have been more striking. He started, and his eyes, dilating, lost their bewilderment and showed plain, overwhelming horror. His mouth opened with a shout of:

"Was that midnight?"

"Very likely," Anthony said impatiently. "But as to——"

"Where's my cap and coat?" David demanded.

"Never mind your cap and coat. I——"

"But I do mind 'em!" David cried. "I've got to have them—quick! Where are they? Where's the man who took them?"

Anthony merely smiled with waxing curiosity.

"So you are really rejecting opportunity at the first knock, eh?" he mused.

And now David stilled his rising excitement only with a huge effort. He gripped his chair and looked Anthony in the eye.

"Opportunity be—hanged!" he cried shrilly. "Give me my cap and coat! I want to go home!"

CHAPTER IV

The Reluctant One

One knew Anthony Fry for two or three decades before quite understanding him. David's great disadvantage, of course, was that he had met Anthony only an hour or so before. To David, doubtless, the quiet, mysterious, speculative smile seemed sinister, for he repeated thickly:

"I want my—my cap and my coat and——"

"Well, what are you going to do if you don't get them?" Anthony laughed.

"What did you say?" David asked quickly.

"What if you don't get your coat?"

"Does that mean that you're going to keep me here, whether I want to stay or not?" the boy asked quickly.

"Not just that, perhaps, but it does mean that I'm going to keep you here for a little while, David, until you've come to your senses and——"

"I'll yell!" David stated.

"Eh?"

"If you try to keep me here I'll yell until everybody in the house comes in to see what's happening!"

Anthony laughed quietly.

"Don't be ridiculous, David," he said. "I've lived here for years, and they will know perfectly well that I'm not injuring you in any way."

"Oh!" gasped David.

"So just sit down again and consider what I have offered you. Sit still for just one minute and consider—and then give me your answer."

Finger-tips drumming, benevolent gaze beaming over his glasses, the unusual Anthony waited. David's scared eyes roved the room, wandered over Johnson Boller, reading his paper, and finally settled so steadily on that gentleman that he looked up and, looking, read David's mind and shrugged his shoulders.

"Your own fault, kid," said he. "I wanted to give you a free ride, but you had to come up and hear what he had to say."

"Johnson!" Anthony said sharply, "Just let the youngster's mental processes work the thing out in their own way."

Half a minute dragged along—yet before it was gone one saw clearly that the mental processes had taken their grip. An extremely visible change was coming over David Prentiss. He gulped down certain emotions of his own, and presently managed to smile, uneasily at first and then with a certain confidence. He cleared his throat and, with a slight huskiness, addressed Anthony:

"Er—do I understand that you want me to stay here until I fully appreciate all you've offered me, Mr. Fry?"

"Virtually that."

"Well, I appreciated that all along; but—but I was sort of worried about it getting so late, you know," David said brightly. "I certainly do appreciate it, and I thank you very much. Now can I have my coat?"

"Really decided to grip the opportunity, eh?" Anthony asked keenly.

"You bet!"

Johnson Boller laid aside his paper.

"Now chase him, Anthony!" he said. "He's standing up and holding the sugar on his nose. Slip the kid a five-dollar bill and let Wilkins——"

"Do you really imagine that I'd rouse all the boy's hopes and then play him a shabby trick like that?" Anthony asked sharply.

"Huh?"

"Most emphatically not!" Mr. Fry said. "I'll play no such shabby trick on the youngster. He shall have exactly the chance I promised, and I shall watch the working out of the idea with the most intense interest. David, I'm going to keep you here from this minute!"

"Keep me here?" David echoed blankly.

"Certainly."

David gazed fixedly at the electrolier.

"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Fry," he said. "I'd like to stay to-night, but I can't—not to-night. You see, I have to go home to my father. He's an—an invalid."

"We'll telephone the good news to him," Anthony smiled.

"You can't," said David. "We're too poor to have a telephone."

"Very well. Then we'll wire him."

David shook his head energetically.

"That wouldn't do, either," said he. "Father's sick, you know. His heart's very weak. Just the sight of a telegram might kill him."

"Unfortunate!" Anthony sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "Very well, David. Then you shall write him a note, and I'll have Wilkins take it to him."

David swallowed audibly and smiled a wild little smile.

"Oh, no! Not that, sir!" said he. "That might be even worse than a telegram, I think."

"Why?"

"Well, father would be likely to think that I'd been—been injured and taken into some swell home, you know, and that I was writing like that just to reassure him. No," David said firmly, "that would be the worst possible thing. I'll have to go myself and talk it over with father and—now if I can have my cap and my coat?"

It came as a familiar refrain. It caused Anthony's eye to darken suddenly as he sat back and stared at the boy.

"Confound your hat and coat!" he rapped out. "See here, David. You write the note, and I myself will take it to your father and explain—and be sure that he will rejoice. There is the desk. Where do you live?"

His tone was not nearly so benevolent. Opposition, as always, was rousing Anthony's unfortunate stubbornness; with or without reason, had David but known it, every mention of that cap and coat was diminishing his chances of walking out of the Lasande—and it is possible that he sensed something of the kind, for his smile disappeared abruptly, and the assurance that had been with him was no more.

"I can't tell you where I live!" he said hoarsely.

"In the name of heaven, why not?" Anthony snapped.

"Because—because—well, you may not understand this, sir, but I promised father I wouldn't tell any one where we live."

"What?"

"I did, and I can't break a promise!" David insisted. "You see, father was rich once, and he's terribly proud. He doesn't want any one to know we live in such a poor place, because somebody he used to know might hear of it and try to help him, and that would break father's heart."

"His heart's in pretty bad shape, isn't it?" Johnson Boller muttered.

"Frightful!" said David. "And that's why I'll have to go now and explain to him and think it all over and——"

"Why think it over?" Anthony rasped. "Isn't your mind made up now?"

"Of course it is," the boy said hastily. "Only I'll have to tell father and then come back here in the morning, Mr. Fry; only—I have, to go home now!"

His voice broke strangely.

Anthony Fry looked him over with a quantity of sour curiosity.

If the golden opportunity before his very eyes was making even the trace of an impression on David Prentiss, the boy's faculty for masking his true emotions was downright amazing. That bright, rather attractive young countenance told of absolutely nothing but the heartfelt desire to escape from the gentleman who wished to improve his condition.

It was the same old story, world-old and world-wide. David, once he was out of this apartment, would never return; with opportunity fairly pushing against him, he turned from her in terror, refusing to know that she was there.

Well, then, he should see her!

Anthony's square chin set. He rose with a jerk and stood surveying the nervous David, a tall, commanding, rather fearsome figure. Some little time he transfixed the lad with his cold, hard eyes, while David grew paler and paler; then he walked down upon David, who cringed visibly, and seized his shoulders.

"David," he said sternly, "you have no conception at all of what I am trying to offer you. I'm going to keep you here until you have."

"Keep me—here?" David faltered.

"Just that."

It was in Johnson Boller's mind to rise and deliver a little speech of his own, pointing out the legal rights of David Prentiss and the chance that, at some later date, interested parties might hear of this evening and use it in moving Anthony toward an insane asylum. Yet he did not speak, for he grew interested in David himself.

That bewildered youngster was shrinking and shrinking away from Anthony. He was wilting before the stem eye, and he was smiling in the sickliest, most ghastly fashion. And now he was nodding submissively and speaking:

"Yes, I'll stay, Mr. Fry."

"Ah!" said Anthony.

"I—I'm glad to stay," David assured him.

Then, looking at Anthony, he contrived another smile and yawned; and having yawned once, he yawned again, vastly, and stretching the second time.

"The—the trouble with me is that I'm sleepy," David stated, in a strange, low voice. "I get that way because I'm not used to late hours, and when I do get sleepy I—I can't think or talk or do anything. I'll be myself in the morning, Mr. Fry; but if I'm going to stay here, I'd like to go to bed now."

He yawned again and still again, quite noisily and eying Anthony in an odd, expectant, pleading way. Anthony, after a puzzled moment, shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

"Go to bed if you like, David," he said. "There are one or two things I want to say to you first."

"Yes, sir," David said obediently.

"To-morrow, when you have slept on it, I'm confident that you will see the huge opportunity that I have offered you, and that you will stay with me as one of my little household. It is not an exacting position, but there are one or two laws you must remember. For the first—no dissipation. You don't drink, David?"

"Not a drop, sir."

"And for another," Anthony said gravely, "no women!"

"Eh?" said David.

"Absolutely no women in this Hotel Lasande!" Anthony repeated, with a fanatic force that caused Johnson Boller to snort disgustedly and throw up his hands. "This is, perhaps, more strictly than any other house in New York an all-man establishment. There are not even women servants here, David, and other sorts of women don't run in and out of here. In fact, the ladies who do come—relatives of the tenants, of course—are so very few that they're all known to the clerks. So, while you may have a sweetheart, David, and while she may be all very well in her place—keep her out of here!"

"But——"

"That's the unwritten law of the house, and it makes for profound peace," Anthony concluded. "You'll appreciate it more fully when you have lived here for a time."

David, facing Mr. Fry, gazed at the floor and yawned again.

"I guess I'll go to bed," he said weakly.

"And before that we'll start you on the right track," Anthony said with a gentle smile. "You'll take a good, hot bath."

He pressed the button and Wilkins appeared.

"The guest-chamber for young Mr. Prentiss, Wilkins," said Anthony. "You will outfit him with pajamas of my own and the gray bathrobe I used last year. To-morrow we'll get you something that fits, David."

David nodded numbly.

"And, Wilkins," said his master, "you will assist Mr. Prentiss with his bath."

David's nod broke in two.

"I don't want any help," he said.

"But Wilkins——"

"Wilkins or anybody else; I don't want any help with a bath. I know how to take a bath, at least. I don't know how you swells take yours, but I take mine alone; I don't want any one pottering around me, and I won't have it!"

His countenance flushed angrily, and Anthony favored him with an indulgent smile. After all, he was very young.

"As you please, David. Show him to the north bathroom, Wilkins. That is all."

But he tapped Wilkins's shoulder and held him back a moment to add:

"And get his wretched togs, Wilkins. I'll dress him properly to-morrow; but get those rags away from him."

"Very good, sir," said Wilkins, as he glided down the corridor after David.

The proprietor of Fry's Imperial Liniment watched him go and smiled softly, returning to his chair to grin at Johnson Boller in a perfectly human fashion. Johnson Boller, on the other hand, did not grin at all. He merely gazed at his old friend until, after a minute or two, Anthony asked:

"Well—what do you think?"

"I think you're a nut!" Johnson Boller said with sweet candor. "I think you're a plain da—well, I think you're unbalanced. You know what that young thug will do to you, don't you?"

"Eh?"

"If he's the crook he looks, he'll light out of here about three in the morning with everything but the piano and your encyclopædia. If he isn't a crook, just as soon as he gets loose and talks it over with his friends, he'll have you pinched for detaining him here against his will; and I'll give you ten to one that he collects not less than twenty-five hundred dollars before he's through. You scared him stiff with your eagle eye and your crazy notions, and he pleaded guilty so he could go to bed and get away from you. I'll have to testify to that if he calls on me."

"Fiddlesticks!" said Anthony Fry.

"Is it? Wait and see, Anthony," Johnson Boller said earnestly. "That kid spells trouble. I can feel it in the air."

"You can always feel it in the air," Anthony smiled.

"Maybe so; but this feeling amounts to a pain!" Boller said warmly. "This is a hunch—a premonition—one of those prophetic aches that can't be ignored. Why, he had a fight started before you had spoken ten words to him, and——"

"Oh, rot!" Anthony said.

Johnson Boller drew a deep, concerned breath.

"On the level," he said, "are you going to keep this kid imprisoned here?"

"By no means," Anthony laughed. "As a matter of fact, all I want to do is to talk to him in the morning. I want to know, Johnson, whether he will actually persist in fighting off the chance I'm offering him—because it's so confounded characteristic of the whole human race. If he's as obstinate in the morning as he is now—well, I suppose I'll turn him loose with a ten-dollar bill, and look around for another subject. I'd really like to approach a dozen men, picked haphazard, and write a little paper on the manner in which they greet opportunity."

"Yes, but not while I'm with you," Johnson Boller said. "Anthony, do this—get the kid aside in the morning and tell him you'd been drinking heavily all day and didn't know what you were doing to-night. See? Make a joke of it and slip him fifty to keep quiet, and then——"

"Ah, Wilkins," Anthony smiled. "Got his togs, did you?"

The invaluable one bowed and held the shabby garments at a distance from his person.

"He passed them out to me through a crack in the door," he reported disgustedly. "What shall I do with them? They're hardly worth pressing, sir."

"Of course not. Don't bother with them," Anthony smiled, and waved his man away. "Johnson, turn intelligent for a moment, will you?"

"Why? Intelligence has no place in this evening."

"Oh, yes it has. Let's examine the case of this David youngster and try to reconstruct his emotions and his mental impressions when confronted with opportunity such as——"

"Damn opportunity!" said Johnson Boller, rising with a jerk. "I'm going to bed!"

Only once had Johnson Boller tarried in Montreal, and on that occasion the thermometer had ranged about ninety in the shade. Yet now, as he slumbered fitfully in Anthony's Circassian guest-chamber, childhood notions of Canada came to haunt his dreams.

He saw snow—long, glistening roads of snow over which Beatrice whizzed in a four-horse sleigh, with driver and footman on the box, and beside her a tall, foreign-looking creature with a big mustache and flashing eyes and teeth. He talked to Beatrice and leaned very close, devouring her beauty with his eyes; and Johnson Boller groaned, woke briefly, and drifted off again.

He saw ice; they were holding an ice carnival in Montreal, and everybody was on skates. Beatrice was on skates, ravishing in white fur, leading some sort of grand march with the Governor General of Canada, who skated very close to her and devoured her beauty with his bold, official eyes, causing Johnson Boller to groan again and thresh over on his other side.

He saw a glittering toboggan slide; laughing people in furs were there at the head of the slide, notably Beatrice, chatting shyly with a blond giant in a Mackinaw, who leaned very close to her as they prepared to coast and devoured her beauty with his large, blue eyes. Now they settled on the toboggan, just these two, although Johnson Boller's astral self seemed to be with them. The blond giant whispered something, and they slid down—down—down!

And they struck something, and Johnson Boller was on his feet in the middle of the Circassian chamber, demanding:

"What's that? What was that?"

Somewhere, Anthony was muttering and moving about. Somewhere else, Wilkins was chattering; but the main impression was that the roof had fallen in—and Johnson Boller, struggling into his bathrobe, stumbled to the door and burst into the brilliant living-room.

In the center of the room, flattened upon the floor, was Anthony's substantial little desk. Papers were around it and blotters and letters without number, and the old-fashioned inkwell had shot off its top and set a black streak across the beautiful Oriental carpet.

Two chairs were on their sides, also, but the striking detail of the picture was furnished by David Prentiss. That young man was sprawled crazily, just beyond the desk, and beside him, holding him down with both hands, was Wilkins, tastefully arrayed in the flowered silk pajamas Anthony had discarded last year as too vivid.

"I've got him, sir!" Wilkins' pale lips reported, as his master appeared. "I have him fast."

"What'd he do?" Johnson Boller asked quickly. "Pull a knife on you, Wilkins?"

"He'd not time for that, sir," Wilkins said grimly. "I think he stumbled over a chair and took the desk along with him, trying to get out. I always wake just as the clock strikes two, and stay awake ten minutes or more, and that's how I came to hear him and get him. He was just getting to his feet when I ran in and turned on the lights, and he——"

"Let him up!" Anthony said sharply.

"But don't let go of him!" Johnson Boller said harshly. "I missed the time by an hour, but I was right otherwise, Anthony. He's got the silver and your stick-pins and rings on him, and—what the dickens is he wearing?"

Silence fell upon them for a little, as David struggled to his feet and looked about with a strange, trancelike stare—for there was some reason for Mr. Boller's query.

David, apparently, had dressed for the street. He wore shoes not less than five sizes too long; he wore a bright brown sack coat which came almost to his knees, and blue trousers which were turned up until they all but met the coat. He had acquired a rakish felt hat, too, which rested mainly on the back of his neck.

"He got them clothes out of the junk-closet at the end of the corridor, sir," Wilkins said quite breathlessly. "He must have been roaming the place quite a bit, to have found them, and——"

"What were you trying to do, David?" Anthony snapped.

"I don't know, sir," David said vaguely, passing a hand over his eyes in a manner far too dramatic to be convincing.

"Where did you get those clothes?"

"I have no idea, sir," David murmured.

"Don't lie to me!" Anthony snapped. "What——"

"I'm not lying, sir," David said in the same vague, far-away tone. "I must have been asleep, Mr. Fry. I remember having a terrible dream—it was about father and it seemed to me that he was dying. There were doctors all about the bed and father was calling to me, and it seemed to me that I must get to him, no matter what stood in the way. I remember trying to go to him, and then—why, I must have fallen there, sir, and wakened."

For an instant the vagueness left his eyes and they looked straight at Anthony.

"May I go to father now?" he asked. "That—that dream upset me."

"Morning will do for father," Anthony said briefly.

"But I have a feeling that something terrible's going to happen if I don't go——"

Anthony Fry laid a kindly hand on his shoulder.

"Get back to bed, youngster," he smiled. "You're nervous, I suppose, being in a strange bed, and all that sort of thing. And incidentally, get off those clothes and give them to Wilkins."

David gulped audibly.

"I'll pass them out to Wilkins, if I must, sir," he said in the queerest, choking voice—and he turned from them and shuffled down the corridor to the north bedroom of Anthony Fry's apartment.

"Curious kid!" Anthony muttered.

"Not nearly as curious as you are," said Johnson Boller. "You didn't even go through his pockets and get out the stuff while he was here, and we could see just what he'd taken! You let him go in there and dump the pockets before he gives up the clothes and——"

Anthony permitted himself a grin and a yawn.

"My dear chap, go back to bed and forget it," he said impatiently. "The boy was stealing nothing. He may have been trying to escape; he may have been walking in his sleep. Consciously or subconsciously, he's certainly giving us a demonstration of humanity's tendency to dodge its opportunities."

Johnson Boller gave it up and returned, soured, to his Circassian walnut bedstead—soured because, if there was one thing above all others that he abominated, it was being routed out in the middle of the night.

Five minutes or more he spent in muttering before he drifted away again, this time to arrive at somebody's grand ball in Montreal. It was a tremendous function, plainly given in honor of Beatrice's arrival in town, yet she was not immediately visible. Johnson Boller's dream personality hunted around for some time before it found her in the conservatory.

Behind thick palms, Beatrice sat with a broad-shouldered person in the uniform of a field-marshal; he had a string of medals on his chest, and he was devouring her beauty with his hungry eyes. Nay, more, he leaned close to Beatrice and sought to take her hand, and although she shrank from him in terror, there was a certain fascinated light in her own lovely black eyes; she clutched her bosom and sought to escape, but——

"Oh, my Lord!" said Johnson Boller, awakening to stare at the dark ceiling.

Somewhere a window slammed.

He listened for a little and heard nothing more; then, having the room nearest the elevators, he heard one of them hum up swiftly and heard the gate clatter open. And then there were voices and some one knocked on the door of the apartment with a club, as it seemed. Somebody else protested and pressed the buzzer—and by that time Wilkins had padded down the hall and was opening the door.

Johnson Boller caught:

"Police officer! Lemme in quick! You've got a burglar in there!"

CHAPTER V

The Wee Sma' Hours

Wilkins, in his official black, was a wonderfully self-contained person; roused from slumber in pink-rosed silk, his self-control was not so perfect, for as he struggled out of bed again Johnson Boller caught:

"God bless my soul, officer! What——"

"Hush!" interrupted an unfamiliar, horrified voice. "Come inside quickly and close that door."

Anthony was in motion, too. Johnson Boller, stumbling out of his Circassian apartment, met him just entering the living-room from his own chamber, and for an instant they stared at one another as they knotted bathrobe cords about them.

"You see?" Johnson Boller said, with acid triumph. "I was right, eh?"

"What?"

"The cops have tracked the little devil down for his last job, whatever that may have been, and they've found him here! Now you've got a nice scandal on your hands, haven't you? A tenth-rate kid crook found hiding in the flat of Mr. Anthony Fry, with the full knowledge and consent of——"

"Upon my word, Johnson, I think you've lost your senses to-night!" Anthony snapped. "Whatever is wrong, Wilkins?"

The silk-pajamaed one indicated their visitors with a hand that was none too steady.

"It's Mr. Dodbury, the night manager, sir, and this policeman that says——"

"I'm afraid you have a burglar in here, Mr. Fry," the manager put in agitatedly. "I can't understand how it occurred; nothing of the kind has ever happened to us before, and the mouth of that alley is constantly under the eye of the firemen on that side of the boiler-room. Moreover, there is a high gate from the street and I cannot believe that any one——"

The burly officer halted him.

"Well, however he got there, he was on the fire-escape and coming down when I see him from the street," he said energetically. "When he seen me he turned into this north window and closed it after him, and my partner'd have given me the whistle if he'd come out again. Which room will it be, now?"

Wilkins glanced significantly at his master.

"If it's the north room on the fire-escape, sir, it must be the room young Mr. Prentiss has to-night."

"And the burglar is supposed to have gone in there?" Anthony said calmly.

"He ain't supposed—he went. I seen him!" stated the law. "And the longer we stand here and talk about it, the more chance he has to kill whoever's in there!"

"Well, as it happens, he isn't killing any one, because he isn't there," Mr. Fry said patiently and with just a touch of contempt. "Any one entering that room must have wakened Mr. Prentiss, and he certainly hasn't called for help. For that matter, I should have heard the window myself, because I sleep very lightly. Nevertheless, if you wish, we will go in there."

Impressively dignified even in his bathrobe, Anthony led the way down the side corridor, with the four trailing after him. They came to the door, and the officer pushed forward, club raised grimly over his right shoulder as he laid his left hand on the knob.

"Where's the light-switch in there?" he whispered.

"Right by the door," Wilkins supplied.

"Duck in the second I turn the knob, throw on the light, and then dodge along the wall," the law commanded briefly. "Are you ready?"

The invaluable one muttered his assent. The knob turned soundlessly and the door flew open. Wilkins, with a distinctly terrified little wheeze, pushed in, jabbed at the button, and scurried down the room on his hands and knees, eyes shut to shield his brain from the horrible impression.

Yet there was no hint of anything horrible. With all four corners of the room in plain sight, with the empty closet partly open and its interior fully visible, no burglar crouched, pistol in hand—no masked malefactor leaped forward to stun the officer with his padded lead-pipe. Only David Prentiss was in the room, and David slumbered sweetly in the bed, the covers pulled tight up around his young chin, a gentle dream-smile upon his regular features.

"Well, wotter yuh know about——" the officer began.

"Hush!" Anthony said gently.

"What?"

"Don't wake the youngster!" Anthony whispered sharply. "There's no need for that, officer. Look around if you like and then let us get out of here."

He folded his arms and waited, while the officer, visibly puzzled, poked about the room, and Wilkins, on his feet and smiling sheepishly, tip-toed to the door—while the night manager of the Lasande stepped in and looked about with a mixture of perplexity and relief, and Johnson Boller stood and stared at the sleeping David.

"Are you quite sure it was this window, officer?" the manager asked.

"I am that, if this is the one next to the corner of the house."

"But are you quite sure that you didn't imagine it?" Anthony asked tartly.

The policeman looked him over gravely.

"Boss, when I can see a man in black clothes staring down at me, letting off a little howl of fright, and then turning around and going into a window—when I can see that and it ain't there, I'll turn in my tin and go back to the docks. The guy came in this window and——"

"Well, since it is quite evident that he didn't, he couldn't have come in," the manager of the faultless hotel said hastily, as he caught Anthony's expression. "You've made a mistake in the window, officer. We'll go down and look up from the street again and see just what window you do mean."

"But——"

"We will not bother the gentlemen further," Mr. Dodbury said firmly.

Anthony nodded.

"Show them out, Wilkins. Come, Johnson."

"Wait a second," Johnson Boller said softly, as the others filed out of sight.

"Wait for what?"

"I want to admire this little cherub, sleeping here so soundly," Mr. Boller muttered.

"Don't be absurd! Come and——"

This thing of losing sleep rendered Johnson Boller uglier than could anything else in the world.

"Are they out of hearing?" he said. "All right. Somebody did close a window in here. I heard it close!"

"When?"

"Five minutes before the last excitement," said Mr. Boller. "How many pair of pajamas did Wilkins give this kid?"

"What? One pair, I suppose. Why?"

Johnson Boller grinned almost wickedly.

"Because there's a pajama suit under that chair and it's been worn!" said he. "What's the kid wearing in bed there?"

He stepped forward suddenly and jerked back the covers, and Anthony stepped forward with a sharp little exclamation, for David Prentiss, although he seemed to slumber between the sheets, wore a suit of black clothes and a pair of black shoes, and beside him a black felt hat was crumpled!

"Maybe that cop wasn't the idiot he seemed, eh?" Johnson Boller asked.

"I don't understand it," Anthony said angrily. "I—David!"

The boy merely sighed in his sleep and turned on his back.

"David!" Johnson Boller snapped, thrusting a hard forefinger directly into the pit of David's stomach.

"Good gracious!" gasped David Prentiss, sitting up and staring about with eyes wide open. "What—I must have been asleep and——"

Anthony's gaze was growing keener and angrier by the second.

"Never mind that artistic amazement, David," he said sourly. "What were you trying to do?"

"Trying?" echoed David. "To do?"

"Those are Wilkins's clothes. Where did you get them?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do!" Anthony snapped. "You must have found them in his room. Well?"

David gazed up at him with the same unfathomable look that had so disturbed Johnson Boller in the taxicab.

"Very well—I did find them in his room," he said. "I put them on because I couldn't find my own clothes, and I—I wanted to get to father."

"Yes, and now you're going to father!" Johnson Boller said decisively. "Better let him go, Anthony."

David was on his feet with one swing.

"That's the only thing to do with me," he said heartily. "I'm too much of a nuisance to keep around, Mr. Fry; I'm so worried about father that I can't think of anything else. So now I'll go and——"

"So now you'll stay right here!" Anthony said fiercely.

"Why?" Boller asked.

"Because I've undertaken to show this kid the opportunity of his lifetime, and I'll drive it into his infernal little skull if I have to chloroform him and have a surgeon drill a hole to let it through!" Mr. Fry said quite irresponsibly.

David collapsed hopelessly on the edge of the bed.

"I—I should think you'd be so out of patience with me——" he began mournfully.

"I am, but I'm not going to drop the job on that account," Anthony said grimly. "Shed those clothes, David."

"I'll shed 'em when you go out," David said monotonously. "I—I'd rather undress alone."

Johnson Boller's plump hands were on his plump hips and he surveyed his old friend darkly.

"Are you actually going to keep the youngster here against his will?" he demanded.

"I am!" snapped Anthony Fry.

Johnson Boller swallowed his wondering rage.

"I hope you get all that's coming to you!" he said. "I hope he sues you for a million dollars and collects every penny of it!"

And he turned and thumped out of David's chamber, down the corridor, and into the living-room, across the living-room, and into his own bedchamber—and there for a little he sat on the edge of the bed and swore aloud.

Presently he heard Anthony come through from David's room, muttering to himself; he heard the switch snap, and the streak of light under his door vanished.

With a long, weary groan, Johnson Boller slipped back to slumberland, and presently he was again in Montreal. It was still winter, and they were holding a skiing contest. Beatrice was there at the top of the slide, and beside her stood a tall, foppish youth with a little blond mustache. He leaned very close to Beatrice as he spoke, and devoured her beauty with his hungry eyes.

In the east the first gray light of dawn was streaking the skies.

In Anthony Fry's living-room, ever so faintly, objects just took shape in the gloom, coming foggily out of the inky blackness that had been, even ten minutes ago. Down the corridor a door creaked, and for a minute or more after the creak the stillness was even more pronounced.

Then, had one been awake and listening, the softest, lightest shuffle came from the corridor—paused—moved on again. There was a sharp intake of breath and the almost inaudible sound of a hand feeling along the corridor wall, feeling along and feeling along, until it touched the curtains of the living-room.

In the wide doorway of the dusky place an indefinite, strange figure appeared and stopped. It wore slippers, several sizes too large. It wore a bathrobe of gray, so long that its owner held it up from the floor to avoid tripping. It wore pajamas, too, and of these the legs were upturned almost one foot—for they were Anthony's pajamas.

Warily the figure gazed about, squinting through the gloom for half a minute, listening intently. Its frowzy brown head nodded then and the bathrobed one tip-toed on, now with a definite idea of direction. Past Anthony's door it went and past Johnson Boller's without a sound, without a slip—stopped to listen again, and then scuffed on toward the far corner, where stood the little telephone table.

And now, trembling, the figure settled on the stool, and shaky hands gripped the instrument itself. The receiver went to its ear and the figure whispered into the transmitter—trembled the harder and waited through minutes that were hours, while from behind Johnson Boller's door came an irregular snore and an occasional groan, as some new fiend sought to capture Beatrice's slender hand.

Suddenly a visible shock ran through the stealthy figure at the telephone. The trembling ceased abruptly and the figure stiffened, leaning forward eagerly and cupping a hand about the transmitter. Thrice it whispered shrilly, nodding desperately at the uncomprehending instrument; and at last the listener at the other end seemed to understand, for the figure pressed lips even closer and spoke swiftly.

A full two minutes of sharp whispering and it waited—listened and nodded animatedly—spoke again, enunciating each word clearly and still so softly that one across the living-room could not have heard.

Without the suggestion of a click, the receiver was returned to its hook. The figure rose cautiously and peered all about, through the shadows, getting its bearings once more. Again the bathrobe was gathered high above the grotesquely slippered feet; again the figure shuffled along, moving toward the doorway.

Without a stumble it threaded its mysterious way between chairs and little tables, divans and cases and pedestals, until it came safely to the corridor. There it paused for an instant, and in the gloom the faintest, excited giggle issued from beside the curtains. Then the corridor doorway was empty, and Johnson Boller snored on and groaned.

At the end of the corridor David Prentiss's door closed and utter stillness rested upon the apartment again.

After the skiing contest, although Johnson Boller did not seem to be present at the end, all hands trooped off to a clubhouse of some kind and there was a general jollification. Lovely women, handsome men grouped about a long table, and waiters rushed hither and thither, bearing viands and wine—although mostly wine.

He of the little blond mustache sat beside Beatrice, and as the champagne came around for the second or third time he leaped from his chair. Glass high held, he pointed to Johnson Boller's lovely wife with the other hand; he was beginning a toast, the temperature and intimacy of which caused Johnson Boller's fists to clench, and—he woke with a violent jerk and stared at the ceiling.

It was daylight—had been daylight for some time, apparently, because an early sun was reflected from the high building on the other side of the street. Wilkins seemed to be moving around, too, which indicated that it was at least six o'clock.

Johnson Boller stretched and snarled; he had had a wretched night of it! He was tired all through, as he was always tired when his rest had been broken. He was ugly as sin, too, and almost at once he found his ugliness focusing on young David Prentiss.

If Anthony Fry had carried his obsession over into the daylight, if he still persisted in poking his idiotic opportunity at David and the end of it did not seem to be in sight, Johnson Boller decided that the empty flat on Riverside should know its master's presence hereafter and—Boller sat up in bed, listening.

That was certainly Wilkins's voice, raised in horror—ah, and Wilkins was hurrying, too. Or no, it couldn't be Wilkins; that was somebody a good deal lighter, rushing along the corridor. And now the oddest babel of voices had risen, with Wilkins thrusting in an incoherent word here and there—and now the voices were growing fainter, all of a sudden, and he could hear Anthony Fry stirring in the next room.

Something new had happened! Johnson Boller, swinging out of bed, jammed his feet into his slippers and snatched up his bathrobe. Another night like this, and he'd be ready for emergency drill with a fire company.

Not that there was any need for haste, though. By the time he had opened the door and stepped into the living-room the little excitement seemed to have quieted down again. Anthony, bathrobed also, was just issuing from his bedroom, and again, for a moment, they gazed at one another.

"What was it that time?" Johnson Boller asked.

"I've no idea. Did you hear it, too?"

"Naturally. I——"

"Why, Wilkins!" Anthony Fry all but gasped, as his servitor appeared in the doorway. "What under the sun's the matter with you?"

"My—my eye, sir!" choked the faithful one. "It's downright scandalous, Mr. Fry!"

"What is?"

"The—the woman, sir! The woman that's come to see him!"

His jaw sagged senselessly and his blank eyes regarded his master quite fishily; and Anthony, after a wondering second or so, scuffed over to him and snapped:

"What's wrong with you, Wilkins? What woman came?"

"A—a young Frenchwoman, I should judge, sir," Wilkins stammered. "She came to the door here, getting past the office I don't know how. At any rate, she came, sir, and said some gibberish about Mr. David Prentiss, and with that she was past me and inside, Mr. Fry."

"Where is she now?"

"Well, she—she's in his bedroom, sir!" Wilkins stated. "The young chap came flying out like a madman, Mr. Fry, and threw his arms around her, speaking French as I suppose. And she—she threw her arms around Mr. Prentiss, sir, and with that they—well, they're in there now, sir."

Johnson Boller laughed unpleasantly.

"Picked off a live one, didn't you, Anthony?" said he. "There's nothing slow about David. He comes here and settles down at midnight, and his lady friends are calling by six the next morning. When you——"

Anthony had passed him, chin set and lips rather white.

There are some places where the questionable may be passed over quite lightly. The Hotel Lasande is not one of these places. There are thousands upon thousands of bachelors who would merely have grinned interestedly at the news; Anthony, being impeccable and a genuine woman-hater at heart, was not of these thousands. Hence, even his lean and aristocratic cheeks were white as he rattled at the knob of David's door.

He had expected to find it locked, and in that he was disappointed. The door gave quite readily, admitting Anthony and Johnson Boller as well—and for a matter of seconds they stood transfixed before the picture.

Beyond question, the woman was there!

She was little and very dark, decidedly pretty, for that matter, and obviously fond of David Prentiss; she sat at David's side on the edge of the bed and her arms were about David—while young Mr. Prentiss himself held her fast and seemed in a high state of excitement.

Even as the door opened, they had been speaking, both at the same time and both in French, in itself rather an astonishing phenomenon; but as the bathrobed gentlemen stopped beside them they ceased speaking. They merely clutched each other the tighter and looked at Anthony.

"Well?" Anthony Fry said slowly, and his voice was a terrible thing to hear.

"Well?" David said faintly.

His pretty little friend broke into a torrent of French, of which, unfortunately, neither Anthony nor Johnson Boller could make anything at all. David, with a long, gasping intake of his breath, muttered something to her, and that proving futile, put a gentle hand over her mouth. The girl, looking at Anthony, burst suddenly into loud and hysterical weeping!

"For Heaven's sake, shut her up!" gasped the master of the apartment.

"You started her—it was the way you looked at her!" David said thickly.

"Well, you stop her or I'll wring your neck!" Anthony panted. "You can hear that over half the house."

He turned his eye back to the unfortunate and froze her into sudden silence. Shaking, the girl crouched closer to David Prentiss, and Anthony drew breath once more.

It was a horrible thing that had happened, of course—this coming of a strange woman into his apartment. It was likely to take a good deal of explaining to the management of the Lasande, too, later on. But he had brought it upon himself, and the realization caused Anthony's white fury to glow.

"This—this woman is a friend of yours?" he choked.

"One of the—best friends I have!" David faltered.

"How does she come to be here?"

"I—I sent for her," David confessed. "I telephoned and——"

"All right. That's enough," Anthony Fry said, composure returning in some degree. "Can she speak English?"

"Not one word."

"Positively," the master of the apartment said slowly, "the thing to do is to have you both arrested, David. Don't start like that and don't speak! There is a certain presumption that this woman is some sort of accomplice, David—not much, perhaps, but one strong enough to hold you until both of you had learned a lesson!"

David, himself, white to the lips, was beyond words.

"Nevertheless," Anthony pursued, only a trifle more gently, "I shall go to no such length, because of the character of the house and the personal reflection such a mess would cast upon myself. Tell the woman to go, David, and then you and I will have a little chat."

"But——" David whispered.

"Tell her to go this instant!" Anthony thundered.

The boy in the oversize bathrobe looked at his girl friend with stricken eyes—looked at Anthony for an instant, and turned away as swiftly. He swallowed, and, lips trembling, addressed the little French girl; and she started from him and threw out her hands in horror, pouring out a torrent of words. David spoke again, however, and she rose, swaying.

"Show the woman to the door, Wilkins, and to the back stairs," Anthony ordered, restraining himself with a considerable effort. "Be sure she doesn't go near the elevators. Quick!"

David spoke again, in French and in a strange, low, forlorn wail. The girl, as if at an eternal parting, thrust out the expressive hands once more and gurgled hysterical Gallic snatches; and then Wilkins had laid a hand on her shoulder, turned her about, and she was gone.

Johnson Boller looked after them and at his old friend.

"Aren't you going to send the youngster after her?" he asked with the superior air of a man who has proved his case beyond a doubt.

"Quite possibly," Anthony said, smiling a dangerous little smile. "But I mean to have a chat with David first."

Johnson Boller gazed at David for a moment and smiled himself, almost happily. Unless indications were highly deceptive, Anthony, with his precious reputation all mussed up by the pretty little French girl, was mad enough to beat up David.

But Johnson Boller had no idea of sitting around and watching it, later to waste days in a police court for David's wretched sake. Hence he thumped out of David's room and back to his own.

Alone with his find, Anthony said not a word for a full minute, nor did David. The boy, hunched on the edge of his bed, had passed the capability of motion and even of thought; he merely stared at Anthony with dazed, thunder-struck eyes that were very far from being intelligent.

"David," Anthony said savagely, "however slightly unusual the circumstances may have been, I brought you to this apartment for your own good."

"Um," David said numbly.

"And last night I laid down for you the rule that you were to have no women here."

David said nothing at all.

"Yet even before we've dressed this morning, you manage to worm an infernal woman in here and—what the devil do you mean by it, anyway, you infernal little whelp?" Anthony cried, as his temper snapped. "Don't sit there and shiver! Answer me!"

Still David said nothing.

"Answer or I'll shake some wits into you!" Anthony cried.

And by way of doing this he seized David's thick brown hair and gave a first, threatening shake.

And having shaken—Anthony Fry, the chilly and self-contained, emitted one rattling, half-shrieking gasp and reeled backward!

CHAPTER VI

Johnson Boller Proposes

The whole head of brown hair had come free in his hand, and from David's cranium, billow upon billow of red-gold glory floated down about the bathrobed shoulders.

David, in fine, with no warning at all, had turned into a decidedly pretty young woman!

Through Anthony's astounded brain, impressions pursued one another so rapidly, those first few seconds, that the room danced crazily. There were two or three Davids and oceans of reddish-gold hair; there were several pairs of somber, deep-blue eyes as well, whirling around and mocking him, regarding his quite steadily and all packed with new significance.

Yet in the tumult several details, which had rather puzzled Anthony Fry, grew painfully clear. Very fully now did he understand that delicacy of feature—the small, beardless chin and the fine, regular little nose, which he had ascribed to good blood somewhere in David's family. He understood also the slenderness of David's hands and the curious, high-pitched shrillness that had come into the voice once or twice in moments of excitement.

But these were minor, insignificant realizations; he understood them and passed them, forcing his brain to some sort of calm; and now, with only one David in the room and the furniture quite steady again, he stood face to face with what was really one of the most horrible facts of his whole life; a pretty young woman, of whose identity he was utterly ignorant, was in his guest chamber now, in pajamas and bathrobe—and she had been there all night!

Out of Anthony's limp fingers the wig dropped, landing on the floor with a soft thump. He sought to speak and found that words would not come as yet; he gripped at one of the little chairs and presently discovered that his weak knees had lowered him into it, so that he sat and still stared at David and——

"I wish you wouldn't kick that wig around," said his guest. "I only hired it for the night, you know."

The owner of Fry's Imperial Liniment pulled at the loose collar of his pajamas.

"You—er—you——" he said intelligently.

"I wouldn't faint," the girl said coolly. "I'm not going to bite you, you know. And please don't make those silly faces, either, Mr. Fry. You've brought it on yourself. I'm not here by my own choosing. I've done my level best to get out and——"

Anthony's voice returned explosively.

"Why," he cried thickly, "why didn't you tell me?"

"That I was a girl?"

"Yes!"

The lovely little mystery had kicked off her slippers and was looking pensively at her bare feet. They were pink and tiny; as feet, however, they belonged anywhere in the world but in Anthony Fry's bachelor home, and he turned suddenly from them and looked at their owner, who smiled faintly.

"You look a lot saner when you're scared," she mused.

"Why didn't——"

"I'm coming to that, just because you do look saner," the girl explained. "I didn't tell you because I didn't dare. I thought you were crazy."

"What?"

"Who wouldn't, when you were talking that way about opportunity and insisting that I stay here and all that sort of thing?" the young woman inquired tartly. "It was plain enough that you were a crank, at the best of it, and I didn't know—well, it seemed better to take a chance of getting out during the night."

Second by second, normal cerebration was returning to Anthony, and although it caused him to grow colder and colder with plain apprehension it also rendered his perspective more true, for he burst out with——

"Why in Heaven's name did you, a girl, ever come here in the first place?"

"What?" The girl smiled flittingly and ruefully. "Oh, there was a reason for that, too."

"What was it?"

She of the Titian hair eyed him thoughtfully and shook her head.

"Perhaps I'll tell you some other time," she said.

"Why not now?" Anthony snapped.

"You wouldn't be any happier for knowing, just now," the girl said mysteriously.

Her pajamaed legs, swathed in the mighty bathrobe, crossed comfortably Turkish fashion, and she considered Anthony with her calm, quizzical eyes—and of a sudden an overwhelming helplessness surged through Anthony Fry and he had more than a little difficulty in concealing the slight tremble of his limbs.

For if the boy David had been a nervous, frightened creature, the lady who had succeeded him was almost anything else! David had been timorous and given to shrinking; the girl was all quiet assurance. David's eyes had been frightened and round; these eyes were just as round, but, as much as anything else, they seemed to express mild amusement at Anthony's discomfiture.

And that was the way of the whole sex, Anthony reflected bitterly. Having enmeshed mere man and entangled him, hands, feet, and everything else, it was woman's habit to sit and stare calmly, just as this one was sitting and staring, wordlessly inquiring just what he meant to do about it.

"Who are you?" he asked dizzily.

"Um," said the girl meditatively. "Well, if you find it necessary to call me anything, call me—er—Mary."

"Mary what?"

"Just Mary."

"But your other name——"

"You wouldn't be any happier for knowing that either," the girl assured him serenely.

"What on earth does that mean?" Anthony demanded, with almost a return of his old imperious manner.

Mary gazed fixedly at him for a moment, deeply and inscrutably and with that in her eyes which, although he could not name it, caused Anthony's chilly blood to drop several more degrees.

"Don't ask me what it means, because I might tell you, and you wouldn't be any happier for knowing that!" the girl said quietly.

"But the Frenchwoman?" Anthony essayed, lunging off in another direction. "Who was she?"

"Well, she was my personal maid—at least it won't hurt you to know that much," Mary dimpled. "I sent for her and asked her to bring my bag and—there's the bag."

One pink foot indicated it, and for many seconds Anthony's dumfounded eyes stared at the thing. There was an intricate monogram on one end, which he could not decipher; otherwise, it impressed him. The bag was a very, very expensive bit of luggage and his failing heart thumped a trifle harder.

No stray young woman owns a bag like that and a French maid to carry it around; no adventurous female waif of the type one might expect to find wandering about in masculine raiment speaks in the unquestionably cultivated tone that Mary was using now. And no clear-eyed, clear-skinned young female friend of Mary's type ever belonged to the demi-monde!

Mary was a person of parts and position. How she had appeared at the fight, Anthony, if he had wonderful luck, might never learn; but the fact remained that he had detained her against her will in his apartment, and possibilities loomed so swiftly and numerous before his mental vision that his throat tightened.

"You—you're a respectable young woman!" he said hoarsely.

"Thank you, unquestionably," Mary smiled dryly.

"And—er—as such, the thing to do is to get you out of here as quickly and as inconspicuously as possible."

"I've been trying to get out inconspicuously myself," Mary suggested.

Anthony rose and his sickly smile appeared again.

"I can—can only apologize and assume all the blame," he said unsteadily. "I will have Wilkins bring you your clothes, and as soon as you are dressed we will——"

"You mean those men's clothes?" Mary asked sharply.

"Of course."

"And go out in them in daylight?"

"Certainly."

"I wouldn't do that for an even million dollars!" Mary informed him.

"But you'll have to do that!" said Anthony.

"But I will not have to do it, because I won't do it!" the girl said flatly and with considerable warmth. "Why, every man, woman, and child in the street would know, the very second they looked at me, and I—oh, no! I won't do that!"

"There's nothing else to do!" Anthony cried desperately. "You—er—you don't understand this hotel, young woman. A woman seen leaving one of these apartments and going out of the house, more especially at this time of the day—er——"

He flushed angrily.

"Yes, I know," Mary said helpfully. "But I'm not going out in those clothes if I stay here and die of old age."

And here, from the end of the corridor, Johnson Boller's deep, carrying voice came:

"Has he kicked the kid out yet, Wilkins?"

"Not yet, sir," said Wilkins's grave tone.

"What? Is he going to keep him here after all?"

"I should judge so, sir. There's been no disturbance down that way."

"Well, what," Johnson Boller muttered audibly, "do you know about that?"

"It's most distressing, sir!" Wilkins replied.

Anthony Fry's pupils dilated.

"He's coming down here, I think!" he said. "Get on that wig again!"

"Why?" Mary inquired, pausing in the process of knotting up her wonderful hair.

"Because Boller—Boller——" Anthony stammered wildly. "There is no need of his knowing that you're a—a young woman, now or in future. I am speaking for your own sake, you know. You may meet him a thousand times elsewhere in years to come, and there's a mean streak in Boller which——"

"Is there?" Mary asked, with what was really her very first touch of concern since resuming her proper sex. "Give me the wig, then."

Fortunately, at the living-room end of the corridor, Johnson Boller devoted a good five minutes to meditation. He had finished his usual lightning morning tub and resumed his bathrobe in a more cheerful frame of mind, quite confident that David Prentiss was no longer in their midst. He had even prepared a peppery line of chaffing for the breakfast table, the same dealing with the visit of a pretty little French girl to the irreproachable apartment and the various methods by which Anthony Fry could explain the matter to the management, should he be requested to explain.

Yet David was still with them and—if quiet down there meant anything—with them to stay. Anthony's trouble remained with him this morning; even now, undoubtedly, he was sitting in there and hurling opportunity again and again at David's invulnerable armor—and if the idiotic idea had taken as firm a grip as that the end might be days away, just as it had been in the case of the yeggmen.

It gibed not at all with Boller's plans for his visit to Anthony. He caressed his chin and scowled for a little; later, he smiled grimly. After all, there are more ways of killing a cat than by drowning the animal in champagne—and David was a tender shoot as yet.

Johnson Boller flexed his muscles and examined his smile in the mirror. It was a broad, genial expression, all warm and friendly; and without permitting one of its curves to slip from place he strode down the corridor and threw open the door of David Prentiss's chamber.

Hunched up in his big bathrobe, the boy was sitting on the edge of the bed, while Anthony stood across the room with his back wisely to the light. It was entirely plain that the trouble had gone up in smoke and that the presumably angry interview had flattened out to a love feast; David had not been and, so far as concerned Anthony, would not be ejected—yet instead of protesting Johnson Boller said jovially:

"Licked him into shape, eh?"

"Ah—David has explained," Anthony managed.

"Got the trouble all smoothed over, eh?"

"Yes."

Johnson Boller laughed mightily and winked at David. Further, he stepped over and slapped David's back—no mere friendly tap, but a whack that nearly sent him from the bed.

"Who was the squab, kid?" he cried. "Who——"

"Don't hit him like that!" Anthony gasped.

"What?"

"The boy——"

"Tap like that won't hurt him!" Johnson Boller chuckled as David, suppressing a shriek, managed to grip the bed and regain his balance. "Who was the Gallic chicken, my lad?"

"A—a friend of mine," David said weakly.

"I betcher!" said Johnson Boller significantly. "I got a line on her the second I laid eyes on her, kid. Now, I want to tell you something. You're a young sport and these things look different to you now, but the long and the short of a dizzy little——"

"Johnson!" Anthony broke in.

"What now?"

"It—it is not necessary to advise David," said David's captor, quite thickly, for he was familiar with Johnson Boller's views on many subjects and his manner of airing them. "The boy has—er—explained the—ah—young woman and——"

He could get no farther. Johnson Boller eyed him with an amused and quizzical grin.

"Going to keep this kid with you?"

"For a time, yes."

"You know, you're a funny character, Anthony," Boller mused. "If your great-grandmother came to this joint to have a cup of tea with you, you'd want her to stop at the desk and show her pedigree and the family Bible, just so they'd be sure she was your great-grandmother, and your lovely reputation wouldn't have a spot of suspicion on it as big as a pinpoint. But you go and rake this kid off the streets and when his lady friends come in——Where did she come from, kid, and how did she get up here?"

His smile broadened happily as he observed that David had not yet ceased wiggling his back in search of broken bones.

"I explained all that to Mr. Fry," David said rather sulkily.

"I know, Davy, but that doesn't count for anything," Mr. Boller chuckled. "You see, Mr. Fry's a bachelor—has been all his life and expects to be if he lives to be a hundred. What he doesn't know about females in general would fill a string of libraries from here to Battery Park and half way across to Staten Island.

"You've probably told him the squab was your sister and he fell and said what a pretty sister she was. But as for me, Dave—you couldn't put that stuff over if you tried a month. I'm the original specialist in everything female; I've got a kind of sixth sense that tells me all about them before I've even seen 'em and after I've looked at 'em once I can tell you where they were three weeks ago last Saturday night. You can't fool me when it comes to women."

"Well, now, suppose we drop the subject and——" Anthony began agitatedly.

"Let me slip this kid some real advice," said Mr. Boller. "Davy, I know all sorts of women—good and bad and the kind you think are all right, but aren't! Get me? You're only a boy, and offhand I'd say that this French damsel belonged in the latter class. At a guess, you met her——"

"Stop!" cried Anthony Fry in pure terror.

Johnson Boller gazed mildly at him.

"If you're going to adopt this kid, Anthony, you might better let me put him wise to some of his past mistakes and tell him how to avoid 'em in his new life. I don't know what lie he put over on you, but you know as well as I do that the just-right kind of boy isn't receiving mysterious calls before seven in the morning from a highly affectionate——"

"Stop!" gasped Anthony. "Whatever—whatever advice David needs I shall give him myself!"

Johnson Boller sighed and shrugged his shoulders, as if casting aside a responsibility he had assumed only because of a strong sense of duty. It was a little disappointing, because he had figured fully on rousing David—who must be a white-livered, spiritless little whelp, by the way—and having David rush to the defense of his mysterious lady. He had counted fully on David's voice rising and then upon raising his own, in spectacular anger, so that a real noisy rumpus would develop in Anthony's flat and send David's stock a little farther down.

Instead, he had only roused Anthony; and Anthony certainly was a curious cuss, when one came to think of it! He was standing over there now, almost dead white, not trembling but looking as if he would like to tremble with rage.

And for what?

Because, ostensibly, his oldest friend had tried to advise the boy he had snatched from a prize-fight. Johnson Boller shook his head. That opportunity business had been queer, but still it had been quite like Anthony in his eccentric moments—but this continuation of the queerness was bad! Before sixty, Anthony Fry would have settled down in some nice, comfortable sanitarium.

These things, however, were not the moment's chief concern. It behooved Johnson Boller to try the second section of his hasty little plan, if David were to be ousted from the flat. Hence, he allowed his benevolent, genial grin to return; he flashed it upon Anthony and then upon the boy.

"As you please," said he, "although I don't know how much good he'll get out of the kind of advice you're able to give him. However—that's your lookout. Going to turn him into a man, eh?"

"Yes," Anthony said thickly.

Johnson Boller yawned, by way of demonstrating unconcern.

"Well, kid, it's pretty soft for you, but since Mr. Fry's determined on the job I'll be around for the first month to offer whatever assistance may be within my power," said he. "Good meals—early hours—regular habits—all that sort of thing. And then, of course, a proper amount of athletic work to keep you fit."

"Yes," David agreed.

"Don't be so hellish surly about it," smiled Mr. Boller. "How are you, David—pretty athletic?"

"Athletic enough," David submitted.

"That means, I suppose, that you never raise a hand unless somebody pays you to do it. That'll never do, boy. Regular, scientific training means everything to a man who wants to keep his health. Look at me! Ten years ago I weighed fifty pounds more than I do now—sick half the time and disgusted with life the other half. I got over it and to-day I feel like a two-year-old. What did it?"

David was looking at Anthony.

"Exercise did it!" stated Johnson Boller. "Stand up here?"

"What for?" David asked quickly.

"I'm going to teach the first principles of bounding health to you."

"If David needs any training, it can be arranged for later," Anthony put in hastily. "You see, Johnson, although——"

"Anthony," his friend interrupted firmly, "you'll have to pardon me, but there are some things about which you know no more than an unborn kitten and one of them is physical training. I, on the other hand, have paid out about five thousand dollars to different specialists, and what I don't know about keeping fit hasn't been discovered yet. You do your share for the kid and I'll do mine, and later on he'll thank me more than he does you, Stand up, David."

"But——"

"Stand up and I'll show you the elementary ideas of boxing," smiled Johnson Boller. "Come! Don't be a mollycoddle!"

He waited, fists clenched loosely, smiling artlessly—although it was a bitter, cowardly thing that was in his heart.

Johnson Boller, be it admitted, intended to beat up David Prentiss; with the youngster's good as his shallow pretext, he meant to bruise David's young anatomy—and when this bruising was over to contrive another occasion and bruise it further—and after that to discover additional excuses and continue the bruising—until David Prentiss should flee the flat in sheer terror.

Hence, he smiled again and said:

"Come, kid! Come! Stand up or I'll soak you right there!"

"Johnson!" Anthony said sharply.

"Like that!" said Johnson Boller, jabbing suddenly before the protest could take form.

And now Anthony cried aloud, for the boy had toppled over backward—and almost immediately Anthony's teeth shut with a click. Because young David, eyes flashing, had bounced up again and was on his feet. One of his small fists, tight shut, had whisked out and met Johnson Boller's countenance with a loud crack.

And Mr. Boller, expelling his breath with an amazed hiss, had lost his balance and was sitting on the floor!

CHAPTER VII

The Butterfly

One bad feature of having passed one's earlier days in the remote fastnesses of New England, in the era before the automobile and the telephone came to complicate life, is that one's ideas of womanhood are likely to be definite and rooted.

Part of Anthony's boyhood had been spent in a Massachusetts hamlet nine miles from the nearest railroad, and at forty-five he had not fully recovered from some of the effects.

Even after decades of New York, Anthony's notion of woman embodied a prim creature, rather given to talking of her sorrows, able to faint prettily on occasion, and, unless born to the coarser form life, a little fatigued after dusting the parlor.

She was a creature, lovely and delicate, who played croquet as the extreme of exercise and never even watched more violent sports. She did not golf; she did not swim or shoot. She was, in a word, one hundred per cent. feminine—and about the most scandalous thing that could be suggested about her was that she savored, even one per cent., of the masculine.

So, while another type of citizen, possessed of all the facts, might have thrown up his hands in glee and laughed merrily at the sight of Johnson Boller sitting there on the floor, Anthony Fry merely stood frozen.

Minute by minute, he was understanding more fully just what manner of individual his insistence had inducted into his chaste home. She was a female in sex only! She was no timid little thing, swooning and weeping at her terrible predicament; she was the sort that dons trousers and goes to prize-fights—but what was infinitely worse, if one judged by that resounding whack, she was herself a prize-fighter!

Anthony, you see, was a mild enthusiast about the fighting game; when he saw a genuine short-arm jab he recognized it instantly.

And going further—for he could not help doing that—what was to be the end of the mess? Last night, could his addled head but have permitted it, she would have gone away gladly as a boy. Now that the truth was out, she was making no effort to escape; far worse, just at this minute, she seemed bent on continuing the fistic battle, for she stood and fairly glared down at Johnson Boller.

Ten seconds had passed since the resounding thump which proclaimed that heavy gentleman's meeting with the floor, and still he had not risen. Five of them he spent in staring blankly up at David; three he spent in gathering a scowl; the final two found his plump countenance turning to an angry red—and Johnson Boller was struggling to his feet, breathing hard.

"Say, kid——" he began gustily and threateningly.

Anthony Fry came to life and, with a bound, was between them.

"Let this thing stop right here, Johnson!" he said ringingly. "No more of it—do you understand? No more!"

"No more, your eye!" panted Johnson Boller. "Get out of the way before I knock you out!"

"Johnson, I refuse to permit you——" Anthony cried, and with both lean hands pushed back on Mr. Boller's heaving chest.

"Look here, Anthony," said Johnson Boller, with plainly forced calm; "when a dirty little guttersnipe like that hits me a foul blow, something happens!"

"There wasn't anything foul about that blow," David said calmly. "That was a nice clean jab, and nothing like the one you gave me without warning and while I was sitting down."

"That's enough, David!" Anthony said.

"He started it," David submitted.

Anthony pushed on. Johnson Boller was against the bureau now—had been there for some seconds, indeed—and his expression was changing. Young David, to be sure, had rendered him slightly ridiculous for a bit, but getting mad about it was not likely to help in eliminating David.

"It's all right, Anthony," Mr. Boller said with a sudden grim smile. "Don't shove me through the wall. I won't hurt the kid."

"You'll not lay hands on him?"

"No."

"That's a promise?"

"Why, of course it is!" Johnson Boller said heartily.

Anthony Fry heaved a great, shaky sigh and stood back. It had not happened that time. David's wig was still in place, and David was still David. Yet, all other things apart, what if David's wig had slipped? What if, during the thirty or forty years he still had to live, Anthony must have cut out Johnson Boller's really stimulating friendship, or have listened, day in and day out, night in and night out, at every meeting and on every sly occasion, to a recital of what had happened this morning?

The strain was really growing too much. Johnson Boller would have to get out of here now and—although why was Johnson Boller smiling so sweetly?

"Quite a little boxer, kid, aren't you?" he was asking in the most friendly fashion.

"I've boxed with my brother," David said.

"Made a study of it, eh?"

"So-so," said David.

They were going to have a little conversation now, which gave Anthony a minute or two for thought. First he would get Johnson Boller out of here on the plea that it was time to dress; then he would have David's man-clothes brought, and, in one way or another, he would persuade David to don them. It could be worked, the calmer Anthony assured himself, and then—

"Well, if you're inclined that way, there's nothing like keeping in shape for it," Mr. Boller was saying as he fumbled at the knot of his bathrobe. "I'll show you my back muscles and then show you how——"

"Johnson!" Anthony exploded.

"Well, what in the name of common sense is the matter with you?" Mr. Boller cried.

"I—that is to say, David—your confounded back muscles don't interest him, Johnson. Not one particle! Do they, David?"

"Not a bit!" David said faintly from the corner toward which he was backing.

"So let this physical-training rot rest!" cried the master of the apartment. "Go and dress and——"

"My dear fellow," Johnson Boller broke in mildly, "you are, so far as physical training goes, a nice old lady. But for Heaven's sake, if you're going to keep this boy, don't try to bring him up along similar lines. Go look over your bean-pole anatomy, and you'll need no further argument. This kid is young and supple, and fit to be whacked into a real man and—say, get out of here for fifteen minutes, Anthony, will you?"

"Why?"

"I'm going to strip this youngster and look him over, and then start him on the right track," Mr. Boller said with an unconscious and affectionate glance at his fist.

"Mr. Fry!" gasped David.

"Well, has this mollycoddle stuff in the air infected you, too?" Johnson Boller asked tartly. "Don't you want to be a man?"

"No!"

Johnson Boller laughed scornfully.

"Anthony, I think your presence is a bad influence," he said. "Will you please get out of here? Shed that bathrobe, kid, and let's see if there's anything to you but pulp!"

"No!" said David.

"Well, I say yes, and I say it for your own good!" Johnson Boller said firmly as he advanced. "I'm going to make a man of you!"

"You can't!" said David thinly.

"I can, boy! Believe me, I can!" Mr. Boller smiled. "Get out of that robe!"

He was advancing. Ten seconds more and he would lay violent hands on David, and Anthony Fry, with a wrench that racked his very soul, hurled back every emotion and contrived a really quiet smile. More, even; when he spoke it was in the tone of one merely amused and slightly tried in patience.

"You mean well, old chap," he said, laying a firm hand on Johnson Boller's arm, "but you're a crank on this gymnastic business. Don't be absurd, please—you're fairly frightening the boy. Later on, perhaps, when he is more accustomed to you and the surroundings, and all that sort of thing, you may take him in hand. Just now it is well past seven o'clock, and I'm hungry. Come to your senses and get dressed, Johnson, if only as a favor."

His eye was firm and steady; and having faced it for a moment, Johnson Boller shrugged his shoulders again. And yet he had not inflicted even one bruise on David, but pressing the matter now was likely to do no more than excite Anthony, and there was still time.

As head of his particular woolen concern, Johnson Boller could well spend the whole morning away from the office, so that it gained him the chance of hammering the boy to a jelly and ousting him from Johnson Boller's temporary home. Mr. Boller, therefore, sighed a little in disappointment as he said:

"If you insist. I'd rather put the kid through his first paces naked, of course, because then one——"

"Yes, some other time, doubtless," Anthony said hastily. "Get along now, Johnson and dress."

They were alone again, Anthony and David.

David's color was decidedly higher, and his eyes burned with a mixture of fright and indignation, while the bathrobe was clutched defensively about his throat. Anthony himself had lost his pallor, and on his high, thoughtful forehead a glistening glaze had come into being. He dabbed it away with his handkerchief and glanced fearfully toward the door.

"This is—er—most embarrassing!" he breathed.

"It is for me!" said the apparent David. "What's the matter with that man?"

"He has his own ideas about most things," Anthony said with a shudder. "However, he is out of the way now and—er—the next thing is to get you out, also."

"Well?"

"I am sorry, Miss Mary, truly sorry if it displeases you," Anthony went on carefully; "but there is really only one way for you to leave quite safely. This house, you see, is rather different from other houses. It would be possible to send for your—ah—proper clothing and have you leave as the doubtless prepossessing young woman that you are; but to do that you would have to pass through the office downstairs, and the elevator men would know that you came from this apartment."

"Ah?" said Mary, without expression.

"And inasmuch as every one here knows that I'm not married, and that I have no female relatives or even friends of your age, the—ah—very painful inference——"

"I see," said Mary, as he paused and flushed. "Go on."

She was not exactly helpful, sitting there and staring at Anthony with her great, deep-blue eyes. They were very beautiful eyes, doubtless, but they caused Anthony's mind to stagger as he labored on.

"There are the back stairs, of course, but to pass them it would be necessary to meet servants and employees of the house in half a dozen places; I believe there is even a gate-keeper of some sort below and—oh, the back stairs would not be at all possible!" said Anthony as he pushed the button for Wilkins. "I deplore the necessity of sending you out as you came, Miss Mary, but—er—Wilkins! Mr. Prentiss's clothes, if you please."

"What of them, sir?" Wilkins asked blankly.

"Bring them here."

"But I can't do that, Mr. Fry."

"Why not?" Anthony asked crisply.

"You told me to dispose of them last night, sir. I've thrown them out!"

Anthony caught his breath.

"Where have you thrown them?"

"Out with the other refuse of the day, sir—on the dumbwaiter."

"Then—well, never mind. That is all, Wilkins," said Anthony Fry, his voice thickening somewhat.

The invaluable one retired, with a last disapproving glance at the frowsy David, and Anthony's forehead wrinkled. David, the while, sat hunched on the bed and seemed altogether unaffected by the disaster.

"Well, you'll have to make the best of some of my wardrobe, I fear," the master of the apartment smiled.

"Yours?" Mary cried.

"They will be a trifle large, but you'll have to hitch them up in spots and in in other spots and make the best of it," Anthony pursued firmly. "It's too bad, of course, but it is unavoidable. Those togs of yours were decidedly shabby and I had meant, while supposing you to be a boy, that to-day we'd have some shopping done for you. Just a moment, please."

He left the room with a nervous stride altogether unlike his usual dignified glide. He turned, wildly almost, into the nearest closet in the corridor and switched on the light. There was the dark gray suit, which was too loose even for Anthony, and the dark brown suit, which happened to be too long for him; but the old blue suit—ah, that was the one!

Very earnestly, Anthony tried to assure himself that it had been both far too tight and far too short in every detail, at its last wearing; almost pathetically he sought to tell himself that David in the old blue suit would look quite like a young man wearing his own clothes—and with the old blue suit over his arm and a pair of shoes in the other hand, he tip-toed back to David.

"This is the next best thing to the clothes you wore, and I'm sure you'll find them quite all right," said he.

"Me get into those?" Mary murmured with the same strange apathy.

"Most certainly, and I've thought out the rest of it—there while I was locating this suit," Anthony pursued, with what was meant for a reassuring smile and making his jerky way to the little desk in the corner of the guest chamber. "I shall give you a note, David, addressed to a mythical person and unsealed."

"What for?"

"So that, on the remote chance of any one in this house questioning your presence, you can show that you're merely delivering a grip—your own—for me!" smiled Fry, as he scribbled. "Rather clever, that, eh?"

"Horribly clever!" Mary said enigmatically.

Two long minutes the pen scratched on, while Mary watched his back with the same inscrutable, almost unwinking stare. Then Anthony turned with a smile.

"This is to Mr. J. Thurston Phillips at the Astor Hotel," said he. "If I were you, I'd carry it rather conspicuously; it's quite possible that the clerk downstairs may want to know who you are. And, also if I were you, I'd explain that you're the son of an old friend of mine and a stranger in the city and that I put you up overnight—something like that. You understand?"

"I hear you say it," said Mary.

Anthony's countenance darkened a little as he rose.

"Then please pay strict attention to what I say!" he said. "I am doing my best to undo an absurd piece of business. I'm quite ready to admit that it is just that, but the blame isn't quite all my own. You should have told me the truth. Now, when you're dressed and ready—simply leave! Just walk down the corridor to the door, please, open it and go. There's no need of risking another inspection by Mr. Boller; you look decidedly less like a boy in daylight, believe me. Is everything clear?"

"I suppose it is," sighed Mary, with a significant glance at the door.

Anthony allowed himself a single sigh of relief.

"This, then, is our parting," he said, with a faint, Kindly smile. "I ask your pardon and the best thing I can wish you is a safe return home. Good-by."

"Au revoir," Mary said, with another glance at the door.

She seemed to have accepted the situation, blue suit and all; she was a sensible little thing, Anthony reflected almost comfortably, as he hurried back to his own room and his bath.

And now he would rush through the dressing process himself, as he had never rushed before, and by some means he would manage to keep Johnson Boller in his own room and out of sight of the corridor, until the telltale closing of the door assured him that one of his life's most painful episodes was over.

It had not been entirely without humor. Later on—much later on—Anthony assured himself that he would have many a good laugh in private over the youth upon whom he had tried to thrust opportunity—laughs that would be the richer and more enjoyable because he alone possessed the key to the joke. That would be after the shock had passed, of course; enough for the present to sigh again and again and think gloriously that each second brought David that much nearer to leaving.

Yet David had not departed, even when Anthony had given the last twitch to his morning coat and the last dab to his thin, rather prim hair. He listened, as he entered the living-room, and then risked a quiet trip across and looked down the corridor; David's door was closed tightly and—yes, even though it caused Anthony's hair to rise and his cheek to flush angrily, David was singing a faint little snatch of song in a perfectly indubitable soprano!

The little fool should have had more sense; Anthony listened, started down to halt the song and turned back as quickly, to head for Johnson Boller's room and engage that citizen in conversation, for that was the important thing just now. He turned the knob and would have entered rather breezily, but that Johnson Boller, fully groomed and ready for the day, walked out suddenly and resistlessly and looked around with:

"Where's the kid?"

"Er—dressing," said Anthony.

"Where's breakfast?" Mr. Boller pursued.

Inspiration came swiftly to Anthony.

"I breakfast in here as a rule," said he, "but—just this morning, you know—I thought we might go below. It's not so quiet down there and there's more to see, Johnson, and——"

Johnson Boller sprawled comfortably in a chair near the corridor and grinned.

"Nix!" said he, with a shake of the head. "We'll eat right here; I'm all done with that noisy stuff, Anthony, and this is more homelike. And then, another thing," he added more seriously, "I want to cross-examine that little shaver in private, as it were. This idea of settling him in the house without knowing anything about him is downright crazy. I want to ask him about that French doll and——."

He stopped. The window at the end of the corridor was open and the fresh morning breeze was blowing lightly past him. Also, he sniffed.

"Who's using perfume around here?" asked Johnson Boller.

"What?"

"Strong—rank!" said Anthony's guest. "Don't you smell it?"

"I smell nothing," Anthony said, as an expensive pungence tickled his nostrils suddenly, "but I'll see——"

He started for the corridor and stopped short. David had left his room and was coming down—and still, it did not sound like David! David, in Anthony's shoes, six or seven sizes too large, should have been thumping clumsily; these footsteps were firm little pats, with the sharp rap of a heel once or twice on the polished floor beside the runner. More still, with no regard at all for caution, David, using his soprano voice, was humming the same little tune.

And just as pure premonition had sent Anthony's skin to crawling, just as his scalp was prickling and his eyes narrowing angrily, David was with them.

By way of raiment, David, the grip emptied, wore the daintiest tailored walking-gown, short of skirt and displaying silken stockings and patent leathers, with high, slender French heels. David's slim, round, girl-throat suggested the faintest powdering; David's abundant hair was dressed bewitchingly, with little reddish-blond curls straying down about the temples—and had one spent a morning on Fifth Avenue it would really have been rather difficult to find a more thoroughly attractive or better gowned girl than David!

Yet, in spite of her charms, Johnson Boller, who had bounced instinctively from his chair, could do no more than stare at David with the general expression of a fish new-snatched from water. Second after second he gaped before his thick:

"Who's that?"

"That's David!" Anthony said weakly.

"The—the boy was a girl?"

"It would seem so."

"Then——" Johnson Boller stopped, teeth shutting suddenly. He stared at the young woman and he stared at Anthony Fry, who smiled faintly and hopelessly. His face grew red and then purple and then black.

"Hah!" he cried savagely. "I've got it! I've got it, you—you——"

"Hey?" said Anthony.

"I see it now!" Mr. Boller vociferated surprisingly. "You framed this thing up on me!"

CHAPTER VIII

Scorned

Anthony's brain, accustomed to the most precise and unexciting of routines, was tired—not nearly so tired as it was destined to become, yet too tired to grasp at once the significance of that flaming countenance. He could no more than stand limply and look at Johnson Boller, as that gentleman, ignoring Mary altogether, strode down upon him with clenched fists.

"You did it, but you'll never get away with it!" he cried.

"Johnson——"

"Never in the world! I've got Wilkins as a witness and——"

"Witness for what?"

Johnson Boller, albeit he trembled with fury, controlled himself.

"Don't try that baby-stare stuff on me, Fry," he said. "I understand now. Last night I thought you were off on one of your eccentric spells, but you were crazy like a fox, you were! But don't think for one minute that Beatrice is fool enough to drop into such a trap!"

Anthony himself did a little controlling.

"What are you talking about?" he cried.

"The thing you've tried to put over, to get me away from Beatrice!" Johnson Boller thundered. "That's enough! Don't deny it! I know you don't approve of matrimony; I know you never wanted me to get married; I know that we haven't traveled around as much this last six months as we did in the twenty years before it—and I suppose you've been lonely, because nobody else in the world would stand for you. But by Heaven, Anthony, I never thought you'd try to break up my family by——"

"Try to do what?"

Johnson Boller dashed the sweat of fury from his eyes.

"I come to stay with you, when Beatrice goes," he said tremblingly. "And although there's no woman in this flat ordinarily, a woman's here last night——"

"Stop there!" Anthony Fry cried savagely. "Do you mean that I brought this woman here deliberately? Do you mean that I knew?"

"Knew!" Johnson Boller jeered.

"Then I tell you that you're an infernal ass, sir, and I decline to defend myself!" Anthony snarled fiercely. "You! You lovesick fool and your crazy imagination! You're too much in love to reason, but—what about me?"

"Well, what about you?" Johnson Boller sneered.

"I," said Anthony, "have borne the reputation of a decent man! No women have ever been in this apartment before, save one or two relatives! No woman of any description has ever passed the night here before. And yet now, when this infernal thing has happened, your poor addled wits—oh, bah! Bah, sir!"

"Don't bah at me!" Mr. Boller said dangerously, although not quite so dangerously, because Anthony's emotion had carried its own conviction.

Then, for a little, these two old friends stood and trembled and glared at each other, Johnson Boller contemplating a swift and terrible uppercut to Anthony's lean jaw, which should stretch him unconscious perhaps for hours—Anthony meanwhile wondering superheatedly whether, once his long fingers had wound about Johnson Boller's plump throat, he could hold on until wretched life was extinct.

They were angry, terribly angry and almost for the first time in their lives, and had they stood and glared for another fifteen seconds it is possible that one or the other might have ended his days in Sing Sing's electric chair—but as it happened Mary's voice came upon the vibrating, pregnant air, clear and cool and full of warranted acerbity.

"While all this talk of reputations is going on," said Mary, "what about mine?"

Anthony Fry's tension snapped. Johnson Boller, it seemed, was of no mind to relinquish his rare fury so easily, for he stood with his fists clenched and trembled a little even now and his color was no lighter than scarlet; but Anthony turned and bowed almost humbly.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Mary," he said bitterly.

"Miss Mary!" echoed Boller. "You know her, hey?"

"She told me to call her Mary," Anthony said stiffly.

"When? When you hired her for this job?" Johnson Boller persisted, although quite weakly.

"When I discovered—not half an hour back—that she was—er—what she is," Anthony said coldly. "And let that be an end to your comments, please. You saw me meet this young woman for the first time, as you will know when you recover your senses. You know for what purpose and under what misapprehension I brought her to this apartment. Don't make a bad matter worse by injecting your personal brand of asininity."

He turned his back on Johnson Boller and walked away.

Johnson Boller, however, turned his whole attention to Mary, perched on the arm of a chair, distressed enough but self-contained, pretty as a picture. And slowly reason climbed upon her throne again in Johnson Boller's brain, possessed though it was by Beatrice, loveliest of wives.

He smiled suddenly, because Beatrice in far-off Montreal would never know; he even grinned after a few seconds; and then, the enormity of the joke on Anthony Fry overcoming him suddenly, Johnson Boller opened his mouth and laughed—not a mere, decent expression of mirth, but a roar which suggested a wild bull in acute agony.

A Niagara of sound left Johnson Boller and ended in a deep, happy wheeze—and the torrent broke loose again and he hugged his fat sides and rocked and roared again, until Wilkins, genuinely startled, entered the living-room, and stopped, more genuinely startled, and regarded the altered David with mouth wide open.

"God bless my soul!" Wilkins said frankly. "What——"

"Wilkins!" Anthony snapped.

"I—I beg pardon, sir!" the faithful one choked. "The young lady——"

"The young lady," said his master, and his voice had the edge of a razor blade, "is—here by accident, Wilkins. She came here last night, under a misapprehension, while masquerading as a boy. You will forget immediately that I have told you this."

"Very good, sir," Wilkins said; and being one of those rare, model creatures we read about but rarely meet, he straightened up and forced his tone back to the matter-of-fact mumble. "As to breakfast, sir?"

Anthony glanced at Mary.

"Yes, I'm quite human," she said crisply. "I eat breakfast."

"For three, Wilkins," said Anthony.

And now, with Wilkins moving incessantly in and out, a peculiar, almost silent constraint came upon them. Anthony, at the window gazed at the distant street and tried his best to think; there was just one awful thought that obtruded itself upon his mind and, although he thrust it away again and again, the thought came back and mocked at him. Mentally, he lashed at it—yet ever and anon it returned and mocked a little more and made impish faces at him.

Johnson Boller, recovering in a long, delighted series of wheezes, merely ambled to a corner and gazed at Mary, who affected to read unconcernedly. She was certainly pretty and watching a pretty girl had never wearied Mr. Boller; but far beyond her prettiness was the terrific joke on old Anthony.

This was Anthony who, year in and year out, avoided even social gatherings where women predominated. This was Anthony, who abominated the whole sex and could be goaded into actual rage by repeated suggestions that one of his wealth and standing should marry! This was Anthony, who had threatened to leave the Lasande that day, long ago, when the pretty little woman canvasser had flitted past the office and made her way to this very living-room.

Well, it was one on Anthony! Nay, it was a million on Anthony! From this day forth, Johnson Boller reflected in the depths of his perverted, amusement-loving mind, he had such a grip on Anthony Fry that, should he order that distinguished citizen to walk down Fifth Avenue with a lump of sugar on his nose, he would have no choice but obedience.

And how Anthony would writhe and how that austere countenance could be colored with the blush of helpless anger! A quantity of the savage, merciless little boy had survived in Johnson Boller and this wait for breakfast was really one of the happiest periods of his life.

Wilkins, quite himself again, worked deftly. The service elevator from the pantry, one of the Lasande's features, whined softly to the Fry apartment and stopped, and presently, silently, Anthony motioned them to the table.

Johnson Boller came shaking pleasantly, albeit with countenance grave enough. Mary came daintily and thoughtfully. But Anthony Fry came as one going to his doom—because the inescapable thought had fastened in his brain and every new, terrible second held less hope than had the one before.

Coffee was poured then and food served and Wilkins moved out.

"Is he gone now?" Mary asked quietly.

"Yes," sighed Anthony.

"Then, without wasting any more time, wouldn't it be as well to decide just what we are going to do?"