Odd Numbers / Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe

E-text prepared by Roger Frank
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)

“‘Sisters? Do we look it?’ says Maisie”

ODD NUMBERS

BEING FURTHER CHRONICLES

OF SHORTY McCABE

BY

SEWELL FORD

AUTHOR OF

TRYING OUT TORCHY, ETC.

Illustrations by

F. VAUX WILSON

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, by

SEWELL FORD

Copyright, 1912, by

EDWARD J. CLODE

Contents

ODD NUMBERS

CHAPTER I

GOLIAH AND THE PURPLE LID

One of my highbrow reg’lars at the Physical Culture Studio, a gent that mixes up in charity works, like organizin’ debatin’ societies in the deaf and dumb asylums, was tellin’ me awhile back of a great scheme of his to help out the stranger in our fair village. He wants to open public information bureaus, where a jay might go and find out anything he wanted to know, from how to locate a New Thought church, to the nearest place where he could buy a fresh celluloid collar.

“Get the idea?” says he. “A public bureau where strangers in New York would be given courteous attention, friendly advice, and that sort of thing.”

“What’s the use?” says I. “Ain’t I here?”

Course, I was just gettin’ over a josh. But say, it ain’t all a funny dream, either. Don’t a lot of ’em come my way? Maybe it’s because I’m so apt to lay myself open to the confidential tackle. But somehow, when I see one of these tourist freaks sizin’ me up, and lookin’ kind of dazed and lonesome, I can’t chuck him back the frosty stare. I’ve been a stray in a strange town myself. So I gen’rally tries to seem halfway human, and if he opens up with some shot on the weather, I let him get in the follow-up questions and take the chances.

Here the other day, though, I wa’n’t lookin’ for anything of the kind. I was just joltin’ down my luncheon with a little promenade up the sunny side of Avenue V, taking in the exhibits—things in the show windows and folks on the sidewalks—as keen as if I’d paid in my dollar at some ticket office.

And say, where can you beat it? I see it ’most every day in the year, and it’s always new. There’s different flowers in the florists’ displays, new flags hung out on the big hotels, and even the chorus ladies in the limousines are changed now and then.

I can’t figure out just what it was landed me in front of this millinery window. Gen’rally I hurry by them exhibits with a shudder; for once I got gay and told Sadie to take her pick, as this one was on me; and it was months before I got over the shock of payin’ that bill. But there I finds myself, close up to the plate glass, gawpin’ at a sample of what can be done in the hat line when the Bureau of Obstructions has been bought off and nobody’s thought of applyin’ the statute of limitations.

It’s a heliotrope lid, and the foundation must have used up enough straw to bed down a circus. It has the dimensions and general outlines of a summerhouse. The scheme of decoration is simple enough, though. The top of this heliotrope summerhouse has been caught in a heliotrope fog, that’s all. There’s yards and yards of this gauzy stuff draped and puffed and looped around it, with only a wide purple ribbon showin’ here and there and keepin’ the fog in place.

Well, all that is restin’ careless in a box, the size of a quarter-mile runnin’ track, with the cover half off. And it’s a work of art in itself, that box,—all Looey Cans pictures, and a thick purple silk cord to tie it up with. Why, one glimpse of that combination was enough to make me clap my hand over my roll and back away from the spot!

Just then, though, I notices another gent steppin’ up for a squint at the monstrosity, and I can’t help lingerin’ to see if he gets the same kind of a shock. He’s sort of a queer party, too,—short, stoop shouldered, thin faced, wrinkled old chap, with a sandy mustache mixed some with gray, and a pair of shrewd little eyes peerin’ out under bushy brows. Anybody could spot him as a rutabaga delegate by the high crowned soft hat and the back number ulster that he’s still stickin’ to, though the thermometer is way up in the eighties.

But he don’t seem to shy any at the purple lid. He sticks his head out first this way and then that, like a turtle, and then all of a sudden he shoots over kind of a quizzin’ glance at me. I can’t help but give him the grin. At that his mouth corners wrinkle up and the little gray eyes begin to twinkle.

“Quite a hat, eh?” he chuckles.

“It’s goin’ some in the lid line,” says I.

“I expect that’s a mighty stylish article, though,” says he.

“That’s the bluff the store people are makin’,” says I, “and there’s no law against it.”

“What would be your guess on the price of that there, now?” says he, edging up.

“Ah, let’s leave such harrowin’ details to the man that has to pay for it,” says I. “No use in our gettin’ the chilly spine over what’s marked on the price ticket; that is, unless you’re thinking of investin’,” and as I tips him the humorous wink I starts to move off.

But this wa’n’t a case where I was to get out so easy. He comes right after me. “Excuse me, neighbor,” says he; “but—but that’s exactly what I was thinking of doing, if it wasn’t too infernally expensive.”

“What!” says I, gazin’ at him; for he ain’t the kind of citizen you’d expect to find indulgin’ in such foolishness. “Oh, well, don’t mind my remarks. Go ahead and blow yourself. You want it for the missus, eh?”

“Ye-e-es,” he drawls; “for—for my wife. Ah—er—would it be asking too much of a stranger if I should get you to step in there with me while I find out the price?”

“Why,” says I, lookin’ him over careful,—“why, I don’t know as I’d want to go as far as—— Well, what’s the object?”

“You see,” says he, “I’m sort of a bashful person,—always have been,—and I don’t just like to go in there alone amongst all them women folks. But the fact is, I’ve kind of got my mind set on having that hat, and——”

“Wife ain’t in town, then?” says I.

“No,” says he, “she’s—she isn’t.”

“Ain’t you runnin’ some risks,” says I, “loadin’ up with a lid that may not fit her partic’lar style of beauty?”

“That’s so, that’s so,” says he. “Ought to be something that would kind of jibe with her complexion and the color of her hair, hadn’t it?”

“You’ve surrounded the idea,” says I. “Maybe it would be safer to send for her to come on.”

“No,” says he; “couldn’t be done. But see here,” and he takes my arm and steers me up the avenue, “if you don’t mind talking this over, I’d like to tell you a plan I’ve just thought out.”

Well, he’d got me some int’rested in him by that time. I could see he wa’n’t no common Rube, and them twinklin’ little eyes of his kind of got me. So I tells him to reel it off.

“Maybe you never heard of me,” he goes on; “but I’m Goliah Daggett, from South Forks, Iowy.”

“Guess I’ve missed hearin’ of you,” says I.

“I suppose so,” says he, kind of disappointed, though. “The boys out there call me Gol Daggett.”

“Sounds most like a cussword,” says I.

“Yes,” says he; “that’s one reason I’m pretty well known in the State. And there may be other reasons, too.” He lets out a little chuckle at that; not loud, you know, but just as though he was swallowin’ some joke or other. It was a specialty of his, this smothered chuckle business. “Of course,” he goes on, “you needn’t tell me your name, unless——”

“It’s a fair swap,” says I. “Mine’s McCabe; Shorty for short.”

“Yes?” says he. “I knew a McCabe once. He—er—well, he——”

“Never mind,” says I. “It’s a big fam’ly, and there’s only a few of us that’s real credits to the name. But about this scheme of yours, Mr. Daggett?”

“Certainly,” says he. “It’s just this: If I could find a woman who looked a good deal like my wife, I could try the hat on her, couldn’t I? She’d do as well, eh?”

“I don’t know why not,” says I.

“Well,” says he, “I know of just such a woman; saw her this morning in my hotel barber shop, where I dropped in for a haircut. She was one of these—What do you call ’em now?”

“Manicure artists?” says I.

“That’s it,” says he. “Asked me if I didn’t want my fingers manicured; and, by jinks! I let her do it, just to see what it was like. Never felt so blamed foolish in my life! Look at them fingernails, will you? Been parin’ ’em with a jackknife for fifty-seven years; and she soaks ’em out in a bowl of perfumery, jabs under ’em with a little stick wrapped in cotton, cuts off all the hang nails, files ’em round at the ends, and polishes ’em up so they shine as if they were varnished! He, he! Guess the boys would laugh if they could have seen me.”

“It’s one experience you’ve got on me,” says I. “And this manicure lady is a ringer for Mrs. Daggett, eh?”

“Well, now,” says he, scratchin’ his chin, “maybe I ought to put it that she looks a good deal as Mrs. Daggett might have looked ten or fifteen years ago if she’d been got up that way,—same shade of red hair, only not such a thunderin’ lot of it; same kind of blue eyes, only not so wide open and starry; and a nose and chin that I couldn’t help remarking. Course, now, you understand this young woman was fixed up considerable smarter than Mrs. Daggett ever was in her life.”

“If she’s a manicure artist in one of them Broadway hotels,” says I, “I could guess that; specially if Mrs. Daggett’s always stuck to Iowa.”

“Yes, that’s right; she has,” says Daggett. “But if she’d had the same chance to know what to wear and how to wear it——Well, I wish she’d had it, that’s all. And she wanted it. My, my! how she did hanker for such things, Mr. McCabe!”

“Well, better late than never,” says I.

“No, no!” says he, his voice kind of breakin’ up. “That’s what I want to forget, how—how late it is!” and hanged if he don’t have to fish out a handkerchief and swab off his eyes. “You see,” he goes on, “Marthy’s gone.”

“Eh?” says I. “You mean she’s——”

He nods. “Four years ago this spring,” says he. “Typhoid.”

“But,” says I, “how about this hat?”

“One of my notions,” says he,—“just a foolish idea of mine. I’ll tell you. When she was lying there, all white and thin, and not caring whether she ever got up again or not, a new spring hat was the only thing I could get her to take an interest in. She’d never had what you might call a real, bang-up, stylish hat. Always wanted one, too. And it wasn’t because I was such a mean critter that she couldn’t have had the money. But you know how it is in a little place like South Forks. They don’t have ’em in stock, not the kind she wanted, and maybe we couldn’t have found one nearer than Omaha or Chicago; and someway there never was a spring when I could seem to fix things so we could take the trip. Looked kind of foolish, too, traveling so far just to get a hat. So she went without, and put up with what Miss Simmons could trim for her. They looked all right, too, and I used to tell Marthy they were mighty becoming; but all the time I knew they weren’t just—well, you know.”

Say, I never saw any specimens of Miss Simmons’ art works; but I could make a guess. And I nods my head.

“Well,” says Daggett, “when I saw that Marthy was kind of giving up, I used to coax her to get well. ‘You just get on your feet once, Marthy,’ says I, ‘and we’ll go down to Chicago and buy you the finest and stylishest hat we can find in the whole city. More than that, you shall have a new one every spring, the very best.’ She’d almost smile at that, and half promise she’d try. But it wasn’t any use. The fever hadn’t left her strength enough. And the first thing I knew she’d slipped away.”

Odd sort of yarn to be hearin’ there on Fifth-ave. on a sunshiny afternoon, wa’n’t it? And us dodgin’ over crossin’s, and duckin’ under awnin’s, and sidesteppin’ the foot traffic! But he keeps right close to my elbow and gives me the whole story, even to how they’d agreed to use the little knoll just back of the farmhouse as a burial plot, and how she marked the hymns she wanted sung, and how she wanted him to find someone else as soon as the year was out.

“Which was the only thing I couldn’t say yes to,” says Daggett. “‘No, Marthy,’ says I, ‘not unless I can find another just like you.’—‘You’ll be mighty lonesome, Goliah,’ says she, ‘and you’ll be wanting to change your flannels too early.’—‘Maybe so,’ says I; ‘but I guess I’ll worry along for the rest of the time alone.’ Yes, sir, Mr. McCabe, she was a fine woman, and a patient one. No one ever knew how bad she wanted lots of things that she might of had, and gave up. You see, I was pretty deep in the wheat business, and every dollar I could get hold of went to buying more reapers and interests in elevator companies and crop options. I was bound to be a rich man, and they say I got there. Yes, I guess I am fairly well fixed.”

It wa’n’t any chesty crow, but more like a sigh, and as we stops on a crossing to let a lady plutess roll by in her brougham, Mr. Daggett he sizes up the costume she wore and shakes his head kind of regretful.

“That’s the way Marthy should have been dressed,” says he. “She’d have liked it. And she’d liked a hat such as that one we saw back there; that is, if it’s the right kind. I’ve been buying ’em kind of careless, maybe.”

“How’s that?” says I.

“Oh!” says he, “I didn’t finish telling you about my fool idea. I’ve been getting one every spring, the best I could pick out in Chicago, and carrying it up there on the knoll where Marthy is—and just leaving it. Go on now, Mr. McCabe; laugh if you want to. I won’t mind. I can almost laugh at myself. Of course, Marthy’s beyond caring for hats now. Still, I like to leave ’em there; and I like to think perhaps she does know, after all. So—so I want to get that purple one, providing it would be the right shade. What do you say?”

Talk about your nutty propositions, eh? But honest, I didn’t feel even like crackin’ a smile.

“Daggett,” says I, “you’re a true sport, even if you have got a few bats in the loft. Let’s go back and get quotations on the lid.”

“I wish,” says he, “I could see it tried on that manicure young woman first. Suppose we go down and bring her up?”

“What makes you think she’ll come?” says I.

“Oh, I guess she will,” says he, quiet and thoughtful. “We’ll try, anyway.”

And say, right there I got a new line on him. I could almost frame up how it was he’d started in as a bacon borrowin’ homesteader, and got to be the John D. of his county. But I could see he was up against a new deal this trip. And as it was time for me to be gettin’ down towards 42d-st. anyway, I goes along. As we strikes the hotel barber shop I hangs up on the end of the cigar counter while Daggett looks around for the young woman who’d put the chappy polish on his nails.

“That’s her,” says he, pointing out a heavyweight Titian blonde in the far corner, and over he pikes.

I couldn’t help admirin’ the nerve of him; for of all the l’ongoline queens I ever saw, she’s about the haughtiest. Maybe you can throw on the screen a picture of a female party with a Lillian Russell shape, hair like Mrs. Leslie Carter’s, and an air like a twelve-dollar cloak model showin’ off a five hundred-dollar lace dress to a bookmaker’s bride.

Just as Daggett tiptoes up she’s pattin’ down some of the red puffs that makes the back of her head look like a burnin’ oil tank, and she swings around languid and scornful to see who it is that dares butt in on her presence. All the way she recognizes him is by a little lift of the eyebrows.

I don’t need to hear the dialogue. I can tell by her expression what Daggett is saying. First there’s a kind of condescendin’ curiosity as he begins, then she looks bored and turns back to the mirror, and pretty soon she sings out, “What’s that?” so you could hear her all over the shop. Then Daggett springs his proposition flat.

“Sir!” says she, jumpin’ up and glarin’ at him.

Daggett tries to soothe her down; but it’s no go.

“Mr. Heinmuller!” she calls out, and the boss barber comes steppin’ over, leavin’ a customer with his face muffled in a hot towel. “This person,” she goes on, “is insulting!”

“Hey?” says Heinmuller, puffin’ out his cheeks. “Vos iss dot?”

And for a minute it looked like I’d have to jump in and save Daggett from being chucked through the window. I was just preparin’ to grab the boss by the collar, too, when Daggett gets in his fine work. Slippin’ a ten off his roll, he passes it to Heinmuller, while he explains that all he asked of the lady was to try on a hat he was thinkin’ of gettin’ for his wife.

“That’s all,” says he. “No insult intended. And of course I expect to make it worth while for the young lady.”

I don’t know whether it was the smooth “young lady” business, or the sight of the fat roll that turned the trick; but the tragedy is declared off. Inside of three minutes the boss tells Daggett that Miss Rooney accepts his apology and consents to go if he’ll call a cab.

“Why, surely,” says he. “You’ll come along, too, won’t you, McCabe? Honest, now, I wouldn’t dare do this alone.”

“Too bad about that shy, retirin’ disposition of yours!” says I. “Afraid she’ll steal you, eh?”

But he hangs onto my sleeve and coaxes me until I give in. And we sure made a fine trio ridin’ up Fifth-ave. in a taxi! But you should have seen ’em in the millinery shop as we sails in with Miss Rooney, and Daggett says how he’d like a view of that heliotrope lid in the window. We had ’em guessin’, all right.

Then they gets Miss Rooney in a chair before the mirror, and fits the monstrosity on top of her red hair. Well, say, what a diff’rence it does make in them freak bonnets whether they’re in a box or on the right head! For Miss Rooney has got just the right kind of a face that hat was built to go with. It’s a bit giddy, I’ll admit; but she’s a stunner in it. And does she notice it any herself? Well, some!

“A triumph!” gurgles the saleslady, lookin’ from one to the other of us, tryin’ to figure out who she ought to play to.

“It’s a game combination, all right,” says I, lookin’ wise.

“I only wish——” begins Daggett, and then swallows the rest of it. In a minute he steps up and says it’ll do, and that the young lady is to pick out one for herself now.

“Oh, how perfectly sweet of you!” says Miss Rooney, slippin’ him a smile that should have had him clear through the ropes. “But if I am to have any, why not this?” and she balances the heliotrope lid on her fingers, lookin’ it over yearnin’ and tender. “It just suits me, doesn’t it?”

Then there’s more of the coy business, aimed straight at Daggett. But Miss Rooney don’t quite put it across.

“That’s going out to Iowy with me,” says he, prompt and decided.

“Oh!” says Miss Rooney, and she proceeds to pick out a white straw with a green ostrich feather a yard long. She was still lookin’ puzzled, though, as we put her into the cab and started her back to the barber shop.

“Must have set you back near a hundred, didn’t they?” says I, as Daggett and I parts on the corner.

“Almost,” says he. “But it’s worth it. Marthy would have looked mighty stylish in that purple one. Yes, yes! And when I get back to South Forks, the first thing I do will be to carry it up on the knoll, box and all, and leave it there. I wonder if she’ll know, eh?”

There wa’n’t any use in my tellin’ him what I thought, though. He wa’n’t talkin’ to me, anyway. There was a kind of a far off, batty look in his eyes as he stood there on the corner, and a drop of brine was tricklin’ down one side of his nose. So we never says a word, but just shakes hands, him goin’ his way, and me mine.

“Chee!” says Swifty Joe, when I shows up, along about three o’clock, “you must have been puttin’ away a hearty lunch!”

“It wa’n’t that kept me,” says I. “I was helpin’ hand a late one to Marthy.”

CHAPTER II

HOW MAIZIE CAME THROUGH

Then again, there’s other kinds from other States, and no two of ’em alike. They float in from all quarters, some on ten-day excursions, and some with no return ticket. And, of course, they’re all jokes to us at first, while we never suspicion that all along we may be jokes to them.

And say, between you and me, we’re apt to think, ain’t we, that all the rapid motion in the world gets its start right here in New York? Well, that’s the wrong dope. For instance, once I got next to a super-energized specimen that come in from the north end of nowhere, and before I was through the experience had left me out of breath.

It was while Sadie and me was livin’ at the Perzazzer hotel, before we moved out to Rockhurst-on-the-Sound. Early one evenin’ we was sittin’, as quiet and domestic as you please, in our twelve by fourteen cabinet finished dinin’ room on the seventh floor. We was gazin’ out of the open windows watchin’ a thunder storm meander over towards Long Island, and Tidson was just servin’ the demitasses, when there’s a ring on the ’phone. Tidson, he puts down the tray and answers the call.

“It’s from the office, sir,” says he. “Some one to see you, sir.”

“Me?” says I. “Get a description, Tidson, so I’ll know what to expect.”

At that he asks the room clerk for details, and reports that it’s two young ladies by the name of Blickens.

“What!” says Sadie, prickin’ up her ears. “You don’t know any young women of that name; do you, Shorty?”

“Why not?” says I. “How can I tell until I’ve looked ’em over?”

“Humph!” says she. “Blickens!”

“Sounds nice, don’t it?” says I. “Kind of snappy and interestin’. Maybe I’d better go down and——”

“Tidson,” says Sadie, “tell them to send those young persons up here!”

“That’s right, Tidson,” says I. “Don’t mind anything I say.”

“Blickens, indeed!” says Sadie, eyin’ me sharp, to see if I’m blushin’ or gettin’ nervous. “I never heard you mention any such name.”

“There’s a few points about my past life,” says I, “that I’ve had sense enough to keep to myself. Maybe this is one. Course, if your curiosity——”

“I’m not a bit curious, Shorty McCabe,” she snaps out, “and you know it! But when it comes to——”

“The Misses Blickens,” says Tidson, holdin’ back the draperies with one hand, and smotherin’ a grin with the other.

Say, you couldn’t blame him. What steps in is a couple of drippy females that look like they’d just been fished out of a tank. And bein’ wet wa’n’t the worst of it. Even if they’d been dry, they must have looked bad enough; but in the soggy state they was the limit.

They wa’n’t mates. One is tall and willowy, while the other is short and dumpy. And the fat one has the most peaceful face I ever saw outside of a pasture, with a reg’lar Holstein-Friesian set of eyes,—the round, calm, thoughtless kind. The fact that she’s chewin’ gum helps out the dairy impression, too. It’s plain she’s been caught in the shower and has sopped up her full share of the rainfall; but it don’t seem to trouble her any.

There ain’t anything pastoral about the tall one, though. She’s alive all the way from her runover heels to the wiggly end of the limp feather that flops careless like over one ear. She’s the long-waisted, giraffe-necked kind; but not such a bad looker if you can forget the depressin’ costume. It had been a blue cheviot once, I guess; the sort that takes on seven shades of purple about the second season. And it fits her like a damp tablecloth hung on a chair. Her runnin’ mate is all in black, and you could tell by the puckered seams and the twisted sleeves that it was an outfit the village dressmaker had done her worst on.

Not that they gives us much chance for a close size-up. The lengthy one pikes right into the middle of the room, brushes a stringy lock of hair off her face, and unlimbers her conversation works.

“Gosh!” says she, openin’ her eyes wide and lookin’ round at the rugs and furniture. “Hope we haven’t pulled up at the wrong ranch. Are you Shorty McCabe?”

“Among old friends, I am,” says I, “Now if you come under——”

“It’s all right, Phemey,” says she, motionin’ to the short one. “Sit down.”

“Sure!” says I. “Don’t mind the furniture. Take a couple of chairs.”

“Not for me!” says the tall one. “I’ll stand in one spot and drip, and then you can mop up afterwards. But Phemey, she’s plumb tuckered.”

“It’s sweet of you to run in,” says I. “Been wadin’ in the park lake, or enjoyin’ the shower?”

“Enjoying the shower is good,” says she; “but I hadn’t thought of describing it that way. I reckon, though, you’d like to hear who we are.”

“Oh, any time when you get to that,” says I.

“That’s a joke, is it?” says she. “If it is, Ha, ha! Excuse me if I don’t laugh real hearty. I can do better when I don’t feel so much like a sponge. Maizie May Blickens is my name, and this is Euphemia Blickens.”

“Ah!” says I. “Sisters?”

“Do we look it?” says Maizie. “No! First cousins on the whiskered side. Ever hear that name Blickens before?”

“Why—er—why——” says I, scratchin’ my head.

“Don’t dig too deep,” says Maizie. “How about Blickens’ skating rink in Kansas City?”

“Oh!” says I. “Was it run by a gent they called Sport Blickens?”

“It was,” says she.

“Why, sure,” I goes on. “And the night I had my match there with the Pedlar, when I’d spent my last bean on a month’s trainin’ expenses, and the Pedlar’s backer was wavin’ a thousand-dollar side bet under my nose, this Mr. Blickens chucked me his roll and told me to call the bluff.”

“Yes, that was dad, all right,” says Maizie.

“It was?” says I. “Well, well! Now if there’s anything I can do for——”

“Whoa up!” says Maizie. “This is no grubstake touch. Let’s get that off our minds first, though I’m just as much obliged. It’s come out as dad said. Says he, ‘If you’re ever up against it, and can locate Shorty McCabe, you go to him and say who you are.’ But this isn’t exactly that kind of a case. Phemey and I may look a bit rocky and—— Say, how do we look, anyway? Have you got such a thing as a——”

“Tidson,” says Sadie, breakin’ in, “you may roll in the pier glass for the young lady.” Course, that reminds me I ain’t done the honors.

“Excuse me,” says I. “Miss Blickens, this is Mrs. McCabe.”

“Howdy,” says Maizie. “I was wondering if it wasn’t about due. Goshety gosh! but you’re all to the peaches, eh? And me——”

Here she turns and takes a full length view of herself. “Suffering scarecrows! Say, why didn’t you put up the bars on us? Don’t you look, Phemey; you’d swallow your gum!”

But Euphemia ain’t got any idea of turnin’ her head. She has them peaceful eyes of hers glued to Sadie’s copper hair, and she’s contented to yank away at her cud. For a consistent and perseverin’ masticator, she has our friend Fletcher chewed to a standstill. Maizie is soon satisfied with her survey.

“That’ll do, take it away,” says she. “If I ever get real stuck on myself, I’ll have something to remember. But, as I was sayin’, this is no case of an escape from the poor farm. We wore these Hetty Green togs when we left Dobie.”

“Dobie?” says I.

“Go on, laugh!” says Maizie. “Dobie’s the biggest joke and the slowest four corners in the State of Minnesota, and that’s putting it strong. Look at Phemey; she’s a native.”

Well, we looked at Phemey. Couldn’t help it. Euphemia don’t seem to mind. She don’t even grin; but just goes on workin’ her jaws and lookin’ placid.

“Out in Dobie that would pass for hysterics,” says Maizie. “The only way they could account for me was by saying that I was born crazy in another State. I’ve had a good many kinds of hard luck; but being born in Dobie wasn’t one of the varieties. Now can you stand the story of my life?”

“Miss Blickens,” says I, “I’m willin’ to pay you by the hour.”

“It isn’t so bad as all that,” says she, “because precious little has ever happened to me. It’s what’s going to happen that I’m living for. But, to take a fair start, we’ll begin with dad. When they called him Sport Blickens, they didn’t stretch their imaginations. He was all that—and not much else. All I know about maw is that she was one of three, and that I was born in the back room of a Denver dance hall. I’ve got a picture of her, wearing tights and a tin helmet, and dad says she was a hummer. He ought to know; he was a pretty good judge.

“As I wasn’t much over two days old when they had the funeral, I can’t add anything more about maw. And the history I could write of dad would make a mighty slim book. Running roller skating rinks was the most genteel business he ever got into, I guess. His regular profession was faro. It’s an unhealthy game, especially in those gold camps where they shoot so impetuous. He got over the effects of two .38’s dealt him by a halfbreed Sioux; but when a real bad man from Taunton, Massachusetts, opened up on him across the table with a .45, he just naturally got discouraged. Good old dad! He meant well when he left me in Dobie and had me adopted by Uncle Hen. Phemey, you needn’t listen to this next chapter.”

Euphemia, she misses two jaw strokes in succession, rolls her eyes at Maizie May for a second, and then strikes her reg’lar gait again.

“Excuse her getting excited like that,” says Maizie; “but Uncle Hen—that was her old man, of course—hasn’t been planted long. He lasted until three weeks ago. He was an awful good man, Uncle Hen was—to himself. He had the worst case of ingrowing religion you ever saw. Why, he had a thumb felon once, and when the doctor came to lance it Uncle Hen made him wait until he could call in the minister, so it could be opened with prayer.

“Sundays he made us go to church twice, and the rest of the day he talked to us about our souls. Between times he ran the Palace Emporium; that is, he and I and a half baked Swede by the name of Jens Torkil did. To look at Jens you wouldn’t have thought he could have been taught the difference between a can of salmon and a patent corn planter; but say, Uncle Hen had him trained to make short change and weigh his hand with every piece of salt pork, almost as slick as he could do it himself.

“All I had to do was to tend the drygoods, candy, and drug counters, look after the post-office window, keep the books, and manage the telephone exchange. Euphemia had the softest snap, though. She did the housework, planted the garden, raised chickens, fed the hogs, and scrubbed the floors. Have I got the catalogue right, Phemey?”

Euphemia blinks twice, kind of reminiscent; but nothin’ in the shape of words gets through the gum.

“She has such an emotional nature!” says Maizie. “Uncle Hen was like that too. But let’s not linger over him. He’s gone. The last thing he did was to let go of a dollar fifty in cash that I held him up for so Phemey and I could go into Duluth and see a show. The end came early next day, and whether it was from shock or enlargement of the heart, no one will ever know.

“It was an awful blow to us all. We went around in a daze for nearly a week, hardly daring to believe that it could be so. Jens broke the spell for us. One morning I caught him helping himself to a cigar out of the two-fer box. ‘Why not?’ says he. Next Phemey walks in, swipes a package of wintergreen gum, and feeds it all in at once. She says, ‘Why not?’ too. Then I woke up. ‘You’re right,’ says I. ‘Enjoy yourself. It’s time.’ Next I hints to her that there are bigger and brighter spots on this earth than Dobie, and asks her what she says to selling the Emporium and hunting them up. ‘I don’t care,’ says she, and that was a good deal of a speech for her to make. ‘Do you leave it to me?’ says I. ‘Uh-huh,’ says she. ‘We-e-e-ough!’ says I,” and with that Maizie lets out one of them backwoods college cries that brings Tidson up on his toes.

“I take it,” says I, “that you did.”

“Did I?” says she. “Inside of three days I’d hustled up four different parties that wanted to invest in a going concern, and before the week was over I’d buncoed one of ’em out of nine thousand in cash. Most of it’s in a certified check, sewed inside of Phemey, and that’s why we walked all the way up here in the rain. Do you suppose you could take me to some bank to-morrow where I could leave that and get a handful of green bills on account? Is that asking too much?”

“Considering the way you’ve brushed up my memory of Sport Blickens,” says I, “it’s real modest. Couldn’t you think of something else?”

“If that had come from Mrs. McCabe,” says she, eyin’ Sadie kind of longin’, “I reckon I could.”

“Why,” says Sadie, “I should be delighted.”

“You wouldn’t go so far as to lead two such freaks as us around to the stores and help us pick out some New York clothes, would you?” says she.

“My dear girl!” says Sadie, grabbin’ both her hands. “We’ll do it to-morrow.”

“Honest?” says Maizie, beamin’ on her. “Well, that’s what I call right down decent. Phemey, do you hear that? Oh, swallow it, Phemey, swallow it! This is where we bloom out!”

And say, you should have heard them talkin’ over the kind of trousseaus that would best help a girl to forget she ever came from Dobie.

“You will need a neat cloth street dress, for afternoons,” says Sadie.

“Not for me!” says Maizie. “That’ll do all right for Phemey; but when it comes to me, I’ll take something that rustles. I’ve worn back number cast-offs for twenty-two years; now I’m ready for the other kind. I’ve been traveling so far behind the procession I couldn’t tell which way it was going. Now I’m going to give the drum major a view of my back hair. The sort of costumes I want are the kind that are designed this afternoon for day after to-morrow. If it’s checks, I’ll take two to the piece; if it’s stripes, I want to make a circus zebra look like a clipped mule. And I want a change for every day in the week.”

“But, my dear girl,” says Sadie, “can you afford to——”

“You bet I can!” says Maizie. “My share of Uncle Hen’s pile is forty-five hundred dollars, and while it lasts I’m going to have the lilies of the field looking like the flowers you see on attic wall paper. I don’t care what I have to eat, or where I stay; but when it comes to clothes, show me the limit! But say, I guess it’s time we were getting back to our boarding-house. Wake up, Phemey!”

Well, I pilots ’em out to Fifth-ave., stows ’em into a motor stage, and heads ’em down town.

“Whew!” says Sadie, when I gets back. “I suppose that is a sample of Western breeziness.”

“It’s more’n a sample,” says I. “But I can see her finish, though. Inside of three months all she’ll have left to show for her wad will be a trunk full of fancy regalia and a board bill. Then it will be Maizie hunting a job in some beanery.”

“Oh, I shall talk her out of that nonsense,” says Sadie. “What she ought to do is to take a course in stenography and shorthand.”

Yes, we laid out a full programme for Maizie, and had her earnin’ her little twenty a week, with Phemey keepin’ house for both of ’em in a nice little four-room flat. And in the mornin’ I helps her deposit the certified check, and then turns the pair over to Sadie for an assault on the department stores, with a call at a business college as a finish for the day, as we’d planned.

When I gets home that night I finds Sadie all fagged out and drinkin’ bromo seltzer for a headache.

“What’s wrong?” says I.

“Nothing,” says Sadie; “only I’ve been having the time of my life.”

“Buying tailor made uniforms for the Misses Blickens?” says I.

“Tailor made nothing!” says Sadie. “It was no use, Shorty, I had to give in. Maizie wanted the other things so badly. And then Euphemia declared she must have the same kind. So I spent the whole day fitting them out.”

“Got ’em something sudden and noisy, eh?” says I.

“Just wait until you see them,” says Sadie.

“But what’s the idea?” says I. “How long do they think they can keep up that pace? And when they’ve blown themselves short of breath, what then?”

“Heaven knows!” says Sadie. “But Maizie has plans of her own. When I mentioned the business college, she just laughed, and said if she couldn’t do something better than pound a typewriter, she’d go back to Dobie.”

“Huh!” says I. “Sentiments like that has got lots of folks into trouble.”

“And yet,” says Sadie, “Maizie’s a nice girl in her way. We’ll see how she comes out.”

We did, too. It was a couple of weeks before we heard a word from either of ’em, and then the other day Sadie gets a call over the ’phone from a perfect stranger. She says she’s a Mrs. Herman Zorn, of West End-ave., and that she’s givin’ a little roof garden theater party that evenin’, in honor of Miss Maizie Blickens, an old friend of hers that she used to know when she lived in St. Paul and spent her summers near Dobie. Also she understood we were friends of Miss Blickens too, and she’d be pleased to have us join.

“West End-ave.!” says I. “Gee! but it looks like Maizie had been able to butt in. Do we go, Sadie?”

“I said we’d be charmed,” says she. “I’m dying to see how Maizie will look.”

I didn’t admit it, but I was some curious that way myself; so about eight-fifteen we shows up at the roof garden and has an usher lead us to the bunch. There’s half a dozen of ’em on hand; but the only thing worth lookin’ at was Maizie May.

And say, I thought I could make a guess as to somewhere near how she would frame up. The picture I had in mind was a sort of cross between a Grand-st. Rebecca and an Eighth-ave. Lizzie Maud,—you know, one of the near style girls, that’s got on all the novelties from ten bargain counters. But, gee! The view I gets has me gaspin’. Maizie wa’n’t near; she was two jumps ahead. And it wa’n’t any Grand-st. fashion plate that she was a livin’ model of. It was Fifth-ave. and upper Broadway. Talk about your down-to-the-minute costumes! Say, maybe they’ll be wearin’ dresses like that a year from now. And that hat! It wa’n’t a dream; it was a forecast.

“We saw it unpacked from the Paris case,” whispers Sadie.

All I know about it is that it was the widest, featheriest lid I ever saw in captivity, and it’s balanced on more hair puffs than you could put in a barrel. But what added the swell, artistic touch was the collar. It’s a chin supporter and ear embracer. I thought I’d seen high ones, but this twelve-inch picket fence around Maizie’s neck was the loftiest choker I ever saw anyone survive. To watch her wear it gave you the same sensations as bein’ a witness at a hanging. How she could do it and keep on breathin’, I couldn’t make out; but it don’t seem to interfere with her talkin’.

Sittin’ close up beside her, and listenin’ with both ears stretched and his mouth open, was a blond young gent with a bristly Bat Nelson pompadour. He’s rigged out in a silk faced tuxedo, a smoke colored, open face vest, and he has a big yellow orchid in his buttonhole. By the way he’s gazin’ at Maizie, you could tell he approved of her from the ground up. She don’t hesitate any on droppin’ him, though, when we arrives.

“Hello!” says she. “Ripping good of you to come. Well, what do you think? I’ve got some of ’em on, you see. What’s the effect?”

“Stunning!” says Sadie.

“Thanks,” says Maizie. “I laid out to get somewhere near that. And, gosh! but it feels good! These are the kind of togs I was born to wear. Phemey? Oh, she’s laid up with arnica bandages around her throat. I told her she mustn’t try to chew gum with one of these collars on.”

“Say, Maizie,” says I, “who’s the Sir Lionel Budweiser, and where did you pick him up?”

“Oh, Oscar!” says she. “Why, he found me. He’s from St. Paul, nephew of Mrs. Zorn, who’s visiting her. Brewer’s son, you know. Money? They’ve got bales of it. Hey, Oscar!” says she, snappin’ her finger. “Come over here and show yourself!”

And say, he was trained, all right. He trots right over.

“Would you take him, if you was me?” says Maizie, turnin’ him round for us to make an inspection. “I told him I wouldn’t say positive until I had shown him to you, Mrs. McCabe. He’s a little under height, and I don’t like the way his hair grows; but his habits are good, and his allowance is thirty thousand a year. How about him? Will he do?”

“Why—why——” says Sadie, and it’s one of the few times I ever saw her rattled.

“Just flash that ring again, Oscar,” says Maizie.

“O-o-oh!” says Sadie, when Oscar has pulled out the white satin box and snapped back the cover. “What a beauty! Yes, Maizie, I should say that, if you like Oscar, he would do nicely.”

“That goes!” says Maizie. “Here, Occie dear, slide it on. But remember: Phemey has got to live with us until I can pick out some victim of nervous prostration that needs a wife like her. And for goodness’ sake, Occie, give that waiter an order for something wet!”

“Well!” says Sadie afterwards, lettin’ out a long breath. “To think that we ever worried about her!”

“She’s a little bit of all right, eh?” says I. “But say, I’m glad I ain’t Occie, the heir to the brewery. I wouldn’t know whether I was engaged to Maizie, or caught in a belt.”

CHAPTER III

WHERE SPOTTY FITTED IN

Also we have a few home-grown varieties that ain’t listed frequent. And the pavement products are apt to have most as queer kinks to ’em as those from the plowed fields. Now take Spotty.

“Gee! what a merry look!” says I to Pinckney as he floats into the studio here the other day. He’s holdin’ his chin high, and he’s got his stick tucked up under his arm, and them black eyes of his is just sparklin’. “What’s it all about?” I goes on. “Is it a good one you’ve just remembered, or has something humorous happened to one of your best friends?”

“I have a new idea,” says he, “that’s all.”

“All!” says I. “Why, that’s excuse enough for declarin’ a gen’ral holiday. Did you go after it, or was it delivered by mistake? Can’t you give us a scenario of it?”

“Why, I’ve thought of something new for Spotty Cahill,” says he, beamin’.

“G’wan!” says I. “I might have known it was a false alarm. Spotty Cahill! Say, do you want to know what I’d advise you to do for Spotty next?”

No, Pinckney don’t want my views on the subject. It’s a topic we’ve threshed out between us before; also it’s one of the few dozen that we could debate from now until there’s skatin’ on the Panama Canal, without gettin’ anywhere. I’ve always held that Spotty Cahill was about the most useless and undeservin’ human being that ever managed to exist without work; but to hear Pinckney talk you’d think that long-legged, carroty-haired young loafer was the original party that philanthropy was invented for.

Now, doing things for other folks ain’t one of Pinckney’s strong points, as a rule. Not that he wouldn’t if he thought of it and could find the time; but gen’rally he has too many other things on his schedule to indulge much in the little deeds of kindness game. When he does start out to do good, though, he makes a job of it. But look who he picks out!

Course, I knew why. He’s explained all that to me more’n once. Seems there was an old waiter at the club, a quiet, soft-spoken, bald-headed relic, who had served him with more lobster Newburg than you could load on a scow, and enough highballs to float the Mauretania in. In fact, he’d been waitin’ there as long as Pinckney had been a member. They’d been kind of chummy, in a way, too. It had always been “Good morning, Peter,” and “Hope I see you well, sir,” between them, and Pinckney never had to bother about whether he liked a dash of bitters in this, or if that ought to be served frappe or plain. Peter knew, and Peter never forgot.

Then one day when Pinckney’s just squarin’ off to his lunch he notices that he’s been given plain, ordinary salt butter instead of the sweet kind he always has; so he puts up a finger to call Peter over and have a swap made. When he glances up, though, he finds Peter ain’t there at all.

“Oh, I say,” says he, “but where is Peter?”

“Peter, sir?” says the new man. “Very sorry, sir, but Peter’s dead.”

“Dead!” says Pinckney. “Why—why—how long has that been?”

“Over a month, sir,” says he. “Anything wrong, sir?”

To be sure, Pinckney hadn’t been there reg’lar; but he’d been in off and on, and when he comes to think how this old chap, that knew all his whims, and kept track of ’em so faithful, had dropped out without his ever having heard a word about it—why, he felt kind of broke up. You see, he’d always meant to do something nice for old Peter; but he’d never got round to it, and here the first thing he knows Peter’s been under the sod for more’n a month.

That’s what set Pinckney to inquirin’ if Peter hadn’t left a fam’ly or anything, which results in his diggin’ up this Spotty youth. I forgot just what his first name was, it being something outlandish that don’t go with Cahill at all; but it seems he was born over in India, where old Peter was soldierin’ at the time, and they’d picked up one of the native names. Maybe that’s what ailed the boy from the start.

Anyway, Peter had come back from there a widower, drifted to New York with the youngster, and got into the waiter business. Meantime the boy grows up in East Side boardin’-houses, without much lookin’ after, and when Pinckney finds him he’s an int’restin’ product. He’s twenty-odd, about five feet eleven high, weighs under one hundred and thirty, has a shock of wavy, brick-red hair that almost hides his ears, and his chief accomplishments are playin’ Kelly pool and consumin’ cigarettes. By way of ornament he has the most complete collection of freckles I ever see on a human face, or else it was they stood out more prominent because the skin was so white between the splotches. We didn’t invent the name Spotty for him. He’d already been tagged that.

Well, Pinckney discovers that Spotty has been livin’ on the few dollars that was left after payin’ old Peter’s plantin’ expenses; that he didn’t know what he was goin’ to do after that was gone, and didn’t seem to care. So Pinckney jumps in, works his pull with the steward, and has Spotty put on reg’lar in the club billiard room as an attendant. All he has to do is help with the cleanin’, keep the tables brushed, and set up the balls when there are games goin’ on. He gets his meals free, and six dollars a week.

Now that should have been a soft enough snap for anybody, even the born tired kind. There wa’n’t work enough in it to raise a palm callous on a baby. But Spotty, he improves on that. His idea of earnin’ wages is to curl up in a sunny windowseat and commune with his soul. Wherever you found the sun streamin’ in, there was a good place to look for Spotty. He just seemed to soak it up, like a blotter does ink, and it didn’t disturb him any who was doin’ his work.

Durin’ the first six months Spotty was fired eight times, only to have Pinckney get him reinstated, and it wa’n’t until the steward went to the board of governors with the row that Mr. Cahill was given his permanent release. You might think Pinckney would have called it quits then; but not him! He’d started out to godfather Spotty, and he stays right with the game. Everybody he knew was invited to help along the good work of givin’ Spotty a lift. He got him into brokers’ offices, tried him out as bellhop in four diff’rent hotels, and even jammed him by main strength into a bank; but Spotty’s sun absorbin’ habits couldn’t seem to be made useful anywhere.

For one while he got chummy with Swifty Joe and took to sunnin’ himself in the studio front windows, until I had to veto that.

“I don’t mind your friends droppin’ in now and then, Swifty,” says I; “but there ain’t any room here for statuary. I don’t care how gentle you break it to him, only run him out.”

So that’s why I don’t enthuse much when Pinckney says he’s thought up some new scheme for Spotty. “Goin’ to have him probed for hookworms?” says I.

No, that ain’t it. Pinckney, he’s had a talk with Spotty and discovered that old Peter had a brother Aloysius, who’s settled somewhere up in Canada and is superintendent of a big wheat farm. Pinckney’s had his lawyers trace out this Uncle Aloysius, and then he’s written him all about Spotty, suggestin’ that he send for him by return mail.

“Fine!” says I. “He’d be a lot of use on a wheat farm. What does Aloysius have to say to the proposition?”

“Well, the fact is,” says Pinckney, “he doesn’t appear at all enthusiastic. He writes that if the boy is anything like Peter when he knew him he’s not anxious to see him. However, he says that if Spotty comes on he will do what he can for him.”

“It’ll be a long walk,” says I.

“There’s where my idea comes in,” says Pinckney. “I am going to finance the trip.”

“If it don’t cost too much,” says I, “it’ll be a good investment.”

Pinckney wants to do the thing right away, too. First off, though, he has to locate Spotty. The youth has been at large for a week or more now, since he was last handed the fresh air, and Pinckney ain’t heard a word from him.

“Maybe Swifty knows where he roosts,” says I.

It was a good guess. Swifty gives us a number on Fourth-ave. where he’d seen Spotty hangin’ around lately, and he thinks likely he’s there yet.

So me and Pinckney starts out on the trail. It leads us to one of them Turkish auction joints where they sell genuine silk oriental prayer rugs, made in Paterson, N. J., with hammered brass bowls and antique guns as a side line. And, sure enough, camped down in front on a sample rug, with his hat off and the sun full on him, is our friend Spotty.

“Well, well!” says Pinckney. “Regularly employed here, are you, Spotty?”

“Me? Nah!” says Spotty, lookin’ disgusted at the thought. “I’m only stayin’ around.”

“Ain’t you afraid the sun will fade them curly locks of yours?” says I.

“Ah, quit your kiddin’!” says Spotty, startin’ to roll a fresh cigarette.

“Don’t mind Shorty,” says Pinckney. “I have some good news for you.”

That don’t excite Spotty a bit. “Not another job!” he groans.

“No, no,” says Pinckney, and then he explains about finding Uncle Aloysius, windin’ up by askin’ Spotty how he’d like to go up there and live.

“I don’t know,” says Spotty. “Good ways off, ain’t it!”

“It is, rather,” admits Pinckney; “but that need not trouble you. What do you think I am going to do for you, Spotty?”

“Give it up,” says he, calmly lightin’ a match and proceedin’ with the smoke.

“Well,” says Pinckney, “because of the long and faithful service of your father, and the many little personal attentions he paid me, I am going to give you—— Wait! Here it is now,” and hanged if Pinckney don’t fork over ten new twenty-dollar bills. “There!” says he. “That ought to be enough to fit you out well and take you there in good shape. Here’s the address too.”

Does Spotty jump up and crack his heels together and sputter out how thankful he is? Nothin’ so strenuous. He fumbles the bills over curious for a minute, then wads ’em up and jams ’em into his pocket. “Much obliged,” says he.

“Come around to Shorty’s with your new clothes on to-morrow afternoon about four o’clock,” says Pinckney, “and let us see how you look. And—er—by the way, Spotty, is that a friend of yours?”

I’d been noticin’ her too, standin’ just inside the doorway pipin’ us off. She’s a slim, big-eyed, black-haired young woman, dressed in the height of Grand-st. fashion, and wearin’ a lot of odd, cheap lookin’ jewelry. If it hadn’t been for the straight nose and the thin lips you might have guessed that her first name was Rebecca.

“Oh, her?” says Spotty, turnin’ languid to see who he meant. “That’s Mareena. Her father runs the shop.”

“Armenian?” says I.

“No, Syrian,” says he.

“Quite some of a looker, eh?” says I, tryin’ to sound him.

“Not so bad,” says Spotty, hunchin’ his shoulders.

“But—er—do I understand,” says Pinckney, “that there is—ah—some attachment between you and—er—the young lady?”

“Blamed if I know,” says Spotty. “Better ask her.”

Course, we couldn’t very well do that, and as Spotty don’t seem bubblin’ over with information he has to chop it off there. Pinckney, though, is more or less int’rested in the situation. He wonders if he’s done just right, handin’ over all that money to Spotty in a place like that.

“It wa’n’t what you’d call a shrewd move,” says I. “Seems to me I’d bought his ticket, anyway.”

“Yes; but I wanted to get it off my mind, you know,” says he. “Odd, though, his being there. I wonder what sort of persons those Syrians are!”

“You never can tell,” says I.

The more Pinckney thinks of it, the more uneasy he gets, and when four o’clock comes next day, with no Spotty showin’ up, he begins to have furrows in his brow. “If he’s been done away with, it’s my fault,” says Pinckney.

“Ah, don’t start worryin’ yet,” says I. “Give him time.”

By five o’clock, though, Pinckney has imagined all sorts of things,—Spotty bein’ found carved up and sewed in a sack, and him called into court to testify as to where he saw him last. “And all because I gave him that money!” he groans.

“Say, can it!” says I. “Them sensation pictures of yours are makin’ me nervous. Here, I’ll go down and see if they’ve finished wipin’ off the daggers, while you send Swifty out after something soothin’.”

With that off I hikes as a rescue expedition. I finds the red flag still out, the sample rug still in place; but there’s no Spotty in evidence. Neither is there any sign of the girl. So I walks into the store, gazin’ around sharp for any stains on the floor.

Out from behind a curtain at the far end of the shop comes a fat, wicked lookin’ old pirate, with a dark greasy face and shiny little eyes like a pair of needles. He’s wearin’ a dinky gold-braided cap, baggy trousers, and he carries a long pipe in one hand. If he didn’t look like he’d do extemporaneous surgery for the sake of a dollar bill, then I’m no judge. I’ve got in too far to look up a cop, so I takes a chance on a strong bluff.

“Say, you!” I sings out. “What’s happened to Spotty?”

“Spot-tee?” says he. “Spot-tee?” He shrugs his shoulders and pretends to look dazed.

“Yes, Spotty,” says I, “red-headed, freckle-faced young gent. You know him.”

“Ah!” says he, tappin’ his head. “The golden crowned! El Sareef Ka-heel?”

“That’s the name, Cahill,” says I. “He’s a friend of a friend of mine, and you might as well get it through your nut right now that if anything’s happened to him——”

“You are a friend of Sareef Ka-heel?” he breaks in, eyin’ me suspicious.

“Once removed,” says I; “but it amounts to the same thing. Now where is he?”

“For a friend—well, I know not,” says the old boy, kind of hesitatin’. Then, with another shrug, he makes up his mind. “So it shall be. Come. You shall see the Sareef.”

At that he beckons me to follow and starts towards the back. I went through one dark room, expectin’ to feel a knife in my ribs every minute, and then we goes through another. Next thing I knew we’re out in a little back yard, half full of empty cases and crates. In the middle of a clear space is a big brown tent, with the flap pinned back.

“Here,” says the old gent, “your friend, the Sareef Ka-heel!”

Say, for a minute I thought it was a trap he’s springin’ on me; but after I’d looked long enough I see who he’s pointin’ at. The party inside is squattin’ cross-legged on a rug, holdin’ the business end of one of these water bottle pipes in his mouth. He’s wearin’ some kind of a long bath robe, and most of his red hair is concealed by yards of white cloth twisted round his head; but it’s Spotty all right, alive, uncarved, and lookin’ happy and contented.

“Well, for the love of soup!” says I. “What is it, a masquerade?”

“That you, McCabe?” says he. “Come in and—and sit on the floor.”

“Say,” says I, steppin’ inside, “this ain’t the costume you’re going to start for Canada in, is it?”

“Ah, forget Canada!” says he. “I’ve got that proposition beat a mile. Hey, Hazzam,” and he calls to the old pirate outside, “tell Mrs. Cahill to come down and be introduced!”

“What’s that?” says I. “You—you ain’t been gettin’ married, have you?”

“Yep,” says Spotty, grinnin’ foolish. “Nine o’clock last night. We’re goin’ to start on our weddin’ trip Tuesday, me and Mareena.”

“Mareena!” I gasps. “Not the—the one we saw out front? Where you going, Niagara?”

“Nah! Syria, wherever that is,” says he. “Mareena knows. We’re goin’ to live over there and buy rugs. That two hundred was just what we needed to set us up in business.”

“Think you’ll like it?” says I.

“Sure!” says he. “She says it’s fine. There’s deserts over there, and you travel for days and days, ridin’ on bloomin’ camels. Here’s the tent we’re goin’ to live in. I’m practisin’ up. Gee! but this pipe is somethin’ fierce, though! Oh, here she is! Say, Mareena, this is Mr. McCabe, that I was tellin’ you about.”

Well, honest, I wouldn’t have known her for the same girl. She’s changed that Grand-st. uniform for a native outfit, and while it’s a little gaudy in color, hanged if it ain’t becomin’! For a desert bride I should say she had some class.

“Well,” says I, “so you and Spotty are goin’ to leave us, eh?”

“Ah, yes!” says she, them big black eyes of hers lightin’ up. “We go where the sky is high and blue and the sun is big and hot. We go back to the wide white desert where I was born. All day we shall ride toward the purple hills, and sleep at night under the still stars. He knows. I have told him.”

“That’s right,” says Spotty. “It’ll be all to the good, that. Mareena can cook too.”

To prove it, she makes coffee and hands it around in little brass cups. Also there’s cakes, and the old man comes in, smilin’ and rubbin’ his hands, and we has a real sociable time.

And these was the folks I’d suspected of wantin’ to carve up Spotty! Why, by the looks I saw thrown at him by them two, I knew they thought him the finest thing that ever happened. Just by the way Mareena reached out sly to pat his hair when she passed, you could see how it was.

So I wished ’em luck and hurried back to report before Pinckney sent a squad of reserves after me.

“Well!” says he, the minute I gets in. “Let me know the worst at once.”

“I will,” says I. “He’s married.” It was all I could do, too, to make him believe the yarn.

“By Jove!” says he. “Think of a chap like Spotty Cahill tumbling into a romance like that! And on Fourth-ave!”

“It ain’t so well advertised as some other lanes in this town,” says I; “but it’s a great street. Say, what puzzled me most about the whole business, though, was the new name they had for Spotty. Sareef! What in blazes does that mean?”

“Probably a title of some sort,” says Pinckney. “Like sheik, I suppose.”

“But what does a Sareef have to do?” says I.

“Do!” says Pinckney. “Why, he’s boss of the caravan. He—he sits around in the sun and looks picturesque.”

“Then that settles it,” says I. “Spotty’s qualified. I never thought there was any place where he’d fit in; but, if your description’s correct, he’s found the job he was born for.”

CHAPTER IV

A GRANDMOTHER WHO GOT GOING

Ever go on a grandmother hunt through the Red Ink District? Well, it ain’t a reg’lar amusement of mine, but it has its good points. Maybe I wouldn’t have tackled it at all if I hadn’t begun by lettin’ myself get int’rested in Vincent’s domestic affairs.

Now what I knew about this Vincent chap before we starts out on the grandmother trail wouldn’t take long to tell. He wa’n’t any special friend of mine. For one thing, he wears his hair cut plush. Course, it’s his hair, and if he wants to train it to stand up on top like a clothes brush or a blacking dauber, who am I that should curl the lip of scorn?

Just the same, I never could feel real chummy towards anyone that sported one of them self raisin’ crests. Vincent wa’n’t one of the chummy kind, though. He’s one of these stiff backed, black haired, brown eyed, quick motioned, sharp spoken ducks, that wants what he wants when he wants it. You know. He comes to the studio reg’lar, does his forty-five minutes’ work, and gets out without swappin’ any more conversation than is strictly necessary.

All the information I had picked up about him was that he hailed from up the State somewhere, and that soon after he struck New York he married one of the Chetwood girls. And that takes more or less capital to start with. Guess Vincent had it; for I hear his old man left him quite a wad and that now he’s the main guy of a threshin’ machine trust, or something like that. Anyway, Vincent belongs in the four-cylinder plute class, and he’s beginnin’ to be heard of among the alimony aristocracy.

But this ain’t got anything to do with the way he happened to get confidential all so sudden. He’d been havin’ a kid pillow mix-up with Swifty Joe, just as lively as if the thermometer was down to thirty instead of up to ninety, and he’s just had his rub down and got into his featherweight serge, when in drifts this Rodney Kipp that’s figurin’ so strong on the defense side of them pipe line cases.

“Ah, Vincent!” says he.

“Hello, Rodney!” says Vincent as they passes each other in the front office, one goin’ out and the other comin’ in.

I’d never happened to see ’em meet before, and I’m some surprised that they’re so well acquainted. Don’t know why, either, unless it is that they’re so different. Rodney, you know, is one of these light complected heavyweights, and a swell because he was born so. I was wonderin’ if Rodney was one of Vincent’s lawyers, or if they just belonged to the same clubs; when Mr. Kipp swings on his heel and says:

“Oh, by the way, Vincent, how is grammy?”

“Why!” says Vincent, “isn’t she out with you and Nellie?”

“No,” says Rodney, “she stayed with us only for a couple of days. Nellie said she hadn’t heard from her for nearly two months, and told me to ask you about her. So long. I’m due for some medicine ball work,” and with that he drifts into the gym. and shuts the door.

Vincent, he stands lookin’ after him with a kind of worried look on his face that was comical to see on such a cocksure chap as him.

“Lost somebody, have you?” says I.

“Why—er—I don’t know,” says Vincent, runnin’ his fingers through the bristles that waves above his noble brow. “It’s grandmother. I can’t imagine where she can be.”

“You must have grandmothers to burn,” says I, “if they’re so plenty with you that you can mislay one now and then without missin’ her.”

“Eh?” says he. “No, no! She is really my mother, you know. I’ve got into the way of calling her grammy only during the last three or four years.”

“Oh, I see!” says I. “The grandmother habit is something she’s contracted comparative recent, eh? Ain’t gone to her head, has it?”

Vincent couldn’t say; but by the time he’s quit tryin’ to explain what has happened I’ve got the whole story. First off he points out that Rodney Kipp, havin’ married his sister Nellie, is his brother-in-law, and, as they both have a couple of youngsters, it makes Vincent’s mother a grammy in both families.

“Sure,” says I. “I know how that works out. She stays part of the time with you, and makes herself mighty popular with your kids; then she takes her trunk over to Rodney’s and goes through the same performance there. And when she goes visitin’ other places there’s a great howl all round. That’s it, ain’t it?”

It wa’n’t, not within a mile, and I’d showed up my low, common breedin’ by suggesting such a thing. As gently as he could without hurtin’ my feelin’s too much, Vincent explains that while my programme might be strictly camel’s foot for ordinary people, the domestic arrangements of the upper classes was run on different lines. For instance, his little Algernon Chetwood could speak nothing but French, that bein’ the brand of governess he’d always had, and so he naturally couldn’t be very thick with a grandmother that didn’t understand a word of his lingo.

“Besides,” says Vincent, “mother and my wife, I regret to say, have never found each other very congenial.”

I might have guessed it if I’d stopped to think of how an old lady from the country would hitch with one of them high flyin’ Chetwood girls.

“Then she hangs out with your sister, eh, and does her grandmother act there?” says I.

“Well, hardly,” says Vincent, colorin’ up a little. “You see, Rodney has never been very intimate with the rest of our family. He’s a Kipp, and—— Well, you can’t blame him; for mother is rather old-fashioned. Of course, she’s good and kind-hearted and all that; but—but there isn’t much style about her.”

“Still sticks to the polonaise of ’81, and wears a straw lid she bought durin’ the Centennial, eh?” says I.

Vincent says that about tells the story.

“And where is it she’s been livin’ all this time that you’ve been gettin’ on so well in New York?” says I.

“In our old home, Tonawanda,” says he, shudderin’ some as he lets go of the name. “It’s where she should have stayed, too!”

“So-o-o-o?” says I. I’d been listenin’ just out of politeness up to that point; but from then on I got int’rested, and I don’t let up until I’ve pumped out of him all the details about just how much of a nuisance an old, back number mother could be to a couple of ambitious young folks that had grown up and married into the swell mob.

It was a case that ought to be held up as a warnin’ to lots of superfluous old mothers that ain’t got any better taste than to keep on livin’ long after there’s any use for ’em. Mother Vincent hadn’t made much trouble at first, for she’d had an old maid sister to take care of; but when a bad case of the grip got Aunt Sophrony durin’ the previous winter, mother was left sort of floatin’ around.

She tried visitin’ back and forth between Vincent and Nellie just one consecutive trip, and the experiment was such a frost that it caused ructions in both families. In her Tonawanda regalia mother wa’n’t an exhibit that any English butler could be expected to pass the soup to and still keep a straight face.

So Vincent thinks it’s time to anchor her permanent somewhere. Accordin’ to his notion, he did the handsome thing too. He buys her a nice little farm about a mile outside of Tonawanda, a place with a fine view of the railroad tracks on the west and a row of brick yards to the east, and he lands mother there with a toothless old German housekeeper for company. He tells her he’s settled a good comfortable income on her for life, and leaves her to enjoy herself.

But look at the ingratitude a parent can work up! She ain’t been there more’n a couple of months before she begins complainin’ about bein’ lonesome. She don’t see much of the Tonawanda folks now, the housekeeper ain’t very sociable, the smoke from the brick yards yellows her Monday wash, and the people she sees goin’ by in the cars is all strangers. Couldn’t Vincent swap the farm for one near New York? She liked the looks of the place when she was there, and wouldn’t mind being closer.

“Of course,” says he, “that was out of the question!”

“Oh, sure!” says I. “How absurd! But what’s the contents of this late bulletin about her being a stray?”

It was nothing more or less than that the old girl had sold up the farm a couple of months back, fired the housekeeper, and quietly skipped for New York. Vincent had looked for her to show up at his house, and when she didn’t he figured she must have gone to Nellie’s. It was only when Rodney Kipp fires the grammy question at him that he sees he’s made a wrong calculation and begins havin’ cold feet.

“If she’s here, alone in New York, there’s no knowing what may be happening to her,” says he. “Why, she knows nothing about the city, nothing at all! She might get run over, or fall in with disreputable people, or——” The other pictures was so horrible he passes ’em up.

“Mothers must be a great care,” says I. “I ain’t had one for so long I can’t say on my own hook; but I judge that you and sister has had a hard time of it with yours. Excuse me, though, if I don’t shed any tears of sympathy, Vincent.”

He looks at me kind of sharp at that; but he’s too busy with disturbin’ thoughts to ask what I mean. Maybe he’d found out if he had. It’s just as well he didn’t; for I was some curious to see what would be his next move. From his talk it’s plain Vincent is most worried about the chances of the old lady’s doin’ something that would get her name into the papers, and he says right off that he won’t rest easy until he’s found her and shooed her back to the fields.

“But where am I to look first?” says he. “How am I to begin?”

“It’s a big town to haul a dragnet through, that’s a fact,” says I. “Why don’t you call in Brother-in-Law Rodney, for a starter?”

“No, no,” says Vincent, glancin’ uneasy at the gym. door. “I don’t care to have him know anything about it.”

“Maybe sister might have some information,” says I. “There’s the ’phone.”

“Thanks,” says he. “If you don’t mind, I will call her up at the Kipp country place.”

He does; but Nellie ain’t heard a word from mother; thought she must be with Vincent all this time; and has been too busy givin’ house parties to find out.

“Have her cross examine the maids,” says I. “The old lady may have left some orders about forwardin’ her mail.”

That was the clew. Inside of ten minutes Nellie ’phones back and gives a number on West 21st-st.

“Gee!” says I. “A hamfatters’ boardin’-house, I’ll bet a bag of beans! Grandmother has sure picked out a lively lodgin’-place.”

“Horrible!” says Vincent. “I must get her away from there at once. But I wish there was someone who——Shorty, could I get you to go along with me and——”

“Rescuin’ grandmothers ain’t my long suit,” says I; “but I’ll admit I’m some int’rested in this case. Come on.”

By the time our clockwork cab fetches up in front of the prunery it’s after six o’clock. There’s no mistakin’ the sort of histrionic asylum it was, either. A hungry lookin’ bunch of actorets was lined up on the front steps, everyone of ’em with an ear stretched out for the dinner bell. In the window of the first floor front was a beauty doctor’s sign, a bull fiddle-artist was sawin’ out his soul distress in the hall bedroom above, and up under the cornice the Chicini sisters was leanin’ on the ledge and wishin’ the folks back in Saginaw would send on that grubstake letter before the landlady got any worse. But maybe you’ve seen samples of real dogday tragedy among the profesh, when the summer snaps have busted and the fall rehearsals have just begun. What, Mabel?

“It’s a sure enough double-in-brass roost,” says I. “Don’t say anything that sounds like contract, or you’ll be mobbed.”

But they sizes Vincent up for a real estate broker, and gives him the chilly stare, until he mentions the old lady’s name. Then they thaws out sudden.

“Oh, the Duchess!” squeals a couple in chorus. “Why, she always dines out, you know. You’ll find her around at Doughretti’s, on 27th-st.”

“Duchess!” says Vincent. “I—I’m afraid there’s some mistake.”

“Not at all,” says one of the crowd. “We all call her that. She’s got Little Spring Water with her to-night. Doughretti’s, just in from the avenue, is the place.”

And Vincent is the worst puzzled gent you ever saw as he climbs back into the cab.

“It can’t be mother they mean,” says he. “No one would ever think of calling her Duchess.”

“There’s no accountin’ for what them actorines would do,” says I. “Anyway, all you got to do is take a peek at the party, and if it’s a wrong steer we can go back and take a fresh start.”

You know Doughretti’s, if you don’t you know a dozen just like it. It’s one of these sixty-cent table dotty joints, with an electric name sign, a striped stoop awnin’, and a seven-course menu manifolded in pale purple ink. You begin the agony with an imitation soup that looks like Rockaway beach water when the tide’s comin’ in, and you end with a choice of petrified cheese rinds that might pass for souvenirs from the Palisades.

If you don’t want to taste what you eat, you let ’em hand you a free bottle of pure California claret, vatted on East Houston-st. It’s a mixture of filtered Croton, extra quality aniline dyes, and two kinds of wood alcohol, and after you’ve had a pint of it you don’t care whether the milk fed Philadelphia chicken was put in cold storage last winter, or back in the year of the big wind.

Madam Doughretti had just fed the Punk Lady waltz into the pianola for the fourth time as we pulls up at the curb.

“It’s no use,” says Vincent. “She wouldn’t be here. I will wait, though, while you take a look around; if you will, Shorty.”

On the way over he’s given me a description of his missin’ parent; so I pikes up the steps, pushes past the garlic smells, and proceeds to inspect the groups around the little tables. What I’m lookin’ for is a squatty old party with gray hair pasted down over her ears, and a waist like a bag of hay tied in the middle. She’s supposed to be wearin’ a string bonnet about the size of a saucer, with a bunch of faded velvet violets on top, a coral brooch at her neck, and either a black alpaca or a lavender sprigged grenadine. Most likely, too, she’ll be doin’ the shovel act with her knife.

Well, there was a good many kinds of females scattered around the coffee stained tablecloths, but none that answers to these specifications. I was just gettin’ ready to call off the search, when I gets my eye on a couple over in one corner. The gent was one of these studio Indians, with his hair tucked inside his collar.

The old girl facin’ him didn’t have any Tonawanda look about her, though. She was what you might call a frosted pippin, a reg’lar dowager dazzler, like the pictures you see on fans. Her gray hair has been spliced out with store puffs until it looks like a weddin’ cake; her hat is one of the new wash basin models, covered with pink roses that just matches the color of her cheeks; and her peek-a-poo lace dress fits her like it had been put onto her with a shoe horn.

Sure, I wa’n’t lookin’ for any such party as this; but I can’t help takin’ a second squint. I notices what fine, gentle old eyes she has, and while I was doin’ that I spots something else. Just under her chin is one of them antique coral pins. Course, it looked like a long shot, but I steps out to the door and motions Vincent to come in.

“I expect we’re way off the track,” says I; “but I’d like to have you take a careless glance at the giddy old party over under the kummel sign in the corner; the one facin’ this way—there.”

Vincent gives a jump at the first look. Then he starts for her full tilt, me trailin’ along and whisperin’ to him not to make any fool break unless he’s dead sure. But there’s no holdin’ him back. She’s so busy chattin’ with the reformed Sioux in store clothes that she don’t notice Vincent until he’s right alongside, and just as she looks up he lets loose his indignation.

“Why, grandmother!” says he.

She don’t seem so much jarred as you might think. She don’t even drop the fork that she’s usin’ to twist up a gob of spaghetti on. All she does is to lift her eyebrows in a kind of annoyed way, and shoot a quick look at the copper tinted gent across the table.

“There, there, Vincent?” says she. “Please don’t grandmother me; at least, not in public.”

“But,” says he, “you know that you are a——”

“I admit nothing of the kind,” says she. “I may be your mother; but as for being anybody’s grandmother, that is an experience I know nothing about. Now please run along, Vincent, and don’t bother.”

That leaves Vincent up in the air for keeps. He don’t know what to make of this reception, or of the change that happened to her; but he feels he ought to register some sort of a kick.

“But, mother,” says he, “what does this mean? Such clothes! And such—such”—here he throws a meanin’ look at the Indian gent.

“Allow me,” says grandmother, breakin’ in real dignified, “to introduce Mr. John Little Bear, son of Chief Won-go-plunki. I am very sorry to interrupt our talk on art, John; but I suppose I must say a few words to Vincent. Would you mind taking your coffee on the back veranda?”

He was a well-trained red man, John was, and he understands the back out sign; so inside of a minute the crockery has been pushed away and I’m attendin’ a family reunion that appears to be cast on new lines. Vincent begins again by askin’ what it all means.

“It means, Vincent,” says she, “that I have caught up with the procession. I tried being the old-fashioned kind of grandmother, and I wasn’t a success. Now I’m learning the new way, and I like it first rate.”

“But your—your clothes!” gasps Vincent.

“Well, what of them?” says she. “You made fun of the ones I used to wear; but these, I would have you know, were selected for me by a committee of six chorus ladies who know what is what. I am quite satisfied with my clothes, Vincent.”

“Possibly they’re all right,” says he; “but how—how long have you been wearing your hair that way?”

“Ever since Madam Montrosini started on my improvement course,” says she. “I am told it is quite becoming. And have you noticed my new waist line, Vincent?”

Vincent hadn’t; but he did then, and he had nothin’ to say, for she has an hourglass lookin’ like a hitchin’ post. Not bein’ able to carry on the debate under them headings, he switches and comes out strong on what an awful thing it was for her to be livin’ among such dreadful people.

“Why,” says grandmother, “they’re real nice, I’m sure. They have been just as good to me as they could be. They take turns going out to dinner with me and showing me around the town.”

“Good heavens!” says Vincent. “And this—this Bear person, does he——”

“He is an educated, full blooded Sioux,” says grandmother. “He has toured Europe with Buffalo Bill, and just now he is an artists’ model. He is very entertaining company, Johnny is.”

“Johnny!” gasps Vincent under his breath. That’s the last straw. He lays down the law then and there to grandmother. If she ever expects him to recognize her again, she must shake this whole crowd and come with him.

“Where to, Vincent?” says she.

“Why, to my home, of course,” says he.

“And have your wife’s maid speak of me as a dumpy old scarecrow? No, thank you!” and she calls the waiter to bring a demitasse with cognac.

“But no one could call you that now, mother,” says Vincent. “You—you’re different, quite different.”

“Oh, am I?” says she.

“To be sure you are,” says he. “Julia and I would be glad to have you with us. Really, we would.”

She was a good natured old girl, grandmother was. She says she’ll try it; but only on one condition. It was a corker, too. If she’s going to give all her good friends at the actors’ boardin’ house the shake, she thinks it ought to be done at a farewell dinner at the swellest place in town. Vincent groans; but he has to give in. And that’s how it happens the other night that about two dozen liberty people walked up from Appetite Row and fed themselves off Sherry’s gold plates until the waiters was weak in the knees watchin’ ’em.

“Is the old lady still leadin’ the band wagon, Vincent!” says I to him yesterday.

“She is,” says he, “and it is wonderful how young she has grown.”

“New York is a great place for rejuvenatin’ grandmothers,” says I, “specially around in the Red Ink Zone.”

CHAPTER V

A LONG SHOT ON DELANCEY

Well, I’ve been slummin’ up again. It happens like this: I was just preparin’, here the other noontime, to rush around the corner and destroy a plate of lunch counter hash decorated with parsley and a dropped egg, when I gets this ’phone call from Duke Borden, who says he wants to see me the worst way.

“Well,” says I, “the studio’s still here on 42d-st., and if your eyesight ain’t failed you——”

“Oh, chop it, can’t you, Shorty?” says he. “This is really important. Come right up, can’t you!”

“That depends,” says I. “Any partic’lar place?”

“Of course,” says he. “Here at the club. I’m to meet Chick Sommers here in half an hour. We’ll have luncheon together and——”

“I’m on,” says I. “I don’t know Chick; but I’m a mixer, and I’ll stand for anything in the food line but cold egg. Scratch the chilled hen fruit and I’m with you.”

Know about Duke, don’t you? It ain’t much to tell. He’s just one of these big, handsome, overfed chappies that help the mounted traffic cops to make Fifth-ave. look different from other Main-sts. He don’t do any special good, or any partic’lar harm. Duke’s got just enough sense, though, to have spasms of thinkin’ he wants to do something useful now and then, and all I can dope out of this emergency call of his is that this is a new thought.

That’s the answer, too. He begins tellin’ me about it while the head waiter’s leadin’ us over to a corner table. Oh, yes, he’s going in for business in dead earnest now, y’know,—suite of offices, his name on the letterheads, and all that sort of thing, bah Jove!

All of which means that Mr. Chick Sommers, who was a star quarterback in ’05, when Duke was makin’ his college bluff on the Gold Coast, has rung him into a South Jersey land boomin’ scheme. A few others, friends of Chick’s, are in it. They’re all rippin’ good fellows, too, and awfully clever at planning out things. Chick himself, of course, is a corker. It was him that insisted on Duke’s bein’ treasurer.

“And really,” says Duke, “about all I have to do is drop around once or twice a week and sign a few checks.”

“I see,” says I. “They let you supply the funds, eh?”

“Why, yes,” says Duke. “I’m the only one who can, y’know. But they depend a great deal on my judgment, too. For instance, take this new deal that’s on; it has all been left to me. There are one hundred and eighteen acres, and we don’t buy a foot unless I say so. That’s where you come in, Shorty.”

“Oh, do I?” says I.

“You see,” Duke goes on, “I’m supposed to inspect it and make a decision before the option expires, which will be day after to-morrow. The fact is, I’ve been putting off going down there, and now I find I’ve a winter house party on, up in Lenox, and—— Well, you see the box I’m in.”

“Sure!” says I. “You want me to sub for you at Lenox?”

“Deuce take it, no!” says Duke. “I want you to go down and look at that land for me.”

“Huh!” says I. “What I know about real estate wouldn’t——”

“Oh, that’s all right,” says Duke. “It’s only a matter of form. The boys say they want it, and I’m going to buy it for them anyway; but, just to have it all straight and businesslike, either I ought to see the land myself, or have it inspected by my personal representative. Understand?”

“Duke,” says I, “you’re a reg’lar real estate Napoleon. I wouldn’t have believed it was in you.”

“I know,” says he. “I’m really surprised at myself.”

Next he explains how he happened to think of sendin’ me, and casually he wants to know if a couple of hundred and expenses will be about right for spoilin’ two days of my valuable time. How could I tell how much it would lose me? But I said I’d run the chances.

Then Chick shows up, and they begin to talk over the details of this new bungalow boom town that’s to be located on the Jersey side.

“I tell you,” says Chick, “it’ll be a winner from the start. Why, there’s every advantage anyone could wish for,—ocean breezes mingled with pine scented zephyrs, magnificent views, and a railroad running right through the property! The nearest station now is Clam Creek; but we’ll have one of our own, with a new name. Clam Creek! Ugh! How does Pinemere strike you?”

“Perfectly ripping, by Jove!” says Duke, so excited over it that he lights the cork end of his cigarette. “Shorty, you must go right down there for me. Can’t you start as soon as you’ve had your coffee?”

Oh, but it was thrillin’, listenin’ to them two amateur real estaters layin’ plans that was to make a seashore wilderness blossom with surveyors’ stakes and fresh painted signs like Belvidere-ave., Ozone Boulevard, and so on.

It struck me, though, that they was discussin’ their scheme kind of free and public. I spots one white haired, dignified old boy, doing the solitaire feed at the table back of Duke, who seems more or less int’rested. And I notices that every time Clam Creek is mentioned he pricks up his ears. Sure enough, too, just as we’re finishing, he steps over and taps Duke on the shoulder.

“Why, howdy do, Mr. Cathaway?” says Duke. “Charmed to see you, by Jove!”

And it turns out he’s DeLancey Cathaway, the big noise in the philanthropy game, him that gets up societies for suppressin’ the poor and has his name on hospitals and iron drinkin’ fountains. After he’s been introduced all around he admits that he’s caught one or two remarks, and says he wants to congratulate Duke on givin’ up his idle ways and breakin’ into an active career.

Oh, he’s a smooth old party, Mr. Cathaway is! He don’t let on to be more’n moderately int’rested, and the next thing I know he’s sidled away from Duke and is walkin’ out alongside of me.

“Going down town?” says he. “Then perhaps you will allow me to give you a lift?” and he motions to his town car waiting at the curb.

“Gee!” thinks I. “I’m makin’ a hit with the nobility, me and my winnin’ ways!”

That don’t exactly state the case, though; for as soon as we’re alone DeLancey comes right to cases.

“I understand, Mr. McCabe,” says he, “that you are to visit Clam Creek.”

“Yep,” says I. “Sounds enticin’, don’t it?”

“Doubtless you will spend a day or so there?” he goes on.

“Over night, anyway,” says I.

“Hum!” says he. “Then you will hardly fail to meet my brother. He is living at Clam Creek.”

“What!” says I. “Not Broadway Bob?”

“Yes,” says he, “Robert and his wife have been there for nearly two years. At least, that is where I have been sending his allowance.”

“Mrs. Bob too!” says I. “Why—why, say, you don’t mean the one that——”

“The same,” he cuts in. “I know they’re supposed to be abroad; but they’re not, they are at Clam Creek.”

Maybe you’ve heard about the Bob Cathaways, and maybe you ain’t. There’s so many new near-plutes nowadays that the old families ain’t getting the advertisin’ they’ve been used to. Anyway, it’s been sometime since Broadway Bob had his share of the limelight. You see, Bob sort of had his day when he was along in his thirties, and they say he was a real old-time sport and rounder, which was why he was let in so bad when old man Cathaway’s will was probated. All Bob pulls out is a couple of thousand a year, even that being handled first by Brother DeLancey, who cops all the rest of the pile as a reward for always having gone in strong for charity and the perfectly good life.

It’s a case where virtue shows up strong from the first tap of the bell. Course, Bob can look back on some years of vivid joy, when he was makin’ a record as a quart opener, buyin’ stacks of blues at Daly’s, or over at Monte Carlo bettin’ where the ball would stop. But all this ends mighty abrupt.

In the meantime Bob has married a lively young lady that nobody knew much about except that she was almost as good a sport as he was, and they were doin’ some great teamwork in the way of livenin’ up society, when the crash came.

Then it was the noble hearted DeLancey to the rescue. He don’t exactly take them right into the fam’ly; but he sends Mr. and Mrs. Bob over to his big Long Island country place, assigns ’em quarters in the north wing, and advises ’em to be as happy as they can. Now to most folks that would look like landin’ on Velveteen-st.,—free eats, no room rent, and a forty-acre park to roam around in, with the use of a couple of safe horses and a libr’y full of improvin’ books, such as the Rollo series and the works of Dr. Van Dyke.

Brother Bob don’t squeal or whine. He starts in to make the best of it by riggin’ himself out like an English Squire and makin’ a stagger at the country gentleman act. He takes a real int’rest in keepin’ up the grounds and managin’ the help, which DeLancey had never been able to do himself.

It’s as dull as dishwater, though, for Mrs. Robert Cathaway, and as there ain’t anyone else handy she takes it out on Bob. Accordin’ to all accounts, they must have done the anvil chorus good and plenty. You can just see how it would be, with them two dumped down so far from Broadway and only now and then comp’ny to break the monotony. When people did come, too, they was DeLancey’s kind. I can picture Bob tryin’ to get chummy with a bunch of prison reformers or delegates to a Sunday school union. I don’t wonder his disposition curdled up.

If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Bob, though, they’d been there yet. She got so used to rowin’ with Bob that she kept it up even when Brother DeLancey and his friends came down. DeLancey stands for it until one morning at breakfast, when he was entertainin’ an English Bishop he’d corraled at some conference. Him and the Bishop was exchangin’ views on whether free soup and free salvation was a good workin’ combination or not, when some little thing sets Mr. and Mrs. Bob to naggin’ each other on the side. I forgot just what it was Bob shot over; but after standin’ her jabs for quite some time without gettin’ real personal he comes back with some stage whisper remark that cut in deep.

Mrs. Bob was right in the act of helpin’ herself to the jelly omelet, usin’ a swell silver servin’ shovel about half the size of a brick layer’s trowel. She’s so stirred up that she absentmindedly scoops up a double portion, and just as Bob springs his remark what does she do but up and let fly at him, right across the table. Maybe she’d have winged him too,—and served him right for saying what no gentleman should to a lady, even if she is his wife,—but, what with her not stoppin’ to take good aim, and the maid’s gettin’ her tray against her elbow, she misses Bob by about three feet and plasters the English Bishop square between the eyes.

Now of course that wa’n’t any way to serve hot omelet to a stranger, no matter how annoyed you was. DeLancey told her as much while he was helpin’ swab off the reverend guest. Afterwards he added other observations more or less definite. Inside of two hours Mr. and Mrs. Bob found their baggage waitin’ under the porte cochère, and the wagonette ready to take ’em to the noon train. They went. It was given out that they was travelin’ abroad, and if it hadn’t been for the omelet part of the incident they’d been forgotten long ago. That was a stunt that stuck, though.

As I looks at DeLancey there in the limousine I has to grin. “Say,” says I, “was it a fact that the Bishop broke loose and cussed?”

“That humiliating affair, Mr. McCabe,” says he, “I would much prefer not to talk about. I refer to my brother now because, knowing that you are going to Clam Creek, you will probably meet him there.”

“Oh!” says I. “Like to have me give him your best regards!”

“No,” says DeLancey. “I should like, however, to hear how you found him.”

“Another report, eh!” says I. “All right, Mr. Cathaway, I’ll size him up for you.”

“But chiefly,” he goes on, “I shall depend upon your discretion not to mention my brother’s whereabouts to anyone else. As an aid to that discretion,” says he, digging up his roll and sortin’ out some tens, “I am prepared to——”

“Ah, button ’em back!” says I. “Who do you think you’re dealin’ with, anyway?”

“Why,” says he, flushin’ up, “I merely intended——”

“Well, forget it!” says I. “I ain’t runnin’ any opposition to the Black Hand, and as for whether I leak out where your brother is or not, that’s something you got to take chances on. Pull up there, Mr. Chauffeur! This is where I start to walk.”

And say, you could put his name on all the hospitals and orphan asylums in the country; but I never could see it again without growin’ warm under the collar. Bah! Some of these perfectly good folks have a habit of gettin’ on my nerves. All the way down to Clam Creek I kept tryin’ to wipe him off the slate, and I’d made up my mind to dodge Brother Bob, if I had to sleep in the woods.

So as soon as I hops off the train I gets my directions and starts to tramp over this tract that Duke Borden was plannin’ on blowin’ some of his surplus cash against. And say, if anybody wants an imitation desert, dotted with scrub pine and fringed with salt marshes, that’s the place to go lookin’ for it. There’s hundreds of square miles of it down there that nobody’s usin’, or threatenin’ to.

Also I walked up an appetite like a fresh landed hired girl. I was so hungry that I pikes straight for the only hotel and begs ’em to lead me to a knife and fork. For a wonder, too, they brings on some real food, plain and hearty, and I don’t worry about the way it’s thrown at me.

Yon know how it is out in the kerosene district. I finds myself face to face with a hunk of corned beef as big as my two fists, boiled Murphies, cabbage and canned corn on the side, bread sliced an inch thick, and spring freshet coffee in a cup you couldn’t break with an ax. Lizzie, the waitress, was chewin’ gum and watchin’ to see if I was one of them fresh travelin’ gents that would try any funny cracks on her.

I’d waded through the food programme as far as makin’ a choice between tapioca puddin’ and canned peaches, when in drifts a couple that I knew, the minute I gets my eyes on ’em, must be Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cathaway. Who else in that little one-horse town would be sportin’ a pair of puttee leggin’s and doeskin ridin’ breeches? That was Bob’s makeup, includin’ a flap-pocketed cutaway of Harris tweed and a corduroy vest. They fit him a little snug, showin’ he’s laid on some flesh since he had ’em built. Also he’s a lot grayer than I expected, knowin’ him to be younger than DeLancey.

As for Mrs. Bob—well, if you can remember how the women was dressin’ as far back as two years ago, and can throw on the screen a picture of a woman who has only the reminders of her good looks left, you’ll have her framed up. A pair of seedy thoroughbreds, they was, seedy and down and out.

“I knew it must be Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cathaway”

I was wonderin’ if they still indulged in them lively fam’ly debates, and how soon I’d have to begin dodgin’ dishes; but they sits down across the table from me and hardly swaps a word. All I notices is the scornful way Lizzie asks if they’ll have soup, and the tremble to Bob Cathaway’s hand as he lifts his water tumbler.

As there was only us three in the room, and as none of us seemed to have anything to say, it wa’n’t what you might call a boisterous assemblage. While I was waitin’ for dessert I put in the time gazin’ around at the scenery, from the moldy pickle jars at either end of the table, over to the walnut sideboard where they kept the plated cake basket and the ketchup bottles, across to the framed fruit piece that had seen so many hard fly seasons, and up to the smoky ceilin’. I looked everywhere except at the pair opposite.

Lizzie was balancin’ the soup plates on her left arm and singsongin’ the bill of fare to ’em. “Col’-pork-col’-ham-an’-corn-beef-’n’-cabbage,” says she.

If Bob Cathaway didn’t shudder at that, I did for him. “You may bring me—er—some of the latter,” says he.

I tested the canned peaches and then took a sneak. On one side of the front hall was the hotel parlor, full of plush furniture and stuffed birds. The office and bar was on the other. I strolls in where half a dozen Clam Creekers was sittin’ around a big sawdust box indulgin’ in target practice; but after a couple of sniffs I concludes that the breathin’ air is all outside.

After half an hour’s stroll I goes in, takes a lamp off the hall table, and climbs up to No. 7. It’s as warm and cheerful as an underground beer vault. Also I finds the window nailed down. Huntin’ for someone to fetch me a hammer was what sent me roamin’ through the hall and took me past No. 11, where the door was part way open. And in there, with an oil-stove to keep ’em from freezin’, I see Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cathaway sittin’ at a little marble topped table playin’ double dummy bridge. Say, do you know, that unexpected glimpse of this little private hard luck proposition of theirs kind of got me in the short ribs. And next thing I knew I had my head in the door.

“For the love of Mike,” says I, “how do you stand it?”

“Eh?” says Bob, droppin’ his cards and starin’ at me. “I—I beg pardon?”

Well, with that I steps in, tells him who I am, and how I’d just had a talk with Brother DeLancey. Do I get the glad hand? Why, you’d thought I was a blooming he angel come straight from the pearly gates. Bob drags me in, pushes me into the only rocker in the room, shoves a cigar box at me, and begins to haul decanters from under the washstand. They both asks questions at once. How is everybody, and who’s married who, and are so and so still living together?

I reels off society gossip for an hour before I gets a chance to do some pumpin’ on my own hook. What I wants to know is why in blazes they’re hidin’ in a hole like Clam Creek.

Bob only shrugs his shoulders. “Why not here as well as anywhere?” says he. “When you can’t afford to live among your friends, why—you live in Clam Creek.”

“But two years of it!” says I. “What do you find to do?”

“Oh, we manage,” says he, wavin’ at the double dummy outfit. “Babe and I have our little game. It’s only for a dime a point; but it helps pass away the time. You see, when our monthly allowance comes in we divide it equally and take a fresh start. The winner has the privilege of paying our bills.”

How was that for excitement? And Bob whispers to me, as we starts out for a little walk before turnin’ in, “I generally fix it so Babe—er, Mrs. Cathaway—can win, you know.”

From other little hints I gathers that their stay in Clam Creek has done one thing for ’em, anyway. It had put ’em wise to the great fact that the best way for two parties to get along together is to cut out the hammer music.

“So you had a talk with DeLancey?” says Bob on the way back. “I suppose he—er—sent no message?”

It had taken Bob Cathaway all this while to work up to that question, and he can’t steady down his voice as he puts it. And that quaver tells me the whole story of how he’s been hoping all along that Brother DeLancey would sometime or other get over his grouch. Which puts it up to me to tell him what a human iceberg he’s related to. Did I? Honest, there’s times when I ain’t got much use for the truth.

“Message?” says I, prompt and cheerful. “Now what in blazes was it he did say to tell you? Something about asking how long before you and Mrs. Cathaway was goin’ to run up and make him a visit, I guess.”

“A visit!” gasps Bob. “Did—did DeLancey say that? Then thank Heaven it’s over! Come on! Hurry!” and he grabs me by the arm, tows me to the hotel, and makes a dash up the stairs towards their room.

“What do you think, Babe?” says he, pantin’. “DeLancey wants to know when we’re coming back!”

For a minute Mrs. Bob don’t say a word, but just stands there, her hands gripped in Bob’s, and the dew startin’ out of her eye corners. Then she asks, sort of husky, “Isn’t there a night train, Bob?”

There wa’n’t; but there was one at six-thirty-eight in the mornin’. We all caught it, too, both of ’em as chipper as a pair of kids, and me wonderin’ how it was all goin’ to turn out.

For three days after that I never went to the ’phone without expectin’ to hear from Bob Cathaway, expressin’ his opinion about my qualifications for the Ananias class. And then here the other afternoon I runs into Brother DeLancey on the avenue, not seein’ him quick enough to beat it up a side street.

“Ah, McCabe,” he sings out, “just a moment! That little affair about my Brother Robert, you know.”

“Sure, I know,” says I, bracin’ myself. “Where is he now?”

“Why,” says DeLancey, with never an eyelash flutterin’, “he and his wife are living at Green Oaks again. Just returned from an extended trip abroad, you know.” Then he winks.

Say, who was it sent out that bulletin about how all men was liars? I ain’t puttin’ in any not guilty plea; but I’d like to add that some has got it down finer than others.

CHAPTER VI

PLAYING HAROLD BOTH WAYS

Anyway, they came bunched, and that was some comfort. Eh? Well, first off there was the lovers, then there was Harold; and it was only the combination that saved me from developin’ an ingrowin’ grouch.

You can guess who it was accumulated the lovers. Why, when Sadie comes back from Bar Harbor and begins tellin’ me about ’em, you’d thought she’d been left something in a will, she’s so pleased.

Seems there was these two young ladies, friends of some friends of hers, that was bein’ just as miserable as they could be up there. One was visitin’ the other, and, as I made out from Sadie’s description, they must have been havin’ an awful time, livin’ in one of them eighteen-room cottages built on a point juttin’ a mile or so out into the ocean, with nothin’ but yachts and motor boats and saddle horses and tennis courts and so on to amuse themselves with.

I inspected some of them places when I was up that way not long ago,—joints where they get their only information about hot waves by readin’ the papers,—and I can just imagine how I could suffer puttin’ in a summer there. Say, some folks don’t know when they’re well off, do they?

And what do you suppose the trouble with ’em was? Why, Bobbie and Charlie was missin’. Honest, that’s all the place lacked to make it a suburb of Paradise. But that was enough for the young ladies; for each of ’em was sportin’ a diamond ring on the proper finger, and, as they confides to Sadie, what was the use of havin’ summer at all, if one’s fiancé couldn’t be there?

Bobbie and Charlie, it appears, was slavin’ away in the city; one tryin’ to convince Papa that he’d be a real addition to Wall Street, and the other trainin’ with Uncle for a job as vice president of a life insurance company. So what did Helen and Marjorie care about sea breezes and picture postal scenery? Once a day they climbed out to separate perches on the rocks to read letters from Bobbie and Charlie; and the rest of the time they put in comparin’ notes and helpin’ each other be miserable.

“Ah, quit it, Sadie!” says I, interruptin’ the sad tale. “Do you want to make me cry?”

“Well, they were wretched, even if you don’t believe it,” says she; “so I just told them to come right down here for the rest of the season.”

“Wha-a-at!” says I. “Not here?”

“Why not?” says Sadie. “The boys can run up every afternoon and have dinner with us and stay over Sunday, and—and it will be just lovely. You know how much I like to have young people around. So do you, too.”

“Yes, that’s all right,” says I; “but——”

“Oh, I know,” says she. “This isn’t matchmaking, though. They’re already engaged, and it will be just delightful to have them with us. Now won’t it?”

“Maybe it will,” says I. “We ain’t ever done this wholesale before; so I ain’t sure.”

Someway, I had a hunch that two pair of lovers knockin’ around the premises at once might be most too much of a good thing; but, as long as I couldn’t quote any authorities, I didn’t feel like keepin’ on with the debate.

I couldn’t object any to the style of the young ladies when they showed up; for they was both in the queen class, tall and willowy and sweet faced. One could tease opera airs out of the piano in great shape, and the other had quite some of a voice; so the prospects were for a few weeks of lively and entertainin’ evenin’s at the McCabe mansion. I had the programme all framed up too,—me out on the veranda with my heels on the rail, the windows open, and inside the young folks strikin’ up the melodies and makin’ merry gen’rally.

Bobbie and Charles made more or less of a hit with me too when they first called,—good, husky, clean built young gents that passed out the cordial grip and remarked real hearty how much they appreciated our great kindness askin’ ’em up.

“Don’t mention it,” says I. “It’s a fad of mine.”

Anyway, it looked like a good game to be in on, seein’ there wa’n’t any objections from any of the fam’lies. Made me feel bright and chirky, just to see ’em there, so that night at dinner I cut loose with some real cute joshes for the benefit of the young people. You know how easy it is to be humorous on them occasions. Honest, I must have come across with some of the snappiest I had in stock, and I was watchin’ for the girls to pink up and accuse me of bein’ an awful kidder, when all of a sudden I tumbles to the fact that I ain’t holdin’ my audience.

Say, they’d started up a couple of conversations on their own hook—kind of side issue, soft pedal dialogues—and they wa’n’t takin’ the slightest notice of my brilliant efforts. At the other end of the table Sadie is havin’ more or less the same experience; for every time she tries to cut in with some cheerful observation she finds she’s addressin’ either Marjorie’s left shoulder or Bobbie’s right.

“Eh, Sadie?” says I across the centerpiece. “What was that last of yours?”

“It doesn’t matter,” says she. “Shall we have coffee in the library, girls, or outside! I say, Helen, shall we have—— I beg pardon, Helen, but would you prefer——”

“What we seem to need most, Sadie,” says I as she gives it up, “is a table megaphone.”

Nobody hears this suggestion, though, not even Sadie. I was lookin’ for the fun to begin after dinner,—the duets and the solos and the quartets,—but the first thing Sadie and I know we are occupyin’ the libr’y all by ourselves, with nothing doing in the merry music line.

“Of course,” says she, “they want a little time by themselves.”

“Sure!” says I. “Half-hour out for the reunion.”

It lasts some longer, though. At the end of an hour I thinks I’ll put in the rest of the wait watchin’ the moon come up out of Long Island Sound from my fav’rite corner of the veranda; but when I gets there I finds it’s occupied.

“Excuse me,” says I, and beats it around to the other side, where there’s a double rocker that I can gen’rally be comfortable in. Hanged if I didn’t come near sittin’ slam down on the second pair, that was snuggled up close there in the dark!

“Aha!” says I in my best comic vein. “So here’s where you are, eh? Fine night, ain’t it?”

There’s a snicker from the young lady, a grunt from the young gent; but nothing else happens in the way of a glad response. So I chases back into the house.

“It’s lovely out, isn’t it?” says Sadie.

“Yes,” says I; “but more or less mushy in spots.”

With that we starts in to sit up for ’em. Sadie says we got to because we’re doin’ the chaperon act. And, say, I’ve seen more excitin’ games. I read three evenin’ papers clear through from the weather forecast to the bond quotations, and I finished by goin’ sound asleep in my chair. I don’t know whether Bobbie and Charlie caught the milk train back to town or not; but they got away sometime before breakfast.

“Oh, well,” says Sadie, chokin’ off a yawn as she pours the coffee, “this was their first evening together, you know. I suppose they had a lot to say to each other.”

“Must have had,” says I. “I shouldn’t think they’d have to repeat that performance for a month.”

Next night, though, it’s the same thing, and the next, and the next. “Poor things!” thinks I. “I expect they’re afraid of being guyed.” So, just to show how sociable and friendly I could be, I tries buttin’ in on these lonely teeter-tates. First I’d hunt up one couple and submit some samples of my best chatter—gettin’ about as much reply as if I was ringin’ Central with the wire down. Then I locates the other pair, drags a rocker over near ’em, and tries to make the dialogue three handed. They stands it for a minute or so before decidin’ to move to another spot.

Honest, I never expected to feel lonesome right at home entertainin’ guests! but I was gettin’ acquainted with the sensation. There’s no musical doings, no happy groups and gay laughter about the house; nothing but now and then a whisper from dark corners, or the creak of the porch swings.

“Gee! but they’re takin’ their spoonin’ serious, ain’t they?” says I to Sadie. “And how popular we are with ’em! Makes me feel almost like I ought to put on a gag and sit down cellar in the coalbin.”

“Pooh!” says Sadie, makin’ a bluff she didn’t mind. “Do let them enjoy themselves in their own way.”

“Sure I will,” says I. “Only this chaperon business is gettin’ on my nerves. I don’t feel like a host here; I feel more like a second story man dodgin’ the night watchman.”

There wa’n’t any signs of a change, either. When they had to be around where we was they had hardly a word to say and acted bored to death; and it must have taxed their brains, workin’ up all them cute little schemes for leavin’ us on a siding so they could pair off. Course, I’ve seen engaged couples before; but I never met any that had the disease quite so hard. And this bein’ shunned like I had somethin’ catchin’ was new to me. I begun to feel like I was about ninety years old and in the way.

Sunday forenoon was the limit, though. Sadie had planned to take ’em all for a motor trip; but they declines with thanks. Would they rather go out on the water? No, they didn’t care for that, either. All they seems to want to do is wander round, two by two, where we ain’t. And at that Sadie loses some of her enthusiasm for havin’ bunches of lovers around.

“Humph!” I hears her remark as she watches Bobbie and Marjorie sidestep her and go meanderin’ off down a path to the rocks.

A little while later I happens to stroll down to the summerhouse with the Sunday paper, and as I steps in one door Charlie and Helen slip out by the other. They’d seen me first.

“Well, well!” says I. “I never knew before how unentertainin’ I could be.”

And I was just wonderin’ how I could relieve my feelin’s without eatin’ a fuzzy worm, like the small boy that nobody loved, when I hears footsteps approachin’ through the shrubb’ry. I looks up, to find myself bein’ inspected by a weedy, long legged youth. He’s an odd lookin’ kid, with dull reddish hair, so many freckles that his face looks rusty, and a pair of big purple black eyes that gazes at me serious.

“Well, son,” says I, “where did you drop from?”

“My name is Harold Burbank Fitzmorris,” says he, “and I am visiting with my mother on the adjoining estate.”

“That sounds like a full description, Harold,” says I. “Did you stray off, or was you sent?”

“I trust you don’t mind,” says he; “but I am exploring.”

“Explore away then,” says I, “so long as you don’t tramp through the flowerbeds.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of injuring them,” says he. “I am passionately fond of flowers.”

“You don’t say!” says I.

“Yes,” says Harold, droppin’ down easy on the bench alongside of me. “I love Nature in all her moods. I am a poet, you know.”

“Eh!” says I. “Ain’t you beginning sort of young?”

“Nearly all the really great men of literature,” comes back Harold as prompt as if he was speakin’ a piece, “have begun their careers by writing verse. I presume mine might be considered somewhat immature; but I am impelled from within to do it. All that will pass, however, when I enter on my serious work.”

“Oh, then you’ve got a job on the hook, have you!” says I.

“I expect,” says Harold, smilin’ sort of indulgent and runnin’ his fingers careless through his thick coppery hair, “to produce my first novel when I am twenty. It will have a somber theme, something after the manner of Turgenieff. Do you not find Turgenieff very stimulating?”

“Harold,” says I, “all them Hungarian wines are more or less heady, and a kid like you shouldn’t monkey with any of ’em.”

He looks almost pained at that. “You’re chaffing me now, I suppose,” says he. “That sort of thing, though, I never indulge in. Humor, you know, is but froth on the deep seas of thought. It has never seemed to me quite worth one’s while. You will pardon my frankness, I know.”

“Harold,” says I, “you’re a wizard. So it’s nix on the josh, eh?”

“What singular metaphors you employ!” says he. “Do you know, I can hardly follow you. However, colloquial language does not offend my ear. It is only when I see it in print that I shudder.”

“Me too,” says I. “I’m just as sore on these foreign languages as anyone. So you’re visitin’ next door, eh? Enjoyin’ yourself?”

That was a plain cue for Harold Burbank to launch out on the story of his life; but, say, he didn’t need any such encouragement. He was a willin’ and ready converser, Harold was; and—my!—what a lot of classy words he did have on tap! First off I wondered how it was a youngster like him could dig up so many; but when I’d heard a little more about him I could account for it all.

He’d cut his teeth, as you might say, on the encyclopedia. Harold’s father had been a professor of dead languages, and I guess he must have died of it. Anyway, Mother was a widow, and from things Harold dropped I judged she was more or less frisky, spendin’ her time at bridge and chasin’ teas and dinner parties. It was clear she wa’n’t any highbrow, such as Father must have been. All of which was disappointin’ to Harold. He made no bones of sayin’ so.

“Why pretend to approve of one’s parent,” says he, “when approval is undeserved?”

There was a lot of other folks that Harold disapproved of too. In fact, he was a mighty critical youth, only bein’ able to entertain a good opinion of but one certain party. At any other time I expect he’d have given me an earache; but I’d been handed so much silence by our double Romeo-Juliet bunch that most any kind of conversation was welcome just then. So I lets him spiel away.

And, say, he acts like he was hungry for the chance. Why, he gives me his ideas on every subject you could think of, from the way Napoleon got himself started on the toboggan, to the folly of eatin’ fried ham for breakfast. He sure was a wonder, that kid! Two solid hours we chinned there in the summerhouse, and it was almost by main strength I broke away for a one o’clock dinner.

Then, just as I’d got settled comf’table on the veranda in the afternoon, he shows up and begins again. There was nothin’ diffident or backward about Harold. He didn’t have any doubts about whether he was welcome or not, and his confidence about bein’ able to entertain was amazin’.

It didn’t do any good to throw out hints that perhaps he was bein’ missed at home, or to yawn and pretend you was sleepy. He was as persistent as a mosquito singin’ its evenin’ song, and most as irritatin’. Twice I gets up and pikes off, tryin’ to shake him; but Harold trails right along too. Maybe I’d yearned for conversation. Well, I was gettin’ it.

At last I grows desp’rate, and in about two minutes more he would have been led home to Mother with the request that she tether him on her side of the fence, when I sees two of the lovers strollin’ off to find a nook that wa’n’t preempted by the other pair. And all of a sudden I has this rosy thought.

“Harold,” says I, “it’s most too bad, your wastin’ all this flossy talk on me, who can’t appreciate its fine points as I should, when there go some young people who might be tickled to death to have you join ’em. Suppose you try cheerin’ ’em up?”

“Why,” says Harold, “I had not observed them before. Thank you for the suggestion. I will join them at once.”

Does he? Say, for the next couple of hours I had the time of my life watchin’ the maneuvers. First off I expect they must have thought him kind of cute, same as I did; but it wa’n’t long before they begun tryin’ to lose him. If they shifted positions once, they did a dozen times, from the summerhouse to the rocks, then up to the veranda and back again, with Harold Burbank taggin’ right along and spoutin’ his best. He tackles first one pair, and then the other, until fin’lly they all retreats into the house. Harold hesitates a little about walkin’ through the door after ’em, until I waves my hand cordial.

“Make yourself right to home, Harold,” says I. “Keep ’em cheered up.”

Not until he drives the girls off to their rooms and has Bobbie and Charles glarin’ murderous at him, does he quit the sport and retire for supper.

“Come over again this evenin’,” says I. “You’re makin’ a hit.”

Harold thanks me some more and says he will. He’s a great one to keep his word too. Bobbie and Marjorie have hardly snuggled up in one end of a hammock to watch the moon do things to the wavelets before here is Harold, with a fresh line of talk that he’s bent on deliverin’ while the mood is on.

Gettin’ no answer from his audience didn’t bother him a bit; for passin’ out the monologue is his strong suit. Not to seem partial, he trails down Charlie and Helen and converses with them too. Course, all this occurrin’ outside, I couldn’t watch everything that took place; but I sits in the lib’ry with Sadie a lot more contented than I’d been before that week.

And when Marjorie drifts in alone, along about nine o’clock, and goes to drummin’ on the piano, I smiles. Ten minutes later Helen appears too; and it’s only when neither of the boys show up that I begins wonderin’. I asks no questions; but goes out on a scoutin’ trip. There’s nobody on the veranda at all. Down by the waterfront, though, I could hear voices, and I goes sleuthin’ in that direction.

“Yes,” I could hear Harold sayin’ as I got most to the boat landin’, “the phosphorescence that ignorant sailors attribute to electricity in the air is really a minute marine animal which——”

I expect I’ll never know the rest; for just then there’s a break in the lecture.

“One, two, three—now!” comes from Bobbie, and before Harold can let out a single squeal they’ve grabbed him firm and secure, one by the heels and the other by the collar, and they’ve begun sousin’ him up and down off the edge of the float. It was high tide too.

“Uggle-guggle! Wow!” remarks Harold between splashes.

“That’s right,” observes Charles through, his teeth. “Swallow a lot of it, you windbag! It’ll do you good.”

Course, these young gents was guests of mine, and I hadn’t interfered before with their partic’lar way of enjoyin’ themselves; so I couldn’t begin now. But after they was through, and a draggled, chokin’, splutterin’ youth had gone beatin’ it up the path and over towards the next place, I strolls down to meet ’em as they are comin’ up to the house.

“Hope you didn’t see what happened down there just now, Professor,” says Bobbie.

“Me?” says I. “Well, if I did I can forget it quick.”

“Thanks, old man!” says both of ’em, pattin’ me friendly on the shoulder.

“The little beast!” adds Charles. “He had the nerve to say you had put him up to it. That’s what finally earned him his ducking, you know.”

“Well, well!” says I. “Such a nice spoken youngster too!”

“Huh!” says Bobbie. “I suppose there’ll be no end of a row about this when he gets home with his tale; but we’ll stand for it. Meanwhile let’s go up and get the girls to give us some music.”

Say, I don’t believe Harold ever mentioned it to a soul. It’s a funny thing too, but he hasn’t been over here since. And someway, gettin’ better acquainted with the boys in that fashion, made it pleasanter all round.

But no more entertainin’ lovers for us! Harolds ain’t common enough.

CHAPTER VII

CORNELIA SHOWS SOME CLASS

“Oh, by the way, Shorty,” says Sadie to me the other mornin’, just as I’m makin’ an early get-away for town.

“Another postscript, eh?” says I. “Well, let it come over speedy.”

“It’s something for Mrs. Purdy-Pell,” says she. “I’d almost forgotten.”

“Is it orderin’ some fancy groceries, or sendin’ out a new laundry artist?” says I. “If it is, why I guess I can——”

“No, no,” says Sadie, givin’ my tie an extra pat and brushin’ some imaginary dust off my coat collar; “it’s about Cousin Cornelia. She’s in town, you know, and neither of the Purdy-Pells can get in to see her before next week on account of their garden party, and Cornelia is staying at a hotel alone, and they’re a little anxious about her. So look her up, won’t you? I told them you would. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Me?” says I. “Why, I’ve been waitin’ for this. Makin’ afternoon calls on weepy old maids is my specialty.”

“There, there!” says Sadie, followin’ me out on the veranda. “Don’t play the martyr! Perhaps Cornelia isn’t the most entertaining person in the world, for she certainly has had her share of trouble; but it isn’t going to hurt you merely to find out how she is situated and ask if you can be of any help to her. You know, if there was anything she could do for us, she would——”

“Oh, sure!” says I. “If I’m ever brought home on a shutter, I shall look for Cornelia to be waitin’ on the mat with a needle and thread, ready to sew mournin’ bands on the help.”

That seems to be Cousin Cornelia’s steady job in life, tendin’ out on the sick and being in at the obsequies. Anyway, she’s been at it ever since we knew her. She’s a cousin of Mr. Purdy-Pell’s, and his branch of the fam’ly, being composed mainly of antiques and chronic invalids, has been shufflin’ off in one way or another for the last three or four years at the rate of about one every six months.

Course, it was kind of sad to see a fam’ly peter out that way; but, as a matter of fact, most of ’em was better off. At first the Purdy-Pells started in to chop all their social dates for three months after each sorrowful event; but when they saw they was being let in for a continuous performance, they sort of detailed Cousin Cornelia to do their heavy mournin’ and had a black edge put on their stationery.

Maybe Cornelia didn’t exactly yearn for the portfolio; but she didn’t have much choice about taking it. She was kind of a hanger-on, Cornelia was, you see, and she was used to going where she was sent. So when word would come that Aunt Mehitabel’s rheumatism was worse and was threatenin’ her heart, that meant a hurry call for Cousin Cornelia. She’d pack a couple of suit cases full of black skirts and white shirtwaists, and off she’d go, not showin’ up again at the Purdy-Pells’ town house until Aunty had been safely planted and the headstone ordered.

You couldn’t say but what she did it thorough, too; for she’d come back wearin’ a long crape veil and lookin’ pasty faced and wore out. Don’t know as I ever saw her when she wa’n’t either just comin’ from where there’d been a funeral, or just startin’ for where there was likely to be one.

So she didn’t cut much of a figure in all the gay doin’s the Purdy-Pells was always mixed up in. And yet she wasn’t such a kiln dried prune as you might expect, after all. Rather a well built party, Cornelia was, with a face that would pass in a crowd, and a sort of longin’ twist to her mouth corners as if she wanted to crack a smile now and then, providin’ the chance would only come her way.

And it wa’n’t hardly a square deal to list her with the U.B.’s as soon as we did; for all this time she was doing the chief mourner act she was engaged to young Durgin. First off it was understood that she was waitin’ for him to settle on whether he was goin’ to be a minister or a doctor, him fiddlin’ round at college, now takin’ one course and then another; but at last he makes up his mind to chuck both propositions and take a hack at the law.

Durgin got there, too, which was more or less of a surprise to all hands, and actually broke in as partner in a good firm. Then it was a case of Durgin waitin’ for Cornelia; for about that time the relations got to droppin’ off in one-two-three order, and she seemed to think that so long as she’d started in on the job of ridin’ in the first carriage, she ought to see it through.

Whether it was foolish of her or not, ain’t worth while debatin’ now. Anyhow, she stuck to it until the last one had cashed in, puttin’ Durgin off from month to month and year to year. Then it turns out that the last of the bunch, Uncle Theodore, had left her a good-sized wad that Purdy-Pell had always supposed was comin’ to him, but which he didn’t grudge to Cornelia a bit.

So there she was, all the lingerin’ ones off her hands, and her sportin’ a bank account of her own. She’s some tired out, though; so, after sendin’ Durgin word that they might as well wait until fall now, she hikes off to some little place in New Hampshire and spends the summer restin’ up. Next she comes down unexpected and hits New York.

In the meantime, though, Durgin has suddenly decided to scratch his entry for that partic’lar Matrimonial Handicap. Not that he’s seriously int’rested in somebody else, but he’s kind of got weary hangin’ around, and he’s seen a few livelier ones than Cornelia, and he feels that somehow him and her have made a great mistake. You know how they’re apt to talk when they get chilly below the ankles? He don’t hand this straight out to Cornelia, mind you, but goes to Mrs. Purdy-Pell and Sadie with the tale, wantin’ to know what he’d better do.

Now I ain’t got any grouch against Durgin. He’s all right, I expect, in his way, more or less of a stiff necked, mealy mouthed chump, I always thought; but they say he’s nice to his old mother, and he’s makin’ good in the law business, and he ain’t bad to look at. The women folks takes his side right off. They say they don’t blame him a bit, and, without stoppin’ to think how Cousin Cornelia is going to feel left alone there on the siding, they get busy pickin’ out new candidates for Durgin to choose from.

Well, that’s the situation when I’m handed this assignment to go and inspect the head of the Purdy-Pells’ obituary department and see if she’s all comfy. Couldn’t have weighed very heavy on my mind; for I don’t think of it until late afternoon, just as I’m startin’ to pull out for home. Then I says to myself that maybe it’ll do just as well if I ring her up on the ’phone at her hotel. She’s in, all right, and I explains over the wire how anxious I am to know if she’s all right, and hopes nobody has tried to kidnap her yet, and asks if there’s anything I can do.

“Why, how kind of you, Mr. McCabe!” says Cornelia. “Yes, I am perfectly well and quite safe here.”

“Good!” says I. And then, seein’ how easy I was gettin’ out of it, I has to pile on the agony a little by addin’, “Ain’t there some way I can be useful, though? No errands you want done, or any place you’d like to be towed around to, eh?”

“Why—why——” says she, hesitatin’. “Oh, but I couldn’t think of troubling you, you know.”

“Why not?” says I, gettin’ reckless. “Just remember that I’d be tickled to death, any time you push the button.”

“We-e-ell,” says she, “we were just wishing, Miss Stover and I, that we did have some gentleman friend who would——”

“Count me in,” says I. “What’s the game? Trip to Woodlawn Cemetery some day, or do you want to be piloted up to Grant’s Tomb?”

No, it wa’n’t either of them festive splurges she had in mind. They wanted a dinner escort for that evenin’, she and Miss Stover. The other lady, she goes on to say, is a school teacher from up Boston way, that she’d made friends with durin’ the summer. Miss Stover was takin’ a year off, for the benefit of her nerves, and before she sailed on her Cook’s trip abroad she thought she’d like to see a little of New York. They’d been tryin’ to knock around some alone, and had got along all right daytimes, but hadn’t dared venture out much at night. So if I wanted to be real generous, and it wouldn’t be too much of a bore, they’d be very thankful if I would——

“In a minute,” says I and, seein’ I was up against it anyhow, I thought I might as well do it cheerful. “I’ll be up about six, eh?”

“Chee!” says Swifty Joe, who always has his ear stretched out on such occasions, “you make a noise like you was fixin’ up a date.”

“What good hearin’ you have, Swifty!” says I. “Some day, though, you’ll strain one of them side flaps of yours. Yes, this is a date, and it’s with two of the sportiest female parties that ever dodged an old ladies’ home.”

Excitin’ proposition, wa’n’t it? I spends the next half-hour battin’ my head to think of some first class food parlor where I could cart a couple like this Boston schoolma’am and Cousin Cornelia without shockin’ ’em. There was the Martha Washington; but I knew I’d be barred there. Also there was some quiet fam’ly hotels I’d heard of up town; but I couldn’t remember exactly what street any of ’em was on.

“Maybe Cornelia will have some plans of her own,” thinks I, as I gets into my silk faced dinner jacket and V-cut vest. “And I hope she ain’t wearin’ more’n two thicknesses of crape veil now.”

Well, soon after six I slides out, hops on one of these shed-as-you-enter surface cars, and rides up to the hotel. I’d been holdin’ down one of the velvet chairs in the ladies’ parlor for near half an hour, and was wonderin’ if Cornelia had run out of black headed pins, or what, when I pipes off a giddy specimen in wistaria costume that drifts in and begins squintin’ around like she was huntin’ for some one. Next thing I knew she’d spotted me and was sailin’ right over.

“Oh, there you are!” she gurgles, holdin’ out her hand.

“Excuse me, lady,” says I, sidesteppin’ behind the chair, “but ain’t you tryin’ to tag the wrong party?”

“Why,” says she, lettin’ out a chuckle, “don’t you know me, Mr. McCabe?”

“Not yet,” says I; “but it looks like I would if——Great snakes!”

And honest, you could hardly have covered my face cavity with a waffle iron when I drops to the fact that it’s Cousin Cornelia. In place of the dismal female I’d been expectin’, here’s a chirky party in vivid regalia that shows class in every line. Oh, it’s a happy days uniform, all right, from the wide brimmed gauze lid with the long heliotrope feather trailin’ over one side, to the lavender kid pumps.

“Gee!” I gasps. “The round is on me, Miss Cornelia. But I wa’n’t lookin’ for you in—in——”

“I know,” says she. “This is the first time I’ve worn colors for years, and I feel so odd. I hope I don’t look too——”

“You look all to the skookum,” says I.

It wa’n’t any jolly, either. There never was any real sharp angles to Cornelia, and now I come to reckon up I couldn’t place her as more’n twenty-six or twenty-seven at the outside. So why shouldn’t she show up fairly well in a Gibson model?

“It’s so good of you to come to our rescue,” says she. “Miss Stover will be down presently. Now, where shall we go to dinner?”

Well, I see in a minute I’ve got to revise my plans; so I begins namin’ over some of the swell grillrooms and cafes.

“Oh, we have been to most of those, all by ourselves,” says Cornelia. “What we would like to see to-night is some real—well, a place where we couldn’t go alone, out somewhere—an automobile resort, for instance.”

“Whe-e-ew!” says I through my front teeth. “Say, Miss Cornie, but you are gettin’ out of the bereft class for fair! I guess it’s comin’ to you, though. Now jest let me get an idea of how far you want to go.”

“Why,” says she, shruggin’ her shoulders,—“how is it you put such things?—the limit, I suppose?”

“Honest?” says I. “Then how about Clover Blossom Inn?”

Heard about that joint, haven’t you? Of course. There’s a lot of joy-ride tank stations strung along Jerome-ave. and the Yonkers road; but when it comes to a genuine tabasco flavored chorus girls’ rest, the Clover Blossom has most of the others lookin’ like playgrounds for little mothers. But Cornie don’t do any dodgin’.

“Fine!” says she. “I’ve read about that inn.” Then she hurries on to plan out the details. I must go over to Times Square and hire a nice looking touring car for the evening. And I mustn’t let Miss Stover know how much it costs; for Cornelia wants to do that part of it by her lonely.

“The dinner we are to go shares on,” says she.

“Couldn’t think of it,” says I. “Let that stand as my blow.”

“No, indeed,” says Cornelia. “We have the money all put aside, and I sha’n’t like it. Here it is, and I want you to be sure you spend the whole of it,” and with that she shoves over a couple of fives.

I couldn’t help grinnin’ as I takes it. Maybe you’ve settled a dinner bill for three and a feed for the shofer at the Clover Blossom; but not with a ten-spot, eh?

And while Cornelia is goin’ back in the elevator after the schoolma’am, I scoots over to get a machine. After convincin’ two or three of them leather capped pirates that I didn’t want to buy their blamed outfits, I fin’lly beats one down to twenty-five and goes back after the ladies.

“Cornelia whispered about the peroxide puffed girl”

Miss Stover don’t turn out to be any such star as Cornelia; but she don’t look so much like a suffragette as I expected. She’s plump, and middle aged, and plain dressed; but there’s more or less style to the way she carries herself. Also she has just a suspicion of eye twinkle behind the glasses, which suggests that perhaps some of this programme is due to her.

“All aboard for the Clover Blossom!” says I, handin’ ’em into the tonneau; “that is, as soon as I run in here to the telephone booth.”

It had come to me only at that minute what a shame it was this stunt of Cornelia’s was goin’ to be wasted on an audience that couldn’t appreciate the fine points, and I’d thought of a scheme that might supply the gap. So I calls up an old friend of mine and has a little confab.

By the time we’d crossed the Harlem and had got straightened out on the parkway with our gas lamps lighted, and the moon comin’ up over the trees, and hundreds of other cars whizzin’ along in both directions, Cornelia and her schoolma’am friend was chatterin’ away like a couple of boardin’ school girls. There’s no denyin’ that it does get into your blood, that sort of ridin’. Why, even I begun to feel some frisky!

And look at Cornelia! For years she’d been givin’ directions about where to put the floral wreaths, and listenin’ to wills being read, and all summer long she’d been buried in a little backwoods boardin’ house, where the most excitin’ event of the day was watchin’ the cows come home, or going down for the mail. Can you blame her for workin’ up a cheek flush and rattlin’ off nonsense?

Clover Blossom Inn does look fine and fancy at night, too, with all the colored lights strung around, and the verandas crowded with tables, and the Gypsy orchestra sawin’ away, and new parties landin’ from the limousines every few minutes. Course, I knew they’d run against perfect ladies hittin’ up cocktails and cigarettes in the cloak room, and hear more or less high spiced remarks; but this was what they’d picked out to view.

So I orders the brand of dinner the waiter hints I ought to have,—little necks, okra soup, broiled lobster, guinea hen, and so on, with a large bottle of fizz decoratin’ the silver tub on the side and some sporty lookin’ mineral for me. It don’t make any diff’rence whether you’ve got a wealthy water thirst or not, when you go to one of them tootsy palaces you might just as well name your vintage first as last; for any cheap skates of suds consumers is apt to find that the waiter’s made a mistake and their table has been reserved for someone else.

But if you don’t mind payin’ four prices, and can stand the comp’ny at the adjoinin’ tables, just being part of the picture and seeing it from the inside is almost worth the admission. If there’s any livelier purple spots on the map than these gasolene road houses from eight-thirty p. m. to two-thirty in the mornin’, I’ll let you name ’em.

Cornelia rather shies at the sight of the fat bottle peekin’ out of the cracked ice; but she gets over that feelin’ after Miss Stover has expressed her sentiments.

“Champagne!” says the schoolma’am. “Oh, how perfectly delightful! Do you know, I always have wanted to know how it tasted.”

Say, she knows all about it now. Not that she put away any more’n a lady should,—at the Clover Blossom,—but she had tackled a dry Martini first, and then she kept on tastin’ and tastin’ her glass of fizz, and the waiter keeps fillin’ it up, and that twinkle in her eye develops more and more, and her conversation gets livelier and livelier. So does Cornelia’s. They gets off some real bright things, too. You’d never guess there was so much fun in Cornie, or that she could look so much like a stunner.

She was just leanin’ over to whisper something to me about the peroxide puffed girl at the next table, and I was tryin’ to stand bein’ tickled in the neck by that long feather of hers while I listens, and Miss Stover was snuggled up real chummy on the other side, when I looks up the aisle and sees a little group watchin’ us with their mouths open and their eyebrows up.

Leadin’ the way is Pinckney. Oh, he’d done his part, all right, just as I’d told him over the wire; for right behind him is Durgin, starin’ at Cornelia until he was pop eyed.

But that wa’n’t all. Trust Pinckney to add something. Beyond Durgin is Mrs. Purdy-Pell—and Sadie. Now, I’ve seen Mrs. McCabe when she’s been some jarred; but I don’t know as I ever watched the effect of such a jolt as this. You see, Cornelia’s back was to her, and all Sadie can see is that wistaria lid with the feather danglin’ down my neck.

Sadie don’t indulge in any preliminaries. She marches right along, with her chin in the air, and glues them Irish blue eyes of hers on me in a way I can feel yet. “Well, I must say!” says she.

“Eh?” says I, tryin’ hard to put on a pleased grin. “So Pinckney brought you along too, did he? Lovely evenin’, ain’t it?”

“Why, Sadie?” says Cornelia, jumpin’ up and givin’ ’em a full face view. And you should have seen how that knocks the wind out of Sadie.

“Wha-a-at!” says she. “You?”

“Of course,” says Cornie. “And we’re just having the grandest lark, and——Oh! Why, Durgin! Where in the world did you come from? How jolly!”

“Ain’t it?” says I. “You see, Sadie, I’m carryin’ out instructions.”

Well, the minute she gets wise that it’s all a job that Pinckney and I have put up between us, and discovers that my giddy lookin’ friend is only Cousin Cornelia doin’ the butterfly act, the thunder storm is all over. The waiter shoves up another table, and they plants Durgin next to Cornie, and the festivities takes a new start.

Did Durgin boy forget all about them chilly feet of his? Why, you could almost see the frost startin’ out before he’d said a dozen words, and by the time he’d let the whole effect sink in, he was no nearer contractin’ chilblains than a Zulu with his heels in the campfire.

What pleases me most, though, was the scientific duck I made in the last round. We’d gone clear through the menu, and they was finishin’ up their cordials, when I spots the waiter comin’ with a slip of paper on his tray as long as a pianola roll.

“Hey, Pinckney,” says I, “see what’s comin’ now!”

And when Pinckney reached around and discovers what it is, he digs down for his roll like a true sport, never battin’ an eyelash.

“You would ring in the fam’ly on me, would you,” says I, “when I’m showin’ lady friends the sights?”

CHAPTER VIII

DOPING OUT AN ODD ONE

Say, notice any deep sea roll about my walk? No? Well, maybe you can get the tarry perfume as I pass by? Funny you don’t; for I’ve been a Vice Commodore for most three weeks now. Yes, that’s on the level—belay my spinnaker taffrail if it ain’t!

That’s what I get for bein’ one of the charter members of the Rockhurst Yacht Club. You didn’t, eh? Well, say, I’m one of the yachtiest yachters that ever jibbed a gangway. Not that I do any sailin’ exactly; but I guess Sadie and me each paid good money for our shares of club stock, and if that ain’t as foolish an act as you can find in the nautical calendar, then I’ll eat the binnacle boom.

Course, this Vice Commodore stunt was sort of sprung on me; for I’d been such an active member I didn’t even know the bloomin’ clubhouse was finished until here the other day I gets this bulletin from the annual meetin’, along with the programme for the openin’ exercises.

“Gee!” says I. “Vice Commodore! Say, there must be some mistake about this.”

“Not at all,” says Sadie.

“Sure there is,” says I. “Why, I hardly know one end of a boat from the other; and besides I ain’t got any clubby habits. They’ve been let in wrong, that’s all. I’ll resign.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort!” says Sadie. “When I took all that trouble to have you win over that ridiculous Bronson-Smith!”

“Eh?” says I. “Been playin’ the Mrs. Taft, have you? In that case, I expect I’ll have to stay with it. But, honest, you can look for a season of perfectly punk Vice Commodorin’.”

As it turns out, though, there ain’t one in ten members that knows much more about yachtin’ than I do. Navigatin’ porch rockers, orderin’ all hands up for fancy drinks, and conductin’ bridge whist regattas was their chief sea-goin’ accomplishments; and when it come to makin’ myself useful, who was it, I’d like to know, that chucked the boozy steward off the float when he had two of the house committee treed up the signal mast?

I suspect that’s how it is I’m played up so prominent for this house warmin’ episode. Anyway, when I arrives there on the great night—me all got up fancy in a double breasted serge coat, white flannel pants, and cork soled canvas shoes—I finds they’ve put me on the reception committee; and that, besides welcomin’ invited guests, I’m expected to keep one eye peeled for outsiders, to see that nobody starts nothin’.

So I’m on deck, as you might say, and more or less conspicuous, when this Larchmont delegation is landed and comes stringin’ up. It was “Ahoy there, Captain This!” and “How are you, Captain That?” from the rest of the committee, who was some acquainted; and me buttin’ around earnest tryin’ to find someone to shake hands with, when I runs across this thick set party in the open front Tuxedo regalia, with his opera hat down over one eye and a long cigar raked up coquettish from the sou’west corner of his face.

Know him? I guess! It’s Peter K. Tracey; yes, the one that has his name on so many four-sheet posters. Noticed how he always has ’em read, ain’t you? “Mr. Peter K. Tracey presents Booth Keene, the sterling young actor.” Never forgets that “Mr.”; but, say, I knew him when he signed it just “P. Tracey,” and chewed his tongue some at gettin’ that down.

Them was the days when he’d have jumped at the chance of managin’ my ring exhibits, and he was known in sportin’ circles as Chunk Tracey. I ain’t followed all his moves since then; but I know he got to handlin’ the big heavyweights on exhibition tours, broke into the theatrical game with an animal show that was a winner, and has stuck to the boxoffice end ever since.

Why shouldn’t he, with a half ownership in a mascot Rube drama that never has less than six road companies playin’ it, and at least one hit on Broadway every season? I admit I was some surprised, though, to hear of him buyin’ a house on Fifth-ave. and makin’ a stab at mixin’ in society. That last I could hardly believe; but here he was, and lookin’ as much jarred at findin’ me as I was to see him.

“Well, I’ll be hanged!” says I. “Chunk Tracey!”

“Why, hello, Shorty!” says he, and neither one of us remembers the “Charmed to see yuh, old chappy” lines we should have been shootin’ off. Seems he’d been towed along with a bunch of near-swells that didn’t dare treat him as if he really belonged, and he was almost frothin’ at the mouth.

“Talk about your society folks!” says he. “Why,—blankety blank ’em!—I can go down the Rialto any afternoon, pick up a dozen people at twenty-five a week, drill ’em four days, and give a better imitation than this crowd ever thought of putting up!”

“Yes; but look who you are, Chunk,” says I.

“I know,” says he.

And he meant it too. He always was about the cockiest little rooster in the business; but I’d rather expected eight or ten years of ups and downs in the theatrical game, bein’ thrown out of the trust and crawlin’ back on his knees would have tempered him down some.

You couldn’t notice it, though. In fact, this chesty, cocksure attitude seemed to have grown on him, and it was plain that most of his soreness just now come from findin’ himself in with a lot of folks that didn’t take any special pains to admit what a great man he was. So, as him and me was sort of left to flock by ourselves, I undertook the job of supplyin’ a few soothin’ remarks, just for old time’s sake. And that’s how it was he got rung in on this little mix-up with Cap’n Spiller.

You see, the way the committee had mapped it out, part of the doin’s was a grand illumination of the fleet. Anyway, they had all the craft they could muster anchored in a semicircle off the end of the float and trimmed up with Japanese lanterns. Well, just about time for lightin’ up, into the middle of the fleet comes driftin’ a punk lookin’ old sloop with dirty, patched sails, some shirts and things hangin’ from the riggin’, and a length of stovepipe stickin’ through the cabin roof. When the skipper has struck the exact center, he throws over his mud hook and lets his sail run.

Not bein’ posted on the details, I didn’t know but that was part of the show, until the chairman of my committee comes rushin’ up to me all excited, and points it out.

“Oh, I say, McCabe!” says he. “Do you see that?”

“If I didn’t,” says I, “I could almost smell it from here. Some new member, is it?”

“Member!” he gasps. “Why, it’s some dashed old fisherman! We—we cawn’t have him stay there, you know.”

“Well,” says I, “he seems to be gettin’ plenty of advice on that point.” And he was; for they was shoutin’ things at him through a dozen megaphones.

“But you know, McCabe,” goes on the chairman, “you ought to go out and send him away. That’s one of your duties.”

“Eh?” says I. “How long since I’ve been official marine bouncer for this organization? G’wan! Go tell him yourself!”

We had quite an argument over it too, with Peter K. chimin’ in on my side; but, while the chappy insists that it’s my job to fire the old hooker off the anchorage, I draws the line at interferin’ with anything beyond the shore. Course, it might spoil the effect; but the way it struck me was that we didn’t own any more of Long Island Sound than anyone else, and I says so flat.

That must have been how the boss of the old sloop felt about it too; for he don’t pay any attention to the howls or threats. He just makes things snug and then goes below and starts pokin’ about in his dinky little cabin. Judgin’ by the motions, he was gettin’ a late supper.

Anyway, they couldn’t budge him, even though half the club was stewin’ about it. And, someway, that seemed to tickle Chunk and me a lot. We watched him spread his grub out on the cabin table, roll up his sleeves, and square away like he had a good appetite, just as if he’d been all by himself, instead of right here in the midst of so many flossy yachtsmen.

He even had music to eat by; for part of the programme was the turnin’ loose of one of these high priced cabinet disk machines, that was on the Commodore’s big schooner, and feedin’ it with Caruso and Melba records. There was so much chatterin’ goin’ on around us on the verandas, and so many corks poppin’ and glasses clinkin’, that the skipper must have got more benefit from the concert than anyone else. At last he wipes his mouth on his sleeve careful, fills his pipe, and crawls out on deck to enjoy the view.

It was well worth lookin’ at too; for, although there was most too many clouds for the moon to do much execution, here was all the yachts lighted up, and the clubhouse blazin’ and gay, and the water lappin’ gentle in between. He gazes out at it placid for a minute or so, and then we see him dive down into the cabin. He comes back with something or other that we couldn’t make out, and the next thing I knows I finds myself keepin’ time with my foot to one of them lively, swingin’ old tunes which might have been “The Campbells Are Coming” or might not; but anyway it was enough to give you that tingly sensation in your toes. And it was proceedin’ from the after deck of that old hulk.

“Well, well!” says I. “Bagpipes!”

“Bagpipes be blowed!” says Chunk. “That’s an accordion he’s playing. Listen!”

Say, I was listenin’, and with both ears. Also other folks was beginnin’ to do the same. Inside of five minutes, too, all the chatter has died down, and as I glanced around at the tables I could see that whole crowd of fancy dressed folks noddin’ and beatin’ time with their fans and cigars and fizz glasses. Even the waiters was standin’ still, or tiptoin’ so’s to take it in.

Ever hear one of them out-of-date music bellows handled by a natural born artist? Say, I’ve always been partial to accordions myself, though I never had the courage to own up to it in public; but this was the first time I’d ever heard one pumped in that classy fashion.

Music! Why, as he switches off onto “The Old Folks at Home,” you’d thought there was a church organ and a full orchestra out there! Maybe comin’ across the water had something to do with it; but hanged if it wa’n’t great! And of all the fine old tunes he gave us—“Nellie Gray,” “Comin’ Through the Rye,” “Annie Laurie,” and half a dozen more.

“Chunk,” says I, as the concert ends and the folks begin to applaud, “there’s only one thing to be done in a case like this. Lemme take that lid of yours.”

“Certainly,” says he, and drops a fiver into it before he passes it over. That wa’n’t the only green money I collects, either, and by the time I’ve made the entire round I must have gathered up more’n a quart of spendin’ currency.

“Hold on there, Shorty,” says Chunk, as I starts out to deliver the collection. “I’d like to go with you.”

“Come along, then,” says I. “I guess some of these sailormen will row us out.”

What we had framed up was one of these husky, rugged, old hearts of oak, who would choke up some on receivin’ the tribute and give us his blessin’ in a sort of “Shore Acres” curtain speech. Part of that description he lives up to. He’s some old, all right; but he ain’t handsome or rugged. He’s a lean, dyspeptic lookin’ old party, with a wrinkled face colored up like a pair of yellow shoes at the end of a hard season. His hair is long and matted, and he ain’t overly clean in any detail. He don’t receive us real hearty, either.

“Hey, keep your hands off that rail!” he sings out, reachin’ for a boathook as we come alongside.

“It’s all right, Cap,” says I. “We’re friends.”

“Git out!” says he. “I ain’t got any friends.”

“Sure you have, old scout,” says I. “Anyway, there’s a lot of people ashore that was mighty pleased with the way you tickled that accordion. Here’s proof of it too,” and I holds up the hat.

“Huh!” says he, gettin’ his eye on the contents. “Come aboard, then. Here, I guess you can stow that stuff in there,” and blamed if he don’t shove out an empty lard pail for me to dump the money in. That’s as excited as he gets about it too.

Say, I’d have indulged in about two more minutes of dialogue with that ugly faced old pirate, and then I’d beat it for shore good and disgusted, if it hadn’t been for Chunk Tracey. But he jumps in, as enthusiastic as if he was interviewin’ some foreign Prince, presses a twenty-five-cent perfecto on the Cap’n, and begins pumpin’ out of him the story of his life.

And when Chunk really enthuses it’s got to be a mighty cold proposition that don’t thaw some. Ten to one, too, if this had been a nice, easy talkin’, gentle old party, willin’ to tell all he knew in the first five minutes, Chunk wouldn’t have bothered with him; but, because he don’t show any gratitude, mushy or otherwise, and acts like he had a permanent, ingrowin’ grouch, Chunk is right there with the persistence. He drags out of him that he’s Cap’n Todd Spiller, hailin’ originally from Castine, Maine, and that the name of his old tub is the Queen of the Seas. He says his chief business is clammin’; but he does a little fishin’ and freightin’ on the side. He don’t work much, though, because it don’t take a lot to keep him.

“But you have a wife somewhere ashore, I suppose,” suggests Chunk, “a dear old soul who waits anxiously for you to come back?”

“Bah!” grunts Cap’n Spiller, knockin’ the heel out of his corncob vicious. “I ain’t got any use for women.”

“I see,” says Chunk, gazin’ up sentimental at the moon. “A blighted romance of youth; some fair, fickle maid who fled with another and left you alone?”

“No such luck,” says Spiller. “My trouble was havin’ too many to once. Drat ’em!”

And you’d most thought Chunk would have let it go at that; but not him! He only tackles Spiller along another line. “What I want to know, Captain,” says he, “is where you learned to play the accordion so well.”

“Never learned ’tall,” growls Spiller. “Just picked it up from a Portugee that tried to knife me afterwards.”

“You don’t say!” says Chunk. “But there’s the musician’s soul in you. You love it, don’t you? You use it to express your deep, unsatisfied longings?”

“Guess so,” says the Captain. “I allus plays most when my dyspepshy is worst. It’s kind of a relief.”

“Um-m-m—ah!” says Chunk. “Many geniuses are that way. You must come into town, though, and let me take you to hear some real, bang up, classical music.”

“Not me!” grunts Spiller. “I can make all the music I want myself.”

“How about plays, then?” says Chunk. “Now, wouldn’t you like to see the best show on Broadway?”

“No, sir,” says he, prompt and vigorous. “I ain’t never seen any shows, and don’t want to seen one, either.”

And, say, along about that time, what with the stale cookin’ and bilge water scents that was comin’ from the stuffy cabin, and this charmin’ mood that old Spiller was in, I was gettin’ restless. “Say, Chunk,” I breaks in, “you may be enjoyin’ this, all right; but I’ve got enough. It’s me for shore! Goin’ along?”

“Not yet,” says he. “Have the boat come back for me in about an hour.”

It was nearer two, though, before he shows up again, and his face is fairly beamin’.

“Well,” says I, “did you adopt the old pirate, or did he adopt you?”

“Wait and see,” says he, noddin’ his head cocky. “Anyway, he’s promised to show up at my office to-morrow afternoon.”

“You must be stuck on entertaining a grouchy old lemon like that,” says I.

“But he’s a genius,” says Chunk. “Just what I’ve been looking for as a head liner in a new vaudeville house I’m opening next month.”

“What!” says I. “You ain’t thinkin’ of puttin’ that old sour face on the stage, are you? Say, you’re batty!”

“Batty, am I?” says Chunk, kind of swellin’ up. “All right, I’ll show you. I’ve made half a million, my boy, by just such batty moves as that. It’s because I know people, know ’em through and through, from what they’ll pay to hear, to the ones who can give ’em what they want. I’m a discoverer of talent, Shorty. Where do I get my stars from? Pick ’em up anywhere. I don’t go to London and Paris and pay fancy salaries. I find my attractions first hand, sign’ em up on long contracts, and take the velvet that comes in myself. That’s my way, and I guess I’ve made good.”

“Maybe you have,” says I; “but I’m guessin’ this is where you stub your toe. Hot line that’ll be for the head of a bill, won’t it—an accordion player? Think you can get that across?”

“Think!” says Chunk, gettin’ indignant as usual, because someone suggests he can fall down on anything. “Why, I’m going to put that over twice a day, to twelve hundred-dollar houses! No, I don’t think; I know!”

And just for that it wouldn’t have taken much urgin’ for me to have put up a few yellow ones that he was makin’ a wrong forecast.

But, say, you didn’t happen to be up to the openin’ of Peter K.’s new Alcazar the other night, did you? Well, Sadie and I was, on account of being included in one of Chunk’s complimentary box parties. And, honest, when they sprung that clouded moonlight water view, with the Long Island lights in the distance, and the Sound steamers passin’ back and forth at the back, and the rocks in front, hanged if I didn’t feel like I was on the veranda of our yacht club, watchin’ it all over again, the same as it was that night!

Then in from one side comes this boat; no ordinary property piece faked up from something in stock; but a life sized model that’s a dead ringer for the old Queen of the Seas, even to the stovepipe and the shirts hung from the forestay. It comes floatin’ in lazy and natural, and when Cap Spiller goes forward to heave over the anchor he drops it with a splash into real water. He’s wearin’ the same old costume,—shirt sleeves, cob pipe, and all,—and when he begins to putter around in the cabin, blamed if you couldn’t smell the onions fryin’ and the coffee boilin’. Yes, sir, Chunk had put it all on!

Did the act get ’em interested? Say, there was fifteen straight minutes of this scenic business, with not a word said; but the house was so still I could hear my watch tickin’. But when he drags out that old accordion, plants himself on the cabin roof with one leg swingin’ careless over the side, and opens up with them old tunes of his—well, he had ’em all with him, from the messenger boys in the twenty-five-cent gallery to the brokers in the fifteen-dollar boxes. He takes five curtain calls, and the orchestra circle was still demandin’ more when they rung down the front drop.

“Chunk,” says I, as he shows up at our box, “I take it back. You sure have picked another winner.”

“Looks like it, don’t it?” says he. “And whisper! A fifty-minute act for a hundred a week! That’s the best of it. Up at the Columbus their top liner is costing them a thousand a day.”

“It’s a cinch if you can hold onto him, eh?” says I.

“Oh, I can hold him all right,” says Chunk, waggin’ his head confident. “I know enough about human nature to be sure of that. Of course, he’s an odd freak; but this sort of thing will grow on him. The oftener he gets a hand like that, the more he’ll want it, and inside of a fortnight that’ll be what he lives for. Oh, I know people, from the ground up, inside and outside!”

Well, I was beginnin’ to think he did. And, havin’ been on the inside of his deal, I got to takin’ a sort of pride in this hit, almost as much as if I’d discovered the Captain myself. I used to go up about every afternoon to see old Spiller do his stunt and get ’em goin’. Gen’rally I’d lug along two or three friends, so I could tell ’em how it happened.

Last Friday I was a little late for the act, and was just rushin’ by the boxoffice, when I hears language floatin’ out that I recognizes as a brand that only Chunk Tracey could deliver when he was good and warm under the collar. Peekin’ in through the window, I sees him standin’ there, fairly tearin’ his hair.

“What’s up, Chunk?” says I. “You seem peeved.”

“Peeved!” he yells. “Why, blankety blank the scousy universe, I’m stark, raving mad! What do you think? Spiller has quit!”

“Somebody overbid that hundred a week?” says I.

“I wish they had; then I could get out an injunction and hold him on his contract,” says Peter K. “But he’s skipped, skipped for good. Read that.”

It’s only a scrawly note he’d left pinned up in his dressin’ room, and, while it ain’t much as a specimen of flowery writin’, it states his case more or less clear. Here’s what it said:

Mister P. K. Tracey;

Sir:—I’m through being a fool actor. The money’s all right if I needed it, which I doant, but I doant like makin’ a fool of myself twict a day to please a lot of citty foalks I doant give a dam about annie way, I doant like livin’ in a blamed hotel either, for there aint annie wheres to set and smoak and see the sun come up. I’d ruther be on my old bote, and that’s whare I’m goin’. You needn’t try to find me and git me to come back for I wont. You couldn’t git me to act on that staige agin, ever. It’s foolish.

Yours, Todd Spiller.

“Now what in the name of all that’s woolly,” says Chunk, “would you say to a thing like that?”

“Me?” says I. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d start in by admittin’ that to card index the minds of the whole human race was a good deal of a job for one party to tackle, even with a mighty intellect like yours. Also, if it was put up to me flat, I might agree with Spiller.”

CHAPTER IX

HANDING BOBBY A BLANK

Say, what do you make out of this plute huntin’ business, anyway? Has the big money bunch got us down on the mat with our wind shut off and our pockets inside out; or is it just campaign piffle? Are we ghost dancin’, or waltz dreamin’, or what? It sure has me twisted up for fair, and I don’t know whether I stand with the criminal rich or the predatory poor.

That’s all on account of a little mix-up I was rung into at the hotel Perzazzer the other day. No, we ain’t livin’ there reg’lar again. This was just a little fall vacation we was takin’ in town, so Sadie can catch up with her shoppin’, and of course the Perzazzer seems more or less like home to us.

But it ain’t often I’ve ever run against anything like this there. I’ve been thinkin’ it over since, and it’s left me with my feet in the air. No, you didn’t read anything about it in the papers. But say, there’s more goes on in one of them big joints every week than would fill a whole issue.

Look at the population the Perzazzer’s got,—over two thousand, countin’ the help! Why, drop us down somewhere out in Iowa, and spread us around in separate houses, and there’d be enough to call for a third-class postmaster, a police force, and a board of trade. Bunched the way we are, all up and down seventeen stories, with every cubic foot accounted for, we don’t cut much of a figure except on the checkbooks. You hear about the Perzazzer only when some swell gives a fancy blow-out, or a guest gets frisky in the public dining room.

And anything in the shape of noise soon has the muffler put on it. We’ve got a whole squad of husky, two-handed, soft spoken gents who don’t have anything else to do, and our champeen ruction extinguisher is Danny Reardon. To see him strollin’ through the café, you might think he was a corporation lawyer studyin’ how to spend his next fee; but let some ambitious wine opener put on the loud pedal, or have Danny get his eye on some Bridgeport dressmaker drawin’ designs of the latest Paris fashions in the tea room, and you’ll see him wake up. Nothing seems to get by him.

So I was some surprised to find him havin’ an argument with a couple of parties away up on our floor. Anyone could see with one eye that they was a pair of butt-ins. The tall, smooth faced gent in the black frock coat and the white tie had sky pilot wrote all over him; and the Perzazzer ain’t just the place an out of town minister would pick out to stop at, unless he wanted to blow a year’s salary into a week’s board.

Anyway, his runnin’ mate was a dead give away. He looked like he might have just left a bench in the Oriental lodgin’ house down at Chatham Square. He’s a thin, gawky, pale haired youth, with tired eyes and a limp lower jaw that leaves his mouth half open all the time; and his costume looks like it had been made up from back door contributions,—a faded coat three sizes too small, a forty fat vest, and a pair of shiny black whipcord pants that someone had been married in about twenty years back.

What gets me is why such a specimen should be trailin’ around with a clean, decent lookin’ chap like this minister. Maybe that’s why I come to take any notice of their little debate. There’s some men, though, that you always give a second look at, and this minister gent was one of that kind. It wa’n’t until I see how he tops Danny by a head that I notices how well built he is; and I figures that if he was only in condition, and knew how to handle himself, he could put up a good lively scrap. Something about his jaw hints that to me; but of course, him bein’ a Bible pounder, I don’t expect anything of the kind.

“Yes, I understand all that,” Danny was tellin’ him; “but you’d better come down to the office, just the same.”

“My dear man,” says the minister, “I have been to the office, as I told you before, and I could get no satisfaction there. The person I wish to see is on the ninth floor. They say he is out. I doubt it, and, as I have come six hundred miles just to have a word with him, I insist on a chance to——”

“Sure!” says Danny. “You’ll get your chance, only it’s against the rules to allow strangers above the ground floor. Now, you come along with me and you’ll be all right.” With that Danny gets a grip on the gent’s arm and starts to walk him to the elevator. But he don’t go far. The next thing Danny knows he’s been sent spinnin’ against the other wall. Course, he wa’n’t lookin’ for any such move; but it was done slick and prompt.

“Sorry,” says the minister, shovin’ his cuffs back in place; “but I must ask you to keep your hands off.”

I see what Danny was up to then. He looks as cool as a soda fountain; but he’s red behind his ears, and he’s fishin’ the chain nippers out of his side pocket. I knows that in about a minute the gent in the frock coat will have both hands out of business. Even at that, it looks like an even bet, with somebody gettin’ hurt more or less. And blamed if I didn’t hate to see that spunky minister get mussed up, just for objectin’ to takin’ the quiet run out. So I pushes to the front.

“Well, well!” says I, shovin’ out a hand to the parson, as though he was someone I’d been lookin’ for. “So you showed up, eh?”

“Why,” says he,—“why—er——”

“Yes, I know,” says I, headin’ him off. “You can tell me about that later. Bring your friend right in; this is my door. It’s all right, Danny; mistakes will happen.”

And before any of ’em knows what’s up, Danny is left outside with his mouth open, while I’ve towed the pair of strays into our sittin’ room, and shooed Sadie out of the way. The minister looks kind of dazed; but he keeps his head well.

“Really,” says he, gazin’ around, “I am sure there must be some misunderstanding.”

“You bet,” says I, “and it was gettin’ worse every minute. About two shakes more, and you’d been the center of a local disturbance that would have landed you before the police sergeant.”

“Do you mean,” says he, “that I cannot communicate with a guest in this hotel without being liable to arrest?”

“That’s the size of it,” says I. “Danny had the bracelets all out. The conundrum is, though, Why I should do the goat act, instead of lettin’ you two mix it up? But that’s what happened, and now I guess it’s up to you to give an account.”

“H’m!” says he. “It isn’t quite clear; but I infer that you have, in a way, made yourself responsible for me. May I ask whom I have to thank for——”

“I’m Shorty McCabe,” says I.

“Oh!” says he. “It seems to me I’ve heard——”

“Nothing like bein’ well advertised,” says I. “Now, how about you—and this?” With that I points to the specimen in the cast offs, that was givin’ an imitation of a flytrap. It was a little crisp, I admit; but I’m gettin’ anxious to know where I stand.

The minister lifts his eyebrows some, but proceeds to hand out the information. “My name is Hooker,” says he,—“Samuel Hooker.”

“Preacher?” says I.

“Ye-es, a poor one,” says he. “Where? Well, in the neighborhood of Mossy Dell, Pennsylvania.”

“Out in the celluloid collar belt, eh?” says I. “This ain’t a deacon, is it?” and I jerks my thumb at the fish eyed one.

“This unfortunate fellow,” says he, droppin’ a hand on the object’s shoulder, “is one of our industrial products. His name is Kronacher, commonly called Dummy.”

“I can guess why,” says I. “But now let’s get down to how you two happen to be loose on the seventh floor of the Perzazzer and so far from Mossy Dell.”

The Reverend Sam says there ain’t any great mystery about that. He come on here special to have a talk with a party by the name of Rankin, that he understood was stoppin’ here.

“You don’t mean Bobby Brut, do you?” says I.

“Robert K. Rankin is the young man’s name, I believe,” says he,—“son of the late Loring Rankin, president of the Consolidated——”

“That’s Bobby Brut,” says I. “Don’t catch onto the Brut, eh? You would if you read the champagne labels. Friend of yours, is he?”

But right there the Rev. Mr. Hooker turns balky. He hints that his business with Bobby is private and personal, and he ain’t anxious to lay it before a third party. He’d told ’em the same at the desk, when someone from Bobbie’s rooms had ’phoned for details about the card, and then he’d got the turn down. But he wa’n’t the kind that stayed down. He’s goin’ to see Mr. Rankin or bu’st. Not wantin’ to ask for the elevator, he blazes ahead up the stairs; and Danny, it seems, hadn’t got on his track until he was well started.

“All I ask,” says he, “is five minutes of Mr. Rankin’s time. That is not an unreasonable request, I hope?”

“Excuse me,” says I; “but you’re missin’ the point by a mile. It ain’t how long you want to stay, but what you’re here for. You got to remember that things is run different on Fifth-ave. from what they are on Penrose-st., Mossy Dell. You might be a book agent, or a bomb thrower, for all the folks at the desk know. So the only way to get next to anyone here is to show your hand and take the decision. Now if you want to try runnin’ the outside guard again, I’ll call Danny back. But you’ll make a mess of it.”

He thinks that over for a minute, lookin’ me square in the eye all the time, and all of a sudden he puts out his hand. “You’re right,” says he. “I was hot headed, and let my zeal get the better of my commonsense. Thank you, Mr. McCabe.”

“That’s all right,” says I. “You go down to the office and put your case to ’em straight.”

“No,” says he, shruggin’ his shoulders, “that wouldn’t do at all. I suppose I’ve come on a fool’s errand. Kronacher, we’ll go back.”

“That’s too bad,” says I, “if you had business with Bobby that was on the level.”

“Since you’ve been so kind,” says he, “perhaps you would give me your opinion—if I am not detaining you?”

“Spiel away!” says I. “I’ll own up you’ve got me some interested.”

Well, say, when he’d described his visit as a dippy excursion, he wa’n’t far off. Seems that this Rev. Sam Hooker ain’t a reg’lar preacher, with a stained glass window church, a steam heated parsonage, and a settled job. He’s sort of a Gospel promoter, that goes around plantin’ churches here and there,—home missionary, he calls it, though I always thought a home missionary was one that was home from China on a half-pay visit.

Mainly he says he drifts around through the coke oven and glass works district, where all the Polackers and other dagoes work. He don’t let it go with preachin’ to ’em, though. He pokes around among their shacks, seein’ how they live, sendin’ doctors for sick babies, givin’ the women folks hints on the use of fresh air and hard soap, an’ advisin’ ’em to keep their kids in school. He’s one of them strenuous chaps, too, that believes in stirrin’ up a fuss whenever he runs across anything he thinks is wrong. One of the fights he’s been making is something about the boys in the glass works.

“Perhaps you have heard of our efforts to have a child labor bill passed in our State?” says he.

“No,” says I; “but I’m against it. There’s enough kids has to answer the mill whistle, without passin’ laws to make ’em.”

Then he explains how the bill is to keep ’em from goin’ at it too young, or workin’ too many hours on a stretch. Course, I’m with him on that, and says so.

“Ah!” says he. “Then you may be interested to learn that young Mr. Rankin is the most extensive employer of child labor in our State. That is what I want to talk to him about.”

“Ever see Bobby?” says I.

He says he hasn’t.

“Know anything of his habits, and so on?” I asks.

“Not a thing,” says the Rev. Sam.

“Then you take it from me,” says I, “that you ain’t missed much.”

See? I couldn’t go all over that record of Bobby Brut’s, specially to a preacher. Not that Bobby was the worst that ever cruised around the Milky Way in a sea goin’ cab with his feet over the dasher; but he was something of a torrid proposition while he lasted. You remember some of his stunts, maybe? I hadn’t kept strict tabs on him; but I’d heard that after they chucked him out of the sanatorium his mother planted him here, with a man nurse and a private doctor, and slid off to Europe to stay with her son-in-law Count until folks forgot about Bobby.

And this was the youth the Rev. Mr. Hooker had come to have a heart to heart talk with!

“Ain’t you takin’ a lot of trouble, just for a few Polackers?” says I.

“They are my brothers,” says he, quiet like.

“What!” says I. “You don’t look it.”

His mouth corners flickers a little at that, and there comes a glimmer in them solemn gray eyes of his; but he goes on to say that it’s part of his belief that every man is his brother.

“Gee!” says I. “You’ve adopted a big fam’ly.”

But say, he’s so dead in earnest about it, and he talks so sensible about other things, besides appearin’ so white clear through, that I can’t help likin’ the cuss.

“Look here!” says I. “This is way out of my line, and it strikes me as a batty proposition anyway; but if you’re still anxious to have a chin with Bobby, maybe I can fix it.”

“Thank you, thank you!” says he, givin’ me the grateful grip.

It’s a good deal easier than I’d thought. All I does is get one of Bobby’s retinue on the house ’phone, tell who I am, and say I was thinkin’ of droppin’ up with a couple of friends for a short call, if Bobby’s agreeable. Seems he was, for inside of two minutes we’re on our way up in the elevator.

Got any idea of the simple way a half baked young plute can live in a place like the Perzazzer? He has one floor of a whole wing cut off for his special use,—about twenty rooms, I should judge,—and there was hired hands standin’ around in every corner. We’re piloted in over the Persian rugs, with the preacher blinkin’ his eyes to keep from seein’ some of the statuary and oil paintin’s.

At last we comes to a big room with an eastern exposure, furnished like a show window. Sittin’ at a big mahogany table in the middle is a narrow browed, pop eyed, bat eared young chap in a padded silk dressin’ gown, and I remembers him for the Bobby Brut I used to see floatin’ around with the Trixy-Madges at the lobster palaces. He has a couple of decks of cards laid out in front of him, and I guesses he’s havin’ a go at Canfield solitaire. Behind his chair stands a sour faced lackey who holds up his hand for us to wait.

Bobby don’t look up at all. He’s shiftin’ the cards around, tryin’ to make ’em come out right, doin’ it quick and nervous. All of a sudden the lackey claps his hand down on a pile and says, “Beg pardon, sir, but you can’t do that.”

“Blast you!” snarls Bobby. “And I was just getting it! Why didn’t you look the other way? Bah!” and he sends the whole lot flyin’ on the floor. Do you catch on? He has the lackey there to see that he don’t cheat himself.

But while the help was pickin’ up the cards Bobby gets a glimpse of our trio, ranged up against the door draperies.

“Hello, Shorty McCabe!” he sings out. “It’s bully of you to drop in. Nobody comes to see me any more—hardly a soul. Say, do you think there’s anything the matter with my head?”

“Can’t say your nut shows any cracks from here,” says I. “Who’s been tellin’ you it did?”

“Why, all those blasted doctors,” says he. “They won’t even let me go out alone. But say,” here he beckons me up and whispers mysterious, “I’ll fix ’em yet! You just wait till I get my animals trained. You wait!” Then he claps his hands and hollers, “Atkins! Set ’em going!”

Atkins, he stops scrabblin’ after the cards and starts around the room. And say, would you believe it, on all the tables and mantelpieces was a lot of those toy animals, such as they sell durin’ the holidays. There was lions and tigers and elephants, little and big, and every last one of ’em has its head balanced so it’ll move up and down when you touch it. Atkins’ job was to go from one to the other and set ’em bobbin’. Them on the mantels wa’n’t more’n a few inches long; but on the floor, hid behind chairs, was some that was life size. One was a tiger, made out of a real skin, and when his head goes his jaws open and shut, and his tail lashes from side to side, as natural as life. Say, it was weird to watch that collection, all noddin’ away together—almost gave you the willies!

“Are they all going?” says Bobby.

“Yes, sir,” says Atkins, standin’ attention.

“What do you think, eh?” says Bobbie, half shuttin’ his pop eyes and starin’ at me, real foxy.

“Great scheme!” says I. “Didn’t know you had a private zoo up here. But say, I brought along someone that wants to have a little chin with you.”

With that I hauls the Rev. Sam to the front and gives him the nudge to fire away. And say, he’s all primed! He begins by givin’ Bobbie a word picture of the Rankin glass works at night, when the helpers are carryin’ the trays from the hot room, where the blowers work three-hour shifts, with the mercury at one hundred and twenty, to the coolin’ room, where it’s like a cellar. He tells him how many helpers there are, how many hours they work a day, and what they get for it. It didn’t make me yearn for a job.

“And here,” says the Rev. Mr. Hooker, pullin’ the Dummy up by the sleeve, “is what happens. This boy went to work in your glass factory when he was thirteen. He was red cheeked, clear eyed, then, and he had a normal brain. He held his job six years. Then he was discharged. Why? Because he wasn’t of any more use. He was all in, the juice sapped out of him, as dry as a last year’s cornhusk. Look at him! Any doubt about his being used up? And what happened to him is happening to thousands of other boys. So I have come here to ask you, Mr. Rankin, if you are proud of turning out such products? Aren’t you ready to stop hiring thirteen-year-old boys for your works?”

Say, it was straight from the shoulder, that talk,—no flourishes, no fine words! And what do you guess Bobby Brut has to say? Not a blamed thing! I doubt if he heard more’n half of it, anyway; for he’s got his eyes set on that pasty face of Dummy Kronacher, and is followin’ his motions.

The Dummy ain’t payin’ any attention to the speech, either. He’s got sight of all them animals with their heads bobbin’, and a silly grin spreads over his face. First he sidles over to the mantel and touches up one that was about stopped. Then he sees another, and starts that off again, and by the time Hooker is through the Dummy is as busy and contented as you please, keepin’ them tigers and things movin’.

“Well?” says the Rev. Sam.

“Eh?” says Bobby, tearin’ his eyes off the Dummy. “Were you saying something about the glass works? Beastly bore! I never go near them. But say! I want that chap over there. I want to hire him. What’s his name?”

“Dummy Kronacher,” says the Rev. Sam, comin’ out strong on the first word.

“Good!” says Bobbie. “Hey, Dummy? What will you take to stay here with me and do that right along?”

Dummy has just discovered a stuffed alligator that can snap its jaws and wiggle its tail. He only looks up and grins.

“I’ll make it a hundred a month,” says Bobbie. “Well, that’s settled. Atkins, you’re fired! And say, McCabe, I must show this new man how I want this business done. You and your friend run in some other time, will you?”

“But,” says Hooker, “can’t you do something about those helpers? Won’t you promise to——”

“No!” snaps Bobby. “I’ve no time to bother with such things. Atkins, show ’em out!”

Well, we went. We goes so sudden the Rev. Sam forgets about leavin’ the Dummy until we’re outside, and then he’s for goin’ back after him.

“What for?” says I. “That pair’ll get along fine; they’re two of a kind.”

“I guess you’re right,” says he. “And it’s something to have brought those two together. Perhaps someone will see the significance of it, some day.”

Now what was he drivin’ at then? You can search me. All I’ve been able to make out of it is that what ails the poor is poverty, and the trouble with the plutes is that they’ve got too much. Eh? Barney Shaw said something like that too? Well, don’t let on I agree with him. He might get chesty.

CHAPTER X

MARMADUKE SLIPS ONE OVER

And you’d almost think I could accumulate enough freaks, all by myself, without havin’ my friends pass theirs along, wouldn’t you? Yet lemme tell you what Pinckney rung up on me.

He comes into the Studio one day towin’ a party who wears brown spats and a brown ribbon to his shell rimmed eyeglasses, and leaves him planted in a chair over by the window, where he goes to rubbin’ his chin with a silver-handled stick while we dive into the gym. for one of our little half-hour sessions. Leaves him there without sayin’ a word, mind you, like you’d stand an umbrella in the corner!

“Who’s the silent gazooks you run on the siding out front?” says I.

“Why,” says Pinckney, “that’s only Marmaduke.”

“Only!” says I. “I should say Marmaduke was quite some of a name. Anything behind it? He ain’t a blank, is he?”

“Who, Marmaduke?” says he. “Far from it! In fact, he has a most individual personality.”

“That sounds good,” says I; “but does it mean anything? Who is he, anyway?”

“Ask him, Shorty, ask him,” says Pinckney, and as he turns to put his coat on the hanger I gets a glimpse of that merry eye-twinkle of his.

“Go on—I’m easy,” says I. “I’d look nice, wouldn’t I, holdin’ a perfect stranger up for his pedigree?”

“But I assure you he’d be pleased to give it,” says Pinckney, “and, more than that, I want to be there to hear it myself.”

“Well, you’re apt to strain your ears some listenin’,” says I. “This ain’t my day for askin’ fool questions.”

You never can tell, though. We hadn’t much more’n got through our mitt exercise, and Pinckney was only half into his afternoon tea uniform, when there’s a ’phone call for him. And the next thing I know he’s hustled into his frock coat and rushed out.

Must have been five minutes later when I fin’lly strolls into the front office, to find that mysterious Marmaduke is still holdin’ down the chair and gazin’ placid out onto 42d-st. It looks like he’d been forgotten and hadn’t noticed the fact.

One of these long, loose jointed, languid actin’ gents, Marmaduke is; the kind that can drape themselves careless and comf’table over almost any kind of furniture. He’s a little pop eyed, his hair is sort of a faded tan color, and he’s whopper jawed on the left side; but beyond that he didn’t have any striking points of facial beauty. It’s what you might call an interestin’ mug, though, and it’s so full of repose that it seems almost a shame to disturb him.

Someone had to notify him, though, that he’d overslept. I tried clearin’ my throat and shufflin’ my feet to bring him to; but that gets no action at all. So there was nothing for it but to go over and tap him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” says I, “but your friend has gone.”

“Ah, quite so,” says he, still starin’ out of the window and rubbin’ his chin. “’Tis a way friends have. They come, and they go. Quite so.”

“Nobody’s debatin’ that point,” says I; “but just now I wa’n’t speakin’ of friends in gen’ral. I was referrin’ to Pinckney. He didn’t leave any word; but I suspicion he was called up by——”

“Thanks,” breaks in Marmaduke. “I know. Mrs. Purdy-Pell consults him about dinner favors—tremendous trifles, to be coped with only by a trained intelligence. We meet at the club later.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” says I. “In that case, make yourself to home. Have an evening paper?”

“Please take it away,” says he. “I might be tempted to read about the beastly stock market.”

“Been taking a little flyer, eh?” says I.

“What, I?” says he. “Why, I haven’t enough cash to buy a decent dinner. But everybody you meet follows the market, you know. It’s a contagious disease.”

“So?” says I. “Now I’ve been exposed a lot and haven’t caught it very hard.”

“Gifted of the gods!” says he.

“Eh?” says I.

“I’m Marmaduke, you know,” says he.

“I’ve heard that much,” says I.

“To him that hath ears—mufflers,” says he.

“Mufflers?” says I. “I guess I must be missin’ some of my cues, Mister.”

“Never care,” says he. “Why cry over spilt milk when one can keep a cat?”

“Look here!” says I. “Are you stringin’ me, or am I stringin’ you?”

“Of what use to fret the oracle?” says he. “They say silence is golden—well, I’ve spent mine.”

And, say, he had me doin’ the spiral dip at that. I don’t mind indulgin’ in a little foolish conversation now and then; but I hate to have it so one sided. And, honest, so far as I figured, he might have been readin’ the label off a tea chest. So with that I counters with one of my rough and ready comebacks.

“Marmaduke—did you say it was?” says I. “If you did, where’s the can?”

“By Jove! That’s rather good, though!” says he, rappin’ the floor with his stick. “A little crude; but the element is there. Brava! Bravissimo!”

“Stirred up the pigeons, anyway,” says I.

“Pigeons?” says he, lookin’ puzzled.

“Well, well!” says I. “And he wants a diagram for that mossy one! Loft, you know,” and I taps my forehead.

“Almost worthy of my steel!” says he, jumpin’ up and shovin’ out his hand. “Well met, Brother!”

“I don’t know which of us has a call to get chesty over it; but here’s how,” says I, takin’ the friendly palm he holds out. “Seein’ it’s gone this far, though, maybe you’ll tell me who in blazes you are!”

And there I’d gone and done just what Pinckney had egged me to do. Course, the minute I asked the question I knew I’d given him a chance to slip one over on me; but I wa’n’t lookin’ for quite such a double jointed jolt.

“Who am I?” says he. “Does it matter? Well, if it does, I am easily accounted for. Behold an anachronism!”

“A which?” says I.

“An anachronism,” says he once more.

“I pass,” says I. “Is it part of Austria, or just a nickname for some alfalfa district out West?”

“Brave ventures,” says he; “but vain. One’s place of birth doesn’t count if one’s twentieth century mind has a sixteenth century attitude. That’s my trouble; or else I’m plain lazy, which I don’t in the least admit. Do you follow me?”

“I’m dizzy from it,” says I.

“The confession is aptly put,” he goes on, “and the frankness of it does you credit. But I perceive. You would class me by peg and hole. Well, I’m no peg for any hole. I don’t fit. On the floor of life’s great workshop I just kick around. There you have me—ah—what?”

“Maybe,” says I; “but take my advice and don’t ever spring that description on any desk Sergeant. It may be good; but it sounds like loose bearin’s.”

“Ah!” says he. “The metaphor of to-morrow! Speak on, Sir Galahad!”

“All right,” says I. “I know it’s runnin’ a risk; but I’ll chance one more: What part of the map do you hail from, Marmaduke?”

“My proper home,” says he, “is the Forest of Arden; but where that is I know not.”

“Why,” says I, “then you belong in the new Harriman State Park. Anyway, there’s a station by that name out on the Erie road.”

“Rails never ran to Arden Wood,” says he, “nor ever will. Selah!”

“Sounds like an old song,” says I. “Are you taken this way often?”

“I’m Marmaduke, you know,” says he.

“Sure, that’s where we begun,” says I; “but it’s as far as we got. Is bein’ Marmaduke your steady job?”

“Some would call it so,” says he. “I try to make of it an art.”

“You win,” says I. “What can I set up?”

“Thanks,” says he. “Pinckney has thoughtlessly taken his cigarette case with him.”

So I sends Swifty out for a box of the most expensive dope sticks he can find. Maybe it wouldn’t strike everybody that way; but to me it seemed like bein’ entertained at cut rates. Next to havin’ a happy dream about nothing I could remember afterwards, I guess this repartee bout with Marmaduke gets the ribbon. It was like blowin’ soap bubbles to music,—sort of soothin’ and cheerin’ and no wear and tear on the brain. He stayed until closin’ up time, and I was almost sorry to have him go.

“Come around again,” says I, “when the fog is thinner.”

“I’m certain to,” says he. “I’m Marmaduke, you know.”

And the curious thing about that remark was that after you’d heard it four or five times it filled the bill. I didn’t want to know any more, and it was only because Pinckney insisted on givin’ me the details that the mystery was partly cleared up.

“Well,” says he, “what did you think of Marmaduke?”

“Neither of us did any thinkin’,” says I. “I just watched the butterflies.”

“You what?” says Pinckney.

“Oh, call ’em bats, then!” says I. “He’s got a dome full.”

“You mean you thought Marmaduke a bit off?” says he. “Nothing of the kind, Shorty. Why, he’s a brilliant chap,—Oxford, Heidelberg, and all that sort of thing. He’s written plays that no one will put on, books that no one will publish, and composed music that few can understand.”

“I can believe it,” says I. “Also he can use language that he invents as he goes along. Entertainin’ cuss, though.”

“A philosopher soufflé,” says Pinckney.

“Does it pay him well?” says I.