Short Fiction

By Ring Lardner.

Imprint

This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.

This particular ebook is based on transcriptions from various sources and on digital scans from various sources.

The source text and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. They may still be copyrighted in other countries, so users located outside of the United States must check their local laws before using this ebook. The creators of, and contributors to, this ebook dedicate their contributions to the worldwide public domain via the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.

My Roomy

I

No⁠—I ain’t signed for next year; but there won’t be no trouble about that. The dough part of it is all fixed up. John and me talked it over and I’ll sign as soon as they send me a contract. All I told him was that he’d have to let me pick my own roommate after this and not sic no wild man on to me.

You know I didn’t hit much the last two months o’ the season. Some o’ the boys, I notice, wrote some stuff about me gettin’ old and losin’ my battin’ eye. That’s all bunk! The reason I didn’t hit was because I wasn’t gettin’ enough sleep. And the reason for that was Mr. Elliott.

He wasn’t with us after the last part o’ May, but I roomed with him long enough to get the insomny. I was the only guy in the club game enough to stand for him; but I was sorry afterward that I done it, because it sure did put a crimp in my little old average.

And do you know where he is now? I got a letter today and I’ll read it to you. No⁠—I guess I better tell you somethin’ about him first. You fellers never got acquainted with him and you ought to hear the dope to understand the letter. I’ll make it as short as I can.

He didn’t play in no league last year. He was with some semipros over in Michigan and somebody writes John about him. So John sends Needham over to look at him. Tom stayed there Saturday and Sunday, and seen him work twice. He was playin’ the outfield, but as luck would have it they wasn’t a fly ball hit in his direction in both games. A base hit was made out his way and he booted it, and that’s the only report Tom could get on his fieldin’. But he wallops two over the wall in one day and they catch two line drives off him. The next day he gets four blows and two o’ them is triples.

So Tom comes back and tells John the guy is a whale of a hitter and fast as Cobb, but he don’t know nothin’ about his fieldin’. Then John signs him to a contract⁠—twelve hundred or somethin’ like that. We’d been in Tampa a week before he showed up. Then he comes to the hotel and just sits round all day, without tellin’ nobody who he was. Finally the bellhops was going to chase him out and he says he’s one o’ the ballplayers. Then the clerk gets John to go over and talk to him. He tells John his name and says he hasn’t had nothin’ to eat for three days, because he was broke. John told me afterward that he’d drew about three hundred in advance⁠—last winter sometime. Well, they took him in the dinin’ room and they tell me he inhaled about four meals at once. That night they roomed him with Heine.

Next mornin’ Heine and me walks out to the grounds together and Heine tells me about him. He says:

“Don’t never call me a bug again. They got me roomin’ with the champion o’ the world.”

“Who is he?” I says.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” says Heine; “but if they stick him in there with me again I’ll jump to the Federals. To start with, he ain’t got no baggage. I ast him where his trunk was and he says he didn’t have none. Then I ast him if he didn’t have no suitcase, and he says: ‘No. What do you care?’ I was goin’ to lend him some pajamas, but he put on the shirt o’ the uniform John give him last night and slept in that. He was asleep when I got up this mornin’. I seen his collar layin’ on the dresser and it looked like he had wore it in Pittsburgh every day for a year. So I throwed it out the window and he comes down to breakfast with no collar. I ast him what size collar he wore and he says he didn’t want none, because he wasn’t goin’ out nowheres. After breakfast he beat it up to the room again and put on his uniform. When I got up there he was lookin’ in the glass at himself, and he done it all the time I was dressin’.”

When we got out to the park I got my first look at him. Pretty good-lookin’ guy, too, in his unie⁠—big shoulders and well put together; built somethin’ like Heine himself. He was talkin’ to John when I come up.

“What position do you play?” John was askin’ him.

“I play anywheres,” says Elliott.

“You’re the kind I’m lookin’ for,” says John. Then he says: “You was an outfielder up there in Michigan, wasn’t you?”

“I don’t care where I play,” says Elliott.

John sends him to the outfield and forgets all about him for a while. Pretty soon Miller comes in and says:

“I ain’t goin’ to shag for no bush outfielder!”

John ast him what was the matter, and Miller tells him that Elliott ain’t doin’ nothin’ but just standin’ out there; that he ain’t makin’ no attemp’ to catch the fungoes, and that he won’t even chase ’em. Then John starts watchin’ him, and it was just like Miller said. Larry hit one pretty near in his lap and he stepped out o’ the way. John calls him in and ast him:

“Why don’t you go after them fly balls?”

“Because I don’t want ’em,” says Elliott.

John gets sarcastic and says:

“What do you want? Of course we’ll see that you get anythin’ you want!”

“Give me a ticket back home,” says Elliott.

“Don’t you want to stick with the club?” says John, and the busher tells him, no, he certainly did not. Then John tells him he’ll have to pay his own fare home and Elliott don’t get sore at all. He just says:

“Well, I’ll have to stick, then⁠—because I’m broke.”

We was havin’ battin’ practice and John tells him to go up and hit a few. And you ought to of seen him bust ’em!

Lavender was in there workin’ and he’d been pitchin’ a little all winter, so he was in pretty good shape. He lobbed one up to Elliott, and he hit it way up in some trees outside the fence⁠—about a mile, I guess. Then John tells Jimmy to put somethin’ on the ball. Jim comes through with one of his fast ones and the kid slams it agin the right-field wall on a line.

“Give him your spitter!” yells John, and Jim handed him one. He pulled it over first base so fast that Bert, who was standin’ down there, couldn’t hardly duck in time. If it’d hit him it’d killed him.

Well, he kep’ on hittin’ everythin’ Jim give him⁠—and Jim had somethin’ too. Finally John gets Pierce warmed up and sends him out to pitch, tellin’ him to hand Elliott a flock o’ curve balls. He wanted to see if left-handers was goin’ to bother him. But he slammed ’em right along, and I don’t b’lieve he hit more’n two the whole mornin’ that wouldn’t of been base hits in a game.

They sent him out to the outfield again in the afternoon, and after a lot o’ coaxin’ Leach got him to go after fly balls; but that’s all he did do⁠—just go after ’em. One hit him on the bean and another on the shoulder. He run back after the short ones and way in after the ones that went over his head. He catched just one⁠—a line drive that he couldn’t get out o’ the way of; and then he acted like it hurt his hands.

I come back to the hotel with John. He ast me what I thought of Elliott.

“Well,” I says, “he’d be the greatest ballplayer in the world if he could just play ball. He sure can bust ’em.”

John says he was afraid he couldn’t never make an outfielder out o’ him. He says:

“I’ll try him on the infield tomorrow. They must be some place he can play. I never seen a left-hand hitter that looked so good agin left-hand pitchin’⁠—and he’s got a great arm; but he acts like he’d never saw a fly ball.”

Well, he was just as bad on the infield. They put him at short and he was like a sieve. You could of drove a hearse between him and second base without him gettin’ near it. He’d stoop over for a ground ball about the time it was bouncin’ up agin the fence; and when he’d try to cover the bag on a peg he’d trip over it.

They tried him at first base and sometimes he’d run way over in the coachers’ box and sometimes out in right field lookin’ for the bag. Once Heine shot one acrost at him on a line and he never touched it with his hands. It went bam! right in the pit of his stomach⁠—and the lunch he’d ate didn’t do him no good.

Finally John just give up and says he’d have to keep him on the bench and let him earn his pay by bustin’ ’em a couple o’ times a week or so. We all agreed with John that this bird would be a whale of a pinch hitter⁠—and we was right too. He was hittin’ way over five hundred when the blow-off come, along about the last o’ May.

II

Before the trainin’ trip was over, Elliott had roomed with pretty near everybody in the club. Heine raised an awful holler after the second night down there and John put the bug in with Needham. Tom stood him for three nights. Then he doubled up with Archer, and Schulte, and Miller, and Leach, and Saier⁠—and the whole bunch in turn, averagin’ about two nights with each one before they put up a kick. Then John tried him with some o’ the youngsters, but they wouldn’t stand for him no more’n the others. They all said he was crazy and they was afraid he’d get violent some night and stick a knife in ’em.

He always insisted on havin’ the water run in the bathtub all night, because he said it reminded him of the sound of the dam near his home. The fellers might get up four or five times a night and shut off the faucet, but he’d get right up after ’em and turn it on again. Carter, a big bush pitcher from Georgia, started a fight with him about it one night, and Elliott pretty near killed him. So the rest o’ the bunch, when they’d saw Carter’s map next mornin’, didn’t have the nerve to do nothin’ when it come their turn.

Another o’ his habits was the thing that scared ’em, though. He’d brought a razor with him⁠—in his pocket, I guess⁠—and he used to do his shavin’ in the middle o’ the night. Instead o’ doin’ it in the bathroom he’d lather his face and then come out and stand in front o’ the lookin’-glass on the dresser. Of course he’d have all the lights turned on, and that was bad enough when a feller wanted to sleep; but the worst of it was that he’d stop shavin’ every little while and turn round and stare at the guy who was makin’ a failure o’ tryin’ to sleep. Then he’d wave his razor round in the air and laugh, and begin shavin’ agin. You can imagine how comf’table his roomies felt!

John had bought him a suitcase and some clothes and things, and charged ’em up to him. He’d drew so much dough in advance that he didn’t have nothin’ comin’ till about June. He never thanked John and he’d wear one shirt and one collar till someone throwed ’em away.

Well, we finally gets to Indianapolis, and we was goin’ from there to Cincy to open. The last day in Indianapolis John come and ast me how I’d like to change roomies. I says I was perfectly satisfied with Larry. Then John says:

“I wisht you’d try Elliott. The other boys all kicks on him, but he seems to hang round you a lot and I b’lieve you could get along all right.”

“Why don’t you room him alone?” I ast.

“The boss or the hotels won’t stand for us roomin’ alone,” says John. “You go ahead and try it, and see how you make out. If he’s too much for you let me know; but he likes you and I think he’ll be diff’rent with a guy who can talk to him like you can.”

So I says I’d tackle it, because I didn’t want to throw John down. When we got to Cincy they stuck Elliott and me in one room, and we was together till he quit us.

III

I went to the room early that night, because we was goin’ to open next day and I wanted to feel like somethin’. First thing I done when I got undressed was turn on both faucets in the bathtub. They was makin’ an awful racket when Elliott finally come in about midnight. I was layin’ awake and I opened right up on him. I says:

“Don’t shut off that water, because I like to hear it run.”

Then I turned over and pretended to be asleep. The bug got his clothes off, and then what did he do but go in the bathroom and shut off the water! Then he come back in the room and says:

“I guess no one’s goin’ to tell me what to do in here.”

But I kep’ right on pretendin’ to sleep and didn’t pay no attention. When he’d got into his bed I jumped out o’ mine and turned on all the lights and begun stroppin’ my razor. He says:

“What’s comin’ off?”

“Some o’ my whiskers,” I says. “I always shave along about this time.”

“No, you don’t!” he says. “I was in your room one mornin’ down in Louisville and I seen you shavin’ then.”

“Well,” I says, “the boys tell me you shave in the middle o’ the night; and I thought if I done all the things you do mebbe I’d get so’s I could hit like you.”

“You must be superstitious!” he says. And I told him I was. “I’m a good hitter,” he says, “and I’d be a good hitter if I never shaved at all. That don’t make no diff’rence.”

“Yes, it does,” I says. “You prob’ly hit good because you shave at night; but you’d be a better fielder if you shaved in the mornin’.”

You see, I was tryin’ to be just as crazy as him⁠—though that wasn’t hardly possible.

“If that’s right,” says he, “I’ll do my shavin’ in the mornin’⁠—because I seen in the papers where the boys says that if I could play the outfield like I can hit I’d be as good as Cobb. They tell me Cobb gets twenty thousand a year.”

“No,” I says; “he don’t get that much⁠—but he gets about ten times as much as you do.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m goin’ to be as good as him, because I need the money.”

“What do you want with money?” I says.

He just laughed and didn’t say nothin’; but from that time on the water didn’t run in the bathtub nights and he done his shavin’ after breakfast. I didn’t notice, though, that he looked any better in fieldin’ practice.

IV

It rained one day in Cincy and they trimmed us two out o’ the other three; but it wasn’t Elliott’s fault.

They had Larry beat four to one in the ninth innin’ o’ the first game. Archer gets on with two out, and John sends my roomy up to hit⁠—though Benton, a left-hander, is workin’ for them. The first thing Benton serves up there Elliott cracks it a mile over Hobby’s head. It would of been good for three easy⁠—only Archer⁠—playin’ safe, o’ course⁠—pulls up at third base. Tommy couldn’t do nothin’ and we was licked.

The next day he hits one out o’ the park off the Indian; but we was way behind and they was nobody on at the time. We copped the last one without usin’ no pinch hitters.

I didn’t have no trouble with him nights durin’ the whole series. He come to bed pretty late while we was there and I told him he’d better not let John catch him at it.

“What would he do?” he says.

“Fine you fifty,” I says.

“He can’t fine me a dime,” he says, “because I ain’t got it.”

Then I told him he’d be fined all he had comin’ if he didn’t get in the hotel before midnight; but he just laughed and says he didn’t think John had a kick comin’ so long as he kep’ bustin’ the ball.

“Some day you’ll go up there and you won’t bust it,” I says.

“That’ll be an accident,” he says.

That stopped me and I didn’t say nothin’. What could you say to a guy who hated himself like that?

The “accident” happened in St. Louis the first day. We needed two runs in the eighth and Saier and Brid was on, with two out. John tells Elliott to go up in Pierce’s place. The bug goes up and Griner gives him two bad balls⁠—way outside. I thought they was goin’ to walk him⁠—and it looked like good judgment, because they’d heard what he done in Cincy. But no! Griner comes back with a fast one right over and Elliott pulls it down the right foul line, about two foot foul. He hit it so hard you’d of thought they’d sure walk him then; but Griner gives him another fast one. He slammed it again just as hard, but foul. Then Griner gives him one way outside and it’s two and three. John says, on the bench:

“If they don’t walk him now he’ll bust that fence down.”

I thought the same and I was sure Griner wouldn’t give him nothin’ to hit; but he come with a curve and Rigler calls Elliott out. From where we sat the last one looked low, and I thought Elliott’d make a kick. He come back to the bench smilin’.

John starts for his position, but stopped and ast the bug what was the matter with that one. Any busher I ever knowed would of said, “It was too low,” or “It was outside,” or “It was inside.” Elliott says:

“Nothin’ at all. It was right over the middle.”

“Why didn’t you bust it, then?” says John.

“I was afraid I’d kill somebody,” says Elliott, and laughed like a big boob.

John was pretty near chokin’.

“What are you laughin’ at?” he says.

“I was thinkin’ of a nickel show I seen in Cincinnati,” says the bug.

“Well,” says John, so mad he couldn’t hardly see, “that show and that laugh’ll cost you fifty.”

We got beat, and I wouldn’t of blamed John if he’d fined him his whole season’s pay.

Up ’n the room that night I told him he’d better cut out that laughin’ stuff when we was gettin’ trimmed or he never would have no pay day. Then he got confidential.

“Pay day wouldn’t do me no good,” he says. “When I’m all squared up with the club and begin to have a pay day I’ll only get a hundred bucks at a time, and I’ll owe that to some o’ you fellers. I wisht we could win the pennant and get in on that World’s Series dough. Then I’d get a bunch at once.”

“What would you do with a bunch o’ dough?” I ast him.

“Don’t tell nobody, sport,” he says; “but if I ever get five hundred at once I’m goin’ to get married.”

“Oh!” I says. “And who’s the lucky girl?”

“She’s a girl up in Muskegon,” says Elliott; “and you’re right when you call her lucky.”

“You don’t like yourself much, do you?” I says.

“I got reason to like myself,” says he. “You’d like yourself, too, if you could hit ’em like me.”

“Well,” I says, “you didn’t show me no hittin’ today.”

“I couldn’t hit because I was laughin’ too hard,” says Elliott.

“What was it you was laughin’ at?” I says.

“I was laughin’ at that pitcher,” he says. “He thought he had somethin’ and he didn’t have nothin’.”

“He had enough to whiff you with,” I says.

“He didn’t have nothin’!” says he again. “I was afraid if I busted one off him they’d can him, and then I couldn’t never hit agin him no more.”

Naturally I didn’t have no comeback to that. I just sort o’ gasped and got ready to go to sleep; but he wasn’t through.

“I wisht you could see this bird!” he says.

“What bird?” I says.

“This dame that’s nuts about me,” he says.

“Good-looker?” I ast.

“No,” he says; “she ain’t no bear for looks. They ain’t nothin’ about her for a guy to rave over till you hear her sing. She sure can holler some.”

“What kind o’ voice has she got?” I ast.

“A bear,” says he.

“No,” I says; “I mean is she a baritone or an air?”

“I don’t know,” he says; “but she’s got the loudest voice I ever hear on a woman. She’s pretty near got me beat.”

“Can you sing?” I says; and I was sorry right afterward that I ast him that question.

I guess it must of been bad enough to have the water runnin’ night after night and to have him wavin’ that razor round; but that couldn’t of been nothin’ to his singin’. Just as soon as I’d pulled that boner he says, “Listen to me!” and starts in on “Silver Threads Among the Gold.” Mind you, it was after midnight and they was guests all round us tryin’ to sleep!

They used to be noise enough in our club when we had Hofman and Sheckard and Richie harmonizin’; but this bug’s voice was louder’n all o’ theirn combined. We once had a pitcher named Martin Walsh⁠—brother o’ Big Ed’s⁠—and I thought he could drownd out the Subway; but this guy made a boiler factory sound like Dummy Taylor. If the whole hotel wasn’t awake when he’d howled the first line it’s a pipe they was when he cut loose, which he done when he come to “Always young and fair to me.” Them words could of been heard easy in East St. Louis.

He didn’t get no encore from me, but he goes right through it again⁠—or starts to. I knowed somethin’ was goin’ to happen before he finished⁠—and somethin’ did. The night clerk and the house detective come bangin’ at the door. I let ’em in and they had plenty to say. If we made another sound the whole club’d be canned out o’ the hotel. I tried to salve ’em, and I says:

“He won’t sing no more.”

But Elliott swelled up like a poisoned pup.

“Won’t I?” he says. “I’ll sing all I want to.”

“You won’t sing in here,” says the clerk.

“They ain’t room for my voice in here anyways,” he says. “I’ll go outdoors and sing.”

And he puts his clothes on and ducks out. I didn’t make no attemp’ to stop him. I heard him bellowin’ “Silver Threads” down the corridor and down the stairs, with the clerk and the dick chasin’ him all the way and tellin’ him to shut up.

Well, the guests make a holler the next mornin’; and the hotel people tells Charlie Williams that he’ll either have to let Elliott stay somewheres else or the whole club’ll have to move. Charlie tells John, and John was thinkin’ o’ settlin’ the question by releasin’ Elliott.

I guess he’d about made up his mind to do it; but that afternoon they had us three to one in the ninth, and we got the bases full, with two down and Larry’s turn to hit. Elliott had been sittin’ on the bench sayin’ nothin’.

“Do you think you can hit one today?” says John.

“I can hit one any day,” says Elliott.

“Go up and hit that left-hander, then,” says John, “and remember there’s nothin’ to laugh at.”

Sallee was workin’⁠—and workin’ good; but that didn’t bother the bug. He cut into one, and it went between Oakes and Whitted like a shot. He come into third standin’ up and we was a run to the good. Sallee was so sore he kind o’ forgot himself and took pretty near his full windup pitchin’ to Tommy. And what did Elliott do but steal home and get away with it clean!

Well, you couldn’t can him after that, could you? Charlie gets him a room somewheres and I was relieved of his company that night. The next evenin’ we beat it for Chi to play about two weeks at home. He didn’t tell nobody where he roomed there and I didn’t see nothin’ of him, ’cep’ out to the park. I ast him what he did with himself nights and he says:

“Same as I do on the road⁠—borrow some dough some place and go to the nickel shows.”

“You must be stuck on ’em,” I says.

“Yes,” he says; “I like the ones where they kill people⁠—because I want to learn how to do it. I may have that job some day.”

“Don’t pick on me,” I says.

“Oh,” says the bug, “you never can tell who I’ll pick on.”

It seemed as if he just couldn’t learn nothin’ about fieldin’, and finally John told him to keep out o’ the practice.

“A ball might hit him in the temple and croak him,” says John.

But he busted up a couple o’ games for us at home, beatin’ Pittsburgh once and Cincy once.

V

They give me a great big room at the hotel in Pittsburgh; so the fellers picked it out for the poker game. We was playin’ along about ten o’clock one night when in come Elliott⁠—the earliest he’d showed up since we’d been roomin’ together. They was only five of us playin’ and Tom ast him to sit in.

“I’m busted,” he says.

“Can you play poker?” I ast him.

“They’s nothin’ I can’t do!” he says. “Slip me a couple o’ bucks and I’ll show you.”

So I slipped him a couple o’ bucks and honestly hoped he’d win, because I knowed he never had no dough. Well, Tom dealt him a hand and he picks it up and says:

“I only got five cards.”

“How many do you want?” I says.

“Oh,” he says, “if that’s all I get I’ll try to make ’em do.”

The pot was cracked and raised, and he stood the raise. I says to myself: “There goes my two bucks!” But no⁠—he comes out with three queens and won the dough. It was only about seven bucks; but you’d of thought it was a million, to see him grab it. He laughed like a kid.

“Guess I can’t play this game!” he says; and he had me fooled for a minute⁠—I thought he must of been kiddin’ when he complained of only havin’ five cards.

He copped another pot right afterward and was sittin’ there with about eleven bucks in front of him when Jim opens a roodle pot for a buck. I stays and so does Elliott. Him and Jim both drawed one card and I took three. I had kings or queens⁠—I forget which. I didn’t help ’em none; so when Jim bets a buck I throws my hand away.

“How much can I bet?” says the bug.

“You can raise Jim a buck if you want to,” I says.

So he bets two dollars. Jim comes back at him. He comes right back at Jim. Jim raises him again and he tilts Jim right back. Well, when he’d boosted Jim with the last buck he had, Jim says:

“I’m ready to call. I guess you got me beat. What have you got?”

“I know what I’ve got, all right,” says Elliott. “I’ve got a straight.” And he throws his hand down. Sure enough, it was a straight, eight high. Jim pretty near fainted and so did I.

The bug had started pullin’ in the dough when Jim stops him.

“Here! Wait a minute!” says Jim. “I thought you had somethin’. I filled up.” Then Jim lays down his nine full.

“You beat me, I guess,” says Elliott, and he looked like he’d lost his last friend.

“Beat you?” says Jim. “Of course I beat you! What did you think I had?”

“Well,” says the bug, “I thought you might have a small flush or somethin’.”

When I regained consciousness he was beggin’ for two more bucks.

“What for?” I says. “To play poker with? You’re barred from the game for life!”

“Well,” he says, “if I can’t play no more I want to go to sleep, and you fellers will have to get out o’ this room.”

Did you ever hear o’ nerve like that? This was the first night he’d came in before twelve and he orders the bunch out so’s he can sleep! We politely suggested to him to go to Brooklyn.

Without sayin’ a word he starts in on his “Silver Threads”; and it wasn’t two minutes till the game was busted up and the bunch⁠—all but me⁠—was out o’ there. I’d of beat it too, only he stopped yellin’ as soon as they’d went.

“You’re some buster!” I says. “You bust up ball games in the afternoon and poker games at night.”

“Yes,” he says; “that’s my business⁠—bustin’ things.”

And before I knowed what he was about he picked up the pitcher of ice-water that was on the floor and throwed it out the window⁠—through the glass and all.

Right then I give him a plain talkin’ to. I tells him how near he come to gettin’ canned down in St. Louis because he raised so much Cain singin’ in the hotel.

“But I had to keep my voice in shape,” he says. “If I ever get dough enough to get married the girl and me’ll go out singin’ together.”

“Out where?” I ast.

“Out on the vaudeville circuit,” says Elliott.

“Well,” I says, “if her voice is like yours you’ll be wastin’ money if you travel round. Just stay up in Muskegon and we’ll hear you, all right!”

I told him he wouldn’t never get no dough if he didn’t behave himself. That, even if we got in the World’s Series, he wouldn’t be with us⁠—unless he cut out the foolishness.

“We ain’t goin’ to get in no World’s Series,” he says, “and I won’t never get a bunch o’ money at once; so it looks like I couldn’t get married this fall.”

Then I told him we played a city series every fall. He’d never thought o’ that and it tickled him to death. I told him the losers always got about five hundred apiece and that we were about due to win it and get about eight hundred. “But,” I says, “we still got a good chance for the old pennant; and if I was you I wouldn’t give up hope o’ that yet⁠—not where John can hear you, anyway.”

“No,” he says, “we won’t win no pennant, because he won’t let me play reg’lar; but I don’t care so long as we’re sure o’ that city-series dough.”

“You ain’t sure of it if you don’t behave,” I says.

“Well,” says he, very serious, “I guess I’ll behave.” And he did⁠—till we made our first Eastern trip.

VI

We went to Boston first, and that crazy bunch goes out and piles up a three-run lead on us in seven innin’s the first day. It was the pitcher’s turn to lead off in the eighth, so up goes Elliott to bat for him. He kisses the first thing they hands him for three bases; and we says, on the bench: “Now we’ll get ’em!”⁠—because, you know, a three-run lead wasn’t nothin’ in Boston.

“Stay right on that bag!” John hollers to Elliott.

Mebbe if John hadn’t said nothin’ to him everythin’ would of been all right; but when Perdue starts to pitch the first ball to Tommy, Elliott starts to steal home. He’s out as far as from here to Seattle.

If I’d been carryin’ a gun I’d of shot him right through the heart. As it was, I thought John’d kill him with a bat, because he was standin’ there with a couple of ’em, waitin’ for his turn; but I guess John was too stunned to move. He didn’t even seem to see Elliott when he went to the bench. After I’d cooled off a little I says:

“Beat it and get into your clothes before John comes in. Then go to the hotel and keep out o’ sight.”

When I got up in the room afterward, there was Elliott, lookin’ as innocent and happy as though he’d won fifty bucks with a pair o’ treys.

“I thought you might of killed yourself,” I says.

“What for?” he says.

“For that swell play you made,” says I.

“What was the matter with the play?” ast Elliott, surprised. “It was all right when I done it in St. Louis.”

“Yes,” I says; “but they was two out in St. Louis and we wasn’t no three runs behind.”

“Well,” he says, “if it was all right in St. Louis I don’t see why it was wrong here.”

“It’s a diff’rent climate here,” I says, too disgusted to argue with him.

“I wonder if they’d let me sing in this climate?” says Elliott.

“No,” I says. “Don’t sing in this hotel, because we don’t want to get fired out o’ here⁠—the eats is too good.”

“All right,” he says. “I won’t sing.” But when I starts down to supper he says: “I’m li’ble to do somethin’ worse’n sing.”

He didn’t show up in the dinin’ room and John went to the boxin’ show after supper; so it looked like him and Elliott wouldn’t run into each other till the murder had left John’s heart. I was glad o’ that⁠—because a Mass’chusetts jury might not consider it justifiable hommercide if one guy croaked another for givin’ the Boston club a game.

I went down to the corner and had a couple o’ beers; and then I come straight back, intendin’ to hit the hay. The elevator boy had went for a drink or somethin’, and they was two old ladies already waitin’ in the car when I stepped in. Right along after me comes Elliott.

“Where’s the boy that’s supposed to run this car?” he says. I told him the boy’d be right back; but he says: “I can’t wait. I’m much too sleepy.”

And before I could stop him he’d slammed the door and him and I and the poor old ladies was shootin’ up.

“Let us off at the third floor, please!” says one o’ the ladies, her voice kind o’ shakin’.

“Sorry, madam,” says the bug; “but this is a express and we don’t stop at no third floor.”

I grabbed his arm and tried to get him away from the machinery; but he was as strong as a ox and he throwed me agin the side o’ the car like I was a baby. We went to the top faster’n I ever rode in an elevator before. And then we shot down to the bottom, hittin’ the bumper down there so hard I thought we’d be smashed to splinters.

The ladies was too scared to make a sound durin’ the first trip; but while we was goin’ up and down the second time⁠—even faster’n the first⁠—they begun to scream. I was hollerin’ my head off at him to quit and he was makin’ more noise than the three of us⁠—pretendin’ he was the locomotive and the whole crew o’ the train.

Don’t never ask me how many times we went up and down! The women fainted on the third trip and I guess I was about as near it as I’ll ever get. The elevator boy and the bellhops and the waiters and the night clerk and everybody was jumpin’ round the lobby screamin’; but no one seemed to know how to stop us.

Finally⁠—on about the tenth trip, I guess⁠—he slowed down and stopped at the fifth floor, where we was roomin’. He opened the door and beat it for the room, while I, though I was tremblin’ like a leaf, run the car down to the bottom.

The night clerk knowed me pretty well and knowed I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that; so him and I didn’t argue, but just got to work together to bring the old women to. While we was doin’ that Elliott must of run down the stairs and slipped out o’ the hotel, because when they sent the officers up to the room after him he’d blowed.

They was goin’ to fire the club out; but Charlie had a good stand-in with Amos, the proprietor, and he fixed it up to let us stay⁠—providin’ Elliott kep’ away. The bug didn’t show up at the ball park next day and we didn’t see no more of him till we got on the rattler for New York. Charlie and John both bawled him, but they give him a berth⁠—an upper⁠—and we pulled into the Grand Central Station without him havin’ made no effort to wreck the train.

VII

I’d studied the thing pretty careful, but hadn’t come to no conclusion. I was sure he wasn’t no stew, because none o’ the boys had ever saw him even take a glass o’ beer, and I couldn’t never detect the odor o’ booze on him. And if he’d been a dope I’d of knew about it⁠—roomin’ with him.

There wouldn’t of been no mystery about it if he’d been a left-hand pitcher⁠—but he wasn’t. He wasn’t nothin’ but a whale of a hitter and he throwed with his right arm. He hit left-handed, o’ course; but so did Saier and Brid and Schulte and me, and John himself; and none of us was violent. I guessed he must of been just a plain nut and li’ble to break out any time.

They was a letter waitin’ for him at New York, and I took it, intendin’ to give it to him at the park, because I didn’t think they’d let him room at the hotel; but after breakfast he come up to the room, with his suitcase. It seems he’d promised John and Charlie to be good, and made it so strong they b’lieved him.

I give him his letter, which was addressed in a girl’s writin’ and come from Muskegon.

“From the girl?” I says.

“Yes,” he says; and, without openin’ it, he tore it up and throwed it out the window.

“Had a quarrel?” I ast.

“No, no,” he says; “but she can’t tell me nothin’ I don’t know already. Girls always writes the same junk. I got one from her in Pittsburgh, but I didn’t read it.”

“I guess you ain’t so stuck on her,” I says.

He swells up and says:

“Of course I’m stuck on her! If I wasn’t, do you think I’d be goin’ round with this bunch and gettin’ insulted all the time? I’m stickin’ here because o’ that series dough, so’s I can get hooked.”

“Do you think you’d settle down if you was married?” I ast him.

“Settle down?” he says. “Sure, I’d settle down. I’d be so happy that I wouldn’t have to look for no excitement.”

Nothin’ special happened that night ’cep’ that he come in the room about one o’clock and woke me up by pickin’ up the foot o’ the bed and droppin’ it on the floor, sudden-like.

“Give me a key to the room,” he says.

“You must of had a key,” I says, “or you couldn’t of got in.”

“That’s right!” he says, and beat it to bed.

One o’ the reporters must of told Elliott that John had ast for waivers on him and New York had refused to waive, because next mornin’ he come to me with that dope.

“New York’s goin’ to win this pennant!” he says.

“Well,” I says, “they will if someone else don’t. But what of it?”

“I’m goin’ to play with New York,” he says, “so’s I can get the World’s Series dough.”

“How you goin’ to get away from this club?” I ast.

“Just watch me!” he says. “I’ll be with New York before this series is over.”

Well, the way he goes after the job was original, anyway. Rube’d had one of his good days the day before and we’d got a trimmin’; but this second day the score was tied up at two runs apiece in the tenth, and Big Jeff’d been wabblin’ for two or three innin’s.

Well, he walks Saier and me, with one out, and Mac sends for Matty, who was warmed up and ready. John sticks Elliott in in Brid’s place and the bug pulls one into the right-field stand.

It’s a cinch McGraw thinks well of him then, and might of went after him if he hadn’t went crazy the next afternoon. We’re tied up in the ninth and Matty’s workin’. John sends Elliott up with the bases choked; but he doesn’t go right up to the plate. He walks over to their bench and calls McGraw out. Mac tells us about it afterward.

“I can bust up this game right here!” says Elliott.

“Go ahead,” says Mac; “but be careful he don’t whiff you.”

Then the bug pulls it.

“If I whiff,” he says, “will you get me on your club?”

“Sure!” says Mac, just as anybody would.

By this time Bill Koem was hollerin’ about the delay; so up goes Elliott and gives the worst burlesque on tryin’ to hit that you ever see. Matty throws one a mile outside and high, and the bug swings like it was right over the heart. Then Matty throws one at him and he ducks out o’ the way⁠—but swings just the same. Matty must of been wise by this time, for he pitches one so far outside that the Chief almost has to go to the coachers’ box after it. Elliott takes his third healthy and runs through the field down to the clubhouse.

We got beat in the eleventh; and when we went in to dress he has his street clothes on. Soon as he seen John comin’ he says: “I got to see McGraw!” And he beat it.

John was goin’ to the fights that night; but before he leaves the hotel he had waivers on Elliott from everybody and had sold him to Atlanta.

“And,” says John, “I don’t care if they pay for him or not.”

My roomy blows in about nine and got the letter from John out of his box. He was goin’ to tear it up, but I told him they was news in it. He opens it and reads where he’s sold. I was still sore at him; so I says:

“Thought you was goin’ to get on the New York club?”

“No,” he says. “I got turned down cold. McGraw says he wouldn’t have me in his club. He says he’d had Charlie Faust⁠—and that was enough for him.”

He had a kind o’ crazy look in his eyes; so when he starts up to the room I follows him.

“What are you goin’ to do now?” I says.

“I’m goin’ to sell this ticket to Atlanta,” he says, “and go back to Muskegon, where I belong.”

“I’ll help you pack,” I says.

“No,” says the bug. “I come into this league with this suit o’ clothes and a collar. They can have the rest of it.” Then he sits down on the bed and begins to cry like a baby. “No series dough for me,” he blubbers, “and no weddin’ bells! My girl’ll die when she hears about it!”

Of course that made me feel kind o’ rotten, and I says:

“Brace up, boy! The best thing you can do is go to Atlanta and try hard. You’ll be up here again next year.”

“You can’t tell me where to go!” he says, and he wasn’t cryin’ no more. “I’ll go where I please⁠—and I’m li’ble to take you with me.”

I didn’t want no argument, so I kep’ still. Pretty soon he goes up to the lookin’-glass and stares at himself for five minutes. Then, all of a sudden, he hauls off and takes a wallop at his reflection in the glass. Naturally he smashed the glass all to pieces and he cut his hand somethin’ awful.

Without lookin’ at it he come over to me and says: “Well, goodbye, sport!”⁠—and holds out his other hand to shake. When I starts to shake with him he smears his bloody hand all over my map. Then he laughed like a wild man and run out o’ the room and out o’ the hotel.

VIII

Well, boys, my sleep was broke up for the rest o’ the season. It might of been because I was used to sleepin’ in all kinds o’ racket and excitement, and couldn’t stand for the quiet after he’d went⁠—or it might of been because I kep’ thinkin’ about him and feelin’ sorry for him.

I of’en wondered if he’d settle down and be somethin’ if he could get married; and finally I got to b’lievin’ he would. So when we was dividin’ the city series dough I was thinkin’ of him and the girl. Our share o’ the money⁠—the losers’, as usual⁠—was twelve thousand seven hundred sixty bucks or somethin’ like that. They was twenty-one of us and that meant six hundred seven bucks apiece. We was just goin’ to cut it up that way when I says:

“Why not give a divvy to poor old Elliott?”

About fifteen of ’em at once told me that I was crazy. You see, when he got canned he owed everybody in the club. I guess he’d stuck me for the most⁠—about seventy bucks⁠—but I didn’t care nothin’ about that. I knowed he hadn’t never reported to Atlanta, and I thought he was prob’ly busted and a bunch o’ money might make things all right for him and the other songbird.

I made quite a speech to the fellers, tellin’ ’em how he’d cried when he left us and how his heart’d been set on gettin’ married on the series dough. I made it so strong that they finally fell for it. Our shares was cut to five hundred eighty apiece, and John sent him a check for a full share.

For a while I was kind o’ worried about what I’d did. I didn’t know if I was doin’ right by the girl to give him the chance to marry her.

He’d told me she was stuck on him, and that’s the only excuse I had for tryin’ to fix it up between ’em; but, b’lieve me, if she was my sister or a friend o’ mine I’d just as soon of had her manage the Cincinnati Club as marry that bird. I thought to myself:

“If she’s all right she’ll take acid in a month⁠—and it’ll be my fault; but if she’s really stuck on him they must be somethin’ wrong with her too, so what’s the diff’rence?”

Then along comes this letter that I told you about. It’s from some friend of hisn up there⁠—and they’s a note from him. I’ll read ’em to you and then I got to beat it for the station:

Dear Sir: They have got poor Elliott locked up and they are goin’ to take him to the asylum at Kalamazoo. He thanks you for the check, and we will use the money to see that he is made comf’table.

When the poor boy come back here he found that his girl was married to Joe Bishop, who runs a soda fountain. She had wrote to him about it, but he did not read her letters. The news drove him crazy⁠—poor boy⁠—and he went to the place where they was livin’ with a baseball bat and very near killed ’em both. Then he marched down the street singin’ “Silver Threads Among the Gold” at the top of his voice. They was goin’ to send him to prison for assault with intent to kill, but the jury decided he was crazy.

He wants to thank you again for the money.

Yours truly,
Jim⁠—

I can’t make out his last name⁠—but it don’t make no diff’rence. Now I’ll read you his note:

Old Roomy: I was at bat twice and made two hits; but I guess I did not meet ’em square. They tell me they are both alive yet, which I did not mean ’em to be. I hope they got good curve-ball pitchers where I am goin’. I sure can bust them curves⁠—can’t I, sport?

Yours,
B. Elliot.

P.S.⁠—The B stands for Buster.

That’s all of it, fellers; and you can see I had some excuse for not hittin’. You can also see why I ain’t never goin’ to room with no bug again⁠—not for John or nobody else!

Sick ’Em

This is just between I and you. I don’t want it to go no further. In the first place a feller that’s had rotten luck as long as Red is entitled to the credit when his club fin’lly comes through and cops. In the second place if I was to tell the newspapers or the public that I was the one that really done it they’d laugh at me. They’d say: “How could you of did it when you was sittin’ on the bench all summer?”

But you know I wouldn’t lie to you, Jake, and you know I don’t care nothin’ about the honor or that bunk.

The little old World’s Serious check is honor enough for me. So let ’em say that it was Red’s managin’ and them two guys’ pitchin’ that won for us, and let it go at that. I’m just tellin’ you this to get it offen my chest.

Well, you must of read about Lefty Smith last fall, after we’d grabbed him. He’s a wop and Smith ain’t his real name, but it’s the one he’s went under ever since he started pitchin’. I heard his right name oncet, but I ain’t got time to tell it to you today. It’s longer’n Eppa Rixey. Anyway, the papers was full o’ what him and Fogarty had did at Fort Wayne; how they’d worked a hundred games between ’em and copped the Central League pennant, and how all the scouts had went after ’em.

Pat had stopped off there when we was goin’ West one trip and had saw ’em both work, and they’d looked so good to him that he’d advised Red to buy the both o’ them. Well, Red told the big boss and he bought Smitty; paid five thousand for him, they say. They wanted even more for Fogarty; so we just put in a draft for him. But pretty near all the other clubs done the same and the Cubs got him.

Red thought Smitty’d fit in nice with our bunch. We needed all the pitchers we could get after what the Feds done to us. Most o’ these guys with all the toutin’ turns out to be dubs; but Smitty had a whale of a record, full o’ no-hit games and shutouts. He’d whiffed more guys than Rube Waddell or Johnson, and had tooken part in fifty games. Besides, he had some pitchin’ sense, which is more’n you can say for most o’ them bushers. Fogarty’s record was just as good as Smitty’s; but, o’ course we wasn’t so much interested in him. We figured from what Smitty’d did and from what Pat said about him that he’d come right through from the jump and show enough to make Red stick him in there in his reg’lar turn.

Well, we got down South and had a chancet to look him over. You could spot him right off the reel for a wop, but he was a handsome devil, big as a house, and with black eyes and black hair.

He didn’t show nothin’ for a couple o’ weeks, but nobody lost no sleep over that; we thought he was takin’ it easy and was one o’ them careful birds that comes slow. Along in the third week we had some practice games between ourselves and Red starts Smitty agin the second club in one o’ them. Say, he had a fast one like Waddell’s and a cross fire like Sallee’s! But he seemed to be afraid he’d show too much. He’d begin an innin’ by puttin’ more stuff on the ball than I ever seen, but after he’d threw two or three he’d ease up and lob ’em over. Them goofs couldn’t see ’em when he was tryin’; but, say, they hit ’em acrost the state line when he let up. That didn’t bother us none, neither, for we figured that he had the stuff when he wanted to use it, and when he got in shape he’d burn up the league.

We played a few games with them Southern clubs and Smitty kept on the same way. Maybe he’d pitch hard to one guy in a innin’, but then he’d quit workin’ and just float ’em up there like a balloon. Red told him one day to cut loose and see if he could go the route. He might just as well of told him to shave himself with a dish o’ prunes. He went right along the way he’d been doin’, pitchin’ like a bear cat oncet in a while and sloppin’ ’em over the rest o’ the time. We was playin’ the Richmond Club and they scored eleven runs, but Red wouldn’t take him out.

After the game Red give him a bawlin’ and ast him what was the matter. He said, Nothin’; he was doin’ the best he knowed how. Red says: “You ain’t doin’ no such a thing. You’ve got the stuff, but you won’t let go of it. Are you lazy or what?” Smitty didn’t say a word. Then Red ast him if he wasn’t in shape, and he said, Yes, he guessed he was. “Well,” says Red, “you’ll have to cut out the monkey business or I’ll put the rollers under you!”

We stopped off in Washin’ton for a couple of exhibition games and broke even with ’em. Then we went home and tackled the Athaletics in the spring serious. Alexander trimmed ’em and they licked Mayer. Red sent Smitty at ’em in the third game and he was worse’n ever. I thought he’d be massacreed.

For two innin’s they couldn’t touch him and then he pulled the old stuff. Cy Young could of run to the plate as fast as the balls this bird throwed. It was just like hittin’ fungoes for them Athaletics. A slow ball’s all right in its place, but it’s got to be mixed up with somethin’ else. The way Smitty mixed ’em up was to throw one slow, and then one slower, and then one slower yet. Along in the fourth, before Red took him out, you could of went on one o’ them street cars from the hotel to the ball park in St. Louis between the time he let go o’ the pill and when one o’ them Mackmen kissed it. Pat was crazy. He says:

“I’d give my glove to know what’s the matter with him. He was the best pitcher in the world when I looked him over, and now he couldn’t hold a job with a high school. He must of been full o’ dope at Fort Wayne.”

Meantime I got a hold o’ one o’ the Chi papers and seen where they was pannin’ Fogarty. They said he seemed to be as fast as Johnson and to have a lot o’ stuff, but he didn’t show no more ambish than a horse car. I read the piece to Smitty.

“Your old sidekick don’t seem to be cuttin’ up much,” I says.

“He ain’t no sidekick o’ mine,” Smitty says.

“You and him was together at Fort Wayne, wasn’t you?” says I.

“Yes,” says Smitty; “and he’s a false alarm.”

I thought I’d bruise him.

“He ain’t got nothin’ on you,” I says.

But he took it just as calm as though I’d told him his collar was dirty. Then I says:

“You and Fogarty must of pawned your pepper when you left Fort Wayne. Or maybe you can’t get along without your Hoosier hops. Somethin’s wrong. You couldn’t of won all them games if you worked there like you’re doin’ here. What’s the matter?”

“Matter with who?” he says.

“Both o’ you⁠—you and Fogarty,” I says.

“They’s nothin’ the matter with me,” says Smitty. “I’m all right; but that slob never had no business tryin’ to pitch.”

“How did he win them games?” I ast.

“I guess they felt sorry for him,” says Smitty.

“They’ll be feelin’ sorry for you if you don’t go and get some ginger,” says I.

The season opened and we started off like we always do, playin’ ’em off their feet and lookin’ like champs. Alexander and Rixey was better’n I’d ever saw ’em, and the boys was all hittin’. It was a rotten day when Cravath or Magee or Luderus, or some o’ them, didn’t pole a couple out o’ the park. We didn’t get excited about it, though: We’d been May champions too often. We was wonderin’ when the Old Jinx was goin’ to hit us in the eye, and whether we’d get smashed up in a railroad wreck or have a epidemic o’ lepersy. The papers was sayin’ that we was up to our old tricks and that we’d blow higher’n a kite when the annual cyclone struck us.

Red had started Smitty just oncet. That was agin the Boston bunch, and he’d tooken him out in the first innin’ so’s we could finish the game that day. The first ball he throwed made a noise like a cannon when it hit Bill’s glove. The rest o’ them never got that far. One was all he had the strength to pitch. The first seven guys that come up was expresses⁠—they didn’t stop at first or second base. Paskert ast Red to send him a taxi. Smitty fin’lly was invited to the bench and sat there blinkin’ while Red sprung a monologue.

“You’re layin’ down on me,” says Red, “and it’s goin’ to cost you a month’s pay. If you’re playin’ for your release you’re wastin’ time. I’d get rid o’ you if I could, but nobody’ll take you. I’ve ast for waivers and I know what I’m talkin’ about. You’re wished on to us for the summer, but you ain’t goin’ to do no more pitchin’. I wouldn’t even let you work in battin’ practice, ’cause the fellers couldn’t see a real pitcher’s stuff after lookin’ at your’n. You can help the clubhouse boy, and you can hustle out the canvas when it rains, and you can stand and hold the bottle while the real ball players is gettin’ rubbed. And you can stick round after the games and hang up the undershirts.

“We’d ought to sue the Fort Wayne club for swindlin’ us! I’d like to manage a team in that league if fellers like you can win a pennant there. I’d give the ground keeper a dollar a day extra to do the pitchin’ for me, and I’d go in myself when he was too busy. They give you a salary for playin’ ball, but they pinch a man for stealin’ a loaf o’ bread! If you’re the best pitcher in the Central League the rest o’ them is paralytics. If we’d spent five thousand for the middle of a doughnut we’d have a better chancet o’ realizin’ on our investment. If pepper was worth a million dollars a ounce you’d be rated at ten cents!”

“Can I go in and dress?” says Smitty.

“I doubt it,” says Red. “You better take somebody along to help you.” Well, that might of been the end o’ the bird if he was with any club but our’n. Red had the waivers all right, but couldn’t make no deal that’d bring us within four thousand bucks of even. Still, we wasn’t gettin’ no service out of him and was payin’ him salary all the time.

So Red was just about to sell him to a old-clo’es man when the old hoodoo hit us. Alexander strained his souper and Rixey got a pair o’ busted fingers, all in the same serious. We was left with one fair pitcher and a gang o’ kids that’d never saw no big-league games till last spring. The bust-up didn’t surprise nobody. We figured that we’d been lucky to go till the first o’ June without none o’ the boys gettin’ killed. It was the same old gag with us: Right up near the top and happy for a couple o’ months. Then, Blooie!⁠—and the club all shot to pieces.

It wouldn’t of been sensible to turn even a rotten pitcher loose at that stage. We had to keep a hold of all o’ them, so’s when some got their bumps they’d be plenty to take their place. That’s how Smitty happened to hang on. Red didn’t start him, but he let him finish for some o’ the others that wasn’t much better. And he kept lookin’ worse all the while.

Well, it was the second week in June when Red sent me from Cincy to Dayton to look at a big spitter.

“I ain’t strong for the Central League after what they handed me,” he says; “but maybe this guy’s better’n most o’ them, and you can see where we’re up agin it. We got to get somebody or we’ll go to the bottom so fast they’ll pinch us for speedin’. If he’s got anything at all and looks like as if he was alive we can use him; but if he’s a dope, like this other boob, we don’t need him. I don’t want to run no lodgin’ house for vagrants.”

So I beat it over there and seen a doubleheader between the home club and Evansville. The guy I was sent after worked one game and had about as much action as a soft drink. I voted No! before he’d went two innin’s. Evansville had a left-hander who knowed how to pitch, but they told me he’d been in the league six years; and, besides, he was a little feller.

Well, I spotted old Jack Barnett on the Evansville bench, so I waited to shake hands with him when the game was over. You know him and me broke in together at Utica. I found out while we rode downtown that he’d been with the Fort Wayne Club the last year and was traded to Evansville durin’ the winter. I’d sort o’ lost track of old Jack ’cause he hadn’t been playin’ enough in recent years to get his name in the book.

“I see your club’s still lucky,” he says. “We all thought you had a grand chancet till them two fellers got hurt.”

“Yes,” I says, “but we’re gone now. The young guys we got ought to of been dressmakers instead o’ pitchers.” Then I happened to think o’ Smitty. “Maybe you can tell me somethin’,” says I. “How did this here Smitty ever win all them games for you?”

Barnett started to laugh.

“What’s the matter?” he ast. “Ain’t the big wop worth five thousand?”

“He ain’t worth a cigar coupon,” I says. “He’s a big, lazy tramp.”

Barnett kept on laughin’.

“I knowed what’d come off,” he says. “I told the fellers what’d happen. I bet Punch Knoll fifty bucks that Smitty wouldn’t last the season. You guys can talk about McGraw and Mack, and them other big-league managers, all you want to, but it’s us fellers down here in the sticks that knows how to get the work out of a man.”

I ast him what he meant.

“Well,” he says, “we had Smitty two years ago and he was a bum. He was sloppin’ along with us like he’s doin’ with you now. At that time the Grand Rapids Club had Fogarty, the guy the Cubs got now. Fogarty’s a big right-hander, with a spitter and a good hook and just as good a fast ball as Smitty. He’s a big, handsome brute, too, and maybe he don’t know it! Up to Grand Rapids he was doin’ nothin’ but look pretty and draw his pay. He was just as valuable to them as Smitty was to us; but we used to have all kinds o’ fun with ’em both, kiddin’ ’em about their looks. We’d say to Smitty: ‘You’d be the handsomest guy in this league if it wasn’t for Fogarty.’ And we’d pull the same stuff on Fogarty when we was playin’ Grand Rapids. And the both o’ them would get as sore as a boil. I never seen nothin’ like it.

“At the schedule meetin’ a year ago last winter, our club and Grand Rapids pulled off a trade, Bill Peck comin’ to us for Joe Hammond and Bull Harper, a couple of infielders. Jack Burke, our manager, told the owner o’ the Grand Rapids Club that it didn’t look fair, givin’ up two men for one. So he says: ‘All right; I’ll throw in Fogarty and then you’ll have the two handsomest ball players in the business.’ Jack thought he was jokin’; but, sure enough, he turned Fogarty over to us.

“We started in on the pair o’ them right off the reel, tryin’ to make their life miserable. When Smitty was round we’d talk about Fogarty’s pretty red hair; and when Fogarty was with us we’d be wishin’ we had big black eyes like Smitty’s. I done the most of it, but I didn’t have no idea what’d happen.

“Well, to make it short, Smitty come up to Jack a week before the season opened and ast if he could pitch the first game. Jack pretty near dropped dead, ’cause it’d been all he could do the year before to get him to put on his uniform. Mind you, we all knowed then that Smitty had the stuff if he’d only use it. Burke told him he’d think it over and was wonderin’ whether to turn him down or not, when up come Fogarty and ast the same thing. Burke decided to take a chancet, so he had the two o’ them toss a coin, and Smitty won the toss. He opened up for us and shut Terre Haute out with two hits. And the next day Fogarty worked and shut ’em out again, but give ’em one more hit than Smitty. They was nothin’ to it after that. We kept up the good work, gettin’ ’em madder and madder at each other. And the madder they got the harder they worked. Either one o’ them would of pitched every day if Burke had of let ’em. While Fogarty was workin’ Smitty’d slide up and down the bench cussin’ to himself and pullin’ his head off for the other club. And Fogarty’d do the same thing when Smitty was in there.

“Both o’ them was strong for the skirts; and, o’ course, a pair o’ fine-lookin’ slobs like them could cop one out in every town. We took up that end of it, too, tellin’ Smitty that Fogarty’s Marie was prettier than his Julia, and that kind o’ stuff.

“You know what they done for us. We’d of finished about sixth without ’em. I never seen such pitchin’ in my life, and I never seen two fellers hate each other the way them two done. When you guys bought Smitty and didn’t get Fogarty I called the turn. Some o’ the boys figured they both might of got the habit o’ workin’ and might keep it up when they was separated; but I knowed different. And that’s why I made the bet with Punch Knoll. Looks like I’ll win it easy, don’t it?”

“Looks like it,” I says. “Alexander and Rixey’d both ought to be ready again in a month and then Smitty’ll lose his home sure. And we’ll be absolutely last by that time.”

We was goin’ to Chi that night and I didn’t see no use o’ stickin’ in Dayton when I hadn’t had no orders to look at no one else but that one guy. Besides, Barnett told me they wasn’t nobody else on neither club worth lampin’. I’d of liked to of listened to some more o’ the stuff about the two jealous cats, but I had to beat it back to Cincy.

Well, on the way I done some thinkin’; but I was afraid to spring anything on Red for fear he’d laugh at me. We’ve all knew o’ cases where jealousy’d helped a ball club, and a lot more cases where it’d hurt ’em; but I hadn’t never heard o’ no case like this here one.

We got to Chi and the Cubs proceeded to murder us. Red was desp’rate and so was the rest o’ the gang. We dropped the first three and didn’t have no hopes o’ winnin’ the fourth unless Hank lost his mind and pitched the bat boy agin us.

I hadn’t never saw Fogarty. He’d been left to home when the Cubs come East in May. But I spotted him the first day out there to the Cubs’ park. He sure was a nice-lookin’ devil and big enough to pitch every afternoon and twicet on Sundays. He wasn’t doin’ no pitchin’ for them, though. They was lucky enough to have their reg’lars in shape and wasn’t obliged to fill up the box score with ornaments.

Well, I went up to Schulte durin’ battin’ practice and ast him what was the matter with Fogarty.

“Nothin’ at all,” says Frank. “I don’t figure they can be nothin’ the matter with a guy that draws his pay for sittin’ on the bench and lookin’ beautiful. I wisht I could get away with it.”

“Don’t he work none?” I ast.

“He pitches to the batters about oncet in two weeks,” says Frank. “He does it when Hank can get his consent. And on the days he pitches to us I manage to hide somewheres till the practice is over.”

“Why?” I ast.

“ ’Cause,” says Frank, “I figure that, barrin’ accidents, I got many happy years before me. If he was to happen to put all his stuff on the ball oncet and hit me in the head, they wouldn’t be nobody to drive the mules on my peach ranch in Georgia.”

“He’s got a lot o’ stuff, then?” I says.

“Yes,” says Frank; “and he’s savin’ it up for somethin’⁠—maybe to give it away for a birthday present. All he does now is sit and wait for everybody to look away from him, so’s he can pull out his pocket mirror and enjoy himself.”

This dope fit in perfect with what Jack Barnett had been tellin’ me. I made up my mind right there that the thing was worth tryin’; but it took all the nerve I had to spring it on Red. My chancet soon come. He was put off the field in the second innin’ and I got myself chased right afterward. He was sittin’ in the clubhouse with his head in his hands when I come in.

“Red,” I says, “we couldn’t be worse off’n we are, could we?” He didn’t pay no attention. “We’d be better off if we had somebody that could pitch, wouldn’t we?” I says.

“What are you drivin’ at?” he ast.

“I want you to try a experiment,” I says. “It may not do no good, and then again it might. It might pull us through OK if you was willin’ to take a chancet.”

“Shoot,” says Red. “I’ll try anything oncet.”

“Do you think you could get Fogarty offen the Cubs?” I says.

“Could I get him?” says Red. “Sure I could get him! They just give me notice that they’d ast waivers. But what do I want with Fogarty? He’s another one just like this Smitty we got. I give him the oncet over today on their bench, and if they’s anybody in the world that’s lazier’n Smitty, he’s him. Don’t you think we’re carryin’ enough excess baggage?”

Then I told him what Barnett’d told me, only I made it even stronger. At first he called me a nut, and it took me pretty near till the game was over to coax him into it. He’d just gave up when the gang come in.

“How bad did they trim us?” ast Red.

“I don’t know,” says Magee; “but I know I chased back to that fence a hundred and sixteen times.”

“Better go see Hank,” says I to Red.

I had to pretty near drag him to get him out o’ the clubhouse. Hank was just goin’ in their door.

“Wait a minute, Hank,” I says. “Red wants to see you.”

“Just heard you was askin’ waivers on Fogarty,” says Red. “What do want for him?”

“I guess you can get him for the waiver price,” says Hank; “but you’ll have to see the boss.”

So me and Red went up to the office and sprung it on ’em. They seemed surprised, but said Red could have him. So Red wired home and got the deal OK’d. And Fogarty went with us to St. Louis.

Before we got on the train, Red told me I’d have to do the funny work. I said I’d tackle it, and then I went to Pat and explained the thing to him and ast for help. He was willin’ and we fixed it up that I was to room with Fogarty and Pat with Smitty.

Smitty was in his berth, gettin’ his beauty sleep, when Fogarty clumb aboard that night. So they didn’t see each other till next mornin’. Smitty nailed me comin’ out o’ the Union Station in St. Louis.

“What’s that guy doin’ with us?” he says.

“Who do you mean?” I says.

“That big, ugly Mick,” says he.

“Ugly!” I says. “If I was you I wouldn’t call him ugly. He’s a big, handsome boy, and he looks handsomer’n ever alongside a homely wop like you.”

He never said a word. He turned away from me like as if I’d ast him for a hundred bucks. Red told me afterward that he come and sat with him in the dinin’ room at the hotel and ast if Fogarty was goin’ to be with us.

“Sure!” says Red. “I thought it was about time we was gettin’ a pitcher.”

“A pitcher!” says Smitty. “If they sold him to you for a pitcher you got cheated. He’s only a swell-headed pup that don’t think about nothin’ but the part in his hair.”

“Well,” says Red, “if I had hair as pretty as his’n I’d be proud of it too.”

That shut up Smitty and he left the table without finishin’ his Java; but he come to Red in the lobby an hour later and ast if he could work that afternoon! It took Red five minutes to come to. He hadn’t had no such request as that from nobody for pretty near three weeks, and Smitty was the last guy on earth he expected it from. You can bet he give his consent.

When our grips come I went to my room to take a nap and a shave; but I didn’t get no nap. My new roomy, Fogarty, followed me in and begin talkin’ right away.

“What kind o’ burg is Philly?” he says.

“Swell!” says I. “You can get anything you want there.”

“How about the female population?” he ast. “Lots o’ good lookers?”

“Well,” I says, “I guess there’s plenty o’ pretty girls; but I’m a married man and I ain’t got no time for ’em. If you’re after information on that subject you better ast Smitty.”

“Smitty!” he says. “What does he know about girls?”

“He must know how to grab ’em,” says I. “All the real dolls in the burg is bugs over him.”

“They must be a fine bunch!” says Fogarty. “It must be they never seen nobody.”

“Well,” I says, “they ain’t looked at nobody since they seen him.”

“I can’t figure it out,” he says.

“That’s easy,” says I. “In the first place he’s a fine-lookin’ boy, and in the second place he’s a swell pitcher.”

“Where do you get that stuff?” says Fogarty. “Don’t you think I know nothin’? If he’s fine-lookin’ I’m a snake. And if he’s a swell pitcher, why don’t they never start him?”

“He’s had a sore arm,” I says; “but he’s all OK now and Red’s goin’ to work him today.”

He left the room right after that and I didn’t see no more of him till we got out to the park; but Red tipped me that he’d came to him and ast if he could work the game. Red told him he was goin’ to start Smitty.

“Good night!” says Fogarty. “They’ll get a hundred runs.”

But, say, I never seen such a change in a man as they was in Smitty that afternoon. He warmed up with Pat first and was so fast that Pat couldn’t hardly keep his glove on. Then Red took him a while and was so pleased that he forgot to get sore when he catched one right on the meat hand.

Well, he didn’t shut ’em out⁠—he hadn’t had no real work for a long time and he was hog wild; but, say, they couldn’t hit him with a shovel! Two blows was what they got, an’ we licked ’em, five to two. It was the first game we’d win since we left home; and all through it Fogarty was frothin’ at the mouth. Every little while he’d say: “He can’t keep it up⁠—the lucky bum! He’s slippin’. Better let me warm up!” But Red didn’t pay no attention to him.

Maybe you think we didn’t feel good in that clubhouse⁠—’specially me and Pat and Red! We was the only ones in on the secret. We’d decided not to ask no help from the other boys for fear they’d make it too raw. I felt the best of anybody, ’cause it was my scheme and I’d been scared that it wouldn’t work. It made me look good to myself and to Red too. Before we was dressed, Fogarty’d drew Red aside and got him to promise to pitch him next day.

I wasn’t sure yet that success was goin’ to be permanent. Still, it was up to I and Pat to go through with our end of it, and my job was to stick close to Fogarty all that evenin’ and keep goadin’ him. I braced him outside o’ the hotel after supper and ast him to take a walk.

“Grand game Smitty pitched today!” I says.

“What was grand about it?” says he. “Who couldn’t beat that bunch? He’d ought to of been ashamed of himself for lettin’ ’em score.”

“He only give ’em two hits,” says I.

“Sure!” says Fogarty. “And how was they goin’ to get hits when he didn’t throw nothin’ near the plate?”

“Well,” I says, “I don’t see no harm in a few walks so long’s a feller can get ’em over when he has to. It’s pretty hard for a guy with all that smoke to control it right along.”

“Yes,” he says; “but I claim it takes a lucky bird to give eight bases on balls and get away with the ball game. It don’t show no pitchin’ on his part; all it shows is that the other club’d ought to try some easier game than baseball. All they had to do was go up there without their bats and they’d of trimmed us; but they didn’t even make him pitch. It looked to me like as if their manager’d offered a prize to the one that could miss ’em the furthest. They looked like a vaudeville team rehearsin’ a club-swingin’ act. At that, Smitty’s got a big advantage over most pitchers. He’s so dam’ homely that it scares a feller to look at him.”

“If that’s a advantage,” I says, “nobody’d never even bunt one safe off o’ you.”

“You’re kiddin’ me now,” he says. “I ain’t stuck on my looks, but they wouldn’t be no sense in me pretendin’ that I didn’t have him beat. I and him was together in the Central, y’know; and I was one o’ the most pop’lar if not the pop’larest feller that ever played ball in Fort Wayne. It takes the skirts to judge if a man’s good-lookin’ or not; and I’m here to tell you without no boastin’ that I could of married any dame in that burg. So far’s Smitty was concerned, he couldn’t get no girl to look at him.”

“Fort Wayne girls ain’t like the ones in Philly, then,” says I.

“Girls is the same everywheres,” says Fogarty. “You can’t never make me believe that they’d chase him, unless it’s out o’ curiosity. You’ll often see a crowd round a monkey cage, but it ain’t ’cause the monkeys is handsome.”

“Some girls likes them big, dark fellers,” I says.

“Yes,” he says, “and some people likes the smell o’ garlic.”

“I s’pose we’ll get a lickin’ tomorrow,” I says. “Red ain’t got nobody left to work, outside of a few bushers.”

“This busher right here works tomorrow,” says Fogarty; “and you can bet a month’s pay that he won’t give no eight bases on balls.”

“Maybe you won’t be in there long enough,” I says.

“I’ll be in there just nine innin’s,” says he; “and at the end o’ that time the St. Louis Club won’t have nothin’ to show they been in a ball game.”

“All you need to do,” says I, “is to work as good as Smitty done today; but that’s too much to look for from most bushers.”

That stung him.

“They ain’t no homely wop got nothin’ on me!” he says. “If I can’t do no better’n he done I’ll quit pitchin’ and peddle bananas, which is what he’d ought to be doin’.”

Well, I kept him goin’ till bedtime and all the next forenoon. He was out to the park and dressed before anybody, and he warmed up enough for three games. Red ast him oncet if he wasn’t workin’ too hard.

“Not me,” he says. “I ain’t delicate like some o’ these here pitchers. Work’s my middle name and you’ll find it out before I get through.”

Say, they wasn’t no kick comin’ on the way he done the job! One o’ the St. Louis guys got as far as second base and was so surprised that Bill caught him off o’ there flatfooted. Three little singles he give ’em and not a man did he walk. Bill told me afterward that it was fast one, fast one, fast one, and hardly three hooks or spitters all through the game. Bill said them fast ones stung right through his big mitt like he’d been barehanded.

And Smitty, on the bench, acted just like Fogarty’d did the day before. He called them St. Louis hitters everything he could think of. When the big Turk whiffed the hull side in the seventh Smitty was so sore he kicked a hole in the ball bag and throwed away his chew.

The rest o’ the bunch couldn’t help noticin’ the way he acted, and I seen where they’d be wise to the whole game before long.

That night Pat took Smitty to a bunch o’ nickel shows and entertained him with conversation about Fogarty’s grand performance. The result was that the wop got Red out o’ bed at seven the next mornin’ and ast him whether he could pitch the game. Red stalled him, ’cause he didn’t know then how strong the both o’ them was⁠—him and Fogarty.

Anyway, it rained, so Smitty’d had two days’ rest before we played again, and Red sent him in to wind up the serious. Gavvy saved St. Louis another whitewashin’ by droppin’ a fly ball with a guy on; but that run was all they got. Fogarty’s game wasn’t a bit better’n this second one o’ Smitty’s, and I kept rubbin’ that into Fogarty all the way back to Philly.

They ain’t no use goin’ on and tellin’ you about all the rest o’ the games they pitched. They was both beat a few times, but it wasn’t ’cause they didn’t try. Every pitcher with a arm and a glove’d cop more’n two-thirds of his games if he’d work as hard as these babies done. Some o’ the papers come out and said that Red was overworkin’ ’em, but the reporters that wrote that didn’t know what they was talkin’ about. It was all Red could do to keep either o’ them on the bench. If they’d of had their way about it they’d of both been out there in the middle o’ the diamond every day, fightin’ for possession o’ the ball.

When Red sent Mayer or one o’ the other boys in, the pair o’ them’d sit on the bench growlin’ and makin’ remarks about each other. The minute the feller in there workin’ showed any signs o’ weakenin’, Fogarty and Smitty’d both jump up and race down to the bullpen. And when Red got ready to take the guy out and sent for one or the other o’ the two handsome birds the one he didn’t pick would slam his glove on the ground and start kickin’ it. Everybody on the ball club kept at ’em on the bench; but Red, figurin’ they might get suspicious, give orders that nobody but I and Pat was to ride ’em in private.

We was right up on the Giants’ heels by the first of August. Then Rixey and Alexander joined us, but all they was ast to do was fill in when Red could persuade Fogarty and Smitty to take a rest. We was about the only club that was beatin’ New York, or else we’d of had the flag cinched long before we did. We was runnin’ through the rest o’ the league like soup through a sieve.

One day Smitty held the Brooklyn Club to six hits in a doubleheader and beat ’em both games. Fogarty ast me a hundred times in the next few days when we was goin’ to have another doubleheader. And a week before it come off he made Red promise to let him tackle it alone. It was agin the Cubs and he beat ’em clean as a whistle; but they got a couple more hits than Brooklyn’d made agin Smitty. So the big Turk was just as discontented as though he hadn’t did nothin’ at all. You ought to of heard Hank rave, though! He couldn’t figure how Red could get so much work out of a guy who’d been on his bench two or three months and hadn’t did nothin’ but sleep.

But you know what they done. What I set out to tell you was how I and Pat kept ’em goin’. We soon found out that they wasn’t only jealous of each other’s looks and their pitchin’. Neither one o’ them would let the other have anything on him at all. If I’d make a remark about what a classy necktie Smitty was wearin’, Fogarty’d go out and buy the loudest one he could find. If Pat mentioned to Smitty that Fogarty always kept his shoes shined up nice, Smitty’d sneak away to a shine parlor and make the boy work his fool head off for a hour. They just naturally hated each other and acted like a pair o’ grand opery stars or a couple o’ schoolgirls that was both tryin’ to be teacher’s pet.

I and Pat would get together and figure out different things to rile ’em up with. Pat was singin’ “The River Shannon” in the clubhouse one day. Fogarty was standin’ right by me.

“Pat’s got a good voice,” he says.

“Fair,” says I; “but the best singer on the club is Smitty.”

Now I hadn’t heard Smitty sing⁠—didn’t know whether he could or not. Fogarty’d ought to of knew somethin’ about it, as they’d been at Fort Wayne together a hull season; but, regardless o’ the fact that neither one o’ the two had a voice⁠—as we soon learned⁠—the Turk joined right in with Pat, and it wasn’t two seconds before Smitty was whinin’ too. Pat quit when he seen he had competition. Everybody stopped talkin’ and listened.

I wisht you could of heard it! It was like as though all the ferryboats in East River had got into trouble at once. Their idea o’ singin’ was to see how many sour notes they could hit and how loud they could hit ’em. The bunch give ’em a hand when they got through, and each o’ them figured it was on the square and was for him personally. Well, that was a big laugh with us for a while; but it got so’s it was no joke when they done it every day and yelled different songs at the same time.

Another thing we done was to write letters to both o’ them and sign a girl’s name. The letters was just the same, and they said that she was a great fan and was pullin’ for our club, and just loved to see them two pitch. We wound them up somethin’ like this:

“I think you’re so handsome and I would love to meet you. I’ve already met Mr. Smith.” We said Mr. Smith in one and Mr. Fogarty in the other. “I think he’s the handsomest man I ever seen, but maybe you’re just as handsome when a person sees you up close. I sit in the third or fourth row o’ the stand, right back o’ your bench, every afternoon.”

Say, you’d ought to of seen them birds fall for that! They rubbered for that dame every day we played at home for the last two months o’ the season. Sometimes, when neither o’ them was workin’, they’d both get up and lean on the roof o’ the bench and try to get a smile from every skirt in the place, thinkin’ one o’ them must be the girl who’d wrote.

On the road we’d get the telephone girls in the hotels to call up Smitty and ask him if he was Mr. Fogarty. When he’d say no she’d ring off; but she’d call him up again in about ten minutes and ask him the same question. We worked this on Fogarty, too, and both o’ them pretty near went nuts ’cause the other was gettin’ so many calls.

Pat pulled a hot one in Pittsburgh. He told Smitty that Fogarty was the most generous guy he’d ever met.

“Why?” says Smitty.

“He’s so good to the waiters and bellhops,” says Pat. “He gives the waiters a quarter tip at every meal and slips the boys two bits when they bring him ice water.”

That started a battle that was pretty costly to the both o’ them, but mighty sweet for the hops and waiters. If I’d of been Pat I’d of made ’em slip me a commission.

We had ’em both ridin’ in taxis to and from all the parks on the last trip West. We had ’em gettin’ their clo’es pressed every night, and buyin’ new shirts and collars in every burg we blowed into, and gettin’ shaved twicet a day, till Red made us cut some of it out, sayin’ they was touchin’ the club for too much dough. And all season I never seen ’em speak to each other, though neither one couldn’t talk about nothin’ else but the other when they was separated.

The pennant race was settled when we won a doubleheader in Cincy on the fifteenth o’ September. When we got back to the hotel Red told us the lid was off for that night⁠—that we could do anything we wanted to and stay out until breakfast. So they can’t blame neither Pat nor I for what come off. One o’ the other boys⁠—I never found out who⁠—told Fogarty that Smitty could hold more wine than a barrel. Then he pulled the same thing on Smitty about Fogarty.

I and Pat went to a show. When we blowed back, about eleven, they was a noise like New Year’s Eve in the café. We went in to see what it was. They was a gang o’ fellers at one table with Smitty, and another bunch at another table with Fogarty. They was four or five empty quart bottles in front o’ each o’ them. They’d had five or six more pints than they could carry comfortable and was hollerin’ for more, but was broke. We got ’em both at one table and ast ’em to sing. Before they was halfway through the first verse o’ whatever it was, the night clerk horned in and stopped ’em. Then we took ’em out in the street and told ’em to finish it, but they was too many coppers round.

Most of us was roomin’ on the tenth floor and one o’ the boys talked the pair into racin’ upstairs instead of usin’ the elevator. They both fell down at the first landin’ and when they hit the floor they was all in. They’d of slept there for a week if we hadn’t of carried ’em to the elevator and got ’em up the rest o’ the way. Then what did we do but steer ’em both into Pat’s room and put ’em to bed together. They was no danger o’ them gettin’ wise till the next day; they was dead to the world. I and Pat slept in my room and we was up bright and early so’s not to miss nothin’. We walked in and found ’em both poundin’ their ear. It must of tooken us fifteen minutes to get ’em roused.

“Well, boys,” says Pat, “I’m glad to see you so friendly and lookin’ so fresh.”

They looked about as fresh as a old dray horse.

“How did you happen to be roomin’ together?” I says.

It wasn’t till then that they wised up. Smitty jumped out o’ bed like the hotel was afire.

“I’ll murder the guy that done this!” he hollered.

“What do you mean?” says Pat. “Don’t you know who you went to bed with?”

“You must of been in bad shape,” I says. “Fogarty was all right; he knowed what he was doin’.”

Fogarty wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t, ’cause if he had of he’d be admittin’ that the wine was too much for him. So he just had to shut up and take it.

“I was all right too,” says Smitty.

“Then what are you crabbin’ about?” says Pat.

They wasn’t no answer to that.

“I’m goin’ to ring for some ice water,” says Fogarty.

“Nobody never wants ice water at this time o’ the mornin’ unless they had a bad night,” I says. “You don’t hear Smitty askin’ for no ice water.”

Smitty’d of gave his right eye for a barrel of it, but he didn’t have the nerve to say so.

Well, we made Fogarty get up and we stuck in there while they was dressin’. Fogarty had to go to his own room to get a clean shirt and collar, and we could hear him ringin’ for water the minute he got in there. Fin’lly we took pity on Smitty and got him some too. He complained o’ headache, and I says:

“That’s a funny thing about Fogarty⁠—no matter how much wine he laps up he don’t never have no headache the next mornin’.”

We didn’t hear no more complaints from Smitty. They both went down to breakfast and tried to eat somethin’, but it was hard work. And I noticed that neither o’ them bothered Red with requests to pitch that day.

They went to bed⁠—separated⁠—right after supper and was as good as ever the followin’ mornin’. I don’t s’pose neither o’ them had never drank no wine before, and, so far as I know, they didn’t tackle it again. They both wanted to pitch in Chi, but Red was anxious to try out some kids; so he told both o’ them, on the quiet, that they was the ones he was dependin’ on for the World’s Serious and he didn’t want to risk gettin’ ’em hurt.

Well, we wound up the season in Boston, and it was the next to the last day that we got into a awful jam! You remember readin’ about Davis, the infielder Red bought from the New England League? Well, he’d got married the week before he joined us⁠—married a Boston girl. He’d left her with her folks while he went West with us and she stuck to home till we hit Boston on that last trip. She was goin’ to Philly with us to take in the serious.

Davis was a fast little cuss, not much bigger’n Maranville. Red had tried him out at short agin Pittsburgh and he’d looked good; but he was usin’ the reg’lars most o’ the time to keep ’em in shape for the big show. Davis had more nerve than any little feller I ever seen. He wouldn’t break ground for none o’ them Pittsburgh guys when they come into second base. In one o’ the games there big Honus had told him to keep out o’ the way or he’d get killed.

“It won’t be no big slob like you that’ll kill me!” says Davis.

Honus had a license to get sore at that, ’cause he was just slippin’ the kid a friendly warnin’; but it shows you what a game little devil Davis was.

Well, as I was sayin’, it was the next to the last day up in Boston that somethin’ come off that pretty near cost us the big money. Mayer was pitchin’ the game and we had the reg’lar club in agin ’em.

In one o’ the boxes, right down next to the field, they was the prettiest girl I ever looked at. She was all alone and she was dressed up like a million bucks. She was sittin’ where we could lamp her from our bench and all the boys had gave her the oncet over before the game ever started. Fogarty and Smitty wiped the dirt offen their faces and smoothed their hair the minute they piped her.

She was a lot more interestin’ than the national pastime and I guess we was all gettin’ a eyeful when, all of a sudden, she smiled right at us. Our club was in the field and they was only a few of us on the bench⁠—me and Pat and Davis and the pitchers, and one or two others. Well, I was one of a number that returned the salute; but after doin’ it oncet I remembered I was a old married man and cut it out. But Fogarty and Smitty give a correct imitation of a toothpaste advertisement all the rest o’ the time they sat there. Every three or four minutes she’d smile and then they’d smile back. They was wise to each other and it was a battle to see which one could give her the prettiest grin.

Just before the last half o’ the eighth Fogarty ast Red whether he could go in and dress. He hadn’t no more’n got permissionwhen Smitty wanted to go too. I had ’em guessed right, and I and Pat was wonderin’ which one’d cop. They raced to the clubhouse and Smitty beat him in. Now them two birds was usually awful slow about gettin’ their clo’es changed, ’cause they was so partic’lar; but they beat the world’s record this time. They was in their street clo’es and down in front o’ that box just as the game ended.

Smitty was there first, but lots o’ good it done him! He tipped his hat to the girl and got a cold stare. Then Fogarty come up and spoke to her. He was gave just as much encouragement as Smitty.

I begin to laugh, but I stopped quick. Before I knowed what was comin’ off, little Davis grabbed a bat and started for the stand. Smitty was leanin’ agin the box, with his left hand flat on the rail. Without a word o’ warnin’ Davis swung the bat overhand and it come down on poor Smitty’s hand like a ton o’ brick. Smitty yelled and fell over on the ground. Fogarty tried to duck, but he was too late. The little busher aimed the bat at his bean and catched him square on the right arm as he throwed it up to protect himself.

That’s all they was to the bout. The first punch is a lot⁠—’specially if you use a baseball bat. Neither o’ them showed signs o’ fightin’ back. Besides, we was all on the job by that time and grabbed Davis. Little as he was, it took three of us to hold him. But, say, they was the devil to pay in the clubhouse! Red was goin’ to shoot Davis till the truth come out.

“They went too far with it,” says Davis. “They ain’t no man can go up and talk to my wife without a introduction! I seen ’em tryin’ to flirt with her. Them big bugs is so swell-headed that they think no girl could smile at nobody but them.”

“You’d ought to of tipped ’em off,” says Red.

“I hadn’t ought to of did no sucha thing,” says Davis. “They’d ought to of knew by lookin’ that she wasn’t the kind o’ girl that’d flirt. But I didn’t feel in no danger o’ havin’ my home broke up, so I let ’em go.”

Then Red jumped on me.

“That’s what you get for eggin’ ’em on,” he says. “Where’s our chancet in the World’s Serious now?”

“Have some sense!” I says. “You wouldn’t be thinkin’ o’ no World’s Serious if I hadn’t of egged ’em on.”

We called a doctor for Smitty and Fogarty, and the news he give us didn’t cheer us up none. He said he thought Smitty’s hand was broke, but he’d have to take a X ray. The mitt was swole up as big as a ham. Fogarty’s souper was hangin’ limp as a rag, and the doc didn’t believe he’d be able to raise it for a month. Afterward he found out that they was no bones busted in Smitty’s hand, but it was in such shape that he couldn’t hold a han’kerchief, let alone a baseball. There we was, three days before the start o’ the serious, and our pitchin’ staff shot to hellangone!

Red sent me and Pat and the trainer home that night with the pair o’ cripples. We was to report up to the club’s offices next mornin’ and have all the doctors in Philly called in. Me and Pat was so sore that we couldn’t talk to each other, and I don’t think they was a word said on the trip. Yes, they was too; just before Smitty went to sleep he ast me a question:

“Who was that girl?”

“You’d ought to know by this time,” I says. “That wasn’t nobody but Davis’ wife.”

“Then what was she smilin’ at me for?” he says.

Well, the Philly doctors told us they was absolutely no chancet o’ havin’ either o’ them in shape for the serious and we was gettin’ ready to count the losers’ share. Red’d been figurin’ on alternatin’ the two, cause none o’ the rest was in real shape; but now we didn’t have nothin’ that you could call a airtight pitcher.

Rixey and Alexander and Mayer would of made ’em step some if they’d been right, but they wasn’t.

I says to Pat:

“Looks like as though I and you and the bat boy would have to work.”

“Looks that way,” he says, “unless we can bring them two fellers round.”

“How can we do that?” I says. “You heard what them doctors said.”

“Yes,” says Pat; “but they’re the only hope we got, and I ain’t goin’ to give up till I have to.”

Red and the bunch got in the next mornin’, which was a Sunday. Most o’ the gang went to church, and if the Lord’d never heard o’ Fogarty and Smitty before I bet He knowed who they was when we got through prayin’. We practiced Monday and went over to Washin’ton that night.

Well, you know what come off. Johnson beat us there and Boehling beat us Wednesday in Philly. With Johnson to come back, twicet if necessary, it looked like a short serious.

And then it begin to rain. It’s a wonder the District o’ Columbia wasn’t washed away. Four straight days of it, includin’ Sunday; and I never seen it come down so hard. A cleanin’ like that might do Pittsburgh or Chi some good, but it looked like wastin’ it in Washin’ton. We was anxious to get the serious over with; and the more it rained, the worse we hated it. We never figured that it was the best thing that could of happened to us!

I’m the guy they’d ought to thank for coppin’ the league pennant. And the rain and me together was what saved us from a awful lickin’ for the big dough. On Sunday night, while we was still layin’ round the hotel in Washin’ton, where we’d been stalled since Thursday, I got my hunch. I went to Red with it.

“Maybe one o’ them fellers could help us out now,” I says.

“What makes you think so?” says Red.

“Well,” I says, “they’ve had time to get back in shape.”

“No use,” says Red. “I was just talkin’ to Smitty in the dinin’ room. He couldn’t even hold his knife. He says his mitt feels just as bad as it did the first day.”

“How about Fogarty?” I ast.

“He ain’t no better off,” says Red. “The worst of it is that neither one o’ them seems to care.”

“Maybe I can wake ’em up,” I says.

“You got my permission to try,” says Red.

Me and Fogarty wasn’t roomin’ together. The trainer was doubled up with him and they had another guy lookin’ out for Smitty. Neither o’ them had put on a suit, but they’d saw us get our two beatin’s from the stand. I found Smitty first and took him into the bar.

“How does it look to you?” I says.

“We’re licked,” says he.

“Don’t be too sure!” I says.

“What do you mean?” he ast me. “What chancet have we got with nobody to pitch?”

“We got somebody to pitch now,” I says.

“Who?” says Smitty.

“Fogarty,” says I. “The doctor says he’s all right and Red’s goin’ to start him tomorrow.”

“You’re crazy!” says Smitty. “The doctor said he wouldn’t be no good till next year.”

“That was pretty near a week ago,” I says. “Besides, that doctor didn’t know nothin’. We had the best doctor in Washin’ton up to see him tonight⁠—the doctor that looks after the President and all the congressmen. He says they’s nothin’ at all the matter with him.”

I left Smitty then and went lookin’ for Fogarty.

I found him in his room gettin’ his poor souper rubbed. I spoke my piece over again. I told him Smitty’d been pronounced cured by the President’s special surgeon and that he was goin’ to start the next day’s game.

An hour later I run into Red, and he was smilin’ like Davis’ wife.

“You’ve did it, old boy!” he says. “They both been after me till I had to duck out in the wet to get away from ’em. They both insist on workin’ tomorrow, and I told ’em I wasn’t goin’ to decide on my pitcher till mornin’.”

“I guess I don’t know nothin’!” I says. “Which one are you goin’ to start?”

“The one that can throw a ball with the least pain,” says Red.

You know the rest of it. The sun shined on us next day, and Smitty shut ’em out and beat Johnson on the wettest grounds I ever seen! I don’t know yet how he gripped a wet ball with that hand, but he done it. And Fogarty’s game Tuesday was even better. If his arm hurt he kept it to himself.

Smitty come back agin Johnson Wednesday and pitched the prettiest game that was ever pitched. Milan and Gandil and them might just as well of used jackstraws as bats, for all the good their swingin’ done. He whiffed plain sixteen men and Johnson’s two-bagger was their only wallop. Nobody didn’t grudge Walter that one, ’cause he pitched a grand game too.

Well, the honor o’ coppin’ the final pastime and winnin’ the title went to Fogarty; and it pleased him about as much as a toothache. Do you know why? ’Cause the papers was full o’ Smitty’s two victories over Johnson and didn’t say much about nothin’ else. Fogarty told me afterward that if he’d thought at the time he’d of refused to pitch Thursday and made Red work him agin the big blond in the seventh game.

“But,” I says, “s’pose Red had pitched Smitty right back and he’d of trimmed ’em and they hadn’t been no seventh game anyway. Then where’d you of been at?”

“That’s right!” he says. “That wop is just lucky enough to of did it, too, even if he can’t pitch up an alley.”

Well, I made a little speech in the clubhouse and collected a purse of a hundred and fifty bucks. I’m goin’ to send it to Jack Barnett as soon as I can get his address. That’ll fix him up on that bet he made with Punch Knoll and give him a little spendin’ money besides. If he hadn’t of told me that stuff in Dayton we’d of been fightin’ the Cardinals for seventh place. And if he’d of told it to some guys they wouldn’t of had sense enough to of token advantage of it.

One o’ the Philly doctors told Red, and Red told me, that we’d prob’ly ruined both o’ them guys for the next season by workin’ ’em in the shape they was in. But I should worry! Between me and you, I ain’t goin’ to be with the Phillies next year. I’m goin’ to manage the Mobile Club; and maybe I can play some in that climate. And I guess I don’t know nothin’ about managin’ a ball club. No; I guess not!

Horseshoes

The series ended Tuesday, but I had stayed in Philadelphia an extra day on the chance of there being some followup stuff worth sending. Nothing had broken loose; so I filed some stuff about what the Athletics and Giants were going to do with their dough, and then caught the eight o’clock train for Chicago.

Having passed up supper in order to get my story away and grab the train, I went to the buffet car right after I’d planted my grips. I sat down at one of the tables and ordered a sandwich. Four salesmen were playing rum at the other table and all the chairs in the car were occupied; so it didn’t surprise me when somebody flopped down in the seat opposite me.

I looked up from my paper and with a little thrill recognized my companion. Now I’ve been experting round the country with ball players so much that it doesn’t usually excite me to meet one face to face, even if he’s a star. I can talk with Tyrus without getting all fussed up. But this particular player had jumped from obscurity to fame so suddenly and had played such an important though brief part in the recent argument between the Macks and McGraws that I couldn’t help being a little awed by his proximity.

It was none other than Grimes, the utility outfielder Connie had been forced to use in the last game because of the injury to Joyce⁠—Grimes, whose miraculous catch in the eleventh inning had robbed Parker of a home run and the Giants of victory, and whose own homer⁠—a fluky one⁠—had given the Athletics another World’s Championship.

I had met Grimes one day during the spring he was with the Cubs, but I knew he wouldn’t remember me. A ball player never recalls a reporter’s face on less than six introductions or his name on less than twenty. However, I resolved to speak to him, and had just mustered sufficient courage to open a conversation when he saved me the trouble.

“Whose picture have they got there?” he asked, pointing to my paper.

“Speed Parker’s,” I replied.

“What do they say about him?” asked Grimes.

“I’ll read it to you,” I said:

“ ‘Speed Parker, McGraw’s great third baseman, is ill in a local hospital with nervous prostration, the result of the strain of the World’s Series, in which he played such a stellar role. Parker is in such a dangerous condition that no one is allowed to see him. Members of the New York team and fans from Gotham called at the hospital today, but were unable to gain admittance to his ward. Philadelphians hope he will recover speedily and will suffer no permanent ill effects from his sickness, for he won their admiration by his work in the series, though he was on a rival team. A lucky catch by Grimes, the Athletics’ substitute outfielder, was all that prevented Parker from winning the title for New York. According to Manager Mack, of the champions, the series would have been over in four games but for Parker’s wonderful exhibition of nerve and⁠—’ ”

“That’ll be a plenty,” Grimes interrupted. “And that’s just what you might expect from one o’ them doughheaded reporters. If all the baseball writers was where they belonged they’d have to build an annex to Matteawan.”

I kept my temper with very little effort⁠—it takes more than a peevish ball player’s remarks to insult one of our fraternity; but I didn’t exactly understand his peeve.

“Doesn’t Parker deserve the bouquet?” I asked.

“Oh, they can boost him all they want to,” said Grimes; “but when they call that catch lucky and don’t mention the fact that Parker is the luckiest guy in the world, somethin’ must be wrong with ’em. Did you see the serious?”

“No,” I lied glibly, hoping to draw from him the cause of his grouch.

“Well,” he said, “you sure missed somethin’. They never was a serious like it before and they won’t never be one again. It went the full seven games and every game was a bear. They was one big innin’ every day and Parker was the big cheese in it. Just as Connie says, the Ath-a-letics would of cleaned ’em in four games but for Parker; but it wasn’t because he’s a great ball player⁠—it was because he was born with a knife, fork and spoon in his mouth, and a rabbit’s foot hung round his neck.

“You may not know it, but I’m Grimes, the guy that made the lucky catch. I’m the guy that won the serious with a hit⁠—a home-run hit; and I’m here to tell you that if I’d had one-tenth o’ Parker’s luck they’d of heard about me long before yesterday. They say my homer was lucky. Maybe it was; but, believe me, it was time things broke for me. They been breakin’ for him all his life.”

“Well,” I said, “his luck must have gone back on him if he’s in a hospital with nervous prostration.”

“Nervous prostration nothin’,” said Grimes. “He’s in a hospital because his face is all out o’ shape and he’s ashamed to appear on the street. I don’t usually do so much talkin’ and I’m ravin’ a little tonight because I’ve had a couple o’ drinks; but⁠—”

“Have another,” said I, ringing for the waiter, “and talk some more.”

“I made two hits yesterday,” Grimes went on, “but the crowd only seen one. I busted up the game and the serious with the one they seen. The one they didn’t see was the one I busted up a guy’s map with⁠—and Speed Parker was the guy. That’s why he’s in a hospital. He may be able to play ball next year; but I’ll bet my share o’ the dough that McGraw won’t reco’nize him when he shows up at Marlin in the spring.”

“When did this come off?” I asked. “And why?”

“It come off outside the clubhouse after yesterday’s battle,” he said; “and I hit him because he called me a name⁠—a name I won’t stand for from him.”

“What did he call you?” I queried, expecting to hear one of the delicate epithets usually applied by conquered to conqueror on the diamond.

“ ‘Horseshoes!’ ” was Grimes’ amazing reply.

“But, good Lord!” I remonstrated, “I’ve heard of ball players calling each other that, and Lucky Stiff, and Four-leaf Clover, ever since I was a foot high, and I never knew them to start fights about it.”

“Well,” said Grimes, “I might as well give you all the dope; and then if you don’t think I was justified I’ll pay your fare from here to wherever you’re goin’. I don’t want you to think I’m kickin’ about trifles⁠—or that I’m kickin’ at all, for that matter. I just want to prove to you that he didn’t have no license to pull that Horseshoes stuff on me and that I only give him what was comin’ to him.”

“Go ahead and shoot,” said I.

“Give us some more o’ the same,” said Grimes to the passing waiter. And then he told me about it.

Maybe you’ve heard that me and Speed Parker was raised in the same town⁠—Ishpeming, Michigan. We was kids together, and though he done all the devilment I got all the lickin’s. When we was about twelve years old Speed throwed a rotten egg at the teacher and I got expelled. That made me sick o’ schools and I wouldn’t never go to one again, though my ol’ man beat me up and the truant officers threatened to have me hung.

Well, while Speed was learnin’ what was the principal products o’ New Hampshire and Texas I was workin’ round the freight-house and drivin’ a dray.

We’d both been playin’ ball all our lives; and when the town organized a semipro club we got jobs with it. We was to draw two bucks apiece for each game and they played every Sunday. We played four games before we got our first pay. They was a hole in my pants pocket as big as the home plate, but I forgot about it and put the dough in there. It wasn’t there when I got home. Speed didn’t have no hole in his pocket⁠—you can bet on that! Afterward the club hired a good outfielder and I was canned. They was huntin’ for another third baseman too; but, o’ course, they didn’t find none and Speed held his job.

The next year they started the Northern Peninsula League. We landed with the home team. The league opened in May and blowed up the third week in June. They paid off all the outsiders first and then had just money enough left to settle with one of us two Ishpeming guys. The night they done the payin’ I was out to my uncle’s farm, so they settled with Speed and told me I’d have to wait for mine. I’m still waitin’!

Gene Higgins, who was manager o’ the Battle Creek Club, lived in Houghton, and that winter we goes over and strikes him for a job. He give it to us and we busted in together two years ago last spring.

I had a good year down there. I hit over .300 and stole all the bases in sight. Speed got along good too, and they was several big-league scouts lookin’ us over. The Chicago Cubs bought Speed outright and four clubs put in a draft for me. Three of ’em⁠—Cleveland and the New York Giants and the Boston Nationals⁠—needed outfielders bad, and it would of been a pipe for me to of made good with any of ’em. But who do you think got me? The same Chicago Cubs; and the only outfielders they had at that time was Schulte and Leach and Good and Williams and Stewart, and one or two others.

Well, I didn’t figure I was any worse off than Speed. The Cubs had Zimmerman at third base and it didn’t look like they was any danger of a busher beatin’ him out; but Zimmerman goes and breaks his leg the second day o’ the season⁠—that’s a year ago last April⁠—and Speed jumps right in as a regular. Do you think anything like that could happen to Schulte or Leach, or any o’ them outfielders? No, sir! I wore out my uniform slidin’ up and down the bench and wonderin’ whether they’d ship me to Fort Worth or Siberia.

Now I want to tell you about the miserable luck Speed had right off the reel. We was playin’ at St. Louis. They had a one-run lead in the eighth, when their pitcher walked Speed with one out. Saier hits a high fly to centre and Parker starts with the crack o’ the bat. Both coachers was yellin’ at him to go back, but he thought they was two out and he was clear round to third base when the ball come down. And Oakes muffs it! O’ course he scored and the game was tied up.

Parker come in to the bench like he’d did something wonderful.

“Did you think they was two out?” ast Hank.

“No,” says Speed, blushin’.

“Then what did you run for?” says Hank.

“I had a hunch he was goin’ to drop the ball,” says Speed; and Hank pretty near falls off the bench.

The next day he come up with one out and the sacks full, and the score tied in the sixth. He smashes one on the ground straight at Hauser and it looked like a cinch double play; but just as Hauser was goin’ to grab it the ball hit a rough spot and hopped a mile over his head. It got between Oakes and Magee and went clear to the fence. Three guys scored and Speed pulled up at third. The papers come out and said the game was won by a three-bagger from the bat o’ Parker, the Cubs’ sensational kid third baseman. Gosh!

We go home to Chi and are havin’ a hot battle with Pittsburgh. This time Speed’s turn come when they was two on and two out, and Pittsburgh a run to the good⁠—I think it was the eighth innin’. Cooper gives him a fast one and he hits it straight up in the air. O’ course the runners started goin’, but it looked hopeless because they wasn’t no wind or high sky to bother anybody. Mowrey and Gibson both goes after the ball; and just as Mowrey was set for the catch Gibson bumps into him and they both fall down. Two runs scored and Speed got to second. Then what does he do but try to steal third⁠—with two out too! And Gibson’s peg pretty near hits the left field seats on the fly.

When Speed comes to the bench Hank says:

“If I was you I’d quit playin’ ball and go to Monte Carlo.”

“What for?” says Speed.

“You’re so dam’ lucky!” says Hank.

“So is Ty Cobb,” says Speed. That’s how he hated himself!

First trip to Cincy we run into a couple of old Ishpeming boys. They took us out one night, and about twelve o’clock I said we’d have to go back to the hotel or we’d get fined. Speed said I had cold feet and he stuck with the boys. I went back alone and Hank caught me comin’ in and put a fifty-dollar plaster on me. Speed stayed out all night long and Hank never knowed it. I says to myself: “Wait till he gets out there and tries to play ball without no sleep!” But the game that day was called off on account o’ rain. Can you beat it?

I remember what he got away with the next afternoon the same as though it happened yesterday. In the second innin’ they walked him with nobody down, and he took a big lead off first base like he always does. Benton throwed over there three or four times to scare him back, and the last time he throwed, Hobby hid the ball. The coacher seen it and told Speed to hold the bag; but he didn’t pay no attention. He started leadin’ right off again and Hobby tried to tag him, but the ball slipped out of his hand and rolled about a yard away. Parker had plenty o’ time to get back; but, instead o’ that, he starts for second. Hobby picked up the ball and shot it down to Groh⁠—and Groh made a square muff.

Parker slides into the bag safe and then gets up and throws out his chest like he’d made the greatest play ever. When the ball’s throwed back to Benton, Speed leads off about thirty foot and stands there in a trance. Clarke signs for a pitch-out and pegs down to second to nip him. He was caught flatfooted⁠—that is, he would of been with a decent throw; but Clarke’s peg went pretty near to Latonia. Speed scored and strutted over to receive our hearty congratulations. Some o’ the boys was laughin’ and he thought they was laughin’ with him instead of at him.

It was in the ninth, though, that he got by with one o’ the worst I ever seen. The Reds was a run behind and Marsans was on third base with two out. Hobby, I think it was, hit one on the ground right at Speed and he picked it up clean. The crowd all got up and started for the exits. Marsans run toward the plate in the faint hope that the peg to first would be wild. All of a sudden the boys on the Cincy bench begun yellin’ at him to slide, and he done so. He was way past the plate when Speed’s throw got to Archer. The bonehead had shot the ball home instead o’ to first base, thinkin’ they was only one down. We was all crazy, believin’ his nut play had let ’em tie it up; but he comes tearin’ in, tellin’ Archer to tag Marsans. So Jim walks over and tags the Cuban, who was brushin’ off his uniform.

“You’re out!” says Klem. “You never touched the plate.”

I guess Marsans knowed the umps was right because he didn’t make much of a holler. But Speed sure got a pannin’ in the clubhouse.

“I suppose you knowed he was goin’ to miss the plate!” says Hank sarcastic as he could.

Everybody on the club roasted him, but it didn’t do no good.

Well, you know what happened to me. I only got into one game with the Cubs⁠—one afternoon when Leach was sick. We was playin’ the Boston bunch and Tyler was workin’ against us. I always had trouble with left-handers and this was one of his good days. I couldn’t see what he throwed up there. I got one foul durin’ the afternoon’s entertainment; and the wind was blowin’ a hundred-mile gale, so that the best outfielder in the world couldn’t judge a fly ball. That Boston bunch must of hit fifty of ’em and they all come to my field.

If I caught any I’ve forgot about it. Couple o’ days after that I got notice o’ my release to Indianapolis.

Parker kept right on all season doin’ the blamedest things you ever heard of and gettin’ by with ’em. One o’ the boys told me about it later. If they was playin’ a doubleheader in St. Louis, with the thermometer at 130 degrees, he’d get put out by the umps in the first innin’ o’ the first game. If he started to steal the catcher’d drop the pitch or somebody’d muff the throw. If he hit a pop fly the sun’d get in somebody’s eyes. If he took a swell third strike with the bases full the umps would call it a ball. If he cut first base by twenty feet the umps would be readin’ the mornin’ paper.

Zimmerman’s leg mended, so that he was all right by June; and then Saier got sick and they tried Speed at first base. He’d never saw the bag before; but things kept on breakin’ for him and he played it like a house afire. The Cubs copped the pennant and Speed got in on the big dough, besides playin’ a whale of a game through the whole serious.

Speed and me both went back to Ishpeming to spend the winter⁠—though the Lord knows it ain’t no winter resort. Our homes was there; and besides, in my case, they was a certain girl livin’ in the old burg.

Parker, o’ course, was the hero and the swell guy when we got home. He’d been in the World’s Serious and had plenty o’ dough in his kick. I come home with nothin’ but my suitcase and a hard-luck story, which I kept to myself. I hadn’t even went good enough in Indianapolis to be sure of a job there again.

That fall⁠—last fall⁠—an uncle o’ Speed’s died over in the Soo and left him ten thousand bucks. I had an uncle down in the Lower Peninsula who was worth five times that much⁠—but he had good health!

This girl I spoke about was the prettiest thing I ever see. I’d went with her in the old days, and when I blew back I found she was still strong for me. They wasn’t a great deal o’ variety in Ishpeming for a girl to pick from. Her and I went to the dance every Saturday night and to church Sunday nights. I called on her Wednesday evenin’s, besides takin’ her to all the shows that come along⁠—rotten as the most o’ them was.

I never knowed Speed was makin’ a play for this doll till along last Feb’uary. The minute I seen what was up I got busy. I took her out sleigh-ridin’ and kept her out in the cold till she’d promised to marry me. We set the date for this fall⁠—I figured I’d know better where I was at by that time.

Well, we didn’t make no secret o’ bein’ engaged; down in the poolroom one night Speed come up and congratulated me. He says:

“You got a swell girl, Dick! I wouldn’t mind bein’ in your place. You’re mighty lucky to cop her out⁠—you old Horseshoes, you!”

“Horseshoes!” I says. “You got a fine license to call anybody Horseshoes! I suppose you ain’t never had no luck?”

“Not like you,” he says.

I was feelin’ too good about grabbin’ the girl to get sore at the time; but when I got to thinkin’ about it a few minutes afterward it made me mad clear through. What right did that bird have to talk about me bein’ lucky?

Speed was playin’ freeze-out at a table near the door, and when I started home some o’ the boys with him says:

“Good night, Dick.”

I said good night and then Speed looked up.

“Good night, Horseshoes!” he says.

That got my nanny this time.

“Shut up, you lucky stiff!” I says. “If you wasn’t so dam’ lucky you’d be sweepin’ the streets.” Then I walks on out.

I was too busy with the girl to see much o’ Speed after that. He left home about the middle o’ the month to go to Tampa with the Cubs. I got notice from Indianapolis that I was sold to Baltimore. I didn’t care much about goin’ there and I wasn’t anxious to leave home under the circumstances, so I didn’t report till late.

When I read in the papers along in April that Speed had been traded to Boston for a couple o’ pitchers I thought: “Gee! He must of lost his rabbit’s foot!” Because, even if the Cubs didn’t cop again, they’d have a city serious with the White Sox and get a bunch o’ dough that way. And they wasn’t no chance in the world for the Boston Club to get nothin’ but their salaries.

It wasn’t another month, though, till Shafer, o’ the Giants, quit baseball and McGraw was up against it for a third baseman. Next thing I knowed Speed was traded to New York and was with another winner⁠—for they never was out o’ first place all season.

I was gettin’ along all right at Baltimore and Dunnie liked me; so I felt like I had somethin’ more than just a one-year job⁠—somethin’ I could get married on. It was all framed that the weddin’ was comin’ off as soon as this season was over; so you can believe I was pullin’ for October to hurry up and come.

One day in August, two months ago, Dunnie come in the clubhouse and handed me the news.

“Rube Oldring’s busted his leg,” he says, “and he’s out for the rest o’ the season. Connie’s got a youngster named Joyce that he can stick in there, but he’s got to have an extra outfielder. He’s made me a good proposition for you and I’m goin’ to let you go. It’ll be pretty soft for you, because they got the pennant cinched and they’ll cut you in on the big money.”

“Yes,” I says; “and when they’re through with me they’ll ship me to Hellangone, and I’ll be draggin’ down about seventy-five bucks a month next year.”

“Nothin’ like that,” says Dunnie. “If he don’t want you next season he’s got to ask for waivers; and if you get out o’ the big league you come right back here. That’s all framed.”

So that’s how I come to get with the Ath-a-letics. Connie give me a nice, comf’table seat in one corner o’ the bench and I had the pleasure o’ watchin’ a real ball club perform once every afternoon and sometimes twice.

Connie told me that as soon as they had the flag cinched he was goin’ to lay off some o’ his regulars and I’d get a chance to play.

Well, they cinched it the fourth day o’ September and our next engagement was with Washin’ton on Labor Day. We had two games and I was in both of ’em. And I broke in with my usual lovely luck, because the pitchers I was ast to face was Boehling, a nasty left-hander, and this guy Johnson.

The mornin’ game was Boehling’s and he wasn’t no worse than some o’ the rest of his kind. I only whiffed once and would of had a triple if Milan hadn’t run from here to New Orleans and stole one off me.

I’m not boastin’ about my first experience with Johnson though. They can’t never tell me he throws them balls with his arm. He’s got a gun concealed about his person and he shoots ’em up there. I was leadin’ off in Murphy’s place and the game was a little delayed in startin’, because I’d watched the big guy warm up and wasn’t in no hurry to get to that plate. Before I left the bench Connie says:

“Don’t try to take no healthy swing. Just meet ’em and you’ll get along better.”

So I tried to just meet the first one he throwed; but when I stuck out my bat Henry was throwin’ the pill back to Johnson. Then I thought: Maybe if I start swingin’ now at the second one I’ll hit the third one. So I let the second one come over and the umps guessed it was another strike, though I’ll bet a thousand bucks he couldn’t see it no more’n I could.

While Johnson was still windin’ up to pitch again I started to swing⁠—and the big cuss crosses me with a slow one. I lunged at it twice and missed it both times, and the force o’ my wallop throwed me clean back to the bench. The Ath-a-letics was all laughin’ at me and I laughed too, because I was glad that much of it was over.

McInnes gets a base hit off him in the second innin’ and I ast him how he done it.

“He’s a friend o’ mine,” says Jack, “and he lets up when he pitches to me.”

I made up my mind right there that if I was goin’ to be in the league next year I’d go out and visit Johnson this winter and get acquainted.

I wished before the day was over that I was hittin’ in the catcher’s place, because the fellers down near the tail-end of the battin’ order only had to face him three times. He fanned me on three pitched balls again in the third, and when I come up in the sixth he scared me to death by pretty near beanin’ me with the first one.

“Be careful!” says Henry. “He’s gettin’ pretty wild and he’s liable to knock you away from your uniform.”

“Don’t he never curve one?” I ast.

“Sure!” says Henry. “Do you want to see his curve?”

“Yes,” I says, knowin’ the hook couldn’t be no worse’n the fast one.

So he give me three hooks in succession and I missed ’em all; but I felt more comf’table than when I was duckin’ his fast ball. In the ninth he hit my bat with a curve and the ball went on the ground to McBride. He booted it, but throwed me out easy⁠—because I was so surprised at not havin’ whiffed that I forgot to run!

Well, I went along like that for the rest o’ the season, runnin’ up against the best pitchers in the league and not exactly murderin’ ’em. Everything I tried went wrong, and I was smart enough to know that if anything had depended on the games I wouldn’t of been in there for two minutes. Joyce and Strunk and Murphy wasn’t jealous o’ me a bit; but they was glad to take turns restin’, and I didn’t care much how I went so long as I was sure of a job next year.

I’d wrote to the girl a couple o’ times askin’ her to set the exact date for our weddin’; but she hadn’t paid no attention. She said she was glad I was with the Ath-a-letics, but she thought the Giants was goin’ to beat us. I might of suspected from that that somethin’ was wrong, because not even a girl would pick the Giants to trim that bunch of ourn. Finally, the day before the serious started, I sent her a kind o’ sassy letter sayin’ I guessed it was up to me to name the day, and askin’ whether October twentieth was all right. I told her to wire me yes or no.

I’d been readin’ the dope about Speed all season, and I knowed he’d had a whale of a year and that his luck was right with him; but I never dreamed a man could have the Lord on his side as strong as Speed did in that World’s Serious! I might as well tell you all the dope, so long as you wasn’t there.

The first game was on our grounds and Connie give us a talkin’ to in the clubhouse beforehand.

“The shorter this serious is,” he says, “the better for us. If it’s a long serious we’re goin’ to have trouble, because McGraw’s got five pitchers he can work and we’ve got about three; so I want you boys to go at ’em from the jump and play ’em off their feet. Don’t take things easy, because it ain’t goin’ to be no snap. Just because we’ve licked ’em before ain’t no sign we’ll do it this time.”

Then he calls me to one side and ast me what I knowed about Parker.

“You was with the Cubs when he was, wasn’t you?” he says.

“Yes,” I says; “and he’s the luckiest stiff you ever seen! If he got stewed and fell in the gutter he’d catch a fish.”

“I don’t like to hear a good ball player called lucky,” says Connie. “He must have a lot of ability or McGraw wouldn’t use him regular. And he’s been hittin’ about .340 and played a bang-up game at third base. That can’t be all luck.”

“Wait till you see him,” I says; “and if you don’t say he’s the luckiest guy in the world you can sell me to the Boston Bloomer Girls. He’s so lucky,” I says, “that if they traded him to the St. Louis Browns they’d have the pennant cinched by the Fourth o’ July.”

And I’ll bet Connie was willin’ to agree with me before it was over.

Well, the Chief worked against the Big Rube in that game. We beat ’em, but they give us a battle and it was Parker that made it close. We’d gone along nothin’ and nothin’ till the seventh, and then Rube walks Collins and Baker lifts one over that little old wall. You’d think by this time them New York pitchers would know better than to give that guy anything he can hit.

In their part o’ the ninth the Chief still had ’em shut out and two down, and the crowd was goin’ home; but Doyle gets hit in the sleeve with a pitched ball and it’s Speed’s turn. He hits a foul pretty near straight up, but Schang misjudges it. Then he lifts another one and this time McInnes drops it. He’d ought to of been out twice. The Chief tries to make him hit at a bad one then, because he’d got him two strikes and nothin’. He hit at it all right⁠—kissed it for three bases between Strunk and Joyce! And it was a wild pitch that he hit. Doyle scores, o’ course, and the bugs suddenly decide not to go home just yet. I fully expected to see him steal home and get away with it, but Murray cut into the first ball and lined out to Barry.

Plank beat Matty two to one the next day in New York, and again Speed and his rabbit’s foot give us an awful argument. Matty wasn’t so good as usual and we really ought to of beat him bad. Two different times Strunk was on second waitin’ for any kind o’ wallop, and both times Barry cracked ’em down the third-base line like a shot. Speed stopped the first one with his stomach and extricated the pill just in time to nail Barry at first base and retire the side. The next time he throwed his glove in front of his face in self-defense and the ball stuck in it.

In the sixth innin’ Schang was on third base and Plank on first, and two down, and Murphy combed an awful one to Speed’s left. He didn’t have time to stoop over and he just stuck out his foot. The ball hit it and caromed in two hops right into Doyle’s hands on second base before Plank got there. Then in the seventh Speed bunts one and Baker trips and falls goin’ after it or he’d of threw him out a mile. They was two gone; so Speed steals second, and, o’ course, Schang has to make a bad peg right at that time and lets him go to third. Then Collins boots one on Murray and they’ve got a run. But it didn’t do ’em no good, because Collins and Baker and McInnes come up in the ninth and walloped ’em where Parker couldn’t reach ’em.

Comin’ back to Philly on the train that night, I says to Connie:

“What do you think o’ that Parker bird now?”

“He’s lucky, all right,” says Connie smilin’; “but we won’t hold it against him if he don’t beat us with it.”

“It ain’t too late,” I says. “He ain’t pulled his real stuff yet.”

The whole bunch was talkin’ about him and his luck, and sayin’ it was about time for things to break against him. I warned ’em that they wasn’t no chance⁠—that it was permanent with him.

Bush and Tesreau hooked up next day and neither o’ them had much stuff. Everybody was hittin’ and it looked like anybody’s game right up to the ninth. Speed had got on every time he come up⁠—the wind blowin’ his fly balls away from the outfielders and the infielders bootin’ when he hit ’em on the ground.

When the ninth started the score was seven apiece. Connie and McGraw both had their whole pitchin’ staffs warmin’ up. The crowd was wild, because they’d been all kinds of action. They wasn’t no danger of anybody’s leavin’ their seats before this game was over.

Well, Bescher is walked to start with and Connie’s about ready to give Bush the hook; but Doyle pops out tryin’ to bunt. Then Speed gets two strikes and two balls, and it looked to me like the next one was right over the heart; but Connolly calls it a ball and gives him another chance. He whales the groove ball to the fence in left center and gets round to third on it, while Bescher scores. Right then Bush comes out and the Chief goes in. He whiffs Murray and has two strikes on Merkle when Speed makes a break for home⁠—and, o’ course, that was the one ball Schang dropped in the whole serious!

They had a two-run lead on us then and it looked like a cinch for them to hold it, because the minute Tesreau showed a sign o’ weakenin’ McGraw was sure to holler for Matty or the Rube. But you know how quick that bunch of ourn can make a two-run lead look sick. Before McGraw could get Jeff out o’ there we had two on the bases.

Then Rube comes in and fills ’em up by walkin’ Joyce. It was Eddie’s turn to wallop and if he didn’t do nothin’ we had Baker comin’ up next. This time Collins saved Baker the trouble and whanged one clear to the woods. Everybody scored but him⁠—and he could of, too, if it’d been necessary.

In the clubhouse the boys naturally felt pretty good. We’d copped three in a row and it looked like we’d make it four straight, because we had the Chief to send back at ’em the followin’ day.

“Your friend Parker is lucky,” the boys says to me, “but it don’t look like he could stop us now.”

I felt the same way and was consultin’ the timetables to see whether I could get a train out o’ New York for the West next evenin’. But do you think Speed’s luck was ready to quit? Not yet! And it’s a wonder we didn’t all go nuts durin’ the next few days. If words could kill, Speed would of died a thousand times. And I wish he had!

They wasn’t no record-breakin’ crowd out when we got to the Polo Grounds. I guess the New York bugs was pretty well discouraged and the bettin’ was eight to five that we’d cop that battle and finish it. The Chief was the only guy that warmed up for us and McGraw didn’t have no choice but to use Matty, with the whole thing dependin’ on this game.

They went along like the two swell pitchers they was till Speed’s innin’, which in this battle was the eighth. Nobody scored, and it didn’t look like they was ever goin’ to till Murphy starts off that round with a perfect bunt and Joyce sacrifices him to second. All Matty had to do then was to get rid o’ Collins and Baker⁠—and that’s about as easy as sellin’ silk socks to an Eskimo.

He didn’t give Eddie nothin’ he wanted to hit, though; and finally he slaps one on the ground to Doyle. Larry made the play to first base and Murphy moved to third. We all figured Matty’d walk Baker then, and he done it. Connie sends Baker down to second on the first pitch to McInnes, but Meyers don’t pay no attention to him⁠—they was playin’ for McInnes and wasn’t takin’ no chances o’ throwin’ the ball away.

Well, the count goes to three and two on McInnes and Matty comes with a curve⁠—he’s got some curve too; but Jack happened to meet it and⁠—Blooie! Down the left foul line where he always hits! I never seen a ball hit so hard in my life. No infielder in the world could of stopped it. But I’ll give you a thousand bucks if that ball didn’t go kerplunk right into the third bag and stop as dead as George Washington! It was child’s play for Speed to pick it up and heave it over to Merkle before Jack got there. If anybody else had been playin’ third base the bag would of ducked out o’ the way o’ that wallop; but even the bases themselves was helpin’ him out.

The two runs we ought to of had on Jack’s smash would of been just enough to beat ’em, because they got the only run o’ the game in their half⁠—or, I should say, the Lord give it to ’em.

Doyle’d been throwed out and up come Parker, smilin’. The minute I seen him smile I felt like somethin’ was comin’ off and I made the remark on the bench.

Well, the Chief pitched one right at him and he tried to duck. The ball hit his bat and went on a line between Jack and Eddie. Speed didn’t know he’d hit it till the guys on the bench wised him up. Then he just had time to get to first base. They tried the hit-and-run on the second ball and Murray lifts a high fly that Murphy didn’t have to move for. Collins pulled the old bluff about the ball bein’ on the ground and Barry yells, “Go on! Go on!” like he was the coacher. Speed fell for it and didn’t know where the ball was no more’n a rabbit; he just run his fool head off and we was gettin’ all ready to laugh when the ball come down and Murphy dropped it!

If Parker had stuck near first base, like he ought to of done, he couldn’t of got no farther’n second; but with the start he got he was pretty near third when Murphy made the muff, and it was a cinch for him to score. The next two guys was easy outs; so they wouldn’t of had a run except for Speed’s boner. We couldn’t do nothin’ in the ninth and we was licked.

Well, that was a tough one to lose; but we figured that Matty was through and we’d wind it up the next day, as we had Plank ready to send back at ’em. We wasn’t afraid o’ the Rube, because he hadn’t never bothered Collins and Baker much.

The two left-handers come together just like everybody’d doped it and it was about even up to the eighth. Plank had been goin’ great and, though the score was two and two, they’d got their two on boots and we’d hit ourn in. We went after Rube in our part o’ the eighth and knocked him out. Demaree stopped us after we’d scored two more.

“It’s all over but the shoutin’!” says Davis on the bench.

“Yes,” I says, “unless that seventh son of a seventh son gets up there again.”

He did, and he come up after they’d filled the bases with a boot, a base hit and a walk with two out. I says to Davis:

“If I was Plank I’d pass him and give ’em one run.”

“That wouldn’t be no baseball,” says Davis⁠—“not with Murray comin’ up.”

Well, it mayn’t of been no baseball, but it couldn’t of turned out worse if they’d did it that way. Speed took a healthy at the first ball; but it was a hook and he caught it on the handle, right up near his hands. It started outside the first-base line like a foul and then changed its mind and rolled in. Schang run away from the plate, because it looked like it was up to him to make the play. He picked the ball up and had to make the peg in a hurry.

His throw hit Speed right on top o’ the head and bounded off like it had struck a cement sidewalk. It went clear over to the seats and before McInnes could get it three guys had scored and Speed was on third base. He was left there, but that didn’t make no difference. We was licked again and for the first time the gang really begun to get scared.

We went over to New York Sunday afternoon and we didn’t do no singin’ on the way. Some o’ the fellers tried to laugh, but it hurt ’em. Connie sent us to bed early, but I don’t believe none o’ the bunch got much sleep⁠—I know I didn’t; I was worryin’ too much about the serious and also about the girl, who hadn’t sent me no telegram like I’d ast her to. Monday mornin’ I wired her askin’ what was the matter and tellin’ her I was gettin’ tired of her foolishness. O’ course I didn’t make it so strong as that⁠—but the telegram cost me a dollar and forty cents.

Connie had the choice o’ two pitchers for the sixth game. He could use Bush, who’d been slammed round pretty hard last time out, or the Chief, who’d only had two days’ rest. The rest of ’em⁠—outside o’ Plank⁠—had a epidemic o’ sore arms. Connie finally picked Bush, so’s he could have the Chief in reserve in case we had to play a seventh game. McGraw started Big Jeff and we went at it.

It wasn’t like the last time these two guys had hooked up. This time they both had somethin’, and for eight innin’s runs was as scarce as Chinese policemen. They’d been chances to score on both sides, but the big guy and Bush was both tight in the pinches. The crowd was plumb nuts and yelled like Indians every time a fly ball was caught or a strike called. They’d of got their money’s worth if they hadn’t been no ninth; but, believe me, that was some round!

They was one out when Barry hit one through the box for a base. Schang walked, and it was Bush’s turn. Connie told him to bunt, but he whiffed in the attempt. Then Murphy comes up and walks⁠—and the bases are choked. Young Joyce had been pie for Tesreau all day or else McGraw might of changed pitchers right there. Anyway he left Big Jeff in and he beaned Joyce with a fast one. It sounded like a tire blowin’ out. Joyce falls over in a heap and we chase out there, thinkin’ he’s dead; but he ain’t, and pretty soon he gets up and walks down to first base. Tesreau had forced in a run and again we begun to count the winner’s end. Matty comes in to prevent further damage and Collins flies the side out.

“Hold ’em now! Work hard!” we says to young Bush, and he walks out there just as cool as though he was goin’ to hit fungoes.

McGraw sends up a pinch hitter for Matty and Bush whiffed him. Then Bescher flied out. I was prayin’ that Doyle would end it, because Speed’s turn come after his’n; so I pretty near fell dead when Larry hit safe.

Speed had his old smile and even more chest than usual when he come up there, swingin’ five or six bats. He didn’t wait for Doyle to try and steal, or nothin’. He lit into the first ball, though Bush was tryin’ to waste it. I seen the ball go high in the air toward left field, and then I picked up my glove and got ready to beat it for the gate. But when I looked out to see if Joyce was set, what do you think I seen? He was lyin’ flat on the ground! That blow on the head had got him just as Bush was pitchin’ to Speed. He’d flopped over and didn’t no more know what was goin’ on than if he’d croaked.

Well, everybody else seen it at the same time; but it was too late. Strunk made a run for the ball, but they wasn’t no chance for him to get near it. It hit the ground about ten feet back o’ where Joyce was lyin’ and bounded way over to the end o’ the foul line. You don’t have to be told that Doyle and Parker both scored and the serious was tied up.

We carried Joyce to the clubhouse and after a while he come to. He cried when he found out what had happened. We cheered him up all we could, but he was a pretty sick guy. The trainer said he’d be all right, though, for the final game.

They tossed up a coin to see where they’d play the seventh battle and our club won the toss; so we went back to Philly that night and cussed Parker clear across New Jersey. I was so sore I kicked the stuffin’ out o’ my seat.

You probably heard about the excitement in the burg yesterday mornin’. The demand for tickets was somethin’ fierce and some of ’em sold for as high as twenty-five bucks apiece. Our club hadn’t been lookin’ for no seventh game and they was some tall hustlin’ done round that old ball park.

I started out to the grounds early and bought some New York papers to read on the car. They was a big story that Speed Parker, the Giants’ hero, was goin’ to be married a week after the end o’ the serious. It didn’t give the name o’ the girl, sayin’ Speed had refused to tell it. I figured she must be some dame he’d met round the circuit somewheres.

They was another story by one o’ them smart baseball reporters sayin’ that Parker, on his way up to the plate, had saw that Joyce was about ready to faint and had hit the fly ball to left field on purpose. Can you beat it?

I was goin’ to show that to the boys in the clubhouse, but the minute I blowed in there I got some news that made me forget about everything else. Joyce was very sick and they’d took him to a hospital. It was up to me to play!

Connie come over and ast me whether I’d ever hit against Matty. I told him I hadn’t, but I’d saw enough of him to know he wasn’t no worse’n Johnson. He told me he was goin’ to let me hit second⁠—in Joyce’s place⁠—because he didn’t want to bust up the rest of his combination. He also told me to take my orders from Strunk about where to play for the batters.

“Where shall I play for Parker?” I says, tryin’ to joke and pretend I wasn’t scared to death.

“I wisht I could tell you,” says Connie. “I guess the only thing to do when he comes up is to get down on your knees and pray.”

The rest o’ the bunch slapped me on the back and give me all the encouragement they could. The place was jammed when we went out on the field. They may of been bigger crowds before, but they never was packed together so tight. I doubt whether they was even room enough left for Falkenberg to sit down.

The afternoon papers had printed the stuff about Joyce bein’ out of it, so the bugs was wise that I was goin’ to play. They watched me pretty close in battin’ practice and give me a hand whenever I managed to hit one hard. When I was out catchin’ fungoes the guys in the bleachers cheered me and told me they was with me; but I don’t mind tellin’ you that I was as nervous as a bride.

They wasn’t no need for the announcers to tip the crowd off to the pitchers. Everybody in the United States and Cuba knowed that the Chief’d work for us and Matty for them. The Chief didn’t have no trouble with ’em in the first innin’. Even from where I stood I could see that he had a lot o’ stuff. Bescher and Doyle popped out and Speed whiffed.

Well, I started out makin’ good, with reverse English, in our part. Fletcher booted Murphy’s ground ball and I was sent up to sacrifice. I done a complete job of it⁠—sacrificin’ not only myself but Murphy with a pop fly that Matty didn’t have to move for. That spoiled whatever chance we had o’ gettin’ the jump on ’em; but the boys didn’t bawl me for it.

“That’s all right, old boy. You’re all right!” they said on the bench⁠—if they’d had a gun they’d of shot me.

I didn’t drop no fly balls in the first six innin’s⁠—because none was hit out my way. The Chief was so good that they wasn’t hittin’ nothin’ out o’ the infield. And we wasn’t doin’ nothin’ with Matty, either. I led off in the fourth and fouled the first one. I didn’t molest the other two. But if Connie and the gang talked about me they done it internally. I come up again⁠—with Murphy on third base and two gone in the sixth, and done my little whiffin’ specialty. And still the only people that panned me was the thirty thousand that had paid for the privilege!

My first fieldin’ chance come in the seventh. You’d of thought that I’d of had my nerve back by that time; but I was just as scared as though I’d never saw a crowd before. It was just as well that they was two out when Merkle hit one to me. I staggered under it and finally it hit me on the shoulder. Merkle got to second, but the Chief whiffed the next guy. I was gave some cross looks on the bench and I shouldn’t of blamed the fellers if they’d cut loose with some language; but they didn’t.

They’s no use in me tellin’ you about none o’ the rest of it⁠—except what happened just before the start o’ the eleventh and durin’ that innin’, which was sure the big one o’ yesterday’s pastime⁠—both for Speed and yours sincerely.

The scoreboard was still a row o’ ciphers and Speed’d had only a fair amount o’ luck. He’d made a scratch base hit and robbed our bunch of a couple o’ real ones with impossible stops.

When Schang flied out and wound up our tenth I was leanin’ against the end of our bench. I heard my name spoke, and I turned round and seen a boy at the door.

“Right here!” I says; and he give me a telegram.

“Better not open it till after the game,” says Connie.

“Oh, no; it ain’t no bad news,” I said, for I figured it was an answer from the girl. So I opened it up and read it on the way to my position. It said:

Forgive me, Dick⁠—and forgive Speed too. Letter follows.

Well, sir, I ain’t no baby, but for a minute I just wanted to sit down and bawl. And then, all of a sudden, I got so mad I couldn’t see. I run right into Baker as he was pickin’ up his glove. Then I give him a shove and called him some name, and him and Barry both looked at me like I was crazy⁠—and I was. When I got out in left field I stepped on my own foot and spiked it. I just had to hurt somebody.

As I remember it the Chief fanned the first two of ’em. Then Doyle catches one just right and lams it up against the fence back o’ Murphy. The ball caromed round some and Doyle got all the way to third base. Next thing I seen was Speed struttin’ up to the plate. I run clear in from my position.

“Kill him!” I says to the Chief. “Hit him in the head and kill him, and I’ll go to jail for it!”

“Are you off your nut?” says the Chief. “Go out there and play ball⁠—and quit ravin’.”

Barry and Baker led me away and give me a shove out toward left. Then I heard the crack o’ the bat and I seen the ball comin’ a mile a minute. It was headed between Strunk and I and looked like it would go out o’ the park. I don’t remember runnin’ or nothin’ about it till I run into the concrete wall head first. They told me afterward and all the papers said that it was the greatest catch ever seen. And I never knowed I’d caught the ball!

Some o’ the managers have said my head was pretty hard, but it wasn’t as hard as that concrete. I was pretty near out, but they tell me I walked to the bench like I wasn’t hurt at all. They also tell me that the crowd was a bunch o’ ravin’ maniacs and was throwin’ money at me. I guess the ground-keeper’ll get it.

The boys on the bench was all talkin’ at once and slappin’ me on the back, but I didn’t know what it was about. Somebody told me pretty soon that it was my turn to hit and I picked up the first bat I come to and starts for the plate. McInnes come runnin’ after me and ast me whether I didn’t want my own bat. I cussed him and told him to mind his own business.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out afterward that they was two out. The bases was empty. I’ll tell you just what I had in my mind: I wasn’t thinkin’ about the ball game; I was determined that I was goin’ to get to third base and give that guy my spikes. If I didn’t hit one worth three bases, or if I didn’t hit one at all, I was goin’ to run till I got round to where Speed was, and then slide into him and cut him to pieces!

Right now I can’t tell you whether I hit a fast ball, or a slow ball, or a hook, or a fader⁠—but I hit somethin’. It went over Bescher’s head like a shot and then took a crazy bound. It must of struck a rock or a pop bottle, because it hopped clear over the fence and landed in the bleachers.

Mind you, I learned this afterward. At the time I just knowed I’d hit one somewheres and I starts round the bases. I speeded up when I got near third and took a runnin’ jump at a guy I thought was Parker. I missed him and sprawled all over the bag. Then, all of a sudden, I come to my senses. All the Ath-a-letics was out there to run home with me and it was one o’ them I’d tried to cut. Speed had left the field. The boys picked me up and seen to it that I went on and touched the plate. Then I was carried into the clubhouse by the crazy bugs.

Well, they had a celebration in there and it was a long time before I got a chance to change my clothes. The boys made a big fuss over me. They told me they’d intended to give me five hundred bucks for my divvy, but now I was goin’ to get a full share.

“Parker ain’t the only lucky guy!” says one of ’em. “But even if that ball hadn’t of took that crazy hop you’d of had a triple.”

A triple! That’s just what I’d wanted; and he called me lucky for not gettin’ it!

The Giants was dressin’ in the other part o’ the clubhouse; and when I finally come out there was Speed, standin’ waitin’ for some o’ the others. He seen me comin’ and he smiled. “Hello, Horseshoes!” he says.

He won’t smile no more for a while⁠—it’ll hurt too much. And if any girl wants him when she sees him now⁠—with his nose over shakin’ hands with his ear, and his jaw a couple o’ feet foul⁠—she’s welcome to him. They won’t be no contest!

Grimes leaned over to ring for the waiter.

“Well,” he said, “what about it?”

“You won’t have to pay my fare,” I told him.

“I’ll buy a drink anyway,” said he. “You’ve been a good listener⁠—and I had to get it off my chest.”

“Maybe they’ll have to postpone the wedding,” I said.

“No,” said Grimes. “The weddin’ will take place the day after tomorrow⁠—and I’ll bat for Mr. Parker. Did you think I was goin’ to let him get away with it?”

“What about next year?” I asked.

“I’m goin’ back to the Ath-a-letics,” he said. “And I’m goin’ to hire somebody to call me ‘Horseshoes!’ before every game⁠—because I can sure play that old baseball when I’m mad.”

Back to Baltimore

Well, boys, I’m goin’ right through to Pittsburgh with you if you don’t mind, and I ain’t been traded to your bunch nor the Pirates neither. It’ll be in all the papers tonight or tomorrow mornin’, so they ain’t no use o’ me keepin’ it a secret. I’ve jumped to the Baltimore Feds, and whether Knabe is figurin’ on usin’ me regular or settin’ me on the bench or givin’ me a job washin’ undershirts, I don’t know or I don’t givadam. I couldn’t be no worse off than I was up there.

Managin’ a club may be all OK if the directors is all bachelors and has all o’ them tooken a oath not to never get married. But when a man’s got a wife, they ain’t no tellin’ when he’s goin’ to die, and when he dies and she gets a hold o’ the ball club, good night. If they ever is a skirt elected President o’ the United States, I’ll move to Paris or Europe or somewheres, if I have to walk.

As for this here Mrs. Hayes, the dope about her lettin’ the directors run the club was all bunk. She’s been the boss ever since the old bird croaked, or else I’d of stuck there and finished higher with that gang than they finished since Frank Selee had ’em.

Well, sir, I’m canned out of a managin’ job, and I’m through with the big league, I guess, and I’m goin’ back where I started in at⁠—Baltimore. But you don’t need to waste no sympathy on me. I’m gettin’ as much dough as they give me up there, and they won’t be no chancet o’ me bein’ drove crazy by a skirt. Them Baltimore people used to like me OK when Dunnie had me, and I guess I ain’t did nothin’ since to make ’em sore. I’ll give ’em the best I got, and I’ll let Knabe do all the worryin’. I’m off’n that stuff, and if any boob ever offers me another managin’ job, I’ll bean him with a crowbar or somethin’.

I bet you’ll see in a few days where Mrs. Hayes gets through bein’ a widow, and her next name’s goin’ to be Mrs. William Baker Junior. They ain’t no danger o’ me forgettin’ that name. The guy that owns it is a ball player, but the only thing alike about he and the Baker Connie Mack’s got is that they both listen with their ears. You fellas didn’t never get a look at this bird because he was so good that we didn’t only play him in one game, and that was against the Philly club. If him and her does hook up, he won’t need to play no more. With them runnin’ the team together, they’ll be enough comedy without him puttin’ on a uniform anymore.

You knowed Old Man Hayes, o’ course. He was a good old scout, but he pulled a lot o’ boners, one o’ which was him marryin’ this doll. She’s a handsome devil all right; I’ll slip her that much. But he should ought to of knew that he didn’t cop her because she was a-stuck on him. She had it doped that he was about all in, and it wouldn’t be long till the dough was all hern. His heart was bad, and they was two or three other things the matter with him, and havin’ her round didn’t make him no healthier. At that, he’d of croaked sooner or later without no female help.

He was sure nuts over his ball club, and it hurt him every time we lose a game. You can see where he was hurt pretty often last year. At that, Bill Fox was gettin’ by all right with the managin’ job, when you figure the bunch he had. But finishin’ seventh didn’t make no hit with the old man, even if we thought we done pretty well to stay in the league and not get arrested. Anyway, Bill got canned and the job was gave to me. If I hadn’t ’ve needed the money pretty bad, I wouldn’t never ’ve tooken it.

Them deals I made last winter helped us a whole lot, and when we got down South this spring, we wasn’t a bad lookin’ club, barrin’ one or two positions. We was such a improvement over the old gang that the old man lost his needle and was countin’ the world’s serious receipts along in March. He kept a-askin’ me who did I think would be in the race with us. If I had of told him the truth and says we couldn’t win no pennant unless your bunch and the New York club was killed in a railroad wreck, he’d of canned me. So what was I to do but tell him we had a good fightin’ chancet to cop, when we didn’t have no more chancet than a rabbit or somethin’. I says the luck would have to be with us and if it was we might surprise everybody. That luck stuff was to be my alibi when we landed where we belonged.

The season opened and we got away good. McGraw’s pitchers was in no shape, and we skun ’em three out o’ the first four. We broke even with Philly and give Brooklyn a good lickin’. We was right out in front along with you fellas. Then we struck a slump, and you guys and Philly both goes ahead of us. The old man called me in and ast me why didn’t we stay in first place. I might of told him it was because we knowed we didn’t have no business there. But I stalled and says I didn’t want to have my club go too fast at first or they might maybe get tired out.

Then we come West in May, and the old boy come along with us. We opened up in Cincy and broke even with ’em, though they looked like the worst club in the world. The old man wasn’t feelin’ well, and a doctor told him he should ought to go home, but he says he would go to St. Louis with us. Higgins trimmed us four straight, and that finished the boss. He grabbed a train for home, but croaked on the way there.

It was gave out in the papers that young Mrs. Hayes would be president o’ the club, but I didn’t take no stock in that till we come in off’n the road. I was like everybody else; I figured that Williams, the vice president, and them other directors would run things.

But when we got home, after a rotten trip, she ast me to come and see her at the office. I goes, and there she is, walkin’ up and down the rug just like her husband was always doin’. When we had shooken hands, she says:

“Well, Mr. Dixon, you didn’t have no success in the West.”

“No,” I says. “We run into some tough luck.”

Then she ast me was it tough luck or rotten ball playin’, and I says it was some o’ both. Then she says:

“We’ll try and stren’then your team. I and Mr. Williams, the vice president, has decided we got to spend some dough for new players. I have gave Mr. Sullivan orders to go scoutin’ round the colleges.”

“Lay off’n the colleges,” I says. “We don’t need no more ornaments. What we should ought to have is some ball players. Besides that, you can’t buy no men off’n the colleges. They don’t sell ’em.”

She says: “I guess we can get a hold of ’em if we slip ’em big sal’ries.” Then she says: “I’d like to make this here club a team of gentlemen, and they’re more gentlemen in the colleges than anywheres else.”

They was nuthin’ for me to do then but beat it out o’ the office and get a drink o’ brandy.

We kept on playin’ our best, and that was about good enough to get us beat oftener than we win. But I was satisfied with the way we was goin’. I knowed we wasn’t topheavy with class. Sullivan came in from scoutin’, and I ast him where was his collegers. He says:

“I’ve been everywhere in the rah-rah circuit, and I ain’t saw no ball player that could carry bats in the Japanese League.”

So I figured we wasn’t goin’ to be pestered with none o’ them there birds that does nothin’ but kick the ball round because they got the habit playin’ football.

The skirt had been travelin’ a lot and hadn’t gave me no bother to speak of. But when she come back, my troubles begin. She come out to the games and set in a box clos’t up to our bench. We was playin’ Brooklyn one day, and Rucker was good. We was a couple o’ runs behind along in the eighth and no hope o’ catchin’ up, with him goin’ that way. They was two of us out, and then Rucker walks somebody and Red Smith boots one, so they was two on when it come my turn to hit. I starts up, but she calls me over to the box.

“Mr. Dixon,” she says, “this would be a good place for a home run.”

I says: “Yes, this is the right spot. I s’pose you’d like to see me hit one.”

“You bet I would,” she says.

“Well,” I says, “which fence do you think I should ought to hit it over?”

“I don’t care which fence,” she says.

Well, I goes up there and done my best to obey orders. Nobody never swung no harder’n me, and the way I was wallopin’ at ’em, I’d of knocked one o’ them walls down if I had of connected. But I missed three and we didn’t score.

Do you remember the day you fellas give us that awful beatin’⁠—twelve to nothin’? Cheney worked for you and we didn’t never have a look-in. What do you think she pulled after that game? She waited for me outside o’ the park and says she wished I’d tell Mr. O’Day not to never let Cheney pitch there no more.

I says: “It wouldn’t hurt my feelin’s if he never pitched nowheres.”

“Well,” she says, “I hope you’ll see to it, because my doctor tells me the spitball ain’t sanitary.”

Then, one day, she ast me what made Hub’s cheek bulge out so when he worked. I told her he had a ulcer on his teeth. She ast why his face was swole up that way only when he was pitchin’, and I told her I didn’t never work him only on days when his teeth was pretty sore, so’s the batters’d feel sorry for him. She must of knew I was kiddin’, but she never called me for it.

She had me worried to death with stuff like that. She wanted the suits sent to the laundry after all the games and says all of us should ought to quit slidin’ because it dirtied us up so much. I got so’s I stuck in the clubhouse a couple of hours after the games, so’s to be sure and not run into her when I come out.

Well, she goes down to Yale college on some party or somethin’, and when she come back, we was just finishin’ up with the Western clubs. We was out in practice one day when I seen her beckonin’ to me. I goes over to where she was settin’, and she says:

“I’ve got you a new player.”

“Who is he?” I says.

She says: “His name is Mr. Baker, and he has just went through Yale. He will meet you in New York.”

Then I ast her what position did he play, and she says: “He ain’t made up his mind yet. He has been busy learnin’ his lessons.”

Then I ast her wasn’t he on the Yale team, and she says: “No, but he could of been of been if he had of wanted to. The coach told him so, but he didn’t have no time to play. You could tell the minute you seen him that he was a born ath-a-lete and he’s a gentleman too, and I b’lieve he will help you in more ways than just one way.”

“Well,” I says, “they’s only one way he could help us and that is to get in there and play ball. If he can do that, I don’t care if he’s a gentleman or a policeman.”

Then I ast her what sal’ry was he goin’ to get.

“Oh,” she says, “you won’t need to bother about that. I’ve already fixed that up already. I have gave him a contract for five thousand.”

I ast her did she mean five thousand for five years, and she says: “No, I meant five thousand for this year.”

Then I says: “That’s as much as I’m gettin’, and this here guy ain’t even made good yet.”

“He’ll make good all right,” she says. “You can tell that from just lookin’ at him, and he comes off’n a good fam’ly.”

Well, we goes to New York, and I was waitin’ round the lobby o’ the hotel for the baggage to come in, when Kelly, the secretary, calls me over to the desk. He pointed out a name on the hotel book and ast me who was it, because the guy was registered as belongin’ to us. “William Baker Junior, Boston Baseball Nine,” was what it says. Do you get that? “Boston Baseball Nine.” Before I ever seen him, I knowed just what he was goin’ to look like, and when I seen him, he looked just like I knowed he was goin’ to. But he was a big bird⁠—so big he couldn’t get no clo’es big enough. He looked like as if he was goin’ to bust right through ’em. His hair was plastered back off’n his forehead, and his shirt and tie would’ve made a rainbow jealous.

He come up to me and says: “Is this the head coach?”

I says: “Yes, whatever that is, I’m it.”

“What time does the game start?” he says.

“Three thirty,” I says, “but we get out there about a quarter after two.”

Then he ast me couldn’t they start it some other time because he had a engagement. I says I would excuse him, and he says: “Thanks.” Then I says: “I’ll excuse you all the time if you say the word.” But he says no, that wouldn’t be right, because he felt like as if he should ought to do some work oncet in a while to earn his pay. Then he says he was pleased to of met me and walked away.

I guess he must of kept his date at a soda fountain or wherever it was he had a date at, because he didn’t show up out to the park and I never seen no more of him till the next mornin’. Then he come to see me while I was writin’ a letter and ast me could he have six passes to the game. I says: “You’d better take ten,” and I writes out a pass for ten on one o’ the hotel letterheads, and I signs Otto Hess’ name to it. He says “Thanks,” and walked away. If I’d of signed President Bryan’s name, he’d of thanked me just the same. And the pass would of been just as good.

I come out o’ the hotel about one o’clock and starts for the elevated, but the colleger was standin’ on the sidewalk and he hollered at me. He ast me was I goin’ out and I says yes, I thought I would, because I didn’t have no other date. Then he ast me would I ride out with him because he’d ordered a taxi. They wasn’t none o’ my ball players had ever tooken me to the park in a taxi before, but I didn’t have no objection, so I and him piled in, and out we goes together.

When we got through ridin’, I says. “You better let me split with you,” but he says, “They ain’t no splittin’ to be did. It’s in my contract that I use cabs to and from the grounds,” and he tells the driver to charge it to the club. Well, I butts in and says, “Here! You can’t get by with that stuff. If you’re out to give the club a trimmin’, you better pull it when I ain’t round.” Then what does he do but pull his contract out of his pocket and show it to me, and there it was, in black and white, that he was to be gave rides on the club to and from the parks where we played. Can you beat that?

We come into the grounds and I took him in the clubhouse and had Doc give him a unie. He made a holler because they wasn’t no feet in the stockin’s and I told him he was supposed to wear socks besides the stockin’s. So he leaves on the reg’lar socks he’d wore with his street clo’es and they was purple!

I wisht you could of heard the ball players ride him. They pulled some awful raw stuff, and if he hadn’t of been such a boob, he’d of lost his temper and tried to lick somebody. But I don’t b’lieve he never wised up that he was gettin’ kidded. Even when Hub called him “Gertie,” it didn’t seem to make no difference to him.

We goes out to warm up and I notice that he don’t have no cap on. I was goin’ to tell him about it, but the boys says: “No. Let him play bareheaded and give the crowd a treat.” They wasn’t much practicin’ done. The New York bunch come over round our bench so’s they wouldn’t miss nothin’. I give him a ball and a catcher’s glove and told Tyler to throw him a few. George just lobbed one at him and he got it on the meat hand. He raised a holler and tells Tyler he shouldn’t ought to throw so hard. I yells at him to use his mitt, but he says the ball stung his hand right through it, and after tryin’ all the wrong ways they is o’ catchin’ a ball, he quit and set down on the bench. McGraw calls me over and ast was I startin’ a chorus or what. I told him how I happened to get ahold o’ the bird, and then I ast him did he want to make a trade. He says:

“What’ll you take for him?”

I says: “Oh, I’ll give him to you for Matty and a piece o’ money.”

“No,” he says, “I don’t want to cheat you. Take the grandstand and a chew o’ tobacco.”

Well, I sends him up to take his turn in battin’ practice, and he acted like as if the bat was as heavy as one o’ these here steel rails. Hess slops a slow one up to him, and instead o’ swingin’, he ducks out o’ the way and tells me he ain’t used to battin’ at such swift balls. Hess hears him pull that and the next one he throwed was a fast one, just as fast as he could throw it. Mr. Baker turns white as a sheet and drops his bat and walks to the bench.

I stuck him in the outfield in fieldin’ practice, but he looked so rotten that I took him out o’ there for fear o’ gettin’ him killed. I called him in and says:

“You’ve did enough for one day, so go in and change your clo’es and you can watch the game from the stand. Maybe you’ll run acrost that crowd I give you the passes for.”

He was willin’ to quit, all right, and the fun was over fer the day. After the game, I send a long telegram to Williams, the vice president, and tells him what a joke our new player was and that it was throwin’ money away to even pay his board, let alone that Fed’ral League sal’ry he was gettin’. I didn’t get no answer from Williams, but a letter come from the skirt. She give me a call for not sendin’ the telegram to her instead o’ Williams and ast me how could I judge if a man was a ball player when I hadn’t only saw him one day.

Well, I wires to Williams that I was through, because I’d signed to manage a ball club and not to run no burlesque show, but he jumps on a train and comes over to New York to see me. He says they was tryin’ to get her to sell out her stock and that him and the other directors appreciated what I’d did for the club and wanted me to stick.

So I stuck and went along the best I could. I didn’t pay no more attention to “Gertie” except to tell him to beat it to the clubhouse before the games started. He kept on comin’ out to the park, wherever we was playin’, and puttin’ on his unie, without no cap, and settin’ on the bench till the practice was over. Then he’d go in and put on one of his eight or nine different suits o’ clo’es, and go up in the stand and watch the game from there or else go to the matinée or somewheres.

I didn’t hardly ever say nothin’ to him, but I couldn’t make the rest o’ the bunch lay off. They tipped their hats whenever they seen him. While he was settin’ on the bench, they’d take a shot at him with the ball, and oncet or twicet they hit him, but not wheres it hurt him bad. He thought it was a accident when he got hit, but I knowed better. Every oncet in a while, somebody’d happen to step on his feet with their spikes, and then they’d beg his pardon. Some o’ them left their caps off while they was practicin’ and hollered “Ouch!” when they catched the ball. And on the train they’d get together and give college yells. He didn’t never get sore, and I don’t s’pose I would of neither if I’d been gettin’ five thousand for changin’ my clo’es a couple o’ times a day.

They tried to get him in the poker game, but they wasn’t nothin’ doin’. He says he liked to play bridge w’ist but that was all the cards he knowed. When we was on trains, he spent the time lookin’ at the scenery or readin’ magazines.

I remember one night when we was goin’ to Philly and he was settin’ acrost the aisle from I and Hub. He was readin’, and pretty soon he looks up from off of his magazine and says:

“You guys should ought to read this here story in here. It’s a baseball story and it’s about two teams bein’ tied for the pennant on the last day o’ the season, and one o’ the teams had a star pitcher that was sure to win the decidin’ game if nothin’ didn’t happen to him, so they stuck him in to pitch but in the first innin’ he strained his arm so it hurt him every ball he throwed but he didn’t say nothin’ about it, but kept on pitchin’ and win his game and the pennant, though he was sufferin’ terrible pain all the while. I call that nerve!”

“Nerve!” says Hub. “Say, that wasn’t nothin’ to what I seen come off in the Southern League the last year I was down there. The Nashville club that I was with and the New Orleans club was tied for first place, and we had to play a extra game to settle it. We had a first sacker named Smith that was the greatest I ever see. Up to the first of August he was battin’ .600 and it got so’s the pitchers wouldn’t give him nothin’ more to hit but walked him every time he come up. He offered to bat with one hand if they’d pitch strikes to him, but they wouldn’t take a chancet, and finally the umps’d just give him his base every time he come up without waitin’ for the four balls to be throwed.

“Well, it come time for this final game and we knowed we had it won if Smith was all right. The New Orleans club knowed it too, and they was out to get him. So when he got on in the first innin’ on a base on balls, their first baseman deliberately stepped on his foot and spiked him somethin’ awful. He couldn’t walk on that foot no more, but he wouldn’t quit, and after he’d drawed one of his bases on balls, every so often, he stole all the rest o’ the bases hoppin’ on his good foot.

“It come along the twenty-first innin’ and the score was six to six. He’d scored every one of our six runs by walkin’ to first and then hoppin’ the rest o’ the way. Well, he walked in the twenty-first and starts hoppin’ to second. The catcher knowed they was no use to throw to second or to third neither, because Smith was so fast, even on one foot, that he was bound to beat it. So the catcher just kept a hold o’ the ball, knowin’ Smith wouldn’t never stop till he got clear home. Along come Smith, hoppin’ for the plate, and the catcher run out to meet him, but he hopped clean over the catcher’s head and scored the run that beat ’em and won us the pennant. They was about sixty thousand people out there, and they tried to carry Smith off o’ the field on their shoulders, but he hopped into the clubhouse before they could catch him. And when he took off his shoe, two toes dropped out!”

“My!” says the colleger, with his mouth wide open. “I should say that was nerve. And didn’t this here Smith never get into the big league?”

“No,” says Hub. “He got blood-poisonin’ in that foot and they had to cut his whole leg off, and the National Commission’s got a rule that you can’t play in neither big league unless you got two legs.”

After that, Baker and Hub hung round together all the time. He fell for everything Hub told him, no matter how raw. He was givin’ Hub a good time, and it’d ’ve been all right if we could of stayed on the road all the while, but I knowed when we got home, the doll’d ast me why wasn’t I playin’ him and then the trouble’d start.

Sure enough, when we come in off o’ the trip, she called me to the office and put it up to me.

“Well,” I says, “I don’t think he’s got enough experience yet. You just let me handle him and keep him on the bench awhile, and maybe he’ll develop into a pretty fair ball player.”

I suppose I should ought not to of gave her no encouragement about him, but I was figurin’ all the time that she’d be boughten out o’ the club pretty soon, and then I could can him. At that, I didn’t have no objections to keepin’ him except that I knowed he was cheatin’ the club out of about two hundred bucks every first and fifteenth. If I had to let him go, the gang’d of missed him, especially Hub.

I run into Williams one day and ast him when was the skirt goin’ to sell out, and he says they’d tried hard to get her stock away from her, but she’d made up her mind to stick it out till the end o’ the season, but that Williams and the other directors was thinkin’ about takin’ it up with the rest o’ the league and tryin’ to force her out, but she’d gave ’em her promise that she’d sell in the fall if they still thought she should ought to. So they was nothin’ for me to do but make as good a showin’ as I could and figure on next year.

It was after the mornin’ game on the Fourth o’ July that she horned in again. She tells me that her brother and bunch of his friends from Yale college is comin’ to the afternoon game, and they want to see their pal perform. I says I’d let him practice and they could watch him if they come out early enough, but she says, no, that wouldn’t do: some o’ them boys was sayin’ that they didn’t b’lieve he could play ball, and she wanted to show ’em that he could.

Well, I thought awhile, and then I made up my mind that if he had to be gave some position, he might as well have mine and I could take a rest. So I tells the umps about the change and then I goes back to the bench and sits in a corner where they wasn’t nobody could see me.

I wisht you could of been there. The papers had a lot o’ stuff about it, but they didn’t tell more’n half. Hub was pitchin’ and we was playin’ Philly. He got the first two of ’em out, and then Cravath hits one down to the colleger on a perfect hop. I was lookin’ for him to throw it wild after he got it, but Pat Moran was coachin’ at first base, and he hollers to him to throw it to second. So what does he do but just like Pat tells him to, and naturally Maranville wasn’t there to cover because they wasn’t no play. So the ball goes out in the outfield, and Cravath got clear round to third base. Then Magee busts one, and they got a run. I thought Hub’d be sore, but he wasn’t. When he come in to the bench, he was laughin’ his head off, and he says:

“Don’t never take me out o’ this game. This is one battle I want to see all the way through.”

Well, Devore leads off for us, and he walks. The colleger’s up next, and I tells him to bunt. The first two Rixey throwed him was a mile outside, but he bunts at ’em just the same. Then Rixey curves one, and he tries to duck, but he can’t get out o’ the way. The ball hit him in the sleeve or somewheres, and Rigler tells him to take his base, but he wouldn’t move.

“What’s the matter?” says Rig. “Why don’t you take your base? Are you hurt?”

“No,” says the colleger, “but the manager says I was to bunt.”

Well, we had to drive him to first base, and then he steals second, or tries to, with Devore standin’ right there. Devore don’t move off’n the bag, so they tagged “Gertie” out. When he comes in, I ast him what was he tryin’ to pull off. He says Luderus had told him to steal. Then I says:

“Don’t never pay no attention to what them Philly guys tells you. If I want you to steal a base, I’ll send you a night letter.”

We didn’t score, and nobody hit nothin’ at him in their half o’ the second, though they was all tryin’ to. Hub was tryin’ to let ’em, too.

The third innin’ was a bear. Dooin hits one at him, and he jumps out o’ the way. Rixey struck out, and then Dooin starts to steal. I’d told Maranville to take all the pegs, but he thought it’d be more fun to leave ’em to “Gertrude.” So he hollers to him to cover. Whalin makes a perfect peg, and the colleger surprises everybody by catchin’ it. But when he’d catched it, he steps on the bag instead of tryin’ to tag Red. Then Red says to him:

“I bet I can beat you to third base.”

Red starts runnin’ with the ball right in Baker’s hands, and instead o’ throwin’ it, he holds right on to it and goes after Red. He wasn’t no slouch runner at that, and he made it a clos’t race, but Red beat him. The bugs was a-hollerin’ their heads off, and most o’ the ball players was so sick from laughin’ that they couldn’t do nothin’. Rig’ kept lookin’ over at me to see if I wasn’t goin’ to take the bird out o’ the game, but I didn’t have no stren’th left to shake my head, even.

After the sprintin’ race, they took the ball away from him and throwed it back to Hub. Byrne hits one at Hub, but he jumps out o’ the way so our “star” can get it, and he goes over and sticks his feet in front o’ the ball and it stops right clost to him. Byrne kept on runnin’ past first base and yelled at him to leave the ball lay, so he left it lay and Byrne goes all the way home. After that, when anybody got a hold o’ the ball, they’d throw it to him and he catched one or two the throws, but most o’ them he got out o’ the way of, and even when he catched ’em, he held onto the ball till everybody’d scored. They made twelve runs in that one innin’, and we wouldn’t never of got the side out if it hadn’t only of been for the umpires. They was tired from workin’ the mornin’ game and this one, too, so they pulled a couple o’ raw ones and wound it up.

Rig’ come over to me between innin’s and ast me did I think this was a joke. I told him it wasn’t no fault o’ mine, and explained how it had came off.

“Well,” he says, “I’ve got to catch the midnight train for New York, and we won’t never get through in time if this keeps up.”

“I can’t help it,” I says.

Then he says: “I can,” and he goes back to his position.

The colleger’s turn to bat come in our half, and Rixey rolls one up to him on the ground. Rig’ calls it another strike, tryin’ to get Baker sore, but he don’t never even look round. It’d of been OK with him if they’d called a strike before the ball was throwed. Rixey rolled another one up, and Rig’ calls it another strike. Then before Baker could say a word, and he wasn’t goin’ to say nothin’ neither, Rig’ puts him out of the gam for kickin’. Most o’ the crowd started home when they seen the show was over, but I didn’t blame the umps none⁠—I’d of did the same if I’d of been in their place. We finished up pretty fast after that, because they wasn’t no chancet for us to ever come near catchin’ up.

After I dressed. I forgot what I was doin’ and walked right out o’ the clubhouse without givin’ the doll a chancet to make a getaway. There she was, layin’ for me.

“What did you take him out o’ the game for?” she says.

“I didn’t take him out o’ no game,” I says. “The umps didn’t like his language.”

Then she ast me what was the matter with his language, and I says I didn’t think the umps could understand it right.

“Well,” she says, “if a umpire can’t understand plain English, he should not ought to be no umpire, and I will write to the president o’ the league and have both o’ these here men discharged.” Then she says: “Mr. Baker was doin’ splendid and would of did still better if he had of been left in longer. He didn’t catch all them balls that was throwed to him, but that’s because he ain’t had no practice.” Then she says: “I’m goin’ out of town tonight, but I want you to keep on lettin’ Mr. Baker play every day, and I’ll watch the papers, and if I see where he ain’t playin’, you’ll hear from me.”

Well, I couldn’t see no joke in it when I got home that night. The ball players was wise and knowed it wasn’t my fault. But I was a-scared that the bugs and these here reporters would get after me if I let the boob play every day. And I was a little bit proud o’ the work we’d did and didn’t want to have it all wasted. I figured it all out, the way I was goin’ to get rid of him. I was goin’ to have one o’ the pitchers hit him with the ball in battin’ practice⁠—not hard enough to kill him, but just so’s it would scare him out of baseball. I thought he couldn’t stand the gaff and would quit in a minute.

I gets out there early the next mornin’ for practice and frames it up with Young, a big busher we had that was fast as a streak and hog wild. I sends him out to pitch to us and then tells the colleger to go up there and swing till he learned how to bat. It was prob’ly a dirty trick, but I couldn’t think o’ no other way.

Well, I pulled a boner when I says anything to this here Young. What I should ought to of did was say nothin’, but just stick him in there to pitch natural, and then he’d of hit the bird by accident. But when he was tryin’ to hit him, he couldn’t even come clost. He was tryin’ to be wild, and he pitched more strikes than he ever done before in his life. Gertrude didn’t hit nothin’, and nothin’ hit him. So fin’lly I give up and sent Young to the clubhouse and started the reg’lar practice.

Fallin’ down on that made me meaner’n ever, and I doped out something else. I tells the colleger he stood too far from the plate when he swung at a ball. I says: “When you go up to bat in the game, keep one foot on the plate.” figurin’ that the guy that pitched for Philly would try to drive him away and either wound him or scare him to death.

Alexander worked for them, and Baker stood right on top o’ the plate. Dooin called the umps’ attention, and the umps warned him, but he wouldn’t move. Fin’lly Alexander shot one up there and he didn’t duck in time. It catched him in front o’ the ear, and he dropped like as if he was shot. I bet I was the most scared guy in the world. For a minute I felt like a murderer, and I wasn’t never so glad in my life as when I seen him get up. He staggered round a little, and I had ’em bring him over to the bench. I stuck myself in to run for him, and some o’ the boys took him in the clubhouse and got him fixed up. He wasn’t hurt bad, though he got a mean lookin’ bump.

We was startin’ West again that night and I didn’t never expect him to show up for no trip. But there he was, down to the train, with his wagonload o’ scenery.

“Well,” I says, “you got your nerve.”

“Yes,” he says, “I’m goin’ to show Hub that they’s more’n one game ball player in the world.”

He was still thinkin’ about that one-legged guy in the Southern League.

We opened up in Pittsburgh, and I kept him on the bench. I knewed Mrs. Hayes would wire and ask me why wasn’t he playin’, and when she did, I wrote to her sayin’ he was hurt by that there blow on the head. But that alibi wouldn’t get by very long, and I figured I’d have to frame somethin’ new.

The first night in St. Louis, I thought up somethin’ and got Doc, the trainer, to help me pull it. I buys two tickets to a show and gives ’em to Doc with instructions to ask the colleger to go along. After the show, they was to go to Tony’s for lunch. He was to order two beers, and then I was to drop in and catch Baker with a big stein in front of him. Then I was to swell up and suspend him for drinkin’. Doc done his best, but the bird says beer made him sick and he wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with it. So when I come in, he was eatin’ some kind o’ fancy sandwich and lappin’ up a lemonade or somethin’.

He ast me the next afternoon why didn’t I let him play, and I says:

“You ain’t no ball player and you wouldn’t be no ball player if you kept at it a thousand years. You should ought to be trimmin’ hats.”

“Mrs. Hayes thinks I’m all OK,” he says.

“Yes,” I says, “and you could start one o’ these here Carnegie li-berries with what she don’t know about baseball.” I says: “Why don’t you quit?”

Then he says: “I can’t quit because I can’t afford to lose this here sal’ry.”

I says: “What do you mean, you can’t afford? You had plenty o’ clo’es when you joined us,” I says, “and you must of had money o’ your own or you couldn’t of boughten them clo’es.”

Then he says his old man give him a allowance of a hundred a month and he spent all o’ that on his clo’es, and that the old man had told him he would double this here allowance if the boy showed he could earn five thousand bucks a year when he got out o’ college, and the old man didn’t care how he earned it. So he’d told Mrs. Hayes the whole story and she’d tooken pity on him and give him the job. I ast him wasn’t they no other way he could “earn” the money, and he says he s’posed they was lots o’ ways, only this here way was easiest.

I says: “Yes, but you ain’t earnin’ nothin’ here. You might just as well stick fellas up on the street as draw a sal’ry as a ball player. You’re stealin’ it either way.”

He just laughed, and then I says:

“Don’t your old man care if you mix up with us tough guys?”

“No,” he says, “the old man don’t care, but the old lady does. I told her you was a nice, polite bunch o’ fellas and she fell for it, or else she’d of made me cut this out and come home.”

The hunch come to me all of a sudden, and I says:

“What’s your old lady’s name and where does she live at?”

He told me, and I couldn’t hardly wait till I got back to the hotel.

I don’t know now just what I wrote, but it was some letter. I told her we was a bunch o’ stews and that when we wasn’t lushin’ beer or playin’ poker, we was going to burlesque shows. I says her son was pickin’ up a awful bunch o’ language and drinkin’ his fool head off. I says he was stuck on a burlesque queen and was spendin’ all his dough on her. And I wound it up by sayin’ that Dixon, the manager, had killed his wife and they wasn’t no tellin’ when he’d cut loose and kill somebody else. I didn’t sign no name, but just put “From a Friend in Need” down at the bottom.

It was in your town that he heard from her, and he showed me the letter. She says he was to come home at oncet and that she’d made the old man promise to come through with a extra allowance without makin’ him do no work for it. But if he didn’t cut out the ball playin’ and beat it for home, he wouldn’t never get another nickel out o’ none o’ them. She hadn’t gave no reason for writin’ this way, and he was up in the air. I told him we was sorry to lose him, but maybe it was best for him to quit playin’ ball, even if he hadn’t never started. He left us the second night in Chi. Hub was good and sore at me. He says I’d spoiled the season for him.

I felt so good about gettin’ him off’n my hands that I went out there and played like Cobb or somebody the rest o’ the trip. Maybe you fellas remember how I hit ag’in’ you them last two days. I done even better’n that in Cincinnati and New York. It was the best trip we’d made in a good many years, and the bugs at home went crazy over us. They was ten thousand out to the first game of our serious at home with St. Louis⁠—on a Thursday, at that.

O’ course I knowed they’d be a argument with the skirt. Our winnin’ streak wouldn’t make her forget to ask me what had became o’ Baker. When she ast me, I sprung the stuff about him gettin’ a letter from his mother, but I didn’t tell her nothin’ about the letter I’d wrote. She didn’t have nothin’, but she looked pretty sore and forgot all about givin’ me the glad hand for what we’d did in the West.

We done pretty well at home ag’in’ St. Louis and Pittsburgh. Then you fellas come along and I guess I don’t need to tell you that we was goin’ good. I was beginnin’ to think we maybe might keep it up and throw a scare into some o’ you birds.

She didn’t never come out to yesterday’s game, but I didn’t suspect nothin’ wrong till Kelly, the secretary, come into the clubhouse after me. He tells me that she wants to see me down to the downtown office.

“All right,” I says. “I’ll beat it down there right after the game.”

“No,” says Kelly, “she wants you right now.”

So I took my unie off and beat it down there in a taxi. The girl in the front office told me to go right on in, and in I went. There was the dame, settin’ at the desk where poor old Hayes used to set. And they was two big coppers with her. Without sayin’ “How d’ya do” or nothin’, she opens right up on me and says:

“These here officers is here to protect me. If you start somethin’, you’ll get nothin’ but the worst of it.” Then she pulls a letter out o’ the desk and says: “This here letter is from Mr. Baker’s mother, and in it she tells me why she made her boy come home. Somebody has tooken the trouble to tell her some fac’s about this here ball club⁠—my ball club that I was proud of! But I ain’t proud of it no more. I ain’t proud o’ no gang o’ hoodlums that don’t do, nothin’ but gamble and drink and run round with actresses and lead young men astray.”

“Is that all?” I says.

“No,” she hollers, “that ain’t all. Mr. Dixon, you killed your wife!”

“That’s a whole lot o’ bunk,” I says. “I didn’t never have no wife, so how could I kill my wife when I didn’t never have none?”

“Don’t lie to me!” she says. “Even if you didn’t never have no wife, you killed somebody, maybe a innocent girl that was wronged.”

“Cut the comedy,” I says. “They’s nothin’ to that stuff. Somebody’s went and gave the old lady a bum steer.”

“What for?” she ast.

“Prob’ly,” I says, “because somebody was tired o’ having that boob on the ball club and figured that was the best way to get rid of him.”

“We won’t discuss it no fu’ther,” she says. “I called you up to tell you you ain’t managin’ the club no longer. You can stay here under the terms o’ your contract and play ball if you want to, but maybe you wouldn’t want to work for the new manager.”

“Who is it?” I says.

“That’s none o’ your business,” she says. “I will tell you when the proper time comes.”

Then I says: “Is the seamstress comin’ back?”

“The who?” she hollers.

“That there colleger,” I says. “If I was you, I’d get him back, because you and him is certainly a grand combination. It’s hard to tell which one o’ you knows the most about baseball, you or that bird. Even if you couldn’t use him as no ball player, you could chop up his head and build a new grandstand.”

“He was smart enough to go through Yale college,” she says.

“No.” says I. “He didn’t never go through no Yale college. If they was any college that he went through, it was this here Wellesley college.”

Then I turns and beats it for the door.

Well, sir, they ain’t nothin’ more to tell except one thing. When I come out o’ the door into the outside office, I bumped right square into “Gertie.” He was smilin’ like a big kid, and he says: “Hello, there!” Well, I didn’t say nothin’ to him, but I give him a good kick in the shin, and I stepped all over his patent-leather shoes. Then I went on about my business.

I wired and they wasn’t nothin’ to it. He told me to come on and join ’em in Pittsburgh, and I just had time to get my stuff together and catch this train.

I guess she won’t try and get no injunction out agin’ me. But I wisht she would. I’d like to tell my story to a judge, provided the judge wasn’t no woman.

You know who’s goin’ to manage that club, don’t you? And you know who’s goin’ to be president of it. Well, sir, I’ll bet you anything you want to bet that they won’t even finish in Mass’chusetts.

Phil and His 4d

Chi. Sep. 26.

Friend Dave: Jest a short note Dave to let you know how wear geting a long and I would of wrote a long wile a go only I been so busy. Now I supose you will wander what has been keeping me busy well Dave Im a full fledjed moterist now and if you dont believe it keeps a man busy jest buy a car and try it your self.

Nell was after me all summer to buy 1 and I was going to get 1 of these here moter sickles with the bath tub attached on to them but when Nell seen it she says she wouldent never have the nerve to ride in it and she insisted on me geting a reglar car so I says I dident have money enough and she says may be we could get a hold of a 2nd hand car some wheres and she kept studing the want ads in the paper till finely 1 day she seen where a man wanted to sell his car for $150.00 dollars and the car was a 1915 4d in good repares. The man was going to move out of town and I supose he dident want to stick it in his sutecase for the fear he would get some grease on his other shirt.

So she called the man up and says I would be over to see him that p.m. and when I got there he still had it yet and they dident seem to be nothing the matter with it so I give him the money and then I ast him how I would get the car home because I hadent never drove 1 and he says he would call up a garrage and get a man to come up and lern me so pretty soon the man come and I ast him how much would he charge and he says $.60 per hr. so bessides the $150.00 cash money for the car it costed me $.20 right off the real beffore I knowed how to run it. I ast the man would it go fast and he says he guest it would because the Russia army just ordered a hole flock of them.

It was supper time when I got her home but Nell says to hell with supper and I would half to take her out for a ride and while we was out we happened to think all of a sudden that we dident have no garrage to keep a car in it and we couldent leave it out in the st. all night for the fear some stew might trip over it and sew us for dammiges so Nell says she would sleep on the lunge in the liveing rm. and I could take the car in with me so I says all right. But you know we live on the 2nd floor and I hadent hardley got ½ way up the stares when I notised the horn wasent working and no way to warn the roaches that we was comeing. So I had to pull up on a step and wait till Nell went acrost to the delicatessen and got a man to come over and fix it.

Youd of thot that was bad luck enough for 1 day haveing the horn not work but Nell had been pairing her finger nales in the bed rm. and we hadent no sooner got in then we had a puncture. By the time Id chaste out to the drug store and got some cort plaster and stuck it on and blowed up the tire I was pretty well wore out and ready for a all night sleep. But I had to get up twict in the night and drive a way pinching bugs that was squeezing the horn and rouseing the hole building.

Well the next day was Sun. and I and Nell got up early to drive out in the country. It was so hot that I left my vest off and Id stuck a extra bottle of gassoline in 1 of the pockets. Well the man that sold me the car hadent left hardley any in the tank so of coarse we run out of it before we went a mile from home. I says I would hurry back and get the bottle out of my vest but Nell says that would take 2 long and we was right in front of a garrage when it happened so I blowed the horn and a man come out and I told him we wanted gassoline and he says how much and I says how much is it and he says 11 cts. per gal. and I says give us ½ a pt. but he says he dident sell nothing less then a gal. so we had to buy a gal. off him. I guess he must have thot we was going to frisco or some wheres. But I figgured may be we would meet an other moterist that was shy and we could sell him back what we dident need. But thats been a wk. a go and wear still carrying all that extra bessides the bottle I bought.

Well yest. I drove down to work and it rained all day and comeing home the car got all over mud and dirt so I took her in the bath rm. and filled the basin up with water and left her to soke and Nell wasent in when I got home and when she come I forgot to tell her where the car was and with out thinking nothing about it she jest seen the dirty water in the wash basin and pulled the stopper out. I got a hold of a plummer as soon as I could and if he had of came 5 min. later it would of been good night because the car wasent only a bout 10 ft. from the main pipe in the st. when he located her. And I guess you know how plummers charges for there time. $.80 is all it costed me.

Well the janiter found out this a.m. that we was keeping a car in the flat and its against the rules and he says he would make us cut it out if he had to put fly paper on the stare way. I says what objections you got if we dont leave it bother no body and he says it tracks mud and oil on to the steps so I says well if we dont run it up and down the stares will you leave us keep it and he says yes. So tomorrow Im going to cut a hole in the screen to the window that connex on to the fire escape and then we wont have no more trubble with Mr. janiter. I give him a good cigar when we was threw talking. I supose tho that we will half to stick some paper over the hole in the screen nights or all the bugs in this ward will come in and monkey with the horn and so 4th.

Mean while Nells makeing up to the Thomsons that lives on the 1st floor and Mrs. Thomsons a woman that if you dident know who she was youd think she was a hippopothenus and tomorrow night Nells going to ask them to go out with us and we will plant them in the back seat where theyll do the most good. The car will ride smoother that way tho of coarse it will be hard on the rear tires to rub against the pavement onct in a while when they aint used to it.

You can see where this here motering keeps a man busy Dave and its a hole lot of fun but dont never leave no body tell you its a cheap sport. Not even with a 4d it aint.

Your old pal.
Phil.

Tour No. 2

I

Chgo. Ill. July 1.19.14.

Dear bro. Ed. You will half to excus this pensil & they dont seem to be no ink in the bottle. your post cards come ok and you & Kate must of had 1 grand time up to mackinac and I and Minnie was sore we couldent go a long with you but I was right in the mist of fixing up the summer garden & Minnie says she dident have no close tho from the looks of the bills I got to day from the dept. stores she must of spend most of last mo. buying close but you been marred long enough to know what these women is tho I guess the irish girls dont come no wheres near the dutch girls when it come to spending money. When we was 1st marred & I had the place on 31th st. & was cleaning up 2 hunderd a mo. she spend most of that and I offten says to my self if I ever clean up 1 hunderd a mo. more I will be on easy st. but here I am cleaning up over $1000.00 a mo. in the new place & I dont have no more of it left then I did in the old days. & she dont look no better. I dont know where would you of been at if you had of marred a dutch girl on your 1 hunderd & 50 a mo. but you was wise & picked out the right kind of a girl that dont throw a way all there money on close & Kate dont look so sloppy at that.

Well Ed the reason I am writeing to you so soon after you got back to Det. is I want to tell you the news a bout I & Minnie and if this wasent your busy season I would ask you to come over here & spend the next 2 mos. and look after the place and you and Kate could live in the house & probly in joy the change but I know they must be a lot doing in your busness in Det. at this time of yr. and you dont want to over look O so I cant ask you to pass up your busness on my acct. & we will half to shut up the house & leave Louis Shaffer in charge of the place & I hate to trust a dutch man to look after my busness & a speshauly when I am opening the new summer garden but what else can I do & he is the only 1 that knows the ins & outs of the busness and dont drink nothing him self at lest he says he dont & I never seen him with a drink in front of him. & besides him being Minnies cousin its to his intrust to run things right and not steal nothing off of me & he knows I will treat him right if he treats me right. besides if I found out that he was grafting off of me a round the place I would brake him in 2 and he knows it & he knows it dont pay for no dutch man to monky with a irish man.

But I havent told you where is it we are going to and you wont beleive it & I dont hardly beleive it my self only I know its true because all day yest. I was husling a round and stratening things up & seeing the boys and fixing up whats to be did at the primeries & I hate to be a way when the primeries comes off because they aint no body that can handle the boys like I if I do say it my self. I all ways figured a man was a sucker to make his wife a promise because they dont never forget nothing but I made Minnie a promise with out thinking & now I am getting payed for it. It come off last winter the time the boys wanted I should go down to french lick with them and they wouldent take no for a anser so I says to Minnie I was going down to french lick & she says I was not going un less I took her a long & I says that this here was going to be a stagg party and they wasent no skirts invited and then she says she wouldent let me go neither & we had it back & 4th and finely she agrede I could go but she made me promise that I was to take her any wheres she wanted to go this summer and thats the only way I got her to leave me go down to french lick.

Well the other day she sprung it on me and says do you remember what you promised me when I left you go down to french lick with them stews and I remembered all right but I says no what did I promise & she says you promised you would take me any wheres I want to go this summer & I says o yes I remember but things is going to be busy down to the place and I cant get a way for very long & where would you like to go to benton harbor or south haven or may be cedar lake or some wheres & we can stay a week. & she says I am not asking you where is it we are going because I know where it is & it aint to none of them places a round here & if your a good sport like your all ways clameing you will take me where I say. Then I says all right we will make it atlantic city or N.Y. city or niagara falls & we will stay 2 wks. and then she says if you will shut up your big mouth a min. I will tell you where is it where I want to go & then she sprung it on me & I would of dropt dead if it hadent of been a Sat. & things had to be looked after down to the place. Where do you think she says we was going no wheres but europe & 1st I looked her in the eye to see was she may be kiding but she wasent kiding and so I says you must be crazy & did she think I was a million air & how could I leave the place all summer when the new summer garden was just open & she begin to bello and says I cared more for my busness then for she and I was a cheap sport and she knowed I was dirty with money but what good did it do her and if I was going to brake my promise she would brake hern that she made when we was marred & would go back to milwaukee & stay there till she found some body that was not tight with there money & she knowed of a hunderd men that would be tickelld to death to be in my place & I knowed she was telling the truth because they is that many right here in Chi judgeing from the way they lamp her when her & I go out any wheres to gather. May be I was a sucker to marry a dutch girl & a girl as pretty as her but I done it & I aint sorry and if these willy boys gets to fresh a round her I will brake them in 2. Well if I had of wanted to be mean I could of turn her down & after she pretty near drownd the house out crying she would of been ok again but I figured a promise was a promise and if a mans ever going to do some thing for any body his wife should ought to get in on it 1st & it aint like I was broke & cant a ford it and we done a $1300.00 busness this last mo. and pretty near that good in may and Minnie knows it to.

Well shes went up to milwaukee to brake the news to mother & all them other dutch men and she left me orders to go down to 1 of the steam boat co. & see what kind of a trip can we make. You can bet I wont go no futher then I half to. I wisht you & Kate could go a long with us but I know a trip like this here is going to cost more then you can a ford & if it wasent for youre leaveing your busness I would take you a long as our guest & pay for it but I know you will say no & its busness before plesure. Any way we will keep you posted & may be bring back a present for you & Kate.

Well Ed. take good care of your self and go home nights.

your Bro.
Larry M. Burns.

Chgo. Ill. July 3.19.14.

Dear bro. Ed. I guess I put 1 over & I wont half to be a way all summer but only a little over 3 wks. & I will be keeping my promise at that. I went downtown to a steam boat co. yest. and asked them what was the shortest trip they had to europe & back and they tells me I could go over to plymouth & England and that would take 6 days on the boat & I could start back the 1st day after I got there if I want to and get back here 2 wks. after I left here but they wouldent hardly be no sence in makeing a trip over there with out staying a wile so I & the man at the steam boat co. figured it out where we could spend 6 days getting over to England & then stay there a wk. & take in Ireland and see some of the places uncle Johnny use to tell us a bout & then come back on the boat to N.Y. city and then if Minnie hasent had enough travveling we can stop up to niagara falls on the way back home from N.Y. city or may be stop off in Det. & make you a little visit or I could leave Minnie in Det. with you and Kate & come home a lone by my self. I thot it took more then a wk. to get a crost the ocean or I wouldent of never made no holler in the 1st place & it wont put me out none to be a way 3 wks. but I was scared I would half to be a way 2 mos. & miss the primeries. It will cost me a bout $240.00 for I & Minnie on the boat & that includs meals and thats in the 2nd cabin which is right behind the 1st cabin so the wind is broke for us and it aint near so cold as if we had to ride in the 1st cabin. Besides the 2nd cabin must be near the center of the boat where it aint such ruff rideing but some people that has did a lot of travveling on the ocean likes ruff rideing and pays a little more money to ride up in the 1st cabin near the head end of the boat. All to gather with the $240.00 for boat fair & meals and R. R. fair & every thing acrost the ocean & from here to N.Y. city & back wont be over $500.00 for the 2 of us and theys X curshons on all the R. R. to N.Y. city and back this time of year so may be it wont be up to my figure $500.00 and the place if Shaffer takes care of it right should ought to clear at lest 2 times that sum dureing the time wile we are a way. Theys a boat leaves N.Y. city Tues. the 21 of the mo. and thats the 1 I guess I & Minnie will take but I will half to see if that dates all ok with her & that she aint got no dutch picknicks to go to a long a bout that time. She is comeing back from milwaukee for the 4th and will be home when I get home tonight and if the 21 of the mo. is all right with her I will buy the boat fair Monday.

Well Ed. enough for this time and hopeing you dont run up against no full hands.

Your Bro.
L. M. Burns.

Chgo. Ill. July 10.19.14.

Dear bro. Ed. You will excus this pensil I got pen & ink but the pen dont work good. Well Ed. I couldent put that over a bout going to England & Ireland and comeing right back again because Minnie wouldent stand for it & says I was welshing & I says what do you mean by welshing I promised to take you any wheres you want to go & you says you want to go to europe so what kick you got come ing because if Ireland & England is not europe where is they. Then she says You dont know if there europe or not but that dont make no diffrunce because if thats where your going to take me I aint going for who cares a bout them places. I says I am irish & thats why I want to go to Ireland & she says yes your people was irish but you couldent never make no body beleive you was irish because your nose turns the wrong way and you cant talk no more irish then I can and if you was to go over there and tell them you was irish they would run you out & besides if all the irish is as tight as you I dont want to see no more of them & I will give you your choise ether you can take me on a real trip to europe or I will go up to milwaukee and stay there. For a wile I felt like telling her to go to milwaukee or some wheres else but you know how it is & a man dont feel like being nasty to a woman even his wife it dont make no diffrunce what a fool she makes out of her self. So finely I give up argueing with her & let her have her own way and Monday I & her went down to gather to the steam boat co. and heres what we got framed up and its all framed up. We are going all over the world and we are going to see all they is to see and then sum & I got the hole trip right here in a book.

The trip what we are going to take is what they call tour no. 2 & they will be 6 or 7 people going a long with us and I dont know what is there name but Minnies got there name and we never seen them but the steam boat co. fixed it up that we all was to go to gather & when a gang gos to gather like that it dont cost no body so much money but it is with a gang I would hate to go a lone or I & Minnie a lone to gather & no body with us. In the 1st place we go from N.Y. city to Bremen & from there to Germany & the fair on the boat will be $70.00 a peace & that includs meals & our party are going to ride in the 2nd cabin & have the wind broke for us. We dont stop at ether England or Ireland so you see its a fast boat we are takeing & we leave N.Y. city on Thurs. the 23 of July & the name of the boat is prince S. N. katrina and we will be 7 days getting to bremen the 1st stop so we should ought to get to bremen the 30 of this mo. but may be not till the 31. when ever we get to bremen we hop right on a train and go to handover a old town that must be older then Chgo. but we dont only stop there a part of 1 day so I dont mind if its old and you know Det. & Chgo. is both old but they got new hotels so whats the diffrunce and we probly wont half to stay over night any way. Then theys an other old town hildesheim thats a bout as old as handover & we wont stay there no longer then we half to and after we get out of there we go to Germany & berlin & we stay there 4 or 5 days but as Minnie says the dutch word for beer is the same as the american so I will get a long ok and 1 of the places there that we got to visit is sans souci & may be its a immatashon of the 1 in Chgo. & they got a dance hall & tables & if thats right we will have a good time. after we get threw germany we go to dresden & prague & Vienna & then we go up to Venice where they got the boats in stead of the st. cars and the Dog house & I guess I can show them wops a thing or 2 a bout puting the spagety a way & then we spend 4 or 5 days a round them wop lakes & may be I can catch a few musky and then we go to switzerland & lucerne & then back to germany and I dont see why should we go back unless they think may be we would of left some of our bagage when we was there before. & some of the places we got to go to is heidelberg & frank fort & may be while I am there I can buy some sausige cheap for the place eh Ed. Then we go to mayence & cologne & amsterdam and the hague where all them diffrunt countrys met to gather & fixed it up that they wasent to be no more fighting back & 4th and brussels & Bellijum & then we finely get to Paris and we stay in Paris 5 days & they got a lot of places down in the book where there going to take us to in Paris but they dont look good to me & I wouldent be suprized if I snuck off by my self and done a little sight seen only if I snuck a way and left Minnie a lone some of them french willy boys would probly get fresh or else she would go in to 1 of them Paris hat & dress stores & start chargeing things like she does a round here only there even worse burglers in Paris then in Chgo. & she would come back here looking swell probly but I would half to eat the free lunch down to the place the rest of the winter.

When we get threw Paris we go to a place called cherbourg where they got a steam boat co. that will bring us back to N.Y. city & the hole trip costs us $395.00 a peace and thats just wile we are in europe & dont includ the boat fair over & back and thats a bout $140.00 a peace but the $395.00 includes the fair on the trains & boats we ride on in europe & the hotel bill but we got to pay for the drinks but the $395.00 includs guides to guide us a round & hacks to take us a round to diffrunt places only the guides probly talks there own languidge & they wont do me no good. & it dont includ tiping the waiters but if there any thing like the waiters down to the place they wont build no bungleohs off of what I give them. The trip will take us 64 days all to gather & I figure I will be lucky if I get off with less then $1200.00 figureing $1070.00 for boat & R. R. fair & hotel bord bill & loging & the other $130.00 for drinks & what ever Minnie buys in Paris and may be a little present for your self.

We leave here on the 21 of this mo. & we got X curshon rates 2 & from N.Y. city & the round trip is $26.00 a peace not includeing birth & meals on the train & I forgot to put that in wile I was figureing the expences so you see it will cost me nearer $1300.00 then $1200.00 & I guess a trip like that would bankrup you wouldent it Ed. so your lucky you dident marry no dutch girl or no pretty 1 thats got these nosions in there head a bout travveling. I wisht I had of stayed a way from french lick last winter because evry body accept I & Pat was on the wagon.

I will be pretty busy before we start but may be I will get time to write to you from N.Y. city because I aint going to spend no time monking around before we take the boat.

my regards to Kate & be good Ed.

Your Bro.
Larry M. Burns.

N.Y. city. July 22.19.14.

Dear bro. Ed. Here we are I & Minnie & Minnie is all dressed up like a horse and got a bunch of new close and she got them in Chgo. the day before yest. so the bill will be waiting to wellcome me home the last of Sept. The boys give me some send off & when I got on the train I dident know weather I was going to europe or oak park & Minnies folks from milwaukee was down to the train to see us off & I guess Minnie was sore a bout me being lit up but a man dont start for europe evry day & if I am spending $1300.00 I am going to get a run for my money.

We got here this a m & come to the king charles hotel & thats where I am at now & Minnies takeing a nap & shes sore at me now because I turned her down when she wanted to get some money off of me to go over on 5th av. & get more close & I turned her down because she dont know when to stop and shes got enough close now to start a dept. store & shes got a trunk a long with her besides 2 suit cases and a grip she borrowed off of her mother that looks like it was boughten before the fire and all I got for my close is 2 grips but I brung pretty near all the good close I got includeing the dress suit that I bought for the sullivan banquit & ½ a doz. shirts besides my sox & 3 changes of under ware and 1 doz. collars and a couple extra ties & my patent lether low shoes and a cap to ware on the boat & my over coat that Minnie made me bring a long tho we will be back home the last of Sept. and then of corse a couple of night gowns. I guess them other passengers on the boat will look at me when I get that old soup & fish on eh Ed.

1st thing this a.m. after we got our breakfast we went down to the steam boat co. N.Y. office & fixed things up and was interduced to the rest of the party that is going a long with us in our party and they is 7 of them besides I & Minnie and 2 of them is a marred couple & then theys a couple men that Minnie says is school teachers and 3 girls a bout 25 yrs. of age and pretty good lookers but they acted like they was proud & stuck on there self. I cant tell you there names but Minnies got them wrote down some wheres.

The steam boat co. man asked us how many cabins did we want & he looked right at me because I guess he figured I looked more like ready money then the rest of them and may be he thought I was paying all there fair and I says 1 cabin is all we want and he says I mean for the hole party & I says we are all going to gather in the 2nd cabin and he says how do you want to sleep and I says as good as we can & then 1 of the girls buts in & says us 3 girls is to gather and we want 1 cabin and I says all right you can take the 1st cabin and pay the diffrunce besides brakeing the wind for us. I guess that woke her up because she dident say nothing more. Minnie horned in then and fixed up a bout our rooms while I was talking to 1 of the school teachers and he acts like a pretty good guy and we laughed & joked to gather while the rest of them was fighting over there rooms. I told him that story a bout the 2 irish men pat & mike that come over on the boat to gather & I thot he would bust laughing. After we was fixed up some of them went down to the dock to take a look at the boat but I figure I will see enough of it while I am on it & I & Minnie come back to the hotel to get rested up and tonight may be we will go to a pitcher show some wheres & I guess they must be some good ones a round here if you know where to find them at.

Now I got to see a bout getting our bagage took down to the dock & speaking of bagage I musent forget to open up the trunk again & slip in a couple cakes of soap and a couple towls thats got the king charles printed on them and they is to good to use down to the place but we can spring them at home when Minnies folks or some body comes to visit.

Well Ed. be good & dont take no wooden nickles & of corse you wont get no male from me till we get acrost on the other side of the ocean because they aint much chance of us runing in to a male box on the ocean eh Ed. With out no jokeing this is going to be a grand trip & I wisht you could go a long & may be some day I will have enough saved up so as I can take you a long on an other trip. With out no jokeing I wouldent miss this trip for nothing now I got started on it and just think of going a round the world & seeing all they is to be seen & I feel sorry for men that aint had my luck or aint good busness men like I or what ever it is that I owe my sucess to and cant take these trips but has got to stay in 1 place all the time and not never see nothing. But be good & give our regards the wifes & mine to Kate and dont take no wooden nickles & if you do get a chance run over to Chgo. & see how the place is getting a long but I guess Louis Shaffer will run things ok and he should ought to.

Well be good Ed.

Your Bro.
Larry M. Burns.

p s Dont worry a bout us because they say this steam boat co. dident never have no wreck & is the safest co. they is & they dont go near where them ice bgs. is at so they is not much danger of nothing going wrong & I am not worring because it dont get a man nothing to worry. Be good Ed. & dont take no bad money.

on the prinzessin Katrina. July. 25.19.14.

Dear bro. Ed. I bet you dident think you would get a letter from me so quick & I wouldent of knew enough to write 1 only I was walking a long the deck with prof. Baker 1 of the school teachers in our party and we come to a male box right on the boat and I dident know what it was at 1st but I asked him & he told me and it says on it some thing in german or dutch and it means the male closes for N.Y. city at noon evry day so I asked prof. Baker how they got the male back to N.Y. city and he says they put it in a bbl. & throw it over bord & the boats comeing from the other way is suposed to pick up these bbls. & take them a long & there speed boats so it dont take them hardly no time at all to get back to N.Y. city so you will rec. this letter a lot sooner then if I maled it over acrost on the other side.

Well Ed. this is some boat & its a bout 3 times as big as the city of benton harbor & its 4 storys high & 600 ft. long & has got electrick lights & they must have there own electrick light plt. on the boat or else they got wires conecting with the cabels on the bottom. & I am glad we pickt out the 2nd cabin in stead of the 1st because the 1st cabin has got 4 hunderd pgrs. & we only got 330 so we aint so crowded but I was wrong a bout the 2nd cabin being back of the 1st 1 because the 1st 1 is right in the middle of the boat and they must begin numbring from the middle but it dont make no diffrunce because the weather has been grand & if we was in the 1st cabin where they dont get no breeze we would probly suffakate. The book all so speaks a bout they being 4 saloons on the boat but I only seen 3 of them so far but 3 is a plenty & if a man drinks all they got in 1 of them hes doing pretty good. I been all over the boat wile Minnie hasent did nothing but set in the parlor & walk up & down the deck a couple times a day & chin with the other skirts & I been trying to get her to livun up but nothing doing & may be she is sea sick but I dont see how even a woman could get sea sick because the weathers been grand & the oceans just as smoth as mich. av. prof. Baker who has been acrost before I dont know how many times showed me all over the boat from the engine room to the steerage where the steering is done at. I told Minnie a bout they being a jimnasum on the boat & she says I better go in there evry day & work some of the fat off of me & may be thats a good tip because I have fated up some since I got a chance to rest up my self & let others do the heavy work a round the place. The boat is 20 thous. horse power so prof. Baker tells me but I guess it gets a long better then 20 thous. horses would if they was pulling out here in the middle of the ocean. they got a wire lest tellegram on the boat & we get all the news from all countrys evry day but they aint been nothing from Chgo. as yet & I aint seen your name menshoned Ed. so may be they dont know who you are. Then they got a barber shop & them saloons I was telling you a bout and 2 or 3 rooms to smoke in & play cards & I am going to get in to a game tonight with some men I met on the boat & I wouldent play no cards if Minnie would livun up & pal a round with me but any way I am haveing the time of my life & if she aint haveing a good time with them skirts its her own falt.

I wisht you could see the meals they hand out & no wonder they soak a man for the boat fair because the meals is included in it. I thot breakfast must be there big meal when I seen it but they come back at noon with 9 or 10 corses & then at supper they hand you enough to choke a horse but they aint managed to choke me yet but Minnie makes me ware the soup & fish at supper because the 2 school teachers done it the 1st night & the collars enough to choke me. It is some swell dinning room where we eat at & its full of pretty pitchers drawed by a man named Louis Seize & there pretty good for a dutch man. Our party of 9 eats at 1 table but we dont all get there at onct most of the time but we was all there to supper to gather last night & we had a swell time because this here prof. Baker got after me to tell some storys & I told the 1 a bout the 2 irish men mike & pat that come acrost to gather on the boat & then I told them the 1 a bout the men driveing up to Fogartys house in the auto. and asking weather Fogarty lived there but I dont know if I ever told you that 1 or not. Two men drove up to Fogartys house in a auto. & 1 of them run up and rung the door bell & Mrs. Fogarty come to the door & 1 of the men says does Fogarty live here and she says yes bring him in. you see she thot Fogarty was piped & they was bringing him home & the men was just friends of Fogartys & was trying to find him & so they asked his wife if thats where he lived. Any way I told them that 1 & 3 or 4 others & I thot theyd bust laughing & then I asked them why dident we all go in the cafe to gather & make a night of it but the 3 girls says they was sleepy & Minnie had a date to play rummy with some of the skirts on the boat & the other man & his wife in our party is a couple grouchs & so I & prof. Baker & the other school teacher set down to gather in the cafe & told storys & histed a few till it was time to go to bed. I lerned all the names of our party & the 3 girls is miss hendricks & lamont & griffith from What Cheer iowa so why should they be swelled on them self & I guess there ok when you know them better. prof. Baker is 1 of the school teachers & the other is prof. Hunter & they teach school in some collige in O. & the marred couple is mr & mrs chambers from down south some wheres. at supper last night this chambers asked me what busness was I in & I was getting ready to tell him when Minnie horns in & says I was a dr. & prof. Baker & Hunter both knowed she was kiding because I all ready told them a bout the place but I dont know if they give it a way to the others or not but I guess chambers fell for the dr. stuff ok because he begin asking me a bout hay feever & if Minnie hadent of change the subjeck I would of been up against it.

Well Ed. its time to go down & wash up & put on the soup & fish & get in on the big feed and after supper I will see how the cards is runing & if I can help pay expences. Minnie coped $3.00 out of the rummy game last night so if she can win I should certinly ought to because she plays cards like a cow. any way I will make them go some. regards to Kate & watch your step & dont slip.

Your Bro.
Larry M. Burns.

on the prinzessin Katrina. July. 26. 19.14.

Dear bro. Ed. I only been up ½ hour & its 11.30 but I dident get no to much sleep because we had some seshon last night & it dident brake up till 6 this a.m. but I trimmed them for $120.00 and in a $1.00 limit game at that & they was all men I never seen before & at 1 time I was $130.00 a head of the game & would of gave anything to have it broke up because I was so sleepy I couldent hardly keep my eyes open but I dident feel like quiting way a head because they was a pretty nice bunch of gents I was playing with. I dident hold no real big hands all night outside of 1 ace full & 1 ten full but I helped evry pair I drawed to pretty near & no body helped against me when I had the openers. They was $30.00 in the pot I coped with the ten full & that was the bigest pot they was & 1 guy filled a flush that time & an other had 3 kings to go in on. prof. Baker set behind me till he got to sleepy to set up. He kept calling me dr. Burns and pretty soon the hole table were calling me doc but as long as I was winning I dident care if they called me hinky dink. I wisht I could grab off $120.00 evry night wear on the boat both comeing & going & the trip wouldent hardly cost me nothing. I told prof. Baker that when I seen him out on deck a wile a go but he says I was lucky to get ½ that much in a mo. playing with 2nd cabin pgrs. because they wasent genally dirty with money. He says he wouldent be suprized if that 1 game broke the most of them but they wasent no body handed me no i o u but I will be careful next time.

The weather keeps on grand & the oceans as smoth as glass & the capt. says we may probly get in to bremen a head of time but I dont care now & I aint in no hurry as long as I keep on catching my 3rd man.

This is just a short note & I aint had no breakfast yet & you will half to excus the pensil but I dont know where it is they keep there pen & ink. So long Ed. & dont take no counter fit money.

Your Bro.
L. M. Burns.

on the prinzessin Katrina. July. 28. 19.14.

Dear bro. Ed. Minnies livund up finely Ed. may be because the trips pretty near over and wear geting near germany & I guess shes been home sick & she may be thinks bremen will be some thing like milwaukee. I took them for $40.00 more in the game yesterday p m & I coped $15.00 last night but I would of got more if I had of started sooner only Minnie woke up and wanted I should play rummy with her & the 3 girls & I had to do it tho rummys a rummy game just like its name & espeshaly when you play with women. The 3 girls was all calling me dr. Burns & you cant never tell me they dont know I aint no dr. because they couldent hardly help from laughing evry time they says dr. & they kept asking me what to do for hay feever & other kinds of dizees & I kided a long with them & told them the cure for evry thing they brung up & I told them when they had hay feever the only thing to do was to hit the hay & I thot theyd bust laughing but all the time Minnie thinks I got them fooled & when I told her in the state room that they was wise she says they wasent so shes trying to kid somebody and shes a bout the only 1 thats geting kided out side of may be dr. & mrs. chambers. I was in a hurry to get in to the real game so when 1 of the girls asked was we tired of playing rummy I says it was kind of tire sum & finely they cut out the game but then miss Hendricks says that miss Griffith was a shark at telling fortuns with cards & did I want my fortun told & of corse I had to say yes tho I could of told my fortun a hole lot quicker if they had of let me run a long to the big game.

well miss griffith told my fortun & she says I am going to make a lot of money more money than I ever dreamd a bout & that I am going to have nothing but good luck from now on & it was a pretty good fortun but of corse they aint nothing in that bunk tho some people beleives it.

When she got threw I says how much was it & she says $.50 & I wasent going to be no cheap skate so I give her a ½ dollar & told her to buy some candy & she kept the money & of corse Minnie balled me out for it when we got in the state room where I went to get my money before geting in to the p g game & Minnie says if I am giveing money a way to women I wont half to leave home to find 1 thats willing to take it but if miss Griffith wasent a pretty girl Minnie wouldent of cared if I had of gave her $.75 in stead of $.50. Well my luck started all ok but as I say the game only lasted a little wile and I only got a way with $15.00 but thats a lot better then looseing $15.00.

Today Minnies been after me to walk up & down the deck all the time & we must of walked 70 miles & shes still walking but I cant see nothing in walking up & down when they aint no new senery but nothing but the same ocean to look at all the wile & when you see it onct you see it all ways. I will walk all she wants me to when we get where they is something to see say in germany or Paris.

well Ed. the trips pretty near over I mean the ocean trip & its been a grand trip & if any body ever tells you a mans libel to get sea sick or not in joy evry minut of the trip you tell them there off there nut.

Kindest regards to Kate & dont take no bad money.

Your Bro.
Larry M. Burns.

p s when I say a man in joys evry minut of the trip I mean he in joys it if hes after a rest because they aint realy nothing doing on a trip like this & a man would get pretty tired if it wasent for the p g game but its all ok for a man that wants to get a way from busness & not have no excitmunt for a wile.

on the prinzessin Katrina. July. 30.19.14.

Bro. Ed. Well Ed. here we are and we dont know where we are & this was the day when we was suposed to land in bremen but we aint in no bremen or no wheres else as yet and they aint no telling when we will get there tho the capt. says we will get there the day after tomorrow at night & that will be 2 days late but how are you going to tell weather the capt. is telling the truth or if he knows where hes at because he wasent telling the truth when he says we would get in a head of time & he wasent telling the truth when he says they would be good weather all the way. I wisht I had of stayed home from french lick last winter & I wouldent of been here.

I guess the worst is over now & if I thot it wasent I would tie a peace of led a round me & jump over the side but all the rotten things that could hapen has hapend all ready so the worst must be over.

in the 1st place I got in bad with the party at the supper table the night before last & I will tell you how it come off & you see if you think they had a lisence to get sore. prof. Baker asked me to tell them some storys & I started off with that 1 a bout pat & his wife haveing the scrap bout there pig and the story dident go very good so I thot I would wake them up and I told them that 1 a bout mr. & mrs. Flynn & the burgler & they aint realy nothing wrong a bout the story only just them 2 words but the 3 girls got up & beat it and so did mr. & mrs. chambers & Minnie says where do you think your at in a baroom & the only ones that stuck with me was the 2 profs. I felt pretty rotten & I asked the profs. would they drink a bottle of wine with me & they was willing but we dident stop at no 1 bottle but had sevrul & they let me lap up the most of it & then like a rummy I went & got all my money accept $50.00 & got in the big game & I never played in such luck in my life. right off the reel I have 3 aces to go and the pots opend a head of me & stayed with & then I tilts it & the 2 thats in stands the raze & we draw cards & the guy a head of me catches 2 trays to a pare of them & him standing a raze on 2 trays. I fill up & we go to it & it costs me some thing like $32.00. If this guy had of had any lisence in the pot I wouldent of gave a dam. I anteed a way a bout 20 bucks then with out getting nothing & then finely I picks up a doose full & all they was out against it was a 6 full & 4 5 spots & finely we begin playing roodels & I got 1 big hand a ace high flush & bumped in to another 6 full & they cleaned me out of what I had with me a bout $185.00 & I was going back to the state room & get the $50.00 but prof. Baker wouldent let me. Of corse I got my letter of creddit but I cant get nothing on that till we land & Minnies got a roll on her but I couldent get it off her with out a shot gun. the servunts on this here boat wont buy no french auto mobiles with what I give them.

well we went up on the deck after I was cleaned prof. Baker & I & prof. Hunter & it had turned off cold & prof. Hunter says they was a storm comeing up & it looked like it was going to be ruff & the boat was beggining to stagger all ready before we went to bed but it wasent nothing then to what it was when we got up in the morning only I dident get up & I only got up just a little wile a go after being in my birth since the night before last. Ed. we had some storm and the capt. says it was the worst he seen in 20 yrs. of going back & 4th acrost the ocean & back. They was 2 or 3 times when the smoke stacks was down in the water where the keels suposed to be & the keel was up where the smoke stacks is genally at. The capt. add mited that he dident know weather we was up or down or headed for bremen or cedar lake. Orders was gave that no pgrs. was to be aloud on the deck but they dident half to give no orders like that because they wasent no body could of stayed there un less they was naled down. Do you remmember that coster I & you & Kate & Minnie rode on out to forest pk. well Ed. that was as smoth as mich. av. come paired with this here boat. I have road in taxi cabs & seenick railroads that was pretty ruff rideing but I could lay down & go to sleep in 1 of them after what I went threw.

I dont know wich was sicker I or Minnie but I guess I was because they couldent of been no body sicker then me & still be a live & they was sevrul times when I would of gave a man a dollar to shoot me threw the tempul. I bet if they was 1 of them bbls. with the male in throwed over bord yest. it rolled all the way to N.Y. city with out no boat picking it up. I use to get pretty bad when we was kids & laped up them manhattan cock tails but nothing like this & onct or twict I was sick going over to st. Joe but if I had of been that sick yest. I would of thot I was in the best of helth. I fell out of the birth 3 times & the 3rd time I just layed there on to the floor and rolled a round because that wasent as bad as rolling a round in the birth for a while & then geting bumped on to the floor out of the birth. 1 of the waiters come in & picked me up some time last night & it was geting commer then & so I got a little sleep but I feel rotten yet & I dont half to go in to no jimnasum now because they aint nothing left on me to work off. Minnies still in her birth & I asked her a wile a go when was she going to get up & she says never but she will get over that just like I done.

Well Ed. the boat has went out of its corse and the capt. says he knows where hes at but how do we know if he knows or dont know & he says we will be in bremen on the 1 of Aug. late that day & I hope we will before an other 1 of them storms comes up & if we ever do get to bremen I will stay there or in europe till they build a bridge over the ocean because I wont take no more chances on a boat after what I went threw. In stead of stringing a man up for murder they should ought to put him on 1 of these here boats & make him ride acrost the ocean & back till he couldent stand it no more & I guess a bout 2 trips like this here would finnish him. what I cant figure is why they give you all them swell meals & they must know all the wile that there going to be waisted.

Well Ed. I lost my repatashon & I lost my money & I lost evry thing else & that girl that told my fortun & says I was going to have nothing but good luck was some fortun teller was she not & I got a nosion to ask her for my $.50 back only I guess she wouldent speak to me now.

Your Bro.
Larry M. Burns.

on the prinzessin Katrina. July. 31.1914.

Dear bro. Ed. The weather is grand and we are haveing grand weather and are geting a long grand & you wouldent never guess that they had been a storm to see the ocean now because its just as smoth as grand blvd. I & Minnie is both ok again and the both of us is feeling ok & it dont hardly seem posable that just a little wile a go I was pretty near deth & dident care weather I got well or not & the sooner I dide the better. prof. Baker says that when a mans sea sick he is a frade at 1st that he is going to die & after words he is a frade he isent. & thats pretty good & just hits the nale on the head 1st a mans a frade he is going to die and after words is a frade he isent. prof. Baker was kiding me this a m & come up to me & says I want you should give me some addvise dr. Burns what is the best thing a man can do when he is sea sick & I says I can tell you the best thing I done & you dont half to go to no dr. to lern how. prof. Baker says he wasent a bit sick all threw the storm but after words I asked the capt. if he knowed of any body on the boat that wasent sick & he says no even the boat it self lost its cargo. our party havent all been able to set down to the table since the night I got in wrong but I & the 3 girls is friends again so the only people thats mad at me yet is mr. & mrs. Chambers & of corse Minnie but she aint mad at me no more for geting in wrong but now she is mad at me because shes been sick & to hear her tell it you would think it was my falt & it was me that was ruff & not the ocean. but she will be better when we get to bremen & we will get there sure tommorow because I was asking the capt. a bout it & he says we will get there sure tommorow because they aint no more storms in sight but its going to be grand weather & they aint nothing can stop us from going right a long in to bremen. I am certunly anxius to get there & I guess I had enough rotten luck & cant have no more & the girl that told my fortun says she ment that all that good luck was just going to comense now in sted of 3 or 4 days a go. & now that wear pretty near there I can realy say its been a grand trip & I wouldent of missed it for nothing in the world & I am glad I fixed it to come & let Minnie come a long with me though she says I wouldent never of came if it wasent for she makeing me & of corse clames all the credit but I all ways wanted to make this trip & if she only knowed it I was thinking a bout comeing before she ever said a word. & I feel that I am pretty lucky to have the money & make a trip like this & I feel sorry for people that has to stick a round home all the wile & dont never see nothing. I dont wonder that people gos nuts a bout travveling acrost the ocean & a trip like this makes michigan city & benton harbor & them places look pretty sick.

I will drop you a card from bremen or may be wait till we get to Germany & drop you a card from there because I know it must be pretty slow for you to be shut up in Det. & me haveing this big time.

Your Bro.
L. M. Burns.

on the prinzessin Katrina. Aug. 1.19.14.

Dear bro. Ed. This is a good buy letter Ed. & I dont know weather you will rec. it or not. If you rec. this letter you will know long before you rec. it whats came off & probly you all ready know it that theys a war bet. germany & England & france & russia and pretty near all the countrys in europe accept norway & ejypt. The news was gave out on the boat this a.m. but prof. Baker says the boat got a wire lest tel. a bout it yest. or even before that but was keeping it a secrit & if they had give it out when they got it I would of made them run in to England or Ireland and let me off of the boat but now there going to try & run a head to bremen & what chance have I got when them dutch gets a hold of me because prof. Baker says theys nothing but dutch in bremen & if a man cant talk no dutch or prove that hes a dutch man they will murder him a live. & if we dont get to bremen before the England or france navey gets us we aint got no chance neither because they will see the dutch name on the boat & blow us up before asking us who are we. prof. Baker says the capt. told him it was pretty near a cinch that we would get to bremen ok & he says I should ought to be great full that my wifes a dutch man because they wont do nothing to her & she will be ok wile the men on the boat thats got wifes that isent dutch will be murdered both them & there wife. I says what will Minnie, do all a lone a mist the dutch men with out no husband to look after her & he says a pretty girl like she wont have no trouble because 1 of the dutch army offusers will fall for her & probly want to get marred to her or may be the zar him self will fall for her & she will live in a palice. prof. Baker says I would be ok if I could talk dutch & he tried to lern me how but I am to nervus & cant lern nothing & all the rest of them in our party can talk dutch accept I & mr. & mrs. chambers & so us 3 will be the ones they get & even if they dont kill us right a way but stick us in jale I will half to be lockd up with them & they aint no good & never was.

Ed. I am to nervus to write & I am just writeing to tell you whats came off & if 1 of these dutch men gets Minnie I want you to have the place Ed. & if any body makes a fus a bout it show them this letter & I dont want none of Minnies people to get a hold of it after what shes pulled off. I know now that the old man was right when he says I shouldent of never mixed up with the dutch. but its to late & what can I do. Minnies going to get rid of me just like she wanted to & the reason she done it this way in sted of sticking a knife in my back is because they cant never prove this on her. & prof. Baker says that any body with sence could of saw this comeing & Minnie knowed it before we left home & probly some of them dutch friends of hern tiped her off. your lucky Ed. & if I was to do it over again I would marry some old stiff with out no looks & it wouldent be no dutch man neither.

I been up on the deck since I begin this letter to see was they a boat comeing after us but they is none & evry body says its a cinch we will get to bremen. remmember Ed. I want you to have the place & an other thing I want you to do is to tell this hole thing to pres. Wilson & show him this letter if you half to go clear to Wash. & see that he gets these dutch for what they done to me. I am to nervus to write Ed. but I want you to have the place & dont let Minnies folks get a hold of it & take it your self Ed. you & Kate & do the best you can with it. Its a good thing now that you tended bar all them yrs. at callighans. If Louis Shaffer says any thing to you brake him in 2 & tell him what you think of he & his famly the hole kit & caboodel of them.

I been up on deck again & the capt. told prof. Baker we would be in bremen in 4 hours & prof. Baker says he will male this letter for me & look you up when he gets back. some day he will be back in the good old US but I wont never be Ed. & I wont never see you again & I wont even be burred in the semmitery where I payed for the lot & may be not burred at all but eat up by the croes. Minnies got the st. room door locked & wont let me in but I seen her since the news come & I told her what I think of her. She busted out crying & may be shes a little sorry now but what good is that now & why did she do it & why did she in sisst on us comeing & make me come when some thing told me I should stay home or go to cedar lake & why did I ever make that trip to french lick last winter or why wasent I sattisfide to marry a plane irish girl like you & leave the dutch to the dutch.

I am to nervus to write & I just want to tell you the place is yours & you wont never see Minnie again because even if the zar or some other dutch man dont grab her she will be a shamed to look you in the face. & good buy Ed. & god bless you & the same to Kate.

from your Bro.
Lawrence Martin Burns.

p s prof. Baker says he will do all he can to save me but what chance has he got. If its comeing its comeing & I been a good man Ed. but I dident have no sence.

II

Bremen, Germ. Aug. 2. 19.14.

Bro. Eddy. Well Eddy I says good buy to you in my last letter & I give prof. Baker the letter to male for me in case some thing hapened but nothing hapend & it wasent nessary for him to male the letter & I maled the letter my self & now Im writeing you an other letter when I dident expect never to be writeing to no body again & I wouldent of maled that other letter only I was to nervus to know what was it I was doing & now I got to write you this letter & let you know Im still a live & they wasent no navy over took us and when we got here they wasent no body even looked mad let a lone ack like they was going to shoot us full of holes. Minnie & prof. Baker says every body here are talking a bout the war.

As far is Im consernd I dont know what there talking a bout because they dont talk nothing but dutch & for all as I know they may be talking a bout the ball game. There all exited tho & theys solders all over town but what do I care a bout there solders because if they start after us all as we got to say is wear america citzens & they dont dare touch us. If they beggun monking with us uncle sam would here a bout it some ways & I guess pres. Wilson would make them wisht they had of left us a lone.

But Ed a man aint got no busness over here un lest he can talk dutch & Im glad our trip is spoild for us because I know now that I couldent never have no fun runing a round with people that I cant under stand a word of what there saying & when 1 of them comes up to me & shoots off there mouth I dont know are they saying how do you do or go to hell. Minnie can under stand them tho & I guess I would here a bout it if any of them says some thing out of the way but if she was to get 1 of her spells & see some dutch man that she wanted to kid a long with him she could go a long just like I wasent a round & he might may be call her deary & I wouldent know was he calling her deary or asking her would she pass the pickles.

So Im glad wear going to take the next boat back home & prof. Baker is down to the steam boat co. now makeing in querys a bout what time does the next boat leave for N.Y. city & wear going to be a bord of it & may be you will see us pretty near as soon is you get this letter because I & Minnie got it fixed up to stop off in Det. on our way home from N.Y. city to Chgo. because I got to waist a little time on acct. of Minnie geting dissapointed in her trip & cant go strate home to Chgo. like I want to & if I had my way a bout we wouldent never of left. But I got to stall a round a wile so as she wont have no holler comeing.

In the book it says they got a boat leaveing here tommorow but prof. Baker says may be they might not be runing reglar on acct. the war & thats why he went down to see a bout it. We aint unpack none of our bagige because we dont know for sure a bout our plans & Minnies laying down here in the hotel & geting rested tho I told her if we was going to start right back on the next boat to N.Y. city she would probly be laying down all the way home on the boat like she was comeing over most of the time so why not stand up or walk a round wile shes got a chance. But you cant tell a woman nothing & if she had of listen to me we would of been in joying our self at cedar lake or st. Joe or some wheres & not makeing these rotten trips back & 4th acrost the ocean & back.

The 3 girls from What Cheer ia. thats in our party wanted we should keep on with our trip & go all a round Germ. & up to Venice & them other places like in the book & they says if we would stick a round a few days the war would probly be over but prof. Baker & prof. Hunter says they aint no chance of the war geting over quick because the armys is so mad at each other. 1 of the girls miss Griffith says well what if the war aint over we can go a head & make our trip & they wont shoot at us because we aint on 1 side or the other & I says no they wont shoot at us but if 1 of them canon balls was comeing right at our head it wouldent stop & ask us was we dutch men or america or egjyp. After our head was shot off the men that done it might look in our pocket & see they made a miss take but what would that get us? & besides I says if wear not on 1 side or the other wear right bet. the both of them & that would be a fine place to be at. I says if I want to commit suside I will take either or go on the water wagon.

Well Ed I supose the papers over there is full of the war but may be they dont know over there what is it there fighting a bout & I wouldent of knew neither only prof. Baker told me & hes a smart man Ed & teachs school. Some guy from Hungry was walking down the st. with his wife & I guess she must of been miss took for some body elses wife & any way some body took a shot at the both of them & croked them & the Hungry police men says the men that done the shooting was from Serbia & the people over in Serbia got sore & says they wasent no such a thing so they went to it & then of corse the other countrys took sides with there pals just like as if 1 of your freinds got mixed up & you seen he was going to get the worst of it & you mixed up in it & the other guys freinds, horned in & made it a good 1.

So you can see how it got started & now there all fighting accept italy & I never seen a wop yet that was looking for trouble or 1 that would come out & fight with out a knife accept Hugo Kelly & he wouldent of un lest hed of had a irish name. It all started over them police men saying that the shooting was done by them fellows from Serbia & if the police over here is any thing like at home there probly wrong & so the hole things a bout nothing & besides that it dont do them diffrunt countrys no good to call each other names because they all talk diffrunt languidges & Id hate to fight with a man & not have him know what was I calling him. It would be like swareing at them rats a round the place & they dont know what Im talking about.

Well Ed its a bout time prof. Baker was comeing back & teling us what did he find out so I will close & I bet your glad to here from me & know wear safe & I will wire you when we get to N.Y. city & let you know when we will reach Det. My best to Kate & go home nights Ed & be have your self.

Your Bro.,
L. M. Burns.

Bremen, Germ. Aug. 2. 19.14.

Bro. Ed. Here I am Ed writing to you again tonight & I all ready wrote you 1 letter today but in the letter I all ready wrote I says we was comeing home on the next boat but come to find out they aint going to be no next boat & so Im writeing to you again. Dont worry Ed. Wear safe & all ok & will get home sooner or latter & I cant tell just when but wear all ok & dont worry. prof. Baker went down to the steam boat co. this a m & asked them was they an other boat going back to N.Y. city tommorow & they says they dident know. Then he says well you should ought to know because you got it down in the book that theys a boat leaveing tommorow & if you say in your book your going to run a boat you should ought to run it.

Then they says well may be if you oned this here co. you would run a boat & not care what hapend to your boat but we aint going to start out with no boat & have the england navy shoot a hole threw it & drownd evry body. He argude with them for a ½ hour but we might as well of argude with a crossing police man & when he seen they wasent no use of argueing no more he went & seen the america counsil that they got here & the counsil says if we stuck a round here we might probly be all ok & nothing hapen to us but we might may be be better off if we took a train & went to some new trull country so prof. Baker come back & put it up to us what would we do & we says where could we go if we dident stay here & he, says they was 2 countrys we could get to in a hurry that was new trull countrys & that means there countrys where they dont have no fighting because its against the law.

The 2 countrys he says was holland & Belljum so mr. & mrs. Chambers & the 3 girls & Minnie wanted to go to holland but I seen where they was a good chance to shake mr. & mrs. Chambers who I aint got no use for them so I says why not each of us go where they want to now that the tours broke up & I says that because Im sick & tired of hanging a round them Chambers & all so I found out that they dont talk nothing but dutch in holland & I dont want to be in no more places where Minnie can talk & I cant. So I says I was going to Belljum & I finely got Minnie coxed a round by me promussing her I would buy her a Brussels carpet over to Brussels & Brussels is the capitle of Belljum & where they make them swell carpets & they dont cost near as much is a Orentul rug that Minnies been after me I should buy for the house.

Well heres how we finely got it fixed up the Chambers & the 3 girls is going to holland & I hope the girls has a good time because there all ok but I dont see how can no body have a good time with them Chambers. prof. Hunter aint going no wheres but is going to stay here in germ. & write a book a bout the war & if he wants to be a sucker all right & he wanted prof. Baker should stay here with him but prof. Baker says no he would go a long with I & Minnie to Belljum because he wanted to here some more of my storys & I guess he wasent kiding none at that because I never seen a man laugh like he when I pull 1 of them storys & I thot he would bust laughing when I sprung that 1 a bout the 4 irish men at the pick nick.

Well Ed we all ready says good buy to the Chambers & them girls & Im writeing wile wear waiting for the time when our train gos & the others has went all ready & wear all ready when the trains ready because we dident un pack none of our stuff & wear all ready to go. I dont know what kind of a dump is Brussels but prof. Baker says theys plenty to drink there & if we dont like it we dont half to stay but can go some wheres else & pretty soon take a boat from there over to england & get a boat from there to N.Y. city but I dont mind sticking a round Belljum a wile as long as its a new trull country where they cant be no war & fighting.

Tell Kate not to do no worring & wear all ok & will get a long ok as long is prof. Bakers with us.

Your Bro.,
Larry M. Burns.

Brussels, Bell. Aug. 4. 19.14.

Dear Ed. What do you think Ed? wear in a new trull country that dont never do no fighting & all there talking a bout a round here is the war only there talking it in Belljum languidge so as I wouldent knew what was they talking about only for prof. Baker & he must be able to talk all the languidges they is. He says the Belljums is all exited because the dutch army are trying to walk acrost a part of Belljum on there way from germ. to France & the Belljums is trying to not let them & did you ever here any thing to beat it because its just like as if a man wanted to walk from 35 to 34 st. & I wouldent leave him walk on the side walk in front of my place but made him walk out in the middle of the st. & some of the Belljums is fighting the dutch army over east of here some wheres to try & keep them off of Belljum & some body will get hurt all for nothing & prof. Baker says england has declaired war on the dutch men for walking on Belljum & I dont see what is it to england where the dutch men walks & besides germ. & england all ready been fighting for 2 or 3 days so whats the use of declairing war now & its just like as if I was to go up & bust you in the jaw & then when you was laying on the ground I would say Im sore at you.

Prof. Baker says they aint no danger where wear at because Paris is where the dutch men is going & Paris is way south of here & to come threw here to go to Paris would be just like a man that wanted to go from lincoln pk. to So. Chgo & went a round by la Grange or if I & you was going down to new Orleans from Chgo. & went threw Omaha & we wouldent be no such suckers as that eh Ed? & the dutch men isent so smart that it hurts them but they aint no such suckers as that neither.

Well Ed wear not in no danger you see & besides as soon as the england army wake up & get busy they will make the dutch men look like a rummy because they tell me the irish has called off there quarl with england & are going to help clean up germ. & besides where wear at here in Brussels aint only a short distence from Austin where you can get a boat for england & they must be boats runing from england to N.Y. city so we can stay here or not stay here just like we want to only I want to stay here a wile because this looks like a live town Ed & plenty doing & I could have some time here if I could know what there talking about & Minnie likes it 1st strate & as long is wear both in joying our self why should we leave? Only I cant get in no card game because Im not what you could call dirty with money & besides I wouldent know to here them talk weather they was razeing the pot or complaneing a bout the heat.

They aint no use of you & Kate trying to write us no letters till we get home because the way things has turned out we dont know where wear going to be at from 1 day to the next. I will keep you post it how we get a long & you dont need to do no worring because wear haveing the finest kind of a time & it seems like a dream me thinking we was going to get mixed up in the war & shot full of holes.

Your Bro.,
L. M. Burns.

Brussels, Bell. Aug. 6. 19.14.

Bro. Ed. What do you think Ed? The little Belljums has licked the stufing out of the dutch men down to Liege where they been fighting all the wile & it looks like the dutch men was licked so bad they wouldent be no more war & the dutch men will probly give up when they see they aint good enough to even beat little Belljum let a lone france & england & russia & after this any time a dutch man talks to me a bout fighting I will give him the laugh & I been haveing a lot of fun kiding Minnie because shes all ways been teling me what fighters the dutch men was. & now look at them. This towns went plum nuts & the people gos a round holering like a bunch of collidge boys thats had a bronix cock tale.

Well Ed you cant hardly blame them from feeling good because they thot they dident have no chance of stoping the dutch men & look what they done to them. & they say a round here that they was 4 hunderd thousend dutch men killed & thats more then they is in Milwaukee & they cant be many more of them left so it looks like the war is pretty near over & these little Belljums done it & I guess I dident know what I was doing when I made Minnie come to Belljum insted of going to holland where they aint no exitemunt. I guess I cant pick a winner eh Ed? & when I get back home I can tell the boys I was right here in Belljum when the Belljums cleaned up the dutch men & when ever a dutch man comes in to the place I will kid the life out of them only of corse I wont kid them & make them sore if there buying a drink & in joying them self at there own expence.

Heres what come off Ed. The dutch men was trying to make the Belljums let them go threw Belljum & the Belljums says no; the dutch men pulled there gun & beggun shooting & then the Belljums pulled there gun & beggun shooting back & they fired back & 4th till all them dutch was killed 4 hunderd thousend of them & they wasent no ducks or partige to shoot so the Belljums quit shooting. The news got up here & evry body went crazy & now this town looks like the old 1st ward ball a bout 5 a.m. I says to Minnie well do I know where to come for exitemunt or dont I? & she says shut your big mouth so she just as good is add mitted Id picked the right spot & them people that went to holland is down on a dead 1.

we will stick a round here un till the exitemunts over & then we will look up a bout getting a boat at Austin for england & then catch the boat for N.Y. city.

Your Bro.,
Larry M. Burns.

Brussels, Bell. Aug. 10. 19.14.

Dear Eddy. That was a hole lot of bunk Eddy a bout them Belljums killing all them dutch men & they may of killed 2 or 3 dutch men but not no 4 hunderd thousend or no wheres near that amt. or else how could the dutch men of did what they done now? We just got the news here a little wile a go & we was pretty much worred when it 1st come but prof. Baker went up & seen the america counsil & he says they aint no reason for us worring because all america citzens is safe if they mind there own busness. Heres what come off Eddy. The dutch men beat them Belljums down to Liege where they been fighting all this time & thats the way you spell it only it aint spoke nothing like that & youd think it was Liege like the national or american Liege but it aint nothing like that when you say it.

Well the Belljums left the dutch men grab Liege off of them & now what do you think the dutch men is doing? there comeing over here to Brussels & aint that just like a dutch man to go all over trying to get some wheres right clost to them? & its the same way when they talk & I bet if a dutch man was trying to get from Det. to Chgo. they would take the wabash to st. Louis & come a round that way. Now there trying to get to Paris & there ½ way there & insted of going a long down there they got to come over here & see if may be they isent some sour crout laying a round lose.

Well of corse we aint in no danger as long is we mind our own busness but its going to be a pretty stiff proppisishon for me to mind my own busness when theys a hole lot of dutch mens struting a round. prof. Baker says pretty soon we will get our pass sports that you got to have when you want to get some wheres else in europe from where your at & I says why shouldent we get them right a way & get out of here now? & then we wont half to worry about minding our own busness when the dutch men gets here but he says they aint no trains runing over to Austin & we will may be half to hire a taxi cab or a horse & buggy or some thing & before we can do that we will half to find 1 of them things & then borry enough money off the america counsil to pay for it because they wont trust no body for nothing over here now & not even Minnie cant start no charge acct.

Prof. Baker says we aint in no danger of geting struck by no canon balls because the mare of the town aint going to try & stop the dutch men from comeing in here & I wisht I was the mare of the town because I would give them the fight of there life & I bet they wouldent never get in here if I was the mare of the town. I guess you seen me handle dutch men before this eh Eddy? & if it wasent for geting Minnie & prof. Baker in trouble I would give them a battle mare or no mare because I aint never seen no dutch man yet that wouldent quit when I went after them. But on acct. of Minnie & prof. Baker I got to mind my own busness & not start no trouble but the dutch men better not try & start nothing with me or they will get the worst of it. I dont half to tell you that Ed.

Your Bro.
L. M. Burns.

Brussels, Bell. Aug. 16. 19.14.

Bro. Eddy. Well Ed. this is a grate place for storys & theys as many storys a round here is they is on the massonic temple. The latest story they got now a round here is that the dutch men has tooken Liege & they says the same thing a wk. a go but it wasent right that time but now its the right dope so how can a man tell what your going to beleive They cant Ed & thats all they is to it. When they tell so many diffrunt storys you cant tell which to beleive & which to not beleive & Ive quit worring a bout it & let them beleive what they want to & it dont make no diffrunts to me any way because the dutch men cant do nothing to us even if they come here where wear at & may be they aint comeing after all because the story a bout them comeing may be wrong if the other storys is wrong.

Any way, we would be all ok Ed if we wasent pretty near broke & wear runing so shy that we cant spend no more in joying our self but got to save up all we got to pay our fair from Austin to england & then we got to get some more in england to buy our ticket acrost the ocean & I dont know who are we going to borry it off of but prof. Baker says hes got friends over there who we can get it off of & I wisht we could start right now but we cant get a hold of no horse & buggy or taxi cab to take us to Austin & prof. Baker says we should ought to start out & walk but on acct. of Minnies feet hurting her I & her couldent do that & I told prof. Baker if he was in a hurry to go a head by him self but he says no we would all stick to gather. I guess prof. Bakers afrade he might may be miss 1 of them storys of mine if he was to go off & leave us & he sure does like them storys Ed & he just eats them up.

Well Eddy theys nothing much to write a bout wile wear just here waiting & I will let you know the minut I have any news & kindest regards to Kate.

Your Bro.,
Larry M. Burns.

Brussels, Bell. Aug. 22. 19.14.

Dear bro. Eddy. Talk a bout dutch men Ed. I dident know they was so many in the world & all the dutch men they is must of walked threw here yest. & today. The mare surenderd the town to the dutch men yest. & they wasent no exitemunt a bout it he just says the town is yrs. like they says to us in denver that time the elks had the convenshon in denver. & the dutch men just come in and took it but I dident have no idear they would be so many of them but I thot they might may be a couple thousend but no they been walking threw here for 2 hole days or may be they been walking a round in circuls & the same 1’s is comeing threw now that was threw here yest. & you cant proove it by me because they all look a like but prof. Baker says no there all diffrunt & he says theys a lot more of them we havent seen but any way Ive saw all I want to see & if I dont never see an other dutch man all my life I can still say I seen enough & when theys such a gang of them to gather & all looking just a like I should think theyd get all balled up & none of them know weather he was himself or some body else.

People use to say I & you looked a like Ed & they wasent giveing you none the worst of it but how would you like to look like a bout a million other dutch mens & all be walking a long & you wouldent know weather you was here or a mile a head. There all going to paris prof. Baker says but they wont be enough hotels & bording houses to take care of them all when they get there & if I was them Id make some of them go some wheres else because they all of them will want the same things to eat liver worst & pretsils & you cant expect no 1 town to have enough of them things a round to feed the hole Germ. army.

But Id like to own 1 of them paris brewrys now eh Ed. prof. Baker says I want to be care full what I write in a letter a bout the dutch men because there libel to get a hold of the letters & read them & might may be get sore so I will be care full & I dont half to tell you what I think of them any way do I Eddy because I & you thinks the same thing a bout the dutch men & any body that wants my share of them can have it & besides I guess they wouldent dare open no letters because I would get the P O dept. after them & its a peneteniary ofense.

Prof. Baker says they will leave some of the officers & solders here in this town to take care of it wile the rest of them gos on down to paris & I guess he knows what hes talking a bout because hes been talking to some of the dutch officers in dutch & they give him the dope but I dont see why does any of them want to stay here or why they should ought to because we was geting a long ok before the dutch men ever come here & just as good as we are now & may be better & as far is Im consernd they can all go down to paris or Pittsburgh or any wheres else theyve a mind to. but we cant do nothing a bout getting out of here till theyve all went threw & things is quited down & I will let you know when we get ready to start & give Kate our kindest.

Your Bro.
L. M. Burns.

Brussels, Bell. Aug. 24. 19.14.

Dear Eddy. Well Eddy wear all fixed up & prof. Baker done it & wear going to get out of here tommorow or next day & the dutch men is going to send us down to Austin in a auto mobile & it wont cost us nothing & prof. Baker done pretty good to get it fixed up & he done it by talking to the dutch officers in there own languige. He says some of them is pretty nice fellows & a couple of thems been over to the US & knows some people he knows & the fellows hes been talking to is officers thats left here to gard Brussels & theyve got a hole lot of solders left here with them to help gard the town but all them dutch men or the most of them that went threw here is pretty near down to paris by this time & the 1s thats here is just men that aint going no wheres & prof. Baker says they aint going to hurt no body.

Some of them talks america he says & hes frammed it up for I & Minnie to meet 1 of them tommorow & the 4 of us is going to have a little party on the dutch man & I hope we get some thing to eat out of it because we aint been what you could call crowding our stumick & if it wasent for prof. Baker laying in a stock of crackers and cheese & bread when he herd the dutch men was comeing we would be up against it but its pretty near all over now because this here dutch man that wear going to have the party is the 1 thats going to send us to Austin & theyll be plenty to eat for us there because they aint been no war over that way & besides we wont only stay there till its time for the boat to go.

Prof. Baker says this dutch man is all ok & as nice a man is you want to meat & may be he aint realy no dutch man but got mixed up in the army some ways but his names Klinke or how ever you spell it so I guess hes a dutch man or any way hes got a dutch name but if he sets up the lunch & gives us some thing to wash it down I wont care if hes a dutch man or a hunk or what is he.

Wear still staying in the hotel where we was before all this come off & the eating was all ok before all this come off but now the hotels full of dutch officers & solders & they get most evry thing they is to eat & the sooner we get out of here & some wheres else so much the better. But if we dont get out of here & on the way home pretty quick they wont be no chance for me to be home for the primerys & besides I want to get home before Louis Shaffers played to many tunes on the cash rejister. Eh Ed.

Your Bro.,
Larry M. Burns.

Brussels, Bell. Aug. 26. 19.14.

Bro. Eddy. Here I am Eddy hideing & I dont know whats going to happen to me & I cant tell you where Im hideing at because some of them dutch men might get a hold of this letter & open it & I dont even know will I ever get it maled but if I dont never get out of here a live & some body should male this letter you will know what come off & what them dutch men done to me. Heres what come off Eddy & we should ought to knew better then trust a dutch man & look what we got for it.

This here Klinke the dutch officer that promussed to give us some thing to eat come up to I & Minnies room in the hotel yest. a m & I & Minnie & prof. Baker was all seting in there talking & this here Klinke knocks & we says come in & in he come & says did we want to have lunch with him & he talked america just as good as I or you & we says sure we would have lunch with him because we was hungry is a bare & prof. Baker interduced I & Minnie to him & he says he was please to meet us & then we went down stares all to gather to the dinning room of the hotel. They was an other dutch officer there & we was interduced to him & set down & ordered some thing to eat & you can bet I ordered some thing to Eddy because my stumick felt like the colliseem & I ordered evry thing I could think of & wile we was waiting for them to bring in the stuff we ordered this here Klinke calls 1 of the solders & says some thing to him in dutch & pretty soon he comes back with some wine & I wisht you could of seen me go to it & any way we eat & drink & set there all pm & was haveing a real time but I might of knew them 2 officers wasent right & I will tell you what come off.

1 of them says he had it fixed up that they was to be a auto mobile to take us to Austin a bout 5 oclock & we might is well in joy our self till then & so we set there & I bet I must of drink 4 or 5 qts but you know it dont never faze me Ed & I was all ok & finely prof. Baker says mr. Burns should ought to entertane us with 1 of his storys & Minnie says you better not get Larry started because he dont never know when to stop & I says I guess I know when to stop all right & Klinke says sure go a head & tell us a story because theys nothing I like better than a good story & prof. Baker says well this old boy dont never tell nothing but good 1s & he had me right there at that eh Ed.

I dident want to tell no story but they coxed me & I finely says to my self well why not do some thing for them because they been treating us pretty good so I told them 1 or 2 & I told them the 1 a bout the pick nick & I thot they would all bust laughing even prof. Baker who herd it before but he dident laugh no harder then them dutch officers & finely they says is all your storys a bout irish men & dont you know none a bout dutch men & I says sure I know a hole lot of them a bout dutch men then I told them the 1 a bout the 2 dutch men quarling over there wife & it went good & they hollered for more & then the trouble beggun & I will tell you how it come off.

I guess you may be herd the story Ed because I told it a couple times & I dont know weather you was there or not but any way heres the story & its a bout a dutch man that use to keep comeing in to a place that was ran by a irish man & when hed get a few drinks under his belt he use to holler hock the kiser & that means hurah for the kiser in dutch. & evry time this here dutch man would get a few drinks under his belt he would holler hock the kiser & he use to keep comeing in to the irish mans place & hollering that evry time he got a few under his belt.

So 1 night the dutch man was broke & he come in to the irish mans place all lit up & says would the irish man stand him off for a drink & the irish man says no you bought all your drinks some wheres else tonight so you can go some wheres else & get stood off for an other 1 & the dutch man says I cant get stood off no wheres else & the irish man says well you cant get nothing here & the dutch man says will you lend me the money & then I can go some wheres else & get the drink & wont bother you no more & the irish man says how much money do you want & the dutch man says just a dime thats all. & then the irish man says if you dont want to borry more then a dime why dont you hock the kiser?

Well Ed that dident make no hit like I thot it would & they wasent no body done no laughing not even prof. Baker & they wasent nothing said for a bout 1 min. & then this here other officer that I dont know his name got up & grabs me by the sholder & says come a long with me I want to see you out side & they wasent nothing I could do but go a long with him & prof. Baker got up & was comeing a long with us & the officer told him to set down where he was at & mind his own busness & then I seen it was serius & the dutch man was good & sore & heres what come off Ed.

He took me out side where they was a bunch of dutch solders & then he says to me that was a good story you told wasent it & I dident say nothing & he says the irish man got the best of the dutch man in that story dident he & I dident say nothing back & he says well heres where the dutch men gets back & then he hollers to a couple of them solders & says some thing to them in dutch & then he says these here solders will take care of you & then he left me & them 2 solders grabed me & what do you think they done Ed.

They throwed me in to a corner of the yard of the hotel that there useing for a jale & there I was locked up with some other prissoners & couldent get out & I says to the solders you better leave me out of here before you get your self in trouble & they just laughed & beat it out of the room & left me there.

Well Eddy the prissoners in there was all Belljums or french men or some thing & they couldent under stand what I says to them & I couldent make no head or tale out of what they says to me & so they wasent no body I could talk to. I dident know what was comeing off & I must of set there a hour wondring what was they going to do with me & then this here officer not Klinke but the other 1 come in with 1 of the solders & come up to me & says some thing to the solder in dutch & then he says to me may be youd like to know what wear going to do & I says it dont make no diffrunts to me what are you going to do & he says no I supose not but any way Im going to tell you & this is it.

Evry hour from now to morning you got to get up & stand on your feet & holler hock the kiser & the gard here will come & tell you when its time for you to holler & if you miss a hour with out hollering your going to get shot as a spy & I says you know I aint no spy & you better be care full what you do to me or uncle Sam will get after you & he says uncle Sam wouldent never miss you because hes got a hole lot of jokers & I says what have you did with my wife & prof. Baker & he says Im not runing your wife or prof. Baker & I got enough to keep track of with out worring a bout them.

Then he left me & went away from me & they wasent nothing more come off till finely the gard come up & says some thing in dutch & I couldent make no head or tale of it & then he points at me & says hock the kiser & I just laughed at him & then he pulls out a gun & points it at me & says hock the kiser so what could I do Ed & I had to get up & holler it but I bet I wouldent of never done it only for the gun & they isent no dutch man could make me do nothing with there bear fists.

Well Eddy the same thing come off 4 or 5 or 6 times & the last couple times I was a sleep & the gard had to waken me up & finely in come Klinke & it must of been a long a bout midnight & he come up to me a long with the gard & says some thing to the gard & then asked me was I sorry & I says what for & he says you know what for you insulted the emper of Germ. & I says I dident mean to insult no body & he says all right then come a long with me & your pretty lucky to not get shot for what you done.

Then I & him walked out & he says the best thing you can do is beat it out of town & I says where would I go & he says you better beat it for Austin & I says I aint going no wheres with out my wife & prof. Baker & he says they all ready went & I says when & he says we sent them a way from here in a auto mobile but they only been gone a bout 6 hrs. & if you run fast you might catch up with them & then I says aint you going to give me no auto mobile & he says I should say not your lucky to be a live & then he give me a peace of paper & says it was my pass sport & thats the last I seen of him. only before he left me he says dont let yourself be seen a round here tommorow or no time or its all off with you.

Well Eddy I started out of town but how did I know which way to go & evry little wile theyd be a dutch solder jump out at me from behind a tree or some thing & hold me up & make me show them the peace of paper & I wasent geting no wheres & it was dark is pitch & finely. I snuck in where Im at & now its morning again but I dont dare go out or them officers might see me & I dont know where Minnie & prof. Baker is at or whats going to happen to me & there a fine team to go runing off & leave me here & if a man cant trust his wife & his friends who can they trust. Nobody Ed. I dont know will I get this letter maled but if I do get it maled & you dont here no more from me you will know how it come off.

Your Bro.,
Larry M. Burns.

Austin, Bell. Sept. 1. 19.14.

Bro. Eddy. I dont know weather you got my last letter or not but it dont make no diffrunts Ed because now I guess we will get home all ok & I can tell you what happend to me when I see you but I dont know when will that be unlest you can get a way & come to Chgo. because we aint going to stop off at no Det. or no wheres else but if we ever get to N.Y. city wear going strate home.

I told you in my last letter which I dont know if you got it or not a bout me being a prissoner & the dutch men haveing me locked up in jale & I bluffed them in to leaveing me out & if it hadent of been for me haveing all the nerve in the world Id of probly been there yet or may be shot as a spy & I was in hideing pretty near a hole day in a house in Brussels but finely I snuck out & started for here where Im at now only they spell it Ostend over here but that dont make no diffrunts.

Ed I wont never for get my trip comeing here as long is I live & they aint no danger of me for geting it for a wile any way because my feets so sore there a bout ready to drop off & I dont know how far I walked but I walked over ½ the way from Brussels here & the rest of the time I was rideing in farmers waggons & could of road all the way may be but I dident have no money & I dont know how far is it from here to Brussels but its far enough & I dident have nothing to eat the hole trip accept just a couple peaces of bread that I beged off of farmers just like a bum.

Well Ed I couldent tell you in a hunderd yrs. all I went threw but I will tell you when I see you because they isent time to write it all. I come in here last night pretty near dead & went up to the america counsils place & they give me some soup & some brandy & I layed down & the counsil asked me who was I & I told him & he says your wifes been up here evry day to know had we herd any thing a bout you & I know where shes at & will send for her & I says never mind sending for her because I dont want to see her or no body else but he dident pay no a tension.

Pretty soon in come Minnie & prof. Baker & Minnie beggun screeking & throwing on a lot of aggony & I says cut it out & dont come near me you run off & left me & I dont want nothing more to do with you & then prof. Baker told me to shut up & I told him to shut up him self & we had it back & 4th.

Finely he told me how it come off & heres how it come off. & it wasent there falt Ed because they tride to make the dutch officers leave them wait for me so as they could bring me a long in the auto mobile & the dutch officers says no I would half to be punnished for insulting the emper of Germ. & they would give me a good scare & then make me walk to Austin & they promussed they wouldent do nothing to me but just scare me & Minnie says couldent her & prof. Baker wait till theyd scared me & then take me a long in there auto mobile & the dutch officers says no & if dont hurry up & get out of town your self some things libel to happen to you so thats why they come a way & leave me but what do you think of them dutch officers Ed geting swelled up & thinking they scared me. Fine chance eh Ed. But they made me walk all right & I wisht there feet was as sore is mine.

Well Ed prof. Baker borryed the money off of the america counsil & wear going to dover Eng. on a boat tonight & then wear going to catch a boat for N.Y. city as soon is theys 1 leaveing & it cant leave to soon to suit me & prof. Baker says if wear lucky we should ought to be in N.Y. city in a little over a wk. & then Minnie says O lets stay a little wile in London & in joy our self because they aint no war there & I says no & they wasent no war in Belljum neither & if Londons a new trull country like Belljum I dont want to go no wheres near it & we aint going to stay in no London or no wheres else but wear going to N.Y. city as soon is we can & then we wont get in to no more trouble.

Minnie says I guess we better not stop in London at that because youd probly want to tell them some storys & youd probly wind up by insulting king Geo. & get us all in bad & may be get us all shot & then I told them how clost I come to geting shot in Brussels & Minnie says you dont half to tell us that because you was ½ shot before you left us & we talked a wile longer & finely I says I wanted a place to sleep & Minnie says you look like you should ought to sleep in the bath tub & I says is that so. & she seen she was going to far so she shut up.

Well Eddy this towns full of refuges thats been drove out of there homes & there all looking for boats to take them some wheres & theys going to be some crowd on the boat over to Eng. but prof. Bakers got things fixed up so as we cant get crowded off but will have rms. to our self & its a bout time he done some thing after interduceing us to them dutch officers & geting us in to all that trouble.

I dont care if the oceans ruff or smoth going back Ed because Im going to stay in bed all the way & you wont here nothing more from me till we get to N.Y. city & may be not then. This has been some trip Ed. & if my hare aint gray it aint this trips falt.

Your Bro.,
L. M. Burns.

Chgo., Ill. Sept. 11. 19.14.

Bro. Eddy. Excus this pencill Ed & all so for not writeing to you before & I would of wrote you from London Eng. or from N.Y. city or some wheres only I figgured on acct. of us comeing home from Eng. on the 1st boat that we would get to the US as soon is a letter would & thats why I dident write you nothing from London while we was there & we wasent in N.Y. city only long enough to go from the boat to the station where we took the train at & we just got here this a m & I went right down to the place from the station & I went right down there because I wanted to see how was things geting a long & what do you think Ed? Louis Shaffer wasent down to the station to meet us or he wasent up to the place & Joe harding that was on watch says he hadent been a round for 2 or 3 days.

Thats a fine thing for a man to do when you leave him in charge of your place but thats a bout all I should ought to of expected from a dutch man & I hope hes quit because that will save me from the trouble of fireing him because I wouldent have no dutch men a round my place after what I went threw & the sight of 1 of them makes me sick. But I cant tell weather I been doing a good busness or a rotten busness till I see Louis Shaffer & hes got the bank book & all the rest of it & I dont know nothing till I see him but Joe says they been doing good busness & the summer gardens been doing grate & evry things ok as far is I could see & its a bout time I was haveing a little luck eh Ed?

Well Ed we come acrost from Austin to dover on a boat & I wisht you could of saw it because they must of been a thousand people on the bord of it & they was room for a bout 2 or 3 hunderd & they was hanging over the sides & evry wheres else & I expected evry minut to see the boat sink down in the bottom of the water & then when we got over to dover we had to stand up in the train all the way to London & then we had to lay a round London 2 days and then an other train to south Hampton where the boats leaves from but finely they was 1 going & we took it but we had to pay extra on acct. the crowd going & we got rotten rooms on the boat at that & we was 7 days comeing acrost & they was the longest 7 days I ever seen because wed spent all the money we borryed on the boat fair & they wasent no games on the boat but even if they had of been I couldent of got in to them.

But who do you think was on the boat Ed. mr. & mrs. Chambers & them 3 girls & they says they figgured it out we must be dead on acct. of us being down in Belljum where all the fighting was at & they was mighty supprised to see us & wanted to here all a bout it & I says let prof. Baker tell you a bout it but prof. Baker says mr. Burns is the best 1 at telling storys & let him tell you all a bout it.

So they wouldent have nothing else but I must tell them all a bout it & I give them the hole story & told them a bout me geting locked up in prisson by the dutch men & busting my way out of prisson & how they was going to shoot me as a spy if I hadent of knocked down the gard & broke out & a bout the dutch officer trying to flirt with Minnie & a bout me busting him in the jaw & geting a way with it right in front of the hole dutch army & a bout the Belljum woman that they was going to burn up her house & I stood up in front of the house & told them I would kill the 1st man that started some thing & they seen I was in ernest & beat it a way from the house & a bout the canon balls just missing us when we was walking down Main st. Brussels.

I told them evry thing we seen & done & the girls wouldent hardly leave me for a minut they was so exited over what was I telling them but mr. & mrs. Chambers wouldent lissen to none of it & wouldent stay a round where we was at & I guess they was sore they picked out holland where they wasent no exitemunt or nothing. If it hadent of been for me telling them storys a bout the war we would of had a rotten trip because they wasent nothing doing at all on the boat & if I told them storys onct I must of told them a hunderd times because they kept after me to tell them again.

Prof. Baker says the storys kept geting better the more I told them but that was just my way of telling them Ed & I will try & remmember evry thing we went threw so as I can tell you & Kate when I see you & I wisht youd come over and pay us a visit so as you could here all a bout it. I bet they will be a crowd down to the place tonight because our name was in the paper where we got back from europe & all the boys will want to here the dope & I guess Im the 1 that can give it to them eh Ed.

Well Ed I dont know if Im glad we made the trip or not because it cost me a hole lot of money & I was figgureing up on the train comeing home & it cost me a bout 8 hunderd dollars all to gather & that includs all expenses including $140 for the fair acrost the ocean & $150 comeing back acrost the ocean & a hunderd dollars r r fair on this side of the ocean comeing back & 4th to N.Y. city & back & all expenses includeing what I lost in the poker game & I wouldent of never lost it if the cards had broke good a couple of times. & besides the 8 hunderd dollars Minnie lost some of her close & only brung a bout ½ of them with her a way from Brussels.

She says shes got to have a hole new out fit & how much will that cost me godd knows I dont & for all my money what did I see. Nothing but a hole lot of water & 3 or 4 1 horse towns that you could stick them in the Chgo. river with out over flowing the banks & a lot of scared Belljums & a bout 3 times as many dutch men is they is in milwaukee & you could go up to milwaukee 3 times & see as many dutch men is we seen & it wouldent cost you over 10 dollars & thats not saying I would want to throw a way 10 dollars or $.10 cents to look at dutch men tho Id give up $.75 cents to see 1 or 2 of them say hands Wagner or Frank Schulte.

But still in all I cant say the trip was waisted & probly we seen more exitemunt then wed of saw if we took the reglar tour No. 2 like it was in the book & besides that I had the satisfaction of showing them dutch men that I wasent afrade of there hole army.

But what do you think now Ed? We hadent no sooner got home than Minnie pulls it on me that on acct. of our trip geting broke up by the war she realy had an other trip comeing & would I take her up to black Lake Mich. where her sisters been all summer & I says black Lake wheres that? & she says its up in Mich. near holland. Near Holland I says.

I should think youd got enough of being near holland because when we was in Belljum we was near holland & look at the time we had.

She says yes but they wont be no danger of us getting in trouble up to this place if youll just keep your mouth shut & not tell no funny storys & I says shut up your self & quit talking a bout trips because Ive herd enough a bout trips & next time you want to go vissiting you can go over on the north side & vissit the animuls in lincoln pk. but you wont never get me to go a long with you because Im not never going out of the 3rd ward again & she says it wouldent be fare to the rest of the city for you to stay in 1 ward & I says your to smart & she dident say nothing back.

Well Ed I hope you & Kate can come over & pay us a vissit & may be you could come when prof. Bakers here because he promussed he would come to Chgo. when he got a chance & I says to him dont for get our No. & he says you bet I wont because I will want to here you tell some more storys so you see Eddy he likes them storys of mine pretty well even if the dutch men dont.

Write & let us know how are you geting a long Ed & take care of your self & dont take no bad money. Kindest to Kate.

Your Bro.,
Larry M. Burns.

Alibi Ike

I

His right name was Frank X. Farrell, and I guess the X stood for “Excuse me.” Because he never pulled a play, good or bad, on or off the field, without apologizin’ for it.

“Alibi Ike” was the name Carey wished on him the first day he reported down South. O’ course we all cut out the “Alibi” part of it right away for the fear he would overhear it and bust somebody. But we called him “Ike” right to his face and the rest of it was understood by everybody on the club except Ike himself.

He ast me one time, he says:

“What do you all call me Ike for? I ain’t no Yid.”

“Carey give you the name,” I says. “It’s his nickname for everybody he takes a likin’ to.”

“He mustn’t have only a few friends then,” says Ike. “I never heard him say ‘Ike’ to nobody else.”

But I was goin’ to tell you about Carey namin’ him. We’d been workin’ out two weeks and the pitchers was showin’ somethin’ when this bird joined us. His first day out he stood up there so good and took such a reef at the old pill that he had everyone lookin’. Then him and Carey was together in left field, catchin’ fungoes, and it was after we was through for the day that Carey told me about him.

“What do you think of Alibi Ike?” ast Carey.

“Who’s that?” I says.

“This here Farrell in the outfield,” says Carey.

“He looks like he could hit,” I says.

“Yes,” says Carey, “but he can’t hit near as good as he can apologize.”

Then Carey went on to tell me what Ike had been pullin’ out there. He’d dropped the first fly ball that was hit to him and told Carey his glove wasn’t broke in good yet, and Carey says the glove could easy of been Kid Gleason’s gran’father. He made a whale of a catch out o’ the next one and Carey says “Nice work!” or somethin’ like that, but Ike says he could of caught the ball with his back turned only he slipped when he started after it and, besides that, the air currents fooled him.

“I thought you done well to get to the ball,” says Carey.

“I ought to been settin’ under it,” says Ike.

“What did you hit last year?” Carey ast him.

“I had malaria most o’ the season,” says Ike. “I wound up with .356.”

“Where would I have to go to get malaria?” says Carey, but Ike didn’t wise up.

I and Carey and him set at the same table together for supper. It took him half an hour longer’n us to eat because he had to excuse himself every time he lifted his fork.

“Doctor told me I needed starch,” he’d say, and then toss a shoveful o’ potatoes into him. Or, “They ain’t much meat on one o’ these chops,” he’d tell us, and grab another one. Or he’d say: “Nothin’ like onions for a cold,” and then he’d dip into the perfumery.

“Better try that apple sauce,” says Carey. “It’ll help your malaria.”

“Whose malaria?” says Ike. He’d forgot already why he didn’t only hit .356 last year.

I and Carey begin to lead him on.

“Whereabouts did you say your home was?” I ast him.

“I live with my folks,” he says. “We live in Kansas City⁠—not right down in the business part⁠—outside a ways.”

“How’s that come?” says Carey. “I should think you’d get rooms in the post office.”

But Ike was too busy curin’ his cold to get that one.

“Are you married?” I ast him.

“No,” he says. “I never run round much with girls, except to shows onct in a wile and parties and dances and roller skatin’.”

“Never take ’em to the prize fights, eh?” says Carey.

“We don’t have no real good bouts,” says Ike. “Just bush stuff. And I never figured a boxin’ match was a place for the ladies.”

Well, after supper he pulled a cigar out and lit it. I was just goin’ to ask him what he done it for, but he beat me to it.

“Kind o’ rests a man to smoke after a good workout,” he says. “Kind o’ settles a man’s supper, too.”

“Looks like a pretty good cigar,” says Carey.

“Yes,” says Ike. “A friend o’ mine give it to me⁠—a fella in Kansas City that runs a billiard room.”

“Do you play billiards?” I ast him.

“I used to play a fair game,” he says. “I’m all out o’ practice now⁠—can’t hardly make a shot.”

We coaxed him into a four-handed battle, him and Carey against Jack Mack and I. Say, he couldn’t play billiards as good as Willie Hoppe; not quite. But to hear him tell it, he didn’t make a good shot all evenin’. I’d leave him an awful-lookin’ layout and he’d gather ’em up in one try and then run a couple o’ hundred, and between every carom he’d say he’d put too much stuff on the ball, or the English didn’t take, or the table wasn’t true, or his stick was crooked, or somethin’. And all the time he had the balls actin’ like they was Dutch soldiers and him Kaiser William. We started out to play fifty points, but we had to make it a thousand so as I and Jack and Carey could try the table.

The four of us set round the lobby a wile after we was through playin’, and when it got along toward bedtime Carey whispered to me and says:

“Ike’d like to go to bed, but he can’t think up no excuse.”

Carey hadn’t hardly finished whisperin’ when Ike got up and pulled it:

“Well, good night, boys,” he says. “I ain’t sleepy, but I got some gravel in my shoes and it’s killin’ my feet.”

We knowed he hadn’t never left the hotel since we’d came in from the grounds and changed our clo’es. So Carey says:

“I should think they’d take them gravel pits out o’ the billiard room.”

But Ike was already on his way to the elevator, limpin’.

“He’s got the world beat,” says Carey to Jack and I. “I’ve knew lots o’ guys that had an alibi for every mistake they made; I’ve heard pitchers say that the ball slipped when somebody cracked one off’n ’em; I’ve heard infielders complain of a sore arm after heavin’ one into the stand, and I’ve saw outfielders tooken sick with a dizzy spell when they’ve misjudged a fly ball. But this baby can’t even go to bed without apologizin’ and I bet he excuses himself to the razor when he gets ready to shave.”

“And at that,” says Jack, “he’s goin’ to make us a good man.”

“Yes,” says Carey, “unless rheumatism keeps his battin’ average down to .400.”

Well, sir, Ike kept whalin’ away at the ball all through the trip till everybody knowed he’d won a job. Cap had him in there regular the last few exhibition games and told the newspaper boys a week before the season opened that he was goin’ to start him in Kane’s place.

“You’re there, kid,” says Carey to Ike, the night Cap made the ’nnouncement. “They ain’t many boys that wins a big league berth their third year out.”

“I’d of been up here a year ago,” says Ike, “only I was bent over all season with lumbago.”

II

It rained down in Cincinnati one day and somebody organized a little game o’ cards. They was shy two men to make six and ast I and Carey to play.

“I’m with you if you get Ike and make it seven-handed,” says Carey.

So they got a hold of Ike and we went up to Smitty’s room.

“I pretty near forgot how many you deal,” says Ike. “It’s been a long wile since I played.”

I and Carey give each other the wink, and sure enough, he was just as ig’orant about poker as billiards. About the second hand, the pot was opened two or three ahead of him, and they was three in when it come his turn. It cost a buck, and he throwed in two.

“It’s raised, boys,” somebody says.

“Gosh, that’s right, I did raise it,” says Ike.

“Take out a buck if you didn’t mean to tilt her,” says Carey.

“No,” says Ike, “I’ll leave it go.”

Well, it was raised back at him and then he made another mistake and raised again. They was only three left in when the draw come. Smitty’d opened with a pair o’ kings and he didn’t help ’em. Ike stood pat. The guy that’d raised him back was flushin’ and he didn’t fill. So Smitty checked and Ike bet and didn’t get no call. He tossed his hand away, but I grabbed it and give it a look. He had king, queen, jack and two tens. Alibi Ike he must have seen me peekin’, for he leaned over and whispered to me.

“I overlooked my hand,” he says. “I thought all the wile it was a straight.”

“Yes,” I says, “that’s why you raised twice by mistake.”

They was another pot that he come into with tens and fours. It was tilted a couple o’ times and two o’ the strong fellas drawed ahead of Ike. They each drawed one. So Ike throwed away his little pair and come out with four tens. And they was four treys against him. Carey’d looked at Ike’s discards and then he says:

“This lucky bum busted two pair.”

“No, no, I didn’t,” says Ike.

“Yes, yes, you did,” says Carey, and showed us the two fours.

“What do you know about that?” says Ike. “I’d of swore one was a five spot.”

Well, we hadn’t had no pay day yet, and after a wile everybody except Ike was goin’ shy. I could see him gettin’ restless and I was wonderin’ how he’d make the getaway. He tried two or three times. “I got to buy some collars before supper,” he says.

“No hurry,” says Smitty. “The stores here keeps open all night in April.”

After a minute he opened up again.

“My uncle out in Nebraska ain’t expected to live,” he says. “I ought to send a telegram.”

“Would that save him?” says Carey.

“No, it sure wouldn’t,” says Ike, “but I ought to leave my old man know where I’m at.”

“When did you hear about your uncle?” says Carey.

“Just this mornin’,” says Ike.

“Who told you?” ast Carey.

“I got a wire from my old man,” says Ike.

“Well,” says Carey, “your old man knows you’re still here yet this afternoon if you was here this mornin’. Trains leavin’ Cincinnati in the middle o’ the day don’t carry no ball clubs.”

“Yes,” says Ike, “that’s true. But he don’t know where I’m goin’ to be next week.”

“Ain’t he got no schedule?” ast Carey.

“I sent him one openin’ day,” says Ike, “but it takes mail a long time to get to Idaho.”

“I thought your old man lived in Kansas City,” says Carey.

“He does when he’s home,” says Ike.

“But now,” says Carey, “I s’pose he’s went to Idaho so as he can be near your sick uncle in Nebraska.”

“He’s visitin’ my other uncle in Idaho.”

“Then how does he keep posted about your sick uncle?” ast Carey.

“He don’t,” says Ike. “He don’t even know my other uncle’s sick. That’s why I ought to wire and tell him.”

“Good night!” says Carey.

“What town in Idaho is your old man at?” I says.

Ike thought it over.

“No town at all,” he says. “But he’s near a town.”

“Near what town?” I says.

“Yuma,” says Ike.

Well, by this time he’d lost two or three pots and he was desperate. We was playin’ just as fast as we could, because we seen we couldn’t hold him much longer. But he was tryin’ so hard to frame an escape that he couldn’t pay no attention to the cards, and it looked like we’d get his whole pile away from him if we could make him stick.

The telephone saved him. The minute it begun to ring, five of us jumped for it. But Ike was there first.

“Yes,” he says, answerin’ it. “This is him. I’ll come right down.”

And he slammed up the receiver and beat it out o’ the door without even sayin’ goodbye.

“Smitty’d ought to locked the door,” says Carey.

“What did he win?” ast Carey.

We figured it up⁠—sixty-odd bucks.

“And the next time we ask him to play,” says Carey, “his fingers will be so stiff he can’t hold the cards.”

Well, we set round a wile talkin’ it over, and pretty soon the telephone rung again. Smitty answered it. It was a friend of his’n from Hamilton and he wanted to know why Smitty didn’t hurry down. He was the one that had called before and Ike had told him he was Smitty.

“Ike’d ought to split with Smitty’s friend,” says Carey.

“No,” I says, “he’ll need all he won. It costs money to buy collars and to send telegrams from Cincinnati to your old man in Texas and keep him posted on the health o’ your uncle in Cedar Rapids, DC”

III

And you ought to heard him out there on that field! They wasn’t a day when he didn’t pull six or seven, and it didn’t make no difference whether he was goin’ good or bad. If he popped up in the pinch he should of made a base hit and the reason he didn’t was so-and-so. And if he cracked one for three bases he ought to had a home run, only the ball wasn’t lively, or the wind brought it back, or he tripped on a lump o’ dirt, roundin’ first base.

They was one afternoon in New York when he beat all records. Big Marquard was workin’ against us and he was good.

In the first innin’ Ike hit one clear over that right field stand, but it was a few feet foul. Then he got another foul and then the count come to two and two. Then Rube slipped one acrost on him and he was called out.

“What do you know about that!” he says afterward on the bench. “I lost count. I thought it was three and one, and I took a strike.”

“You took a strike all right,” says Carey. “Even the umps knowed it was a strike.”

“Yes,” says Ike, “but you can bet I wouldn’t of took it if I’d knew it was the third one. The score board had it wrong.”

“That score board ain’t for you to look at,” says Cap. “It’s for you to hit that old pill against.”

“Well,” says Ike, “I could of hit that one over the score board if I’d knew it was the third.”

“Was it a good ball?” I says.

“Well, no, it wasn’t,” says Ike. “It was inside.”

“How far inside?” says Carey.

“Oh, two or three inches or half a foot,” says Ike.

“I guess you wouldn’t of threatened the score board with it then,” says Cap.

“I’d of pulled it down the right foul line if I hadn’t thought he’d call it a ball,” says Ike.

Well, in New York’s part o’ the innin’ Doyle cracked one and Ike run back a mile and a half and caught it with one hand. We was all sayin’ what a whale of a play it was, but he had to apologize just the same as for gettin’ struck out.

“That stand’s so high,” he says, “that a man don’t never see a ball till it’s right on top o’ you.”

“Didn’t you see that one?” ast Cap.

“Not at first,” says Ike; “not till it raised up above the roof o’ the stand.”

“Then why did you start back as soon as the ball was hit?” says Cap.

“I knowed by the sound that he’d got a good hold of it,” says Ike.

“Yes,” says Cap, “but how’d you know what direction to run in?”

“Doyle usually hits ’em that way, the way I run,” says Ike.

“Why don’t you play blindfolded?” says Carey.

“Might as well, with that big high stand to bother a man,” says Ike. “If I could of saw the ball all the time I’d of got it in my hip pocket.”

Along in the fifth we was one run to the bad and Ike got on with one out. On the first ball throwed to Smitty, Ike went down. The ball was outside and Meyers throwed Ike out by ten feet.

You could see Ike’s lips movin’ all the way to the bench and when he got there he had his piece learned.

“Why didn’t he swing?” he says.

“Why didn’t you wait for his sign?” says Cap.

“He give me his sign,” says Ike.

“What is his sign with you?” says Cap.

“Pickin’ up some dirt with his right hand,” says Ike.

“Well, I didn’t see him do it,” Cap says.

“He done it all right,” says Ike.

Well, Smitty went out and they wasn’t no more argument till they come in for the next innin’. Then Cap opened it up.

“You fellas better get your signs straight,” he says.

“Do you mean me?” says Smitty.

“Yes,” Cap says. “What’s your sign with Ike?”

“Slidin’ my left hand up to the end o’ the bat and back,” says Smitty.

“Do you hear that, Ike?” ast Cap.

“What of it?” says Ike.

“You says his sign was pickin’ up dirt and he says it’s slidin’ his hand. Which is right?”

“I’m right,” says Smitty. “But if you’re arguin’ about him goin’ last innin’, I didn’t give him no sign.”

“You pulled your cap down with your right hand, didn’t you?” ast Ike.

“Well, s’pose I did,” says Smitty. “That don’t mean nothin’. I never told you to take that for a sign, did I?”

“I thought maybe you meant to tell me and forgot,” says Ike.

They couldn’t none of us answer that and they wouldn’t of been no more said if Ike had of shut up. But wile we was settin’ there Carey got on with two out and stole second clean.

“There!” says Ike. “That’s what I was tryin’ to do and I’d of got away with it if Smitty’d swang and bothered the Indian.”

“Oh!” says Smitty. “You was tryin’ to steal then, was you? I thought you claimed I give you the hit and run.”

“I didn’t claim no such a thing,” says Ike. “I thought maybe you might of gave me a sign, but I was goin’ anyway because I thought I had a good start.”

Cap prob’ly would of hit him with a bat, only just about that time Doyle booted one on Hayes and Carey come acrost with the run that tied.

Well, we go into the ninth finally, one and one, and Marquard walks McDonald with nobody out.

“Lay it down,” says Cap to Ike.

And Ike goes up there with orders to bunt and cracks the first ball into that right-field stand! It was fair this time, and we’re two ahead, but I didn’t think about that at the time. I was too busy watchin’ Cap’s face. First he turned pale and then he got red as fire and then he got blue and purple, and finally he just laid back and busted out laughin’. So we wasn’t afraid to laugh ourselfs when we seen him doin’ it, and when Ike come in everybody on the bench was in hysterics.

But instead o’ takin’ advantage, Ike had to try and excuse himself. His play was to shut up and he didn’t know how to make it.

“Well,” he says, “if I hadn’t hit quite so quick at that one I bet it’d of cleared the center-field fence.”

Cap stopped laughin’.

“It’ll cost you plain fifty,” he says.

“What for?” says Ike.

“When I say ‘bunt’ I mean ‘bunt,’ ” says Cap.

“You didn’t say ‘bunt,’ ” says Ike.

“I says ‘Lay it down,’ ” says Cap. “If that don’t mean ‘bunt,’ what does it mean?”

“ ‘Lay it down’ means ‘bunt’ all right,” says Ike, “but I understood you to say ‘Lay on it.’ ”

“All right,” says Cap, “and the little misunderstandin’ will cost you fifty.”

Ike didn’t say nothin’ for a few minutes. Then he had another bright idear.

“I was just kiddin’ about misunderstandin’ you,” he says. “I knowed you wanted me to bunt.”

“Well, then, why didn’t you bunt?” ast Cap.

“I was goin’ to on the next ball,” says Ike. “But I thought if I took a good wallop I’d have ’em all fooled. So I walloped at the first one to fool ’em, and I didn’t have no intention o’ hittin’ it.”

“You tried to miss it, did you?” says Cap.

“Yes,” says Ike.

“How’d you happen to hit it?” ast Cap.

“Well,” Ike says, “I was lookin’ for him to throw me a fast one and I was goin’ to swing under it. But he come with a hook and I met it right square where I was swingin’ to go under the fast one.”

“Great!” says Cap. “Boys,” he says, “Ike’s learned how to hit Marquard’s curve. Pretend a fast one’s comin’ and then try to miss it. It’s a good thing to know and Ike’d ought to be willin’ to pay for the lesson. So I’m goin’ to make it a hundred instead o’ fifty.”

The game wound up 3 to 1. The fine didn’t go, because Ike hit like a wild man all through that trip and we made pretty near a cleanup. The night we went to Philly I got him cornered in the car and I says to him:

“Forget them alibis for a wile and tell me somethin’. What’d you do that for, swing that time against Marquard when you was told to bunt?”

“I’ll tell you,” he says. “That ball he throwed me looked just like the one I struck out on in the first innin’ and I wanted to show Cap what I could of done to that other one if I’d knew it was the third strike.”

“But,” I says, “the one you struck out on in the first innin’ was a fast ball.”

“So was the one I cracked in the ninth,” says Ike.

IV

You’ve saw Cap’s wife, o’ course. Well, her sister’s about twict as good-lookin’ as her, and that’s goin’ some.

Cap took his missus down to St. Louis the second trip and the other one come down from St. Joe to visit her. Her name is Dolly, and some doll is right.

Well, Cap was goin’ to take the two sisters to a show and he wanted a beau for Dolly. He left it to her and she picked Ike. He’d hit three on the nose that afternoon⁠—off’n Sallee, too.

They fell for each other that first evenin’. Cap told us how it come off. She begin flatterin’ Ike for the star game he’d played and o’ course he begin excusin’ himself for not doin’ better. So she thought he was modest and it went strong with her. And she believed everything he said and that made her solid with him⁠—that and her makeup. They was together every mornin’ and evenin’ for the five days we was there. In the afternoons Ike played the grandest ball you ever see, hittin’ and runnin’ the bases like a fool and catchin’ everything that stayed in the park.

I told Cap, I says: “You’d ought to keep the doll with us and he’d make Cobb’s figures look sick.”

But Dolly had to go back to St. Joe and we come home for a long serious.

Well, for the next three weeks Ike had a letter to read every day and he’d set in the clubhouse readin’ it till mornin’ practice was half over. Cap didn’t say nothin’ to him, because he was goin’ so good. But I and Carey wasted a lot of our time tryin’ to get him to own up who the letters was from. Fine chanct!

“What are you readin’?” Carey’d say. “A bill?”

“No,” Ike’d say, “not exactly a bill. It’s a letter from a fella I used to go to school with.”

“High school or college?” I’d ask him.

“College,” he’d say.

“What college?” I’d say.

Then he’d stall a wile and then he’d say:

“I didn’t go to the college myself, but my friend went there.”

“How did it happen you didn’t go?” Carey’d ask him.

“Well,” he’d say, “they wasn’t no colleges near where I lived.”

“Didn’t you live in Kansas City?” I’d say to him.

One time he’d say he did and another time he didn’t. One time he says he lived in Michigan.

“Where at?” says Carey.

“Near Detroit,” he says.

“Well,” I says, “Detroit’s near Ann Arbor and that’s where they got the university.”

“Yes,” says Ike, “they got it there now, but they didn’t have it there then.”

“I come pretty near goin’ to Syracuse,” I says, “only they wasn’t no railroads runnin’ through there in them days.”

“Where’d this friend o’ yours go to college?” says Carey.

“I forget now,” says Ike.

“Was it Carlisle?” ast Carey.

“No,” says Ike, “his folks wasn’t very well off.”

“That’s what barred me from Smith,” I says.

“I was goin’ to tackle Cornell’s,” says Carey, “but the doctor told me I’d have hay fever if I didn’t stay up North.”

“Your friend writes long letters,” I says.

“Yes,” says Ike; “he’s tellin’ me about a ball player.”

“Where does he play?” ast Carey.

“Down in the Texas League⁠—Fort Wayne,” says Ike.

“It looks like a girl’s writin’,” Carey says.

“A girl wrote it,” says Ike. “That’s my friend’s sister, writin’ for him.”

“Didn’t they teach writin’ at this here college where he went?” says Carey.

“Sure,” Ike says, “they taught writin’, but he got his hand cut off in a railroad wreck.”

“How long ago?” I says.

“Right after he got out o’ college,” says Ike.

“Well,” I says, “I should think he’d of learned to write with his left hand by this time.”

“It’s his left hand that was cut off,” says Ike; “and he was left-handed.”

“You get a letter every day,” says Carey. “They’re all the same writin’. Is he tellin’ you about a different ball player every time he writes?”

“No,” Ike says. “It’s the same ball player. He just tells me what he does every day.”

“From the size o’ the letters, they don’t play nothin’ but doubleheaders down there,” says Carey.

We figured that Ike spent most of his evenin’s answerin’ the letters from his “friend’s sister,” so we kept tryin’ to date him up for shows and parties to see how he’d duck out of ’em. He was bugs over spaghetti, so we told him one day that they was goin’ to be a big feed of it over to Joe’s that night and he was invited.

“How long’ll it last?” he says.

“Well,” we says, “we’re goin’ right over there after the game and stay till they close up.”

“I can’t go,” he says, “unless they leave me come home at eight bells.”

“Nothin’ doin’,” says Carey. “Joe’d get sore.”

“I can’t go then,” says Ike.

“Why not?” I ast him.

“Well,” he says, “my landlady locks up the house at eight and I left my key home.”

“You can come and stay with me,” says Carey.

“No,” he says, “I can’t sleep in a strange bed.”

“How do you get along when we’re on the road?” says I.

“I don’t never sleep the first night anywheres,” he says. “After that I’m all right.”

“You’ll have time to chase home and get your key right after the game,” I told him.

“The key ain’t home,” says Ike. “I lent it to one o’ the other fellas and he’s went out o’ town and took it with him.”

“Couldn’t you borry another key off’n the landlady?” Carey ast him.

“No,” he says, “that’s the only one they is.”

Well, the day before we started East again, Ike come into the clubhouse all smiles.

“Your birthday?” I ast him.

“No,” he says.

“What do you feel so good about?” I says.

“Got a letter from my old man,” he says. “My uncle’s goin’ to get well.”

“Is that the one in Nebraska?” says I.

“Not right in Nebraska,” says Ike. “Near there.”

But afterwards we got the right dope from Cap. Dolly’d blew in from Missouri and was goin’ to make the trip with her sister.

V

Well, I want to alibi Carey and I for what come off in Boston. If we’d of had any idear what we was doin’, we’d never did it. They wasn’t nobody outside o’ maybe Ike and the dame that felt worse over it than I and Carey.

The first two days we didn’t see nothin’ of Ike and her except out to the park. The rest o’ the time they was sight-seein’ over to Cambridge and down to Revere and out to Brook-a-line and all the other places where the rubes go.

But when we come into the beanery after the third game Cap’s wife called us over.

“If you want to see somethin’ pretty,” she says, “look at the third finger on Sis’s left hand.”

Well, o’ course we knowed before we looked that it wasn’t goin’ to be no hangnail. Nobody was su’prised when Dolly blew into the dinin’ room with it⁠—a rock that Ike’d bought off’n Diamond Joe the first trip to New York. Only o’ course it’d been set into a lady’s-size ring instead o’ the automobile tire he’d been wearin’.

Cap and his missus and Ike and Dolly ett supper together, only Ike didn’t eat nothin’, but just set there blushin’ and spillin’ things on the tablecloth. I heard him excusin’ himself for not havin’ no appetite. He says he couldn’t never eat when he was clost to the ocean. He’d forgot about them sixty-five oysters he destroyed the first night o’ the trip before.

He was goin’ to take her to a show, so after supper he went upstairs to change his collar. She had to doll up, too, and o’ course Ike was through long before her.

If you remember the hotel in Boston, they’s a little parlor where the piano’s at and then they’s another little parlor openin’ off o’ that. Well, when Ike come down Smitty was playin’ a few chords and I and Carey was harmonizin’. We seen Ike go up to the desk to leave his key and we called him in. He tried to duck away, but we wouldn’t stand for it.

We ast him what he was all duded up for and he says he was goin’ to the theayter.

“Goin’ alone?” says Carey.

“No,” he says, “a friend o’ mine’s goin’ with me.”

“What do you say if we go along?” says Carey.

“I ain’t only got two tickets,” he says.

“Well,” says Carey, “we can go down there with you and buy our own seats; maybe we can all get together.”

“No,” says Ike. “They ain’t no more seats. They’re all sold out.”

“We can buy some off’n the scalpers,” says Carey.

“I wouldn’t if I was you,” says Ike. “They say the show’s rotten.”

“What are you goin’ for, then?” I ast.

“I didn’t hear about it bein’ rotten till I got the tickets,” he says.

“Well,” I says, “if you don’t want to go I’ll buy the tickets from you.”

“No,” says Ike, “I wouldn’t want to cheat you. I’m stung and I’ll just have to stand for it.”

“What are you goin’ to do with the girl, leave her here at the hotel?” I says.

“What girl?” says Ike.

“The girl you ett supper with,” I says.

“Oh,” he says, “we just happened to go into the dinin’ room together, that’s all. Cap wanted I should set down with ’em.”

“I noticed,” says Carey, “that she happened to be wearin’ that rock you bought off’n Diamond Joe.”

“Yes,” says Ike. “I lent it to her for a wile.”

“Did you lend her the new ring that goes with it?” I says.

“She had that already,” says Ike. “She lost the set out of it.”

“I wouldn’t trust no strange girl with a rock o’ mine,” says Carey.

“Oh, I guess she’s all right,” Ike says. “Besides, I was tired o’ the stone. When a girl asks you for somethin’, what are you goin’ to do?”

He started out toward the desk, but we flagged him.

“Wait a minute!” Carey says. “I got a bet with Sam here, and it’s up to you to settle it.”

“Well,” says Ike, “make it snappy. My friend’ll be here any minute.”

“I bet,” says Carey, “that you and that girl was engaged to be married.”

“Nothin’ to it,” says Ike.

“Now look here,” says Carey, “this is goin’ to cost me real money if I lose. Cut out the alibi stuff and give it to us straight. Cap’s wife just as good as told us you was roped.”

Ike blushed like a kid.

“Well, boys,” he says, “I may as well own up. You win, Carey.”

“Yatta boy!” says Carey. “Congratulations!”

“You got a swell girl, Ike,” I says.

“She’s a peach,” says Smitty.

“Well, I guess she’s OK,” says Ike. “I don’t know much about girls.”

“Didn’t you never run round with ’em?” I says.

“Oh, yes, plenty of ’em,” says Ike. “But I never seen none I’d fall for.”

“That is, till you seen this one,” says Carey.

“Well,” says Ike, “this one’s OK, but I wasn’t thinkin’ about gettin’ married yet a wile.”

“Who done the askin’⁠—her?” says Carey.

“Oh, no,” says Ike, “but sometimes a man don’t know what he’s gettin’ into. Take a good-lookin’ girl, and a man gen’ally almost always does about what she wants him to.”

“They couldn’t no girl lasso me unless I wanted to be lassoed,” says Smitty.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Ike. “When a fella gets to feelin’ sorry for one of ’em it’s all off.”

Well, we left him go after shakin’ hands all round. But he didn’t take Dolly to no show that night. Sometime wile we was talkin’ she’d came into that other parlor and she’d stood there and heard us. I don’t know how much she heard. But it was enough. Dolly and Cap’s missus took the midnight train for New York. And from there Cap’s wife sent her on her way back to Missouri.

She’d left the ring and a note for Ike with the clerk. But we didn’t ask Ike if the note was from his friend in Fort Wayne, Texas.

VI

When we’d came to Boston Ike was hittin’ plain .397. When we got back home he’d fell off to pretty near nothin’. He hadn’t drove one out o’ the infield in any o’ them other Eastern parks, and he didn’t even give no excuse for it.

To show you how bad he was, he struck out three times in Brooklyn one day and never opened his trap when Cap ast him what was the matter. Before, if he’d whiffed oncet in a game he’d of wrote a book tellin’ why.

Well, we dropped from first place to fifth in four weeks and we was still goin’ down. I and Carey was about the only ones in the club that spoke to each other, and all as we did was remind ourself o’ what a boner we’d pulled.

“It’s goin’ to beat us out o’ the big money,” says Carey.

“Yes,” I says. “I don’t want to knock my own ball club, but it looks like a one-man team, and when that one man’s dauber’s down we couldn’t trim our whiskers.”

“We ought to knew better,” says Carey.

“Yes,” I says, “but why should a man pull an alibi for bein’ engaged to such a bearcat as she was?”

“He shouldn’t,” says Carey. “But I and you knowed he would or we’d never started talkin’ to him about it. He wasn’t no more ashamed o’ the girl than I am of a regular base hit. But he just can’t come clean on no subjec’.”

Cap had the whole story, and I and Carey was as pop’lar with him as an umpire.

“What do you want me to do, Cap?” Carey’d say to him before goin’ up to hit.

“Use your own judgment,” Cap’d tell him. “We want to lose another game.”

But finally, one night in Pittsburgh, Cap had a letter from his missus and he come to us with it.

“You fellas,” he says, “is the ones that put us on the bum, and if you’re sorry I think they’s a chancet for you to make good. The old lady’s out to St. Joe and she’s been tryin’ her hardest to fix things up. She’s explained that Ike don’t mean nothin’ with his talk; I’ve wrote and explained that to Dolly, too. But the old lady says that Dolly says that she can’t believe it. But Dolly’s still stuck on this baby, and she’s pinin’ away just the same as Ike. And the old lady says she thinks if you two fellas would write to the girl and explain how you was always kiddin’ with Ike and leadin’ him on, and how the ball club was all shot to pieces since Ike quit hittin’, and how he acted like he was goin’ to kill himself, and this and that, she’d fall for it and maybe soften down. Dolly, the old lady says, would believe you before she’d believe I and the old lady, because she thinks it’s her we’re sorry for, and not him.”

Well, I and Carey was only too glad to try and see what we could do. But it wasn’t no snap. We wrote about eight letters before we got one that looked good. Then we give it to the stenographer and had it wrote out on a typewriter and both of us signed it.

It was Carey’s idear that made the letter good. He stuck in somethin’ about the world’s serious money that our wives wasn’t goin’ to spend unless she took pity on a “boy who was so shy and modest that he was afraid to come right out and say that he had asked such a beautiful and handsome girl to become his bride.”

That’s prob’ly what got her, or maybe she couldn’t of held out much longer anyway. It was four days after we sent the letter that Cap heard from his missus again. We was in Cincinnati.

“We’ve won,” he says to us. “The old lady says that Dolly says she’ll give him another chance. But the old lady says it won’t do no good for Ike to write a letter. He’ll have to go out there.”

“Send him tonight,” says Carey.

“I’ll pay half his fare,” I says.

“I’ll pay the other half,” says Carey.

“No,” says Cap, “the club’ll pay his expenses. I’ll send him scoutin’.”

“Are you goin’ to send him tonight?”

“Sure,” says Cap. “But I’m goin’ to break the news to him right now. It’s time we win a ball game.”

So in the clubhouse, just before the game, Cap told him. And I certainly felt sorry for Rube Benton and Red Ames that afternoon! I and Carey was standin’ in front o’ the hotel that night when Ike come out with his suitcase.

“Sent home?” I says to him.

“No,” he says, “I’m goin’ scoutin’.”

“Where to?” I says. “Fort Wayne?”

“No, not exactly,” he says.

“Well,” says Carey, “have a good time.”

“I ain’t lookin’ for no good time,” says Ike. “I says I was goin’ scoutin’.”

“Well, then,” says Carey, “I hope you see somebody you like.”

“And you better have a drink before you go,” I says.

“Well,” says Ike, “they claim it helps a cold.”

Harmony

Even a baseball writer must sometimes work. Regretfully I yielded my seat in the P.G., walked past the section where Art Graham, Bill Cole, Lefty Parks and young Waldron were giving expert tonsorial treatment to “Sweet Adeline,” and flopped down beside Ryan, the manager.

“Well, Cap,” I said, “we’re due in Springfield in a little over an hour and I haven’t written a line.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” said Ryan.

“I want you to start me,” I said.

“Lord!” said Ryan. “You oughtn’t to have any trouble grinding out stuff these days, with the club in first place and young Waldron gone crazy. He’s worth a story any day.”

“That’s the trouble,” said I. “He’s been worked so much that there’s nothing more to say about him. Everybody in the country knows that he’s hitting .420, that he’s made nine home runs, twelve triples and twenty-some doubles, that he’s stolen twenty-five bases, and that he can play the piano and sing like Carus’. They’ve run his picture oftener than Billy Sunday and Mary Pickford put together. Of course, you might come through with how you got him.”

“Oh, that’s the mystery,” said Ryan.

“So I’ve heard you say,” I retorted. “But it wouldn’t be a mystery if you’d let me print it.”

“Well,” said Ryan, “if you’re really hard up I suppose I might as well come through. Only there’s really no mystery at all about it; it’s just what I consider the most remarkable piece of scouting ever done. I’ve been making a mystery of it just to have a little fun with Dick Hodges. You know he’s got the Jackson club and he’s still so sore about my stealing Waldron he’ll hardly speak to me.

“I’ll give you the dope if you want it, though it’s a boost for Art Graham, not me. There’s lots of people think the reason I’ve kept the thing a secret is because I’m modest.

“They give me credit for having found Waldron myself. But Graham is the bird that deserves the credit and I’ll admit that he almost had to get down on his knees to make me take his tip. Yes, sir, Art Graham was the scout, and now he’s sitting on the bench and the boy he recommended has got his place.”

“That sounds pretty good,” I said. “And how did Graham get wise?”

“I’m going to tell you. You’re in a hurry; so I’ll make it snappy.

“You weren’t with us last fall, were you? Well, we had a day off in Detroit, along late in the season. Graham’s got relatives in Jackson; so he asked me if he could spend the day there. I told him he could and asked him to keep his eyes peeled for good young pitchers, if he happened to go to the ball game. So he went to Jackson and the next morning he came back all excited. I asked him if he’d found me a pitcher and he said he hadn’t, but he’d seen the best natural hitter he’d ever looked at⁠—a kid named Waldron.

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’re the last one that ought to be recommending outfielders. If there’s one good enough to hold a regular job, it might be your job he’d get.’

“But Art said that didn’t make any difference to him⁠—he was looking out for the good of the club. Well, I didn’t see my way clear to asking the old man to dig up good money for an outfielder nobody’d ever heard of, when we were pretty well stocked with them, so I tried to stall Art; but he kept after me and kept after me till I agreed to stick in a draft for the kid just to keep Art quiet. So the draft went in and we got him. Then, as you know, Hodges tried to get him back, and that made me suspicious enough to hold on to him. Hodges finally came over to see me and wanted to know who’d tipped me to Waldron. That’s where the mystery stuff started, because I saw that Hodges was all heated up and wanted to kid him along. So I told him we had some mighty good scouts working for us, and he said he knew our regular scouts and they couldn’t tell a ballplayer from a torn ligament. Then he offered me fifty bucks if I’d tell him the truth and I just laughed at him. I said: ‘A fella happened to be in Jackson one day and saw him work. But I won’t tell you who the fella was, because you’re too anxious to know.’ Then he insisted on knowing what day the scout had been in Jackson. I said I’d tell him that if he’d tell me why he was so blame curious. So he gave me his end of it.

“It seems his brother, up in Ludington, had seen this kid play ball on the lots and had signed him right up for Hodges and taken him to Jackson, and of course, Hodges knew he had a world beater the minute he saw him. But he also knew he wasn’t going to be able to keep him in Jackson, and, naturally he began to figure how he could get the most money for him. It was already August when the boy landed in Jackson; so there wasn’t much chance of getting a big price last season. He decided to teach the kid what he didn’t know about baseball and to keep him under cover till this year. Then everybody would be touting him and there’d be plenty of competition. Hodges could sell to the highest bidder.

“He had Waldron out practising every day, but wouldn’t let him play in a game, and every player on the Jackson club had promised to keep the secret till this year. So Hodges wanted to find out from me which one of his players had broken the promise.

“Then I asked him if he was perfectly sure that Waldron hadn’t played in a game, and he said he had gone in to hit for somebody just once. I asked him what date that was and he told me. It was the day Art had been in Jackson. So I said:

“ ‘There’s your mystery solved. That’s the day my scout saw him, and you’ll have to give the scout a little credit for picking a star after seeing him make one base hit.’

“Then Hodges said:

“ ‘That makes it all the more a mystery. Because, in the first place, he batted under a fake name. And, in the second place, he didn’t make a base hit. He popped out.’

“That’s about all there is to it. You can ask Art how he picked the kid out for a star from seeing him pop out once. I’ve asked him myself, and he’s told me that he liked the way Waldron swung. Personally, I believe one of those Jackson boys got too gabby. But Art swears not.”

“That is a story,” I said gratefully. “An old outfielder who must know he’s slipping recommends a busher after seeing him pop out once. And the busher jumps right in and gets his job.”

I looked down the aisle toward the song birds. Art Graham, now a bench warmer, and young Waldron, whom he had touted and who was the cause of his being sent to the bench, were harmonizing at the tops of their strong and not too pleasant voices.

“And probably the strangest part of the story,” I added, “is that Art doesn’t seem to regret it. He and the kid appear to be the best of friends.”

“Anybody who can sing is Art’s friend,” said Ryan.

I left him and went back to my seat to tear off my seven hundred words before we reached Springfield. I considered for a moment the advisability of asking Graham for an explanation of his wonderful bit of scouting, but decided to save that part of it for another day. I was in a hurry and, besides, Waldron was just teaching them a new “wallop,” and it would have been folly for me to interrupt.

“It’s on the word ‘you,’ ” Waldron was saying. “I come down a tone; Lefty goes up a half tone, and Bill comes up two tones. Art just sings it like always. Now try her again,” I heard him direct the song birds. They tried her again, making a worse noise than ever:

I only know I love you;
Love me, and the world (the world) is mine (the world is mine).

“No,” said Waldron. “Lefty missed it. If you fellas knew music, I could teach it to you with the piano when we get to Boston. On the word ‘love,’ in the next to the last line, we hit a regular F chord. Bill’s singing the low F in the bass and Lefty’s hitting middle C in the baritone, and Art’s on high F and I’m up to A. Then, on the word ‘you,’ I come down to G, and Art hits E, and Lefty goes up half a tone to C sharp, and Cole comes up from F to A in the bass. That makes a good wallop. It’s a change from the F chord to the A chord. Now let’s try her again,” Waldron urged.

They tried her again:

I only know I love you⁠—

“No, no!” said young Waldron. “Art and I were all right; but Bill came up too far, and Lefty never moved off that C. Half a tone up, Lefty. Now try her again.”

We were an hour late into Springfield, and it was past six o’clock when we pulled out. I had filed my stuff, and when I came back in the car the concert was over for the time, and Art Graham was sitting alone.

“Where are your pals?” I asked.

“Gone to the diner,” he replied.

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

“No,” he said, “I’m savin’ up for the steamed clams.” I took the seat beside him.

“I sent in a story about you,” I said.

“Am I fired?” he asked.

“No, nothing like that.”

“Well,” he said, “you must be hard up when you can’t find nothin’ better to write about than a old has-been.”

“Cap just told me who it was that found Waldron,” said I.

“Oh, that,” said Art. “I don’t see no story in that.”

“I thought it was quite a stunt,” I said. “It isn’t everybody that can pick out a second Cobb by just seeing him hit a fly ball.”

Graham smiled.

“No,” he replied, “they’s few as smart as that.”

“If you ever get through playing ball,” I went on, “you oughtn’t to have any trouble landing a job. Good scouts don’t grow on trees.”

“It looks like I’m pretty near through now,” said Art, still smiling. “But you won’t never catch me scoutin’ for nobody. It’s too lonesome a job.”

I had passed up lunch to retain my seat in the card game; so I was hungry. Moreover, it was evident that Graham was not going to wax garrulous on the subject of his scouting ability. I left him and sought the diner. I found a vacant chair opposite Bill Cole.

“Try the minced ham,” he advised, “but lay off’n the sparrow-grass. It’s tougher’n a doubleheader in St. Louis.”

“We’re over an hour late,” I said.

“You’ll have to do a hurry-up on your story, won’t you?” asked Bill. “Or did you write it already?”

“All written and on the way.”

“Well, what did you tell ’em?” he inquired. “Did you tell ’em we had a pleasant trip, and Lenke lost his shirt in the poker game, and I’m goin’ to pitch tomorrow, and the Boston club’s heard about it and hope it’ll rain?”

“No,” I said. “I gave them a regular story tonight⁠—about how Graham picked Waldron.”

“Who give it to you?”

“Ryan,” I told him.

“Then you didn’t get the real story,” said Cole, “Ryan himself don’t know the best part of it, and he ain’t goin’ to know it for a w’ile. He’ll maybe find it out after Art’s got the can, but not before. And I hope nothin’ like that’ll happen for twenty years. When it does happen, I want to be sent along with Art, ’cause I and him’s been roomies now since 1911, and I wouldn’t hardly know how to act with him off’n the club. He’s a nut all right on the singin’ stuff, and if he was gone I might get a chanct to give my voice a rest. But he’s a pretty good guy, even if he is crazy.”

“I’d like to hear the real story,” I said.

“Sure you would,” he answered, “and I’d like to tell it to you. I will tell it to you if you’ll give me your promise not to spill it till Art’s gone. Art told it to I and Lefty in the clubhouse at Cleveland pretty near a month ago, and the three of us and Waldron is the only ones that knows it. I figure I’ve did pretty well to keep it to myself this long, but it seems like I got to tell somebody.”

“You can depend on me,” I assured him, “not to say a word about it till Art’s in Minneapolis, or wherever they’re going to send him.”

“I guess I can trust you,” said Cole. “But if you cross me, I’ll shoot my fast one up there in the press coop some day and knock your teeth loose.”

“Shoot,” said I.

“Well,” said Cole, “I s’pose Ryan told you that Art fell for the kid after just seein’ him pop out.”

“Yes, and Ryan said he considered it a remarkable piece of scouting.”

“It was all o’ that. It’d of been remarkable enough if Art’d saw the bird pop out and then recommended him. But he didn’t even see him pop out.”

“What are you giving me?”

“The fac’s,” said Bill Cole. “Art not only didn’t see him pop out, but he didn’t even see him with a ball suit on. He wasn’t never inside the Jackson ball park in his life.”

“Waldron?”

“No. Art I’m talkin’ about.”

“Then somebody tipped him off,” I said, quickly.

“No, sir. Nobody tipped him off, neither. He went to Jackson and spent the ev’nin’ at his uncle’s house, and Waldron was there. Him and Art was together the whole ev’nin’. But Art didn’t even ask him if he could slide feet first. And then he come back to Detroit and got Ryan to draft him. But to give you the whole story, I’ll have to go back a ways. We ain’t nowheres near Worcester yet, so they’s no hurry, except that Art’ll prob’ly be sendin’ for me pretty quick to come in and learn Waldron’s lost chord.

“You wasn’t with this club when we had Mike McCann. But you must of heard of him; outside his pitchin’, I mean. He was on the stage a couple o’ winters, and he had the swellest tenor voice I ever heard. I never seen no grand opera, but I’ll bet this here C’ruso or McCormack or Gadski or none o’ them had nothin’ on him for a pure tenor. Every note as clear as a bell. You couldn’t hardly keep your eyes dry when he’d tear off ‘Silver Threads’ or ‘The River Shannon.’

“Well, when Art was still with the Washin’ton club yet, I and Lefty and Mike used to pal round together and onct or twict we’d hit up some harmony. I couldn’t support a fam’ly o’ Mormons with my voice, but it was better in them days than it is now. I used to carry the lead, and Lefty’d hit the baritone and Mike the tenor. We didn’t have no bass. But most o’ the time we let Mike do the singin’ alone, ’cause he had us outclassed, and the other boys kept tellin’ us to shut up and give ’em a treat. First it’d be ‘Silver Threads’ and then ‘Jerusalem’ and then ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ and this and that, whatever the boys ast him for. Jake Martin used to say he couldn’t help a short pair if Mike wasn’t singin’.

“Finally Ryan pulled off the trade with Griffith, and Graham come on our club. Then they wasn’t no more solo work. They made a bass out o’ me, and Art sung the lead, and Mike and Lefty took care o’ the tenor and baritone. Art didn’t care what the other boys wanted to hear. They could holler their heads off for Mike to sing a solo, but no sooner’d Mike start singin’ than Art’d chime in with him and pretty soon we’d all four be goin’ it. Art’s a nut on singin’, but he don’t care nothin’ about list’nin’, not even to a canary. He’d rather harmonize than hit one past the outfielders with two on.

“At first we done all our serenadin’ on the train. Art’d get us out o’ bed early so’s we could be through breakfast and back in the car in time to tear off a few before we got to wherever we was goin’.

“It got so’s Art wouldn’t leave us alone in the different towns we played at. We couldn’t go to no show or nothin’. We had to stick in the hotel and sing, up in our room or Mike’s. And then he went so nuts over it that he got Mike to come and room in the same house with him at home, and I and Lefty was supposed to help keep the neighbors awake every night. O’ course we had mornin’ practice w’ile we was home, and Art used to have us come to the park early and get in a little harmony before we went on the field. But Ryan finally nailed that. He says that when he ordered mornin’ practice he meant baseball and not no minstrel show.

“Then Lefty, who wasn’t married, goes and gets himself a girl. I met her a couple o’ times, and she looked all right. Lefty might of married her if Art’d of left him alone. But nothin’ doin’. We was home all through June onct, and instead o’ comin’ round nights to sing with us, Lefty’d take this here doll to one o’ the parks or somewheres. Well, sir, Art was pretty near wild. He scouted round till he’d found out why Lefty’d quit us and then he tried pretty near everybody else on the club to see if they wasn’t someone who could hit the baritone. They wasn’t nobody. So the next time we went on the road, Art give Lefty a earful about what a sucker a man was to get married, and looks wasn’t everything and the girl was prob’ly after Lefty’s money and he wasn’t bein’ a good fella to break up the quartet and spoil our good times, and so on, and kept pesterin’ and teasin’ Lefty till he give the girl up. I’d of saw Art in the Texas League before I’d of shook a girl to please him, but you know these left-handers.

“Art had it all framed that we was goin’ on the stage, the four of us, and he seen a vaudeville man in New York and got us booked for eight hundred a week⁠—I don’t know if it was one week or two. But he sprung it on me in September and says we could get solid bookin’ from October to March; so I ast him what he thought my Missus would say when I told her I couldn’t get enough o’ bein’ away from home from March to October, so I was figurin’ on travelin’ the vaudeville circuit the other four or five months and makin’ it unanimous? Art says I was tied to a woman’s apron and all that stuff, but I give him the cold stare and he had to pass up that dandy little scheme.

“At that, I guess we could of got by on the stage all right. Mike was better than this here Waldron and I hadn’t wore my voice out yet on the coachin’ line, tellin’ the boys to touch all the bases.

“They was about five or six songs that we could kill. ‘Adeline’ was our star piece. Remember where it comes in, ‘Your fair face beams’? Mike used to go away up on ‘fair.’ Then they was ‘The Old Millstream’ and ‘Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet.’ I done some fancy work in that one. Then they was ‘Down in Jungle Town’ that we had pretty good. And then they was one that maybe you never heard. I don’t know the name of it. It run somethin’ like this.”

Bill sottoed his voice so that I alone could hear the beautiful refrain:

“Years, years, I’ve waited years
Only to see you, just to call you ‘dear.’
Come, come, I love but thee,
Come to your sweetheart’s arms; come back to me.”

“That one had a lot o’ wallops in it, and we didn’t overlook none o’ them. The boys used to make us sing it six or seven times a night. But ‘Down in the Cornfield’ was Art’s favor-ight. They was a part in that where I sung the lead down low and the other three done a banjo stunt. Then they was ‘Castle on the Nile’ and ‘Come Back to Erin’ and a whole lot more.

“Well, the four of us wasn’t hardly ever separated for three years. We was practisin’ all the w’ile like as if we was goin’ to play the big time, and we never made a nickel off’n it. The only audience we had was the ball players or the people travelin’ on the same trains or stoppin’ at the same hotels, and they got it all for nothin’. But we had a good time, ’specially Art.

“You know what a pitcher Mike was. He could go in there stone cold and stick ten out o’ twelve over that old plate with somethin’ on ’em. And he was the willin’est guy in the world. He pitched his own game every third or fourth day, and between them games he was warmin’ up all the time to go in for somebody else. In 1911, when we was up in the race for aw’ile, he pitched eight games out o’ twenty, along in September, and win seven o’ them, and besides that, he finished up five o’ the twelve he didn’t start. We didn’t win the pennant, and I’ve always figured that them three weeks killed Mike.

“Anyway, he wasn’t worth nothin’ to the club the next year; but they carried him along, hopin’ he’d come back and show somethin’. But he was pretty near through, and he knowed it. I knowed it, too, and so did everybody else on the club, only Graham. Art never got wise till the trainin’ trip two years ago this last spring. Then he come to me one day.

“ ‘Bill,’ he says, ‘I don’t believe Mike’s comin’ back.’

“ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘you’re gettin’s so’s they can’t nobody hide nothin’ from you. Next thing you’ll be findin’ out that Sam Crawford can hit.’

“ ‘Never mind the comical stuff,’ he says. ‘They ain’t no joke about this!’

“ ‘No,’ I says, ‘and I never said they was. They’ll look a long w’ile before they find another pitcher like Mike.’

“ ‘Pitcher my foot!’ says Art. ‘I don’t care if they have to pitch the bat boy. But when Mike goes, where’ll our quartet be?’

“ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘do you get paid every first and fifteenth for singin’ or for crownin’ that old pill?’

“ ‘If you couldn’t talk about money, you’d be deaf and dumb,’ says Art.

“ ‘But you ain’t playin’ ball because it’s fun, are you?’

“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘they ain’t no fun for me in playin’ ball. They’s no fun doin’ nothin’ but harmonizin’, and if Mike goes, I won’t even have that.’

“ ‘I and you and Lefty can harmonize,’ I says.

“ ‘It’d be swell stuff harmonizin’ without no tenor,’ says Art. ‘It’d be like swingin’ without no bat.’

“Well, he ast me did I think the club’d carry Mike through another season, and I told him they’d already carried him a year without him bein’ no good to them, and I figured if he didn’t show somethin’ his first time out, they’d ask for waivers. Art kept broodin’ and broodin’ about it till they wasn’t hardly no livin’ with him. If he ast me onct he ast me a thousand times if I didn’t think they might maybe hold onto Mike another season on account of all he’d did for ’em. I kept tellin’ him I didn’t think so; but that didn’t satisfy him and he finally went to Ryan and ast him point blank.

“ ‘Are you goin’ to keep McCann?’ Art ast him.

“ ‘If he’s goin’ to do us any good, I am,’ says Ryan. ‘If he ain’t, he’ll have to look for another job.’

“After that, all through the trainin’ trip, he was right on Mike’s heels.

“ ‘How does the old souper feel?’ he’d ask him.

“ ‘Great!’ Mike’d say.

“Then Art’d watch him warm up, to see if he had anything on the ball.

“ ‘He’s comin’ fine,’ he’d tell me. ‘His curve broke today just as good as I ever seen it.’

“But that didn’t fool me, or it didn’t fool Mike neither. He could throw about four hooks and then he was through. And he could of hit you in the head with his fast one and you’d of thought you had a rash.

“One night, just before the season opened up, we was singin’ on the train, and when we got through, Mike says:

“ ‘Well, boys, you better be lookin’ for another C’ruso.’

“ ‘What are you talkin’ about?’ says Art.

“ ‘I’m talkin’ about myself,’ says Mike. ‘I’ll be up there in Minneapolis this summer, pitchin’ onct a week and swappin’ stories about the Civil War with Joe Cantillon.’

“ ‘You’re crazy,’ says Art. ‘Your arm’s as good as I ever seen it.’

“ ‘Then,’ says Mike, ‘you must of been playin’ blindfolded all these years. This is just between us, ’cause Ryan’ll find it out for himself; my arm’s rotten, and I can’t do nothin’ to help it.’

“Then Art got sore as a boil.

“ ‘You’re a yellow, quittin’ dog,’ he says. ‘Just because you come round a little slow, you talk about Minneapolis. Why don’t you resign off’n the club?’

“ ‘I might just as well,’ Mike says, and left us.

“You’d of thought that Art would of gave up then, ’cause when a ball player admits he’s slippin’, you can bet your last nickel that he’s through. Most o’ them stalls along and tries to kid themself and everybody else long after they know they’re gone. But Art kept talkin’ like they was still some hope o’ Mike comin’ round, and when Ryan told us one night in St. Louis that he was goin’ to give Mike his chanct, the next day, Art was as nervous as a bride goin’ to get married. I wasn’t nervous. I just felt sorry, ’cause I knowed the old boy was hopeless.

“Ryan had told him he was goin’ to work if the weather suited him. Well, the day was perfect. So Mike went out to the park along about noon and took Jake with him to warm up. Jake told me afterwards that Mike was throwin’, just easy like, from half-past twelve till the rest of us got there. He was tryin’ to heat up the old souper and he couldn’t of ast for a better break in the weather, but they wasn’t enough sunshine in the world to make that old whip crack.

“Well, sir, you’d of thought to see Art that Mike was his son or his brother or somebody and just breakin’ into the league. Art wasn’t in the outfield practisin’ more than two minutes. He come in and stood behind Mike w’ile he was warmin’ up and kept tellin’ how good he looked, but the only guy he was kiddin’ was himself.

“Then the game starts and our club goes in and gets three runs.

“ ‘Pretty soft for you now, Mike,’ says Art, on the bench. ‘They can’t score three off’n you in three years.’

“Say, it’s lucky he ever got the side out in the first innin’. Everybody that come up hit one on the pick, but our infield pulled two o’ the greatest plays I ever seen and they didn’t score. In the second, we got three more, and I thought maybe the old bird was goin’ to be lucky enough to scrape through.

“For four or five innin’s, he got the grandest support that was ever gave a pitcher; but I’ll swear that what he throwed up there didn’t have no more on it than September Morning. Every time Art come to the bench, he says to Mike, ‘Keep it up, old boy. You got more than you ever had.’

“Well, in the seventh, Mike still had ’em shut out, and we was six runs to the good. Then a couple o’ the St. Louis boys hit ’em where they couldn’t nobody reach ’em and they was two on and two out. Then somebody got a hold o’ one and sent it on a line to the left o’ second base. I forgot who it was now; but whoever it was, he was supposed to be a right field hitter, and Art was layin’ over the other way for him. Art started with the crack o’ the bat, and I never seen a man make a better try for a ball. He had it judged perfect; but Cobb or Speaker or none o’ them couldn’t of catched it. Art just managed to touch it by stretchin’ to the limit. It went on to the fence and everybody come in. They didn’t score no more in that innin’.

“Then Art come in from the field and what do you think he tried to pull?

“ ‘I don’t know what was the matter with me on that fly ball,’ he says. ‘I ought to caught it in my pants pocket. But I didn’t get started till it was right on top o’ me.’

“ ‘You misjudged it, didn’t you?’ says Ryan.

“ ‘I certainly did,’ says Art without crackin’.

“ ‘Well,’ says Ryan, ‘I wisht you’d misjudge all o’ them that way. I never seen a better play on a ball.’

“So then Art knowed they wasn’t no more use trying to alibi the old boy.

“Mike had a turn at bat and when he come back, Ryan ast him how he felt.

“ ‘I guess I can get six more o’ them out,’ he says.

“Well, they didn’t score in the eighth, and when the ninth come Ryan sent I and Lefty out to warm up. We throwed a few w’ile our club was battin’; but when it come St. Louis’ last chanct, we was too much interested in the ball game to know if we was throwin’ or bakin’ biscuits.

“The first guy hits a line drive, and somebody jumps a mile in the air and stabs it. The next fella fouled out, and they was only one more to get. And then what do you think come off? Whoever it was hittin’ lifted a fly ball to centre field. Art didn’t have to move out of his tracks. I’ve saw him catch a hundred just like it behind his back. But you know what he was thinkin’. He was sayin’ to himself, ‘If I nail this one, we’re li’ble to keep our tenor singer a w’ile longer.’ And he dropped it.

“Then they was five base hits that sounded like the fourth o’ July, and they come so fast that Ryan didn’t have time to send for I or Lefty. Anyway, I guess he thought he might as well leave Mike in there and take it.

“They wasn’t no singin’ in the clubhouse after that game. I and Lefty always let the others start it. Mike, o’ course, didn’t feel like no jubilee, and Art was so busy tryin’ not to let nobody see him cry that he kept his head clear down in his socks. Finally he beat it for town all alone, and we didn’t see nothin’ of him till after supper. Then he got us together and we all went up to Mike’s room.

“ ‘I want to try this here “Old Girl o’ Mine,” ’ he says.

“ ‘Better sing our old stuff,’ says Mike. ‘This looks like the last time.’

“Then Art choked up and it was ten minutes before he could get goin’. We sung everything we knowed, and it was two o’clock in the mornin’ before Art had enough. Ryan come in after midnight and set a w’ile listenin’, but he didn’t chase us to bed. He knowed better’n any of us that it was a farewell. When I and Art was startin’ for our room, Art turned to Mike and says:

“ ‘Old boy, I’d of gave every nickel I ever owned to of caught that fly ball.’

“ ‘I know you would,’ Mike says, ‘and I know what made you drop it. But don’t worry about it, ’cause it was just a question o’ time, and if I’d of got away with that game, they’d of murdered some o’ the infielders next time I started.’

“Mike was sent home the next day, and we didn’t see him again. He was shipped to Minneapolis before we got back. And the rest o’ the season I might as well of lived in a cemetery w’ile we was on the road. Art was so bad that I thought onct or twict I’d have to change roomies. Onct in a w’ile he’d start hummin’ and then he’d break off short and growl at me. He tried out two or three o’ the other boys on the club to see if he couldn’t find a new tenor singer, but nothin’ doin’. One night he made Lefty try the tenor. Well, Lefty’s voice is bad enough down low. When he gets up about so high, you think you’re in the stockyards.

“And Art had a rotten year in baseball, too. The old boy’s still pretty near as good on a fly ball as anybody in the league; but you ought to saw him before his legs begin to give out. He could cover as much ground as Speaker and he was just as sure. But the year Mike left us, he missed pretty near half as many as he got. He told me one night, he says:

“ ‘Do you know, Bill, I stand out there and pray that nobody’ll hit one to me. Every time I see one comin’ I think o’ that one I dropped for Mike in St. Louis, and then I’m just as li’ble to have it come down on my bean as in my glove.’

“ ‘You’re crazy,’ I says, ‘to let a thing like that make a bum out o’ you.’

“But he kept on droppin’ fly balls till Ryan was talkin’ about settin’ him on the bench where it wouldn’t hurt nothin’ if his nerve give out. But Ryan didn’t have nobody else to play out there, so Art held on.

“He come back the next spring⁠—that’s a year ago⁠—feelin’ more cheerful and like himself than I’d saw him for a long w’ile. And they was a kid named Burton tryin’ out for second base that could sing pretty near as good as Mike. It didn’t take Art more’n a day to find this out, and every mornin’ and night for a few days the four of us would be together, hittin’ her up. But the kid didn’t have no more idea o’ how to play the bag than Charley Chaplin. Art seen in a minute that he couldn’t never beat Cragin out of his job, so what does he do but take him out and try and learn him to play the outfield. He wasn’t no worse there than at second base; he couldn’t of been. But before he’d practised out there three days they was bruises all over his head and shoulders where fly balls had hit him. Well, the kid wasn’t with us long enough to see the first exhibition game, and after he’d went, Art was Old Man Grump again.

“ ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I says to him. ‘You was all smiles the day we reported and now you could easy pass for a undertaker.’

“ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I had a great winter, singin’ all the w’ile. We got a good quartet down home and I never enjoyed myself as much in my life. And I kind o’ had a hunch that I was goin’ to be lucky and find somebody amongst the bushers that could hit up the old tenor.’

“ ‘Your hunch was right,’ I says. ‘That Burton kid was as good a tenor as you’d want.’

“ ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and my hunch could of played ball just as good as him.’

“Well, sir, if you didn’t never room with a corpse, you don’t know what a whale of a time I had all last season. About the middle of August he was at his worst.

“ ‘Bill,’ he says, ‘I’m goin’ to leave this old baseball flat on its back if somethin’ don’t happen. I can’t stand these here lonesome nights. I ain’t like the rest o’ the boys that can go and set all ev’nin’ at a pitcher show or hang round them Dutch gardens. I got to be singin’ or I am mis’rable.’

“ ‘Go ahead and sing,’ says I. ‘I’ll try and keep the cops back.’

“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to sing alone. I want to harmonize and we can’t do that ’cause we ain’t got no tenor.’

“I don’t know if you’ll believe me or not, but sure as we’re settin’ here he went to Ryan one day in Philly and tried to get him to make a trade for Harper.

“ ‘What do I want him for?’ says Ryan.

“ ‘I hear he ain’t satisfied,’ says Art.

“ ‘I ain’t runnin’ no ball players’ benefit association,’ says Ryan, and Art had to give it up. But he didn’t want Harper on the club for no other reason than because he’s a tenor singer!

“And then come that Dee-troit trip, and Art got permission to go to Jackson. He says he intended to drop in at the ball park, but his uncle wanted to borry some money off’n him on a farm, so Art had to drive out and see the farm. Then, that night, this here Waldron was up to call on Art’s cousin⁠—a swell doll, Art tells me. And Waldron set down to the py-ana and begin to sing and play. Then it was all off; they wasn’t no spoonin’ in the parlor that night. Art wouldn’t leave the kid get off’n the py-ana stool long enough to even find out if the girl was a blonde or a brunette.

“O’ course Art knowed the boy was with the Jackson club as soon as they was interduced, ’cause Art’s uncle says somethin’ about the both o’ them bein’ ball players, and so on. But Art swears he never thought o’ recommendin’ him till the kid got up to go home. Then he ast him what position did he play and found out all about him, only o’ course Waldron didn’t tell him how good he was ’cause he didn’t know himself.

“So Art ast him would he like a trial in the big show, and the kid says he would. Then Art says maybe the kid would hear from him, and then Waldron left and Art went to bed, and he says he stayed awake all night plannin’ the thing out and wonderin’ would he have the nerve to pull it off. You see he thought that if Ryan fell for it, Waldron’d join us as soon as his season was over and then Ryan’d see he wasn’t no good; but he’d prob’ly keep him till we was through for the year, and Art could alibi himself some way, say he’d got the wrong name or somethin’. All he wanted, he says, was to have the kid along the last month or six weeks, so’s we could harmonize. A nut? I guess not.

“Well, as you know, Waldron got sick and didn’t report, and when Art seen him on the train this spring he couldn’t hardly believe his eyes. He thought surely the kid would of been canned durin’ the winter without no trial.

“Here’s another hot one. When we went out the first day for practice, Art takes the kid off in a corner and tries to learn him enough baseball so’s he won’t show himself up and get sent away somewheres before we had a little benefit from his singin’. Can you imagine that? Tryin’ to learn this kid baseball, when he was born with a slidin’ pad on.

“You know the rest of it. They wasn’t never no question about Waldron makin’ good. It’s just like everybody says⁠—he’s the best natural ball player that’s broke in since Cobb. They ain’t nothin’ he can’t do. But it is a funny thing that Art’s job should be the one he’d get. I spoke about that to Art when he give me the story.

“ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I can’t expect everything to break right. I figure I’m lucky to of picked a guy that’s good enough to hang on. I’m in stronger with Ryan right now, and with the old man, too, than when I was out there playin’ every day. Besides, the bench is a pretty good place to watch the game from. And this club won’t be shy a tenor singer for nine years.’

“ ‘No,’ I says, ‘but they’ll be shy a lead and a baritone and a bass before I and you and Lefty is much older.’

“ ‘What of it?’ he says. ‘We’ll look up old Mike and all go somewheres and live together.’ ”

We were nearing Worcester. Bill Cole and I arose from our table and started back toward our car. In the first vestibule we encountered Buck, the trainer.

“Mr. Graham’s been lookin’ all over for you, Mr. Cole,” he said.

“I’ve been rehearsin’ my part,” said Bill.

We found Art Graham, Lefty, and young Waldron in Art’s seat. The kid was talking.

“Lefty missed it again. If you fellas knew music, I could teach it to you on the piano when we get to Boston. Lefty, on the word ‘love,’ in the next to the last line, you’re on middle C. Then, on the word ‘you,’ you slide up half a tone. That’d ought to be a snap, but you don’t get it. I’m on high A and come down to G and Bill’s on low F and comes up to A. Art just sings the regular two notes, F and E. It’s a change from the F chord to the A chord. It makes a dandy wallop and it ought to be a⁠—”

“Here’s Bill now,” interrupted Lefty, as he caught sight of Cole.

Art Graham treated his roommate to a cold stare.

“Where the h⁠⸺⁠l have you been?” he said angrily.

“Lookin’ for the lost chord,” said Bill.

“Set down here and learn this,” growled Art. “We won’t never get it if we don’t work.”

“Yes, let’s tackle her again,” said Waldron. “Bill comes up two full tones, from F to A. Lefty goes up half a tone, Art sings just like always, and I come down a tone. Now try her again.”

Two years ago it was that Bill Cole told me that story. Two weeks ago Art Graham boarded the evening train on one of the many roads that lead to Minneapolis.

The day Art was let out, I cornered Ryan in the clubhouse after the others had dressed and gone home.

“Did you ever know,” I asked, “that Art recommended Waldron without having seen him in a ball suit?”

“I told you long ago how Art picked Waldron,” he said.

“Yes,” said I, “but you didn’t have the right story.”

So I gave it to him.

“You newspaper fellas,” he said when I had done, “are the biggest suckers in the world. Now I’ve never given you a bad steer in my life. But you don’t believe what I tell you and you go and fall for one of Bill Cole’s hop dreams. Don’t you know that he was the biggest liar in baseball? He’d tell you that Walter Johnson was Jack’s father if he thought he could get away with it. And that bunk he gave you about Waldron. Does it sound reasonable?”

“Just as reasonable,” I replied, “as the stuff about Art’s grabbing him after seeing him pop out.”

“I don’t claim he did,” said Ryan. “That’s what Art told me. One of those Jackson ball players could give you the real truth, only of course he wouldn’t, because if Hodges ever found it out he’d shoot him full of holes. Art Graham’s no fool. He isn’t touting ball players because they can sing tenor or alto or anything else.”

Nevertheless, I believe Bill Cole; else I wouldn’t print the story. And Ryan would believe, too, if he weren’t in such a mood these days that he disagrees with everybody. For in spite of Waldron’s wonderful work, and he is at his best right now, the club hasn’t done nearly as well as when Art and Bill and Lefty were still with us.

There seems to be a lack of harmony.

The Poor Simp

I

My head ain’t so heavy with brains that I walk stooped over. But I do claim to have more sense than the most o’ them that’s gettin’ by in this league, and when I get the can it won’t be because I don’t know what I’m doin’ out there. Ask anybody in the business what kind of a ball player I am. Some o’ them will say I’m pretty fair, and some o’ them may say I’m rotten; but they’ll all say I’m smart.

I’ve made my share of errors and I’ve hit many a perpendicular home run in the pinch, but I never lost a game by peggin’ to the wrong base or by not knowin’ how many was out. They ain’t many can claim a record like that without gettin’ called on it.

Well, that record won’t buy me no round steaks when I get through here, and when I think o’ the things that’s happened to me and the things that’s happened to fellas that didn’t hardly know which was right field, I feel like I’d been better off if I’d just been born from my neck down.

Look at Jack Andrews! Bill Garwood, that batted right ahead of him, told me onct that the calves of his legs was all spike wounds, where Jack had slid into him from behind. It got so finally that every time Bill was on second and Jack on first Bill’d steal third to keep from bein’ cut down. And Bill’d try to stretch every hit he made into a double so’s to be two bases ahead o’ Jack. And now Jack’s runnin’ a halfway house outside o’ Chicago and it’s a dull night when he don’t take in a hundred bucks!

Then look at Red Burns!

Red never knowed how the game come out till he seen the paper next mornin’, and they had to page him when it was his turn to hit. And now he’s in the contractin’ business in Cleveland and the hardest work he does is addin’ up the month’s profits.

And then look at me! S’posed to be one o’ these here brainy ball players that never pulls a bone. Playin’ my seventh year in fast company. Only gettin’ forty-five hundred right now, because I never jumped a contract or spiked an umpire. And when they’re through with me I can starve to death or pick up some nice, soft snap in a foundry.

I read the other day where some doctor says everybody should ought to have their appendixes and their tonsils and their adenoids cut out when they’re still a baby yet. Well, them things didn’t never give me no trouble. But I wisht I’d of had my brains removed before I ever learned to use ’em. They’re the worst handicap a man can have in this business.

The less a guy knows, so much the sooner he can retire and live on his income.

You think I’m just talkin’ against time? No, sir; you’re listenin’ to the truth now. And if you don’t believe me ask Carey. Ask him to tell you about Skull Scoville. Or if you ain’t too sleepy I’ll tell you about him myself.

II

It takes Carey to spot these boobs, and Carey wasn’t with us on the spring trip last year. If you’ll remember he was coachin’ a college team down in Ohio and got permission to report late. Skull was with us all the wile, but I was too busy gettin’ myself in shape to pay much attention to the new ones. All as I noticed about him was that he done a lot of struttin’ and acted like he was more anxious to look pretty than to make good.

But Carey hadn’t been round more’n a day when he braced me about Skull.

“When did we sign Francis X. Bushman?” he says.

“That’s Scoville,” I told him. “Skull Scoville.”

“Some jealous cat must of gave him that nickname,” says Carey.

“It’s what they called him last year in the Carolina League,” I says.

“Is he goin’ back there?” ast Carey.

“I haven’t been watchin’ him much,” I says.

“I hope he sticks,” says Carey. “All our club needs is looks.”

“You don’t care nothin’ about his looks,” I says. “You’re scoutin’ for somebody to pick on.”

“Maybe you’re right,” says Carey. “I wisht I could stay with them college boys all year. A couple o’ them fell for all the old junk I could remember. I run out o’ stale stuff finally and was goin’ to write to you.”

“Thanks,” I says.

“But this here Skull does look promisin’,” says Carey, “and I guess we’ll have to try him out.”

So Carey went over to where the kid was warmin’ up and started in on him. After a wile he come back.

“I guess I can’t pick ’em,” he says. “When they get waivers on me I’m goin’ scoutin’⁠—not for no ball club, but for some circus that’s shy o’ clowns.”

“What did you pull on him?” I ast.

“Just a couple o’ feelers,” says Carey. “I ast him what league he come from and he says the Carolina League. I says: ‘Oh, yes. Milwaukee won the pennant, didn’t they?’ ‘No,’ he says; ‘Columbia.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I says. ‘I got it mixed up with the Utah League, where the women manages the teams.’ ‘Where’s that league at?’ he says. ‘The Utah League?’ I says. ‘You take a westbound Hodiamont car in St. Louis and transfer twict, and then walk a block down to the wharf and get on the steamer goin’ to Michigan City, only you get off when they come to Shreveport, and you can see it from there.’ ”

“You’re goin’ to have a good season,” I says.

“No, it can’t last,” says Carey. “Some day Cap’ll stick him in there and then it’ll be back to the Carolina you love.”

But Carey had it doped wrong. Cap give Skull a chance the second serious with the Cardinals, up home, and he got by nice. He was a little wild, but it helped him, because his fast one was fast enough to have ’em scared. They was swingin’ with one foot in the bucket. Bill handled him good and Cap was tickled to death with his showin’.

“What do you think of him?” Cap ast Carey.

“Best young pitcher I’ve looked at in a long wile,” says Carey. “You’ll make a big mistake if you leave him go.”

“I ain’t goin’ to leave him go,” says Cap.

“You’d be a sucker if you did,” says Carey. “But if I was you I wouldn’t work him too of’en for a wile. He’s nothin’ but a kid and you ought to give him time to get his bearin’s.”

You see Carey was afraid that Skull wouldn’t look as good the next time out, and he was crazy to have him stick on the club so’s we could enjoy him. They wasn’t no need of him bein’ afraid, though, because Skull kept right on mowin’ ’em down. He had everything but a noodle, and a man don’t need to know nothin’ about pitchin’ with Bill behind that bat.

III

It come along May and we was goin’ East. Brooklyn was the first place we was scheduled and we was leavin’ home on the five-thirty, right after a game.

Well, the first thing Carey done when we got on the train was to tell the dinge to make up two berths. Then he took off his coat and collar like he was gettin’ ready to undress. Some o’ the boys went right into the diner and Skull was goin’ to follow ’em when Carey nailed him.

“Where are you goin’, kid?” he says.

“To get my supper,” says Skull.

“Take a tip from me and stay where you are,” says Carey. “Them other fellas ain’t goin’ to have nothin’ to eat. They’re tryin’ to stall you.”

“What’s the idear?” says Skull.

“It’s old stuff,” says Carey, “but I’ll explain it to you. This car ain’t only got twelve lowers and they’s twenty-four of us on the trip. That means they can’t only twelve of us have lowers and the rest gets uppers. But the first twelve in bed gets the lowers.”

“Yes,” says Skull, “but the secretary give me a piece o’ paper that says I’m to have a lower.”

“Well,” says Carey, “can you knock somebody out o’ bed with that piece of paper? I’m tellin’ you, kid. The paper don’t make no difference; it’s the fellas that gets there first.”

“Are you goin’ to bed yourself?” says Skull.

“You bet I am,” says Carey.

“But you won’t get no supper,” says Skull.

“Supper!” says Carey. “I’d rather go without twenty suppers than ride in a upper through them Indiana mountains. These other birds is tryin’ to put somethin’ over. They’ll wait till the dinge gets a couple o’ berths made up and then they’ll race fer ’em. He’s makin’ up two right now and you can bet that one is goin’ to be mine.”

Pretty soon Skull was peelin’ his coat.

“Keep some loose change under your pillow,” says Carey. “You’re liable to be awake when we go through Fall River and you can send the porter out for a sandwich.”

Well, Carey hid behind the curtains of his berth and waited till Skull was all set for the night. Then he put his collar and coat back on and come into the diner and told us about it. Only o’ course he didn’t tell Cap.

I was back in our car when Cap come in. He seen the two berths made up and got curious. First he peeked into the one Carey’s been settin’ in and they wasn’t nobody there. Then he looked in at Skull.

“What’s the matter?” he says. “Sick?”

“No, I ain’t sick,” says Skull.

“Been drinkin’ somethin’?” says Cap.

“No,” says Skull.

“Well,” says Cap, “you go to bed nights after this and you won’t be all in in the middle o’ the afternoon.”

I snuck down to Skull’s berth.

“Just lay low in there,” I says. “He was tryin’ to get you out because he wants that berth. It’s the best spot in the car⁠—right over the front wheels. You hold on to it.”

Along about nine o’clock all the berths was made up but one, the seat where the boys was playin’ cards. I and Carey was up in the buffet car, but Smitty told us what come off.

Skull stuck his head out between the curtains and seen the card game. Smitty seen him lookin’.

“Ain’t you goin’ to bed?” says Skull.

“We can’t,” says Smitty. “All the lowers is gone.”

“I’ll set up a wile if you want to lay here,” says Skull.

“Off o’ that noise!” says Smitty. “Cap would fine us a hundred apiece if he catched us tradin’ berths.”

So Skull laid back, but pretty soon he peeked out again and ast for the porter.

“He got sore and quit at South Bend,” says Smitty.

“Have we came to Fall River yet?” ast Skull.

“No, and we ain’t goin’ to,” says Smitty.

“Why not?” says Skull.

“They’s a big storm there,” says Smitty. “So we’re goin’ round the other way, through Evanston.”

“Can a man get a sandwich there?”

“Not a sandwich,” says Smitty. “But they’s a old lady meets this train every night with a basket o’ fried chicken and mashed potatoes⁠—four bits a throw.”

“What time do we get to Evanston?”

“Can’t tell; it ain’t on the regular schedule,” says Smitty.

“But you’ll know when we’re pullin’ in⁠—the engine’ll give one long whistle.”

“They done that a wile ago,” says Skull.

“Yes,” says Smitty. “The engineer thought it was Evanston, but it wasn’t. His mistake.”

Smitty come up afterward and joined us in the buffet car. We was all back and undressin’ when we slowed up for Toledo. Carey spoke up loud.

“This must be Evanston,” he says.

Skull popped out of his berth.

“Where’ll I find that woman?” he says to Smitty.

“Up at the head end,” says Smitty. “She’s the fireman’s mother-in-law.”

Skull started up the aisle.

“Here,” I says, “you can’t go callin’ in your nightgown.”

“You won’t have time to dress,” says Smitty. “We’re only here two minutes.”

“You better forget eatin’,” says Carey. “I got hungry at Elkhart and wile I was scoutin’ I lost my berth.”

Skull turned to me.

“Go out and find her for me, will you?” he says. “Get two orders, one for you and one for me, and I’ll pay you for the both.”

“I ain’t hungry,” I says. “I had a pretty good dinner⁠—soup and lake trout and a porterhouse with mushrooms and hashed brown potatoes and poached eggs and salad and apple pie and coffee.”

“I’ll go out for you,” says Carey; “but if I get left you’ll have to pay my fare from here to New York.”

So Carey went out in the vestibule and stalled round till the train started up again. Then he come back, pantin’ like he’d ran a mile.

“That’s fine luck!” he says. “She’d just gave me the stuff when the train began to pull out. If I hadn’t ran clear back here I’d of got left; they wasn’t no other door open. And wile I was runnin’ I dropped your supper.”

Well, I don’t know how much more sleep Skull got that night, but I’ll bet he was No. 1 in the diner next mornin’. And I’ll bet when the chef seen the order he wondered where Jess Willard got on at.

IV

It rained the first two days we was East. The sun was out the third mornin’ and I and Carey was standin’ in front o’ the hotel when Skull showed up.

“Swell day,” he says.

“Yes,” says Carey, “and you know what it means, don’t you? It means we’ll have to beat it for Brooklyn as soon as we digest our breakfast. Three games.”

“Three games,” says Skull. “They won’t play ’em all today, will they?”

“They’re liable to,” says Carey. “You can’t never tell about Brooklyn.”

“I ain’t had no breakfast yet,” says Skull.

“You better hurry it up, then,” says Carey. “We was just goin’ to start.”

“Wait for me, will you?” says Skull.

“Not a chancet,” says Carey. “I got to be there early to help direct the practice.”

“You’ll have to go alone,” I says. “All the rest o’ the boys will be gone before you’re through your breakfast.”

“How do I get there?” says Skull.

“They’ll be a taxi to take you,” says Carey. “You just come out here and look round and when you see a driver lookin’ at you, hop in his car and tell him where you want to go. The club’ll settle for it.”

Well, as soon as Skull had went in to breakfast, Carey tipped off the rest o’ the gang to keep out o’ sight for a wile. I and him went over in the park acrost the street and watched for Skull to come out. Finally he come and they was two taxis standin’ there. He hopped into the nearest one, told the driver to take him to the Brooklyn ball park, and off they went. It wasn’t much of a trip⁠—only from Eighty-first and Columbus to hellangone.

I s’pose he landed there about ten or ten thirty. When we come, at a quarter to two, he was out in a suit, practicin’ with the Brooklyn bunch.

Robbie seen us and came over.

“What are you fellas pullin’?” he says. “Tryin’ to get our signs? This bird’s been here all day; landed in a taxi this mornin’. And he had a big brawl with the chauffeur about who was goin’ to settle. Finally the chauffeur said he’d have him pinched and then the guy come acrost. But he told me that your club was payin’ for the rig and he’d collect back from your secretary. Then he ast me if we was goin’ to play three games today and I says, No, the first two had been called off. So he’s been out monkeyin’ with my crowd ever since. I thought at first he was lit up, but afterward I seen he wasn’t.”

“We was tryin’ to do you a favor,” says Carey. “A fella that’s managin’ a club in Brooklyn deserves a treat oncet in a wile. We’re doin’ the best we can for you, and we’ll call it square if you don’t pitch Rucker against us.”

“But what’s this bird’s name?” says Robbie.

“That’s Scoville,” I says, “the boy that’s been doin’ all our winnin’.”

“I’m too old to be kidded,” says Robbie. “That fella’s too handsome to be a good pitcher.”

“If you think he can’t pitch, you ain’t too old to make a mistake,” I says.

“It’s a part of his system,” says Carey, “to visit all mornin’ with the club he’s goin’ to work against. He figures he’ll do better if he knows the batters.”

Well, sir, Skull pitched the game and Rucker pitched against him. Rucker outpitched him about two to one, but Skull copped.

“What do you think o’ the visitin’ system?” I says to Robbie, goin’ out.

But he didn’t have no comeback.

I and Carey and Skull rode back to the hotel together.

“Too bad you went over this mornin’ for nothin’,” says Carey. “As soon as we got there and found out they wasn’t only goin’ to play one game, we called you up to tell you about it, but you’d already left.”

“I didn’t go over for nothin’,” says Skull. “It was eight dollars and seventy-five cents. But o’ course the club’ll give it back to me.”

Carey seen where he was liable to get into trouble.

“Don’t say nothin’ to them about it,” he says. “I’ll go to the front for you. I know the sec. better’n you do and I can handle him.”

So after supper, Carey found Skull again and broke the news to him.

“I seen the sec.,” he says, “but they was nothin’ doin’. If you’ll remember, two taxis was settin’ out there when you got ready to go, and you took the wrong one. The other one was already paid for. So you’ll have to stand for it. That’s what you get for bein’ with a cheap club.”

Skull swallowed his medicine without a whimper. But after that you couldn’t get him into a taxi, not if he seen you pay for it in advance.

V

The mornin’ o’ the first day o’ the New York serious he set with us at breakfast.

“You want to get up to the Polo Grounds early,” says Carey.

“Maybe you’ll see part o’ the polo game.”

“Are you fellas goin’ early?” he says.

“No,” says Carey, “we’ve saw polo played already, and they won’t let a man in twicet. They’re afraid he’d learn the secrets o’ the game.”

“How do you get there without goin’ in no taxi?” ast Skull.

I guess I already told you where we was stoppin’⁠—Eighty-first and Columbus. I was just goin’ to tell him to jump on the Elevated and stay on to the end o’ the line, but Carey flagged me.

“Go out here on the corner,” he says, “and take a car goin’ south. If the motorman don’t make no mistake, it’ll keep goin’ till it gets way down to the Battery⁠—that’s where the pitchers and catchers all starts from. But if you don’t see no pitchers and catchers that you know, ask a policeman where the Sixth Avenue Elevated is, and then get on a Harlem train. Ride forward and hold on round the curves. Set near a window if you can, only don’t catch cold in your arm. Better be readin’ a paper, if you can find one in the train; then they won’t no girls talk to you. They’s a couple o’ girls here in New York that’d pick your pockets if they got a chancet. Your looks wouldn’t save you. And get off when you get to the Polo Grounds.”

“How’ll I know when I’m there?” ast Skull.

“You’ll hear a lot o’ yellin’,” says Carey, “the Giants practicin’ what they’re goin’ to say to Klem.”

Skull got lost somewheres, way downtown; he couldn’t tell us just where. It was afternoon when he finally got to the Polo Grounds, and o’ course the polo game was all over.

“You seen the town, though, didn’t you?” says Carey.

“What town?” says Skull.

“Ishpeming,” says Carey.

“No,” says Skull, “I was right here in New York all the wile.”

He made earlier starts the next two mornin’s, but he never did manage to get there in time for polo. He was to pitch the third game and he was restin’ in the clubhouse when I and Carey come in.

“You work today, don’t you?” says Carey.

“Yes,” he says.

“I got a message for you from Cap,” says Carey. “He had to go back to the hotel after the bag o’ close decisions, and he wanted me to be sure and tell you to have a long talk with McGraw before the game.”

“What should I talk to him about?” says Skull.

“Ask him a lot o’ questions,” says Carey. “He’s a grand fella for a young pitcher to talk to. He’ll help you a lot. Ask him what his men can hit and what they can’t hit, and who’s goin’ to work for them. Ask him anything you can think of, and try and remember everything he tells you.”

Skull got right up and went out to look for McGraw. When we was dressed and come on the field, he was over by their bench, obeyin’ instructions. I don’t know what Mac thought of him; probably didn’t think much of anything. Mac’s saw so many nuts that they don’t excite him no more.

Pretty soon Skull come struttin’ back to where we was.

“What’d you learn?” I ast him.

“He told me Mathewson or Marquard or Tesreau was goin’ to pitch,” says Skull. “Then I ast him what his men could hit and he says they can’t hit nothin’. So I ast him what they couldn’t hit and he says everythin’. Then he ast me what I done for my complexion and I told him I didn’t do nothin’ for it. And I couldn’t think o’ nothin’ more to ask him, so I come away.”

Well, after a wile, Cap showed up and Carey stuck round to change the subject if Skull begun tellin’ about his interview with McGraw. They wasn’t nothin’ said till it was time for their fieldin’ practice.

“You work, Scoville,” says Cap.

“All right,” says Skull.

“Well, warm up with somebody,” says Cap.

“I won’t need much warmin’ up,” says Skull.

“Why not?” says Cap.

“These fellas can’t hit nothin’,” says Skull.

“Who told you so?” ast Cap.

“McGraw,” says Skull. “He’s their manager.”

“Is he?” says Cap. “I thought it was George Cohan.”

“No,” says Skull. “It’s McGraw.”

“When was you talkin’ with him?” ast Cap.

Then Carey horned in. “Mac was kiddin’ you,” he says. “He’s got a good hittin’ club.”

“You bet he has!” says Cap. “You get that other idear out o’ your head.”

“What would he kid me for?” says Skull.

“Get out there and warm up!” says Cap. “McGraw’s got three of ’em doin’ it.”

“Yes,” says Skull. “He’s goin’ to work Mathewson or Marquard or Tesreau.”

“I don’t see how you can guess so good,” says Cap.

“No,” says Skull. “It’s one o’ them three.”

Well, McGraw’d either been kiddin’ him or he was mistaken about his own ball club. Skull didn’t know which. But he knowed before he went to the shower that they could hit.

VI

Skull pitched a one-hit game over in Philly. But he wasn’t in there a whole innin’. He pitched to six men and the other five got bases on balls.

He went better up in Boston. He had two men out before Cap yanked him.

“What time can you get a train for Carolina?” says Carey.

“You goin’ down there?” ast Skull.

“No,” says Carey. “I thought maybe you was goin’.”

“Oh, no,” says Skull. “I’m gettin’ more money up here.”

“Did you get your pockets picked in New York?” says Carey.

“I guess not,” says Skull.

“Just plain lost it, huh?” says Carey.

“Lost what?” asts Skull.

“Your control,” says Carey.

“What’s that?” says Skull.

“You had swell control in New York,” says Carey. “You was hittin’ their bats right in the middle. But the way you’ve went the last two games, you’ve got us all guessin’. We don’t know whether you’re goin’ to hit the coacher at third base or kill a reporter. Pretty soon you’ll have the field umpire wearin’ a mask and protector. Is your arm sore?”

“No,” says Skull.

“I didn’t think it could be,” says Carey, “on account o’ the distance you get. But if your arm ain’t sore, what’s the matter?”

“Matter with who?” says Skull.

“You,” says Carey. “You don’t think the umpire’s missin’ ’em all, do you?”

“I’m wild,” says Skull.

“Oh, that’s it!” says Carey. “I’ve been puzzlin’ my brains to find out what it was. But I see now; you’re wild. And what do you s’pose makes you wild?”

“I can’t pitch where I’m aimin’,” says Skull. “I can’t pitch no strikes. I keep givin’ bases on balls.”

“Funny I didn’t think of that,” says Carey. “I knowed they was somethin’ the matter, but I couldn’t put my finger right on it. I’ll tell Cap and maybe we can get them to enlarge the plate.”

“They wouldn’t do that, would they?” says Skull.

“Well,” says Carey, “they probably wouldn’t in most o’ the towns. But they can’t stop us from doin’ it on our own grounds. It’s our own plate there, and I guess we can have any size we want to.”

“But if I kept pitchin’ too high or too low, the size o’ the plate wouldn’t make no difference,” says Skull.

When we was through at Boston we made the cute little jump to St. Louis, and Carey was ridin’ him all the way.

“This line,” he told him, “is the one the James Boys works on. You see one o’ the Jameses pitches for Boston and another pitches for St. Louis in the other league. And the ones that ain’t ball players works back and forth between the two towns. Somebody has to set up all night and keep watch. I’ve been picked to set up the first night because I can shoot so good. Tomorrow mornin’ we’ll draw lots to see who sets up tomorrow night. But if you got somethin’ you don’t want to lose you better sleep with one eye open and keep your suitcase right in the berth with you. O’ course it’s too late for ’em to steal your control, but they might get your fast ball and then you wouldn’t have nothin’ but your complexion.”

“Oh, yes, I would,” says Skull. “I got a little money and a watch and some clo’es.”

“Shut up!” says Carey. “Don’t be boastin’ o’ what you got. Maybe one o’ them Jameses is right in this car now. You can’t never tell where they’re hidin’.”

Well, the next mornin’ we all ast Carey what kind of a night he had and did he see anything suspicious, and so forth. He told us he had one bad scare. Somebody come through the car with a mask on. But as soon as he seen the mask he knowed it wasn’t one o’ the James Boys, because they wasn’t none of them catchers.

“Who was it?” I says.

“Some society fella,” he says, “goin’ to the masquerade ball up in the day coach.”

We drawed lots right after we was through breakfast. They was supposed to be all our names wrote on pieces o’ paper and dropped into a hat. Then the fella that drawed his own name was to keep watch the second night.

Skull was the baby. All the rest of us drawed his name, too, only o’ course he didn’t know that.

“Well,” says Carey, “it looks like it’s up to you. And you don’t want to take it as a joke. Whether we get by or not depends on how you work. You’ll have to take my gun; I’ll show you how it handles. If you see some stranger come into the car, shoot! Don’t throw a baseball at him or you might wound the engineer. You better set up in the washroom all night with the porter, and if he asks you to help him shine shoes you go ahead and help him. Some o’ these here porters is in with the James Boys and if they get sore it’s good night. And be sure and don’t let the robbers get the first shot.”

Skull tried to sleep a little durin’ the day. But he was too nervous.

“Who’s keepin’ watch now?” he ast Carey.

“Nobody, in the daytime,” says Carey. “They’re afraid of bein’ seen by scouts, because, as I say, one o’ them’s with the Braves and another with the Browns, and the next one that gets caught might be hung or sent to the Carolina League.”

Carey had to borry a gun off’n the conductor.

“I’ll be sure it’s empty before I leave the bird have it,” he says. “He’s dangerous enough with a baseball in his hand, let alone a loaded gat.”

Well, sir, I wisht you’d saw the porter when Skull and the gun went on watch at eleven that night. We had to call him out and put him wise or he’d of dove off the train. He told us he never seen a guy as restless as Skull. All night long he was movin’ round⁠—out on the platform, then back in the washroom, then through to the other end o’ the car and then out on the platform again. And jumpin’ sideways at every noise.

“Nothin’ doin’, eh?” says Carey in the mornin’. “Not a sign o’ ’em?”

“Not a sign,” says Skull.

“And ain’t you sleepy?” says Carey.

“Yes, I am,” says Skull. “I hope I don’t have to work this afternoon.”

“What if you do?” says Carey. “It won’t keep you up more’n ten minutes.”

VII

Skull didn’t pitch that afternoon. He didn’t pitch the next day neither, but he was in there tryin’. Rigler could of umpired with his right arm cut off. They wasn’t no strikes to call.

When he’d throwed fourteen without gettin’ one clost, Cap took him out.

“I’d leave you go through with it,” says Cap, “only the public likes to see some hittin’. Did you think just because this is a bad ball town you couldn’t pitch nothin’ but bad balls?”

“I’m wild,” says Skull. “I can’t get ’em over.”

“I’d of guessed it in a few more minutes,” says Cap. “Did you ever try pitchin’ left-handed?”

“Left-handed?” says Skull. “Why, I wouldn’t know where a ball was goin’ if I throwed it left-handed.”

“Then you must be equally good with both hands,” says Cap.

Waivers was ast on Skull before we left St. Louis.

“They’s no use foolin’ along with him,” Cap told us. “He don’t look like he’d ever get a man out, and even if his control come back you couldn’t never learn him nothin’.”

“I knowed it,” says Carey. “I knowed we’d never have him the whole year.”

“It’s better for you this way,” I says. “Your brains would be wore out before fall.”

We went back home and the third day we was there Cap told us that everybody’d waived.

“The next thing’s placin’ him,” he says. “The newspaper boys has advertised him so good that every hick town in the country is wise to him. If I can’t make no deal within a couple o’ weeks I’ll leave him go outright.”

The two weeks was pretty near up when Carey put over his last one on the poor simp. I and Carey was throwin’ in front o’ the stand when a couple o’ girls was showed into a box right clost to us. They was in black from head to foot; pretty as a picture too. But their clo’es was the kind that you don’t see no city-broke dames wearin’ in a ball orchard.

“Come to town just for the day?” says Carey, but they didn’t pay no attention.

Carey come over to me.

“Uncle Zeke died and left ’em three hundred iron men,” he says, “and they’re goin’ to blow it all in one grand good time. I bet they’ll be dancin’ in Dreamland tonight; they’re dressed for it already.”

“The blonde’s a bearcat,” I says.

“Yes,” says Carey, “and you can figure the other one’s the class o’ the pair. That’s the way it always breaks.”

Skull had been shaggin’ in the outfield. Carey spotted him as he was struttin’ back to the bench, and it was all off.

“You lucky stiff!” says Carey.

“What do you mean?” says Skull.

“I guess you know what I mean,” says Carey. “What did you come in for?”

“I’m tired,” says Skull.

“Oh, yes,” says Carey. “I s’pose you didn’t see them dolls lookin’ you over.”

“What dolls?” ast Skull.

“Them two in the box,” says Carey.

Skull give ’em the double-o.

“Who are they?” he says.

“You don’t know who they are?” says Carey. “That’s Lizzie Carnegie and her sister-in-law, and they’s a movin’ van outside with their pocketbooks in it.”

“Well,” says Skull, “that don’t get me nothin’.”

“Don’t get you nothin’ when the richest girl in the country wants to meet you?” says Carey.

“How do you know she wants to meet me?” says Skull.

“Didn’t she call me over and tell me?” says Carey. “She says: ‘Who’s that handsome bird shaggin’ fungoes in the outfield?’ So I told her who you was. Then she ast if you was married and I says you wasn’t. Then she ast how she could get to talk to you, and I told her I’d find out if you was engaged after the game, and if you wasn’t you’d probably be glad to give her a minute’s time. So all as you have to do now is go over there and make the date.”

“Which is Lizzie?” ast Skull.

“The one with the earrings,” says Carey. They both was wearin’ ’em.

Well, sir, Skull started over toward the box.

“He’s liable to get pinched,” I says.

“If he does I’ll fix it,” says Carey.

Skull didn’t get pinched. He got two nice smiles, and Cap had to send me over to drag him away when the game started. And I and Carey came out o’ the clubhouse after the game just in time to see Skull and the pair o’ them hikin’ for the exit.

When we got to mornin’ practice next day, Skull had been let out already.

“I told him he was free to sign wherever he wanted to go,” says Cap. “I told him to get a catcher somewheres and practice till he could pitch one or two strikes per innin’. I told him maybe he could land in the Federal. He says he guessed he would try the Utah League, where the women manages the clubs. He says women almost always gen’ally took a fancy to him.”

“Yes,” says Carey, “most o’ them likes a good-lookin’ fella all the better if he’s a little wild.”

We didn’t see no more o’ Skull till we got in from Cincinnati, the day before the Fourth o’ July. He was standin’ in the station, holdin’ two suit cases.

“Hello there, boy,” says Carey. “Where are you headin’?”

“Just downstate a ways,” he says.

“Joinin’ some club?” says Carey.

“No,” says Skull. “I’m goin’ to get married.”

“Good night!” says Carey. “And who’s the defendant?”

“That there blond girl,” says Skull. “The girl that was out to the park that day with the other girl. Only you had her name wrong. Her name’s Conahan⁠—Mary Conahan. And the other one ain’t her sister-in-law, but just a friend o’ her’n.”

“I must of had ’em mixed up,” says Carey. “Yes,” says Skull, “you mistook ’em for somebody else. But you had one thing right: She’s got the old kale.”

“A lot of it?” says Carey.

“A plenty,” says Skull. “Her old man makes this here Silver Tip beer; maybe you’ve drank it already.”

“And I s’pose you’re goin’ to drive a wagon,” says Carey.

“No,” says Skull. “The old man’s been feelin’ bad for the last year and I’m goin’ to kinda look after the business.”

“And,” I says, “I bet you know just as much about brewin’ beer as you do about pitchin’.”

“Oh, no,” says Skull. “Nowheres near.”

“But you pick things up quick,” says Carey. Skull’s train was gettin’ ready to start.

“Well,” he says, “good luck to you, and tell the boys I hope they win the pennant.”

“No chancet now,” says Carey.

We went over to the gate with him.

“Where to?” says the guy. “Show your ticket!”

“By cracky, I forgot about a ticket.”

“I s’pose you thought the secretary’d tend to that,” says Carey.

“Too late now,” I says. “You’ll have to pay on the train.”

“You won’t have no trouble,” says Carey. “They’s lady conductors on this road.”

We persuaded the gateman to leave him through.

“Now,” says Carey, “let’s I and you get good and drunk.”

“Yes,” I says; “but let’s go to a place where they keep Silver Tip, so’s to help out old Skull.”

“Help him out!” says Carey. “We’re the ones that need help⁠—us smart Alecks!”

Where Do You Get That Noise?

I

The trade was pulled wile the Phillies was here first trip. Without knockin’ nobody, the two fellas we give was worth about as much as a front foot on Main Street, Belgium. And the fella we got had went better this spring than any time since he broke in. So when the news o’ the deal come out I says to Dode, I says:

“What’s the matter with Pat⁠—tradin’ Hawley? What’s he goin’ to do with them two he’s gettin’⁠—make ticket takers out of ’em? What’s the idear?”

“It does look like a bad swap for us,” says Dode. “Hawley’s worth six like them you’re givin’ us, and he ain’t only twenty-seven years old.”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you,” I says. “The deal looks like you was tryin’ to help us out.”

“We are,” says Dode. “Didn’t we just get through helpin’ you out o’ the first division?”

“Save that for the minstrels,” I says. “Give me the inside on this business: Is they somethin’ the matter with him? The trade’s made now already and it won’t hurt you none to come clean. Didn’t him and Pat get along?”

“Sure! Why not?” says Dode. “Did you ever see a guy that Pat couldn’t get along with him?”

“Well then,” says I, “what’s the answer? Don’t keep me in suspenders.”

“I ain’t sure myself,” says Dode, “but I and Bobby was talkin’ it over and we figured that Pat just plain got sick o’ hearin’ him talk.”

“Feed that to the goldfish,” I says. “If Pat couldn’t stand conversation he wouldn’t of never lasted this long.”

“Conversation, yes,” Dode says; “but it’s a different thing when a bird makes an argument out of everything that’s said. They wasn’t a day passed but what Hawley just as good as called everybody on the club a liar. And it didn’t make no difference whether you was talkin’ to him or not. If I happened to be tellin’ you that my sister was the champion chess player o’ Peanut County, he’d horn right in and say she wasn’t no such a thing; that So-and-So was the champion. And they wouldn’t be no use to argue with him because you couldn’t even get a draw. He’d say he was born in the county seat o’ Peanut County and empired all the chess tournaments there. They wasn’t no subject that he didn’t know all about it better’n anybody else. They wasn’t no town he wasn’t born and brought up in. His mother or his old man is first cousins to everybody in the United States. He’s been operated on for every disease in the hospital. And if he’s did all he says he’s did he’ll be eight hundred and twenty-two years old next Halloween.”

“They’s lots o’ fellas like that,” I says.

“You think so?” says Dode. “You wait a wile. Next time I see you, if you don’t say he’s all alone in the Argue League I’ll give you my bat.”

“If he’s that good,” I says, “he’ll be soup for Carey.”

“He will at first, maybe,” says Dode; “but Carey’ll get sick of him, just like Pat and all the rest of us did.”

II

I didn’t lose no time tellin’ Carey about Dode’s dope, and Carey didn’t lose no time tryin’ it out. It was the second day after Hawley joined us. It looked like rain, as usual, and we was stallin’ in the clubhouse, thinkin’ they’d maybe call it off before we had to dress.

“I see in some paper,” says Carey, “where the heavy artillery fire over in Europe is what makes all this duck weather.”

He didn’t get no rise; so he wound up again.

“It seems like it must be somethin’ that does it because they wasn’t never no summer like this before,” he says.

“What do you mean⁠—no summer like this?” says Hawley.

“No summer with so much rain as they’s been this summer,” Carey says.

“Where do you get that stuff?” says Hawley. “This here summer’s been dry, you might say.”

“Yes,” says Carey; “and you might say the Federals done well in Newark.”

“I mean,” says Hawley, “that this here summer’s been dry compared to other summers.”

“I s’pose,” says Carey, “they wasn’t never such a dry summer?”

“They’s been lots of ’em,” Hawley says.

“They’s been lots o’ summers that was drier and they’s been lots o’ summers when they was more rain.”

“Not in the last twenty years,” says Carey.

“Yes, in the last twenty years too,” says Hawley. “Nineteen years ago this summer made this here one look like a drought. It come up a storm the first day o’ May and they wasn’t a day from then till the first o’ September when it didn’t rain one time or another.”

“You got some memory,” says Carey⁠—“goin’ back nineteen years.”

“I guess I ought to remember it,” says Hawley. “That was the first year my old man left me go to the ball games alone, and they wasn’t no games in our town from April till Labor Day. They wasn’t no games nowheres because the railroads was all washed out. We lived in Cleveland and my old man was caught in New York when the first o’ the floods come and couldn’t get back home for three months.”

“Couldn’t he hire a canoe nowheres?” says Carey.

“Him and some others was thinkin’ about tryin’ the trip on a raft,” says Hawley, “but my old lady was scared to have him try it; so she wrote and told him to stay where he was.”

“She was lucky to have a carrier pigeon to take him the letter,” says Carey. “Or did you swim East with it?”

“Swim!” Hawley says. “Say, you wouldn’t talk about swim if you’d saw the current in them floods!”

“I’m sorry I missed it,” says Carey. “I was still over in Portugal yet that year.”

“It dried up in time for the world serious,” says Hawley.

“The world serious between who?” ast Carey.

“The clubs that won out in the two leagues,” says Hawley.

“I didn’t know they was two leagues in ’96,” says Carey. “Who did they give the pennants to⁠—the clubs that was ahead when it begin to sprinkle?”

“Sprinkle!” says Hawley. “Say, you’d of called it a sprinkle if you’d saw it. Sprinkle! Say, I guess that was some sprinkle!”

“I guess it must of been some sprinkle!” says Carey. “It must of made this summer look like a sucker.”

“No,” says Hawley; “this summer’s been pretty bad.”

“But nowheres near like nineteen year ago,” says Carey.

“Oh, I guess they’s about the same rainfall every year,” Hawley says. “But, still and all, we’ve had some mighty wet weather since the first o’ May this year, and I wouldn’t be su’prised if the heavy artillery fire in Europe had somethin’ to do with it.”

“That’s ridic’lous,” says Carey.

“Ridic’lous!” says Hawley. “Where do you get that stuff? Don’t you know that rain can be started with dynamite? Well, then, why wouldn’t all that shootin’ affect the weather? They must be some explanation.”

“Did you make him?” says Carey to me afterward. “He trimmed me both ways. Some day he’ll single to right field and throw himself out at first base. I seen I was in for a lickin’, so I hedged to get a draw, and the minute I joined his league he jumped to the outlaws. But after this I’m goin’ to stick on one side of it. He goes better when he’s usin’ his own stuff.”

III

In battin’ practice the next day Carey hit one up against them boards in right center on a line.

“Good night!” says Smitty. “I bet that’s the hardest wallop that was ever made on these grounds.”

“I know I didn’t never hit one harder here,” says Carey. “I don’t never hit good in this park. I’d rather be on the road all the wile. I hit better on the Polo Grounds than anywheres else. I s’pose it’s on account o’ the background.”

“Where do you get that stuff?” says Hawley. “Everybody hits better in New York than they do here. Do you want to know why? Because it’s a clean town, without no dirt and cinders blowin’ in your eyes. This town’s all smoke and dirt, and it ain’t no wonder a man’s handicapped. The fellas that’s with clubs in clean towns has got it all over us. Look at Detroit⁠—one o’ the cleanest towns in the country! And look how Cobb and Crawford hit! A man in one o’ these smoke holes can’t never pile up them big averages, or he can’t last as long, neither.”

“No,” says Carey; “and that accounts for Wagner’s rotten record in Pittsburgh.”

Do you think that stopped him? Not him!

“Yes,” he says; “and how much would Wagner of hit if he’d been playin’ in New York or Detroit all the wile? He wouldn’t never been below .500. And he’d of lasted just twicet as long.”

“But on account of him landin’ in Pittsburgh,” says Carey, “the poor kid’ll be all through already before he’s fairly started yet. It’s a crime and the grand jury should ought to take steps.”

“Have you ever been to Washington?” says I.

“Have I ever been to Washington?” says Hawley. “Say, I know Washington like a book. My old man’s brother’s a senator there in Congress. You must of heard o’ Senator Hawley.”

“Oh, yes,” says Carey; “the fella that made the speech that time.”

“That’s the fella,” says Hawley. “And a smart fella too. Him and Woodruff Wilson’s just like brothers. They’re always to each other’s houses. That’s where I met Wilson⁠—was at Uncle Zeke’s. We fanned together for a couple hours. You wouldn’t never know he was the President. He don’t let on like he was any better than I or you.”

“He ain’t as good as you; that’s a pipe!” says Carey.

“Where does your cousin live?” says Smitty.

“Cousin Zeke’s got the swellest apartment in Washington,” says Hawley. “Right next to the Capitol, on Pennsylvania Street.”

“I wisht I could live there,” I says. “It’s the best town in the country for my money. And it’s the cleanest one too.”

“No factories or smoke there,” says Carey.

“I wonder how it comes,” I says, “that most o’ the fellas on the Washington Club, playin’ in the cleanest town in the country most o’ the wile, can’t hardly foul a ball⁠—let alone hit it.”

“Maybe the silver dust from the mint gets in their eyes,” says Carey.

“Where do you get that noise?” says Hawley. “The mint ain’t nowheres near the ball orchard.”

“Well then,” I says, “how do you account for the club not hittin’?”

“Say,” says Hawley, “it ain’t no wonder they don’t hit in that town. We played a exhibition game there last spring and we didn’t hit, neither.”

“Who pitched against you⁠—Johnson?” I ast him.

“Yes; Johnson,” says Hawley.

“But that don’t explain why the Washington bunch can’t hit,” says Carey. “He ain’t mean enough to turn round and pitch against his own club.”

“They won’t nobody hit in that town,” says Hawley, “and I don’t care if it’s Johnson pitchin’ or the mayor.”

“What’s the trouble?” I says.

“The heat gets ’em!” says Carey.

“No such a thing!” says Hawley. “That shows you don’t know nothin’ about it. It’s the trees.”

“The trees!” I says. “Do they play out in the woods or somewheres?”

“No,” says Hawley. “If they did they’d be all right. Their ball park’s just like any ball park; they ain’t no trees in it. But they’s trees all over the rest o’ the town. It don’t make no difference where you go, you’re in the shade. And then, when you get to the ball park you’re exposed to the sun all of a sudden and it blinds you.”

“I should think it would affect their fieldin’ too,” says Carey.

“They wear goggles in the field,” says Hawley.

“Do the infielders wear goggles?” ast Carey.

“No; but most o’ the balls they got to handle comes on the ground. They don’t have to look up for ’em,” says Hawley.

“S’pose somebody hits a high fly ball that’s comin’ down right in the middle o’ the diamond,” says Carey. “Who gets it?”

“It ain’t got,” says Hawley. “They leave it go and it gen’ally almost always rolls foul.”

“If I was Griffith,” says Carey, “I’d get the Forestry Department to cut away the trees in some part o’ town and then make all my ball players live there so’s they’d get used to the sun.”

“Or he might have a few big maples planted round the home plate some Arbor Day,” I says.

“Yes,” says Carey; “or he might trade Johnson to the Pittsburgh Federals for Oakes.”

“He’d be a sucker to trade Johnson,” says Hawley.

IV

Well, we played down in Cincy one Saturday to a crowd that might of all came out in one street car without nobody ridin’ in the motorman’s vest pocket. We was discussin’ it that night at supper.

“It’s no more’n natural,” I says. “The home club’s been goin’ bad and you can’t expect the whole population to fight for a look at ’em.”

“Yes,” says Carey; “but it ain’t only here. It’s everywheres. We didn’t hardly draw our breath at St. Louis and the receipts o’ that last doubleheader at home with Pittsburgh wouldn’t buy enough shavin’ soap to lather a gnat. All over the circuit it’s the same way, and in the other leagues too. It’s a off year, maybe; or maybe they’s reasons for it that we ain’t doped out.”

“Well,” I says, “the war’s hurt business, for one thing, and people ain’t got no money to spend on box seats. And then golf’s gettin’ better all the wile. A man’d naturally rather do some exercisin’ himself than watch somebody else do it. Besides that, automobiles has got so cheap that pretty near everybody can buy ’em, and the people that owns ’em takes their friends out in the country instead o’ comin’ to the ball yard. And besides that,” I says, “they’s too much baseball and the people’s sick of it.”

Hawley come in and set down with us wile I was still talkin’ yet.

“What’s the argument?” he says.

“We was tryin’ to figure out why we can’t get a quorum out to the games no more,” says Carey.

“Well,” says Hawley, “you know the real reason, don’t you?”

“No,” says Carey; “but I bet we’re goin’ to hear it. I bet you’ll say it’s on account o’ the Gulf Stream.”

“Where do you get that noise?” says Hawley. “If you want to know the real reason, the war’s the real reason.”

“That’s what I was sayin’,” says I. “The war’s hurt business and people ain’t got no money to blow on baseball.”

“That shows you don’t know nothin’ about it,” says Hawley.

“Then I got you tied,” I says, “because you just sprung the same thing yourself.”

“No such a thing!” says Hawley. “You’re talkin’ about the war hurtin’ business and I’m talkin’ about the war hurtin’ baseball.”

“What’s the difference?” I says.

“All the difference in the world,” says Hawley. “If everybody was makin’ twicet as much money durin’ the war as they made before the war started yet, the baseball crowds wouldn’t be no bigger than they have been.”

“Come acrost with the answer,” says Carey. “The strain’s somethin’ awful.”

“Well, boys,” says Hawley, “they ain’t nobody in this country that ain’t pullin’ for one side or the other in this here war. Is that right or wrong?”

“Which do you say it is?” says Carey.

“I say it’s right because I know it’s right,” says Hawley.

“Well then,” says Carey, “don’t ask us boobs.”

“No matter what a man says about he bein’ neutral,” says Hawley, “you can bet that down in his heart he’s either for the Dutchmen or the Alleys; I don’t care if he’s Woodruff Wilson or Bill Klem. We all got our favorites.”

“Who’s yours?” I says.

“Don’t you tell!” says Carey. “It wouldn’t be fair to the other side.”

“I don’t mind tellin’,” says Hawley. “I’d be a fine stiff to pull for the Dutchmen after all King George done for my old man.”

“What did he do for him?” says Carey.

“Well, it’s a long story,” says Hawley.

“That’s all right,” says Carey. “They’s only one game tomorrow.”

“I’ll give it to you some other time,” Hawley says.

“I hope you don’t forget it,” says Carey.

“Forget it!” says Hawley. “When your old man’s honored by the royalties you ain’t liable to forget it.”

“No,” says Carey; “but you could try.”

“Here!” I says. “I’m waitin’ to find out how the war cuts down the attendance.”

“I’m comin’ to that,” says Hawley. “When you figure it out they couldn’t nothin’ be simpler.”

“It does sound simple, now it’s been explained,” says Carey.

“It ain’t been explained to me,” I says.

“You’re in too big a hurry,” Hawley says. “If you wouldn’t interrupt a man all the wile you might learn somethin’. You admit they ain’t nobody that’s neutral. Well then, you can’t expect people that’s for the Alleys to come out to the ball park and pull for a club that’s mostly Dutchmen, and you can’t expect Dutchmen to patronize a club that’s got a lot o’ fellas with English and French names.”

“Wait a minute!” says Carey. “I s’pose they ain’t no Germans here in Cincinnati, is they?”

“Sure!” says Hawley. “The place is ran over with ’em.”

“Then,” says Carey, “why don’t they break all records for attendance at this park, with Heine Groh and Fritz Mollwitz and Count Von Kolnitz and Wagner and Schneider and Herzog on the ball club?”

“Because they’s others on the team that offsets ’em,” says Hawley. “We’ll say they’s a Dutchman comes out to the game to holler for some o’ them boys you mentioned. We’ll say that Groh kicks a ground ball and leaves three runs score and puts the club behind. And then we’ll say that Clarke comes up in the ninth innin’ and wins the game for Cincinnati with a home run. That makes the Dutchman look like a rummy, don’t it? Or we’ll say Schneider starts to pitch a game and gets knocked out, and then Dale comes in and they can’t foul him. Your German friend wishes he had of stayed home and washed part o’ the dashhound.”

“Yes,” says Carey; “but wouldn’t he want to come to the game again the next day in hopes he’d get his chancet to holler?”

“No,” says Hawley; “because, whatever happened, they’d be somethin’ about it he wouldn’t like. If the Reds win the Alleys on the club’d feel just as good as the Dutchmen, and that’d make him sore. And if they lost he’d be glad on account o’ the Alleys; but he’d feel sorry for the Germans.”

“Then they’s only one thing for Garry Herrmann to do,” I says: “he should ought to trade off all his Alleys for Dutch.”

“That’d help the attendance at home,” says Hawley; “but when his club played in Boston who’d go out to see ’em?”

“Everybody that could borrow a brick,” says Carey.

“Accordin’ to your dope,” I says, “they’s only one kind of a club that’d draw everywheres, and that’s a club that didn’t have no Dutchmen or Alleys⁠—neither one.”

“That’s the idear,” says Hawley: “a club made up o’ fellas from countries that ain’t got nothin’ to do with the war⁠—Norwegians, Denmarks, Chinks, Mongrels and them fellas. A guy that had brains enough to sign up that kind of a club would make a barrel o’ money.”

“A guy’d have a whole lot o’ trouble findin’ that kind of a club,” I says.

“He’d have a whole lot more trouble,” says Carey, “findin’ a club they could beat.”

V

Smitty used to get the paper from his hometown where his folks lived at, somewheres near Lansing, Michigan. One day he seen in it where his kid brother was goin’ to enter for the state golf championship.

“He’ll just about cop it too,” says Smitty. “And he ain’t only seventeen years old. He’s been playin’ round that Wolverine Country Club, in Lansing, and makin’ all them birds like it.”

“The Wolverine Club, in Lansing?” says Hawley.

“That’s the one,” Smitty says.

“That’s my old stampin’ grounds,” says Hawley. “That’s where I learned the game at.”

“The kid holds the record for the course,” says Smitty.

“He don’t no such a thing!” says Hawley.

“How do you know?” says Smitty.

“I guess I’d ought to know,” Hawley says. “The guy that holds that record is talkin’ to you.”

“What’s your record?” says Smitty.

“What’d your brother make?” says Hawley.

“Plain seventy-one,” says Smitty; “and if you ever beat that you can have my share o’ the serious money.”

“You better make a check right now,” says Hawley. “The last time I played at that club I rolled up seventy-three.”

“That beats me,” Smitty says.

“If you’re that good,” says Carey, “I’d like to take you on sometime. I can score as high as the next one.”

“You might get as much as me now because I’m all out o’ practice,” says Hawley; “but you wouldn’t of stood no show when I was right.”

“What club was you best with?” ast Carey.

“A heavy one,” says Hawley. “I used to play with a club that they couldn’t hardly nobody else lift.”

“An iron club?” says Smitty.

“Well,” says Hawley, “it felt like they was iron in it.”

“Did you play all the wile with one club?” ast Carey.

“You bet I did,” Hawley says. “I paid a good price and got a good club. You couldn’t break it.”

“Was it a brassie?” says Smitty.

“No,” says Hawley. “It was made by some people right there in Lansing.”

“I’d like to get a hold of a club like that,” says Carey.

“You couldn’t lift it,” Hawley says; “and even if you could handle it I wouldn’t sell it for no price⁠—not for twicet what it cost.”

“What did it cost?” Smitty ast him.

“Fifty bucks,” says Hawley; “and it’d of been more’n that only for the people knowin’ me so well. My old man used to do ’em a lot o’ good turns.”

“He must of stood in with ’em,” says Carey, “or they wouldn’t of never left go of a club like that for fifty.”

“They must of sold it to you by the pound,” I says⁠—“about a dollar a pound.”

“Could you slice a ball with it?” says Carey.

“That was the trouble⁠—the balls wouldn’t stand the gaff,” Hawley says. “I used to cut ’em in two with it.”

“How many holes did they have there when you was playin’?” Smitty ast.

“Oh, three or four,” he says; “but they didn’t feaze me.”

“They got eighteen now,” says Smitty.

“They must of left the course run down,” Hawley says. “You can bet they kept it up good when my old man was captain.”

“Has your brother ever been in a big tourney before?” I says to Smitty.

“He was in the city championship last summer,” says Smitty.

“How’d he come out?” Hawley ast.

“He was second highest,” says Smitty. “He’d of win, only he got stymied by a bumblebee.”

“Did they cauterize it?” says Carey.

“Where do you get that noise?” says Hawley. “They ain’t no danger in a bee sting if you know what to do. Just slip a piece o’ raw meat on it.”

“Was you ever stymied by a bee?” says Carey.

“Was I!” says Hawley. “Say, I wisht I had a base hit for every time them things got me. My old lady’s dad had a regular bee farm down in Kentucky, and we’d go down there summertimes and visit and help gather the honey. I used to run round barefooted and you couldn’t find a square inch on my legs that wasn’t all et up.”

“Must of kept your granddad broke buyin’ raw meat,” says Carey.

“Meat wasn’t so high in them days,” says Hawley. “Besides he didn’t have to buy none. He had his own cattle.”

“I should think the bees would of stymied the cattle,” says Carey.

“Cattle’s hide’s too tough; a bee won’t go near ’em,” says Hawley.

“Why didn’t you hire a cow to go round with you wile you collected honey?” says Carey.

“What’d you quit golf for?” ast Smitty.

“A fella can’t play golf and hit good,” says Hawley.

“I should think it’d help a man’s hittin’,” Carey says. “A golf ball’s a whole lot smaller than a baseball, and a baseball should ought to look as big as a balloon to a man that’s been playin’ golf.”

“Where do you get that noise?” says Hawley. “Golf’s bad for a man’s battin’; but it ain’t got nothin’ to do with your swing or your eye or the size o’ the ball.”

“What makes it bad, then?” I ast him.

“Wait a minute and I’ll tell you,” he says. “They’s two reasons: In the first place they’s genally almost always some people playin’ ahead o’ you on a golf course and you have to wait till they get out o’ reach. You get in the habit o’ waitin’ and when you go up to the plate in a ball game and see the pitcher right in front o’ you and the infielders and baserunners clost by, you’re liable to wait for ’em to get out o’ the way for the fear you’ll kill ’em. And wile you’re waitin’ the pitcher’s liable to slip three over in the groove and you’re struck out.”

“I wasn’t never scared o’ killin’ no infielder,” says Carey.

“And what’s the other reason?” I says.

“The other reason,” says Hawley, “is still better yet than the one I give you.”

“Don’t say that!” says Smitty.

“When you’re playin’ golf you pay for the balls you use,” says Hawley; “so in a golf game you’re sort of holdin’ back and not hittin’ a ball as far as you can, because it’ll cost you money if you can’t find it. So you get used to sort o’ holdin’ back; and when you get up there to the plate you don’t take a good wallop for the fear you’ll lose the ball. You forget that the balls is furnished by the club.”

“And besides that,” says Carey, “you’re liable to get to thinkin’ that your bat cost fifty bucks, the same as your golf racket, and you don’t swing hard because you might break it.”

“You don’t know nothin’ about it,” says Hawley.

VI

Now I don’t care how big a goof a man is, he’d ought to know better than get smart round a fella that’s slumped off in his battin’. Most o’ the time they ain’t no better-natured fella in the world than Carey; but when him and first base has been strangers for a wile, lay offen him!

That’s how Hawley got in bad with Carey⁠—was talkin’ too much when the old boy wasn’t in no mood to listen.

He begin to slump off right after the Fourth o’ July doubleheader. In them two games a couple o’ the boys popped out when they was sent up to sacrifice. So Cap got sore on the buntin’ game and says we’d hit and run for a wile. Well, in the first innin’, every day for the next three days, Bishop led off with a base on balls and then started down when he got Carey’s sign. And all three times Carey cracked a line drive right at somebody and they was a double play. After the last time he come in to the bench tryin’ to smile.

“Well,” he says, “I guess that’s about a record.”

“A record! Where do you get that stuff?” says Hawley. “I come up four times in Philly in one game and hit into four double plays.”

“You brag too much!” says Carey; but you could see he didn’t want to go along with it.

Well, that last line drive seemed to of took the heart out of him or somethin’, because for the next week he didn’t hardly foul one⁠—let alone gettin’ it past the infield.

When he’d went through his ninth game without a blow Hawley braced him in the clubhouse. “Do you know why you ain’t hittin’?” he says.

“Yes,” says Carey. “It’s because they don’t pitch where I swing.”

“It ain’t no such a thing!” says Hawley. “It’s because you don’t choke up your bat enough.”

“Look here!” says Carey. “I been in this league longer’n you and I’ve hit better’n you. When I want advice about how to hold my bat I’ll get you on the wire.”

You know how clost the clubs was bunched along in the middle o’ July. Well, we was windin’ up a series with Brooklyn and we had to cop the last one to break even.

We was tied up in the ninth and one out in their half when Wheat caught ahold o’ one and got three bases on it. Cutshaw raised one a little ways back o’ second base and it looked like a cinch Wheat couldn’t score if Carey got her. Well, he got her all right and Wheat come dashin’ in from third like a wild man.

Now they ain’t no better pegger in the league than this same Carey and I’d of bet my life Wheat was runnin’ into a double play. I thought he was a sucker for makin’ the try. But Carey throwed her twenty feet to one side o’ the plate. The run was in and the game was over.

Hawley hadn’t hardly got in the clubhouse before he started in.

“Do you know what made you peg bad?” he says.

“Shut up!” says Smitty. “Is that the first bad peg you ever seen? Does they have to be a reason for all of ’em? He throwed it bad because he throwed it bad.”

“He throwed it bad,” says Hawley, “because he was in center field instead o’ left field or right field. A center fielder’ll peg wide three times to the others’ oncet. And you know why it is, don’t you?”

Nobody answered him.

“I’ll tell you why it is,” he says: “They’s a foul line runnin’ out in right field and they’s a foul line runnin’ out in left field, and them two lines gives a fielder somethin’ to guide his throw with. If they was a white line runnin’ from home plate through second base and out in center field you wouldn’t see so many bad pegs from out there.

“But that ain’t the only reason,” says Hawley. “They’s still another reason: The old boy ain’t feelin’ like hisself. He’s up in the air because he ain’t hittin’.”

That’s oncet where Hawley guessed right. But Carey didn’t say a word⁠—not till we was in the Subway.

“I know why I ain’t hittin’ and why I can’t peg,” he told me. “I’m so sick o’ this Wisenheimer that I can’t see. I can’t see what they’re pitchin’ and I can’t see the bases. I’m lucky to catch a fly ball.”

“Forget him!” I says. “Let him rave!”

“I can’t stop him from ravin’,” says Carey; “but he’s got to do his ravin’ on another club.”

“What do you mean?” I says. “You ain’t manager.”

“You watch me!” says Carey. “I ain’t goin’ to cripple him up or nothin’ like that, but if he’s still with us yet when we come offen this trip I’ll make you a present o’ my oldest boy.”

“Have you got somethin’ on him?”

“No,” says Carey; “but he’s goin’ to get himself in wrong. And I think he’s goin’ to do it tonight.”

VII

He done it⁠—and that night too. I guess you know that, next to winnin’, Cap likes his missus better’n anything in the world. She is a nice gal, all right, and as pretty as they make ’em.

Cap’s as proud of her as a colleger with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. When the different papers would print Miss So-and-So’s pitcher and say she was the handsomest girl in this, that or the other place, Cap’d point it out to us and say: “My gal makes her look like a bad day outdoors.”

Cap’s wife’s a blonde; and⁠—believe me, boy⁠—she dresses! She wasn’t with us on this trip I’m speakin’ of. She hasn’t been with us all season, not since the trainin’ trip. I think her mother’s sick out there in St. Joe. Anyway, Hawley never seen her⁠—that is, to know who she was.

Well, Carey framed it up so’s I and him and Cap went in to supper together. Hawley was settin’ all alone. Carey, brushin’ by the head waiter, marches us up to Hawley’s table and plants us. Carey’s smilin’ like he didn’t have a care in the world. Hawley noticed the smile.

“Yattaboy!” he says. “Forget the base hits and cheer up!”

“I guess you’d cheer up, too, if you’d seen what I seen,” says Carey. “Just lookin’ at her was enough to drive away them Ockaway Chinese blues.”

“That ain’t no way for a married man to talk,” says Cap.

“Well,” says Carey, “gettin’ married don’t mean gettin’ blind.”

“What was she like?” ast Cap.

“Like all the prettiest ones,” says Carey. “She was a blonde.”

“Where do you get that noise?” says Hawley, buttin’ in. “I s’pose they ain’t no pretty dark girls?”

“Oh, yes,” says Carey⁠—“octoroons and them.”

“Well,” says Hawley, “I never seen no real pretty blondes. They ain’t a blonde livin’ that can class up with a pretty brunette.”

“Where do you get that noise?” says Carey.

“Where do I get it!” says Hawley. “Say, I guess I’ve saw my share o’ women. When you seen as many as I seen you won’t be talkin’ blonde.”

“I seen one blonde that’s the prettiest woman in this country,” says Carey.

“The one you seen just now?” says Hawley.

“No, sir; another one,” says Carey.

“Where at?” Hawley ast him.

“She’s in Missouri, where she first come from,” says Carey; “and she’s the prettiest girl that was ever in the state.”

“That shows you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Hawley says. “I guess I ought to know the prettiest girl in Missouri. I was born and raised there, and the prettiest girl in Missouri went to school with me.”

“And she was a blonde?” says Carey.

“Blonde nothin’!” says Hawley. “Her hair was as black as Chief Meyers’. And when you see a girl with black hair you know it’s natural color. Take a blonde and you can’t tell nothin’ about it. They ain’t one in a thousand of ’em that ain’t dyed their hair.”

Cap couldn’t stand it no longer.

“You talk like a fool!” he says. “You don’t know nothin’ about women.”

“I guess I know as much as the next one,” says Hawley.

“You don’t know nothin’!” says Cap. “What was this girl’s name?”

“What girl’s name?” says Hawley.

“This black girl you’re talkin’ about⁠—this here prettiest girl in Missouri,” says Cap.

“I forget her name,” says Hawley.

“You never knowed her name,” says Cap. “You never knowed nothin’! We traded nothin’ to get you and we got stung at that. If you want your unconditional release, all you got to do is ask for it. And if you don’t want it I’ll get waivers on you and send you down South where you can be amongst the brunettes. We ain’t got no room on this club for a ball player that don’t know nothin’ on no subject. You’re just as smart about baseball as you are about women. It’s a wonder your head don’t have a blowout! If a torpedo hit a boat you was on and you was the only one drownded, the captain’d send a wireless: ‘Everybody saved!’ ”

Cap broke a few dishes gettin’ up from the table and beat it out o’ the room.

Hawley was still settin’, with his mouth wide open, lookin’ at his prunes. After a wile I and Carey got up and left him.

“He ain’t a bad fella,” I says when we was outside. “He don’t mean nothin’. It looks to me like a raw deal you’re handin’ him.”

“I don’t care how it looks to you or anybody else,” says Carey. “I still got a chancet to lead this league in hittin’ and I ain’t goin’ to be talked out of it.”

“Do you think you’ll hit when he’s gone?”

“You bet I’ll hit!” says Carey.

Cap ast for waivers on Hawley, and Pittsburgh claimed him.

“I wisht it had of been some other club,” he says to me. “That’s another o’ them burgs where the smoke and cinders kills your battin’.”

But I notice he’s been goin’ good there and he should ought to enjoy hisself tellin’ Wagner how to stand up to the plate.

The day after he’d left us I kept pretty good track o’ Carey. He popped out twicet, grounded out oncet and hit a line drive to the pitcher.

Oh, You Bonehead!

“What did the Coach say to him?” asked Harris.

“You’ll fall over when I tell you,” Dana replied.

“The fellas hadn’t started takin’ off their suits. They were waitin’ to hear Dickie get his. Some of ’em were cryin’ and I was blubberin’ a bit myself. Dickie sat in front of his locker, white as a sheet. The Coach came in and stood there a minute, lookin’ us over. Everybody in the room expected him to cut loose on Dickie. Dickie himself expected it. And why shouldn’t he?

“Well, the Coach, as I say, just stood there a minute, lookin’ us over. Then he went right up to where Dickie was sittin’, and I thought he was goin’ to punch him. Dickie thought so, too, ’cause I could see him sort o’ cringe; but the Coach smiled at him⁠—yes, sir, smiled. And then he said:

“ ‘Dickie, I want to shake hands with you. You didn’t quite put it over, but you gave ’em a good scare.’

“Well, Dickie broke down then and cried worse than any of us; but the Coach kept right on smilin’.

“ ‘Don’t let it bother you anymore,’ he said. ‘We’ll get ’em next year when we’re not all crippled up.’ Then he turned to the rest of the bunch. ‘Why don’t you get those dirty suits off?’ he said. ‘There’s no use sittin’ there like mourners at a funeral. The beans are spilled, but we gave ’em a mighty good fight. Everybody expected ’em to run all over us, and holdin’ ’em to three points is a credit to you, boys. We can’t help it if they’ve got a good kicker. Without him it would have been 0 to 0.’

“ ‘And if it hadn’t been for me,’ said poor Dickie, ‘we’d have licked ’em 7 to 3.’

“ ‘If it hadn’t been for you,’ said the Coach, ‘they’d have licked us 20 to 0. Hurry up now, boys; get those suits off and quit thinkin’ about it. You can do what you please tonight and tomorrow, and I’ll see you Monday.’ ”

“What do you know about that!” Harris exclaimed.

“It’s got me beat,” replied Dana. “Course, after he got through I didn’t feel like sayin’ what I thought. He went away and left us, and I haven’t seen him since. I stuck in there a while with the boys, but finally it got too painful. You could cut the silence with a knife. So I followed the Coach’s example and left.”

“Do you s’pose Dickie really knew he’d pulled a boner?”

“How could he help knowin’ it? The whole bunch lit into him before we ever left the field. And I could hear some of the crowd hollerin’ ‘Bonehead!’ at him while we were comin’ off. He knew it, all right.”

“If it was me,” said Harris, “I’d buy a cannon and blow out my brains.”

“How could you blow out your brains,” demanded Dana, “if you didn’t have any? If he’d had even half a brain he’d have known better than to pull what he pulled. There was absolutely no excuse on earth, and⁠—”

The gym door opened and the Coach came in.

“Hello, Bert!” he said, and shook Harris’ hand. “How’s my trusty scout? And how did they look to you?”

“Mighty good, Coach!” was the reply. “They’ll give us all we can handle. It’s the best team I’ve looked at in two years.”

“Did you get anything on ’em?” asked the Coach.

“Sure! Enough to write a book. Some of their signals too.”

And Harris drew a notebook from his pocket and handed it to his chief.

“I’ll look it over after a while,” said the Coach. “I want to tell you two boys that we’ve got to go some this week to keep those fellas keyed up. I’m afraid that game Saturday has taken the heart out of ’em. If we’d won that one, Doane would be easy for us. And we could have won it just like that!”

“It was a rotten shame!” said Harris.

“It was a shame,” agreed the Coach. “I s’pose Dana’s told you all about it?”

“He told me enough,” Harris replied. “He told me you let Dickie off mighty easy.”

“I should think you did!” Dana put in. “If I’d been him I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t knocked my block off.”

The Coach smiled.

“Just between us,” he said, “I felt like killin’ him. I b’lieve I would if I could have got hold of him right after he pulled it. Maybe you noticed that I was a little late gettin’ in here afterward. I didn’t come in till I was cooled off. I wanted to be sure to keep myself in hand when I saw him.”

“You certainly kept yourself in hand,” said Dana. “If you’re askin’ me, you were a whole lot too good to him. You’d have given your right eye to win that game, and he went and lost it for you. If he’d dropped a punt or missed a tackle I wouldn’t think anything about it. Anybody’s li’ble to do those things. But⁠—”

“But he lost his head,” the Coach interrupted. “All he had to do was use common sense and we’d have trimmed ’em. He went out of his way to pull a boner and you fellas think he should have been called for it. You wonder why I didn’t cut loose on him. Well, I’m goin’ to tell you a little story and then maybe you’ll understand why Dickie got the glad hand instead of a lot of abuse.”

The Coach pocketed Harris’ notebook and sat down. His two assistants, who had risen at his entrance, resumed their seats on the rubbing table and were ready to listen.

If you fellas followed the dope you’ll remember Joe Draper. He was quarterback two years ago, my last year at Leighton. You must have read about his track work anyway. He ran the 100 and the 220 and the high hurdles, and was first in both dashes in the intercollegiate of 1911 and 1912. He tied the 220 record twice and could do the 100 in even time whenever he wanted to. Leighton finished second in the meet both those years, and if it hadn’t been for him they’d have dropped out of the bottom. He was their whole track team.

He was an Alpha Delt and the Alpha Delt’s were the real cheese at Leighton. He was as smart as a whip and there never was a bit of danger of the faculty keepin’ him out of athletics; in fact he was just about the best student in college and everybody was predictin’ a whale of a career for him. He was a boy a great deal like Dickie. He was popular with everybody, but he never ran round nights or cut up any, and it wasn’t a particle of trouble to keep him in shape.

His only dissipation was the prettiest girl on the campus. Nobody could blame him for pursuin’ her. He seemed to have all his speed on that track, too, ’cause they were engaged before he was through his junior year.

She was from St. Louis and the best-lookin’ girl I ever saw, bar one. Her family were well fixed and the boys had a license to envy Joe. At that, he wasn’t gettin’ any the better of the bargain, ’cause he was a handsome kid and good-natured as they make ’em, besides bein’ so smart that it was a cinch he’d get somewhere.

Joe and the girl were together all the time he wasn’t in the classroom or gym. In the vacation before his senior year he went down to St. Louis to meet her folks and made a big hit. They didn’t think anybody was quite good enough for her, but Joe came as close as any boy they could hope to find. She was a year behind Joe in school, but she was figurin’ on passin’ up her senior year so they could be married as soon as Joe got through.

Joe came from Cedarville, a little burg in Iowa. He’d played football in the high school and he tried out for our Freshmen team in his first year at Leighton. He made the team at quarterback and I was tickled to death to see him there, ’cause I figured I could use him to good advantage the followin’ fall. It didn’t take a stop watch to tell you how fast he was. In the practice against my bunch and the scrubs he got away often and there was no catchin’ him in a clear field. Course I had McGill for quarter at that time and he was only a second-year man; so I was plannin’ to make a halfback out of Joe. But one night the kid broke his arm scrimmagin’ with the scrubs, and the Freshmen had to go along without him the rest of the season.

That winter Joe showed Murphy, our track coach, what he could do in the sprints and hurdles, and the Freshmen bunch cleaned up in every meet they had. He went outdoors in the spring and did even better than Murphy expected. He could run the 100 backward in .10 flat, and he went over the sticks so fast you thought he was flyin’.

Well, I went up to Leighton in June to see how many of the good-lookin’ Freshmen I could count on for that fall. Almost the first fella I ran into was Murphy. I started kiddin’ him about his varsity track team, which had finished sixth in the intercollegiate.

“Wait till next year,” said Murph. “If I don’t land second or better my name’s Goldstein.”

“What’s up your sleeve?” I asked him.

“The most consistent sprinter I ever saw,” said Murph. “I can tell you to a fifth of a second what his time’s goin’ to be before he ever starts runnin’. He can go the 100 in .10 five times a day durin’ the week and as many times as he has to on Saturday. What’s more, the boy’s good enough to beat the world in the 220 and the high sticks.”

“You kept him pretty well under cover in the big meet,” I said.

“He’s a Freshman,” answered Murph.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Joe Draper,” said Murph.

“Oh, I know him,” I said. “He was quarter on the All-Fresh.”

“Yes, till he broke an arm,” said Murph; “but he’s through with football now.”

“What do you mean⁠—through with football?” said I. “You’ll find him playin’ halfback for me this fall. I’ve been countin’ on him all winter.”

“I’m sorry you’ve been countin’ on him,” said Murph; “but I might as well break the news to you. He’s promised me to stick to track and pass up everything else. I’m not goin’ to have that baby spoiled; so you can just keep your hands off him. It won’t do you any good to meddle anyway. I’ve got his promise and that means something to a boy like him.”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve!” I said. “I s’pose everybody’s got to step out of the way to make room for your rotten old track team.”

“Be decent!” said Murph. “You know very well I’m not hurtin’ you any. You’ve got McGill at quarter for two more years and you’ve got two halfbacks that anybody’d be glad to have, now that Bixby’s eligible. What you need is big tackles; and if young Draper could help you out there I’d let you have him, and welcome.”

Well, he made me own up that I wasn’t exactly starvin’ to death for lack of good backs and I finally promised him I’d leave Draper alone. Maybe one reason I promised was because I knew it wouldn’t do me any good not to.

McGill was pretty near a perfect quarterback for my style of game. He could use his head as well as his legs and his right foot. I b’lieve that with him in the back field alone, I could have scored on anybody; but he had a good supportin’ company too. Bixby, who’d been on the All-Fresh, could run and grab passes with the best of ’em; and when the other side spraddled their defense all over the field to stop my open game, I had Conrad and Meeks to shoot through the holes.

In the next two seasons we were scored on just twice and nobody came near tyin’ us. You remember what we did to Pelham in 1911. We licked ’em 27 to 0 and that was the worst beatin’ they got in fifteen years. But 1911 was McGill’s last year, and Conrad’s and Meeks’ too. The Pelham papers all came out after the season and said our days of glory were about over; that losin’ McGill and Conrad and Meeks, besides some of the linemen, would leave us up against it, and Pelham, which had all their good ones comin’ back, would probably get plenty of revenge the followin’ fall.

I figured this dope was pretty near right and I was wishin’ my contract with Leighton had run out that season instead of holdin’ over another year; but the fact that the next was goin’ to be my last season, and that Pelham figured on givin’ us a good trimmin’, made me all the more anxious to beat ’em. And I didn’t think or dream about anything but football all that winter long.

In January I wrote to Murphy. I pointed out to him that I didn’t have a quarterback to take McGill’s place; there was nothin’ on the scrubs or Freshmen that looked even fair. I told him I thought I could make a dandy out of Draper, and I didn’t think it would be any more than right for Murphy to give me a whack at him after I’d laid off for two whole seasons. I said my chances of turnin’ out a team that wouldn’t disgrace Leighton for life depended on my gettin’ hold of a boy with Draper’s speed.

I made it pretty strong and Murphy fell. He said he would release Joe from his promise and if I could persuade him to come out for football, all right. So then I sat down and wrote to the kid. I gave him a nice little spiel about comin’ to the old school’s rescue, and told him that if I had a man of his speed in there we’d hang a surprise on Pelham and Marshall, and the rest of ’em, and he’d have a lot more honors to add to those he’d won on the track.

He wrote back a gentlemanly little note. He said he wasn’t after any glory for himself; but Leighton had been good to him and he felt as though he owed it to her to come out for football if I really needed him. And if Mr. Murphy was willin’ to release him from his promise I could count on him to show up in the fall. He asked to be excused from reportin’ early ’cause he had made engagements for the first two weeks in September. About the time he was writin’ this note to me he was gettin’ engaged to the girl I told you about, and the date he had for the followin’ September was with her people down in St. Louis. I found that out afterward.

Bixby’d been elected captain and I knew I’d have him to figure on. There was a big, strong kid named Ashton that I’d used as substitute for Conrad, and I was countin’ on makin’ a regular fullback out of him. I’d have to dig up another halfback and a kicker; I didn’t know then that Draper could kick. I’d lost my four best linemen, so there was another problem starin’ me in the face; but I gritted my teeth and said to myself that the bigger the handicap was I had to work against, the more fun it would be to put somethin’ over. And I thought and thought and figured and figured, till it got so bad that I’d wake myself up in the middle of the night, callin’ signals.

Bixby and the rest of the boys I’d invited showed up the first week in September. I started ’em all kickin’ and found that there wasn’t a man in the crowd that could punt one from here to that wall. As for drop and place kickin’, none of ’em could raise the ball off the ground. After three days I gave up and decided to wait till college opened and the rest of the squad showed up.

Then Draper came out and I got the surprise of my life. Just foolin’, his first day on the field, he dropped a couple of goals from forty yards out, and he cut loose some punts that would have made Pat O’Dea jealous. They went way up in the clouds and they averaged a good fifty yards. You can bet all you’ve got that I was tickled.

“Where did you learn to kick?” I said to Joe.

“I was a pretty fair kicker in high school,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry we didn’t have you the last two years.”

“You got along all right without me,” said he, smilin’.

“Yes,” said I; “but you’ll fit in very nicely this year and, if you’re willin’, you’ll get three years’ work crowded into one.”

“That suits me,” he said. “When I go into a thing I like to go into it hard.”

Well, things went along pretty good and we opened up our season with Brandon. We beat ’em 13 to 0. We could have made it 40 to 0 without strainin’ ourselves; but I took pretty near the whole first string out when I saw how easy they were. I let Joe do a little puntin’ in the game, but I was keepin’ the other part of his kickin’ a secret. I told our newspaper boys about it and asked ’em not to say anything. They agreed, and then I knew I was safe and could give Joe plenty of practice shootin’ at goals without any danger of it gettin’ into print.

Honest, I never saw his equal as a point kicker; and I don’t except Eckersall or Brickley, or any of ’em. Give him proper protection, and he could score from forty yards out just as often as he tried.

That simplified matters a whole lot. Instead of workin’ up an offense that would get touchdowns, which was no cinch when I didn’t have a good plunger, all I had to do was figure somethin’ that would take me inside their forty-yard line. I knew there wasn’t much danger of Joe’s gettin’ hurt; he was a rugged kid for his size and, besides, I intended to play him safe. So I just went ahead and built round that right foot of his. I worked up some open stuff for him and Bixby that would gain if it wasn’t used often. Most of it was fakes from kick formation, ’cause, of course, I was goin’ strong to the puntin’ game with a feller like that to send ’em away.

Only when the gates were locked tight did we practice those plays of Bixby’s and Joe’s. The rest of the time we plunged or else we kicked; and people must have thought I was crazy to stick to the plungin’ game when I didn’t have a plunger who’d go into the line frontward. But we went through the practice season without showin’ anything else; and we went through clean too. Our line smashers didn’t smash. They backed up. But they were good enough, along with Joe’s puntin’, to win from Barnes and Riverside and Hotchkiss and the Indians. Even if they hadn’t been I wouldn’t have cared. I was out to trim Pelham and Marshall, and if those little dubs had licked us I’d have just laughed.

We had some mighty close shaves and everybody who saw us thought we’d get everlastingly slaughtered in our two big games. That’s just what I wanted ’em to think and it didn’t make any difference to me how much abuse I got. The New York papers were sayin’ I was loafin’ on the job ’cause it was my last year at Leighton. They said it was a crime for a coach that had as good a man as Bixby not to build an attack round him. They said I might be holdin’ somethin’ back, but they didn’t b’lieve so, ’cause the fellas I had in my backfield, outside of Bixby, didn’t even look capable of keepin’ a secret. They said the burden of bein’ captain was takin’ some of the football out of Bixby. And they said I ought to do somethin’ with Draper’s speed or else set him on the side lines, where there was no danger of his gettin’ hurt. One of the experts said he’d be willin’ to bet that Ashton, my fullback, could plunge three times into a bathtub full of water without makin’ a ripple. He was about right too.

Well, I was glad they thought I was soldierin’ on the job and that I didn’t have anything; but don’t imagine that I was enthusiastic over what I did have. My chance was better than anybody figured, but it wasn’t much good at that.

I had the best punter and point kicker I’d ever looked at, and he was a fast man too. Then I had Bixby, who’d made All-America the year before; but his strength was in his open-field work and his defense. He couldn’t plunge a yard against the wind. And I had one guard that was alive, and a pair of ends who could smash things up, but who weren’t worth a nickel apiece to catch a pass. They couldn’t have covered an ordinary man’s punts, either; but Joe’s went so high you could have driven a hearse down there and beat ’em to the fullback.

I worked for days at a time fixin’ up protection for Joe’s kicks. He made that part of it less of a job for me by learnin’ to get ’em off in next to nothin’. And when the week of the Pelham game came round I was pretty well satisfied that nobody’d break through in time to block ’em.

I’ll tell you just what I told the boys⁠—and I was tellin’ ’em the truth too. I said:

“Boys, we’re goin’ into this game the underdogs. You know just what we’ve got and I know what Pelham’s got. I’ll give it to you straight that Pelham’s got more than we have; but they think we’re a lot worse than we are. That’s our chance. They’re goin’ into this game overconfident and we’re goin’ into it determined. If you show all the football I’ve taught you, and if you never quit fightin’ from start to finish, you’ll beat ’em, ’cause they’ll be surprised to death. But if you ease up for a minute, or if you don’t carry out instructions, you’ll get the worst lickin’ in history. I’m not askin’ much of you. You haven’t got a complicated set of signals to think of. All you have to do is fight.

“I’m lookin’ to you linemen to see that they don’t get through on Joe’s kicks, and he’s goin’ to kick on pretty near every first down when the ball’s in our territory. I don’t have to tell you what your duty is if he gets a chance to shoot at their goal. We won’t score any touchdowns on ’em without a lot of luck; but we will score from the field if you boys hold up your end. And we’re li’ble to score more from the field than they can score against us, if Joe’s properly protected.

“You ends want to remember that Joe and Bix can’t get loose unless you knock those red sweaters galley-west. Keep your eyes open for red jerseys on those plays and drive into ’em. And when they’ve got the ball smash that interference if it breaks your necks. Remember that Winslow and Smith will run wild if you don’t bust up their interference so Bix and Ashton can get at ’em.

“You linemen can stop Eaton if you’re not afraid to get down. Pelham plays a high line, and that gives you fellers all the best of it if you keep at ’em and keep low. Eaton’s got a big reputation as a plunger, but you boys want to remember that the best plunger in the world can’t gain if he’s stopped before he gets to the line. Bix will tell you what defense to play and the minute he gives it to you, you do it, without stoppin’ to ask questions. This is his third game against those fellers and he knows what they’re up to better than you do.”

That’s what I told ’em the week of the game. I kept drivin’ it into those ends that our chance was to score from the field, and the only way we could get close enough was for them to cover Joe’s punts, or, on our fake plays, to put three or four red jerseys out of business.

I may as well tell you what our attack was; it won’t take but a minute. I figured Pelham would play their defense open all the time, ’cause they knew we couldn’t plunge and thought we might pass once in a while when we weren’t puntin’. So I had a shift that took the whole line except the left end over to the right of center. Then I had Joe back in the kickin’ position and Bixby pretty near as far back and over on the right side. Ashton and my other halfback, Warner, were up on the line, on the strong side. The ball was passed back to Joe and he made a bluff to throw it down the field on the strong side. I played my left end in the guard’s position, and the minute the ball was passed he’d let the man playin’ against him come on through. Bixby’d wait till this feller got pretty near on top of Joe and then he’d take the ball off Joe’s hand and run to their weak side. I figured on his speed to get him out of the way of the feller my left end had let through. After my end was free, he was supposed to knock their right halfback out of it. It was a good deal like the play Dickie and Benson have been usin’ all fall. It was to be used a couple of times, with shifts to both sides.

Then I had a fake kick that relied just on Joe’s speed and wouldn’t work more than once, and maybe not at all, ’cause they’d be layin’ for it and they had the men to stop it. And I had a pretty fair onside kick that I figured would work once or twice, ’cause Joe could kick ’em up in the clouds and Bixby wasn’t afraid to grab ’em when they came down.

And I had a lateral and forward pass from Joe to Ashton to Bixby. It was to be used just once. I was pretty sure it would go through, ’cause all my other passes were fakes; and, though Ashton wasn’t worth dependin’ on for anything in most plays, I’d drilled him so hard in this one that he got to doin’ it pretty good.

And then I had one pet. I’m goin’ to give it to the boys when I get ’em out there this afternoon. We called it Number 91 and it was a double-X special. The whole line except one man shifted to the right side. Then my backs lined up in tandem formation, close to the line on the right side, with Draper in the regular quarterback position. He’d call a long string of signals; and, when the other side thought the ball must be snapped pretty soon, Ashton, my fullback, would butt in and holler: “Wait a minute! Signals!”

Well, sir, nine times out of ten the other team would raise up and kind of stretch themselves while they were waitin’ for the signals to be started again; and the minute they raised up the ball was passed to Joe and he’d scoot wide round their weak end. We’d fooled the scrubs with it even when they knew what was comin’.

That was my offense. Ashton and Warner were to be sent into the line four or five times to give Joe and Bix a rest and to keep Pelham guessin’; but I knew neither of ’em could gain a foot.

Joe was to keep kickin’ and kickin’ till we were in the middle of the field, and then try somethin’ that would get us to where he could take a shot.

I had more different formations for defense than I had for attack. Pelham’s team was practically the same as the year before and I knew their plays like a book. Bix knew ’em, too, and I could rely on him to call the right defense for whatever they sprung; but I couldn’t rely on my men to do their part of it. If they’d been as strong and smart as my 1911 gang I’d have been willin’ to bet that the formations I’d planned would stop anything Pelham tried. But these boys were awful, awful green and all I could do was try to get ’em worked up to the fightin’ point and keep ’em there. I was backin’ up the line with Carey, my big guard, and I knew we were gone if anything happened to him.

Carey, Bixby and Draper⁠—that’s what I had. And I was actually plannin’ to beat eleven seasoned football players with those three, and two of ’em had never been in a real game.

We went over to Pelham Friday mornin’ and I rode with Joe all the way, tellin’ him what I expected of him.

“You’re the baby,” I said. “If you put this over there’ll be more glory in it for you than you could win in twenty track meets or ten college courses. Keep the ball high up and you’ll gain ten yards on every swap. Don’t forget that you’ve got to stick in the game. Don’t get hurt. Signal for a fair catch every time they kick to you, no matter where you are. And don’t be a bit afraid to take a shot at those uprights whenever you’re within forty yards. You can do it.”

I had ’em out at Pelham Field on Friday afternoon. I didn’t let Joe drop kick, ’cause, as I told you, nobody but our bunch knew he could; but he punted and he caught punts till he knew what the wind was apt to do in that stadium of theirs. The rest of the boys just warmed up and I didn’t keep ’em out there long⁠—I was afraid they might see some of those big, husky Pelham birds and get scared.

The bettin’ against us was 3 to 1. Those odds were about right on the showin’ we’d made and on the looks of the two teams on paper; but if I’d been anybody but who I was I’d have grabbed some of that short end, ’cause I knew we weren’t so long a shot as that.

Well, a couple of trainloads came from Leighton on Saturday morning. They were a brave gang to make the trip, ’cause ninety-nine out of every hundred of ’em thought we’d be murdered.

Joe’s girl was in the crowd. I’d seen her lots of times and admired her from a distance, but I never saw her look prettier than when he introduced her to me in the hotel lobby that mornin’.

“Is there any hope?” she asked me.

“A little,” I said. “It’s right there with you.”

Then she and Joe looked at each other and smiled, and she said:

“Well, if he’s it we’ll win, sure.”

“We will if he keeps his head,” said I.

“Oh,” said she, “there’s no danger of his not doin’ that. It must be you haven’t heard how clever Joe is.”

“I can see right now that he’s clever,” said I. And they smiled again and walked away.

Well, I took the boys out to the field late, so they wouldn’t have time to get nervous. I gave ’em one final talkin’ to in the dressin’ room; and I got Joe and Bix off to one side and told ’em, for the five-thousandth time, what they were to do. My last word to Joe was:

“Don’t be afraid to take a shot,” I said. “If you’re in good position it’s better to try one on the first down than run the risk of losin’ the ball on a fumble.”

That’s how sure I was that he could score from the field. I wish now I hadn’t been so sure.

I won’t have to waste much time tellin’ you about the game. They had the wind in the first quarter, but Joe held his own at that. Big Carey was a whale. He not only stopped Eaton, but he spilled most of their open stuff before they could get it started. Only twice did Smith or Winslow get loose, and then Bixby nailed ’em before they’d gone far. But the ball was in our territory all the while and we didn’t do anything but kick. I was pullin’ for Smith to muff one of those high punts, but he was as sure as taxes.

Well, it looked pretty good. We’d have the wind the next quarter and then Joe’s foot would put us up somewhere close. I was so anxious to get that wind back of us that those first fifteen minutes seemed like a week. Finally it came time for us to change goals; and then, sure enough, Joe lifted one over Smith’s head and she rolled out of bounds on their six-yard line. They brought her in and made one play to get out in the middle of the field. Eaton kicked against the wind and Joe grabbed her for a fair catch on their thirty-five-yard line. He was off to the side quite a bit; so he sent Bix out to the middle with her on the first play and then he dropped back for his first try.

“Now we’ll see if he’s there in the pinch,” I said to myself.

He was. The ball went about twenty feet above the crossbar and right straight between the posts. I wish you could have heard that crowd! Our little bunch made more noise than the German Army, and the whole Pelham gang let out a groan. It sure was a shock to ’em. They’d never suspected we had a Brickley and they couldn’t have been more surprised if we’d come on the field in nightgowns. I looked over to where Joe Bentley, their coach, was standin’, and I could see him scowlin’ clear across the field.

Well, the rest of the period was all puntin’, and we gained every whack, but not enough to get us within range again. My boys were playin’ like crazy men on defense and our only danger was that they’d wear out and let up. I was tickled to death when the end of the half came and they had a chance to rest.

“You’re goin’ to be against the wind this next quarter,” I told ’em. “You’ll have to work your heads off for fifteen minutes more, and then you’ll get that old breeze back of you again and it’ll be all over but the shoutin’. They’ll try to rough you from now on, Joe. Keep out of their way all you can. That one long punt put you in right that time. Maybe you’ll have another piece of luck like that; but, if you don’t, remember, they haven’t seen any of our plays yet and they all ought to work⁠—what there is of ’em. You’ll be All-America, Carey, if you keep goin’. Don’t ease up for a minute, boys! We’ve got ’em in a hole now and all you have to do is fight.”

I was right about their roughin’ Joe, but they were too smart to get caught at it. They didn’t bump him after he’d kicked; but occasionally they got a chance at him while Ashton and Warner were givin’ a demonstration of how to get stopped on a crossbuck. They’d come through and fall into my star performer as though it was an accident; and I might have thought it was if I hadn’t known it wasn’t. But Joe seemed to be standin’ the gaff all right. He never had to ask for time. Bixby, though, was dropped for the count twice in succession and I began worryin’ about him.

I could see that my whole bunch were gettin’ tired along in the last end of that third quarter, but I couldn’t relieve ’em, ’cause my substitutes were an awful bunch of cheese. I did send in one new tackle, with instructions to have somebody lay down after every play, so the boys could get plenty of rest. They were too green to do that without tellin’ ’em.

We still had ’em 3 to 0 goin’ into the last quarter. The wind was with us now and I wasn’t lookin’ for any trouble. But it came. They had the ball on their own forty-yard line, with three to go on the fourth down. Eaton dropped back to kick. It was a fake and Winslow came scootin’ round our right end. I saw he was goin’ to make his distance, but I wasn’t really scared till Bix missed him.

I don’t know yet how he could have, ’cause Winslow was straight up and didn’t even dodge. Well, he got by Bix somehow and it looked for a minute as though Joe’d miss him too; but Joe finally chased him out of bounds. They were on our twelve-yard line.

I knew they’d plunge with Eaton now. Bixby knew it too. He called the right defense for it, but the boys were all in. They couldn’t stop him. He went over in five punches and somebody kicked the goal.

“Good night!” I said to myself; and I was as happy as a Belgian farmer.

There was about seven minutes to play and my kids were dyin’ on their feet. The crowd was hollerin’ so I could hardly think. There didn’t seem to be much use of thinkin’ anyway. Two minutes before we’d looked like a cinch. Now we were a million-to-one shot.

The ball was kicked off and punted back and forth before I realized they were playin’ again. I suddenly woke up to the fact that Joe was still puntin’ on first downs. I grabbed one of my cheesy substitutes off the bench. I hustled him out there to tell Joe to cut loose with all he had.

“Try the bluff passes; and if they don’t work give ’em your onside kick.” That’s what I told him.

It was our ball on our own twenty-five when my messenger went in. We had three minutes to play. Joe called a fake pass play and I thought Bix was goin’ to get away, sure; but he stumbled and tackled himself after he’d gone ten yards.

Then the onside kick, and it worked better than I ever saw it. Joe sent the ball just far enough for Bix to get it on the dead run, and he was off down the field like a shot. If he’d been fresh Smith couldn’t have stopped him with a lasso. He was actually past Smith once and there was nothin’ between him and the goal; but he’d played himself out, poor boy, and he couldn’t make a finish. Smith nailed him from behind on their eight-yard line and they went down together like a ton of brick. And Bixby didn’t get up.

They carried him off the field and he was ravin’ like a wild man. He was tellin’ ’em he’d scored and the officials had robbed him. He started cussin’ me out, but I didn’t have time to listen⁠—I was too busy givin’ my order to the kid that was to take his place.

“Tell Joe Number 91,” I said. “Don’t forget it! Number 91! Number 91!”

There we were, on their eight-yard line, with a minute to play. Old 91 would score just as sure as taxes!

Pelham was scared stiff. They were ready to be licked and that’s the play that would do it. Their defense was drawn in, ’cause we were so close up and ’cause they didn’t think we had anybody to run their ends, with Bixby out of it.

The kid dashed in and gave Joe the dope. We lined up, and all of a sudden Joe dropped back to his kickin’ position. That wasn’t 91 and I saw there was somethin’ wrong. But what could I do? I started on the field myself, and then I started to send in another sub. But it was too late! Joe, standin’ back there on the eighteen-yard line, called for the ball and shot another drop kick square between the posts!

Don’t say a word! You can’t say anything I didn’t say. I was out there among ’em myself when the next kickoff was caught, but it didn’t make any difference. Time was up before a play could be started, and then I got Joe. Right in front of my team and part of Pelham’s, I gave it to him:

“You bonehead!” I yelled. “You boob! You blockhead! You’re smart, are you? You’re the bright boy in your class, are you? You ignorant bum! Why don’t you study arithmetic, you poor numskull! Where did you learn that six was more than seven? Who told you that three and three was eight or nine? Four points behind and you dropkick! Why didn’t you take the ball and run back to your own goal? Why were you in there if you didn’t know the game? Go into the gym and drown yourself in the shower! Get out of my sight before I murder you!”

The Pelham team were hollerin’ at him too. And you ought to have heard the crowd!

“Oh, you bonehead!” they were yellin’⁠—Pelham, Leighton and everybody.

There’s no use describin’ what came off in the gym. Poor Bixby was still off his nut, but the rest of ’em hopped into Draper as though they’d cut his throat. And they were as much to blame as he was. When they heard the signal they should have stopped him; but they didn’t think of that, and I couldn’t think of anything. All I could do was rave.

The kid I’d sent in with the orders established his alibi right off. He’d done his duty. Joe admitted it. Joe said he was rattled and thought 91 was one of our dropkick signals; that he got it balled up with 19.

“How could you do that?” I barked at him. “How could you think I’d tell you to drop kick, with the ball on their eight-yard line, a minute to play, and the score 7 to 3 against us?”

“I lost my head,” said Joe.

“Impossible!” said I. “You couldn’t lose what you never had.”

Pretty soon Bixby came to. He asked for the score and we told him. We told him what had happened, and he lit into Joe pretty near as hard as I had.

Reporters generally miss the important details of a football game, but not a one of ’em missed Joe’s boner. There were whole columns about it. The Pelham papers went to it strongest, ’cause Joe’d been showin’ up their track team for two years and they loved him like a snake.

I’ll give you the windup in a few words. Nobody saw Joe from the time he left the Pelham dressin’ room till a week after the Marshall game, which wound up our season and my career as coach at Leighton. Marshall beat us by the narrow margin of 40 to 0.

Joe’d gone home, and he’d gone home intendin’ to stay; but his people felt so bad he couldn’t stand it. They got him to promise that he’d finish his senior year. So back he came to Leighton.

I ducked out right after the season was over, but I heard all about Joe. He didn’t even last through the semester. There were some fellas in college decent enough to treat him as though nothin’ had happened. There were others who couldn’t resist the temptation to get back at a boy who’d outshone ’em in athletics and scholarship and everything else. They kept pestering him and they finally had him so he was cuttin’ classes to keep away from ’em. He lost that smile of his. He also lost some of his good habits. And he lost the girl.

I’ve figured since that she wasn’t worth keepin’ if she’d quit under fire like that; but naturally Joe couldn’t see it that way. The worse your girl treats you, the better you like her. That’s how I’ve got it doped. Anyway, that’s how it worked on Joe. It was the finisher for him.

I’m keepin’ a line on him yet and the latest report is hopeful. He’s still mopin’ down in that burg in Iowa, but he’s showin’ occasional signs of life and smilin’ once in a great while. I won’t get a good night’s sleep, though, till he’s all over it. I’m afraid that won’t be for a year or two more. I wrote him a letter that I thought might cheer him up. He never paid any attention to it.

I wrote the girl a letter too. I told her it was my fault⁠—that Joe had pulled the play under orders; but she didn’t fall for it. She wrote back that she was grateful for my interest and appreciated my motives in tellin’ her what wasn’t true. The break between her and Joe, she said, had nothin’ to do with football. She’d just decided that they weren’t suited to each other. Some bunk, eh? A hero was what she was after, and I hope she gets one that’ll make her wish she’d stuck to Joe⁠—not wishin’ her any bad luck.

Don’t think I haven’t been punished for my part in it. I’ve told you that I couldn’t sleep, thinkin’ about the poor kid; but I haven’t told you about the pannin’ I got from Murphy, Leighton’s track coach.

I went back there the followin’ spring as a favor to Chandler, my successor. I went to give him the dope on his material. I was lookin’ for him in the athletic office when I bumped into Murph.

“Hello, Murph!” I said, but he didn’t even look at me. I stepped right in front of him. “You’re certainly cordial!” I said. “Can’t you say anything to a man you haven’t seen for six months?”

“I can say plenty,” he answered, “but I don’t b’lieve you’ll like to hear it.”

“Sure I will!” said I. “Go ahead and shoot.”

“All right,” said Murphy; and he sailed into me. I can’t remember his exact words, but they were somethin’ like this:

“I s’pose you’re proud of what you’ve done to my track team. I s’pose you’re glad you’ve broken it up. But I don’t care about that. What I do care about is your breakin’ up that boy’s life. You coaxed him into football and he made it possible for you to scare Pelham with a team that Pelham ought to have licked 50 to 0. You found out the boy was a star and you used his ability to the limit. If you’d trimmed Pelham he’d have got a little credit, maybe, and you’d have hogged most of it. And, without him, you’d have felt like forfeitin’ the game. Your team showed what he was worth to it when you played Marshall with him gone, and got licked 40 to 0.

“You gave him orders to drop kick on first down whenever he got within their forty-yard line. He carried out your orders and you called him a bonehead. You say that he ought to have used judgment, and yet you knew he was just a kid, twenty years old, and that he’d never played in a real game of football before.

“You wanted to make the world think you were a wizard. You saw a victory over Pelham right in your grasp, and you could almost hear the people sayin’ what a wonderful man you were to win with nothin’. Then you lost in the last minute of play and it drove you insane. I’m givin’ you the benefit of the doubt when I say you were insane. I certainly hope you weren’t in your right mind when you called Joe those names.

“The trouble with you football coaches is that you expect too much. You forget that your players are just boys, hardly out of their teens. You want a kid twenty years old to think as much football as you yourselves, and you’ve been studyin’ and teachin’ the game for fifteen years. And if the kid doesn’t learn in one short season all you’ve learned in fifteen years you call him a bonehead and ruin him. Do you call it sport to shove more responsibility on to a kid than a grown man should be asked to bear, and then jump all over him when he fails? What’s a football game compared with a boy’s career! When you called him a numskull you were talkin’ to the wrong party. You should have been lookin’ in a mirror!”

That’s all I can remember of it, and that’s plenty. Pretty near everything he said was true, and I knew it. He left me without sayin’ goodbye, and I beat it out of town without seein’ my successor. I wanted to get away somewhere and think.

I did think, boys, and I thought hard. The more I thought the worse I felt. I was mighty sore at myself when I got up home again; and I figured maybe I’d get a little sympathy if I told my wife the whole story. Course she knew how we’d lost that game, but I’d never given her the dope about Joe’s finish. She sure was sympathetic⁠—for Joe.

“Poor young kid!” she said. “If I didn’t think you were sorry I b’lieve I’d leave you.”

So you can see why I shook hands with Dickie on Saturday instead of scoldin’ him. He was disobeyin’ orders, but he thought he was doin’ somethin’ brilliant. He fooled everybody but the other team, and he cost us the game; but I’m goin’ to need that fightin’ spirit of his against Doane next Saturday. And you just watch his smoke!

Good for the Soul

Before me, a member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, appeared this first day of February, 1916, one Robert Frederick Warner, alias Buck Warner, lately a professional player of the game known as baseball and now part owner of an automobile garage in Hopsboro, a suburb of Cincinnati, and voluntarily and without threat or coercion did dictate a confession, the full text of which follows:

I

The wife says that if I didn’t quit grouchin’ round the house she’d just plain leave me and go and live with her Aunt Julia. Well, the wife’s a good scout and Aunt Julia’s home is a farm twelve miles from Dayton, so I promised I’d try and cheer up.

“Yes, but you promised the same thing before,” says Ethel; that’s the wife’s name. “You promised the same thing before and that’s all the good it done,” she says. “It’s your crazy old conscience that’s botherin’ you. You’d ought to go to the hospital and have it took out.”

“Operations costs money,” I says.

“Well,” says Ethel, “I’d rather be broke than have old Sidney Gloom for a husband.”

“I’ll try and cheer up,” I says again.

“You’re the world’s greatest tryer,” says she, “but your attempts to make everybody miserable is the only ones that’s successful.”

It was at breakfast yesterday mornin’ that she was payin’ me these compliments. At supper she pointed out a piece in the evenin’ paper and told me I should read it.

Seems like some old bird about seventy, worth a couple o’ millions, had been a clerk in a grocery store when he was a kid, and one day he helped himself to twenty dollars out o’ the till, and he was scared to death they’d learn who done it and send him over, but for some reason it wasn’t never found out. So, as I say, he finally got rich and had everything that’s supposed to make a man happy, but he hadn’t been able to sleep good for several years on account o’ thinkin’ about his crime. So the minister o’ the church where he attended at preached a sermon on what a good thing confession was for sinners, and the old boy couldn’t even sleep through the sermon, so he got the drift and made up his mind to see if a confession would cure his insomnia and not bein’ able to sleep. So he wrote one out, describin’ what he’d did, and sent it to the minister to be read out loud in church, and that night he slept like a horse.

“Well,” I says, when I was through readin’, “what about it?”

“It’s worth a try,” says Ethel.

“You go in town tomorrow and find somebody that’ll listen, and tell ’em all about your horrible crime. And then see if you can’t come home to me smilin’.”

“That’ll be easy,” I says, “if you’ll leave me drink a couple o’ beers.”

“You can do that too,” she says, “if you think it’ll wash away the blues.”

I thought she was kiddin’ at first; I mean about the confessin’. But she made me understand she was serious.

“But I’d have to bring in the names of others that ain’t entirely innocent,” I says.

“Go as far as you like,” says she. “You certainly don’t think they’re worth shieldin’; ’specially Carmody.”

So here I am and she says I was to tell it all and not keep nothin’ back.

It won’t be necessary to start with where I was born and so forth. A year ago last August is where it really begins. Before that I’d been in the National League six years, and if they’d left me stick to shortstop all the time, they wouldn’t of nobody had me beat. But they found out I could play anywheres they put me and they kept shiftin’ me round like a motorcycle cop.

In the six years I’d did even worse than not save no money. I’d piled up pretty near four thousand dollars’ worth o’ debts. The biggest part of it I owed to fellas on the club that’d came through for me when I made a flivver out of a billiard hall in Brooklyn.

So, as I say, a year ago last August found me four thousand to the bad and that’s when I met Ethel. We was playin’ in Pittsburgh and she was visitin’ some people I know there. She had eye trouble and liked me the first time she seen me. But she didn’t like me nowheres near as much as I liked her. We both fell pretty hard, though, and the third evenin’ we was together we got engaged to be married.

“I wisht I had more to offer you,” I told her. “I’m flat outside o’ my salary and I owe a plain four thousand.”

“I don’t care how much or how little you’ve got,” she says. “Your salary’ll keep us all right. But I don’t want to marry you till you’re clear o’ debt.”

“We’ll do some waitin’ then,” I says. “A year from this fall is the best I can promise. I’ll live on nothin’ this winter and I won’t spend nothin’ next summer and I think I can just about get cleaned up. It’ll be somethin’ new for me to try and save, but you’re worth starvin’ for.”

“And you’re worth waitin’ for,” says she.

So we says goodbye and I went to Chicago with the club. And the second day there I slipped roundin’ first base and throwed my knee pretty near out o’ my stockin’.

It wasn’t no common sprain or strain. The old bird just simply flew out of his cage and flew out to stay. I seen two doctors there and two more back home. They all says the same thing; that I was through playin’ ball.

“After it’s had a rest,” they told me, “just walkin’ on it won’t hurt nothin’. But the minute you run you’re liable to get crippled up good and proper. And if you stooped quick or made a quick turn or if your leg got bumped into, you might serve a good long sentence on the old hair mattress.”

I didn’t want Ethel to find out how bad it was, so all that come out in the paper was that I had a Charley horse. Mac, o’ course, knowed the truth, but he couldn’t do nothin’ except feel sorry for me. He knowed about the girl too.

“I wisht I had a place for you,” he says, “but you wouldn’t be satisfied scoutin’, and with the low player limit we can’t carry no men that ain’t goin’ to do us some good. You’ll get paid, o’ course, up to the end o’ the season. But I can’t offer you no contract for next year.”

“That’s all right,” I says. “I just want it kept quiet till I find somethin’ I can do.”

And w’ile I was still half dazed over the shock of it I got a letter from the girl. She had some big news, she says. Her Aunt Julia’d been told about I and her bein’ engaged and had promised her a present o’ $2,500 on the day we was married. And we was to put this money with another $2,500 that her brother, Paul, was goin’ to save up, and I and her brother was goin’ to buy a garage in Hopsboro from a fella that’d promised Paul he’d sell it to him in a year. And it was the only garage in Hopsboro and done a whale of a business. And Paul was a swell mechanic and I’d take care o’ the business end. And I could quit playin’ ball and never be away from home. It sounded mighty good to me just then. But they was still a little trifle o’ four thousand that’d have to be took care of.

I’d just mailed back an answer, as cheerful as I could write, when a call come over the phone that Mr. A. T. Grant wanted to see me at the Kingsley Hotel. I’d saw his name mentioned in connection with a club in the new league, but I didn’t know if he’d bought it or not.

Well, I went down there in a taxi and was showed right up to his room.

He shook hands with me and then ast me if I was signed up for next year. I told him I wasn’t.

“I’ve just bought the club I was after,” he says. “I wanted to know if you’d consider an offer.”

I done some tall thinkin’. I made up my mind that it wouldn’t do no harm to sign. If I found I couldn’t play nobody’d be hurt. But if the old knee wasn’t as bad as the doctors thought I’d probably get a better job here than anywheres else.

“Who’s goin’ to be your manager?” I ast him.

“Billy Carmody,” he says. “He was the shortstop on the club this year.”

“I never met him, but o’ course I’ve heard of him,” I says.

Then I done some more thinkin’.

“What’s your offer?” I says.

“Five thousand,” says Mr. Grant.

“Where would you want me to play?” I ast him.

“Where would you want to play?” says he.

That give me a hunch. I’d heard they was one or two short fences in the league. Maybe I could play an outfield position even if my legs wouldn’t stand the infield strain.

“In the outfield,” I told him.

“Which field?” he says, and then I knowed he was a bug.

“Right field,” says I.

“That suits me,” he says, and he sent for his secretary to fix up a contract.

So I signed to play right field, and nowheres else, for Mr. Grant’s club for one year at $5,000.

“This business is new to me,” he says, “but I believe I’ll get a lot o’ pleasure out of it.”

“What other men have you got signed?” I ast him.

“I’m not at liberty to tell you,” he says. “But I may tell you that most o’ them is young men that’s as new to professional ball as I am. I believe in gettin’ young fellas, for enthusiasm’s more valuable than experience in a sport o’ this kind.”

“Oh, easy,” I says.

Then we shook hands again and I beat it to a train for Dayton, where the girl was stayin’. And when I seen her I give her the whole story. It looked now like they was a little bit o’ hope.

II

The papers I’d saw durin’ the winter hadn’t wasted no space on our club and I didn’t know exactly who was my teammates till I blowed into Dixie Springs, the first week in March.

I landed in the forenoon. The clerk at the hotel told me the gang was all out to the grounds, practicin’. So I planted my baggage and washed up, and then set out on the porch, waitin’ for the boys to come back. The beanery was on the main street, but from the number o’ people that went past you’d of thought our trainin’ camp had been picked out by Robinson Caruso. About one bell I got sick o’ lookin’ at mud puddles and woke up the clerk again.

“What do you s’pose is keepin’ ’em so long?” I ast him.

“They don’t never show up till after four,” he says.

“Don’t they come back for lunch?” I ast.

“No,” he says. “You see the ball grounds is over a quarter of a mile from here and Mr. Grant, who’s the proprietor o’ the nine, figured it would wear his men out to make the trip four times a day.”

“So they don’t eat at noon?” I says.

“Oh, yes,” says the clerk. “We put up a nice lunch here and send it to ’em.”

“I hope you don’t send ’em nothin’ that’s hard to chew,” I says. After a w’ile I got up nerve enough to attemp’ the killin’ journey to the orchard.

It was an old fairgrounds or somethin’, just on the edge o’ what you’d call the town if you was good-natured. Waivers had been ast on a lot o’ the boards on the fence and they was plenty o’ places where a brewer could of walked through sideways. I was goin’ in at the gate because it was handiest, but I found it locked. I give it a kick and it was opened from inside by a barber hater.

“You can’t come in,” he says through the shrubbery.

“Why not?” says I.

“I’ve got orders,” he says.

“I don’t wonder,” I says. “You’re liable to get anything in them dragnets.”

“I’ll fix you if you try to come in,” he says.

“What’ll you do?” says I. “Tickle me to death with them plumes?”

“Mr. Grant don’t want no spies hangin’ round,” says Whiskers.

“O’ course not,” says I. “But I’m one of his ball players.”

“Oh, no, you ain’t,” says the Old Fox. “If you was you’d be wearin’ one o’ them get-ups with the knee pants and the spellin’ on the blouse.”

“Look here,” I says. “I don’t want to cut my way through the undergrowth; they’s too much danger of infection. You run along and tell Mr. Grant his star performer has arrived, and when you come back I’ll give you thirty-five cents to’rds a shave.”

So the old boy slammed the gate shut and locked her again and the minute it was locked I went to the nearest gap in the fence and eased in.

They was a game o’ ball goin’ on and I started over to where they was playin’ to see if I recognized anybody. But I hadn’t went more’n a step or two when Whiskers come dashin’ up to me with Mr. Grant followin’.

“This is the man!” yells Whiskers.

“And my suspicions was right or he wouldn’t of snuck in.”

Mr. Grant was gaspin’ too hard to talk at first; when he catched his breath he lit into me. “A spy, eh!” he says. “Tryin’ to learn our secrets, eh! That’s a fine job for a big man like you! Whose stool pigeon are you?” he says. “Stop the game!” he says to Whiskers. “Don’t let ’em show nothin’ in front o’ this sneak!”

But they wasn’t no need of him givin’ that order, because when the boys heard the rumpus they quit o’ their own accord and come runnin’ over to be in on it.

Leadin’ the pack was Jimmy Boyle, that I’d busted into the game with, out in Des Moines. I’d noticed from the box scores the summer before that they was a Boyle in this league, but I hadn’t never thought of it bein’ Jimmy. In fac’, till I seen him sprintin’ to’rds me, I’d forgot they was such a guy. It was nine years since I’d saw him.

“Hello, Buck!” he hollers.

“Buck!” says Mr. Grant. “You ain’t Buck Warner, are you?”

“That’s me,” I says, “and I guess if it hadn’t been for Jimmy recognizin’ me you’d of had me shot for a spy.”

The Old Boy looked like he was gettin’ ready to cry.

“I certainly owe you my apologies,” he says. “I don’t remember faces as good as I used to and besides, you’re dressed different than when you and me met.”

“Yes,” I says, “I’ve changed my clo’es twice since September.”

“I hope you’ll forgive me,” says Mr. Grant.

“I’ll think it over,” I says.

By this time the whole bunch was gathered round and I had a chance to see who was who. Outside o’ Jimmy Boyle they wasn’t only four out o’ more’n two dozen that I knowed by sight. One o’ the four, o’ course, was Billy Carmody. Him and I hadn’t never met; he’d always been in the American till he jumped. But I’d saw his picture of’en enough to spot him. Then they was Hi Boles that I’d knew in the Association. And they was Charley Wade that the Boston club had for w’ile, and Red Fulton, that had been with Philly. The rest o’ them was all strangers to me and most o’ them looked about as much like ball players as Mary Pickford.

I shook hands with Red and Charley and Jimmy and Hi Boles, and Mr. Grant introduced me to the gang.

“Now,” he says, “I wisht you’d shake with me to show you don’t bear no grudge. I wouldn’t of had this thing happen for the world.”

“I don’t blame you at all, sir,” I says. “A club owner’s got to be careful these days, because if other owners will go as far as stealin’ your ball players, they certainly wouldn’t hesitate at hirin’ spies to try and cop your club’s hit-and-run signs. But,” I says, “I think you’re foolish not to plug them holes in the fence. A scout with a strong glass could stand way out there behind center field and find out how many fingers your catchers used to signal for a curve ball.”

“Yes,” he says, winkin’, “but the signals we use now and the signals we’re goin’ to use when the season opens up is two different things.”

“Oh! Deep stuff, eh!” says I. “Well, if that’s the way you’re workin’ it you’d ought not to be scared of outsiders swipin’ information. Leave as many of ’em as wants to come and look us over, and the more bum dope they take back home, the easier we’ll beat ’em when we meet ’em.”

“But I don’t want nobody to even know my lineup,” says Mr. Grant, “not till the boys runs out on the field for the openin’ game. If they don’t know who we got or what we got or our battin’ order or nothin’, they can’t prepare for us, can they?”

“Ain’t they no reporters along?” I ast him.

“I wouldn’t have ’em,” says Mr. Grant. “I don’t want to have no advance news get out about this club. Takin’ your enemies by su’prise is more’n half the battle.”

“Yes,” says I, “but after the first day they won’t be no more su’prise. The whole country’ll know who we are.”

“But we’ll be leadin’ the league,” he says. “They can’t take that away from us.”

“Not for twenty-four hours,” says I.

By this time, Carmody’d took his men back to their practice. I wanted to see ’em in action and made a move to go over to where they was at, but the Old Boy flagged me.

“They’ll be through in five minutes,” he says. “You must be wore out with your long trip, so let’s you and I walk back to the hotel and set and rest till the boys comes in. I want you to be fresh tomorrow.”

So we come away together and the last thing I seen at the grounds was Whiskers. He had the gate open far enough so’s his head could stick out and he could see the whole length o’ the main street. They wasn’t a chance for a spy to catch him off guard, unless the spy used unfair tactics and snuck up from some other direction.

“What do you think of our club?” says Mr. Grant.

“I don’t know nothin’ about it,” I says. “Most o’ them boys is strangers to me.”

“But ain’t they nice lookin’ boys?” he says.

“Sure,” says I, “but some o’ the best ball players I ever seen was homelier than muskrats.”

“But their bein’ homely didn’t make ’em good ball players,” says he.

“No,” I says, “but it helped ’em keep in the pink. They couldn’t go girl-crazy and stay out all hours o’ the night dancin’; they wasn’t no girls that’d dance with ’em or be seen with ’em. And they couldn’t lay against the mahogany all evenin’, because all bars has got mirrors back o’ them, and if a man didn’t never open his eyes they’d think you’d fell asleep and throw you out.”

“Your arguments may be all right for some teams,” says Mr. Grant, “but they don’t hold as far as we’re concerned. Bein’ handsome won’t hurt my boys, because they can’t run round nights or drink neither one.”

“Why not?” I ast him.

“Because they’s a club rule against it,” he says.

“Oh!” I says. “O’ course that makes it different. How’d you ever happen to think o’ makin’ a rule like that? I bet when the other club owners hears about it, they’ll follow suit and thank you for originatin’ the idear.”

“I hope they do follow suit,” he says. “It’s one o’ my ambitions to perjure baseball of its evils.”

“I wish you luck,” says I.

“And another one,” he says, “is to win the pennant, and between you and I, I believe I’m goin’ to realize it.”

“What year?” I says.

“This year,” says my boss.

“Well,” I says, “I’m new in the league and I don’t know what it takes to win. But from what I seen of your club and from what I read about Chicago and St. Louis and some o’ the rest, I’d say you had to strengthen some.”

“I’m afraid you’re pessimistical, Warner,” he says. “I’ve got the winnin’ combination⁠—yourself and Carmody and Fulton and Wade and Boles and Boyle for experience and balance, and those youngsters o’ mine for speed and spirit. We’ll take the League off’n their feet.”

“What does Carmody think about it?”

“The same as me,” he says. “And he’s a great manager.”

“He must be,” says I.

Well, when the crowd come in, Jimmy Boyle chased up to the clerk o’ the hotel and had it fixed for me to room with him.

“They had me paired with one o’ the kids,” he says, “but I got to have somebody to laugh with. This is goin’ to be the greatest season you ever went through. I don’t know what I’ll hit, but I bet I giggle .380.”

“What is they to laugh at?” I says.

“What ain’t they to laugh at?” says Jimmy. “Wait till you get acquainted with the old man! Wait till you’ve saw our gang in action! Wait till you watch Carmody managin’! Dutch Schaefer couldn’t of got up a better club than this.”

“What have we got, outside o’ you and the other fellas I know?” I ast him.

“Say, if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it,” says Jimmy. “In the first place, there’s old Grant. If he ain’t got no relatives the county’d ought to look after him. He’s goin’ to keep us a secret till the season opens and then we’re goin’ to win the first game by su’prise. And somebody tipped him off that the club that wins the first game has got the best chance for the pennant. O’ course they’s eight clubs in the league and four o’ them’ll prob’ly win their first games, but he never thought o’ that. And besides, the only chance we got o’ winnin’ the first game or any other game is to have the other club look at us and die laughin’.”

“Ain’t they no stuff in them kids?” I ast.

“Just one o’ them,” says Boyle. “They’s a boy named Steele that must of took his name from his right arm. He can whizz ’em through there faster’n Johnson. He could win with any club in the world but our’n.”

“Who’s the other pitchers?” I ast him.

“They ain’t none,” says Boyle, “none that counts. All told, we got three right-handers and three cockeyes, but outside o’ Steele, I’d go up there and catch any one o’ them without a mask or glove or protector or nothin’. When the balls they throw don’t hit the screen on the fly they’ll hit the fence on the first hop.”

“Where’d he get ’em all?” says I.

“He must of bought ’em off’n Pawnee Bill,” says Jimmy.

“We seem to be long on catchers,” I says.

“Wade and Fulton and myself,” says Jimmy, “but some of us is goin’ to get switched before the season’s a week old. As I say, when Steele ain’t pitchin’ the club don’t need no catcher, and it sure does need other things. Carmody’s playin’ short and Boles is the first sacker and you’ll be somewheres in the outfield. That only leaves four positions without nobody to fill ’em. So I and Red and Charley’s wonderin’ which one of us’ll be elected first. I wouldn’t mind tacklin’ right field; they’s some short fences in the league. But Carmody’s just crazy enough to stick me at third base where a man don’t have time to duck.”

“You lay off’n right field,” I says. “I got a lien on that bird.”

“You’ll play where Carmody puts you,” says Jimmy.

“You’re delirious,” says I. “You ain’t seen my contract. I signed to play right field and nowheres else, and you couldn’t get me out o’ there with a habeas corpus.”

“Mr. Fox, eh?” says Boyle.

“You know it,” I says, “and between you and I, they’s a reason. I’d just as soon tell you because they ain’t no danger o’ you spillin’ it. My right knee slipped out on me last August, and when it went, it went for good. All the doctors I seen give me the same advice⁠—to get out o’ baseball. And I had my mind all made up to quit when old Grant stepped in with his offer. I took it, knowin’ all the w’ile that it was grand larceny.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” says Jimmy. “They’ll be only one guy on this club that ain’t a burglar. That’s young Steele. The rest of us, includin’ the M.G.R., is a bunch o’ bandits. But I’m not frettin’ over it. I figure that if he wasn’t givin’ me this dough somebody else’d be gettin’ it, maybe somebody without as much license to it as me. If they wasn’t nobody dependin’ on me I might feel ashamed. But when you got a wife and two kids, and an old bug comes along and slips you a contract for three times what you’re worth, it’d be cheatin’ your folks to not take it.”

“I ain’t got no folks,” I says.

“But you can’t never tell,” says Boyle.

“I can tell,” I says, “if you’ll listen. I met a little lady the middle o’ last July. The first week in August we got engaged. And the second week in August Mr. Knee blowed out. So when Grant come after me, along in September, I begin to believe in angels. But I ain’t never felt right about it.”

“How bad is the old dog?” says Jimmy. “Can you run on it at all?”

“I can run on it,” I says, “but I can’t get up no speed. And I don’t know when she’s goin’ to slip again. I can’t start quick. And I’m scared to stoop.”

“You won’t need to stoop; not with our pitchers,” says Jimmy. “All that’ll come out your way is line drives or high boys over the wall.”

“And if I turn sudden, I’m gone,” says I.

“That’s easy,” says Boyle. “Rest your spine against them boards and do all your runnin’ to’rds the infield. You won’t be the first outfielder that played that system.”

“Carmody’ll wise up to me,” I says.

“You should worry your head off about Carmody,” says Boyle. “He’s pretendin’ to take his job serious, but down in his heart he knows he’s a thief. He’s got just as much right to manage a ball club as that girl o’ yours. You just stick it out and draw the old check every first and fifteenth, and remember that you got plenty o’ company. Even if your two legs was cut off at the waist you’d be worth five times as much as some of us.”

“Careful there, Jim,” I says.

“You can hit, can’t you?” he says. “And you can catch fly balls, and you can throw. There’s three things you can do, and that’s three more things than most of our gang can do. No, I’ll take that back. They’s one thing they can all do.”

“What’s that?” I ast him.

“Eat,” says Jimmy, “and if you don’t believe it come down in the dinin’ room. The doors is supposed to open for supper at five thirty, but after the first day we was here, the manager seen that the only way to save the doors was to keep ’em open all the w’ile. All the other ball clubs I was ever with talked about their hittin’ and their bad luck, and all that. But this bunch don’t talk nothin’ but meats and groceries, and when they ain’t talkin’ about ’em it’s because they got so many o’ them in their mouth that they can’t talk. The kid that was roomin’ with me put what he couldn’t eat in his pockets or inside his shirt, and after every meal he’d come straight to the room and unload on top o’ the bureau. And if I went near his storehouse to brush my hair or look in the glass, he’d growl like a dog. He had himself trained so’s he wouldn’t sleep more’n three hours in a row. He’d go to bed at nine and get up at twelve and three for refreshments. But no matter how hungry he was at three, he always managed to save a piece o’ cold hamburger or a little fricasseed veal for when he woke up in the mornin’, so’s he wouldn’t have to go down to breakfast in his nightgown. Our second day here it was rainin’ when I rolled out o’ bed. Griffin, the kid I’m tellin’ you about, was puttin’ on his clo’es with one hand and feedin’ himself with the other. ‘Well, boy,’ I says to him, ‘it looks like we’d loaf today.’ He must of thought I’d mentioned veal loaf or a loaf o’ bread, because all the answer I got was more things to eat. ‘Fruit and cereal,’ he says, ‘prunes and oranges and oatmeal, bacon and eggs straight up, small tenderloin medium, sausage and cakes, buttered toast, some o’ them rolls, and a pot o’ coffee.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘your dress rehearsal goes off all right; if you don’t get scared and forget your lines in front o’ the waiter, you’ll be the hit o’ the show.’ But I might as well of been talkin’ to a post hole. He didn’t know I was speakin’ unless I spoke like a bill o’ fare.”

“What position does he play?” I ast.

“Third base,” says Jimmy, “and for the fear everybody won’t know it, he always keeps one foot on the bag. But don’t get the idear that he’s a bigger eater than the rest o’ them. They ain’t no more difference in their appetites than in their ball playin’. When they got their noses in the feed-trough, though, they look like they was at home. And when they’re out there on the field, you’d think they was It for blindman’s buff.”

I ast him about the Old Man havin’ their lunch sent out.

“Even Carmody laughed at that,” he says; “but Carmody’s figured that the way to get along with old Grant is to agree with him in everything. So we’re relieved from two changes o’ clo’es, and a half mile walk that might help some of us get down to weight.”

“Is it a regular lunch?” I ast him.

“All but the tools,” says Jimmy. “And that makes it the favorite meal with Griffin and them. They can throw it in faster and without near as much risk. And all you have to do to start a riot is drop a bone or part of a potato on the grass.”

“How is the grounds?” I says.

“Just as good as the club,” says Boyle.

“Who picked out this joint?” says I.

“The same old bug that picked up these ball players,” says Jimmy. “He was lookin’ for a quiet place and he got it. The burg’s supposed to have a population o’ twelve hundred, but I haven’t even saw the twelve. Dixie Springs they call it, but the only springs is in Carmody’s bed. The town and the grounds is both jokes. The hotel’s all right outside o’ the rooms. I’ll own up the eatin’s good, but that’s the one thing that don’t make no difference to this bunch of our’n. They’d go to it just the same if it was raw mule chops.”

“How much longer do we stick?” I ast him.

“Plain five weeks,” says Jimmy. “We don’t play no exhibitions nowheres because they might be spies from the other clubs watchin’ us. We stay right here and do all our practicin’ in a park that was laid out by a steeplechase fan, and then we go straight home and win the openin’ game and the pennant by su’prise. You’re lucky you come a week late. If I’d knew the dope in advance I wouldn’t of never reported till the day o’ the big su’prise party. But leave us hurry downstairs or it’ll be too late for you to get a look at a fine piece of American scenery.”

“What’s that?” I ast.

“The Royal Gorge,” says Jimmy.

Well, he hadn’t lied when he told me about their eatin’. It was just like as if they knowed the league wasn’t only goin’ to last this one more season, and they all o’ them expected to live to be over ninety, and was tryin’ to get fixed up in a year for the next sixty-five. You remember how them waiters down South come one-steppin’ in with their trays balanced on their thumb a mile over their head? Well, they didn’t pull that stunt with the orders these here boys give ’em. Each fella’s meal took two pallbearers, with a couple o’ mourners followin’ along behind to pick up whatever floral pieces fell off when the casket listed.

I and Boyle and Fulton and Hi Boles had a table to ourself, and you ought to saw them Ephs quarrel over who’d wait on us. Besides our four orders together not bein’ as big as one o’ them other guys’, we wasn’t so exhausted at the end o’ the meal that we couldn’t dig down in our pocket and get a dime. Mr. Grant and Carmody and the secretary set next to our table and it seemed to worry the Old Boy that our appetites was so poor. He’d say:

“Warner, I’m afraid you ain’t feelin’ good. You don’t eat hardly nothin’.”

“I’m all right,” I’d tell him; “but eatin’ ain’t no new experience for me. I ett for several years before I broke into baseball and I been gettin’ regular meals ever since.”

The lunch served out to the grounds was worth travelin’ south just to look at it. It always come prompt at twelve, and for a half hour before that time every ground ball was a base hit because the fielders was all lookin’ up at the sun. And when the baskets full o’ nourishment was drug in, no matter if we was right in the middle of an innin’, everybody’d throw away their bats and gloves and race for the front. Carmody’d follow along smilin’, like it was a good joke.

I was hungry my first day out. I told Jimmy I felt like eatin’ a big meal.

“Well,” he says, “I bet you don’t eat it when you see it.”

He win his bet. I was the last fella up to the baskets. They was a couple o’ sandwiches and one or two pieces o’ fried chicken left, but it’d all been pawed over by the early birds, and amongst the other things the grounds was shy of was a place to wash your hands. Even if they’d been one, nobody’d of had time to use it.

So that day and the rest o’ the time we was there I set out on the sidelines with Hi and Jimmy and Red durin’ the noon hour, and watched the performance.

“This mayn’t be a big league,” says Jimmy, “but our club’ll be big if they don’t all get lockjaw.”

“It’ll take two engines to pull us home,” says Red.

“If them boys could hit, they’d be heavy hitters,” says Hi.

Well, they couldn’t hit or they couldn’t field; that is, the most o’ them couldn’t. They was a couple that had the stuff to make pretty fair ball players if they’d knew anything. Carmody couldn’t learn ’em because he didn’t know nothin’ himself. I done what I could to help ’em, partly because I’m kindhearted and partly so’s I’d be doin’ somethin’ else besides riskin’ my life in that outfield. It was rough enough so’s a fella with two good legs would be scared to take a chance, and it wasn’t no place for a cripple to frolic round in.

We put on two ball games a day between the regulars and yannigans. The only reason for callin’ our team the regulars was on account o’ Carmody playin’ with us. We was licked most o’ the time because young Steele done most o’ the pitchin’ against us. He sure could buzz ’em through and he had as good control as I ever seen in a kid. He was workin’ the day that I and Carmody had our first and last argument. Carmody’s whole idear o’ baseball was “take two strikes.” That was his instructions to everybody that went up to hit. It was all right when the other fellas was pitchin’ because they was all o’ them pretty near sure to walk you. But I couldn’t see no sense doin’ it against Steele; it just helped him get you in a hole.

This day it come up to the seventh innin’ and Steele had us beat four to nothin’. We was all ordered to take two strikes and most of us was addin’ one onto the order. But in the seventh, one o’ the kids happened to get a base hit and they was a couple o’ boots, and when it was my turn to go up there, the bases was choked and two out.

“Take two strikes,” yells Carmody.

“Yes,” I says to myself, “I’ll take two strikes.”

So Steele, thinkin’ I’d obey orders, laid the first one right over in my groove and I busted it out o’ the ball park.

When I come in to the bench Carmody was layin’ for me.

“What kind o’ baseball is that?” he says.

“It’s real baseball,” I says. “If you think it ain’t you’re crazy. When a pitcher’s got as good control as him, and we’re four runs behind and the bases is full, I’m goin’ to crack the first ball I can reach.”

He called me over away from the gang.

“It’s a bad example,” he says, “for you to not follow instructions.”

“Maybe it is,” says I, “but when the instructions is ridic’lous I’m goin’ to forget ’em.”

“I’m managin’ this ball club,” he says.

“You’re doin’ a grand job,” says I. “When you take money for managin’, it’s plain highway robbery.”

“I suppose you’re earnin’ yourn,” says Carmody. “I suppose you got two good legs.”

That kind o’ shook me up.

“Listen,” he says, “I got just as much license to draw a manager’s salary as you have for takin’ a ball player’s. You’re liable to be on crutches before the middle of April. But if I don’t make no crack to Grant he won’t know you was crippled when you signed; he’ll think, when your knee goes back on you, that it’s the first time and just an accident. So,” he says, “if I was you I’d play the way the manager told me and not make no fuss.”

“You win,” says I. “But have a heart and forget once in a w’ile to give me orders. I don’t mind if the rest o’ the league knows I got a bum leg, but I don’t want ’em to think my head’s cut off.”

They wasn’t never such a long five weeks as I put in down to this excuse for a trainin’ camp. After the first few days I got sick o’ laughin’ and sleepin’ and everything else. I’d promised the girl I wouldn’t take a drink, but all that kept me from breakin’ the promise was lack of opportunity. The burg didn’t even have a soda foundry.

Nights after supper I’d write a long letter to the future Missus and then I and Boyle’d set up in the room and wish we was somewheres else. Once or twice old Grant called on us and raved about our chances to win the pennant.

“If you boys finish on top,” he says, “and if the European war’s over by that time, I might give you all a trip acrost the pond next fall.”

When he’d went out and left us after spillin’ that great piece o’ news, we was as excited as a couple o’ draft horses.

“I wonder what they soak a man for a steamer trunk,” says Jimmy. “It’d be a grand honeymoon for you,” he says. “The lady’ll love you better’n ever when she knows you’re goin’ to take her to see the Tower o’ London and the Plaster o’ Paris.”

“I hope,” says I, “that they’ll be sure and have all the dead removed before we get there.”

“We’ll be right to home in the trenches after practicin’ all spring on these grounds,” says Jimmy.

Well, the time went by one way and another and the happiest day o’ my life, bar one, was when us Wellfeds clumb aboard a rattler headed north. Our trainin’ season was over and we was in every bit as good shape as if we’d just left the operatin’ table. Our team was picked and they was ball players in every position except two, but Carmody and Wade was the only ones in the lot that was playin’ where they belonged. The two kids that acted like they had a little ability was in the outfield with me. Jimmy Boyle’d been tried at second base and third base, but he was lost both places, so they’d stuck him on first and shifted Hi Boles, a first sacker, to third. Red Fulton, another catcher, was pretendin’ to play second base. Carmody was at shortstop and it looked like Charley Wade was elected to catch whenever it didn’t rain. That was the club that was goin’ to take the pennant by su’prise and spend the winter in Monte Carlo.

But I was too happy over leavin’ Dixie Springs to be worryin’ about how rotten we looked.

“Lord!” I says to Charley Wade, “I guess it won’t seem great to be in a real town!”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m afraid I’ll be nervous when I get where they’s people.”

III

They wasn’t enough people in the park the day we opened to bother Charley Wade or anybody else. Old Grant had made such a success o’ keepin’ us a secret that only about eight hundred knowed we was goin’ to perform; anyway, that’s all that come out to watch us, and in his great, big new stands, they looked like a dozen fleas on a flat car.

It was a crime, too, that we didn’t have a crowd, because we win the ball game. The records will show that; you don’t have to take my word. The Old Boy had predicted a su’prise and his prophecy come true. And the ones that was most su’prised was us and the fellas we beat.

When that Buffalo bunch first come out and seen our lineup in battin’ practice, they laughed themself hoarse. But they didn’t do no laughin’ after the game started and they got a sample o’ Steele’s stuff. The weather was twice as cold as any we’d ran into down South, but it didn’t seem to make no difference to him. He was lightnin’ fast and steady as Matty. He didn’t give ’em one real chance to score.

We trimmed ’em two to nothin’ and I drove in the both of our runs. Along with that I was lucky enough to make quite a catch o’ the only ball they hit hard off o’ Steele.

When we got in the clubhouse afterwards, Mr. Grant was there, actually cryin’ for joy. He throwed his arms round Steele and was goin’ to do the same to me, but I backed off and told him I was engaged.

O’ course they was reporters lookin’ us over this time and the next mornin’ the population was informed that Grant and Carmody’d made quite a ball club out of a bunch of misfits. So when she started that afternoon, the stands was pretty near filled.

Our whole pitchin’ staff, except Steele, was in there at one time or another. The Buffalo club hadn’t been able to hit Steele. They didn’t have to hit these other babies. I don’t know how many bases on balls was gave, but I bet it was a world’s record. Charley Wade, back o’ the bat, did more shaggin’ than all the outfielders. When Buffalo was battin’ the umps could of left his right arm in the checkroom. Fourteen to nothin’ it wound up and they was no spoonin’ in the clubhouse after the game.

Steele was beat his next time out, but win his third start. And one o’ the cockeyes come acrost with a win in the second series, gettin’ some valuable help from an umpire that’d been let out o’ the Association for bein’ stone blind. I think altogether we copped four games in April. Along the last part o’ May or the first o’ June we grabbed two in succession, but the streak was broke up when Jimmy dropped three pegs in the eighth and ninth innin’s o’ the third game.

Durin’ the home series in May, four or five hundred people that was fond o’ low comedy come out every afternoon to get our stuff. But we pulled the same gags so often that they quit us after a w’ile. We went round the western half o’ the circuit in June and our split o’ the gate wouldn’t of tipped the porters. Then we come home again and was welcomed by thirty-seven paid admissions, five ushers and two newspaper men.

The Old Boy cut the price to a dime for the bleachers. The ticket takers slept peaceful all afternoon. Then he hired a band to give a concert every day, so for a w’ile we was sure of an attendance o’ thirty, except when the piccolo player got piccoloed.

When August come I was leadin’ the league in hittin’ and Mr. Grant thought I was the most valuable man he had. He overlooked a few things about my record that would of wised up any real baseball man. For instance, though I was battin’ .420, my total o’ stolen bases was three, and all three o’ them was steals o’ second that’d been made in double steals with Hi Boles goin’ from second to third. And I didn’t only have about ten extra base hits, o’ which five was home run drives out o’ the park. In other words, I wasn’t doin’ no more runnin’ than I had to, and I didn’t try to get nowheres where they was a chance that I’d have to slide. And under this kind o’ treatment, Mr. Leggo had held up good. I’d felt him wabble two different times when I was chasin’ fly balls, but he’d popped back into place without me even coaxin’ him.

Then, in the middle of August, everything happened at once. Charley Wade broke an ankle, Carmody’s right arm went dead, and the girl had a brawl with Aunt Julia.

We was in Indianapolis. We’d just got through carryin’ Charley into the clubhouse when a boy come down to the bench and handed me a telegram. It says I was to come at once; she must see me.

“Carmody,” I says, “I got to run down to Dayton tonight.”

“What for?” he says.

“Somebody wants me,” I told him.

“Not as bad as I do,” he says.

“Well,” says I, “it’s somebody that makes more difference than you do.”

“I’ll talk to you after the game,” he says. It was our last bats and it didn’t take ’em long to get us out.

“Now,” says Carmody, “you can go to Dayton tonight if you’ll promise to be back in time to play tomorrow.”

“I can’t make no promise,” I says.

“Then you can’t go,” says Carmody.

“What’s the matter with you?” I says. “Can’t you stick a pitcher or one o’ them kids in right field for one day?”

“You ain’t goin’ to play right field no more,” he says.

“I ain’t goin’ to play nowheres else,” says I. “Do you think I’m goin’ to catch in Charley’s place?”

“No,” he says. “I’m goin’ to put Boyle back there.”

“And me go to first?” I says.

“No,” says Carmody. “I’m goin’ there nyself and you’re goin’ to take my place at shortstop.”

“You’re maudlin,” I says. “I signed a contract to play right field and that’s where I’m goin’ to stick. I’m awkward enough out there; I’d be a holy show on the infield. Besides, you never played first base in your life and one o’ the pitchers or that big Griffin kid could do as good as you. What’s the use o’ breakin’ up your whole combination just because one fella’s hurt?”

“We couldn’t make no change that’d be for the worse,” says Carmody. “But I’ll come clean with you and tell you where I’m at. I’m gettin’ $1,800 a month for this job. But my contract says I got to play the whole season out or he can cut $2,500 off’n my year’s salary.”

“Well,” I says, “what’s the difference if you play first base or stay where you’re at?”

“I can’t stay where I’m at,” he says. “My souper’s deader’n that place we trained. She quit on me in the seventh innin’ today. I couldn’t stand on the foul line and throw to fair ground.”

“You hurt it in action, didn’t you?” I says.

“Yes, but he’s sore at me,” says Carmody, “on account of our swell showin’. And the way my contract reads, he could keep my dough if he wanted to.”

“But you’ll have to throw when you’re playin’ first base,” says I.

“No, I won’t,” he says. “You watch me and see. If I’ve got the ball and they’s a play to make anywheres, you’ll see the old pill slip right out o’ my hand and lay there on the ground.”

“But I don’t see why you should pick on me,” I says. “Boles or Red Fulton or one o’ them kids could do a whole lot better job o’ shortstoppin’ than me.”

“Boles and Fulton is bad enough where they’re at,” he says, “without wishin’ a new bunch o’ trouble on ’em. You’ve played there and you’d know what you was doin’ even if you couldn’t stoop over or cover no ground. Besides,” he says, “old Grant wants you to tackle it.”

“When was you talkin’ to him?” I says. “You ain’t seen him since Charley got hurt and your arm went.”

“That’s more secrets,” says Carmody. “Between you and I, my arm’s been bad a long w’ile and I had the hunch it was goin’ to do just what it done. So I told him a little story a couple o’ weeks ago. I told him I wasn’t satisfied with the way Boyle was playin’ first base and I told him I was a pretty good first sacker myself and thought I’d move over there. So he ast me who’d play shortstop and I told him you’d make the best man and he says he thought so, too, but your contract read that you’d only play right field. So I told him maybe he could coax you to switch.”

“It must be hard for you to shave with all that cheek,” I says. “You can go and tell him now that you ast me would I play shortstop and I told you No, I wouldn’t. So that’s settled, and now I’m goin’ to catch a train. If I can get back tomorrow I will. And if I do get back, I’ll be in right field.”

I left him bawlin’ me out, but I knowed he couldn’t do nothin’ to me. I had as much on him as he had on me.

I run into a flood in Dayton, but it was salt water this time. The girl cried for two hours after I got there and couldn’t quit long enough to tell me what it was about. I finally made like I was goin’ away disgusted. Then she come through.

They wasn’t goin’ to be no $2,500 from Aunt Julia. Aunt Julia’d fell in love with a G.A.R. that hadn’t did nothin’ since ’65 but celebrate his team’s victory. So Ethel, instead o’ usin’ her head, lost it, and ast Aunt Julia what she meant by tyin’ up with a bird twenty years older than herself that hadn’t shaved since Grant took Richmond. So they broke up in a riot and all bets was off.

“Well,” I says, “maybe she’ll get over it.”

“No, she won’t,” says Ethel, “and even if she did, I wouldn’t take her old money.”

“Any high-class bank would give you new money for it,” I says.

“It ain’t no time for jokin’,” she says. “Everything’s all over. We can’t get married this year; maybe not for ten years; maybe never.”

“I don’t have to pay all them debts right away,” I says. “I can hold out $2,500 and give it to Paul. The boys have waited this long for their dough; I guess they can wait a w’ile longer.”

“You know what I’ve told you,” she says. “We won’t be married one minute before you’re out o’ debt.”

“Well,” I says, “it looks like they was no hurry about gettin’ a license. They ain’t goin’ to be no post-season money for us guys.”

“We’ll just have to wait then,” says the girl. “You’ll have to save every cent o’ your next year’s pay.”

“They ain’t goin’ to be no next year’s pay,” says I. “This league’ll be past history in another season. And I couldn’t carry bats anywheres else.”

The more we talked the bluer things looked and I guess I’d of been cryin’ myself in another minute if the big idear hadn’t came to me.

“Wait a minute!” I says. “They’s a chance that we can get out o’ this all right.”

“What’s the dope?” she ast me.

But I wouldn’t tell her; it wasn’t clear in my own mind yet and I didn’t want to say nothin’ till I’d schemed it out.

“I’m goin’ right back, back, back to Indiana,” I says. “You’ll get a wire from me tomorrow night. Maybe it’ll be good news and maybe it won’t. But you’ll know pretty near as soon as I do.”

I was up in Carmody’s room at seven o’clock the next mornin’. I ast him if he’d said anything to Mr. Grant about me refusin’ to play shortstop.

“No,” he says. “I was hopin’ you’d change your mind.”

“Maybe I will,” I says, “but not without he coaxes me.”

Carmody didn’t ask me what I was gettin’ at. He dressed and went downstairs to find the Old Boy. And at half-past eight, in the dinin’ room, the coaxin’ commenced.

“Warner,” says Mr. Grant, “Carmody’s thinkin’ about makin’ a few changes in the team.”

“Is that so?” I says. “What are they?”

“Well,” he says, “he ain’t satisfied with the way Boyle plays first base. And besides, now that Wade’s hurt, he thinks Boyle should ought to go back and catch again. And he wants to try first base himself. So that would leave shortstop open.”

“Maybe you could get a hold o’ some semipro shortstopper,” I says.

“I don’t want none,” he says. “I want a man that’s had big league experience. I believe that with Carmody on first base and a good man at shortstop we could finish seventh yet. What do you think?”

“Very likely,” I says, knowin’ that they wasn’t a chance in the world.

“I’d give a good deal to pull out o’ last place,” says he.

“Well,” I says, “I’ll see if I can’t think o’ some good shortstop that ain’t tied up.”

“You don’t have to try and think o’ one,” says Mr. Grant. “I’ve got one in mind.”

“Who’s that?” I says.

“Yourself,” he says. I pretended like I was too su’prised to speak.

“You can play the position, can’t you?” he ast.

“Sure,” says I. “That’s where I was born and brought up.”

“Well, then,” he says, rubbin’ his hands.

“Well, nothin’,” I says. “I’m signed as a right fielder.”

“We could make a new contract,” he says.

“But listen, Mr. Grant,” I says. “W’ile I know shortstop like a book, I don’t want to play it. It’s too hard. It keeps a man thinkin’ and workin’ every minute. One season at shortstop is pretty near as wearin’ as two in the outfield. That’s why I insisted on right field. I wanted to take things a little easier this year. That’s why I was willin’ to sign with $5,000.”

“What would you of wanted to play short?” he ast me.

“Oh,” I says, “I wouldn’t of thought of it for less than $9,000.”

He didn’t say nothin’ for a minute; a good long minute too. Finally he says:

“Well, Warner, they’s only about six more weeks to go. But I’m wild to get out o’ last place and I’ll spend some money to do it, though spendin’ money has been my chief business all season. I want to be fair with you, so if you’ll finish out the season at shortstop I’ll give you $2,500 extra.”

This time it was me that wanted to hug him. But I played safe. I considered and considered and considered and finally I give in.

“I’ll do it, Mr. Grant,” I says. “As a favor to you, I’ll do it.”

Out in the lobby Carmody was waitin’ for me.

“It’s fixed,” I says. “He’s a pretty good coaxer.”

“What did you get?” he ast me.

“A November weddin’,” says I.

I’d promised to wire Ethel by night, but the thing had been pulled a whole lot quicker’n I’d hoped for. I run right from Carmody to the telegraph office.

“All fixed,” I says in my message. “I got $2,500 extra.”

At lunch time her answer come back:

Good old boy. Did you hold somebody up?

Well, sir, believe me or not, I hadn’t thought of it that way before. But when I read her wire I had to admit to myself that she’d pretty near called the turn.

The less said about them last six weeks the better. I don’t know how many games we was beat, but five was what we win. I felt worst about poor Steele. There he was, workin’ his head off two to four games a week, worth four times as much as all the rest of us together, and drawin’ a salary o’ $400 a month. He’s with a real club this year and you watch him go!

They’ll always be a question in my mind about which was the biggest flivver, me at shortstop or Carmody at first base. I covered just as much ground as was under my shoes and if a ground ball didn’t hop up waist high when it come to me, it kept right on travelin’.

I didn’t take many plays at second base for the fear I’d get slid into. If I tagged anybody it was because they stuck out their hand and insisted on it. And I was so nervous all the w’ile that I couldn’t hardly foul one up at that plate.

Carmody’s dead arm wasn’t half his troubles. Findin’ first base with his feet was what bothered him most. Everybody in the league was ridin’ him.

“Tie a bell on the bag!” they’d holler. “Look out! You’ll spike yourself! Get a compass! Who hid first base?”

It was lucky for me that the Old Boy’s box was on the first base side and that he couldn’t see far. He could take in a lot more o’ Carmody’s fox trottin’ than he could o’ my still life posin’. He knowed, though, that I wasn’t a howlin’ success as a shortstopper. When he give me my extra money, he says:

“Warner, you didn’t come up to my expectations.”

“Mr. Grant,” I says, “playin’ that outfield spoiled me for an infield job. I won’t never tackle it again.”

And for once I was tellin’ him the truth.

I ast him what his plans was for another season.

“I ain’t only got the one plan,” he says. “That’s to get out o’ baseball.”

“Well,” I says, “I hope you can find somebody to buy the club.”

“I ain’t goin’ to sell it,” he says. “The next man that does me a dirty trick, I’m goin’ to give it to him.”

IV

Well, sir, I paid my debts first and then I sent the girl’s brother a check for my share o’ the dandy little garage. The marriage nuptials come off on schedule and I guess we wasn’t su’prised when Aunt Julia showed up with a forgivin’ smile and a check for $2,500.

“You can’t tell if it’s old money or not,” I says to Ethel.

“I guess we’ll keep it anyway,” she says.

“Maybe,” I says, “I’ll send it back to old Grant.”

“Maybe you won’t too,” says she. “This money happens to belong to me and I never pretended I could play shortstop.”

I feel better now that’s off’n my chest. I know it was wrong, but as Jimmy Boyle pointed out, if one fella didn’t take it some other fella would. And I think I got a better excuse than anybody else. Come out to the house sometime and see for yourself.

The Crook

Tomorrow mornin’ you’ll see statement in the papers, signed by Ban, sayin’ that it’s been learned that they was some excuse for Bull doin’ what he done, and that the charge of him bein’ pickled on the field wasn’t true, and that he’s been took back on the staff. But they won’t be nothin’ printed about who was the dandy little fixer; my part in it is a secret between you and I and one or two others.

I don’t suppose they’s a ball player in the League that Bull’s chased as often as me. I don’t suppose they’s anybody he’s pulled as much of his stuff on. I can’t count the times I’ve got cute with him, but the times I got the best o’ the repartee I can count ’em on the fingers of a catcher’s mitt. Just the same, it was me that went to Ban with the real dope and was the cause of him gettin’ rehired, and it was me that got him his girl back, though he don’t know about that yet.

I wouldn’t of took no trouble in the case if it was any other umps but Bull. But I come as near likin’ him as a man could like a guy that never give a close one any way but against you. And he’s a good umps, too; he guesses about a third of ’em right, where the rest o’ Ban’s School for the Blind don’t see one in ten. And another thing: I felt sorry for him when he told me the deal he got. And besides that, he’s gave me too many good laughs for me to stand by and see him canned out o’ the League. Many’s the time I’ve made a holler just to hear what he’d say, and he always said somethin’ worth hearin’, even if it stung; that is, up to day before yesterday, when the blow-off come.

I noticed he wasn’t himself when I was throwed out at the plate in the second innin’. I wanted to stop at third, but Jack made me keep goin’, and Duff Lewis all ready to shoot with that six-inch howitzer he wears in his right sleeve. Cady and the ball strolled out to meet me and I couldn’t get past ’em.

“You’re out!” says Bull.

“He didn’t tag me,” I says.

And Bull didn’t say a word.

In the fourth innin’ Hooper was on third base and somebody hit a fly ball to Shano. Hooper scored after the catch and big Cahill run out from the bench and made a holler that he’d left the bag too quick. The ball was throwed over to third base, but Tommy wouldn’t allow the play. Then Cahill went to Bull and ast him hadn’t he saw it. O’ course Bull says he hadn’t.

“No, I guess not!” says Cahill. “Us burglars stick together.” And then, on the way back to the bench, he turned to Bull and says: “You’re so crooked you could sleep in a French horn.”

Bull was just puttin’ on his mask, but he throwed it on the ground and tore after Cahill. He nailed him right on the edge o’ the dugout, and what a beatin’ he give him! It took eight or nine of us to drag him off, and he managed to wallop everybody at least once durin’ the action. Some o’ the boys picked Cahill up and carried him to the clubhouse. He was a wreck. Bull stood there a minute, starin’ at nothin’; then he turned and faced the grand stand.

“Anybody else,” he yelled⁠—“anybody else that thinks I’m a crook can come down and get a little o’ the same.”

Well, they wasn’t no need of extra police to keep the crowd back. But Ban was settin’ in the stand and o’ course he wasn’t goin’ to just set there and not do nothin’. It was too raw. So he give orders for the cops to grab Bull and get him out o’ the way before he committed murder. They led him to his dressin’ room and stuck with him w’ile he changed clo’es. Then they called the wagon and give him a ride. Tommy handled the rest o’ the game alone and we was beat just as bad as if nothin’ had happened.

Right after the game the witnesses was examined. Cahill’s lips was so swelled he couldn’t hardly talk. But several of us had heard the whole thing and could testify they hadn’t been no profanity. Cahill hadn’t no license to call Bull crooked, but if an umps was goin’ to fight for a little thing like that, every ball game’d wind up in a holycaust. Besides, “a crook” was one o’ the mildest things Bull’d ever been called, and till this time nobody’d ever knew him to lose his temper.

As I say, his specialty was conversation. When they was a kick made, he’d generally always pull some remark that got a laugh from everybody but the fella that was crabbin’, and sometimes from he himself. He’d canned plenty o’ guys out o’ the ball game for tryin’ too hard to show him up, but he’d did it as part o’ the day’s work and without displayin’ any venoms. I’d heard ’em tell him he was yellow, and blind, and a jellyfish, and a “homer,” and a thief, and a liar; and that he’d steal the cream off’n his mother’s coffee; and that his backbone was all above the neck. I’d heard ’em call him fightin’ names and saw him take it smilin’. And now, because a fella made an innocent remark about him bein’ crooked, and no naughty words along with it, he’d went off his bean and all but destroyed a good Irish citizen, besides intimidatin’ five or six thousand o’ the unemployed.

It wasn’t no wonder everybody thought what they thought, though Bull hadn’t never been known to touch a drop between April and October.

“I’ll uphold my umpires when they’re right,” Ban says to the reporters; “but when they’re wrong, they got to suffer for it. They’s only just the one explanation for Bull’s actions. So he’s discharged from the staff.”

“What about Cahill?” ast somebody. “Goin’ to suspend him?”

“No,” says Ban. “Bull saved me the trouble.”

Well, Tommy fixed it up to have Bull let out o’ jail and took him back to the hotel where the two o’ them was stoppin’. When Tommy told him he was canned he didn’t make no comments only to say that they was one good thing about the umpirin’ job⁠—you didn’t feel bad if you lost it.

On my way home from the game I got to thinkin’ about Bull and what a shame it was to have him let out for just the one slip, and wonderin’ what he’d do with himself, and so on. So when I’d had supper I rode down to the umps’ beanery to try and find him, and maybe cheer him up.

He’d went out. Tommy told me he’d disappeared after askin’ for his mail and not gettin’ none.

“He’ll come back with a fine package,” says Tommy.

“Do you know what made him fall off?” I says.

“He didn’t fall off,” says Tommy. “That’s the funny part of it. I and him was right up in my room readin’ the papers all mornin’; then we had lunch and went out to the park together and got dressed and went on the field. I noticed he was grouchin’, but I was with him every minute o’ the day up to game time and I know for a fact that he didn’t have nothin’ to drink only his coffee at breakfast. Somethin’s happened to him, but I don’t like to get inquisitive because we haven’t only been teamin’ together a couple o’ weeks.”

I and Tommy didn’t have nothin’ else to do, so we set down in the writin’ room and chinned. Bull, o’ course, was the subject o’ the conversation. You could talk about him all week and not tell half o’ the stuff.

The first game he umpired in our League was openin’ day in Chi, four or five years ago. It was our club and St. Louis. I guess he was about twenty-six years old then, but he didn’t look more’n twenty. So the boys was inclined to ride him. Arnold, the St. Louis catcher, started on him in the first innin’.

“Did you ever see a ball game, kid?” he ast him.

“No,” says Bull, “but if I make good these four days, I’m goin’ to stay here for the Detroit series.”

Arnold come up with the bases full and two out in the fourth or fifth. He took three healthy lunges and fanned. I led off in our half and Bull called the first one a ball. It was pretty close and Arnold, peeved about strikin’ out in the pinch, slammed the pill on the ground.

“You’re a fine umpire!” he says.

“I can’t be right all the time,” says Bull. “Even the best of us misses ’em sometimes. But I’ll have to miss the next two in succession to tie your score.”

We was one run ahead when the ninth begin. We got two o’ them out and then Hank Douglas made a base hit and stole second. The next fella made another base hit, but Shano fielded it clean and Hank was called out at the plate.

“That’s right,” he says to Bull. “Favor the home team. You wouldn’t be umpirin’ in this league if you wasn’t yellow.”

“No,” says Bull, walkin’ away, “and you wouldn’t be in the League at all if you wasn’t a Brown.”

In one o’ the Detroit games Cobb was on second base with a man out and Crawford hit a slow ground ball between short and third. The ball was fielded to first base and Cobb kept right on for home. Parker was catchin’ for us and he was a little spike-shy, especially with Cobb. So when the ball was relayed to him from first base he backed off in an alley somewheres and give Tyrus the right o’ way. Somebody hollered from the bench that Cobb hadn’t touched third.

“Yes, I seen it,” says Parker to Bull, lookin’ for an alibi. “He cut third base.”

“I don’t know about that,” Bull says, “but it’s a safe bet that he’ll never cut you.”

Bull went with us for our first series in Cleveland that year. They was a fly-ball hit to Lawton in the third and he muffed it square, lettin’ in a couple o’ runs. As soon as he’d dropped the ball he looked up in the sky and then stopped the game till he’d ran in and got his glasses, though it was so cloudy that we was hurryin’ to beat the rain. Right afterward, when Lawton come to bat, Bull called a strike on him.

“Too high! Too high!” says Lawton.

“Maybe it was,” says Bull. “I lost it in the sun.”

A little w’ile later the Cleveland club had a chance to tie us up. It was some left-hand batter’s turn to hit, but they was a cockeye pitchin’ for us, so they sent up a kid named Brodie, a right-hander, to pinch hit. He swung at the first one and missed it. The next one was called a strike, and w’ile he was turned round, arguin’ with Bull about it, another one come whizzin’ over and Bull says:

“You’re out!”

“It wasn’t a legal delivery,” says Brodie.

“Why not?” says Bull. “His feet was on the slab and you wasn’t out o’ your box.”

“You got a lot to learn about baseball,” says Brodie.

“I’m learnin’ fast,” says Bull. “I just found out why they call your club the Naps.”

He didn’t put nobody out of a game till along in the middle o’ that season. We was playin’ Washin’ton and Kennedy was in a battin’ slump. He was sore at the world and tryin’ to take it out on the umps. He’d throwed his glove all over the field and tossed his cap in the air and beefed on every decision, if it was close or not. He struck out twice, and when Bull called a strike on him his third time up, he stooped over and grabbed a handful o’ dirt.

“A yard outside!” he says, and tossed the dirt to’rds Bull.

“Well, Mr. Kennedy,” Bull says, “if there is a yard outside, that’s where you better spend the rest o’ the afternoon.”

“Am I out o’ the game?” says Kennedy.

“Hasn’t nobody told you?” says Bull. “You been out of it pretty near two weeks.”

“You’re about as funny as choppin’ down trees,” says Kennedy.

“Go in and dress,” Bull told him. “Maybe you’ll find your battin’ eye in your street clo’es.”

The next day Bull was umpirin’ the bases. Kennedy didn’t get suspended, and when he come to bat in the first innin’ and seen that Bull had switched, he yelled to him: “Congratulations! You ought to do better out there. It’s a cinch you couldn’t do worse.”

“Walter,” says Bull to Johnson, who was pitchin’, “give Kennedy a base on balls. I want to talk to him.”

In the last game o’ the series Kennedy finally did get a hold o’ one and hit it for two bases.

“Now it’s my turn to congratulate you,” Bull says to him.

“Oh,” says Kennedy, “I can hit ’em all right when they’s a good umps behind that plate.”

W’ile he was still talkin’, whoever was pitchin’ wheeled round and catched him a mile off’n the bag. Bull waved him out and he started to crab.

“Go on in to the bench, Kennedy,” says Bull. “The game must look funny to you from here anyway.”

Big Johnson worked against us in Chi one day and he had more stuff than I ever seen him have. Poor little Weber, facin’ him for the first time, was scared stiff. He just stood there and took three. Next time, he struck at one and let the next two come right over. Bull, who was back o’ the plate, couldn’t help from laughin’ and the kid got sore.

“Why don’t you call ’em all strikes!” he says.

“I would,” Bull says, “only they’s just a few o’ them I can see.”

Well, Weber’s third trip up there was just like his first one. He didn’t even swing. And after Bull had called him out for the third time, he says:

“Fine work, umps! You ought to go to an oculist and get the dust took out o’ your eyes.”

“Yes,” says Bull, “and you ought to go to a surgeon and have the bat removed from your shoulder.”

One afternoon Jennin’s started a kid named Sawyer against us. He was hog wild and he throwed ten balls without gettin’ a strike.

“It looks like a tough day for us, Bull,” says Stanage.

“Well, anyway,” Bull says, “my right arm needs a good rest.”

When two fellas had walked and they was two balls on the next one, Sawyer pitched a ball that you could of called either way. Bull called it a ball.

“What was the matter with that one?” says Sawyer.

“You pitched it,” says Bull.

He was base umpire once when Walsh caught Carney flatfooted off o’ third base. It was in the ninth innin’ and they was only the one run behind us, so Carney begin to whine.

“Kind o’ drowsy, eh?” says Bull. “I’ll bet your mother was up all night with you.”

Before the end of his first season he had the boys pretty well scared o’ that tongue of his’n and they weren’t none o’ them sayin’ much to him. But o’ course, durin’ the winter, they forgot how he could lash ’em, and when spring come again he was as good as ever. It’s been that way every season since. Along about this time, and up to July, they’re layin’ themself wide open and takin’ all he can give. Then, from July on, they’re tired o’ bein’ laughed at and they see they can’t get the best of him, so they lay off.

Not me, though. I beef on every decision he makes against me all season long. I can get as good a laugh when it’s me that’s the goat as when it’s somebody else.

He’s pulled some pippins on me. I wisht I’d wrote down even half o’ them, but anyway they don’t sound as good when I tell ’em as when he sprung ’em on me.

I remember we was playin’ our last series with the Boston club in 1912. They’d cinched the pennant already and nobody cared a whole lot how our games come out. I’ve got plenty o’ friends in Boston, and the first night we was there I neglected to go to bed. So the next afternoon I was kind o’ logy.

I dropped a couple o’ thrown balls at first base and was off the bag once when I had all the time in the world to find it. Well, Bull had three or four close ones to guess and he guessed ’em all against us.

“Are you goin’ to work in the World’s Series?” I ast him.

“I haven’t heard,” he says.

“If you do,” I says, “I’m goin’ to bet my season’s pay on the Red Sox.”

“If you’re lookin’ for easy money,” says Bull, “why don’t you go ahead and bet your season’s pay on the Red Sox, and then sign with the Giants to play first base?”

In 1914 I’d been havin’ a long spell o’ bad luck with my hittin’ and they was just gettin’ ready to bench me when one day, in St. Louis, I got one safe. I tried to make two bases on it, but overslid the bag and Bull called me out.

“Oh, Bull!” I says. “Have a heart.”

“They won’t bawl you for this,” says Bull. “You ain’t been here in so long it’s no wonder you forgot where the station was. I think you done pretty well to remember my name. I been umpirin’ the bases for two weeks.”

Then they was once in Boston, just last year. We still had a chance yet and we was crazy to take a fall out o’ that bunch. I was overanxious, I guess. Anyway, it was a tight game and in the sixth or seventh innin’ I got caught off o’ first. “Bull,” I says, “if you’re with the home club, why don’t you wear a white suit?”

“Larry,” says he, “you ought to play ball in your pyjamas.”

And in New York one day I give somebody the hit and run, and the ball fooled me and I didn’t swing. The fella was throwed out at second base, and Bull called it a strike on me.

“Why, Bull!” I says. “He was wastin’ that ball.”

“Sure he was,” says Bull. “All the good balls is wasted on you.”

And once in Washin’ton, we was two runs to the good in the ninth and had two men out and it looked all over. The next man⁠—Milan, I think it was⁠—hit a fly ball straight up and I hollered I was goin’ to take it. Well, it just missed beanin’ me and Milan pulled up at second base. The next fella hit a ground ball between I and the bag. I missed it clean. Milan scored and the other fella stopped at second. Then somebody made a three-base hit. The score was tied and the winnin’ run was on third base.

A slow ground ball was hit down to’rds me. I seen that Doran, who was pitchin’, was goin’ for the ball instead o’ the bag and I seen that the ball was mine and I’d have to get it and chase back with it myself. I done it as fast as I could and the play was mighty close. Bull called the man safe. It meant the game and we was all sore, but me especially, on account o’ them two flivvers.

“You blind owl!” I says to Bull. “Who told you you could umpire?”

“Who recommended you to Griffith?” says Bull.

That’s the way he was. You could set up all night and figure out what you was goin’ to say to him next day, and then when you said it, he’d come back with somethin’ that made you wish you hadn’t. That is, unless you was like me and kept after him just for the laughs he give you.

I and Tommy set there talkin’ till pretty close to midnight. Then we decided they wasn’t no more use waitin’ for Bull. So Tommy went up to his room and I moseyed out the front door and onto the walk. I hadn’t took more’n a couple o’ steps when I seen the guy we’d been fannin’ about. He was just goin’ in to the hotel bar. I followed him.

“Hello, Bull!” I says, when we was both inside.

“What’s the idear?” he says. “Did you come clear down here to tell me that Cady didn’t tag you?”

“No,” I says. “He tagged me all right. But I’m taggin’ you to find out what’s got into you.”

“I guess I got plenty into me now,” says he. “When a man that’s cold sober gets fired from his job for bein’ lit, they’s only the one thing to do. I’ve been tryin’ my best all evenin’ to deserve the reputation they’ve wished on me.”

I give him the double O. He could walk straight and he could talk straight. But he was kind of owl-eyed and his face looked like a royal flush o’ diamonds.

“Let’s have somethin’,” he says.

“You’ve had enough,” says I.

“That’s no sign I ain’t goin’ to have more,” he says.

“You better go to bed,” I says.

“What for?” says he. “I got nothin’ to do tomorrow or any other tomorrow. I’m through.”

“They’s other leagues,” says I. “You won’t have no trouble gettin’ a job.”

“I don’t want no job,” says Bull. “I haven’t no use for a job.”

“What are you goin’ to live on?” I ast him.

“I don’t want to live,” he says.

“Aw, piffle!” says I. “You’ll feel better for a good night’s sleep.”

“Well,” says Bull, “they’s just as much chance o’ me gettin’ a good night’s sleep as they is o’ them playin’ part o’ the World’s Series in Peoria.”

“Bull,” I says, “I believe they’s somethin’ botherin’ you outside o’ losin’ your job.”

“You’re too smart to be playin’ ball,” he says.

O’ course I knowed then that Tommy’d been right⁠—that the old boy had had a blow o’ some kind. And I was mighty curious to learn what’d came off. But I realized it wouldn’t get me nothin’ to ask.

We h’isted three or four together without exchangin’ a word. Then, all of a sudden, I seen a big tear streakin’ down Bull’s cheek and in another minute I was listenin’ to his story.

Bull’s parents is both dead⁠—been dead five or six years. He never had no brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles or nothin’. He was born down South somewheres and didn’t have no use for cold weather, but his old man moved to Buffalo when Bull was about sixteen, so from that time till his mother and father died he spent his winters, and the summers before he went to umpirin’, up North. They wasn’t no reason why he shouldn’t suit himself after the old people passed out, so back South he went for his winters. He stayed in New Orleans the first couple o’ years, but it cost him a pile o’ money. Then he tried Montgomery, and that’s where he met the lady.

Her name’s Maggie, Maggie Gregory. Bull described her as the prettiest thing he ever seen, and so on. The Gregorys didn’t have so much dough that they didn’t know how to spend it. In fact, they was kind o’ hard up. The head o’ the house worked in a hardware store for somethin’ like fifteen a week. He had a son named Martin; yes, sir, the same Martin Gregory that Connie Mack let go last week and we got signed up now.

Martin and Maggie was twins. Maggie was learnin’ the milliner trade, but at the time Bull met ’em Martin wasn’t workin’ at all, except durin’ meals. He was one o’ the kind o’ guys that’d rather go to the electric chair, where he could be sure o’ settin’ down, than attend the theater and take a chance o’ havin’ to stand up w’ile they played the “Star-Spangled Banner.” If he’d lived in a town where they wasn’t no letter carriers he wouldn’t never got no mail. He’d of starved to death in a cafeteria with a pocket full o’ money.

He treated the whole of his family like they was waiters, and they treated him like he was the Kaiser. His mother was crazy over him, and Maggie used to split fifty-fifty with him on her princely salary. The old man never called him, and seemed to just take it for granted that Martin was born to have the best of it.

Bull landed in Montgomery the same time that the Gregorys made up their mind to take a boarder. They put an ad in the paper and Bull answered it. He answered it in the evenin’, when Maggie was home. After gettin’ a look at her, he’d of stayed there if they made him sleep in the sink and give him nothin’ to eat but catnip.

Maggie and Martin was eighteen then. They ain’t no use o’ me tryin’ to give you Bull’s description of her. Martin, accordin’ to Bull, was a handsome kid and had the best clo’es his sister’s money could buy. He was built like an ath-a-lete and his features was enough like the girl’s to make him good-lookin’. Bull fell for him this first night; he didn’t know nothin’ then about the feud between Martin and Work.

Well, they all treated Bull like he was an old friend and made him feel more like it was his own house than just a place to board. Maggie smiled at him every time she seen him, though it wasn’t no case o’ love at first sight on her part; she was just tryin’ to be friendly. The old lady worried if he didn’t take nine or ten helpin’s o’ whatever was on the table, and kept his room as neat and clean as Martin’s. The old man played rummy with him three or four times a week and give Bull good laughs on all his quick stuff. And Martin took kindly to him, too, figurin’ probably that the dough Bull paid for board would mean more dude clo’es in the wardrobe. Bull says he never knowed what this here Southern hospitality was till he went to live with the Gregorys.

It wasn’t till Bull had been there about three weeks that he told ’em what he done for a livin’. Well, the old people and Maggie didn’t know nothin’ about baseball except that Martin, when he was a kid, had been the best player in the school where he attended at. He’d told ’em so. But Martin himself, it turned out, was a nut on the national pastime. He knowed who Cobb was and who Matty was and their records, right down to little bits o’ fractions. Not only that, but he went to see the Montgomery bunch perform whenever they had the courage to face the home crowd. So Bull was a hero to him, in spite of his profession.

At meals, Martin wouldn’t talk nothin’ but baseball, and Bull had to talk it with him. I suppose the proud parents and Maggie felt kind o’ sorry for Bull, figurin’ that the kid, bein’ perfect, was gettin’ all the best of him in the arguments. The old boy was foxy enough to see that the easiest way to win Maggie was by helpin’ to make Martin look good. So when they’d got about so far in a fannin’ bee, Bull’d stop dead and say, “By George! You’re right,” even if Martin was arguin’ that Walter Johnson ought to learn to throw left-handed and play third base.

Bull thought he was just a fresh kid. He thought the reason he wasn’t workin’ was probably because he’d lost a job and hadn’t found another. He liked Martin OK till he begin to suspect that he was too proud to toil. It was the old lady that give him the hunch, when she says somethin’ about the kid’s delicate health.

“Yes,” Bull says to himself, “he’s awful delicate lookin’, like Frank Gotch.”

Before the winter was half over, Bull was givin’ ’em the time o’ their lives, takin’ ’em somewheres every other night. It was a pipe that Maggie liked him, and it was a bigger pipe that she had him on her reserve list, with no chance to get away. But he was too shy to talk to her about anything but the climate; he says she was the first girl he was ever scared of.

Along in March, some o’ the Montgomery ball players showed up for their trainin’. Bull always took some work in the spring to get himself hard and fix up his windpipes, so that year he joined the local bunch and done stunts with them. Martin ast to go along with him the third or fourth day. So out they went together to the Montgomery orchard and Bull got the biggest su’prise of his life.

Instead o’ settin’ up in the stand and lookin’ on, Martin peeled down to his shirtsleeves and busted right into the practice. He tackled the high-low game first, and Bull says to see him at it you wouldn’t of never believed it was the same boy that wouldn’t drink coffee unless you held the cup to his mush. Baseball wasn’t work to him⁠—it was fun. And that made the whole difference.

Well, Martin showed so much life the first day that Bull borrowed a suit for him and fixed it with the Montgomery gang to leave him frolic round their park as much as he liked. And he wasn’t no joke with the ath-a-letes. He didn’t know nothin’, but he had as much mechanical ability as you ever see in a kid. He could whip the ball round like a shot, and he was good on ground balls and he swung the old stick like it was a lath. Bull give him a lot o’ pointers and so did the rest o’ the boys, and by the time Bull was ready to go North, Martin was good enough to hold down an infield job somewhere in the brush.

Maggie and old Gregory was as proud as peacocks. The old woman was proud too, but she was scared to death that the pet would get beaned or stepped on and killed. Bull finally convinced her that baseball was as safe as ridin’ in a rockin’-chair, and Martin was allowed to keep on with the only exercise he’d took in years, outside o’ puttin’ on his pyjamas at night and pullin’ ’em off in the mornin’.

Bull left Montgomery with the understandin’ that he could have his room when he come back in the fall. Maggie squeezed his hand when she told him goodbye, and that, Bull says, along with the post cards she sent him, was all that kept him alive that summer.

In June the Gregorys sent him a clippin’ from a Montgomery paper. Martin had been signed by the Montgomery club to play second base, and he looked like the best thing that had broke into the Southern League in years.

The second off-season that Bull spent with the Gregorys he was still too shy yet to make any play for the lady, outside o’ blowin’ all his loose change in showin’ she and her folks a time. But last fall, after they’d gave him his bit for workin’ in the big series, and he felt like he had enough financial backin’ to justify the plunge, he wired her to meet his train and he pulled his speech on her w’ile his nerve was still with him.

She didn’t say yes or she didn’t say no. She told him she liked him a whole lot bettern’n anybody except Brother Martin, and she appreciated his kindness to all o’ them, and so on. But it would take a lot o’ thinkin’ to decide the question, and could he wait? So he says he could do anything for her and they left it go at that.

As soon as they was off’n the subject, she begin to talk about Martin and what he’d been doin’ in baseball. She admitted that he was the greatest ball player south of Alaska, but o’ course the Montgomery club didn’t give him a fair show on account o’ bein’ jealous, and the manager kept him on the bench half the time for the fear some big league scout’d see him and steal him away from Montgomery. What she wanted Bull to do was tell some manager in our league about him, and have him bought. Martin would do the rest; he’d show ’em if he ever got the chance.

Well, Bull told her it was against the rules for an umps to recommend a ball player to a club in his own league. It wouldn’t be fair to the Boston club, for instance, if Bull give Detroit first whack at a second Cobb. O’ course Bull knowed that plenty o’ scouts must of saw Martin and passed him up, and that the Montgomery club wasn’t tryin’ to conceal a man for who they could get a big price.

She ast him if he couldn’t get some friend to do the recommendin’ if he couldn’t do it himself. He told her he was scared his part in it would be found out. Then she says that he must care a lot about her if he was afraid to take a little risk like that. He told her he’d try and think of a way to swing it, but she must give him time.

He found Martin more of a dude than ever and as modest as a wrestler. He couldn’t talk about nothin’ but how much better he was than the Southern League, and it was easy to see from his clo’es that he wasn’t contributin’ nothin’ to the family except conversation and his personal attendance at meals.

Hatin’ yourself, though, ain’t nothin’ against a ball player. Take most any real star and when the dialogue ain’t about him he’s bored to death, and if he has a bad day, pitchin’ or hittin’ or whatever it is he does, it’s plain tough luck or rotten umpirin’.

So Bull didn’t think none the less o’ Martin’s ability on account o’ the size of his chest, even if he did get good an’ sick o’ hearin’ nothin’ but Martin, Martin, Martin, all day and half the night.

Bull would of gave anything if Maggie and the rest o’ them had forgot their scheme to land the pet in the big menagerie. But they wasn’t a chance. When he’d rather of been hearin’ that she cared somethin’ about him, she was eggin’ him on to hurry up and think of a way to bring Brother to the attention o’ the real people.

In December Bull read in the paper that Ted Pierce, the manager o’ the Montgomery club, was in town. He made a date to meet him and find out just how good Martin was.

“He’s just good enough to of pretty near drove me wild,” Ted told him. “If we’re ten runs ahead and he comes up with the bases full, he’ll hit one from here to Nashville. Or if we’re fifteen runs behind in the last half o’ the ninth, with two out, it’s fifty to one that he’ll get to first base. But put him up to that plate when everything depends on him and you’d think he had paralysis o’ the arms. He’ll take three in the groove and then holler murder at the umps.”

“Plain yellow, eh?” says Bull.

“I don’t like to say that about nobody,” Ted says. “But if the old U.S. called for volunteers, I’d bet on Benedict Arnold to beat him to the front.”

“Ain’t they no chance of him gettin’ over it?” ast Bull.

“I’ve tried everything,” says Ted. “I’ve called him all the names I could think of. I’ve tried to jolly him too; I’ve told him the pitchers was all scared of him and all he’d have to do was swing that club. But he’s just as bad as when he broke in.”

“He’s a kid yet,” says Bull. “It may be just stage fright.”

“It may be,” says Ted. “He certainly is cocky enough most o’ the time; it’s only in a pinch that he loses it.”

“I’m a friend of his family,” says Bull. “I’d like awful well to see him move up.”

“You wouldn’t like it no better’n me,” says Ted. “I’d like to see him move anywheres. I’m sick o’ lookin’ at him. If you can sell him for any kind of a price, I’ll give you half of it.”

“You know I couldn’t sell him,” says Bull. “But if somebody else recommended him to somebody and I was ast about him, I’d do my best.”

“Well,” says Ted, “I ain’t goin’ to recommend him nowheres, unless it’s to a fella I got no use for. I’m goin’ to try him again in the spring, and if he don’t quit chokin’ to death every time he’s got a chance to be a hero, I’ll tie a can on him whether he’s a friend o’ yours or Woodrow Wilson’s.”

“Outside o’ that, he’s a good ball player, is he?” says Bull.

“They ain’t no man I ever seen with more natural advantages,” Ted told him. “His record shows that he hit .329 and stole thirty-two bases and fielded as good as any second baseman in the league. But he didn’t make none o’ those base hits when we’d of gave a thousand dollars apiece for ’em, and when he could of pulled a pitcher out of a hole with a swell piece o’ fieldin’ he simply booted the ball all over the infield.”

“They’s just the one hope for him, then,” says Bull, “and that’s to go out and get some o’ the old nervine.”

“If you can make him do that,” says Ted, “I’ll guarantee to sell him to any club you name.”

So Bull, that night, told Maggie that Martin was still shy of experience and needed at least another year in minor league ball before he could hope to stick up with the E-light. He figured that he could work on the kid all the rest o’ the winter and maybe succeed in stingin’ him enough with hot conversation to get that streak out of him.

But Maggie right away wanted to know where Bull’d got his information and Bull had to tell her.

“No wonder!” says Maggie. “Pierce never did have a good word for him. Him and all the rest o’ them’s jealous.”

“You’re mistaken,” says Bull. “Pierce wouldn’t like nothin’ better than to sell him for a good price.”

“All right,” says Maggie, “if you think I’m mistaken, that shows you don’t care nothin’ about me.”

So Bull didn’t have no answer to that swell argument only to beg her pardon and say she was probably right.

Well, it finally come to a kind of a showdown: Bull was either to see that Martin got his chance this spring or he’d have to worry along without Maggie. She didn’t come right out and say that the way I’ve put it, but she made it plain enough so’s they wasn’t much chance to misunderstand.

Bull kicked the sheets round for a few nights and then got his idear. O’ course the first thing was to pick a club that was tryin’ to build up, and if possible to pick one that had a manager who’d pay the right kind of attention to a kid. Bull chose Connie as the best bet. The next thing was to persuade Connie to give Martin his trial. Bull wanted to be perfectly square, as you’ll see by the deal he put through. He got a fella there in Montgomery with a good Irish name to write to Connie and recommend the boy, and if Connie didn’t believe Martin was a good prospect he was to ask Bull about him, and if Martin didn’t make good he wouldn’t cost Connie nothin’, not even his railroad fare to the trainin’ camp and back. Bull framed it up with Ted Pierce as a matter o’ friendship to leave the boy go on trial, and if he did su’prise ’em all and make good, the Montgomery club was to get whatever Connie was willin’ to pay.

Well, the letter was sent and Connie wrote back to Bull, and says a boy named Gregory had been mentioned to him, and ast Bull was he worth a trial. Bull answered that Gregory was a kid with great natural ability and one or two faults that’d have to be overcome. Then Connie fixed it with the Montgomery club, and Bull thought he’d finished his job.

But he found out different. W’ile Maggie consented to becomin’ engaged, she wasn’t in no hurry to get married. She says her parents was gettin’ old and she didn’t want to leave ’em all summer, and besides, she didn’t have no clo’es, and besides, it would be a whole lot nicer to wait till fall and spend the honeymoon where they’d first met each other and when Bull was just startin’ his vacation instead of endin’ it. Bull coaxed and coaxed, but her rules was just like his’n⁠—she couldn’t change a decision on a question o’ judgment.

In the three weeks before Martin was to report in Jacksonville, Bull done nothin’ but try and shoot him full o’ confidence.

“The pitchers down here have got everything you’ll see in the big league,” he told him. “You don’t need to be afraid o’ none o’ them. A man that handles a bat the way you do can hit anything in the world if he’ll just swing. Connie or any other manager don’t care how many times you strike out in the pinch, provided you strike out tryin’. You got the stuff in you to make Cobb and Baker and them look like a rummy. Don’t get scared; that’s all.”

Bull pulled that talk on him right up to the day the kid left Montgomery. Down at the train, Bull says to him:

“Remember, they’s nothin’ to be scared of. Make us all proud o’ you! Make good!”

“I’ll make good if they give me a square deal,” he says.

“Yes,” Bull says to himself, “it’s a cinch it’ll be somebody else’s fault if he falls down. It always is.”

Well, in a little w’ile it come time for Bull to leave too. And here’s what the girl sprung on him at the partin’:

“You’ll help him all you can, won’t you?” she says.

“They’s not a chance for me to help him,” says Bull. “A man in my place can’t favor nobody.”

“A man could,” she says, “if a man knowed it would please the girl he was stuck on.”

Now if it’d of been me that she made that remark to, I’d of ast for waivers. But you know what they say about love bein’ blind. And when it’s a combination o’ love and an umpire⁠—well, how can you beat it!

Bull kept close tab on the papers and he seen that Martin was at second base in the lineup o’ the Ath-a-letics’ regular club. This was w’ile they was still South. Then, in one o’ their last exhibitions before the season started, Martin’s name was left out. He wrote to the kid and he wrote to Maggie, tryin’ to find out what was doin’. Maggie wrote back that she didn’t know and Martin didn’t answer at all.

The season begin and Bull was workin’ in the West. Every mornin’ he grabbed the papers and looked to see if Martin was back in. Four times in three weeks the kid went up to bat for somebody, but without doin’ no good. Then come the second week in this month and the first series between the Eastern clubs and us.

Bull had the Detroit⁠–⁠Philadelphia series. Just before the first game he run into Connie outside o’ the park. They shook hands and then Bull says:

“Didn’t you ask me about a ball player this winter?”

“Yes,” says Connie, “a boy named Gregory.”

“How’s he comin’?” says Bull.

“I don’t think he’s comin’,” says Connie. “I think he’s just gettin’ ready to go.”

“What’s the trouble?” ast Bull.

“Well,” says Connie, “once in a w’ile our club happens to not be more’n two or three runs behind, happens to have a chance to tie or win. Gregory’s one o’ the kind o’ ball players that spoils them chances. In practice down South he looked like a find. He hit everything and fielded all over the place. But we got into some tight exhibitions on the way up and when the opportunities come to him to do somethin’ big he faded away. He ain’t there in a pinch; that’s all.”

“Is he with you yet?” Bull ast him.

“He’s with us,” says Connie; “he’s with us for one more trial. If they’s a place in this series where I can use a substitute hitter, Gregory’s goin’ to be the man. And if he don’t swing that club the way he can swing it when it don’t mean nothin’, I’ll hand him his transportation back to Montgomery.”

“Does the kid know that?” ast Bull.

“Yes,” says Connie, “and if they’s any stuff in him the knowledge that this is his last chance should ought to bring it out.”

“You mean,” says Bull, “that if he strikes out again in a pinch he’s through?”

“No, I don’t,” says Connie. “I mean he’s through if he doesn’t try to murder that ball. I don’t care if he strikes out on three pitches, just so he swings.”

“But suppose,” says Bull⁠—“suppose they don’t throw him nothin’ he can hit; suppose they walk him.”

“O’ course,” says Connie, “if the count gets down to two and three, I’d want him to pass the ball up if it was bad. But if it was where he could reach it, I’d want him to take a wallop, just to show me he ain’t scared.”

So that’s how Martin stood with Connie at the beginnin’ o’ this series between the Ath-a-letics and Detroit.

The thing didn’t happen the first day. The game wasn’t close and Martin watched it all from the bench. Bull talked to him, but didn’t get what you could call a cordial welcome. Bull wasn’t su’prised at that; they ain’t no ball player that’ll kid with an umps when his dauber’s down. He refused Bull’s invitation to come round to the hotel that night and have supper with him. And Bull decided that the best play was to leave him alone.

They was a letter from the girl waitin’ for Bull that evenin’. She’d heard from her brother and she knowed that he wasn’t burnin’ up the League; but he’d confessed that Connie hadn’t treated him good and the umpires had robbed him blind. She knew, she wrote, that Bull wouldn’t cheat him; if Bull really cared for her, he’d help him if he got a chance. And it would kill her and her father and mother besides if Martin had to face the disgrace o’ not makin’ good.

Bull went to bed and dreamt that Martin was up in a pinch, and he was umpirin’ behind the plate, and Martin turned round and looked at him just before the ball was pitched, and Bull smiled at him to encourage him, and Martin took an awful wallop at the pill and give it a ride to the fence in right center. That’s what Bull dreamt before the second game o’ that series. And here’s what really come off:

Big Coveleskie and Bush was havin’ a whale of a battle. They wasn’t nobody scored till the eighth. Cobb got on then, with only one out. So that give Detroit a run. The ninth looked to be all over. Two o’ the Ath-a-letics was out. Then somebody got hold o’ one and lit on it for three bases, and what was left o’ the crowd decided to stick round a w’ile.

Bull says he knowed Martin was comin’ up before he ever looked. And he smiled at him when he announced himself as the batter.

Coveleskie come with a fast ball. Martin had to duck to keep from gettin’ hit. Coveleskie come with a curve. Martin made a feeble swing and missed it. Jennin’s hollered from the bench:

“Run out with the water! The boy’s goin’ to swoon!”

Another curve ball that broke over, and Martin left it go.

“Strike two!” says Bull.

“It was inside,” says Martin.

“You’ll never drive in that run with a base on balls,” says Bull.

Coveleskie come with a curve that was high and outside. It was the second ball. He come with another curve, in the same spot. It was three and two.

“Give him all you got!” yelled Jennin’s. “Get it over there! He’s too scared to swing!”

Bull told me that w’ile Coveleskie was gettin’ ready for that next pitch he could see Maggie and the old folks in front of him just as plain as if they was there, and a voice kept sayin’ to him, “Call it a ball! Call it a ball!”

The ball come⁠—a fast one. Bull knowed what it was and where it was comin’, and he bit his tongue to keep from sayin’ “Swing!” Right across the middle it come, as perfect a strike as was ever pitched. And Martin’s bat stayed on his shoulder.

“You’re out!” says Bull. “It cut the heart!”

The heart o’ the plate, and Bull’s too, I guess.

Bull met Connie again next day, outside o’ the park.

“I’ve canned your friend Gregory,” says Connie.

“Do you know,” says Bull, “I come near callin’ that last one a ball?”

“If you had,” says Connie, “the kid would of been let out anyway, and you’d of fell, in my estimation, from the best umpire in the league to the worst in the world.”

Now what does dear little Brother Martin do next? Instead o’ goin’ back to Montgomery like a man and tryin’ to get a fresh start with the club that he’d been borrowed off of, he sets down and writes Maggie that Connie would of kept him only for Bull callin’ him out on a ball that was so low and so far outside that the Detroit catcher had to lay down to get it, and that Bull done it because he didn’t like him, and if Maggie didn’t tie a can to Bull, Martin was through with her and with the old man and old lady too.

Well, the girl wrote back to Bull callin’ off the engagement, sayin’ how sorry her and her parents was to find out that he would stoop to such meanness and askin’ him not to communicate with her no more. And Bull’s bullheaded enough so as he wouldn’t make a move to square things.

He got that letter from her day before yesterday, just before he left his hotel to come out to the yard. Is it any wonder he didn’t say nothin’ when I claimed Cady didn’t tag me, and went entirely off’n his nut when Cahill called him a crook?

W’ile he was spillin’ me the story I got enough into him to make a good sleepin’ potion, and then helped him to the hay. The first thing yesterday mornin’ I seen Ban and fixed that end of it by repeatin’ the romance. But don’t never breathe that Ban knows all about it. Bull thinks he’s takin’ him back because it was his first offense. And he’s comin’ back; Ban says he’s promised to be in there tomorrow.

And right here in my pocket I got somethin’ to show him that’ll be better news than gettin’ back his job. As luck would have it, I was the first guy to get to the park yesterday, and when I blowed into the clubhouse, who was settin’ there but young Mr. Gregory himself! He told me his name and wanted to know was they any chance of him gettin’ a tryout with us?

“Yes,” I says, “they’s one chance and you’ll get it if you do as I say. Connie couldn’t of gave you to the Montgomery club again if we hadn’t waived. But I’ll fix it for you to join us tomorrow and try your luck again on these conditions: In the first place, you got to go right out now and wire your sister and tell her that the ball you was called out on was right through the middle o’ the plate and the best strike you ever seen, and that Connie would of released you anyway, and that if your sister don’t wire right back to Bull, in my care, statin’ that she’s reconsidered and it’s still on between she and him, you won’t never recognize her as your sister.”

“And what if I won’t do that?” he says.

“You won’t get no chance at a job here,” says I, “but you’ll get the worst lickin’ that was ever gave.”

He sent the telegram and I got a night letter this mornin’; addressed to Bull it was, but I read it. I’ve been tryin’ to locate him all day and he’s goin’ to call up as soon as he gets back to his hotel. Everything’s fixed and tomorrow he’ll feel so good that he’s liable to forget himself and give us somethin’ but the worst of it.

As for Martin, if he don’t make good with our club it’ll be because he can’t hit and not because he’s too scared to try. I’ll have him too scared o’ me to be scared of anything else.

Champion

Midge Kelly scored his first knockout when he was seventeen. The knockee was his brother Connie, three years his junior and a cripple. The purse was a half dollar given to the younger Kelly by a lady whose electric had just missed bumping his soul from his frail little body.

Connie did not know Midge was in the house, else he never would have risked laying the prize on the arm of the least comfortable chair in the room, the better to observe its shining beauty. As Midge entered from the kitchen, the crippled boy covered the coin with his hand, but the movement lacked the speed requisite to escape his brother’s quick eye.

“Watcha got there?” demanded Midge.

“Nothin’,” said Connie.

“You’re a one legged liar!” said Midge.

He strode over to his brother’s chair and grasped the hand that concealed the coin.

“Let loose!” he ordered.

Connie began to cry.

“Let loose and shut up your noise,” said the elder, and jerked his brother’s hand from the chair arm.

The coin fell onto the bare floor. Midge pounced on it. His weak mouth widened in a triumphant smile.

“Nothin’, huh?” he said. “All right, if it’s nothin’ you don’t want it.”

“Give that back,” sobbed the younger.

“I’ll give you a red nose, you little sneak! Where’d you steal it?”

“I didn’t steal it. It’s mine. A lady give it to me after she pretty near hit me with a car.”

“It’s a crime she missed you,” said Midge.

Midge started for the front door. The cripple picked up his crutch, rose from his chair with difficulty, and, still sobbing, came toward Midge. The latter heard him and stopped.

“You better stay where you’re at,” he said.

“I want my money,” cried the boy.

“I know what you want,” said Midge.

Doubling up the fist that held the half dollar, he landed with all his strength on his brother’s mouth. Connie fell to the floor with a thud, the crutch tumbling on top of him. Midge stood beside the prostrate form.

“Is that enough?” he said. “Or do you want this, too?”

And he kicked him in the crippled leg.

“I guess that’ll hold you,” he said.

There was no response from the boy on the floor. Midge looked at him a moment, then at the coin in his hand, and then went out into the street, whistling.

An hour later, when Mrs. Kelly came home from her day’s work at Faulkner’s Steam Laundry, she found Connie on the floor, moaning. Dropping on her knees beside him, she called him by name a score of times. Then she got up and, pale as a ghost, dashed from the house. Dr. Ryan left the Kelly abode about dusk and walked toward Halsted Street. Mrs. Dorgan spied him as he passed her gate.

“Who’s sick, Doctor?” she called.

“Poor little Connie,” he replied. “He had a bad fall.”

“How did it happen?”

“I can’t say for sure, Margaret, but I’d almost bet he was knocked down.”

“Knocked down!” exclaimed Mrs. Dorgan.

“Why, who⁠—?”

“Have you seen the other one lately?”

“Michael? No, not since mornin’. You can’t be thinkin’⁠—”

“I wouldn’t put it past him, Margaret,” said the doctor gravely. “The lad’s mouth is swollen and cut, and his poor, skinny little leg is bruised. He surely didn’t do it to himself and I think Helen suspects the other one.”

“Lord save us!” said Mrs. Dorgan. “I’ll run over and see if I can help.”

“That’s a good woman,” said Doctor Ryan, and went on down the street.

Near midnight, when Midge came home, his mother was sitting at Connie’s bedside. She did not look up.

“Well,” said Midge, “what’s the matter?”

She remained silent. Midge repeated his question.

“Michael, you know what’s the matter,” she said at length.

“I don’t know nothin’,” said Midge.

“Don’t lie to me, Michael. What did you do to your brother?”

“Nothin’.”

“You hit him.”

“Well, then, I hit him. What of it? It ain’t the first time.”

Her lips pressed tightly together, her face like chalk, Ellen Kelly rose from her chair and made straight for him. Midge backed against the door.

“Lay off’n me, Ma. I don’t want to fight no woman.”

Still she came on breathing heavily.

“Stop where you’re at, Ma,” he warned.

There was a brief struggle and Midge’s mother lay on the floor before him.

“You ain’t hurt, Ma. You’re lucky I didn’t land good. And I told you to lay off’n me.”

“God forgive you, Michael!”

Midge found Hap Collins in the showdown game at the Royal.

“Come on out a minute,” he said.

Hap followed him out on the walk.

“I’m leavin’ town for a w’ile,” said Midge.

“What for?”

“Well, we had a little run-in up to the house. The kid stole a half buck off’n me, and when I went after it he cracked me with his crutch. So I nailed him. And the old lady came at me with a chair and I took it off’n her and she fell down.”

“How is Connie hurt?”

“Not bad.”

“What are you runnin’ away for?”

“Who the hell said I was runnin’ away? I’m sick and tired o’ gettin’ picked on; that’s all. So I’m leavin’ for a w’ile and I want a piece o’ money.”

“I ain’t only got six bits,” said Happy.

“You’re in bad shape, ain’t you? Well, come through with it.”

Happy came through.

“You oughtn’t to hit the kid,” he said.

“I ain’t astin’ you who can I hit,” snarled Midge. “You try to put somethin’ over on me and you’ll get the same dose. I’m goin’ now.”

“Go as far as you like,” said Happy, but not until he was sure that Kelly was out of hearing.

Early the following morning, Midge boarded a train for Milwaukee. He had no ticket, but no one knew the difference. The conductor remained in the caboose.

On a night six months later, Midge hurried out of the “stage door” of the Star Boxing Club and made for Duane’s saloon, two blocks away. In his pocket were twelve dollars, his reward for having battered up one Demon Dempsey through the six rounds of the first preliminary.

It was Midge’s first professional engagement in the manly art. Also it was the first time in weeks that he had earned twelve dollars.

On the way to Duane’s he had to pass Niemann’s. He pulled his cap over his eyes and increased his pace until he had gone by. Inside Niemann’s stood a trusting bartender, who for ten days had staked Midge to drinks and allowed him to ravage the lunch on a promise to come in and settle the moment he was paid for the prelim.

Midge strode into Duane’s and aroused the napping bartender by slapping a silver dollar on the festive board.

“Gimme a shot,” said Midge.

The shooting continued until the windup at the Star was over and part of the fight crowd joined Midge in front of Duane’s bar. A youth in the early twenties, standing next to young Kelly, finally summoned sufficient courage to address him.

“Wasn’t you in the first bout?” he ventured.

“Yeh,” Midge replied.

“My name’s Hersch,” said the other.

Midge received the startling information in silence.

“I don’t want to butt in,” continued Mr. Hersch, “but I’d like to buy you a drink.”

“All right,” said Midge, “but don’t overstrain yourself.”

Mr. Hersch laughed uproariously and beckoned to the bartender.

“You certainly gave that wop a trimmin’ tonight,” said the buyer of the drink, when they had been served. “I thought you’d kill him.”

“I would if I hadn’t let up,” Midge replied. “I’ll kill ’em all.”

“You got the wallop all right,” the other said admiringly.

“Have I got the wallop?” said Midge. “Say, I can kick like a mule. Did you notice them muscles in my shoulders?”

“Notice ’em? I couldn’t help from noticin’ ’em,” said Hersch. “I says to the fella settin’ alongside o’ me, I says: ‘Look at them shoulders! No wonder he can hit,’ I says to him.”

“Just let me land and it’s goodbye, baby,” said Midge. “I’ll kill ’em all.”

The oral manslaughter continued until Duane’s closed for the night. At parting, Midge and his new friend shook hands and arranged for a meeting the following evening.

For nearly a week the two were together almost constantly. It was Hersch’s pleasant role to listen to Midge’s modest revelations concerning himself, and to buy every time Midge’s glass was empty. But there came an evening when Hersch regretfully announced that he must go home to supper.

“I got a date for eight bells,” he confided. “I could stick till then, only I must clean up and put on the Sunday clo’es, ’cause she’s the prettiest little thing in Milwaukee.”

“Can’t you fix it for two?” asked Midge.

“I don’t know who to get,” Hersch replied. “Wait, though. I got a sister and if she ain’t busy, it’ll be OK. She’s no bum for looks herself.”

So it came about that Midge and Emma Hersch and Emma’s brother and the prettiest little thing in Milwaukee foregathered at Wall’s and danced half the night away. And Midge and Emma danced every dance together, for though every little onestep seemed to induce a new thirst of its own, Lou Hersch stayed too sober to dance with his own sister.

The next day, penniless at last in spite of his phenomenal ability to make someone else settle, Midge Kelly sought out Doc Hammond, matchmaker for the Star, and asked to be booked for the next show.

“I could put you on with Tracy for the next bout,” said Doc.

“What’s they in it?” asked Midge.

“Twenty if you cop,” Doc told him.

“Have a heart,” protested Midge. “Didn’t I look good the other night?”

“You looked all right. But you aren’t Freddie Welsh yet by a consid’able margin.”

“I ain’t scared of Freddie Welsh or none of ’em,” said Midge.

“Well, we don’t pay our boxers by the size of their chests,” Doc said. “I’m offerin’ you this Tracy bout. Take it or leave it.”

“All right; I’m on,” said Midge, and he passed a pleasant afternoon at Duane’s on the strength of his booking.

Young Tracy’s manager came to Midge the night before the show.

“How do you feel about this go?” he asked.

“Me?” said Midge, “I feel all right. What do you mean, how do I feel?”

“I mean,” said Tracy’s manager, “that we’re mighty anxious to win, ’cause the boy’s got a chanct in Philly if he cops this one.”

“What’s your proposition?” asked Midge.

“Fifty bucks,” said Tracy’s manager.

“What do you think I am, a crook? Me lay down for fifty bucks. Not me!”

“Seventy-five, then,” said Tracy’s manager.

The market closed on eighty and the details were agreed on in short order. And the next night Midge was stopped in the second round by a terrific slap on the forearm.

This time Midge passed up both Niemann’s and Duane’s, having a sizable account at each place, and sought his refreshment at Stein’s farther down the street.

When the profits of his deal with Tracy were gone, he learned, by firsthand information from Doc Hammond and the matchmakers at the other “clubs,” that he was no longer desired for even the cheapest of preliminaries. There was no danger of his starving or dying of thirst while Emma and Lou Hersch lived. But he made up his mind, four months after his defeat by Young Tracy, that Milwaukee was not the ideal place for him to live.

“I can lick the best of ’em,” he reasoned, “but there ain’t no more chanct for me here. I can maybe go east and get on somewheres. And besides⁠—”

But just after Midge had purchased a ticket to Chicago with the money he had “borrowed” from Emma Hersch “to buy shoes,” a heavy hand was laid on his shoulders and he turned to face two strangers.

“Where are you goin’, Kelly?” inquired the owner of the heavy hand.

“Nowheres,” said Midge. “What the hell do you care?”

The other stranger spoke:

“Kelly, I’m employed by Emma Hersch’s mother to see that you do right by her. And we want you to stay here till you’ve done it.”

“You won’t get nothin’ but the worst of it, monkeying with me,” said Midge.

Nevertheless, he did not depart for Chicago that night. Two days later, Emma Hersch became Mrs. Kelly, and the gift of the groom, when once they were alone, was a crushing blow on the bride’s pale cheek.

Next morning, Midge left Milwaukee as he had entered it⁠—by fast freight.

“They’s no use kiddin’ ourself anymore,” said Tommy Haley. “He might get down to thirty-seven in a pinch, but if he done below that a mouse could stop him. He’s a welter; that’s what he is and he knows it as well as I do. He’s growed like a weed in the last six mont’s. I told him, I says, ‘If you don’t quit growin’ they won’t be nobody for you to box, only Willard and them.’ He says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t run away from Willard if I weighed twenty pounds more.’ ”

“He must hate himself,” said Tommy’s brother.

“I never seen a good one that didn’t,” said Tommy. “And Midge is a good one; don’t make no mistake about that. I wisht we could of got Welsh before the kid growed so big. But it’s too late now. I won’t make no holler, though, if we can match him up with the Dutchman.”

“Who do you mean?”

“Young Goetz, the welter champ. We mightn’t not get so much dough for the bout itself, but it’d roll in afterward. What a drawin’ card we’d be, ’cause the people pays their money to see the fella with the wallop, and that’s Midge. And we’d keep the title just as long as Midge could make the weight.”

“Can’t you land no match with Goetz?”

“Sure, ’cause he needs the money. But I’ve went careful with the kid so far and look at the results I got! So what’s the use of takin’ a chanct? The kid’s comin’ every minute and Goetz is goin’ back faster’n big Johnson did. I think we could lick him now; I’d bet my life on it. But six mont’s from now they won’t be no risk. He’ll of licked hisself before that time. Then all as we’ll have to do is sign up with him and wait for the referee to stop it. But Midge is so crazy to get at him now that I can’t hardly hold him back.”

The brothers Haley were lunching in a Boston hotel. Dan had come down from Holyoke to visit with Tommy and to watch the latter’s protégé go twelve rounds, or less, with Bud Cross. The bout promised little in the way of a contest, for Midge had twice stopped the Baltimore youth and Bud’s reputation for gameness was all that had earned him the date. The fans were willing to pay the price to see Midge’s haymaking left, but they wanted to see it used on an opponent who would not jump out of the ring the first time he felt its crushing force. But Cross was such an opponent, and his willingness to stop boxing-gloves with his eyes, ears, nose and throat had long enabled him to escape the horrors of honest labor. A game boy was Bud, and he showed it in his battered, swollen, discolored face.

“I should think,” said Dan Haley, “that the kid’d do whatever you tell him after all you done for him.”

“Well,” said Tommy, “he’s took my dope pretty straight so far, but he’s so sure of hisself that he can’t see no reason for waitin’. He’ll do what I say, though; he’d be a sucker not to.”

“You got a contrac’ with him?”

“No, I don’t need no contrac’. He knows it was me that drug him out o’ the gutter and he ain’t goin’ to turn me down now, when he’s got the dough and bound to get more. Where’d he of been at if I hadn’t listened to him when he first come to me? That’s pretty near two years ago now, but it seems like last week. I was settin’ in the s’loon acrost from the Pleasant Club in Philly, waitin’ for McCann to count the dough and come over, when this little bum blowed in and tried to stand the house off for a drink. They told him nothin’ doin’ and to beat it out o’ there, and then he seen me and come over to where I was settin’ and ast me wasn’t I a boxin’ man and I told him who I was. Then he ast me for money to buy a shot and I told him to set down and I’d buy it for him.

“Then we got talkin’ things over and he told me his name and told me about fightn’ a couple o’ prelims out to Milwaukee. So I says, ‘Well, boy, I don’t know how good or how rotten you are, but you won’t never get nowheres trainin’ on that stuff.’ So he says he’d cut it out if he could get on in a bout and I says I would give him a chanct if he played square with me and didn’t touch no more to drink. So we shook hands and I took him up to the hotel with me and give him a bath and the next day I bought him some clo’es. And I staked him to eats and sleeps for over six weeks. He had a hard time breakin’ away from the polish, but finally I thought he was fit and I give him his chanct. He went on with Smiley Sayer and stopped him so quick that Smiley thought sure he was poisoned.

“Well, you know what he’s did since. The only beatin’ in his record was by Tracy in Milwaukee before I got hold of him, and he’s licked Tracy three times in the last year.

“I’ve gave him all the best of it in a money way and he’s got seven thousand bucks in cold storage. How’s that for a kid that was in the gutter two years ago? And he’d have still more yet if he wasn’t so nuts over clo’es and got to stop at the good hotels and so forth.”

“Where’s his home at?”

“Well, he ain’t really got no home. He came from Chicago and his mother canned him out o’ the house for bein’ no good. She give him a raw deal, I guess, and he says he won’t have nothin’ to do with her unlest she comes to him first. She’s got a pile o’ money, he says, so he ain’t worryin’ about her.”

The gentleman under discussion entered the café and swaggered to Tommy’s table, while the whole room turned to look.

Midge was the picture of health despite a slightly colored eye and an ear that seemed to have no opening. But perhaps it was not his healthiness that drew all eyes. His diamond horseshoe tie pin, his purple cross-striped shirt, his orange shoes and his light blue suit fairly screamed for attention.

“Where you been?” he asked Tommy. “I been lookin’ all over for you.”

“Set down,” said his manager.

“No time,” said Midge. “I’m goin’ down to the w’arf and see ’em unload the fish.”

“Shake hands with my brother Dan,” said Tommy.

Midge shook with the Holyoke Haley.

“If you’re Tommy’s brother, you’re OK with me,” said Midge, and the brothers beamed with pleasure.

Dan moistened his lips and murmured an embarrassed reply, but it was lost on the young gladiator.

“Leave me take twenty,” Midge was saying. “I prob’ly won’t need it, but I don’t like to be caught short.”

Tommy parted with a twenty dollar bill and recorded the transaction in a small black book the insurance company had given him for Christmas.

“But,” he said, “it won’t cost you no twenty to look at them fish. Want me to go along?”

“No,” said Midge hastily. “You and your brother here prob’ly got a lot to say to each other.”

“Well,” said Tommy, “don’t take no bad money and don’t get lost. And you better be back at four o’clock and lay down a w’ile.”

“I don’t need no rest to beat this guy,” said Midge. “He’ll do enough layin’ down for the both of us.”

And laughing even more than the jest called for, he strode out through the fire of admiring and startled glances.

The corner of Boylston and Tremont was the nearest Midge got to the wharf, but the lady awaiting him was doubtless a more dazzling sight than the catch of the luckiest Massachusetts fisherman. She could talk, too⁠—probably better than the fish.

“O you Kid!” she said, flashing a few silver teeth among the gold. “O you fighting man!”

Midge smiled up at her.

“We’ll go somewheres and get a drink,” he said. “One won’t hurt.”

In New Orleans, five months after he had rearranged the map of Bud Cross for the third time, Midge finished training for his championship bout with the Dutchman.

Back in his hotel after the final workout, Midge stopped to chat with some of the boys from up north, who had made the long trip to see a champion dethroned, for the result of this bout was so nearly a foregone conclusion that even the experts had guessed it.

Tommy Haley secured the key and the mail and ascended to the Kelly suite. He was bathing when Midge came in, half an hour later.

“Any mail?” asked Midge.

“There on the bed,” replied Tommy from the tub.

Midge picked up the stack of letters and postcards and glanced them over. From the pile he sorted out three letters and laid them on the table. The rest he tossed into the wastebasket. Then he picked up the three and sat for a few moments holding them, while his eyes gazed off into space. At length he looked again at the three unopened letters in his hand; then he put one in his pocket and tossed the other two at the basket. They missed their target and fell on the floor.

“Hell!” said Midge, and stooping over picked them up.

He opened one postmarked Milwaukee and read:

Dear Husband:

I have wrote to you so manny times and got no anser and I dont know if you ever got them, so I am writeing again in the hopes you will get this letter and anser. I dont like to bother you with my trubles and I would not only for the baby and I am not asking you should write to me but only send a little money and I am not asking for myself but the baby has not been well a day sence last Aug. and the dr. told me she cant live much longer unless I give her better food and thats impossible the way things are. Lou has not been working for a year and what I make dont hardley pay for the rent. I am not asking for you to give me any money, but only you should send what I loaned when convenient and I think it amts. to about $36.00. Please try and send that amt. and it will help me, but if you cant send the whole amt. try and send me something.

Your wife,
Emma.

Midge tore the letter into a hundred pieces and scattered them over the floor.

“Money, money, money!” he said. “They must think I’m made o’ money. I s’pose the old woman’s after it too.”

He opened his mother’s letter:

dear Michael Connie wonted me to rite and say you must beet the dutchman and he is sur you will and wonted me to say we wont you to rite and tell us about it, but I gess you havent no time to rite or we herd from you long beffore this but I wish you would rite jest a line or 2 boy becaus it wuld be better for Connie then a barl of medisin. It wuld help me to keep things going if you send me money now and then when you can spair it but if you cant send no money try and fine time to rite a letter onley a few lines and it will please Connie. jest think boy he hasent got out of bed in over 3 yrs. Connie says good luck.

Your Mother,
Ellen F. Kelly.

“I thought so,” said Midge. “They’re all alike.”

The third letter was from New York. It read:

Hon:⁠—This is the last letter you will get from me before your champ, but I will send you a telegram Saturday, but I can’t say as much in a telegram as in a letter and I am writeing this to let you know I am thinking of you and praying for good luck.

Lick him good hon and don’t wait no longer than you have to and don’t forget to wire me as soon as its over. Give him that little old left of yours on the nose hon and don’t be afraid of spoiling his good looks because he couldn’t be no homlier than he is. But don’t let him spoil my baby’s pretty face. You won’t will you hon.

Well hon I would give anything to be there and see it, but I guess you love Haley better than me or you wouldn’t let him keep me away. But when your champ hon we can do as we please and tell Haley to go to the devil.

Well hon I will send you a telegram Saturday and I almost forgot to tell you I will need some more money, a couple hundred say and you will have to wire it to me as soon as you get this. You will won’t you hon.

I will send you a telegram Saturday and remember hon I am pulling for you.

Well goodbye sweetheart and good luck.

Grace.

“They’re all alike,” said Midge. “Money, money, money.”

Tommy Haley, shining from his ablutions, came in from the adjoining room.

“Thought you’d be layin’ down,” he said.

“I’m goin’ to,” said Midge, unbuttoning his orange shoes.

“I’ll call you at six and you can eat up here without no bugs to pester you. I got to go down and give them birds their tickets.”

“Did you hear from Goldberg?” asked Midge.

“Didn’t I tell you? Sure; fifteen weeks at five hundred, if we win. And we can get a guarantee o’ twelve thousand, with privileges either in New York or Milwaukee.”

“Who with?”

“Anybody that’ll stand up in front of you. You don’t care who it is, do you?”

“Not me. I’ll make ’em all look like a monkey.”

“Well you better lay down aw’ile.”

“Oh, say, wire two hundred to Grace for me, will you? Right away; the New York address.”

“Two hundred! You just sent her three hundred last Sunday.”

“Well, what the hell do you care?”

“All right, all right. Don’t get sore about it. Anything else?”

“That’s all,” said Midge, and dropped onto the bed.

“And I want the deed done before I come back,” said Grace as she rose from the table. “You won’t fall down on me, will you, hon?”

“Leave it to me,” said Midge. “And don’t spend no more than you have to.”

Grace smiled a farewell and left the café. Midge continued to sip his coffee and read his paper.

They were in Chicago and they were in the middle of Midge’s first week in vaudeville. He had come straight north to reap the rewards of his glorious victory over the broken down Dutchman. A fortnight had been spent in learning his act, which consisted of a gymnastic exhibition and a ten minutes’ monologue on the various excellences of Midge Kelly. And now he was twice daily turning ’em away from the Madison Theater.

His breakfast over and his paper read, Midge sauntered into the lobby and asked for his key. He then beckoned to a bellboy, who had been hoping for that very honor.

“Find Haley, Tommy Haley,” said Midge. “Tell him to come up to my room.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Kelly,” said the boy, and proceeded to break all his former records for diligence.

Midge was looking out of his seventh-story window when Tommy answered the summons.

“What’ll it be?” inquired his manager.

There was a pause before Midge replied.

“Haley,” he said, “twenty-five percent’s a whole lot o’ money.”

“I guess I got it comin’, ain’t I?” said Tommy.

“I don’t see how you figger it. I don’t see where you’re worth it to me.”

“Well,” said Tommy, “I didn’t expect nothin’ like this. I thought you was satisfied with the bargain. I don’t want to beat nobody out o’ nothin’, but I don’t see where you could have got anybody else that would of did all I done for you.”

“Sure, that’s all right,” said the champion. “You done a lot for me in Philly. And you got good money for it, didn’t you?”

“I ain’t makin’ no holler. Still and all, the big money’s still ahead of us yet. And if it hadn’t of been for me, you wouldn’t of never got within grabbin’ distance.”

“Oh, I guess I could of went along all right,” said Midge. “Who was it that hung that left on the Dutchman’s jaw, me or you?”

“Yes, but you wouldn’t been in the ring with the Dutchman if it wasn’t for how I handled you.”

“Well, this won’t get us nowheres. The idear is that you ain’t worth no twenty-five percent now and it don’t make no diff’rence what come off a year or two ago.”

“Don’t it?” said Tommy. “I’d say it made a whole lot of diference.”

“Well, I say it don’t and I guess that settles it.”

“Look here, Midge,” Tommy said, “I thought I was fair with you, but if you don’t think so, I’m willin’ to hear what you think is fair. I don’t want nobody callin’ me a Sherlock. Let’s go down to business and sign up a contrac’. What’s your figger?”

“I ain’t namin’ no figger,” Midge replied. “I’m sayin’ that twenty-five’s too much. Now what are you willin’ to take?”

“How about twenty?”

“Twenty’s too much,” said Kelly.

“What ain’t too much?” asked Tommy.

“Well, Haley, I might as well give it to you straight. They ain’t nothin’ that ain’t too much.”

“You mean you don’t want me at no figger?”

“That’s the idear.”

There was a minute’s silence. Then Tommy Haley walked toward the door.

“Midge,” he said, in a choking voice, “you’re makin’ a big mistake, boy. You can’t throw down your best friends and get away with it. That damn woman will ruin you.”

Midge sprang from his seat.

“You shut your mouth!” he stormed. “Get out o’ here before they have to carry you out. You been spongin’ off o’ me long enough. Say one more word about the girl or about anything else and you’ll get what the Dutchman got. Now get out!”

And Tommy Haley, having a very vivid memory of the Dutchman’s face as he fell, got out.

Grace came in later, dropped her numerous bundles on the lounge and perched herself on the arm of Midge’s chair.

“Well?” she said.

“Well,” said Midge, “I got rid of him.”

“Good boy!” said Grace. “And now I think you might give me that twenty-five percent.”

“Besides the seventy-five you’re already gettin’?” said Midge.

“Don’t be no grouch, hon. You don’t look pretty when you’re grouchy.”

“It ain’t my business to look pretty,” Midge replied.

“Wait till you see how I look with the stuff I bought this mornin’!”

Midge glanced at the bundles on the lounge.

“There’s Haley’s twenty-five percent,” he said, “and then some.”

The champion did not remain long without a manager. Haley’s successor was none other than Jerome Harris, who saw in Midge a better meal ticket than his popular-priced musical show had been.

The contract, giving Mr. Harris twenty-five percent of Midge’s earnings, was signed in Detroit the week after Tommy Haley had heard his dismissal read. It had taken Midge just six days to learn that a popular actor cannot get on without the ministrations of a man who thinks, talks and means business. At first Grace objected to the new member of the firm, but when Mr. Harris had demanded and secured from the vaudeville people a one-hundred dollar increase in Midge’s weekly stipend, she was convinced that the champion had acted for the best.

“You and my missus will have some great old times,” Harris told Grace. “I’d of wired her to join us here, only I seen the Kid’s bookin’ takes us to Milwaukee next week, and that’s where she is.”

But when they were introduced in the Milwaukee hotel, Grace admitted to herself that her feeling for Mrs. Harris could hardly be called love at first sight. Midge, on the contrary, gave his new manager’s wife the many times over and seemed loath to end the feast of his eyes.

“Some doll,” he said to Grace when they were alone.

“Doll is right,” the lady replied, “and sawdust where her brains ought to be.”

“I’m li’ble to steal that baby,” said Midge, and he smiled as he noted the effect of his words on his audience’s face.

On Tuesday of the Milwaukee week the champion successfully defended his title in a bout that the newspapers never reported. Midge was alone in his room that morning when a visitor entered without knocking. The visitor was Lou Hersch.

Midge turned white at sight of him.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“I guess you know,” said Lou Hersch. “Your wife’s starvin’ to death and your baby’s starvin’ to death and I’m starvin’ to death. And you’re dirty with money.”

“Listen,” said Midge, “if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t never saw your sister. And, if you ain’t man enough to hold a job, what’s that to me? The best thing you can do is keep away from me.”

“You give me a piece o’ money and I’ll go.”

Midge’s reply to the ultimatum was a straight right to his brother-in-law’s narrow chest.

“Take that home to your sister.”

And after Lou Hersch had picked himself up and slunk away, Midge thought: “It’s lucky I didn’t give him my left or I’d of croaked him. And if I’d hit him in the stomach, I’d of broke his spine.”

There was a party after each evening performance during the Milwaukee engagement. The wine flowed freely and Midge had more of it than Tommy Haley ever would have permitted him. Mr. Harris offered no objection, which was possibly just as well for his own physical comfort.

In the dancing between drinks, Midge had his new manager’s wife for a partner as often as Grace. The latter’s face as she floundered round in the arms of the portly Harris, belied her frequent protestations that she was having the time of her life.

Several times that week, Midge thought Grace was on the point of starting the quarrel he hoped to have. But it was not until Friday night that she accommodated. He and Mrs. Harris had disappeared after the matinée and when Grace saw him again at the close of the night show, she came to the point at once.

“What are you tryin’ to pull off?” she demanded.

“It’s none o’ your business, is it?” said Midge.

“You bet it’s my business; mine and Harris’s. You cut it short or you’ll find out.”

“Listen,” said Midge, “have you got a mortgage on me or somethin’? You talk like we was married.”

“We’re goin’ to be, too. And tomorrow’s as good a time as any.”

“Just about,” Midge said. “You got as much chanct o’ marryin’ me tomorrow as the next day or next year and that ain’t no chanct at all.”

“We’ll find out,” said Grace.

“You’re the one that’s got somethin’ to find out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m married already.”

“You lie!”

“You think so, do you? Well, s’pose you go to this here address and get acquainted with my missus.”

Midge scrawled a number on a piece of paper and handed it to her. She stared at it unseeingly.

“Well,” said Midge, “I ain’t kiddin’ you. You go there and ask for Mrs. Michael Kelly, and if you don’t find her, I’ll marry you tomorrow before breakfast.”

Still Grace stared at the scrap of paper. To Midge it seemed an age before she spoke again.

“You lied to me all this w’ile.”

“You never ast me was I married. What’s more, what the hell diff’rence did it make to you? You got a split, didn’t you? Better’n fifty-fifty.”

He started away.

“Where you goin’?”

“I’m goin’ to meet Harris and his wife.”

“I’m goin’ with you. You’re not goin’ to shake me now.”

“Yes, I am, too,” said Midge quietly. “When I leave town tomorrow night, you’re going to stay here. And if I see where you’re goin’ to make a fuss, I’ll put you in a hospital where they’ll keep you quiet. You can get your stuff tomorrow mornin’ and I’ll slip you a hundred bucks. And then I don’t want to see no more o’ you. And don’t try and tag along now or I’ll have to add another K.O. to the old record.”

When Grace returned to the hotel that night, she discovered that Midge and the Harrises had moved to another. And when Midge left town the following night, he was again without a manager, and Mr. Harris was without a wife.

Three days prior to Midge Kelly’s ten-round bout with Young Milton in New York City, the sporting editor of The News assigned Joe Morgan to write two or three thousand words about the champion to run with a picture layout for Sunday.

Joe Morgan dropped in at Midge’s training quarters Friday afternoon. Midge, he learned, was doing road work, but Midge’s manager, Wallie Adams, stood ready and willing to supply reams of dope about the greatest fighter of the age.

“Let’s hear what you’ve got,” said Joe, “and then I’ll try to fix up something.”

So Wallie stepped on the accelerator of his imagination and shot away.

“Just a kid; that’s all he is; a regular boy. Get what I mean? Don’t know the meanin’ o’ bad habits. Never tasted liquor in his life and would prob’bly get sick if he smelled it. Clean livin’ put him up where he’s at. Get what I mean? And modest and unassumin’ as a school girl. He’s so quiet you wouldn’t never know he was round. And he’d go to jail before he’d talk about himself.

“No job at all to get him in shape, ’cause he’s always that way. The only trouble we have with him is gettin’ him to light into these poor bums they match him up with. He’s scared he’ll hurt somebody. Get what I mean? He’s tickled to death over this match with Milton, ’cause everybody says Milton can stand the gaff. Midge’ll maybe be able to cut loose a little this time. But the last two bouts he had, the guys hadn’t no business in the ring with him, and he was holdin’ back all the w’ile for the fear he’d kill somebody. Get what I mean?”

“Is he married?” inquired Joe.

“Say, you’d think he was married to hear him rave about them kiddies he’s got. His fam’ly’s up in Canada to their summer home and Midge is wild to get up there with ’em. He thinks more o’ that wife and them kiddies than all the money in the world. Get what I mean?”

“How many children has he?”

“I don’t know, four or five, I guess. All boys and every one of ’em a dead ringer for their dad.”

“Is his father living?”

“No, the old man died when he was a kid. But he’s got a grand old mother and a kid brother out in Chi. They’re the first ones he thinks about after a match, them and his wife and kiddies. And he don’t forget to send the old woman a thousand bucks after every bout. He’s goin’ to buy her a new home as soon as they pay him off for this match.”

“How about his brother? Is he going to tackle the game?”

“Sure, and Midge says he’ll be a champion before he’s twenty years old. They’re a fightin’ fam’ly and all of ’em honest and straight as a die. Get what I mean? A fella that I can’t tell you his name come to Midge in Milwaukee onct and wanted him to throw a fight and Midge give him such a trimmin’ in the street that he couldn’t go on that night. That’s the kind he is. Get what I mean?”

Joe Morgan hung around the camp until Midge and his trainers returned.

“One o’ the boys from The News,” said Wallie by way of introduction. “I been givin’ him your fam’ly hist’ry.”

“Did he give you good dope?” he inquired.

“He’s some historian,” said Joe.

“Don’t call me no names,” said Wallie smiling. “Call us up if they’s anything more you want. And keep your eyes on us Monday night. Get what I mean?”

The story in Sunday’s News was read by thousands of lovers of the manly art. It was well written and full of human interest. Its slight inaccuracies went unchallenged, though three readers, besides Wallie Adams and Midge Kelly, saw and recognized them. The three were Grace, Tommy Haley and Jerome Harris and the comments they made were not for publication.

Neither the Mrs. Kelly in Chicago nor the Mrs. Kelly in Milwaukee knew that there was such a paper as the New York News. And even if they had known of it and that it contained two columns of reading matter about Midge, neither mother nor wife could have bought it. For The News on Sunday is a nickel a copy.

Joe Morgan could have written more accurately, no doubt, if instead of Wallie Adams, he had interviewed Ellen Kelly and Connie Kelly and Emma Kelly and Lou Hersch and Grace and Jerome Harris and Tommy Haley and Hap Collins and two or three Milwaukee bartenders.

But a story built on their evidence would never have passed the sporting editor.

“Suppose you can prove it,” that gentleman would have said, “It wouldn’t get us anything but abuse to print it. The people don’t want to see him knocked. He’s champion.”

A One-Man Team

“Two thirty today, boys,” announced the Coach. “How many can be there?”

“I have a class till three,” said Dickie.

“Me too,” said big Wickham.

“Cut ’em if you can,” said the Coach. “If you can’t, hustle out as soon as you’re through. We don’t get any too much daylight.”

Monday lunch at the training-table was over. The squad, chatting noisily, dispersed to afternoon tasks. The Coach and his three aids remained seated, for there were things to talk over.

It was the final week of the season, and the Doane game loomed large ahead. Harris had scouted the big rival school’s battle with Monroe on the preceding Saturday, and the others waited for him to offer his report.

“It’s a one-man team, Coach, just as Wallace and Dana told us,” he said. “Just take Davis out of their backfield, and they couldn’t score on the North Side Y.M.C.A.”

“Yes,” said the Coach, “but who’s going to ‘just take Davis out of their backfield?’ ”

“Well,” said Wallace, “you oughtn’t to be afraid of these one-man outfits after what you did to Monroe and Benjamin. Benjamin was their whole team, and what did he do against us? He might as well have been muzzled and on a leash. If he got away with anything, it was between halves.”

“There’s a difference between Monroe and Doane,” put in Dana. “All those Monroe coaches know about working up an attack, you could put on a souvenir postcard and mail it anywhere for one cent. Benjamin didn’t have as much protection as a kewpie. There was nothing for him to work with. I’m not trying to take away any credit from Coach, but I never saw a team give less help to a star than Monroe gave to Benjamin. It will be another thing again with Doane. They’ll have stuff built up round Davis that they didn’t show when we were watching them. Smith’s no fool.”

“I didn’t say he was,” retorted Harris. “He’s a good, smart coach and can construct as shifty an attack as you’d want to see. I don’t claim he cut loose with everything he had, for my benefit. But you know as well as I do that ninety percent of his offense is Davis. And you know Coach’s reputation for making a monkey out of that kind of an offense.” He smiled at his chief. “You deserve the rep’, don’t you?”

The Coach smiled back.

“I guess I do,” he said. “I guess Pelham and Marshall will admit that I do. Either one or the other of them had a one-man team the last three years I was at Leighton, and in those three years I didn’t lose a game. One year, Marshall had Kirby. Another year, Pelham’s whole attack was built round a big kid named Hostetter, a plunger. And the third year, it was Marshall again, with Flynn.”

“Was that the kicker?” asked Wallace.

“That was the kicker, and he was the best I ever saw. Their stunt was to let him punt on first downs when the ball was within thirty-five or forty yards of their own goal. They depended on him to gain in the exchanges till they got into the other side’s territory. Then they had a few plays that were to carry them up to where he could dropkick. He might have been harder to beat if I hadn’t had a pair of ends whose middle name was Block, and a quarterback who didn’t know how to drop a punt.

“Another thing in my favor was that Flynn was a frail kid and they were afraid to let him carry the ball. So they couldn’t fake much with him.

“Well, sir, I never saw such an exhibition of distance kicking as he gave against us⁠—and I never saw punts run back as far as we ran them. I had two men, instead of one, to protect my quarter on his catches, and I had my ends lay back about fifteen yards and take the first fellows that came to them. My quarter ran seventy yards for a touchdown after one catch, and he carried another to within easy plunging distance of their goal. And Flynn never got close enough to our end of the field to see the posts.

“The year Pelham had Hostetter, I played my secondary defense so close up that he really had to plunge through two lines instead of one⁠—though he didn’t plunge through either. But he was all they had, and they kept trying him, even when the whole crowd was yelling at them to let up on their star before he was killed. He’d plunged Pelham to victory on seven successive Saturdays, but he did most of his plunging toward his own goal when he ran up against us.

“Then there was the year that Marshall had Kirby. He was a boy a good deal on the Davis order; he could run and dodge, and he could pass as far as most people can kick. Well, I had a live center, that season, and two good defensive backs. I picked those three to stop Kirby, and they went into the game with orders to watch him and pay no attention to anyone else. Say, I’ll give you a hundred dollars for every yard Kirby gained, either passing or running.

“I’m tickled to death when I hear there’s one big, individual star on a team we’ve got to play. That’s my favorite dish, a one-man team.”

“Well, then,” said Harris, “you’ll enjoy a hearty meal when we play Doane.”

“And it’s a cinch,” said Wallace, “that Davis will get more work next Saturday than he ever did in his life. He’s captain, and it’s his last game.”

“If my boys play as I tell them,” said the Coach, “he’ll be glad it is his last game.”

“What did you think of their left halfback, Byron?” asked Dana, turning to Harris.

“Byron looks as if he ought to play football,” Harris replied. “He certainly is big and strong enough. I wish we had him. We could put him to work. But all they use him for is protecting Davis on his passes and runs. I bet we’ll hear more of him next year. If he can do other stuff as well as he blocks, he’ll be a whale.”

“He can block his head off against us if he wants to,” said the Coach. “I’m not going to bother Davis on his passes. I’m going to let him throw that ball just as far as he can. But when he throws it, one of my men will catch it or else it won’t be caught. And when he runs, he’ll run into more tacklers than he ever thought were on one football team.”

“Where are they coming from?” asked Dana.

“Out of my line,” said the Coach. “When you’re playing a man who never does anything but forward pass or sweep round the ends, what’s the use of sticking to an old army defense? We know that Davis is practically their entire attack, and we know what he can do. One of the things he can’t do is plunge. So I don’t see any sense in keeping my linemen nailed to one spot. I’m going to play everybody loose, and I’m going to tell every man on the team that if he doesn’t tackle Davis at least twice, he won’t get his letter. You’ll see what looks like the craziest defense ever pulled, but it’ll do the business.”

“Those Doane ends must be basketball players,” said Harris. “They don’t miss that old ball once in ten times.”

“When they get close to it,” said the Coach. “But I’m going to see that they don’t get close to it.”

On Thursday night the Coach had a frightful dream. He dreamed that his team was playing Doane. Davis received the ball on the kickoff and ran to midfield before he was thrown. Then, in utter disregard of his teaching, his boys lined up in a defensive formation that might have been designed to stop the old “guards back” play. Taking quick advantage, Davis shot a forward pass thirty yards down the field, and one of his basketball-trained ends, catching it, raced the rest of the way to a touchdown.

The Coach cried out in his sleep. His words might have been part of a prayer, save for the volume of voice he put into them.

He awoke trembling and slept but fitfully the rest of the night. In the morning he was the first man at the training-table, and his waiter, who was specializing in archeology and considered football a criminal waste of time, had to feign interest in the story of a nightmare that he neither understood nor cared to understand.

The Coach was just finishing his second cup of coffee when big Wickham and four of his fellow regulars came in.

“Good morning, Coach,” said Wickham.

“Good morning, Wickham,” his mentor replied. “What do you do when you see Davis get the ball?”

“I leave my position and run out to one side,” said Wickham.

“What side?”

“The side I think he’s going to run to.”

“What do you do when you get out there?”

“I tackle him.”

“Whom do you watch besides Davis?”

“Nobody.”

The Coach ordered more coffee.

“How about you, Robbins?” he asked. “What’s your job?”

“I’m going to watch Davis,” said the boy addressed.

“There’ll be thirty thousand doing that,” said the Coach. “Aren’t you going to do anything else?”

“I’m going to stop him,” said Robbins.

“What are you going to do when he shoots a pass?”

“Block an end.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes sir.”

The table was filled when the Coach again recounted his dream.

“It was just a dream and a bad one,” he said. “If it should come true, how many of you Varsity men would get your letters?” He paused for a reply, but his audience seemed stricken dumb. “Not a one of you,” he went on. “If Davis gets away with one good pass, the man responsible for it will come out of that game quicker than if he broke his neck. You, Barrows! What’s Doane’s captain’s name?”

“Davis,” replied a picture of health.

“How many times are you going to get him?”

“At least twice, if I live,” said Barrows.

“Is he going to dodge you?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You’d better help it. There’s a couple of good men hustling for your place.”

The couple of good men tried not to look it.

“Classes or no classes,” said the Coach, “I expect everybody out on the field at two o’clock. I won’t keep you long. And remember, we’re leaving at four thirty. I may not be able to get here for lunch. If I’m not here, you can practice this song.” The Coach’s raucous voice filled the room:

Hang Doane’s Davis on a sour-apple tree,
Hang Doane’s Davis on a sour-apple tree,
Hang Doane’s Davis on a sour-apple tree,
As we go marching on.

His three assistants joined in the chorus.

“There, boys,” said the Coach when the song was over and the applause had died out, “you see we don’t have to teach football for a living. We’re in the game because we like it. Whether we keep on liking it or not depends on what you do to Davis on Saturday. Now remember! Two o’clock at the field, and the station at four thirty.”

Thirty pairs of eyes followed him to the door.

“The old man’s full of pep,” observed Harris. “He thinks we’ve got Davis stopped.”

“Well,” said Wallace, “I think we have, too.”

Barrows rose from the other end of the table and started out.

“You, Barrows!” shouted big Wickham. “What are you going to do Saturday?”

Barrows paused and burst into song.

Hang Doane’s Davis on a sour-apple tree!

And if it hadn’t been such a disrespectful thing to do, one might have supposed, from the tone of his voice, that he was mimicking the Coach.

“ ‘The career of the greatest football player Doane ever had will end with tomorrow’s game. Davis’ record has never been approached by another wearer of the D. In his three years of competition for the Varsity, he has scored at least one touchdown against every opponent. Will he cross the Blue and White goal-line tomorrow and keep his record? All Doane believes he will.’ ”

Harris was reading aloud from the Doane Daily. He and the Coach, having sent their charges to bed in Doane’s new fireproof hotel, lounged in the lobby, knowing that for themselves a good night’s sleep was impossible.

“It’s an even bet,” remarked the Coach, “that all Doane is wrong.”

“ ‘Coach Belden of the visitors,’ ” Harris read on, “has the reputation of being a wonderful architect of defenses designed to stop one man, but Doane will stake all its worldly goods on Davis’ ability to gain against any defense. Belden has had his scouts in the stand at all of Doane’s games this year, and undoubtedly he knows just where Davis is strong. But the coaches of other teams have been as well informed, and with what result? Davis has invariably made good against all opponents.’ ”

“And that,” said the Coach, “is because the coaches of other teams have been afraid to take a chance.”

“ ‘A defense to foil the Doane captain,’ ” Harris read, “ ‘is extremely difficult of construction. If his running game is checked, he is still certain to get away with some of those long forward passes that worked so effectively last Saturday. In one way or another, despite the best-laid plans of the wily Belden, Davis will gain ground, yards and yards of it.’ ”

“They’re nothing if not chesty,” remarked the Coach.

“ ‘Captain Davis was not present at last night’s mass-meeting in Crilly Hall. But wherever he was, he must have heard the wild cheering with which every mention of his name was greeted.

“ ‘Speeches were made by other members of the team and by Coach Smith. The latter talked with much more confidence than is his custom. He expressed the belief that Davis, playing his last game, would extend himself to the limit and that if he did, all the defenses in the world would be powerless to stop him.’ ”

“We shall see,” said the Coach.

Harris tossed the paper aside.

“I think I’ll turn in,” he said. “You’d better, too.”

“What’s the use?” said the Coach. “It’s only two o’clock.”

Harris bade his chief good night. The latter picked up the Daily and stared for some moments at its three-column picture of Doane’s brilliant captain.

“You may be a whale,” he said aloud, “but if I don’t stop you, I’ll quit coaching.”

On the walk in front of the hotel, five Doane students⁠—with the accent on the first syllable⁠—paused in their uncertain journey homeward long enough to give their weary throats a final workout.

Yea, Davis! Yea, Davis! Yea, Davis!
Doane! Doane! Doane!
Yea!

“They’ve got it on me,” said the Coach to himself. “When they do get to bed, they’ll sleep.”

It must be recorded that the Coach slept too. From four till six he slept, and again he dreamed of Davis. But this time the dream was pleasant. Doane’s star, his passes intercepted time after time and himself tackled by full eleven men and thrown for repeated losses, at last led his team off the field, hopeless and disgusted.

“One thing more, boys,” said the Coach. “I’m responsible for this defense, and if it isn’t the right one, I’ll take the blame. All I ask you to do is play it, play it as I’ve taught it to you. Remember, it’s his last chance to shine, and he’ll want to do all the shining. Forget everybody else and go after Davis. Now get him! Get him! Get him!”

The squad raced out of the dressing-room onto the field. From ten thousand throats came a welcoming cheer. Ten thousand voices chanted the Varsity hymn, trailing not more than a beat or two behind the accompaniment of the Blue and White band.

The team lined up and hurried through a few simple formations⁠—formations learned for exhibition purposes only.

The band started another tune. Someone had introduced the Coach’s parody to the crowd.

“Hang Doane’s Davis on a sour-apple tree,” sang the Blue and White rooters, and the Doane section smiled its appreciation.

But now the song was drowned in a flood of riotous cheers. Davis had arrived, Davis and the ten men who were to help him stage a fitting climax for his career of glory.

Yea, Davis! Yea, Davis! Yea, Davis!
Doane! Doane! Doane!
Yea!

The Coach and Harris, on the sidelines, observed closely Doane’s practice formation. Davis stood back in the kicker’s position. Byron and the other halfback, Moxey, were three or four yards behind the tackles. The quarter crouched behind his center, hands outstretched. The ball was passed to him. He tossed it to Byron, and the team jogged forward as in a simple line play.

“They’re not fooling anybody with that,” said the Coach.

“That’s their regular formation for Davis’ stuff,” said Harris. “The ball usually goes straight back to him, and the halfbacks are there to block.”

The referee called the rival captains to the center of the field. The Blue and White leader made his guess as the coin spun in the air. The guess was wrong.

“They get the north goal and that little breeze,” said the Coach. “We can try out that defense right away.”

The ball was kicked off short, and a Doane tackle caught it. He was thrown almost in his tracks.

“Now,” said the Coach, “we’ll see what Davis can do against a bunch that’s ready for him.”

Doane’s team lined up for scrimmage, against the most open defense that had ever been seen on that field.

“Lord!” said Dana on the bench.

“They could drive a truck through that hole in our middle.”

“But they have no truck,” replied Wallace.

Doane’s quarterback called three numbers. Back came the ball, not to Davis, but to the quarter himself. Straight through the big gap in the center of the line he sped. But a Blue and White guard managed to throw him off his balance, and his gain was only four yards.

“They’re trying to draw us in,” said the Coach. “Fine chance!”

Again the teams lined up, and again Davis took his station on the spot whence passes and kicks are sent away. His ends, the basketball players, were far out. His halfbacks stood where they could block an aggressive lineman and give their star a chance to do whatever was in his mind. But the play was a duplicate of the first. This time, however, the quarter tripped himself before he’d gone a yard.

“I should think that’d be enough bluffing,” said Harris.

“You can bet your pile it’ll be Davis this time,” said the Coach.

Barrows, from his position far down the field, yelled a warning to his fellows:

“Watch him this time! Watch a pass!”

Doane’s formation was slightly different on this, the third lineup. Davis stayed back, and the ends remained far out, but Byron moved over behind Moxey, the other halfback, in a sort of tandem. And as the signals were called, Davis shifted a little toward the side the two halfbacks were on.

“He’ll throw to that other side,” said the Coach.

He had hardly finished speaking when the ball was passed⁠—passed to Byron. Through the open gate between the Blue and White’s right tackle and guard drove the tandem. Down the field they romped, Moxey brushing aside the only member of Coach Belden’s secondary line who was not too much surprised to move.

Barrows made a desperate effort to nail the man with the ball, but Moxey floored him. Byron was across the line for a touchdown, and the game was hardly a minute old.

“Yea, Byron! Yea, Byron!” yelled the Doane stands.

And “Yea, Davis!” as Doane’s captain added a point with a perfect kick.

Dana hurried to his chief’s side.

“Better close in a little,” he advised. “They’ll go through our line for fifty touchdowns if we play that defense.”

“No,” said the Coach. ‘What they want us to do is close in and give Davis a chance. That score surprised them as much as it did us. They were trying to scare us into tightening up, and they just happened to score in the attempt. My center can stop that plunger from going too far, and I don’t care, if he gains only two or three yards at a clip. They’ll never keep that game up when they’ve got a man like Davis to work the other, especially when he’s captain and this is his last appearance. I’m going to stand pat for a while, at least.”

Once more the Blue and White kicked off, and once more Doane started out with their quarter-through-center play. But the Blue and White center, big Wickham, knew enough by this time to dive in when he saw where the play was headed; and in two tries Doane’s gain was less than three yards.

“Now I guess they’ll open up,” said the Coach.

But with everybody expecting a direct pass to Davis, the ball was snapped again to the quarter and shot sideways by that young man to the waiting Byron. Straight ahead he plunged, for nine yards and a first down.

“That’s enough,” said the Coach. “That little game will stop right here.”

He beckoned to Ainslee, a sub.

“Go in for Hayes,” he said. “Tell those fellows to close up. Tell them to stay closed up till they actually see the ball in Davis’ hands. When they do, they can spread out fast and stop him. They’ll have to keep their eyes open and step lively.”

The quarterback had gone through for another yard or so before Ainslee delivered his message. Then, when they saw the Blue and White defense tighten up, the Doane backs held a council of war while one of their guards played dead.

“With us bunched like that,” said Harris, “Davis will throw it a mile.”

“I can’t help it,” said the Coach. “I’ve got to take the chance.”

The consultation was over. Doane’s quarterback began shouting his numbers. Doane’s ends ran far out, and the Blue and White ends went with them. Moxey and Byron again lined up tandem, behind a tackle.

“My holes are plugged now,” said the Coach. “They can’t gain with that. They won’t try. It’ll be Davis this time, sure.”

But it wasn’t. The quarter took the pass and started to the left as if to sweep the Blue and White right end. Then, as a tackle was about to grasp him, he shot a lateral pass to Byron, who had dug for the sideline as the ball was snapped. The Doane left end smothered his adversary. Moxey dashed down the field unchallenged and put a defensive halfback out of it. Byron, running alone and so close to the boundary that the Doane substitutes could almost have reached out and touched him, had only Barrows between him and another score.

“Chase him out! Chase him out!” shrieked the Coach and his aids in chorus.

But Byron, safe from rear pursuit, had left the sideline and wass heading straight for the posts. And Barrows, not yet over the shock of the last touchdown, allowed himself to be dodged as cleanly as ever man was.

Davis kicked another easy goal while the stands shook with cheers for old Doane.

“Licked fourteen to nothing,” said the Coach. “Licked before we’ve even had a feel of the ball.”

“We’re not licked yet,” said Harris.

“Don’t kid yourself,” said the Coach. “You know how they’ll fight with that lead. And it’ll take our bunch the rest of the half to recover. Davis can punt on first downs from now on, and still trim us.”

Well, Doane proceeded to punt on first downs, but it was Moxey who did it, not Davis. And Moxey’s punting was as much of a revelation as Byron’s running had been. How those ends did cover his kicks, too! They were shaking hands with Barrows before ever the ball came down, and they worried him so that along in the second period he made a square muff and gave them their third and last touchdown.

Between halves the Coach talked, as coaches will. But the Coach did not scold, because the Coach was a just coach.

“Boys,” he said, “they’ve made us look bad, and I’m taking most of the blame. I thought Davis was their football team, and I made you think the same thing. We paid entirely too much attention to him in practice. I thought if we stopped him, we had all the best of it. I thought they’d quit when they saw that he couldn’t get anywhere. But it seems they have two or three other fellows with speaking parts.

“But the game isn’t over yet, and you boys can still win by fighting. In this next quarter I want you to play the best football you know how, and to play just as if you’d never heard of Davis or anybody else on their team. Forget everything except that we’re behind and must catch up. They’ve had the luck so far, but it’s time for it to break our way. Give them everything you’ve got, and remember some of you are playing your last game. There’s no reason to hold back anything. It’s mostly my fault if you lose. If you win, the credit’s all yours. Now go to it!”

And his men went to it, with spirit and fight, which are better than almost anything except twenty-one points and a team full of confidence. They fought and they fought, and their reward was seven points, just one-third of what Doane had.

There was no problem of defense for the Blue and White to solve in the second half. Whenever Doane got the ball, it was kick, kick, kick. Four times did Coach Belden’s braves push the oval up to the shadow of Doane’s goal, and three times they were stopped just short of a score. Three times Moxey’s good right foot shot the ball back over acres of ground that Belden’s team had fought, yard by yard, to gain.

When the last quarter began, there was a substitute in Davis’ place.

“Their captain’s out,” said Harris.

The Coach did not reply at once. He was thinking.

And in the dressing-room, when the game was history and his poor beaten boys had shed their armor and departed, he spoke.

“Didn’t you think it was funny?” he asked Dana.

“There was no laugh in it for me.”

“Queer, then, if you’d rather,” said the Coach.

“Well,” said Harris, “it was queer that we scouts couldn’t see anything to their team but Davis. How we overlooked Byron and Moxey and those ends is beyond me.”

“I won’t apologize for overlooking them,” said Dana. “When I saw Doane play, all the ends did was catch Davis’ throws, and all the halfbacks did was protect Davis. The information I gave Coach was absolutely correct.”

“All right,” said Harris, “and so was mine. When I scouted them, Davis was the only man besides the center and the ends who had his hands on the ball.”

“Yes,” said the Coach, “and how many times did Davis have his hands on the ball today?”

“Hardly at all,” said Harris.

“Not ‘hardly at all,’ ” said the Coach. “No ‘hardly’ about it. If you’ll look back through that game, you’ll see that Davis never touched the ball except with his foot, and then only when he was kicking goals from touchdowns.”

“By George, you’re right!” said Dana.

“You certainly are!” said Wallace.

“You bet I’m right,” said the Coach. “And that’s what was queer. Here’s a star player, the captain of the team, playing his last game of collegiate football. He can run like a deer, punt pretty well and pass better than anybody you ever saw. But in his final game he kicks three goals from touchdowns and stands there the rest of the afternoon as idle as a goalpost.”

“Smith’s even smarter than we figured him,” said Harris.

“He knew we’d be laying for Davis, and he crossed us,” said Dana.

“He surely did cross us, and I’ll admit that he deserves credit,” said the Coach. “But I don’t believe he’s as much of a strategist as all that. I’ve read a lot about Napoleon, but I don’t recall his ever having kept his best army in the stable during a big battle, just to fool the other side. And did Hughey Jennings ever order Ty Cobb to go up and take three strikes in an important game because the other club expected him to hit? Hardly! If Smith, all by his lonesome, could sit down and think of the scheme they worked on us today, he wouldn’t be coaching football teams. He’d be Thomas A. Edison’s boss.”

“Who helped him, do you s’pose?” asked Harris.

“I’ll know when I see Smith,” said the Coach. “And you bet I’m going to see him.”

The Coach found Smith in the café of Doane’s new fireproof hotel. It was several minutes before he could get him away from a crowd of wild Doane rooters, who could imagine no greater treat than to shake his hand.

“Here’s Belden!” they cried. “What do you think of Smith, Belden? Is he the best coach in America, or isn’t he?”

“He is,” said the Coach, “and I want a chance to tell him so privately.”

So the Coach led his triumphant rival to a table in the corner, as far as possible from the mad throng.

“I want to congratulate you, Smith,” said the Coach.

“Thanks,” said Smith.

“You completely outguessed me, Smith.”

“Thank you for saying so,” said Smith.

“I never heard of a stunt like that before, keeping your star idle when you knew we were primed for him⁠—not letting him handle the ball in his last game and then taking him out before the game was over. Why, I had a defense framed that would have made Davis look foolish, if you’d given it a chance. And how in the world did you ever keep two men like Moxey and Byron under cover so long?”

“To tell you the truth,” said Smith, “I didn’t know till last Wednesday that they could play football.”

“So it wasn’t till last Wednesday that you thought of this stunt?”

“That’s right,” said Smith.

“Now, Smith,” said the Coach, “I don’t want you to think I underestimate your ability. But did this idea originate in your own head? Did you get it up all alone?”

“No,” said Smith, “I didn’t. I had help.”

“Who helped you?”

“Old Lady Necessity, the mother of invention,” said Smith.

“What do you mean?” asked the Coach.

“You know, of course,” said Smith, “that Davis is right-handed.”

“What of it?” demanded the Coach.

“Well,” said Smith, “in scrimmage practice, last Tuesday night, Davis broke his right wrist.”

The Facts

I

The engagement was broken off before it was announced. So only a thousand or so of the intimate friends and relatives of the parties knew anything about it. What they knew was that there had been an engagement and that there was one no longer. The cause of the breach they merely guessed, and most of the guesses were, in most particulars, wrong.

Each intimate and relative had a fragment of the truth. It remained for me to piece the fragments together. It was a difficult job, but I did it. Part of my evidence is hearsay; the major portion is fully corroborated. And not one of my witnesses had anything to gain through perjury.

So I am positive that I have at my tongue’s end the facts, and I believe that in justice to everybody concerned I should make them public.

Ellen McDonald had lived on the North Side of Chicago for twenty-one years. Billy Bowen had been a South-Sider for seven years longer. But neither knew of the other’s existence until they met in New York, the night before the Army-Navy game.

Billy, sitting with a business acquaintance at a neighboring table in Tonio’s, was spotted by a male member of Ellen’s party, a Chicagoan, too. He was urged to come on over. He did, and was introduced. The business acquaintance was also urged, came, was introduced and forgotten; forgotten, that is, by everyone but the waiter, who observed that he danced not nor told stories, and figured that his function must be to pay. The business acquaintance had been Billy’s guest. Now he became host, and without seeking the office.

It was not that Billy and Miss McDonald’s male friends were niggards. But unfortunately for the b.a., the checks always happened to arrive when everybody else was dancing or so hysterical over Billy’s repartee as to be potentially insolvent.

Billy was somewhere between his fourteenth and twenty-first highball; in other words, at his best, from the audience’s standpoint. His dialogue was simply screaming and his dancing just heavenly. He was Frank Tinney doubling as Vernon Castle. On the floor he tried and accomplished twinkles that would have spelled catastrophe if attempted under the fourteen mark, or over the twenty-one. And he said the cutest things⁠—one right after the other.

II

You can be charmed by a man’s dancing, but you can’t fall in love with his funniness. If you’re going to fall in love with him at all, you’ll do it when you catch him in a serious mood.

Miss McDonald caught Billy Bowen in one at the game next day. Entirely by accident or a decree of fate, her party and his sat in adjoining boxes. Not by accident, Miss McDonald sat in the chair that was nearest Billy’s. She sat there first to be amused; she stayed to be conquered.

Here was a different Billy from the Billy of Tonio’s. Here was a Billy who trained his gun on your heart and let your risibles alone. Here was a dreamy Billy, a Billy of romance.

How calm he remained through the excitement! How indifferent to the thrills of the game! There was depth to him. He was a man. Her escort and the others round her were children, screaming with delight at the puerile deeds of pseudo heroes. Football was a great sport, but a sport. It wasn’t Life. Would the world be better or worse for that nine-yard gain that Elephant or Oliphant, or whatever his name was, had just made? She knew it wouldn’t. Billy knew, too, for Billy was deep. He was thinking man’s thoughts. She could tell by his silence, by his inattention to the scene before him. She scarcely could believe that here was the same person who, last night, had kept his own, yes, and the neighboring tables, roaring with laughter. What a complex character his!

In sooth, Mr. Bowen was thinking man’s thoughts. He was thinking that if this pretty Miss McDowell, or Donnelly, were elsewhere, he could go to sleep. And that if he could remember which team he had bet on and could tell which team was which, he would have a better idea of whether he was likely to win or lose.

When, after the game, they parted, Billy rallied to the extent of asking permission to call. Ellen, it seemed, would be very glad to have him, but she couldn’t tell exactly when she would have to be back in Chicago; she still had three more places to visit in the East. Could she possibly let him know when she did get back? Yes, she could and would; if he really wanted her to, she would drop him a note. He certainly wanted her to.

This, thought Billy, was the best possible arrangement. Her note would tell him her name and address, and save him the trouble of phoning to all the McConnells, McDowells, and Donnellys on the North Side. He did want to see her again; she was pretty, and, judging from last night, full of pep. And she had fallen for him; he knew it from that look.

He watched her until she was lost in the crowd. Then he hunted round for his pals and the car that had brought them up. At length he gave up the search and wearily climbed the elevated stairs. His hotel was on Broadway, near Forty-fourth. He left the train at Forty-second, the third time it stopped there.

“I guess you’ve rode far enough,” said the guard. “Fifteen cents’ worth for a nickel. I guess we ought to have a Pullman on these here trains.”

“I guess,” said Billy, “I guess⁠—”

But the repartee well was dry. He stumbled downstairs and hurried toward Broadway to replenish it.

III

Ellen McDonald’s three more places to visit in the East must have been deadly dull. Anyway, on the sixth of December, scarcely more than a week after his parting with her in New York, Billy Bowen received the promised note. It informed him merely that her name was Ellen McDonald, that she lived at so-and-so Walton Place, and that she was back in Chicago.

That day, if you’ll remember, was Monday. Miss McDonald’s parents had tickets for the opera. But Ellen was honestly just worn out, and would they be mad at her if she stayed home and went to bed? They wouldn’t. They would take Aunt Mary in her place.

On Tuesday morning, Paul Potter called up and wanted to know if she would go with him that night to The Follies. She was horribly sorry, but she’d made an engagement. The engagement, evidently, was to study, and the subject was harmony, with Berlin, Kern, and Van Alstyne as instructors. She sat on the piano-bench from half-past seven till quarter after nine, and then went to her room vowing that she would accept any and all invitations for the following evening.

Fortunately, no invitations arrived, for at a quarter of nine Wednesday night, Mr. Bowen did. And in a brand-new mood. He was a bit shy and listened more than he talked. But when he talked, he talked well, though the sparkling wit of the night at Tonio’s was lacking. Lacking, too, was the preoccupied air of the day at the football game. There was no problem to keep his mind busy, but even if the Army and Navy had been playing football in this very room, he could have told at a glance which was which. Vision and brain were perfectly clear. And he had been getting his old eight hours, and, like the railroad hen, sometimes nine and sometimes ten, every night since his arrival home from Gotham, NY. Mr. Bowen was on the wagon.

They talked of the East, of Tonio’s, of the game (this was where Billy did most of his listening), of the war, of theatres, of books, of college, of automobiles, of the market. They talked, too, of their immediate families. Billy’s, consisting of one married sister in South Bend, was soon exhausted. He had two cousins here in town whom he saw frequently, two cousins and their wives, but they were people who simply couldn’t stay home nights. As for himself, he preferred his rooms and a good book to the so-called gay life. Ellen should think that a man who danced so well would want to be doing it all the time. It was nice of her to say that he danced well, but really he didn’t, you know. Oh, yes, he did. She guessed she could tell. Well, anyway, the giddy whirl made no appeal to him, unless, of course, he was in particularly charming company. His avowed love for home and quiet surprised Ellen a little. It surprised Mr. Bowen a great deal. Only last night, he remembered, he had been driven almost desperate by that quiet of which he was now so fond; he had been on the point of busting loose, but had checked himself in time. He had played Canfield till ten, though the bookshelves were groaning with their load.

Ellen’s family kept them busy for an hour and a half. It was a dear family and she wished he could meet it. Mother and father were out playing bridge somewhere tonight. Aunt Mary had gone to bed. Aunts Louise and Harriet lived in the next block. Sisters Edith and Wilma would be home from Northampton for the holidays about the twentieth. Brother Bob and his wife had built the cutest house; in Evanston. Her younger brother, Walter, was a case! He was away tonight, had gone out right after dinner. He’d better be in before mother and father came. He had a new love-affair every week, and sixteen years old last August. Mother and father really didn’t care how many girls he was interested in, so long as they kept him too busy to run round with those crazy schoolmates of his. The latter were older than he; just at the age when it seems smart to drink beer and play cards for money. Father said if he ever found out that Walter was doing those things, he’d take him out of school and lock him up somewhere.

Aunts Louise and Mary and Harriet did a lot of settlement work. They met all sorts of queer people, people you’d never believe existed. The three aunts were unmarried.

Brother Bob’s wife was dear, but absolutely without a sense of humor. Bob was full of fun, but they got along just beautifully together. You never saw a couple so much in love.

Edith was on the basketball team at college and terribly popular. Wilma was horribly clever and everybody said she’d make Phi Beta Kappa.

Ellen, so she averred, had been just nothing in school; not bright; not athletic, and, of course, not popular.

“Oh, of course not,” said Billy, smiling.

“Honestly,” fibbed Ellen.

“You never could make me believe it,” said Billy.

Whereat Ellen blushed, and Billy’s unbelief strengthened.

At this crisis, the Case burst into the room with his hat on. He removed it at sight of the caller and awkwardly advanced to be introduced.

“I’m going to bed,” he announced, after the formality.

“I hoped,” said Ellen, “you’d tell us about the latest. Who is it now? Beth?”

“Beth nothing!” scoffed the Case. “We split up the day of the Keewatin game.”

“What was the matter?” asked his sister.

“I’m going to bed,” said the Case. “It’s pretty near midnight.”

“By George, it is!” exclaimed Billy. “I didn’t dream it was that late!”

“No,” said Walter. “That’s what I tell dad⁠—the clock goes along some when you’re having a good time.”

Billy and Ellen looked shyly at each other, and then laughed; laughed harder, it seemed to Walter, than the joke warranted. In fact, he hadn’t thought of it as a joke. If it was that good, he’d spring it on Kathryn tomorrow night. It would just about clinch her.

The Case, carrying out his repeated threat, went to bed and dreamed of Kathryn. Fifteen minutes later Ellen retired to dream of Billy. And an hour later than that, Billy was dreaming of Ellen, who had become suddenly popular with him, even if she hadn’t been so at Northampton, which he didn’t believe.

IV

They saw The Follies Friday night. A criticism of the show by either would have been the greatest folly of all. It is doubtful that they could have told what theatre they’d been to ten minutes after they’d left it. From wherever it was, they walked to a dancing place and danced. Ellen was so far gone that she failed to note the change in Billy’s trotting. Foxes would have blushed for shame at its awkwardness and lack of variety. If Billy was a splendid dancer, he certainly did not prove it this night. All he knew or cared to know was that he was with the girl he wanted. And she knew only that she was with Billy, and happy.

On the drive home, the usual superfluous words were spoken. They were repeated inside the storm-door at Ellen’s father’s house, while the taxi driver, waiting, wondered audibly why them suckers of explorers beat it to the Pole to freeze when the North Side was so damn handy.

Ellen’s father was out of town. So in the morning she broke the news to mother and Aunt Mary, and then sat down and wrote it to Edith and Wilma. Next she called up Bob’s wife in Evanston, and after that she hurried to the next block and sprang it on Aunts Louise and Harriet. It was decided that Walter had better not be told. He didn’t know how to keep a secret. Walter, therefore, was in ignorance till he got home from school. The only person he confided in the same evening was Kathryn, who was the only person he saw.

Bob and his wife and Aunts Louise and Harriet came to Sunday dinner, but were chased home early in the afternoon. Mr. McDonald was back and Billy was coming to talk to him. It would embarrass Billy to death to find such a crowd in the house. They’d all meet him soon, never fear, and when they met him, they’d be crazy about him. Bob and Aunt Mary and mother would like him because he was so bright and said such screaming things, and the rest would like him because he was so well-read and sensible, and so horribly good-looking.

Billy, I said, was coming to talk to Mr. McDonald. When he came, he did very little of the talking. He stated the purpose of his visit, told what business he was in and affirmed his ability to support a wife. Then he assumed the role of audience while Ellen’s father delivered an hour’s lecture. The speaker did not express his opinion of Tyrus Cobb or the Kaiser, but they were the only subjects he overlooked. Sobriety and industry were words frequently used.

“I don’t care,” he prevaricated, in conclusion, “how much money a man is making if he is sober and industrious. You attended college, and I presume you did all the fool things college boys do. Some men recover from their college education, others don’t. I hope you’re one of the former.”

The Sunday-night supper, just cold scraps you might say, was partaken of by the happy but embarrassed pair, the trying-to-look happy but unembarrassed parents, and Aunt Mary. Walter, the Case, was out. He had stayed home the previous evening.

“He’ll be here tomorrow night and the rest of the week, or I’ll know the reason why,” said Mr. McDonald.

“He won’t, and I’ll tell you the reason why,” said Ellen.

“He’s a real boy, Sam,” put in the real boy’s mother. “You can’t expect him to stay home every minute.”

“I can’t expect anything of him,” said the father. “You and the girls and Mary here have let him have his own way so long that he’s past managing. When I was his age, I was in my bed at nine o’clock.”

“Morning or night?” asked Ellen.

Her father scowled. It was evident he could not take a joke, not even a good one.

After the cold scraps had been ruined, Mr. McDonald drew Billy into the smoking-room and offered him a cigar. The prospective son-in-law was about to refuse and express a preference for cigarettes when something told him not to. A moment later he was deeply grateful to the something.

“I smoke three cigars a day,” said the oracle, “one after each meal. That amount of smoking will hurt nobody. More than that is too much. I used to smoke to excess, four or five cigars per day, and maybe a pipe or two. I found it was affecting my health, and I cut down. Thank heaven, no one in my family ever got the cigarette habit; disease, rather. How any sane, clean-minded man can start on those things is beyond me.”

“Me, too,” agreed Billy, taking the proffered cigar with one hand and making sure with the other that his silver pill-case was as deep down in his pocket as it would go.

“Cigarettes, gambling, and drinking go hand in hand,” continued the man of the house. “I couldn’t trust a cigarette fiend with a nickel.”

“There are only two or three kinds he could get for that,” said Billy.

“What say?” demanded Mr. McDonald, but before Billy was obliged to wriggle out of it, Aunt Mary came in and reminded her brother-in-law that it was nearly church time.

Mr. McDonald and Aunt Mary went to church. Mrs. McDonald, pleading weariness, stayed home with “the children.” She wanted a chance to get acquainted with this pleasant-faced boy who was going to rob her of one of her five dearest treasures.

The three were no sooner settled in front of the fireplace than Ellen adroitly brought up the subject of auction bridge, knowing that it would relieve Billy of the conversational burden.

“Mother is really quite a shark, aren’t you, mother?” she said.

“I don’t fancy being called a fish,” said the mother.

“She’s written two books on it, and she and father have won so many prizes that they may have to lease a warehouse. If they’d only play for money, just think how rich we’d all be!”

“The game is fascinating enough without adding to it the excitements and evils of gambling,” said Mrs. McDonald.

“It is a fascinating game,” agreed Billy.

“It is,” said Mrs. McDonald, and away she went.

Before father and Aunt Mary got home from church, Mr. Bowen was a strong disciple of conservativeness in bidding and thoroughly convinced that all the rules that had been taught were dead wrong. He saw the shark’s points so quickly and agreed so wholeheartedly with her arguments that he impressed her as one of the most intelligent young men she had ever talked to. It was too bad it was Sunday night, but some evening soon he must come over for a game.

“I’d like awfully well to read your books,” said Billy.

“The first one’s usefulness died with the changes in the rules,” replied Mrs. McDonald. “But I think I have one of the new ones in the house, and I’ll be glad to have you take it.”

“I don’t like to have you give me your only copy.”

“Oh, I believe we have two.”

She knew perfectly well she had two dozen.

Aunt Mary announced that Walter had been seen in church with Kathryn. He had made it his business to be seen. He and the lady had come early and had maneuvered into the third row from the back, on the aisle leading to the McDonald family pew. He had nudged his aunt as she passed on the way to her seat, and she had turned and spoken to him. She could not know that he and Kathryn had “ducked” before the end of the processional.

After reporting favorably on the Case, Aunt Mary launched into a description of the service. About seventy had turned out. The music had been good, but not quite as good as in the morning. Mr. Pratt had sung “Fear Ye Not, O Israel!” for the offertory. Dr. Gish was still sick and a lay reader had served. She had heard from Allie French that Dr. Gish expected to be out by the middle of the week and certainly would be able to preach next Sunday morning. The church had been cold at first, but very comfortable finally.

Ellen rose and said she and Billy would go out in the kitchen and make some fudge.

“I was afraid Aunt Mary would bore you to death,” she told Billy, when they had kissed for the first time since five o’clock. “She just lives for the church and can talk on no other subject.”

“I wouldn’t hold that against her,” said Billy charitably.

The fudge was a failure, as it was bound to be. But the Case, who came in just as it was being passed round, was the only one rude enough to say so.

“Is this a new stunt?” he inquired, when he had tested it.

“Is what a new stunt?” asked Ellen.

“Using cheese instead of chocolate.”

“That will do, Walter,” said his father. “You can go to bed.”

Walter got up and started for the hall. At the threshold he stopped.

“I don’t suppose there’ll be any of that fudge left,” he said. “But if there should be, you’d better put it in the mouse trap.”

Billy called a taxi and departed soon after Walter’s exit. When he got out at his South Side abode, the floor of the tonneau was littered with recent cigarettes.

And that night he dreamed that he was president of the anti-cigarette league; that Dr. Gish was vice-president, and that the motto of the organization was “No trump.”

Billy Bowen’s business took him out of town the second week in December, and it was not until the twentieth that he returned. He had been East and had ridden home from Buffalo on the same train with Wilma and Edith McDonald. But he didn’t know it and neither did they. They could not be expected to recognize him from Ellen’s description⁠—that he was horribly good-looking. The dining-car conductor was all of that.

Ellen had further written them that he (not the dining-car conductor) was a man of many moods; that sometimes he was just nice and deep, and sometimes he was screamingly funny, and sometimes so serious and silent that she was almost afraid of him.

They were wild to see him and the journey through Ohio and Indiana would not have been half so long in his company. Edith, the athletic, would have revelled in his wit. Wilma would gleefully have fathomed his depths. They would both have been proud to flaunt his looks before the hundreds of their kind aboard the train. Their loss was greater than Billy’s, for he, smoking cigarettes as fast as he could light them and playing bridge that would have brought tears of compassion to the shark’s eyes, enjoyed the trip, every minute of it.

Ellen and her father were at the station to meet the girls. His arrival on this train had not been heralded, and it added greatly to the hysterics of the occasion.

Wilma and Edith upbraided him for not knowing by instinct who they were. He accused them of recognizing him and purposely avoiding him. Much more of it was pulled in the same light vein, pro and con.

He was permitted at length to depart for his office. On the way he congratulated himself on the improbability of his ever being obliged to play basketball versus Edith. She must be a whizz in condition. Chances were she’d train down to a hundred and ninety-five before the big games. The other one, Wilma, was a splinter if he ever saw one. You had to keep your eyes peeled or you’d miss her entirely. But suppose you did miss her; what then! If she won her Phi Beta Kappa pin, he thought, it would make her a dandy belt.

These two, he thought, were a misdeal. They should be reshuffled and cut nearer the middle of the deck. Lots of other funny things he thought about these two.

Just before he had left Chicago on this trip, his stenographer had quit him to marry an elevator-starter named Felix Bond. He had phoned one of his cousins and asked him to be on the lookout for a live stenographer who wasn’t likely to take the eye of an elevator-starter. The cousin had had one in mind.

Here was her card on Billy’s desk when he reached the office. It was not a business-card visiting-card, at $3 per hundred. “Miss Violet Moore,” the engraved part said. Above was written: “Mr. Bowen⁠—Call me up any night after seven. Calumet 2678.”

Billy stowed the card in his pocket and plunged into a pile of uninteresting letters.

On the night of the twenty-second there was a family dinner at McDonald’s, and Billy was in on it. At the function he met the rest of them⁠—Bob and his wife, and Aunt Harriet and Aunt Louise.

Bob and his wife, despite the former’s alleged sense of humor, spooned every time they were contiguous. That they were in love with each other, as Ellen had said, was easy to see. The wherefore was more of a puzzle.

Bob’s hirsute adornment having been disturbed by his spouse’s digits during one of the orgies, he went upstairs ten minutes before dinner time to effect repairs. Mrs. Bob was left alone on the davenport. In performance of his social duties, Billy went over and sat down beside her. She was not, like Miss Muffet, frightened away, but terror or some other fiend rendered her temporarily dumb. The game Mr. Bowen was making his fifth attempt to pry open a conversation when Bob came back.

To the impartial observer the scene on the davenport appeared heartless enough. There was a generous neutral zone between Billy and Flo, that being an abbreviation of Mrs. Bob’s given name, which, as a few may suspect, was Florence. Billy was working hard and his face was flushed with the effort. The flush may have aroused Bob’s suspicions. At any rate, he strode across the room, scowling almost audibly, shot a glance at Billy that would have made the Kaiser wince, halted magnificently in front of his wife, and commanded her to accompany him to the hall.

Billy’s flush became ace high. He was about to get up and break a chair when a look from Ellen stopped him. She was at his side before the pair of Bobs had skidded out of the room.

“Please don’t mind,” she begged. “He’s crazy. I forgot to tell you that he’s insanely jealous.”

“Did I understand you to say he had a sense of humor?”

“It doesn’t work where Flo’s concerned. If he sees her talking to a man he goes wild.”

“With astonishment, probably,” said Billy.

“You’re a nice boy,” said Ellen irrelevantly.

Dinner was announced and Mr. Bowen was glad to observe that Flo’s terrestrial body was still intact. He was glad, too, to note that Bob was no longer frothing. He learned for the first time that the Case and Kathryn were of the party. Mrs. McDonald had wanted to make sure of Walter’s presence; hence the presence of his crush.

Kathryn giggled when she was presented to Billy. It made him uncomfortable and he thought for a moment that a couple of studs had fallen out. He soon discovered, however, that the giggle was permanent, just as much a part of Kathryn as her fraction of a nose. He looked forward with new interest to the soup course, but was disappointed to find that she could negotiate it without disturbing the giggle or the linen.

He next centred his attention on Wilma and Edith. Another disappointment was in store. There were as many and as large oysters in Wilma’s soup as in anyone’s. She ate them all, and, so far as appearances went, was the same Wilma. He had expected that Edith would either diet or plunge. But Edith was as prosaic in her consumption of victuals as Ellen, for instance, or Aunt Louise.

He must content himself for the present with Aunt Louise. She was sitting directly opposite and he had an unobstructed view of the widest part he had ever seen in woman’s hair.

“Ogden Avenue,” he said to himself.

Aunt Louise was telling about her experiences and Aunt Harriet’s among the heathen of Peoria Street.

“You never would dream there were such people!” said she.

“I suppose most of them are foreign born,” supposed her brother, who was Mr. McDonald.

“Practically all of them,” said Aunt Louise.

Billy wanted to ask her whether she had ever missionaried among the Indians. He thought possibly an attempt to scalp her had failed by a narrow margin.

Between courses Edith worked hard to draw out his predicated comicality and Wilma worked as hard to make him sound his low notes. Their labors were in vain. He was not sleepy enough to be deep, and he was fourteen highballs shy of comedy.

In disgust, perhaps, at her failure to be amused, the major portion of the misdeal capsized her cocoa just before the close of the meal and drew a frown from her father, whom she could have thrown in ten minutes, straight falls, any style.

“She’ll never miss that ounce,” thought Billy.

When they got up from the table and started for the living-room, Mr. Bowen found himself walking beside Aunt Harriet, who had been so silent during dinner that he had all but forgotten her.

“Well, Miss McDonald,” he said, “it’s certainly a big family, isn’t it?”

“Well, young man,” said Aunt Harriet, “it ain’t no small family, that’s sure.”

“I should say not,” repeated Billy.

Walter and his giggling crush intercepted him.

“What do you think of Aunt Harriet’s grammar?” demanded Walter.

“I didn’t notice it,” lied Billy.

“No, I s’pose not. ‘Ain’t no small family.’ I s’pose you didn’t notice it. She isn’t a real aunt like Aunt Louise and Aunt Mary. She’s just an adopted aunt. She kept house for dad and Aunt Louise after their mother died, and when dad got married, she just kept on living with Aunt Louise.”

“Oh,” was Billy’s fresh comment, and it brought forth a fresh supply of giggles from Kathryn.

Ellen had already been made aware of Billy’s disgusting plans. He had to catch a night train for St. Louis, and he would be there all day tomorrow, and he’d be back Friday, but he wouldn’t have time to see her, and he’d surely call her up. And Friday afternoon he was going to South Bend to spend Christmas Day with his married sister, because it was probably the last Christmas he’d be able to spend with her.

“But I’ll hustle home from South Bend Sunday morning,” he said. “And don’t you dare make any engagement for the afternoon.”

“I do wish you could be with us Christmas Eve. The tree won’t be a bit of fun without you.”

“You know I wish I could. But you see how it is.”

“I think your sister’s mean.”

Billy didn’t deny it.

“Who’s going to be here Christmas Eve?”

“Just the people we had tonight, except Kathryn and you. Why?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Billy.

“Look here, sir,” said his betrothed. “Don’t you do anything foolish. You’re not supposed to buy presents for the whole family. Just a little, tiny one for me, if you want to, but you mustn’t spend much on it. And if you get anything for anyone else in this house, I’ll be mad.”

“I’d like to see you mad,” said Billy.

“You’d wish you hadn’t,” Ellen retorted.

When Billy had gone, Ellen returned to the living-room and faced the assembled company.

“Well,” she said, “now that you’ve all seen him, what’s the verdict?”

The verdict seemed to be unanimously in his favor.

“But,” said Bob, “I thought you said he was so screamingly funny.”

“Yes,” said Edith, “you told me that, too.”

“Give him a chance,” said Ellen. “Wait till he’s in a funny mood. You’ll simply die laughing!”

V

It is a compound fracture of the rules to have so important a character as Tommy Richards appear in only one chapter. But remember, this isn’t a regular story, but a simple statement of what occurred when it occurred. During Chapter Four, Tommy had been on his way home from the Pacific Coast, where business had kept him all fall. His business out there and what he said en route to Chicago are collateral.

Tommy had been Billy’s pal at college. Tommy’s home was in Minnesota, and Billy was his most intimate, practically his only friend in the so-called metropolis of the Middle West. So Tommy, not knowing that Billy had gone to St. Louis, looked forward to a few pleasant hours with him between the time of the coast train’s arrival and the Minnesota train’s departure.

The coast train reached Chicago about noon. It was Thursday noon, the twenty-third. Tommy hustled from the station to Billy’s office, and there learned of the St. Louis trip. Disappointed, he roamed the streets a while and at length dropped into the downtown ticket office of his favorite Minnesota road. He was told that everything for the night was sold out. Big Christmas business. Tommy pondered.

The coast train reached Chicago about noon. It was Thursday noon, the twenty-third.

“How about tomorrow night?” he inquired.

“I can give you a lower tomorrow night on the six-thirty,” replied Leslie Painter, that being the clerk’s name.

“I’ll take it,” said Tommy.

He did so, and the clerk took $10.05.

“I’ll see old Bill after all,” said Tommy.

Leslie Painter made no reply.

In the afternoon Tommy sat through a vaudeville show, and at night he looped the loop. He retired early, for the next day promised to be a big one.

Billy got in from St. Louis at seven Friday morning and had been in his office an hour when Tommy appeared. I have no details of the meeting.

At half-past eight Tommy suggested that they’d better go out and h’ist one.

“Still on it, eh?” said Billy.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I’m off of it.”

“Good Lord! For how long?”

“The last day of November.”

“Too long! You look sick already.”

“I feel great,” averred Billy.

“Well, I don’t. So come along and bathe in vichy.”

On the way “along” Billy told Tommy about Ellen. Tommy’s congratulations were physical and jarred Billy from head to heels.

“Good stuff!” cried Tommy so loudly that three pedestrians jumped sideways. “Old Bill hooked! And do you think you’re going to celebrate this occasion with water?”

“I think I am,” was Billy’s firm reply.

“You think you are! What odds?”

“A good lunch against a red hot.”

“You’re on!” said Tommy. “And I’m going to be mighty hungry at one o’clock.”

“You’ll be hungry and alone.”

“What’s the idea? If you’ve got a lunch date with the future, I’m in on it.”

“I haven’t,” said Billy. “But I’m going to South Bend on the one-forty, and between now and then I have nothing to do but clean up my mail and buy a dozen Christmas presents.”

They turned in somewhere.

“Don’t you see the girl at all today?” asked Tommy.

“Not today. All I do is call her up.”

“Well, then, if you get outside of a couple, who’ll be hurt? Just for old time’s sake.”

“If you need lunch money, I’ll give it to you.”

“No, no. That bet’s off.”

“It’s not off. I won’t call it off.”

“Suit yourself,” said Tommy graciously.

At half-past nine, it was officially decided that Billy had lost the bet. At half-past twelve, Billy said it was time to pay it.

“I’m not hungry enough,” said Tommy.

“Hungry or no hungry,” said Billy, “I buy your lunch now or I don’t buy it. See? Hungry or no hungry.”

“What’s the hurry?” asked Tommy.

“I guess you know what’s the hurry. Me for South Bend on the one-forty, and I got to go to the office first. Hurry or no hurry.”

“Listen to reason, Bill. How are you going to eat lunch, go to the office, buy a dozen Christmas presents and catch the one-forty?”

“Christmas presents! I forgot ’em! What do you think of that? I forgot ’em. Good night!”

“What are you going to do?”

“Do! What can I do? You got me into this mess. Get me out!”

“Sure, I’ll get you out if you’ll listen to reason!” said Tommy. “Has this one-forty train got anything on you? Are you under obligations to it? Is the engineer your girl’s uncle?”

“I guess you know better than that. I guess you know I’m not engaged to a girl who’s got an uncle for an engineer.”

“Well, then, what’s the next train?”

“That’s the boy, Tommy! That fixes it! I’ll go on the next train.”

“You’re sure there is one?” asked Tommy.

“Is one! Say, where do you think South Bend is? In Europe?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Tommy.

“South Bend’s only a two-hour run. Where did you think it was? Europe?”

“I don’t care where it is. The question is, what’s the next train after one-forty?”

“Maybe you think I don’t know,” said Billy. He called the gentleman with the apron. “What do you know about this, Charley? Here’s an old pal of mine who thinks I don’t know the timetable to South Bend.”

“He’s mistaken, isn’t he?” said Charley.

“Is he mistaken? Say, Charley, if you knew as much as I do about the timetable to South Bend, you wouldn’t be here.”

“No, sir,” said Charley. “I’d be an announcer over in the station.”

“There!” said Billy triumphantly. “How’s that, Tommy? Do I know the timetable or don’t I?”

“I guess you do,” said Tommy. “But I don’t think you ought to have secrets from an old friend.”

“There’s no secrets about it, Charley.”

“My name is Tommy,” corrected his friend.

“I know that. I know your name as well as my own, better’n my own. I know your name as well as I know the timetable.”

“If you’d just tell me the time of that train, we’d all be better off.”

“I’ll tell you, Tommy. I wouldn’t hold out anything on you, old boy. It’s five twenty-five.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure! Say, I’ve taken it a hundred times if I’ve taken it once.”

“All right,” said Tommy. “That fixes it. We’ll go in and have lunch and be through by half-past one. That’ll give you four hours to do your shopping, get to your office and make your train.”

“Where you going while I shop?”

“Don’t bother about me.”

“You go along with me.”

“Nothing doing.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

But this argument was won by Mr. Bowen. At ten minutes of three, when they at last called for the check, Mr. Richards looked on the shopping expedition in an entirely different light. Two hours before, it had not appealed to him at all. Now he could think of nothing that would afford more real entertainment. Mr. Richards was at a stage corresponding to Billy’s twenty-one. Billy was far past it.

“What we better do,” said Tommy, “is write down a list of all the people so we won’t forget anybody.”

“That’s the stuff!” said Billy. “I’ll name ’em, you write ’em.”

So Tommy produced a pencil and took dictation on the back of a menu-card.

“First, girl’s father, Sam’l McDonald.”

“Samuel McDonald,” repeated Tommy. “Maybe you’d better give me some dope on each one, so if we’re shy of time, we can both be buying at once.”

“All right,” said Billy. “First, Sam’l McDonal’. He’s an ol’ crab. Raves about cig’rettes.”

“Like ’em?”

“No. Hates ’em.”

“Sam’l McDonald, cigarettes,” wrote Tommy. “Old crab,” he added.

When the important preliminary arrangement had at last been completed, the two old college chums went out into the air.

“Where do we shop?” asked Tommy.

“Marsh’s,” said Billy. “ ’S only place I got charge account.”

“Maybe we better take a taxi and save time,” suggested Tommy.

So they waited five minutes for a taxi and were driven to Marsh’s, two blocks away.

“We’ll start on the first floor and work up,” said Tommy, who had evidently appointed himself captain.

They found themselves among the jewelry and silverware.

“You might get something for the girl here,” suggested Tommy.

“Don’t worry ’bout her,” said Billy. “Leave her till las’.”

“What’s the limit on the others?”

“I don’t care,” said Billy. “Dollar, two dollars, three dollars.”

“Well, come on,” said Tommy. “We got to make it snappy.”

But Billy hung back.

“Say, ol’ boy,” he wheedled. “You’re my ol’st frien’. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” agreed Tommy.

“Well, say, ol’ frien’, I’m pretty near all in.”

“Go home, then, if you want to. I can pull this all right alone.”

“Nothin’ doin’. But if I could jus’ li’l nap, ten, fifteen minutes⁠—you could get couple things here on fir’ floor and then come get me.”

“Where?”

“Third floor waitin’-room.”

“Go ahead. But wait a minute. Give me some of your cards. And will I have any trouble charging things?”

“Not a bit. Tell ’em you’re me.”

It was thus that Tommy Richards was left alone in a large store, with Billy Bowen’s charge account, Billy Bowen’s list, and Billy Bowen’s cards.

He glanced at the list.

“ ‘Samuel McDonald, cigarettes. Old crab,’ ” he read.

He approached a floorwalker.

“Say, old pal,” he said. “I’m doing some shopping and I’m in a big hurry. Where’d I find something for an old cigarette fiend?”

“Cigarette-cases, two aisles down and an aisle to your left,” said Old Pal.

Tommy raised the limit on the cigarette-case he picked out for Samuel McDonald. It was $3.75.

“I’ll cut down somewhere else,” he thought. “The father-in-law ought to be favored a little.”

“Charge,” he said in response to a query. “William Bowen, Bowen and Company, 18 South La Salle. And here’s a card for it. That go out tonight sure?”

He looked again at the list.

“Mrs. Samuel McDonald, bridge bug. Miss Harriet McDonald, reverse English. Miss Louise McDonald, thin hair. Miss Mary Carey, church stuff. Bob and Wife, The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife and gets mysteriously jealous. Walter McDonald, real kid. Edith, fat lady. Wilma, a splinter.”

He consulted Old Pal once more. Old Pal’s advice was to go to the third floor and look over the books. The advice proved sound. On the third floor Tommy found for Mother The First Principles of Auction Bridge, and for Aunt Harriet an English grammar. He also bumped into a counter laden with hymnals, chant books, and Books of Common Prayer.

“Aunt Mary!” he exclaimed. And to the clerk: “How much are your medium prayer-books?”

“What denomination?” asked the clerk, whose name was Freda Swanson.

“One or two dollars,” said Tommy.

“What church, I mean?” inquired Freda.

“How would I know?” said Tommy. “Are there different books for different churches?”

“Sure. Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran⁠—”

“Let’s see. McDonald, Carey. How much are the Catholic?”

“Here’s one at a dollar and a half. In Latin, too.”

“That’s it. That’ll give her something to work on.”

Tommy figured on the back of his list.

“Good work, Tommy!” he thought. “Four and a half under the top limit for those three. Walter’s next.”

He plunged on Walter. A nice poker set, discovered on the fourth floor, came to five even. Tommy wished he could keep it for himself. He also wished constantly that the women shoppers had taken a course in dodging. He was almost as badly battered as the day he played guard against the Indians.

“Three left besides the queen herself,” he observed. “Lord, no. I forgot Bob and his missus.”

He moved downstairs again to the books.

“Have you got The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife?” he queried.

Anna Henderson looked, but could not find it.

“Never mind!” said Tommy. “Here’s one that’ll do.”

And he ordered The Green-Eyed Monster for the cooing doves in Evanston.

“Now,” he figured, “there’s just Wilma and Edith and Aunt Louise.” Once more he started away from the books, but a title caught his eye: Eat and Grow Thin.

“Great!” exclaimed Tommy. “It’ll do for Edith. By George! It’ll do for both of them. ‘Eat’ for Wilma, and the ‘Grow Thin’ for Edith. I guess that’s doubling up some! And now for Aunt Louise.”

The nearest floorwalker told him, in response to his query, that switches would be found on the second floor.

“I ought to have a switch-engine to take me round,” said Tommy, who never had felt better in his life. But the floorwalker did not laugh, possibly because he was tired.

“Have you anything to match it with?” asked the lady in the switch-yard.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Can you give me an idea of the color?”

“What colors have you got?” demanded Tommy.

“Everything there is. I’ll show them all to you, if you’ve got the time.”

“Never mind,” said Tommy. “What’s your favorite color in hair?”

The girl laughed.

“Golden,” she said.

“You’re satisfied, aren’t you?” said Tommy, for the girl had chosen the shade of her own shaggy mane. “All right, make it golden. And a merry Christmas to you.”

He forgot to ask the price of switches. He added up the rest and found that the total was $16.25.

“About seventy-five cents for the hair,” he guessed. “That will make it seventeen even. I’m some shopper. And all done in an hour and thirteen minutes.”

He discovered Billy asleep in the waiting-room and it took him three precious minutes to bring him to.

“Everybody’s fixed but the girl herself,” he boasted. “I got books for most of ’em.”

“Where you been?” asked Billy. “What time is it?”

“You’ve got about thirty-three minutes to get a present for your lady love and grab your train. You’ll have to pass up the office.”

“What time is it? Where you been?”

“Don’t bother about that. Come on.”

On the ride down, Billy begged everyone in the elevator to tell him the time, but no one seemed to know. Tommy hurried him out of the store and into a taxi.

“There’s a flock of stores round the station,” said Tommy. “You can find something there for the dame.”

But the progress of the cab through the packed downtown streets was painfully slow and the station clock, when at last they got in sight of it, registered 5:17.

“You can’t wait!” said Tommy. “Give me some money and tell me what to get.”

Billy fumbled clumsily in seven pockets before he located his pocketbook. In it were two fives and a ten.

“I gotta have a feevee,” he said.

“All right. I’ll get something for fifteen. What’ll it be?”

“Make it a wristwatch.”

“Sure she has none?”

“She’s got one. That’s for other wris’.”

“I used your last card. Have you got another?”

“Pocketbook,” said Billy.

Tommy hastily searched and found a card. He pushed Billy toward the station entrance.

“Goodbye and merry Christmas,” said Tommy.

“Goo’bye and God bless you!” said Billy, but he was talking to a large policeman.

“Where are you trying to go?” asked the latter.

“Souse Ben’,” said Billy.

“Hurry up, then. You’ve only got a minute.”

The minute and six more were spent in the purchase of a ticket. And when Billy reached the gate, the 5:25 had gone and the 5:30 was about to chase it.

“Where to?” inquired the gateman.

“Souse Ben’,” said Billy.

“Run then,” said the gateman.

Billy ran. He ran to the first open vestibule of the Rock Island train, bound for St. Joe, Missouri.

“Where to?” asked a porter.

“Souse,” said Billy.

“Ah can see that,” said the porter. “But where you goin’?”

The train began to move and Billy, one foot dragging on the station platform, moved with it. The porter dexterously pulled him aboard. And he was allowed to ride to Englewood.

Walking down Van Buren Street, it suddenly occurred to the genial Mr. Richards that he would have to go some himself to get his baggage and catch the 6:30 for the northwest. He thought of it in front of a Van Buren jewelry shop. He stopped and went in.

Three-quarters of an hour later, a messenger-boy delivered a particularly ugly and frankly inexpensive wristwatch at the McDonald home. The parcel was addressed to Miss McDonald and the accompanying card read:

“Mr. Bowen: Call me up any night after seven. Calumet 2678. Miss Violet Moore.”

There was no goodwill toward men in the McDonald home this Christmas. Ellen spent the day in bed and the orders were that she must not be disturbed.

Downstairs, one person smiled. It was Walter. He smiled in spite of the fact that his father had tossed his brand-new five-dollar poker set into the open fireplace. He smiled in spite of the fact that he was not allowed to leave the house, not even to take Kathryn to church.

“Gee!” he thought, between smiles, “Billy sure had nerve!”

Bob walked round among his relatives seeking to dispel the gloom with a remark that he thought apt and nifty:

“Be grateful,” was the remark, “that he had one of his screamingly funny moods before it was too late.”

But no one but Bob seemed to think much of the remark, and no one seemed grateful.

Those are the facts, and it was quite a job to dig them up. But I did it.

Tour Y-10

Saturday, August 26: Diary, I am so thrilled I can hardly write, and who would not be, to think that Kate and I start tonight on our wonderful trip and will be away from work and grimy old Chi for two whole weeks. But I simply know that something will happen between now and ten o’clock to prevent us going; mother will get sick or I will wake up and find it is “all a dream,” or something. I would simply die if something did happen, but I just won’t let anything happen, and that settles it.

Kate just called up, and when I went to the phone she said she had decided not to go, after all. I believe I would of died if she had not laughed right after she said it, and then I knew she was joking. Kate is an awful tease, but the dearest girl in the world, and I could not of loved a sister more than she. I believe she and I are really closer to each other than most sisters, and it is funny we should be as we are as opposite as two girls could be in disposition and character and appearance and everything. I am serious, though I have a keen sense of humor, while Kate is always looking at the funny side of things, and when we are together she keeps me simply screaming at the things she says and does. I believe I do a lot more thinking than she and try to get at the bottom of things. As for appearance, while she is a dear girl, she is not a bit pretty. She is dark; dark hair and brown eyes, and does not take any care of her complexion. She wears glasses, and she is large enough to make two of poor little me. I am five feet five, and slender; golden, wavy hair; eyes that are sometimes blue and sometimes violet; good features and a good complexion. It is funny we should get along so well, being so unlike; but maybe it is because of the contrast between us that we are such good friends; and, of course, when she makes some remark about my looks, I always laugh it off, and say that beauty is only “skin deep,” or something.

What I envy about Kate is her nerve. She is positively not afraid of anything. It was she who suggested spending our vacation on a trip to Yellowstone Park. I would never of dared think about it myself. When she first sprung it, one day last June, when we were coming down on the “L,” I thought she must be up to one of her practical jokes, but for once she was in dead earnest.

“Let’s have one good time, girlie,” was the way she put it.

“But listen, Kate,” was my reply; “it would cost a million dollars. You talk like we were Hetty Gould, or something.”

“It will cost just about $125 apiece,” was her reply “Yes, but that is nearly $125 more than either of us have,” I said.

“Speak for yourself, girlie,” was her reply. “I am only shy twenty dollars myself, and we don’t have to go till the last of August. You just quit plunging in silk stockings and other things that nobody ever sees, and save up every penny between now and then, and, if it isn’t enough, I will be your uncle for the difference.”

“You would make a fine uncle, Kate,” I said laughingly. “I never heard of a girl being an uncle.”

Of course, I knew what she meant, but I was just joking her. Well, there is no arguing with Kate when her mind is made up. I tried to tell her how crazy it was, and how we would both have to go without a fall suit, and wear our last winter coats and everything; but I might as well of been talking to a stone or something. She said she was sick and tired of St. Joe and South Haven, and all the resorts around Chi, and if I did not make the trip with her she would go alone; and she did not think it would be proper for a girl to go alone on such a trip.

“Would it be proper for two girls?” I inquired.

“Sure it would,” was her reply. “Della and Paula Ingles made the trip two years ago, and had a perfectly wonderful time, and everybody in the party treated them grand and did their best to show them a good time. It’s always a great big party that makes the trips, and there is a man in charge and everything. We will be just as safe as though we were home.”

Well, I had to give in, and mother said it was all right with her when she understood that we were going with a large party and would be looked after by the man who has charge of these trips; and I have decided to keep a diary of the trip that will only be for my eyes alone, and I can read it in after years and enjoy the trip all over again.

I thought this day would never come, but it did, and now I must call up some of the girls and tell them goodbye. Bruce Patterson and Don Kellogg both said they would be down to the station and see me off. I hope they will pay a little attention to Kate.

Sunday, August 27: We are on our way at last, and now nothing can stop us only a train wreck or something; and the man in charge of the trip says there is no danger of that, as the cars are all made of steel; and even if we had a collision it could not smash up the steel cars; and besides, the railroad has a double track most of the way, and the cars going one way run on one track, and the cars going the other way run on the other track. His name is Mr. Garrett, and he is grand to us; always asking if there is something he can do, and how are we getting along, etc.

Bruce Patterson and Don Kellogg were down to the train last night to see me off. Bruce brought me a perfectly dear bouquet of carnations and Don Kellogg gave me a big, five-pound box of chocolates. I wish one of them had thought to of brought something for Kate; and I was terribly embarrassed when there was no one there to see her off only her sister and her brother-in-law; but I tried to make it easy for her by pretending the boys had come to say goodbye to both of us, and that the candy and flowers were meant for her as well as I; but, of course, she knew better. I was also embarrassed by Bruce and Don both being there together; and they simply looked daggers at each other. Í hope they did not quarrel or do anything foolish after we left. I tried to treat them both alike, but Don was the boldest of the two, and followed us right into the car; and right in front of Kate he asked me to kiss him goodbye.

“Don,” I said, “you know that is impossible. I will never allow a man to kiss me till I am his fiancéd bride.”

Poor boy, I could not help from feeling sorry for him. He looked like he had lost his last friend.

“Kate,” I said, after he had got off the train and we had started, “I sometimes wish I was as homely as a mud fence or something. It makes me feel perfectly terrible to have a man look at me like Don did just now. Maybe I am too softhearted.”

She did not say anything, and I was sorry I had said anything about it, as probably it reminded her that nobody had been down to see her off only her sister and brother-in-law. I would not hurt her feelings for the world. I hate to hurt anybody, and that is why I feel so sorry for Bruce and Don, because, though I care for both a great deal as a friend, I do not believe I could ever love either one of them enough to marry them. The man I marry must take me by storm; and besides, I seriously doubt if I will ever marry, as I love my freedom above everything.

Our party is divided into two sleeping-cars. When we got on the train last night most of the seats had been made into beds for the night. Kate and I had No. 3; and when I looked inside it and saw how small it was, I remarked that I did not see how we were going to be able to sleep together in it on account of Kate being so large; though, of course, I did not say that. The colored man who takes care of the car said he had also fixed us up a bed up above the one below, and one of us could sleep up there.

Heavens! I remarked. “I would be afraid of rolling out.”

So Kate said she would not mind sleeping up there at all; and when I asked her if she really meant it, she said she did, so I said if she would promise to let me sleep up there tonight I would let her sleep there last night. She had to climb up to it on a funny little ladder and undress after she got up there. But, really, it was less embarrassing for her than I, as I had to undress right down where everybody was walking through behind a curtain. When I finally did get in bed, I hardly slept at all, as there was so much noise and jar.

It was perfectly terrible dressing this morning. All the ladies have to wash and do their hair in one dinky little room, with the train going all the time, and you can hardly stand up. I am afraid I look a fright, but there is one comfort. At least “there are others.”

Mr. Garrett says there are about thirty-five people in our party. Most of them are elderly married couples around forty, and some of their children. Then there is two old girls that look like they had come out of the ark or something. One of them was in the dressing-room while I was there this morning, and we were both using the looking-glass at the same time, and she kept pushing me and annoying me till I lost my temper, and asked her if she could not act like a lady, even if she wasn’t one.

“Are you going to hog the looking-glass all day?” she said. “You have been brushing your hair nearly an hour.”

“Well,” was my reply, “my hair isn’t like yours, that if you brushed it two minutes there would not be any left to brush.”

After that she kept still and quit annoying me. Then there are three or four young boys about seventeen that think they are just about right. One of them keeps looking at me all the time, and when I catch him at it, he turns as red as fire. Poor kid, but he ought to be thinking about something besides girls three or four years his elder.

Besides those I have mentioned, there are two young men who must be just out of college, or possibly are still students. They are dandy-looking fellows, and dress in perfect taste; stylish but not loud. Mr. Garrett has introduced us to several of our fellow travelers, but as yet we have not met these young men. Personally, I do not care to meet them, as it would probably make things uncomfortable for Kate, as she is not one of the kind of girl that attract men, and I am afraid she would feel sort of out of it. I want her to enjoy herself on this trip as much as possible, as she does not get much pleasure out of life, with all her joking ways, which I sometimes think she puts on to hide her inner feelings.

Mr. Garrett says we are almost at Omaha, so I will put this away for the time.

Monday, August 28: Well, diary, here we are nearly at the end of the second day of our journey, and I am enjoying it more every minute. In spite of not wishing to make the acquaintance of the two young men I mentioned yesterday on account of Kate, we met them at breakfast in the dining-car this morning, and it came about in a way so that I could not avoid it without being rude. Last night I was tired out and went to bed early, before Kate did, and, without thinking, I got in the lower bed again, and Kate slept up above, like the first night, and this morning she waited till I got through dressing, because she said she could dress easier in the lower bed, so she told me to go in the dining-car and order our breakfast and she would join me later.

So when I got in the dining-car there was one table for two people left; and then there was a table for four, with nobody sitting at it only the two college men; and at first I was going to sit down at the smaller table, but one of the chairs at it was facing backward, and it makes me sick to ride that way, even on the “L”; and I thought, perhaps, it might make Kate sick, too; and the men at the larger table were both riding backward, and the two vacant seats were both facing forward, so I hesitated a minute, and then one of the men got up and smiled, and said: “There is lots of room here.” I am afraid I blushed furiously, but there was nothing left to do only for me to sit down at their table; and I had hardly no more than got seated when Mr. Garrett came up to our table.

“I was looking for a chance to introduce you young folks,” he said, “but I see you are already acquainted.”

“No, I am afraid not, Mr. Garrett,” I replied, smiling slightly. “But it makes both my girlfriend and I sick to ride backward, and as one of these gentlemen was kind enough to invite me to sit here, I accepted, as I expect my girlfriend to join me in a few minutes.”

“Then I am not too late to do my duty,” said Mr. Garrett. “Mr. Coles, allow me to make you acquainted with Miss Emerson. And the other gentleman is Mr. Lester, Miss Emerson.”

Mr. Garrett remained chatting with us till Kate came in. Then he introduced her to Mr. Coles and Mr. Lester, and left us. I watched both of the men’s faces when they were introduced to Kate, and was glad to see that they were gentlemanly enough to receive her as politely as they had received me.

“Well, girlie,” said Kate after Mr. Garrett left, “I am half starved and the other half hungry. What have you ordered for us to eat?”

Then I realized that I had forgotten all about ordering our breakfast, and I am afraid I blushed furiously. I stammered something about not having seen a bill-of-fare and no waiter having been at our table since my arrival. Mr. Lester came to my rescue.

“It’s Coles’s fault, Miss Hayes,” he said, smiling at Kate. “He has a delicate appetite, like a truck horse; and the order he gave the dinge will keep the chef busy clear to Ogden.”

I could not help from laughing at the way he put it. He says perfectly screaming things, and I thought I would simply die before breakfast was over. We were going through Wyoming, and most of it is just nothing but desert; but once in a while there is a small town; and right after we had passed through one of these little towns, Mr. Coles asked what town it was.

“I could not see the town,” was Mr. Lester’s reply. “There was a boxcar in front of it.”

“How are you enjoying the trip?” Mr. Coles asked me.

“I think it is just wonderful,” was my reply.

“The scenery gets better farther west,” said Mr. Lester.

“I think the scenery is great already, especially inside the car,” said Mr. Coles; and the way he looked at me I could not help from blushing.

“I am afraid you are a great jollier, Mr. Coles,” I said, embarrassed; but another remark of Mr. Lester’s soon had us all laughing again.

“Did you see all that corn in Nebraska yesterday?” he inquired.

“Yes,” was my reply.

“Aren’t you glad you did not have it all on your feet?” he said, and I thought I would simply fall out of my chair.

When the waiter came in with the men’s order they insisted on sharing it with us till the waiter could fill our own. I thought it was dandy of them to think of it, and I was glad for Kate’s sake, as I could see she was embarrassed and I could think of nothing to say, and having something eat put her more at ease.

I wish I could remember all the witty remarks Mr. Lester made; and the other people in the car must of thought it was a regular vaudeville show at our table to hear us laugh. He and Mr. Coles are as different than each other as Kate and I. Mr. Lester is a regular clown, and as good as a show. Mr. Coles is more serious, and looks like there was more to him. I believe he is the kind of a man that would get anything they wanted, and I am afraid a poor little girl like me would not have a chance if he took it into his head that I was the girl he wanted. The way he looked at me at breakfast, and after we all came back to our own car, I am afraid of him already; and I think I will try and keep out of his way as much as possible. Seriously, I would hate awfully to wound a man like he; and, of course, it is absurd to imagine me becoming engaged to a man I met on a trip of this kind, and really know nothing about him except that he is a gentleman and very good-looking. He is tall and dark, and I bet he and I make a striking contrast together. Mr. Lester is not quite as tall, and has light hair and a fair complexion. You can see that both of them have traveled a great deal and are well educated.

We four chatted together a few minutes after we got back to our car, and then Kate excused herself, saying she was going to read, and I did not feel like sitting with the two men, so I excused myself also, and have been busy writing ever since.

We are due at Ogden this afternoon, and from there we go to Salt Lake City, where we will have a chance to get off the train and stretch our limbs before tonight’s ride, which will take us to Yellowstone.

Tuesday, August 29: “When you come to the end of a perfect day” expresses the way I feel tonight better than any poor words of mine could tell it. Kate has gone to bed, but, though I have been riding and walking in the open air since early this morning, I know that was I to retire there would be no sleep for me, as my heart is too full of all I have seen and heard, and I feel like I must set it down while it is still fresh in my memory.

We did not see much of Salt Lake City yesterday afternoon, but we are to stop over there a whole day on our way back. When we got on the Yellowstone train last evening, Kate made the remark that she was worn out and was going right to bed.

“The boys have asked us to sit up awhile and play cards with them,” I said.

“What boys?” she asked.

“You know perfectly well,” was my reply. “Mr. Coles and Mr. Lester.”

“Well, you can play cards with them if you want to,” said Kate, “but I would rather sleep laying down than sitting up playing cards.”

“Kate,” I said, “I do not believe you are having a good time.”

“Sure I am,” was her reply. “I came out here to rest and see the scenery and not sit up all night playing cards with a couple of chorus men.”

“Chorus men,” I said. “You know very well they are no such a thing. They are men of the world and college graduates.”

“Yes,” she said, “graduates from Boler’s Barber College.”

I could see from her spiteful remarks what was the matter. Neither Mr. Coles or Mr. Lester had made a fuss over her, and she was taking it to heart.

“Listen, Kate,” I said, “I believe I know how you feel. But if you are going to act that way it will spoil my whole trip. Remember, dearie, that looks are not everything in this world, and when these boys have had a chance to get better acquainted with you, and know you as well as I do, they will see what a grand, good-hearted, bright, clever girl you are. Don’t be foolish, dearie, but let us get all the enjoyment we can out of our vacation.”

“That is just what I am doing,” was her reply, “only my idea of a good time is different than yours.”

I saw there was no use arguing with her, and I said good night and went back to where the boys were sitting to tell them our card game was off.

“What’s the idea?” asked Mr. Lester.

“My girlfriend, Miss Hayes, is tired out and does not feel well,” was my reply.

“Probably she got a good look at herself in the glass,” said Mr. Lester, and though I bit my lips till they almost bled, I could not help from laughing. But when I had controlled myself again, I said:

“You ought not to make a remark like that, Mr. Lester. Miss Hayes is my dearest friend, and I will not stand for anybody making unkind remarks about her.”

“Do you and she always pal around together?” he asked.

“We certainly do,” was my reply.

“It’s always the way,” said Mr. Lester. “A pippin and a prune are always coupled in the betting.”

“I don’t understand your slang expressions, Mr. Lester,” I said. “But I assure you you can look a long ways before you will find Kate Hayes’s equal.”

“I assure you I won’t even try,” he replied, “because when I found it I would not know what to do with it.”

I felt guilty sitting there listening to remarks like that, witty as they were, so after awhile I excused myself and retired.

When we wakened this morning we were nearly to Yellowstone Station, and we only just had time to dress and get our baggage ready when we were there. There was four stage coaches waiting to take our party through the park. Of course, I wanted to sit alongside of Kate, but before I realized it I was in the second seat of the first coach, with Mr. Coles on the one side of me and Mr. Lester on the other. Kate was in the driver’s seat with the driver and Mr. Garrett. In the other seats was a married couple and their little boy, and the two old girls that I had an unpleasant time with one of them in the dressing-room the morning after we left Chi.

I wish I was gifted with the pen so as I could describe all we have seen today. I will try and remember as much of it as possible and do the best I can, which is all anybody can do.

First we drove through what they call “Xmas tree park” and they call it that because the trees are the kind they use for Xmas trees. They are beautiful. Soon we were at Madison River and it is a small river, but very beautiful. We passed many points of interest, including some groups of tents where people can come and rent all summer and live in them. I just loved them. I said to Mr. Coles:

“Would not you just love to come and live here all summer?”

“It would depend on who was here with me,” was his reply, and I am afraid I blushed furiously.

On both sides of the river there was high mountains that were perfectly gorgeous and different than anything I had ever seen. Between eleven and noon we came to our first stop at the Fountain Hotel where we stopped and had lunch and it is one of the highest points in the U.S. and over 7,000 miles above the sea level. There was a great many points of interest around there which is called the “Lower Geyser Basin.” The geysers were simply wonderful and different than anything I had ever seen.

“Did you ever see anything more beautiful?” I said to Mr. Coles.

“Nothing that was not human,” he replied.

“Mr. Coles,” I said, trying to speak lightly, “I am afraid you are a great jollier.”

He turned to Kate.

“You do not think so, do you, Miss Hayes?” he said; and poor Kate was so embarrassed she did not know what to say. She is not used to fencing back and forth with men of the other sex.

Besides the geysers there was the Mammoth Paint Pots, and they are the most wonderful things I have ever seen, and they bubble up and down all the time like paint pots. And then there was the pools that are all different colors and boiling all the time, and Mr. Garrett told us there was a guide fell into one of them just a week ago, and before they could get him out he was burned to death though he was a fine swimmer on account of the water being so hot.

“That bird was prepared for Hades before he got there,” said Mr. Lester, and I tried not to laugh, because he said something stronger than Hades; but he put it so funny one could not take offense. Imagine calling a man a bird.

Before it was time for us to get in the coach again, we went back of the hotel where they keep the garbage and the bears come up and get it, and sure enough there was two huge bears coming up for their dinner just as we got there. I thought I would scream when I saw them, and, without realizing it, I dashed over to where Mr. Coles was standing and took a hold of his arm.

“Oh, Mr. Coles,” I said, “are you sure they won’t come after us?”

“You are in no danger from a bear when his taste runs to garbage,” he said.

I am really beginning to think Mr. Coles cannot say anything to a girl without turning it into a compliment. Mr. Garrett told us the bears were really very tame and would eat out of a person’s hand, and that they liked sugar better than anything. Imagine a bear eating sugar; but Mr. Garrett says they do.

The drive from the Fountain Hotel to Old Faithful was simply heavenly. There was several points of interest in rout, including what they call the “Morning Glory Pool,” because they made it to look just like a morning glory. But the most beautiful sight of all was Old Faithful Geyser, which is the geyser right near Old Faithful Inn, where I am now sitting in Kate’s and my room writing. This geyser is simply gorgeous and different than all the others, because it comes up at regular intervals of about every hour and everybody goes down to watch it and tonight when it was dark after supper and it was time for it to throw up again, they turned a searchlight on it from the roof of the hotel, and it was simply gorgeous. Mr. Garrett and Mr. Lester took me down to see it. Mr. Coles said the wind had made him sleepy, and he was going to bed right after supper. Kate said she was sleepy, too, but I guess the poor girl is not having a good time and wanted to be alone. After we had seen Old Faithful by night we walked round awhile and then sat in front of the log fire in the hotel, and Mr. Lester kept us in an uproar.

The hotel itself is perfectly wonderful, and all made out of logs and pieces of wood and matches each other perfectly. Mr. Garrett says it took years to build it and it cost two hundred and fifty million dollars.

When I came into the room Kate was sound asleep, and I could not help from feeling sorry for her. Imagine going to bed early in a place like this and on such a night. But it is after midnight now and time for a certain little girl I know to go to bed herself, so she can get her “beauty sleep” and look her best tomorrow, because⁠—But I don’t know of anyone here who cares if she looks her best or not; do you, diary?

Wednesday, August 30: If we thought we were seeing wonders yesterday what about today, and it almost seems like there could not be anything more beautiful in heaven than some of the things that was on our rout today.

But there was an occurrence this morning that somewhat marred the pleasure of our drive from Old Faithful to the place we stopped for lunch. Everybody thought, of course, we would occupy the same seats in the coach like we did yesterday, at least I am sure most of us did, and we would of only for those two old impossible cats that sat in the back seat yesterday. They hurried through their breakfast and rushed out to the porch and climbed into the coach first, and took the second seat; and you can bet nobody was going to sit with them. I expect they thought Mr. Lester or Mr. Coles or somebody was going to climb in with them, just as though they were not old enough to be their grandmother. Then when we came out and saw it, Kate said to me:

“Girlie, you sit up in front because you can see so much better.”

So Mr. Lester helped me up in front, and Kate got in the back seat and Mr. Coles got in there with her, because he was standing back that way, and it would of seemed rude for him to come up in front. And then Mr. Lester said he supposed Mr. Garrett, being in charge, always sat in the front, and Mr. Lester went in the back seat, too, and the man and his wife and little boy were in the third seat, and that left myself and Mr. Garrett and the driver for the front seat.

I was terribly embarrassed for Kate’s sake, because I cannot imagine what she could of talked about to those two boys, and I knew they were disappointed, too, but were trying to make the best of it and at first Mr. Garrett seemed to realize how ridiculous it was and did not do much talking, but after a while the two chatterboxes on the second seat began asking him questions, and he had to answer them, but some of the things he told them were simply screaming, and I could see he was making regular fools of them. He told them, for instance, that the tourists in the park were called dudes, and those that drove autos were called toot dudes, and the driver on our coach was called a scissors bill, because he drove four horses, and the help in the park were called heavers and savages, and when a man and a girl went out for a spoon in the dark they called it rotten-logging, because the only place they could sit down would be on one of the old dead logs. And the worst of it was that the two old girls took it all in and giggled and tee-heed like they had no idea they were being made a fool of.

But the scenery was simply heavenly, though most of the way we were driving right on the edge of the canyon, and I was simply petrified sometimes for fear one of the horses would make a misstep and we would all be killed, and I wished more than once that Mr. Coles was sitting beside me, and I know I would not of felt half as nervous if he had of. He is one of the kind of man that a girl feels perfectly safe when they are together.

About noon we came to the place where they serve lunch, and they call it the “Thumb” because it is a part of Yellowstone Lake. The view of the lake was perfectly heavenly, and there was a soldiers’ camp there. Mr. Garrett said they have to keep soldiers in the park all the time on account of Mexico being so close.

When it came time to leave the “Thumb,” I saw to it that there would not be another embarrassing situation like in the a.m. I made believe to Kate that it made me dizzy to ride in the front seat, and she got up there, and I called Mr. Coles over to one side and asked him would he not ride in the back seat with me, as I had something important to tell him, so when we started he and myself were in the back seat, and the father and mother and little boy in their regular place, and Mr. Garrett and Kate and the driver in front, and poor Mr. Lester in the second seat with the two old girls. I would of felt sorry for him, only I knew he must be enjoying himself making fools of them, When we got started Mr. Coles said:

“Well, Miss Emerson, what is the big secret?”

“What do you mean, Mr. Coles?” I asked.

“You said you had something to tell me,” was his reply!

“Oh,” was my reply, “that was just a little piece of stradegy on my part. I could see how uncomfortable it was for all of us this morning.”

“I was perfectly comfortable,” he said.

“I do not mean physical comfort, Mr. Coles,” I said pointedly.

“Well,” was his reply, “I cannot think of any way I was not comfortable.”

“It’s dandy of you to act that way about it,” I said, “but I knew how you must feel, and I know Kate felt the same way.”

“I hope so,” he said.

“Surely you do not mean that, Mr. Coles,” I said. “You do not want to embarrass the poor girl to death.”

“She did not act embarrassed,” he said.

“Oh, Mr. Coles, I am afraid you are a fibber,” I said, but I just loved the way he stood up for Kate. I like a man to be chivalrous to the entire feminine sex, no matter who they are, but of course I liked it specially in this case on account of Kate being my dearest girlfriend and chum.

The drive from the “Thumb” to the Lake Hotel took over two hours, and Mr. Coles was silent a good deal of the way. I did not mind, in fact, I was glad he was, for I felt in a silent mood myself. Sometimes just being together is enough, without words to spoil it. “Silence is golden and often speaks plainer than words.” Two or three times the party in the third seat turned round and tried to start a conversation, but we both discouraged them, though Mr. Coles answered whatever questions they asked pleasantly and I smiled at the little boy. One of my strongest instincts is my love for children, and I would of tried to win his little heart had there not been even stronger feelings tugging at my own.

As we approached the Lake Hotel we caught sight of the most wonderful sight of all and different than anything I have ever seen. It was the mountain across the lake, called the “Sleeping Giant” because it is shaped like a man’s head asleep.

It was Mr. Garrett who called our attention to it and called to us to look at it from the front seat.

“Oh, how simply heavenly,” I exclaimed, and without realizing it my hand reached out to Mr. Coles’s and grasped it tight. When I realized what I had done I nearly died of embarrassment and I am afraid I blushed furiously.

“Mr. Coles,” I said when I could recover command of my voice, “I hope you will pardon me. I am different than other girls and when I am deeply moved my feelings often gets the best of me and I do things unconsciously that I would never think of doing was I not moved right out of myself and when I realize what I have done I nearly die of embarrassment. But I hope you will not think any the worse of me.”

“Not a bit, Miss Emerson,” was his reply and he gave me the nicest smile.

But my face simply burned and I had not entirely recovered myself when the coach stopped at the Lake Hotel. My only comfort was that we had been on the back seat when it happened where none of the others could see us, and also that it had been Mr. Coles instead of a man of less character and less of a gentleman.

As soon as we reached the hotel Kate and myself hurried to our room to tidy up as the ride had been dusty.

“Kate,” I said to her when we were alone, “I hope you had a good enough time this afternoon to make up for this morning.”

“Well, girlie,” was her reply, “if you ask me, it was about fifty fifty. But what do you mean?”

“You know all right, Kate,” I said. “I could see you were simply dying on that back seat with those two boys this morning.”

“If that was dying I hope to die,” said Kate, and I saw she intended to laugh it off so I let the subject drop.

After supper tonight Mr. Coles and Mr. Lester and Mr. Garrett all disappeared somewhere, and I suppose Mr. Coles was forced into a card game or something though I know he would of given anything to get out of it. Kate and myself sat in the lobby for a little while and then I suggested coming here to the room as I wanted to do my writing, but Kate said she was not ready to come just then.

“But what are you going to do?” I asked her.

“I am going for a walk,” was her reply. “I am going over to see the Sleeping Giant. I think it is about time he woke up.”

Of course she was joking but imagine a girl like Kate going out for a walk alone after dark. I do believe she is getting sentimental. Poor old Kate.

Thursday, August 31: Diary, I wish I was like some girls who have a heart of stone and no matter how many wounds they inflict on others they are able to smile and forget it, but I am not one of those kind and I never wound a fellow creature without feeling the hurt perhaps keener than they do themselves.

Kate and myself were the last ones of our party to be ready for the start from the Lake Hotel this morning. When I came out on the porch our coach was waiting for us. Mr. Garrett was in the front seat with Mr. Lester, and his “maiden aunts” in the second seat, and the man and wife and boy in the third seat, and Mr. Coles all alone in the back seat. It was easy to see that Mr. Coles had asked Mr. Lester to make this arrangement so that he and myself could be in the back seat alone and Kate would ride up with Mr. Garrett and the driver. But instead of me getting up beside Mr. Coles, what did I do but climb up in the driver’s seat beside Mr. Garrett and leave Kate to sit with Mr. Coles. I did not dare look round at Mr. Coles to see how he took it, but I can imagine.

“Well,” I said to myself, “it will only be for a few hours till we get to the ‘Canyon Hotel,’ and it will show Mr. Coles that I am not running after him, though of course he knows I am not that kind.”

But I never would of done it had I of known the state of Mr. Garrett’s feelings toward me. Before, he had kept himself well in hand and though he had looked at me two or three times when he thought I was not observing him, he had always treated me just like I was only one of the party who it was his duty to be polite to. But when I got up beside him his face turned pale at first and then got as red as fire and I was glad none of the rest of the party could see it.

“Mr. Garrett,” I said, “I am awfully sorry.”

“That’s all right, Miss Emerson,” he replied bravely. “I guess I can live through it.”

Poor fellow, he blushed all the more when he saw that his face had betrayed his secret.

“But it is not all right, Mr. Garrett,” I said, “and I wish I could do something for you, but I fear it is hopeless.”

“Is there someone else?” he asked, his voice shaking.

“Yes,” I replied softly.

I could of killed myself then for the mischievous spirit that had made me take the front seat. I had no heart to appreciate the beauties of our drive along the Yellowstone River, though Mr. Garrett showed perfectly fine self control and pointed out all the points of interest, never once eluding to the pain I had caused him.

The coach stopped for a few minutes at the Upper Falls so we could get out and view it. It is perfectly wonderful and different than anything I have ever seen, and I wish I had of been more in the mood to enjoy it. I had a mind to get in the back seat for the balance of the trip to the hotel, but I heard Mr. Garrett say it was only a few minutes drive; and besides it was too late to undo the harm I had done.

At noon we reached the Canyon Hotel, which is certainly beautiful. Kate and myself immediately went to our room and got ready for lunch, Mr. Garrett said that right after lunch we would all take a walk down to Inspiration Point, where we could get a fine view of the Lower Falls, but Kate said she did not feel like walking and went to our room right after lunch. I followed her in there to see if she was sick or something, but she said she was all right, only tired.

“Kate,” I said, “I am afraid you are not having a good time.”

“Don’t worry about me, girlie,” was her reply.

“Listen, Kate,” I said; “I am ashamed of myself for what I did this morning, making you ride back there alone with Mr. Coles. I just did it to tease him. I know you must of both felt uncomfortable. I never would of done it had I guessed the state of Mr. Garrett’s feelings toward me.”

“What is he sore at you about?” she asked.

“You misunderstand me, Kate,” I said. “I only wish he was sore, as you call it. I am afraid he is growing too fond of me.”

I could see that she was not expecting this, as her face got red, and it is usually no color at all.

“Did he tell you so?” she asked.

“Yes,” was my reply.

“When?” she asked.

“This morning,” was my reply, “when I was sitting in the front seat with him.”

“Well, all I can say is that he has got his nerve,” said Kate.

“We must not be too hard on him, Kate,” I said. “Nobody can help their feelings.”

“What did you tell him?” she asked.

“I was as gentle with him as possible,” was my reply. “But I thought it kindest to tell him the truth. I told him there was somebody else.”

“Who is it?” asked Kate. “You have been holding out on me. Is it Bruce or Don?”

“Oh, Kate, I could never care for either one of those poor boys,” I said. “They are all right, I suppose, but there is no class to them.”

“Well, then, who is it?” she asked.

“Kate,” was my reply, “I guess I can trust you to keep a secret. I am not exactly engaged, but there is an understanding between a certain person and I. Cannot you guess who it is?”

“I certainly cannot,” was her reply.

“Kate,” I said, “it is Mr. Coles.”

Poor girl, this came as such a surprise to her that I thought she was going to faint, though I should think she could of seen that Mr. Coles and myself were more than merely interested in each other. From her looks when I told her the news I believe Kate was actually jealous. She hated to think of anyone, even a man, taking her place in my affections.

“Poor old Kate,” I said, “I know this is hard on you. But you will be my maid of honor and we will do our best to make you look pretty.”

There was a knock at our door and a boy called to us that Mr. Garrett was waiting to take us down and see the Falls.

“Come on, Kate,” I said. “The walk will do you good.”

But she had thrown herself on the bed, and I could see that the poor girl was worn out as well as almost sick over what I had told her. So I left her and went out to join the others on the porch. Mr. Coles was not with them. Mr. Lester said he had gone to his room with a sick headache. This took all the pleasure out of the walk for me, and I would gladly of stayed in the hotel and tried to comfort Kate, but I thought it would look funny. So I went with the party to Inspiration Point, and I was glad afterward that I had, for the Great Falls is perfectly wonderful and different than anything I have ever seen, and I would not of missed it for the world. It is simply heavenly, and I would of loved to of sat there all afternoon “lost in dreams,” watching this grand sight. But how much more I would of enjoyed it had Mr. Coles been along, and I could not help from worrying about him and wondering was he really very ill, and poor Kate, too.

Mr. Lester saw that I was worrying about something, and did his best to cheer me up with his remarks which really were laughable had I been in the mood for laughing. When we were standing on the point, with the bottom of the canyon miles below us, he said:

“It would be simply killing to fall off of here.”

A little later he said:

“If a man tripped and fell down, it would be some trip.”

Then he told a story about a man whom he said jumped out of the nineteenth story of the Masonic Temple, and when he got to the eighth floor he said to himself:

“Well, I am all right so far.”

Of course, it was simply nonsense, because the man could not of talked, and if he had of been able, he would not of had time.

I noticed that Mr. Garrett hardly smiled at all all the time we were out, though he tried his best to be cheerful and do right by those who he was showing the sights to. Poor boy, it made me feel like a criminal to look at him, and yet, was it my fault?

Kate was still lying down when we got back to the hotel, and looked like she had been crying, but I thought it best not to talk on the subjects I knew was occupying her thoughts. She got up and changed her dress, and I helped her fix her hair, which would not be bad if it was not so stringy and perfectly straight.

“Kate,” I said, trying to cheer her up, “you look almost pretty with that dress and your hair fixed that way.”

Mr. Coles was at the supper table when we got there. I could see he was still suffering from his headache, and I wished he had been alone so I could of comforted him. He bowed to both of us when we sat down, but I noticed Kate did not return his bow and had nothing to say all through supper. How silly of her to take it that way, just as though I was never going to look at a man on her account. Mr. Garrett did not appear in the dining-room at all, and I did not see him at all this evening.

Mr. Coles excused himself before we were through. I hoped he would go out on the porch or wait somewhere else for me so that I could ask him how he felt and perhaps help him to forget his suffering, but when I went on the porch no one was there only Mr. Lester and some of the rest of the party who I do not know. Kate had gone straight to our room from the table. Mr. Lester and myself walked up and down together for a few minutes, but he began making such silly remarks that after a while I left him and came in here to my room.

“What has come over this bunch?” was Mr. Lester’s first remark. “Everybody acts sore at each other.”

“I have not noticed anything,” was my reply, as I did not think it necessary to take him into my confidence.

“Your eyes are just ornaments, then,” he said. “Your friend and Coles did not speak at supper and Garrett has had a grouch all day.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe they are not feeling well. You know Mr. Coles has a sick headache.”

“No such a thing,” said Mr. Lester. “He pretended he had a headache so he would not have to go down to the canyon with us. But he had a date with your friend to go walking by themselves.”

“You are always joking, Mr. Lester,” I said.

“There is no joke about it,” was his reply. “He tried to get your friend to go walking with him, and she turned him down cold. And tonight they had a date to go rotten-logging, and that is off, too.”

“Mr. Lester,” I said, you can carry your jokes too far. Mr. Coles would not care to hear you talk like that, and neither would my girlfriend. She is not the kind that goes rotten-logging, as you call it.”

“Then what was she doing that night at Old Faithful’ and last night at the lake?” he said.

“She was tired out and was resting in her room,” I said.

“You think she was,” he said.

“Mr. Lester,” I said coldly, “you are trying to be funny or else you are trying to find out something. Whichever it is, I am tired of listening and think I will go to bed.”

“Don’t hurry,” was his reply. “I will promise to be good, and maybe we can have a little logging party of our own.”

“That will do, Mr. Lester,” I said coldly, and left him.

Mr. Lester is the kind of man who is comical sometimes, but does not know when to stop. Imagine a man wanting to go out walking with Kate, and especially a man like Mr. Coles.

Kate has been in bed for hours, and I am going to bed myself, but I know I shall not sleep, for I will not only be thinking about my poor, dear boy with his sick headache, but also about Mr. Garrett, who has something a thousand times worse, because it lasts so long, a wound in his heart.

Friday, September 1: Diary, my heart is broken, and the sooner die the better.

Thank God, I found out in time before it was too late the kind of a man Mr. Coles is, and Mr. Garrett, too. And, thank God, I have at last seen Kate in her true colors, she who posed as my friend, but who is false to the core.

Our trip has come to a sudden end, just as has my poor little romance and my friendship with Kate, who I thought was my dearest chum, and not the false, deceitful traitor she has turned out to be. We have left Yellowstone Park, and tomorrow morning will be in Ogden. The others are going on to Salt Lake City and home from there tomorrow afternoon. But I am going to stay in Ogden and take the first train for Chi, which I wish to heavens I had never left.

The darkey has made up my bed, but I know I cannot sleep, and I must be doing something or I would go mad, though I do not know if I have the courage to write down the events of this day, which will live in my memory forever.

We left the Canyon Hotel at half-past eight this morning. I was in the back seat with Mr. Lester and Mr. Coles. Mr. Coles had not spoken to Kate and had merely bowed to me at breakfast, and on our trip to Norris Basin he hardly spoke a word. From Norris Basin we were to go to Mammoth Hot Springs, to spend the night there, but when we reached Norris Basin, at noon, we got some news that made us change all our plans. It was that the railroads are all going on a strike next Monday, and if we did not get right out of the park and start home we might have to stay out here all winter, and the park was going to close up on account of the strike, and everybody would have to be out of there by tonight.

So Mr. Garrett said that he was sorry, but we would have to miss the trip to Mammoth Hot Springs and we would start for Yellowstone Station right after lunch and catch this train for Ogden. The ride to Norris had been dusty, but in the excitement of hearing the news about the strike I had forgotten to get cleaned up before lunch, so after lunch, thinking it would be a few minutes before my coach started, I went in to wash my hands and face and fix my hair. When I came out and looked for my coach, it was gone. Two of the others had started, too, and there was only the one left.

“You will have to crowd into this one,” said the driver. “The others must of forgotten you in the excitement.”

Hardly knowing what I was doing, I climbed into a seat beside two strangers, and we started out. I expected every minute to see Mr. Garrett’s coach coming back after me, for then I did not know the truth, that Kate was not really my friend, but false and deceitful, and that she had turned Mr. Coles and Mr. Garrett against me with her lies. What we saw on that terrible ride this afternoon I do not know. I could hear my companions pointing out points of interest, but my heart was too sore to take it in. When at last we reached the Yellowstone Station, the other coaches were there ahead of us and the rest of the party were standing on the station platform. Mr. Garrett came up to meet us.

“Miss Emerson,” he said, “I must ask your pardon for us running off and forgetting you this afternoon. I was worried about getting all these people out of the park.”

“Yes, Mr. Garrett,” I said coldly, “it is all right for you to forget me, and the sooner you do so the better for both of us.”

Then I saw Kate, and went to her.

“Kate,” I said, “I do not believe there can be any explanation for you running off and leaving me in that place alone, but I want to hear what excuse you have got.”

“Girlie,” she said, “I can never forgive myself, but I was so upset I hardly knew what I was doing.”

“But someone must of noticed my absence,” I said.

“If they did, they kept it to themselves,” was her reply.

“Kate,” I said, “I cannot believe that. I know that there was at least one who thought of me.”

“Who?” she inquired.

“You know, Kate,” I replied. “Mr. Coles.”

“Poor Mr. Coles,” said Kate, “I am afraid he had other things to think about.”

“What do you mean, Kate?” I inquired.

“Well, girlie,” was her reply, “I suppose I might as well come across with the truth, though I know it will be hard for you to believe. While we were at Norris this noon, Mr. Coles honored me by asking me to become his wife.”

“Kate,” I said, “you are carrying a joke too far.”

“I know it sounds like a joke,” was her reply; “but it’s just as true as that your name is Violet Emerson.”

I cannot remember what was said in the next few minutes, for suddenly I realized that Kate was telling me the truth. I believe I would of fainted was it not for my horror of making a scene before strangers.

“I told him I was sorry,” was Kate’s next words, “but I could not accept because I was engaged to another man. It was a lie when I told it to him, but it was not a lie very long, for Mr. Garrett and I became engaged about a half-hour after we left Norris. You nearly spoiled everything for me yesterday by telling me Mr. Garrett had told you he cared for you. I thought he was in the wholesale business. But I knew there must be some explanation, and I gave him a chance to make it. When you thought he was talking about you yesterday, it was I he was talking about. So that is about all there is to it. We are going to get married in November and you are to be my maid of honor.”

“Kate,” I said coldly, “I thought you were my friend. Instead of that, you have spread lies about me and have stolen the one man you knew I cared for.”

“I thought you cared for Mr. Coles,” she said.

“I do,” was my reply.

“Well,” she said, “as far as I am concerned, you can have him.”

“Kate,” I said coldly, “I see now that your friendship for me was merely a pose. But let me tell you that you will pose no longer. From now on you will do me a favor by not speaking to me. Henceforth you and myself are as strangers.”

“I am sorry you feel that way, girlie,” was her reply, “but you must suit yourself.”

I left her then, and found my seat in the train. While I was sitting there Mr. Coles came up.

“Well, Miss Emerson,” he said, “I guess I will have to admit defeat. But she is a fine girl, and Garrett is a lucky dog. I suppose the best thing I can do is congratulate him and try and forget it.”

“You may do whatever you choose, I am sure,” I replied coldly.

Mr. Garrett stopped at the table where I was eating in the dining-car to ask me if I wanted to go straight home from Ogden.

“Where is the rest of the party going?” I inquired.

“Most of them are going to Salt Lake, and start east from there tomorrow afternoon,” was his reply. “Kate is going to Salt Lake, and so are Lester and Coles.”

“All right, then,” I said coldly. “I will go straight home from Ogden. I guess I know when I am not wanted.”

It seems like Mr. Garrett and Kate were proud of what they had done, for they spread the news all over the train. One of the two old maids heard it at supper and came rushing up to me.

“I hear we have a romance,” she said.

“We,” I said. “I guess there is no danger of you ever having one.”

“You either,” she said.

“That is none of your business,” was my reply, “and the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut.”

After that she let me alone, the old fossil.

Mr. Lester just came through the car and saw me sitting here writing.

“Are you writing the Yellowstone Romance?” he asked.

“It is none of your business what I am writing, Mr. Lester,” I replied.

“What do you think of them?” he continued. “Who would of thought she would of got both of them on her staff and you be overlooked? Some people have funny taste. I would of bet my pile on you. In fact, I would fall in love with you myself, only I have a wife and family in Kenosha.”

“You are welcome to them and they are welcome to you,” was my reply, and he walked away.

I have told the darkey to be sure and see that I get off at Ogden in the morning. I believe I would die if I had to spend another day in the company of those who have betrayed me. I believe I am going to die, anyway. I hope so, for what is there to live for, diary?

Sunday, September 3: The conductor told me this morning that there is not going to be any railroad strike, after all, as President Wilson has fixed everything up, so I suppose that my dear “friends” will keep on with their trip and take in Colorado Springs and Denver, etc. They can do it as far as I am concerned. I will not stop them. I will be in Chi tomorrow morning, and how good it will seem after all I have gone through.

I still have a week left of my vacation and I think I will stay at home and read. I will not let anyone know I am home, unless it is one or two of my girl chums. I do not want to ever see a man of the opposite sex again as long as I live.

It has been a lonesome trip from Ogden, and I am glad it is nearly over, though I am not shedding any tears over making the trip alone. I had much rather be alone than in the company of those who I started out with. I suppose by this time Mr. Coles has found some other girl to try and flirt with, and I hope for his sake he has found a girl who will fall for him because she has been shut up all her life and never saw another man. That is about the only kind of a girl who he could make a hit with. As for Mr. Garrett and Kate, I wish them happiness, and they ought to be happy together, because they are two of a kind, and, thank heavens, I am not one of their kind.

When I was getting off the train at Ogden yesterday morning, poor Kate saw me and climbed out of her bed in her kimona to say “goodbye” to me. I wish Mr. Garrett and Mr. Coles could of seen her the way she looked, and Mr. Coles would of thanked heavens for his escape.

“You are not getting off here, are you, girlie?” she said.

“I certainly am,” was my reply.

“But the rest of us are going through to Salt Lake,” she said.

“I should worry where the rest of you are going,” I said.

“Girlie,” she said, “please do not bear any grudge against me and break up our friendship.”

“I guess you know, Kate, who has broken up our friendship,” I replied coldly.

“If you will just tell me what I have done, I will try and make it right,” she said.

“Kate,” I said, “there is no use of you pretending. You know what you have done, and you did it with your eyes open.”

“You mean me getting engaged to Mr. Garrett?” she said. “Remember, girlie, there is always some man somewhere foolish enough to fall for a girl as ugly as I. You pretty girls cannot expect to get all the men.”

“If you think I wanted Mr. Garrett or Mr. Coles, either one, you are much mistaken,” I replied coldly.

“Then what is the trouble?” she asked.

“I guess you know, Kate,” I said. “There is no use discussing it. You had better get back in your berth before Mr. Garrett sees you, because if you care for him you certainly do not want him to faint away.”

I left her then and got off the train, and if I never see her again I guess I will live through it.

I have been doing a lot of thinking yesterday and today on the train, and I have come to the conclusion that a girl is foolish to give up her freedom for any man, no matter how attractive she may think him at first. There is nobler work in the world for a girl besides being a drudge for her husband. As soon as I get home I believe I will make inquiries about how much it would cost to train to be a Red Cross nurse. Surely that is a nobler work than that of a housewife. Anyway, I certainly am through with the opposite sex for all time, and will be just as well satisfied if no man ever looks at me again.

Monday, September 4: I do not know why I am keeping up this diary, now that my trip is over. Just to pass the time, I guess. I thought this morning I would tear it all up, but then I happened to think that it contained my personal impressions of Yellowstone Park, which I will copy out some day and keep, and tear up the rest of it.

It is after supper and mother has gone out to the picture show. I would of gone with her only Don Kellogg is coming to see me. How he will laugh when I tell him about Kate and her “great catch.” I bet he will not believe me when I tell him she is actually engaged. He will say: “Is the poor guy blind or crazy or what?”

I would not of let Don know I was in town only I happened to remember I had lent him the book I wanted to read this week, so I phoned him as soon as I got home this morning and asked him would he send it to me.

“No,” was his reply; “but I will bring it to you.”

“You are the same old Don,” I said laughingly, “persistent as ever.”

I did not have the heart to tell him not to come. He is a dear, and it will be grand to see him after spending nearly a week in the kind of company I have been in.

Next time I take a trip I will pick my own company, and maybe, diary, it will be a honeymoon trip. Who knows?

The Holdout

Three people, not countin’ myself, think I’m the greatest guy in the world. One o’ them’s my first and last wife, another’s Mr. Edwards, and the other’s Bill Hagedorn.

It’d be hard to pick three that I’d rather have cordial. If a person is livin’ with their wife, it makes it kind o’ pleasant to have her like you. Mr. Edwards, o’ course, is the man I’m workin’ for, so it don’t hurt me at all to be his hero. And I’m glad to have Bill added to the list, because it means he’ll play the bag better for me this year than he’s done yet, and with a little pep on first base we’re liable to be bad news to George Stallin’s, Wilbert Robinson and John J. McGraw.

But listen: If Mr. Edwards ever got hold o’ the truth o’ the Hagedorn business, him and I’d be just as clubby as Lord George and the Kaiser. If he didn’t drop dead when he found it out, he’d slip me the tinware, contract or no contract, and I wouldn’t have the heart to fight it in the courts, because I admit I gave him a raw deal. My only alibi is that I left my feelin’s get the best o’ me, and that excuse wouldn’t be worth a dime with him; they’s no excuse that would be, where his pocketbook’s concerned, like in this case. He just simply hates money!

The worst of it is that Hagedorn didn’t deserve no consideration. I like to see a fella get all that’s comin’ to him, provided he goes after it in the right way and puts up a real fight. Hagedorn made a hog of himself and was tremblin’ all the time he did it. If he was as yellow on the ball field as when he’s makin’ a play for more dough, I’d take away his uniform and suspend him for life; he wouldn’t be no more use to me than a set of adenoids.

He’s just as game a ball player, though, as you’ll find. The minute he trots out there in the old orchard he’s a different guy, afraid o’ nothin’. All he’s lacked so far is ambish, and I figure he’ll show some o’ that this year. He’ll give me his best out o’ gratitude. If he don’t, it’ll mean his finish on the big time, family or no family.

It’s part o’ my agreement with Mr. Edwards that I stick on the job all the year round, goin’ to the league meetin’s with him in winter, helpin’ him sign up the boys, and so forth. Well, after we was through last fall, he called me up in the office and begin crabbin’ about finances.

“Frank,” he says, “we lost $18,000 this season. I pretty near wish I didn’t have no ball club.”

“You’ve pretty near got your wish,” I says. “If some o’ those bushers don’t come through next spring, or if we don’t swing a couple o’ deals between now and then, the clubs that play against us won’t even get good practice.”

“Bad as we are,” he says, “I bet we got the biggest salary list in the big leagues. It looks to me like not only one or two, but several of our men were bein’ overpaid.”

“Yes, sir,” I says; “and on their showin’ the last few months some o’ them would be overpaid if they drawed a dollar a day.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m goin’ to do some trimmin’. The boys’ll kick, I suppose, but I’m dependin’ on you to show ’em they deserve cuts.”

“That’s a nice little job for me,” I says. “It’s just as easy to convince a ball player that his pay ought to be trimmed as it is to score twelve runs off Alexander.”

“I’d just as leave pay good prices for good work,” he says, “but I’m not goin’ to maintain no pension bureau. These ridic’lous Federal League contracts have all run out, thank heavens, and from now on my ball club’ll be run on a sane basis. Look at Lefty Grant!” he says. “He got $7,000 and pitched pretty near eleven full games, winnin’ three o’ them. And look at Hagedorn! A $6,000 contract and no more life in him than a wet rag! What do you suppose ailed him?”

“Federalitis,” I says. “He was gettin’ soft money in the Federal, with no incentive to win and nobody to try and make him hustle.”

“A $6,000 salary,” says Mr. Edwards, “for a man that hit round .220 and played first base like he was bettin’ against us! Maybe we’d better just let loose of him.”

“If I was you,” I says, “I’d see what the recruits is like before gettin’ rid o’ Hagedorn. I’ll admit he’s been loafin’, but he’s a mighty good ball player when he tries.”

“Maybe it’ll wake him up to cut him,” says he. “I’m goin’ to send him a contract for $4,000.”

“Suit yourself,” says I. “He’ll holler like an Indian, but if he sees you’re in earnest I guess he’ll come round.”

“He lives here in town,” says Mr. Edwards. “I’ll have the girl call him up sometime and tell him I want to see him.”

So we discussed a few others that was gettin’ way more than they earned, and the boss says he wouldn’t play no favorites, but would cut ’em all from ten to forty percent. I knew they’d be plenty o’ trouble, but I didn’t care a whole lot. I figured that if everybody on the payroll quit the game and went to work it’d strengthen the team.

Well, Hagedorn accepted Mr. Edwards’ invitation to call and I was in the office when Bill come in.

“Mr. Hagedorn,” says the boss, “Manager Conley and myself’s been talkin’ things over and we come to the conclusion that several o’ you boys was earnin’ less than we paid you. What do you think about it?”

“Well,” says Hagedorn, “some o’ the boys maybe deserve cuts. But I don’t see how I come in on it.”

“Why not?” says Mr. Edwards. “The unofficial averages gives you a battin’ percentage o’ .220.”

“I can’t help what them dam scorers do to me,” says Bill. “I never did get fair treatment from the reporters.”

“But when you was in the league before,” says the boss, “you always hit up round .280, and it’s a cinch the scorers didn’t cheat you out o’ sixty points.”

“They’d cheat me out o’ my shirt if they had a chance,” Bill says. “But even if I did have a bad year with the wood, that ain’t no sign I won’t do all right next season.”

“That’s true enough,” says Mr. Edwards. “Anybody’s liable to have a battin’ slump. But Manager Conley and myself wasn’t thinkin’ about your hittin’ alone. We kind o’ thought that your work all round was below the standard; that you was sort o’ layin’ down on the job.”

Hagedorn began to whine.

“Mr. Edwards,” he says, “you got me entirely wrong. I wouldn’t lay down on nobody. I’ve give you my best every minute, and if I haven’t it was because things broke bad for me.”

“What things?” I ast him.

“Well,” he says, “for one thing, I felt rotten all summer. My legs was bad.”

“Well,” I says, “you can’t expect Mr. Edwards to pay $3,000 apiece for bad legs.”

“But they’re all right now,” he says. “I haven’t had a bit o’ trouble with ’em all fall. And I’m takin’ grand care o’ myself and next spring I’ll be as good as ever.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about your legs?” I ast him. “I’d of let you lay off. You certainly wasn’t helpin’ us much.”

“I’d of told you only I don’t like to quit,” he says. “And besides, my legs wasn’t the whole trouble.”

“What else was it?” I says.

“Well,” he says, “the Missus was sick and in the hospital, and I had to pay out a lot o’ money and it kept me worried.”

“When was she sick?” I ast him.

“Let’s see,” he says, “it was while we was on our last Eastern trip.”

“You never ast me to let you come home,” I says.

“No,” he says, “I didn’t know nothin’ at all about it till we got back.”

“That’s why you worried, I suppose,” says I, “and I guess your wife’s illness in September was what worried you in June and July.”

“She was sick on and off all season,” he says.

“I noticed,” says I, “that she done most of her sufferin’ in a grandstand seat. Her ailment,” I says, “was probably brought on by watchin’ you perform.”

“She’s full o’ nerve,” he says. “She wouldn’t miss a ball game if she was dyin’. And besides, her sickness wasn’t all of it.”

“Let’s hear the whole story at once,” I says. “The suspense is fierce.”

“Her folks kept botherin’ us,” says Hagedorn. “They live in Louisville, and they’re gettin’ old and they wanted that she should come down there and stay with ’em.”

“Couldn’t they come up here?” I ast him.

“No,” he says, “they got their own home and their own friends and everything down there.”

“Well,” I says, “that’d probably be the square thing for you to do, just pack up and move to Louisville and live with ’em.”

“We’d only be there in the winter,” he says.

“No,” says I, “I’ll fix it so’s you can be there all the year round.”

“What do you mean?” he says.

“I mean that if you don’t want to sign at our figures Louisville’d be the ideal spot for you,” says I.

“What’s your figures?” he ast.

“I’m willin’ to give you $4,000,” says Mr. Edwards.

Hagedorn swelled up.

“If you think I’ll take a $2,000 cut, you got me wrong,” he says.

“All right,” says I, “and I hope the Kentucky climate agrees with your legs.”

We sent Lefty Grant a contract for $5,000 and after a little crabbin’ by mail he signed. Joe Marsh stood for a $1,000 cut, and Bones McChesney, shaved from $3,500 to $3,000, refused to sign and got himself sold to Toronto. I didn’t cry over losin’ him; he’d always been fat from his neck up, and in the last two seasons the epidemic had spread all over his body.

Now it don’t often happen that a seventh-place club begins lookin’ like a pennant contender between October and February. But that’s what come off with us. Our worst weakness last year was at shortstop and third base and back o’ the bat. Well, I talked to a lot of Association men durin’ the fall, and they told me that I had a second Schalk in this young Stremmle from Indianapolis. And I got swell reports on Berner, the shortstop we drew from Dayton. Both these guys, I was told, were ready. They wouldn’t need no more seasonin’.

And then along come the league meetin’ in New York, and I happened to catch the St. Louis gang when they were thinkin’ about somethin’ else, and they traded me Johnny Gould for Hype Corliss and Jack Moran, two guys that I’d kept down in the bull pen all summer so’s the bugs couldn’t get a good look at ’em. There was my third base hole plugged up and the ball club was bound to be a hundred percent better, provided Hagedorn signed and give us his best work, or that young Lahey, the first sacker we bought from Davenport, made good. I wasn’t worryin’ much about him, as I figured right along that Hagedorn would take his $4,000 when he seen we were in earnest.

O’ course he had a little bit the best of us in the argument⁠—that is, he would of had if he’d knew enough. Him and Lahey was the only candidates for first base, and no matter if he played the position in a hammock, he’d be better than an inexperienced kid from the Three Eye. Even if he wasn’t never worth a nickel over $4,000, here was a grand chance for him to hold us up. All he had to do was lay quiet at home, and when it come time for us to go South we’d of looked him up and met his demands. But no, he didn’t have the nerve or sense to go at it the right way.

Instead o’ keepin’ us guessin’, what does he do but hunt up excuses to come and hang round the office and try and get a hint o’ whether we were goin’ to stand pat or back down. I was alone the first time he showed.

“Hello, Bill,” I says. “Did you bring your fountain pen?”

“What for?” he says.

“To sign that $4,000 contract,” says I.

“Oh, no,” he says, “I wasn’t thinkin’ nothin’ about the contract. I come up to see if they was any mail for me.”

“Not now,” I says, “but you may be hearin’ from the Louisville club in a few days.”

“What would they be writin’ me about?” he says.

“Maybe they’ll hear about you wantin’ to move there,” I says, “and they’ll probably be askin’ you if you’d care to take a job with ’em.”

“Well,” says Bill, “you won’t catch me playin’ ball with Louisville.”

“Who was you thinkin’ about playin’ with?” I ast him.

“Nobody,” he says. “I’ve decided to quit.”

“That’s fine, Bill!” I says. “Somebody left you money?”

“No,” he says, “but I got some o’ my own saved up.”

“How much?” I ast him.

“Close to $2,000,” says Bill.

“Fine work!” says I. “You must of lived pretty simple to save $2,000 in seven years.”

“I never skimped,” says Bill.

“Well,” I says, “I don’t know how you managed. But it’s nice to feel that you won’t never have to skimp again. If you can get six percent for your money, that’ll mean $120 a year or $10 a month. That puts you on Easy Street. All you’ll have to get along without is food, clothes, heat and a place to live.”

He paid us another visit Christmas week, thinkin’, maybe, that Mr. Edwards would be runnin’ over with holiday spirits.

This was a bum guess. The old man’s got more relatives than a perch, and when he was through buyin’ presents for all o’ them he wouldn’t of paid a telephone slug for the release o’ Ty Cobb.

“No mail yet,” I says to Bill when he come in.

“I wasn’t expectin’ no mail,” he says. “I was just wonderin’ if I left a pair o’ gloves here last time.”

“A pair o’ tan gloves?” I says.

“Yes,” says Hagedorn.

“I didn’t see ’em,” I says. “I found some gray ones.”

“How is everything?” he says.

“Fine!” says I. “It looks like we’re goin’ to have a regular ball club.”

“Well, I hope you do,” Bill says.

“Gould’s goin’ to help us a lot,” says I, “and they tell me Stremmle and Berner’s both good enough for anybody’s team. And then, o’ course, we got young Lahey.”

“Who’s young Lahey?” ast Bill.

“Can’t be you never heard of him,” I says. “He’s the first sacker from Davenport that everybody was after. They say you can’t hardly tell him from Hal Chase when he’s in action. And he cracked the marble for about .340 last season.”

“Hittin’ .340 in the sticks and hittin’ it up here is two different things,” says Hagedorn.

“Not so different,” I says. “A bird that can hit .340 anywhere can hit pretty good.”

That’s right, too. But the truth was that Lahey’s figure had been eighty points shy o’ what I credited him with. And from what I’d learned from some o’ the Three Eye boys, Lahey was the eighth best first baseman in their league.

“Well,” says Hagedorn, “if he makes good, you won’t have no use for me.”

“No,” I says, “but I’d hate to see you go back in the bushes.”

“Don’t worry!” he says. “I’m goin’ to stick right here in town.”

“And live on your savin’s?” I says.

“No,” says Bill. “I’m just about signed up to play with the Acmes in the semipro league.”

“How much are they givin’ you?” I ast him.

“Fifty a game, and they only play Sundays,” he says.

“Yes,” says I, “and they’re doin’ well if they play twenty games a season. That nets you $1,000, and you’ll have somethin’ like six days a week to spend it in.”

“I can work at somethin’ durin’ the week,” he says. “Maybe sell automobiles or somethin’.”

“You could do that in the winter, too,” I says, “if you didn’t waste so much o’ your time comin’ for your mail and lookin’ for your gloves.”

“How’s Mr. Edwards?” says Bill.

“Fine and dandy!” I says. “Want to see him?”

“What would I want to see him about?” says Bill.

“You might be able to sell him a car,” says I. “He’s right in the spendin’ mood now. His nieces and nephews and Mr. Wilson’s peace note has relieved him o’ the few hundreds he had left after last season. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d reconsider cuttin’ your contract⁠—maybe give you a bonus just for the devil of it.”

While we was talkin’ Mr. Edwards come out from his private office.

“Hello, Hagedorn,” he says. “Ready to sign?”

“At my own figure,” says Bill.

“That’s good,” says Mr. Edwards. “Conley and myself was afraid you might accept the cut, and we couldn’t hardly afford to keep an extra first baseman at $4,000 a year.”

“It’s best all round,” I says. “Bill’s goin’ to make more dough than we could possibly give him; he’s goin’ to sell cars durin’ the week and play semipro ball Sundays. And maybe he can master the barber trade and pick up a few extra hundreds Saturday nights. But even if he don’t make a nickel, he’s got $2,000 hoarded up.”

“That’s fine!” says the boss. “I like to see thrift in a young man. And it always seems like a pity that so many boys squander their earnin’s and have to keep on slavin’ as ball players till they’re thirty years old and past the prime o’ life.”

For three or four days early in January they was an epidemic o’ lockjaw in Washin’ton, and the market come up enough for Mr. Edwards to take a trip to New Orleans. He left me in charge o’ things, and my job consisted o’ makin’ up stories for the newspaper boys and entertainin’ Hagedorn about once a week.

Once he dropped in to find out Joe Marsh’s address; it’d of been impossible, o’ course, to inquire by telephone. Another time he just happened to be passin’, and happened to remember that he was carryin’ a letter that his wife had ast him to mail, and wanted to know if I had a stamp.

I entertained him every time with dope on Lahey and what a whale of a man he was goin’ to make us. But one day he come up loaded with some real facts about the guy I’d been boostin’.

“I thought you told me Lahey hit .340 with Davenport,” he says.

“I did tell you that,” says I.

“Well,” says Bill, “somebody was stringin’ you. I seen the Three Eye records the other day and they give Lahey .262.”

“That don’t mean nothin’,” I says. “The scorers probably had it in for him.”

“And he made more boots than any first baseman in the league,” says Bill.

“That shows he was hustlin’,” I says. “The more ground you cover, the more you’re liable to kick ’em round. Besides,” I says, “he was so perfect that the scorers probably thought he’d ought to make plays that would be impossible for a common first sacker.”

“Another thing,” says Hagedorn: “I happened to run acrost Jack Wells that played in the league with him, and he tells me Lahey’s a left-hand hitter. Well, Gould’s a left-hand hitter and so’s young Berner, and you already had two left-hand hitters amongst the regulars. Your club’s goin’ to be balanced like a stew on a wild bronco. McGraw and them’ll left-hand you to death.”

“What do you care!” I says.

“It’s nothin’ to me,” says Bill.

“Well, what do you suppose we better do about it?” I ast him.

“If I was you,” he says, “I’d try and get myself a first baseman that hits right-handed.”

“It’s too late to get anybody,” says I. “I guess we’re just plain up against it. I wisht you hadn’t made up your mind to retire.”

“I’d play for you,” says Bill, “if you’d meet my price.”

“That’s up to the old man,” I says, “but I know he won’t back down. He wouldn’t give in to one man when he’s stood pat on all the rest o’ them.”

“It won’t be just one man,” says Bill.

“What do you mean?” I ast him.

“He’ll be lucky if he’s got anybody when the showdown comes,” says Bill. “The fraternity’s give orders that nobody’s to sign till you hear from them, and you won’t hear from them till the leagues meets its demands.”

“That don’t affect our club,” I says. “We got every man already signed up except yourself.”

“Yes,” says Hagedorn, “but signed up or not signed up, they won’t report till the fraternity tells ’em to.”

“You’ve been playin’ long enough to know better’n that,” says I. “If you think any ball player’s goin’ without his prunes to help out some other ball player, you got even less brains than I figured.”

“They’ll have to strike if the fraternity says so,” says Bill. “They’re goin’ into the Federation o’ Labor and be like any other union. And if they don’t strike when they’re ordered to they’ll be canned out o’ the fraternity.”

“Well,” I says, “suppose you was Ty Cobb, draggin’ down a measly $16,000 a year, or whatever he’s gettin’. Which would you do if the choice come up, go without the $16,000 or go without the fraternity?”

“I’d certainly stick with the fraternity,” says Hagedorn. “If I didn’t, I’d be a traitor.”

“If I make you out a contract for $6,000, will you sign it?” I ast him.

“Sure,” he says. “I always told you I’d sign for my price.”

“Well, Bill,” I says, “I won’t give you the contract. I’d hate to think I’d made a traitor out o’ you.”

“I don’t want no contract anyway,” says Bill. “I’m through. I’m goin’ into business.”

“What business?” I says.

“Somethin’ pretty good,” he says. “I and a friend o’ mine’s goin’ in partners in a garage.”

“That’s a great idear!” says I. “You won’t have no competition, and it won’t cost nothin’ to start, and besides that, it’s a game you know more about than any other, unless it’s dressmakin’.”

“My friend knows all about it,” says Bill, “and I can pick it up from him.”

“You better stick to pickin’ up low throws,” I says. “It takes years to learn the mechanism of a car when you don’t know nothin’ to start, not even what makes the front wheels run. But o’ course you won’t be the only one in the garage business that has to learn, and so long as it’s other people’s cars you wreck while you’re learnin’, why what’s the difference!”

“They’s good money in a garage,” says Bill.

“I know it, and a whole lot of it’s mine,” I says. “They’s good money in any business like that⁠—smugglin’ or counterfeitin’ or snatchin’ purses. But it must be hell on a man’s conscience, even worse’n drawin’ $6,000 per annum for takin’ a six months’ nap on the old ball field.”

The first thing Mr. Edwards ast me when he got back from the South was what was the latest dope on Hagedorn.

“He’s surprised me,” I says. “I thought he’d give in long before this. But nothin’ doin’.”

“What will we do about it?” says the boss.

“Mr. Edwards,” I says, “you’re the man that’s payin’ me my money, and it’s my business to look out for your interests. If Hagedorn had of kept away from here all winter, if we hadn’t heard nothin’ from him from the day he first turned down the contract, I’d say give him his $6,000. But him comin’ round here once a week shows that he needs us as much as we need him, and that he’ll stand for the cut if he’s got to. Besides, he’s showed a mighty poor opinion o’ me by expectin’ me to believe all that junk about him goin’ into business, and so on⁠—stuff that was old in the Noah’s Ark League. He couldn’t earn a dime a day in anything outside o’ baseball. If he had a factory that made shells out o’ lake water, he’d be bankrupt in a month. Now they’s probably four better first basemen than him in the league, but I doubt if more’n one o’ them’s drawin’ $6,000. O’ course with him on the ball club it looks like we’d be somewheres up in the race, and we ain’t got a chance with a busher playin’ the position.

“If it was a case o’ givin’ him his dough or gettin’ along without him, I’d rather see him get the money even if it’s a holdup. But if I’m any judge of a ball player, he’ll come round here on his hands and knees the day before we start for the Springs, and he’ll sign at whatever price you offer him.”

“It’s a shame,” says Mr. Edwards, “when everything else looks so good for us, to have to be worryin’ about a man like him, that loafed on us all last summer and that I’d get rid of in a minute if I had somebody in his place. I suppose they’s no chance o’ tradin’ for a first baseman at this stage.”

“Oh, yes, they’s a chance,” I says. “I suppose Matty’d let us have Chase if we’d give up our pitchin’ staff and half a dozen infielders and $40,000 or $50,000 in cash. Then we’d have Chase and nothin’ with him.”

“Maybe young Lahey’ll surprise us,” says the boss.

“It won’t hurt us to hope,” I says, “but from what I can learn Bill Doyle was mad at you when he recommended him. And besides,” I says, “Lahey’s a left-hand hitter, and that’d mean five o’ them in the game every day. We’d be a setup for fellas like Schupp and Smith and Tyler. Take Hagedorn, and he can murder a left-hander even when he ain’t hittin’ his weight against a regular pitcher.”

“Well, all we can do is wait,” says Mr. Edwards.

“And I don’t think it’ll be long,” I says.

But when the night come for us to start South, Hagedorn was still a holdout, though he did show one more sign o’ weakenin’. He was down to the station to shake hands with the boys and see us off, and he looked like he was ready to cry. I called him off to one side.

“Would you like to be goin’ along, Bill?” I ast him.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says.

“Why don’t you take your medicine and hop aboard?” I says. “Your missus can pack up your stuff and send it after you.”

“I’ll go if you say the word,” he says.

“You’re the one that must do the talkin’,” says I.

“Why couldn’t I go along without signin’?” he says. “Maybe the old man would meet my figure when he seen how hard I’d work to get in shape.”

“No,” says I; “this ain’t no charity excursion we’re runnin’. We pay nobody’s fare that ain’t signed up and a member o’ this ball club. If you want to sign at $4,000, they’s a contract right there in my grip. If you don’t, why you can spend the rest o’ the winter countin’ snowflakes and cursin’ the coal trust.”

“Well,” he says, “I’ll freeze to death before I’ll be robbed; starve to death, too, before I’ll let old Edwards bull me out o’ what’s comin’ to me.”

“I’m sorry, Bill,” I says. “But anyway, good luck to you.”

“Good luck to you too,” says Bill. “You’ll need it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I says. “I got a hunch that it’s goin’ to be a great year for everybody in baseball.”

“Well,” says Hagedorn, “I know some fellas that’ll have a great year.”

“Who do you mean, Bill?” I ast him.

“All the left-handers that pitches against your ball club,” he says.

About half the baseball reporters on our papers know somethin’ about the game. The other half’s kids that can write cute stories, but don’t know a wild pitch from a hit and run sign. This was the half that went on the spring trip with us. The old heads was sent with the Americans, because they’d made a fight for the pennant last year and the public was strong for ’em.

Well, I took advantage of our gang bein’ green and made ’em perjure themself to their papers every day. When they’d come to me for the dope, I’d rave to ’em about what a world-beater young Lahey was, and how he’d burn up the league as soon as I’d learned him a few o’ the fine points o’ first-base play. If they’d been wise they could of told with one look that Mr. Lahey wouldn’t do. But they were just kids and they ate it up. I bet if any o’ the fellas that had played with Lahey read what I was sayin’ about him in the papers they must of thought I was crazy.

My idear, o’ course, was to worry Hagedorn. I knew he’d be readin’ everything he could find about us, and I didn’t want him to get the impression that the ball club was goin’ to bust up without him.

I thought Mr. Edwards would have sense enough to get this. But no; he fell just as hard as the reporters. And when he joined us after we’d been at the Springs two weeks, he was all smiles.

“Well,” he says, “I been readin’ some mighty encouragin’ news.”

“What news?” I says.

“About Lahey,” says he. “I told you he might surprise us.”

“He’s surprised me in one way,” I says. “I’m surprised that he ever had the nerve to come on this trainin’ trip. I always thought pretty well o’ the Three Eye League till I seen him,” I says.

“You’re jokin’,” says Mr. Edwards. “I’ve read nothin’ but good reports of him.”

“I’m responsible for the reports,” I says, “but I thought you’d guess that I was fakin’ for Hagedorn’s benefit.”

“Well, if you’ve fooled Hagedorn, he’s got company,” says Mr. Edwards. “I thought our troubles was all over.”

“Our troubles won’t never be over if Hagedorn don’t give in,” I says.

“But Lahey must be some good, the way he was recommended,” says the boss.

“Doyle probably seen him just once,” I says, “and that must of been the one good day he had. But even at that, Doyle couldn’t of never watched him handle his feet and thought he was a ball player.”

“Is it just his feet that’s the trouble?” ast Mr. Edwards.

“No,” I says, “but they’d be plenty without outside help. We’ve had infield practice about nine times since we been here, and that means he’s got nine hundred self-inflicted spike wounds. And they must of kept first base in a different place down to Davenport. Anyway he can’t find it here. And when he does happen to stumble onto it, it’s always with the wrong foot. Besides that, every time Gould or Berner makes a low peg Lahey loses a tooth. Gould ast him one day why he didn’t wear a mask. But you ought to see him field bunts! If experience counts for anything, he’d ought to be the most accurate thrower in the world, from a sittin’ posture.”

“How about his hittin’?” the boss ast me.

“He’s a consistent hitter,” I says. “They’s a party from Kansas City stoppin’ at the hotel. They come out to every practice and always set in the same place, right back o’ the plate, behind the grandstand screen. Well, every ball Lahey’s hit so far has made ’em duck.”

“Does he act like he had stage fright?” says the boss.

“Not him!” says I. “Nobody but the gamest guy in the world could cut off a few toes every day and come out the next day for more. And nobody without a whole lot o’ nerve could keep diggin’ after low throws when he knows that they’re goin’ to uppercut him in the jaw. No, sir! You can’t scare Charley!”

“Charley!” says Mr. Edwards. “I thought his name was Mike.”

“Gould’s nicknamed him Charley,” I says, “after Charley Chaplin.”

Well, the boss wasn’t what you could call tickled to death with my dope on Lahey, but he cheered up a little when I told him about Gould and the rest o’ them. Gould was goin’ even better than when he was with St. Louis. He was hustlin’ like a colt and hittin’ everything they throwed up there. And he kept coachin’ young Berner like he’d been hired for that job. He put real pep in the infield, and I knew it was tough for him to keep it up when Lahey gummed pretty near every play that was pulled.

Berner cinched his job the first day out. He’s the kind of a kid that just won’t stay on the bench, as lively and full o’ fight as little Bush, at Detroit, or Buck Weaver, or Rabbit Maranville. And Stremmle come up to everything they said about him. Then Joe Marsh seemed to of got over the Federal League and acted five years younger than he is. And our outfield was workin’ hard. O’ course this young Sheppard showin’ up so good helped a lot and made the rest o’ them hustle.

I told Mr. Edwards, I says:

“Outside o’ first base, I wouldn’t trade this ball club for McGraw’s. These boys have got more spirit than any team I ever managed. They’re the kind that’s liable to upset the whole league. If we only just had a good reliable man on that bag, I’d almost guarantee to finish one-two-three.”

“And do you still think Hagedorn’s goin’ to join us?” the boss ast me.

“I certainly do,” I says. “I wouldn’t be surprised to get a wire from him any day.”

But we went along another week without hearin’ from Bill. Mr. Edwards kept gettin’ more and more nervous. And I guess I was beginnin’ to get nervous too.

About the second day o’ the third week down there, a letter come to me from Hagedorn’s wife. It hit me right in the eye.

Bill, she told me, didn’t know she was writin’ and would probably kill her if he found it out. She’d been beggin’ and beggin’ him all winter to take what we offered, and she’d just about had him coaxed when the papers begin printin’ the swell reports about Lahey. Those reports had took all the zip out o’ Bill. Instead o’ frightenin’ him into signin’ at our figure, they’d convinced him that he wasn’t wanted on our club. And Bill was worse than broke. He was over three months behind with the rent and the meat bill and so forth, and coal was a hundred dollars a ton, and they wasn’t no coal even at that price, and she was afraid he’d do somethin’ desperate. And she thought if I’d just send Bill a wire and tell him that we’d carry him as an extra man, or if I’d try and trade him somewheres where he could make some kind of a salary, he’d be so tickled that he’d come to us or go wherever we sent him at whatever price he could get. And she begged me to not tell anybody that she’d wrote.

Mr. Edwards had just left us to run down to Dallas for a few days. O’ course I wouldn’t of let him know about the letter anyway. But him bein’ away give me the idear o’ keepin’ Bill’s comin’ a secret. I was goin’ to surprise him by havin’ Bill blow in unexpected, because it was a cinch the old man’d be back before Bill could get there. So I didn’t wire Dallas, but just sent a telegram to Bill, sayin’, If you’ll sign for $4,000, first-base job is yours. Answer.

The answer come the same night. It said all right, that he’d join us the followin’ Thursday.

On Wednesday Mr. Edwards come back to the Springs. And that afternoon Charles C. Lahey give the funniest exhibition I ever seen on a ball field. The whole practice was a joke, because Gould and Berner and Marsh and the rest o’ them was laughin’ so hard they couldn’t do nothin’. But the windup come near not bein’ a joke. It’d of been a tragedy if Lahey wasn’t the awkwardest guy in the world.

We was tryin’ the double play, first base to second base and back. I hit a ball pretty close to the bag and it took a nice hop, so they wasn’t no chance for Charley to boot it. He pegged down to Berner, and then turned round and started lookin’ for his own bag. Berner took the throw and sent it back as fast as I ever seen a ball pegged. Well, sir, Lahey found out where first base was by trippin’ over it. But just before he tripped he turned his head to look for the throw. If he hadn’t tripped and went sprawlin’, that ball would of cracked him right in the temple, and if it had, good night! To show you how much Berner had on it, it hit the grandstand on the short hop and made a noise like somewheres in France.

“That’ll do, boys!” I hollered to them.

“We’ll quit. The express rates on caskets between here and Davenport is somethin’ fierce.”

I walked back to the hotel with Mr. Edwards. I never seen a guy so blue.

“He’s impossible,” he says.

“Never mind,” says I. “He won’t be with us long. One o’ these days his luck’ll desert him and he’ll get killed.”

“I think we’d better send for Hagedorn,” says the boss.

“Oh, no,” I says. “He’ll show up before long.”

“Yes,” says Mr. Edwards; “but he’d ought to be here right now to get used to playin’ with Gould and Berner. And I ain’t so sure he’ll show up, neither.”

“I’d like to make you a little bet,” I says. “I’d like to bet you five that we hear from him before the end o’ the week.”

“I’ll just take that bet,” says Mr. Edwards, “and I’ll be glad to pay if I lose.”

Well, knowin’ him pretty well, I didn’t hardly believe that. But I told him the bet was on.

The first train into the Springs from the North is supposed to arrive at nine in the mornin’ and it don’t hardly ever get in later than 3 p.m. On this Thursday it come at one thirty. I snuck down alone to meet it, and there was Bill. “Mighty glad to see you, Hagedorn,” I says.

“I’m glad to get here,” says Bill.

“You don’t need to work today if you don’t want to,” says I, “but we want you out there as soon as you feel like it.”

“Why, what’s happened to this wonderful Lahey?” says Bill.

“Not a thing,” I says; “but, as you pointed out, he’s a left-hand hitter, and we’re overloaded with ’em.”

“I suppose you’ll play him when they’s right-hand pitchin’ against us,” says Hagedorn.

“No,” I says, “I don’t believe in switchin’ on the infield. Still, you’ll have to keep hustlin’ to hold him on the bench. He’s one o’ the most remarkable first sackers in baseball.”

“I’m just as good as he is,” says Bill.

“You’ll have to show me,” I says.

“That’s just what I’m goin’ to do,” says Hagedorn.

“And how’s everything at home?” I ast him.

“Well, Frank,” he says, “it’s been a tough winter⁠—the toughest I ever put in. I’m in debt so far that it scares me to think of it.”

“Where was that $2,000 you had saved?” I says.

“I was just stringin’ you about that,” says Bill. “I never had a nickel saved. But $2,000 is just about what I’m behind.”

“Good lord, Bill!” I says to him. “What have you done, bought a limousine?”

“No, sir,” he says. “I ain’t bought nothin’ only clothes and food and not much o’ that. But I was way in the hole before, and just this week they’ve ran up about $200 more on me.”

“What for?” I ast him.

“Well, Frank,” he says, “the wife presented me with a little boy last Sunday mornin’. If it hadn’t been for that, and the way she worried about things, I’d of never been down here to sign for $4,000. It was a case of have to, that’s all.”

I’d left orders for the boys to be out for practice at a quarter to two, and I knew Mr. Edwards would be out there with ’em. I and Bill was pretty near to the hotel by this time, but I stopped him short.

“Bill,” I says, “you ain’t givin’ me no bull like that $2,000 fortune, are you?”

“No, Frank,” he says, “I’m tellin’ you the truth.”

“All right, Bill,” I says; “I’m takin’ your word. They’s a northbound local train leavin’ here at three bells. You go down and get aboard it and ride to Silver Creek. That’s a station about twenty miles up the line. They’s a hotel there, and that’s about all. You go there and stay till I send for you.”

“What’s the idear?” he says.

“You’ll find out later,” I says. “I just tell you now that it’s to your interest to do what I say.”

“I can’t go nowheres,” he says. “I’ve got just forty cents.”

“I’ll stake you,” says I, “and you’ll hear from me in three or four days.”

“But I want to get out there and see this here Lahey,” says Bill. “I want to get busy showin’ him up.”

“He’ll tend to that end of it himself,” I says. “But you’re on this ball club and I’m manager of it, and if you want to stick on this ball club you’ll obey the manager’s orders.”

So Bill took the local for Silver Creek and I beat it out to the orchard to see that nobody got killed.

I set down with the boss at supper that night.

“Mr. Edwards,” I says, “I’ve changed my mind about Hagedorn.”

“What do you mean?” he says.

“I mean that I think he’s through with us,” I says.

“But good lord!” says the boss. “We can’t get along without him.”

“Well,” says I, “we can get him by givin’ him $6,000.”

Mr. Edwards shook like he had a chill.

“Give in to him now!” he says. “When he’s tried to hold us up! And I thought you was so sure he’d come round.”

“I did think he would,” says I, “but I’m sure now that he won’t. He’s stuck this long, and he’ll stick forever. He’s gamer’n I figured.”

“But I’d rather lose another $18,000 than let him hold us up,” says the boss.

“Well,” I says, “that’s up to you. But you’ll lose the $18,000 all right, and maybe then some, if you don’t get him. Because without him on first base we’ll be the worst ball club in the league.”

Mr. Edwards didn’t say nothin’ more for maybe five minutes. Then he give up.

“I got a lot o’ confidence in you, Frank,” he says. “I’ll go by what you tell me. If you want to you can wire Hagedorn. Tell him we’ll meet his terms, and tell him to get here on the first train.”

“I think it’s the best thing to do,” I says. And I went out and pretended to send Bill a wire.

It takes two days and a half to get to the Springs from home. So I called Bill up at Silver Creek and had him blow into camp on the Sunday train. I met him and tipped him off. He fell all over himself thankin’ me and says he was goin’ to name the boy Frank. And then he made a request.

“Keep this a secret from my missus,” he says. “I want her to think that I got what I was after because I insisted on it. Because she kept tellin’ me all winter that I wouldn’t never get it and was a sucker to try.”

“Don’t worry,” I says; “I want it to be kept a secret from certain people myself, and I certainly ain’t goin’ to spill it to no woman.”

Mr. Edwards was on the walk in front o’ the hotel when I and Bill showed up.

“Well, Hagedorn,” he says, “you got what you wanted and I hope you’ll try and earn it.”

“I’ll earn it all right, Mr. Edwards,” he says, “and I’m mighty grateful to you for comin’ acrost.”

The boss turned to me.

“How about our little bet?” he says.

“What bet?” says I.

“You bet me five,” he says, “that we’d hear from Hagedorn before the week was over. And this is another week.”

“So you want me to pay you that five?” I ast him.

“I certainly do,” he says.

Well, I give him the five, and afterwards Bill told me he’d make that up to me as soon as he could. But I can’t accept it from him. I’d feel like I was takin’ candy from a baby, a baby named Frankie Hagedorn.

Ball-a-Hole

Riverside’s only got a nine-hole course, but they’ve bought some more land and by the end of this summer they’ll have eighteen holes. They’re planning a new clubhouse too. You know the other one caught fire and burnt down. This one’s just supposed to be temporary. When they get the new course done and the clubhouse built they expect to take in about a hundred more members; and then, of course, they’ll have to have some more of us kids.

By that time, though, I hope I’ll be doing something else. I wouldn’t keep ahold of this job now, only it gives me a chance to practice golf when there’s nobody on the course. I and Jake⁠—he’s the second oldest kid that’s caddying here⁠—him and I come out early Saturday mornings, and sometimes afternoons during the week when the men and women aren’t playing, and we go round together, for a nickel a hole sometimes. I’m a little better than him and I have to give him three strokes on the nine, and we break about even that way. I’ve made the nine holes once in forty-three already, and I’m only sixteen. Most generally I get round in about forty-eight or forty-nine. Jake’ll average round fifty or fifty-one. Mac, the pro, he’s an old crab. He wouldn’t try to learn us nothing. Besides, I think a fella’s better off learning by himself. Francis Ouimet started as a caddy and I guess nobody ever showed him anything. But, besides getting the chance to practice, I and Jake’s considered the best kids they got, and we make pretty good money⁠—twice as much as the younger kids get. The regular price is two bits for every nine holes, but fellas like Mr. Joyce and Mr. Davis and them, they always slip us fifteen cents extra and sometimes as high as thirty or forty. That’s outside of the two bits.

There’s a rule in the club that nobody can call up ahead of time and engage their caddy. They’re all supposed to take whoever they get when they get up here. We’re all supposed to stick round the shop, and when somebody’s ready to play Mac tells who shall caddy for them. But I and Jake work a kind of a system. When we see somebody walking to the first tee that takes good care of us, we get outside of the shop, where the guys can see us; and then they usually holler to Mac to send them Jake and I. And when some old tightwad or some crab shows up, Mac can’t find us with a search warrant. We’re gone⁠—that’s all.

When we make the best cleanup is when Mr. Joyce and Mr. Davis and Mr. McNally and Mr. Harper play together. They never shoot for less’n a dollar a hole, and sometimes it’s as high as five bucks. And they’re all fellas that likes to win; but when they get beat it ain’t never our fault, like with some of the crabs. And the fellas that cop most of the dough don’t never forget to remember Jake and I. Mr. Joyce win thirty dollars one day this spring, and he give I and Jake a five-spot to split between us. Believe me, when there’s any balls found laying loose round the course they belong to Mr. Joyce! And I’ve gone out in the river over my knees more’n once, chasing a new ball for him, when he happened to hook one on the seventh or eighth hole.

The other kids always are trying to fix it so’s they can go round with him and the rest of the live ones, and I and Jake sometimes feel like we were hogging it. But it ain’t our fault, is it, if they’d rather have us and ask Mac to let them? Fellas that does as much for the club as them, they’ve got a right to have the caddies they like.

Well, if they were all Mr. Joyces nobody’d have a kick coming. But, believe me, there’s a few guys in the club that’s so tight you could play on them with a drumstick! I’ve been round with some of them when I couldn’t get out of it, and it’s like pulling teeth to get them to come acrost with the regular pay they’re supposed to give us. There was one that used to come out from town last year, and he never had nothing less’n a twenty-dollar bill when it was time to settle up with his caddy. The first time he sprung that on me I said I couldn’t change it but the man in the clubhouse could. So this guy said he’d go in himself and get it changed. So he went in and stalled round half an hour, hoping I’d go home. I stuck, but it didn’t get me nothing. He was studying astronomy when he came out. And the next time I seen him he’d forgot all about it.

When I went round with him again and he hauled out his twenty, I said I thought I could break it, and before he could get it back in his jeans I copped it out of his hand and ran in the clubhouse.

I got it changed into a ten and a five and five ones. I gave him back nineteen dollars.

“It’s half a buck for eighteen holes,” I said. “There was eighteen holes today and eighteen last time, so it’s a dollar altogether.” And by the time he begun to argue I was on the way to the village.

He never took me after that, but I managed not to shed tears over it.

Then there’s the fellas that everything you do for them is wrong and spoils their game. If they’ve got a five-foot putt and you take the flag out, and they miss the putt by four or five feet, it’s “Why in hell didn’t you leave the flag alone?” And if they’ve got a mashie shot and you give them their mashie and they make a flivver of it, it’s “Why didn’t you give me my niblick, like I ast you to?” And if you stand over in the rough on the right side of the fairway when they’re driving, if they dub their drive it’s because you weren’t over on the left side.

And then there’s the guys that can’t remember how many strokes they’ve had, and they ask you. If you tell them the truth they’re as sore as a boil. What you’re supposed to do is lie a stroke. That saves them the trouble and disgrace of doing it themselves. All us kids were in the shop one week day, waiting for somebody to show, and we were talking things over; and Davy Schultz was crabbing because he never got to go round with one of the regular fellas. He said he’d drop dead if anybody ever slipped him more’n a dime extra. “You don’t go after them right,” I said to him. “If you handle them the proper way they’ll all come acrost.”

“You ain’t the only wise guy in the world,” he said to me. “I can handle them just as good as you, only I don’t get the ones that can be handled. Mac don’t never send me out with anybody but hard-boiled eggs.”

So I told him:

“I never saw the man yet that I couldn’t make him loosen up.”

So he said: “Well, there’s a pair of them right here in this club that if you can squeeze a dime out of either of them on the side, I’ll give you all I make in a week.”

So I ast him who they were. He said it was Mr. Perkins and Mr. Conklin. Mr. Perkins joined the club last fall and Mr. Conklin just came in this last spring already. He’s the kind that wants all the barbers to starve to death. Jake says he wears all that stuff on his chin to keep his Adam’s apple from insect pests and frostbites. He’s director of two or three banks downtown, and every time the schoolteachers can’t think of nothing else to talk about, they tell you to always be straight and honest and work hard, and you’ll turn out a second Mr. Conklin. Because he did it all himself. He didn’t even have his whiskers to start with. Mr. Perkins is a warder in one of the churches and gives talks to the young men’s meetings every other Friday night. He don’t play golf on Sunday, and he don’t play golf on Monday or Saturday on account of those two days being so close to Sunday. Jake says he don’t play golf on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, either. But, anyway, he’s got as much dough as all of Mr. Conklin’s banks, pretty near, and he don’t have to do nothing.

Well, up to the time Davy was telling his troubles I or Jake had never caddied for either one of these birds. We probably never would of, only we wanted to show Davy how good we were.

“They’re airtight,” he said to us. “You’d stand just as much of a chance of getting three hundred yards out of a spoon.”

“What do they go round in?” I ast him.

“Neither one of them ever plays more’n the nine holes,” Davy told us; “and if you add nine or ten strokes to the score they got, you’ll be closer to the right score than they are. Mr. Conklin’s speed’s about sixty-three, and Mr. Perkins made a fifty-nine once. It was even fifty the way he counted.”

“So they underestimate, do they?” I ast him.

“Do they!” Dave said. “Why, if Chick Evans had their system he could play this course four times in thirty-six! He’d hole out from every tee. All he’d need’d be one club and a good, sharp pencil.”

“Do they ever play together?” I ast him.

“No,” said Davy. “Mr. Perkins went round with Mr. Adams a couple of times, but Mr. Conklin likes his solitary.”

Well, I winked at Jake and we moseyed out together; and I was going to tell him my idear, but he beat me to it.

“We’ll get a bet with Davy,” he said. “We’ll bet him that I and you can squeeze real money out of the both of them. And we can do it easy if we can get them to play against each other.”

“That’s the whole thing,” I said. “You can work it better’n me. You lay for them and get them matched. The rest of it’s a setup.”

So the next day we brought it up again in the shop, and Davy made us the bet. It was his week’s earnings against ours. And it was understood that we weren’t to come right out and ask for something extra. We weren’t to do anything that was not legitimate⁠—begging, or anything like that. If they tipped us, it had to be of their own free will, without compunction.

It was about a week afterwards that Jake braced Mr. Conklin. He was practicing putts on the “clock.” Jake waited till he happened to sink a ten-footer.

“That was great, Mr. Conklin!” Jake said to him. “If you putt like that right along, I’m thinking Mr. Perkins would have to go some.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Conklin ast him.

“Maybe I oughtn’t to of said nothing,” Jake said to him. “But I overheard Mr. Perkins the other day telling Mac that he’d been watching you a couple of times, and he’d noticed you had some mighty bad habits, and he thought Mac ought to tell you about them. And then he said he wasn’t much of a golfer himself, but he hadn’t been at it nowhere near as long as you; but he could trim you three up on nine holes.”

“What does he go round in?” Mr. Conklin ast Jake.

“He’ll average about sixty,” Jake told him.

Then Mr. Conklin said:

“If that’s all the better he is, he’d have his troubles beating me even.”

“Why don’t you tackle him?” said Jake.

“I’d just as lief,” Mr. Conklin said. “But I ain’t going to suggest it.”

“You don’t have to,” Jake said to him. “The way to do is for you to be up here when he is⁠—he’s here any weekday afternoon except Mondays and Saturdays⁠—and you could just happen to be starting out when he is and when he saw you were alone he’d probably ask you if you didn’t want to go round with him.”

Mr. Conklin didn’t say no more; and the next day Jake went to work on Mr. Perkins.

“Mr. Perkins,” he said, “I seen that approach you made on the ninth. That was a pippin! You could give Mr. Conklin a pretty good battle now, if that’s the way you shoot all the time.”

“Conklin!” said Mr. Perkins. “I didn’t know he was very good.”

“I don’t know if he is or not,” Jake said. “But I heard him tell Mac that he’d been watching you, and he didn’t see how a man could keep on making the same mistakes without finding out what was the matter with him. He said somebody ought to tell you that you stood wrong and come back too fast, and he had half a notion to tell you about it himself, only he felt like you’d think he was fresh or something.”

So Mr. Perkins said:

“Well, if Conklin’s such a expert, how does it come he always plays alone?”

“He’d like to play with somebody,” said Jake, “but he don’t only get up here in the middle of the week, and you’re about the only fella on the course that ain’t hooked up with somebody else; and you always get an earlier start than him.”

So Mr. Perkins ast Jake what Mr. Conklin usually shot, and Jake told him he didn’t know for sure, but he thought he was round sixty for the nine holes.

The following afternoon Mr. Perkins showed up about one o’clock, like always; but he didn’t drive off till pretty near two.

You could see he was waiting for something. Finally he gave up and started out alone, with poor Davy carrying his bag.

But on Thursday Mr. Perkins hadn’t hardly more’n got into his playing clothes when Mr. Conklin’s big car showed up.

I said to Jake:

“Here’s where we’ve got them. You go out to the tee and help Mr. Perkins stall till Mr. Conklin’s ready.”

And I told Mac that Mr. Perkins and Mr. Conklin had ast specially for Jake and I to go round with them.

“Well, I’m willing,” Mac said. “It’s about time you two cinch bugs caddied for somebody besides the spendthrifts.”

“We’ll loosen them up,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mac; “you’ve got a sweet chance! They don’t think no more of a nickel than a caddy does.”

“Or a pro from Edinburgh,” I said.

And then I grabbed Mr. Conklin’s bag and went out to where Jake and Mr. Perkins was standing.

“Whose clubs?” Mr. Perkins ast me.

“Mr. Conklin’s,” I said. “He’ll be out in a minute.”

Now, Mr. Perkins knew whose clubs I had, all right. He’d seen Mr. Conklin go in the clubhouse; and besides, his and Mr. Conklin’s bags looked just alike and was different from everybody else’s. You can buy a pretty fair bag for five or six dollars. These two must of cost pretty near a dollar and a quarter apiece, and was easily worth more’n half that much.

“Mr. Conklin going round with you?” I said to Mr. Perkins.

“He can if he wants to,” said Mr. Perkins. “I’d just as lief go round alone.”

But he kept on waiting, and didn’t even tee his ball till Mr. Conklin showed up.

First thing Mr. Conklin said was to ask where Davy was at.

“Home sick,” I told him. “He got tipped pretty good yesterday and I guess he blew himself to candy.”

Then Mr. Perkins said:

“Hello, Conklin! Have you got a pardner?”

“No,” said Mr. Conklin. “I usually go it alone.”

“Well, I’ll shoot and get out of your way,” said Mr. Perkins.

“If you’re alone, too, we might as well go round together,” said Mr. Conklin.

“That suits me,” said Mr. Perkins. “I’m not very good, but I’ll try and make it interesting.”

“What do you shoot?” Mr. Conklin ast him.

“About sixty for the nine,” said Mr. Perkins.

“I guess we’re pretty near even,” said Mr. Conklin.

“Well,” said Mr. Perkins, “I suppose I’ll get the worst of it; but let’s play for a ball-a-hole.”

“You’ll beat me,” Mr. Conklin said; “but I’m willing.”

I dug down in the pocket of the bag for a ball. There were three of them. They all looked like they’d slept in the coal bin. One of them was almost round. Somebody’d mistook the other two for blackberries and bit a hunk out of them. I gave the best one a good scrubbing and got it so’s it was about caramel color and you could see the name on it. It was a Whizz: three for a dollar, and not so cheap, at that.

Well, they decided Mr. Perkins should have the honor, and he started off with a twenty-yard drive, right down the middle. Mr. Conklin put his hand over his whiskers so’s Mr. Perkins couldn’t see him smile, and then teed his Whizz. He took his stance with his kneecaps kissing each other and stood there wiggling his toes and elbows till he had all four of us nervous. Finally he swang, and away she went. Two hundred yards⁠—a hundred up and a hundred down.

Mr. Perkins said to him:

“You better try it again. I think you tee your ball too high.”

Mr. Conklin acted like he hadn’t heard him, and ast me for his brassy. The Whizz laid about six feet off the tee. Mr. Conklin’s knees kissed again, but he was too sore this time to take it slow. He whanged away the minute he was set and sliced her over to the right, into a mud-hole. Well, looking for that ball there was about like trying to find a drop of ink in a coal mine. Mr. Joyce or Mr. Davis wouldn’t of wasted a minute on it. But I’ll bet our search party worked half an hour before Mr. Conklin’d give up. Then I dug out one of the two he had left. First, I showed it to Jake, and he said:

“Anyway, he won’t have to slice this one. It’s been done already.”

I handed it to Mr. Conklin and watched close to see if he’d give himself a bad lie. He didn’t.

“Better take a mashie,” said Mr. Perkins. “The best dope is to play safe and get out on the fairway.”

So Mr. Conklin used his brassy again and pulled the best shot he made all day, sending her down past the bunker, just a good mashie pitch from the green.

Then Mr. Perkins took his brassy and in two more shots his ball was about ten yards behind Mr. Conklin’s. If he could of only got the distance with his ball that he did with the divots, he’d of been hole-high in three.

Jake said to me:

“They ought to follow my man round with a steam roller.”

I said:

“He could dig up twice as much ground if he’d use an iron.”

And Jake said:

“He ought to go out West somewhere and drill oil wells.”

Mr. Perkins ast for his cleek and we felt sorry for the people that live in Hong-Kong, but he topped her this time and she rolled into the ditch. Mr. Conklin was clubby and went to the same place with his mashie. The balls laid about a yard apart, with Mr. Conklin’s away. Now his and Mr. Perkins’ didn’t look no more alike than a watermelon and a motorcycle. But when Mr. Conklin got there, and found that his ball was about half buried in the ground, what does he do but pick it up to see if it’s his or Mr. Perkins’. And when he put it down again, he laid it on top of a little clump of weeds. With that lie and that distance, I could of pitched to the green with a carpet sweeper; but Mr. Conklin, using his mashie again, was still ten feet short yet. Mr. Perkins did pretty fair with his and stopped about eight feet from the can.

Mr. Conklin ast for a putter and drove acrost the green and ten feet off on the other side.

Jake whispered to me:

“That’s the club he ought to use off the tee.”

He shot again and was a good yard short of the hole. Mr. Perkins got to within half a foot and picked up his ball.

“I guess we halved it,” Mr. Conklin said, and picked up hisn.

Mr. Perkins made a holler. “Halved it nothing!” he said. “Even if I give you that putt you didn’t make, I got you beat a stroke, 6 and 7.”

So Mr. Conklin said:

“You took seven yourself. First, there was your tee shot; that’s one. Two brassies makes three. Then you went into the ditch; that’s four. You got on the green in five, and took two putts.”

So Mr. Perkins said:

“You better figure out your own strokes and I’ll tend to mine. You got two yards off the tee; then you sliced into the rough with your brassy. It took you two more to get into the ditch. Then you was short of the green in five, acrost the green in six, and about four or five feet from the cup in seven. If I concede that putt, you were down in eight; but I don’t know why I should concede it. You might of made it and you might not. But, anyway, I’m one up. I’ll leave it to the caddies.”

Jake spoke up: “I think Mr. Perkins won the hole.”

So I butted in and said I thought they halved it.

Then the argument begun all over. Finally Mr. Conklin gave in and admitted that Mr. Perkins had beat him, 6 and 7. So long as he was beat, what was the difference if he trimmed a stroke off both of their scores?

There was no use trying to clean the ball my man was playing with now, so I and Jake gave them their drivers and went over and stood near the fairway on the second, about fifty yards from the tee. They both sliced right in behind us.

“They don’t use any judgment,” said Jake. “If they want to underestimate, they’d ought to keep on opposite sides of the course.”

The rough where the two balls laid had been mowed three days before and Mr. Conklin took his brassy. He shot acrost the fairway and into the rough at the left. Mr. Perkins used a mashie and went farther into the rough on the right.

“Now,” I said to Jake, “they’re separated and can lie their heads off.”

And Jake said that we were sure to be called as witnesses on this hole.

So I ast him to let me win it, so’s to even up the match. So he said that when we got down near the green he’d hold up as many fingers as he thought Mr. Perkins would say he’d had strokes, and then I could fix up Mr. Conklin’s to suit.

Well, my man missed the ball entirely once, and the next time he dribbled it just out of the rough. Then he shut his eyes and made a pretty good brassy shot and got on the green with a mashie in six. I looked over at Jake and Mr. Perkins. They were hole-high, but still in the rough. They got out and onto the green, and Jake held up six fingers.

So I said to Mr. Conklin:

“Let’s see. You’ve shot five, haven’t you?”

“Let’s see,” he said. “Yes; that’s right-five.”

Mr. Perkins laid near us now, and he ast how many we’d had. Mr. Conklin told him five.

“Alike as we lay,” said Mr. Perkins.

They both went down in three more and agreed that the hole was a half, 8 and 8. But on the way to the third tee Jake told me that Mr. Perkins was six before he ever got out of the rough, and he’d figured that he wouldn’t dare cut it down more’n one stroke. I saw right there that I and Mr. Conklin were up against a tough proposition.

They sliced their drives again and Mr. Perkins landed in the uncut. Mr. Conklin would of, only there wasn’t enough force to his wallop. Mr. Perkins shot three times with a mashie and managed to get a little farther into the long grass.

“He’s good-hearted,” said Jake. “He’s got enough regard for the fairway to stay off of it.”

There isn’t much to the third hole, only distance. A good drive and a brassy and a pitch’ll get you onto the green, or pretty close to it. So I told Mr. Conklin. I said:

“All you got to do is stay on the course. If it takes you five to reach the green you’ve still got him trimmed yet. He won’t be out of the weeds in six.”

But Mr. Conklin, of course, didn’t want to take no unfair advantage; so, after gumming up two brassy shots, he took a midiron and sliced pretty near over to the fifth fairway. He lit where the grass was longest, and I could see another long hunt.

Jake left his man and came over to us.

“Have you lost your ball?” he ast me.

So I said:

“No. We’re looking for mushrooms.”

“What kind of a ball was it?” Jake ast.

“A Black Walnut,” I told him.

Mr. Perkins kindly consented to join the party and we lined up and marched back and forth all over the property; but nothing doing. Jake called me to one side and said:

“Have you looked in his beard yet?”

Finally Mr. Perkins got impatient and ast Mr. Conklin why he didn’t drop another ball. “There’s no sense to losing this one,” he said. “If my boy would keep his eyes open he’d know right where it was.”

Just then Jake stepped on a ball. It was a Major, Number 28, and pretty near new. Jake picked it up and ast Mr. Conklin if it was his. Mr. Conklin said it was. Then Mr. Perkins said:

“I thought you never used anything but a Whizz.”

“I got this one by mistake,” said Mr. Conklin. “I ast the salesman for a Whizz and he gave me this one. I didn’t find it out till I got home.”

So he tees her up on a tuft of weeds and goes clear to the green with a brassy.

Well, Mr. Perkins did some more mowing with his mashie, and finally gave up.

“You can have this hole,” he said. “You got a six to my seven. We’re all even.”

Seven! Say, the way this guy figured he must of thought he was eating breakfast at noon!

The fourth hole they call the Railroad. It runs along parallel with the tracks. It’s only about two hundred and fifty yards, but a hundred yards from the tee there’s a bunker clear acrost the course. And there’s a ditch over to the left, just this side of the tracks. And the green’s just short of the river bank. The main thing to do is clear the first bunker and it don’t make much difference if you slice a little. But if you hook you’re liable to go into the ditch, and that’s out of bounds.

Both of our men had been hitting them high off the tee so far; but of course when they had that bunker staring them in the face they topped their drives a little and smashed right into it. Then they took their mashies and lofted over to the left, into the ditch. We’d had some rain and it was pretty wet down there; so Jake and I stood on the edge a minute, hoping they’d tell us to never mind. Fine chance! The balls were both in sight and we had to go after them. We brought them up, along with some of the richest soil in Illinois.

Mr. Perkins ast what the rules were about counting a shot out of bounds; so Jake told him it cost you one stroke. So Mr. Perkins said that as long as they’d both done it, what was the use of counting it at all? So they both shot three from the edge of the fairway. They were to the green in six and their first putt left them about ten feet each from the can.

“Well,” Mr. Perkins said, “I’ve had six. You’ve had seven, haven’t you?”

I butted in before Mr. Conklin could answer.

“You’ve both had the same number,” I said, “whether it’s six or two hundred.”

Mr. Perkins gave me a sour look and putted to the left of the hole, and about four feet away.

“I’m down in eight,” he said; and he picked up his ball.

I expected my man to yelp; but he’d done the same thing on the first hole, so he kept his clam closed. And his putt, starting way over to the right, bumped into a pebble or something, and darned if it didn’t twist round and drop in the cup!

“There!” said Mr. Conklin. “I’m one up.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Perkins; “but you got to admit it was luck, pure and simple. The groundkeeper won that hole for you.”

“Well,” said Mr. Conklin, “you can’t blame him for not being on your side.”

All I can remember about the fifth and sixth was that it took us an hour to play them and Mr. Perkins only got off of the fairway once. After that, he stayed off of it. But my man, though he managed to keep in the course mostly, couldn’t seem to do anything to the ball, only bunt it. Between the four of us, we decided that both holes were halved in eights. To get that figure, I and Mr. Conklin only cut two off each hole, and I suppose Jake and Mr. Perkins did that well at least.

On the way to the seventh tee I said to Jake⁠—I said:

“Your fella’s got to cop one of these two next holes and the other one’s got to be halved, so’s we’ll be all even on the ninth. Then we’ll have a chance to blackmail them.”

Let me tell you, first, that these last three holes are some holes. The seventh is par three and a good player can usually make it in par. But it’s gosh-awful for a wild man! It’s only a hundred and thirty yards, but it’s right along the river bank; and if you pull the ball the least little bit, the fish get it. And to the right of the green there’s a clump of trees and a whole lot of long grass. Your tee shot’s got to be just about straight, or you’re in bad.

Most everybody drives with an iron here, and Jake and I handed them their cleeks. They were both scared not to take them; but, believe me, there ain’t a hole in the world that there’s any danger of either one of them over-driving it!

It was Mr. Conklin’s honor and he fed his Major 28 to a carp.

“Can you get that ball, boy?” he ast me.

“Not me!” I said. “I’m no U-boat.”

“Well, give me another,” he said; and I hauled out the one he had left, the blackest one of the Whizzes.

Jake whispered to me. He said:

“That’s the one he ought to of given the bath to.”

Mr. Perkins claimed it was his shot before Mr. Conklin drove again. So he teed his ball and sliced into the orchard.

“You oughtn’t to use a tee for an iron,” said Mr. Conklin; and then he laid his ball on the ground and sliced to the same place.

Well, we didn’t have to do any fancywork to let Mr. Perkins cop this hole. It took him only three to get out of the woods and onto the edge of the green. And, of course, Mr. Conklin was charged with one stroke for his fish ball and had to get clear of the rough in two to be even with Mr. Perkins. There was one thin thorn-apple tree in the line between the cup and where Mr. Conklin’s ball laid; so naturally he hit it right in the middle and it bounded back into the thickest part of the orchard. He was seven before he ever begun to putt. His nerves were a little shaky, and he finally went down in eleven, or only eight over par. Mr. Perkins holed out in six⁠—his count. They were all even and two to go.

“We’ll see that they halve the eighth,” said Jake.

Now about this eighth: If the seventh’s dangerous for a dub, the eighth’s a whole lot worse. It’s bad enough for the good ones. You can’t make a real long drive without going into the Grand Canyon, that lays about thirty yards this side of the green. And on the right, all the way down, there’s a regular jungle. On the left there’s the river again; and though it ain’t any closer to the fairway than it is on the seventh hole, still there’s no bushes or shrubbery to hide it from you. You can see it perfectly plain, and that makes you wonder whether a ball would make much of a splash if it lit in there; and the next thing you know, you find out for sure.

Our fellas got away to an even start. Mr. Perkins hooked into the middle of the river and Mr. Conklin sliced into the forest preserves. Mr. Perkins teed another ball, and this time he come about ten feet from the opposite shore. Then he made some remark that he never sprung at the Friday-night talks to the young men, and waited for Mr. Conklin to take another shot. But Mr. Conklin couldn’t see it that way. He said he thought we could find his first one.

“How about it, boy?” he ast me.

“It’s gone,” I told him.

“The Woodmen of the World couldn’t never locate that baby!” said Jake.

“Well,” said Mr. Conklin, “I’ll have to borrow a ball.” And he looked toward Mr. Perkins.

But Mr. Perkins was admiring the ripples that his last plunger had stirred up. So I dug down in my pocket and pulled one out.

“Here,” I said. “Here’s one that I’ll sell you for twenty cents.”

“Twenty cents!” said Mr. Conklin. “Why, it’s secondhand. I couldn’t play with that one.”

“It’s the oldest I’ve got,” I said. “After you’ve driven it into a couple of ditches you won’t know the difference between it and your Whizzes.”

Well, he started to argue and I started to put the ball back into my pocket; and then he said he’d take it and settle after the game. So I gave it to him and it seemed to bring him luck. Anyway, he managed to lift it out to the middle of the fairway, pretty near a hundred yards down the course. Mr. Perkins’ third attempt was too close to the woods for comfort, but it was playable.

“Now go easy,” I said to my man. “You’re a stroke better off than he is. Try and run her up to the edge of the ditch on this one, and next time you can pitch onto the green. Take a mashie,” I told him.

But no! He insisted on using his brassy, and the ball scooted along the ground and plump into the bottom of the Canyon. And Mr. Perkins, with a midiron, managed just to clear the ditch and stop on the high ground this side of the green.

I and Mr. Conklin beat the other two to the gully, and there was our ball, laying in about two inches of water, at the bottom of the bank that’s away from the green.

So Mr. Conklin said:

“I can’t play it there. What am I going to do?”

“You can pick it up and toss it back on top of the bank,” I told him. “It’ll cost you one stroke.”

He looked round to see how close Mr. Perkins was. Then he looked at his ball again. Then he said:

“If she only just lay out of the water, on the other side, I could lift her onto the green with a mashie or niblick.”

And then he looked at me.

Well, I can take a hint, and I didn’t have any hesitation about pulling rough stuff on Mr. Perkins. Warder or no warder, he’d been pretty raw himself. So I fished the ball out of the creek and tossed it to the other side, from where it was a pipe to loft it to the green⁠—that is, provided you hit it. Mr. Conklin missed it the first time, and as Jake and Mr. Perkins were getting pretty close to us he made his next attempt in a hurry. He connected, but didn’t get under the ball good, and it just did manage to roll up to the top of the bank and stop alongside of Mr. Perkins’.

Mr. Perkins ast us how many we’d shot.

“Let’s see,” said Mr. Conklin. “How many is it, boy?”

“Let’s see,” I said. “There was your first tee shot, into the woods; then your second tee shot; then your brassy in the ditch, and your pitch out. Four, altogether.”

Mr. Perkins looked kind of suspicious. He said:

“I thought I saw you miss one swing in the ditch.”

“Miss one!” said Mr. Conklin. “Of course I did. But it was practice.”

“Well, then,” said Mr. Perkins, “we’re alike as we lay. I’ve had four strokes without any practice.”

So I said:

“I don’t see how you could put two balls so close together in the river without some practice.”

“You’re too fresh!” said Mr. Perkins. “This is the last time you’ll caddy in a game I’m in.”

So I said: “I knew that the minute we left the first tee.”

They were both nervous now. While Mr. Conklin was getting ready to approach, I was scared to death that his knees would knock each other out and maybe cripple him for life. He finally dribbled his ball six feet, and when Mr. Perkins accidentally approached to about four feet from the can I thought we were gone. We were still off of the green yet. Mr. Conklin took his putter and stopped five feet from the cup. He shot again and missed by a foot. Mr. Perkins could cop the hole by going down in three putts from four feet away. The idear got the best of him and pretty near choked him to death. He didn’t have anything for his Adam’s apple to hide behind, and I could see it bobbing up and down like one of those there bell buoys. His arms were shaking so that he couldn’t control his club, and he hit the ball while he was still trying to aim. Then he leaned over it again and this time he was all right, except his direction and distance. The ball stopped off to one side, behind Mr. Conklin’s and about a foot farther away.

“I’ve got you stymied,” said Mr. Conklin. “I’ll putt and get out of your road.”

But Mr. Perkins leaned over and picked up both balls.

“We’ll halve the hole,” he said. “We’re both down in seven.”

Seven’s his favorite number, I guess.

Mr. Conklin thought he had a kick coming and started to say something, but Mr. Perkins was walking off the green. If they’d both putted it out I bet neither one of them would of gone down in less’n sixteen, the way they were wabbling.

Our last hole’s a funny one. You can’t see the green from the tee on account of what we call the Airline. It’s a kind of a hill, about fifteen or twenty feet high, that runs all the way acrost the course, thirty yards from the tee. On both sides of it there’s long grass and marsh, and everything else; and over to the right there’s another part of the jungle that you’re liable to get into on the eighth.

After you leave the eighth green the caddies always give the guys their drivers, and then go up and stand on top of the Airline, so’s they can see where the drives light. When a man has played the hole a few times and gets to know it, he can drive for it just as accurate as if he could see the green. The distance is only about two-fifty, and Mac’s often made it in three, and once in a while in two. He can drive right on the green once in five or six times.

I and Jake left our men and took the shortcut through the woods to the top of the Airline. Jake said:

“There’s no use of us going up there. They’ll both flivver and fall short.”

I ast him if he had anything on his bird.

“Have I!” he said. “Say, when he was laying against the woods on the eighth, before that midiron shot, he kicked the ball five feet toward the middle of the course, so’s he could get a real whack at it. And, at that, he whiffed before he belted it.”

“Don’t forget to remind him of that,” I said.

“Do you think I’m Davy?” said Jake.

It was Mr. Perkins’ honor, if you could say that about him. Anyway, he shot first and topped into the rough at the left, short of the hill. Mr. Conklin made just as good a drive, and they laid close together. We ran down to give them their mashies.

“Now is our chance!” I whispered to Jake.

“You start,” he said.

So, while I was changing my man’s clubs, I said kind of offhand:

“Play easy now. Be sure you hit the ball. You remember, when we were in the ditch on the eighth⁠—”

He had a coughing spell and I waited till he was through with it. Then I begun again:

“When you’re trying to loft a ball up over something you’re liable to be nervous and miss it entirely. You did it on⁠—”

That’s as far as I got. He didn’t know what to say; but he had to say something. So he ast me to give him his niblick instead of a mashie.

I said:

“I wouldn’t change if I were you. It was a niblick you tried to get out of the ditch with, on the eighth, and⁠—”

He interrupted me.

“Say, boy,” he said; “I’m forgetful sometimes. Before we wind up, I better settle with you, or I’m liable to walk off without doing it at all.”

“Go ahead and shoot,” said Mr. Perkins. “I’ve got to be getting home.”

“I’m going to settle with the boy here first,” said Mr. Conklin, and he dropped his club and begun going through his pockets.

He came up with a two-dollar bill.

“It’s a quarter a round, ain’t it?” he ast me.

“Yes, sir,” I said; “and the ball I gave you is twenty cents. You’ll find that’s a mighty good ball. It don’t even hurt it to lay in the water, like when we were⁠—”

He interrupted me again.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I owe you forty-five cents. This is the smallest I’ve got; but it don’t make any difference. I guess you can find some use for the rest of it.”

And he slipped me the two-spot.

It took them two more apiece to get over the Airline and into the marsh on the other side. They laid ten feet apart, with Mr. Perkins away. His ball was in a bad spot. There was weeds, a bunch of them, right behind it, and you were lucky to hit it at all. If you did hit it you wouldn’t have any force after cutting through the weeds.

“You got a rotten lie,” said Jake, so’s we could all hear him. “I should think you could kick it away from those weeds to where you could get a crack at it.”

“Kick it away!” said Mr. Perkins. “That’s against the rules.”

So Jake said:

“Why, don’t you remember when you laid next to the woods⁠—”

Mr. Conklin wasn’t the only one with a bad cold.

“You’re even worse off now,” said Jake, “than when you were laying against those trees on the eighth. And then⁠—”

Mr. Perkins had heard aplenty. He went up to Jake, pretending to look in the bag for another club or something. And when he moved back to his ball again to shoot, Jake was putting the day’s receipts in his pocket.

Whether Mr. Perkins was mad or not I don’t know; but he cut through those weeds with that mashie as though he’d been saving up for this shot all afternoon. And, believe me, he got a whale of a shot, the ball carrying pretty near to the green and rolling onto it!

I thought to myself “It’s good night to my man!”

But maybe he was sore too. Or maybe he’d just come to realize how bad he needed a new ball. Anyway, he pulled one pretty near as good as Mr. Perkins’, stopping just off of the green.

“What’s come over them?” I whispered to Jake.

“They ain’t muscle-bound no more,” he said. “They’ve both loosened up.”

Mr. Conklin approached and went six or seven feet past the cup. Mr. Perkins was quavering again, and he stopped about the same distance short. He was away. He already had his putter in his hands, but he was too scared to know if it was a golf club or a monkey wrench. What did he do but stick it into the bag and haul out his spoon, the first time he’d touched it all day!

“What are you going to do with that?” Jake ast him.

And then the poor goop came to and looked at it.

“I’ve played too hard,” he said, kind of half smiling. “Conklin, what do you say if we call it square?”

“I’m willing,” said Mr. Conklin; and you bet he was!

Neither one of them could have hit their ball in three putts.

“We’ll call this hole halved in fives,” said Mr. Perkins. “And-let’s see: As near as I can figure, that gives us both a medal score of fifty-four apiece.”

“He means,” said Jake to me, “that their score’s fifty-four apiece after they’ve meddled with it.”

We took their bags and started for the shop.

“How much did you get?” I ast Jake.

He told me a dollar and a half.

“But I guess we earned it,” he said. “We’ve been out three hours.”

So I said:

“Davy can have them after this.” And then I happened to think of the bet we’d made him. “Say, Jake,” I said, “he’s just a kid and don’t know how to handle these fellas. He’ll learn when he’s older. It don’t seem right for us to take advantage of him and collect that dough.”

“No,” said Jake. “Let’s show him the proceeds and tell him the bet’s off.” And then he said: “Say, my old man told me if I saved up twenty-five dollars between now and Christmas he’d give me ten to put with it. What do you think about us both taking these geezers’ money and putting it in some bank?”

“I’m with you,” I said⁠—“only the bank won’t be one of Mr. Conklin’s.”

Gas, Oil and Air

In pretty near every magazine these days, they’s advertisers that tells you you’re a sucker to keep on workin’ for what your employers pays you, and why don’t you buy our correspondence course in somethin’ or other and soon you’ll be makin’ from $5,000 to $5,000,000 a year, and so forth. And they print a picture of Adolph Klauss, from Ligonier, Indiana, that slaved for years keepin’ books for the Elite Grocery and finally got hep to himself and took our course, and now look at him! General manager o’ the Peekskill Prune Company at an annual pittance o’ fifty thousand per year, not includin’ tips.

I’m not knockin’ these birds. They’s no question but that a man that’s goin’ along in a rut should ought to get out of it and get into another one, and he can learn how to do it by subscribin’ to one o’ these courses. They’re pretty reasonable, too, I guess. But still, they do cost some money, and the average man in a rut ain’t got it to spare.

Well, I’ve found a lucrative profession that you can go into without payin’ for lessons or wastin’ time on ’em. Anybody in the world can be a mechanic in a garage. You don’t have to know nothin’.

All you got to do is give your conscience a sleepin’ potion and borrow a pair of overalls.

The reason I got a car lives out in Hyde Park, but she’s thinkin’ about leavin’ there. Her name’s Alice. I ain’t alone in considerin’ her the greatest girl that ever lived; at least, they’s been others.

One o’ them was George Boles. His old man’s a plumber, so George never had to worry. His father even give him a chummy roadster last Christmas.

I and Alice was brought up in the same neighborhood. I’ve knew her ever since she was a foot high, and always liked her. After my people moved out on the West Side, and I wasn’t able to see her more’n once a week, I begun to realize that she was somethin’ more to me than just a lifelong friend; in fact, that she was more to me than any girl I ever seen. To get from where we moved to, to her house, you got to take one elevated and transfer to another and then walk about a mile. The trip back and forth uses up about half o’ the evenin’ and they’s nothin’ pleasant connected with it. So when I tell you that I made it once a week, you can see I was fond of her; especially if you stop and think that I didn’t get home from the office till after seven and I had to be there at seven a.m.

It was along in February that Alice met Boles at a dance. That was on a Tuesday night, and when I went out to see her on the Friday, Boles was amongst those present.

I and him was in love with each other from the start⁠—like a couple o’ strange gamecocks. On this evenin’ when we was introduced, Alice had to do all the talkin’ while us two set there and sized each other up. About one o’clock she give unmistakable signs that she longed for the hay. Boles had been waitin’ for me to go, and I’d been waitin’ for him to do the same thing. When I finally seen how tired Alice was, I give up and beat it. He come away soon after. I know because him and his chummy roadster passed me before I’d walked two blocks. The roadster wasn’t feelin’ chummy enough to pick me up and ride me to the elevated.

The next day I called her up.

“Alice,” I says, “my visit with you last night wasn’t what I’d call a complete success. You know, I hate crowds.”

“Well,” she says, “come out some evenin’ when they’s less traffic.”

“How about this evenin’?” I ast her.

“Nothin’ doin’,” she says. “I’m goin’ out for a ride, with Mr. Boles.”

“Tomorrow evenin’, then,” says I.

“I’m afraid not tomorrow evenin’, neither,” she says. “I’m goin’ downtown to a show, with Mr. Boles.”

“Tomorrow afternoon?” I says.

She acted kind o’ fussed.

“No,” she says. “You see, Mr. Boles is comin’ out to dinner and then he’s goin’ to take Mother and Sis and I for a ride and stay to supper, and then the show.”

“Will he be out for breakfast Monday mornin’?” says I.

“Don’t be sarcastical, Charley,” she says. “If you really want to see me, I think I can spare Tuesday evenin’.”

“I can’t,” I says, and slammed up the receiver.

The peeve lasted till Tuesday mornin’. Then I got over it and phoned again.

“If you can still spare this evenin’,” I says.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I’m goin’ over on the North Side to see Julia.”

“With Mr. Boles?” says I.

“Well, yes, if you must know,” she says.

One o’ the salesmen down to the office told me that the best car he knowed of that cost less than $1,000 was the Swift Six.

“But you can’t afford no car,” he says.

“I know it,” says I, “but I can’t afford to not have one, neither.”

“Have you got the money to pay for it?” he ast me.

“No,” I says. “I got $400 in the savin’s bank, besides a month’s pay.”

“Well,” he says, “I know the boss o’ their Chicago office, and if you insist, I can get him to leave you take the car for $400 down and pay the balance in six months or so.”

“Go ahead,” I says.

So the next day⁠—it was the first o’ March⁠—I become a motorist.

The Swift Six people was mighty nice to me. Besides the car, they give me a hand pump for the tires, and five gallons o’ gasoline, and a set o’ tools that I didn’t know what any o’ them was for, and couldn’t of used ’em if I had.

“Go easy with her,” they says, “till the weather moderates. It don’t help a car to break it in in the cold.”

So I just run her up and down the West Side boulevards a few minutes every night, for practice, and waited for the papers to prophesy fair and warmer.

Well, I mastered the art o’ drivin’ and still they wasn’t no signs o’ Spring, so I decided to not wait no longer. One Friday noon I called Alice up. It was the first time I’d talked to her for pretty near two weeks.

“What are you doin’ Sunday?” I ast her.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe I’ll take a ride.”

“That’s just what you’re goin’ to do,” says I. “But you’re goin’ to take it with me.”

“What do you mean?” she says.

“A friend o’ mine’s got a new car,” I told her, “and he’s goin’ to take you and I up on the North Shore.”

“That’ll be grand!” she says. “But will you be sure and get here by one o’clock?”

“Why?” I says.

“Because I want to be gone before Mr. Boles comes,” she says. “He’s got a habit o’ comin’ round every evenin’, and on Sunday afternoons and he’s so persistent that it’s hard to refuse him. He’ll want me to go ridin’ with him, and I’d a whole lot rather be gone before he comes than have to explain why I can’t go.”

“I’ll be there at noon,” says I, “and if you ain’t ready I’ll wait for you.”

So on Saturday morning, on the way to work, I drove Mr. Swift Six down lookin’ for a garage to get him all primed up for my first real trip. I’d read the ads of this Great East Auto School where they says everything’s half price ’cause the students does the work, only perfect under the supervision of expert teachers. So in I bobs, it bein’ handy.

“Fill it up with gas,” I says, “and see if it needs oil, and that left rear tire looks like it could stand a little air. How soon can you get through with it?”

“In about twenty minutes,” says the guy.

“All right,” I says. “Make it as fast as you can.”

I didn’t have no intention o’ callin’ for it till evenin’, but I wanted to be sure.

It was pretty near seven o’clock when I come to take it out. A different student guy was on the job.

“What can I do for you?” he ast me.

“Nothin’,” says I. “Just show me where my car is and I’ll get it out o’ your way.”

“What car is it?” he says.

“A new Swift Six,” says I.

“I don’t remember seein’ it,” he says.

“Oh, yes. That’s the boat that Jerry took out.”

“What for?” I says. “He’s got no right to go joy-ridin’ in my machine.”

“He ain’t joy-ridin’,” says the guy. “He took it out for a test. Somethin’ was poundin’.”

“Nothin’ was poundin’ when I brought it in this mornin’,” I says.

“You’re new at the game, ain’t you?” he says.

“Yes,” says I.

“Well, then, you probably wouldn’t notice when somethin’ was wrong,” he says.

“When’s he comin’ back with it?” says I.

“He’d ought to be back now,” says the guy.

So I waited till ten minutes to eight and then in come Jerry with my Swift Six. She was hittin’ on all but five cylinders.

“What have you done to my car?” I says.

“Me? Nothin’,” he says. “But it’s in pretty bad shape. They’s a lot o’ carbon and she needs grease and the right front wheel acts like it had a defective bearin’.”

“That’s ridiculous,” says I. “The car’s only a couple o’ weeks old.”

“I don’t care how old it is,” says Jerry. “An automobile don’t have to be old to get somethin’ the matter with it, no more’n a person. Look at babies. Just because they’re only babies, that don’t prevent ’em from havin’ colic, does it?”

“I won’t argue with you,” says I. “What I want to know is how soon you can get this machine fixed up?”

“By tomorrow mornin’,” says Jerry.

“That won’t do,” I says. “I got to have it by midnight tonight.”

“Well, I guess we can let you have it then,” he says, “but we’ll have to hustle.”

“I’ll drop in at midnight,” says I, and beat it home. I’d told him midnight so’s to be sure she’d be ready by eleven o’clock Sunday mornin’.

I went back right after breakfast. Still another fella was on the floor.

“I come for that new Swift Six,” I says.

“I haven’t seen nothin’ of it,” says he.

“You’re a fine bunch,” says I. “I brought the car in here yesterday mornin’ with nothin’ the matter with it and now they been workin’ on it over twenty-four hours and lost it besides.”

“Oh,” says this guy, “is that the car that we had to recharge the batteries on it?”

“No,” says I, “this here car’s pretty near new.”

“It’s the same one,” says the fella. “The batteries was dead and we’re rechargin’ ’em now.”

“Let’s see the car you’re talkin’ about,” I says, and he took me back and pointed it out to me.

It was mine.

“Can you tell me,” I says, “how it comes that the batteries can die on a brand new car?”

“Sure,” he says. “The batteries is supposed to charge themself while you run, and you ain’t used the car enough to let ’em do it.”

“How long before they’ll be recharged?” I ast him.

“About three hours,” says he.

“I can’t wait,” says I.

“O’ course,” he says, “you could take it now, the way it is, but you ought to bring it back and let us finish the batteries.”

“That’s what I’ll do,” says I. “You can turn the juice off.”

So he disconnected the charger or whatever you call it, and I jumped in the seat to back her out. I pushed the starter down, and down she stayed.

“See!” he says. “She’s as dead as Napoleon.”

“What am I goin’ to do?” I ast him. “I got to drive out on the South Side.”

“They’s nothin’ to prevent you from crankin’ her,” he says. “I’ll turn it over if you want me to.”

“That’s mighty friendly of you,” I says. So he turned it over and sure enough, the engine begun to hum. I put her in reverse and pressed down the accelerator. They wasn’t no response. I pressed down harder and harder and harder, and finally all the way down. Nothin’ doin’. Then I took my foot off, but the pedal stayed down.

“Here!” I says. “What’s happened now?”

The guy leaned over and looked at the pedal.

“Turn your dash light on,” he says.

Well, I turned the dash light switch without no results. This scared me into tryin’ the whole lightin’ system. Nowheres did I get a rise.

“You’re in tough luck,” says the mechanical genius. “Your starter won’t work and your accelerator won’t work and you got no lights. Looks like the South Side trip was off.”

“You think it does?” says I. “Well, listen: I’m goin’ to make it if I have to be towed. And between now and eleven o’clock, you got to have this car so’s it’ll run.”

“I can’t promise,” he says. “They’s a lot of other rush jobs round here.”

“They ain’t no job that’s rusher than this,” says I.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he says. “I’ll do the best I can. Nobody can do better than that.”

“You certainly pull some original remarks,” says I. “Now, get busy! Because I’m comin’ back here at eleven o’clock, and if you ain’t ready for me they’ll be trouble.”

“If they wasn’t no trouble,” he says, “they wouldn’t be no garages.”

“Good!” says I. “You can pull cute ones when you try.”

I and eleven o’clock arrived at the same time.

“All set!” says the fella when he seen me come in. “I’ve even got the starter workin’.”

“How about the accelerator?” says I.

“It’s OK,” he says. “It was just disconnected.”

I climbed in, or started to, and come within a ace o’ breakin’ a leg or somethin’. The floor board was missin’ and they wasn’t nothin’ but Nature and machinery between me and the ground. I happened to be hangin’ on to the seat and the dash with my hands or it’d of been good night.

“Well!” says the mechanic, lookin’ astounded. “Somebody’s ran off with your floor board. Oh, yes, I remember,” he says. “I took it out when I was monkeyin’ with the clutch.”

“Why was you monkeyin’ with the clutch?” I ast him.

“It seemed to stick,” he says. “It’s all right now.”

“And where’s the floor board?” I says.

“It can’t be very far away,” says he. “I ain’t been out o’ the place, so I couldn’t of carried it nowheres.”

At 11:20 he found the floor board. At a quarter to twelve, he had it squeezed into place. At five minutes to one, I pulled up in front of Alice’s, just behind the chummy roadster.

Alice answered the doorbell.

“Where’s your friend?” she ast me.

“Out in the car,” says I.

“Bring him in,” she says. “I won’t be ready for five or ten minutes.”

“He never goes in anywheres,” I told her. “He’s an outdoor bug.”

“Well,” she says, “I’ll hurry as fast as I can. But Mr. Boles is here and it don’t seem right to dash off and leave him.”

“Why not?” I says. “He’s just like one o’ the family.”

“He’s no such a thing,” says she. “But we all like him because he’s such a gentleman and so good about takin’ us out for rides.”

“I guess,” I says, “that a man’s got to have a machine to make a hit with you.”

“It does help,” she says, laughin’. “But I do like some people for themself; you, for instance; that is, when you’re not mean and sarcastical.”

“If I had a car, though,” says I, “you’d like me a whole lot better.”

“O’ course,” she says, laughin’ again. “Why, I’d like you enough to marry you.”

“Do you mean that?” says I.

“Certainly,” she says, and led me into the house.

Mr. Boles was settin’ on the lounge in the livin’ room.

“Don’t get up,” I says to him. It was like tellin’ Mr. Bryan not to get stewed.

Alice left us together while she went to put on her things. If I had a nickel for every word that was spoke, I’d ask you for carfare.

When she come back, he says:

“I guess I’ll stay and talk to your mother a while. How soon do you expect to be home?”

“That’s up to Charley,” she says.

“Never,” says I.

And I left him to chew on that.

Alice pretty near fainted, when I sprung my surprise. “Why, Charley Graham!” she says. “Where did you get it?”

“I forget now,” says I. “Kresge’s or Woolworth’s.”

“And can you drive it?” she ast me.

“I don’t know,” I says. “When I come here from home today, I brought it in my pocket, on the elevated.”

For some peculiar reason, the starter worked. We was soon tearin’ northwards, twelve miles an hour. It was a swell day, and the first Sunday that had been really decent. The boulevards was jammed with cars, and I’ll admit I was nervous. I guess Alice was, too, but she was game enough to keep it to herself.

But the only danger was that somethin’ would hit us from behind, and nothin’ did.

I’m gettin’ so now that I can talk when I drive; then I was scared to open my mouth. Alice made a couple o’ starts about the weather, but her heart wasn’t in it. What she wanted to say was “Look out!” or “Be careful!” and I liked her all the better for not sayin’ it.

At five p.m., we’d got as far as Lake Forest, havin’ drove forty miles in a fraction under four hours.

“My! It’s pretty out here,” says Alice. “I wisht I could stay here a while.”

She got her wish.

The Swift Six liked Lake Forest, too. Between five and dark, I done nothin’ but crank and cuss, crank and cuss. When the daylight was gone, I’d lost some o’ my independence, and I stopped a guy that was goin’ past.

“Mister,” I says to him, “what I know about automobiles you could write on the back of a small flea. Will you see if you can spot the trouble with this masterpiece o’ human ingenuity?”

He looked her all over.

“For one thing,” he says, “your left rear tire is down.”

“But that wouldn’t keep me from startin’, would it?” I ast him.

“No,” he says, “but I thought I’d mention it before I forgot it. It’s another thing that keeps you from startin’. You’re out o’ gasoline!”

Who that guy was I don’t know. But if he ever runs out o’ cigarettes, I’ll loan him the rollin’s. First he drove to the nearest garage and brought us back enough gas so’s we could get there and fill our tank. Then he blowed up the tire with his engine drove pump. (They wasn’t nothin’ the matter with it, only the valve was loose.) And finally he rode ahead of us to the garage, so’s we’d be sure and find it.

“Alice,” I says, when he’d left us, “there’s the best fella I ever met.”

“I know one I like better,” says she.

“Don’t tell me it’s Boles,” I says.

“I won’t tell you nothin’,” she says. “I ain’t goin’ to bother you while you’re drivin’ ”

“But I want to hear it,” I says, and I stopped the Swift Six in the middle o’ the road.

“Well,” she says, “I always like people that likes me. And anybody that likes me well enough to go head over ears in debt to buy a car, because he thinks he’ll make good with me that way⁠—well⁠—”

Well.

I hadn’t kissed her more’n twenty-nine times when we was interrupted. The brightest lights I ever seen was shinin’ right in our face. And the guy behind the lights was George Boles.

“I’ve found you,” he says, runnin’ up beside us. “Your mother’s worried to death.”

“What for?” says Alice.

“Because you didn’t come home,” says Boles.

“Didn’t Charley tell you that I was never comin’ home?” says Alice. “We thought o’ course you’d tell mother.”

“Now,” I says, “we’ll have to go there and tell her ourself.”

It’s a good thing we telephoned her from Evanston. Because, owin’ to the fact that I wasn’t sure of the road and that my drivin’ was bein’ seriously interfered with, it wasn’t so darn far from breakfast time when we landed.

The old lady didn’t take it very hard.

“All I wonder,” she says, “is what you’re goin’ to live on.”

“Charley makes enough,” says Alice, “and o’ course our furniture will be all paid for.”

“What with?” I ast her.

“Whatever you can get for your car,” she says.

I was lucky in findin’ the whole school force in that evenin’. “Listen,” I says, to the one I’d seen first, “when I brought this ship in Saturday, what did I say I wanted done?”

“How do I know?” says he.

“Oh, I forgot,” I says. “O’ course you don’t know. I told you,” I says, “to pump up the left rear tire and to give me some gas and oil. I didn’t tell you to kill my batteries or take out my floor board or monkey with my clutch or gum up my cylinders or put my starter on the hummer or douse my lights. I just wanted gas and oil and air, them three.”

“And didn’t you get gas and oil and air?” says the one they called Jerry.

“I did not,” says I, “and you know it.”

“Well,” says Jerry, “I’ll tell you why: Pumpin’ a tire or fillin’ a tank with gasoline or pourin’ in oil, all that stuff’s a cinch; anybody can do it. But if we don’t take a few cars apart and put ’em together again, why, how’ll we ever learn?”

“And are you goin’ to charge me for the job?” I says.

“Only twenty dollars even,” says Jerry. “That’s twenty-five hours o’ labor at eighty cents an hour.”

“Boys,” I says, “I ought to murder all three of you, and the unwritten law’d acquit me. But I’m feelin’ too good.

“And besides, boys,” I says, “you’ve got me out o’ the rut. No more will I strain my eyes and benumb my brain with columns on columns o’ figures. From now on, I’m a carefree mechanic.”

The Yellow Kid

I

The first thing we found out about Crosby was that he couldn’t read. The next thing was that he was scared to death o’ women and girls. It was Buck Means that give us the info, and he done it out o’ spite.

You see, Buck and Crosby was with the Dallas Club together year before last, and Buck was sore because Crosby got drafted, while Buck was overlooked. And Buck didn’t like to see a kid with only one year’s experience go up, when Buck himself had been in the sticks four or five seasons and nobody’d paid any attention to him.

Crosby was recommended to us by Jake Atz. Jake wrote up along in July and ast if we could use the fastest young left-hander he ever seen. So the old man put in a draft and we got him.

Well, Jake was right about the kid’s speed. I’ve faced ’em all, from Rube Waddell down, but I never hit against nobody that could zip ’em through there like Crosby. If he ever beaned a man they’d have to get along afterwards without no head. O’ course that wouldn’t be no hardship to most o’ them. It wouldn’t affect the work o’ nobody on our club.

Our first exhibition game last spring was in Dallas. Buck Means was talkin’ to Gilbert and I before the practice.

“How’s Crosby comin’?” he ast us.

“I’m glad he’s on our club,” I says, “so I don’t have to hit against him all season.”

“He’s faster’n Johnson,” says Gilbert. “If he was only a little wild with it they’d all be swingin’ from the bench.”

“They’s no doubt about his smoke,” says Buck; “but he’s got nothin’ besides, not even a noodle. He can’t even read.”

“Can’t read!” I says. “Why, he looks brighter’n that.”

“Sure!” says Means. “He’s a good-lookin’ kid. But, from the shoulders up, he’s unimproved property.”

“Not bein’ able to read won’t hurt him,” I says. “He won’t be bothered if the newspaper boys handle him a little rough once in a while.”

“But if you got a joker on your club,” says Buck, “Crosby’ll be pie for him. McGowan, one of our outfielders, made a monkey of him all last year. He’d buy a paper and come and set down somewheres near Crosby and make up stuff that was supposed to be in there, and read it out loud. And he didn’t ‘read’ no compliments, neither, except when it come to Crosby’s looks. You see, that’s another thing about the poor simp: He’s afraid o’ skirts. He’s so bashful that if they’s a girl under ninety stoppin’ at the same hotel he’ll duck out and buy a meal at his own expense rather’n take a chance o’ havin’ her look at him in the dinin’ room. And McGowan, while pretendin’ that the papers was knockin’ him as a pitcher, pretended, besides, that they were always printin’ how handsome he was and how all the girls was wild about him. And, to make it good, Mac’d write fake love letters to him and he’d get somebody to read ’em, and then good night! He’d lock himself up in his room for a week and never come out, only to get to the ball park. We had him believin’ they was a girl in Austin that was crazy to marry him, and he was weak and sick all the times we was there, for the fear she’d call him up or he’d run into her on the street.”

Well, when I and Gilbert was alone, I says that maybe we’d better keep this dope to ourself, or somebody might take advantage o’ the kid and maybe spoil him as a pitcher. Gilbert was agreeable⁠—that is, he told me he was. But he didn’t lose no time spillin’ the whole thing to Harry Childs, and he couldn’t of picked out a worse one to tell it to.

Harry’d rather kid somebody than hit one on the pick, and him and Joe Jackson hates their base hits just alike.

So as soon as he got a chance he went after Crosby.

We was ridin’ to Fort Worth and Childs had a Chicago paper. He flopped down in the seat beside Crosby.

“Well, kid,” he says, “do you want to read what the reporters has sent up about you?”

“No,” says Crosby. “I ain’t interested in no newspaper talk. As long as I give the club the best I got, they can write anything they please.”

“Yes,” says Childs; “but this is a nice little boost and they’s no man can tell me he don’t like encouragement.”

“But readin’ papers on the train always puts my eyes on the bum,” says the kid.

“I’ll read it to you,” says Harry. “I don’t think your ears’ll be hurt.”

So Childs pulled somethin’ about like this:

“One o’ the most promisin’ recruits is Lefty Crosby, that was drafted from the Texas League last fall. Though this boy only had one year’s experience in the minors, he already handles himself like a veteran. His speed is terrific and his control a whole lot better than the average young left-hander’s.

“Manager Cahill’s only fear about him is that the female fans o’ Chicago and New York will bother him to death with telephone calls and sweet notes. In appearance, Crosby is a great deal like Francis X. Bushman. It is a certainty that he will take the fair sex by storm, provided he gives them the slightest encouragement.”

Crosby was redder’n an undershirt.

“That’s bunk!” he says. “Who wrote that?”

“The guy didn’t sign his name,” says Childs.

“I shouldn’t think he would,” says Crosby.

“I don’t know why not,” says Childs. “He was tellin’ the truth. A fella as handsome and young-lookin’ as you can just about take his pick of any dame in New York or Chi.”

“I wasn’t thinkin’ about gettin’ married,” says Crosby. “I’m satisfied the way I am.”

“Cahill’d rather have you married, though,” says Harry. “He figures a man’s liable to behave himself better if he’s tied down.”

“I’ll behave all right,” says the kid. “I got no bad habits.”

“But if they’s a beautiful bride for you to support, you’ll work harder and improve faster,” Childs says.

“I always work as hard as I can,” says the kid.

“Maybe you already got a girl here in Texas,” says Harry. “Maybe it’s some little black-eyed peacherita from acrost the Border.”

“I haven’t no girl at all, and don’t want none,” says Crosby. “I don’t see why a man can’t get along without thinkin’ about girls all the while.”

“But,” says Harry, “the Lord wouldn’t of made you so beautiful if he thought you was goin’ to be a woman hater.”

“I ain’t beautiful or nothin’ o’ the kind,” says Crosby, blushin’ harder’n ever.

Childs started to tell him he was too modest; but the kid got up and moved away.

In the hotel at Fort Worth, Harry got one o’ the telephone girls to call up Crosby’s room and tell him she’d love to meet him. He hung up on her. In Oklahoma City, Childs had one o’ the local papers print a picture o’ Crosby in action. He brought the paper into the dinin’ room and flopped down at the same table with the kid.

“Did you see this?” he ast him. “It’s pretty fair; but it don’t hardly do you justice.”

“What do I care!” says Crosby.

“I’d care a whole lot if I was you,” says Harry. “If I had your looks I wouldn’t allow no picture to be printed that didn’t give me a square deal. And you ought to read what it says under it. But maybe it affects your stomach to read while you’re eatin’. I’ll read it to you.”

“I don’t care what it says,” says Crosby.

“It’s only a few words,” says Childs. “I don’t mind readin’ it at all.” And he handed him this kind o’ stuff: “Above is showed a likeness o’ Lefty Crosby, one o’ Manager Cahill’s recruits from Texas. They expect him to not only break a few strikeout records in the big circuit, but also the hearts of all the girls that gets a good look at him. Crosby promises to be the Adonis o’ baseball.”

I guess the kid didn’t know Adonis from Silk O’Loughlin; but that didn’t keep him from blushin’ like a beet. Childs leaned over and whispered to him.

“They’s a queen over there by the window,” he says, “and she’s done nothin’ only look at you for five minutes. Maybe if I leave you alone she’ll come over and introduce herself.”

“I don’t feel like eatin’ no more lunch,” says Crosby; and he beat it out o’ the room. He hadn’t hardly gargled half his soup.

From then on the kid tried to duck Harry all he could. But he didn’t have the nerve to offend nobody, and lots o’ times Childs’d corner him where he couldn’t escape without makin’ it too raw.

Crosby’s best pal on the club was Joe Martin. Joe’s always the bushers’ friend because he don’t believe in ridin’ ’em. Crosby tried to set with Joe at the same table on the diners and in the hotels, because Martin’d read pretty near the whole bill o’ fare out loud and Crosby could pick out what he really wanted to eat. Martin, o’ course, done this on purpose, knowin’ Crosby couldn’t read and was generally always hungry.

It’s pretty tough on a kid with a good appetite to not be able to tell what’s listed unless somebody reads it off to him.

But Joe couldn’t spend all his time makin’ things easy for Crosby, and whenever Childs could manage to set with the kid he was meaner to him than a snake. For instance, after we’d had a tough workout and everybody was starvin’, Childs’d pick up the bill and begin crabbin’ about how many things had been scratched offen it.

“We’re gettin’ a fine deal,” he’d say. “They’s nothin’ left only salad and ice cream.” Then he’d say to the waiter: “Bring me salad and ice cream.”

And Crosby’d have to say that he’d take the same. Childs was willin’ to go hungry himself for the sake o’ puttin’ it over.

The last day we was on the spring trip, Harry bought a rule book and brought it on the train.

“They’ve certainly made some radical changes this year,” he says to Crosby. “A left-handed pitcher can’t throw to first base without turnin’ round twice before he pegs. And a left-handed pitcher can’t throw more’n two curve balls to the same left-handed hitter durin’ one time at bat. They’re tryin’ to increase the hittin’. And only the first foul counts a strike. And the pitcher and catcher ain’t goin’ to be allowed to work with signs. And when it’s a pitcher’s first year in the Big League, he ain’t only allowed two strikes up there at bat. That’s to hurry the game. And you got to get four men out instead o’ three. And you can’t pitch nothin’ only new balls. The minute a ball’s even tipped by a bat, the umps throws it away and gives you a brand-new one. And a pitcher ain’t allowed to warm up the day he’s goin’ to pitch. And a pitcher can’t wear a glove. And a pitcher can’t wind up unless they’s a runner on first or second base. Then he’s got to. And if a pitcher’s taken out three times in three months, he’s automatically released, and either he’s got to go to a Class E league or quit playin’ baseball.”

I don’t know if Crosby fell for all o’ that or not; but, anyway, I got him alone a while later and told him Childs was just kiddin’ and the rules was the same as ever. It’d probably been hard enough for him to learn ’em in the first place without ringin’ in no long list o’ changes for him to try and master.

The train was late pullin’ into Chi next mornin’ and Harry got one more crack at the kid before we come to Englewood.

“Well, Lefty,” he says, “you’re goin’ to have a real tryout right away. I was talkin’ to Cahill and he says he’s goin’ to start you Friday o’ this week.”

Crosby looked tickled to death.

“The reason for it,” says Childs, “is because Friday is Lady’s Day at our park. The womenfolks all comes in free and the boxes and stand is always full o’ them. And the old man wants to get ’em well pleased with the club right from the jump. He figures that if they see you once, they’ll make their husbands and sweethearts bring ’em every time you pitch.”

“I don’t know if I’m goin’ to be right to pitch Friday or not,” says the poor boob. “The old souper felt kind o’ numb when I worked yesterday.”

“On Fridays,” says Childs, “the boxes right back of our bench is always saved for showgirls. And the ball players that looks good to them, they always talk to.”

“If Friday ain’t a nice hot day,” says Crosby, “I’m goin’ to ask him not to work me. My arm feels rotten.”

II

Well, Cahill didn’t ask the kid to pitch Friday’s game; never had no intention o’ doin’ it, o’ course. But he did start him the followin’ Monday, against the Cleveland gang.

For five innin’s he pitched as pretty a game o’ ball as I ever seen and we had ’em licked 3 to 0. Then Childs, who was warmin’ the bench, got after him, either because he was sore on havin’ been took out o’ the outfield or just naturally couldn’t resist a chance to pull somethin’.

While Cahill was coachin’ at first base, Childs called Crosby up to one side o’ the shed.

“Did you see her yet?” he ast him.

“See who?” says the kid.

“I guess you know who,” says Childs. “They’s a peach right behind the middle o’ this bench. I noticed her lookin’ at you ever since you warmed up. And while you was out there pitchin’ last innin’, she ast me your name. I told her and she says you was the handsomest man she ever looked at. So then she ast me would I introduce her to you when the game’s over.”

“I won’t have no time,” says Crosby.

“But, man,” says Harry, “I promised I’d do it.”

Just then the innin’ was over and we went out. You never seen such a change in a pitcher. He couldn’t get one near the plate. He acted like he was scared stiff. He was so wild that he had the ushers duckin’.

Cahill left him in there a few minutes to give him a chance to steady himself. But they wasn’t nothin’ to do but take him out after he’d walked four o’ them without pitchin’ a strike. Cahill was ravin’ mad.

“Another yellow dog!” he says. “The next time Jake Atz recommends a man to me, I’ll wire him at his own expense to take a dose o’ bichloride. What do you think o’ this stiff? We give him a three-run lead and they can’t hit him with a board, and he’s only got four innin’s to go! And he blows higher’n a kite! Sixteen balls without a strike! And once he pretty near missed the whole grand stand! Go climb in the shower so you’ll be clean when you start back for Texas.”

Crosby was glad to sneak to the clubhouse and get out o’ the park. But I and Martin was suspicious that somethin’ had come off, and next time we come in we ast Childs.

“Yes,” says Harry, “I suppose it’s my fault. But if the poor boob is as simple as that, he’d ought to lose out.”

“What did you pull on him?” ast Joe.

“I just told him,” says Harry, “that they was a pretty girl settin’ right back of our bench that ast to meet him after the game.”

“That ain’t right, Harry,” says Martin. “He looks as good as any left-hander in the league, and we can’t afford to spoil him. Just lay offen him. You know he’s scared o’ women; but that ain’t the worst fault in the world, and you got to admit that he didn’t look scared o’ them Cleveland boys till he blowed up. Leave him alone and he’ll win a lot o’ ball games for us.”

“Why should I leave him alone?” says Harry. “Since they got me settin’ on the bench, they’s nothin’ left for me to do only kid somebody.”

“All right,” says Joe, “if you won’t do it for me I’ll put it up to Cahill.”

And sure enough, in the clubhouse after the game, Martin told the M.G.R. just what had come off.

“Look here, Childs!” says Cahill. “That’ll be enough o’ that. I don’t care how much fun you have with him offen the field, but when we’re playin’ a game, lay off! If you don’t think I’m in earnest you may soon be takin’ a trip to Texas yourself!”

So Childs laid offen him entirely for a while, not even tryin’ to pester him when we went on our first trip. But I knew it wouldn’t never last. While it did last, though, Crosby done better work than any o’ the rest of our pitchers and had the whole league stood on their heads with that fast one o’ his.

III

We left Cleveland one evenin’, goin’ to St. Louis, and the boys started a game o’ cards. Childs was in it and Crosby was leanin’ over the back of a seat, watchin’. I was settin’ in the game, too, right where I could look at Crosby.

Well, Gilbert win three pots in a row, with aces one time, aces up the next time, and the third time he beat Childs with three o’ the big bulls.

“Come on, Gil!” says Harry. “Give the aces a chance to roam round the deck once in a while.”

“I can’t spare ’em, Harry,” says Gilbert.

“You put ’em in the deck!” says Childs, just kiddin’.

“You make me put ’em in the deck!” says Gil.

Well, Harry had a gun on his hip, with nothin’ in it but blanks, and he pulled it out and laid it on the table in front of him, just for a joke.

But Crosby didn’t see the joke. I happened to be lookin’ at him when Childs showed the gun. He turned white as a sheet and I thought for a minute he was goin’ to keel over. Then he grabbed the top o’ the seat to steady up, and the next thing we knew he was beatin’ it for the other end o’ the car as fast as he could navigate.

“What’s the matter with him now?” says Harry.

“Looks like he objected to the firearms,” says Gilbert.

“What the hell ain’t he scared of?” says Childs.

“Well,” I says, “Ty Cobb for one thing and Bob Veach for another.”

“Did he think I’d be monkeyin’ with a loaded gat?” says Harry. “I’ll have to try him out and see which he likes best, women or artillery.”

“Oh, leave him alone!” says I. “As long as he keeps winnin’ ball games for us, what’s the difference if he’s scared o’ wild cats or fishworms?”

But Harry’d been good long enough. The next mornin’, when we was crossin’ the bridge into St. Louis, he finds Crosby in the washroom. Without sayin’ nothin’, he just simply laid his gun on one o’ the sills, pointin’ it straight at the kid. And Crosby begin shakin’ like a leaf and staggered out o’ the room without even waitin’ to grab his collar.

Childs told us about it and seemed to think it was the funniest thing ever pulled off. But some o’ the rest of us didn’t think it was so funny, especially when we had to put Crosby to bed the minute we got to the hotel, and then get along without him all through the series with the Browns.

And Cahill made the remark, so as Childs could hear him, that the next guy that pulled a gun where Crosby was, or left one where he would see it, was through with our ball club for life.

IV

For a while after that, Harry was satisfied to just pull the girl stuff on his victim. He begin writin’ fake love letters, like the guy’d done down in the Texas League. Some o’ them was wonders. I know, because I read ’em to Crosby myself, he tellin’ me that the different handwritin’s was so funny that he couldn’t make ’em out. But this wasn’t much joy for Childs, because you can bet he wasn’t never ast to read ’em.

Crosby wouldn’t only let me get so far when he’d make me stop, and then he’d take the letters and tear ’em up.

“I wisht all girls would leave me alone,” he’d say.

“What have you got against ’em?” I’d say to him.

“Bill,” he’d say, “I’d just as lief own up to you. I don’t feel comfortable round ’em. I’m just plain bashful. That’s what my sister used to tell me. She was the only one I could ever talk to without pretty near faintin’.”

“You’d get over that soon enough, if you’d try,” I’d tell him. “You won’t never know what livin’ is till you get married and have a home o’ your own. And they’s nothin’ about girls to be scared of, especially for as nice a lookin’ guy as you are. They wouldn’t never make fun o’ you.”

“I ain’t afraid o’ that,” he’d say to me. “I wouldn’t mind talkin’ to ’em if I thought they’d just laugh and joke with me or talk baseball. But girls is liable to get personal and begin makin’ eyes; and if they done that with me, I’d run a mile.”

“Wasn’t they no girls in the town you come from?”

“Too many o’ them,” he says. “They was only about two hundred people in the town and half o’ them was girls, seemed like to me.”

“How’d you get away from ’em?” I says.

“Just by runnin’,” he says. “I beat it from home when I was twelve years old and that’s why I didn’t get no schoolin’ to speak of. I joined in with a minin’ gang up North, where I was sure they wouldn’t be no skirts to bother me.”

“You was young to be mixed up with a crowd like that,” says I.

“Yes; but they treated me fine,” says Crosby. “I’d of been in that game yet only for somethin’ happenin’.”

“What happened?” I ast.

“Oh, you’d think I was crazy if I told you,” he says. “They was too rough for me. I can fight as good as the next guy when it’s just usin’ your fists. But I can’t stand guns. Between you and I, I’m scareder o’ them than I am o’ girls. It started, I guess, one night when they was a scrap in a saloon. Everybody was lit up and, first thing you know, they had their gats out and was pluggin’ away. And the guy that had took care o’ me, when I first come to the camp, was shot dead right in front o’ my eyes. I got sick at the time, watchin’ it, and ever since then I get sick every time I see one o’ the damn things.”

“You’re gun-shy and girl-shy,” I says. “Anything else you’re scared of?”

“Yes,” he says; “a fast ball that’s comin’ at my bean. But I guess I got plenty o’ company there.”

“Well, Lefty,” I says, “I can say one thing for you: You’re brave enough when it comes to pitchin’ against a .400 hitter in a pinch. And that’s more than can be said for some o’ the rest of our beautiful pitchers.”

V

One o’ the prettiest girls I ever seen was a telegraph operator at the hotel where we stop at in Detroit. Her name was Mary Lloyd. All the single guys on the ball club was more’n half crazy about her, and even the married ones was never heard objectin’ when she give ’em a smile. To see us in that hotel, you’d of thought we was the greatest bunch o’ telegram senders in the world.

Harry Childs had probably fell for her stronger than any o’ the rest. When he wasn’t busy talkin’ base hits or kiddin’ Crosby, he was tellin’ somebody what a pippin she was, like nobody else had suspected it. And I guess he’d sent her enough cards from round the circuit to start a pinochle deck.

“Bill,” he’d say to me, “she’s the only one I ever met that I felt like I wanted to marry her.”

“Go ahead!” I’d tell him. “I’d want to marry her, too, only I kind o’ feel my own Missus might make a holler.”

“Go ahead!” he’d say. “It’s all right to say ‘Go ahead’; but every time I start she says ‘Back up!’ She’s worse’n a traffic cop.”

“Keep tryin’, Harry,” I’d say to him. “Maybe she’s heard about you bein’ the world’s champion joker and thinks you’re just triflin’ with her.”

“She does all the jokin’ when I’m round,” he says. “She makes a regular monkey out o’ me.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t blame that on her!” I says.

Now Mary wasn’t no flirt, but she didn’t mind bein’ admired. She never give one guy more encouragement than another; she didn’t play no favorites, or she didn’t never let nobody on the club get the idear that she was to be had for the astin’. But she wasn’t never too busy to talk to any of us, or to smile back when we smiled at her.

I and Gilbert was standin’ there kiddin’ with her the first time she seen Crosby. We’d just got in that mornin’, and when he come out from breakfast he beat it through the lobby past her desk and out on the front walk.

“Who’s that handsome wretch?” she ast us.

“That’s the guy that made a sucker out o’ Cobb and Veach over home,” says Gilbert.

“Maybe if I ast him not to,” she says, “he’ll leave our team win a game or two this series.”

“You got a sweet chance of astin’ him anything,” says I, “unless you got a megaphone.”

“Is he deef?” says Mary.

“When they’s girls round he’s deef and dumb and blind,” I says.

“He must of been disappointed in love,” she says.

“Not him,” says Gil. “The only time he was ever disappointed was when they postponed the game he was goin’ to pitch.”

“What’s the trouble between him and girls?” says Mary.

“He just naturally don’t like ’em⁠—that’s all,” I says.

“Well,” says Mary, “I don’t think that’s hardly fair to our sex. They ain’t so many handsome men in the world that we can afford to have ’em woman haters.”

“No,” I says; “and they ain’t so many good pitchers on our ball club that we can have him scared to death by gettin’ a smile from you. So when you happen to run into him, face to face, kindly act like you didn’t see him.”

“I’m much obliged,” she says, “for bein’ told that my smile is terrifyin’. I’ll keep it to myself after this.”

“Not at all,” says I. “I’d pretty near rather miss a hit-and-run sign than that smile o’ yours. But this kid is just plain bashful; he ain’t no woman hater; he’s too backward to hate anything. He wants to be left alone⁠—that’s all. If a girl looks at him cross-eyed it takes him a week to get so’s he can pitch again.”

“I believe I’ll go right out now,” says Mary, “and look at him cross-eyed. You know I ought to be loyal to the Tigers.”

“You ought to be loyal to this here beanery,” says I; “and if you put him out o’ commission, why, we’ll just pass up this hotel.”

“All right,” she says. “I won’t pay no attention to him, because I know I’d simply die if you boys stopped somewheres else and gave me a chance to do a little work.”

“Has Childs been round yet?” says Gilbert.

“Foolish Question 795!” I says. “He was here even before he went in for his prunes.”

“What’s the matter with Harry Childs?” she ast us. “Why ain’t he playin’?”

“We like to win once in a while,” says Gilbert.

“The reason Harry ain’t playin’,” I says, “is a young outfielder from the Coast, named Patrick.”

“Why,” says Mary, “Harry told me he was out of it with a Charley Horse.”

“Yes,” I says; “and a battin’ average last year o’ .238.”

Crosby pitched the first game for us and win 2 to 1 in eleven innin’s. He was goin’ to wind up the series, but it begin to pour rain at noon o’ the last day and the battle was off before we went out to the park. We wasn’t startin’ home till nine o’clock that night; so we had a lot o’ time to kill. Naturally they was a reception all afternoon round Mary’s desk. I and Joe Martin happened to be left there alone with her while Childs was gettin’ shaved and some o’ the others was celebratin’.

“Well,” says Mary, “now that they ain’t no more chance o’ me spoilin’ your trip, I think you might bring Mr. Shy round.”

“She means the kid,” I says to Joe. “I told her all about him.”.

“Have you seen him?” Joe ast her.

“O’ course I seen him,” she says.

“What do you think of him?” says Joe.

“Well, gentlemen,” she says, “I don’t want to hurt the feelin’s o’ the present company, so I’ll just keep still.”

“He is a pretty kid,” says Martin, “and he’s a whole lot better-lookin’ since I coaxed him into some decent clothes. But he don’t want to meet no girls.”

“They’s no sense to it,” I says. “It wouldn’t hurt him a bit to mingle a little with the dames. It’d do him good. And he’d get along OK when he found out they wasn’t all tryin’ to steal him.”

“I’ll promise not to steal him,” says Mary.

“Well, it’s up to Joe, here,” I says. “He’s his best pal.”

“I guess he’d come if I ast him,” says Martin. “But I don’t know if I want to take a chance.”

“Oh, come on!” says Mary. “I don’t feel comfortable when they’s one o’ your boys I ain’t acquainted with.”

“Well,” says Joe, “maybe he’s up in his room takin’ a nap.”

“If he is in his room,” says I, “that’s probably what he’s doin’. It’s a cinch he ain’t readin’.”

“Why not?” says Mary.

Joe give me the wink.

“He hates books,” I says.

It was just then that the kid come across the lobby, toward the front windows. He looked like he was goin’ to cry.

“My! He needs cheerin’ up,” says Mary. “Do you suppose he’s sick?”

“You bet he’s sick,” says Martin. “He was goin’ to give your Tigers another lickin’ today, and the rain beat him out of it.”

“Well, how about callin’ him over?” I says.

So Martin went up to him and made the proposition. I could see the poor kid blush and then start like he was goin’ to run out in the rain. Then Joe grabbed ahold of his arm and begin arguin’ with him. And finally the pair o’ them come toward us. Nobody only Joe could of done it.

“Miss Lloyd,” says Martin, “this is another o’ the boys, Mr. Crosby. He’s disappointed about the rain and I thought maybe you could cheer him up.”

Mary give him her best smile.

“I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Crosby,” she says. “You’re the first ball player I ever seen that was disappointed about the rain.”

“Except when it didn’t fall,” I says.

The kid didn’t say nothin’; didn’t even look at her. I caught him moistenin’ his lips, tryin’ to get a word out. But he couldn’t. He seen her put her hand out to shake, and he finally managed to meet it. But he done it with the one he uses in pitchin’. And then, the minute Martin left go his arm, he backed away, pivoted on a pillar and dashed for the elevator.

“Good night!” says Mary. “Well, of all the rummies!”

“We warned you,” says Martin.

“You certainly cheered him up,” I says⁠—“all the way up to his room.”

“He can stay there, for all o’ me,” she says. “I won’t never try to force my acquaintance on nobody again.”

“I bet he’s offen me for life,” says Joe.

“You ought to be glad if he is,” she says.

“But you got to admit he’s a handsome brute,” says I.

“Yes,” says Mary; “and I’d like to scratch his handsome face to pieces.”

When we got on the train that night Harry Childs come up to me.

“Bill,” he says, “I believe I’m goin’ to win out.”

“Win out what?” I ast him.

“With Mary,” he says. “I took her out to supper. It was the first time she ever let me do it. And she acted like she really was fond o’ me.”

“Here’s luck, Harry!” I says.

I didn’t tell him the reason she was so friendly. It was because she’d been stung. And Harry’s attentions was salve.

We was in Detroit again the first week in July. Harry took her out to supper or a picture show, or somethin’, every night. I never heard her mention Crosby, and I was scared to mention him in front of her.

I did see her try to get even though. She come out from behind her desk one mornin’, just as he was walkin’ in from outside. She got right in his way, so as he either had to run into her or dodge. And he couldn’t help lookin’ at her. She looked him right in the eye and didn’t speak.

And the kid looked like he was mighty glad of it.

VI

Young Patrick got hurt and Childs was back in the game when we went East in August. Harry was full o’ pep.

“I’ll show ’em I can hit,” he says to me. “I never felt luckier in my life.”

“You don’t need no luck to hit if you take care o’ yourself,” I says.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “I got to keep in shape. I’m tryin’ to save the coin.”

“What for?” I ast him.

“Well, Bill,” he says, “I’m kind o’ figurin’ on gettin’ married.”

“Nice work, Harry!” I says. “I didn’t know you’d gone as far as that.”

“They’s nothin’ settled,” he says. “But she’s writin’ to me, and when we strike Detroit next month I’ll make her say yes.”

Harry started to paste that pill in Philly. He broke up two games for us there and got seven blows in three days. He was the pepper kid when we got to Washington and he couldn’t resist takin’ some of it out on Crosby.

They set at lunch together the second day.

“Lefty,” he says, “looks like we’re goin’ to fight Germany. I was down to the White House this mornin’ to call on a friend o’ mine, a Mr. Wilson, and he says he don’t think we can hold out much longer.”

“Well,” says Crosby, “let ’em fight, as long as they leave us guys out of it.”

“Who says they’d leave us out of it?” Harry ast him.

“They’ll leave me out of it, all right,” says Crosby. “I never shot a gun in my life.”

“It ain’t guns they want you to shoot. It’s Germans,” says Childs. “And if the President called for volunteers I bet you’d be one o’ the first to go.”

“You’d lose your bet,” says the kid. “I can’t take no chance o’ gettin’ my left arm shot off.”

“Good Lord! That reminds me o’ somethin’,” says Harry. “I seen in the papers this mornin’ that most o’ the guns this country’s got is left-handed guns. And they’ll probably call for all the left-handed men in the United States to handle ’em.”

Crosby didn’t wait for no desert.

In New York, a couple o’ days later, Childs was at him again.

“War’s gettin’ closer every minute,” he says to Crosby.

“The Germans torpedoed the City o’ Benton Harbor yesterday and sunk eleven bootblacks without even givin’ ’em a chance to take their stands with ’em. And the Kaiser went fishin’ in the mornin’ and caught an American sturgeon. The President says if that kind o’ thing keeps up he’s offen the Kaiser and we’ll all have to enlist⁠—that is, all the able-bodied guys.”

“That lets me out,” says the kid. “My ankles wouldn’t hold up a minute if I was to try and march.”

“They’d stick you in the calvary and leave you ride a motorcycle,” says Childs.

“I don’t know how,” says Crosby; “and, besides, a man couldn’t ride no motorcycle acrost the ocean.”

“Oh, yes, they could,” says Childs, “if the tires was blowed up tight enough. And, anyway, they’s lots of us would have to do our fightin’ here in this country, to keep the Germans from breakin’ up the League.”

I went in to breakfast with the kid the mornin’ we landed in Boston. I had a paper myself and they was a piece in it sayin’ that this country was thinkin’ about callin’ on all the young men o’ nineteen and twenty, to train ’em for war⁠—that is, all the ones that wasn’t married. Childs, settin’ at the next table, read it and couldn’t get over to us fast enough.

“Crosby,” he says, “how old are you?”

“Twenty,” says the kid.

“You’re in tough luck, old boy!” says Childs; and he begin readin’ out loud. It was a cinch this time, because the readin’ matter was really there.

“Congress,” it says, “is considerin’ a proposition to start universal military trainin’ on account o’ the strained relations with Germany and the prospects o’ war. The plan is to draft every unmarried man in the United States o’ the ages o’ nineteen and twenty, and make ’em fit for war.”

Anyway, it was somethin’ like that.

“It looks like your baseball career was pretty near over,” Harry says to the kid. “It’s a crime too! You’ve had a great year, and without knowin’ nothin’ about pitchin’ at that. But still, it ain’t hard to learn to shoot and duck bullets; and they’s a whole lot o’ satisfaction in knowin’ that you’re workin’ for the Stars and Stripes.”

“When does this business come off?” says Crosby.

“Oh, not for a couple months,” says Childs. “They’ll probably leave you stick with us through the city series.”

Then Childs got up and left us.

“Bill,” says Crosby to me, “they ain’t no kiddin’ about this, is they?”

“No, Lefty,” I says. “It’s there in the paper, all right. But it just says they’re thinkin’ about it. If I was you I wouldn’t start worryin’ yet.”

“Bill,” he says, “before I’ll join a army I’ll walk out in Lake Michigan till my hat floats.”

“Quit frettin’ over it,” says I. “You won’t be able to pitch in this series, and you know we want some o’ these games.”

“But they’re goin’ to draft all the twenty-year-olds,” he says, “and I just broke into that class. I wisht to the devil I was your age.”

“Yes,” I says; “or married.”

“Married!” says Crosby. “That’s right! It’s just the single fellas that’s gone.”

“They ain’t nobody gone,” says I. “But if you don’t quit worryin’ you’ll be just as good.”

Childs spoiled whatever chance the Kid had to quit worryin’ by sayin’ to him, just before we started the game:

“Well, Lefty, they’s one pipe: You’ll be the handsomest guy in the army.”

Before Crosby was taken out, Harry probably regretted that remark; because in the five innin’s he pitched our outfielders must of ran back to the fence fifty times.

VII

Joe Martin told me about the kid bracin’ him in the hotel that night. “Joe,” Crosby says to him, “I’d kind o’ like to get acquainted with a girl.”

“Good Lord!” says Joe. “What girl?”

“It don’t make no difference,” says the kid. “Some girl that ain’t married, but might like to be, and ain’t liable to want to spoon or make eyes or nothin’ like that.”

“Are you thinkin’ o’ gettin’ married?” Joe ast him.

“Yes; only keep it quiet,” says Lefty.

“And do you expect a girl to marry you for your money?” says Joe.

“You know I got no money,” Crosby says.

“Well,” says Joe, “if you got no money and you want to get married, you got to find a girl that’s fond o’ you. And a girl that’s fond o’ you might want to hold hands sometime.”

“Ain’t they no sensible girl that might take me?” says the kid.

“What girls do you know?” Joe ast him.

“Joe,” he says, “I ain’t met a girl since I was fifteen or sixteen years old.”

“Oh, yes, you have,” says Joe. “How about that girl you was so nice to in Detroit?”

“Do you mean that girl you introduced me to?” says Crosby.

“Sure!” says Martin. “Mary Lloyd, the telegraph operator.”

“Do you think she’d like me?” ast the kid.

“Well,” Joe told him, “she ast to meet you, and she certainly was broke up the way you treated her.”

“But what kind of a girl is she?” he says. “She ain’t too soft?”

“I never caught her at it,” says Joe.

“But she’s probably sore at me,” says Crosby.

“You can apologize to her,” says Martin.

“But we won’t be in Detroit for ten days,” says the kid.

“Write her a letter,” says Joe.

“I don’t like to write letters,” Crosby says. “Joe, will you write her a letter for me?”

“That’d make her sorer than ever,” says Martin. “Besides, I don’t know what you’re tryin’ to pull off.”

“I’m on the square,” says the kid. “If she’ll marry me⁠—why, I’ll take her.”

“That’s damn sweet o’ you!” says Joe. “But what’s your idear in gettin’ married?”

“Never mind, Joe,” says the kid. “I just feel like I want to.”

“Well,” says Joe, “if you want to square it with Mary, and you don’t feel like writin’ to her, why not send her a night letter?”

“What’s that?” says Crosby.

“It’s a telegram that goes at night, and you can say about fifty words for fifty cents,” Joe told him.

“But I don’t know no fifty words to say,” says the poor kid.

To make it short, Joe done it for him, either because he was sorry for the kid or because he thought it was a joke or because he ain’t none too good friends with Harry Childs. The telegram said that the kid was sorry he’d froze her, that he’d been feelin’ tough that afternoon, that he apologized, and would she please forgive him, because he thought a whole lot of her.

The answer come next day, at noon. Mary wired that she’d pay more attention to him if he said all that to her face.

VIII

Harry Childs’ lucky spell ended when we stopped over for a game in Cleveland on the way home. He changed his mind at the last minute about makin’ a slide to the plate, and they carried him off with a busted leg.

So Harry Childs didn’t make the last trip to Detroit.

Young Mr. Crosby did, though he was so scared leavin’ Chi that I and Gil and Martin was afraid he’d throw himself offen the train in the night.

The three of us talked it all over.

“He’ll fall down, sure!” says Gil. “She’ll give him an unmerciful pannin’ and he’ll faint dead away.”

“But suppose he don’t,” I says. “Suppose he goes through with it and wins. Are we bein’ fair to Harry?”

“Why not?” says Martin. “Childs played jokes on him all season. It’s pretty near time the kid got back.”

“I’m for helpin’ him,” says Gilbert.

“Me too,” says Joe.

“All right; you’re on!” I says; and we begin discussin’ how to go about it.

We finally fixed it up that we’d get a taxi to come to the hotel at Mary’s lunchtime. Then we’d coax ’em into it and slam the doors, and tell the driver to break all the laws o’ Michigan.

Because, as Joe said, if we put ’em together where Crosby could get away, he’d get away sure!

They’s nothin’ more to it. They were back from their ride at one o’clock, both o’ them as red as an open switch. But the smile Mary give us was an inch or so wider than we ever got before.

Crosby come blushin’ acrost the lobby.

“Well?” we says.

“Well, boys,” he says, “it wasn’t bad.”

“What do you mean⁠—wasn’t bad?” says Martin.

“Her,” says the kid.

“Not half as bad as one o’ them German centipede guns,” says I.

“Not half!” says Crosby.

I suppose by this time she’s got him through the First Reader.

The Last Night

Jay Arnold, being a resident of Chicago and not stone deaf, knew there was a war somewhere in Europe. He had heard also that the United States had gone or was going into it. But until the twenty-ninth day of June, this year of so-called grace, he didn’t care. For Mr. Arnold was a man of simple tastes⁠—rye and water all morning, a seat in the bleachers all afternoon, rye and water all evening and then eight or nine hours of melodious sleep⁠—and the tumult Over There had not interfered a bit with his daily program of innocent pleasure.

The gentleman’s reading was confined to the sporting pages of the morning papers and “Today’s Results” in the evening sheets. It was simply tough luck that he had to sit, on his way gameward this blizzardy June day, beside one of those born genials to whom proximity is a formal introduction and an excuse for opening up.

“Looks,” said this fluent soul, “like as if we’d soon be bone dry.”

“Oh, I guess not for ten or a dozen years,” said Mr. Arnold.

“Years, nothing!” the other ejaculated. “It’s liable to be all off tomorrow morning.”

Mr. Arnold scrutinized the stranger. He looked sober.

“Where do you get that stuff!” said Mr. Arnold.

“In the morning paper. I seen an article this morning where the fella says Wilson’s to have the whole say and if he says dry, dry she is.”

“What fella says that?” asked Mr. Arnold.

“He signed his name, but I forget it,” replied our hero’s seat-mate. “It’s the fella that writes the articles from Washington, DC.”

“They wasn’t no game in Washington yesterday!” And Mr. Arnold smiled triumphantly.

“This ain’t got nothing to do with a game,” said the other. “This guy ain’t the baseball-article writer. He pulls the stuff about Wilson and the Senate and Congress⁠—deep stuff.”

“Those fellas are crazy,” Said Mr. Arnold. “Besides, you probably misread it wrong.”

“I guess I can read!” said his companion peevishly.

“But listen,” said Mr. Arnold: “The President of the United States ain’t the king of the world. He can’t vote the country dry without Congress and the people having their say.”

“He can in war-times. He can do anything he feels like in war-times.”

“What’s the war got to do with the liquor business?”

“A whole lot! And Wilson’s going to call off the liquor business to preserve the food.”

Mr. Arnold laughed hoarsely.

“A fine way to preserve the food!” he said. “A Democrat ought to know that when a man’s drinking he ain’t got no time to eat. I remember one time eight years ago last fifth of May,” he added. “I went on the waterwagon four days at that time, and I eat like a bay horse.”

“You don’t get the point,” said the other. “The stuff that liquor is made out of is the stuff that could be made into food if it wasn’t made into liquor. And we’re going to be up against it for stuff to eat during war-times, so the President’s going to help preserve the food by cutting out the liquor.”

“But,” objected Mr. Arnold, “why should he cut out a necessity, like drinking, to preserve eating, that’s just a habit?”

“They’s more people that eats than there is that drinks,” said Mr. Fisher, for that was his name.

“Now you’re talking wild,” said Mr. Arnold. “If that’s true, why is there more saloons than restaurants?”

“Because people don’t eat all day.”

“Of course not! They’s no fun in it.”

And as they had reached the ballpark, Mr. Arnold rose and left the car, an easy winner in the argument.

But neither Mr. Arnold’s victory nor the game pleased him, and at the end of three innings he got up and walked out, worried for the first time in eight years.

“I must find some fella I can trust,” he said to himself. “I must find out if it’s true.” And he boarded a car for his first post-pastime local stop.

Eddie, the barkeeper, and two ticker-fans observed his entrance with surprise.

“Well, Jay,” said the former, “what’s the idear? Wasn’t it going to suit you?”

“They’s other things besides baseball,” said Mr. Arnold shortly.

“Yes,” agreed Eddie, “but this ain’t no time to quit⁠—not when old Commy’s got the best club he’s had in years.”

Mr. Arnold appeared not to be listening.

“You look like an undertaker,” said Eddie. “What about a shot?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Mr. Arnold, and he helped himself from the bottle placed before him. “Eddie,” he said, lowering his voice, “what’s this bunk I been hearing?”

“You mean about Commy getting another manager?”

“No!” said Mr. Arnold. “But I was reading in the paper where Wilson’s going to stop the liquor-business to preserve the food.”

“Sure,” replied Eddie. “It’s bound to come.”

“When?”

“Most any time. But we figure it’ll be about the first of September.”

“The paper I seen it in,” said Mr. Arnold, “talked like it was liable to happen any morning.”

“They’s no telling,” said Eddie.

“Maybe it’ll come tomorrow morning,” said Mr. Arnold.

“They’s no telling,” said Eddie cruelly. “But we don’t know if they’re going to cut it all out or not. They’re talking about barring just the heavy stuff and letting us keep on selling the stuff that ain’t as much as ten percent dynamite.”

“What would that leave?”

“Well, beer and a few of the very light wines.”

“This stuff’s bound to go?” asked Jay, pointing to his glass.

“Sure as one o’clock,” said Eddie.

“And cocktails and those things?”

“All of them.”

“Put me up two bottles of that rye,” said Mr. Arnold.

On the way downtown Mr. Arnold reached a decision, Never in his life had he tasted a cocktail; never had his finely chiseled lips touched the edge of a cordial-glass. It was not fair to himself to die without knowing all there was to know of alcoholic delights. He had seen their hilarious results in dozens of his friends, but rye and its two or three cousins had been his special study. He would take a full course tonight. He would be a graduate with an M.A. degree before tomorrow’s dawn and the President’s facile signature had taken the joy out of life.

“Ben,” he said to his favorite at Carney’s, “what kind of cocktails is they?”

“Oh, they’s a raft of them,” said Ben, “⁠—Manhattan, Bronx, Clover Leaf, Sazarac, Southern Comfort, rum⁠—oh, a raft of them!”

“Mix them up for me,” said Mr. Arnold.

“You could do it quicker with chloroform,” said Ben.

“Don’t try and kid somebody,” said Mr. Arnold. “As long as I got the money, I guess I can get what I order.”

“Sure you can,” agreed the gentleman on the sane side of the mahogany. “But we don’t want nobody dying on our hands, and that’s what’d happen to you if you tried to put away all them things at once.”

“I don’t want them all at once,” said Mr. Arnold. “I want them one at a time, in succession. While I’m cuddling one, you can be mixing the next, and so on Do you get me?”

“The cocktails will tend to that,” said Ben.

A Martini was the ninth on the list that Mr. Arnold put down.

“That’s all I know how to make,” said Ben after a close observation of his guest. “If I was you, I’d get myself something to eat.”

“That wouldn’t be the right spirit,” said Mr. Arnold. “We got to lay off of food and preserve it. Give us another cocktail.”

“They ain’t no more,” said Ben.

“All right. Start in on the cordials.”

“Cordials! You don’t drink them till after you’ve eat.”

“Is that the rules?” inquired Mr. Arnold.

“That’s the rules. Go back in the café and throw a big steak into you.”

“But I don’t feel like a steak. I feel like some cheese.”

“I thought you would,” said Ben.⁠ ⁠…

“I want to go where they’s music and dancing.”

So said Mr. Arnold to the driver, and he climbed into the car without mishap save for a barked shin.

Before he had got fairly asleep, the taxi stopped in front of the Red Duck.

“This is about the livest place,” the driver said, and Mr. Arnold, relieved of one dollar and thirty cents, walked in.

“What will it be?” inquired the waiter.

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Arnold.

“Something to drink?”

“Why, certainly. What did you think I came in for⁠—to get a suit pressed?”

“What kind of a drink?”

“What kind ain’t I had?”

“I don’t believe they’s any,” said the waiter.

“But listen here, George. You must know of some fancy drink I ain’t had.”

“How about an absinthe frappée?”

“What is that like?” asked Mr. Arnold.

“Well, let’s see⁠—” said George. “It’s a good deal like shrapnel, kind of mild and harmless.”

“I don’t want nothing mild, but I don’t want to miss nothing. So bring it on.”

And it happened that in George’s absence they began to dance, and a girl at the next table thought Mr. Arnold looked so funny that she had to laugh at him just as the music started. And Mr. Arnold took the laugh as an invitation and went over there.

“Good evening,” he said.

Promptly arose the girl’s escort, a tall well-dressed young man.

“I guess you’ve made a mistake,” he said.

Mr. Arnold was embarrassed and said:

“I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon.”

“All right. Beat it!” said the youth.

“Yes, but I don’t want no bad feeling. I ain’t a bad fella. My friends’ll tell you that.”

“I’ll bet you they don’t.”

“They would if they was here. But that makes no difference. We’d ought to all be friends tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the last night.”

“The last night! Are you one of those bugs?”

Mr. Arnold laughed uproariously.

“That’s pretty good!” he said at length. “ ‘One of those bugs.’ I’ll bet they don’t nobody get ahead of you. I’d liked to of met you before it was too late.”

“I hope we’re not detaining you.”

“Not a minute! I’m all alone and just looking for company. It’s pretty tough running round alone the last night.”

“Say, what are you talking about? Did somebody tip you off that Gabriel was going to play ‘The Holy City’ tomorrow?”

“I guess you know what I’m talking about,” said Mr. Arnold, winking. “I guess you read the papers.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I guess you’re on the square,” said Mr. Arnold, “and if you really ain’t heard the dope, I’ll give it to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“And I may as well set down and buy a drink while I’m at it,” said Mr. Arnold.

“Walter,” said the young lady, “let’s finish this dance. Please!”

“No,” said Walter, “we’ll have the next.”

And he and Mr. Arnold sat down.

“Now,” said Walter, “what’s the big secret?”

“What are we going to drink?” said Mr. Arnold.

“What are you drinking?” inquired the younger man.

“Mine’s over to that other table. I’ll have the waiter fetch it. It’s something new⁠—an absinthe frappée.”

“Yes, that is a new one. But anyway, it suits me.”

“Walter! Anything but that! You promised!” said the girl.

“Yes, yes, I know!”⁠—impatiently. “But if this is the end of the world, promises don’t go.”

“And,” said Mr. Arnold, “won’t the young lady have one too?”

“Never mind her!” said the youth impatiently. “She’s Miss Gloom tonight. Let’s get to the secret.”

Mr. Arnold lighted a cigar with an unsteady hand.

“Well,” he said, “you know this here war⁠—”

“I’d heard there was one,” said Walter.

“Well, this war’s what’s brought up this here other thing. It seems like the President wants to preserve food.”

“Strawberries and stuff like that?”

“No, no. He wants to keep a hold of all the food, so’s they won’t be no famines during the war. And the stuff they make liquor out of could be made into something to eat if they didn’t make it out of liquor.”

“Yes, yes. Go on.”

“So tomorrow morning it’s off.”

The girl looked up eagerly.

“Was that in tonight’s paper?” she said.

“Sure, it was in all of them,” said Mr. Arnold.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s a cinch⁠—that is, the papers didn’t say it was going to be tomorrow, but it’s liable to be.”

The young man laughed.

“So you’re taking no chances,” he said.

“That’s me,” said Mr. Arnold. “When I heard about it, when I found out we was liable to wake up tomorrow morning and find everything closed, I says to myself I’d finish in a blaze of glory. And I swore I wouldn’t go home till I’d tasted every drink that’s made. I guess I’m pretty near to the end of the list now.”

“What have you had?”

“Well, I had nine different cocktails and seven cordials and I forget what all. And now I’m winding up with a few of the fancy ones.”

“Maybe I can think of some you’ve missed.”

“Walter!”

“Have you tackled a julep?”

“No.”

“Or a Swiss Ess?”

“No.”

“Or⁠—”

“Wait a minute. Let’s make lis’. Write ’em all down black and white.”

“Go ahead.”

“You write ’em. My hand kind of shakes.”

“I don’t see why it should.”

“Never mind. Make lis’.”

“I could make one a mile long. But I don’t believe you’d appreciate them all tonight. I’ll give you a few to wind up the evening on. And if you run shy tomorrow, call me up and I’ll give you some more.”

Whereupon Walter handed Mr. Arnold his card.

“You’ve got a good system,” continued Walter. “Pretend every night’s the last one and enjoy it to the limit.”

“No sys’m ’bout it. This’s pos’ively las’.”

“I’d like to bet you.”

“All bets off. I know!”

The girl rose from her chair. “Walter,” she said, “I’m tired. I’m going home.”

“All right, if that’s the way you feel about it. I’ll call you a cab.”

“Tha’s right,” said Mr. Arnold. “Time for li’le girls to be in bed.”

Jay Arnold awoke at noon on the thirtieth in a room in the Grand Hotel. The telephone was ringing insistently. He got out of bed⁠—a head-splitting operation⁠—and went to answer it. A voice at the other end announced that its owner was Walter Crowell.

“What of it?” said Mr. Arnold testily. “I don’t know nobody of that name.”

“Yes, you do,” said the voice. “Anyway, I’m coming up.”

“Well, don’t stay long,” said Mr. Arnold.

A few moments later he admitted the young man of the Red Duck.

“You!” said Mr. Arnold. “And how did you know I was here?”

“I put you to bed,” said Walter.

“The dickens you say! Well, it’s the first time that ever had to be done.”

Walter produced a morning paper.

“Arnold,” he said, “if you’d made that bet, you’d have lost it.”

“What bet?”

“I wanted to bet you that the country wouldn’t be bone dry this morning. It isn’t. And it probably won’t be for some time to come.” He paused. “But as far as I’m concerned, it is. I want to apologize for leading you on last night, and I hope that terrific mixture won’t kill you.”

“I think it has,” said Mr. Arnold.

“I acted,” said Walter, “like a first-class mutt.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” said Mr. Arnold. “I don’t know how you acted. I don’t know if you acted at all. All as I remember is that I and you and some girl were together.”

“She’s my wife, Arnold. She’s forgiven me for two reasons. One is that I’ve jumped aboard the wagon for keeps. And the other is that she knows I was downhearted and had reason to be.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“I can’t go.”

“Go where?”

“Well, to France.”

“Good Lord! That’s the last place I’d want to be.”

“Not if you’re a real man.”

“Well, I certainly ain’t, not this morning.”

“And I certainly wasn’t last night. But it’ll be different from now on.”

“If you want to go, why don’t you go?”

“They won’t let me in. My vision’s bad.”

“It was all right when you picked that girl.”

“But even if it was all right now, I couldn’t leave her. We have nothing saved.”

“Well, listen, kid: I don’t believe you’re liable to save nothing, hanging round the Red Duck nights.”

“There’s no mistake about that,” said Walter. “But you can bet I’m going to save from this out, because the day may come when they’re not so particular about vision.”

“Do you think we’re in for extra innings?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And they need more men than they’ve got?”

“You bet they need them⁠—all they can grab.”

“Well,” said Mr. Arnold, “I’m going back to that bed and lay down awhile longer.”

“Sure. Go ahead, and I’ll be running along.”

Walter started toward the door.

“Wait a minute!” said Mr. Arnold. “On your way out, I wish you’d tell them to send me up a drink.”

“Something brand new and fancy?”

“Yeah! Ice water,” said Mr. Arnold.⁠ ⁠…

“How old are you?” asked the doctor Arnold consulted a little later.

“Thirty-seven,” answered Mr. Arnold without evasion.

“There’s just one thing the matter with you. You drink too much.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken, Doc,” said Mr. Arnold. “I’m bone dry.”

“Since when?”

“Well, about three o’clock yesterday morning.”

“I thought so.”

“I’m through with it now.”

“If you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to be.”

“But if I obey orders, there’s a chance?”

“Yes.”

“All right, Doc. Shoot!” ordered Mr. Arnold.⁠ ⁠…

Eddie was taking the third inning from the ticker when Mr. Arnold blew in.

“Well, if it ain’t old Jay,” said Eddie. “I figured you must be sick when you didn’t show up yesterday, with Detroit here and everything.”

“I was sick, good and sick,” said Mr. Arnold.

“And why ain’t you there today?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. It don’t seem right to go and watch a lot of fellas play ball when they’s a game across on the other side that really means something. And besides, a man can’t get no exercise setting in the bleachers.”

“Who in blazes wants exercise?”

“I do.”

“You get plenty of exercise walking from one place to the next.”

“You know how much I walk! If they was a streetcar line from one side of my bed to the other, they’d get all my nickels on a restless night.”

“Well,” said Eddie, “this ain’t giving you no service.”

“I don’t want no service.”

“You certainly are sick!”

“I’m sick, but it ain’t incurable. It ain’t even going to cost me anything to get well⁠—that is, no money.”

“What is it going to cost you?”

“Just some nerve, Eddie⁠—enough to carry me through the rye-fields without stopping to pick the fruit.”

“You’re on the wagon?”

“Yes sir.”

“For how long?”

“Well, if those Dutchmen’s aim is as good as they say, it’ll be all my life.”

“What in thunder are you talking about? Have you went nuts?”

“I’ve learned something, Eddie.”

“You’ve been to a doctor or something.”

“Yes sir.”

“And he throwed a scare into you?”

“Well, he did that too. He said I’d last about two years longer if I didn’t cut it out right away. So I’ve cut it out, and I may not even last two years. But if they get me, it’ll be with a shot that don’t need no chaser. I’ve learned about this war, Eddie. They’s fellas right here in this town that want to go and can’t. They’re tied down with their families or something. And they’s fellas all over this country that don’t think much of a guy that can go and won’t. Well, I can go and I’m going.”

“When?”

“Not for a couple of months⁠—maybe more. They won’t take me now. But the Doc says if I’ll go to some springs and boil awhile, and if I’ll exercise, and if I’ll behave, he thinks eight or nine weeks will make a man out of me. I’m leaving the old burg tonight, and I thought I’d drop in and say goodbye.”

“Well, I’m hanged!” said Eddie. “And it was only two days ago that you was worried to death for the fear Wilson was going to take out your meter. And I was trying to kid you, telling you that night would probably be the last.”

“It was,” said Mr. Arnold.

“And did you make it a good one?”

“Oh, boy!” said Mr. Arnold.

“There’s another inning coming in,” said Eddie, and he walked over to the ticker. “Cleveland nothing, Sox two. Did you see what Felsch done yesterday?”

“No,” said Mr. Arnold. “I was reading about some other Dutchmen, on the front page.”

The Clubby Roadster

Young Harry Cross breezed into my office one morning in May with the sad news that his wife’s Aunt Myrtle had died of the blues in Memphis and had left Harry and she twenty-five hundred dollars.

“And only thirty-nine years old!” said Harry.

“Don’t kick about her going so young,” I told him. “You’d ought to be glad she succumbed before spending the twenty-five hundred.”

“That’s no way to talk!” he said. “I care more for Nan’s relatives than all the money in the world.”

“But it looks like the hand of Providence was in this,” said I. “It means you’re at liberty to leave home and go to France. I wish I could.”

“Why don’t you?” he asked me.

“How can I,” I said, “with a dependable wife and no millionaire aunts?”

“But what’s twenty-five hundred dollars?” said Harry. “The interest on it wouldn’t hardly keep a person in toothpicks.”

“You can do the next-best thing then,” I said. “You can buy twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of Liberty bonds.”

“Not no three and a half percent, I can’t!” said Cross. “A man that don’t get six percent for his money these days is a fish. But,” he goes on, “I’m not going to get no six percent or any other percent. I’m going to spend the money.”

I asked him what on.

“Well,” he said, “I’m tired of living with the wife’s folks.”

“And maybe it’s fifty-fifty,” said I.

“Anyway,” he said, “I and Nan are figuring on a cozy little flat of our own, and it’s going to cost us about six hundred dollars for furniture, a piano inclusive.”

“Well,” I said, “that’ll leave you nineteen hundred for the Liberty loan.”

“No,” said Cross, “because I promised to buy the Missus a car.”

“You certainly are a sport,” said I, “⁠—to forget your own comfort and enjoyment and think only of your wife’s, especially when you stop to consider that the lady who died was her aunt. I suppose it’ll be an electric.”

“No,” said Cross, “and it won’t be no flivver. When I buy a car, it’ll be a regular car. We’ve just about decided on a Champion.”

“A seven-passenger?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, “it’s what they call the Clubby Roadster, with room for four.”

“And how much do they cost?” said I.

“About fifteen hundred,” he said. “But that don’t include the extra tire or the engine-driven pump or the bumper, or the freight from Cleveland to here.”

“I suppose,” said I, “that they throw in a steering-wheel and a horn.”

“Altogether,” said Cross, “it comes to about fifteen-ninety, and the salesman says it’s the biggest bargain a man could find.”

I asked him if he could drive it.

“I won’t have no trouble,” he said. “It’s half nerve and half good judgment.”

“Well,” said I, “you can be sure of fifty percent efficiency.”

“And as soon as I get good,” said Cross, “I’m coming to take you and your Missus for a ride.”

“Call up ahead of time,” I said. “We’re busy about one night a week.”

“What night?” he asked me.

“The night you come to take us for a ride,” said I.⁠ ⁠…

But one day near the end of June I picked up a paper and seen where Mr. Wilson was liable to torpedo all the neutral Bourbon without warning; so I and a friend of mine down to the office spent the afternoon lightening his task. And by the time I got home, I was on friendly terms with the whole world and absolutely unable to say no to anybody. That’s the only way I can explain accepting Cross’ invitation, and if the Prohibition forces wants to use this as a moral lesson, they’re as welcome as a fresh egg.

He called up while the Missus was doing the supper-dishes.

“Listen!” he said. “Could you and your wife get off next Saturday?”

I told him I was off now.

“If you could,” he said, “how would you like to take a trip in the car with my wife and I?”

“Tickled to death!” said I.

“All right,” said Cross. “We’ll be over for you early Saturday morning. And have your nighties packed, because wherever we go, we won’t get back before Sunday night.”

I told him that suited me fine, and the deal was closed. You wouldn’t hardly believe a man could get that bad in one afternoon.

Cross came for us about eight o’clock.

“The wife wasn’t quite ready,” he said. “We’ll pick her up on the way. And that’ll give you and your Missus a chance to run up and see our flat.”

So we climbed into the shiny new Champion, I and the Missus in the back seat, and Cross started her off so smooth and easy that I cut my lip on the top of my spine. That first standing broad jump of half a block was the fastest we went on the whole trip.

“The engine’s a little stiff,” said Cross.

“The driver’s a big one,” I said to the Missus.

“They call this car the Clubby Roadster,” said Cross. “It’s a roadster, but most of them only have the driver’s seat, where this one’s got the extra seat for two more passengers. It’s a regular roadster body, only for the extra seat, so they call it a Clubby Roadster, on account of the back seat being right up close to the front. Everybody close together, so they named it the Clubby Roadster.”

“I never saw this style of car before,” said I. “I should think they’d have some special name for it, like Clubby Roadster.”

“That’s what they do call it,” said Cross.

I asked him why, but a postman was crossing the street four blocks off and he had to concentrate.

After we’d cleared this hazard, Cross said:

“I’m wild to get out on the country roads where I can step on her. They tell me she’s capable of fifty-five miles an hour. Would you believe it?”

“You bet I would,” said I, “and hearsay evidence ample.”

“We’re only going fourteen now,” said Cross. “If I speeded up here in the city, I’d be liable to get pinched.”

“And the way you’re going now,” said I, “the danger is that a thirsty truck-horse will romp up behind and drink all your gasoline. Or maybe a vicious snail will stick a claw through your extra tire.”

“There! I just hit fifteen,” said Cross. “The way that I tell is by this thing on the dashboard. It registers how fast I’m going. They call it a speedometer.”

“Is that so!” I said. “I always thought a speedometer was a kind of germicide.”

“No,” said Cross. “One part of it registers speed and another part registers mileage. So far, I’ve traveled just two hundred and twelve miles.”

“You’d ought to swap experiences with Bud Holmes,” said I.

Pretty soon we come to the Honeymoon Pub and Cross stopped the Champion by the simple process of running her into the curb.

“We’ll all go up for just a minute,” said our host. “Nan will be pretty near ready.”

Nan was pretty near ready⁠—to cry. From her miserable looks I figured she must of broken a tumbler, but it seems it was worse than that.

“Oh, Harry,” she said to her husband, “I turned Jack down.”

Then she went on to tell him that her brother had been in the Officers’ Reserve camp out to Fort Sheridan, and he’d just called up to say that they’d asked for waivers on him.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t see what you’re sad over. Did you want him to get killed?”

“Oh, no,” she sniffled. “But it’ll break his heart. He was crazy to give himself to the country. He passed the physical test and everything⁠—and now he can’t go.”

“It’s too bad,” I said, “that there’s no vacancies in the regular army. Otherwise he might horn in there as a private. Haven’t you no friends with a political pull?”

“Let’s not talk about it, or the little girl’s trip will be spoiled,” said Cross. “Come on and see what you think of our flat.”

Well, this tour of examination didn’t take much time. There was four rooms all told, and Jess Willard could have hung his head out of the front window and washed his feet in the kitchen sink. If a man coming in had tripped on the hall rug, he’d be in bed.

After an argument about whether Nan was taking enough wraps, and whether Harry should have the pajamas with the feet in them or the ones that allowed his toe-ums to run amuck at night, we squeezed out and started downstairs. Then Nan wasn’t sure she’d locked the door.

“What’s the difference?” I asked her. “A very thin burglar might manage to scrape in between the furniture, but Houdini’s the only one that could get out again and bring anything with him.”

She ran back, though, and convinced herself, and then we went on down to the car. Nan said I and the Missus would have to sit in back, so she could be beside Harry in front and read him the route out of the Blue Book.

I asked where we was headed.

“It’s a secret,” said Mrs. Cross, giggling.

“I don’t doubt it,” said I. “With your husband in the driver’s seat, the destination’s always a secret.”

I and the wife braced ourselves for another leaping getaway, but Cross did a whole lot better this time.

“If it wasn’t for straining the engine,” he said, “I’d start right out on high.”

“Anyway,” said I, “that’s where we’ll probably finish.”

We hadn’t been out of bed more than two hours, but that didn’t stop my Missus from going to sleep before we struck South Chicago.

After four wrong turns, we finally came to Indianapolis Avenue, that’s named after a town in the American Association. A few blocks ahead I saw a roadhouse called the Auto Inn, probably under the same management as the Grand Hotel and the Elite Café and the Economy Dry Goods Store.

“Cross,” I said, “our cupboard was bare this morning, and I don’t like to start out on a joyride with no oil. If you think you’re not going too fast to stop, let’s pull up minute at the joint with the peculiar name and get a couple of quick ones while the Missus is asleep.”

Nan cut in.

“No, indeed!” she said. “Harry mustn’t drink while he’s driving. Pretty near all automobile accidents are caused by liquor.”

“Anyway,” said Cross, “I’m going to try not to stop at all till we reach Michigan City. You can get a drink there.”

“How far is that?” I asked him.

“About sixty miles,” he said.

“But Indiana goes dry next April,” I said.

The book told us to fork off Indianapolis Avenue to the right. Between the place you fork and the outskirts of Hammond, there’s three or four miles of cement along Lake George that’s like a billiard table, and wide enough for three machines and a kid on roller skates to pass.

“Now we can make some time,” said Cross, and before I realized it, he had her up to eighteen miles per hour.

Nan grabbed his right arm. “Oh, Harry, please slow down!” she said.

“I’m all right,” said Cross, giving a kind of scared laugh. “There’s no danger as long as I keep my nerve. Besides, I’ve gone faster than this already.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “but it was when the instructor was with you.”

“But he couldn’t do anything to prevent an accident,” said Cross.

“He might have bigger hands than your wife,” said I, “and get a better grip on your arm. Many a life’s been saved by a good tight grasp on the chauffeur’s arm.”

In East Chicago we changed our minds about not stopping. The book said we had to turn left at the intersection of Chicago Avenue and something else, and right in the middle of the four corners, there was the East Chicago traffic-squad. Cross cut in to the left of him and he was on our running-board in nothing.

“Czech ipecac?” he said, which means in the English language: “What’s the matter with you?”

“Don’t get fresh, now!” said Cross.

“Tisza goulash!” (Come along to the station!) said the squad.

“Listen, old pal!” I said. “The lady in the back seat here is sick, and we’re trying to get her to a hospital in Gary. Do you ever smoke?”

So we were on our way again.

“Cross,” I said, “I bet your middle initial is von Bethmann. You know just how to handle ’em. Only you made one mistake. You should always call them some name⁠—or else have your tire-wrench handy and crack them in the bean.”

The book’s next instructions was to cross fifty-two railroad tracks, but the deck was a couple shy.

“ ‘At the end of the street,’ ” read Mrs. Cross, “ ‘turn right.’ ”

This was pretty good dope, as you couldn’t of turned to the left or driven straight ahead without hurdling a fence or a signboard into a field.

“The man that got up this book,” said Mrs. Cross, “must of rode along here himself sometime.”

“Either that,” I said, “or else he wrote the book first and then they made the turns to fit it.”

We hit eighteen again on the cement stretch that precedes the curve onto Fifth Avenue, Gary. But Fifth Avenue, Gary, or whatever they call the western continuation of it, must of been selected as the scene of some of our intense training in digging trenches. Anyway, there’s three miles of gorges before you strike town, some of them as much as a yard apart. The first jolt woke the Missus. It would of done the same to Rip Van Winkle.

“Where are we?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

“This is the Swiss Alps,” I said.

“I must of dropped off,” said she, and I thought at first she was trying to pull something, but then I remembered who it was.

“How long have we been on the road?” she asked me.

“Ever since we started,” said I, “up to just now.”

But Mrs. Cross heard us and looked at her wristwatch, the gift of the groom.

“Why, Harry,” she said, “we left Chicago at just nine and it’s after eleven now, and you said we could get to Michigan City in three hours.”

“We could if you’d let me step on her,” said Harry.

“Maybe we’re not on the right road,” said Nan.

“Whose fault is it if we ain’t?” said Cross, and his tone was not that of a passionate lover. I whispered to the Missus. “This may not be such a rotten trip after all,” I said.

There was no more social intercourse till we reached the pavement in Gary proper, if you could call it that.

“Yes, we’re all right,” said Nan, when we’d crossed the main street. “That was Broadway, and we’re on Fifth Avenue. Straight ahead now.”

“I don’t see how they think of all those names for streets,” said I.

“There’s a Broadway in New York, and a Fifth Avenue too,” said Mrs. Cross. “Maybe these were named after those.”

You can’t find fault with the stretch of road leading east out of Gary.

“Now’s your chance, Cross,” I said. “No danger to your springs here.” And I kept after him till we just touched twenty.

“Oh, look!” said the Missus. “We’re coming to a soldiers’ camp.”

“They’re guarding the Aetna Explosives,” said Cross.

A sentry loomed up on the horizon.

“Now listen, Cross,” I said. “If this guy tells you to halt, call him something and then run him down. No use arguing with him.”

“Harry, you be careful!” said Nan. “We’d better stop if he says so.”

“Oh, shut up!” said Cross, and my hopes revived.

The sentry saw he was badly outnumbered and let us pass unchallenged. Otherwise we might never have seen the town of Miller, which was evidently named after Joe.

Just this side of East Gary there was a sign that said:

Danger. Bridge Unsafe for Loads over 3,000 Pounds.

“Let’s see,” said Cross, when he’d stopped the car. “The machine’s supposed to weigh just twenty-eight-fifty. I weigh one hundred and forty-three pounds, and Nan weighs one hundred and thirteen. How much do you weigh?”

“About three hundred for both of us,” I said, “and the division of poundage is none of your business.”

“I and the car together makes twenty-nine-ninety-three,” said Cross. “You three people’ll have to get out, and I’ll pick you up when I get across.”

“But listen!” said I. “The suitcases and your tools and the extra tire totals a whole lot more than seven pounds. If I was you, I’d start the car at the regular pace and then jump out. We can catch up with it the other side of the bridge.”

“How would it steer?” he asked me.

“You can stand on the running-board and guide it,” said I.

“No,” he said, “I’ll stick at the wheel and chance it.”

Well, sir, three of us got out and walked ahead, and arranged it so we were standing right in the middle of the bridge when Cross drove over. And he was too scared to notice!

While he halted again to let us get in, a furniture van that must of weighed two and a half tons passed from the opposite direction and sailed over the bridge without even stopping to unload a soft pillow.

The giddy whirl of East Gary was too much for Mrs. Cross, and she sent us a matter of three miles up the wrong road. By the time we got back to the metropolis and headed in the right direction, the pair on the front seat were speaking to each other in words of one syllable and very few of those. But Dearie had to talk to somebody.

“The next town’s Porter,” she said, turning round. “There’s another route that goes right through it. But we miss it.”

“Speak for yourself. I don’t,” said I.

“Porter,” said the Missus. “That’s a funny name for a town.”

“Nothing funny about it, when you know how it got it’s name,” I said. “You see, practically all the railroads from the East run through it, and it’s forty miles from Chicago, and most people don’t sleep very good on a train, and they wake up along about here, and they can’t find their shoes, so they all stick their heads out at once and say the name of the town.”

“Porter?” asked the Missus.

“No,” said I. “George.”

Six miles west of Michigan City, Mrs. Cross looked at her watch and announced it was one o’clock.

“What do you care?” said Cross.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and her voice was full of tears.

“Well,” said Cross, “we’ll be in, in half an hour.”

Which words were scarcely uttered when there was a pop and hiss, and our right tire was down.

“It can’t be!” said Cross, looking at it. “They’re all guaranteed for six thousand miles.”

“Not against nails,” said I.

“It must be a puncture,” said Cross.

“Don’t jump at conclusions,” I said,

“I’ve forgotten if it’s Resta or De Palma or who holds that record for quick changes, or what the record is but in exactly thirty-five minutes we had the bum tire hanging on the back and the spare one in its place and were more moving Michigan Cityward. And I had the dirtiest shirt I ever saw, next to Harry’s.

“You can stop at a garage and have them patch that tube while we eat lunch,” I said.

“Like blazes!” said Cross. “I’ll wait till we get back home. We could never have two punctures on one trip.”

“No,” said I. “I’d forgotten that rule for the moment.”

“And furthermore,” said Cross, “we’re not going to stop in Michigan City for no lunch. We’re going to stop just long enough to get water and gas. Those that are hungry can buy some sandwiches and eat them on the way.”

“But Harry, I’m starved,” said his wife.

“Well, it’s your own fault,” said Cross. “In the first place, you didn’t get up in time to cook a decent breakfast. And the second place, if you’d kept track of the route, and not run us clear to Louisville trying to get out of East Gary, we’d of had time for a porterhouse steak in this town we’re coming to.”

“If you’d watched where you were driving, we might not of picked up that nail,” said his wife. “And then it took you all day and half the night to switch tires.”

“Shut up!” said Cross.

When we stopped in front of Michigan City’s handsomest garage, I handed the Missus fifty cents and jumped out.

“Buy yourself whatever you want to eat,” I told her. “I’ve got a date down at the next corner.”

She leaned over and whispered to me. “Don’t be long,” she said. “He’s just mean enough to go off and leave you.”

“You mean,” said I, “that he’s just mean enough not to.”

I was right. I had five and took my time about it, but when I came back, the car was still there. The Missus had a sackful of doughnuts, and Mrs. Cross an eyeful of tears.

The Missus whispered to me again. “He’s been abusing her terribly,” she said.

“What for?” I asked.

“Because you kept us waiting,” said the Missus. “He’s no different from other husbands.”

I was feeling too good to resent this fearful insult at the time, and I managed to be jovial all the way to New Buffalo. But it was a solo part. The Missus offered Nan a doughnut and got snapped at. Cross lost all control of himself and covered a mile and a half at the fearful rate of twenty-two per hour.

“Look out, boy!” I said to him. “There’s speed-laws even in the country.”

“Shut up!” said Cross.

“You’ve got some vocabulary! Six words and a bark!”

I’d been through New Buffalo on the train, but never knew before why they call it that. It’s because the sensation of motoring through the streets is like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

A mile or so the other side we stopped dead, all spraddled out over a railroad track.

“This is the Père Marquette,” said Cross.

“Even so,” I said, “there may be trains on it.”

“I’ve killed my engine,” said Cross.

“That has nothing to do with theirs,” said I, and I got out to stretch.

We’d been pulling through sand in second speed, and at the time of the engine’s demise our host had neglected to shift into neuter. So when his foot pressed the self-starter, the Champion was off the track in one jump. After that the engine died again.

“Now you’re using better judgment,” I said, and climbed back in.

“If you don’t like the way I drive, you know what you can do,” said Cross.

“Yes sir,” said I, “and I’m going to do it.”

And while we were breezing along the beautiful road to Three Oaks at a nineteen-mile gait, I confided my plans to the Missus.

“I’m beginning to get deliberately unfriendly myself,” I told her. “They hate us, and we hate them. They also hate each other, and it’s just a question of time till we’ll be doing that too. Where we’re going is no longer a secret. We’re going back to Chicago.”

“Mrs. Cross will be mad,” said the wife.

“Will be!” I said.

“And besides,” said the Missus, “if we leave them to go on alone, they’ll kill each other and then we’ll have it on our conscience.”

“Not as much,” said I, “as though we personally assisted at the function.”

“Well,” said the Missus, “you know best.”

So on Main Street, in Three Oaks, Mich., I ordered our chauffeur to desist.

“Cross,” I said, “we’re going to leave you here.”

“Oh, don’t do that!” said Mrs. Cross, and her voice was as full of warmth as the Kaiser.

“We must,” I said. “My Missus doesn’t feel good. She’s got another of those spells that overtook her in East Chicago. And she’s always prayed that when Death came, she would receive him at home and not among Michigan strangers.”

“Don’t coax them!” said Cross. “If they want to quit on us, I’m willing.”

“Goodbye, then,” I said, “and good luck to you!”

“Shut your mouth!” said Cross.

It was four o’clock when we were set down in Three Oaks, and we had to wait till pretty near seven for a train. So we had plenty of time to count all the acorns.

“I hope there’s a diner,” said the Missus.

She said that four hundred and sixty-two times.

“I hope they have another puncture.”

I said that just as often.

“We made a mistake accepting their invitation,” said the Missus, when we were speeding westward with a double order of ham and eggs staring us in the face.

“Thanks for the ‘we,’ ” said I. “But it was my mistake.”

During the next two weeks I saw Cross five or six times and got nothing but sour looks. But on Monday morning of the third week he was standing by my desk when I blew in to work.

I didn’t give him any encouragement, and it took all the nerve he had to open up.

“Well?” he said finally.

“Shut your mouth!” said I.

“Say, listen!” he said. “Let’s forget all that. I owe you all kinds of apologies.”

“I’m willing you should stay in debt,” said I.

“But I’m not,” he said. “I acted like a rummy.”

“You were natural,” I said.

“No, I wasn’t,” said Cross. “It was that blasted car.”

Five minutes of silence.

“Would you like to hear what happened?” he asked me.

“Yes,” said I, knowing he’d tell me anyway.

“Well,” he said, “our intentions was to take you to St. Joe⁠—but we never got there ourselves. We were going through a burg called Sawyer when the rule was broken.”

“What rule?” I asked him.

“I had another puncture,” he said.

“I was afraid you would,” said I.

“Well, I did,” said Cross, “and it kind of upset the both of us; and to hear us light into each other, you’d of thought we’d been married a year. There wasn’t nothing to do but spend the night there. So I went to a kind of hotel, and she stayed with some old lady. The next day I got one of the tires fixed and drove back to Chi. She took our friend the Père Marquette.”

“I told you there might be trains on it,” said I.

“I didn’t go home for two nights,” said Cross, “and when I did, she wasn’t there. I found her at her folks’. I asked her to come home, but she said she wouldn’t come home till I sold the car. She said that only for it, we’d of gone all our life without a cross word, and she never wanted to see it again. Well, I agreed with her. So we fixed it all up.”

“And are you going to sell the Clubby Roadster?” I asked him.

“It’s sold already,” he said.

“What profit did you make?” said I.

“I took a two-hundred-dollar loss,” said Cross. “Then when I got the money, we were going to take a boat-trip and spend some of it. And then we got to thinking it over and decided it’d be a nice thing to invest the whole roll in Liberty bonds. We felt like we ought to do something for the country.”

“That’s a fine spirit!” I said. “But I know how you could of done a whole lot more.”

“How?” he asked me.

“You could of crated up the Clubby Roadster,” said I, “and sent it to the Kaiser with your fondest regards, and told him to be sure and take von Hindenburg and the Crown Prince and Mr. Ludendorff on a weekend trip, say to St. Joe or somewheres.”

“Well, it’s too late now,” said Cross. “Besides, they might of been like Nan and I and loved each other all the more for having a little misunderstanding. I never really appreciated my wife till we quarreled. Now⁠—”

“Shut up!” said I.

A Chip of the Old Block

Weedsburg, May 16.

Dear Grandfather:

How can I thank you for remembering me on my twenty-first birthday with such a wonderful present? I know how you feel about spending money recklessly, and I assure you I will not throw it away on foolish luxuries. In fact, I have about made up my mind not to spend it at all, but to deposit the check in the savings bank and not draw it out until actually necessary. Perhaps I will keep it until the next Liberty Loan is announced and buy a Liberty Bond with it, because I think a person ought to do all they can for the Government at a time like this. Thanks ever so much, dear Grandfather, and I wish there was some way in which I might show my appreciation otherwise than mere words.

I suppose you are like all the rest of us and crazy to get the papers every day and find out the latest about what is going on “over there.” The news has been rather discouraging lately, don’t you think? But Mother and I both think things will improve fast as soon as Gen. Pershing gets enough men so that he can begin to really do something. How splendidly the French and British have been fighting, and how glad they will be when we come to their rescue! But I guess the Kaiser won’t be so glad.

I have not made up my mind as yet just what to do. The other night I spoke to Mother about enlisting in the Navy, and just talking about it affected her so that I gave up the idea. Once a few weeks ago I mentioned the aviation, but she said it seemed such a terrible waste to go into that branch, as most of the aviators were accidentally killed before they ever got to do any fighting.

So, as I say, I don’t know exactly what to do, and there is no one here whom we can rely on to give me advice. Mr. Leslie, who was one of Father’s old friends and in the Spanish War with him, said yesterday that if he were I, he would not worry, but would wait until the next draft. But there are several reasons why I don’t like to do that. In the first place, there might be some other way in which I could serve my country to better advantage. Then it takes so long for a man to be called after he is drafted, and then he is kept in training for months before they send him anywhere. Besides, I suppose the men in charge of the drafting make mistakes the same as everybody else, and I might be overlooked entirely or left out in some way, and then it might be too late for me to do anything.

However, Mother is going to write soon to Congressman Shultz and see if he can give us any advice. I must do something to keep up the family record and following the footsteps of you and poor Dad, and I only wish it was the Germans who had killed Dad instead of the Spaniards so I could avenge his death or at least try to.

Well, Grandfather, thanks again for the check, and I know how you hate to write, so I won’t expect an answer to this letter, but we will let you know the news as soon as there is any.

Your affectionate grandson,
Evan.

P.S. I looked up in the back of the dictionary one time to see what my name meant, and it means “young warrior!” So, altogether it seems “up to me” to do something, don’t you think so, Grandfather?

E.

Weedsburg, May 30.

Dear Grandfather:

Just a line, Grandfather, to tell you the news. Mother received a letter yesterday from Congressman Shultz saying that I was to come to Washington at once, as he thought he could arrange for me to get a commission. He did not say what brand of the service it was in, but he did say I would be located in Washington and not sent to France, so I suppose it has something to do with the secret service or something.

Mother is almost heartbroken over the thought of losing me, but I tell her everybody must be brave in times like this and smile, no matter what happens. Besides, as soon as she can find trustworthy people to whom to rent the house, she is going to follow me to Washington and keep house for me.

I know you will be pleased to hear that I am about to enter the service, and that no one can say the grandson of a Civil War veteran and the son of a Spanish War hero failed to do his bit when his country needed him.

Mother and I were at the cemetery today and I thought of you when we saw the G.A.R. graves being decorated.

There is no time to write more now, as I must do a lot of packing, but Mother has made me promise I will write you once a week after I get there, though I would have made it a point to do so without her asking me, knowing as I do that you must be deeply interested in everything that is going on.

Your affectionate grandson,
Evan.

Washington, DC, June 2.

Dear Grandfather:

Well, Grandfather, here I am in the Capital, and it seems like a different world. Washington is not at all like it was when Mother and I were here in 1915. Then it was just a beautiful, staid old city, but now everything is bustle and hurry, and it gives me a thrill to think that soon I will be bustling and hurrying with the rest of them and doing my share, for everyone must do it here, as there is no room for a slacker.

I arrived this afternoon and am at the Shoreham, where I shall probably stay until Mother comes and finds a house or an apartment. I called on Congressman Shultz as soon I arrived, but he was busy and said I was to come again tomorrow morning.

The trip was hot and dusty, but I made up my mind I would not complain because a man must get used to things and take them as they come, and I would feel pretty mean if I “kicked” at discomforts.

For some reason our sleeper was taken off at noon and we had to complete the journey in another Pullman that was already pretty well filled, but I found a seat in the smoking-compartment, though I did not have it to myself, but shared it with an elderly man about thirty-six or thirty-seven. He smoked continually and nearly choked me to death, but I was so excited about getting here and “in it” that I hardly noticed his “poison gas.” I made some remark about the train being late, and I am glad I started a conversation with him, as it turned out to be rather amusing. One of the first things he said was:

“As a rule, when traveling, I shun intercourse with strangers. But how can a man be reserved when even the seats find it impossible?”

Then he asked me if I had ever been in Washington before, and I said yes, in 1915. Then he said:

“Well, young man, if you haven’t been there for three years, you will find some changes. I suppose the male population then was about two hundred thousand. Now there are two hundred thousand men and three hundred thousand officers.”

Of course I knew he was trying to jolly me, but I didn’t mind, so I asked him what kind of officers, and he said N.C.O.’s. So I pretended I believed him and said:

“You don’t mean to tell me there are actually three hundred thousand corporals and sergeants in Washington.”

“No,” he said. “But I do mean to tell you there are about three hundred thousand N.C.O.’s, and by that I mean noncombatant officers. I don’t know whether my figure is accurate or not, but I’ll make you a little bet there are more officers than men, and I’ll leave it to any bellhop you care to name.”

Well, I laughed and said I didn’t know any “bellhops” by name, so I was afraid his offer would have to go unchallenged. Then he asked me what I was going to do, and I told him I expected a commission, but I didn’t know just yet in what branch of the service it would be. He seemed very much interested in me and asked me all sorts of questions, so finally I thought it was time to return the compliment, and I began cross-examining him. He didn’t seem to mind at all and told me his name was Tracy and that he was a newspaper correspondent from Cincinnati, and he said he would like to call and see me after I had got my commission and have an interview with me for his paper. Well, I told him he might, for I suppose a man in the service must receive reporters and all kinds of people. Besides, as I said, he is rather amusing. So he asked me where I expected to stop, and I said at the Shoreham, and he said I would be right at home, because that was where most of the young N.C.O.’s were garrisoned.

“Of course,” he said, “you must expect a great many inconveniences. They have no rattraps in the rooms, and they don’t dress or undress you. But you’ll have to overlook those things, for you’re in the army now.”

I can’t remember all we said, and anyway I’m afraid I have bored you with this long letter, but I thought you might be amused with his chatter. These newspaper men do get around and see life, I suppose, and their conversation is so breezy one can’t help enjoying them for a while, though I suppose too much of it would prove tedious.

Well, Grandfather, goodbye for this time, and I hope the warm weather agrees with you. Mother would send love if she were here.

Your affectionate grandson,
Evan.

Washington, DC, June 2.

Dear Grandfather:

Well, Grandfather, salute your grandson, Captain Barnes. For that is what I am, Grandfather, and have been since this morning. Congressman Shultz made good his promise, and early this week got me placed in the Sleuth Department with the title of captain. It’s a pretty ticklish assignment, for I have to do all sorts of detective work, such as shadowing, eavesdropping, etc., and report to headquarters anything I learn which might lead to the apprehension of German propagandists and spies. But the more danger there is, why, the more excitement, and the better I will like it. Moreover a man must expect to put himself in constant peril at a time like this, and if I can discover one plot in time to frustrate it, I will not care what is done to me in the way of vengeance. I will feel that my life has not been wasted in that case.

My one regret is that Father could not have lived to see me “make good.”

But just think, Grandfather, here I am, only twenty-one and a captain, while you were only a sergeant at the end of the Civil War after being in it almost from the time it began. Of course I don’t mean that seriously, and I wouldn’t say anything to hurt you for the world, and I realize that conditions were different then. I also realize that you did not have the same advantage of an education which I have had, which is a big advantage after all. But doesn’t it seem queer when you think of it?

Mother wired that she was glad I had made good, but warned me not to take any foolish risks. Isn’t that just like a woman, to imagine a man would stop to consider risks if there was important work at hand, no matter how ticklish it might be?

My duties, of course, will keep me fairly busy, but at that my time will be practically my own. I am to report at headquarters every morning at ten, and if there is any particular assignment for the day, they will give it to me. If not, I am just to drop in at the cafés and pick up, without seeming to, any information that I think valuable. I go to work tomorrow and will soon let you know how I am getting along.

Well, Grandfather, I won’t ask you to congratulate me in writing or by telegraph, for I know how you dislike to bother with things like that. But I know you are proud of me and I will try to make you even prouder by doing “something big” and perhaps rising to a higher rank.

Your affectionate grandson,
Capt. Evan Barnes.

Washington, DC, June 11.

Dear Grandfather:

Well, Grandfather, I have been in the service nearly a week now and have not turned up anything big yet, though I have enjoyed a few thrills, and I think the Department is working on a couple of the tips I turned in.

Well, then, Sunday night I was at dinner in the Willard and at the next table I noticed two men who looked very German. They had blond mustaches and everything. To throw them off the track, I pretended I was reading a newspaper, but you can bet I was listening to every word they had to say. Well, pretty soon I heard one of them make the remark that General Foch certainly had a job on his hands, and it wouldn’t have sounded so bad if he had not pronounced the name with the guttural German “ch,” but that was a giveaway. I couldn’t catch just what the other replied, and I was afraid to take any chances of their getting through and leaving before I knew who they were; so I got up and went to the head waiter and asked him quietly if he knew them. He said he didn’t; and while I was talking to him, one of them looked up and saw me staring at him, and he turned away as if he were afraid of being recognized. So I saw there was nothing more to do about it that night, and I merely wrote out a careful description of both men and put down what I had heard.

The other wasn’t quite as positive or exciting. It happened yesterday forenoon. I was walking past the White House grounds on the State Department side, and two strangers were walking ahead of me, and of course their backs were turned and I couldn’t see what they looked like, so I hurried up to get ahead of them so I could turn around and look at their faces. Well, just as I was passing them, one of them said: “Well, I suppose that’s a swell place to live, but I wouldn’t trade jobs with old W. W. for all the White Houses in the world.”

He couldn’t have meant anyone else but Woodrow Wilson when he said “W. W.” under those circumstances, and especially when he mentioned the White House in the same breath; so I went on and then turned around and took a long look at both of them so I could describe them at the Department. Of course the remark might have been innocent, and he might have meant the President’s job was so hard he would not want it. But anyway it was my duty to report it, and I don’t know whether the Department will take it up or not.

Anyway, Grandfather, you see they are keeping me busy, and I like the risk and excitement of it immensely, and I will never be satisfied till I turn up something big, and after that I suppose I will want to turn up something bigger and so on. That’s the way it usually goes.

Well, in my spare moments I have met a lot of nice people including a few girls⁠—the nicest of whom unfortunately is engaged. But it always does happen that way, eh, Grandfather? The one we want is the one we can’t get. Was it that way with you, or wasn’t it? Most of my acquaintances, of course, are fellow-officers of my own age or a few years older, the majority of them captains in various departments, but I guess there aren’t many I would trade with, for it’s the constant excitement of my job that I like. Anyway, we have gay old times together in the hotel and at parties outside, and if it weren’t the military discipline, reporting every morning at ten o’clock, etc., I wouldn’t ever want to return to civil life.

Mother expects to be here in a few days.

Your affectionate grandson,
Capt. Evan Barnes.

Washington, DC, June 17.

Dear Grandfather:

Mother came yesterday, and after we had spent nearly an hour looking for a house or an apartment that was fit to live in, we gave it up and decided to stop at the Shoreham indefinitely. I think it is much better so, for here we are right in the midst of things. All the best of the young officers are here or come here, and that means it’s the social center of the town.

Last night I went to a very pretty ball and would have enjoyed it very much if I could have become interested in any of the “freelance” girls. Unfortunately the only girl who interests me that I have met here so far, is engaged to a fellow in France. He enlisted in the infantry right after we declared war and went over a year ago in July, but he is only corporal now. Her name is Kathryn Stark, and she is “some peach.” But I don’t suppose you are interested in such things anymore, so I will talk about something else.

I believe I told you about my meeting a man named Tracy on the train coming here. He is correspondent for one of the Cincinnati papers. Well, when I left him after our first meeting, he asked permission to call on me and obtain an interview as soon as I had been given my commission. But he didn’t call, and I was glad of it till I got to thinking that perhaps he would be hurt if I didn’t, and I don’t want to seem snobbish or anything⁠—so yesterday I called him up and had him lunch with me.

He was as breezy as usual; in fact, he did most of the talking, and I was glad to have it that way, for reporters usually make you feel uncomfortable with their impertinent questions. He merely asked what branch of the service I had been commissioned in, and how I liked it, and whether I had run across anything interesting. I told him of course I could not discuss matters like that. So he gave up and entertained me with some of his nonsense.

He asked me what officers I had met, and I gave him the names of a few.

“Haven’t you met Major G. Willis Faulkner yet?” he inquired. “That’s probably because he’s a casualty. But you know who he is, of course.”

Well, I had heard the name, and I told him so. Faulkner is a young millionaire from down South somewhere, about two years older than I and one of the youngest majors in the service.

“Major Faulkner was on the casualty list about ten days ago,” Tracy went on. “He is a major in the Cushion Corps. His job was to go out to the ballpark every afternoon and keep track of the number of balls lost or injured. Of course it would have been a cinch if the home team here had been the only team playing, because they could use one ball a whole season and then sell it for new. But some of the visiting teams sometimes fouled balls off into the stand or over it, or roughened them up with their bats; so the Major was kept pretty busy. But he was making good when a careless vendor hit him in the head with a sack of peanuts, and he got shell shock.”

Well, of course, he was just talking, but it was such nonsense that I had to smile.

“And right over at that third table,” he went on, “sits Capt. F. Conklin Stone of the Monument Department. He tried to enlist in the regulars but he failed on the physical test on account of his long eyelashes. So he’s a captain, and he has to go over to the Monument three times a week and look up and see if the top is still on it. It’s bound to give him stiff neck in time, but you’d think to look at him he didn’t have a worry in the world.

“And the captain at the table near the window,” Tracy continued, “is Captain Jarvis Bellows of the Toy Balloons. He would have tried for the Marines, but he had a hangnail. So now he has to buy a couple of uninflated balloons every day from a street-hawker, and bring them here to give to some of the guests’ kids. And of course he has to blow them up first. And believe me, if one of them ever busted in his face it would be good night! Besides that, he’s got his own Rolls-Royce, and some day it’s going to get away from him and bang into the Treasury Building, and if his head is thrown hard enough against the side of the building, he’ll be laid up a week. So you see you aren’t the only man in the army who is taking chances.”

Well, Grandfather, he talked on that way all through the meal until I was nearly worn out with it, and I suppose I have worn you out too, but I haven’t told you half. However, I have written a long letter and Mother will be wondering why I don’t take her to dinner.

Your affectionate grandson,
Capt. Evan Barnes.

Washington, DC, June 24.

Dear Grandfather:

Well, Grandfather, I thought I was going to turn up something big yesterday, but it was a false scent; at least, so I was told this morning at the Department. However, I am grateful to Tracy, my newspaper acquaintance, for giving me the tip, and it’s a good thing to stand well with a man like him because he gets around and sees everybody and everything and may some day give me a clue that will amount to something.

He called me up yesterday forenoon just after I had reported at the Department and had returned to the hotel to take Mother for a drive. He said if I would meet him at a certain place on the Avenue, he thought he could put me on the trail of a big conspiracy. So I asked him if it had to be right away, as I had promised to take Mother driving, and he said he thought it would be very dangerous to delay even for two or three hours. So I apologized to Mother and went down to meet him.

When I met him, he said we mustn’t be seen talking together in such a prominent place because no one knew who was watching us; so we went into a drugstore where there was only one customer, a girl, and the clerk, and he told me he had just heard that on Florida Avenue, at a certain address, there was a shoe-shining parlor of which the proprietor was a German, whereas almost all the other bootblacks in town were either black or tan, and that was suspicious in itself; but furthermore several young men who had patronized him had been afflicted almost immediately afterwards with falling arches, and it was believed he was using polish of such chemical composition that it would penetrate the leather and cause this condition of the feet, the object of course being to decrease the man power eligible for the draft by rendering them physically deficient.

He gave me the address, and I returned to the hotel and got Mother, for I thought she might as well go along in the taxi for the drive, and of course I would leave her and the machine far enough from the shine-stand to be perfectly safe in case of an outbreak of any kind. But the neighborhood to which we had to go looked so disreputable that I was afraid to leave her⁠—so I told the driver to take her back to the hotel and I would return on the streetcar when my work was done.

Well, there was no shine-parlor at the address Tracy had given me⁠—nothing, in fact, but a vacant lot. So I returned to the hotel and called up Tracy, who said he must have had the wrong address, but anyway he was sure the tip was good and if he were I, he would look around town a little and try to find the shine-stand that was not conducted by negroes. But I had an engagement in the afternoon, and of course it was folly to try to do anything about it last night, and there was a dance to which I had accepted an invitation. So I merely wrote down the data I had and gave it to one of the men at the Department this morning.

I heard a bit of rather sad news at the dance. Miss Stark, the girl of whom I believe I once wrote you, was not there, and it seems that her fiancé, who had been in France a year, was so badly wounded last week that he has been honorably discharged as unfit for further service and will be sent back here as soon as he is able to make the trip. It is tough on a young fellow to get it like that, and of course she felt so bad over the news that she would not come to the dance, and as a result I had a rather tedious evening of it. However, I called her up this forenoon and did what I could to cheer her, and tomorrow I am to take her for a drive unless there is some special assignment for me at headquarters.

Your affectionate grandson,
Capt. Evan Barnes.

Washington, DC, July 1.

Dear Grandfather:

Well, Grandfather, I just had the pleasure of meeting Gen. Rowan, one of the biggest men in the country today, but of course there is no need of my telling you who he is. Capt. Bellows introduced me to him, and he asked us both to sit down at his table and visit a moment. He inquired what branch I was in, and I told him, and he seemed very much interested in me and asked whether I was all right physically. I told him I certainly was, though sometimes I felt awfully tired and nervous in the morning. Then he said to Bellows:

“Why is it some of you boys don’t try to get to France?”

Bellows said he supposed it was because most of us had been there with our parents several years ago, so it would be no novelty, and others of us preferred waiting until long enough after the war so that the country would be rebuilt to look something like its old self. Then the General asked us if we would please get up and leave him, as he felt rather nauseated and wanted to be alone; so of course we got up and left. Poor old General, I suppose he is in a decline and won’t be of service much longer, but everyone seems to think highly of him now, and I guess the country would be better off if there were more like him, only younger, of course.

Between you and me, Grandfather, I am not very well satisfied with the way things are being run here. There appears to be a lack of seriousness, particularly in my branch of the service. For instance, I have turned in four or five clues for the Department to work on, and so far as I can make out, nothing has been done with any of them. I cannot get a satisfactory answer when I complain, and altogether it is discouraging to work under such conditions. Sometimes I feel like chucking the whole thing up and taking Mother back home. But of course that is just a temporary spell, you might call it, for nothing could drive me from my duty at a time like this.

Miss Stark, the girl I have written you about, received word from France yesterday that her fiancé would not be able to leave the hospital and start back for two months or more, and of course she feels pretty blue over it. Well, it’s all in the game, grandfather.

Your affectionate grandson,
Capt. Evan Barnes.

Washington, DC, July 8.

Dear Grandfather:

Congratulate me, Grandfather! I am engaged to the dearest girl that ever lived or ever could live. You would be crazy about her if you could see her, which I trust will be in the near future, for she has relatives in Sandusky, the J. F. Hammonds, whom perhaps you know, though they are new people there and I know you don’t get around much anymore. But anyway, if I can get leave of absence, I will come to Sandusky and she will arrange to be there at the same time, and I can bring her to see you, for I know you will be crazy about her.

We are planning to be married in the fall, for neither of us wants to wait long, and I am confident we can get along on my salary.

I am too happy to write much, but I wanted you to be among the first to know. Of course it is unnecessary to tell you her name, as I know I have written about her till you must be sick of my maudlin ravings. But anyway I will tell you: it’s Kathryn Stark, the girl who I once told you was “some peach.” Well, she is, Grandfather, if you will pardon the slang.

Mother is almost as wild about her as I am, and when you have met her and given us your blessing, everything will be perfect.

We think we will have a rather quiet wedding, as Kathryn was engaged to marry a poor sucker who went to France and was so badly wounded that he is through as a soldier, and will be sent home as soon as he can travel. So of course we don’t want any big splurge.

Well, Grandfather, goodbye for this time and I wish it weren’t so much trouble for you to write so you could congratulate me. But never mind; it will be time enough when I see you.

Your affectionate grandson,
Capt. Evan Barnes.

Sandusky, O., July 11.

Capt. Evan Barnes,
Sleuth Department, Washington, DC

Dear Sir:

As you say, it is a great deal of trouble for me to write. Yet I am going to take that trouble once or twice more before my pen and I are too hopelessly rusted.

Your confidence that you will be able to live on your salary pleases me beyond measure and leaves me free to dispose of my modest means as I see fit. I presume that should you, in some daredevil undertaking in behalf of your government, lose sight of discretion in patriotism and perish of, say, poisoned shoe-blacking, your widow would always be well provided for by said government. Nevertheless I beg you to take no needles risk; for the Government, under stress of other weighty matters, might forget.

In view of our relationship and former acquaintance, may I make three requests?

First, that neither you nor your lady nor both of you attempt to visit me here. My physician advises me that any excitement would probably be my death-warrant.

Second, that you forward me the name and address of the poor sucker who enlisted in the infantry right after we declared war, won only a corporal’s stripes though he fought in France a year and is now lying in a French hospital, through as a soldier.

Third, that the letter providing me with the information regarding him be the last you write me, for though it is a great deal of trouble for me to write, it is even more to read.

Your grandfather (God help him),
Henry R. Barnes.

The Young Immigrunts

By Ring W. Lardner, Jr.1

Preface

The person whose name is signed to this novel was born on the nineteenth day of August, 1915, and was therefore four years and three months old when the manuscript was found, late in November, 1919. The narrative is substantially true, with the following exceptions:

“My Father,” the leading character in the work, is depicted as a man of short temper, whereas the person from whom the character was drawn is in reality as pleasant a fellow as one would care to meet and seldom has a cross word for anyone, let alone women and children.

The witty speeches accredited to “My Father” have, possibly owing to the limitations of a child’s memory, been so garbled and twisted that they do not look half so good in print as they sounded in the open air.

More stops for gas were made than are mentioned in the story.

As the original manuscript was written on a typewriter with a rather frayed ribbon, and as certain words were marked out and others handwritten in, I have taken the liberty of copying the entire work with a fresh ribbon and the inclusion of the changes which the author indicated in pencil in the first draft. Otherwise the story is presented to the reader exactly as it was first set down.

The Father.

I

My Parents

My parents are both married and ½ of them are very good looking. The balance is tall and skiny and has a swarty complexion with moles but you hardily ever notice them on account of your gaze being rapped up in his feet which would be funny if brevvity wasnt the soul of wit. Everybody says I have his eyes and I am glad it didnt half to be something else tho Rollie Zeider the ball player calls him owl eyes for a nick name but if I was Rollie Zeider and his nose I wouldnt pick on somebodys else features.

He wears pretty shirts which he bought off of another old ball player Artie Hofman to attrack tension off of his feet and must of payed a big price for them I heard my ant tell my uncle when they thorght I was a sleep down to the lake tho I guess he pays even more for his shoes if they sell them by the frunt foot.

I was born in a hospittle in Chicago 4 years ago and liked it very much and had no idear we were going to move till 1 day last summer I heard my mother arsk our nurse did she think she could get along OK with myself and 3 brothers John Jimmie and David for 10 days wilst she and my old man went east to look for a costly home.

Well yes said our nurse barshfully.

I may as well exclaim to the reader that John is 7 and Jimmie is 5 and I am 4 and David is almost nothing as yet you might say and tho I was named for my father they call me Bill thank God.

The conversation amungst my mother and our nurse took place right after my father came back from Toledo where Jack Dempsey knocked Jessie Willard for a gool tho my father liked the big fellow and bet on him.

David was in his bath at the time and my mother and our nurse and myself and 2 elder brothers was standing around admireing him tho I notice that when the rest of the family takes their bath they dont make open house of the occassion.

Well my parents went east and dureing their absents myself and brothers razed hell with David on the night shift but when they come back my mother said to the nurse were they good boys.

Fine replid our nurse lamely and where are you going to live.

Connecticut said my mother.

Our nurse forced a tired smile.

Here we will leave my parents to unpack and end this chapter.

II

Starting Gaily

We spent the rest of the summer on my granmother in Indiana and my father finley went to the worst series to write it up as he has followed sports of all sorts for years and is a expert so he bet on the wite sox and when he come home he acted rarther cross.

Well said my mother simperingly I suppose we can start east now.

We will start east when we get good and ready said my father with a lordly sneeze.

The next thing was how was we going to make the trip as my father had boughten a new car that the cheepest way to get it there was drive it besides carrying a grate deal of our costly bagage but if all of us went in it they would be no room left for our costly bagage and besides 2 of my brothers always acts like devils incarnite when they get in a car so my mother said to our nurse.

If you think you can manage the 2 older boys and David on the train myself and husband will take Bill in the car said my mother to our nurse.

Fine replid our nurse with a gastly look witch my mother did not see.

Myself and parents left Goshen Indiana on a fine Monday morning leaveing our nurse and brothers to come latter in the weak on the railway. Our plans was to reach Detroit that night and stop with my uncle and ant and the next evening take the boat to Buffalo and thence to Connecticut by motor so the first town we past through was Middlebury.

Elmer Flick the old ball player use to live here said my father modestly.

My mother forced a smile and soon we were acrost the Michigan line and my mother made the remark that she was thirsty.

We will stop at Coldwater for lunch said my father with a strate face as he pulls most of his lines without changeing expressions.

Sure enough we puled up to 1 side of the road just after leaveing Coldwater and had our costly viands of frid chicken and doughnuts and milk fernished by my grate ant and of witch I partook freely.

We will stop at Ypsilanti for supper said my father in calm tones that is where they have the state normal school.

I was glad to hear this and hoped we would get there before dark as I had always wanted to come in contack with normal peaple and see what they are like and just at dusk we entered a large size town and drove past a large size football field.

Heavens said my mother this must be a abnormal school to have such a large football field.

My father wore a qeer look.

This is not Ypsilanti this is Ann Arbor he crid.

But I thorght you said we would go south of Ann Arbor and direct to Ypsilanti said my mother with a smirk.

I did say that but I thorght I would surprise you by comeing into Ann Arbor replid my father with a corse jesture.

Personly I think the suprise was unanimous.

Well now we are here said my mother we might as well look up Bill.

Bill is my uncle Bill so we stoped at the Alfa Delt house and got him and took him down to the hotel for supper and my old man called up Mr. Yost the football coach of the Michigan football team and he come down and visited with us.

What kind of a team have you got coach said my father lamely.

I have got a determined team replid Mr. Yost they are determined to not play football.

At this junction my unlucky mother changed the subjeck to the league of nations and it was 10 o’clock before Mr. Yost come to a semi colon so we could resume our jurney and by the time we past through Ypsilanti the peaple was not only subnormal but unconsius. It was nerly midnight when we puled up in frunt of my ants and uncles house in Detroit that had been seting up since 7 expecting us.

Were sorry to be so late said my mother bruskly.

Were awfully glad you could come at all replid my ant with a ill consealed yawn.

We will now leave my relitives to get some sleep and end this chapter.

III

Erie Lake

The boat leaves Detroit every afternoon at 5 oclock and reachs Buffalo the next morning at 9 tho I would better exclaim to my readers that when it is 9 oclock in Buffalo it is only 8 oclock in Goshen for instants as Buffalo peaple are qeer.

Well said my father the next morning at brekfus I wander what time we half to get the car on the board of the boat.

I will find out downtown and call up and let you know replid my uncle who is a engineer and digs soors or something.

Sure enough he called up dureing the fornoon and said the car must be on the board of the boat at 3 oclock so my father left the house at 2 oclock and drove down to the worf tho he had never drove a car in Detroit before but has nerves of steal. Latter my uncle come out to his home and took myself and mother and ant down to the worf where my old man was waiting for us haveing put the car on the board.

What have you been doing ever since 3 oclock arsked my mother as it was now nerly 5.

Haveing a high ball my father replid.

I thorght Detroit was dry said my mother shyly.

Did you said my father with a rye smile and as it was now nerly time for the boat to leave we said good by to my uncle and ant and went on the boat. A messenger took our costly bagage and put it away wilst myself and parents went out on the porch and set looking at the peaple on the worf. Suddenly they was a grate hub bub on the worf and a young man and lady started up the gangs plank wilst a big crowd throwed rice and old shoes at them and made a up roar.

Bride and glum going to Niagara Falls said my father who is well travelled and seams to know everything.

Instantly the boat give a blarst on the wistle and I started with suprise.

Did that scare you Bill said my father and seamed to enjoy it and I supose he would of laughed out right had I fell overboard and been drowned in the narsty river water.

Soon we were steeming up the river on the city of Detroit 3.

That is Canada over there is it not said my mother.

What did you think it was the Austrian Tyrol replid my father explodeing a cough. Dureing our progress up the river I noticed sevral funny things flotting in the water with lanterns hanging on them and was wandering what they could be when my mother said they seam to have plenty of boys.

They have got nothing on us replid my father quick as a flarsh.

A little latter who should come out on the porch and set themselfs ner us but the bride and glum.

Oh I said to myself I hope they will talk so as I can hear them as I have always wandered what newlyweds talk about on their way to Niagara Falls and soon my wishs was realized.

Some night said the young glum are you warm enough.

I am perfectly comfertible replid the fare bride tho her looks belid her words what time do we arive in Buffalo.

9 oclock said the lordly glum are you warm enough.

I am perfectly comfertible replid the fare bride what time do we arive in Buffalo.

9 oclock said the lordly glum I am afrade it is too cold for you out here.

Well maybe it is replid the fare bride and without farther adieu they went in the spacius parlers.

I wander will he be arsking her 8 years from now is she warm enough said my mother with a faint grimace.

The weather may change before then replid my father.

Are you warm enough said my father after a slite pause.

No was my mothers catchy reply.

Well said my father we arive in Buffalo at 9 oclock and with that we all went inside as it was now pitch dark and had our supper and retired and when we rose the next morning and drest and had brekfus we puled up to the worf in Buffalo and it was 9 oclock so I will leave the city of Detroit 3 tide to the worf and end this chapter.

IV

Buffalo to Rochester 76.4

As we was leaveing the boat who should I see right along side of us but the fare bride and the lordly glum.

We are right on the dot said the glum looking at his costly watch it is just 9 oclock and so they past out of my life.

We had to wait qite a wile wilst the old man dug up his bill of loading and got the costly moter.

We will half to get some gas he said I wonder where they is a garage.

No sooner had the words fell from his lips when a man with a flagrant Adams apple handed him a card with the name of a garage on it.

Go up Genesee st 5 blks and turn to the left or something said the man with the apple.

Soon we reached the garage and had the gas tank filled with gas it was 27 cents in Buffalo and soon we was on our way to Rochester. Well these are certainly grate roads said my father barshfully.

They have lots better roads in the east than out west replid my mother with a knowing wink.

The roads all through the east are better than out west remarked my father at lenth.

These are wonderfull replid my mother smuggleing me vs her arm.

The time past quickly with my parents in so jocular a mood and all most before I knew it we was on the outer skirts of Batavia.

What town is this quired my mother in a tolerant voice.

Batavia husked my father sloughing down to 15 miles per hour.

Well maybe we would better stop and have lunch here said my mother coyly.

We will have lunch in Rochester replid my father with a loud cough.

My mother forced a smile and it was about ½ past 12 when we arived in Rochester and soon we was on Genesee st and finley stoped in front of a elegant hotel and shared a costly lunch.

V

My Father’s Idear

Wilst participateing in the lordly viands my father halled out his map and give it the up and down.

Look at here he said at lenth they seams to be a choice of 2 main roads between here and Syracuse but 1 of them gos way up north to Oswego wilst the other gos way south to Geneva where as Syracuse is strate east from here you might say so it looks to me like we would save both millage and time if we was to drive strate east through Lyons the way the railway gos.

Well I dont want to ride on the ties said my mother with a loud cough.

Well you dont half to because they seams to be a little road that gos strate through replid my father removeing a flys cadaver from the costly farina.

Well you would better stick to the main roads said my mother tacklessly.

Well you would better stick to your own business replid my father with a pungent glance.

Soon my father had payed the check and gave the waiter a lordly bribe and once more we sprang into the machine and was on our way. The lease said about the results of my fathers grate idear the soonest mended in a word it turned out to be a holycost of the first water as after we had covered miles and miles of ribald roads we suddenly come to a abrupt conclusion vs the side of a stagnant freight train that was stone deef to honks. My father set there for nerly ½ a hour reciteing the 4 Horses of the Apoplex in a under tone but finley my mother mustard up her curage and said affectedly why dont we turn around and go back somewheres. I cant spell what my father replid.

At lenth my old man decided that Lyons wouldnt never come to Mahomet if we set it out on the same lines all winter so we backed up and turned around and retraced 4 miles of shell holes and finley reached our objective by way of Detour.

Puling up in front of a garage my father beckoned to a dirty mechanic.

How do we get to Syracuse from here arsked my father blushing furiously.

Go strate south to Geneva and then east to Syracuse replid the dirty mechanic with a loud cough.

Isnt there no short cut arsked my father.

Go strate south to Geneva and then east to Syracuse replid the dirty mechanic.

You see daddy we go to Geneva after all I said brokenly but luckly for my piece of mind my father dont beleive in corporeal punishment a specially in front of Lyons peaple.

Soon we was on a fine road and nothing more hapened till we puled into Syracuse at 7 that evening and as for the conversation that changed hands in the car between Lyons and Syracuse you could stick it in a day message and send it for 30 cents.

VI

Syracuse to Hudson 183.2

Soon we was on Genesee st in Syracuse but soon turned off a blk or 2 and puled up in front of a hotel that I cant ether spell or pronounce besides witch they must of been a convention of cheese sculpters or something stoping there and any way it took the old man a hour to weedle a parler bed room and bath out of the clerk and put up a cot for me.

Wilst we was enjoying a late and futile supper in the hotel dinning room a man named Duffy reckonized my father and came to our table and arsked him to go to some boxing matchs in Syracuse that night.

Thanks very much said my father with a slite sneeze but you see what I have got on my hands besides witch I have been driveing all day and half to start out again erly in the morning so I guess not.

Between you and I dear reader my old man has been oposed to pugilisms since the 4 of July holycost.

Who is that man arsked my mother when that man had gone away.

Mr. Duffy replid my father shove the ketchup over this way.

Yes I know he is Mr. Duffy but where did you meet him insisted my mother quaintly.

In Boston my father replid where would a person meet a man named Duffy.

When we got up the next morning it was 6 o’clock and purring rain but we eat a costly brekfus and my father said we would save time if we would all walk down to the garage where he had horded the car witch he stated was only 2 short blks away from the hotel. Well if it was only 2 short blks why peaple that lives next door to each other in Syracuse are by no means neighbors and when we got there the entire party was soping wet and rarther rabid.

We will all catch our death of cold chuckled my mother.

What of it explained my old man with a dirty look at the sky.

Maybe we would better put up the curtains sugested my mother smirking.

Maybe we wouldnt too said my father cordialy.

Well maybe it will clear up said my mother convulsively.

Maybe it wont too replid my father as he capered into the drivers seat.

My father is charming company wilst driveing on strange roads through a purring rain and even when we past through Oneida and he pronounced it like it was a biscuit neither myself or my mother ventured to correct him but finley we reached Utica when we got to witch we puled up along side the kerb and got out and rang ourselfs out to a small extent when suddenly a closed car sored past us on the left.

Why that was Mrs. Heywood in that car explained my mother with a fierce jesture. By this time it was not raining and we got back into the car and presently over took the closed car witch stoped when they reckonized us.

And witch boy is this quired Mrs. Heywood when the usual compliments had been changed.

This is the third he is named for his father replid my mother forceing a smile.

He has his eyes was the comment.

Bill dont you remember Mrs. Heywood said my mother turning on me she use to live in Riverside and Dr. Heywood tended to you that time you had that slite atack of obesity.

Well yes I replid with a slite accent but did not add how rotten the medicine tasted that time and soon we was on Genesee st on our way out of Utica.

I wander why they dont name some of their sts Genesee in these eastren towns said my father for the sun was now shining but no sooner had we reached Herkimer when the clouds bersed with renude vigger and I think my old man was about to say we will stop here and have lunch when my mother sugested it herself.

No replid my father with a corse jesture we will go on to Little Falls.

It was raining cats and dogs when we arived at Little Falls and my father droped a quaint remark.

If Falls is a verb he said the man that baptized this town was a practicle joker.

We will half to change our close replid my mother steping into a mud peddle in front of the hotel with a informal look.

When we had done so we partook of a meger lunch and as it was now only drooling resumed our jurney.

They soked me 5 for that room said my father but what is a extra sokeing or 2 on a day like this.

I didnt mean for you to get a room said my mother violently.

Where did you want us to change our close on the register said my old man turning pail.

Wasnt it funny that we should happen to see Mrs. Heywood in Utica said my mother at lenth.

They live there dont they my father replid.

Why yes my mother replid.

Well then my father replid the real joke would of been if we had of happened to see her in Auburn.

A little wile latter we past a grate many signs reading dine at the Big Nose Mountain Inn.

Rollie Zeider never told me they had named a mountain after him crid my father and soon we past through Fonda.

Soon we past through Amsterdam and I guess I must of dosed off at lease I cant remember anything between there and Schenectady and I must apologize to my readers for my laps as I am unable to ether describe the scenery or report anything that may of been said between these 2 points but I recall that as we entered Albany a remark was adrest to me for the first time since lunch.

Bill said my mother with a ½ smirk this is Albany the capital of New York state.

So this is Albany I thorght to myself.

Who is governor of New York now arsked my mother to my father.

Smith replid my father who seams to know everything.

Queer name said my mother sulkily.

Soon we puled up along side a policeman who my father arsked how do we get acrost the river to the New York road and if Albany pays their policemans by the word Ill say we were in the presents of a rich man and by the time he got through it was dark and still drooling and my old man didnt know the road and under those conditions I will not repete the conversation that transpired between Albany and Hudson but will end my chapter at the city limits of the last named settlemunt.

VII

Hudson

We were turing gaily down the main st of Hudson when a man of 12 years capered out from the side walk and hoped on the runing board.

Do you want a good garage he arsked with a dirty look.

Why yes my good man replid my father tenderly but first where is the best hotel.

I will take you there said the man.

I must be a grate favorite in Hudson my father wispered at my mother.

Soon folling the mans directions we puled up in front of a hotel but when my father went at the register the clerk said I am full tonight.

Where do you get it around here arsked my father tenderly.

We have no rooms replid the senile clerk paying no tension to my old mans remark but there is a woman acrost the st that takes loggers.

Not to excess I hope replid my father but soon we went acrost the st and the woman agrede to hord us for the night so myself and mother went to our apartmunts wilst my father and the 12 year old besought the garage. When we finley got reunited and went back to the hotel for supper it was past 8 oclock as a person could of told from the viands. Latter in front of our loggings we again met the young man who had welcomed us to Hudson and called my father to 1 side.

There is a sailer going to spend the night here he said in a horse wisper witch has walked all the way from his home Schenectady and he has got to report on his ship in New York tomorrow afternoon and has got no money so if he dont get a free ride he will be up vs it.

He can ride with us replid my father with a hiccup if tomorrow is anything like today a sailer will not feel out of place in my costly moter.

I will tell him replid the man with a corse jesture.

Will you call us at ½ past 5 my mother reqested to our lanlady as we entered our Hudson barracks.

I will if I am awake she replid useing her handkerchief to some extent.

Latter we wandered how anybody could help from being awake in that hot bed of mones and grones and cat calls and caterwauls and gulish screaks of all kinds and tho we had rose erly at Syracuse and had a day of retchedness we was all more than ready to get up when she wraped on our door long ere day brake.

Where is that sailer that stoped here last night quired my father as we was about to make a lordly outburst.

He wouldnt pay his bill and razed hell so I kicked him out replid the lanlady in her bear feet.

Without farther adieu my father payed his bill and we walked into the dismul st so I will end this chapter by leaveing the fare lanlady flaping in the door way in her sredded night gown.

VIII

Hudson to Yonkers 106.5

It was raining a little so my father had my mother and I stand in the st wilst he went to the garage and retained the costly moter. He returned ½ a hour latter with the story that the garage had been locked and he had to go to the props house and roust him out.

How did you know where he lived quired my mother barshfully.

I used the brains god gave me was my fathers posthumous reply.

Soon we rumpled into Rhinebeck and as it was now day light and the rain had siezed we puled up in front of the Beekman arms for brekfus.

It says this is the oldest hotel in America said my mother reading the programme.

The eggs tastes all right replid my father with a corse jesture.

What is the next town quired my mother when we again set sale.

Pokippsie was my fathers reply.

Thats where Vassar is said my mother as my old man stiffled a yawn I wonder if there is a store there that would have a koop for David.

I doubt it they ever heard of him said my father dryly how much do they cost.

Well I dont know.

We entered Pokippsie at lenth and turned to the left up the main st and puled up in front of a big store where myself and mother went in and purchased a koop for my little brother and a kap for me witch only took a ½ hour dureing witch my father lost his temper and when we finley immerged he was barking like a dog and giveing the Vassar yell. 2 men come out of the store with us and tost the koop with the rest of the junk in the back seat and away we went.

Doesnt this look cute on him said my mother in regards to my new kap.

What of it replid my father with a grimace and with that we puled into Garrison.

Isnt this right acrost the river from West Point said my mother with a gastly look.

What of it replid my father tenderly and soon we found ourselfs in Peekskill.

This is where that young girl cousin of mine gos to school said my father from Philadelphia.

What of it said my mother with a loud cough and presently we stoped and bought 15 gals of gas.

I have got a fund of usefull information about every town we come to said my father admireingly for instants this is Harmon where they take off the steem engines and put on the electric bullgines.

My mother looked at him with ill consealed admiration.

And what do you know about this town she arsked as we frisked into Ossining.

Why this is Ossining where they take off the hair and put on the stripes replid my father qick as a Harsh and the next place is Tarrytown where John D. Rockefeller has a estate.

What is the name of the estate quired my mother breathlessly.

Socony I supose was the sires reply.

With that we honked into Yonkers and up the funny looking main st.

What a funny looking st said my mother and I always thorght it was the home of well to do peaple.

Well yes replid my father it is the home of the ruling class at lease Bill Klem the umpire and Bill Langford the referee lives here.

I will end my chapter on that one.

IX

The Bureau of Manhattan

Isn’t it about time said my mother as we past Spuyten Duyvil and entered the Bureau of Manhattan that we made our plans.

What plans said my father all my plans is all ready made.

Well then you might make me your confident sugested my mother with a quaint smirk.

Well then heres the dope uttered my father in a vage tone I am going to drop you at the 125 st station where you will only half to wait 2 hours and a ½ for the rest of the family as the train from the west is do at 350 at 125 st in the meen wile I will drive out to Grenitch with Bill and see if the house is ready and etc and if the other peaples train is on time you can catch the 4 4 and I an Bill will meet you at the Grenitch station.

If you have time get a qt of milk for David said my mother with a pail look.

What kind of milk arsked my dad.

Oh sour milk my mother screened.

As she was now in a pretty bad temper we will leave her to cool off for 2 hours and a ½ in the 125 st station and end this chapter.

X

N.Y. To Grenitch 500.0

The lease said about my and my fathers trip from the Bureau of Manhattan to our new home the soonest mended. In some way ether I or he got balled up on the grand concorpse and next thing you know we was thretning to swoop down on Pittsfield.

Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.

Shut up he explained.

At lenth we doubled on our tracks and done much better as we finley hit New Rochelle and puled up along side a policeman with falling archs.

What road do I take for Grenitch Conn quired my father with poping eyes.

Take the Boston post replid the policeman.

I have all ready subscribed to one out of town paper said my father and steped on the gas so we will leave the flat foot gaping after us like a prune fed calf and end this chapter.

XI

How It Ended

True to our promise we were at the station in Grenitch when the costly train puled in from 125 st. Myself and father hoped out of the lordly moter and helped the bulk of the famly off of the train and I aloud our nurse and my 3 brothers to kiss me tho Davids left me rarther moist.

Did you have a hard trip my father arsked to our nurse shyly.

Why no she replid with a slite stager.

She did too said my mother they all acted like little devils.

Did you get Davids milk she said turning on my father.

Why no does he like milk my father replid with a gastly smirk.

We got lost mudder I said brokenly.

We did not screened my father and accidently cracked me in the shins with a stray foot.

To change the subjeck I turned my tensions on my brother Jimmie who is nerest my age.

I’ve seen our house Jimmie I said brokenly I got here first.

Yes but I slept all night on a train and you didnt replid Jimmie with a dirty look.

Nether did you said my brother John to Jimmie you was awake all night.

Were awake said my mother.

Me and David was awake all night and crid said my brother John.

But I only crid once the whole time said my brother Jimmie.

But I didnt cry at all did I I arsked to my mother.

So she replid with a loud cough Bill was a very very good boy.

So now we will say fare well to the characters in this book.

The Big Town

How I and the Mrs. Go to New York to See Life and Get Katie a Husband

Preface

This book deals with the adventures of a man and his wife and his sister-in-law who move to New York from a small middle western city. Because the writer and she who jokingly married him moved to New York from the middle west, and because the writer has almost as many sister-in-laws as Solomon, several Nordic blondes have inquired whether the hero and heroines of the book are not actually us. Fortunately most of the inquirers made the inquiry of me, the possessor of a notoriously sweet disposition. Two of them, however, asked the madam herself and were both shot down.

In the first place, the ladies of the book are supposed to have inherited enough money to make them and the gent more or less independent. Nothing like that in our family.

In the second place, the sister-in-law of the book has a hard time getting a man. The sister-in-laws in real life acquired permanent men while still in their nonage, you might say, and didn’t have to move out of the middle west to do it. And though none of them, perhaps, can be said to have done as well as the madam herself, at least from an aesthetic standpoint, still it is something to boast of that none of them was obliged to go Democratic.

The contents of “The Big Town” were written mostly in a furnished house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the author wishes to thank the rats for staying out of the room while he worked. It was winter time and the furnished house was a summer cottage, but we didn’t realize that when we rented it. Nor, apparently, did the rats.

R. W. L.

March, 1925.

I

Quick Returns

This is just a clipping from one of the New York papers; a little kidding piece that they had in about me two years ago. It says:

Hoosier Cleans Up in Wall Street.

Employees of the brokerage firm of H. L. Krause & Co. are authority for the statement that a wealthy Indiana speculator made one of the biggest killings of the year in the Street yesterday afternoon. No very definite information was obtainable, as the Westerner’s name was known to only one of the firm’s employees, Francis Griffin, and he was unable to recall it last night.

You’d think I was a millionaire and that I’d made a sucker out of Morgan or something, but it’s only a kid, see? If they’d of printed the true story they wouldn’t of had no room left for that day’s selections at Pimlico, and God knows that would of been fatal.

But if you want to hear about it, I’ll tell you.

Well, the war wound up in the fall of 1918. The only member of my family that was killed in it was my wife’s stepfather. He died of grief when it ended with him two hundred thousand dollars ahead. I immediately had a black bandage sewed round my left funny bone, but when they read us the will I felt all right again and tore it off. Our share was seventy-five thousand dollars. This was after we had paid for the inheritance tax and the amusement stamps on a horseless funeral.

My young sister-in-law, Katie, dragged down another seventy-five thousand dollars and the rest went to the old bird that had been foreman in papa’s factory. This old geezer had been starving to death for twenty years on the wages my stepfather-in-law give him, and the rest of us didn’t make no holler when his name was read off for a small chunk, especially as he didn’t have no teeth to enjoy it with.

I could of had this old foreman’s share, maybe, if I’d of took advantage of the offer “father” made me just before his daughter and I was married. I was over in Niles, Michigan, where they lived, and he insisted on me seeing his factory, which meant smelling it too. At that time I was knocking out about eighteen hundred dollars per annum selling cigars out of South Bend, and the old man said he would start me in with him at only about a fifty percent cut, but we would also have the privilege of living with him and my wife’s kid sister.

“They’s a lot to be learnt about this business,” he says, “but if you would put your mind on it you might work up to manager. Who knows?”

“My nose knows,” I said, and that ended it.

The old man had lost some jack and went into debt a good many years ago, and for a long wile before the war begin about all as he was able to do was support himself and the two gals and pay off a part of what he owed. When the war broke loose and leather went up to hell and gone I and my wife thought he would get prosperous, but before this country went in his business went on about the same as usual.

“I don’t know how they do it,” he would say. “Other leather men is getting rich on contracts with the Allies, but I can’t land a one.”

I guess he was trying to sell razor strops to Russia.

Even after we got into it and he begin to clean up, with the factory running day and night, all as we knew was that he had contracts with the U.S. Government, but he never confided in us what special stuff he was turning out. For all as we knew, it may of been medals for the ground navy.

Anyway, he must of been hitting a fast clip when the armistice come and ended the war for everybody but Congress! It’s a cinch he wasn’t amongst those arrested for celebrating too loud on the night of November 11. On the contrary they tell me that when the big news hit Niles the old bird had a stroke that he didn’t never recover from, and though my wife and Katie hung round the bedside day after day in the hopes he would tell how much he was going to leave he was keeping his fiscal secrets for Oliver Lodge or somebody, and it wasn’t till we seen the will that we knew we wouldn’t have to work no more, which is pretty fair consolation even for the loss of a stepfather-in-law that ran a perfume mill.

“Just think,” said my wife, “after all his financial troubles, papa died a rich man!”

“Yes,” I said to myself, “and a patriot. His only regret was that he just had one year to sell leather to his country.”

If the old codger had of only been half as fast a salesman as his two daughters this clipping would of been right when it called me a wealthy Hoosier. It wasn’t two weeks after we seen the will when the gals had disposed of the odor factory and the old home in Niles, Michigan. Katie, it seemed, had to come over to South Bend and live with us. That was agreeable to me, as I figured that if two could live on eighteen hundred dollars a year three could struggle along some way on the income off one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Only for me, though, Ella and Sister Kate would of shot the whole wad into a checking account so as the bank could enjoy it wile it lasted. I argued and fought and finally persuaded them to keep five thousand apiece for pin money and stick the rest into bonds.

The next thing they done was run over to Chi and buy all the party dresses that was vacant. Then they come back to South Bend and wished somebody would give a party. But between you and I the people we’d always ran round with was birds that was ready for bed as soon as they got home from the first show, and even though it had been printed in the News-Times that we had fell heir to a lot of jack we didn’t have to hire no extra clerical help to tend to invitations received from the demi-Monday.

Finally Ella said we would start something ourselves. So she got a lot of invitations printed and sent them to all our friends that could read and hired a cater and a three-piece orchestra and everything, and made me buy a dress suit.

Well, the big night arrived and everybody come that had somebody to leave their baby with. The hosts wore evening clothes and the rest of the merrymakers prepared for the occasion with a shine or a clean collar. At first the cat had everybody’s tongue, but when we sat down to eat some of the men folks begun to get comical. For instance, they would say to my wife or Katie, “Ain’t you afraid you’ll catch cold?” And they’d say to me, “I didn’t know you was a waiter at the Oliver.” Before the fish course everybody was in a fair way to get the giggles.

After supper the musicians come and hid behind a geranium and played a jazz. The entire party set out the first dance. The second was a solo between Katie and I, and I had the third with my wife. Then Kate and the Mrs. had one together, wile I tried holds with a lady named Mrs. Eckhart, who seemed to think that somebody had ast her to stand for a time exposure. The men folks had all drifted over behind the plant to watch the drummer, but after the stalemate between Mrs. Eckhart and I I grabbed her husband and took him out in the kitchen and showed him a bottle of bourbon that I’d been saving for myself, in the hopes it would loosen him up. I told him it was my last bottle, but he must of thought I said it was the last bottle in the world. Anyway, when he got through they was international prohibition.

We went back in the ballroom and sure enough he ast Katie to dance. But he hadn’t no sooner than win one fall when his wife challenged him to take her home and that started the epidemic that emptied the house of everybody but the orchestra and us. The orchestra had been hired to stay till midnight, which was still two hours and a half distance, so I invited both of the gals to dance with me at once, but it seems like they was surfeited with that sport and wanted to cry a little. Well, the musicians had ran out of blues, so I chased them home.

“Some party!” I said, and the two girls give me a dirty look like it was my fault or something. So we all went to bed and the ladies beat me to it on account of being so near ready.

Well, they wasn’t no return engagements even hinted at and the only other times all winter when the gals had a chance to dress up was when some secondhand company would come to town with a show and I’d have to buy a box. We couldn’t ask nobody to go with us on account of not having no friends that you could depend on to not come in their stocking feet.

Finally it was summer and the Mrs. said she wanted to get out of town.

“We’ve got to be fair to Kate,” she said.

“We don’t know no young unmarried people in South Bend and it’s no fun for a girl to run round with her sister and brother-in-law. Maybe if we’d go to some resort somewheres we might get acquainted with people that could show her a good time.”

So I hired us rooms in a hotel down to Wawasee Lake and we stayed there from the last of June till the middle of September. During that time I caught a couple of bass and Kate caught a couple of carp from Fort Wayne. She was getting pretty friendly with one of them when along come a wife that he hadn’t thought was worth mentioning. The other bird was making a fight against the gambling fever, but one night it got the best of him and he dropped forty-five cents in the nickel machine and had to go home and make a new start.

About a week before we was due to leave I made the remark that it would seem good to be back in South Bend and get some home cooking.

“Listen!” says my wife. “I been wanting for a long wile to have a serious talk with you and now’s as good a time as any. Here are I and Sis and you with an income of over eight thousand dollars a year and having pretty near as good a time as a bird with habitual boils. What’s more, we can’t never have a good time in South Bend, but have got to move somewheres where we are unknown.”

“South Bend is certainly all of that,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” said the Mrs. “We’re acquainted there with the kind of people that makes it impossible for us to get acquainted with the other kind. Kate could live there twenty years and never meet a decent man. She’s a mighty attractive girl, and if she had a chance they’s nobody she couldn’t marry. But she won’t never have a chance in South Bend. And they’s no use of you saying ‘Let her move,’ because I’m going to keep her under my eye till she’s married and settled down. So in other words, I want us to pack up and leave South Bend for good and all and move somewheres where we’ll get something for our money.”

“For instance, where?” I ast her.

“They’s only one place,” she said; “New York City.”

“I’ve heard of it,” said I, “but I never heard that people who couldn’t enjoy themselves on eight thousand a year in South Bend could go to New York and tear it wide open.”

“I’m not planning to make no big splurge,” she says. “I just want to be where they’s Life and fun; where we can meet real live people. And as for not living there on eight thousand, think of the families that’s already living there on half of that and less!”

“And think of the Life and fun they’re having!” I says.

“But when you talk about eight thousand a year,” said the Mrs., “why do we have to hold ourselves to that? We can sell some of those bonds and spend a little of our principal. It will just be taking money out of one investment and putting it in another.”

“What other?” I ast her.

“Kate,” said the wife. “You let me take her to New York and manage her and I’ll get her a husband that’ll think our eight thousand a year fell out of his vest.”

“Do you mean,” I said, “that you’d let a sister of yours marry for money?”

“Well,” she says, “I know a sister of hers that wouldn’t mind if she had.”

So I argued and tried to compromise on somewheres in America, but it was New York or nothing with her. You see, she hadn’t never been here, and all as she knew about it she’d read in books and magazines, and for some reason another when authors starts in on that subject it ain’t very long till they’ve got a weeping jag. Besides, what chance did I have when she kept reminding me that it was her stepfather, not mine, that had croaked and made us all rich?

When I had give up she called Kate in and told her, and Kate squealed and kissed us both, though God knows I didn’t deserve no remuneration or ask for none.

Ella had things all planned out. We was to sell our furniture and take a furnished apartment here, but we would stay in some hotel till we found a furnished apartment that was within reason.

“Our stay in some hotel will be lifelong,” I said.

The furniture, when we come to sell it, wasn’t worth nothing, and that’s what we got. We didn’t have nothing to ship, as Ella found room for our books in my collar box. I got two lowers and an upper in spite of the Government, and with two taxi drivers and the baggageman thronging the station platform we pulled out of South Bend and set forth to see Life.

The first four miles of the journey was marked by considerable sniveling on the part of the heiresses.

“If it’s so painful to leave the Bend let’s go back,” I said.

“It isn’t leaving the Bend,” said the Mrs., “but it makes a person sad to leave any place.”

“Then we’re going to have a muggy trip,” said I. “This train stops pretty near everywheres to either discharge passengers or employees.”

They were still sobbing when we left Mishawaka and I had to pull some of my comical stuff to get their minds off. My wife’s mighty easy to look at when she hasn’t got those watery blues, but I never did see a gal that knocked you for a goal when her nose was in full bloom.

Katie had brought a flock of magazines and started in on one of them at Elkhart, but it’s pretty tough trying to read with the Northern Indiana mountains to look out at, to say nothing about the birds of prey that kept prowling up and down the aisle in search of a little encouragement or a game of rhum.

I noticed a couple of them that would of give a lady an answer if she’d approached them in a nice way, but I’ve done some traveling myself and I know what kind of men it is that allows themselves to be drawed into a flirtation on trains. Most of them has made the mistake of getting married sometime, but they don’t tell you that. They tell you that you and a gal they use to be stuck on is as much alike as a pair of corsets, and if you ever come to Toledo to give them a ring, and they hand you a telephone number that’s even harder to get than the ones there are; and they ask you your name and address and write it down, and the next time they’re up at the Elks they show it to a couple of the brothers and tell what they’d of done if they’d only been going all the way through.

“Say, I hate to talk about myself! But say!”

Well, I didn’t see no sense in letting Katie waste her time on those kind of guys, so every time one of them looked our way I give him the fish eye and the nonstop signal. But this was my first long trip since the Government started to play train, and I didn’t know the new rules in regards to getting fed; otherwise I wouldn’t of never cleaned up in Wall Street.

In the old days we use to wait till the boy come through and announced that dinner was now being served in the dining car forward; then we’d saunter into the washroom and wash our hands if necessary, and ramble into the diner and set right down and enjoy as big a meal as we could afford. But the Government wants to be economical, so they’ve cut down the number of trains, to say nothing about the victuals; and they’s two or three times as many people traveling, because they can’t throw their money away fast enough at home. So the result is that the wise guys keeps an eye on their watch and when it’s about twenty minutes to dinner time they race to the diner and park against the door and get quick action; and after they’ve eat the first time they go out and stand in the vestibule and wait till it’s their turn again, as one Federal meal don’t do nothing to your appetite only whet it, you might say.

Well, anyway, I was playing the old rules and by the time I and the two gals started for the diner we run up against the outskirts of a crowd pretty near as big as the ones that waits outside restaurant windows to watch a pancake turn turtle. About eight o’clock we got to where we could see the wealthy dining car conductor in the distance, but it was only about once every quarter of an hour that he raised a hand, and then he seemed to of had all but one of his fingers shot off.

I have often heard it said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but every time I ever seen men and women keep waiting for their eats it was always the frail sex that give the first yelp, and personally I’ve often wondered what would of happened in the trenches Over There if ladies had of been occupying them when the rations failed to show up. I guess the bombs bursting round would of sounded like “Sweet and Low” sang by a quextette of deef mutes.

Anyway, my two charges was like wild animals, and when the con finally held up two fingers I didn’t have no more chance or desire to stop them than as if they was the Center College Football Club right after opening prayer.

The pair of them was ushered to a table for four where they already was a couple of guys making the best of it, and it wasn’t more than ten minutes later when one of these birds dipped his bill in the finger bowl and staggered out, but by the time I took his place the other gent and my two gals was talking like barbers.

The guy was Francis Griffin that’s in the clipping. But when Ella introduced us all as she said was, “This is my husband,” without mentioning his name, which she didn’t know at that time, or mine, which had probably slipped her memory.

Griffin looked at me like I was a side dish that he hadn’t ordered. Well, I don’t mind snubs except when I get them, so I ast him if he wasn’t from Sioux City⁠—you could tell he was from New York by his blue collar.

“From Sioux City!” he says. “I should hope not!”

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “You look just like a photographer I used to know out there.”

“I’m a New Yorker,” he said, “and I can’t get home too soon.”

“Not on this train, you can’t,” I said.

“I missed the Century,” he says.

“Well,” I says with a polite smile, “the Century’s loss is our gain.”

“Your wife’s been telling me,” he says, “that you’re moving to the Big Town. Have you ever been there?”

“Only for a few hours,” I says.

“Well,” he said, “when you’ve been there a few weeks you’ll wonder why you ever lived anywhere else. When I’m away from old Broadway I always feel like I’m only camping out.”

Both the gals smiled their appreciation, so I says: “That certainly expresses it. You’d ought to remember that line and give it to Georgie Cohan.”

“Old Georgie!” he says. “I’d give him anything I got and welcome. But listen! Your wife mentioned something about a good hotel to stop at wile you’re looking for a home. Take my advice and pick out one that’s near the center of things; you’ll more than make up the difference in taxi bills. I lived up in the Hundreds one winter and it averaged me ten dollars a day in cab fares.”

“You must of had a pleasant home life,” I says.

“Me!” he said. “I’m an old bachelor.”

“Old!” says Kate, and her and the Mrs. both giggled.

“But seriously,” he says, “if I was you I would go right to the Baldwin, where you can get a room for twelve dollars a day for the three of you; and you’re walking distance from the theaters or shops or cafés or anywheres you want to go.”

“That sounds grand!” said Ella.

“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “I’d just as lief be overseas from any of the places you’ve mentioned. What I’m looking for is a home with a couple of beds and a cookstove in the kitchen, and maybe a bath.”

“But we want to see New York first,” said Katie, “and we can do that better without no household cares.”

“That’s the idear!” says Griffin. “Eat, drink and be merry; tomorrow we may die.”

“I guess we won’t drink ourselves to death,” I said, “not if the Big Town’s like where we been living.”

“Oh, say!” says our new friend. “Do you think little old New York is going to stand for Prohibition? Why, listen! I can take you to thirty places tomorrow night where you can get all you want in any one of them.”

“Let’s pass up the other twenty-nine,” I says.

“But that isn’t the idear,” he said. “What makes we New Yorkers sore is to think they should try and wish a law like that on Us. Isn’t this supposed to be a government of the people, for the people and by the people?”

“People!” I said. “Who and the hell voted for Prohibition if it wasn’t the people?”

“The people of where?” he says. “A lot of small-time hicks that couldn’t buy a drink if they wanted it.”

“Including the hicks,” I says, “that’s in the New York State legislature.”

“But not the people of New York City,” he said. “And you can’t tell me it’s fair to spring a thing like this without warning on men that’s got their fortunes tied up in liquor that they can’t never get rid of now, only at a sacrifice.”

“You’re right,” I said. “They ought to give them some warning. Instead of that they was never even a hint of what was coming off till Maine went dry seventy years ago.”

“Maine?” he said. “What the hell is Maine?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Only they was a ship or a boat or something named after it once, and the Spaniards sunk it and we sued them for libel or something.”

“You’re a smart Aleck,” he said. “But speaking about war, where was you?”

“In the shipyards at South Bend painting a duck boat,” I says. “And where was you?”

“I’d of been in there in a few more weeks,” he says. “They wasn’t no slackers in the Big Town.”

“No,” said I, “and America will never forget New York for coming in on our side.”

By this time the gals was both giving me dirty looks, and we’d eat all we could get, so we paid our checks and went back in our car and I felt kind of apologetic, so I dug down in the old grip and got out a bottle of bourbon that a South Bend pal of mine, George Hull, had give me the day before; and Griffin and I went in the washroom with it and before the evening was over we was pretty near ready to forget national boundaries and kiss.

The old bourb’ helped me save money the next morning, as I didn’t care for no breakfast. Ella and Kate went in with Griffin and you could of knocked me over with a coupling pin when the Mrs. come back and reported that he’d insisted on paying the check. “He told us all about himself,” she said. “His name is Francis Griffin and he’s in Wall Street. Last year he cleared twenty thousand dollars in commissions and everything.”

“He’s a piker,” I says. “Most of them never even think under six figures.”

“There you go!” said the Mrs. “You never believe nothing. Why shouldn’t he be telling the truth? Didn’t he buy our breakfast?”

“I been buying your breakfast for five years,” I said, “but that don’t prove that I’m knocking out twenty thousand per annum in Wall Street.”

Francis and Katie was setting together four or five seats ahead of us.

“You ought to of seen the way he looked at her in the diner,” said the Mrs. “He looked like he wanted to eat her up.”

“Everybody gets desperate in a diner these days,” I said. “Did you and Kate go fifty-fifty with him? Did you tell him how much money we got?”

“I should say not!” says Ella. “But I guess we did say that you wasn’t doing nothing just now and that we was going to New York to see Life, after being cooped up in a small town all these years. And Sis told him you’d made us put pretty near everything in bonds, so all we can spend is eight thousand a year. He said that wouldn’t go very far in the Big Town.”

“I doubt if it ever gets as far as the Big Town,” I said. “It won’t if he makes up his mind to take it away from us.”

“Oh, shut up!” said the Mrs. “He’s all right and I’m for him, and I hope Sis is too. They’d make a stunning couple. I wished I knew what they’re talking about.”

“Well,” I said, “they’re both so reserved that I suppose they’re telling each other how they’re affected by cucumbers.”

When they come back and joined us Ella said: “We was just remarking how well you two young things seemed to be getting along. We was wondering what you found to say to one another all this time.”

“Well,” said Francis, “just now I think we were discussing you. Your sister said you’d been married five years and I pretty near felt like calling her a fibber. I told her you looked like you was just out of high school.”

“I’ve heard about you New Yorkers before,” said the Mrs. “You’re always trying to flatter somebody.”

“Not me,” said Francis. “I never say nothing without meaning it.”

“But sometimes,” says I, “you’d ought to go on and explain the meaning.”

Along about Schenectady my appetite begin to come back. I’d made it a point this time to find out when the diner was going to open, and then when it did our party fell in with the door.

“The wife tells me you’re on the stock exchange,” I says to Francis when we’d give our order.

“Just in a small way,” he said. “But they been pretty good to me down there. I knocked out twenty thousand last year.”

“That’s what he told us this morning,” said Ella.

“Well,” said I, “they’s no reason for a man to forget that kind of money between Rochester and Albany, even if this is a slow train.”

“Twenty thousand isn’t a whole lot in the Big Town,” said Francis, “but still and all, I manage to get along and enjoy myself a little on the side.”

“I suppose it’s enough to keep one person,” I said.

“Well,” says Francis, “they say two can live as cheap as one.”

Then him and Kate and Ella all giggled, and the waiter brought in a part of what he thought we’d ordered and we eat what we could and ast for the check. Francis said he wanted it and I was going to give in to him after a long hard struggle, but the gals reminded him that he’d paid for breakfast, so he said all right, but we’d all have to take dinner with him some night.

I and Francis set a wile in the washroom and smoked, and then he went to entertain the gals, but I figured the wife would go right to sleep like she always does when they’s any scenery to look out at, so I stuck where I was and listened to what a couple of toothpick salesmen from Omsk would of done with the League of Nations if Wilson had of had sense enough to leave it to them.

Pulling into the Grand Central Station, Francis apologized for not being able to steer us over to the Baldwin and see us settled, but said he had to rush right downtown and report on his Chicago trip before the office closed. To see him when he parted with the gals you’d of thought he was going clear to Siberia to compete in the Olympic Games, or whatever it is we’re in over there.

Well, I took the heiresses to the Baldwin and got a regular Big Town welcome. Ella and Kate set against a pillar wile I tried different tricks to make an oil-haired clerk look at me. New York hotel clerks always seem to of just dropped something and can’t take their eyes off the floor. Finally I started to pick up the register and the guy give me the fish eye and ast what he could do for me.

“Well,” I said, “when I come to a hotel I don’t usually want to buy a straw hat.”

He ast me if I had a reservation and I told him no.

“Can’t do nothing for you then,” he says. “Not till tomorrow morning anyway.”

So I went back to the ladies.

“We’ll have to go somewheres else,” I said. “This joint’s a joint. They won’t give us nothing till tomorrow.”

“But we can’t go nowheres else,” said the Mrs. “What would Mr. Griffin think, after recommending us to come here?”

“Well,” I said, “if you think I’m going to park myself in a four-post chair all night just because we got a tip on a hotel from Wall Street you’re Queen of the Cuckoos.”

“Are you sure they haven’t anything at all?” she says.

“Go ask them yourself!” I told her.

Well, she did, and in about ten minutes she come back and said everything was fixed.

“They’ll give us a single room with bath and a double room with bath for fifteen dollars a day,” she said.

“ ‘Give us’ is good!” said I.

“I told him we’d wired for reservations and it wasn’t our fault if the wire didn’t get here,” she said. “He was awfully nice.”

Our rooms was right close to each other on the twenty-first floor. On the way up we decided by two votes to one that we’d dress for dinner. I was still monkeying with my tie when Katie come in for Ella to look her over. She had on the riskiest dress she’d bought in Chi.

“It’s a pretty dress,” she said, “but I’m afraid maybe it’s too daring for just a hotel dining room.”

Say, we hadn’t no sooner than set down in the hotel dining room when two other gals come in that made my team look like they was dressed for a sleigh ride with Doc Cook.

“I guess you don’t feel so daring now,” I said. “Compared to that baby in black you’re wearing Jess Willard’s ulster.”

“Do you know what that black gown cost?” said Ella. “Not a cent under seven hundred dollars.”

“That would make the material twenty-one hundred dollars a yard,” I says.

“I’d like to know where she got it,” said Katie.

“Maybe she cut up an old stocking,” said I.

“I wished now,” said the Mrs., “that we’d waited till we got here before we bought our clothes.”

“You can bet one thing,” says Katie. “Before we’re ast out anywheres on a real party we’ll have something to wear that isn’t a year old.”

“First thing tomorrow morning,” says the Mrs., “we’ll go over on Fifth Avenue and see what we can see.”

“They’ll only be two on that excursion,” I says.

“Oh, we don’t want you along,” said Ella. “But I do wished you’d go to some first-class men’s store and get some ties and shirts and things that don’t look like an embalmer.”

Well, after a wile one of the waiters got it in his head that maybe we hadn’t came in to take a bath, so he fetched over a couple of programs.

“Never mind them,” I says. “What’s ready? We’re in a hurry.”

“The Long Island Duckling’s very nice,” he said. “And how about some nice au gratin potatoes and some nice lettuce and tomato salad with Thousand Island dressing, and maybe some nice French pastry?”

“Everything seems to be nice here,” I said. “But wait a minute. How about something to drink?”

He give me a mysterious smile.

“Well,” he said, “they’re watching us pretty close here, but we serve something we call a cup. It comes from the bar and we’re not supposed to know what the bartender puts in it.”

“We’ll try and find out,” I said. “And rush this order through, as we’re starved.”

So he frisked out and was back again in less than an hour with another guy to help carry the stuff, though Lord knows he could of parked the three ducklings on one eyelid and the whole meal on the back of his hand. As for the cup, when you tasted it they wasn’t no big mystery about what the bartender had put in it⁠—a bottle of seltzer and a prune and a cherry and an orange peel, and maybe his finger. The check come to eighteen dollars and Ella made me tip him the rest of a twenty.

Before dinner the gals had been all for staying up a wile and looking the crowd over, but when we was through they both owned up that they hadn’t slept much on the train and was ready for bed.

Ella and Kate was up early in the morning. They had their breakfast without me and went over to stun Fifth Avenue. About ten o’clock Francis phoned to say he’d call round for us that evening and take us to dinner. The gals didn’t get back till late in the afternoon, but from one o’clock on I was too busy signing for packages to get lonesome. Ella finally staggered in with some more and I told her about our invitation.

“Yes, I know,” she said.

“How do you know?” I ast her.

“He told us,” she said. “We had to call him up to get a check cashed.”

“You got plenty nerve!” I said. “How does he know your checks is good?”

“Well, he likes us,” she said. “You’ll like us too when you see us in some of the gowns we bought.”

“Some!” I said.

“Why, yes,” said the Mrs. “You don’t think a girl can go round in New York with one evening dress!”

“How much money did you spend today?” I ast her.

“Well,” she said, “things are terribly high⁠—that is, nice things. And then, of course, there’s suits and hats and things besides the gowns. But remember, it’s our money. And as I told you, it’s an investment. When young Mister Wall Street sees Kate tonight it’ll be all off.”

“I didn’t call on you for no speech,” I says. “I ast you how much you spent.”

“Not quite sixteen hundred dollars.”

I was still out on my feet when the phone rung. Ella answered it and then told me it was all right about the tickets.

“What tickets?” I said.

“Why, you see,” she says, “after young Griffin fixing us up with that check and inviting us to dinner and everything we thought it would be nice to take him to a show tonight. Kate wanted to see Ups and Downs, but the girl said she couldn’t get us seats for it. So I ast that nice clerk that took care of us yesterday and he’s fixed it.”

“All right,” I said, “but when young Griffin starts a party, why and the hell not let him finish it?”

“I suppose he would of took us somewheres after dinner,” says the Mrs., “but I couldn’t be sure. And between you and I, I’m positive that if he and Kate is throwed together a whole evening, and her looking like she’ll look tonight, we’ll get mighty quick returns on our investment.”

Well, to make a short story out of it, the gals finally got what they called dressed, and I wished Niles, Michigan, or South Bend could of seen them. If boxers wore bathing skirts I’d of thought I was in the ring with a couple of bantams.

“Listen!” I said. “What did them two girdles cost?”

“Mine was three hundred and Kate’s three hundred and fifty,” said the Mrs.

“Well,” I says, “don’t you know that you could of went to any cut-rate drug store and wrapped yourself up just as warm in thirty-two cents’ worth of adhesive tape? Listen!” I said. “What’s the use of me paying a burglar for tickets to a show like Ups and Downs when I could set round here and look at you for nothing?”

Then Griffin rung up to say that he was waiting and we went downstairs. Francis took us in the same dining room we’d been in the night before, but this time the waiters all fought each other to get to us first.

I don’t know what we eat, as Francis had something on the hip that kind of dazed me for a wile, but afterwards I know we got a taxi and went to the theater. The tickets was there in my name and only cost me thirteen dollars and twenty cents.

Maybe you seen this show wile it was here. Some show! I didn’t read the program to see who wrote it, but I guess the words was by Noah and the music took the highest awards at the St. Louis Fair. They had a good system on the gags. They didn’t spring none but what you’d heard all your life and knew what was coming, so instead of just laughing at the point you laughed all the way through it.

I said to Ella, I said, “I bet the birds that run this don’t want prohibition. If people paid $3.30 apiece and come in here sober they’d come back the next night with a machine gun.”

“I think it’s dandy,” she says, “and you’ll notice every seat is full. But listen! Will you do something for me? When this is over suggest that we go up to the Castle Roof for a wile.”

“What for?” I said. “I’m sleepy.”

“Just this once,” she says. “You know what I told you about quick returns!”

Well, I give in and made the suggestion, and I never seen people so easy coaxed. I managed to get a ringside table for twenty-two bucks. Then I ast the boy how about getting a drink and he ast me if I knew any of the head waiters.

“I do,” says Francis. “Tell Hector it’s for Frank Griffin’s party.”

So we ordered four Scotch highballs and some chicken à la King, and then the dinge orchestra tore loose some jazz and I was expecting a dance with Ella, but before she could ask me Francis had ast her, and I had one with Kate.

“Your Wall Street friend’s a fox,” I says, “asking an old married lady to dance so’s to stand in with the family.”

“Old married lady!” said Kate. “Sis don’t look a day over sixteen tonight.”

“How are you and Francis coming?” I ast her.

“I don’t know,” she says. “He acts kind of shy. He hasn’t hardly said a word to me all evening.”

Well, they was another jazz and I danced it with Ella; then her and Francis had another one and I danced again with Kate. By this time our food and refreshments was served and the show was getting ready to start.

I could write a book on what I don’t remember about that show. The first sip of their idear of a Scotch highball put me down for the count of eight and I was practic’lly unconscious till the waiter woke me up with a check for forty bucks.

Francis seen us home and said he would call up again soon, and when Ella and I was alone I made the remark that I didn’t think he’d ever strain his larnix talking to Kate.

“He acts gun-shy when he’s round her,” I says. “You seem to be the one that draws him out.”

“It’s a good sign,” she says. “A man’s always embarrassed when he’s with a girl he’s stuck on. I’ll bet you anything you want to bet that within a week something’ll happen.”

Well, she win. She’d of win if she’d of said three days instead of a week. It was a Wednesday night when we had that party, and on the Friday Francis called up and said he had tickets for the Palace. I’d been laid up mean wile with the Scotch influenza, so I told the gals to cut me out. I was still awake yet when Ella come in a little after midnight.

“Well,” I said, “are we going to have a brother-in-law?”

“Mighty soon,” she says.

So I ast her what had came off.

“Nothing⁠—tonight,” she says, “except this: He wrote me a note. He wants me to go with him tomorrow afternoon and look at a little furnished apartment. And he ast me if I could come without Sis, as he wants to pull a surprise on her. So I wondered if you couldn’t think of some way to fix it so’s I can sneak off for a couple of hours.”

“Sure!” I said. “Just tell her you didn’t sleep all night and you’re wore out and you want to take a nap.”

So she pulled this gag at lunch Saturday and Katie said she was tired too. She went up to her room and Ella snuck out to keep her date with Francis. In less than an hour she romped into our room again and throwed herself on the bed.

“Well,” I says, “it must of been a little apartment if it didn’t only take you this long to see it.”

“Oh, shut up!” she said. “I didn’t see no apartment. And don’t say a word to me or I’ll scream.”

Well, I finally got her calmed down and she give me the details. It seems that she’d met Francis, and he’d got a taxi and they’d got in the taxi and they hadn’t no sooner than got in the taxi when Francis give her a kiss.

“Quick returns,” I says.

“I’ll kill you if you say another word!” she says.

So I managed to keep still.

Well, I didn’t know Francis’ home address, and Wall Street don’t run Sundays, so I spent the Sabbath training on a quart of rye that a bellhop picked up at a bargain sale somewheres for fifteen dollars. Mean wile Katie had been let in on the secret and stayed in our room all day, moaning like a prune-fed calf.

“I’m afraid to leave her alone,” says Ella. “I’m afraid she’ll jump out the window.”

“You’re easily worried,” I said. “What I’m afraid of is that she won’t.”

Monday morning finally come, as it generally always does, and I told the gals I was going to some first-class men’s store and buy myself some ties and shirts that didn’t look like a South Bend embalmer.

So the only store I knew about was H. L. Krause & Co. in Wall Street, but it turned out to be an office. I ast for Mr. Griffin and they ast me my name and I made one up, Sam Hall or something, and out he come.

If I told you the rest of it you’d think I was bragging. But I did bust a few records. Charley Brickley and Walter Eckersall both kicked five goals from field in one football game, and they was a bird named Robertson or something out at Purdue that kicked seven. Then they was one of the old-time ball players, Bobby Lowe or Ed Delehanty, that hit four or five home runs in one afternoon. And out to Toledo that time Dempsey made big Jess set down seven times in one round.

Well, listen! In a little less than three minutes I floored this bird nine times and I kicked him for eight goals from the field and I hit him over the fence for ten home runs. Don’t talk records to me!

So that’s what they meant in the clipping about a Hoosier cleaning up in Wall Street. But it’s only a kid, see?

II

Ritchey

Well, I was just getting used to the Baldwin and making a few friends round there when Ella suddenly happened to remember that it was Griffin who had recommended it. So one day, wile Kate was down to the chiropodist’s, Ella says it was time for us to move and she had made up her mind to find an apartment somewheres.

“We could get along with six rooms,” she said. “All as I ask is for it to be a new building and on some good street, some street where the real people lives.”

“You mean Fifth Avenue,” said I.

“Oh, no,” she says. “That’s way over our head. But we’d ought to be able to find something, say, on Riverside Drive.”

“A six room apartment,” I says, “in a new building on Riverside Drive? What was you expecting to pay?”

“Well,” she said, “you remember that time I and Kate visited the Kitchells in Chi? They had a dandy apartment on Sheridan Road, six rooms and brand new. It cost them seventy-five dollars a month. And Sheridan Road is Chicago’s Riverside Drive.”

“Oh, no,” I says. “Chicago’s Riverside Drive is Canal Street. But listen: Didn’t the Kitchells have their own furniture?”

“Sure they did,” said Ella.

“And are you intending to furnish us all over complete?” I asked her.

“Of course not,” she says. “I expect to get a furnished apartment. But that don’t only make about twenty-five dollars a month difference.”

“Listen,” I said: “It was six years ago that you visited the Kitchells; beside which, that was Chi and this is the Big Town. If you find a six room furnished apartment for a hundred dollars in New York City today, we’ll be on Pell Street in Chinatown, and maybe Katie can marry into a laundry or a joss house.”

“Well,” said the wife, “even if we have to go to $150 a month for a place on the Drive, remember half of it’s my money and half of it’s Kate’s, and none of it’s yours.”

“You’re certainly letter perfect in that speech,” I says.

“And further and more,” said Ella, “you remember what I told you the other day. Wile one reason we moved to New York was to see Life, the main idear was to give Kate a chance to meet real men. So every nickel we spend making ourself look good is just an investment.”

“I’d rather feel good than look good,” I says, “and I hate to see us spending so much money on a place to live that they won’t be nothing left to live on. For three or four hundred a month you might get a joint on the Drive with a bed and two chairs, but I can’t drink furniture.”

“This trip wasn’t planned as no spree for you,” says Ella. “On the other hand, I believe Sis would stand a whole lot better show of landing the right kind of a man if the rumor was to get out that her brother-in-law stayed sober once in a wile.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think my liberal attitude on the drink question affected the results of our deal in Wall Street. That investment would of turned out just as good whether I was a teetotaler or a lush.”

“Listen,” she says: “The next time you mention ancient history like that, I’ll make a little investment in a lawyer. But what’s the use of arguing? I and Kate has made up our mind to do things our own way with our own money, and today we’re going up on the Drive with a real estate man. We won’t pay no more than we can afford. All as we want is a place that’s good enough and big enough for Sis to entertain her gentleman callers in it, and she certainly can’t do that in this hotel.”

“Well,” I says, “all her gentleman callers that’s been around here in the last month, she could entertain them in one bunch in a telephone booth.”

“The reason she’s been let alone so far,” says the Mrs., “is because I won’t allow her to meet the kind of men that stays at hotels. You never know who they are.”

“Why not?” I said. “They’ve all got to register their name when they come in, which is more than you can say for people that lives in $100 apartments on Riverside Drive.”

Well, my arguments went so good that for the next three days the two gals was on a home-seekers’ excursion and I had to spend my time learning the eastern intercollegiate kelly pool rules up to Doyle’s. I win about seventy-five dollars.

When the ladies come home the first two nights they was all wore out and singing the landlord blues, but on the third afternoon they busted in all smiles.

“We’ve found one,” says Ella. “Six rooms, too.”

“Where at?” I asked her.

“Just where we wanted it,” she says. “On the Drive. And it fronts right on the Hudson.”

“No!” I said. “I thought they built them all facing the other way.”

“It almost seems,” said Katie, “like you could reach out and touch New Jersey.”

“It’s what you might call a near beer apartment,” I says.

“And it’s almost across the street from Grant’s Tomb,” says Ella.

“How many rooms has he got?” I says.

“We was pretty lucky,” said Ella. “The people that had it was forced to go south for the man’s health. He’s a kind of a cripple. And they decided to sublet it furnished. So we got a bargain.”

“Come on,” I says. “What price?”

“Well,” she says, “they don’t talk prices by the month in New York. They give you the price by the year. So it sounds a lot more than it really is. We got it for $4,000.”

“Sweet patootie!” I said. “That’s only half your income.”

“Well, what of it?” says Ella. “It won’t only be for about a year and it’s in the nicest kind of a neighborhood and we can’t meet nothing only the best kind of people. You know what I told you.”

And she give me a sly wink.

Well, it seems like they had signed up a year’s lease and paid a month’s rent in advance, so what was they left for me to say? All I done was make the remark that I didn’t see how we was going to come even close to a trial balance.

“Why not?” said Katie. “With our rent paid we can get along easy on $4,000 a year if we economize.”

“Yes,” I said. “You’ll economize just like the rest of the Riverside Drivers, with a couple of servants and a car and four or five new evening dresses a month. By the end of six months the bank’ll be figuring our account in marks.”

“What do you mean ‘our’ account?” says Ella.

“But speaking about a car,” said Katie, “do you suppose we could get a good one cheap?”

“Certainly,” I said. “They’re giving away the good ones for four double coupons.”

“But I mean an inexpensive one,” says Kate.

“You can’t live on the River and ride in a flivver,” I said. “Besides, the buses limp right by the door.”

“Oh, I love the buses!” said Ella.

“Wait till you see the place,” says Katie to me. “You’ll go simply wild! They’s a colored boy in uniform to open the door and they’s two elevators.”

“How high do we go?” I said.

“We’re on the sixth floor,” says Katie.

“I should think we could get that far in one elevator,” I says.

“What was it the real estate man told us?” said Ella. “Oh, yes, he said the sixth floor was the floor everybody tried to get on.”

“It’s a wonder he didn’t knock it,” I said.

Well, we was to have immediate possession, so the next morning we checked out of this joint and swooped up on the Drive. The colored boy, who I nicknamed George, helped us up with the wardrobe. Ella had the key and inside of fifteen minutes she’d found it.

We hadn’t no sooner than made our entrée into our new home when I knew what ailed the previous tenant. He’d crippled himself stumbling over the furniture. The living room was big enough to stage the high hurdles, and that’s what was in it, only they’d planted them every two feet apart. If a stew with the blind staggers had of walked in there in the dark, the folks on the floor below would of thought he’d knocked the head pin for a goal.

“Come across the room,” said Ella, “and look at the view.”

“I guess I can get there in four downs,” I said, “but you better have a substitute warming up.”

“Well,” she says, when I’d finally fell acrost the last white chalk mark, “what do you think of it?”

“It’s a damn pretty view,” I says, “but I’ve often seen the same view from the top of a bus for a thin dime.”

Well, they showed me over the whole joint and it did look OK, but not $4,000 worth. The best thing in the place was a half full bottle of rye in the kitchen that the cripple hadn’t gone south with. I did.

We got there at eleven o’clock in the morning, but at three p.m. the gals was still hanging up their Follies costumes, so I beat it out and over to Broadway and got myself a plate of pea soup. When I come back, Ella and Katie was laying down exhausted. Finally I told Ella that I was going to move back to the hotel unless they served meals in this dump, so her and Kate got up and went marketing. Well, when you move from Indiana to the Big Town, of course you can’t be expected to do your own cooking, so what we had that night was from the delicatessen, and for the next four days we lived on dill pickles with dill pickles.

“Listen,” I finally says: “The only reason I consented to leave the hotel was in the hopes I could get a real home cook meal once in a wile and if I don’t get a real home cook meal once in a wile, I leave this dive.”

“Have a little bit of patience,” says Ella. “I advertised in the paper for a cook the day before we come here, the day we rented this apartment. And I offered eight dollars a week.”

“How many replies did you get?” I asked her.

“Well,” she said, “I haven’t got none so far, but it’s probably too soon to expect any.”

“What did you advertise in, the world almanac?” I says.

“No, sir,” she says. “I advertised in the two biggest New York papers, the ones the real estate man recommended.”

“Listen,” I said: “Where do you think you’re at, in Niles, Michigan? If you get a cook here for eight dollars a week, it’ll be a one-armed leper that hasn’t yet reached her teens.”

“What would you do, then?” she asked me.

“I’d write to an employment agency,” I says, “and I’d tell them we’ll pay good wages.”

So she done that and in three days the phone rung and the agency said they had one prospect on hand and did we want her to come out and see us. So Ella said we did and out come a colleen for an interview. She asked how much we was willing to pay.

“Well,” said Ella, “I’d go as high as twelve dollars. Or I’d make it fifteen if you done the washing.”

Kathleen Mavourneen turned her native color.

“Well,” I said, “how much do you want?”

“I’ll work for ninety dollars a month,” she said, only I can’t get the brogue. “That’s for the cookin’ only. No washin’. And I would have to have a room with a bath and all day Thursdays and Sunday evenin’s off.”

“Nothing doing,” said Ella, and the colleen started for the door.

“Wait a minute,” I says. “Listen: Is that what you gals is getting in New York?”

“We’re a spalpeen if we ain’t,” says the colleen bawn.

Well, I was desperate, so I called the wife to one side and says: “For heaven’s sakes, take her on a month’s trial. I’ll pay the most of it with a little piece of money I picked up last week down to Doyle’s. I’d rather do that than get dill pickled for a goal.”

“Could you come right away?” Ella asked her.

“Not for a couple days,” says Kathleen.

“It’s off, then,” I said. “You cook our supper tonight or go back to Greece.”

“Well,” she says, “I guess I could make it if I hurried.”

So she went away and come back with her suitcase, and she cooked our supper that night. And Oh darlint!

Well, Beautiful Katie still had the automobile bug and it wasn’t none of my business to steer her off of it and pretty near every day she would go down to the “row” and look them over. But every night she’d come home whistling a dirge.

“I guess I’ve seen them all,” she’d say, “but they’re too expensive or else they look like they wasn’t.”

But one time we was all coming home in a taxi from a show and come up Broadway and all of a sudden she yelled for the driver to stop.

“That’s a new one in that window,” she says, “and one I never see before.”

Well, the dive was closed at the time and we couldn’t get in, but she insisted on going down there the first thing in the morning and I and Ella must go along. The car was a brand new model Bam Eight.

“How much?” I asked him.

“Four thousand,” he says.

“When could I get one?” says Katie.

“I don’t know,” said the salesman.

“What do you mean?” I asked him. “Haven’t they made none of them?”

“I don’t know,” says the salesman. “This is the only one we got.”

“Has anybody ever rode in one?” I says.

“I don’t know,” said the guy.

So I asked him what made it worth four thousand.

“Well,” he says, “what made this lady want one?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Could I have this one that’s on the floor?” says Katie.

“I don’t know,” said the salesman.

“Well, when do you think I could get one?” says Katie.

“We can’t promise no deliveries,” says the salesman.

Well, that kind of fretted me, so I asked him if they wasn’t a salesman we could talk to.

“You’re talking to one,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” said I. “But I used to be a kind of a salesman myself, and when I was trying to sell things, I didn’t try and not sell them.”

“Yes,” he says, “but you wasn’t selling automobiles in New York in 1920. Listen,” he says: “I’ll be frank with you. We got the New York agency for this car and was glad to get it because it sells for four thousand and anything that sells that high, why the people will eat up, even if it’s a pearl-handle ketchup bottle. If we ever do happen to get a consignment of these cars, they’ll sell like oil stock. The last word we got from the factory was that they’d send us three cars next September. So that means we’ll get two cars a year from next October and if we can spare either of them, you can have one.”

So then he begin to yawn and I said, “Come on, girls,” and we got a taxi and beat it home. And I wouldn’t of said nothing about it, only if Katie had of been able to buy her Bam, what come off might of never came off.

It wasn’t only two nights later when Ella come in from shopping all excited. “Well,” she said, “talk about experiences! I just had a ride home and it wasn’t in a street car and it wasn’t in a taxi and it wasn’t on the subway and it wasn’t on a bus.”

“Let’s play charades,” said I.

“Tell us, Sis,” says Katie.

“Well,” said the wife, “I was down on Fifth Avenue, waiting for a bus, and all of a sudden a big limousine drew up to the curb with a livery chauffeur, and a man got out of the back seat and took off his hat and asked if he couldn’t see me home. And of course I didn’t pay no attention to him.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“But,” says Ella, “he says, ‘Don’t take no offense. I think we’re next door neighbors. Don’t you live acrost the hall on the sixth floor of the Lucius?’ So of course I had to tell him I did.”

“Of course,” I said.

“And then he said,” says Ella, “ ‘Is that your sister living with you?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she lives with my husband and I.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you’ll get in and let me take you home, I’ll tell you what a beautiful girl I think she is.’ So I seen then that he was all right, so I got in and come home with him. And honestly, Sis, he’s just wild about you!”

“What is he like?” says Katie.

“He’s stunning,” says the wife. “Tall and wears dandy clothes and got a cute mustache that turns up.”

“How old?” says Kate, and the Mrs. kind of stalled.

“Well,” she said, “he’s the kind of a man that you can’t tell how old they are, but he’s not old. I’d say he was, well, maybe he’s not even that old.”

“What’s his name?” asked Kate.

“Trumbull,” said the Mrs. “He said he was keeping bachelor quarters, but I don’t know if he’s really a bachelor or a widower. Anyway, he’s a dandy fella and must have lots of money. Just imagine living alone in one of these apartments!”

“Imagine living in one of them whether you’re a bachelor or a Mormon,” I says.

“Who said he lived alone?” asked Katie.

“He did,” says the Mrs. “He told me that him and his servants had the whole apartment to themselves. And that’s what makes it so nice, because he’s asked the three of us over there to dinner tomorrow night.”

“What makes it so nice?” I asked her.

“Because it does,” said Ella, and you can’t ever beat an argument like that.

So the next night the two girls donned their undress uniforms and made me put on the oysters and horse radish and we went acrost the hall to meet our hero. The door was opened by a rug peddler and he showed us into a twin brother to our own living room, only you could get around it without being Houdini.

“Mr. Trumbull will be right out,” said Omar.

The ladies was shaking like an aspirin leaf, but in a few minutes, in come mine host. However old Ella had thought he wasn’t, she was wrong. He’d seen baseball when the second bounce was out. If he’d of started his career as a barber in Washington, he’d of tried to wish a face massage on Zachary Taylor. The only thing young about him was his teeth and his clothes. His dinner suit made me feel like I was walking along the station platform at Toledo, looking for hot boxes.

“Ah, here you are!” he says. “It’s mighty nice of you to be neighborly. And so this is the young sister. Well,” he says to me, “you had your choice, and as far as I can see, it was heads you win and tails you win. You’re lucky.”

So when he’d spread all the salve, he rung the bell and in come Allah with cocktails. I don’t know what was in them, but when Ella and Katie had had two apiece, they both begin to trill.

Finally we was called in to dinner and every other course was hootch. After the solid and liquid diet, he turned on the steam piano and we all danced. I had one with Beautiful Katie and the rest of them was with my wife, or, as I have nicknamed them, quarrels. Well, the steam run out of three of us at the same time, the piano inclusive, and Ella sat down in a chair that was made for Eddie Foy’s family and said how comfortable it was.

“Yes,” says Methuselah, “that’s my favorite chair. And I bet you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how much it cost.”

“Oh, I’d like to know,” says Ella.

“Two hundred dollars,” says mine host.

“Do you still feel comfortable?” I asked her.

“Speaking about furniture,” said the old bird, “I’ve got a few bits that I’m proud of. Would you like to take a look at them?”

So the gals said they would and we had to go through the entire apartment, looking at bits. The best bits I seen was tastefully wrapped up in kegs and cases. It seemed like every time he opened a drawer, a cork popped up. He was a hundred percent proofer than the governor of New Jersey. But he was giving us a lecture on the furniture itself, not the polish.

“I picked up this dining room suit for eighteen hundred,” he says.

“Do you mean the one you’ve got on?” I asked him, and the gals give me a dirty look.

“And this rug,” he says, stomping on an old rag carpet. “How much do you suppose that cost?”

It was my first guess, so I said fifty dollars.

“That’s a laugh,” he said. “I paid two thousand for that rug.”

“The guy that sold it had the laugh,” I says.

Finally he steered us into his bedroom.

“Do you see that bed?” he says. “That’s Marie Antoinette’s bed. Just a cool thousand.”

“What time does she usually get in?” I asked him.

“Here’s my hobby,” he said, opening up a closet, “dressing gowns and bathrobes.”

Well, they was at least a dozen of them hanging on hangers. They was all colors of the rainbow including the Scandinavian. He dragged one down that was redder than Ella’s and Katie’s cheeks.

“This is my favorite bathrobe,” he said. “It’s Rose D. Barry.”

So I asked him if he had all his household goods and garments named after some dame.

“This bathrobe cost me an even two hundred,” he says.

“I always take baths bare,” I said. “It’s a whole lot cheaper.”

“Let’s go back in the living room,” says Katie.

“Come on,” said Ella, tugging me by the sleeve.

“Wait a minute,” I says to her. “I don’t know how much he paid for his toothbrush.”

Well, when we got back in the living room, the two gals acted kind of drowsy and snuggled up together on the davenport and I and the old bird was left to ourself.

“Here’s another thing I didn’t show you,” he says, and pulls a pair of African golf balls out of a drawer in his desk. “These dice is real ivory and they cost me twelve and a half berries.”

“You mean up to now,” I said.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll make it a twenty-five dollar limit.”

Well, I didn’t have no business in a game with him, but you know how a guy gets sometimes. So he took them first and rolled a four.

“Listen,” I says: “Do you know how many times Willard set down in the first round?”

And sure enough he sevened.

“Now solid ivory dice,” I said, “how many days in the week?”

So out come a natural. And as sure as I’m setting here, I made four straight passes with the whole roll riding each time and with all that wad parked on the two thousand dollar rug, I shot a five and a three. “Ivory,” I said, “we was invited here tonight, so don’t make me pay for the entertainment. Show me eighter from Decatur.”

And the lady from Decatur showed.

Just then they was a stir on the davenport, and Ella woke up long enough to make the remark that we ought to go home. It was the first time she ever said it in the right place.

“Oh,” I says, “I’ve got to give Mr. Trumbull a chance to get even.”

But I wasn’t in earnest.

“Don’t bother about that,” said Old Noah. “You can accommodate me some other time.”

“You’re certainly a sport,” I says.

“And thanks for a wonderful time,” said Ella. “I hope we’ll see you again soon.”

“Soon is tomorrow night,” said mine host. “I’m going to take you all up the river to a place I know.”

“Well,” I says to Katie, when we was acrost the hall and the door shut, “how do you like him?”

“Oh, shut up!” says Katie.

So the next night he come over and rung our bell and said Ritchey was waiting with the car and would we come down when we was ready. Well, the gals had only had all day to prepare for the trip, so in another half hour they had their wraps on and we went downstairs. They wasn’t nothing in front but a Rools-Royce with a livery chauffeur that looked like he’d been put there by a rubber stamp.

“What a stunning driver!” said Katie when we’d parked ourself in the back seat.

“Ritchey?” says mine host. “He is a nice looking boy, but better than that, he’s a boy I can trust.”

Well, anyway, the boy he could trust took us out to a joint called the Indian Inn where you wouldn’t of never knew they was an eighteenth amendment only that the proprietor was asking twenty berries a quart for stuff that used to cost four. But that didn’t seem to bother Methuselah and he ordered two of them. Not only that but he got us a table so close to the orchestra that the cornet player thought we was his mute.

“Now, what’ll we eat?” he says.

So I looked at the program and the first item I seen was “Guinea Hen, $4.50.”

“That’s what Katie’ll want,” I says to myself, and sure enough that’s what she got.

Well, we eat and then we danced and we danced and we danced, and finally along about eleven I and Ella was out on the floor pretending like we was enjoying ourself, and we happened to look over to the table and there was Katie and Trumbull setting one out and to look at either you could tell that something was wrong.

“Dance the next one with her,” says Ella, “and find out what’s the matter.”

So I danced the next one with Katie and asked her.

“He squeezed my hand,” she says. “I don’t like him.”

“Well,” said I, “if you’d of ordered guinea hen on me I wouldn’t of stopped at your hand. I’d of went at your throat.”

“I’ve got a headache,” she says. “Take me out to the car.”

So they was nothing to it but I had to take her out to the car and come back and tell Ella and Trumbull that she wasn’t feeling any too good and wanted to go home.

“She don’t like me,” says the old guy. “That’s the whole trouble.”

“Give her time,” says Ella. “Remember she’s just a kid.”

“Yes, but what a kid!” he says.

So then he paid the check without no competition and we went out and clumb in the big limmie. Katie was pretending like she was asleep and neither Ella or Trumbull acted like they wanted to talk, so the conversation on the way home was mostly one-sided, with me in the title role. Katie went in the apartment without even thanking mine host for the guinea hen, but he kept Ella and I outside long enough to say that Ritchey and the car was at our service any time we wanted them.

So Ella told her that the next noon at breakfast. “And you’d ought to be ashamed of yourself,” says Ella, “for treating a man like that like that.”

“He’s too fresh,” says Katie.

“Well,” said Ella, “if he was a little younger, you wouldn’t mind him being fresh.”

“No,” said Katie, “if he was fresh, I wouldn’t care if he was fresh. But what’s the number of the garage?”

And she didn’t lose no time taking advantage of the old bird. That same afternoon it seemed she had to go shopping and the bus wasn’t good enough no more. She was out in Trumbull’s limmie from two o’clock till pretty near seven. The old guy himself come to our place long about five and wanted to know if we knew where she was at. “I haven’t no idear,” said Ella. “I expected her home long ago. Did you want to use the car?”

“What’s the difference,” I said, “if he wanted to use the car or not? He’s only the owner.”

“Well,” says Trumbull, “when I make an offer I mean it, and that little girl is welcome to use my machine whenever she feels like it.”

So Ella asked him to stay to dinner and he said he would if we’d allow him to bring in some of his hootch, and of course I kicked on that proposition, but he insisted. And when Katie finally did get home, we was all feeling good and so was she and you’d never of thought they’d been any bad feelings the night before.

Trumbull asked her what she’d been buying.

“Nothing,” she says. “I was looking at dresses, but they want too much money.”

“You don’t need no dresses,” he says.

“No, of course not,” said Katie. “But lots of girls is wearing them.”

“Where did you go?” said Ella.

“I forget,” says Katie. “What do you say if we play cards?”

So we played rummy till we was all blear-eyed and the old guy left, saying we’d all go somewheres next day. After he’d gone Ella begin to talk serious.

“Sis,” she says, “here’s the chance of a lifetime. Mr. Trumbull’s head over heels in love with you and all as you have to do is encourage him a little. Can’t you try and like him?”

“They’s nobody I have more respect for,” said Katie, “unless it’s George Washington.”

And then she give a funny laugh and run off to bed.

“I can’t understand Sis no more,” said Ella, when we was alone.

“Why not?” I asked her.

“Why, look at this opportunity staring her in the face,” says the Mrs.

“Listen,” I said: “The first time I stared you in the face, was you thinking about opportunity?”

Well, to make a short story out of it, I was the only one up in the house the next morning when Kathleen said we had a caller. It was the old boy.

“I’m sorry to be so early,” he says, “but I just got a telegram and it means I got to run down to Washington for a few days. And I wanted to tell you that wile I’m gone Ritchey and the car is at your service.”

So I thanked him and he said goodbye and give his regards to the Mrs. and especially Katie, so when they got up I told them about it and I never seen a piece of bad news received so calm as Katie took it.

“But now he’s gone,” I said at the breakfast table, “why not the three of us run out to Bridgeport and call on the Wilmots?”

They’re cousins of mine.

“Oh, fine!” said Ella.

“Wait a minute,” says Katie. “I made a kind of an engagement with a dressmaker for today.”

Well, as I say, to make a short story out of it, it seems like she’d made engagements with the dressmaker every day, but they wasn’t no dresses ever come home.

In about a week Trumbull come back from Washington and the first thing he done was look us up and we had him in to dinner and I don’t remember how the conversation started, but all of a sudden we was on the subject of his driver, Ritchey.

“A great boy,” says Trumbull, “and a boy you can trust. If I didn’t like him for nothing else, I’d like him for how he treats his family.”

“What family?” says Kate.

“Why,” says Trumbull, “his own family: his wife and two kids.”

“My heavens!” says Katie, and kind of fell in a swoon.

So it seems like we didn’t want to live there no more and we moved back to the Baldwin, having sublet the place on the Drive for three thousand a year.

So from then on, we was paying a thousand per annum for an apartment we didn’t live in two weeks. But as I told the gals, we was getting pretty near as much for our money as the people that rented New York apartments and lived in them, too.

III

Lady Perkins

Along the first week in May they was a couple hot days, and Katie can’t stand the heat. Or the cold, or the medium. Anyway, when it’s hot she always says: “I’m simply stifling.” And when it’s cold: “I’m simply frozen.” And when it ain’t neither one: “I wished the weather would do one thing another.” I don’t s’pose she knows what she’s saying when she says any one of them things, but she’s one of these here gals that can’t bear to see a conversation die out and thinks it’s her place to come through with a wise crack whenever they’s a vacuum.

So during this hot spell we was having dinner with a bird named Gene Buck that knowed New York like a book, only he hadn’t never read a book, and Katie made the remark that she was simply stifling.

“If you think this is hot,” says our friend, “just wait till the summer comes. The Old Town certainly steams up in the Old Summer Time.”

So Kate asked him how people could stand it.

“They don’t,” he says. “All the ones that’s got a piece of change ducks out somewheres where they can get the air.”

“Where do they go?” Katie asked him.

“Well,” he says, “the most of my pals goes to Newport or Maine or up in the Adirondacks. But of course them places is out of most people’s reach. If I was you folks I’d go over on Long Island somewheres and either take a cottage or live in one of them good hotels.”

“Where, for instance?” says my Mrs.

“Well,” he said, “some people takes cottages, but the rents is something fierce, and besides, the desirable ones is probably all eat up by this time. But they’s plenty good hotels where you get good service and swell meals and meet good people; they won’t take in no riffraff. And they give you a pretty fair rate if they know you’re going to make a stay.”

So Ella asked him if they was any special one he could recommend.

“Let’s think a minute,” he says.

“Let’s not strain ourself,” I said.

“Don’t get cute!” said the Mrs. “We want to get some real information and Mr. Buck can give it to us.”

“How much would you be willing to pay?” said Buck.

It was Ella’s turn to make a wise crack.

“Not no more than we have to,” she says.

“I and my sister has got about eight thousand dollars per annum between us,” said Katie, “though a thousand of it has got to go this year to a man that cheated us up on Riverside Drive.

“It was about a lease. But papa left us pretty well off; over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Don’t be so secret with Mr. Buck,” I says. “We’ve knew him pretty near a week now. Tell him about them four-dollar stockings you bought over on Fifth Avenue and the first time you put them on they got as many runs as George Sisler.”

“Well,” said Buck, “I don’t think you’d have no trouble getting comfortable rooms in a good hotel on seven thousand dollars. If I was you I’d try the Hotel Decker. It’s owned by a man named Decker.”

“Why don’t he call it the Griffith?” I says.

“It’s located at Tracy Estates,” says Buck. “That’s one of the garden spots of Long Island. It’s a great big place, right up to the minute, and they give you everything the best. And they’s three good golf courses within a mile of the hotel.”

The gals told him they didn’t play no golf.

“You don’t know what you’ve missed,” he says.

“Well,” I said, “I played a game once myself and missed a whole lot.”

“Do they have dances?” asked Kate.

“Plenty of them,” says Buck, “and the guests is the nicest people you’d want to meet. Besides all that, the meals is included in the rates, and they certainly set a nasty table.”

“I think it sounds grand,” said the Mrs. “How do you get there?”

“Go over to the Pennsylvania Station,” says Buck, “and take the Long Island Railroad to Jamaica. Then you change to the Haverton branch. It don’t only take a half hour altogether.”

“Let’s go over tomorrow morning and see can we get rooms,” said Katie.

So Ella asked how that suited me.

“Go just as early as you want to,” I says. “I got a date to run down to the Aquarium and see the rest of the fish.”

“You won’t make no mistake stopping at the Decker,” says Buck.

So the gals thanked him and I paid the check so as he would have more to spend when he joined his pals up to Newport.

Well, when Ella and Kate come back the next afternoon, I could see without them telling me that it was all settled. They was both grinning like they always do when they’ve pulled something nutty.

“It’s a good thing we met Mr. Buck,” said the Mrs., “or we mightn’t never of heard of this place. It’s simply wonderful. A double room with a bath for you and I and a room with a bath for Katie. The meals is throwed in, and we can have it all summer.”

“How much?” I asked her.

“Two hundred a week,” she said. “But you must remember that’s for all three of us and we get our meals free.”

“And I s’pose they also furnish knobs for the bedroom doors,” says I.

“We was awful lucky,” said the wife. “These was the last two rooms they had, and they wouldn’t of had those only the lady that had engaged them canceled her reservation.”

“I wished I’d met her when I was single,” I says.

“So do I,” says Ella.

“But listen,” I said. “Do you know what two hundred a week amounts to? It amounts to over ten thousand a year, and our income is seven thousand.”

“Yes,” says Katie, “but we aren’t only going to be there twenty weeks, and that’s only four thousand.”

“Yes,” I said, “and that leaves us three thousand for the other thirty-two weeks, to pay for board and room and clothes and show tickets and a permanent wave every other day.”

“You forget,” said Kate, “that we still got our principal, which we can spend some of it and not miss it.”

“And you also forget,” said the Mrs., “that the money belongs to Sis and I, not you.”

“I’ve got a sweet chance of forgetting that,” I said. “It’s hammered into me three times a day. I hear about it pretty near as often as I hear that one of you’s lost their new silk bag.”

“Well, anyway,” says Ella, “it’s all fixed up and we move out there early tomorrow morning, so you’ll have to do your packing tonight.”

I’m not liable to celebrate the anniversary of the next day’s trip. Besides the trunks, the gals had a suitcase and a grip apiece and I had a suitcase. So that give me five pieces of baggage to wrestle, because of course the gals had to carry their parasol in one hand and their wrist watch in the other. A redcap helped load us on over to the station, but oh you change at Jamaica! And when we got to Tracy Estates we seen that the hotel wasn’t only a couple of blocks away, so the ladies said we might as well walk and save taxi fare.

I don’t know how I covered them two blocks, but I do know that when I reeled into the Decker my hands and arms was paralyzed and Ella had to do the registering.

Was you ever out there? Well, I s’pose it’s what you might call a family hotel, and a good many of the guests belongs to the cay-nine family. A few of the couples that can’t afford dogs has got children, and you’re always tripping over one or the other. They’s a dining room for the grownups and another for the kids, wile the dogs and their nurses eats in the grillroom à la carte. One part of the joint is bachelor quarters. It’s located right next to the dogs’ dormitories, and they’s a good deal of rivalry between the dogs and the souses to see who can make the most noise nights. They’s also a ballroom and a couple card rooms and a kind of a summer parlor where the folks sets round in the evening and listen to a three-piece orchestra that don’t know they’s been any music wrote since Poets and Peasants. The men get up about eight o’clock and go down to New York to Business. They don’t never go to work. About nine the women begins limping downstairs and either goes to call on their dogs or take them for a walk in the front yard. This is a great big yard with a whole lot of benches strewed round it, but you can’t set on them in the daytime because the women or the nurses uses them for a place to read to the dogs or kids, and in the evenings you would have to share them with the waitresses, which you have already had enough of them during the day.

When the women has prepared themselves for the long day’s grind with a four-course breakfast, they set round on the front porch and discuss the big questions of the hour, like for instance the last trunk murder or whether an Airedale is more loving than a Golden Bantam. Once in a wile one of them cracks that it looks like they was bound to be a panic pretty soon and a big drop in prices, and so forth. This shows they’re broad-minded and are giving a good deal of thought to up-to-date topics. Every so often one of them’ll say: “The present situation can’t keep up.” The hell it can’t!

By one o’clock their appetites is whetted so keen from brain exercise that they make a bum out of a plate of soup and an order of Long Island duckling, which they figure is caught fresh every day, and they wind up with salad and apple pie à la mode and a stein of coffee. Then they totter up to their rooms to sleep it off before Dear gets home from Business.

Saturday nights everybody puts on their evening clothes like something was going to happen. But it don’t. Sunday mornings the husbands and bachelors gets up earlier than usual to go to their real business, which is golf. The womenfolks are in full possession of the hotel till Sunday night supper and wives and husbands don’t see one another all day long, but it don’t seem as long as if they did. Most of them’s approaching their golden-wedding jubilee and haven’t nothing more to say to each other that you could call a novelty. The husband may make the remark, Sunday night, that he would of broke one hundred and twenty in the afternoon round if the caddy hadn’t of handed him a spoon when he asked for a nut pick, and the wife’ll probably reply that she’s got to go in Town some day soon and see a chiropodist. The rest of the Sabbath evening is spent in bridge or listening to the latest song hit from The Bohemian Girl.

The hotel’s got all the modern conveniences like artificial light and a stopper in the bathtubs. They even got a barber and a valet, but you can’t get a shave wile he’s pressing your clothes, so it’s pretty near impossible for a man to look their best at the same time.

Well, the second day we was there I bought me a deck of cards and got so good at solitary that pretty soon I could play fifty games between breakfast and lunch and a hundred from then till suppertime. During the first week Ella and Kate got on friendly terms with over a half dozen people⁠—the head waiter, our waitress, some of the clerks and the manager and the two telephone gals. It wasn’t from lack of trying that they didn’t meet even more people. Every day one or the other of them would try and swap a little small talk with one of the other squatters, but it generally always wound up as a short monologue.

Ella said to me one day, she says: “I don’t know if we can stick it out here or not. Every hotel I was ever at before, it was easy enough to make a lot of friends, but you could stick a bottle of cream alongside one of these people and it’d stay sweet a week. Unless they looked at it. I’m sick of talking to you and Sis and the hired help, and Kate’s so lonesome that she cries herself to sleep nights.”

Well, if I’d of only had sense enough to insist on staying we’d of probably packed up and took the next train to Town. But instead of that I said: “What’s to prevent us from going back to New York?”

“Don’t be silly!” says the Mrs. “We come out here to spend the summer and here is where we’re going to spend the summer.”

“All right,” I says, “and by September I’ll be all set to write a book on one-handed card games.”

“You’d think,” says Ella, “that some of these women was titled royalties the way they snap at you when you try and be friends with them. But they’s only one in the bunch that’s got any handle to her name; that’s Lady Perkins.”

I asked her which one was that.

“You know,” says Ella. “I pointed her out to you in the dining room. She’s a nice-looking woman, about thirty-five, that sets near our table and walks with a cane.”

“If she eats like some of the rest of them,” I says, “she’s lucky they don’t have to w’eel her.”

“She’s English,” says Ella. “They just come over and her husband’s in Texas on some business and left her here. She’s the one that’s got that dog.”

“That dog!” I said. “You might just as well tell me she’s the one that don’t play the mouth organ. They’ve all got a dog.”

“She’s got two,” said the wife. “But the one I meant is that big German police dog that I’m scared to death of him. Haven’t you saw her out walking with him and the little chow?”

“Yes,” I said, “if that’s what it is. I always wondered what the boys in the Army was talking about when they said they eat chow.”

“They probably meant chowchow,” says the Mrs. “They wouldn’t of had these kind of chows, because in the first place, who would eat a dog, and besides these kind costs too much.”

“Well,” I says, “I’m not interested in the price of chows, but if you want to get acquainted with Lady Perkins, why I can probably fix it for you.”

“Yes, you’ll fix it!” said Ella. “I’m begining to think that if we’d of put you in storage for the summer the folks round here wouldn’t shy away from us like we was leopards that had broke out of a pesthouse. I wished you would try and dress up once in a wile and not always look like you was just going to do the chores. Then maybe I and Sis might get somewheres.”

Well, of course when I told her I could probably fix it up with Lady Perkins, I didn’t mean nothing. But it wasn’t only the next morning when I started making good. I was up and dressed and downstairs about half past eight, and as the gals wasn’t ready for their breakfast yet I went out on the porch and set down. They wasn’t nobody else there, but pretty soon I seen Lady Perkins come up the path with her two whelps. When she got to the porch steps their nurse popped out of the servants’ quarters and took them round to the grillroom for their breakfast. I s’pose the big one ordered sauerkraut and kalter Aufschnitt, wile the chow had tea and eggs fo yung. Anyway, the Perkins dame come up on the porch and flopped into the chair next to mine.

In a few minutes Ed Wurz, the manager of the hotel, showed, with a bag of golf instruments and a trick suit. He spotted me and asked me if I didn’t want to go along with him and play.

“No,” I said. “I only played once in my life.”

“That don’t make no difference,” he says. “I’m a bum myself. I just play shinny, you might say.”

“Well,” I says, “I can’t anyway, on account of my dogs. They been giving me a lot of trouble.”

Of course I was referring to my feet, but he hadn’t no sooner than went on his way when Lady Perkins swung round on me and says: “I didn’t know you had dogs. Where do you keep them?”

At first I was going to tell her “In my shoes,” but I thought I might as well enjoy myself, so I said: “They’re in the dog hospital over to Haverton.”

“What ails them?” she asked me.

Well, I didn’t know nothing about cay-nine diseases outside of hydrophobia, which don’t come till August, so I had to make one up.

“They got blanny,” I told her.

“Blanny!” she says. “I never heard of it before.”

“No,” I said. “It hasn’t only been discovered in this country just this year. It got carried up here from Peru some way another.”

“Oh, it’s contagious, then!” says Lady Perkins.

“Worse than measles or lockjaw,” says I. “You take a dog that’s been in the same house with a dog that’s got blanny, and it’s a miracle if they don’t all get it.”

She asked me if I’d had my dogs in the hotel.

“Only one day,” I says, “the first day we come, about a week ago. As soon as I seen what was the matter with them, I took them over to Haverton in a sanitary truck.”

“Was they mingling with the other dogs here?” she says.

“Just that one day,” I said.

“Heavens!” said Lady Perkins. “And what’s the symptoms?”

“Well,” I said, “first you’ll notice that they keep their tongue stuck out a lot and they’re hungry a good deal of the time, and finally they show up with a rash.”

“Then what happens?” she says.

“Well,” said I, “unless they get the best of treatment, they kind of dismember.”

Then she asked me how long it took for the symptoms to show after a dog had been exposed. I told her any time between a week and four months.

“My dogs has been awful hungry lately,” she says, “and they most always keeps their tongue stuck out. But they haven’t no rash.”

“You’re all right, then,” I says. “If you give them treatments before the rash shows up, they’s no danger.”

“What’s the treatment?” she asked me.

“You rub the back of their neck with some kind of dope,” I told her. “I forget what it is, but if you say the word, I can get you a bottle of it when I go over to the hospital this afternoon.”

“I’d be ever so much obliged,” she says, “and I hope you’ll find your dear ones a whole lot better.”

“Dear ones is right,” I said. “They cost a pile of jack, and the bird I bought them off of told me I should ought to get them insured, but I didn’t. So if anything happens to them now, I’m just that much out.”

Next she asked me what kind of dogs they was.

“Well,” I said, “you might maybe never of heard of them, as they don’t breed them nowheres only way down in Dakota. They call them yaphounds⁠—I don’t know why; maybe on account of the noise they make. But they’re certainly a grand-looking dog and they bring a big price.”

She set there a wile longer and then got up and went inside, probably to the nursery to look for signs of rash.

Of course I didn’t tell the Mrs. and Kate nothing about this incidence. They wouldn’t of believed it if I had of, and besides, it would be a knockout if things broke right and Lady Perkins come up and spoke to me wile they was present, which is just what happened.

During the afternoon I strolled over to the drug store and got me an empty pint bottle. I took it up in the room and filled it with water and shaving soap. Then I laid low till evening, so as Perk would think I had went to Haverton.

I and Ella and Kate breezed in the dining room kind of late and we hadn’t no more than ordered when I seen the Lady get up and start out. She had to pass right past us, and when I looked at her and smiled she stopped.

“Well,” she said, “how’s your dogs?”

I got up from the table.

“A whole lot better, thank you,” says I, and then I done the honors. “Lady Perkins,” I said, “meet the wife and sister-in-law.”

The two gals staggered from their chairs, both pop-eyed. Lady Perkins bowed to them and told them to set down. If she hadn’t the floor would of bounced up and hit them in the chin.

“I got a bottle for you,” I said. “I left it upstairs and I’ll fetch it down after supper.”

“I’ll be in the red card room,” says Perk, and away she went.

I wished you could of see the two gals. They couldn’t talk for a minute, for the first time in their life. They just set there with their mouth open like a baby blackbird. Then they both broke out with a rash of questions that come so fast I couldn’t understand none of them, but the general idear was, What the hell!

“They’s no mystery about it,” I said. “Lady Perkins was setting out on the porch this morning and you two was late getting down to breakfast, so I took a walk, and when I come back she noticed that I kind of limped and asked me what ailed my feet. I told her they always swoll up in warm weather and she said she was troubled the same way and did I know any medicine that shrank them. So I told her I had a preparation and would bring her a bottle of it.”

“But,” says Kate, “I can’t understand a woman like she speaking to a man she don’t know.”

“She’s been eying me all week,” I said. “I guess she didn’t have the nerve to break the ice up to this morning; then she got desperate.”

“She must of,” said Ella.

“I wished,” said Kate, “that when you introduce me to people you’d give them my name.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I couldn’t recall it for a minute, though your face is familiar.”

“But listen,” says the wife. “What ails your dogs is a corn. You haven’t got no swelled feet and you haven’t got no medicine for them.”

“Well,” I says, “what I give her won’t hurt her. It’s just a bottle of soap and water that I mixed up, and pretty near everybody uses that once in a wile without no bad after effects.”

Now, the whole three of us had been eating pretty good ever since we’d came to the Decker. After living à la carte at Big Town prices for six months, the American plan was sweet patootie. But this night the gals not only skrimped themselves but they was in such a hurry for me to get through that my molars didn’t hardly have time to identify what all was scampering past them. Ella finally got so nervous that I had to take off the feed bag without dipping my bill into the stewed rhubarb.

“Lady Perkins will get tired waiting for you,” she says. “And besides, she won’t want us horning in there and interrupting them after their game’s started.”

“Us!” said I. “How many do you think it’s going to take to carry this bottle?”

“You don’t mean to say we can’t go with you!” said Kate.

“You certainly can’t,” I says. “I and the nobility won’t have our little romance knocked for a gool by a couple of country gals that can’t get on speaking terms with nobody but the chambermaid.”

“But they’ll be other people there,” says Kate. “She can’t play cards alone.”

“Who told you she was going to play cards?” I says. “She picked the red card room because we ain’t liable to be interrupted there. As for playing cards alone, what else have I done all week? But when I get there she won’t have to play solitary. It’ll be two-handed hearts; where if you was to crowd in, it couldn’t be nothing but rummy.”

Well, they finally dragged me from the table, and the gals took a seat in the lobby wile I went upstairs after the medicine. But I hadn’t no sooner than got a hold of the bottle when Ella come in the room.

“Listen,” she says. “They’s a catch in this somewheres. You needn’t to try and tell me that a woman like Lady Perkins is trying to start a flirtation with a yahoo. Let’s hear what really come off.”

“I already told you,” I said. “The woman’s nuts over me and you should ought to be the last one to find fault with her judgment.”

Ella didn’t speak for a wile. Then she says: “Well, if you’re going to forget your marriage vows and flirt with an old hag like she, I guess two can play at that little game. They’s several men round this hotel that I like their looks and all as they need is a little encouragement.”

“More than a little, I guess,” says I, “or else they’d of already been satisfied with what you and Kate has give them. They can’t neither one of you pretend that you been fighting on the defense all week, and the reason you haven’t copped nobody is because this place is a hotel, not a home for the blind.”

I wrapped a piece of newspaper round the bottle and started for the door. But all of a sudden I heard snuffles and stopped.

“Look here,” I said. “I been kidding you. They’s no need for you to get sore and turn on the tear ducks. I’ll tell you how this thing happened if you think you can see a joke.”

So I give her the truth, and afterwards I says: “They’ll be plenty of time for you and Kate to get acquainted with the dame, but I don’t want you tagging in there with me tonight. She’d think we was too cordial. Tomorrow morning, if you can manage to get up, we’ll all three of us go out on the porch and lay for her when she brings the whelps back from their hike. She’s sure to stop and inquire about my kennel. And don’t forget, wile she’s talking, that we got a couple of yaphounds that’s suffering from blanny, and if she asks any questions let me do the answering, as I can think a lot quicker. You better tell Kate the secret, too, before she messes everything up, according to custom.”

Then I and the Mrs. come downstairs and her and Katie went out to listen to the music wile I beat it to the red card room. I give Perkie the bottle of rash poison and she thanked me and said she would have the dogs’ governess slap some of it onto them in the morning. She was playing bridge w’ist with another gal and two dudes. To look at their faces they wasn’t playing for just pins. I had sense enough to not talk, but I stood there watching them a few minutes. Between hands Perk introduced me to the rest of the party. She had to ask my name first. The other skirt at the table was a Mrs. Snell and one of the dudes was a Doctor Platt. I didn’t get the name of Lady Perkins’ partner.

“Mr. Finch,” says Perk, “is also a dog fancier. But his dogs is sick with a disease called blanny and he’s got them over to the dog hospital at Haverton.”

“What kind of dogs?” asked Platt.

“I never heard of the breed before,” says Perk. “They’re yaphounds.”

“They raise them in South Dakota,” I says.

Platt gives me a funny look and said: “I been in South Dakota several times and I never heard of a yaphound neither; or I never heard of a disease named blanny.”

“I s’pose not,” says I. “You ain’t the only old-fashioned doctor that left themself go to seed when they got out of school. I bet you won’t admit they’s such a thing as appendicitis.”

Well, this got a laugh from Lady Perkins and the other dude, but it didn’t go very big with Doc or Mrs. Snell. Wile Doc was trying to figure out a comeback I said I must go and look after my womenfolks. So I told the party I was glad to of met them and walked out.

I found Ella and Katie in the summer parlor, and they wasn’t alone. A nice-looking young fella named Codd was setting alongside of them, and after we was introduced Ella leaned over and w’ispered to me that he was Bob Codd, the famous aviator. It come out that he had invented some new kind of an aeroplane and had came to demonstrate it to the Williams Company. The company⁠—Palmer Williams and his brother, you know⁠—they’ve got their flying field a couple miles from the hotel. Well, a guy with nerve enough to go up in one of them things certainly ain’t going to hesitate about speaking to a strange gal when he likes their looks. So this Codd baby had give himself an introduction to my Mrs. and Kate, and I guess they hadn’t sprained an ankle running away from him.

Of course Ella wanted to know how I’d came out with Lady Perkins. I told her that we hadn’t had much chance to talk because she was in a bridge game with three other people, but I’d met them and they’d all seemed to fall for me strong. Ella wanted to know who they was and I told her their names, all but the one I didn’t get. She squealed when I mentioned Mrs. Snell.

“Did you hear that, Sis?” she says to Kate. “Tom’s met Mrs. Snell. That’s the woman, you know, that wears them funny clothes and has the two dogs.”

“You’re describing every woman in the hotel,” I said.

“But this is the Mrs. Snell,” said the wife. “Her husband’s the sugar man and she’s the daughter of George Henkel, the banker. They say she’s a wonderful bridge player and don’t never play only for great big stakes. I’m wild to meet her.”

“Yes,” I said, “if they’s one person you should ought to meet, it’s a wonderful bridge player that plays for great big stakes, especially when our expenses is making a bum out of our income and you don’t know a grand slam from no dice.”

“I don’t expect to gamble with her,” says Ella. “But she’s just the kind of people we want to know.”

Well, the four of us set there and talked about this and that, and Codd said he hadn’t had time to get his machine put together yet, but when he had her fixed and tested her a few times he would take me up for a ride.

“You got the wrong number,” I says. “I don’t feel flighty.”

“Oh, I’d just love it!” said Kate.

“Well,” says Codd, “you ain’t barred. But I don’t want to have no passengers along till I’m sure she’s working OK.”

When I and Ella was upstairs she said that Codd had told them he expected to sell his invention to the Williamses for a cold million. And he had took a big fancy to Kate.

“Well,” I said, “they say that the reckless aviators makes the best ones, so if him and Kate gets married he’ll be better than ever. He won’t give a damn after that.”

“You’re always saying something nasty about Sis,” said the Mrs.; “but I know you just talk to hear yourself talk. If I thought you meant it I’d walk out on you.”

“I’d hate to lose you,” I says, “but if you took her along I wouldn’t write it down as a total loss.”

The following morning I and the two gals was down on the porch bright and early and in a few minutes, sure enough, along came Lady Perkins, bringing the menagerie back from the parade. She turned them over to the nurse and joined us. She said that Martha, the nurse, had used the rash poison and it had made a kind of a lather on the dogs’ necks and she didn’t know whether to wash it off or not, but it had dried up in the sun. She asked me how many times a day the dope should ought to be put on, and I told her before every meal and at bedtime.

“But,” I says, “it’s best to not take the dogs right out in the sun where the lather’ll dry. The blanny germ can’t live in that kind of lather, so the longer it stays moist, why, so much the better.”

Then she asked me was I going to Haverton to see my pets that day and I said yes, and she said she hoped I’d find them much improved. Then Ella cut in and said she understood that Lady Perkins was very fond of bridge.

“Yes, I am,” says Perk. “Do you people play?”

“No, we don’t,” says Ella, “but we’d like to learn.”

“It takes a long wile to learn to play good,” said Perk. “But I do wished they was another real player in the hotel so as we wouldn’t have to take Doctor Platt in. He knows the game, but he don’t know enough to keep still. I don’t mind people talking wile the cards is being dealt, but once the hands is picked up they ought to be absolute silence. Last night I lost about three hundred and seventy dollars just because he talked at the wrong time.”

“Three hundred and seventy dollars!” said Kate. “My, you must play for big stakes!”

“Yes, we do,” says Lady Perkins; “and when a person is playing for sums like that it ain’t no time to trifle, especially when you’re playing against an expert like Mrs. Snell.”

“The game must be awfully exciting,” said Ella. “I wished we could watch it sometime.”

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt nothing,” says Perkie; “not if you kept still. Maybe you’d bring me luck.”

“Was you going to play tonight?” asked Kate.

“No,” says the Lady. “They’s going to be a little dance here tonight and Mr. Snell’s dance mad, so he insists on borrowing his wife for the occasion. Doctor Platt likes to dance too.”

“We’re all wild about it,” says Kate. “Is this an invitation affair?”

“Oh, no,” says Perk. “It’s for the guests of the hotel.”

Then she said goodbye to us and went in the dining room. The rest of our conversation all day was about the dance and what should we wear, and how nice and democratic Lady Perkins was, and to hear her talk you wouldn’t never know she had a title. I s’pose the gals thought she ought to stop every three or four steps and declare herself.

I made the announcement about noon that I wasn’t going to partake in the grand ball. My corn was the alibi. But they wasn’t no way to escape from dressing up and escorting the two gals into the grand ballroom and then setting there with them.

The dance was a knockout. Outside of Ella and Kate and the aviator and myself, they was three couple. The Snells was there and so was Doctor Platt. He had a gal with him that looked like she might be his mother with his kid sister’s clothes on. Then they was a pair of young shimmy shakers that ought to of been give their bottle and tucked in the hay at six p.m. A corn wouldn’t of bothered them the way they danced; their feet wasn’t involved in the transaction.

I and the Mrs. and Kate was the only ones there in evening clothes. The others had attended these functions before and knew that they wouldn’t be enough suckers on hand to make any difference whether you wore a monkey suit or rompers. Besides, it wasn’t Saturday night.

The music was furnished by the three-piece orchestra that usually done their murder in the summer parlor.

Ella was expecting me to introduce her and Kate to the Snell gal, but her and her husband was so keen for dancing that they called it off in the middle of the second innings and beat it upstairs. Then Ella said she wouldn’t mind meeting Platt, but when he come past us and I spoke to him he give me a look like you would expect from a flounder that’s been wronged.

So poor Codd danced one with Kate and one with Ella, and so on, and so on, till finally it got pretty late, a quarter to ten, and our party was the only merrymakers left in the joint. The orchestra looked over at us to see if we could stand some more punishment. The Mrs. told me to go and ask them to play a couple more dances before they quit. They done what I asked them, but maybe I got my orders mixed up.

The next morning I asked Wurz, the manager, how often the hotel give them dances.

“Oh,” he says, “once or twice a month.”

I told him I didn’t see how they could afford it.

Kate went out after supper this next evening to take an automobile ride with Codd. So when I and Ella had set in the summer parlor a little wile, she proposed that we should go in and watch the bridge game. Well, I wasn’t keen for it, but when you tell wife you don’t want to do something she always says, “Why not?” and even if you’ve got a reason she’ll make a monkey out of it. So we rapped at the door of the red card room and Lady Perkins said, “Come in,” and in we went.

The two dudes and Mrs. Snell was playing with her again, but Perk was the only one that spoke.

“Set down,” she said, “and let’s see if you can bring me some luck.”

So we drawed up a couple of chairs and set a little ways behind her. Her and the anonymous dude was partners against Doc and Mrs. Snell, and they didn’t change all evening. I haven’t played only a few games of bridge, but I know a little about it, and I never see such hands as Perkie held. It was a misdeal when she didn’t have the ace, king and four or five others of one suit and a few picture cards and aces on the side. When she couldn’t get the bid herself she doubled the other pair and made a sucker out of them. I don’t know what they was playing a point, but when they broke up Lady Perkins and her dude was something like seven hundred berries to the good.

I and Ella went to bed wile they was settling up, but we seen her on the porch in the morning. She smiled at us and says: “You two are certainly grand mascots! I hope you can come in and set behind me again tonight. I ain’t even yet, but one more run of luck like last night’s and I’ll be a winner. Then,” she says, “I s’pose I’ll have to give my mascots some kind of a treat.”

Ella was tickled to death and couldn’t hardly wait to slip Sis the good news. Kate had been out late and overslept herself and we was half through breakfast when she showed up. The Mrs. told her about the big game and how it looked like we was in strong with the nobility, and Kate said she had some good news of her own; that Codd had as good as told her he was stuck on her.

“And he’s going to sell his invention for a million,” says Ella. “So I guess we wasn’t as crazy coming out to this place as some people thought we was.”

“Wait till the machine’s made good,” I said.

“It has already,” says Kate. “He was up in it yesterday and everything worked perfect and he says the Williamses was wild over it. And what do you think’s going to come off tomorrow morning? He’s going to take me up with him.”

“Oh, no, Sis!” said Ella. “S’pose something should happen!”

“No hope,” says I.

“But even if something should happen,” said Katie, “what would I care as long as it happened to Bob and I together!”

I told the waitress to bring me another order of fried mush.

“Tonight,” said Kate, “Bob’s going in Town to a theater party with some boys he went to college with. So I can help you bring Lady Perkins good luck.”

Something told me to crab this proposition and I tried, but it was passed over my veto. So the best I could do was to remind Sis, just before we went in the gambling den, to keep her mouth shut wile the play was going on.

Perk give us a smile of welcome and her partner smiled too.

For an hour the game went along about even. Kate acted like she was bored, and she didn’t have nothing to say after she’d told them, wile somebody was dealing, that she was going to have an aeroplane ride in the morning. Finally our side begin to lose, and lose by big scores. They was one time when they was about sixteen hundred points to the bad. Lady Perkins didn’t seem to be enjoying herself and when Ella addressed a couple of remarks to her the cat had her tongue.

But the luck switched round again and Lady Perk had all but caught up when the blow-off come.

It was the rubber game, with the score nothing and nothing. The Doc dealt the cards. I was setting where I could see his hand and Perk’s both. Platt had the king, jack and ten and five other hearts. Lady Perkins held the ace and queen of hearts, the other three aces and everything else in the deck.

The Doc bid two hearts. The other dude and Mrs. Snell passed.

“Two without,” says Lady Perkins.

“Three hearts,” says Platt.

The other two passed again and Perk says: “Three without.”

Katie had came strolling up and was pretty near behind Perk’s chair.

“Well,” says Platt, “it looks like⁠—”

But we didn’t find out what it looked like, as just then Katie says: “Heavens! Four aces! Don’t you wished you was playing penny ante?”

It didn’t take Lady Perkins no time at all to forget her title.

“You fool!” she screams, w’eeling round on Kate. “Get out of here, and get out of here quick, and don’t never come near me again! I hope your aeroplane falls a million feet. You little fool!”

I don’t know how the hand come out. We wasn’t there to see it played.

Lady Perkins got part of her hope. The aeroplane fell all right, but only a couple of miles instead of a million feet. They say that they was a defect or something in poor Codd’s engine. Anyway, he done an involuntary nose dive. Him and his invention was spilled all over Long Island. But Katie had been awake all night with the hysterics and Ella hadn’t managed to get her to sleep till nine a.m. So when Codd had called for her Ella’d told him that Sis would go some other day. Can you beat it?

Wile I and Ella was getting ready for supper I made the remark that I s’posed we’d live in a vale of tears for the next few days.

“No,” said Ella. “Sis is taking it pretty calm. She’s sensible. She says if that could of happened, why the invention couldn’t of been no good after all. And the Williamses probably wouldn’t of give him a plugged dime for it.”

Lady Perkins didn’t only speak to me once afterwards. I seen her setting on the porch one day, reading a book. I went up to her and said: “Hello.” They wasn’t no answer, so I thought I’d appeal to her sympathies.

“Maybe you’re still interested in my dogs,” I said. “They was too far gone and the veter’nary had to order them shot.”

“That’s good,” said Perk, and went on reading.

IV

Only One

About a week after this, the Mrs. made the remark that the Decker wasn’t big enough to hold both she and Perkins.

“She treats us like garbage,” says the Mrs., “and if I stay here much longer I’ll forget myself and do her nose in a braid.”

But Perk left first and saved us the trouble. Her husband was down in Texas looking after some oil gag and he wired her a telegram one day to come and join him as it looked like he would have to stay there all summer. If I’d of been him I’d of figured that Texas was a sweet enough summer resort without adding your wife to it.

We was out on the porch when her ladyship and two dogs shoved off.

“Three of a kind,” said the Mrs.

And she stuck her tongue out at Perk and felt like that made it all even. A woman won’t stop at nothing to revenge insults. I’ve saw them stagger home in a new pair of 3 double A shoes because some fresh clerk told them the 7 Ds they tried on was too small. So anyway we decided to stay on at the Decker and the two gals prettied themselves up every night for dinner in the hopes that somebody besides the headwaiter would look at them twice, but we attracted about as much attention as a dirty finger nail in the third grade.

That is, up till Herbert Daley come on the scene.

Him and Katie spotted each other at the same time. It was the night he come to the Decker. We was pretty near through dinner when the headwaiter showed him to a table a little ways from us. The majority of the guests out there belongs to the silly sex and a new man is always a riot, even with the married ones. But Daley would of knocked them dead anywheres. He looked like he was born and raised in Shubert’s chorus and the minute he danced in all the women folks forgot the feed bag and feasted their eyes on him. As for Daley, after he’d glanced at the bill of fare, he let his peepers roll over towards our table and then they quit rolling. A cold stare from Kate might have scared him off, but if they was ever a gal with “Welcome” embroidered on her pan, she’s it.

It was all I could do to tear Ella and Sis from the dining room, though they was usually in a hurry to romp out to the summer parlor and enjoy a few snubs. I’d just as soon of set one place as another, only for the waitress, who couldn’t quit till we did and she generally always had a date with the big ski jumper the hotel hires to destroy trunks.

Well, we went out and listened a wile to the orchestra, which had brought a lot of new jazz from the Prince of Pilsen, and we waited for the new dude to show up, but he didn’t, and finally I went in to the desk to buy a couple of cigars and there he was, talking to Wurz, the manager. Wurz introduced us and after we’d shook hands Daley excused himself and said he was going upstairs to write a letter. Then Wurz told me he was Daley the horseman.

“He’s just came up from the South,” says Wurz. “He’s going to be with us till the meetings is over at Jamaica and Belmont. He’s got a whale of a stable and he expects to clean up round New York with Only One, which he claims can beat any horse in the world outside of Man o’ War. They’s some other good ones in the bunch, too, and he says he’ll tell me when he’s going to bet on them. I don’t only bet once in a long wile and then never more than $25 at a crack, but I’ll take this baby’s tips as often as he comes through with them. I guess a man won’t make no mistake following a bird that bets five and ten thousand at a clip, though of course it don’t mean much to him if he win or lose. He’s dirty with it.”

I asked Wurz if Daley was married and he said no.

“And listen,” he says: “It looks like your little sister-in-law had hit him for a couple of bases. He described where she was setting in the dining room and asked who she was.”

“Yes,” I said, “I noticed he was admiring somebody at our table, but I thought maybe it was me.”

“He didn’t mention you,” says Wurz, “only to make sure you wasn’t Miss Kate’s husband.”

“If he was smart he’d know that without asking,” I said. “If she was my wife I’d be wearing weeds.”

I went back to the gals and told them I’d met the guy. They was all steamed up.

“Who is he?” says Kate.

“His name is Herbert Daley,” I told her. “He’s got a stable over to Jamaica.”

“A stable!” says Ella, dropping her jaw. “A man couldn’t dress like he and run a livery.”

So I had to explain that he didn’t run no livery, but owned a string of race horses.

“How thrilling!” says Katie. “I love races! I went to the Grand Circuit once, the time I was in Columbus.”

“These is different,” I says. “These is thurlbreds.”

“So was they thurlbreds!” she says. “You always think a thing can’t be no good if you wasn’t there.”

I let her win that one.

“We must find out when the race is and go,” said the Mrs.

“They’s six of them every day,” I said, “but it costs about five smackers apiece to get in, to say nothing about what you lose betting.”

“Betting!” says Katie. “I just love to bet and I never lose. Don’t you remember the bet I made with Sammy Pass on the baseball that time? I took him for a five-pound box of candy. I just felt that Cincinnati was going to win.”

“So did the White Sox,” I says. “But if you bet with the boys over to Jamaica, the only candy they’ll take you for is an all-day sucker.”

“What did Mr. Daley have to say?” asked Ella.

“He had to say he was pleased to meet me,” I told her. “He proved it by chasing upstairs to write a letter.”

“Probably to his wife,” said Kate.

“No,” I said. “Wurz tells me he ain’t got no wife. But he’s got plenty of jack, so Wurz says.”

“Well, Sis,” says the Mrs., “that’s no objection to him, is it?”

“Don’t be silly!” said Katie. “He wouldn’t look at me.”

“I guess not!” I says. “He was so busy doing it in the dining room, that half his soup never got past his chin. And listen: I don’t like to get you excited, but Wurz told me he asked who you was.”

“O Sis!” said the Mrs. “It looks like a Romance.”

“Wurz didn’t say nothing about a Romance,” said I. “He may be interested like the rubes who stare with their mouth open at Ringling’s ‘Strange People.’ ”

“Oh, you can’t tease Sis like that,” said Ella. “She’s as pretty as a picture tonight and nobody could blame a man from admiring her.”

“Especially when we don’t know nothing about him,” I says. “He may be a snow-eater or his upstairs rooms is unfurnished or something.”

“Well,” says Ella, “if he shows up again tonight, don’t you forget to introduce us.”

“Better not be in no hurry,” I said.

“Why not?” said Ella. “If him and Sis likes each other’s looks, why, the sooner they get acquainted, it won’t hurt nothing.”

“I don’t know,” I says. “I’ve noticed that most of the birds you chose for a brother-in-law only stayed in the family as long as they was strangers.”

“Nobody said nothing about Mr. Daley as a brother-in-law,” says Ella.

“Oh!” I said. “Then I suppose you want Katie to meet him so as she can land a hostler’s job.”

Well, in about a half hour, the gals got their wish and Daley showed up. I didn’t have to pull no strategy to land him. He headed right to where we was setting like him and I was old pals. I made the introductions and he drawed up a chair and parked. The rest of the guests stared at us goggle-eyed.

“Some hotel!” says Daley.

“We like it,” says the Mrs. “They’s so many nice people lives here.”

“We know by hearsay,” I said, but she stepped on my foot.

“It’s handy for me,” said Daley. “I have a few horses over to the Jamaica race track and it’s a whole lot easier to come here than go in Town every night.”

“Do you attend the races every day?” says Katie.

“Sure,” he says. “It’s my business. And they’s very few afternoons when one of my nags ain’t entered.”

“My! You must have a lot of them!” said Kate.

“Not many,” says Daley. “About a hundred. And I only shipped thirty.”

“Imagine!” said Kate.

“The army’s got that many,” I said.

“The army ain’t got none like mine,” says Daley. “I guess they wished they had of had. I’d of been glad to of helped them out, too, if they’d asked me.”

“That’s why I didn’t enlist,” I said. “Pershing never even suggested it.”

“Oh, I done my bit all right,” says Daley. “Two hundred thousand in Liberty Bonds is all.”

“Just like throwing it away!” I says.

“Two hundred thousand!” says Ella. “And you’ve still got money left?”

She said this in a joking way, but she kept the receiver to her ear.

“I ain’t broke yet,” says Daley, “and I don’t expect to be.”

“You don’t half know this hotel,” I says.

“The Decker does charge good prices,” said Daley, “but still and all, a person is willing to pay big for the opportunity of meeting young ladies like the present company.”

“O Mr. Daley!” said Kate. “I’m afraid you’re a flatter.”

“I bet he makes them pretty speeches to every woman he meets,” says Ella.

“I haven’t met none before who I felt like making them,” says Daley.

Wile they was still talking along these lines, the orchestra begin to drool a “Perfect Day,” so I ducked out on the porch for air. The gals worked fast wile I was gone and when I come back it was arranged that Daley was to take us to the track next afternoon in his small car.

His small car was a toy that only had enough room for the people that finds fault with Wilson. I suppose he had to leave his big car in New York on account of the Fifty-ninth Street bridge being so frail.

Before we started I asked our host if they was a chance to get anything to drink over to the track and he says no, but pretty near everybody brought something along on the hip, so I said for them to wait a minute wile I went up to the room and filled a flask. When we was all in the car, the Mrs. wanted to know if it wasn’t risky, me taking the hooch along.

“It’s against the prohibition law,” she says.

“So am I,” I said.

“They’s no danger,” says Daley. “They ain’t began to force prohibition yet. I only wished they had. It would save me a little worry about my boy.”

“Your boy!” said Katie, dropping her jaw a foot.

“Well, I call him my boy,” says Daley. “I mean little Sid Mercer, that rides for me. He’s the duke of them all when he lays off the liquor. He’s gave me his word that he won’t touch nothing as long as he’s under contract to me, and he’s kept straight so far, but I can’t help from worr’ing about him. He ought to be good, though, when I pay him $20,000 for first call, and leave him make all he can on the side. But he ain’t got much stren’th of character, you might say, and if something upsets him, he’s liable to bust things wide open.

“I remember once he was stuck on a gal down in Louisville and he was supposed to ride Great Scott for Bradley in the Derby. He was the only one that could handle Scott right, and with him up Scott would of win as far as from here to Dallas. But him and the gal had a brawl the day before the race and that night the kid got stiff. When it come time for the race he couldn’t of kept a seat on a saw horse. Bradley had to hustle round and dig up another boy and Carney was the only one left that could ride at all and him and Great Scott was strangers. So Bradley lose the race and canned Mercer.”

“Whisky’s a terrible thing,” says Ella. A woman’ll sometimes pretend for a long wile like she’s stupid and all of a sudden pull a wise crack that proves she’s a thinker.

“Well,” says Daley, “when Bradley give him the air, I took him, and he’s been all right. I guess maybe I know how to handle men.”

“Men only?” says Katie, smiling.

“Men and horses,” said Daley. “I ain’t never tried to handle the fair sex and I don’t know if I could or not. But I’ve just met one that I think could handle me.” And he give her a look that you could pour on a waffle.

Daley had a table saved for him in the clubhouse and we eat our lunch. The gals had clubhouse sandwiches, probably figuring they was caught fresh there. They was just one of Daley’s horses entered that day and he told us he wasn’t going to bet on it, as it hadn’t never showed nothing and this was just a tryout. He said, though, that they was other horses on the card that looked good and maybe he would play them after he’d been round and talked to the boys.

“Yes,” says Kate, “but the men you’ll talk to knows all about the different horses and they’ll tell you what horses to bet on and how can I win?”

“Why,” says Daley, “if I decide to make a little bet on So-and-So I’ll tell you about it and you can bet on the same horse.”

“But if I’m betting with you,” says Kate, “how can we bet on the same horse?”

“You’re betting with me, but you ain’t betting against me,” said Daley. “This ain’t a bet like you was betting with your sister on a football game or something. We place our bets with the bookmakers, that makes their living taking bets. Whatever horse we want to bet on, they take the bet.”

“They must be crazy!” says Katie. “Your friends tell you what horse is going to win and you bet on them and the bookbinders is stung.”

“My friends makes mistakes,” says Daley, “and besides, I ain’t the only guy out here that bets. Pretty near everybody at the track bets and the most of them don’t know a race horse from a corn plaster. A bookmaker that don’t finish ahead on the season’s a cuckoo. Now,” he says, “if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, I’ll go down to the paddock and see what’s new.”

So wile he was gone we had a chance to look round and they was plenty to see. It was a Saturday and a big crowd out. Lots of them was gals that you’d have to have a pick to break through to their regular face. Since they had their last divorce, about the only excitement they could enjoy was playing a long shot. Which reminds me that they’s an old saying that nobody loves a fat man, but you go out to a race track or down to Atlantic City or any place where the former wifes hangs out and if you’ll notice the birds with them, the gents that broke up their home, you’ll find out that the most of them is guys with chins that runs into five and six figures and once round their waist is a sleeper jump.

Besides the Janes and the fat rascals with them, you seen a flock of ham actors that looked like they’d spent the night in a Chinese snowstorm, and maybe a half a dozen losers’-end boxers that’d used the bridge of their nose to block with and always got up in the morning just after the clock had struck ten, thinking they’d been counted out.

Pretty near everybody wore a pair of field glasses on a strap and when the race was going on they’d look through them and tell the world that the horse they’d bet on was three len’ths in front and just as good as in, but I never heard of a bookie paying off on that dope, and personally when someone would insist on lending me a pair to look through I couldn’t tell if the things out there racing was horses or gnats.

Daley was back with us in a few minutes and says to Kate: “I guess you’ll have to bet on yourself in the first race.”

So she asked him what did he mean and he said: “I had a tip on a filly named Sweet and Pretty.”

“O Mr. Daley!” says Kate.

“They don’t expect her to win,” says Daley, “but she’s six, two and even, and I’m going to play her place and show.”

Then he explained what that was and he said he was going to bet a thousand each way and finally the gals decided to go in for $10 apiece to show. It tickled them to death to find out that they didn’t have to put up nothing. We found seats down in front wile Daley went to place the bets. Pretty soon the horses come out and Kate and Ella both screamed when they seen how cute the jockeys was dressed. Sweet and Pretty was No. 10 and had a combination of colors that would knock your eye out. Daley come back and explained that every owner had their own colors and of course the gals wanted to know what his was and he told them Navy blue and orange sleeves with black whoops on them and a blue cap.

“How beautiful!” says Ella. “I can’t hardly wait to see them!”

“You must have wonderful taste in colors!” says Kate.

“Not only in colors,” he says.

“O Mr. Daley!” she says again.

Well, the race was ran and No. 10 was a Sweet and Pretty last.

“Now,” I says, “you O Mr. Daley.”

The gals had yelped themself hoarse and didn’t have nothing to say, but I could tell from their face that it would take something more than a few pretty speeches to make up for that twenty men.

“Never mind that!” said Daley. “She got a rotten ride. We’ll get that back on the next one.”

His hunch in the next one was Sena Day and he was betting a thousand on her to place at 4 to 1. He made the gals go in for $20 apiece, though they didn’t do it with no pep. I went along with him to place the bets and he introduced me to a bookie so as I could bet a few smackers of my own when I felt like it. You know they’s a law against betting unless it’s a little bet between friends and in order to be a bookie’s friend he’s got to know your name. A quick friendship sprung up between I and a guy named Joe Meyer, and he not only give me his card but a whole deck of them. You see the law also says that when you make one of these bets with your pals he can’t give you no writing to show for it, but he’s generally always a man that makes a lot of friends and it seems like they all want to make friendly bets with him, and he can’t remember where all his buddies lives, so he makes them write their name and address on the cards and how much the friendly wager is for and who on, and so forth, and the next day he mails them the bad news and they mail him back a check for same. Once in a wile, of course, you get the bad news and forget to mail him the check and he feels blue over it as they’s nothing as sad as breaking up an old friendship.

I laid off Sena Day and she win. Daley smiled at the gals.

“There!” he says. “I’m sorry we didn’t play her on the nose, but I was advised to play safe.”

“Fine advice!” said Kate. “It’s cost Sis and I $60 so far.”

“What do you mean?” says Daley.

“We lose $20 on the first race,” she says, “and you tell us we’ll get it back on the next one and we bet the horse’ll come second and it don’t.”

So we had to explain that if a horse win, why it placed, too, and her and Ella had grabbed $160 on that race and was $140 ahead. He was $2,000 winners himself.

“We’ll have a drink on Sena,” he says. “I don’t believe they was six people out here that bet a nickel on her.”

So Katie told him he was wonderful and him and the gals had a sarsaparilla or something and I poured my own. He’d been touting Cleopatra in the third race, but her and everybody else was scratched out of it except Captain Alcock and On Watch. On Watch was 9 to 10 and Alcock even money and Daley wouldn’t let us bet.

“On Watch is best,” he says, “but he’s giving away twenty pounds and you can’t tell. Anyway, it ain’t worth it at that price.”

“Only two horses in the race?” asked Ella.

“That’s all,” he says.

“Well, then, listen,” she says, all excited: “Why not bet on one of them for place?”

Daley laughed and said it was a grand idear only he didn’t think the bookbinders would stand for it.

“But maybe they don’t know,” she says.

“I guess they do,” said Daley. “It’s almost impossible to keep a secret like that round a race track.”

“Besides,” I said, “the bookworms owes you and Kate $70 apiece and if you put something like that over on them and they find it out, they’ll probably get even by making you a check on the West Bank of the Hudson River.”

So we decided to play fair and lay off the race entirely. On Watch come through and the gals felt pretty bad about it till we showed them that they’d of only grabbed off nine smackers apiece if they’d of plunged on him for $20 straight.

Along toward time for the next race, Daley steered us down by the paddock and we seen some of the nags close up. Daley and the gals raved over this one and that one, and wasn’t this one a beauty, and so forth. Personally they was all just a horse to me and I never seen one yet that wasn’t homelier than the City Hall. If they left it up to me to name the world’s champion eyesore, I’d award the elegant barb’ wire wash rag to a horse rode by a woman in a derby hat. People goes to the Horse Show to see the Count de Fault; they don’t know a case of withers from an off hind hock. And if the Sport of Kings was patronized by just birds that admires equine charms, you could park the Derby Day crowd in a phone booth.

A filly named Tamarisk was the favorite in the fourth race and Daley played her for eight hundred smackers at 4 to 5. The gals trailed along with $8 apiece and she win from here to Worcester. The fifth was the one that Daley had an entry in⁠—a dog named Fly-by-Night. It was different in the daytime. Mercer had the mount and done the best he could, which was finish before supper. Nobody bet, so nobody was hurt.

“He’s just a green colt,” Daley told us. “I wanted to see how he’d behave.”

“Well,” I said, “I thought he behaved like a born caboose.”

Daley liked the Waterbury entry in the last and him and the gals played it and win. All told, Daley was $4,000 ahead on the day and Ella and Kate had picked up $160 between them. They wanted to kiss everybody on the way out. Daley sent us to the car to wait for him. He wanted to see Mercer a minute. After a wile he come out and brought Mercer along and introduced him. He’s a good-looking kid only for a couple of blotches on his pan and got an under lip and chin that kind of lags behind. He was about Kate’s height, and take away his Adams apple and you could mail him to Duluth for six cents. Him and Kate got personal right away and she told him how different he looked now than in his riding makeup. He said he had a new outfit that he’d of wore if he’d knew she was looking on. So I said I hoped he didn’t expect to ride Fly-by-Night round the track and keep a suit new, and he laughed, and Daley didn’t seem to enjoy the conversation and said we’d have to be going, but when we started off, Kate and Mercer give each other a smile with a future in it. She’s one of these gals that can’t help from looking open house, even if the guy takes after a pelican.

Daley moved to our table that night and after that we eat breakfast and supper with him pretty near every day. After breakfast the gals would go down to New York to spend what they had win the day before, and I’ll admit that Daley give us many a winner. I begin betting a little of my own jack, but I stuck the proceeds in the old sock. I ain’t superstitious about living off a woman’s money as long as you’re legally married, but at the clip the two gals was going, it looked like their old man’s war profits was on the way to join their maker, and the more jack I laid by, the less sooner I would have to go to work.

We’d meet every afternoon at the track and after the races Daley’d bring us back to the hotel. After supper we’d set round and chin or play rummy or once in a wile we’d go in Town to a show or visit one of the road houses near the Decker. The mail service on Long Island’s kind of rotten and they’s a bunch of road houses that hasn’t heard of prohibition.

During the time we’d lived in Town Katie had got acquainted with three or four birds that liked her well enough to take her places where they wasn’t no cover charge, but since we’d moved to the Decker we hadn’t heard from none of them. That is, till a few days after we’d met Daley, when she told us that one of the New York boys, a guy named Goldberg, had called up and wanted her to come in and see a show with him. He’s a golf champion or something. Well, Daley offered to drive her in, but she said no, she’d rather go on the train and Goldberg was going to meet her. So she went, and Daley tried to play cards with Ella and I, but he was too restless and finally snuck up to his room.

They wasn’t no question about his feelings toward Kate. He was always trying to fix it to be alone with her, but I guess it was the first time in her life when she didn’t have to do most of the leading and she kept him at arm’s len’th. Her and Ella had many a battle. Ella told her that the first thing she knowed he’d get discouraged and walk out on her; that she’d ought to quit monking and give him to understand that she was ready to yes him when he spoke up. But Katie said she guessed she could run her own love affairs as she’d had a few more of them than Ella.

So Ella says: “Maybe you have, but which one of us has got the husband?”

“You, thank the Lord!” says Katie.

“Thank him twice,” I said.

Kate didn’t come home from her New York party till two o’clock and she overslept herself till it was too late to go down again and shop. So we all drove over to the track with Daley and most of the way over he acted like a child. Katie kept talking about what a good show she seen and had a grand time, and so forth, and he pretended he wasn’t listening. Finally she cut it out and give him the old oil and by the time we got to the clubhouse he’d tossed in the sponge.

That was the last day at Jamaica and a couple of his horses was in. We was all down on them and they both copped, though Mercer had to give one of them a dude ride to pull us through. Daley got maudlin about what a grand rider the kid was and a grand little fella besides, and he had half a notion to bring him along with us back to the hotel and show him a good time. But Kate said what was the use of an extra man, as it would kind of spoil things and she was satisfied with just Daley. So of course that tickled him and everybody was feeling good and after supper him and Kate snuck out alone for the first time. Ella made me set up till they come back, so as she could get the news. Well, Daley had asked her all right, but she told him she wanted a little wile to think.

“Think!” says Ella. “What does she want to think for?”

“The novelty, I suppose,” said I.

Only One was in the big stake race the next day, when we shifted over to Belmont. They was five or six others in with him, all of them pretty good, and the price on him was 3 to 1. He hadn’t started yet since Daley’d brought him here, but they’d been nursing him along and Mercer and the trainer said he was right.

I suppose of course you’ve been out to Belmont. At that time they run the wrong way of the track, like you deal cards. Daley’s table was in a corner of the clubhouse porch and when you looked up the track, the horses was coming right at you. Even the boys with the trick glasses didn’t dast pretend they could tell who’s ahead.

The Belmont national hymn is “Whispering.” The joint’s so big and scattered round that a German could sing without disturbing the party at the next table. But they seems to be a rule that when they’s anything to be said, you got to murmur it with the lips stuck to the opponent’s earlobe. They shush you if you ask out loud for a toothpick. Everywhere you’ll see two or three guys with their heads together in a whispering scene. One of them has generally always just been down to the horses’ dining room and had lunch with Man o’ War or somebody and they told him to play Sea Mint in the next race as Cleopatra had walked the stall all night with her foal. A little ways off they’ll be another pair of shushers and one of them’s had a phone call from Cleopatra’s old dam to put a bet on Cleo as Captain Alcock had got a hold of some wild oats and they couldn’t make him do nothing but shimmy.

If they’s ten horses in a race you can walk from one end of the clubhouse to the other and get a whisper on all ten of them. I remember the second time Man o’ War run there. They was only one horse that wanted to watch him from the track and the War horse was 1 to 100. So just before the race, if you want to call it that, I seen a wise cracker that I’d got acquainted with, that had always been out last night with Madden or Waterbury, so just kidding I walked up to him and asked him who he liked. So he motioned me to come over against the wall where they wasn’t nobody near us and whispered, “Man o’ War’s unbeatable.” You see if that remark had of been overheard and the news allowed to spread round, it might of forced the price to, say, 1 to a lump of coal, and spoiled the killing.

Well, wile the Jamaica meeting was on, the gals had spent some of their spare time figuring out how much they’d of been ahead if Daley had of let them bet more than ten to twenty smackers a race. So this day at Belmont, they said that if he liked Only One so much, he should ought to leave them raise the ante just once and play fifty apiece.

But he says: “No, not this time. I’m pretty sure he’ll win, but he’s in against a sweet field and he ain’t raced for a month. I’ll bet forty on the nose for the two of you, and if he looks good you can gamble some real money the next time he runs.”

So Ella and Kate had to be satisfied with $20 apiece. Daley himself bet $2,000 and I piked along with $200 that I didn’t tell the gals nothing about. We all got 3 to 1. A horse named Streak of Lightning was favorite at 6 to 5. It was a battle. Only One caught the Streak in the last step and win by a flea’s jaw. Everybody was in hysterics and the gals got all messed up clawing each other.

“Nobody but Mercer could of did it!” says Daley, as soon as he could talk.

“He’s some jockey!” yelled Kate. “O you Sid!”

Pretty soon the time was give out and Only One had broke the track record for the distance, whatever it was.

“He’s a race horse!” said Daley. “But it’s too bad he had to extend himself. We won’t get no price the next time out.”

Well, altogether the race meant $14,000 to Daley, and he said we’d all go to Town that night and celebrate. But when we got back to the Decker, they was a telegram for him and he had to pack up and beat it for Kentucky.

Daley being away didn’t stop us from going to the track. He’d left orders with Ernest, his driver, to take us wherever we wanted to go and the gals had it so bad now that they couldn’t hardly wait till afternoon. They kept on trimming the books, too. Kate got a phone call every morning that she said was from this Goldberg and he was giving her tips. Her and Ella played them and I wished I had. I would of if I’d knew who they was from. They was from Mercer, Daley’s boy. That’s who they was from.

I and Ella didn’t wise up till about the third night after Daley’d went. That night, Kate took the train to Town right after supper, saying she had a date with Goldberg. It was a swell night and along about eight, I and Ella decided we might as well have a ride. So we got a hold of Ernest and it wound up by us going to New York too. We seen a picture and batted round till midnight and then Ella says why not go down to the Pennsylvania Station and pick Kate up when she come to take the train, and bring her home. So we done it. But when Katie showed up for the train, it was Mercer that was with her, not Goldberg.

Well, Mercer was pretty near out to the car with us when he happened to think that Daley’s driver mustn’t see him. So he said good night and left us. But he didn’t do it quick enough. Daley’s driver had saw him and I seen that he’d saw him and I knowed that he wasn’t liable to be stuck on another of Daley’s employs that was getting ten times as much money as him and all the cheers, and never had to dirty himself up changing a tire. And I bet it was all Ernest could do was wait till Daley come back so as he could explode the boom.

Kate and Ella didn’t know Ernest was hep and I didn’t tell them for fear of spoiling the show, so the women done their brawling on the way home in a regular race track whisper. The Mrs. told Kate she was a hick to be monking round with a jockey when Daley was ready and willing to give her a modern home with a platinum stopper in the washbowl. Kate told Ella that she wasn’t going to marry nobody for their money, and besides, Mercer was making more than enough to support a wife, and how that boy can dance!

“But listen,” she says: “I ain’t married to neither one of them yet and don’t know if I want to be.”

“Well,” says Ella, “you won’t have no chance to marry Daley if he finds out about you and Mercer.”

“He won’t find out unless you tell him,” said Kate.

“Well, I’ll tell him,” says Ella, “unless you cut this monkey business out.”

“I’ll cut it out when I get good and ready,” says Kate. “You can tell Daley anything you please.”

She knew they wasn’t no chance of Ella making good.

“Daley’ll be back in a couple of days,” says the Mrs. “When he comes he’ll want his answer and what are you going to say?”

“Yes or no, according to which way I make up my mind,” said Kate. “I don’t know yet which one I like best.”

“That’s ridic’lous!” Ella says. “When a girl says she can’t make up her mind, it shows they’s nothing to make up. Did you ever see me when I couldn’t make up my mind?”

“No,” said Katie, “but you never had even one whole man to choose between.”

The last half of the ride neither of them were talking. That’s a world’s record in itself. They kind of made up the next morning after I’d told Ella that the surest way to knock Daley’s chances for a gool was to paste Mercer.

“Just lay off of it,” I told her. “The best man’ll win in fair competition, which it won’t be if you keep plugging for Daley.”

We had two more pretty fair days at the track on Kate’s tips that Mercer give her. We also went on a party with him down Town, but we used the train, not Daley’s car.

Daley showed up on a Wednesday morning and had Ernest take him right over to the track. I suppose it was on this trip that Ernest squealed. Daley didn’t act no different when we joined him on the clubhouse porch, but that night him and Kate took a ride alone and come back engaged.

They’d been pointing Only One for the Merrick Handicap, the fourth race on Saturday. It was worth about $7,000 to the winner. The distance was seven furlongs and Only One had top weight, 126 pounds. But Thursday he done a trial over the distance in 1:22, carrying 130 pounds, so it looked like a setup.

Thursday morning I and Ella happened to be in Katie’s room when the telephone rung. It was Mercer on the other end. He asked her something and she says: “I told you why in my note.”

So he said something else and she says: “Not with no jailbird.”

And she hung up.

Well, Ella wanted to know what all the pleasantries was about, but Kate told her to mind her own business.

“You got your wish and I’m engaged to Daley,” she says, “and that’s all you need to know.”

For a gal that was going to marry a dude that was supposed to have all the money in the world, she didn’t act just right, but she wouldn’t been Kate if she had of, so I didn’t think much about it.

Friday morning I got a wire from one of the South Bend boys, Goat Anderson, sent from Buffalo, saying he’d be in New York that night and would I meet him at the Belmont at seven o’clock. So I went in Town from the track and waited round till pretty near nine, but he didn’t show up. I started to walk across to the Pennsylvania Station and on the way I dropped in at a place where they was still taking a chance. I had one up at the bar and was throwing it into me when a guy in the back part yelled “Hey! Come here!” It was Mercer yelling and it was me he wanted.

He was setting at a table all alone with a highball. It didn’t take no Craig Kennedy to figure out that it wasn’t his first one.

“Set down before I bat you down!” he says.

“Listen,” I says: “I wished you was champion of the world. You’d hold onto the title just long enough for me to reach over and sock you where most guys has a chin.”

“Set down!” he says. “It’s your wife I’m going to beat up, not you.”

“You ain’t going to beat up nobody’s wife or nobody’s husband,” I says, “and if you don’t cut out that line of gab you’ll soon be asking the nurse how you got there.”

“Set down and come clean with me,” he says. “Was your wife the one that told Daley about your sister-in-law and I?”

“If she did, what of it?” I says.

“I’m asking you, did she?” he says.

“No, she didn’t,” I said. “If somebody told him his driver told him. He seen you the other night.”

“Ernest!” he says. “Frank and Ernest! I’ll Ernest him right in the jaw!”

“You’re a fine matchmaker!” I says. “He could knock you for a row of flat tires. Why don’t you try and get mad at Dempsey?”

“Set down and have a drink,” says Mercer.

“I didn’t mean that about your wife. You and her has treated me all right. And your sister-in-law, too, even if she did give me the air. And called me a jailbird. But that’s all right. It’s Daley I’m after and it’s Daley I’m going to get.”

“Sweet chance!” I says. “What could you do to him?”

“Wait and see!” said Mercer, and smiled kind of silly.

“Listen,” I says. “Have you forgot that you’re supposed to ride Only One tomorrow?”

“Supposed to ride is right,” he says, and smiled again.

“Ain’t you going to ride him?” I said.

“You bet I am!” he says.

“Well, then,” I said, “you better call it a day and go home.”

“I’m over twenty-one,” he says, “and I’m going to set here and enjoy myself. But remember, I ain’t keeping you up.”

Well, they wasn’t nothing I could do only set there and wait for him to get stiff and then see him to his hotel. We had a drink and we had another and a couple more. Finally he opened up. I wished you could of heard him. It took him two hours to tell his story, and everything he said, he said it over and over and repeated it four and five times. And part of the time he talked so thick that I couldn’t hardly get him.

“Listen,” he says. “Can you keep a secret? Listen,” he says. “I’m going to take a chance with you on account of your sister-in-law. I loved that little gal. She’s give me the air, but that don’t make no difference; I loved that little gal and I don’t want her to lose no money. So I’m going to tell you a secret and if you don’t keep your clam shut I’ll roll you for a natural. In the first place,” he says, “how do you and Daley stack up?”

“That ain’t no secret,” I said. “I think he’s all right. He’s been a good friend of mine.”

“Oh,” says Mercer, “so he’s been a good friend of yours, has he? All right, then. I’m going to tell you a secret. Do you remember the day I met you and the gals in the car? Well, a couple of days later, Daley was feeling pretty good about something and he asked me how I liked his gal? So I told him she looked good. So he says, ‘I’m going to marry that gal,’ he says. He says, ‘She likes me and her sister and brother-in-law is encouraging it along,’ he says. ‘They know I’ve got a little money and they’re making a play for me. They’re a couple of rats and I’m the cheese. They’re going to make a meal off of me. They think they are,’ he says. ‘But the brother-in-law’s a smart Aleck that thinks he’s a wise cracker. He’d be a clown in a circus, only that’s work. And his wife’s fishing for a sucker with her sister for bait. Well, the gal’s a pip and I’m going to marry her,’ he says, ‘but as soon as we’re married, it’s goodbye, family-in-law! Me and them is going to be perfect strangers. They think they’ll have free board and lodging at my house,’ he says, ‘but they won’t get no meal unless they come to the back door for it, and when they feel sleepy they can make up a lower for themself on my cement porch.’ That’s the kind of a friend of yours this baby is,” says Mercer.

I didn’t say nothing and he went on.

“He’s your friend as long as he can use you,” he says. “He’s been my friend since I signed to ride for him, that is, up till he found out I was stealing his gal. Then he shot my chances for a bull’s-eye by telling her about a little trouble I had, five or six years ago. I and a girl went to a party down in Louisville and I seen another guy wink at her and I asked him what he meant by it and he said he had St. Vitus’ dance. So I pulled the iron and knocked off a couple of his toes, to cure him. I was in eleven months and that’s what Daley told Kate about. And of course he made her promise to not tell, but she wrote me a goodbye note and spilled it. That’s the kind of a pal he is.

“After I got out I worked for Bradley, and when Bradley turned me loose, he give me a $10,000 contract.”

“He told us twenty,” I said.

“Sure he did,” says Mercer. “He always talks double. When he gets up after a tough night, both his heads aches. And if he ever has a baby he’ll invite you over to see the twins. But anyway, what he pays me ain’t enough and after tomorrow I’m through riding. What’s ten or fifteen thousand a year when you can’t drink nothing and you starve to death for the fear you’ll pick up an ounce! Listen,” he says. “I got a brother down in Oklahoma that’s in the oil lease game. He cleaned up $25,000 last year and he wants me to go in with him. And with what I’ve saved up and what I’m going to win tomorrow, I should worry if we don’t make nothing in the next two years.”

“How are you going to win tomorrow?” I said. “The price’ll be a joke.”

“The price on who?” says Mercer.

“Only One,” I said.

He give a silly laugh and didn’t say nothing for a minute. Then he asked if Daley done the betting for I and the two gals. I told him he had did it at first, but now I was doing it.

“Well,” he says, “you do it tomorrow, see? That little lady called me a jailbird, but I don’t want her to lose her money.”

So I asked him what he meant and he asked me for the tenth or eleventh time if I could keep a secret. He made me hold up my hand and swear I wouldn’t crack what he was going to tell me.

“Now,” he says, “what’s the name of the horse I’m riding tomorrow?”

“Only One,” I said.

“That ain’t all of it,” said Mercer. “His name tomorrow is Only One Left. See? Only One Left.”

“Do you mean he’s going to get left at the post?” I says.

“You’re a Ouija board!” says Mercer. “Your name is Ouija and the horse’s name is Only One Left. And listen,” he says. “Everything but three horses is going to be scratched out of this race and we’ll open at about 1 to 3 and back up to 1 to 5. And Daley’s going to bet his right eye. But they’s a horse in the race named Sap and that’s the horse my two thousand smackers is going down on. And you’re a sap, too, if you don’t string along with me.”

“Suppose you can’t hold Only One?”

“Get the name right,” said Mercer. “Only One Left. And don’t worry about me not handling him. He thinks I’m Billy Sunday and everything I say he believes. Do you remember the other day when I beat Streak of Lightning? Well, the way I done that was whispering in One’s ear, coming down the stretch. I says to him, ‘One,’ I says, ‘this Lightning hoss has been spilling it round that your father’s grandmother was a zebra. Make a bum out of him!’ That’s what I whispered to him and he got sore and went past Lightning like he was standing still. And tomorrow, just before we’re supposed to go, I’ll say to him, ‘One, we’re back at Jamaica. You’re facing the wrong way.’ And when Sap and the other dog starts, we’ll be headed towards Rhode Island and in no hurry to get there.”

“Mercer,” I said, “I don’t suppose they’s any use talking to you, but after all, you’re under contract to give Daley the best you’ve got and it don’t look to me just like you was treating him square.”

“Listen!” he says. “Him and square don’t rhyme. And besides, I won’t be under contract to nobody by this time tomorrow. So you save your sermon for your own parish.”

I don’t know if you’ll think I done right or not. Or I don’t care. But what was the sense of me tipping off a guy that had said them sweet things about I and Ella? And even if I don’t want a sister-in-law of mine running round with a guy that’s got a jail record, still Daley squealing on him was rotten dope. And besides, I don’t never like to break a promise, especially to a guy that shoots a man’s toes off just for having St. Vitus’ dance.

Well, anyway, the third race was over and the Merrick Handicap was next, and just like Mercer had said, they all quit but our horse and Sap and a ten-ton truck named Honor Bright. He was 20 to 1 and Sap was 6. Only One was 1 to 3 and Daley hopped on him with fifteen thousand men. Before post time the price was 1 to 5 and 1 to 6.

Daley was off his nut all afternoon and didn’t object when I said I’d place the gals’ money and save him the trouble. Kate and Ella had figured out what they had win up to date. It was about $1,200 and Daley told them to bet it all.

“You’ll only make $400 between you,” he says, “but it’s a cinch.”

“And four hundred’s pretty good interest on $1,200,” says Kate. “About ten percent, ain’t it?”

I left them and went downstairs. I wrote out a card for a hundred smackers on Sap. Then my feet caught cold and I didn’t turn it in. I walked down towards the paddock and got there just as the boys was getting ready to parade. I seen Mercer and you wouldn’t of never knew he’d fell off the wagon.

Daley was down there, too, and I heard him say: “Well, Sid, how about you?”

“Never better,” says Mercer. “If I don’t win this one I’ll quit riding.”

Then he seen me and smiled.

I chased back to the clubhouse, making up my mind on the way. I decided to not bet a nickel for the gals on anything. If Mercer was crossing me, I’d give Ella and Kate their $400 like they had win it, and say nothing. Personally, I was going to turn in the card I’d wrote on Sap. That was my idear when I got to Joe Meyer. But all of a sudden I had the hunch that Mercer was going through; they wasn’t a chance in the world for him to weaken. I left Meyer’s stand and went to a bookie named Haynes, who I’d bet with before.

Sap had went up to 8 to 1, and instead of a hundred smackers I bet a thousand.

He finished ahead by three len’ths, probably the most surprised horse in history. Honor Bright got the place, but only by a hair. Only One, after being detained for some reason another, come faster at the end than any horse ever run before. And Mercer give him an unmerciful walloping, pretending to himself, probably, that the hoss was its master.

We come back to our table. The gals sunk down in their chairs. Ella was blubbering and Kate was as white as a ghost. Daley finally joined us, looking like he’d had a stroke. He asked for a drink and I give him my flask.

“I can’t understand it!” he says. “I don’t know what happened!”

“You don’t!” hollered Kate. “I’ll tell you what happened. You stole our money! Twelve hundred dollars! You cheat!”

“Oh, shut your fool mouth!” says Daley.

And another Romance was knocked for a row of sour apple trees.

Kate brought the mail in the dining room Monday morning. They was a letter for her and one for me. She read hers and they was a couple of tears in her eyes.

“Mercer’s quit riding,” she says. “This is a farewell note. He’s going to Oklahoma.”

Ella picked up my envelope.

“Who’s this from?” she says.

“Give it here,” I said, and took it away from her. “It’s just the statement from Haynes, the bookie.”

“Well, open it up,” she said.

“What for?” said I. “You know how much you lose, don’t you?”

“He might of made a mistake, mightn’t he?” she says.

So I opened up the envelope and there was the check for $8,000.

“Gosh!” I said. “It looks like it was me that made the mistake!” And I laid the check down where her and Kate could see it. They screamed and I caught Ella just as she was falling off the chair.

“What does this mean?” says Kate.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I was kind of rattled Saturday, and when I come to make my bet I got balled up and wrote down Sap. And I must of went crazy and played him for a thousand men.”

“But where’s our statement, mine and Sis’?” says Ella.

“That’s my mistake again,” I said. “I wrote out your ticket, but I must of forgot to turn it in.”

They jumped up and come at me, and before I could duck I was kissed from both sides at once.

“O Sis!” yelps the Mrs. “Just think! We didn’t lose our twelve hundred! We didn’t lose nothing at all. We win eight thousand dollars!”

“Try and get it!” I says.

V

Katie Wins a Home

Oh yes, we been back here quite a wile. And we’re liable to be here quite a wile. This town’s good enough for me and it suits the Mrs. too, though they didn’t neither one of us appreciate it till we’d give New York a try. If I was running the South Bend Boosters’ club, I’d make everybody spend a year on the Gay White Way. They’d be so tickled when they got to South Bend that you’d never hear them razz the old burg again. Just yesterday we had a letter from Katie, asking us would we come and pay her a visit. She’s a regular New Yorker now. Well, I didn’t have to put up no fight with my Mrs. Before I could open my pan she says, “I’ll write and tell her we can’t come; that you’re looking for a job and don’t want to go nowheres just now.”

Well, they’s some truth in that. I don’t want to go nowheres and I’ll take a job if it’s the right kind. We could get along on the interest from Ella’s money, but I’m tired of laying round. I didn’t do a tap of work all the time I was east and I’m out of the habit, but the days certainly do drag when a man ain’t got nothing to do and if I can find something where I don’t have to travel, I’ll try it out.

But the Mrs. has still got most of what the old man left her and all and all, I’m glad we made the trip. I more than broke even by winning pretty close to $10,000 on the ponies down there. And we got Katie off our hands, which was one of the objects of us going in the first place⁠—that and because the two gals wanted to see Life. So I don’t grudge the time we spent, and we had some funny experiences when you look back at them. Anybody does that goes on a tour like that with a cuckoo like Katie. You hear a lot of songs and gags about mother-in-laws. But I could write a book of them about sister-in-laws that’s twenty years old and pretty and full of peace and good will towards Men.

Well, after the blow-off with Daley, Long Island got too slow, besides costing us more than we could afford. So the gals suggested moving back in Town, to a hotel called the Graham on Sixty-seventh Street that somebody had told them was reasonable.

They called it a family hotel, but as far as I could see, Ella and I was the only ones there that had ever forced two dollars on the clergy. Outside of the transients, they was two song writers and a couple of gals that had their hair pruned and wrote for the papers, and the rest of the lodgers was boys that had got penned into a sixteen-foot ring with Benny Leonard by mistake. They looked like they’d spent many an evening hanging onto the ropes during the rush hour.

When we’d stayed there two days, Ella and Katie was ready to pack up again.

“This is just a joint,” said Ella. “The gals may be all right, but they’re never in, only to sleep. And the men’s impossible; a bunch of low prizefighters.”

I was for sticking, on account of the place being cheap, so I said:

“Second prize ain’t so low. And you’re overlooking the two handsome tune thiefs. Besides, what’s the difference who else lives here as long as the rooms is clean and they got a good restaurant? What did our dude cellmates out on Long Island get us? Just trouble!”

But I’d of lose the argument as usual only for Kate oversleeping herself. It was our third morning at the Graham and her and Ella had it planned to go and look for a better place. But Katie didn’t get up till pretty near noon and Ella went without her. So it broke so’s Sis had just came downstairs and turned in her key when the two bellhops reeled in the front door bulging with baggage and escorting Mr. Jimmy Ralston. Yes, Jimmy Ralston the comedian. Or comic, as he calls it.

Well, he ain’t F. X. Bushman, as you know. But no one that seen him could make the mistake of thinking he wasn’t somebody. And he looked good enough to Kate so as she waited till the clerk had him fixed up, and then ast who he was. The clerk told her and she told us when the Mrs. come back from her hunt. Ella begin to name a few joints where we might move, but it seemed like Sis had changed her mind.

“Oh,” she says, “let’s stay here a wile longer, a week anyway.”

“What’s came over you!” ast Ella. “You just said last night that you was bored to death here.”

“Maybe we won’t be so bored now,” said Kate, smiling. “The Graham’s looking up. We’re entertaining a celebrity⁠—Jimmy Ralston of the Follies.”

Well, they hadn’t none of us ever seen him on the stage, but of course we’d heard of him. He’d only just started with the Follies, but he’d made a name for himself at the Winter Garden, where he broke in two or three years ago. And Kate said that a chorus gal she’d met⁠—Jane Abbott⁠—had told her about Ralston and what a scream he was on a party.

“He’s terribly funny when he gets just the right number of drinks,” says Kate.

“Well, let’s stay then,” says Ella. “It’ll be exciting to know a real actor.”

“I would like to know him,” says Katie, “not just because he’s on the stage, but I think it’d be fun to set and listen to him talk. He must say the screamingest things! If we had him round we wouldn’t have to play cards or nothing for entertainment. Only they say it makes people fat to laugh.”

“If I was you, I’d want to get fat,” I said. “Looking like an E string hasn’t started no landslide your way.”

“Is he attractive?” ast the Mrs.

“Well,” said Kate, “he isn’t handsome, but he’s striking looking. You wouldn’t never think he was a comedian. But then, ain’t it generally always true that the driest people have sad faces?”

“That’s a joke!” I said. “Did you ever see Bryan when he didn’t look like somebody was tickling his feet?”

“We’ll have to think up some scheme to get introduced to him,” says Ella.

“It’ll be tough,” I says. “I don’t suppose they’s anybody in the world harder to meet than a member of the Follies, unless it’s an Elk in a Pullman washroom.”

“But listen,” says Kate: “We don’t want to meet him till we’ve saw the show. It’d be awfully embarrassing to have him ask us how we liked the Follies and we’d have to say we hadn’t been to it.”

“Yes,” said the Mrs., “but still if we tell him we haven’t been to it, he may give us free passes.”

“Easy!” I said. “And it’d take a big load off his mind. They say it worries the Follies people half sick wondering what to do with all their free passes.”

“Suppose we go tonight!” says Kate. “We can drop in a hotel somewheres and get seats. The longer we don’t go, the longer we won’t meet him.”

“And the longer we don’t meet him,” I says, “the longer till he gives you the air.”

“I’m not thinking of Mr. Ralston as a possible suitor,” says Katie, swelling up. “But I do want to get acquainted with a man that don’t bore a person to death.”

“Well,” I says, “if this baby’s anything like the rest of your gentleman friends, he won’t hardly be round long enough for that.”

I didn’t make no kick about going to the show. We hadn’t spent no money since we’d moved back to Town and I was as tired as the gals of setting up in the room, playing rummy. They said we’d have to dress, and I kicked just from habit, but I’d got past minding that end of it. They was one advantage in dolling up every time you went anywheres. It meant an hour when they was no chance to do something even sillier.

We couldn’t stop to put on the nose bag at the Graham because the women was scared we’d be too late to get tickets. Besides, when you’re dressed for dinner, you at least want the waiter to be the same. So we took a taxi down to the Spencer, bought Follies seats in the ninth row, and went in to eat. It’s been in all the papers that the price of food has came down, but the hotel man can’t read. They fined us eleven smackers for a two-course banquet that if the Woman’s Guild, here, would dast soak you four bits a plate for it, somebody’d write a nasty letter to the News-Times.

We got in the theater a half hour before the show begin. I put in the time finding out what the men will wear, and the gals looked up what scenes Ralston’d be in. He was only on once in each act. They don’t waste much time on a comedian in the Follies. It don’t take long to spring the two gags they can think up for him in a year, and besides, he just interferes with the big gal numbers, where Bunny Granville or somebody dreams of the different flappers he danced with at the prom, and the souvenirs they give him; and one by one the different gals writhes in, dressed like the stage director thinks they dress at the female colleges⁠—a Wesley gal in pink tights, a Vassar dame in hula-hula, and a Smith gal with a sombrero and a sailor suit. He does a couple of steps with them and they each hand him a flower or a vegetable to remember them by. The song winds up:

But my most exclusive token
Is a little hangnail broken
Off the gal from Gussie’s School for Manicures.

And his real sweet patootie comes on made up as a scissors.

You’ve saw Ralston? He’s a good comedian; no getting away from that. The way he fixes up his face, you laugh just to look at him. I yelled when I first seen him. He was supposed to be an office boy and he got back late from lunch and the boss ast him what made him late and he said he stopped to buy the extra. So the boss ast him what extra and he says the extra about the New York society couple getting married. So the boss said, “Why, they wouldn’t print an extra about that. They’s a New York society couple married most every day.” So Ralston said, “Yes, but this couple is both doing it for the first time.”

I don’t remember what other gags he had, and they’re old anyway by now. But he was a hit, especially with Ella and Kate. They screamed so loud I thought we’d get the air. If he didn’t say a word, he’d be funny with that fool makeup and that voice.

I guess if it wasn’t for me the gals would of insisted on going back to the stage door after the show and waiting for him to come out. I’ve saw Katie bad a lot of times, but never as cuckoo as this. It wasn’t no case of love at first or second sight. You couldn’t be stuck on this guy from seeing him. But she’d always been kind of stage-struck and was crazy over the idear of getting acquainted with a celebrity, maybe going round to places with him, and having people see her with Jimmy Ralston, the comedian. And then, of course, most anybody wants to meet a person that can make you laugh.

I managed to persuade them that the best dope would be to go back to the Graham and wait for him to come home; maybe we could fix it up with the night clerk to introduce us. I told them that irregardless of what you read in books, they’s some members of the theatrical profession that occasionally visits the place where they sleep. So we went to the hotel and set in the lobby for an hour and a half, me trying to keep awake wile the gals played Ralston’s part of the show over again a couple thousand times. They’s nothing goes so big with me as listening to people repeat gags out of a show that I just seen.

The clerk had been tipped off and when Ralston finally come in and went to get his key, I strolled up to the desk like I was after mine. The clerk introduced us.

“I want you to meet my wife and sister-in-law,” I said.

“Some other time,” says Ralston. “They’s a matinée tomorrow and I got to run off to bed.”

So off he went and I got bawled out for Ziegfeld having matinées. But I squared myself two days afterwards when we went in the restaurant for lunch. He was just having breakfast and the three of us stopped by his table. I don’t think he remembered ever seeing me before, but anyway he got up and shook hands with the women. Well, you couldn’t never accuse Ella of having a faint heart, and she says:

“Can’t we set down with you, Mr. Ralston? We want to tell you how much we enjoyed the Follies.”

So he says, sure, set down, but I guess we would of anyway.

“We thought it was a dandy show,” says Katie.

“It ain’t a bad troupe,” says Ralston.

“If you’ll pardon me getting personal,” said Ella, “we thought you was the best thing in it.”

He looked like he’d strain a point and forgive her.

“We all just yelled!” says Katie. “I was afraid they’d put us out, you made us laugh so hard.”

“Well,” says Ralston, “I guess if they begin putting people out for that, I’d have to leave the troupe.”

“It wouldn’t be much of a show without you,” says Ella.

“Well, all that keeps me in it is friendship for Ziggy,” says Ralston. “I said to him last night, I says, ‘Ziggy, I’m going to quit the troupe. I’m tired and I want to rest a wile.’ So he says, ‘Jim, don’t quit or I’ll have to close the troupe. I’ll give you fifteen hundred a week to stay.’ I’m getting a thousand now. But I says to him, I said, ‘Ziggy, it ain’t a question of money. What I want is a troupe of my own, where I get a chance to do serious work. I’m sick of making a monkey of myself in front of a bunch of saps from Nyack that don’t appreciate no art but what’s wrapped up in a stocking.’ So he’s promised that if I’ll stick it out this year, he’ll star me next season in a serious piece.”

“Is he giving you the five hundred raise?” I ast him.

“I wouldn’t take it,” said Ralston. “I don’t need money.”

“At that, a person can live pretty cheap at this hotel,” I says.

“I didn’t move here because it was cheap,” he said. “I moved here to get away from the pests⁠—women that wants my autograph or my picture. And all they could say how much they enjoyed my work and how did I think up all them gags, and so forth. No real artist likes to talk about himself, especially to people that don’t understand. So that’s the reason why I left the Ritz, so’s I’d be left alone, not to save money. And I don’t save no money, neither. I’ve got the best suite in the house⁠—bedroom, bath and study.”

“What do you study?” ast Kate.

“The parts I want to play,” he says; “Hamlet and Macbeth and Richard.”

“But you’re a comedian,” says Kate.

“It’s just a stepping stone,” said Ralston.

He’d finished his breakfast and got up.

“I must go to my study and work,” he says. “We’ll meet again.”

“Yes, indeed,” says Ella. “Do you always come right back here nights after the show?”

“When I can get away from the pests,” he says.

“Well,” says Ella, “suppose you come up to our rooms tonight and we’ll have a bite to eat. And I think the husband can give you a little liquid refreshments if you ever indulge.”

“Very little,” he says. “What is your room number?”

So the Mrs. told him and he said he’d see us after the show that night, and walked out.

“Well,” said Ella, “how do you like him?”

“I think he’s wonderful!” says Katie. “I didn’t have no idear he was so deep, wanting to play Hamlet.”

“Pretty near all comedians has got that bug,” I says.

“Maybe he’s different when you know him better,” said Ella.

“I don’t want him to be different,” says Kate.

“But he was so serious,” said the Mrs. “He didn’t say nothing funny.”

“Sure he did,” I says. “Didn’t he say artists hate to talk about themselfs?”

Pretty soon the waiter come in with our lunch. He ast us if the other gentleman was coming back.

“No,” said Ella. “He’s through.”

“He forgot his check,” says the dish smasher.

“Oh, never mind!” says Ella. “We’ll take care of that.”

“Well,” I says, “I guess the bird was telling the truth when he said he didn’t need no money.”

I and the gals spent the evening at a picture show and stopped at a delicatessen on the way home to stock up for the banquet. I had a quart and a pint of yearling rye, and a couple of bottles of McAllister that they’d fined me fifteen smackers apiece for and I wanted to save them, so I told Kate that I hoped her friend would get comical enough on the rye.

“He said he drunk very little,” she reminded me.

“Remember, don’t make him talk about himself,” said the Mrs. “What we want is to have him feel at home, like he was with old friends, and then maybe he’ll warm up. I hope we don’t wake the whole hotel, laughing.”

Well, Ralston showed about midnight. He’d remembered his date and apologized for not getting there before.

“I like to walk home from the theater,” he says. “I get some of my funniest idears wile I walk.”

I come to the conclusion later that he spent practically his whole life riding.

Ella’s and my room wasn’t no gymnasium for size and after the third drink, Ralston tried to get to the dresser to look at himself in the glass, and knocked a $30 vase for a corpse. This didn’t go very big with the Mrs., but she forced a smile and would of accepted his apology if he’d made any. All he done was mumble something about cramped quarters. They was even more cramped when we set the table for the big feed, and it was my tough luck to have our guest park himself in the chair nearest the clothes closet, where my two bottles of Scotch had been put to bed. The fourth snifter finished the pint of rye and I said I’d get the other quart, but before I could stop her, Ella says:

“Let Mr. Ralston get it. It’s right there by him.”

So the next thing you know, James has found the good stuff and he comes out with both bottles of it.

“McAllister!” he says. “That’s my favorite. If I’d knew you had that, I wouldn’t of drank up all your rye.”

“You haven’t drank it all up,” I says. “They’s another bottle of it in there.”

“It can stay there as long as we got this,” he says, and helped himself to the corkscrew.

Well, amongst the knickknacks the gals had picked up at the delicatessen was a roast chicken and a bottle of olives, and at the time I thought Ralston was swallowing bones, stones and all. It wasn’t till the next day that we found all these keepsakes on the floor, along with a couple dozen assorted cigarette butts.

Katie’s chorus gal friend had told her how funny the guy was when he’d had just the right number of shots, but I’d counted eight and begin to get discouraged before he started talking.

“My mother could certainly cook a chicken,” he says.

“Is your mother living?” Kate ast him.

“No,” he says. “She was killed in a railroad wreck. I’ll never forget when I had to go and identify her. You wouldn’t believe a person could get that mangled! No,” he says, “my family’s all gone. I never seen my father. He was in the pesthouse with smallpox when I was born and he died there. And my only sister died of jaundice. I can still⁠—”

But Kate was scared we’d wake up the hotel, laughing, so she says: “Do you ever give imitations?”

“You mustn’t make Mr. Ralston talk about himself,” says Ella.

“Imitations of who?” said Ralston.

“Oh, other actors,” said Katie.

“No,” he says. “I leave it to the other actors to give imitations of me.”

“I never seen none of them do it,” says Kate.

“They all do it, but they don’t advertise it,” he says. “Every comic in New York is using my stuff.”

“Oh!” said Ella. “You mean they steal your idears.”

“Can’t you go after them for it?” ast Katie.

“You could charge them with petit larceny,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be mean,” said Ralston. “But they ain’t a comic on the stage today that I didn’t give him every laugh he’s got.”

“You ain’t only been on the stage three or four years,” I says. “How did Hitchcock and Ed Wynn and them fellas get by before they seen you?”

“They wasn’t getting by,” he says. “I’m the baby that put them on their feet. Take Hitchy. Hitchy come to me last spring and says, ‘Jim, I’ve ran out of stuff. Have you got any notions I could use?’ So I says, ‘Hitchy, you’re welcome to anything I got.’ So I give him a couple of idears and they’re the only laughs in his troupe. And you take Wynn. He opened up with a troupe that looked like a flop and one day I seen him on Broadway, wearing a long pan, and I says, ‘What’s the matter, Eddie?’ And he brightened up and says, ‘Hello, there, Jim! You’re just the boy I want to see.’ So I says, ‘Well, Eddie, I’m only too glad to do anything I can.’ So he says, ‘I got a flop on my hands unlest I can get a couple of idears, and you’re the baby that can give them to me.’ So I said, ‘All right, Eddie.’ And I give him a couple of notions to work on and they made his show. And look at Stone! And Errol! And Jolson and Tinney! Every one of them come to me at one time another, hollering for help. ‘Jim, give me a couple of notions!’ ‘Jim, give me a couple of gags!’ And not a one of them went away empty-handed.”

“Did they pay you?” ast Ella.

Ralston smiled.

“I wouldn’t take no actor’s money,” he says. “They’re all brothers to me. They can have anything I got, and I can have anything they got, only they haven’t got nothing.”

Well, I can’t tell you all he said, as I was asleep part of the time. But I do remember that he was the one that had give Bert Williams the notion of playing coon parts, and learnt Sarah Bernhardt to talk French.

Along about four o’clock, when they was less than a pint left in the second McAllister bottle, he defied all the theater managers in New York.

“I ain’t going to monkey with them much longer!” he says. “I’ll let you folks in on something that’ll cause a sensation on Broadway. I’m going to quit the Follies!”

We was all speechless.

“That’s the big secret!” he says. “I’m coming out as a star under my own management and in a troupe wrote and produced by myself!”

“When?” ast Kate.

“Just as soon as I decide who I’m going to let in as part owner,” said Ralston. “I’ve worked for other guys long enough! Why should I be satisfied with $800 a week when Ziegfeld’s getting rich off me!”

“When did he cut you $200?” I says. “You was getting $1,000 last time I seen you.”

He didn’t pay no attention.

“And why should I let some manager produce my play,” he says, “and pay me maybe $1,200 a week when I ought to be making six or seven thousand!”

“Are you working on your play now?” Kate ast him.

“It’s done,” he says. “I’m just trying to make up my mind who’s the right party to let in on it. Whoever it is, I’ll make him rich.”

“I’ve got some money to invest,” says Katie. “Suppose you tell us about the play.”

“I’ll give you the notion, if you’ll keep it to yourself,” says Ralston. “It’s a serious play with a novelty idear that’ll be a sensation. Suppose I go down to my suite and get the script and read it to you.”

“Oh, if you would!” says Kate.

“It’ll knock you dead!” he says.

And just the thought of it was fatal to the author. He got up from his chair, done a nose dive acrost the table and laid there with his head in the chili sauce.

I called up the clerk and had him send up the night bellhop with our guest’s key. I and the boy acted as pall bearers and got him to his “suite,” where we performed the last sad rites. Before I come away I noticed that the “suite” was a ringer for Ella’s and mine⁠—a dinky little room with a bath. The “study” was prettily furnished with coat hangers.

When I got back to my room Katie’d ducked and the Mrs. was asleep, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to them till we was in the restaurant at noon. Then I ast Kate if she’d figured out just what number drink it was that had started him being comical.

“Now listen,” she says: “I don’t think that Abbott girl ever met him in her life. Anyway, she had him all wrong. We expected he’d do stunts, like she said, but he ain’t that kind that shows off or acts smart. He’s too much of a man for that. He’s a bigger man than I thought.”

“I and the bellhop remarked that same thing,” I says.

“And you needn’t make fun of him for getting faint,” says Katie. “I called him up a wile ago to find out how he was and he apologized and said they must of been something in that second bottle of Scotch.”

So I says:

“You tell him they was, but they ain’t.”

Well, it couldn’t of been the Scotch or no other brew that ruined me. Or if it was, it worked mighty slow. I didn’t even look at a drink for three days after the party in our room. But the third day I felt rotten, and that night I come down with a fever. Ella got scared and called a doctor and he said it was flu, and if I didn’t watch my step it’d be something worse. He advised taking me to a hospital and I didn’t have pep enough to say no.

So they took me and I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks⁠—too sick for the Mrs. to give me the news. And it’s a wonder I didn’t have a relapse when she finally did.

“You’ll probably yelp when you hear this,” she says. “I ain’t crazy about it myself, but it didn’t do me no good to argue at first and it’s too late for argument now. Well, to begin with, Sis is in love with Ralston.”

“What of it!” I said. “She’s going through the city directory and she’s just got to the R’s.”

“No, it’s the real thing this time,” said the Mrs. “Wait till you hear the rest of it. She’s going on the stage!”

“I’ve got nothing against that,” I says. “She’s pretty enough to get by in the Follies chorus, and if she can earn money that way, I’m for it.”

“She ain’t going into no chorus,” said Ella. “Ralston’s quit the Follies and she’s going in his show.”

“The one he wrote?” I ast.

“Yes,” said the Mrs.

“And who’s going to put it on?” I ast her.

“That’s it,” she says. “They’re going to put it on themself, Ralston and Sis. With Sis’s money. She sold her bonds, fifty thousand dollars’ worth.”

“But listen,” I says. “Fifty thousand dollars! What’s the name of the play, Ringling’s Circus?”

“It won’t cost all that,” said Ella. “They figure it’ll take less than ten thousand to get started. But she insisted on having the whole thing in a checking account, where she can get at it. If the show’s a big success in New York they’re going to have a company in Chicago and another on the road. And Ralston says her half of the profits in New York ought to run round $5,000 a week. But anyway, she’s sure of $200 a week salary for acting in it.”

“Where did she get the idear she can act?” I says.

“She’s always had it,” said the Mrs., “and I think she made him promise to put her in the show before she agreed to back it. Though she says it’s a wonderful investment! She won’t be the leading woman, of course. But they’s only two woman’s parts and she’s got one of them.”

“Well,” I said, “if she’s going to play a sap and just acts normal, she’ll be a sensation.”

“I don’t know what she’ll be,” says Ella. “All I know is that she’s mad over Ralston and believes everything he says. And even if you hadn’t of been sick we couldn’t of stopped her.”

So I ast what the play was like, but Ella couldn’t tell me.

Ralston had read it out loud to she and Kate, but she couldn’t judge from just hearing it that way. But Kate was tickled to death with it. And they’d already been rehearsing a week, but Sis hadn’t let Ella see the rehearsals. She said it made her nervous.

“Ralston thinks the main trouble will be finding a theater,” said the Mrs. “He says they’s a shortage of them and the men that owns them won’t want to let him have one on account of jealousy.”

“Has the Follies flopped?” I ast her.

“No,” she says, “but they’ve left town.”

“They always do, this time of year,” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” says the Mrs., “but Ralston says they’d intended to stay here all the year round, but when the news come out that he’d left, they didn’t dast. He’s certainly got faith in himself. He must have, to give up a $600 a week salary. That’s what he says he was really getting.”

“You say Katie’s in love,” I says. “How about him?”

“I don’t know and she don’t know,” says Ella. “He calls her dearie and everything and holds her hands, but when they’re alone together, he won’t talk nothing but business. Still, as I say, he calls her dearie.”

“Actors calls every gal that,” I says. “It’s because they can’t remember names.”

Well, to make a short story out of it, they had another couple weeks’ rehearsals that we wasn’t allowed to see, and they finally got a theater⁠—the Olney. They had to guarantee a $10,000 business to get it. They didn’t go to Atlantic City or nowheres for a tryout. They opened cold. And Ralston didn’t tell nobody what kind of a show it was.

Of course he done what they generally always do on a first night. He sent out free passes to everybody that’s got a dress suit, and they’s enough of them in New York to pretty near fill up a theater. These invited guests is supposed to be for the performance wile it’s going on. After it’s through, they can go out and ride it all over the island.

Well, the rules wasn’t exactly lived up to at Bridget Sees a Ghost. On account of Ralston writing the play and starring in it, the gang thought it would be comical and they come prepared to laugh. It was comical all right, and they laughed. They didn’t only laugh; they yelled. But they yelled in the wrong place.

The programme said it was “a Daring Drama in Three Acts.” The three acts was what made it daring. It took nerve to even have one. In the first place, this was two years after the armistice and the play was about the war, and I don’t know which the public was most interested in by this time⁠—the war or Judge Parker.

Act 1 was in July, 1917. Ralston played the part of Francis Shaw, a captain in the American army. He’s been married a year, and when the curtain goes up, his wife’s in their New York home, waiting for him to come in from camp on his weekly leave. She sets reading the war news in the evening paper, and she reads it out loud, like people always do when they’re alone, waiting for somebody. Pretty soon in comes Bridget, the Irish maid⁠—our own dear Katie. And I wished you could of heard her brogue. And seen her gestures. What she reminded me most like was a gal in a home talent minstrels giving an imitation of Lew Fields playing the part of the block system on the New York Central. Her first line was, “Ain’t der captain home yed?” But I won’t try and give you her dialect.

“No,” says Mrs. Shaw. “He’s late.” So Katie says better late than never, and the wife says, yes, but she’s got a feeling that some day it’ll be never; something tells her that if he ever goes to France, he won’t come back. So Bridget says, “You been reading the war news again and it always makes you sad.” “I hate wars!” says Mrs. Shaw, and that line got one of the biggest laughs.

After this they was a couple of minutes when neither of them could think of nothing to add, and then the phone rung and Bridget answered it. It was Capt. Shaw, saying he’d be there pretty soon; so Bridget goes right back to the kitchen to finish getting dinner, but she ain’t no sooner than left the stage when Capt. Shaw struts in. He must of called up from the public booth on his front porch.

The audience had a tough time recognizing him without his comic makeup, but when they did they give him a good hand. Mrs. Shaw got up to greet him, but he brushed by her and come down to the footlights to bow. Then he turned and went back to his Mrs., saying “Maizie!” like this was the last place he expected to run acrost her. They kissed and then he ast her “Where is Bobbie, our dear little one?”⁠—for fear she wouldn’t know whose little one he meant. So she rung a bell and back come Bridget, and he says “Well, Bridget!” and Bridget says, “Well, it’s the master!” This line was another riot. “Bring the little one, Bridget,” says Mrs. Shaw, and the audience hollered again.

Wile Bridget was after the little one, the captain celebrated the reunion by walking round the room, looking at the pictures. Bridget brings the baby in and the captain uncovers its face and says, “Well, Bobbie!” Then he turns to his wife and says, “Let’s see, Maizie. How old is he?” “Two weeks,” says Maizie. “Two weeks!” says Captain Shaw, surprised. “Well,” he says, “I hope by the time he’s old enough to fight for the Stars and Stripes, they won’t be no such a thing as war.” So Mrs. Shaw says, “And I hope his father won’t be called on to make the supreme sacrifice for him and we others that must stay home and wait. I sometimes think that in wartime, it’s the women and children that suffers most. Take him back to his cozy cradle, Bridget. We mothers must be careful of our little ones. Who knows when the kiddies will be our only comfort!” So Bridget beat it out with the little one and I bet he hated to leave all the gayety.

“Well,” says Shaw to his wife, “and what’s the little woman been doing?”

“Just reading,” she says, “reading the news of this horrible war. I don’t never pick up the paper but what I think that some day I’ll see your name amongst the dead.”

“Well,” says the captain bravely, “they’s no danger wile I stay on U.S. soil. But only for you and the little one, I would welcome the call to go Over There and take my place in the battle line. The call will come soon, I believe, for they say France needs men.” This rumor pretty near caused a riot in the audience and Ralston turned and give us all a dirty look.

Then Bridget come in again and said dinner was ready, and Shaw says, “It’ll seem funny to set down wile I eat.” Which was the first time I ever knew that army captains took their meals off the mantelpiece.

Wile the Shaws was out eating, their maid stayed in the living room, where she’d be out of their way. It seems that Ralston had wrote a swell speech for her to make in this spot, about what a tough thing war is, to come along and separate a happy young couple like the Shaws that hadn’t only been married a year. But the speech started “This is terrible!” and when Bridget got that much of it out, some egg in the gallery hollered “You said a mouthful, kid!” and stopped the show.

The house finally quieted down, but Katie was dumb for the first time in her life. She couldn’t say the line that was the cue for the phone to ring, and she had to go over and answer a silent call. It was for the captain, and him and his wife both come back on the stage.

“Maizie,” he says, after he’d hung up, “it’s came! That was my general! We sail for France in half an hour!”

“O husband!” says Maizie. “This is the end!”

“Nonsense!” says Shaw with a brave smile. “This war means death for only a small percent of our men.”

“And almost no captains,” yells the guy in the gallery.

Shaw gets ready to go, but she tells him to wait till she puts on her wraps; she’ll go down to the dock and see him off.

“No, darling,” he says. “Our orders is secret. I can’t give you the name of our ship or where we’re sailing from.”

So he goes and she flops on the couch w’ining because he wouldn’t tell her whether his ship left from Times Square or Grand Central.

They rung the curtain down here to make you think six days has passed. When it goes up again, Maizie’s setting on the couch, holding the little one. Pretty soon Bridget comes in with the evening paper.

“They’s a big headline, mum,” she says. “A troopship has been torpedoed.”

Well, when she handed her the paper, I could see the big headline. It said, “Phillies Hit Grimes Hard.” But Maizie may of had a bet on Brooklyn. Anyway, she begin trembling and finally fell over stiff. So Bridget picked up the paper and read it out loud:

“Amongst the men lost was Capt. F. Shaw of New York.”

Down went the curtain again and the first act was over, and some jokesmith in the audience yelled “Author! Author!”

“He’s sunk!” said the egg in the gallery.

Well, Maizie was the only one in the whole theater that thought Shaw was dead. The rest of us just wished it. Still you couldn’t blame her much for getting a wrong idear, as it was Nov. 11, 1918⁠—over a year later⁠—when the second act begins, and she hadn’t heard from him in all that time. It wasn’t never brought out why. Maybe he’d forgot her name or maybe it was Burleson’s fault, like everything else.

The scene was the same old living room and Maizie was setting on the same old couch, but she was all dressed up like Elsie Ferguson. It comes out that she’s expecting a gentleman friend, a Mr. Thornton, to dinner. She asks Bridget if she thinks it would be wrong of her to accept the guy the next time he proposed. He’s ast her every evening for the last six months and she can’t stall him much longer. So Bridget says it’s all right if she loves him, but Maizie don’t know if she loves him or not, but he looks so much like her late relic that she can’t hardly tell the difference and besides, she has got to either marry or go to work, or her and the little one will starve. They’s a knock at the door and Thornton comes in. Him and the absent captain looks as much alike as two brothers, yours and mine. Bridget ducks and Thornton proposes. Maizie says, “Before I answer, I must tell you a secret. Captain Shaw didn’t leave me all alone. I have a little one, a boy.” “Oh, I love kiddies,” says Thornton. “Can I see him?” So she says it’s seven o’clock and the little one’s supposed to of been put to bed, but she has Bridget go get him.

The little one’s entrance was the sensation of this act. In Act 1 he was just three or four towels, but now Bridget can’t even carry him acrost the stage, and when she put him on his feet, he comes up pretty near to her shoulder. And when Thornton ast him would he like to have a new papa, he says, “Yes, because my other papa’s never coming back.”

Well, they say a woman can’t keep a secret, but if Thornton had been nosing round for six months and didn’t know till now that they was a spanker like Bobbie in the family circle, I wouldn’t hardly call Maizie the town gossip.

After the baby’d went back to read himself to sleep and Mrs. Shaw had yessed her new admirer, Bridget dashed in yelling that the armistice was signed and held up the evening paper for Maizie and Thornton to see. The great news was announced in code. It said: “Phillies Hit Grimes Hard.” And it seemed kind of silly to not come right out and say “Armistice Signed!” Because as I recall, even we saps out here in South Bend had knew it since three o’clock that morning.

The last act was in the same place, on Christmas Eve, 1918.

Maizie and her second husband had just finished doing up presents for the little one. We couldn’t see the presents, but I suppose they was giving him a cocktail shaker and a shaving set. Though when he come on the stage you could see he hadn’t aged much since Act 2. He hadn’t even begin to get bald.

Thornton and the Mrs. went off somewheres and left the kid alone, but all of a sudden the front door opened and in come old Cap Shaw, on crutches. He seen the kid and called to him. “Who are you?” says the little one. “I’m Santa Claus,” says the Cap, “and I’ve broughten you a papa for Christmas.” “I don’t want no papa,” says Bobbie. “I’ve just got a new one.” Then Bridget popped in and seen “the master” and hollered, “A ghost!” So he got her calmed down and she tells him what’s came off. “It was in the paper that Capt. F. Shaw of New York was lost,” she says. “It must of been another Capt. F. Shaw!” he says.

“It’s an odd name,” hollered the guy in the gallery.

The Captain thinks it all over and decides it’s his move. He makes Bridget promise to never tell that she seen him and he says goodbye to she and the kid and goes out into the night.

Maizie comes in, saying she heard a noise and what was it? Was somebody here? “Just the boy with the evening paper,” says Bridget. And the cat’s got Bobbie’s tongue. And Maizie don’t even ask for the paper. She probably figured to herself it was the old story; that Grimes was still getting his bumps.

Well, I wished you could of read what the papers wrote up about the show. One of them said that Bridget seen a ghost at the Olney theater last night and if anybody else wanted to see it, they better go quick because it wouldn’t be walking after this week. Not even on crutches. The mildest thing they said about Ralston was that he was even funnier than when he was in the Follies and tried to be. And they said the part of Bridget was played by a young actress that they hoped would make a name for herself, because Ralston had probably called her all he could think of.

We waited at the stage door that night and when Kate come out, she was crying. Ralston had canned her from the show.

“That’s nothing to cry about,” I says. “You’re lucky! It’s just like as if a conductor had put you off a train a couple of minutes before a big smash-up.”

The programme had been to all go somewheres for supper and celebrate the play’s success. But all Katie wanted now was to get in a taxi and go home and hide.

On the way, I ast her how much she was in so far.

“Just ten thousand,” she says.

“Ten thousand!” I said. “Why, they was only one piece of scenery and that looked like they’d bought it secondhand from the choir boys’ minstrels. They couldn’t of spent one thousand, let alone ten.”

“We had to pay the theater a week’s rent in advance,” she says. “And Jimmy give five thousand to a man for the idear.”

“The idear for what?” I ast.

“The idear for the play,” she said.

“That stops me!” I says. “This baby furnishes idears for all the good actors in the world, but when he wants one for himself, he goes out and pays $5,000 for it. And if he got a bargain, you’re Mrs. Fiske.”

“Who sold him the idear?” ast Ella.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” says Kate.

“Ponzi,” I said.

Ralston called Kate up the next noon and made a date with her at the theater. He said that he was sorry he’d been rough. Before she went I ast her to give me a check for the forty thousand she had left so’s I could buy back some of her bonds.

“I haven’t got only $25,000,” she says. “I advanced Jimmy fifteen thousand for his own account, so’s he wouldn’t have to bother me every time they was bills to meet.”

So I said: “Listen: I’ll go see him with you and if he don’t come clean with that money, I’ll knock him deader’n his play.”

“Thank you!” she says. “I’ll tend to my own affairs alone.”

She come back late in the afternoon, all smiles.

“Everything’s all right,” she said. “I give him his choice of letting me be in the play or giving me my money.”

“And which did he choose?” I ast her.

“Neither one,” she says. “We’re going to get married.”

“Bridget” went into the ashcan Saturday night and the wedding come off Monday. Monday night they left for Boston, where the Follies was playing. Kate told us they’d took Ralston back at the same salary he was getting before.

“How much is that?” I ast her.

“Four hundred a week,” she says.

Well, two or three days after they’d left, I got up my nerve and says to the Mrs.:

“Do you remember what we moved to the Big Town for? We done it to see Life and get Katie a husband. Well, we got her a kind of a husband and I’ll tell the world we seen Life. How about moseying back to South Bend?”

“But we haven’t no home there now.”

“Nor we ain’t had none since we left there,” I says. “I’m going down and see what’s the first day we can get a couple of lowers.”

“Get uppers if it’s quicker,” says the Mrs.

So here we are, really enjoying ourselfs for the first time in pretty near two years. And Katie’s in New York, enjoying herself, too, I suppose. She ought to be, married to a comedian. It must be such fun to just set and listen to him talk.

A Frame-Up

I

I suppose you could call it a frame. But it wasn’t like no frame that was ever pulled before. They’s been plenty where one guy was paid to lay down. This is the first I heard of where a guy had to be bribed to win. And it’s the first where a bird was bribed and didn’t know it.

You know they’ve postponed the match with Britton. Nate said at first that his boy wasn’t ready yet, but the papers all kidded him. Because anybody that seen Burke in the Kemp fight knows he’s ready. So Nate had to change his story and say Burke had hurt one of his hands on Kemp’s egg, and he wasn’t going to take no chance boxing again till he was OK, which mightn’t be for a couple of months. Say, Kemp’s head may be hard, but it ain’t hard enough to hurt one of them hands of Burkey’s. He could play catch with Big Bertha.

No, they’s another reason why Nate ast for a postponement of the Britton date. It’s got to be another frame-up that may take a long w’ile to fix, and he ain’t got no plans made yet. And till he’s all set, he’d be a dumbbell to send Burke against a man as good as Jack Britton.

The papers has printed a lot of stuff about Burke⁠—how he ain’t only been boxing a little over a year, and won’t be twenty-one till next July, and five or six bouts is all he’s been in, and now look at him, offered a match for the welterweight championship and $10,000 win, lose or draw! But if they knew Burke like some of us knows him, they could write a book. Because he certainly is Duke of the Cuckoos and the world’s greatest sap. How they got him ready for the Kemp bout is a story in itself, but it won’t come out till he’s through with the game. So what I tell you is between you and I.

It was one afternoon about a year ago. Bill Brennan was in Kid Howard’s gymnasium in Chi, working out, and they was a gang looking on. Howard seen one boy in the crowd that you couldn’t help from noticing. He was made up for one of the hicks in Way Down East. He’d bought his collar in Akron and his coat sleeves died just south of his elbow. From his pants to his vest was a toll call. He hadn’t never shaved and his w’iskers was just the right number and len’th to string a violin. Thinks Howard to himself: “If you seen a stage rube dressed like that, you’d say it was overdone.”

Well, it got late and the gang thinned out till finally they wasn’t nobody left but Howard and this sap. So Howard ast him if he wanted to see somebody.

“Yes,” said the kid. “I want to see a man that can learn me to fight.”

So Howard ast him if he meant box.

“Box or fight, I don’t care which, just so’s I can learn the rules,” said the hick.

“Did you ever box?” says Howard.

“No,” says the kid, “but I can learn quick and I’m willing to pay for it. I got plenty of money. I got pretty close to $700.”

Howard ast him what was his name and where he come from and his business.

“My name’s Burke and I work on my old man’s farm,” he says. “It’s acrost the Lake, outside of Benton Harbor. We raise peaches.”

“Has your old man got money?” ast Howard.

“Plenty,” says the kid.

“Well,” said Howard, “if you work on a farm, you’re getting plenty of exercise. And if your old man’s rich, you ain’t after the sugar. So what’s the idear of going into this game?”

“I don’t want to go in no game,” he says. “I just want to learn good enough so’s I can win this one match and then I’m through.”

“What one match?” says Howard.

“With Charley Porter,” says Burke.

Well, of course you’ve heard of Charley Porter. He’s a Benton Harbor boy too. He’d fought Lewis twice and Britton once and he’d give them both a sweet battle. He was considered about fourth or fifth best amongst the welters. So it struck Howard funny that this green rube, that hadn’t never boxed, should think he could take a few lessons and then be good enough to beat a boy like Porter.

“You’re an ambitious kid,” he says to him, “but if I was you I’d take my seven hundred men and invest it some other way. Porter’s had forty fights, and that’s what counts. You could take all the lessons in the world, and he’d make a monkey out of you. Unless you’re a boy wonder or something. But even if you are, you couldn’t get no match with Porter till you’d proved it. And that means you’d have to beat some other good boys first.”

So Burke said: “All I come to Chicago for is to take some boxing lessons. They told me you was the man to come and see. If I’m willing to pay the money, it shouldn’t ought to make no difference to you if I get a match with Porter or not. Or if I lick him or not.”

“That’s right,” said Howard. “Only I ain’t no burglar or no con man. I’m in this business for money, but I don’t want to take nobody’s money without they get what they think they’re paying for. And if you had seven million smackers I couldn’t guarantee to make you a good boxer, not good enough to land you a match with Porter.”

“I ain’t asking you to land no match,” says Burke. “I’ll tend to that part. He’ll fight me as soon as I think I’m ready. If he don’t, I’ll run him out of Michigan. He wouldn’t dast stay round there if everybody was saying I had him scared. And that’s what they’d say if he wouldn’t fight me.”

“Why would they?” says Howard. “He’s in the game for money, too, and he couldn’t get no money for a bout with a guy like you that nobody ever heard of. They wouldn’t no club match you up.”

“I won’t have no trouble getting matched up,” says Burke. “Fitzsimmons will put us on right there in Benton Harbor. The town’s nuts over Porter and they’ll pay to see him any time. And whatever purse they offer is all his. I’ll fight him for nothing.”

“Oh!” says Howard. “That makes it different! You’re sore at him!”

“No,” says the hick, “I’m not sore at him.”

“You just don’t like him,” says Howard.

“I don’t know if I like him or not,” said Burke. “I don’t even know him.”

“But for some reason you want to give him a trimming,” says Howard. “Well, listen, boy: I understand they’s no capital punishment in your State, so it looks to me like you’d run less risk of getting killed if you’d sneak in Porter’s house some night w’ile he’s asleep and kiss him on the brow with a meat ax.”

Burke didn’t crack a smile.

“That wouldn’t get me nowheres,” he said. “They’s a reason I got to box him. If you can learn me, all right. If not, I’ll go somewheres else.”

So Howard made a date for him to come back the next day.

II

Well, when the kid stripped for action, Howard’s eyes popped out. With them comic clothes on, he’d looked awkward; he was a picture with them off. Howard says he felt like inviting the best sculptures in Chi to come and take a look.

“I was going to box with him myself,” says Howard, “but not after I seen them shoulder muscles. I figured I didn’t have enough insurance to justify me putting on the gloves with this bird. So I made Joe Rivers take him.”

Well, they could see in a minute that the rube was a born boxer. He was fast as a streak and in one lesson he learnt more than most boys picks up in a month. They just showed him how to stand and the rest seemed to come natural. In a little w’ile Joe, with all his experience, was having trouble to land, whereas Burkey was hitting Joe as often as he felt like. Only he didn’t put no zip in his punches. He pulled them all.

“Cut loose once!” says Howard. “Let’s see if you can knock him down!”

“Oh, no,” said Burkey. “This ain’t in earnest.”

Rivers looked just as well satisfied, but Howard says:

“You got to be in earnest, even when you’re just working out. They’s lots of boys as strong as you that don’t know how to get their stren’th into their punch. That’s a thing that’s got to be learnt, and I can’t learn you if I can’t see you wallop.”

“No,” says Burke. “I ain’t going to hurt nobody for nothing.”

And all Howard’s coaxing done no good. He wouldn’t cut loose.

But at the end of the six weeks he stuck round Howard’s he was one of the sweetest boxers you ever seen and Howard thought so well of him that he tried to sign him up.

“Let me handle you, Burkey,” he says. “I’ll get you on in Milwaukee and I’ll take you down east and make you some money. If you’re handled right, they’s no reason why you shouldn’t be welterweight champion some day.”

“I don’t want to be welterweight champion,” said Burke. “I just want to be champion of Charley Porter. And when I’ve beat him, I’m through.”

“All right,” says Howard. “You know what you want. But let me tell you one thing⁠—you won’t beat Porter or no one else if you just pet them. You’ve got to hit!”

The kid smiled.

“I’ll hit when it’s time,” he says.

So that was the last Howard heard of him till pretty near a month later, when he picked up a paper and read where Young Burke, a farmer boy living outside of Benton Harbor, had stopped Charley Porter, an aspirant for the welterweight title, in one round.

III

About a month more went by before Burke showed up in Chi again and called on Nate. As soon as he mentioned his name and where he was from, Nate was interested. Because Howard had told him about his experience with the kid. But Burkey wasn’t made up no more like Howard had described him. He was wearing the best suit of clothes twenty dollars could buy.

“I went to see Howard,” he says, “but he’s out of town. So I come to you. I want to go in the fight game.”

“I understood from Howard,” says Nate, “that you was going to quit after that one bout.”

“I thought I was,” says Burkey. “But it’s different now. You see, I and my old man has busted up. So I got to make a living.”

“What was the bust-up over?” ast Nate. “Didn’t he like you boxing?”

“He didn’t care nothing about that,” says the kid. “But they was a gal he wanted I should marry. And I give her the air. So he done the same to me.”

“Why did you quit the gal?” ast Nate.

“I figured I could do better,” he says. “She’s just a gal round home there, and why should I marry her? I can pretty near pick who I want to marry.”

“Everybody can pick who they want to marry,” said Nate.

“Yes, but who I pick, I can pretty near have,” says the kid. “I thought I was stuck on this gal, but I found I wasn’t. I hadn’t seen hardly any other gals, and she was always round. So I thought she was about the only gal in the world. I know better now. But I did like her and my old man liked her and kept after me to ask her. So I ast her and she told me she was stuck on somebody else. So I ast her who was it and she said Charley Porter. She didn’t know him, but she’d seen him on the street a lot of times, and he’d smiled at her. She thought he was handsome and made a hero out of him. He was the best fighter in the world, to her mind. So I said I could beat him and she laughed at me. She says, ‘You might beat him plowing.’ So I said, ‘I can beat him boxing.’ So she says, ‘All right. You do it and I’ll like you better than him.’ So I come up here and took a few lessons and knocked him cockeyed.

“When she seen me afterwards, she throwed her arms round my neck and said I was the best man in the world, and we got engaged. But during the time I was up here in Chi learning to box, I learnt to dance too. And I bought me these good clothes. So after I trimmed Porter I got to going over to St. Joe, to the pavilion, nights, and I seen all the gals was nuts over me. So I said to myself, ‘What’s the idear of tying up to this rube gal when you can marry somebody that is somebody⁠—maybe one of these rich Chicago society dames.’ So I give this hick the air and my old man throwed me out of the house.”

Well, Nate’s handled a lot of boxers and never seen one yet that despised himself, but after he’d listened to this bird a w’ile, he begin to think that all the rest of them was lilies of the valley.

“Which Chicago society gal have you picked out?” he says, to lead him on.

“I don’t know yet,” says Burkey. “Some of them at the dances in St. Joe looked good, but I want to see them all before I tie myself up.”

If you ever been to St. Joe, you know the Chicago society gals that attends them dances. If you want to see one of them in the middle of the week, go up to the Draperies and ask for Min.

“You got the right dope,” Nate says. “You’d be a sucker to make a choice till you’d looked over the whole field. And in the meanw’ile, I’ll try and get you fixed up with a couple of matches so as you can grab some spending money.”

But Burke was still thinking of the dames.

“I read a great story the other day,” he says. “It was a young fella that was a boxer and one night he was walking along the street and he heard a gal scream. She was up on the porch of a big house and they was a dude there, trying to make love to her. So she didn’t like him and that’s why she screamed. So this young fella went in and grabbed the dude and knocked him for a long trip. So the gal got stuck on this young fella, the boxer, and married him and she turned out to be a millionaire.”

“A great story!” said Nate. “I certainly wished I could of read it. But suppose he’d married her and then found out that her old man made automobiles and owed everybody. A young fella can’t be too careful who he lets marry him. And if I was you I’d go slow. In the first place, most of the gals with the real class and the big money lives in New York. So why not wait till you’ve win a couple of bouts in Milwaukee or somewheres so’s I can get you dated up in the Big Town? Then you can walk up and down Eighth Avenue and help yourself to the cream.”

This was to stall him along so’s he’d forget the skirts for a w’ile and tend to business.

Nate made him work out every day and box with some of the boys. But he was just as shy of a punch as when Howard had him.

“Cut loose and slug!” Nate told him.

“What for?” he says.

“To show me if you’ve got a haymaker,” says Nate.

“Ask Porter if I have,” said the kid.

Finally Nate got him matched with Red Harris in a semi-windup at Milwaukee. Harris can wallop, but he’s slow. Well, Burkey made him look like he was handcuffed. Red never laid a glove on him the whole bout, w’ile Nate’s boy played him like a piano. But it was soft music and when it was over neither of them had a mark. The crowd liked Burke at first on account of his speed. But they razzed him the last few rounds because it looked like he wasn’t trying. The papers couldn’t do nothing but give him the best of it, but said he wouldn’t never get nowheres till he learned to punch. Nate had begged him all through to tear in and end it, but he might as well of tried to argue with Central.

Well, Fitzsimmons was putting on a show over to Benton Harbor and he wired Nate and ast him if he’d bring Burke there for a windup with a Grand Rapids boy named Hap Stein. This kid had met some of the best boys round Michigan and beat them all, and, of course, Burke’d draw good in his hometown, especially after what he done to Porter.

So Nate took Burkey over there and Fitz ast Nate how the kid was coming and Nate told him:

“One of the sweetest boxers I ever seen, but he ain’t showed enough of a wallop to annoy a soap bubble.”

“It’s a funny thing,” said Fitz, “because he hit Porter just once and broke his jaw. And Charley’s jaw ain’t glass, neither. I know a punch when I see one and I doubt if Dempsey could hit harder than this bird plugged this baby.”

“Well,” says Nate, “I wished we had the prescription. He made a monkey out of Harris at Milwaukee, but he wouldn’t even slap him hard. And the boys he works out with, I’ve had them rough him so’s he’d get mad, but it didn’t do no good.”

“I don’t suppose so,” says Fitz, “because he wasn’t sore at Porter. Charley didn’t even know him.”

“But he had a reason to show Porter up,” said Nate, and he told Fitz about the rube gal.

“That’s news to me,” said Fitz. “Maybe he’ll only fight when they’s a dame for a prize. Why don’t you hire some chorus doll to vamp him and have her tell him she’s his as soon as he’s knocked all the other welters for a corpse?”

“You don’t know this bird!” said Nate. “Chorus gals would be beneath his notice. He wants a millionaire society belle and I’d have a fat chance of getting one of them to play the part.”

Well, the bout with Stein was a farce. Burkey was so fast that Hap thought they’d ganged on him, but nothing Nate could say or do had any effect. He couldn’t make the kid cut loose and punch.

IV

When they’d been back in Chi a couple of months and Burke had had one more fight in Milwaukee⁠—he made a monkey out of Jimmy Mason⁠—well, he begin fretting and wanted to know how soon Nate was going to take him east.

“As soon as I can get you matched,” said Nate. “But if I do date you up down there, you’ll have to cut out the cuddling and really fight or they won’t want you a second time.”

“Maybe I’ll be different down there,” said Burkey.

So along late in the fall Nate got him matched with Battling Igoe, in Boston.

“Now here’s your chance,” Nate told him. “I got Rickard’s promise that if you trim Igoe he’ll put you on in New York with Willie Kemp. And the man that beats Willie Kemp will get a whack at Britton and the big money.”

All Burke said was:

“How’s Boston for gals? Any class to them?”

“Not enough for you,” says Nate. “You’d be throwing yourself away! They’s no doubt but that you could go down to Scollay Square or Revere Beach and take your pick, but you’d be a sucker to do it. New York’s the place. And suppose you get tied up to some Boston countess and then went to New York and win a couple of big bouts and got invited round to some of them big mansions on Mott Street or the Tenderloin, and next thing you know, you’d probably meet a dozen gals that never even heard of Boston. Then you’d wished you’d of been more careful and not financed yourself to no bean shooter.”

You read about the Igoe bout? I seen it. When they was all in the ring beforehand, Nate said to Igoe, he says: “Well, Bat, we’ve decided to let you stay three rounds. That’ll be enough to give you a boxing lesson. But in the fourth round, you’re going to hear music that’ll rock you to sleep.” Nate had heard that the Battler wasn’t no lion heart and this kind of gab fretted him.

“I’ll rock him to sleep himself,” he said, but his teeth was shimmying.

Burke was just the same like in his other bouts. He wrote his name and address all over Igoe’s pan, and convinced the Battler that any time he wanted to he could knock him for a row of stumps. That went on for three rounds, with Nate, as usual, begging the kid to put over a haymaker, and Burke paying no attention. So when the bell rung for the fourth, Nate hollered, “Good night, Bat!” and Igoe thought sure he meant business. And he wasn’t named after Nelson. So the first time Burke hit him in this round he folded up like a bass singer’s chin and flopped on the floor, yelling foul. Well, we all seen the blow; it landed just under the green spot where he parks his collar button. And besides that, they wasn’t no force to it. But Igoe was through for the evening, and the kid had win another soft one. Personally I’d of rather took fifty socks on the jaw than the razzing the crowd give Bat.

Well, Nate was going to New York and stay a w’ile and he wanted to send Burke back to Chi to wait till they’d chose a date for the fight with Kemp. But Burkey said no; he could lay round New York as easy as Chicago and if Nate wouldn’t take him there he was through. He says:

“Here I am a coming champion, and what does it get me? I ain’t having no fun. I want to meet some gals and dance with them and kid them.”

“All right, come along,” says Nate. “But I wished you’d remember one thing: When you do meet them swell East Side janes, don’t treat them like toys. They’ve got feelings as well as riches and wealth, and I would rather see Kemp or Britton knock you lopsided than see you win fame and leave a trail of broken hearts.”

“I’m no flirt!” says Burkey. “I can’t help what they feel towards me, but I won’t lead them on, not unlest I’m serious myself.”

“Now you’re talking like a man!” says Nate.

So they come to New York and stopped at the Spencer. Nate had a lot of business to tend to, and guys to see, and he didn’t want this rube chasing round with him all the w’ile, so he turned him over to Jack Grace, the old lightweight. You know Jack, or at least you’ve heard of him. He’d kid Thomas A. Edison.

Nate had tipped off Jack about Burkey, and the second day they was in the Big Town, Jack took the boy for a walk. Every time they passed a car with a good-looking gal in it, Burke would ask, “Who’s that?” And Jack pretended like he knew them all.

“That’s Gwendolyn Weasel,” he’d say. “Her old man owns part of the Grand Central Station⁠—the Lower Level. And that one’s Mildred Whiffletree, a niece of Bud Fisher, the ukulele king. And there’s Honey Hives; she’s a granddaughter of Old Man Bumble, the bee man. They got a big country place on Ellis Island.”

“Where could a man meet these gals?” ast Burkey.

“Nowheres only at their home,” said Jack. “And they’s no chance of you getting invited round yet a w’ile. Nobody knows who you are. But wait till you’ve hung one on this Kemp guy’s chin and I bet you’ll have more invitations than a roach catcher.”

Well, Nate landed the Kemp match sooner than he expected. Rickard said he’d put Burke on with Willie for the windup, three weeks from then. And he’d guarantee the winner a match with Britton.

Nate had got what he was after, but he was worried sick.

“I know he can beat Kemp if he fights,” he says, “but I never yet been able to make him fight. And if he just babies along like he done in these other bouts, one of these New York referees is liable to say he ain’t trying, and stop the bout. Or if it does go the limit, Kemp’ll get the decision because he’ll punch harder. And Kemp’ll hit Burke too. He’s far and away the best boy my kid’s ever been against, too good to get showed up even by as fast and clever a boxer as Burkey. Our only chance is to make this little farmer slug⁠—tear in there and sock him like he did Porter. But how we’re going to do it is more than I know.”

V

Jack Grace is the one that deserves the credit. He went to work the night of Miss Morgan’s big show, when the receipts was turned over to devastated France. Nate had to buy four tickets and I and Jack and Burkey went with him.

Well, as you know, our best people was there that night.

The old Garden was full of the folks that generally goes there to the horse show, not to boxing bouts. The soup and fish was everywheres, and gals that would knock your eye out, dressed pretty near as warm as the fighters themselfs.

We couldn’t keep Burke in his seat. He was scared that he wouldn’t see all the janes, and just as scared that they wouldn’t all see him. The guys behind him was yelling murder and the ushers bawled him out a dozen times.

Then all of a sudden, his eyes jumped right out of his head and he gave a gasp and flopped down in his chair. The three of us looked where he was looking. And no wonder he’d wilted! What a gal!

She was with a middle-aged man, probably her dad, and she set in the row just ahead of us and acrost the aisle. I guess it was the first time she’d ever been to this kind of a party and she was all flushed up with excitement. But she’d of been pretty enough without that.

“There she is!” says Burke. “There’s the gal I want!”

“Who don’t!” says Nate.

“Who is she?” Burke ast, and Nate was going to tell him he didn’t know. But Jack Grace cut in.

“It’s Esther Fester,” he said. “That’s her father with her, Lester Fester. He’s the second richest man in New York. They claim he made three or four billion during the war, selling waffle irons to Belgium. And she’s his only kid. Every young millionaire in town has proposed to her, but she won’t have nothing to do with them, calls them all loafers.

“She says the man she marries will have to be a champion of something, whether it’s football or boxing or halma. She don’t care what, just so’s he’s better in one line than anybody else.”

“She’s quite a boxing fan,” says Nate. “I seen her here several times before. She maybe wants to look all the boys over and see which one she likes the best.”

“I understand she’s a great admirer of Willie Kemp,” says Jack. “She’s always here when he boxes and she probably come tonight expecting to see him in the audience. Maybe he’ll be introduced before the main bout, and if he is, we’ll watch her close and see if she’s interested.”

“Why can’t I get introduced?” ast Burke.

“You can,” said Nate. “Wait till they’re getting ready for the windup and then climb in the ring and tell Joe Humphreys who you are.”

Well, he couldn’t hardly wait till the preliminaries was over so’s he could get up there and have her see him. And when he bowed, it was right at her.

“Young Burke, the Michigan Flash!” says Humphreys. “He is matched to box Willie Kemp in this ring two weeks from Friday night. The winner will meet Jack Britton for the welterweight title.”

Coming back to his seat, Burkey had to pass the gal. He smiled right in her face and she smiled back. I guess it was all she could do to keep from laughing.

I don’t suppose they’s been more than three or four fights better than that Leonard-Mitchell scrap. It was certainly the best I ever seen. But I don’t believe Burke knew they was fighting.

When it was over and the gang started out he would of overtook the gal and spoke to her only for Nate holding him.

“It’d make her sore and spoil everything,” said Nate.

“How could it make her sore?” said Burke. “Didn’t she smile at me?”

“Well, it’d make her old man sore,” says Nate.

“What could he do?” says Burkey. “If he looked cross-eyed at me, I’d bust him.”

“That’d be a sweet way to start a courtship!” said Jack. “Even New York gals ain’t so far ahead of the times that they fall in love with every handsome young bud that introduces himself to their father with a smash in the jaw.”

“But I just want her phone number,” says the kid.

“You can get it at the hotel,” says Jack. “The phone company got out a book three or four years ago that gives the names of a few of their rich subscribers, and what their number used to be, and if you call it up, they’ll tell you what it’s been changed to.”

So as soon as we was back at the Spencer, Burkey run for the book. And he couldn’t find no Lester Fester.

“I didn’t think it’d be in there,” says Jack. “They’s very few New York millionaires has their number in the phone book. If they did, their wifes would bother them to death, calling up.”

“But they must be some way to locate them,” said the kid. “Somebody must know where they stay. A man as rich as him must have a big mansion somewheres. And you got to find out where it’s at. If you don’t find out for me tomorrow, why I’m through! I won’t box Kemp or no one else.”

And they knew he was cuckoo enough to mean it. But Jack Grace had his plans made already.

“I’ll locate them tomorrow,” he said, “that is, unlest you hear from the gal herself.”

“But she don’t know where I’m staying,” says Burke.

“She might maybe call up Rickard and find out,” says Jack.

So the kid went to bed and Nate and Jack set up and talked it over.

“It looks like we got him,” said Jack. “If we can make him think him and Kemp is rivals, he’ll fight.”

“But that gal can’t be framed,” says Nate. “I don’t know who she is, but she ain’t the kind we could get any help from.”

“We don’t need her help,” says Jack. “He’ll get a special delivery tomorrow afternoon, with her name signed to it; that is, what he thinks is her name. I’ll dope out the letter yet tonight. If necessary he’ll get a letter every day till the day of the bout.”

“And then what?” says Nate.

“Why, nothing,” says Jack. “What do you care, if it does the work?”

“It don’t seem right,” said Nate. “I don’t want to break the kid’s heart.”

“You got as much chance of breaking his head!” says Jack. “What about the gal in Benton Harbor, that he was so stuck on and got over it in a day? But as far as that’s concerned, we don’t have to kill this gal off when we’re through with Kemp. We can keep her going till he meets Britton. We’ll have her tell him first that he’s got to trim Kemp, and if that works, we’ll send her to Europe or somewheres, leaving him a farewell note that she’s been called away, but she’ll be back in time to see him win the title.”

“He’s a sap,” said Nate, “but I doubt if he’s dumbbell enough to swallow this.”

“You don’t appreciate him,” said Jack. “Where him and the fair sex is concerned, they’s nothing so raw that he won’t eat it up. But suppose he don’t? You ain’t got nothing to lose.”

“Just him, that’s all,” says Nate.

“Well, he’s no loss if he won’t fight,” said Jack. “And this may be the way to make him.”

VI

Burke had started training at Daley’s. When he got back from there the next afternoon, they was a special delivery waiting for him. It said:

Dear Mr. Burke: You will probably be surprised getting a letter from one who you have never met, but still I suppose you get many letters from silly girls of my sex that has seen you and admires you. Hope you won’t think bad of me for writing to you, but am a girl that acts on their impulse and sometimes am sorry afterwards that I done so and wished I was not so silly, but you know how girls are and especially in regards to affairs of the heart.

Well, Mr. Burke, you don’t know me, but I was to the Garden last night with my daddy and set right near you and noticed you when I first come in, but didn’t dast look at you and didn’t know who you was till you was introduced from the ring. And then when you was returning to your seat I thought you smiled at me and I smiled back. Oh, Mr. Burke, was it me you was smiling at? If not I will feel very foolish for smiling at you and hope you won’t think the worse of me for doing so.

Well, anyway, it’s too late to mend and this a.m. I had my secretary get where you are staying from Mr. Rickard and am writing you this letter and suppose you will say it’s just another fool girl writing mash notes, but I flatter myself that I am a little higher class than most girls as I am a society girl and don’t write these kind of letters as a rule. So please don’t think I am a fool and tear this up. Am just a girl that sometimes lets their feelings run away with them.

Am going to make pa take me to see the bout between you and Willie Kemp, but am afraid you are going to be beaten that night, Mr. Burke, as have seen Mr. Kemp fight and believe he is going to be the champion. I admire him very much and up to last night, admired him more than any other man, but now am not so sure. There I am afraid I have been too bold and you will think I am a perfect fool.

Well, Mr. Burke, will not take up no more of your time though I don’t suppose you have read this far, but hope you don’t think I am a fool, but know you do. Pa don’t approve of me writing to men to who I am not engaged and would be very angry was he to find out I had wrote to you, so can’t let you answer this letter or call me up for fear he would find it out and be very angry. But maybe will write you again and certainly will see you fight Mr. Kemp and if you see me that night, please smile at me again so will not think you consider me a fool. But maybe you will not feel like smiling after you have boxed Mr. Kemp, as I think he is a wonder.

Well, Mr. Burke, goodbye for this time and please don’t think I am a fool.

Your would-be friend,
Esther Fester.

Well, Jack Grace had guessed right. Burkey swallowed it whole. He begin reading it down in the lobby, but when he looked back and seen the name signed to it, he took it up to the room to finish it. And if he read it once, he read it twenty times⁠—and looked sillier every time he read it. He surprised us one way, though. We was expecting he would show it to everybody. But he kept it to himself. Of course, we’d read it before it got to him. Jack had wrote it and had one of the phone gals copy it off.

Nate ast the kid at supper how he felt.

“Great!” he says.

“You want to keep working to improve your wind,” says Nate. “This is your first fifteen-round bout and you may get tired.”

“I won’t have time to get tired,” he says. “I’ll knock him dead in a round!”

It was the first time he’d ever made a speech like that.

“Looks like you was right,” says Nate to Jack, afterwards. “He’s eat it up. The only thing now is to be sure and not overplay it. Just give him a couple more short notes between now and the bout.”

“What shall I say in them?” says Jack.

“You don’t need my advice,” said Nate. “I think you wrote that one from memory. You must of got a few mash notes yourself.”

“No,” says Jack. “All the time I was boxing, I only got letters from one gal. And she always said the same thing: ‘If you’re a man, you’ll pay me back that eight dollars and sixty cents you stole.’ ”

Well, Burke pestered the clerks to death asking if they was sure no mail had came for him; and he went for the phone every time it rung, and was scared to go out for fear a call would come w’ile he wasn’t there. Finally it got so that Nate couldn’t hardly drag him to Daley’s for his workout, and they seen they’d have to spill another note or he’d worry himself out of shape. The second one was short and said:

Dear Mr. Burke: It has been all as I could do to keep from writing you before this, but was afraid if I wrote too often you would think I was a fool.

Well, Mr. Burke, it’s only five days now till your bout with Mr. Kemp and suppose you are excited. I know I am and can’t hardly wait for the big event, though to be perfectly honest am in a funny position as I don’t know if I want you or he to win. You see I am an admirer of the both of you. Suppose you will say to yourself I must be a funny girl to not know her own mind, but you see I have admired Mr. Kemp a long time and only seen you the other night for the first time, so don’t know which I like best. Guess I will let you two decide the question for me and may the best man win.

Pa is going to take me to the fight and only hope I will not faint or something with excitement. Suppose you will think me a fool for feeling this way in regards to two parties who I have never met, but as I told you before, am a girl that always lets their feelings get the best of them, though sometimes am sorry when it is too late. Hope you won’t make me sorry, Mr. Burke. That is, if you win. Am afraid for your sake, however, that you are doomed with defeat, as Mr. Kemp has a punch and you are just a boxer that can’t hit hard.

Well, Mr. Burke, must say ta ta for this time as am going to a toddle party at the Ritz.

Yours, Esther.

And the morning of the big day he got this one:

Dear Mr. Burke: Just a line to let you know am thinking of you and if you beat Mr. Kemp, will call you up and see if we can’t meet somewheres and have a dance, or maybe you don’t care for la dance, but we can have a little chat if you don’t think me too much a fool.

Well, Mr. Burke, I won’t bother you when you must be already worried and nervous over the bout and will just say that I will be at the Garden and will see you even if you don’t see me and wished I could tell you where I will set but don’t know.

Well, Mr. Burke, good luck and may the best man win.

Esther.

On the way down from the hotel that night, Burkey ast Jack and I if we’d bet on him. We told him no. So he says:

“If you want to make some easy money, bet some of these wise crackers that I’ll stop this bird in a round. I’ll slap him dead!”

VII

So I and Jack did get down a couple of bets, fifty apiece. We bet the kid would win by a knock out and we got three to one. The smart guys had looked over his record and didn’t see how he could stop Kemp.

But when they got in the ring, I wished for a minute I hadn’t bet. Instead of paying any attention to what was coming off, Burkey was looking all over the house trying to locate the little peach. I was scared he’d still be doing it yet when the bout started, and Kemp’d sock him before he got down to business. But Jack Grace seen the danger, and leaned over and w’ispered to the kid:

“You remember that Fester gal? She’s up in a box with her old man.”

“Where at?” ast Burke, all excited.

“It’s pretty dark,” says Jack, “but I’ll try and point her out between rounds.”

As you know, they wasn’t no “between rounds.” In the first two minutes Kemp made five trips to the floor, and he liked it so well the last time that he decided to sleep there.

And in the excitement, Jack pretended he’d lost sight of the gal.

VIII

Burkey stayed in the room all the next day, waiting for the phone call. The papers had went nuts over him and said he was the Benny Leonard of the welters, and that it was just a question of the date when the title would change hands. But for all the effect it had on Burke, they might as well of said he’d opened a bird store.

Meanw’ile, Nate and Jack Grace talked it over and decided to go through with Jack’s scheme⁠—keep Esther alive till the Britton bout, but send her to Europe, where she wouldn’t be so much trouble. So late in the evening, w’ile Burkey was still waiting for his call, a special delivery come for him that said:

Dear Mr. Burke: Have bad news or at least hope you will agree with me and think it is bad. By the time you receive this note, will be on the old pond with pa, bound for Europe. He got a cable this a.m. calling him to the other side and insisted on me going along. So we hustled round and got rooms on the ship that sails this p.m. I cried when he said I would have to go and hope you feel as bad as I do. But it’s only for a short time and will be back in time to see you beat Britton and win the title. After that⁠—well, Mr. Burke, I won’t say no more.

You was wonderful last night and am proud of you. Wished I could tell you in person how much I admire you, but will do that later on. Will drop you a note just the minute we get back. In the meantime, don’t forget one who is proud of you and wished I could meet my coming champion.

Esther.

Well, it was a blow to the kid, but it would of worked out all right only for the toughest kind of a break. Nate had to hurry back to Chi, but before he left he seen Rickard and closed for the Britton bout. Burke’s end was to be $10,000.

So the second day after the Kemp bout, they was taking the Century home, and I and Jack Grace was over to see them off. They’d just shook hands and was starting through the gate when Burke seen her, the gal he’d went wild over at Miss Morgan’s show! She was saying goodbye to another pip.

“Wait!” says Burkey, and before Nate could stop him, he’d grabbed the gal by the arm.

“Esther!” he says. “Miss Fester! You didn’t go after all!”

The poor gal was speechless.

“Don’t you know me?” said the kid. “I’m Burke, the boy that beat Kemp, the boy you been writing to.”

She jerked her arm loose and found her tongue.

“I’m not interested in who you are,” she said. “I don’t know you and I don’t believe I want to.”

By this time, Nate had him.

“Come on, boy,” he says. “You’ve made a mistake.”

And he dragged him through the gate, w’ile the crowd stared goggle-eyed.

“Well,” says our gal to her chum, “you’re going to have a thrill⁠—a trip with a crazy man!”

Burke was numb, Nate tells me, till the train was way out of New York. Then he said:

“Maybe she didn’t recognize me. Or maybe she just didn’t want her friend to know.”

“That was probably it,” says Nate.

“But why did she lie to me and say she was going to Europe?” says the kid.

After a w’ile he got up from his seat.

“Her friend’s on this train,” he said. “I’m going to find her and ask her something.”

Nate tried to coax him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. So Nate went with him to see that he didn’t get in no trouble.

They found the gal’s pal a couple of cars back. The kid stopped and said:

“I beg your pardon, lady, but I want to ask you just one question. That gal that seen you off, is her name Esther Fester?”

The jane laughed and says:

“I’m afraid it’s nothing as poetical as that. Her name is plain Mary Holt.”

Without another word, Burke followed Nate back to their own sleeper. He didn’t open his clam again till they hit Albany. Then he made some remark about wanting some fresh air, and got off the train.

That’s the last Nate seen of him till the other day, when he showed up in Chi, after money.

So you see why the Britton show had to be postponed. They’s no plot for it.

Some Like Them Cold

N.Y., Aug. 3.

Dear Miss Gillespie: How about our bet now as you bet me I would forget all about you the minute I hit the big town and would never write you a letter. Well girlie it looks like you lose so pay me. Seriously we will call all bets off as I am not the kind that bet on a sure thing and it sure was a sure thing that I would not forget a girlie like you and all that is worrying me is whether it may not be the other way round and you are wondering who this fresh guy is that is writeing you this letter. I bet you are so will try and refreshen your memory.

Well girlie I am the handsome young man that was wondering round the Lasalle st. station Monday and “happened” to sit down beside of a mighty pretty girlie who was waiting to meet her sister from Toledo and the train was late and I am glad of it because if it had not of been that little girlie and I would never of met. So for once I was a lucky guy but still I guess it was time I had some luck as it was certainly tough luck for you and I to both be liveing in Chi all that time and never get together till a half hour before I was leaveing town for good.

Still “better late than never” you know and maybe we can make up for lost time though it looks like we would have to do our makeing up at long distants unless you make good on your threat and come to N.Y. I wish you would do that little thing girlie as it looks like that was the only way we would get a chance to play round together as it looks like they was little or no chance of me comeing back to Chi as my whole future is in the big town. N.Y. is the only spot and specially for a man that expects to make my liveing in the song writeing game as here is the Mecca for that line of work and no matter how good a man may be they don’t get no recognition unless they live in N.Y.

Well girlie you asked me to tell you all about my trip. Well I remember you saying that you would give anything to be makeing it yourself but as far as the trip itself was conserned you ought to be thankfull you did not have to make it as you would of sweat your head off. I know I did specially wile going through Ind. Monday p.m. but Monday night was the worst of all trying to sleep and finely I give it up and just layed there with the prespiration rolling off of me though I was laying on top of the covers and nothing on but my underwear.

Yesterday was not so bad as it rained most of the a.m. comeing through N.Y. state and in the p.m. we road along side of the Hudson all p.m. Some river girlie and just looking at it makes a man forget all about the heat and everything else except a certain girlie who I seen for the first time Monday and then only for a half hour but she is the kind of a girlie that a man don’t need to see her only once and they would be no danger of forgetting her. There I guess I better lay off that subject or you will think I am a “fresh guy.”

Well that is about all to tell you about the trip only they was one amuseing incidence that come off yesterday which I will tell you. Well they was a dame got on the train at Toledo Monday and had the birth opp. mine but I did not see nothing of her that night as I was out smokeing till late and she hit the hay early but yesterday a.m. she come in the dinner and sit at the same table with me and tried to make me and it was so raw that the dinge waiter seen it and give me the wink and of course I paid no tension and I waited till she got through so as they would be no danger of her folling me out but she stopped on the way out to get a tooth pick and when I come out she was out on the platform with it so I tried to brush right by but she spoke up and asked me what time it was and I told her and she said she geussed her watch was slow so I said maybe it just seemed slow on acct. of the company it was in.

I don’t know if she got what I was driveing at or not but any way she give up trying to make me and got off at Albany. She was a good looker but I have no time for gals that tries to make strangers on a train.

Well if I don’t quit you will think I am writeing a book but will expect a long letter in answer to this letter and we will see if you can keep your promise like I have kept mine. Don’t dissapoint me girlie as I am all alone in a large city and hearing from you will keep me from getting home sick for old Chi though I never thought so much of the old town till I found out you lived there. Don’t think that is kidding girlie as I mean it.

You can address me at this hotel as it looks like I will be here right along as it is on 47th st. right off of old Broadway and handy to everything and am only paying $21 per wk. for my rm. and could of got one for $16 but without bath but am glad to pay the differents as am lost without my bath in the a.m. and sometimes at night too.

Tomorrow I expect to commence fighting the “battle of Broadway” and will let you know how I come out that is if you answer this letter. In the mean wile girlie au reservoir and don’t do nothing I would not do.

Your new friend (?)
Chas. F. Lewis.

Chicago, Ill., Aug. 6.

My Dear Mr. Lewis: Well, that certainly was a “surprise party” getting your letter and you are certainly a “wonder man” to keep your word as I am afraid most men of your sex are gay deceivers but maybe you are “different.” Any way it sure was a surprise and will gladly pay the bet if you will just tell me what it was we bet. Hope it was not money as I am a “working girl” but if it was not more than a dollar or two will try to dig it up even if I have to “beg, borrow or steal.”

Suppose you will think me a “case” to make a bet and then forget what it was, but you must remember, Mr. Man, that I had just met you and was “dazzled.” Joking aside I was rather “fussed” and will tell you why. Well, Mr. Lewis, I suppose you see lots of girls like the one you told me about that you saw on the train who tried to “get acquainted” but I want to assure you that I am not one of those kind and sincerely hope you will believe me when I tell you that you was the first man I ever spoke to meeting them like that and my friends and the people who know me would simply faint if they knew I ever spoke to a man without a “proper introduction.”

Believe me, Mr. Lewis, I am not that kind and I don’t know now why I did it only that you was so “different” looking if you know what I mean and not at all like the kind of men that usually try to force their attentions on every pretty girl they see. Lots of times I act on impulse and let my feelings run away from me and sometimes I do things on the impulse of the moment which I regret them later on, and that is what I did this time, but hope you won’t give me cause to regret it and I know you won’t as I know you are not that kind of a man a specially after what you told me about the girl on the train. But any way as I say, I was in a “daze” so can’t remember what it was we bet, but will try and pay it if it does not “break” me.

Sis’s train got in about ten minutes after yours had gone and when she saw me what do you think was the first thing she said? Well, Mr. Lewis, she said: “Why Mibs (That is a pet name some of my friends have given me) what has happened to you? I never seen you have as much color.” So I passed it off with some remark about the heat and changed the subject as I certainly was not going to tell her that I had just been talking to a man who I had never met or she would of dropped dead from the shock. Either that or she would not of believed me as it would be hard for a person who knows me well to imagine me doing a thing like that as I have quite a reputation for “squelching” men who try to act fresh. I don’t mean anything personal by that, Mr. Lewis, as am a good judge of character and could tell without you telling me that you are not that kind.

Well, Sis and I have been on the “go” ever since she arrived as I took yesterday and today off so I could show her the “sights” though she says she would be perfectly satisfied to just sit in the apartment and listen to me “rattle on.” Am afraid I am a great talker, Mr. Lewis, but Sis says it is as good as a show to hear me talk as I tell things in such a different way as I cannot help from seeing the humorous side of everything and she says she never gets tired of listening to me, but of course she is my sister and thinks the world of me, but she really does laugh like she enjoyed my craziness.

Maybe I told you that I have a tiny little apartment which a girlfriend of mine and I have together and it is hardly big enough to turn round in, but still it is “home” and I am a great home girl and hardly ever care to go out evenings except occasionally to the theatre or dance. But even if our “nest” is small we are proud of it and Sis complimented us on how cozy it is and how “homey” it looks and she said she did not see how we could afford to have everything so nice and Edith (my girlfriend) said: “Mibs deserves all the credit for that. I never knew a girl who could make a little money go a long ways like she can.” Well, of course she is my best friend and always saying nice things about me, but I do try and I hope I get results. Have always said that good taste and being careful is a whole lot more important than lots of money though it is nice to have it.

You must write and tell me how you are getting along in the “battle of Broadway” (I laughed when I read that) and whether the publishers like your songs though I know they will. Am crazy to hear them and hear you play the piano as I love good jazz music even better than classical, though I suppose it is terrible to say such a thing. But I usually say just what I think though sometimes I wish afterwards I had not of. But still I believe it is better for a girl to be her own self and natural instead of always acting. But am afraid I will never have a chance to hear you play unless you come back to Chi and pay us a visit as my “threat” to come to New York was just a “threat” and I don’t see any hope of ever getting there unless some rich New Yorker should fall in love with me and take me there to live. Fine chance for poor little me, eh Mr. Lewis?

Well, I guess I have “rattled on” long enough and you will think I am writing a book unless I quit and besides, Sis has asked me as a special favor to make her a pie for dinner. Maybe you don’t know it, Mr. Man, but I am quite famous for my pie and pastry, but I don’t suppose a “genius” is interested in common things like that.

Well, be sure and write soon and tell me what N.Y. is like and all about it and don’t forget the little girlie who was “bad” and spoke to a strange man in the station and have been blushing over it ever since.

Your friend (?)
Mabelle Gillespie.

N.Y., Aug. 10.

Dear Girlie: I bet you will think I am a fresh guy commenceing that way but Miss Gillespie is too cold and a man can not do nothing cold in this kind of weather specially in this man’s town which is the hottest place I ever been in and I guess maybe the reason why New Yorkers is so bad is because they think they are all ready in H⁠⸺ and can not go no worse place no matter how they behave themselves. Honest girlie I certainly envy you being where there is a breeze off the old Lake and Chi may be dirty but I never heard of nobody dying because they was dirty but four people died here yesterday on acct. of the heat and I seen two different women flop right on Broadway and had to be taken away in the ambulance and it could not of been because they was dressed too warm because it would be impossible for the women here to leave off any more cloths.

Well have not had much luck yet in the battle of Broadway as all the heads of the big music publishers is out of town on their vacation and the big boys is the only ones I will do business with as it would be silly for a man with the stuff I have got to waste my time on somebody that is just on the staff and have not got the final say. But I did play a couple of my numbers for the people up to Levy’s and Goebel’s and they went crazy over them in both places. So it looks like all I have to do is wait for the big boys to get back and then play my numbers for them and I will be all set. What I want is to get taken on the staff of one of the big firms as that gives a man the inside and they will plug your numbers more if you are on the staff. In the mean wile have not got nothing to worry me but am just seeing the sights of the big town as have saved up enough money to play round for a wile and any way a man that can play piano like I can don’t never have to worry about starveing. Can certainly make the old music box talk girlie and am always good for a $75 or $100 job.

Well have been here a week now and on the go every minute and I thought I would be lonesome down here but no chance of that as I have been treated fine by the people I have met and have sure met a bunch of them. One of the boys liveing in the hotel is a vaudeville actor and he is a member of the Friars club and took me over there to dinner the other night and some way another the bunch got wise that I could play piano so of course I had to sit down and give them some of my numbers and everybody went crazy over them. One of the boys I met there was Paul Sears the song writer but he just writes the lyrics and has wrote a bunch of hits and when he heard some of my melodies he called me over to one side and said he would like to work with me on some numbers. How is that girlie as he is one of the biggest hit writers in N.Y.

N.Y. has got some mighty pretty girlies and I guess it would not be hard to get acquainted with them and in fact several of them has tried to make me since I been here but I always figure that a girl must be something wrong with her if she tries to make a man that she don’t know nothing about so I pass them all up. But I did meet a couple of pips that a man here in the hotel went up on Riverside Drive to see them and insisted on me going along and they got on some way that I could make a piano talk so they was nothing but I must play for them so I sit down and played some of my own stuff and they went crazy over it.

One of the girls wanted I should come up and see her again, and I said I might but I think I better keep away as she acted like she wanted to vamp me and I am not the kind that likes to play round with a gal just for their company and dance with them etc. but when I see the right gal that will be a different thing and she won’t have to beg me to come and see her as I will camp right on her trail till she says yes. And it won’t be none of these N.Y. fly by nights neither. They are all right to look at but a man would be a sucker to get serious with them as they might take you up and next thing you know you would have a wife on your hands that don’t know a dish rag from a waffle iron.

Well girlie will quit and call it a day as it is too hot to write anymore and I guess I will turn on the cold water and lay in the tub a wile and then turn in. Don’t forget to write to

Your friend,
Chas. F. Lewis.

Chicago, Ill., Aug. 13.

Dear Mr. Man: Hope you won’t think me a “silly Billy” for starting my letter that way but “Mr. Lewis” is so formal and “Charles” is too much the other way and any way I would not dare call a man by their first name after only knowing them only two weeks. Though I may as well confess that Charles is my favorite name for a man and have always been crazy about it as it was my father’s name. Poor old dad, he died of cancer three years ago, but left enough insurance so that mother and we girls were well provided for and do not have to do anything to support ourselves though I have been earning my own living for two years to make things easier for mother and also because I simply can’t bear to be doing nothing as I feel like a “drone.” So I flew away from the “home nest” though mother felt bad about it as I was her favorite and she always said I was such a comfort to her as when I was in the house she never had to worry about how things would go.

But there I go gossiping about my domestic affairs just like you would be interested in them though I don’t see how you could be though personly I always like to know all about my friends, but I know men are different so will try and not bore you any longer. Poor Man, I certainly feel sorry for you if New York is as hot as all that. I guess it has been very hot in Chi, too, at least everybody has been complaining about how terrible it is. Suppose you will wonder why I say “I guess” and you will think I ought to know if it is hot. Well, sir, the reason I say “I guess” is because I don’t feel the heat like others do or at least I don’t let myself feel it. That sounds crazy I know, but don’t you think there is a good deal in mental suggestion and not letting yourself feel things? I believe that if a person simply won’t allow themselves to be affected by disagreeable things, why such things won’t bother them near as much. I know it works with me and that is the reason why I am never cross when things go wrong and “keep smiling” no matter what happens and as far as the heat is concerned, why I just don’t let myself feel it and my friends say I don’t even look hot no matter if the weather is boiling and Edith, my girlfriend, often says that I am like a breeze and it cools her off just to have me come in the room. Poor Edie suffers terribly during the hot weather and says it almost makes her mad at me to see how cool and unruffled I look when everybody else is perspiring and have red faces etc.

I laughed when I read what you said about New York being so hot that people thought it was the “other place.” I can appreciate a joke, Mr. Man, and that one did not go “over my head.” Am still laughing at some of the things you said in the station though they probably struck me funnier than they would most girls as I always see the funny side and sometimes something is said and I laugh and the others wonder what I am laughing at as they cannot see anything in it themselves, but it is just the way I look at things so of course I cannot explain to them why I laughed and they think I am crazy. But I had rather part with almost anything rather than my sense of humour as it helps me over a great many rough spots.

Sis has gone back home though I would of liked to of kept her here much longer, but she had to go though she said she would of liked nothing better than to stay with me and just listen to me “rattle on.” She always says it is just like a show to hear me talk as I always put things in such a funny way and for weeks after she has been visiting me she thinks of some of the things I said and laughs over them. Since she left Edith and I have been pretty quiet though poor Edie wants to be on the “go” all the time and tries to make me go out with her every evening to the pictures and scolds me when I say I had rather stay home and read and calls me a “book worm.” Well, it is true that I had rather stay home with a good book than go to some crazy old picture and the last two nights I have been reading myself to sleep with Robert W. Service’s poems. Don’t you love Service or don’t you care for “highbrow” writings?

Personly there is nothing I love more than to just sit and read a good book or sit and listen to somebody play the piano, I mean if they can really play and I really believe I like popular music better than the classical though I suppose that is a terrible thing to confess, but I love all kinds of music but a specially the piano when it is played by somebody who can really play.

Am glad you have not “fallen” for the “ladies” who have tried to make your acquaintance in New York. You are right in thinking there must be something wrong with girls who try to “pick up” strange men as no girl with self respect would do such a thing and when I say that, Mr. Man, I know you will think it is a funny thing for me to say on account of the way our friendship started, but I mean it and I assure you that was the first time I ever done such a thing in my life and would never of thought of doing it had I not known you were the right kind of a man as I flatter myself that I am a good judge of character and can tell pretty well what a person is like by just looking at them and I assure you I had made up my mind what kind of a man you were before I allowed myself to answer your opening remark. Otherwise I am the last girl in the world that would allow myself to speak to a person without being introduced to them.

When you write again you must tell me all about the girl on Riverside Drive and what she looks like and if you went to see her again and all about her. Suppose you will think I am a little old “curiosity shop” for asking all those questions and will wonder why I want to know. Well, sir, I won’t tell you why, so there, but I insist on you answering all questions and will scold you if you don’t. Maybe you will think that the reason why I am so curious is because I am “jealous” of the lady in question. Well, sir, I won’t tell you whether I am or not, but will keep you “guessing.” Now, don’t you wish you knew?

Must close or you will think I am going to “rattle on” forever or maybe you have all ready become disgusted and torn my letter up. If so all I can say is poor little me⁠—she was a nice little girl and meant well, but the man did not appreciate her.

There! Will stop or you will think I am crazy if you do not all ready.

Yours (?)
Mabelle.

N.Y., Aug. 20.

Dear Girlie: Well girlie I suppose you thought I was never going to answer your letter but have been busier than a one armed paper hanger the last week as have been working on a number with Paul Sears who is one of the best lyric writers in N.Y. and has turned out as many hits as Berlin or Davis or any of them. And believe me girlie he has turned out another hit this time that is he and I have done it together. It is all done now and we are just waiting for the best chance to place it but will not place it nowheres unless we get the right kind of a deal but maybe will publish it ourselves.

The song is bound to go over big as Sears has wrote a great lyric and I have give it a great tune or at least every body that has heard it goes crazy over it and it looks like it would go over bigger than any song since “Mammy” and would not be surprised to see it come out the hit of the year. If it is handled right we will make a bbl. of money and Sears says it is a cinch we will clean up as much as $25,000 apiece which is pretty fair for one song but this one is not like the most of them but has got a great lyric and I have wrote a melody that will knock them out of their seats. I only wish you could hear it girlie and hear it the way I play it. I had to play it over and over about 50 times at the Friars last night.

I will copy down the lyric of the chorus so you can see what it is like and get the idea of the song though of course you can’t tell much about it unless you hear it played and sang. The title of the song is “When They’re Like You” and here is the chorus:

Some like them hot, some like them cold.
Some like them when they’re not too darn old.
Some like them fat, some like them lean.
Some like them only at sweet sixteen.
Some like them dark, some like them light.
Some like them in the park, late at night.
Some like them fickle, some like them true,
But the time I like them is when they’re like you.

How is that for a lyric and I only wish I could play my melody for you as you would go nuts over it but will send you a copy as soon as the song is published and you can get some of your friends to play it over for you and I know you will like it though it is a different melody when I play it or when somebody else plays it.

Well girlie you will see how busy I have been and am libel to keep right on being busy as we are not going to let the grass grow under our feet but as soon as we have got this number placed we will get busy on another one as a couple like that will put me on Easy st. even if they don’t go as big as we expect but even 25 grand is a big bunch of money and if a man could only turn out one hit a year and make that much out of it I would be on Easy st. and no more hammering on the old music box in some cabaret.

Who ever we take the song to we will make them come across with one grand for advance royaltys and that will keep me going till I can turn out another one. So the future looks bright and rosey to yours truly and I am certainly glad I come to the big town though sorry I did not do it a whole lot quicker.

This is a great old town girlie and when you have lived here a wile you wonder how you ever stood for a burg like Chi which is just a hick town along side of this besides being dirty etc. and a man is a sucker to stay there all their life specially a man in my line of work as N.Y. is the Mecca for a man that has got the musical gift. I figure that all the time I spent in Chi I was just wasteing my time and never really started to live till I come down here and I have to laugh when I think of the boys out there that is trying to make a liveing in the song writeing game and most of them starve to death all their life and the first week I am down here I meet a man like Sears and the next thing you know we have turned out a song that will make us a fortune.

Well girlie you asked me to tell you about the girlie up on the Drive that tried to make me and asked me to come and see her again. Well I can assure you you have no reasons to be jealous in that quarter as I have not been back to see her as I figure it is wasteing my time to play round with a dame like she that wants to go out somewheres every night and if you married her she would want a house on 5th ave. with a dozen servants so I have passed her up as that is not my idea of home.

What I want when I get married is a real home where a man can stay home and work and maybe have a few of his friends in once in a wile and entertain them or go to a good musical show once in a wile and have a wife that is in sympathy with you and not nag at you all the wile but be a real help mate. The girlie up on the Drive would run me ragged and have me in the poor house inside of a year even if I was makeing 25 grand out of one song. Besides she wears a make up that you would have to blast to find out what her face looks like. So I have not been back there and don’t intend to see her again so what is the use of me telling you about her. And the only other girlie I have met is a sister of Paul Sears who I met up to his house wile we was working on the song but she don’t hardly count as she has not got no use for the boys but treats them like dirt and Paul says she is the coldest proposition he ever seen.

Well I don’t know no more to write and besides have got a date to go out to Paul’s place for dinner and play some of my stuff for him so as he can see if he wants to set words to some more of my melodies. Well don’t do nothing I would not do and have as good a time as you can in old Chi and will let you know how we come along with the song.

Chas. F. Lewis.

Chicago, Ill., Aug. 23.

Dear Mr. Man: I am thrilled to death over the song and think the words awfully pretty and am crazy to hear the music which I know must be great. It must be wonderful to have the gift of writing songs and then hear people play and sing them and just think of making $25,000 in such a short time. My, how rich you will be and I certainly congratulate you though am afraid when you are rich and famous you will have no time for insignificant little me or will you be an exception and remember your “old” friends even when you are up in the world? I sincerely hope so.

Will look forward to receiving a copy of the song and will you be sure and put your name on it? I am all ready very conceited just to think that I know a man that writes songs and makes all that money.

Seriously I wish you success with your next song and I laughed when I read your remark about being busier than a one armed paper hanger. I don’t see how you think up all those comparisons and crazy things to say. The next time one of the girls asks me to go out with them I am going to tell them I can’t go because I am busier than a one armed paper hanger and then they will think I made it up and say: “The girl is clever.”

Seriously I am glad you did not go back to see the girl on the Drive and am also glad you don’t like girls who makes themselves up so much as I think it is disgusting and would rather go round looking like a ghost than put artificial color on my face. Fortunately I have a complexion that does not need “fixing” but even if my coloring was not what it is I would never think of lowering myself to “fix” it. But I must tell you a joke that happened just the other day when Edith and I were out at lunch and there was another girl in the restaurant whom Edie knew and she introduced her to me and I noticed how this girl kept staring at me and finally she begged my pardon and asked if she could ask me a personal question and I said yes and she asked me if my complexion was really “mine.” I assured her it was and she said: “Well, I thought so because I did not think anybody could put it on so artistically. I certainly envy you.” Edie and I both laughed.

Well, if that girl envies me my complexion, why I envy you living in New York. Chicago is rather dirty though I don’t let that part of it bother me as I bathe and change my clothing so often that the dirt does not have time to “settle.” Edie often says she cannot see how I always keep so clean looking and says I always look like I had just stepped out of a band box. She also calls me a fish (jokingly) because I spend so much time in the water. But seriously I do love to bathe and never feel so happy as when I have just “cleaned up” and put on fresh clothing.

Edie has just gone out to see a picture and was cross at me because I would not go with her. I told her I was going to write a letter and she wanted to know to whom and I told her and she said: “You write to him so often that a person would almost think you was in love with him.” I just laughed and turned it off, but she does say the most embarrassing things and I would be angry if it was anybody but she that said them.

Seriously I had much rather sit here and write letters or read or just sit and dream than go out to some crazy old picture show except once in awhile I do like to go to the theater and see a good play and a specially a musical play if the music is catchy. But as a rule I am contented to just stay home and feel cozy and lots of evenings Edie and I sit here without saying hardly a word to each other though she would love to talk but she knows I had rather be quiet and she often says it is just like living with a deaf and dumb mute to live with me because I make so little noise round the apartment. I guess I was born to be a home body as I so seldom care to go “gadding.”

Though I do love to have company once in awhile, just a few congenial friends whom I can talk to and feel at home with and play cards or have some music. My friends love to drop in here, too, as they say Edie and I always give them such nice things to eat. Though poor Edie has not much to do with it, I am afraid, as she hates anything connected with cooking which is one of the things I love best of anything and I often say that when I begin keeping house in my own home I will insist on doing most of my own work as I would take so much more interest in it than a servant, though I would want somebody to help me a little if I could afford it as I often think a woman that does all her own work is liable to get so tired that she loses interest in the bigger things of life like books and music. Though after all what bigger thing is there than home making a specially for a woman?

I am sitting in the dearest old chair that I bought yesterday at a little store on the North Side. That is my one extravagance, buying furniture and things for the house, but I always say it is economy in the long run as I will always have them and have use for them and when I can pick them up at a bargain I would be silly not to. Though heaven knows I will never be “poor” in regards to furniture and rugs and things like that as mother’s house in Toledo is full of lovely things which she says she is going to give to Sis and myself as soon as we have real homes of our own. She is going to give me the first choice as I am her favorite. She has the loveliest old things that you could not buy now for love or money including lovely old rugs and a piano which Sis wanted to have a player attachment put on it but I said it would be an insult to the piano so we did not get one. I am funny about things like that, a specially old furniture and feel towards them like people whom I love.

Poor mother, I am afraid she won’t live much longer to enjoy her lovely old things as she has been suffering for years from stomach trouble and the doctor says it has been worse lately instead of better and her heart is weak besides. I am going home to see her a few days this fall as it may be the last time. She is very cheerful and always says she is ready to go now as she has had enough joy out of life and all she would like would be to see her girls settled down in their own homes before she goes.

There I go, talking about my domestic affairs again and I will bet you are bored to death though personly I am never bored when my friends tell me about themselves. But I won’t “rattle on” any longer, but will say good night and don’t forget to write and tell me how you come out with the song and thanks for sending me the words to it. Will you write a song about me sometime? I would be thrilled to death! But I am afraid I am not the kind of girl that inspires men to write songs about them, but am just a quiet “mouse” that loves home and am not giddy enough to be the heroine of a song.

Well, Mr. Man, good night and don’t wait so long before writing again to

Yours (?)
Mabelle.

N.Y., Sept. 8.

Dear Girlie: Well girlie have not got your last letter with me so cannot answer what was in it as I have forgotten if there was anything I was supposed to answer and besides have only a little time to write as I have a date to go out on a party with the Sears. We are going to the Georgie White show and afterwards somewheres for supper. Sears is the boy who wrote the lyric to my song and it is him and his sister I am going on the party with. The sister is a cold fish that has no use for men but she is show crazy and insists on Paul takeing her to 3 or 4 of them a week.

Paul wants me to give up my room here and come and live with them as they have plenty of room and I am running a little low on money but don’t know if I will do it or not as am afraid I would freeze to death in the same house with a girl like the sister as she is ice cold but she don’t hang round the house much as she is always takeing trips or going to shows or somewheres.

So far we have not had no luck with the song. All the publishers we have showed it to has went crazy over it but they won’t make the right kind of a deal with us and if they don’t loosen up and give us a decent royalty rate we are libel to put the song out ourselves and show them up. The man up to Goebel’s told us the song was OK and he liked it but it was more of a production number than anything else and ought to go in a show like the Follies but they won’t be in N.Y. much longer and what we ought to do is hold it till next spring.

Mean wile I am working on some new numbers and also have taken a position with the orchestra at the Wilton and am going to work there starting next week. They pay good money $60 and it will keep me going.

Well girlie that is about all the news. I believe you said your father was sick and hope he is better and also hope you are getting along OK and take care of yourself. When you have nothing else to do write to your friend,

Chas. F. Lewis.

Chicago, Ill., Sept. 11.

Dear Mr. Lewis: Your short note reached me yesterday and must say I was puzzled when I read it. It sounded like you was mad at me though I cannot think of any reason why you should be. If there was something I said in my last letter that offended you I wish you would tell me what it was and I will ask your pardon though I cannot remember anything I could of said that you could take offense at. But if there was something, why I assure you, Mr. Lewis, that I did not mean anything by it. I certainly did not intend to offend you in any way.

Perhaps it is nothing I wrote you, but you are worried on account of the publishers not treating you fair in regards to your song and that is why your letter sounded so distant. If that is the case I hope that by this time matters have rectified themselves and the future looks brighter. But any way, Mr. Lewis, don’t allow yourself to worry over business cares as they will all come right in the end and I always think it is silly for people to worry themselves sick over temporary troubles, but the best way is to “keep smiling” and look for the “silver lining” in the cloud. That is the way I always do and no matter what happens, I manage to smile and my girlfriend, Edie, calls me Sunny because I always look on the bright side.

Remember also, Mr. Lewis, that $60 is a salary that a great many men would like to be getting and are living on less than that and supporting a wife and family on it. I always say that a person can get along on whatever amount they make if they manage things in the right way.

So if it is business troubles, Mr. Lewis, I say don’t worry, but look on the bright side. But if it is something I wrote in my last letter that offended you I wish you would tell me what it was so I can apologize as I assure you I meant nothing and would not say anything to hurt you for the world.

Please let me hear from you soon as I will not feel comfortable until I know I am not to blame for the sudden change.

Sincerely,
Mabelle Gillespie.

N.Y. Sept. 24.

Dear Miss Gillespie: Just a few lines to tell you the big news or at least it is big news to me. I am engaged to be married to Paul Sears’ sister and we are going to be married early next month and live in Atlantic City where the orchestra I have been playing with has got an engagement in one of the big cabarets.

I know this will be a surprise to you as it was even a surprise to me as I did not think I would ever have the nerve to ask the girlie the big question as she was always so cold and acted like I was just in the way. But she said she supposed she would have to marry somebody sometime and she did not dislike me as much as most of the other men her brother brought round and she would marry me with the understanding that she would not have to be a slave and work round the house and also I would have to take her to a show or somewheres every night and if I could not take her myself she would “run wild” alone. Atlantic City will be OK for that as a lot of new shows opens down there and she will be able to see them before they get to the big town. As for her being a slave, I would hate to think of marrying a girl and then have them spend their lives in druggery round the house. We are going to live in a hotel till we find something better but will be in no hurry to start house keeping as we will have to buy all new furniture.

Betsy is some doll when she is all fixed up and believe me she knows how to fix herself up. I don’t know what she uses but it is weather proof and I have been out in a rain storm with her and we both got drowned but her face stayed on. I would almost think it was real only she tells me different.

Well girlie I may write to you again once in a wile as Betsy says she don’t give a damn if I write to all the girls in the world just so I don’t make her read the answers but that is all I can think of to say now except good bye and good luck and may the right man come along soon and he will be a lucky man getting a girl that is such a good cook and got all that furniture etc.

But just let me give you a word of advice before I close and that is don’t never speak to strange men who you don’t know nothing about as they may get you wrong and think you are trying to make them. It just happened that I knew better so you was lucky in my case but the luck might not last.

Your friend,
Chas. F. Lewis.

Chicago, Ill., Sept. 27.

My Dear Mr. Lewis: Thanks for your advice and also thank your fiancé for her generosity in allowing you to continue your correspondence with her “rivals,” but personly I have no desire to take advantage of that generosity as I have something better to do than read letters from a man like you, a specially as I have a man friend who is not so generous as Miss Sears and would strongly object to my continuing a correspondence with another man. It is at his request that I am writing this note to tell you not to expect to hear from me again.

Allow me to congratulate you on your engagement to Miss Sears and I am sure she is to be congratulated too, though if I met the lady I would be tempted to ask her to tell me her secret, namely how she is going to “run wild” on $60.

Sincerely,
Mabelle Gillespie.

The Battle of the Century

I

I don’t know nothing that you don’t know, but if you want to hear it again, all right. I’ll have to start back pretty near two years ago, the first time I seen Jim after he stopped Big Wheeler and win the title. He’d signed up with a circus and I happened to be in Omaha when it hit there. I run into them on the street, Jim and his manager, Larry Moon. I had them come to my hotel where we could talk things over.

“Well, Jim,” I said, “how does it feel to be champ?”

“Not so good,” he says.

“Well,” I said, “you never did care much for the glory. But still and all it’s pretty sweet to have all that dough.”

“All what dough?” says Jim.

“Why,” I said, “what you got out of the Wheeler fight, and what you’re getting with this troupe, and what you’ve got a chance to get.”

Jim laughed and so did Moon.

“Listen, Pinkie,” says Moon. “You’re an old pal, so I don’t mind telling you a couple of facts. Our net profits out of the Wheeler fight wouldn’t pay for a Chinaman’s personal laundry. We’re making a little money with this show, but we’ve got to spend it because we’re champion. We’ve got an offer to make a picture, but it ain’t so much and we’ll have to blow the most of it to show we’re a good fella. Further and more, Jim hates that kind of work. They’s one thing he can do better than anybody else, and that’s fight. And that’s all he wants to do, just fight.”

“Well,” I said, “let him fight! He don’t have to fight for nothing.”

“Let him fight who?” says Larry.

“Why, anybody that’ll take him on,” I said. “Let him be a champ like some of the old boys and battle everybody that wants his game.”

“That’s a grand idear!” said Larry. “Now maybe you’ll go ahead and name four or five guys that wants his game; that is, guys that’s got enough chance with him so as they’d draw two hundred people at the gate.”

“Well,” I said, “how about⁠—” I had to stop and think.

“Sure!” said Larry. “There you are! Now you’ll get some idear of what we’re up against. You say, ‘Let him be a champ like some of the old boys and fight everybody.’ That’d be OK if we was living twenty or thirty years ago when they was a bunch round like Fitz, Corbett and McCoy, and Choynski, Sharkey, Ruhlin, big Jeff, and all that gang; any one of them liable to knock each other’s block off. But who have we got to pick from? They ain’t a man living or dead that’s got a chance in God’s world to even make this baby prespire, and the worst of it is that everybody knows it. Here I got a champion at a time when everything’s big money and he should ought to be worth a million fish to me and himself, and he ain’t worth a dime. And he won’t be worth a dime, neither, unless I can build something up.

“They’s just one chance for us,” says Larry, “and that’s to have some young fella spring up from nowheres and knock five or six of these ‘contenders’ for a gool; then we’ll have to stall a w’ile and pretend like we’re scared of him till we’ve got the bugs thinking that maybe he has a look-in. The one thing in our favor is that people loves to see a champion get socked, especially my champion, who ain’t no matinée idol. So if they think they’s a man capable of socking him, they’ll pay to see it come off. Believe me, if we do get a break like that, I’ll demand a purse that’ll knock their eye out. Because fights is going to be few and far between for my little ward. His trouble is that he’s too good. He’d be better if he was worse. Right now they’s no man in sight that it wouldn’t be a joke to match him with. So, as I say, all we can do is watch and pray and hope that some hero pops up before the heavyweight champion of the world dies of starvation. Him and his manager both.”

II

It was quite a w’ile after this when I was in New York and dropped in at the apartment where Jim and Larry was living.

“Set down,” said Moon. “Jim’s out buying new records, but I expect him right back.”

So we set and chinned till the champ showed up. He’d boughten the afternoon papers and he showed us the big headlines about the scrap in London⁠—“Goulet Stops Bradford in First Round.”

“That Englishman must be a fine heel!” said Jim. “This little French boy popped him on the chin and he laid down and rolled over like a circus dog.”

Larry grabbed the papers and read the story. “Boys,” he says, “this may be it!”

“May be what?” says Jim.

“Our chance!” said Moon. “This thing might be built up till it meant something!”

“Say, listen,” says the champ; “I and you have been together long enough so as we ought to be able to speak the same language. But when you say ‘This thing might be built up,’ I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about this thing that come off in London,” said Larry. “Here’s the champion of England and the champion of France, the only two countries over there that has boxing. Well, the champion of France stops this Englishman with a punch and that makes him the champion of Europe. And it makes him look pretty good to the English because they was all stuck on this Bradford. And what looks good to the English looks good to a lot of people here. The way the papers plays it up, you can see they figure they’s a good deal of interest in it. Further and more, this guy Goulet is a war hero. He’s the idol of Europe and the champion of Europe, and if he was built up right he’d be a great card over here. That’s what I’m talking about, a match between their champ and our champ for the championship of the world.”

“You don’t mean match me with this Goulet?” said Jim.

“That’s exactly what I mean” says Moon. “All right,” says Jim: “You’re my matchmaker and I fight who you pick out. But I don’t see how you come to overlook Benny Leonard.”

III

I stayed round town and seen Larry two or three times, “It’s going to be softer than I figured,” he told me. “Those writers over in England has went cuckoo over the Frenchman. They was so nuts about Bradford that they think the guy that stopped him must be a cave man. And our papers is printing all the junk and their readers falls for it. As a matter of fact, I suppose Johnny Coulon could knock Bradford acrost the channel, but don’t tell nobody I said that. Though I guess they wouldn’t believe it anyway. The combination of what them big English reporters say, along with Goulet being a war hero and handsome⁠—well, it’s making him a popular idol in America.

“But the thing’s got to be nursed along and worked up, and that’s my job. It’ll take time, but it’ll be worth it. The tough problem ain’t getting the fans steamed up. They’ll take care of themselves. What I’ve got to do is convince some guy with money and a lot of nerve that it would be a fight, not a murder. I’ve already stuck one line in the papers that I’m proud of. Maybe you seen it. I said that while Jim Dugan wasn’t scared of nobody in the world, still he felt like he ought to give the American contenders first shot. Because this Goulet has showed that he’s got a wallop and he might land a lucky one on Jim. And we’d hate to see the title leave the old U.S.A. Not so bad, was it?”

A few weeks later it was in the papers that Goulet and his manager, La Chance, was coming over. The picture people had made the Frenchman a sweet offer and they was no money to be picked up in France even for a champion.

“All I hope,” said Moon, “is that he won’t get seasick. Judging from his pictures, he ain’t no sideshow fat man at best and we don’t want him to look no skinnier than usual or our match will be all wet.”

Well, I don’t know if he’d been seasick or not, but he certainly was a brittle-looking bird. The first time I seen him, up to one of the roof shows, I thought the guy that pointed him out must be mistaken. But it really was him⁠—a pale, frail boy that if he’d went to college, the football coaches would of rushed him for cheerleader. As for him standing up in a box fight with the man that had sprinkled Big Wheeler all over Ohio, well, it was just a laugh.

“You may as well forget it,” I said when I seen Moon. “Your show’s a flop and you won’t get no backer.”

“Watch me,” he says. “Give me time and a fair break in the luck!”

So one day he calls up the hotel where the Frenchman was staying and made a date with his manager, La Chance.

“Listen, Mr. La Chance,” he said. “If you’ll let me have a free hand, and you do what I say, I can make some real money for you and me both. Suppose I could get your man matched with Dugan. How much would you want for your share?”

“I can’t speak no English,” said La Chance.

“How about two hundred thousand dollars?” said Moon.

This time he really couldn’t speak no English. He’d swooned.

They called the house physician and brought him to and laid him on the bed.

“A heart attack!” says the Doc. “Don’t let him get excited.”

“All right,” said Larry. “I guess I better go.”

He started to follow the doctor out.

“Wait a minute!” says the sick man of Europe.

So Moon turned round and come back.

“My heart’s all right now,” said La Chance. “It was just the first shock.

“You made mention of a sum of money⁠—two hundred thousand⁠—was it francs?”

“I don’t know nothing about francs,” said Larry. “I asked you a plain question: Will your man fight my man for two hundred thousand dollars?”

“How much would our share be?” said La Chance.

“I’m talking about your share,” says Larry. “Two hundred thousand for you, draw, lose or get killed.”

La Chance sprung at him with a kiss for both cheeks, but Larry ducked away.

“You’ve got to let me run this,” he said. “You’ve got to put yourself in my hands and do everything I say.”

“Absolutely!” says the Frenchman.

“All right,” says Larry. “Now, in the first place, don’t get the idear in your head that this is going to be a quick cleanup. It’ll take time⁠—maybe a year. What are you fellas going to do when you’ve finished your picture?”

“Well,” said La Chance, “we thought maybe we’d stay over here and have a few fights.”

“No!” says Larry. “You go right back home and don’t fight nobody! You stay there till you hear from me. I think it’d be a good idear for you to have one bout in this country, to show that your man can knock somebody besides that English tumbler. But I’ll pick out the man for you to fight and I’ll let you know when I’ve got him. He’ll be somebody that you can’t help licking, not by no possible chance. You won’t get much money for it, but it’ll be advertising. Is that all right with you?”

“Oui, oui,” says La Chance. “What else?”

“Nothing else,” said Moon.

IV

Several months is supposed to elapse between these two acts. During this time Dugan has to eat, so he takes on a setup out in Michigan and knocks him in three rounds, or two rounds longer than necessary. Also, they pick out a guy for Goulet to trim⁠—old Tommy Fogel. This “fight” takes place over in Jersey and Tommy surprises them. He manages to stand up three rounds without his crutches. The Frenchman looks fast as a streak and everybody gets excited. People is saying to each other, “Even if he is a little light he may be just the kind of a fighter that would give Dugan trouble. He’s in there and out again like a flash and he’s hard to hit. Jim ain’t never faced a man like him. He’s liable to run the big boy ragged.”

A little w’ile after this great battle Jim and Larry get hungry again and they accept an offer of a hundred thousand to meet a big horse named Joe Barnes. Dugan has knocked him before and can do it again and they ain’t much danger in taking him on, though some of the wise birds thinks different. They think Larry is risking the title because Barnes is a guy that fights five nights a week and he’s always in shape and he’s so tough that nobody ever did stop him except Jim himself. As a matter of fact, Larry ain’t running no more risk than getting in a bath tub. Because w’ile all the wise guys know that Jim can punch, what they don’t seem to realize is that he can take it.

Anyway, this bout with Barnes was in the Big Town and Jim trained for it on a ship and when he clumb in the ring he was still at sea. In the second round Barnes clipped him on the chin with all he had. And all he had wasn’t half what he needed. After a w’ile Dugan got his land legs and begin to improve and he stopped Barnes in the twelfth with a funny-looking punch to the waistline. But they wasn’t no time during the scrap when he looked like himself and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was under wraps as well as in bad shape. However it happened, it made people think Jim wasn’t the fighter his friends claimed; it made him look like he could be licked, and that was a boost for the Goulet match.

V

They’s a big steamship man, Robert Crawley, that had kind a contract with La Chance and Goulet. The agreement was that if Goulet seen a chance for a big match Crawley was to be the backer. If he wanted to. If he didn’t, he was to step out.

Well, Crawley’s got a partner, Bill Guthrie, who Moon had met. So Moon phones them that he has been in communication with La Chance and La Chance says his man is ready to fight Dugan if a suitable purse is guaranteed.

“I thought maybe you’d like to talk it over,” says Larry.

So Crawley and Guthrie said they would and Moon asks them to come up and see him in a couple of days.

“Now,” said Larry to me, “I’m going way downtown for lunch and you can come along if you want to. But if you don’t like Spanish cooking you better stay home.”

So I went with him to a joint off lower Broadway. They was a flock of Spanish dishes on the bill of fare, but what Moon ordered for him and I was plain ham and eggs.

W’ile the one waiter was out getting it, Moon left me and went over to the guy that had showed us to our table. They talked together for pretty near a half hour and I was through eating when Larry come back. He took a look at his food and passed it up.

“I’ve made a date with the head waiter for half past two,” he says. “That’s the soonest he can get off. If you haven’t nothing to do you can go along with us.”

“Where to?” I asked him.

“Shopping,” he said.

“Well,” I says, “I guess I better stick with you. When a man goes nuts he ought to have a friend along.”

So the two of us walked down to the Battery and fooled round till it was time to keep the date. We dropped in at the restaurant again and come out with the head waiter and the greasy bird that had waited on us. We went over to Broadway and got a taxi. Moon give the driver his orders and we started uptown. We stopped at Livington’s.

“Men’s clothing,” said Moon, and the man showed us where to go.

Well, to cut it short, we was in there an hour and when we come away our two waiter friends had bundles containing a complete new makeup⁠—two silk hats, Prince Albert coats, gray pants, fancy shirts, ties that would knock you dead, and collars like Senator Smoot’s.

“That’s all today, boys,” said Larry. “Here’s twenty-five bucks apiece and you’ll each get seventy-five more tomorrow. Don’t forget nothing,” he says to the head waiter, “and especially that envelope I give you.”

So we left them with their packages.

I was amongst those present the next afternoon when Crawley and Guthrie showed up. Moon had sent Dugan away.

“Now,” says Larry to our visitors, “we may as well get down to business. As I told you over the phone, I been corresponding with La Chance and he’s willing to fight us if he can get his price. But he said I would have to let Mr. Crawley handle the promotion. So I said that suited me.”

“It don’t look like a match,” said Crawley. “Goulet’s a great boy, but look at the difference in size!”

Moon laughed.

“They’s nowheres near as much difference as they was between Jim and Big Wheeler,” he says. “And you know what Jim done to him!”

“That’s all right,” said Guthrie, “but your man weighs pretty near two hundred and when a man’s that big he’s big enough for anybody. But take a man that weighs two hundred and put him against a man that weighs round 165, and the difference counts. Look at Johnson and Ketchel!”

“Now listen,” says Larry. “In the first place, my man won’t weigh 190 stripped; he may tip the beam at ten or twelve pounds more than that, but only in secret. In the second place, if the public demands the match, what do we care if the two men stacks up together like a pimple and a goiter?”

“That’s true enough,” says Crawley. “If the public does want the match.”

“You know they want the match!” said Moon. “Or if you don’t I do. And promoters wants it, too, from the number of offers I’ve had.”

“Offers from who?” says Guthrie.

“I ain’t at liberty to tell,” says Larry. “But it don’t make no difference anyway. You’ve got first crack at it on account of your contract. The question is, do you want it?”

“Yes, we want it,” said Crawley. “That is, if we can get it at a reasonable figure.”

“I’m listening,” says Larry.

“Well,” said Crawley, “your man is champion and entitled to the biggest share. We’d guarantee you a hundred thousand and Goulet fifty.”

“I see what you mean,” says Larry. “You mean you don’t want to handle it and you’ll release Goulet.”

“Where do you get that?” says Guthrie. “We don’t mean no such a thing! We’re making a legitimate offer and a good big one.”

“You’re kidding,” says Larry. “I got a hundred thousand for the match with Barnes and that was just a workout. But forgetting me entirely, what about Goulet? The least he’ll take is two hundred thousand, and if you don’t believe it, cable his manager.”

Just then in come Larry’s butler, or whatever he is.

“Two gentlemen to see you,” he says.

“Who is it?” says Larry.

“Them two foreigners again,” says the man.

“Oh, the two Cubans,” said Larry. “Take them in the side room and tell them to wait. Now,” he says, “where was we? Oh, yes, I was telling you what La Chance wants. If you don’t care to take the trouble to cable, here’s a letter from him.”

And he give them a letter to read. When they’d read it he said: “You see what he says in there about you. He says Mr. Crawley has treated him OK and he wants him to have first refusal of this match. That’s the only reason I’ve bothered you gentlemen. Confidentially, I didn’t think you’d want to handle a thing as big as this. So just give us our release and they’s nobody hurt.”

“Who would you give it to?” says Guthrie.

“Well,” says Moon, “I’m going to tell you men something, but I don’t want it to go no further. They’s two men in the next room that’s been pestering me to death. I promised they’d have their final answer today, but I didn’t expect them to get here till you fellas had left. When I got a release from you, I was going to phone Charley Riggs and tell him he could have the match at our figure, which is $500,000. That’s the $200,000 Goulet demands, and $300,000 for me. I know he’ll take it at that, but the only reason I’m going to offer it to him is to keep the match in this country. Because I’ve got a better offer from outside.”

“Where at?” says Guthrie.

“Havana, Cuba,” says Larry. “It’s two bankers from there that’s in the next room.”

“I’d like to meet them,” says Guthrie.

“I guess it’d be all right,” says Larry, and he touched the button. “One of them can talk pretty fair English. He’s the one I been dealing with. But the other one, I think, is the real money guy, though as far as understanding him is concerned, he might as well be a deaf mute. Show them two gentlemen in here,” he says to the butler.

Well, they come in, dressed for a wedding.

“Hello there, gentlemen,” says Larry, shaking hands with them. “I must apologize for keeping you waiting. I was busy with these two gentlemen here. Mr. Crawley and Mr. Guthrie, meet Senior Lopez and Senior Pancho, from Havana.”

Senior Lopez pulled an envelope out of his pocket and waved it.

“I’ve had this tended to,” he says, “and I guess you’ll find it all right.”

He handed the envelope to Moon and Moon opened it up. For all as I could see, it was a regular certified check.

“It looks all right,” said Larry, and waved it towards Guthrie and Crawley. “Six hundred thousand fish,” he says, “and I wished it was all mine. But I don’t even know yet whether I’m going to let these gentlemen put it up or not. If the seniors will pardon me, I’ve got a little telephoning to do, and then you can have my answer, just as I promised. If I decide on Havana we’ll take the check downtown and leave it with one of the newspapers over night, and deposit it tomorrow.”

“That satisfies us,” says Senior Lopez, and Senior Pancho mumbled something that was probably Spanish for Swiss on rye.

“Now,” says Larry to Crawley, “I know you and Mr. Guthrie will excuse me for hurrying you off. I wished we could of done business, but as long as we can’t I’ve got to close with somebody else.”

“Would you mind waiting a minute?” says Crawley. “Before you do anything, I’d like to have a word or two with Mr. Guthrie and talk to you a moment in private.”

“Well,” says Moon, “I’ve already kept the seniors waiting quite a w’ile.”

“That’s all right,” says Lopez. “We don’t mind a little wait as long as you ain’t going to disappoint us.”

“Then I’ll take you in the other room,” says Larry, and we left Crawley and Guthrie alone. In a few minutes they called Larry back.

“Now listen,” said Guthrie: “You said something about cutting your price from $600,000 to $500,000 to keep the fight in America. You ain’t doing that out of patriotism!”

“You bet I ain’t!” says Moon. “If I do it, it’ll be for two good reasons. One is that all I’ll get anyway is my $300,000; the Cubans is so fair-minded that they want to see Goulet get just as much as me. The other reason is that Dugan’s scared to death of fever and he thinks Cuba’s full of it. He won’t go there unless he has to.”

“Listen,” says Guthrie; “Mr. Crawley and I have decided to make you a flat offer of $500,000 for this match. If you and La Chance are satisfied with this we’ll put up a forfeit of $100,000 tomorrow.”

Moon waited a w’ile before he spoke.

“Would you guarantee to hold the match in America?” he says.

“Either here or in London,” says Crawley.

“They’s no fever in London?” says Moon.

“I should say not!” says Crawley.

“Well,” says Moon, “if I can hold the Cubans off one more day I’ll consider it. I could meet you tomorrow and you could deposit your check.”

“That suits us,” says Crawley, and they shook hands and left.

Larry joined us in the other room and ordered drinks all round.

“You boys done fine!” he says to the two seniors. “Here’s the rest of your hundred apiece and I’m much obliged.”

“Will we send you these clothes?” says Senior Lopez.

“No,” says Larry. “You keep them for the next big fight.”

“And how about your check?” says Lopez.

“Try and cash it!” says Larry.

“That’s over,” he says, when they’d went. “The next thing is to land Charley Riggs.”

“What for?” says I.

“Why, to promote this match,” said Larry. “He’s the guy I’ve been after all the time, the only guy that’s big enough to put it over. But I didn’t dast go after him without something to show. When he sees that these birds is willing to put up half a million fish he’ll know it’s big enough for him.”

“But how are you going to shake them out?” I asked.

“I don’t care if they’re shook out or not, as long as he’s in,” says Moon. “But you can bet they’ll be glad enough to take him in as partner, and that’s all I want. When I get him we’re set!”

Well, as you know, he got him, and it wasn’t no job to shake the other two out. When they talked five hundred thousand, they was over their heads. And when they begin thinking about expenses, and the conversation got up round a million, they was sunk.

VI

It was early spring when I run acrost Larry again.

“I been wanting to see you,” he says. “What are you going to be doing in June?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just loafing, I guess.”

“Well,” he said, “would you mind doing your loafing at our camp?”

“What camp?” I asked him.

“Wherever we train,” he says. “Somewheres near New York, I suppose.”

“Where are you going to fight?” I asked.

“In Jersey,” he says. “They’s nowheres else we can. We got to be near the Big Town to get the money.”

“How about all them offers?” I says.

“Oh, you mean the ones that’s been in the papers?” said Moon. “Wasn’t those a hit? A million dollars from Nugget, Nevada! Why, if a guy showed a nickel in that town, the whole twelve that lives there would blackjack him at once!”

“What do you want of me?” I said.

“Jim needs sparring partners,” says Larry.

“I may look goofy to you,” I said, “but I pass for all right round home.”

“I was kidding,” said Larry. “What Jim wants is somebody he can talk to and play rummy with. It’s going to be a lonesome time for him and I don’t know if he can stand it or not. But he likes you and having you there once in a w’ile would be a help.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll keep him company part of the time.”

“You know,” says Larry, “even the wise birds thinks this is easy money for Jim. But it’s going to be about the toughest money anybody ever earned.”

“What do you mean?” I says. “You don’t think the Frenchman has a chance!”

“Don’t be silly!” says Larry. “That’s just the point. If it was like the Wheeler thing, where the guy was a big hulk that it might take some trouble to topple him over, why training for it wouldn’t be such a grind. Jim would say to himself, ‘Well, I guess I can lick him all right, but he’s big and I better be in good shape. Because he might ⸻’ You know how it was that time. But this is different. Here’s a guy that may be the greatest man in the world for his size. But look at his size and yet Jim’s got to go ahead and work like he done for Wheeler. Even harder, because they’s a lot more interest in this and people’ll be watching us close. Jim could get ready in a week to knock this bird cold. But he’s got to go through with five or six weeks of the toughest kind of work, which he knows ain’t necessary. I’ve tried to convince him that they might be an upset. But he knows it’s the bunk.”

“Well,” I said, “if I haven’t nothing better to do I’ll come round and try and keep him entertained. But personally, I don’t know no work I wouldn’t be glad to stick at for five weeks, not at them kind of wages.”

VII

I landed in Jim’s camp the second week in June. The day I got there he boxed with three of his partners. Two of them was big boys and he flattened them both.

We was all alone that evening and he opened up his heart.

“Goulet’s got the right idear,” he says: “Secret training. I wished we could pull that. My training would be such a secret that I wouldn’t even find out about it myself. But Larry says no. I’ve got to show the boys I’m working so they won’t think it’s a farce. Like it wasn’t a farce already! Anyway it is for me⁠—punching the bag and shadow boxing and skipping the rope. You ain’t got no idear how cute I feel skipping a rope! I suppose I ought to thank God they don’t make me roll a hoop or dress dolls. But even skipping a rope ain’t as bad as boxing with those heels! If I try not to hit them, the crowd thinks I ain’t giving them a run for their money. And if I get my glove close enough to their beezer so they can smell it, over they go! Then the crowd thinks I’m too rough!”

“Well,” I said, “they’s only three more weeks of it. And think of the dough and the glory!”

“The dough part’s all right,” he says. “Whatever’s left of it I can use. But glory! That’s a laugh. You don’t kid me with that line of talk. I’ve got the low-down on the whole works. Here I am, an American that’s supposed to be fighting to keep the title in this country, and I doubt if they’s a dozen Americans that ain’t pulling for me to get knocked for a corpse. Sometimes I almost feel like I ought to let myself get licked. It would be doing everybody such a big favor and make them all happy. But how could I go about it? If the guy was big and had a real haymaker I could take one and flop. But I can’t play dead from a kiss.”

“You’ll be surprised,” I said, “if he nails you in the chin and drops you.”

“Surprised ain’t the word!” said Dugan. “I mean, if he drops me. I expect to get hit; on the chin too. Because I ain’t no defensive fighter. I go in there to get my man and in order to get him I’m willing to take what he’s got. And listen: I’ve been hit on the chin before, and not by children, neither. But I hardly ever lay down unless it’s bedtime.”

I asked him how long he expected the fight to go.

“Don’t call it a fight,” he says, “not when you and I are alone. Whatever it is will go a round or two rounds or three rounds, depending on how he behaves himself. If he wants to tear in and get it over quick, I’m willing. But no matter how long it goes⁠—whether he lays himself wide open so as I can knock him in a round, or whether he keeps away for four or five⁠—you can mark my words that they won’t be no glory for me in winning. He’s a great fighter now! A cave man! But after I’ve knocked him he’ll be a bum. Because anybody I can lick can’t be no good.”

“You’re brooding too much,” I said.

“Let’s play cards and forget it,” he says. “Though it does me good to talk once in a w’ile. When I don’t talk I worry.”

“What about?” I asked him.

“Oh, the ‘big fight,’ ” he says.

“But what’s they about that to worry you?” I asked.

“Well, for one thing,” he said, “I’m scared they won’t put enough padding in the floor. I’ve read of cases where a guy got knocked and hit his bean on the floor and passed out entirely. And the guy that knocked him was held for murder. And another thing: I’m scared it may not come off after all. He may get sick.”

“What would make him sick?” I says.

“Well,” said Dugan, “he may read what the girl reporters has been writing about him.”

VIII

You know what Barnum said. Well, he didn’t go far enough. They like to be bunked, but what they like most of all is to bunk themselves.

Set round some night amongst the boys when they’re easing their way through a bottle of near Johnny Walker at eighteen fish the copy. Pretty soon you’ll hear this:

“Well, fellas, in another year we’ll be leaning up against the old mahogany again, tipping over regular highballs or real beer.”

And this:

“If they’d ever leave prohibition to a vote of the people! But they don’t dast!”

Well, I was in New York for three days prior to the “big fight,” and four or five days afterwards, and anybody that was there had to take a course in human nature. I didn’t learn much that I hadn’t suspected before, but whatever doubts I may of had was removed once and for all.

The plain facts was this: A good big man was going to fight a little man that nobody knew if he was good or not, and the good big man was bound to win and win easy unless he had a sunstroke.

But the little man was a war hero, which the big man certainly wasn’t. And the little man was romantic, besides being one of the most likable guys you’d want to meet⁠—even if he did have a Greek profile and long eyelashes.

So they was only one logical answer, namely that Goulet, the little man, would just about kill Dugan, the big man, maybe by a sudden display of superhuman stren’th which he had been holding back all his life for this one fight, but more likely by some mysterious trick which no other fighter had ever thought of before, because in order to think of it you had to have a French brain and long eyelashes. If Goulet wasn’t going to win, what did him and his manager mean by smiling so much and looking so happy? Of course the two hundred thousand fish had nothing to do with it.

They’s two reasons why I didn’t talk back to them. One was that I haven’t no breath to waste, and the other was that I don’t like to make enemies, which you’re bound to do that whenever you tell somebody something they don’t want to believe. A lot of the fight reporters found this out. Contrary to the general belief, they’s a good many American fight writers that knows more about fights and fighters than even Bernard Shaw. Pretty near all of them come right out in print and said Goulet didn’t have a chance. In return for which they got a hat full of letters calling them every name that could get through the mails.

You seen the fight yourself. Personally, I haven’t made up my mind whether Dugan done it as quick as he could, or whether he held back a w’ile to make it look like the guy was something more than a pushover. I ain’t seen Jim to ask him. And I only seen Moon once, and then all he said was “Didn’t I tell you!”

“Tell me what?” I said.

“That I was doing Charley Riggs a favor, coaxing him into this,” says Larry.

Well, I guess he was. With all the trimming Charley took from one guy and another, he must of came out with a profit for himself and his backer of something like half a million. And not only that, but the way he handled it put him in a class by himself as a promoter. The big fights to come will be staged by Charley or they won’t be big fights.

That’s all, except a little incidence of a man that set beside me coming back in the tube.

“A great fight!” he says.

“Yes, it was,” said I.

“The Frenchman showed up pretty good,” he says, “though I had a kind of an idear that he’d win. I see now where I was foolish.”

“How’s that?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “the way I’ve got it figured out, he wasn’t big enough.”

“By gosh!” I said. “I believe you’ve hit the nail right on the head!”

A Caddy’s Diary

Wed. Apr. 12.

I am 16 of age and am a caddy at the Pleasant View Golf Club but only temporary as I expect to soon land a job some wheres as asst pro as my game is good enough now to be a pro but to young looking. My pal Joe Bean also says I have not got enough swell head to make a good pro but suppose that will come in time, Joe is a wise cracker.

But first will put down how I come to be writeing this diary, we have got a member name Mr Colby who writes articles in the newspapers and I hope for his sakes that he is a better writer then he plays golf but any way I cadded for him a good many times last yr and today he was out for the first time this yr and I cadded for him and we got talking about this in that and something was mentioned in regards to the golf articles by Alex Laird that comes out every Sun in the paper Mr Colby writes his articles for so I asked Mr Colby did he know how much Laird got paid for the articles and he said he did not know but supposed that Laird had to split 50⁠–⁠50 with who ever wrote the articles for him. So I said don’t he write the articles himself and Mr Colby said why no he guessed not. Laird may be a master mind in regards to golf he said, but that is no sign he can write about it as very few men can write decent let alone a pro. Writeing is a nag.

How do you learn it I asked him.

Well he said read what other people writes and study them and write things yourself, and maybe you will get on to the nag and maybe you wont.

Well Mr Colby I said do you think I could get on to it?

Why he said smileing I did not know that was your ambition to be a writer.

Not exactly was my reply, but I am going to be a golf pro myself and maybe some day I will get good enough so as the papers will want I should write them articles and if I can learn to write them myself why I will not have to hire another writer and split with them.

Well said Mr Colby smileing you have certainly got the right temperament for a pro, they are all big hearted fellows.

But listen Mr Colby I said if I want to learn it would not do me no good to copy down what other writers have wrote, what I would have to do would be write things out of my own head.

That is true said Mr Colby.

Well I said what could I write about?

Well said Mr Colby why don’t you keep a diary and every night after your supper set down and write what happened that day and write who you cadded for and what they done only leave me out of it. And you can write down what people say and what you think and etc., it will be the best kind of practice for you, and once in a wile you can bring me your writeings and I will tell you the truth if they are good or rotten.

So that is how I come to be writeing this diary is so as I can get some practice writeing and maybe if I keep at it long enough I can get on to the nag.

Friday, Apr. 14.

We been haveing Apr. showers for a couple days and nobody out on the course so they has been nothing happen that I could write down in my diary but dont want to leave it go to long or will never learn the trick so will try and write a few lines about a caddys life and some of our members and etc.

Well I and Joe Bean is the 2 oldest caddys in the club and I been cadding now for 5 yrs and quit school 3 yrs ago tho my mother did not like it for me to quit but my father said he can read and write and figure so what is the use in keeping him there any longer as greek and latin dont get you no credit at the grocer, so they lied about my age to the trunce officer and I been cadding every yr from March till Nov and the rest of the winter I work around Heismans store in the village.

Dureing the time I am cadding I genally always manage to play at lease 9 holes a day myself on wk days and some times 18 and am never more then 2 or 3 over par figures on our course but it is a cinch.

I played the engineers course 1 day last summer in 75 which is some golf and some of our members who has been playing 20 yrs would give their right eye to play as good as myself.

I use to play around with our pro Jack Andrews till I got so as I could beat him pretty near every time we played and now he wont play with me no more, he is not a very good player for a pro but they claim he is a good teacher. Personly I think golf teachers is a joke tho I am glad people is suckers enough to fall for it as I expect to make my liveing that way. We have got a member Mr Dunham who must of took 500 lessons in the past 3 yrs and when he starts to shoot he trys to remember all the junk Andrews has learned him and he gets dizzy and they is no telling where the ball will go and about the safest place to stand when he is shooting is between he and the hole.

I dont beleive the club pays Andrews much salery but of course he makes pretty fair money giveing lessons but his best graft is a 3 some which he plays 2 and 3 times a wk with Mr Perdue and Mr Lewis and he gives Mr Lewis a stroke a hole and they genally break some wheres near even but Mr Perdue made a 83 one time so he thinks that is his game so he insists on playing Jack even, well they always play for $5.00 a hole and Andrews makes $20.00 to $30.00 per round and if he wanted to cut loose and play his best he could make $50.00 to $60.00 per round but a couple of wallops like that and Mr Perdue might get cured so Jack figures a small stedy income is safer.

I have got a pal name Joe Bean and we pal around together as he is about my age and he says some comical things and some times will wisper some thing comical to me wile we are cadding and it is all I can do to help from laughing out loud, that is one of the first things a caddy has got to learn is never laugh out loud only when a member makes a joke. How ever on the days when theys ladies on the course I dont get a chance to caddy with Joe because for some reason another the woman folks dont like Joe to caddy for them wile on the other hand they are always after me tho I am no Othello for looks or do I seek their flavors, in fact it is just the opp and I try to keep in the back ground when the fair sex appears on the seen as cadding for ladies means you will get just so much money and no more as theys no chance of them loosning up. As Joe says the rule against tipping is the only rule the woman folks keeps.

Theys one lady how ever who I like to caddy for as she looks like Lillian Gish and it is a pleasure to just look at her and I would caddy for her for nothing tho it is hard to keep your eye on the ball when you are cadding for this lady, her name is Mrs Doane.

Sat. Apr. 15.

This was a long day and am pretty well wore out but must not get behind in my writeing practice. I and Joe carried all day for Mr Thomas and Mr Blake. Mr Thomas is the vice president of one of the big banks downtown and he always slips you a $1.00 extra per round but beleive me you earn it cadding for Mr Thomas, there is just 16 clubs in his bag includeing 5 wood clubs tho he has not used the wood in 3 yrs but says he has got to have them along in case his irons goes wrong on him. I dont know how bad his irons will have to get before he will think they have went wrong on him but personly if I made some of the tee shots he made today I would certainly considder some kind of a change of weppons.

Mr Thomas is one of the kind of players that when it has took him more than 6 shots to get on the green he will turn to you and say how many have I had caddy and then you are suppose to pretend like you was thinking a minute and then say 4, then he will say to the man he is playing with well I did not know if I had shot 4 or 5 but the caddy says it is 4. You see in this way it is not him that is cheating but the caddy but he makes it up to the caddy afterwards with a $1.00 tip.

Mr Blake gives Mr Thomas a stroke a hole and they play a $10.00 nassua and niether one of them wins much money from the other one but even if they did why $10.00 is chickens food to men like they. But the way they crab and squak about different things you would think their last $1.00 was at stake. Mr Thomas started out this a.m. with a 8 and a 7 and of course that spoilt the day for him and me to. Theys lots of men that if they dont make a good score on the first 2 holes they will founder all the rest of the way around and raze H with their caddy and if I was laying out a golf course I would make the first 2 holes so darn easy that you could not help from getting a 4 or better on them and in that way everybody would start off good natured and it would be a few holes at lease before they begun to turn sour.

Mr Thomas was beat both in the a.m. and p.m. in spite of my help as Mr Blake is a pretty fair counter himself and I heard him say he got a 88 in the p.m. which is about a 94 but any way it was good enough to win. Mr Blakes regular game is about a 90 takeing his own figures and he is one of these cocky guys that takes his own game serious and snears at men that cant break 100 and if you was to ask him if he had ever been over 100 himself he would say not since the first yr he begun to play. Well I have watched a lot of those guys like he and I will tell you how they keep from going over 100 namely by doing just what he done this a.m. when he come to the 13th hole. Well he missed his tee shot and dubbed along and finely he got in a trap on his 4th shot and I seen him take 6 wallops in the trap and when he had took the 6th one his ball was worse off then when he started so he picked it up and marked a X down on his score card. Well if he had of played out the hole why the best he could of got was a 11 by holeing his next niblick shot but he would of probly got about a 20 which would of made him around 108 as he admitted takeing a 88 for the other 17 holes. But I bet if you was to ask him what score he had made he would say O I was terrible and I picked up on one hole but if I had of played them all out I guess I would of had about a 92.

These is the kind of men that laughs themselfs horse when they hear of some dub takeing 10 strokes for a hole but if they was made to play out every hole and mark down their real score their card would be decorated with many a big casino.

Well as I say I had a hard day and was pretty sore along towards the finish but still I had to laugh at Joe Bean on the 15th hole which is a par 3 and you can get there with a fair drive and personly I am genally hole high with a midiron, but Mr Thomas topped his tee shot and dubbed a couple with his mashie and was still quiet a ways off the green and he stood studing the situation a minute and said to Mr Blake well I wonder what I better take here. So Joe Bean was standing by me and he said under his breath take my advice and quit you old rascal.

Mon. Apr. 17.

Yesterday was Sun and I was to wore out last night to write as I cadded 45 holes. I cadded for Mr Colby in the a.m. and Mr Langley in the p.m. Mr Thomas thinks golf is wrong on the sabath tho as Joe Bean says it is wrong any day the way he plays it.

This a.m. they was nobody on the course and I played 18 holes by myself and had a 5 for a 76 on the 18th hole but the wind got a hold of my drive and it went out of bounds. This p.m. they was 3 of us had a game of rummy started but Miss Rennie and Mrs Thomas come out to play and asked for me to caddy for them, they are both terrible.

Mrs Thomas is Mr Thomas wife and she is big and fat and shakes like jell and she always says she plays golf just to make her skinny and she dont care how rotten she plays as long as she is getting the exercise, well maybe so but when we find her ball in a bad lie she aint never sure it is hers till she picks it up and smells it and when she puts it back beleive me she don’t cram it down no gopher hole.

Miss Rennie is a good looker and young and they say she is engaged to Chas Crane, he is one of our members and is the best player in the club and dont cheat hardly at all and he has got a job in the bank where Mr Thomas is the vice president. Well I have cadded for Miss Rennie when she was playing with Mr Crane and I have cadded for her when she was playing alone or with another lady and I often think if Mr Crane could hear her talk when he was not around he would not be so stuck on her. You would be surprised at some of the words that falls from those fare lips.

Well the 2 ladies played for 2 bits a hole and Miss Rennie was haveing a terrible time wile Mrs Thomas was shot with luck on the greens and sunk 3 or 4 putts that was murder. Well Miss Rennie used some expressions which was best not repeated but towards the last the luck changed around and it was Miss Rennie that was sinking the long ones and when they got to the 18th tee Mrs Thomas was only 1 up.

Well we had started pretty late and when we left the 17th green Miss Rennie made the remark that we would have to hurry to get the last hole played, well it was her honor and she got the best drive she made all day about 120 yds down the fair way. Well Mrs Thomas got nervous and looked up and missed her ball a ft and then done the same thing right over and when she finely hit it she only knocked it about 20 yds and this made her lay 3. Well her 4th went wild and lit over in the rough in the apple trees. It was a cinch Miss Rennie would win the hole unless she dropped dead.

Well we all went over to hunt for Mrs Thomas ball but we would of been lucky to find it even in day light but now you could not hardly see under the trees, so Miss Rennie said drop another ball and we will not count no penalty. Well it is some job any time to make a woman give up hunting for a lost ball and all the more so when it is going to cost her 2 bits to play the hole out so there we stayed for at lease 10 minutes till it was so dark we could not see each other let alone a lost ball and finely Mrs Thomas said well it looks like we could not finish, how do we stand? Just like she did not know how they stood.

You had me one down up to this hole said Miss Rennie.

Well that is finishing pretty close said Mrs Thomas.

I will have to give Miss Rennie credit that what ever word she thought of for this occasion she did not say it out loud but when she was paying me she said I might of give you a quarter tip only I have to give Mrs Thomas a quarter she dont deserve so you dont get it.

Fat chance I would of had any way.

Thurs. Apr. 20.

Well we been haveing some more bad weather but today the weather was all right but that was the only thing that was all right. This p.m. I cadded double for Mr Thomas and Chas Crane the club champion who is stuck on Miss Rennie. It was a 4 some with he and Mr Thomas against Mr Blake and Jack Andrews the pro, they was only playing best ball so it was really just a match between Mr Crane and Jack Andrews and Mr Crane win by 1 up. Joe Bean cadded for Jack and Mr Blake. Mr Thomas was terrible and I put in a swell p.m. lugging that heavy bag of his besides Mr Cranes bag.

Mr Thomas did not go off of the course as much as usual but he kept hitting behind the ball and he run me ragged replaceing his divots but still I had to laugh when we was playing the 4th hole which you have to drive over a ravine and every time Mr Thomas misses his tee shot on this hole why he makes a squak about the ravine and says it ought not to be there and etc.

Today he had a terrible time getting over it and afterwards he said to Jack Andrews this is a joke hole and ought to be changed. So Joe Bean wispered to me that if Mr Thomas kept on playing like he was the whole course would be changed.

Then a little wile later when we come to the long 9th hole Mr Thomas got a fair tee shot but then he whiffed twice missing the ball by a ft and the 3rd time he hit it but it only went a little ways and Joe Bean said that is 3 trys and no gain, he will have to punt.

But I must write down about my tough luck, well we finely got through the 18 holes and Mr Thomas reached down in his pocket for the money to pay me and he genally pays for Mr Crane to when they play together as Mr Crane is just a employ in the bank and dont have much money but this time all Mr Thomas had was a $20.00 bill so he said to Mr Crane I guess you will have to pay the boy Charley so Charley dug down and got the money to pay me and he paid just what it was and not a dime over, where if Mr Thomas had of had the change I would of got a $1.00 extra at lease and maybe I was not sore and Joe Bean to because of course Andrews never gives you nothing and Mr Blake dont tip his caddy unless he wins.

They are a fine bunch of tight wads said Joe and I said well Crane is all right only he just has not got no money.

He aint all right no more than the rest of them said Joe.

Well at lease he dont cheat on his score I said.

And you know why that is said Joe, neither does Jack Andrews cheat on his score but that is because they play to good. Players like Crane and Andrews that goes around in 80 or better cant cheat on their score because they make the most of the holes in around 4 strokes and the 4 strokes includes their tee shot and a couple of putts which everybody is right there to watch them when they make them and count them right along with them. So if they make a 4 and claim a 3 why people would just laugh in their face and say how did the ball get from the fair way on to the green, did it fly? But the boys that takes 7 and 8 strokes to a hole can shave their score and you know they are shaveing it but you have to let them get away with it because you cant prove nothing. But that is one of the penaltys for being a good player, you cant cheat.

To hear Joe tell it pretty near everybody are born crooks, well maybe he is right.

Wed. Apr. 26.

Today Mrs Doane was out for the first time this yr and asked for me to caddy for her and you bet I was on the job. Well how are you Dick she said, she always calls me by name. She asked me what had I been doing all winter and was I glad to see her and etc.

She said she had been down south all winter and played golf pretty near every day and would I watch her and notice how much she had improved.

Well to tell the truth she was no better then last yr and wont never be no better and I guess she is just to pretty to be a golf player but of course when she asked me did I think her game was improved I had to reply yes indeed as I would not hurt her feelings and she laughed like my reply pleased her. She played with Mr and Mrs Carter and I carried the 2 ladies bags wile Joe Bean cadded for Mr Carter. Mrs Carter is a ugly dame with things on her face and it must make Mr Carter feel sore when he looks at Mrs Doane to think he married Mrs Carter but I suppose they could not all marry the same one and besides Mrs Doane would not be a sucker enough to marry a man like he who drinks all the time and is pretty near always stood, tho Mr Doane who she did marry aint such a H of a man himself tho dirty with money.

They all gave me the laugh on the 3rd hole when Mrs Doane was makeing her 2nd shot and the ball was in the fair way but laid kind of bad and she just ticked it and then she asked me if winter rules was in force and I said yes so we teed her ball up so as she could get a good shot at it and they gave me the laugh for saying winter rules was in force.

You have got the caddys bribed Mr Carter said to her.

But she just smiled and put her hand on my sholder and said Dick is my pal. That is enough of a bribe to just have her touch you and I would caddy all day for her and never ask for a cent only to have her smile at me and call me her pal.

Sat. Apr. 29.

Today they had the first club tournament of the yr and they have a monthly tournament every month and today was the first one, it is a handicap tournament and everybody plays in it and they have prizes for low net score and low gross score and etc. I cadded for Mr Thomas today and will tell what happened.

They played a 4 some and besides Mr Thomas we had Mr Blake and Mr Carter and Mr Dunham. Mr Dunham is the worst man player in the club and the other men would not play with him a specialy on a Saturday only him and Mr Blake is partners together in business. Mr Dunham has got the highest handicap in the club which is 50 but it would have to be 150 for him to win a prize. Mr Blake and Mr Carter has got a handicap of about 15 a piece I think and Mr Thomas is 30, the first prize for the low net score for the day was a dozen golf balls and the second low score a ½ dozen golf balls and etc.

Well we had a great battle and Mr Colby ought to been along to write it up or some good writer. Mr Carter and Mr Dunham played partners against Mr Thomas and Mr Blake which ment that Mr Carter was playing Thomas and Blakes best ball, well Mr Dunham took the honor and the first ball he hit went strate off to the right and over the fence outside of the grounds, well he done the same thing 3 times. Well when he finely did hit one in the course why Mr Carter said why not let us not count them 3 first shots of Mr Dunham as they was just practice. Like H we wont count them said Mr Thomas we must count every shot and keep our scores correct for the tournament.

All right said Mr Carter.

Well we got down to the green and Mr Dunham had about 11 and Mr Carter sunk a long putt for a par 5, Mr Blake all ready had 5 strokes and so did Mr Thomas and when Mr Carter sunk his putt why Mr Thomas picked his ball up and said Carter wins the hole and I and Blake will take 6s. Like H you will said Mr Carter, this is a tournament and we must play every hole out and keep our scores correct. So Mr Dunham putted and went down in 13 and Mr Blake got a 6 and Mr Thomas missed 2 easy putts and took a 8 and maybe he was not boiling.

Well it was still their honor and Mr Dunham had one of his dizzy spells on the 2nd tee and he missed the ball twice before he hit it and then Mr Carter drove the green which is only a midiron shot and then Mr Thomas stepped up and missed the ball just like Mr Dunham. He was wild and yelled at Mr Dunham no man could play golf playing with a man like you, you would spoil anybodys game.

Your game was all ready spoiled said Mr Dunham, it turned sour on the 1st green.

You would turn anybody sour said Mr Thomas.

Well Mr Thomas finely took a 8 for the hole which is a par 3 and it certainly looked bad for him winning a prize when he started out with 2 8s, and he and Mr Dunham had another terrible time on No 3 and wile they was messing things up a 2 some come up behind us and hollared fore and we left them go through tho it was Mr Clayton and Mr Joyce and as Joe Bean said they was probly dissapointed when we left them go through as they are the kind that feels like the day is lost if they cant write to some committee and preffer charges.

Well Mr Thomas got a 7 on the 3rd and he said well it is no wonder I am off of my game today as I was up ½ the night with my teeth.

Well said Mr Carter if I had your money why on the night before a big tournament like this I would hire somebody else to set up with my teeth.

Well I wished I could remember all that was said and done but any way Mr Thomas kept getting sore and sore and we got to the 7th tee and he had not made a decent tee shot all day so Mr Blake said to him why dont you try the wood as you cant do no worse?

By Geo I beleive I will said Mr Thomas and took his driver out of the bag which he had not used it for 3 yrs.

Well he swang and zowie away went the ball pretty near 8 inchs distants wile the head of the club broke off clean and saled 50 yds down the course. Well I have got a hold on myself so as I dont never laugh out loud and I beleive the other men was scarred to laugh or he would of killed them so we all stood there in silents waiting for what would happen.

Well without saying a word he come to where I was standing and took his other 4 wood clubs out of the bag and took them to a tree which stands a little ways from the tee box and one by one he swang them with all his strength against the trunk of the tree and smashed them to H and gone, all right gentlemen that is over he said.

Well to cut it short Mr Thomas score for the first 9 was a even 60 and then we started out on the 2nd 9 and you would not think it was the same man playing, on the first 3 holes he made 2 4s and a 5 and beat Mr Carter even and followed up with a 6 and a 5 and that is how he kept going up to the 17th hole.

What has got in to you Thomas said Mr Carter.

Nothing said Mr Thomas only I broke my hoodoo when I broke them 5 wood clubs.

Yes I said to myself and if you had broke them 5 wood clubs 3 yrs ago I would not of broke my back lugging them around.

Well we come to the 18th tee and Mr Thomas had a 39 which give him a 99 for 17 holes, well everybody drove off and as we was following along why Mr Klabor come walking down the course from the club house on his way to the 17th green to join some friends and Mr Thomas asked him what had he made and he said he had turned in a 93 but his handicap is only 12 so that give him a 81.

That wont get me no wheres he said as Charley Crane made a 75.

Well said Mr Thomas I can tie Crane for low net if I get a 6 on this hole.

Well it come his turn to make his 2nd and zowie he hit the ball pretty good but they was a hook on it and away she went in to the woods on the left, the ball laid in behind a tree so as they was only one thing to do and that was waste a shot getting it back on the fair so that is what Mr Thomas done and it took him 2 more to reach the green.

How many have you had Thomas said Mr Carter when we was all on the green.

Let me see said Mr Thomas and then turned to me, how many have I had caddy?

I dont know I said.

Well it is either 4 or 5 said Mr Thomas.

I think it is 5 said Mr Carter.

I think it is 4 said Mr Thomas and turned to me again and said how many have I had caddy?

So I said 4.

Well said Mr Thomas personly I was not sure myself but my caddy says 4 and I guess he is right.

Well the other men looked at each other and I and Joe Bean looked at each other but Mr Thomas went ahead and putted and was down in 2 putts.

Well he said I certainly come to life on them last 9 holes.

So he turned in his score as 105 and with his handicap of 30 why that give him a net of 75 which was the same as Mr Crane so instead of Mr Crane getting 1 dozen golf balls and Mr Thomas getting ½ a dozen golf balls why they will split the 1st and 2nd prize makeing 9 golf balls a piece.

Tues. May 2.

This was the first ladies day of the season and even Joe Bean had to carry for the fair sex. We cadded for a 4 some which was Miss Rennie and Mrs Thomas against Mrs Doane and Mrs Carter. I guess if they had of kept their score right the total for the 4 of them would of ran well over a 1000.

Our course has a great many trees and they seemed to have a traction for our 4 ladies today and we was in amongst the trees more then we was on the fair way.

Well said Joe Bean theys one thing about cadding for these dames, it keeps you out of the hot sun.

And another time he said he felt like a boy scout studing wood craft.

These dames is always up against a stump he said.

And another time he said that it was not fair to charge these dames regular ladies dues in the club as they hardly ever used the course.

Well it seems like they was a party in the village last night and of course the ladies was talking about it and Mrs Doane said what a lovely dress Miss Rennie wore to the party and Miss Rennie said she did not care for the dress herself.

Well said Mrs Doane if you want to get rid of it just hand it over to me.

I wont give it to you said Miss Rennie but I will sell it to you at ½ what it cost me and it was a bargain at that as it only cost me a $100.00 and I will sell it to you for $50.00.

I have not got $50.00 just now to spend said Mrs Doane and besides I dont know would it fit me.

Sure it would fit you said Miss Rennie, you and I are exactly the same size and figure, I tell you what I will do with you I will play you golf for it and if you beat me you can have the gown for nothing and if I beat you why you will give me $50.00 for it.

All right but if I loose you may have to wait for your money said Mrs Doane.

So this was on the 4th hole and they started from there to play for the dress and they was both terrible and worse then usual on acct of being nervous as this was the biggest stakes they had either of them ever played for tho the Doanes has got a bbl of money and $50.00 is chickens food.

Well we was on the 16th hole and Mrs Doane was 1 up and Miss Rennie sliced her tee shot off in the rough and Mrs Doane landed in some rough over on the left so they was clear across the course from each other. Well I and Mrs Doane went over to her ball and as luck would have it it had come to rest in a kind of a groove where a good player could not hardly make a good shot of it let alone Mrs Doane. Well Mrs Thomas was out in the middle of the course for once in her life and the other 2 ladies was over on the right side and Joe Bean with them so they was nobody near Mrs Doane and I.

Do I have to play it from there she said. I guess you do was my reply.

Why Dick have you went back on me she said and give me one of her looks.

Well I looked to see if the others was looking and then I kind of give the ball a shove with my toe and it come out of the groove and laid where she could get a swipe at it.

This was the 16th hole and Mrs Doane win it by 11 strokes to 10 and that made her 2 up and 2 to go. Miss Rennie win the 17th but they both took a 10 for the 18th and that give Mrs Doane the match.

Well I wont never have a chance to see her in Miss Rennies dress but if I did I aint sure that I would like it on her.

Fri. May 5.

Well I never thought we would have so much excitement in the club and so much to write down in my diary but I guess I better get busy writeing it down as here it is Friday and it was Wed. a.m. when the excitement broke loose and I was getting ready to play around when Harry Lear the caddy master come running out with the paper in his hand and showed it to me on the first page.

It told how Chas Crane our club champion had went south with $8000 which he had stole out of Mr Thomas bank and a swell looking dame that was a stenographer in the bank had elloped with him and they had her picture in the paper and I will say she is a pip but who would of thought a nice quiet young man like Mr Crane was going to prove himself a gay Romeo and a specialy as he was engaged to Miss Rennie tho she now says she broke their engagement a month ago but any way the whole affair has certainly give everybody something to talk about and one of the caddys Lou Crowell busted Fat Brunner in the nose because Fat claimed to of been the last one that cadded for Crane. Lou was really the last one and cadded for him last Sunday which was the last time Crane was at the club.

Well everybody was thinking how sore Mr Thomas would be and they would better not mention the affair around him and etc. but who should show up to play yesterday but Mr Thomas himself and he played with Mr Blake and all they talked about the whole p.m. was Crane and what he had pulled.

Well Thomas said Mr Blake I am curious to know if the thing come as a suprise to you or if you ever had a hunch that he was libel to do a thing like this.

Well Blake said Mr Thomas I will admit that the whole thing come as a complete suprise to me as Crane was all most like my son you might say and I was going to see that he got along all right and that is what makes me sore is not only that he has proved himself dishonest but that he could be such a sucker as to give up a bright future for a sum of money like $8000 and a doll face girl that cant be no good or she would not of let him do it. When you think how young he was and the carreer he might of had why it certainly seems like he sold his soul pretty cheap.

That is what Mr Thomas had to say or at lease part of it as I cant remember a ½ of all he said but any way this p.m. I cadded for Mrs Thomas and Mrs Doane and that is all they talked about to, and Mrs Thomas talked along the same lines like her husband and said she had always thought Crane was to smart a young man to pull a thing like that and ruin his whole future.

He was geting $4000 a yr said Mrs Thomas and everybody liked him and said he was bound to get ahead so that is what makes it such a silly thing for him to of done, sell his soul for $8000 and a pretty face.

Yes indeed said Mrs Doane.

Well all the time I was listening to Mr Thomas and Mr Blake and Mrs Thomas and Mrs Doane why I was thinking about something which I wanted to say to them but it would of ment me looseing my job so I kept it to myself but I sprung it on my pal Joe Bean on the way home tonight.

Joe I said what do these people mean when they talk about Crane selling his soul?

Why you know what they mean said Joe, they mean that a person that does something dishonest for a bunch of money or a gal or any kind of a reward why the person that does it is selling his soul.

All right I said and it dont make no differents does it if the reward is big or little?

Why no said Joe only the bigger it is the less of a sucker the person is that goes after it.

Well I said here is Mr Thomas who is vice president of a big bank and worth a bbl of money and it is just a few days ago when he lied about his golf score in order so as he would win 9 golf balls instead of a ½ a dozen.

Sure said Joe.

And how about his wife Mrs Thomas I said, who plays for 2 bits a hole and when her ball dont lie good why she picks it up and pretends to look at it to see if it is hers and then puts it back in a good lie where she can sock it.

And how about my friend Mrs Doane that made me move her ball out of a rut to help her beat Miss Rennie out of a party dress.

Well said Joe what of it?

Well I said it seems to me like these people have got a lot of nerve to pan Mr Crane and call him a sucker for doing what he done, it seems to me like $8000 and a swell dame is a pretty fair reward compared with what some of these other people sells their soul for, and I would like to tell them about it.

Well said Joe go ahead and tell them but maybe they will tell you something right back.

What will they tell me?

Well said Joe they might tell you this, that when Mr Thomas asks you how many shots he has had and you say 4 when you know he has had 5, why you are selling your soul for a $1.00 tip. And when you move Mrs Doanes ball out of a rut and give it a good lie, what are you selling your soul for? Just a smile.

O keep your mouth shut I said to him.

I am going to said Joe and would advice you to do the same.

The Golden Honeymoon

Mother says that when I start talking I never know when to stop. But I tell her the only time I get a chance is when she ain’t around, so I have to make the most of it. I guess the fact is neither one of us would be welcome in a Quaker meeting, but as I tell Mother, what did God give us tongues for if He didn’t want we should use them? Only she says He didn’t give them to us to say the same thing over and over again, like I do, and repeat myself. But I say:

“Well, Mother,” I say, “when people is like you and I and been married fifty years, do you expect everything I say will be something you ain’t heard me say before? But it may be new to others, as they ain’t nobody else lived with me as long as you have.”

So she says:

“You can bet they ain’t, as they couldn’t nobody else stand you that long.”

“Well,” I tell her, “you look pretty healthy.”

“Maybe I do,” she will say, “but I looked even healthier before I married you.”

You can’t get ahead of Mother.

Yes, sir, we was married just fifty years ago the seventeenth day of last December and my daughter and son-in-law was over from Trenton to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding. My son-in-law is John H. Kramer, the real estate man. He made $12,000 one year and is pretty well thought of around Trenton; a good, steady, hard worker. The Rotarians was after him a long time to join, but he kept telling them his home was his club. But Edie finally made him join. That’s my daughter.

Well, anyway, they come over to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding and it was pretty crimpy weather and the furnace don’t seem to heat up no more like it used to and Mother made the remark that she hoped this winter wouldn’t be as cold as the last, referring to the winter previous. So Edie said if she was us, and nothing to keep us home, she certainly wouldn’t spend no more winters up here and why didn’t we just shut off the water and close up the house and go down to Tampa, Florida? You know we was there four winters ago and stayed five weeks, but it cost us over three hundred and fifty dollars for hotel bill alone. So Mother said we wasn’t going no place to be robbed. So my son-in-law spoke up and said that Tampa wasn’t the only place in the South, and besides we didn’t have to stop at no high price hotel but could rent us a couple rooms and board out somewheres, and he had heard that St. Petersburg, Florida, was the spot and if we said the word he would write down there and make inquiries.

Well, to make a long story short, we decided to do it and Edie said it would be our Golden Honeymoon and for a present my son-in-law paid the difference between a section and a compartment so as we could have a compartment and have more privatecy. In a compartment you have an upper and lower berth just like the regular sleeper, but it is a shut in room by itself and got a wash bowl. The car we went in was all compartments and no regular berths at all. It was all compartments.

We went to Trenton the night before and stayed at my daughter and son-in-law and we left Trenton the next afternoon at 3:23 p.m.

This was the twelfth day of January. Mother set facing the front of the train, as it makes her giddy to ride backwards. I set facing her, which does not affect me. We reached North Philadelphia at 4:03 p.m. and we reached West Philadelphia at 4:14, but did not go into Broad Street. We reached Baltimore at 6:30 and Washington, DC, at 7:25. Our train laid over in Washington two hours till another train come along to pick us up and I got out and strolled up the platform and into the Union Station. When I come back, our car had been switched on to another track, but I remembered the name of it, the La Belle, as I had once visited my aunt out in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where there was a lake of that name, so I had no difficulty in getting located. But Mother had nearly fretted herself sick for fear I would be left.

“Well,” I said, “I would of followed you on the next train.”

“You could of,” said Mother, and she pointed out that she had the money.

“Well,” I said, “we are in Washington and I could of borrowed from the United States Treasury. I would of pretended I was an Englishman.”

Mother caught the point and laughed heartily.

Our train pulled out of Washington at 9:40 p.m. and Mother and I turned in early, I taking the upper. During the night we passed through the green fields of old Virginia, though it was too dark to tell if they was green or what color. When we got up in the morning, we was at Fayetteville, North Carolina. We had breakfast in the dining car and after breakfast I got in conversation with the man in the next compartment to ours. He was from Lebanon, New Hampshire, and a man about eighty years of age. His wife was with him, and two unmarried daughters and I made the remark that I should think the four of them would be crowded in one compartment, but he said they had made the trip every winter for fifteen years and knowed how to keep out of each other’s way. He said they was bound for Tarpon Springs.

We reached Charleston, South Carolina, at 12:50 p.m. and arrived at Savannah, Georgia, at 4:20. We reached Jacksonville, Florida, at 8:45 p.m. and had an hour and a quarter to lay over there, but Mother made a fuss about me getting off the train, so we had the darky make up our berths and retired before we left Jacksonville. I didn’t sleep good as the train done a lot of hemming and hawing, and Mother never sleeps good on a train as she says she is always worrying that I will fall out. She says she would rather have the upper herself, as then she would not have to worry about me, but I tell her I can’t take the risk of having it get out that I allowed my wife to sleep in an upper berth. It would make talk.

We was up in the morning in time to see our friends from New Hampshire get off at Tarpon Springs, which we reached at 6:53 a.m.

Several of our fellow passengers got off at Clearwater and some at Belleair, where the train backs right up to the door of the mammoth hotel. Belleair is the winter headquarters for the golf dudes and everybody that got off there had their bag of sticks, as many as ten and twelve in a bag. Women and all. When I was a young man we called it shinny and only needed one club to play with and about one game of it would of been aplenty for some of these dudes, the way we played it.

The train pulled into St. Petersburg at 8:20 and when we got off the train you would think they was a riot, what with all the darkies barking for the different hotels.

I said to Mother, I said:

“It is a good thing we have got a place picked out to go to and don’t have to choose a hotel, as it would be hard to choose amongst them if every one of them is the best.”

She laughed.

We found a jitney and I give him the address of the room my son-in-law had got for us and soon we was there and introduced ourselves to the lady that owns the house, a young widow about forty-eight years of age. She showed us our room, which was light and airy with a comfortable bed and bureau and washstand. It was twelve dollars a week, but the location was good, only three blocks from Williams Park.

St. Pete is what folks calls the town, though they also call it the Sunshine City, as they claim they’s no other place in the country where they’s fewer days when Old Sol don’t smile down on Mother Earth, and one of the newspapers gives away all their copies free every day when the sun don’t shine. They claim to of only give them away some sixty-odd times in the last eleven years. Another nickname they have got for the town is “the Poor Man’s Palm Beach,” but I guess they’s men that comes there that could borrow as much from the bank as some of the Willie boys over to the other Palm Beach.

During our stay we paid a visit to the Lewis Tent City, which is the headquarters for the Tin Can Tourists. But maybe you ain’t heard about them. Well, they are an organization that takes their vacation trips by auto and carries everything with them. That is, they bring along their tents to sleep in and cook in and they don’t patronize no hotels or cafeterias, but they have got to be bona fide auto campers or they can’t belong to the organization.

They tell me they’s over 200,000 members to it and they call themselves the Tin Canners on account of most of their food being put up in tin cans. One couple we seen in the Tent City was a couple from Brady, Texas, named Mr. and Mrs. Pence, which the old man is over eighty years of age and they had come in their auto all the way from home, a distance of 1,641 miles. They took five weeks for the trip, Mr. Pence driving the entire distance.

The Tin Canners hails from every State in the Union and in the summer time they visit places like New England and the Great Lakes region, but in the winter the most of them comes to Florida and scatters all over the State. While we was down there, they was a national convention of them at Gainesville, Florida, and they elected a Fredonia, New York, man as their president. His title is Royal Tin Can Opener of the World. They have got a song wrote up which everybody has got to learn it before they are a member:

The tin can forever! Hurrah, boys! Hurrah!
Up with the tin can! Down with the foe!
We will rally round the campfire, we’ll rally once again,
Shouting, “We auto camp forever!”

That is something like it. And the members has also got to have a tin can fastened on to the front of their machine.

I asked Mother how she would like to travel around that way and she said:

“Fine, but not with an old rattle brain like you driving.”

“Well,” I said, “I am eight years younger than this Mr. Pence who drove here from Texas.”

“Yes,” she said, “but he is old enough to not be skittish.”

You can’t get ahead of Mother.

Well, one of the first things we done in St. Petersburg was to go to the Chamber of Commerce and register our names and where we was from as they’s great rivalry amongst the different States in regards to the number of their citizens visiting in town and of course our little State don’t stand much of a show, but still every little bit helps, as the fella says. All and all, the man told us, they was eleven thousand names registered, Ohio leading with some fifteen hundred-odd and New York State next with twelve hundred. Then come Michigan, Pennsylvania and so on down, with one man each from Cuba and Nevada.

The first night we was there, they was a meeting of the New York-New Jersey Society at the Congregational Church and a man from Ogdensburg, New York State, made the talk. His subject was Rainbow Chasing. He is a Rotarian and a very convicting speaker, though I forget his name.

Our first business, of course, was to find a place to eat and after trying several places we run on to a cafeteria on Central Avenue that suited us up and down. We eat pretty near all our meals there and it averaged about two dollars per day for the two of us, but the food was well cooked and everything nice and clean. A man don’t mind paying the price if things is clean and well cooked.

On the third day of February, which is Mother’s birthday, we spread ourselves and eat supper at the Poinsettia Hotel and they charged us seventy-five cents for a sirloin steak that wasn’t hardly big enough for one.

I said to Mother: “Well,” I said, “I guess it’s a good thing every day ain’t your birthday or we would be in the poorhouse.”

“No,” says Mother, “because if every day was my birthday, I would be old enough by this time to of been in my grave long ago.”

You can’t get ahead of Mother.

In the hotel they had a cardroom where they was several men and ladies playing five hundred and this new fangled whist bridge. We also seen a place where they was dancing, so I asked Mother would she like to trip the light fantastic toe and she said no, she was too old to squirm like you have got to do now days. We watched some of the young folks at it awhile till Mother got disgusted and said we would have to see a good movie to take the taste out of our mouth. Mother is a great movie heroyne and we go twice a week here at home.

But I want to tell you about the Park. The second day we was there we visited the Park, which is a good deal like the one in Tampa, only bigger, and they’s more fun goes on here every day than you could shake a stick at. In the middle they’s a big bandstand and chairs for the folks to set and listen to the concerts, which they give you music for all tastes, from “Dixie” up to classical pieces like “Hearts and Flowers.”

Then all around they’s places marked off for different sports and games⁠—chess and checkers and dominoes for folks that enjoys those kind of games, and roque and horseshoes for the nimbler ones. I used to pitch a pretty fair shoe myself, but ain’t done much of it in the last twenty years.

Well, anyway, we bought a membership ticket in the club which costs one dollar for the season, and they tell me that up to a couple years ago it was fifty cents, but they had to raise it to keep out the riffraff.

Well, Mother and I put in a great day watching the pitchers and she wanted I should get in the game, but I told her I was all out of practice and would make a fool of myself, though I seen several men pitching who I guess I could take their measure without no practice. However, they was some good pitchers, too, and one boy from Akron, Ohio, who could certainly throw a pretty shoe. They told me it looked like he would win the championship of the United States in the February tournament. We come away a few days before they held that and I never did hear if he win. I forget his name, but he was a clean cut young fella and he has got a brother in Cleveland that’s a Rotarian.

Well, we just stood around and watched the different games for two or three days and finally I set down in a checker game with a man named Weaver from Danville, Illinois. He was a pretty fair checker player, but he wasn’t no match for me, and I hope that don’t sound like bragging. But I always could hold my own on a checkerboard and the folks around here will tell you the same thing. I played with this Weaver pretty near all morning for two or three mornings and he beat me one game and the only other time it looked like he had a chance, the noon whistle blowed and we had to quit and go to dinner.

While I was playing checkers, Mother would set and listen to the band, as she loves music, classical or no matter what kind, but anyway she was setting there one day and between selections the woman next to her opened up a conversation. She was a woman about Mother’s own age, seventy or seventy-one, and finally she asked Mother’s name and Mother told her her name and where she was from and Mother asked her the same question, and who do you think the woman was?

Well, sir, it was the wife of Frank M. Hartsell, the man who was engaged to Mother till I stepped in and cut him out, fifty-two years ago!

Yes, sir!

You can imagine Mother’s surprise! And Mrs. Hartsell was surprised, too, when Mother told her she had once been friends with her husband, though Mother didn’t say how close friends they had been, or that Mother and I was the cause of Hartsell going out West. But that’s what we was. Hartsell left his town a month after the engagement was broke off and ain’t never been back since. He had went out to Michigan and become a veterinary, and that is where he had settled down, in Hillsdale, Michigan, and finally married his wife.

Well, Mother screwed up her courage to ask if Frank was still living and Mrs. Hartsell took her over to where they was pitching horseshoes and there was old Frank, waiting his turn. And he knowed Mother as soon as he seen her, though it was over fifty years. He said he knowed her by her eyes.

“Why, it’s Lucy Frost!” he says, and he throwed down his shoes and quit the game.

Then they come over and hunted me up and I will confess I wouldn’t of knowed him. Him and I is the same age to the month, but he seems to show it more, some way. He is balder for one thing. And his beard is all white, where mine has still got a streak of brown in it. The very first thing I said to him, I said:

“Well, Frank, that beard of yours makes me feel like I was back north. It looks like a regular blizzard.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess yourn would be just as white if you had it dry cleaned.”

But Mother wouldn’t stand that.

“Is that so!” she said to Frank. “Well, Charley ain’t had no tobacco in his mouth for over ten years!”

And I ain’t!

Well, I excused myself from the checker game and it was pretty close to noon, so we decided to all have dinner together and they was nothing for it only we must try their cafeteria on Third Avenue. It was a little more expensive than ours and not near as good, I thought. I and Mother had about the same dinner we had been having every day and our bill was $1.10. Frank’s check was $1.20 for he and his wife. The same meal wouldn’t of cost them more than a dollar at our place.

After dinner we made them come up to our house and we all set in the parlor, which the young woman had give us the use of to entertain company. We begun talking over old times and Mother said she was a-scared Mrs. Hartsell would find it tiresome listening to we three talk over old times, but as it turned out they wasn’t much chance for nobody else to talk with Mrs. Hartsell in the company. I have heard lots of women that could go it, but Hartsell’s wife takes the cake of all the women I ever seen. She told us the family history of everybody in the State of Michigan and bragged for a half hour about her son, who she said is in the drug business in Grand Rapids, and a Rotarian.

When I and Hartsell could get a word in edgeways we joked one another back and forth and I chafed him about being a horse doctor.

“Well, Frank,” I said, “you look pretty prosperous, so I suppose they’s been plenty of glanders around Hillsdale.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve managed to make more than a fair living. But I’ve worked pretty hard.”

“Yes,” I said, “and I suppose you get called out all hours of the night to attend births and so on.”

Mother made me shut up.

Well, I thought they wouldn’t never go home and I and Mother was in misery trying to keep awake, as the both of us generally always takes a nap after dinner. Finally they went, after we had made an engagement to meet them in the Park the next morning, and Mrs. Hartsell also invited us to come to their place the next night and play five hundred. But she had forgot that they was a meeting of the Michigan Society that evening, so it was not till two evenings later that we had our first card game.

Hartsell and his wife lived in a house on Third Avenue North and had a private setting room besides their bedroom. Mrs. Hartsell couldn’t quit talking about their private setting room like it was something wonderful. We played cards with them, with Mother and Hartsell partners against his wife and I. Mrs. Hartsell is a miserable card player and we certainly got the worst of it.

After the game she brought out a dish of oranges and we had to pretend it was just what we wanted, though oranges down there is like a young man’s whiskers; you enjoy them at first, but they get to be a pesky nuisance.

We played cards again the next night at our place with the same partners and I and Mrs. Hartsell was beat again. Mother and Hartsell was full of compliments for each other on what a good team they made, but the both of them knowed well enough where the secret of their success laid. I guess all and all we must of played ten different evenings and they was only one night when Mrs. Hartsell and I come out ahead. And that one night wasn’t no fault of hern.

When we had been down there about two weeks, we spent one evening as their guest in the Congregational Church, at a social give by the Michigan Society. A talk was made by a man named Bitting of Detroit, Michigan, on How I was Cured of Story Telling. He is a big man in the Rotarians and give a witty talk.

A woman named Mrs. Oxford rendered some selections which Mrs. Hartsell said was grand opera music, but whatever they was my daughter Edie could of give her cards and spades and not made such a hullaballoo about it neither.

Then they was a ventriloquist from Grand Rapids and a young woman about forty-five years of age that mimicked different kinds of birds. I whispered to Mother that they all sounded like a chicken, but she nudged me to shut up.

After the show we stopped in a drug store and I set up the refreshments and it was pretty close to ten o’clock before we finally turned in. Mother and I would of preferred tending the movies, but Mother said we mustn’t offend Mrs. Hartsell, though I asked her had we came to Florida to enjoy ourselves or to just not offend an old chatterbox from Michigan.

I felt sorry for Hartsell one morning. The women folks both had an engagement down to the chiropodist’s and I run across Hartsell in the Park and he foolishly offered to play me checkers.

It was him that suggested it, not me, and I guess he repented himself before we had played one game. But he was too stubborn to give up and set there while I beat him game after game and the worst part of it was that a crowd of folks had got in the habit of watching me play and there they all was, looking on, and finally they seen what a fool Frank was making of himself, and they began to chafe him and pass remarks. Like one of them said:

“Who ever told you you was a checker player!”

And:

“You might maybe be good for tiddle-de-winks, but not checkers!”

I almost felt like letting him beat me a couple games. But the crowd would of knowed it was a put up job.

Well, the women folks joined us in the Park and I wasn’t going to mention our little game, but Hartsell told about it himself and admitted he wasn’t no match for me.

“Well,” said Mrs. Hartsell, “checkers ain’t much of a game anyway, is it?” She said: “It’s more of a children’s game, ain’t it? At least, I know my boy’s children used to play it a good deal.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It’s a children’s game the way your husband plays it, too.”

Mother wanted to smooth things over, so she said:

“Maybe they’s other games where Frank can beat you.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hartsell, “and I bet he could beat you pitching horseshoes.”

“Well,” I said, “I would give him a chance to try, only I ain’t pitched a shoe in over sixteen years.”

“Well,” said Hartsell, “I ain’t played checkers in twenty years.”

“You ain’t never played it,” I said.

“Anyway,” says Frank, “Lucy and I is your master at five hundred.”

Well, I could of told him why that was, but had decency enough to hold my tongue.

It had got so now that he wanted to play cards every night and when I or Mother wanted to go to a movie, any one of us would have to pretend we had a headache and then trust to goodness that they wouldn’t see us sneak into the theater. I don’t mind playing cards when my partner keeps their mind on the game, but you take a woman like Hartsell’s wife and how can they play cards when they have got to stop every couple seconds and brag about their son in Grand Rapids?

Well, the New York-New Jersey Society announced that they was goin to give a social evening too and I said to Mother, I said:

“Well, that is one evening when we will have an excuse not to play five hundred.”

“Yes,” she said, “but we will have to ask Frank and his wife to go to the social with us as they asked us to go to the Michigan social.”

“Well,” I said, “I had rather stay home than drag that chatterbox everywheres we go.”

So Mother said:

“You are getting too cranky. Maybe she does talk a little too much but she is good hearted. And Frank is always good company.”

So I said:

“I suppose if he is such good company you wished you had of married him.”

Mother laughed and said I sounded like I was jealous. Jealous of a cow doctor!

Anyway we had to drag them along to the social and I will say that we give them a much better entertainment than they had given us.

Judge Lane of Paterson made a fine talk on business conditions and a Mrs. Newell of Westfield imitated birds, only you could really tell what they was the way she done it. Two young women from Red Bank sung a choral selection and we clapped them back and they gave us “Home to Our Mountains” and Mother and Mrs. Hartsell both had tears in their eyes. And Hartsell, too.

Well, some way or another the chairman got wind that I was there and asked me to make a talk and I wasn’t even going to get up, but Mother made me, so I got up and said:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “I didn’t expect to be called on for a speech on an occasion like this or no other occasion as I do not set myself up as a speech maker, so will have to do the best I can, which I often say is the best anybody can do.”

Then I told them the story about Pat and the motorcycle, using the brogue, and it seemed to tickle them and I told them one or two other stories, but altogether I wasn’t on my feet more than twenty or twenty-five minutes and you ought to of heard the clapping and hollering when I set down. Even Mrs. Hartsell admitted that I am quite a speechifier and said if I ever went to Grand Rapids, Michigan, her son would make me talk to the Rotarians.

When it was over, Hartsell wanted we should go to their house and play cards, but his wife reminded him that it was after 9:30 p.m., rather a late hour to start a card game, but he had went crazy on the subject of cards, probably because he didn’t have to play partners with his wife. Anyway, we got rid of them and went home to bed.

It was the next morning, when we met over to the Park, that Mrs. Hartsell made the remark that she wasn’t getting no exercise so I suggested that why didn’t she take part in the roque game.

She said she had not played a game of roque in twenty years, but if Mother would play she would play. Well, at first Mother wouldn’t hear of it, but finally consented, more to please Mrs. Hartsell than anything else.

Well, they had a game with a Mrs. Ryan from Eagle, Nebraska, and a young Mrs. Morse from Rutland, Vermont, who Mother had met down to the chiropodist’s. Well, Mother couldn’t hit a flea and they all laughed at her and I couldn’t help from laughing at her myself and finally she quit and said her back was too lame to stoop over. So they got another lady and kept on playing and soon Mrs. Hartsell was the one everybody was laughing at, as she had a long shot to hit the black ball, and as she made the effort her teeth fell out on to the court. I never seen a woman so flustered in my life. And I never heard so much laughing, only Mrs. Hartsell didn’t join in and she was madder than a hornet and wouldn’t play no more, so the game broke up.

Mrs. Hartsell went home without speaking to nobody, but Hartsell stayed around and finally he said to me, he said:

“Well, I played you checkers the other day and you beat me bad and now what do you say if you and me play a game of horseshoes?”

I told him I hadn’t pitched a shoe in sixteen years, but Mother said:

“Go ahead and play. You used to be good at it and maybe it will come back to you.”

Well, to make a long story short, I give in. I oughtn’t to of never tried it, as I hadn’t pitched a shoe in sixteen years, and I only done it to humor Hartsell.

Before we started, Mother patted me on the back and told me to do my best, so we started in and I seen right off that I was in for it, as I hadn’t pitched a shoe in sixteen years and didn’t have my distance. And besides, the plating had wore off the shoes so that they was points right where they stuck into my thumb and I hadn’t throwed more than two or three times when my thumb was raw and it pretty near killed me to hang on to the shoe, let alone pitch it.

Well, Hartsell throws the awkwardest shoe I ever seen pitched and to see him pitch you wouldn’t think he would ever come nowheres near, but he is also the luckiest pitcher I ever seen and he made some pitches where the shoe lit five and six feet short and then schoonered up and was a ringer. They’s no use trying to beat that kind of luck.

They was a pretty fair size crowd watching us and four or five other ladies besides Mother, and it seems like, when Hartsell pitches, he has got to chew and it kept the ladies on the anxious seat as he don’t seem to care which way he is facing when he leaves go.

You would think a man as old as him would of learnt more manners.

Well, to make a long story short, I was just beginning to get my distance when I had to give up on account of my thumb, which I showed it to Hartsell and he seen I couldn’t go on, as it was raw and bleeding. Even if I could of stood it to go on myself, Mother wouldn’t of allowed it after she seen my thumb. So anyway I quit and Hartsell said the score was nineteen to six, but I don’t know what it was. Or don’t care, neither.

Well, Mother and I went home and I said I hoped we was through with the Hartsells as I was sick and tired of them, but it seemed like she had promised we would go over to their house that evening for another game of their everlasting cards.

Well, my thumb was giving me considerable pain and I felt kind of out of sorts and I guess maybe I forgot myself, but anyway, when we was about through playing Hartsell made the remark that he wouldn’t never lose a game of cards if he could always have Mother for a partner.

So I said:

“Well, you had a chance fifty years ago to always have her for a partner, but you wasn’t man enough to keep her.”

I was sorry the minute I had said it and Hartsell didn’t know what to say and for once his wife couldn’t say nothing. Mother tried to smooth things over by making the remark that I must of had something stronger than tea or I wouldn’t talk so silly. But Mrs. Hartsell had froze up like an iceberg and hardly said good night to us and I bet her and Frank put in a pleasant hour after we was gone.

As we was leaving, Mother said to him: “Never mind Charley’s nonsense, Frank. He is just mad because you beat him all hollow pitching horseshoes and playing cards.”

She said that to make up for my slip, but at the same time she certainly riled me. I tried to keep ahold of myself, but as soon as we was out of the house she had to open up the subject and begun to scold me for the break I had made.

Well, I wasn’t in no mood to be scolded. So I said:

“I guess he is such a wonderful pitcher and card player that you wished you had married him.”

“Well,” she said, “at least he ain’t a baby to give up pitching because his thumb has got a few scratches.”

“And how about you,” I said, “making a fool of yourself on the roque court and then pretending your back is lame and you can’t play no more!”

“Yes,” she said, “but when you hurt your thumb I didn’t laugh at you, and why did you laugh at me when I sprained my back?”

“Who could help from laughing!” I said.

“Well,” she said, “Frank Hartsell didn’t laugh.”

“Well,” I said, “why didn’t you marry him?”

“Well,” said Mother, “I almost wished I had!”

“And I wished so, too!” I said.

“I’ll remember that!” said Mother, and that’s the last word she said to me for two days.

We seen the Hartsells the next day in the Park and I was willing to apologize, but they just nodded to us. And a couple days later we heard they had left for Orlando, where they have got relatives.

I wished they had went there in the first place.

Mother and I made it up setting on a bench.

“Listen, Charley,” she said. “This is our Golden Honeymoon and we don’t want the whole thing spoilt with a silly old quarrel.”

“Well,” I said, “did you mean that about wishing you had married Hartsell?”

“Of course not,” she said, “that is, if you didn’t mean that you wished I had, too.”

So I said:

“I was just tired and all wrought up. I thank God you chose me instead of him as they’s no other woman in the world who I could of lived with all these years.”

“How about Mrs. Hartsell?” says Mother.

“Good gracious!” I said. “Imagine being married to a woman that plays five hundred like she does and drops her teeth on the roque court!”

“Well,” said Mother, “it wouldn’t be no worse than being married to a man that expectorates towards ladies and is such a fool in a checker game.”

So I put my arm around her shoulder and she stroked my hand and I guess we got kind of spoony.

They was two days left of our stay in St. Petersburg and the next to the last day Mother introduced me to a Mrs. Kendall from Kingston, Rhode Island, who she had met at the chiropodist’s.

Mrs. Kendall made us acquainted with her husband, who is in the grocery business. They have got two sons and five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. One of their sons lives in Providence and is way up in the Elks as well as a Rotarian.

We found them very congenial people and we played cards with them the last two nights we was there. They was both experts and I only wished we had met them sooner instead of running into the Hartsells. But the Kendalls will be there again next winter and we will see more of them, that is, if we decide to make the trip again.

We left the Sunshine City on the eleventh day of February, at 11 a.m. This give us a day trip through Florida and we seen all the country we had passed through at night on the way down.

We reached Jacksonville at 7 p.m. and pulled out of there at 8:10 p.m. We reached Fayetteville, North Carolina, at nine o’clock the following morning, and reached Washington, DC, at 6:30 p.m., laying over there half an hour.

We reached Trenton at 11:01 p.m. and had wired ahead to my daughter and son-in-law and they met us at the train and we went to their house and they put us up for the night. John would of made us stay up all night, telling about our trip, but Edie said we must be tired and made us go to bed. That’s my daughter.

The next day we took our train for home and arrived safe and sound, having been gone just one month and a day.

Here comes Mother, so I guess I better shut up.

Bedtime-Stories

How to Tell a True Princess

Well my little boys and gals this is the case of a prince who his father had told him he must get married but the gal he married must be a true princess. So he says to the old man how do you tell if a princess is a true princess or a phony princess. So the old man says why if she is a true princess she must be delicate.

Yes said the prince but what is the true test of delicate.

Why said the old man who was probably the king if she is delicate why she probably can’t sleep over 49 eiderdown quilts and 28 mattresses provided they’s a pea parked under same which might disturb her. So they made her bed this day in these regards. They put a single green pea annext the spring and then piled 28 mattresses and 49 eider quilts on top of same and says if she can sleep on this quantity of bed clothing and not feel disturbed, why she can’t possibly be delicate and is therefore not a princess.

Well the princess went to bed at 10 o’clock on acct. of having called up everybody and nobody would come over and play double Canfield with her and finely she give up and went to bed and hadn’t been asleep more than 3 hrs. when she woke up and says I am very uncomfortable, they must be a pea under all these quilts. So they looked it up and sure enough they was a green pea under the quilts and mattresses. It made her miserable. She was practally helpless.

But the next day when she woke up they didn’t know if she was a princess or the reverse. Because lots of people had slept under those conditions and maybe it was the mattress or the springs that had made them miserable. So finely the king suggested why not give her a modern trial.

So the next evening but one they sent her to bed under these conditions:

The counterpane was concrete and right under it was 30 layers of tin plate and then come 4 bales of cotton and beneath that 50 ft. of solid rock and under the entire layout a canary’s feather.

“Now Princess,” they said to her in a friendly way, “if you can tell us the name of the bird which you are sleeping on under all these condiments, why then we will know you are a true princess and worthy to marry the prince.”

“Prince!” she said. “Is that the name of a dog?”

They all laughed at her in a friendly way.

“Why yes,” she said, “I can tell you the name of that bird. His name is Dickie.”

This turned the laugh on them and at the same time proved she was a true princess.

Tomorrow night I will try to tell you the story of how 6 men travelled through the wide world and the story will begin at 6:30 and I hope it won’t keep nobody up.

Cinderella

Once upon a time they was a prominent clubman that killed his wife after a party where she doubled a bid of four diamonds and the other side made four odd, giving them game and a $26.00 rubber. Well, she left him a daughter who was beginning to run absolutely hog wild and he couldn’t do nothing with her, so he married again, this time drawing a widow with two gals of her own, Patricia and Micaela.

These two gals was terrible. Pat had a wen, besides which they couldn’t nobody tell where her chin started and her neck left off. The other one, Mike, got into a brawl the night she come out and several of her teeth had came out with her. These two gals was impossible.

Well, the guy’s own daughter was a pip, so both her stepmother and the two stepsisters hated her and made her sleep in the ashcan. Her name was Zelda, but they called her Cinderella on account of how the ashes and clinkers clang to her when she got up noons.

Well, they was a young fella in the town that to see him throw his money around, you would of thought he was the Red Sox infield trying to make a double play. So everybody called him a Prince. Finally he sent out invitations to a dance for just people that had dress suits. Pat and Mike was invited, but not Cinderella, as her best clothes looked like they worked in a garage. The other two gals made her help them doll up and they kidded her about not going, but she got partly even by garnisheeing their hair with eau de garlic.

Well, Pat and Mike started for Webster Hall in a bonded taxi and they hadn’t much sooner than went when a little bit of an old dame stepped out of the kitchen sink and stood in front of Cinderella and says she was her fairy godmother.

“Listen,” says Cinderella: “don’t mention mother to me! I’ve tried two different kinds and they’ve both been a flop!”

“Yes, but listen yourself,” says the godmother: “wouldn’t you like to go to this here dance?”

“Who and the h⁠⸺⁠l wouldn’t!” says Cinderella.

“Well, then,” says the godmother, “go out in the garden and pick me a pumpkin.”

“You’re pie-eyed,” was Cinderella’s criticism, but anyway she went out and got a pumpkin and give it to the old dame and the last named touched it with her wand and it turned into a big, black touring car like murderers rides in.

Then the old lady made Cinderella go to the mousetrap and fetch her six mice and she prodded them with her wand and they each became a cylinder. Next she had her bring a rat from the rat trap and she turned him into a big city chauffeur, which wasn’t hardly any trouble.

“Now,” says the godmother, “fetch me a couple lizards.”

So Cinderella says, “What do you think this is, the zoo?” But she went in the living-room and choose a couple lizards off the lounge and the old lady turned them into footmen.

The next thing the old godmother done was tag Cinderella herself with the wand and all of a sudden the gal’s rags had become a silk evening gown and her feet was wrapped up in a pair of plate-glass slippers.

“How do you like them slippers?” asked the old dame.

“Great!” says Cinderella. “I wished you had of made the rest of my garments of the same material.”

“Now, listen,” says the godmother: “don’t stay no later than midnight because just as soon as the clock strikes twelve, your dress will fall off and your chauffeur and so forth will change back into vermin.”

Well, Cinderella clumb in the car and they was about to start when the chauffeur got out and went around back of the tonneau.

“What’s the matter?” says Cinderella.

“I wanted to be sure my taillight was on,” says the rat.

Finally they come to Webster Hall and when Cinderella entered the ballroom everybody stopped dancing and looked at her pop-eyed. The Prince went nuts and wouldn’t dance with nobody else and when it come time for supper he got her two helpings of stewed rhubarb and liver and he also had her laughing herself sick at the different wows he pulled. Like for instance they was one occasion when he looked at her feet and asked her what was her shoes made of.

“Plate glass,” says Cinderella.

“Don’t you feel no pane?” asked the Prince.

Other guests heard this one and the laughter was general.

But finally it got to be pretty near twelve o’clock and Cinderella went home in her car and pretty soon Pat and Mike blowed in and found her in the ashcan and told her about the ball and how the strange gal had come and stole the show.

“We may see her again tomorrow night,” says Pat.

“Oh,” says Cinderella, “is they going to be another ball?”

“Why, no, you poor sap!” says Mike. “It’s a Marathon.”

“I wished I could go,” says Cinderella. “I could if you would leave me take your yellow dress.”

The two stepsisters both razzed her, little wreaking that it was all as she could do to help from laughing outright.

Anyway they both went back to the dance the next night and Cinderella followed them again, but this time the gin made her drowsy and before she realized it, the clock was striking twelve. So in her hurry to get out she threw a shoe and everybody scrambled for it, but the Prince got it. Meanw’ile on account of it being after midnight, the touring car had disappeared and Cindy had to walk home and her former chauffeur kept nibbling at her exposed foot and annoying her in many other ways.

Well, the Prince run a display ad the next morning that he would marry the gal who could wear the shoe and he sent a trumpeter and a shoe clerk to make a house to house canvass of Greater New York and try the shoe on all the dames they could find and finally they come to the clubman’s house and the trumpeter woke up the two stepsisters for a fitting. Well, Pat took one look at the shoe and seen they was no use. Mike was game and tried her best to squeeze into it, but flopped, as her dogs was also mastiffs. She got sore and asked the trumpeter why hadn’t he broughten a shoe horn instead of that bugle. He just laughed.

All of a sudden him and the shoe clerk catched a glimpse of Cinderella and seen that she had small feet and sure enough, the slipper fitted her and they run back to the Prince’s apartment to tell him the news.

“Listen, Scott,” they says, for that was the Prince’s name: “we have found the gal!”

So Cinderella and the Prince got married and Cinderella forgive her two stepsisters for how they had treated her and she paid a high-price dentist to fix Mike up with a removable bridge and staked Pat to a surgeon that advertised a new, safe method of exterminating wens.

That is all of the story, but it strikes me like the plot⁠—with the poor, ragged little gal finally getting all the best of it⁠—could be changed around and fixed up so as it would make a good idear for a play.

Red Riding Hood

Well, children, here is the story of little Red Riding Hood like I tell it to my little ones when they wake up in the morning with a headache after a tough night.

Well, one or two times they was a little gal that lived in the suburbs who they called her little Red Riding Hood because she always wore a red riding hood in the hopes that sometime a fresh guy in a high power roadster would pick her up and take her riding. But the rumor had spread the neighborhood that she was a perfectly nice gal, so she had to walk.

Red had a grandmother that lived over near the golf course and got in on most of the parties and one noon she got up and found that they wasn’t no gin in the house for her breakfast so she called up her daughter and told her to send Red over with a bottle of gin as she was dying.

So Red starts out with a quart under her arm but had not went far when she met a police dog. A good many people has police dogs, and brags about them and how nice they are for children and etc. but personly I would just as leaf have my kids spend their weekend swimming in the State Shark Hatchery.

Well, this special police dog was like the most of them and hated everybody. When he seen Red he spoke to her and she answered him. Even a dog was better than nothing. She told him where she was going and he pertended like he wasn’t paying no tension but no sooner had not she left him when he beat it up a alley and got to her grandmother’s joint ahead of her.

Well the old lady heard him knock at the door and told him to come in, as she thought he must either be Red or a bootlegger. So he went in and the old lady was in bed with this hangover and the dog eat her alive.

Then he put on some pajamas and laid down in the bed and pertended like he was her, so pretty soon Red come along and knocked at the door and the dog told her to come in and she went up to the bed to hand him the quart. She thought of course it would be her grandmother laying in the bed and even when she seen the dog she still figured it was her grandmother and something she had drank the night before must of disagreed with her and made her look different.

“Well, grandmother,” she says, “you must of hit the old hair tonic last night. Your arms looks like Luis Firpo.”

“I will Firpo you in a minute,” says the dog.

“But listen grandmother,” says Red, “don’t you think you ought to have your ears bobbed?”

“I will ear you in a minute,” says the dog.

“But listen grandmother,” says Red, “you are cockeyed.”

“Listen,” says the dog, “if you had of had ½ of what I had last night you would of been stone blind.”

“But listen grandmother,” says Red, “where did you get the new store teeth?”

“I heard you was a tough egg,” says the dog, “so I bought them to eat you with.”

So then the dog jumped out of bed and went after Red and she screamed.

In the mean w’ile Red’s father had been playing golf for a quarter a hole with a couple of guys that conceded themselfs all putts under 12 ft. and he was $.75 looser coming to the 10th tee.

The 10th hole is kind of tough as your drive has to have a carry of 50 yards or it will fall in a garbage incinerating plant. You can either lift out with a penalty of two strokes or else play it with a penalty of suffocation. Red’s old man topped his drive and the ball rolled into the garbage. He elected to play it and made what looked like a beautiful shot, but when they got up on the green they found that he had hit a white radish instead of a golf ball.

A long argument followed during which the gallery went home to get his supper. The hole was finely conceded.

The 11th hole on the course is probably the sportiest hole in golfdom. The tee and green are synonymous and the first shot is a putt, but the rules signify that the putt must be played off a high tee with a driver. Red’s father was on in two and off in three more and finely sunk his approach for a birdie eight, squaring the match.

Thus the match was all square coming to the home hole which is right close to grandmother’s cottage. Red’s father hooked his drive through an open window in his mother-in-law’s house and forced his caddy to lend him a niblick. He entered the cottage just as the dog was beginning to eat Red.

“What hole are you playing father?” asked Red.

“The eighteenth,” says her father, “and it is a dog’s leg.”

Whereat he hit the police dog in the leg with his niblick and the dog was so surprised that he even give up the grandmother.

“I win, one up,” says Red’s father and he went out to tell the news to his two opponents. But they had quit and went home to dress for the Kiwanis Club dance.

Bluebeard

Well children it seems they was a gal married a man named Bluebeard on acct. of he being rich. That was why she married him and not why they called him Bluebeard, the last⁠—named being on acct. of him not having had time to shave for several days.

So on this day he come into his wife’s boudoir whiskers and all and says he was going on the road for 6 wks. to sell tooth brushes with no bristles and might half to make a couple speeches at different Rotary Clubs.

“But listen dearie,” he says before departing, “you have got a charge acct. at Haynes the butcher and the great Atlantic and Pacific Tea store so you should worry. And here is my keys,” he says, “and this here key opens the rm. where I got my dough and this here key is the key to the rm. where the extra dishes is locked up in case you should have a whole lot of Co. and I hope you entertain all your friends w’ile I am gone so as we can get that much over with. And you can use all of these here keys except this little key which opens the closet at the end of the drawing rm. which I forbid you to enter same.”

“Yes, but what is in this closet?” asked the little woman thinking to herself that it must be the place where he kept his Scotch and corkscrew which he had been drinking unbeknownest to her or why would he of went so many days without shaving.

“That is none of your business,” was his husbandly reply. “But I am just telling you to lay off that little closet.”

He hadn’t no sooner than got out of the house when Co. begin to show up as they will when lease desired and amongst the Co. was 2 of her brothers and 1 sister and a couple guys that was stuck on her long before she married Bluebeard.

So they set around all evening and told stories and tried to sing but nothing to sustain them and the little woman wouldn’t open the closet door where everybody thought the hootch was for the simple reason that she had got the key in the door and it wouldn’t fit and finely they all went home and said they would come back the next day and hoped she would not be so stingy with the drinks.

So they beat it all but her sister, and the 2 gals hadn’t no sooner went to bed when the doorbell ring and a Jap answered and who should it be but Bluebeard. And he come up to the rm. and asked her for the keys and she give them all to him except the key to what she thought was the wine cellar.

“Listen,” he says, “I will give you 7 minutes to produce that one key which is the most important key in the house.”

“Sure,” she says, “because that key opens the closet where you are storing the hootch.”

“If you think it’s hootch, look it over,” was his criticism.

So she went up and opened the door to this closet and instead of finding hootch, she found the skeleton forms of former wives and some of them looked like vintage.

“Now,” says Bluebeard, “you are going to occupy a clothes hanger along with the rest of these gals.”

“Just wait a minute,” she says, “till I can go out and get cleaned and pressed.”

So she pretended like she was sending herself out to the tailor’s but in the meantime she was asking her sister to look out of the window and see was they any help coming and finely her 2 brothers and the guys that was stuck on her showed up and stuck a safety razor into Bluebeard’s whiskers and the shock of getting shaved killed him and the little woman and her relatives divided the spoils and believe me spoils is right. The moral of this story is if your husband don’t get shaved for 3 days, somebody should ought to step in and do their duty.

A Closeup of Domba Splew

Not since the tardy, posthumous death of Agera Cholera has the American literati been so baffled toward a rising genius of letters than has been demonstrated in regards to the Italian poet, Domba Splew, who, just a year ago, sprang into worldwide indifference by the publication, in The Bookman, of his verse, “La battia fella inna base tuba” (The weasel fell into the bathtub).

It is a matter of history that in the month in which this poem appeared, the circulation of the magazine in which it was printed increased two copies. And the fame of the author on this side of the old pond, as I call it, spread as far west as North Attleboro, Mass. You could not wake up in the morning or any other time without either wife or kiddies yelping, “Sweet papa, did you see this poem of Domba Splew’s, ‘La battia fella inna base tuba’ (The weasel fell into the bathtub)?”

It got so finely a person could not sleep at home at all and I for one rented one of the big New York hotels and slept outdoors, not being able to get a room. Everybody wondered what was the matter, but I laughed at them. Finely the editor of Rickets Weekly caught me in an upright position in the gutter and made me the unheard-of offer of $5.00 and no hundreds dollars to go and interview this America-Italio sensation and find out something about his home life.

To locate a man as famous as him is what Ex-Attorney-General Daugherty would call “les arbeit tough” (a hard job). But the writer, an experienced interviewer, looked upon it as child’s play and went to the nearest city ticket office where luckily I found a clerk who had not returned from lunch.

“Listen,” I said, “where would a man be apt to run acrost a foreign literary genius, discovered only a year ago?”

“Listen,” replied the clerk, “have you tried the artistic and bohemian mecca of American letters?”

“Where is that?” I coughed.

“Scranton, PA,” was the clerk’s reply.

So the writer bought a ticket to Scranton and arrived there only a half hour late.

To make a short story out of a risqué story, I found our hero living on the top floor of a six-story bungalow.

“If,” he said, “I am away from the smoke and chimbley, I am at a lost. In other words, I am a gone gosling.

“Listen,” he said: “I don’t think you know much about Italy, but I will tell you. In the first place there is a military rule which provides that when a native born reaches the age of seven, they must spend the next three years in jail, or, as Oscar Wilde aptly named it, Reading Gaol. The reason I came over to America was on acct. of the fact that there is more words here. I need words.”

In a little while he was supine.

“Now listen,” I said: “I have been sent over here to Scranton to find out about your home life. Tell me what you do all day.”

He went scarlet.

“I have got a set of rules,” he said, pulling a fresh cucumber off the hatrack. “In the morning I get up and talk to my dromedaries. Oh, those dromedaries! I would walk a mile for one of them! I have got a collection of eighty of them and each one more laughable than the first one. Every morning somebody sends me a dromedary. After talking to my dromedaries. I sit down and read the telephone book from cover to cover charge. But now leave me go out and show you my garden.”

The two of us strolled haltingly through his garden, which was an Italian garden with all the Italian dishes in bloom⁠—ravioli, spaghetti, garlic, Aida, and citrous fruits.

“Is this your diversion?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, toppling over a govvel sprig and breaking his ankle in two places.

“Tell me about your home life,” I said with a sneer.

“I presume,” he said, taking a pair of suspenders out of the nearest waste basket, “I presume you want to know my daily calendar. Well, I always make it a point to get up at six in the morning and eat my breakfast food.”

I found out later that his breakfast food was ground-up quail feathers, the rest of the carcass being thrown outdoors.

“I,” he continued, “spend my next ten minutes with my dromedaries. It is just a romp. Then I return to my own room, where an ostrich shaves me. Not too close.

“Then I sit down on a milk stool and begin my day’s work. I aim to never write lest than one poem a day. For instance, look at this one I turned out this morning, just after the ostrich had shaved me.”

And he read me the verse that was published by mistake in last month’s Applejack⁠—

Hail to thee, blithe owl!
Bird thou never wantest to been.
Queenly and efflorien,
How did thou ever begin?

“That,” I said, “sounds like a steal on Kipling.”

“Kipling yourself!” said the poet, and I loped over the nearest hedge.

“But listen,” he said: “Have you heard my ‘Gooseflesh,’ after the style of Alfred Geese?”

There was no use saying no:

Quiescent, a person sits heart and soul,
Thinking of daytime and Amy Lowell.
A couple came walking along the street;
Neither of them had ever met.

“That,” said Mr. Splew, “is the verse I have worked on all winter.”

“It’s been a hard winter,” I said. “We didn’t have enough coal either.”

With that, he climbed up on top of the pigeon house.

“I want to tell you about my wife,” he said. “She has got what is called chronic paralysis. She has a stroke every day, but it is never quite enough.”

With that, he led me into the beehive, where he and the dromedaries eat all their meals.

“Now, Mr. Splew,” I said, “my editor wanted me to ask you how you got the name ‘Domba.’ He thought it might be a contraction of Dumbbell.”

“Your editor is both wrong,” said Mr. Splew. “I was named for my father, who gave the money to found the Kalter Aufschnitt (Cold High School) in Rome. And the children that attended the school said it must have been dumbfounded. Would you like to go into the pool?”

What of It?

I was telling this to a friend of mine that’s in the furniture game; travels out of Grand Rapids for the Phillips people. And he says I ought to tell it to other friends of mine that’s on the road a good deal so as they’ll know how to protect themself when they bump into one of these here broadcasters like Lacey.

Well, it seems they was a fella named Dexter Cosset and in his spare time he wrote a play and mailed it to a friend of his in New York that was personally acquainted with Joe Morris, the producer. So he give it to Morris and somebody in Morris’ office that could read told Morris the play was good, so Morris got somebody that could write to wire a telegram to Cosset. It says in the telegram:

Accept your play Ghosts but must change title as it seems man named Ibsen has a farce that title come New York at once as we want to go right into rehearsal have renamed play Carlotta’s Corns which will be permanent title unless you can think of better one.

Well, it seems Cosset lived in South Bend and clerked in Ellsworth’s, and his gal clerked there, too, and when he wrote this play he named the heroine Carlotta because that was his gal’s name if you get what I mean. He thought it would kind of tickle her to have the heroine of a play named after her, do you understand me?

But as I say, Carlotta clerked in Ellsworth’s, too, and she was on her feet all day and had a good deal of trouble with them, and if she ever got word that Cosset had wrote a play and used her name in connections with the chiropody game, she would of give him the air and submitted to the caresses of Orville Pleat that was in the automobile game on Vistula Avenue.

And besides they wasn’t no place in the play where any reference was made to anybody’s corns let alone the heroine’s, so if it was produced under the title suggested by Mr. Morris, why unless the author wrote in a new scene devoted to pedal disorders which he had no personal experience, why the critics would say what the hell.

So anyway Cosset got on this train this night determined to think up a decent title for his play before he clumb into Mrs. Pullman’s spare bed, but Cosset, like a good many other South Bend boys, could not even start to think unless they was a live cigarette in his mush. So the first thing he done when he got on this train this night was look up a porter he knew personally named George something, a colored man. He asked George was they a buffet on the train.

“Why, no, massa,” replied George in his laughable darky dialect. “We dinna run no buffet car on this train since ze railroads quit selling what you call ze liquor. But if you got something on ze hip,” he added, rolling those big eyes and doing the double shuffle, “I get you ze ice and ze water.”

Cosset then exclaimed that what he wanted was a place where he could sit and smoke and think without interruptions and the best the clever darky could suggest was the washroom in his own car. It seems the washrooms in the other cars was jammed with members of the Grand Forks Well-Kept Lawns Association, bound for the annual Get-Together Dinner at Saratoga, with a one-day stopover at Troy to get their collar cleaned.

As Cosset entered the washroom of his own Pullman⁠—“Gastritis”⁠—he noted that the only occupant was a man in the late twenties or forties who he remembered having seen once or twice walking up and down Michigan Street with such a big sample case that a great many people thought he must be selling warships. He was a travelling man named Ben Lacey; lived in Chicago and was married to a Kenosha woman who had luckily lost her hearing. The misery left Lacey’s face when he seen Cosset come in. Here was an audience.

“Well,” he said, as the young clerk-playwright seated himself, “according to my watch we are twelve minutes late leaving the Bend. And I’m pretty sure the watch is right. I’ve had this old watch eight years and only paid twenty smackers for it, and it runs just as true now like when I got it. How is that for a twenty dollar watch?”

“Pretty good,” replied Cosset.

“I’ll say it’s pretty good,” said Lacey. “They don’t make watches no more like this here. I got a friend of mine that’s in the watch game and he knows watches. That’s his game. And he says they don’t make no more watches like this here. His name’s Fox, from Lafayette. Maybe you know him.”

“No,” replied Cosset, “I don’t know him.”

“He’s in the watch game,” said Lacey. “I just happened to meet him, and I thought you might maybe know him. He gives me a ring every time he hits Chi. He’s a card. Keep you up all night telling gags and stories. And original, too. I remember one morning I met him on the train going from Chi to Benton Harbor. No, it was Niles. Well, he had a morning paper and they was a big story on the front page about the Cragin murder out in Los Angeles. You remember⁠—Cragin, the picture director. They found him dead in his apartment, and it come out that they’d been a big party the night before where pretty near everybody there was a hophead. So this Fox, this friend of mine, he says had I saw the news in the paper and I says what news, and he says O, they’s been another snowstorm in Hollywood. He’s a card. Keeps everybody laughing. I thought maybe you might of ran across him.”

“No,” replied Cosset, “I don’t know him.”

“What game are you in?” asked Lacey.

“Dry goods,” replied Cosset.

“I got a brother-in-law in that game,” said Lacey. “He was in the insurance game, but now he’s in the dry goods game. He’s on the road for Smythe-Carter. He married my sister⁠—that’s my youngest sister, Bertha. She wouldn’t of met him only for me. I got acquainted with him on a train coming fom Racine to Chi. No, it was Janesville. He was living in a boardinghouse and I felt kind of sorry for him, so I says when he didn’t have nothing to do, to give me a ring. So he come out to the house one night to supper. The kid sister couldn’t see him at first. They was a couple of his front teeth was discolored. But after you got used to him, you didn’t notice it so much.

“So him and the kid got married. Now they got a home of their own out in Morgan Park. Built it cheap on account of one of his brothers being in the building game. They got two of the cutest kiddies you ever seen. The boy’s named after me: Ben. That’s my name. Little Ben’s just two years old and he calls me plain Ben. He can’t say uncle. So he just calls me Ben. Smart as a whip.”

Cosset didn’t deny this or make no comment of any kind as he hoped that absolute silence on his part might prove contagious. But he was too polite not to answer when Uncle Ben asked him a direct question, was he going to the Big Town. He said yes.

“Me, too,” said Lacey. “I generally always take the Century, but I had to take this train this time on account of being tied up in Chi with a customer of mine. He’s in the cement game. I’m in the elevator game myself; with the Trunkey people. Biggest elevator concern in the U.S. Well, this customer of mine got in town and give me a ring and I had to see him and after we was all through with our business I couldn’t get away from him. Great talker. We got in a argument about Coolidge. He was panning Coolidge so I stepped in and told him where he was wrong. If a man says something I don’t like, I tell him where he’s wrong, customer or no customer. He admitted he was wrong after I’d talked to him. He says, ‘I’m wrong, Lacey, and you’re right.’ So then we wound up telling stories. I thought he’d laugh himself sick when I told him the one about the Greek and the Spaniard. Have you heard that one?”

“No,” replied Cosset.

“It’s a good one if you ain’t heard it,” said Lacey. “It seems they was a Greek and a Spaniard and they was out with a couple of fly chorus dames⁠—”

“Would you mind telling it to me after a while?” says Cosset. “Right now, before I forget it, I want to see if my grip’s flied open. It don’t catch right.”

“Well, listen,” said Lacey, “I got a friend of mine in the Big Town in the suitcase and trunk game and I’ll give you a note to him and he’ll sell you the best suitcase you ever seen, at cost.”

“Well, I’m much obliged,” said Cosset, and hurried out of the washroom and to his seat.

He sat there over an hour, trying and trying to think. But as I said a while ago, he couldn’t even start to think unless they was a live cigarette in his mouth. And the car was half full of old women, bound for the annual banquet of the Little Rock Sorrel Growers’ Association at Rutland, Vermont.

Well, finally the man that had the lower come in and sat down in the section. He was a man either forty-two or forty-six years old, named Harrison Quolt. He observed that Cosset was acting very nervous.

“You are acting very nervous,” he said to Cosset. “What can be the matter?”

Cosset then told him all the circumstances and Quolt laughed softly.

“I’ve quit smoking myself,” he says. “I quit on account of a bad stomach. So I don’t have to travel in washrooms no more. But before I quit, I mastered the art of putting the quietus on these Pullman elocutionists. The last three or four trips I made with the cigarette habit, why I could share a washroom from morning till night with one of these here cross-country loud speakers and you’d never hear a word out of him; that is, after I’d give him the treatment.”

“What was the treatment?” asked Cosset. “Did you just keep still and not answer nothing he said?”

“Oh, no,” says Quolt. “Silence don’t do no good. And it don’t help none to pretend like you are reading. That just gives them something more to talk about⁠—books and magazines and so forth. But if you are in earnest about the importance of this thinking you’ve got to do, why I’ll go in there with you and fix this guy so’s he’ll have lockjaw all the rest of the way to New York.”

Cosset gratefully accepted this proposition and the two gents went to the washroom where they found Lacey lighting a fresh cigar. He was on the long seat, next to the window. Quolt moved one of the chairs to a position facing Lacey, and seated himself. He begun staring at Lacey’s right knee, like they was some item there that baffled or fascinated him. Lacey’s eyes hastily followed the direction of Quolt’s, but he couldn’t detect nothing the matter and looked up again.

“Well,” he said, “I was just reading in the paper about two more brokerage firms has failed in the Big Town. That must be a ticklish game. I was thinking once about going into that game myself. I was all set to go into it with another fella in Chi when a friend of mine that’s with the Trunkey Elevator people give me a ring and asked me how would I like to go into the elevator game. I says I would try anything once, so I took the position and been with them ever since.”

“What?” says Mr. Quolt, continuing to stare at Lacey’s knee.

Lacey looked down again, but couldn’t see nothing wrong.

“I was just saying,” he repeated, “that I seen in this paper where they was two more brokerage houses in New York had took the big flop. I was saying it must be a mighty risky game. I’m tickled to death I stayed out of it. I pretty near got into it once with a fella in Chi. But just as we was making our plans, a friend of mine with the Trunkey Elevator people give me a ring and asked me would I like to go into the elevator game. Well, his proposition sounded reasonable so I took him up and been with them ever since.”

“What of it?” said Mr. Quolt.

“Why,” says Lacey, “it just shows how lucky a man can be sometimes and maybe don’t appreciate just how lucky he was.”

“What of it?” said Mr. Quolt, and kept staring at Lacey’s knee.

Lacey’s eyes followed Quolt’s for the third time, but without results. The train was whistling for a station.

“That must be either Kendallville or Ligonier,” said Lacey.

“What of it?” said Mr. Quolt.

For maybe a half an hour the three gents sat in silence. Quolt’s eyes never left Lacey’s knee and the owner of same looked at it nervously every little while. Once or twice he opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but thought better of it. Finally Cosset spoke up.

“That’s plenty,” he says to Quolt. “The treatment’s worked grand and you don’t have to stay in this stuffy hole no longer. I’ve got a swell name for my play already. It’s going to be named ‘What of It?’ ”

Mr. Quolt removed his glance from Lacey’s knee and looked at Cosset.

“What did you say?” he asked him.

“In Conference”

Harvey Hester entered the outer office of Kramer & Company, Efficiency Engineers. He approached the girl at the desk.

“I want to see Mr. Lansing,” he said.

“A. M. or A. T.?” inquired the girl.

“Mr. A. T. Lansing,” Hester replied.

“What is your name?”

“Harvey Hester.”

The girl pressed a button and wrote something on a slip of paper. A boy appeared. She gave him the paper.

“For Mr. A. T. Lansing,” she said.

The boy went away. Presently a young lady in mannish attire came out.

“I am Mr. Lansing’s secretary,” she said. “Did you want to see him personally?”

“I did and do,” said Hester.

“Well, just now he’s in conference,” said the secretary. “Perhaps you would like to wait.”

“Listen. This is pretty important⁠—”

“I’m sorry, but it’s against the rules to disturb any of the officers in conference.”

“How long will the conference last?”

“It’s hard to say,” replied the secretary. “They just got through one conference and they’re beginning another. It may be ten minutes and it may be an hour.”

“But listen⁠—”

“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing for you to do but call again, or else wait.”

“I’ll wait,” snapped Hester, “but I won’t wait long!”

The conferees were sitting around the big table in the conference room. At the head of the table was J. H. Carlisle, president of the firm.

“Where is L. M.?” he inquired crossly. “This is the fifth conference he’s been late to this morning. And we’ve had only six.”

“Well, J. H. C.,” said R. L. Jamieson, a vice-president, “I don’t think we ought to wait for him. If we drag along this way we won’t be able to get in a dozen conferences all day. And a dozen was the absolute minimum agreed on.”

“That’s all right, R. L.,” said K. M. Dewey, another vice-president, “but it happens that L. M. is the one that asked for this conference, and he’s the only one that knows what it’s about. So we’d⁠—”

At this moment the door opened and the tardy one entered. He was L. M. Croft, one of the vice-presidents.

“I’m sorry to be late,” he apologized, addressing J. H. C.

“I was talking over the phone to J. P. The reason I asked for this conference,” he continued, “was to get your thought on a proposition that came up about twenty minutes ago. There was a postcard in the mail addressed to the firm. It was from the main post-office. It says they are holding a letter for us which reached them unstamped. If we sign the card and send it to them, together with a two-cent stamp, they will forward us the letter. Otherwise they will send it to the Dead Letter Office. The question is, Is the letter worth the time and expense of sending for it?”

“Who is the letter from, L. M.?” The inquirer was S. P. Daniels, one of the vice-presidents.

“The card didn’t say, S. P.,” replied Croft.

“My suggestion, J. H. C. and gentlemen,” said A. M. Lansing, a vice-president, “is to write to whoever is in charge of that office, authorize him to open the letter, see who it’s from and what it’s about, and if he thinks it important, to let us know, and then we can mail the required stamp.”

“It’s a mighty ticklish business, gentlemen,” ventured Vice-President T. W. Havers. “I have a brother, G. K. Havers. He’s a pharmaceutical dispenser at a drug store on upper Broadway. He received a card like this from a branch post-office. He signed the card and sent the stamp, and the letter turned out to be nothing but advertising matter from a realtor.”

“Why, T. W.,” said A. T. Lansing, “you never told any one of us you had a brother.”

“Oh, yes, A. T.,” replied Havers. “I’ve got two other brothers besides G. K. One of them, N. D., is a mortuary artisan and the other, V. F., is a garbage practitioner in Harrisburg.”

“I’m one of a family of seven boys,” put in Vice-President B. B. Nordyke.

“I was born in Michigan,” said H. J. Milton, the firm’s secretary, “in a little bit of town called Watervliet.”

“I’m a Yankee myself,” said S. P. Daniels, “born and raised in Hingham, Massachusetts.”

“How far is that from North Attleboro?” asked K. M. Dewey.

“It’s right near Boston, K. M.,” answered S. P. “It’s a suburb of Boston.”

“Philadelphia has some mighty pretty suburbs,” said A. M. Lansing. “Don’t you think so, R. L.?”

“I haven’t been there for fifteen years, A. M.,” replied R. L. Jamieson. “Last time I was there was in 1909.”

“That was fifteen years ago, R. L.,” remarked T. W. Havers.

“That’s what I say, T. W., fifteen years,” said Jamieson.

“I thought you said fourteen years,” rejoined Havers.

“Let’s see,” put in C. T. Miller, treasurer of the firm. “Where was I fifteen years ago? Oh, yes, I was a bibliopolistic actuary in southern Ohio. I was selling Balzac complete for twenty-six dollars.”

“Did you read Jimmie Montague’s poem in the Record this morning, Z. H.?” inquired F. X. Murphy of Z. H. Holt.

“No, F. X.,” replied Holt. “I don’t go in for that highbrow stuff and anyways, when I get through my day’s work here, I’m too tired to read.”

“What do you do with yourself evenings, Z. H.?” asked A. T., the younger of the Lansings.

“Oh, maybe play the player piano or go to a movie or go to bed,” said Holt.

“I bet there’s none of you spends your evenings like I do,” said young Lansing. “Right after dinner, the wife and I sit down in the living room and I tell her everything that I’ve done down here during the day.”

“Don’t she get bored?” asked S. P. Daniels.

“I should say not, S. P.!” replied young Lansing. “She loves it!”

“My sister Minnie⁠—she married L. F. Wilcox, the tire people⁠—she was over to the house last night,” announced L. M. Croft. “She was reading us a poem by this Amy Leslie, the woman that got up this free verse. I couldn’t make much out of it.”

“Gentlemen,” said J. H. C. at this juncture, “have you any more suggestions in regards to this unstamped letter? How about you, Z. H.?” he added, turning to Holt.

“Well, I’ll tell you, J. H. C.,” replied Holt, “a thing like this has got to be handled mighty careful. It may be all right, and it may be a hoax, and it may be out and out blackmail. I remember a somewhat similar case that occurred in my hometown, Marengo, Illinois.”

“Did you know the Lundgrens there?” asked L. M. Croft.

“Yes, indeed, L. M.,” answered Holt. “I used to go into Chicago to see Carl pitch. He was quite a card player, too. But this case I speak of, why, it seems that S. W. Kline⁠—he was a grass truncater around town⁠—why, he received an anonymous postcard with no name signed to it. It didn’t even say who it was from. All it said was that if he would be at a certain corner at a certain hour on a certain day, he would find out something that he’d like to know.”

“What?” interrupted the elder Lansing.

“I was saying,” said Holt, “that in my hometown, Marengo, Illinois, there was a man named S. W. Kline who got an anonymous postcard with no name signed to it, and it said that if he would be at a certain corner at a certain hour on a certain day, he would find out something that he’d like to know.”

“What?” repeated the elder Lansing.

“Never mind, Z. H.,” said J. H. C. “Tell us what happened.”

“Nothing,” said Holt. “Kline never went near the place.”

“That reminds me,” put in K. M. Dewey, “of a funny thing that came off in St. Louis. That’s when I was with the P. D. advertising department. One afternoon the postman brought the mail to our house and my wife looked it over and found a letter addressed to some name like Jennings or Galt or something like that. It wasn’t for us at all. So she laid for the postman next day and gave him back the letter. She said, ‘Look here, here’s a letter that don’t belong to us at all. It’s for somebody else.’ I forget now just what the name was. Anyway, he took the letter and I guess he delivered it to the right people.”

“I got some pretty good Scotch myself for fifty-six dollars a case,” said S. P. Daniels. “It’s old James Buchanan.”

“Where did you get it, S. P.?” inquired Paul Sickles.

“I’ve got the phone number home,” replied Daniels. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow, Paul.”

Sickles was the only man in the outfit who was not an officer, so they called him Paul instead of by his initials.

“Prohibition’s a joke!” said T. W. Havers.

“People drink now’days that never drank before,” said S. P. Daniels.

“Even nice women are drinking,” said L. M. Croft.

“I think you’ll see light wines and beer before it’s over,” said K. M. Dewey.

J. H. C. spoke again.

“But what about this letter?”

“It seems funny to me,” said A. T. Lansing, “that the people in the post-office don’t open it and find out what it’s all about. Why, my wife opens my personal mail, and when I’m home I open hers.”

“Don’t she care?” asked S. P. Daniels.

“No, S. P.,” said the younger Lansing. “She thinks everything I do is all right.”

“My wife got a letter last week with no stamp on it at all,” said Sickles. “The stamp must have dropped off. All it was anyways was a circular about mah jongg sets.”

“Do you play with flowers, Paul?” asked K. M. Dewey.

“Why⁠—”

Harvey Hester, in the outer office, looked at his watch for the twentieth time; then got up and went to the girl at the desk.

“Please have Mr. Lansing’s secretary come out here again,” he said.

“A. M. or A. T.?” asked the girl.

“A. T.,” said Hester.

The secretary came out.

“Listen,” said Hester. “If I can’t see Mr. Lansing right this minute it’ll be too late.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t interrupt him when he’s in conference.”

“All right,” said Hester. “Will you please give him this message? You’ve got my name. Mr. Lansing and I were in school together and were more or less friendly. Well, I was tipped off this morning⁠—I don’t need to tell you how⁠—I was tipped off that Mrs. Lansing is leaving for Chicago on the 12:05 train. And she isn’t leaving alone. She’s eloping. I thought Mr. Lansing might want to try to stop her.”

“What time is it now?”

“Seven minutes of twelve,” said Hester. “He can just make it.”

“But he’s still in conference,” said the secretary.

Haircut

I got another barber that comes over from Carterville and helps me out Saturdays, but the rest of the time I can get along all right alone. You can see for yourself that this ain’t no New York City and besides that, the most of the boys works all day and don’t have no leisure to drop in here and get themselves prettied up.

You’re a newcomer, ain’t you? I thought I hadn’t seen you round before. I hope you like it good enough to stay. As I say, we ain’t no New York City or Chicago, but we have pretty good times. Not as good, though, since Jim Kendall got killed. When he was alive, him and Hod Meyers used to keep this town in an uproar. I bet they was more laughin’ done here than any town its size in America.

Jim was comical, and Hod was pretty near a match for him. Since Jim’s gone, Hod tries to hold his end up just the same as ever, but it’s tough goin’ when you ain’t got nobody to kind of work with.

They used to be plenty fun in here Saturdays. This place is jampacked Saturdays, from four o’clock on. Jim and Hod would show up right after their supper, round six o’clock. Jim would set himself down in that big chair, nearest the blue spittoon. Whoever had been settin’ in that chair, why they’d get up when Jim come in and give it to him.

You’d of thought it was a reserved seat like they have sometimes in a theayter. Hod would generally always stand or walk up and down, or some Saturdays, of course, he’d be settin’ in this chair part of the time, gettin’ a haircut.

Well, Jim would set there a w’ile without openin’ his mouth only to spit, and then finally he’d say to me, “Whitey,”⁠—my right name, that is, my right first name, is Dick, but everybody round here calls me Whitey⁠—Jim would say, “Whitey, your nose looks like a rosebud tonight. You must of been drinkin’ some of your aw de cologne.”

So I’d say, “No, Jim, but you look like you’d been drinkin’ somethin’ of that kind or somethin’ worse.”

Jim would have to laugh at that, but then he’d speak up and say, “No, I ain’t had nothin’ to drink, but that ain’t sayin’ I wouldn’t like somethin’. I wouldn’t even mind if it was wood alcohol.”

Then Hod Meyers would say, “Neither would your wife.” That would set everybody to laughin’ because Jim and his wife wasn’t on very good terms. She’d of divorced him only they wasn’t no chance to get alimony and she didn’t have no way to take care of herself and the kids. She couldn’t never understand Jim. He was kind of rough, but a good fella at heart.

Him and Hod had all kinds of sport with Milt Sheppard. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Milt. Well, he’s got an Adam’s apple that looks more like a mushmelon. So I’d be shavin’ Milt and when I’d start to shave down here on his neck, Hod would holler, “Hey, Whitey, wait a minute! Before you cut into it, let’s make up a pool and see who can guess closest to the number of seeds.”

And Jim would say, “If Milt hadn’t of been so hoggish, he’d of ordered a half a cantaloupe instead of a whole one and it might not of stuck in his throat.”

All the boys would roar at this and Milt himself would force a smile, though the joke was on him. Jim certainly was a card!

There’s his shavin’ mug, settin’ on the shelf, right next to Charley Vail’s. “Charles M. Vail.” That’s the druggist. He comes in regular for his shave, three times a week. And Jim’s is the cup next to Charley’s. “James H. Kendall.” Jim won’t need no shavin’ mug no more, but I’ll leave it there just the same for old time’s sake. Jim certainly was a character!

Years ago, Jim used to travel for a canned goods concern over in Carterville. They sold canned goods. Jim had the whole northern half of the State and was on the road five days out of every week. He’d drop in here Saturdays and tell his experiences for that week. It was rich.

I guess he paid more attention to playin’ jokes than makin’ sales. Finally the concern let him out and he come right home here and told everybody he’d been fired instead of sayin’ he’d resigned like most fellas would of.

It was a Saturday and the shop was full and Jim got up out of that chair and says, “Gentlemen, I got an important announcement to make. I been fired from my job.”

Well, they asked him if he was in earnest and he said he was and nobody could think of nothin’ to say till Jim finally broke the ice himself. He says, “I been sellin’ canned goods and now I’m canned goods myself.”

You see, the concern he’d been workin’ for was a factory that made canned goods. Over in Carterville. And now Jim said he was canned himself. He was certainly a card!

Jim had a great trick that he used to play w’ile he was travelin’. For instance, he’d be ridin’ on a train and they’d come to some little town like, well, like, we’ll say, like Benton. Jim would look out the train window and read the signs on the stores.

For instance, they’d be a sign, “Henry Smith, Dry Goods.” Well, Jim would write down the name and the name of the town and when he got to wherever he was goin’ he’d mail back a postal card to Henry Smith at Benton and not sign no name to it, but he’d write on the card, well, somethin’ like “Ask your wife about that book agent that spent the afternoon last week,” or “Ask your Missus who kept her from gettin’ lonesome the last time you was in Carterville.” And he’d sign the card, “A Friend.”

Of course, he never knew what really come of none of these jokes, but he could picture what probably happened and that was enough.

Jim didn’t work very steady after he lost his position with the Carterville people. What he did earn, doin’ odd jobs round town, why he spent pretty near all of it on gin and his family might of starved if the stores hadn’t of carried them along. Jim’s wife tried her hand at dressmakin’, but they ain’t nobody goin’ to get rich makin’ dresses in this town.

As I say, she’d of divorced Jim, only she seen that she couldn’t support herself and the kids and she was always hopin’ that some day Jim would cut out his habits and give her more than two or three dollars a week.

They was a time when she would go to whoever he was workin’ for and ask them to give her his wages, but after she done this once or twice, he beat her to it by borrowin’ most of his pay in advance. He told it all round town, how he had outfoxed his Missus. He certainly was a caution!

But he wasn’t satisfied with just outwittin’ her. He was sore the way she had acted, tryin’ to grab off his pay. And he made up his mind he’d get even. Well, he waited till Evans’s Circus was advertised to come to town. Then he told his wife and two kiddies that he was goin’ to take them to the circus. The day of the circus, he told them he would get the tickets and meet them outside the entrance to the tent.

Well, he didn’t have no intentions of bein’ there or buyin’ tickets or nothin’. He got full of gin and laid round Wright’s poolroom all day. His wife and the kids waited and waited and of course he didn’t show up. His wife didn’t have a dime with her, or nowhere else, I guess. So she finally had to tell the kids it was all off and they cried like they wasn’t never goin’ to stop.

Well, it seems, w’ile they was cryin’, Doc Stair came along and he asked what was the matter, but Mrs. Kendall was stubborn and wouldn’t tell him, but the kids told him and he insisted on takin’ them and their mother in the show. Jim found this out afterwards and it was one reason why he had it in for Doc Stair.

Doc Stair come here about a year and a half ago. He’s a mighty handsome young fella and his clothes always look like he has them made to order. He goes to Detroit two or three times a year and w’ile he’s there he must have a tailor take his measure and then make him a suit to order. They cost pretty near twice as much, but they fit a whole lot better than if you just bought them in a store.

For a w’ile everybody was wonderin’ why a young doctor like Doc Stair should come to a town like this where we already got old Doc Gamble and Doc Foote that’s both been here for years and all the practice in town was always divided between the two of them.

Then they was a story got round that Doc Stair’s gal had throwed him over, a gal up in the Northern Peninsula somewheres, and the reason he come here was to hide himself away and forget it. He said himself that he thought they wasn’t nothin’ like general practice in a place like ours to fit a man to be a good all round doctor. And that’s why he’d came.

Anyways, it wasn’t long before he was makin’ enough to live on, though they tell me that he never dunned nobody for what they owed him, and the folks here certainly has got the owin’ habit, even in my business. If I had all that was comin’ to me for just shaves alone, I could go to Carterville and put up at the Mercer for a week and see a different picture every night. For instance, they’s old George Purdy⁠—but I guess I shouldn’t ought to be gossipin’.

Well, last year, our coroner died, died of the flu. Ken Beatty, that was his name. He was the coroner. So they had to choose another man to be coroner in his place and they picked Doc Stair. He laughed at first and said he didn’t want it, but they made him take it. It ain’t no job that anybody would fight for and what a man makes out of it in a year would just about buy seeds for their garden. Doc’s the kind, though, that can’t say no to nothin’ if you keep at him long enough.

But I was goin’ to tell you about a poor boy we got here in town⁠—Paul Dickson. He fell out of a tree when he was about ten years old. Lit on his head and it done somethin’ to him and he ain’t never been right. No harm in him, but just silly. Jim Kendall used to call him cuckoo; that’s a name Jim had for anybody that was off their head, only he called people’s head their bean. That was another of his gags, callin’ head bean and callin’ crazy people cuckoo. Only poor Paul ain’t crazy, but just silly.

You can imagine that Jim used to have all kinds of fun with Paul. He’d send him to the White Front Garage for a left-handed monkey wrench. Of course they ain’t no such a thing as a left-handed monkey wrench.

And once we had a kind of a fair here and they was a baseball game between the fats and the leans and before the game started Jim called Paul over and sent him way down to Schrader’s hardware store to get a key for the pitcher’s box.

They wasn’t nothin’ in the way of gags that Jim couldn’t think up, when he put his mind to it.

Poor Paul was always kind of suspicious of people, maybe on account of how Jim had kept foolin’ him. Paul wouldn’t have much to do with anybody only his own mother and Doc Stair and a girl here in town named Julie Gregg. That is, she ain’t a girl no more, but pretty near thirty or over.

When Doc first come to town, Paul seemed to feel like here was a real friend and he hung round Doc’s office most of the w’ile; the only time he wasn’t there was when he’d go home to eat or sleep or when he seen Julie Gregg doin’ her shoppin’.

When he looked out Doc’s window and seen her, he’d run downstairs and join her and tag along with her to the different stores. The poor boy was crazy about Julie and she always treated him mighty nice and made him feel like he was welcome, though of course it wasn’t nothin’ but pity on her side.

Doc done all he could to improve Paul’s mind and he told me once that he really thought the boy was gettin’ better, that they was times when he was as bright and sensible as anybody else.

But I was goin’ to tell you about Julie Gregg. Old Man Gregg was in the lumber business, but got to drinkin’ and lost the most of his money and when he died, he didn’t leave nothin’ but the house and just enough insurance for the girl to skimp along on.

Her mother was a kind of a half invalid and didn’t hardly ever leave the house. Julie wanted to sell the place and move somewheres else after the old man died, but the mother said she was born here and would die here. It was tough on Julie, as the young people round this town⁠—well, she’s too good for them.

She’s been away to school and Chicago and New York and different places and they ain’t no subject she can’t talk on, where you take the rest of the young folks here and you mention anything to them outside of Gloria Swanson or Tommy Meighan and they think you’re delirious. Did you see Gloria in Wages of Virtue? You missed somethin’!

Well, Doc Stair hadn’t been here more than a week when he come in one day to get shaved and I recognized who he was as he had been pointed out to me, so I told him about my old lady. She’s been ailin’ for a couple years and either Doc Gamble or Doc Foote, neither one, seemed to be helpin’ her. So he said he would come out and see her, but if she was able to get out herself, it would be better to bring her to his office where he could make a completer examination.

So I took her to his office and w’ile I was waitin’ for her in the reception room, in come Julie Gregg. When somebody comes in Doc Stair’s office, they’s a bell that rings in his inside office so as he can tell they’s somebody to see him.

So he left my old lady inside and come out to the front office and that’s the first time him and Julie met and I guess it was what they call love at first sight. But it wasn’t fifty-fifty. This young fella was the slickest lookin’ fella she’d ever seen in this town and she went wild over him. To him she was just a young lady that wanted to see the doctor.

She’d came on about the same business I had. Her mother had been doctorin’ for years with Doc Gamble and Doc Foote and without no results. So she’d heard they was a new doc in town and decided to give him a try. He promised to call and see her mother that same day.

I said a minute ago that it was love at first sight on her part. I’m not only judgin’ by how she acted afterwards but how she looked at him that first day in his office. I ain’t no mind reader, but it was wrote all over her face that she was gone.

Now Jim Kendall, besides bein’ a jokesmith and a pretty good drinker, well, Jim was quite a lady-killer. I guess he run pretty wild durin’ the time he was on the road for them Carterville people, and besides that, he’d had a couple little affairs of the heart right here in town. As I say, his wife could of divorced him, only she couldn’t.

But Jim was like the majority of men, and women, too, I guess. He wanted what he couldn’t get. He wanted Julie Gregg and worked his head off tryin’ to land her. Only he’d of said bean instead of head.

Well, Jim’s habits and his jokes didn’t appeal to Julie and of course he was a married man, so he didn’t have no more chance than, well, than a rabbit. That’s an expression of Jim’s himself. When somebody didn’t have no chance to get elected or somethin’, Jim would always say they didn’t have no more chance than a rabbit.

He didn’t make no bones about how he felt. Right in here, more than once, in front of the whole crowd, he said he was stuck on Julie and anybody that could get her for him was welcome to his house and his wife and kids included. But she wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with him; wouldn’t even speak to him on the street. He finally seen he wasn’t gettin’ nowheres with his usual line so he decided to try the rough stuff. He went right up to her house one evenin’ and when she opened the door he forced his way in and grabbed her. But she broke loose and before he could stop her, she run in the next room and locked the door and phoned to Joe Barnes. Joe’s the marshal. Jim could hear who she was phonin’ to and he beat it before Joe got there.

Joe was an old friend of Julie’s pa. Joe went to Jim the next day and told him what would happen if he ever done it again.

I don’t know how the news of this little affair leaked out. Chances is that Joe Barnes told his wife and she told somebody else’s wife and they told their husband. Anyways, it did leak out and Hod Meyers had the nerve to kid Jim about it, right here in this shop. Jim didn’t deny nothin’ and kind of laughed it off and said for us all to wait; that lots of people had tried to make a monkey out of him, but he always got even.

Meanw’ile everybody in town was wise to Julie’s bein’ wild mad over the Doc. I don’t suppose she had any idear how her face changed when him and her was together; of course she couldn’t of, or she’d of kept away from him. And she didn’t know that we was all noticin’ how many times she made excuses to go up to his office or pass it on the other side of the street and look up in his window to see if he was there. I felt sorry for her and so did most other people.

Hod Meyers kept rubbin’ it into Jim about how the Doc had cut him out. Jim didn’t pay no attention to the kiddin’ and you could see he was plannin’ one of his jokes.

One trick Jim had was the knack of changin’ his voice. He could make you think he was a girl talkin’ and he could mimic any man’s voice. To show you how good he was along this line, I’ll tell you the joke he played on me once.

You know, in most towns of any size, when a man is dead and needs a shave, why the barber that shaves him soaks him five dollars for the job; that is, he don’t soak him, but whoever ordered the shave. I just charge three dollars because personally I don’t mind much shavin’ a dead person. They lay a whole lot stiller than live customers. The only thing is that you don’t feel like talkin’ to them and you get kind of lonesome.

Well, about the coldest day we ever had here, two years ago last winter, the phone rung at the house w’ile I was home to dinner and I answered the phone and it was a woman’s voice and she said she was Mrs. John Scott and her husband was dead and would I come out and shave him.

Old John had always been a good customer of mine. But they live seven miles out in the country, on the Streeter road. Still I didn’t see how I could say no.

So I said I would be there, but would have to come in a jitney and it might cost three or four dollars besides the price of the shave. So she, or the voice, it said that was all right, so I got Frank Abbott to drive me out to the place and when I got there, who should open the door but old John himself! He wasn’t no more dead than, well, than a rabbit.

It didn’t take no private detective to figure out who had played me this little joke. Nobody could of thought it up but Jim Kendall. He certainly was a card!

I tell you this incident just to show you how he could disguise his voice and make you believe it was somebody else talkin’. I’d of swore it was Mrs. Scott had called me. Anyways, some woman.

Well, Jim waited till he had Doc Stair’s voice down pat; then he went after revenge.

He called Julie up on a night when he knew Doc was over in Carterville. She never questioned but what it was Doc’s voice. Jim said he must see her that night; he couldn’t wait no longer to tell her somethin’. She was all excited and told him to come to the house. But he said he was expectin’ an important long distance call and wouldn’t she please forget her manners for once and come to his office. He said they couldn’t nothin’ hurt her and nobody would see her and he just must talk to her a little w’ile. Well, poor Julie fell for it.

Doc always keeps a night light in his office, so it looked to Julie like they was somebody there.

Meanw’ile Jim Kendall had went to Wright’s poolroom, where they was a whole gang amusin’ themselves. The most of them had drank plenty of gin, and they was a rough bunch even when sober. They was always strong for Jim’s jokes and when he told them to come with him and see some fun they give up their card games and pool games and followed along.

Doc’s office is on the second floor. Right outside his door they’s a flight of stairs leadin’ to the floor above. Jim and his gang hid in the dark behind these stairs.

Well, Julie come up to Doc’s door and rung the bell and they was nothin’ doin’. She rung it again and she rung it seven or eight times. Then she tried the door and found it locked. Then Jim made some kind of a noise and she heard it and waited a minute, and then she says, “Is that you, Ralph?” Ralph is Doc’s first name.

They was no answer and it must of came to her all of a sudden that she’d been bunked. She pretty near fell downstairs and the whole gang after her. They chased her all the way home, hollerin’, “Is that you, Ralph?” and “Oh, Ralphie, dear, is that you?” Jim says he couldn’t holler it himself, as he was laughin’ too hard.

Poor Julie! She didn’t show up here on Main Street for a long, long time afterward.

And of course Jim and his gang told everybody in town, everybody but Doc Stair. They was scared to tell him, and he might of never knowed only for Paul Dickson. The poor cuckoo, as Jim called him, he was here in the shop one night when Jim was still gloatin’ yet over what he’d done to Julie. And Paul took in as much of it as he could understand and he run to Doc with the story.

It’s a cinch Doc went up in the air and swore he’d make Jim suffer. But it was a kind of a delicate thing, because if it got out that he had beat Jim up, Julie was bound to hear of it and then she’d know that Doc knew and of course knowin’ that he knew would make it worse for her than ever. He was goin’ to do somethin’, but it took a lot of figurin’.

Well, it was a couple days later when Jim was here in the shop again, and so was the cuckoo. Jim was goin’ duck-shootin’ the next day and had came in lookin’ for Hod Meyers to go with him. I happened to know that Hod had went over to Carterville and wouldn’t be home till the end of the week. So Jim said he hated to go alone and he guessed he would call it off. Then poor Paul spoke up and said if Jim would take him he would go along. Jim thought a w’ile and then he said, well, he guessed a half-wit was better than nothin’.

I suppose he was plottin’ to get Paul out in the boat and play some joke on him, like pushin’ him in the water. Anyways, he said Paul could go. He asked him had he ever shot a duck and Paul said no, he’d never even had a gun in his hands. So Jim said he could set in the boat and watch him and if he behaved himself, he might lend him his gun for a couple of shots. They made a date to meet in the mornin’ and that’s the last I seen of Jim alive.

Next mornin’, I hadn’t been open more than ten minutes when Doc Stair come in. He looked kind of nervous. He asked me had I seen Paul Dickson. I said no, but I knew where he was, out duck-shootin’ with Jim Kendall. So Doc says that’s what he had heard, and he couldn’t understand it because Paul had told him he wouldn’t never have no more to do with Jim as long as he lived.

He said Paul had told him about the joke Jim had played on Julie. He said Paul had asked him what he thought of the joke and the Doc had told him that anybody that would do a thing like that ought not to be let live.

I said it had been a kind of a raw thing, but Jim just couldn’t resist no kind of a joke, no matter how raw. I said I thought he was all right at heart, but just bubblin’ over with mischief. Doc turned and walked out.

At noon he got a phone call from old John Scott. The lake where Jim and Paul had went shootin’ is on John’s place. Paul had came runnin’ up to the house a few minutes before and said they’d been an accident. Jim had shot a few ducks and then give the gun to Paul and told him to try his luck. Paul hadn’t never handled a gun and he was nervous. He was shakin’ so hard that he couldn’t control the gun. He let fire and Jim sunk back in the boat, dead.

Doc Stair, bein’ the coroner, jumped in Frank Abbott’s flivver and rushed out to Scott’s farm. Paul and old John was down on the shore of the lake. Paul had rowed the boat to shore, but they’d left the body in it, waitin’ for Doc to come.

Doc examined the body and said they might as well fetch it back to town. They was no use leavin’ it there or callin’ a jury, as it was a plain case of accidental shootin’.

Personally I wouldn’t never leave a person shoot a gun in the same boat I was in unless I was sure they knew somethin’ about guns. Jim was a sucker to leave a new beginner have his gun, let alone a half-wit. It probably served Jim right, what he got. But still we miss him round here. He certainly was a card!

Comb it wet or dry?

Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It

They’re certainly a live bunch in this town. We ain’t only been here three days and had calls already from people representin’ four different organizations⁠—the Chamber of Commerce, Kiwanis, and I forget who else. They wanted to know if we was comfortable and did we like the town and is they anything they can do for us and what to be sure and see.

And they all asked how we happened to come here instead of goin’ somewheres else. I guess they keep a record of everybody’s reasons for comin’ so as they can get a line on what features tourists is most attracted by. Then they play up them features in next year’s booster advertisin’.

Well, I told them we was perfectly comfortable and we like the town fine and they’s nothin’ nobody can do for us right now and we’ll be sure and see all the things we ought to see. But when they asked me how did we happen to come here, I said it was just a kind of a accident, because the real reason makes too long a story.

My wife has been kiddin’ me about my friends ever since we was married. She says that judgin’ by the ones I’ve introduced her to, they ain’t nobody in the world got a rummier bunch of friends than me. I’ll admit that the most of them ain’t, well, what you might call hot; they’re different somehow than when I first hung around with them. They seem to be lost without a brass rail to rest their dogs on. But of course they’re old friends and I can’t give ’em the air.

We have ’em to the house for dinner every little w’ile, they and their wives, and what my missus objects to is because they don’t none of them play bridge or mah jong or do crossword puzzles or sing or dance or even talk, but just set there and wait for somebody to pour ’em a fresh drink.

As I say, my wife kids me about ’em and they ain’t really nothin’ I can offer in their defense. That don’t mean, though, that the shoe is all on one foot. Because w’ile the majority of her friends may not be quite as dumb as mine, just the same they’s a few she’s picked out who I’d of had to be under the ether to allow anybody to introduce ’em to me in the first place.

Like the Crandalls, for instance. Mrs. Crandall come from my wife’s hometown and they didn’t hardly know each other there, but they met again in a store in Chi and it went from bad to worse till finally Ada asked the dame and her husband to the house.

Well, the husband turns out to be the fella that win the war, w’ile it seems that Mrs. Crandall was in Atlantic City once and some movin’ picture company was makin’ a picture there and they took a scene of what was supposed to be society people walkin’ up and down the Boardwalk and Mrs. Crandall was in the picture and people that seen it when it come out, they all said that from the way she screened, why if she wanted to go into the business, she could make Gloria Swanson look like Mrs. Gump.

Now it ain’t only took me a few words to tell you these things, but when the Crandalls tells their story themselves, they don’t hardly get started by midnight and no chance of them goin’ home till they’re through even when you drop ’em a hint that they’re springin’ it on you for the hundred and twelfth time.

That’s the Crandalls, and another of the wife’s friends is the Thayers. Thayer is what you might call a all-around handy man. He can mimic pretty near all the birds and beasts and fishes, he can yodel, he can play a ocarena, or he can recite Kipling or Robert H. Service, or he can do card tricks, and strike a light without no matches, and tie all the different knots.

And besides that, he can make a complete radio outfit and set it up, and take pictures as good as the best professional photographers and a whole lot better. He collects autographs. And he never had a sick day in his life.

Mrs. Thayer gets a headache playin’ bridge, so it’s mah jong or rhum when she’s around. She used to be a teacher of elocution and she still gives readin’s if you coax her, or if you don’t, and her hair is such a awful nuisance that she would get it cut in a minute only all her friends tells her it would be criminal to spoil that head of hair. And when she talks to her husband, she always talks baby talk, maybe because somebody has told her that she’d be single if he wasn’t childish.

And then Ada has got still another pal, a dame named Peggy Flood who is hospital mad and ain’t happy unless she is just goin’ under the knife or just been there. She’s had everything removed that the doctors knew the name of and now they’re probin’ her for new giblets.

Well, I wouldn’t mind if they cut her up into alphabet soup if they’d only do such a good job of it that they couldn’t put her together again, but she always comes through OK and she spends the intermissions at our place, describin’ what all they done or what they’re plannin’ to do next.

But the cat’s nightgown is Tom Stevens and his wife. There’s the team that wins the Olympics! And they’re Ada’s team, not mine.

Ada met Belle Stevens on the elevated. Ada was invited to a party out on the North Side and didn’t know exactly where to get off and Mrs. Stevens seen her talkin’ to the guard and horned in and asked her what was it she wanted to know and Ada told her, and Mrs. Stevens said she was goin’ to get off the same station Ada wanted to get off, so they got off together.

Mrs. Stevens insisted on goin’ right along to the address where Ada was goin’ because she said Ada was bound to get lost if she wasn’t familiar with the neighborhood.

Well, Ada thought it was mighty nice of her to do so much for a stranger. Mrs. Stevens said she was glad to because she didn’t know what would of happened to her lots of times if strangers hadn’t been nice and helped her out.

She asked Ada where she lived and Ada told her on the South Side and Mrs. Stevens said she was sure we’d like it better on the North Side if we’d leave her pick out a place for us, so Ada told her we had a year’s lease that we had just signed and couldn’t break it, so then Mrs. Stevens said her husband had studied law and he claimed they wasn’t no lease that you couldn’t break and some evening she would bring him out to call on us and he’d tell us how to break our lease.

Well, Ada had to say sure, come on out, though we was perfectly satisfied with our apartment and didn’t no more want to break the lease than each other’s jaw. Maybe not as much. Anyway, the very next night, they showed up, Belle and Tom, and when they’d gone, I give ’em the nickname⁠—Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It.

After the introductions, Stevens made some remark about what a cozy little place we had and then he asked if I would mind tellin’ what rent we paid. So I told him a hundred and a quarter a month. So he said, of course, that was too much and no wonder we wanted to break the lease. Then I said we was satisfied and didn’t want to break it and he said I must be kiddin’ and if I would show him the lease he would see what loopholes they was in it.

Well, the lease was right there in a drawer in the table, but I told him it was in my safety deposit box at the bank. I ain’t got no safety deposit box and no more use for one than Judge Landis has for the deef and dumb alphabet.

Stevens said the lease was probably just a regular lease and if it was, they wouldn’t be no trouble gettin’ out of it, and meanw’ile him and his wife would see if they couldn’t find us a place in the same buildin’ with them.

And he was pretty sure they could even if the owner had to give some other tenant the air, because he, the owner, would do anything in the world for Stevens.

So I said yes, but suppose we want to stay where we are. So he said I looked like a man with better judgment than that and if I would just leave everything to him he would fix it so’s we could move within a month. I kind of laughed and thought that would be the end of it.

He wanted to see the whole apartment so I showed him around and when we come to the bathroom he noticed my safety razor on the shelf. He said, “So you use one of them things,” and I said, “Yes,” and he asked me how I liked it, and I said I liked it fine and he said that must be because I hadn’t never used a regular razor.

He said a regular razor was the only thing to use if a man wanted to look good. So I asked him if he used a regular razor and he said he did, so I said, “Well, if you look good, I don’t want to.”

But that didn’t stop him and he said if I would meet him downtown the next day he would take me to the place where he bought all his razors and help me pick some out for myself. I told him I was goin’ to be tied up, so just to give me the name and address of the place and I would drop in there when I had time.

But, no, that wouldn’t do; he’d have to go along with me and introduce me to the proprietor because the proprietor was a great pal of his and would do anything in the world for him, and if the proprietor vouched for the razors, I could be sure I was gettin’ the best razors money could buy. I told him again that I was goin’ to be tied up and I managed to get him on some other subject.

Meanw’ile, Mrs. Stevens wanted to know where Ada had bought the dress she was wearin’ and how much had it cost and Ada told her and Mrs. Stevens said it was a crime. She would meet Ada downtown tomorrow morning and take her to the shop where she bought her clothes and help her choose some dresses that really was dresses.

So Ada told her she didn’t have no money to spend on dresses right then, and besides, the shop Mrs. Stevens mentioned was too high priced. But it seems the dame that run the shop was just like a sister to Mrs. Stevens and give her and her friends a big reduction and not only that, but they wasn’t no hurry about payin’.

Well, Ada thanked her just the same, but didn’t need nothin’ new just at present; maybe later on she would take advantage of Mrs. Stevens’s kind offer. Yes, but right now they was some models in stock that would be just beautiful on Ada and they might be gone later on. They was nothin’ for it but Ada had to make a date with her; she wasn’t obliged to buy nothin’, but it would be silly not to go and look at the stuff that was in the joint and get acquainted with the dame that run it.

Well, Ada kept the date and bought three dresses she didn’t want and they’s only one of them she’s had the nerve to wear. They cost her a hundred dollars a smash and I’d hate to think what the price would of been if Mrs. Stevens and the owner of the shop wasn’t so much like sisters.

I was sure I hadn’t made no date with Stevens, but just the same he called me up the next night to ask why I hadn’t met him. And a couple of days later I got three new razors in the mail along with a bill and a note from the store sayin’ that these was three specially fine razors that had been picked out for me by Thomas J. Stevens.

I don’t know yet why I paid for the razors and kept ’em. I ain’t used ’em and never intended to. Though I’ve been tempted a few times to test their edge on Stevens’s neck.

That same week, Mrs. Stevens called up and asked us to spend Sunday with them and when we got out there, the owner of the buildin’ is there, too. And Stevens has told him that I was goin’ to give up my apartment on the South Side and wanted him to show me what he had.

I thought this was a little too strong and I said Stevens must of misunderstood me, that I hadn’t no fault to find with the place I was in and wasn’t plannin’ to move, not for a year anyway. You can bet this didn’t make no hit with the guy, who was just there on Stevens’s say-so that I was a prospective tenant.

Well, it was only about two months ago that this cute little couple come into our life, but I’ll bet we seen ’em twenty times at least. They was always invitin’ us to their place or invitin’ themselves to our place and Ada is one of these here kind of people that just can’t say no. Which may be why I and her is married.

Anyway, it begin to seem like us and the Stevenses was livin’ together and all one family, with them at the head of it. I never in my life seen anybody as crazy to run other people’s business. Honest to heavens, it’s a wonder they let us brush our own teeth!

Ada made the remark one night that she wished the ski jumper who was doin’ our cookin’ would get married and quit so’s she wouldn’t have to can her. Mrs. Stevens was there and asked Ada if she should try and get her a new cook, but Ada says no, the poor gal might have trouble findin’ another job and she felt sorry for her.

Just the same, the next afternoon a Jap come to the apartment and said he was ready to go to work and Mrs. Stevens had sent him. Ada had to tell him the place was already filled.

Another night, Ada complained that her feet was tired. Belle said her feet used to get tired, too, till a friend of hers recommended a chiropodist and she went to him and he done her so much good that she made a regular appointment with him for once every month and paid him a flat sum and no matter how much runnin’ around she done, her dogs hadn’t fretted her once since this corn-husker started tendin’ to ’em.

She wanted to call up the guy at his home right then and there and make a date for Ada and the only way Ada could stop her was by promisin’ to go and see him the next time her feet hurt. After that, whenever the two gals met, Belle’s first question was “How is your feet?” and the answer was always “Fine, thanks.”

Well, I’m quite a football fan and Ada likes to go, too, when it’s a big game and lots of excitement. So we decided we’d see the Illinois-Chicago game and have a look at this “Red” Grange. I warned Ada to not say nothin’ about it to Tom and Belle as I felt like we was entitled to a day off.

But it happened that they was goin’ to be a game up at Evanston that day and the Stevenses invited us to see that one with them. So we used the other game as a alibi. And when Tom asked me later on if I’d boughten my tickets yet, instead of sayin’ yes, I told him the truth and said no.

So then he said:

“I’m glad you ain’t, because I and Belle has made up our mind that the Chicago game is the one we ought to see. And we’ll all go together. And don’t you bother about tickets because I can get better ones than you can as Stagg and I is just like that.”

So I left it to him to get the tickets and we might as well of set on the Adams Street bridge. I said to Stevens, I said:

“If these is the seats Mr. Stagg digs up for his old pals, I suppose he leads strangers twenty or thirty miles out in the country and blindfolds ’em and ties ’em to a tree.”

Now of course it was the bunk about he and Stagg bein’ so close. He may of been introduced to him once, but he ain’t the kind of a guy that Stagg would go around holdin’ hands with. Just the same, most of the people he bragged about knowin’, why it turned out that he really did know ’em; yes, and stood ace high with ’em, too.

Like, for instance, I got pinched for speedin’ one night and they give me a ticket to show up in the Speeders’ court and I told Stevens about it and he says, “Just forget it! I’ll call up the judge and have it wiped off the book. He’s a mighty good fella and a personal friend of mine.”

Well, I didn’t want to take no chances so I phoned Stevens the day before I was supposed to appear in court, and I asked him if he’d talked to the judge. He said he had and I asked him if he was sure. So he said, “If you don’t believe me, call up the judge yourself.” And he give me the judge’s number. Sure enough, Stevens had fixed it and when I thanked the judge for his trouble, he said it was a pleasure to do somethin’ for a friend of Tom Stevens’s.

Now, I know it’s silly to not appreciate favors like that and not warm up to people that’s always tryin’ to help you along, but still a person don’t relish bein’ treated like they was half-witted and couldn’t button their shirt alone. Tom and Belle meant all right, but I and Ada got kind of tired of havin’ fault found with everything that belonged to us and everything we done or tried to do.

Besides our apartment bein’ no good and our clothes terrible, we learned that my dentist didn’t know a bridge from a mustache cup, and the cigarettes I smoked didn’t have no taste to them, and the man that bobbed Ada’s hair must of been mad at her, and neither of us would ever know what it was to live till we owned a wire-haired fox terrier.

And we found out that the liquor I’d been drinkin’ and enjoyin’ was a mixture of bath salts and assorted paints, and the car we’d paid seventeen hundred smackers for wasn’t nowheres near as much of a car as one that Tom could of got for us for eight hundred on account of knowin’ a brother-in-law of a fella that used to go to school with the president of the company’s nephew, and that if Ada would take up aesthetic dancin’ under a dame Belle knew about, why she’d never have no more trouble with her tonsils.

Nothin’ we had or nothin’ we talked about gettin’ or doin’ was worth a damn unless it was recommended or suggested by the Stevenses.

Well, I done a pretty good business this fall and I and Ada had always planned to spend a winter in the South, so one night we figured it out that this was the year we could spare the money and the time and if we didn’t go this year we never would. So the next thing was where should we go, and we finally decided on Miami. And we said we wouldn’t mention nothin’ about it to Tom and Belle till the day we was goin’. We’d pretend we was doin’ it out of a clear sky.

But a secret is just as safe with Ada as a police dog tethered with dental floss. It wasn’t more than a day or two after we’d had our talk when Tom and Belle sprang the news that they was leavin’ for California right after New Year’s. And why didn’t we go with them.

Well, I didn’t say nothin’ and Ada said it sounded grand, but it was impossible. Then Stevens said if it was a question of money, to not let that bother us as he would loan it to me and I could pay it back whenever I felt like it. That was more than Ada could stand, so she says we wasn’t as poor as people seemed to think and the reason we couldn’t go to California was because we was goin’ to Miami.

This was such a surprise that it almost struck ’em dumb at first and all Tom could think of to say was that he’d been to Miami himself and it was too crowded and he’d lay off of it if he was us. But the next time we seen ’em they had our trip all arranged.

First, Tom asked me what road we was goin’ on and I told him the Big Four. So he asked if we had our reservations and I told him yes.

“Well,” he said, “we’ll get rid of ’em and I’ll fix you up on the C. & E. I. The general passenger agent is a friend of mine and they ain’t nothin’ he won’t do for my friends. He’ll see that you’re treated right and that you get there in good shape.”

So I said:

“I don’t want to put you to all that trouble, and besides I don’t know nobody connected with the Big Four well enough for them to resent me travelin’ on their lines, and as for gettin’ there in good shape, even if I have a secret enemy or two on the Big Four, I don’t believe they’d endanger the lives of the other passengers just to see that I didn’t get there in good shape.”

But Stevens insisted on takin’ my tickets and sellin’ ’em back to the Big Four and gettin’ me fixed on the C. & E. I. The berths we’d had on the Big Four was Lower 9 and Lower 10. The berths Tom got us on the C. & E. I. was Lower 7 and Lower 8, which he said was better. I suppose he figured that the nearer you are to the middle of the car, the less chance there is of bein’ woke up if your car gets in another train’s way.

He wanted to know, too, if I’d made any reservations at a hotel. I showed him a wire I had from the Royal Palm in reply to a wire I’d sent ’em.

“Yes,” he says, “but you don’t want to stop at the Royal Palm. You wire and tell ’em to cancel that and I’ll make arrangements for you at the Flamingo, over at the Beach. Charley Krom, the manager there, was born and raised in the same town I was. He’ll take great care of you if he knows you’re a friend of mine.”

So I asked him if all the guests at the Flamingo was friends of his, and he said of course not; what did I mean?

“Well,” I said, “I was just thinkin’ that if they ain’t, Mr. Krom probably makes life pretty miserable for ’em. What does he do, have the phone girl ring ’em up at all hours of the night, and hide their mail, and shut off their hot water, and put cracker crumbs in their beds?”

That didn’t mean nothin’ to Stevens and he went right ahead and switched me from one hotel to the other.

While Tom was reorganizin’ my program and tellin’ me what to eat in Florida, and what bait to use for barracuda and carp, and what time to go bathin’ and which foot to stick in the water first, why Belle was makin’ Ada return all the stuff she had boughten to wear down there and buy other stuff that Belle picked out for her at joints where Belle was so well known that they only soaked her twice as much as a stranger. She had Ada almost crazy, but I told her to never mind; in just a few more days we’d be where they couldn’t get at us.

I suppose you’re wonderin’ why didn’t we quarrel with ’em and break loose from ’em and tell ’em to leave us alone. You’d know why if you knew them. Nothin’ we could do would convince ’em that we didn’t want their advice and help. And nothin’ we could say was a insult.

Well, the night before we was due to leave Chi, the phone rung and I answered it. It was Tom.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he says. “I and Belle has give up the California idear. We’re goin’ to Miami instead, and on account of me knowin’ the boys down at the C. & E. I., I’ve landed a drawin’ room on the same train you’re takin’. How is that for news?”

“Great!” I said, and I went back and broke it to Ada. For a minute I thought she was goin’ to faint. And all night long she moaned and groaned and had hysterics.

So that’s how we happened to come to Biloxi.

Zone of Quiet

“Well,” said the Doctor briskly, “how do you feel?”

“Oh, I guess I’m all right,” replied the man in bed. “I’m still kind of drowsy, that’s all.”

“You were under the anesthetic an hour and a half. It’s no wonder you aren’t wide awake yet. But you’ll be better after a good night’s rest, and I’ve left something with Miss Lyons that’ll make you sleep. I’m going along now. Miss Lyons will take good care of you.”

“I’m off at seven o’clock,” said Miss Lyons. “I’m going to a show with my G.F. But Miss Halsey’s all right. She’s the night floor nurse. Anything you want, she’ll get it for you. What can I give him to eat, Doctor?”

“Nothing at all; not till after I’ve been here tomorrow. He’ll be better off without anything. Just see that he’s kept quiet. Don’t let him talk, and don’t talk to him; that is, if you can help it.”

“Help it!” said Miss Lyons. “Say, I can be old lady Sphinx herself when I want to! Sometimes I sit for hours⁠—not alone, neither⁠—and never say a word. Just think and think. And dream.

“I had a G.F. in Baltimore, where I took my training; she used to call me Dummy. Not because I’m dumb like some people⁠—you know⁠—but because I’d sit there and not say nothing. She’d say, ‘A penny for your thoughts, Eleanor.’ That’s my first name⁠—Eleanor.”

“Well, I must run along. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Goodbye, Doctor,” said the man in bed, as he went out.

“Goodbye, Doctor Cox,” said Miss Lyons as the door closed.

“He seems like an awful nice fella,” said Miss Lyons. “And a good doctor, too. This is the first time I’ve been on a case with him. He gives a girl credit for having some sense. Most of these doctors treat us like they thought we were Mormons or something. Like Doctor Holland. I was on a case with him last week. He treated me like I was a Mormon or something. Finally, I told him, I said, ‘I’m not as dumb as I look.’ She died Friday night.”

“Who?” asked the man in bed.

“The woman; the case I was on,” said Miss Lyons.

“And what did the doctor say when you told him you weren’t as dumb as you look?”

“I don’t remember,” said Miss Lyons. “He said, ‘I hope not,’ or something. What could he say? Gee! It’s quarter to seven. I hadn’t no idear it was so late. I must get busy and fix you up for the night. And I’ll tell Miss Halsey to take good care of you. We’re going to see What Price Glory? I’m going with my G.F. Her B.F. gave her the tickets and he’s going to meet us after the show and take us to supper.

“Marian⁠—that’s my G.F.⁠—she’s crazy wild about him. And he’s crazy about her, to hear her tell it. But I said to her this noon⁠—she called me up on the phone⁠—I said to her, ‘If he’s so crazy about you, why don’t he propose? He’s got plenty of money and no strings tied to him, and as far as I can see there’s no reason why he shouldn’t marry you if he wants you as bad as you say he does.’ So she said maybe he was going to ask her tonight. I told her, ‘Don’t be silly! Would he drag me along if he was going to ask you?’

“That about him having plenty of money, though, that’s a joke. He told her he had and she believes him. I haven’t met him yet, but he looks in his picture like he’s lucky if he’s getting twenty-five dollars a week. She thinks he must be rich because he’s in Wall Street. I told her, I said, ‘That being in Wall Street don’t mean nothing. What does he do there? is the question. You know they have to have janitors in those buildings just the same like anywhere else.’ But she thinks he’s God or somebody.

“She keeps asking me if I don’t think he’s the best looking thing I ever saw. I tell her yes, sure, but between you and I, I don’t believe anybody’d ever mistake him for Richard Barthelmess.

“Oh, say! I saw him the other day, coming out of the Algonquin! He’s the best looking thing! Even better looking than on the screen. Roy Stewart.”

“What about Roy Stewart?” asked the man in bed.

“Oh, he’s the fella I was telling you about,” said Miss Lyons. “He’s my G.F.’s B.F.”

“Maybe I’m a D.F. not to know, but would you tell me what a B.F. and G.F. are?”

“Well, you are dumb, aren’t you!” said Miss Lyons. “A G.F., that’s a girlfriend, and a B.F. is a boyfriend. I thought everybody knew that.

“I’m going out now and find Miss Halsey and tell her to be nice to you. But maybe I better not.”

“Why not?” asked the man in bed.

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of something funny that happened last time I was on a case in this hospital. It was the day the man had been operated on and he was the best looking somebody you ever saw. So when I went off duty I told Miss Halsey to be nice to him, like I was going to tell her about you. And when I came back in the morning he was dead. Isn’t that funny?”

“Very!”

“Well,” said Miss Lyons, “did you have a good night? You look a lot better, anyway. How’d you like Miss Halsey? Did you notice her ankles? She’s got pretty near the smallest ankles I ever saw. Cute. I remember one day Tyler⁠—that’s one of the interns⁠—he said if he could just see our ankles, mine and Miss Halsey’s, he wouldn’t know which was which. Of course we don’t look anything alike other ways. She’s pretty close to thirty and⁠—well, nobody’d ever take her for Julia Hoyt. Helen.”

“Who’s Helen?” asked the man in bed.

“Helen Halsey. Helen; that’s her first name. She was engaged to a man in Boston. He was going to Tufts College. He was going to be a doctor. But he died. She still carries his picture with her. I tell her she’s silly to mope about a man that’s been dead four years. And besides a girl’s a fool to marry a doctor. They’ve got too many alibis.

“When I marry somebody, he’s got to be a somebody that has regular office hours like he’s in Wall Street or somewhere. Then when he don’t come home, he’ll have to think up something better than being ‘on a case.’ I used to use that on my sister when we were living together. When I happened to be out late, I’d tell her I was on a case. She never knew the difference. Poor sis! She married a terrible oil can! But she didn’t have the looks to get a real somebody. I’m making this for her. It’s a bridge table cover for her birthday. She’ll be twenty-nine. Don’t that seem old?”

“Maybe to you; not to me,” said the man in bed.

“You’re about forty, aren’t you?” said Miss Lyons.

“Just about.”

“And how old would you say I am?”

“Twenty-three.”

“I’m twenty-five,” said Miss Lyons. “Twenty-five and forty. That’s fifteen years’ difference. But I know a married couple that the husband is forty-five and she’s only twenty-four, and they get along fine.”

“I’m married myself,” said the man in bed.

“You would be!” said Miss Lyons. “The last four cases I’ve been on was all married men. But at that, I’d rather have any kind of a man than a woman. I hate women! I mean sick ones. They treat a nurse like a dog, especially a pretty nurse. What’s that you’re reading?”

“Vanity Fair,” replied the man in bed.

“Vanity Fair. I thought that was a magazine.”

“Well, there’s a magazine and a book. This is the book.”

“Is it about a girl?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t read it yet. I’ve been busy making this thing for my sister’s birthday. She’ll be twenty-nine. It’s a bridge table cover. When you get that old, about all there is left is bridge or crossword puzzles. Are you a puzzle fan? I did them religiously for a while, but I got sick of them. They put in such crazy words. Like one day they had a word with only three letters and it said ‘A e‑longated fish’ and the first letter had to be an e. And only three letters. That couldn’t be right. So I said if they put things wrong like that, what’s the use? Life’s too short. And we only live once. When you’re dead, you stay a long time dead.

“That’s what a B.F. of mine used to say. He was a caution! But he was crazy about me. I might of married him only for a G.F. telling him lies about me. And called herself my friend! Charley Pierce.”

“Who’s Charley Pierce?”

“That was my B.F. that the other girl lied to him about me. I told him, I said, ‘Well, if you believe all them stories about me, maybe we better part once and for all. I don’t want to be tied up to a somebody that believes all the dirt they hear about me.’ So he said he didn’t really believe it and if I would take him back he wouldn’t quarrel with me no more. But I said I thought it was best for us to part. I got their announcement two years ago, while I was still in training in Baltimore.”

“Did he marry the girl that lied to him about you?”

“Yes, the poor fish! And I bet he’s satisfied! They’re a match for each other! He was all right, though, at that, till he fell for her. He used to be so thoughtful of me, like I was his sister or something.

“I like a man to respect me. Most fellas wants to kiss you before they know your name.

“Golly! I’m sleepy this morning! And got a right to be, too. Do you know what time I got home last night, or this morning, rather? Well, it was half past three. What would mama say if she could see her little girl now! But we did have a good time. First we went to the show⁠—What Price Glory?⁠—I and my G.F.⁠—and afterwards her B.F. met us and took us in a taxi down to Barney Gallant’s. Peewee Byers has got the orchestra there now. Used to be with Whiteman’s. Gee! How he can dance! I mean Roy.”

“Your G.F.’s B.F.?”

“Yes, but I don’t believe he’s as crazy about her as she thinks he is. Anyway⁠—but this is a secret⁠—he took down the phone number of the hospital while Marian was out powdering her nose, and he said he’d give me a ring about noon. Gee! I’m sleepy! Roy Stewart!”

“Well,” said Miss Lyons, “how’s my patient? I’m twenty minutes late, but honest, it’s a wonder I got up at all! Two nights in succession is too much for this child!”

“Barney Gallant’s again?” asked the man in bed.

“No, but it was dancing, and pretty near as late. It’ll be different tonight. I’m going to bed just the minute I get home. But I did have a dandy time. And I’m crazy about a certain somebody.”

“Roy Stewart?”

“How’d you guess it? But honest, he’s wonderful! And so different than most of the fellas I’ve met. He says the craziest things, just keeps you in hysterics. We were talking about books and reading, and he asked me if I liked poetry⁠—only he called it ‘poultry’⁠—and I said I was wild about it and Edgar M. Guest was just about my favorite, and then I asked him if he liked Kipling and what do you think he said? He said he didn’t know; he’d never kipled.

“He’s a scream! We just sat there in the house till half past eleven and didn’t do nothing but just talk and the time went like we was at a show. He’s better than a show. But finally I noticed how late it was and I asked him didn’t he think he better be going and he said he’d go if I’d go with him, so I asked him where could we go at that hour of night, and he said he knew a roadhouse just a little ways away, and I didn’t want to go, but he said we wouldn’t stay for only just one dance, so I went with him. To the Jericho Inn.

“I don’t know what the woman thought of me where I stay, going out that time of night. But he is such a wonderful dancer and such a perfect gentleman! Of course we had more than one dance and it was after two o’clock before I knew it. We had some gin, too, but he just kissed me once and that was when we said good night.”

“What about your G.F., Marian? Does she know?”

“About Roy and I? No. I always say that what a person don’t know don’t hurt them. Besides, there’s nothing for her to know⁠—yet. But listen: If there was a chance in the world for her, if I thought he cared anything about her, I’d be the last one in the world to accept his intentions. I hope I’m not that kind! But as far as anything serious between them is concerned, well, it’s cold. I happen to know that! She’s not the girl for him.

“In the first place, while she’s pretty in a way, her complexion’s bad and her hair’s scraggy and her figure, well, it’s like some woman in the funny pictures. And she’s not peppy enough for Roy. She’d rather stay home than do anything. Stay home! It’ll be time enough for that when you can’t get anybody to take you out.

“She’d never make a wife for him. He’ll be a rich man in another year; that is, if things go right for him in Wall Street like he expects. And a man as rich as he’ll be wants a wife that can live up to it and entertain and step out once in a while. He don’t want a wife that’s a drag on him. And he’s too good-looking for Marian. A fella as good-looking as him needs a pretty wife or the first thing you know some girl that is pretty will steal him off of you. But it’s silly to talk about them marrying each other. He’d have to ask her first, and he’s not going to. I know! So I don’t feel at all like I’m trespassing.

“Anyway, you know the old saying, everthing goes in love. And I⁠—But I’m keeping you from reading your book. Oh, yes; I almost forgot a T.L. that Miss Halsey said about you. Do you know what a T.L. is?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, you give me one and I’ll give you this one.”

“But I haven’t talked to anybody but the Doctor. I can give you one from myself. He asked me how I liked you and I said all right.”

“Well, that’s better than nothing. Here’s what Miss Halsey said: She said if you were shaved and fixed up, you wouldn’t be bad. And now I’m going out and see if there’s any mail for me. Most of my mail goes to where I live, but some of it comes here sometimes. What I’m looking for is a letter from the state board telling me if I passed my state examination. They ask you the craziest questions. Like ‘Is ice a disinfectant?’ Who cares! Nobody’s going to waste ice to kill germs when there’s so much of it needed in highballs. Do you like highballs? Roy says it spoils whisky to mix it with water. He takes it straight. He’s a terror! But maybe you want to read.”

“Good morning,” said Miss Lyons. “Did you sleep good?”

“Not so good,” said the man in bed. “I⁠—”

“I bet you got more sleep than I did,” said Miss Lyons. “He’s the most persistent somebody I ever knew! I asked him last night, I said, ‘Don’t you never get tired of dancing?’ So he said, well, he did get tired of dancing with some people, but there was others who he never got tired of dancing with them. So I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Jollier, but I wasn’t born yesterday and I know apple sauce when I hear it and I bet you’ve told that to fifty girls.’ I guess he really did mean it, though.

“Of course most anybody’d rather dance with slender girls than stout girls. I remember a B.F. I had one time in Washington. He said dancing with me was just like dancing with nothing. That sounds like he was insulting me, but it was really a compliment. He meant it wasn’t any effort to dance with me like with some girls. You take Marian, for instance, and while I’m crazy about her, still that don’t make her a good dancer and dancing with her must be a good deal like moving the piano or something.

“I’d die if I was fat! People are always making jokes about fat people. And there’s the old saying, ‘Nobody loves a fat man.’ And it’s even worse with a girl. Besides people making jokes about them and don’t want to dance with them and so forth, besides that they’re always trying to reduce and can’t eat what they want to. I bet, though, if I was fat, I’d eat everything in sight. Though I guess not, either. Because I hardly eat anything as it is. But they do make jokes about them.

“I’ll never forget one day last winter, I was on a case in Great Neck and the man’s wife was the fattest thing! So they had a radio in the house and one day she saw in the paper where Bugs Baer was going to talk on the radio and it would probably be awfully funny because he writes so crazy. Do you ever read his articles? But this woman, she was awfully sensitive about being fat and I nearly died sitting there with her listening to Bugs Baer, because his whole talk was all about some fat woman and he said the craziest things, but I couldn’t laugh on account of she being there in the room with me. One thing he said was that the woman, this woman he was talking about, he said she was so fat that she wore a wrist watch on her thumb. Henry J. Belden.”

“Who is Henry J. Belden? Is that the name of Bugs Baer’s fat lady?”

“No, you crazy!” said Miss Lyons. “Mr. Belden was the case I was on in Great Neck. He died.”

“It seems to me a good many of your cases die.”

“Isn’t it a scream!” said Miss Lyons. “But it’s true; that is, it’s been true lately. The last five cases I’ve been on has all died. Of course it’s just luck, but the girls have been kidding me about it and calling me a jinx, and when Miss Halsey saw me here the evening of the day you was operated, she said, ‘God help him!’ That’s the night floor nurse’s name. But you’re going to be mean and live through it and spoil my record, aren’t you? I’m just kidding. Of course I want you to get all right.

“But it is queer, the way things have happened, and it’s made me feel kind of creepy. And besides, I’m not like some of the girls and don’t care. I get awfully fond of some of my cases and I hate to see them die, especially if they’re men and not very sick and treat you halfway decent and don’t yell for you the minute you go out of the room. There’s only one case I was ever on where I didn’t mind her dying and that was a woman. She had nephritis. Mrs. Judson.

“Do you want some gum? I chew it just when I’m nervous. And I always get nervous when I don’t have enough sleep. You can bet I’ll stay home tonight, B.F. or no B.F. But anyway he’s got an engagement tonight, some directors’ meeting or something. He’s the busiest somebody in the world. And I told him last night, I said, ‘I should think you’d need sleep, too, even more than I do because you have to have all your wits about you in your business or those big bankers would take advantage and rob you. You can’t afford to be sleepy,’ I told him.

“So he said, ‘No, but of course it’s all right for you, because if you go to sleep on your job, there’s no danger of you doing any damage except maybe give one of your patients a bichloride of mercury tablet instead of an alcohol rub.’ He’s terrible! But you can’t help from laughing.

“There was four of us in the party last night. He brought along his B.F. and another girl. She was just blah, but the B.F. wasn’t so bad, only he insisted on me helping him drink a half a bottle of Scotch, and on top of gin, too. I guess I was the life of the party; that is, at first. Afterwards I got sick and it wasn’t so good.

“But at first I was certainly going strong. And I guess I made quite a hit with Roy’s B.F. He knows Marian, too, but he won’t say anything, and if he does, I don’t care. If she don’t want to lose her beaus, she ought to know better than to introduce them to all the pretty girls in the world. I don’t mean that I’m any Norma Talmadge, but at least⁠—well⁠—but I sure was sick when I was sick!

“I must give Marian a ring this noon. I haven’t talked to her since the night she introduced me to him. I’ve been kind of scared. But I’ve got to find out what she knows. Or if she’s sore at me. Though I don’t see how she can be, do you? But maybe you want to read.”

“I called Marian up, but I didn’t get her. She’s out of town but she’ll be back tonight. She’s been out on a case. Hudson, New York, that’s where she went. The message was waiting for her when she got home the other night, the night she introduced me to Roy.”

“Good morning,” said Miss Lyons.

“Good morning,” said the man in bed. “Did you sleep enough?”

“Yes,” said Miss Lyons. “I mean no, not enough.”

“Your eyes look bad. They almost look as if you’d been crying.”

“Who? Me? It’d take more than⁠—I mean, I’m not a baby! But go on and read your book.”

“Well, good morning,” said Miss Lyons. “And how’s my patient? And this is the last morning I can call you that, isn’t it? I think you’re mean to get well so quick and leave me out of a job. I’m just kidding. I’m glad you’re all right again, and I can use a little rest myself.”

“Another big night?” asked the man in bed.

“Pretty big,” said Miss Lyons. “And another one coming. But tomorrow I won’t ever get up. Honest, I danced so much last night that I thought my feet would drop off. But he certainly is a dancing fool! And the nicest somebody to talk to that I’ve met since I came to this town. Not a smart Alex and not always trying to be funny like some people, but just nice. He understands. He seems to know just what you’re thinking. George Morse.”

“George Morse!” exclaimed the man in bed.

“Why yes,” said Miss Lyons. “Do you know him?”

“No. But I thought you were talking about this Stewart, this Roy.”

“Oh, him!” said Miss Lyons. “I should say not! He’s private property; other people’s property, not mine. He’s engaged to my G.F. Marian. It happened day before yesterday, after she got home from Hudson. She was on a case up there. She told me about it night before last. I told her congratulations. Because I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for the world! But heavens! what a mess she’s going to be in, married to that dumbbell. But of course some people can’t be choosey. And I doubt if they ever get married unless some friend loans him the price of a license.

“He’s got her believing he’s in Wall Street, but I bet if he ever goes there at all, it’s to sweep it. He’s one of these kind of fellas that’s got a great line for a little while, but you don’t want to live with a clown. And I’d hate to marry a man that all he thinks about is to step out every night and dance and drink.

“I had a notion to tell her what I really thought. But that’d only of made her sore, or she’d of thought I was jealous or something. As if I couldn’t of had him myself! Though even if he wasn’t so awful, if I’d liked him instead of loathed him, I wouldn’t of taken him from her on account of she being my G.F. And especially while she was out of town.

“He’s the kind of a fella that’d marry a nurse in the hopes that some day he’d be an invalid. You know, that kind.

“But say⁠—did you ever hear of J. P. Morgan and Company? That’s where my B.F. works, and he don’t claim to own it neither. George Morse.

“Haven’t you finished that book yet?”

Women

Young Jake uttered a few words which it would pain me to repeat.

“And what are you crabbin’ about?” asked Mike Healy from his corner of the bench.

“Oh, nothin’!” said Jake. “Nothin’ except that I’m sick of it!”

“Sick of what?” demanded Healy.

“Of settin’ here!” Jake replied.

“You!” said Mike Healy, with a short laugh. “You’ve got a fine license to squawk! Why, let’s see: what is it? The third of June, and your first June in the league. You ain’t even begin to sit! Look at me! Been on this bench since catchers started wearin’ a mast, or anyway it seems that long. And you never hear me crab, do you, Lefty?”

“Only when you talk,” answered the athlete addressed. “And that’s only at table or between meals.”

“But if this kid’s hollerin’ already,” said Mike, “what’ll he be doin’ along in August or September, to say nothin’ about next August and the August after that?”

“Don’t worry!” said Young Jake. “I’ll either be a regular by the end of this season or I won’t be on this ball club at all!”

“That-a-boy!” said Healy. “Threaten ’em!”

“I mean what I say!” retorted Jake. “I ain’t goin’ to spend my life on no bench! I come here to play baseball!”

“Oh, you did!” said Healy. “And what do you think I come here for, to fish?”

“I ain’t talkin’ about you,” said Young Jake. “I’m talkin’ about myself.”

“That’s a novelty in a ball player,” remarked Lefty.

“And what I’m sayin’,” Jake went on, “is that I’m sick of settin’ on this bench.”

“This ain’t a bad bench,” said Healy. “They’s a hell of a lot worse places you might sit.”

“And a hell of a lot better places!” said Jake. “I can think of one right now. I’m lookin’ right at it.”

“Where at?”

“Right up in the old stand; the third⁠—no, the fourth row, next to the aisle, the first aisle beyond where the screen leaves off.”

“I noticed her myself!” put in Lefty. “Damn cute! Too damn cute for a busher like you to get smoked up over.”

“Oh, I don’t know!” said Young Jake. “I didn’t get along so bad with them dames down South.”

“Down South ain’t here!” replied Lefty. “Those dames in some of those swamps, they lose their head when they see a man with shoes on. But up here you’ve got to have something. If you pulled that Calhoun County stuff of yours on a gal like that gal in the stand she’d yell for the dog catcher. She’d⁠—”

“They’re all alike!” interrupted Mike Healy. “South, or here, or anywheres, they’re all the same, and all poison!”

“What’s poison?” asked Jake.

“Women!” said Healy. “And the more you have to do with ’em the better chance you’ve got of spendin’ your life on this bench. Why⁠—That’s pitchin’, Joe!” he shouted when the third of the enemy batters had popped out and left a runner stranded at second base. “You look good in there today,” he added to Joe as the big pitcher approached the dugout.

“I’m all right, I guess,” said Joe, pulling on his sweater and moving toward the water bottle. “I wished that wind’d die down.”

The manager had come in.

“All right! Let’s get at ’em!” he said. “Nice work, Joe. Was that a fast one Meusel hit?”

“No,” said Joe. “A hook, but it didn’t break.”

“A couple of runs will beat ’em the way you’re going,” said the manager, stooping over to select his bat. “Make this fella pitch, boys,” he added. “He was hog wild in Philly the other day.”

The half inning wore on to its close, and the noncombatants were again left in possession of the bench. Young Jake addressed Healy.

“What’s women done to you, Mike?”

“Only broke me. That’s all!” said Healy.

“What do you mean, broke you! The boys tells me you ain’t spent nothin’ but the summer since you been in the league.”

“Oh, I’ve got a little money,” said Healy. “I don’t throw it away. I don’t go around payin’ ten smackers a quart for liquid catnip. But they’s more kinds of broke than money broke, a damn sight worse kinds, too. And when I say women has broke me, I mean they’ve made a bum out of my life; they’ve wrecked my⁠—what-do-you-call-it?”

“Your career,” supplied Lefty.

“Yes, sir,” said Healy. “And I ain’t kiddin’, neither. Why say, listen: Do you know where I’d be if it wasn’t for a woman? Right out there in that infield, playin’ that old third sack.”

“What about Smitty?” asked Young Jake.

“He’d be where I am⁠—on this bench.”

“Aw, come on, Mike! Be yourself! You don’t claim you’re as good as him!” Jake remonstrated.

“I do claim it, but it don’t make no difference if I am or I ain’t. He shouldn’t never ought to of had a chance, not on this club, anyway. You’d say the same if you knowed the facts.”

“Well, let’s hear ’em.”

“It’s a long story, and these boys has heard it before.”

“That’s all right, Mike,” said Gephart, a spare catcher. “We ain’t listened the last twelve times.”

“Well, it was the year I come in this league, four years ago this spring. I’d been with the Toledo club a couple of years. I was the best hitter on the Toledo club. I hit .332 the first year and .354 the next year. And I led the third basemen in fieldin’.”

“It would be hard not to,” interposed Lefty. “Anything a third baseman don’t get they call it a base hit. A third baseman ought to pay to get in the park.”

Healy glanced coldly at the speaker, and resumed:

“This club had Johnnie Lambert. He was still about the best third baseman in this league, but he was thirty-five years old and had a bad knee. It had slipped out on him and cost this club the pennant. They didn’t have no other third baseman. They lose sixteen out of twenty games. So that learned ’em a lesson, and they bought me. Their idear was to start Johnnie in the spring, but they didn’t expect his knee to hold up. And then it was goin’ to be my turn.

“But durin’ the winter Johnnie got a hold of some specialist somewheres that fixed his knee, and he come South with a new least of life. He hit good and was as fast as ever on the bases. Meanw’ile I had been on a huntin’ trip up in Michigan that winter and froze my dogs, and they ailed me so that I couldn’t do myself justice all spring.”

“I suppose it was some woman made you go huntin’,” said Gephart, but Healy continued without replying:

“They was a gal from a town named Ligonier, Indiana, that had visited in Toledo the second year I played ball there. The people where she was visitin’ was great baseball fans, and they brought her out to the game with them, and she got stuck on me.”

“Ligonier can’t be a town! It must be an asylum!” said Lefty.

“She got stuck on me,” Healy repeated, “and the people where she was stayin’ asked me to their house to supper. After supper the man and his wife said how about goin’ to the picture show, and the gal said she was tired and rather stay home. So the man and woman excused themselves. They said it was a picture they wanted to see and would I excuse them runnin’ off and leavin’ we two together. They were clubbin’ on me, see?

“Well, I thought to myself, I’ll give this dame an unpleasant surprise, so I didn’t even hold her hand all evenin’. When I got up to go she says she supposed it would be the last time she seen me as she expected to go back to Ligonier the next day. She didn’t have no more intentions of goin’ back the next day than crossin’ Lake Erie in a hollow tooth. But she knowed if I thought it was goodbye I’d kiss her. Well, I knowed it wasn’t goodbye, but what the hell! So that’s how it started, and I went to Ligonier that fall to see her, and we got engaged to be married. At least she seemed to think so.”

“Look at that!” interrupted Young Jake, his eyes on the field of action. “What could Sam of been thinkin’!”

“Thinkin’!” said Gephart. “Him!”

“What would Sam do,” wondered Lefty, “if they played baseball with only one base? He wouldn’t enjoy the game if he couldn’t throw to the wrong one.”

“That play’s liable to cost us somethin’,” said Gephart.

“I went up in Michigan on a huntin’ trip with some friends of mine,” Healy continued. “I froze my feet and was laid up all through January and February and shouldn’t of never went South. It was all as I could do to wear shoes, let alone play baseball. I wasn’t really myself till along the first of May. But, as I say, Johnnie Lambert had a new least of life and was lookin’ better than he’d looked for years. His knee wasn’t troublin’ him at all.

“Well, that’s how things went till around the last part of June. I didn’t get no action except five or six times goin’ up to hit for somebody. And I was like a young colt, crazy to be let loose. I knowed that if I once got in there and showed what I could do Judge Landis himself couldn’t keep me on the bench. I used to kneel down every night and pray to God to get to work on Lambert’s knee.

“The gal kept writin’ me letters and I answered ’em once in a w’ile, but we hadn’t saw each other since before Christmas. She hinted once or twice about when was we goin’ to get married, but I told her I didn’t want to even disgust the subject till I was somethin’ besides a bench warmer.

“We had a serious in Chi the tail-end of June, and the first night we was there I got a long-distance call from Ligonier. It was the gal’s sister, sayin’ the gal was sick. She was delirious part of the time and hollerin’ for me, and the doctor said if she could see me, it’d probably do her more good than medicine.

“So I said that’s all right, but they ain’t no off days in the schedule right now and I can’t get away. But they had looked up the time table and seen where I could leave Chi after the ball game, spend the night in Ligonier and get back for the game the next day.

“So I took a train from Englewood in the evenin’ and when I got off at Ligonier, there was my gal to meet me. She was the picture of health and no more delirious than usual. They said she had been just about ready to pass out when she learned I was comin’ and it cured her. They didn’t tell me what disease she’d had, but I suppose it was a grasshopper bite or somethin’.

“When I left next mornin’, the weddin’ date was set for that fall.

“Somewheres between South Bend and Laporte, the train stopped and liked it so well that we stayed there over three hours. We hit Englewood after four o’clock and I got to the park just in time to see them loadin’ Lambert into a machine to take him away. His knee had broke down on him in the first innin’s. He ain’t never played ball since. And Smitty, who’s always been a natural second baseman, he had my job.”

“He’s filled it pretty good,” said Lefty.

“That’s either here or there,” retorted Healy. “If I’d been around, nobody’d ever knowed if he could play third base or not. And the worst of him is,” he added, “that he never gets hurt.”

“Maybe you ain’t prayed for him like you done for Lambert,” said Young Jake. “What happened to the gal? Did you give her the air?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Healy. “When I give my word, I keep it. I simply wrote and told her that I’d agreed to marry her and I wouldn’t go back on it. But that my feelin’s towards her was the same as if she was an advanced case of spinal meningitis. She never answered the letter, so I don’t know if we’re still engaged or not.”

The inning was over and the boys were coming in.

“Joe was lucky to get out of that with only two runs,” remarked Lefty. “But of course it was Sam that put him in bad.”

“I’m goin’ to see if he’ll leave me get up on the lines,” said Young Jake, “so I can get a better look at that dame.”

The manager waited for Sam to catch up.

“What the hell was the matter with you, Sam?” he demanded.

Sam looked silly.

“I thought⁠—”

“That’s where you make your mistake!” the manager broke in. “Tough luck, Joe! But two runs are nothing. We’ll get ’em back.”

“Shall I go up on the lines?” asked Young Jake, hopefully.

“You? No!” said the manager. “You, Mike,” turning to Healy, “go over and coach at third base. You brought us luck yesterday.”

So it was Mike who was held partly responsible a few moments later when Smitty, who had tripled, was caught napping off the bag.

“Nice coachin’, Mike!” said Lefty, as Healy came back to the bench.

“Why don’t he watch hisself!” growled Mike. “And besides, I did yell at him!”

“You’re a liar!” said Lefty. “Your back was to the ball game. You were lookin’ up in the stand.”

“Why would I be lookin’ at the stand!” demanded Healy.

But nobody answered him. There was silence for a time. The boys were depressed; in their own language, their dauber was down. Finally Young Jake spoke.

“She’s starin’ right over this way!” he said.

“Who?” asked Gephart.

“That dame I pointed out. In the tan suit. Way over behind third base, the other side of the screen, in the fourth row.”

“I see her. Not bad!”

“I’ll say she’s not bad!” said Jake.

“Women!” said Healy. “You better get your mind on baseball or you’ll be back in that silo league, jumpin’ from town to town in a w’eelbarrow.”

“I don’t see why you should be off all women just because one of them brought you a little hard luck.”

“She wasn’t the only one! Why, say, if it wasn’t for women I’d be playin’ regular third base for McGraw right now and cuttin’ in on the big money every fall.”

“I didn’t know you was ever with McGraw.”

“I wasn’t,” said Healy, “but I ought to been, and would of been only for a woman. It was when I was playin’ with the Dayton club; my first year in baseball. Boy, I was fast as a streak! I was peggin’ bunts to first base before the guy could drop his bat. I covered so much ground to my left that I was always knockin’ the shortstop down and bumpin’ heads with the right fielder. Everybody was marvelin’ at me. Some of the old timers said I reminded them of Bill Bradley at his best, only that I made Bradley look like he was out of the game for a few days.

“Baldy Pierce was umpirin’ in our league that year. He wasn’t a bad umps, but he never left business interfere with pleasure. Many’s the time he called the last fella out in the last innin’s when the fella was safer than a hot chocolate at the Elks’ convention⁠—just because Baldy was hungry for supper.

“He was so homely that dogs wouldn’t live in the same town, and his friends used to try and make him wear his mask off the field as well as on. And yet he grabbed some of the prettiest gals you ever see. He said to me once, he said, ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘you tell me I’m homelier than Railroad Street, but I can cop more pips than you can with all your good looks!’ ”

At this point there were unprintable comments by Lefty, Gephart, and other occupants of the bench.

“One of these gals of his,” Healy went on, “was a gal named Helen Buck from Hamilton, Ohio. She was visitin’ in Dayton and come out to the ball game. The first day she was there a lot of the boys was hit in the face by thrown balls, and every time a foul went to the stand the whole infield run in to shag it. But she wouldn’t look at nobody but Pierce.

“Well, McGraw had heard about me, and he sent a fella named McDonald, that was scoutin’ for him, to look me over. It was in September and we was just about through. How the games come out didn’t make no difference, but I knowed this McDonald was there and what he was there for, so I wanted to make a showin’. He had came intendin’ to stay two days, but he’d overlooked a skip in the schedule that left us without no game the second day, so he said one game would have to be enough, as he had to go somewheres else.

“We was playin’ the Springfield club. I had a good day in the field, but Bill Hutton, who started pitchin’ for them, he was hog wild and walked me the first two times up. The third time they was a man on third and I had to follow orders and squeeze him home. So I hadn’t had no chance to really show what I could do up there at the plate.

“Well, we come into the ninth innin’s with the score tied and it was gettin’ pretty dark. We got two of them out, and then their first baseman, Jansen, he got a base on balls. Bill Boone caught a hold of one just right and cracked it to the fence and it looked like Jansen would score, but he was a slow runner. Davy Shaw, our shortstop, thought he must of scored and when the ball was thrown to him he throwed it to me to get Boone, who was tryin’ for three bases.

“Well, I had took in the situation at a glance; I seen that Jansen hadn’t scored and if I put the ball on Boone quick enough, why the run wouldn’t count. So I lunged at Boone and tagged him before Jansen had crossed the plate. But Pierce said the score counted and that Boone wasn’t out because I’d missed him. Missed him! Say, I bet that where I tagged him they had to take stitches!

“Anyway, that give ’em a one run lead, and when the first two fellas got out in our half everybody thought it was over. But Davy Shaw hit one to right center that a man like I could of ran around twice on it, but they held Davy at third base. And it was up to me to bring him in.

“By this time Jim Preston was pitchin’ for Springfield, and Jim was always a mark for me. I left the first one go by, as it was outside, but Pierce called it a strike. Then they was a couple of balls that he couldn’t call strikes. I cracked the next one over the leftfield fence, but it was a few inches foul. That made it two and two, and the next ball he throwed, well, if I hadn’t ducked my head just when I did they’d of been brains scattered all over Montgomery County. And what does Pierce do but yell ‘Batter out!’ and run for the clubhouse!

“Well, I run after him and asked him what the hell, and here is what he said. He said, ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘these games don’t mean nothin’, but if this here game had of wound up a tie it would of meant a game tomorrow, when we got a off day. And I made a date for tomorrow to go on a picnic with my little gal in Hamilton. You wouldn’t want me to miss that, would you?’ ”

“Why,” inquired Young Jake, “didn’t you break his nose or bust him in the chin?”

“His nose was already broke,” said Healy, “and he didn’t have no chin. I tried to get a hold of McDonald, the fella that was there scoutin’ me. I was goin’ to explain the thing to him. But he’d left town before I could catch him. It seems, though, that he’d set over to the side where he couldn’t see what a lousy strike it was and he told a friend of mine that he couldn’t recommend a man that would take a third strike when a base hit would of tied up the game; that on top of me ‘missin’ ’ Boone at third⁠—”

Another half inning was over and Healy started for the third-base coaching line without waiting for the manager to reach the bench. His teammates were not in a position to see the glance he threw at a certain spot in the stand as he walked to his “work.” When the side was retired scoreless and he had returned to his corner of the dugout he looked more desolate than ever.

“Women!” he said. “Why, if it wasn’t for women I’d be playin’ third base for Huggins; I’d have Joe Dugan’s job; I’d be livin’ right here in the capital of the world.”

“How do you make that out?” asked Young Jake.

“It’s a long story,” said Healy, “but I can tell you in a few words. We was playin’ the New York Club out home. Frank Baker had began to slip and Huggins was lookin’ for a good young fella to take his place. He was crazy to get me, but he had heard that I didn’t want to play in New York. This had came from me kiddin’ with some of the boys on the New York Club, tellin’ ’em I wouldn’t play here if they give me the town. So Huggins wanted to make sure before he started a trade. And he didn’t want no one to see him talkin’ to me. So he came around one night to the hotel where I was livin’ at the time. I was up in my room waitin’ for the phone gal to be off duty. She was stuck on me and I had a date to take her for a drive. So when Huggins come to see me she said I was out. She was afraid her date was goin’ to be interfered with. So Huggins went away and his club left town that night.”

“What did you do to her?” asked Jake.

“Oh, I couldn’t do nothin’ to her,” said Healy. “She claimed she didn’t know who it was.”

“Didn’t he give his name?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know it was Huggins?”

“She said it was a little fella.”

“He ain’t the only little fella.”

“He’s the littlest fella I know,” said Healy.

“But you ain’t sure what he wanted to see you for.”

“What would Huggins want to see me for⁠—to scratch my back? But as I say, she didn’t know who it was, so I couldn’t do nothin’ to her except ignore her from then on, and they couldn’t of been no worse punishment as far as she was concerned.”

“All and all,” summed up Lefty, “if it wasn’t for women, you’d of been playin’ third base for McGraw and Huggins and this club, all at the same time.”

“Yes,” said Healy, “and with Washin’ton, too. Why⁠—”

“Mike Healy!” interrupted the voice of Dick Trude, veteran usher. “Here’s a mash note and it wants an answer.”

Healy read the note and crumpled it in his hand.

“Who is she?” he asked.

“Look where I point,” said Trude. “It’s that good-lookin’ dame in the tan suit, in the fourth row, back of third base. There! She asked me who you was when you was out there coachin’. So I told her, and she give me that note. She said you could answer yes or no.”

“Make it ‘yes,’ ” said Healy, and Trude went away.

Healy threw the crumpled note under the water bottle and addressed Young Jake.

“What I want you to get through your head, boy⁠—”

“Oh, for God’s sakes, shut up!” said Young Jake.

The Love Nest

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with you, Mr. Bartlett,” said the great man. “I’m going to take you right out to my home and have you meet the wife and family; stay to dinner and all night. We’ve got plenty of room and extra pajamas, if you don’t mind them silk. I mean that’ll give you a chance to see us just as we are. I mean you can get more that way than if you sat here a whole week, asking me questions.”

“But I don’t want to put you to a lot of trouble,” said Bartlett.

“Trouble!” The great man laughed. “There’s no trouble about it. I’ve got a house that’s like a hotel. I mean a big house with lots of servants. But anyway I’m always glad to do anything I can for a writing man, especially a man that works for Ralph Doane. I’m very fond of Ralph. I mean I like him personally besides being a great editor. I mean I’ve known him for years and when there’s anything I can do for him, I’m glad to do it. I mean it’ll be a pleasure to have you. So if you want to notify your family⁠—”

“I haven’t any family,” said Bartlett.

“Well, I’m sorry for you! And I bet when you see mine, you’ll wish you had one of your own. But I’m glad you can come and we’ll start now so as to get there before the kiddies are put away for the night. I mean I want you to be sure and see the kiddies. I’ve got three.”

“I’ve seen their pictures,” said Bartlett. “You must be very proud of them. They’re all girls, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir; three girls. I wouldn’t have a boy. I mean I always wanted girls. I mean girls have got a lot more zip to them. I mean they’re a lot zippier. But let’s go! The Rolls is downstairs and if we start now we’ll get there before dark. I mean I want you to see the place while it’s still daylight.”

The great man⁠—Lou Gregg, president of Modern Pictures, Inc.⁠—escorted his visitor from the magnificent office by a private door and down a private stairway to the avenue, where the glittering car with its glittering chauffeur waited.

“My wife was in town today,” said Gregg as they glided northward, “and I hoped we could ride out together, but she called up about two and asked would I mind if she went on home in the Pierce. She was through with her shopping and she hates to be away from the house and the kiddies any longer than she can help. Celia’s a great home girl. You’d never know she was the same girl now as the girl I married seven years ago. I mean she’s different. I mean she’s not the same. I mean her marriage and being a mother has developed her. Did you ever see her? I mean in pictures?”

“I think I did once,” replied Bartlett. “Didn’t she play the young sister in The Cad?”

“Yes, with Harold Hodgson and Marie Blythe.”

“I thought I’d seen her. I remember her as very pretty and vivacious.”

“She certainly was! And she is yet! I mean she’s even prettier, but of course she ain’t a kid, though she looks it. I mean she was only seventeen in that picture and that was ten years ago. I mean she’s twenty-seven years old now. But I never met a girl with as much zip as she had in those days. It’s remarkable how marriage changes them. I mean nobody would ever thought Celia Sayles would turn out to be a sit-by-the-fire. I mean she still likes a good time, but her home and kiddies come first. I mean her home and kiddies come first.”

“I see what you mean,” said Bartlett.

An hour’s drive brought them to Ardsley-on-Hudson and the great man’s home.

“A wonderful place!” Bartlett exclaimed with a heroic semblance of enthusiasm as the car turned in at an arc de triomphe of a gateway and approached a white house that might have been mistaken for the Yale Bowl.

“It ought to be!” said Gregg. “I mean I’ve spent enough on it. I mean these things cost money.”

He indicated with a gesture the huge house and Urbanesque landscaping.

“But no amount of money is too much to spend on home. I mean it’s a good investment if it tends to make your family proud and satisfied with their home. I mean every nickel I’ve spent here is like so much insurance; it insures me of a happy wife and family. And what more can a man ask!”

Bartlett didn’t know, but the topic was forgotten in the business of leaving the resplendent Rolls and entering the even more resplendent reception hall.

“Forbes will take your things,” said Gregg. “And, Forbes, you may tell Dennis that Mr. Bartlett will spend the night.” He faced the wide stairway and raised his voice. “Sweetheart!” he called.

From above came the reply in contralto: “Hello, sweetheart!”

“Come down, sweetheart. I’ve brought you a visitor.”

“All right, sweetheart, in just a minute.”

Gregg led Bartlett into a living-room that was five laps to the mile and suggestive of an Atlantic City auction sale.

“Sit there,” said the host, pointing to a balloon-stuffed easy chair, “and I’ll see if we can get a drink. I’ve got some real old Bourbon that I’d like you to try. You know I come from Chicago and I always liked Bourbon better than Scotch. I mean I always preferred it to Scotch. Forbes,” he addressed the servant, “we want a drink. You’ll find a full bottle of that Bourbon in the cupboard.”

“It’s only half full, sir,” said Forbes.

“Half full! That’s funny! I mean I opened it last night and just took one drink. I mean it ought to be full.”

“It’s only half full,” repeated Forbes, and went to fetch it.

“I’ll have to investigate,” Gregg told his guest. “I mean this ain’t the first time lately that some of my good stuff has disappeared. When you keep so many servants, it’s hard to get all honest ones. But here’s Celia!”

Bartlett rose to greet the striking brunette who at this moment made an entrance so Delsarte as to be almost painful. With never a glance at him, she minced across the room to her husband and took a half interest in a convincing kiss.

“Well, sweetheart,” she said when it was at last over.

“This is Mr. Bartlett, sweetheart,” said her husband. “Mr. Bartlett, meet Mrs. Gregg.”

Bartlett shook his hostess’s proffered two fingers.

“I’m so pleased!” said Celia in a voice reminiscent of Miss Claire’s imitation of Miss Barrymore.

“Mr. Bartlett,” Gregg went on, “is with Mankind, Ralph Doane’s magazine. He is going to write me up; I mean us.”

“No, you mean you,” said Celia. “I’m sure the public is not interested in great men’s wives.”

“I am sure you are mistaken, Mrs. Gregg,” said Bartlett politely. “In this case at least. You are worth writing up aside from being a great man’s wife.”

“I’m afraid you’re a flatterer, Mr. Bartlett,” she returned. “I have been out of the limelight so long that I doubt if anybody remembers me. I’m no longer an artist; merely a happy wife and mother.”

“And I claim, sweetheart,” said Gregg, “that it takes an artist to be that.”

“Oh, no, sweetheart!” said Celia. “Not when they have you for a husband!”

The exchange of hosannahs was interrupted by the arrival of Forbes with the tray.

“Will you take yours straight or in a highball?” Gregg inquired of his guest. “Personally I like good whisky straight. I mean mixing it with water spoils the flavor. I mean whisky like this, it seems like a crime to mix it with water.”

“I’ll have mine straight,” said Bartlett, who would have preferred a highball.

While the drinks were being prepared, he observed his hostess more closely and thought how much more charming she would be if she had used finesse in improving on nature. Her cheeks, her mouth, her eyes, and lashes had been, he guessed, far above the average in beauty before she had begun experimenting with them. And her experiments had been clumsy. She was handsome in spite of her efforts to be handsomer.

“Listen, sweetheart,” said her husband. “One of the servants has been helping himself to this Bourbon. I mean it was a full bottle last night and I only had one little drink out of it. And now it’s less than half full. Who do you suppose has been at it?”

“How do I know, sweetheart? Maybe the groceryman or the iceman or somebody.”

“But you and I and Forbes are the only ones that have a key. I mean it was locked up.”

“Maybe you forgot to lock it.”

“I never do. Well, anyway, Bartlett, here’s a go!”

“Doesn’t Mrs. Gregg indulge?” asked Bartlett.

“Only a cocktail before dinner,” said Celia. “Lou objects to me drinking whisky, and I don’t like it much anyway.”

“I don’t object to you drinking whisky, sweetheart. I just object to you drinking to excess. I mean I think it coarsens a woman to drink. I mean it makes them coarse.”

“Well, there’s no argument, sweetheart. As I say, I don’t care whether I have it or not.”

“It certainly is great Bourbon!” said Bartlett, smacking his lips and putting his glass back on the tray.

“You bet it is!” Gregg agreed. “I mean you can’t buy that kind of stuff anymore. I mean it’s real stuff. You help yourself when you want another. Mr. Bartlett is going to stay all night, sweetheart. I told him he could get a whole lot more of a line on us that way than just interviewing me in the office. I mean I’m tongue-tied when it comes to talking about my work and my success. I mean it’s better to see me out here as I am, in my home, with my family. I mean my home life speaks for itself without me saying a word.”

“But, sweetheart,” said his wife, “what about Mr. Latham?”

“Gosh! I forgot all about him! I must phone and see if I can call it off. That’s terrible! You see,” he explained to Bartlett, “I made a date to go up to Tarrytown tonight, to K. L. Latham’s, the sugar people. We’re going to talk over the new club. We’re going to have a golf club that will make the rest of them look like a toy. I mean a real golf club! They want me to kind of run it. And I was to go up there tonight and talk it over. I’ll phone and see if I can postpone it.”

“Oh, don’t postpone it on my account!” urged Bartlett. “I can come out again some other time, or I can see you in town.”

“I don’t see how you can postpone it, sweetheart,” said Celia. “Didn’t he say old Mr. King was coming over from White Plains? They’ll be mad at you if you don’t go.”

“I’m afraid they would resent it, sweetheart. Well, I’ll tell you. You can entertain Mr. Bartlett and I’ll go up there right after dinner and come back as soon as I can. And Bartlett and I can talk when I get back. I mean we can talk when I get back. How is that?”

“That suits me,” said Bartlett.

“I’ll be as entertaining as I can,” said Celia, “but I’m afraid that isn’t very entertaining. However, if I’m too much of a bore, there’s plenty to read.”

“No danger of my being bored,” said Bartlett.

“Well, that’s all fixed then,” said the relieved host. “I hope you’ll excuse me running away. But I don’t see how I can get out of it. I mean with old King coming over from White Plains. I mean he’s an old man. But listen, sweetheart⁠—where are the kiddies? Mr. Bartlett wants to see them.”

“Yes, indeed!” agreed the visitor.

“Of course you’d say so!” Celia said. “But we are proud of them! I suppose all parents are the same. They all think their own children are the only children in the world. Isn’t that so, Mr. Bartlett? Or haven’t you any children?”

“I’m sorry to say I’m not married.”

“Oh, you poor thing! We pity him, don’t we, sweetheart? But why aren’t you, Mr. Bartlett? Don’t tell me you’re a woman hater!”

“Not now, anyway,” said the gallant Bartlett.

“Do you get that, sweetheart? He’s paying you a pretty compliment.”

“I heard it, sweetheart. And now I’m sure he’s a flatterer. But I must hurry and get the children before Hortense puts them to bed.”

“Well,” said Gregg when his wife had left the room, “would you say she’s changed?”

“A little, and for the better. She’s more than fulfilled her early promise.”

“I think so,” said Gregg. “I mean I think she was a beautiful girl and now she’s an even more beautiful woman. I mean wifehood and maternity have given her a kind of a⁠—well, you know⁠—I mean a kind of a pose. I mean a pose. How about another drink?”

They were emptying their glasses when Celia returned with two of her little girls.

“The baby’s in bed and I was afraid to ask Hortense to get her up again. But you’ll see her in the morning. This is Norma and this is Grace. Girls, this is Mr. Bartlett.”

The girls received this news calmly.

“Well, girls,” said Bartlett.

“What do you think of them, Bartlett?” demanded their father. “I mean what do you think of them?”

“They’re great!” replied the guest with creditable warmth.

“I mean aren’t they pretty?”

“I should say they are!”

“There, girls! Why don’t you thank Mr. Bartlett?”

“Thanks,” murmured Norma.

“How old are you, Norma?” asked Bartlett.

“Six,” said Norma.

“Well,” said Bartlett. “And how old is Grace?”

“Four,” replied Norma.

“Well,” said Bartlett. “And how old is baby sister?”

“One and a half,” answered Norma.

“Well,” said Bartlett.

As this seemed to be final, “Come, girls,” said their mother. “Kiss daddy good night and I’ll take you back to Hortense.”

“I’ll take them,” said Gregg. “I’m going upstairs anyway. And you can show Bartlett around. I mean before it gets any darker.”

“Good night, girls,” said Bartlett, and the children murmured a good night.

“I’ll come and see you before you’re asleep,” Celia told them. And after Gregg had led them out, “Do you really think they’re pretty?” she asked Bartlett.

“I certainly do. Especially Norma. She’s the image of you,” said Bartlett.

“She looks a little like I used to,” Celia admitted. “But I hope she doesn’t look like me now. I’m too old looking.”

“You look remarkably young!” said Bartlett. “No one would believe you were the mother of three children.”

“Oh, Mr. Bartlett! But I mustn’t forget I’m to ‘show you around.’ Lou is so proud of our home!”

“And with reason,” said Bartlett.

“It is wonderful! I call it our love nest. Quite a big nest, don’t you think? Mother says it’s too big to be cosy; she says she can’t think of it as a home. But I always say a place is whatever one makes of it. A woman can be happy in a tent if they love each other. And miserable in a royal palace without love. Don’t you think so, Mr. Bartlett?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Is this really such wonderful Bourbon? I think I’ll just take a sip of it and see what it’s like. It can’t hurt me if it’s so good. Do you think so, Mr. Bartlett?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Well then, I’m going to taste it and if it hurts me it’s your fault.”

Celia poured a whisky glass two-thirds full and drained it at a gulp.

“It is good, isn’t it?” she said. “Of course I’m not much of a judge as I don’t care for whisky and Lou won’t let me drink it. But he’s raved so about this Bourbon that I did want to see what it was like. You won’t tell on me, will you, Mr. Bartlett?”

“Not I!”

“I wonder how it would be in a highball. Let’s you and I have just one. But I’m forgetting I’m supposed to show you the place. We won’t have time to drink a highball and see the place too before Lou comes down. Are you so crazy to see the place?”

“Not very.”

“Well, then, what do you say if we have a highball? And it’ll be a secret between you and I.”

They drank in silence and Celia pressed a button by the door.

“You may take the bottle and tray,” she told Forbes. “And now,” she said to Bartlett, “we’ll go out on the porch and see as much as we can see. You’ll have to guess the rest.”

Gregg, having changed his shirt and collar, joined them.

“Well,” he said to Bartlett, “have you seen everything?”

“I guess I have, Mr. Gregg,” lied the guest readily. “It’s a wonderful place!”

“We like it. I mean it suits us. I mean it’s my idear of a real home. And Celia calls it her love nest.”

“So she told me,” said Bartlett.

“She’ll always be sentimental,” said her husband.

He put his hand on her shoulder, but she drew away.

“I must run up and dress,” she said.

“Dress!” exclaimed Bartlett, who had been dazzled by her flowered green chiffon.

“Oh, I’m not going to really dress,” she said. “But I couldn’t wear this thing for dinner!”

“Perhaps you’d like to clean up a little, Bartlett,” said Gregg. “I mean Forbes will show you your room if you want to go up.”

“It might be best,” said Bartlett.

Celia, in a black lace dinner gown, was rather quiet during the elaborate meal. Three or four times when Gregg addressed her, she seemed to be thinking of something else and had to ask, “What did you say, sweetheart?” Her face was red and Bartlett imagined that she had “sneaked” a drink or two besides the two helpings of Bourbon and the cocktail that had preceded dinner.

“Well, I’ll leave you,” said Gregg when they were in the living-room once more. “I mean the sooner I get started, the sooner I’ll be back. Sweetheart, try and keep your guest awake and don’t let him die of thirst. Au revoir, Bartlett. I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped. There’s a fresh bottle of the Bourbon, so go to it. I mean help yourself. It’s too bad you have to drink alone.”

“It is too bad, Mr. Bartlett,” said Celia when Gregg had gone.

“What’s too bad?” asked Bartlett.

“That you have to drink alone. I feel like I wasn’t being a good hostess to let you do it. In fact, I refuse to let you do it. I’ll join you in just a little wee sip.”

“But it’s so soon after dinner!”

“It’s never too soon! I’m going to have a drink myself and if you don’t join me, you’re a quitter.”

She mixed two life-sized highballs and handed one to her guest.

“Now we’ll turn on the radio and see if we can’t stir things up. There! No, no! Who cares about the old baseball! Now! This is better! Let’s dance.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gregg, but I don’t dance.”

“Well, you’re an old cheese! To make me dance alone! ‘All alone, yes, I’m all alone.’ ”

There was no affectation in her voice now and Bartlett was amazed at her unlabored grace as she glided around the big room.

“But it’s no fun alone,” she complained. “Let’s shut the damn thing off and talk.”

“I love to watch you dance,” said Bartlett.

“Yes, but I’m no Pavlowa,” said Celia as she silenced the radio. “And besides, it’s time for a drink.”

“I’ve still got more than half of mine.”

“Well, you had that wine at dinner, so I’ll have to catch up with you.”

She poured herself another highball and went at the task of “catching up.”

“The trouble with you, Mr.⁠—now isn’t that a scream! I can’t think of your name.”

“Bartlett.”

“The trouble with you, Barker⁠—do you know what’s the trouble with you? You’re too sober. See? You’re too damn sober! That’s the whole trouble, see? If you weren’t so sober, we’d be better off. See? What I can’t understand is how you can be so sober and me so high.”

“You’re not used to it.”

“Not used to it! That’s the cat’s pajamas! Say, I’m like this half the time, see? If I wasn’t, I’d die!”

“What does your husband say?”

“He don’t say because he don’t know. See, Barker? There’s nights when he’s out and there’s a few nights when I’m out myself. And there’s other nights when we’re both in and I pretend I’m sleepy and I go upstairs. See? But I don’t go to bed. See? I have a little party all by myself. See? If I didn’t, I’d die!”

“What do you mean, you’d die?”

“You’re dumb, Barker! You may be sober, but you’re dumb! Did you fall for all that apple sauce about the happy home and the contented wife? Listen, Barker⁠—I’d give anything in the world to be out of this mess. I’d give anything to never see him again.”

“Don’t you love him anymore? Doesn’t he love you? Or what?”

“Love! I never did love him! I didn’t know what love was! And all his love is for himself!”

“How did you happen to get married?”

“I was a kid; that’s the answer. A kid and ambitious. See? He was a director then and he got stuck on me and I thought he’d make me a star. See, Barker? I married him to get myself a chance. And now look at me!”

“I’d say you were fairly well off.”

“Well off, am I? I’d change places with the scum of the earth just to be free! See, Barker? And I could have been a star without any help if I’d only realized it. I had the looks and I had the talent. I’ve got it yet. I could be a Swanson and get myself a marquis; maybe a prince! And look what I did get! A self-satisfied, self-centered⁠—! I thought he’d make me! See, Barker? Well, he’s made me all right; he’s made me a chronic mother and it’s a wonder I’ve got any looks left.

“I fought at first. I told him marriage didn’t mean giving up my art, my life work. But it was no use. He wanted a beautiful wife and beautiful children for his beautiful home. Just to show us off. See? I’m part of his chattels. See, Barker? I’m just like his big diamond or his cars or his horses. And he wouldn’t stand for his wife ‘lowering’ herself to act in pictures. Just as if pictures hadn’t made him!

“You go back to your magazine tomorrow and write about our love nest. See, Barker? And be sure and don’t get mixed and call it a baby ranch. Babies! You thought little Norma was pretty. Well, she is. And what is it going to get her? A rich ⸻ of a husband that treats her like a ⸻! That’s what it’ll get her if I don’t interfere. I hope I don’t last long enough to see her grow up, but if I do, I’m going to advise her to run away from home and live her own life. And be somebody! Not a thing like I am! See, Barker?”

“Did you ever think of a divorce?”

“Did I ever think of one! Listen⁠—but there’s no chance. I’ve got nothing on him, and no matter what he had on me, he’d never let the world know it. He’d keep me here and torture me like he does now, only worse. But I haven’t done anything wrong, see? The men I might care for, they’re all scared of him and his money and power. See, Barker? And the others are just as bad as him. Like fat old Morris, the hotel man, that everybody thinks he’s a model husband. The reason he don’t step out more is because he’s too stingy. But I could have him if I wanted him. Every time he gets near enough to me, he squeezes my hand. I guess he thinks it’s a nickel, the tight old ⸻! But come on, Barker. Let’s have a drink. I’m running down.”

“I think it’s about time you were running up⁠—upstairs,” said Bartlett. “If I were you, I’d try to be in bed and asleep when Gregg gets home.”

“You’re all right, Barker. And after this drink I’m going to do just as you say. Only I thought of it before you did, see? I think of it lots of nights. And tonight you can help me out by telling him I had a bad headache.”

Left alone, Bartlett thought a while, then read, and finally dozed off. He was dozing when Gregg returned.

“Well, well, Bartlett,” said the great man, “did Celia desert you?”

“It was perfectly all right, Mr. Gregg. She had a headache and I told her to go to bed.”

“She’s had a lot of headaches lately; reads too much, I guess. Well, I’m sorry I had this date. It was about a new golf club and I had to be there. I mean I’m going to be president of it. I see you consoled yourself with some of the Bourbon. I mean the bottle doesn’t look as full as it did.”

“I hope you’ll forgive me for helping myself so generously,” said Bartlett. “I don’t get stuff like that every day!”

“Well, what do you say if we turn in? We can talk on the way to town tomorrow. Though I guess you won’t have much to ask me. I guess you know all about us. I mean you know all about us now.”

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Gregg. I’ve got plenty of material if I can just handle it.”

Celia had not put in an appearance when Gregg and his guest were ready to leave the house next day.

“She always sleeps late,” said Gregg. “I mean she never wakes up very early. But she’s later than usual this morning. Sweetheart!” he called up the stairs.

“Yes, sweetheart,” came the reply.

“Mr. Bartlett’s leaving now. I mean he’s going.”

“Oh, goodbye, Mr. Bartlett. Please forgive me for not being down to see you off.”

“You’re forgiven, Mrs. Gregg. And thanks for your hospitality.”

“Goodbye, sweetheart!”

“Goodbye, sweetheart!”

A Day with Conrad Green

Conrad Green woke up depressed and, for a moment, could not think why. Then he remembered. Herman Plant was dead; Herman Plant, who had been his confidential secretary ever since he had begun producing; who had been much more than a secretary⁠—his champion, votary, shield, bodyguard, tool, occasional lackey, and the butt of his heavy jokes and nasty temper. For forty-five dollars a week.

Herman Plant was dead, and this Lewis, recommended by Ezra Peebles, a fellow entrepreneur, had not, yesterday, made a good first impression. Lewis was apparently impervious to hints. You had to tell him things right out, and when he did understand he looked at you as if you were a boob. And insisted on a salary of sixty dollars right at the start. Perhaps Peebles, who, Green knew, hated him almost enough to make it fifty-fifty, was doing him another dirty trick dressed up as a favor.

After ten o’clock, and still Green had not had enough sleep. It had been nearly three when his young wife and he had left the Bryant-Walkers’. Mrs. Green, the former Marjorie Manning of the Vanities chorus, had driven home to Long Island, while he had stayed in the rooms he always kept at the Ambassador.

Majorie had wanted to leave a good deal earlier; through no lack of effort on her part she had been almost entirely ignored by her aristocratic host and hostess and most of the guests. She had confided to her husband more than once that she was sick of the whole such-and-such bunch of so-and-so’s. As far as she was concerned, they could all go to hell and stay there! But Green had been rushed by the pretty and stage-struck Joyce Brainard, wife of the international polo star, and had successfully combated his own wife’s importunities till the Brainards themselves had gone.

Yes, he could have used a little more sleep, but the memory of the party cheered him. Mrs. Brainard, excited by his theatrical aura and several highballs, had been almost affectionate. She had promised to come to his office sometime and talk over a stage career which both knew was impossible so long as Brainard lived. But, best of all, Mr. and Mrs. Green would be listed in the papers as among those present at the Bryant-Walkers’, along with the Vanderbecks, the Suttons, and the Schuylers, and that would just about be the death of Peebles and other social sycophants of “show business.” He would order all the papers now and look for his name. No; he was late and must get to his office. No telling what a mess things were in without Herman Plant. And, by the way, he mustn’t forget Plant’s funeral this afternoon.

He bathed, telephoned for his breakfast, and his favorite barber, dressed in a symphony of purple and gray, and set out for Broadway, pretending not to hear the “There’s Conrad Green!” spoken in awed tones by two flappers and a Westchester realtor whom he passed en route.

Green let himself into his private office, an office of luxurious, exotic furnishings, its walls adorned with expensive landscapes and a Zuloaga portrait of his wife. He took off his twenty-five dollar velour hat, approved of himself in the large mirror, sat down at his desk, and rang for Miss Jackson.

“All the morning papers,” he ordered, “and tell Lewis to come in.”

“I’ll have to send out for the papers,” said Miss Jackson, a tired-looking woman of forty-five or fifty.

“What do you mean, send out? I thought we had an arrangement with that boy to leave them every morning.”

“We did. But the boy says he can’t leave them anymore till we’ve paid up to date.”

“What do we owe?”

“Sixty-five dollars.”

“Sixty-five dollars! He’s crazy! Haven’t you been paying him by the week?”

“No. You told me not to.”

“I told you nothing of the kind! Sixty-five dollars! He’s trying to rob us!”

“I don’t believe so, Mr. Green,” said Miss Jackson. “He showed me his book. It’s more than thirty weeks since he began, and you know we’ve never paid him.”

“But hell! There isn’t sixty-five dollars’ worth of newspapers ever been printed! Tell him to sue us! And now send out for the papers and do it quick! After this we’ll get them down at the corner every morning and pay for them. Tell Lewis to bring me the mail.”

Miss Jackson left him, and presently the new secretary came in. He was a man under thirty, whom one would have taken for a high school teacher rather than a theatrical general’s aide-de-camp.

“Good morning, Mr. Green,” he said.

His employer disregarded the greeting.

“Anything in the mail?” he asked.

“Not much of importance. I’ve already answered most of it. Here are a few things from your clipping bureau and a sort of dunning letter from some jeweler in Philadelphia.”

“What did you open that for?” demanded Green, crossly. “Wasn’t it marked personal?”

“Look here, Mr. Green,” said Lewis quietly: “I was told you had a habit of being rough with your employees. I want to warn you that I am not used to that sort of treatment and don’t intend to get used to it. If you are decent with me, I’ll work for you. Otherwise I’ll resign.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lewis. I didn’t mean to be rough. It’s just my way of speaking. Let’s forget it and I’ll try not to give you any more cause to complain.”

“All right, Mr. Green. You told me to open all your mail except the letters with that one little mark on them⁠—”

“Yes, I know. Now let’s have the clippings.”

Lewis laid them on the desk.

“I threw away about ten of them that were all the same⁠—the announcement that you had signed Bonnie Blue for next season. There’s one there that speaks of a possible partnership between you and Sam Stein⁠—”

“What a nerve he’s got, giving out a statement like that. Fine chance of me mixing myself up with a crook like Stein! Peebles says he’s a full stepbrother to the James boys. So is Peebles himself, for that matter. What’s this long one about?”

“It’s about that young composer, Casper Ettelson. It’s by Deems Taylor of the World. There’s just a mention of you down at the bottom.”

“Read it to me, will you? I’ve overstrained my eyes lately.”

The dead Herman Plant had first heard of that recent eye strain twenty years ago. It amounted to almost total blindness where words of over two syllables were concerned.

“So far,” Lewis read, “Ettelson has not had a book worthy of his imaginative, whimsical music. How we would revel in an Ettelson score with a Barrie libretto and a Conrad Green production.”

“Who is this Barrie?” asked Green.

“I suppose it’s James M. Barrie,” replied Lewis, “the man who wrote Peter Pan.”

“I thought that was written by a fella over in England,” said Green.

“I guess he does live in England. He was born in Scotland. I don’t know where he is now.”

“Well, find out if he’s in New York, and, if he is, get a hold of him. Maybe he’ll do a couple of scenes for our next show. Come in, Miss Jackson. Oh, the papers!”

Miss Jackson handed them to him and went out. Green turned first to the society page of the Herald Tribune. His eye trouble was not so severe as to prevent his finding that page. And he could read his name when it was there to be read.

Three paragraphs were devoted to the Bryant-Walker affair, two of them being lists of names. And Mr. and Mrs. Conrad Green were left out.

“⁠⸻!” commented Green, and grabbed the other papers. The World and Times were searched with the same hideous result. And the others did not mention the party at all.

“⁠⸻!” repeated Green. “I’ll get somebody for this!” Then, to Lewis: “Here! Take this telegram. Send it to the managing editors of all the morning papers; you’ll find their names pasted on Plant’s desk. Now: ‘Ask your society editor why my name was not on list of guests at Bryant-Walker dinner Wednesday night. Makes no difference to me, as am not seeking and do not need publicity, but it looks like conspiracy, and thought you ought to be informed, as have always been good friend of your paper, as well as steady advertiser.’ I guess that’s enough.”

“If you’ll pardon a suggestion,” said Lewis, “I’m afraid a telegram like this would just be laughed at.”

“You send the telegram; I’m not going to have a bunch of cheap reporters make a fool of me!”

“I don’t believe you can blame the reporters. There probably weren’t reporters there. The list of guests is generally given out by the people who give the party.”

“But listen⁠—” Green paused and thought. “All right. Don’t send the telegram. But if the Bryant-Walkers are ashamed of me, why the hell did they invite me? I certainly didn’t want to go and they weren’t under obligations to me. I never⁠—”

As if it had been waiting for its cue, the telephone rang at this instant, and Kate, the switchboard girl, announced that the Bryant-Walkers’ secretary was on the wire.

“I am speaking for Mrs. Bryant-Walker,” said a female voice. “She is chairman of the committee on entertainment for the Women’s Progress Bazaar. The bazaar is to open on the third of next month and wind up on the evening of the fifth with a sort of vaudeville entertainment. She wanted me to ask you⁠—”

Green hung up with an oath.

“That’s the answer!” he said. “The damn grafters!”

Miss Jackson came in again.

“Mr. Robert Blair is waiting to see you.”

“Who is he?”

“You know. He tried to write some things for one of the shows last year.”

“Oh, yes. Say, did you send flowers to Plant’s house?”

“I did,” replied Miss Jackson. “I sent some beautiful roses.”

“How much?”

“Forty-five dollars,” said Miss Jackson.

“Forty-five dollars for roses! And the man hated flowers even when he was alive! Well, send in this Blair.”

Robert Blair was an ambitious young freelance who had long been trying to write for the stage, but with little success.

“Sit down, Blair,” said Green. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well, Mr. Green, my stuff didn’t seem to suit you last year, but this time I think I’ve got a scene that can’t miss.”

“All right. If you want to leave it here, I’ll read it over.”

“I haven’t written it out. I thought I’d tell you the idea first.”

“Well, go ahead, but cut it short; I’ve got a lot of things to do today. Got to go to old Plant’s funeral for one thing.”

“I bet you miss him, don’t you?” said Blair, sympathetically.

“Miss him! I should say I do! A lovable character and”⁠—with a glance at Lewis⁠—“the best secretary I’ll ever have. But let’s hear your scene.”

“Well,” said Blair, “it may not sound like much the way I tell it, but I think it’ll work out great. Well, the police get a report that a woman has been murdered in her home, and they go there and find her husband, who is acting very nervous. They give him the third degree, and he finally breaks down and admits he killed her. They ask him why, and he tells them he is very fond of beans, and on the preceding evening he came home to dinner and asked her what there was to eat, and she told him she had lamb chops, mashed potatoes, spinach, and apple pie. So he says, ‘No beans?’ and she says, ‘No beans.’ So he shoots her dead. Of course, the scene between the husband and wife is acted out on the stage. Then⁠—”

“It’s no good!” said Conrad Green. “In the first place, it takes too many people, all those policemen and everybody.”

“Why, all you need is two policemen and the man and his wife. And wait till I tell you the rest of it.”

“I don’t like it; it’s no good. Come back again when you’ve got something.”

When Blair had gone Green turned to Lewis.

“That’s all for just now,” he said, “but on your way out tell Miss Jackson to get a hold of Martin and say I want him to drop in here as soon as he can.”

“What Martin?” asked Lewis.

“She’ll know⁠—Joe Martin, the man that writes most of our librettos.”

Alone, Conrad Green crossed the room to his safe, opened it, and took out a box on which was inscribed the name of a Philadelphia jeweler. From the box he removed a beautiful rope of matched pearls and was gazing at them in admiration when Miss Jackson came in; whereupon he hastily replaced them in their case and closed the safe.

“That man is here again,” said Miss Jackson, “That man Hawley from Gay New York.”

“Tell him I’m not in.”

“I did, but he says he saw you come in and he’s going to wait till you’ll talk to him. Really, Mr. Green, I think it would be best in the long run to see him. He’s awfully persistent.”

“All right; send him in,” said Green, impatiently, “though I have no idea what he can possibly want of me.”

Mr. Hawley, dapper and eternally smiling, insisted on shaking hands with his unwilling host, who had again sat down at his desk.

“I think,” he said, “we’ve met before.”

“Not that I know of,” Green replied shortly.

“Well, it makes no difference, but I’m sure you’ve read our little paper, Gay New York.”

“No,” said Green. “All I have time to read is manuscripts.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” said Hawley. “It’s really a growing paper, with a big New York circulation, and a circulation that is important from your standpoint.”

“Are you soliciting subscriptions?” asked Green.

“No. Advertising.”

“Well, frankly, Mr. Hawley, I don’t believe I need any advertising. I believe that even the advertising I put in the regular daily papers is a waste of money.”

“Just the same,” said Hawley, “I think you’d be making a mistake not to take a page in Gay New York. It’s only a matter of fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Fifteen hundred dollars! That’s a joke! Nobody’s going to hold me up!”

“Nobody’s trying to, Mr. Green. But I might as well tell you that one of our reporters came in with a story the other day⁠—well, it was about a little gambling affair in which some of the losers sort of forgot to settle, and⁠—well, my partner was all for printing it, but I said I had always felt friendly toward you and why not give you a chance to state your side of it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If your reporter has got my name mixed up in a gambling story he’s crazy.”

“No. He’s perfectly sane and very, very careful. We make a specialty of careful reporters and we’re always sure of our facts.”

Conrad Green was silent for a long, long time. Then he said:

“I tell you, I don’t know what gambling business you refer to, and, furthermore, fifteen hundred dollars is a hell of a price for a page in a paper like yours. But still, as you say, you’ve got the kind of circulation that might do me good. So if you’ll cut down the price⁠—”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Green, but we never do that.”

“Well, then, of course you’ll have to give me a few days to get my ad fixed up. Say you come back here next Monday afternoon.”

“That’s perfectly satisfactory, Mr. Green,” said Hawley, “and I assure you that you’re not making a mistake. And now I won’t keep you any longer from your work.”

He extended his hand, but it was ignored, and he went out, his smile a little broader than when he had come in. Green remained at his desk, staring straight ahead of him and making semi-audible references to certain kinds of dogs as well as personages referred to in the Old and New Testaments. He was interrupted by the entrance of Lewis.

“Mr. Green,” said the new secretary, “I have found a check for forty-five dollars, made out to Herman Plant. I imagine it is for his final week’s pay. Would you like to have me change it and make it out to his widow?”

“Yes,” said Green. “But no; wait a minute. Tear it up and I’ll make out my personal check to her and add something to it.”

“All right,” said Lewis, and left.

“Forty-five dollars’ worth of flowers,” said Green to himself, and smiled for the first time that morning.

He looked at his watch and got up and put on his beautiful hat.

“I’m going to lunch,” he told Miss Jackson on his way through the outer office. “If Peebles or anybody important calls up, tell them I’ll be here all afternoon.”

“You’re not forgetting Mr. Plant’s funeral?”

“Oh, that’s right. Well, I’ll be here from one thirty to about three.”

A head waiter at the Astor bowed to him obsequiously and escorted him to a table near a window, while the occupants of several other tables gazed at him spellbound and whispered, “Conrad Green.”

A luncheon of clams, sweetbreads, spinach, strawberry ice cream, and small coffee seemed to satisfy him. He signed his check and then tipped his own waiter and the head waiter a dollar apiece, the two tips falling just short of the cost of the meal.

Joe Martin, his chief librettist, was waiting when he got back to his office.

“Oh, hello, Joe!” he said, cordially. “Come right inside. I think I’ve got something for you.”

Martin followed him in and sat down without waiting for an invitation. Green seated himself at his desk and drew out his cigarette case.

“Have one, Joe?”

“Not that kind!” said Martin, lighting one of his own. “You’ve got rotten taste in everything but gals.”

“And librettists,” replied Green, smiling.

“But here’s what I wanted to talk about. I couldn’t sleep last night, and I just laid there and an idea came to me for a comedy scene. I’ll give you the bare idea and you can work it out. It’ll take a girl and one of the comics, maybe Fraser, and a couple of other men that can play.

“Well, the idea is that the comic is married to the girl. In the first place, I’d better mention that the comic is crazy about beans. Well, one night the comic⁠—no, wait a minute. The police get word that the comic’s wife has been murdered and two policemen come to the comic’s apartment to investigate. They examine the corpse and find out she’s been shot through the head. They ask the comic if he knows who did it and he says no, but they keep after him, and finally he breaks down and admits that he did it himself.

“But he says, ‘Gentlemen, if you’ll let me explain the circumstances, I don’t believe you’ll arrest me.’ So they tell him to explain, and he says that he came home from work and he was very hungry and he asked his wife what they were going to have for dinner. So she tells him⁠—clams and sweetbreads and spinach and strawberry ice cream and coffee. So he asks her if she isn’t going to have any beans and she says no, and he shoots her. What do you think you could do with that idea?”

“Listen, Connie,” said Martin: “You’ve only got half the scene, and you’ve got that half wrong. In the second place, it was played a whole season in the Music Box and it was written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Otherwise I can do a whole lot with it.”

“Are you sure you’re right?”

“I certainly am!”

“Why, that damn little thief! He told me it was his!”

“Who?” asked Martin.

“Why, that Blair, that tried to butt in here last year. I’ll fix him!”

“I thought you said it was your own idea.”

“Hell, no! Do you think I’d be stealing stuff, especially if it was a year old?”

“Well,” said Martin, “when you get another inspiration like this, give me a ring and I’ll come around. Now I’ve got to hurry up to the old Stadium and see what the old Babe does in the first inning.”

“I’m sorry, Joe. I thought it was perfectly all right.”

“Never mind! You didn’t waste much of my time. But after this you’d better leave the ideas to me. So long!”

“Goodbye, Joe; and thanks for coming in.”

Martin went and Green pressed the button for Miss Jackson.

“Miss Jackson, don’t ever let that young Blair in here again. He’s a faker!”

“All right, Mr. Green. But don’t you think it’s about time you were starting for the funeral? It’s twenty minutes of three.”

“Yes. But let’s see: where is Plant’s house?”

“It’s up on One Hundred and Sixtieth street, just off Broadway.”

“My God! Imagine living there! Wait a minute, Miss Jackson. Send Lewis here.”

“Lewis,” he said, when the new secretary appeared, “I ate something this noon that disagreed with me. I wanted to go up to Plant’s funeral, but I really think it would be dangerous to try it. Will you go up there, let them know who you are, and kind of represent me? Miss Jackson will give you the address.”

“Yes, sir,” said Lewis, and went out.

Almost immediately the sanctum door opened again and the beautiful Marjorie Green, née Manning, entered unannounced. Green’s face registered not altogether pleasant surprise.

“Why, hello, dear!” he said. “I didn’t know you were coming to town today.”

“I never told you I wasn’t,” his wife replied.

They exchanged the usual connubial salutations.

“I supposed you noticed,” said Mrs. Green, “that our names were not on the list of guests at the party.”

“No; I haven’t had time to look at the papers. But what’s the difference?”

“No difference at all, of course. But do you know what I think? I think we were invited just because those people want to get something out of you, for some benefit or something.”

“A fine chance! I hope they try it!”

“However, that’s not what I came to talk about.”

“Well, dear, what is it?”

“I thought maybe you’d remember something.”

“What, honey?”

“Why⁠—oh, well, there’s no use talking about it if you’ve forgotten.”

Green’s forehead wrinkled in deep thought; then suddenly his face brightened.

“Of course I haven’t forgotten! It’s your birthday!”

“You just thought of it now!”

“No such a thing! I’ve been thinking of it for weeks!”

“I don’t believe you! If you had been, you’d have said something, and”⁠—his wife was on the verge of tears⁠—“you’d have given me some little thing, just any little thing.”

Once more Green frowned, and once more brightened up.

“I’ll prove it to you,” he said, and walked rapidly to the safe.

In a moment he had placed in her hands the jewel box from Philadelphia. In another moment she had opened it, gasped at the beauty of its contents, and thrown her arms around his neck.

“Oh, dearest!” she cried. “Can you ever forgive me for doubting you?”

She put the pearls to her mouth as if she would eat them.

“But haven’t you been terribly extravagant?”

“I don’t consider anything too extravagant for you.”

“You’re the best husband a girl ever had!”

“I’m glad you’re pleased,” said Green.

“Pleased! I’m overwhelmed. And to think I imagined you’d forgotten! But I’m not going to break up your whole day. I know you want to get out to poor old Plant’s funeral. So I’ll run along. And maybe you’ll take me to dinner somewhere tonight.”

“I certainly will! You be at the Ambassador about six thirty and we’ll have a little birthday party. But don’t you want to leave the pearls here now?”

“I should say not! They’re going to stay with me forever! Anyone that tries to take them will do it over my dead body!”

“Well, goodbye, then, dear.”

“Till half past six.”

Green, alone again, kicked shut the door of his safe and returned to his desk, saying in loud tones things which are not ordinarily considered appropriate to the birthday of a loved one. The hubbub must have been audible to Miss Jackson ouside, but perhaps she was accustomed to it. It ceased at another unannounced entrance, that of a girl even more beautiful than the one who had just gone out. She looked at Green and laughed.

“My God! You look happy!” she said.

“Rose!”

“Yes, it’s Rose. But what’s the matter with you?”

“I’ve had a bad day.”

“But isn’t it better now?”

“I didn’t think you were coming till tomorrow.”

“But aren’t you glad I came today?”

“You bet I am!” said Green. “And if you’ll come here and kiss me I’ll be all the gladder.”

“No. Let’s get our business transacted first.”

“What business?”

“You know perfectly well! Last time I saw you you insisted that I must give up everybody else but you. And I promised you it would be all off between Harry and I if⁠—Well, you know. There was a little matter of some pearls.”

“I meant everything I said.”

“Well, where are they?”

“They’re all bought and all ready for you. But I bought them in Philadelphia and for some damn reason they haven’t got here yet.”

“Got here yet! Were they so heavy you couldn’t bring them with you?”

“Honest, dear, they’ll be here day after tomorrow at the latest.”

“ ‘Honest’ is a good word for you to use! Do you think I’m dumb? Or is it that you’re so used to lying that you can’t help it?”

“If you’ll let me explain⁠—”

“Explain hell! We made a bargain and you haven’t kept your end of it. And now⁠—”

“But listen⁠—”

“I’ll listen to nothing! You know where to reach me and when you’ve kept your promise you can call me up. Till then⁠—Well, Harry isn’t such bad company.”

“Wait a minute, Rose!”

“You’ve heard all I’ve got to say. Goodbye!”

And she was gone before he could intercept her.

Conrad Green sat as if stunned. For fifteen minutes he was so silent and motionless that one might have thought him dead. Then he shivered as if with cold and said aloud:

“I’m not going to worry about them anymore. To hell with all of them!”

He drew the telephone to him and took off the receiver.

“Get me Mrs. Bryant-Walker.”

And after a pause:

“Is this Mrs. Bryant-Walker? No, I want to speak to her personally. This is Conrad Green. Oh, hello, Mrs. Walker. Your secretary called me up this morning, but we were cut off. She was saying something about a benefit. Why, yes, certainly, I’ll be glad to. As many of them as you want. If you’ll just leave it all in my hands I’ll guarantee you a pretty good entertainment. It’s no bother at all. It’s a pleasure. Thank you. Goodbye.”

Lewis came in.

“Well, Lewis, did you get to the funeral?”

“Yes, Mr. Green, and I saw Mrs. Plant and explained the circumstances to her. She said you had always been very kind to her husband. She said that during the week of his illness he talked of you nearly all the time and expressed confidence that if he died you would attend his funeral. So she wished you had been there.”

“Good God! So do I!” said Conrad Green.

Reunion

This is one about a brother and sister and the sister’s husband and the brother’s wife. The sister’s name was Rita Mason Johnston; she was married to Stuart Johnston, whose intimates called him Stu, which was appropriate only on special occasions. The brother was Bob Mason, originally and recently from Buchanan, Michigan, and in between whiles a respected resident of Los Angeles. His wife was a woman he had found in San Bernardino and married for some reason.

Rita had been named after a Philadelphia aunt with money. The flattered aunt had made Rita’s mother bring Rita east for a visit when the child was three or four. After that, until she met Stu, she had spent two-thirds of her time with her aunt or at schools of her aunt’s choosing. Her brother Bob, in bad health at fourteen, had gone to California to live with cousins or something. He had visited home only three times in nearly twenty years, and not once while Rita was there. So he and Rita hardly knew each other, you might say.

Johnston and Rita had become acquainted at a party following a Cornell-Pennsylvania football game. Johnston’s people were decent and well-off, and Rita’s aunt had encouraged the romance, which resulted in a wedding and a comfortable home at Sands Point, Long Island.

Bob Mason had first worked for a cousin in a Los Angeles real estate office, then had gone into business for himself, and finally saved enough to bring his wife to the old Michigan homestead, which had been left him by his father.

He and Jennie were perfectly satisfied with small-town life. Once in a while they visited Chicago, less than a hundred miles away, or drove up the lake shore or down into Indiana in Bob’s two-thousand-dollar automobile. In the past year they had been to Chicago three times and had attended three performances of Abie’s Irish Rose. It was the best play ever played; better, even, than Lightnin’.

“I honestly think we ought to do something about Rita,” said Jennie to Bob one June day. “Imagine a person not seeing their own sister in nearly twenty years!”

“I’d love to see her,” replied Bob, “and I wish you’d write her a letter. She don’t pay no attention to mine. I’ve asked her time and time again to come out here and stay as long as she likes, but she hasn’t even answered.”

“Well,” said Jennie, “I’ll write to her, although she still owes me a letter from last Christmas.”

“Stu,” said Rita to her husband, “we’ve simply got to do something about Bob and his wife. Heaven knows how many times he’s asked us to go out there and visit and now here is a letter from Jennie, inviting us again.”

“Well, why don’t you go? You’d enjoy it, seeing the old home and the people you used to play around with. I’d go along, but I haven’t the time.”

“Time! You have time to go to the Water Gap or up to Manchester for golf every two or three weeks. As for me wanting to see the old home, you know that’s silly!”

“Well, we won’t argue about it, but I’m certainly not going to waste my vacation in any hick town where they’ve probably got a six-hole course that you have to putt on with a niblick! Why can’t they come here?”

“I don’t suppose they could, but if you want me to, I’ll ask them.”

“Suit yourself. It’s your brother.”

The Bob Masons boarded The Wolverine at the nearby metropolis of Niles and got off some twenty hours later in New York’s Grand Central Station. Compared with the jump from California to Michigan, it seemed like once around on a roller coaster.

Rita met them and identified Bob by the initials on his suitcase. He wouldn’t have known her. She was the same age as Jennie, thirty-five, and he had expected her to look it. Instead, she looked ten years younger and was prettier than a member of the Buchanan Mason family had any right to be. And what clothes! Like those of the movie gals who had infested his Los Angeles.

“Why, sis, are you sure it’s you?”

“Am I changed?” she said, laughing.

“Not as much as you ought to be,” replied Bob. “That’s what makes it so hard to recognize you.”

“Well, you’ve changed,” said Rita. “Let’s see⁠—it’s twenty years, isn’t it? You were fourteen and naturally you didn’t have that mustache. But even if you were clean shaven, you wouldn’t be a bit like the Bob I remember. And this is Jennie,” she added. “Well!”

“Yes,” admitted Bob’s wife.

She smiled and Rita noticed her teeth for the first time. Most of the visible ones were of gold, and the work had evidently been done by a dentist for whom three members of a foursome were waiting. Rita, Bob, and Bob’s wife, escorted by a red cap, walked through the Biltmore and across Forty-third Street to where Gates was parked with Rita’s sedan. Gates observed the newcomers as he relieved the red cap of their meager baggage. “Sears, Roebuck,” he said to himself, for he had lived in Janesville, Wisconsin.

“Oh, we forgot to see about your trunks!” exclaimed Rita when the car had started.

“We didn’t bring no trunks,” said Bob.

“We can only stay two weeks,” said his wife.

“That seems like an awfully short visit,” Rita said.

“I know, but Bob don’t feel like he can stay away from the garden this time of year. We left old Jimmy Preston to take care of it, but nobody can be trusted to tend to another person’s garden like you would yourself.”

“Does the place look just the same?”

“I should say not! It was in terrible condition when he first came East.”

“Came East?”

“I mean, to Michigan. But Bob spent⁠—How much did you spend fixing things up, Bob, about?”

“Over two thousand dollars,” said Bob.

“I thought it was nearer twenty-one or twenty-two hundred,” said his wife.

“Well, somewhere over two thousand.”

“It was more than two thousand,” insisted his wife.

“Look out!” yelled Bob, and the two women jumped.

They were on the Fifty-ninth Street bridge and Gates was worming his way through the myriad trucks and funerals that prevail on that structure at 11 a.m.

“What’s the matter? You scared me to death!” said Rita.

“I thought we was going to hit that Reo,” Bob explained.

“Bob’s a nervous wreck when anybody else is driving,” apologized Jennie. “I often think a person who drives themselves is more liable to be nervous when somebody else is driving.”

“I guess that’s true,” agreed Rita, and reflected that she had heard this theory expounded before.

“And I do believe,” continued Jennie, “that Bob is just about the best driver in the world, and that’s not because he’s my husband, either.”

This remark caused Gates to turn around suddenly and look the speaker in the eye, and the sedan missed another Reo by a flea’s upper lip.

The road leading from New York to the towns on Long Island’s north shore is, for the most part, as scenically attractive as an incinerating plant. Nevertheless, Jennie kept saying “How beautiful!” and asking Rita who were the owners of various places which looked as if they had been disowned these many years. Bob was too nervous to make any effort to talk and Rita sighed with relief when the drive was over.

“I’ll show you your room,” she said, “and then you can rest till lunch. Stu is in the city and won’t be home till dinner. But he only goes in once or twice a week, and he said he would arrange not to go at all while you’re here, so he’d have plenty of time to visit.”

Jennie was impressed with the luxurious guest room and its outlook on the Sound, but Bob had slept badly on the train and dozed off while she was still marveling.

“I don’t suppose you feel like doing much this afternoon,” said Rita when lunch was over. “Maybe we’d better just loaf. I imagine that tomorrow and the rest of the week will be pretty strenuous. Stu has all kinds of plans.”

So they loafed, and Jennie and Rita took naps, and Bob walked around the yard and plotted the changes he would make in it if it were his.

Seven o’clock brought Stu, who was introduced to the in-laws and then ordered to his room to make himself presentable for dinner. Rita followed him upstairs.

“Well?” he said.

“I’m not sure yet,” said Rita, “but I’m kind of afraid⁠—Bob is awfully quiet and I guess she’s embarrassed to death. I hope they’ve brought some other clothes, but then I don’t know⁠—A change might be for the worse, though it doesn’t seem possible.”

“Does she think,” asked Stu, “that just because she’s from the Golden State she has to run around with a mouthful of nuggets?”

“She’s all right when she doesn’t smile. You mustn’t say anything what will make her smile.”

“That’s going to be tough,” said Stu. “You know what I am when I get started!”

“And another thing I just thought of,” said Rita. “He didn’t bring any golf clubs.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter. I can fit him out.”

The host and hostess joined their guests on the porch. A Swedish girl served cocktails.

“Are these⁠—is it liquor?” asked Jennie.

“Just Bacardi, and they’re awfully mild,” said Rita.

“But Bob and I don’t indulge at all,” said Jennie.

“This wouldn’t be indulging,” urged Stu. “This is practically a soft drink.”

“I know, but it would be violating the letter of the law,” said Jennie.

So Rita and Stu drank alone and the four moved in to dinner.

“What time do you get up, Bob?” asked the host, at table.

“Six o’clock, in the summer,” replied his brother-in-law.

“Oh, well, there’s no need of that! But it would be nice if we could get through breakfast tomorrow at, say, nine o’clock. I’m going to take you to Piping Rock. We’ll make a day of it.”

“That’ll be fine,” said Bob.

“What do you go around in?” inquired his brother-in-law.

“I’ve got a 1924 Studebaker,” said Bob.

“No, no,” said Stu. “I mean your golf game.”

“Me? I haven’t any golf game. I never played golf in my life.”

Stu’s expression would have made Rita laugh if she hadn’t felt so sorry for him.

“Bob can’t see anything in golf,” explained Jennie. “He says it’s a sissy game. I tell him he ought to try it sometime and he might change his mind. Why don’t you try it while you’re here, Bob? Maybe Stuart would show you the fine points.”

The host seemed not to have heard this suggestion.

“They have got a links near Buchanan, between Buchanan and Niles,” said Bob, “but they charge fifty dollars to join and thirty-five dollars annual dues. That seems exorbitant.”

“It’s an outrage!” is what Stu was going to say, but Rita shook her head at him. “I think you’d find it was worth the money,” is what he said.

“Lots of our friends play,” said Jennie. “Some of the nicest people in both Niles and Buchanan belong to the club, so it can’t be as silly as Bob thinks. But he gets an idear in his head and you can’t change him.”

“What’s on tonight?” asked Stu as the dessert was served.

“Well,” said Rita, “I thought these people would want to get to bed early after their trip, so we won’t go anywhere. We might have a little bridge. Do you feel like bridge, Jennie?”

“I’m awfully sorry, but neither Bob or I play. I know it must be a wonderful game and some of our best friends play it a great deal, but somehow or other, Bob and I just never took it up.”

This was a terrific blow to Rita, who counted that day lost which was without its twenty or thirty rubbers.

“You miss something,” she said with remarkable self-control. “Shall we have our coffee on the porch? I think it’s pleasanter.”

“What do you smoke, Bob? Cigars or cigarettes?” inquired the host.

“Neither, thanks,” Bob replied. “I never cared for tobacco.”

“You’re lucky,” said Stu. “A cigarette, Jennie?”

“Mercy! It would kill me! Even the smell of smoke makes me dizzy.”

Stu and Rita evidently missed this statement for they proceeded to light their cigarettes.

“Is bridge hard to learn?” asked Jennie presently.

“Not very,” said Rita.

“I was wondering if maybe you and Stuart couldn’t teach it to Bob and I. Then we could have some games while we’re here.”

“Well,” said Rita, “it’s⁠—it’s a terribly hard game to learn, that is, to play it right.”

“You said it wasn’t,” put in Bob.

“Well, it isn’t, if you don’t care⁠—if you just⁠—But to learn to play it right, it’s impossible!”

“Have you got a radio?” asked Bob. He pronounced the “a” short, as in Buchanan.

“I’m sorry to say we haven’t,” said Stu, who wasn’t sorry at all.

“I don’t know how you get along without one,” said Bob.

“We just live for ours!” said Jennie.

“What is it, an Atwater-Kent?” asked Rita.

She had seen that name in some paper yesterday.

“No,” replied Bob. “It’s a Ware Neutrodyne, with a Type X receiver.”

“And an Ethovox horn,” added Jennie. “We had Omaha one night.”

“You did!” said Rita.

There was a silence, which was broken by Bob’s asking his sister how often she went to New York.

“Only when I can’t help myself, when I simply have to get something.”

“Don’t you never go to the theater?”

“Oh, yes, if it’s something especially good.”

“Of course,” said Jennie, “you’ve seen Abie’s Irish Rose?”

“Heavens, no!” said Rita. “Everybody says it’s terrible!”

“Well, it’s not terrible!” said Bob indignantly. “That is, if you’ve got anywheres near as good a company here as they have in Chicago.”

“I’d like to see the New York company,” said Jennie, “and see how they do compare.”

This met with no encouragement and another silence followed.

“Well, Bob,” said Stu at length, “you must do something for exercise. How about a little tennis in the morning?”

“That’s another game I don’t play,” Bob replied. “As for exercise, I get plenty of it fooling around the garden and monkeying with the car.”

“Then all I can suggest is that we put in the day fishing or swimming or just riding around in the launch.”

Bob was silent, but his wife spoke up.

“You know, Stuart, Bob’s ashamed to admit it, but being on the water makes him deathly sick, even if it’s as smooth as glass. And he can’t swim.”

Bob didn’t seem to relish this topic and turned to his sister.

“Do you remember the Allens in Buchanan, old Tom Allen and his family?”

“Kind of.”

“Did you hear about Louise Allen running away and getting married?”

“No.”

“Well, she ran away with Doc Marshall and got married. And at first old Tom was pretty near wild, but when Doc and Louise came back, why one day Doc was walking along the street and old Tom came along from the opposite direction and Doc spoke to him and called him by name and old Tom looked at him and asked him what he wanted, and Doc said he wanted to know if he’d forgave him. So old Tom said, ‘Forgiven you! Have you forgiven me, is the question.’ So Doc said, forgiven him for what, and old Tom said, for not killing her when she was a baby. This put the laugh on Doc and the boys have all been kidding him about it. I guess you didn’t know Doc.”

“No, I didn’t,” admitted Rita.

“Quite a card,” said Bob.

Jennie had picked up a book. “May Fair,” she read. “Is it good?”

“Yes,” said Rita. “It’s short stories by Michael Arlen; you know, the man who wrote The Green Hat.”

“A detective story?” asked Bob.

“No, Michael Arlen. He was here last spring and we met him. He’s awfully nice. He’s really an Armenian.”

“There’s an Armenian comes to Buchanan two or three times a year,” said Jennie. “But he sells linen.”

Upstairs, two or three hours later, Stu made a brief speech:

“My God! He doesn’t play golf, he doesn’t play tennis, he doesn’t play bridge, he doesn’t swim, fish, drink, or smoke. And I’d arranged these two weeks for a kind of a vacation! Hell’s bells!”

In the guest room Bob said:

“I certainly miss the old radio.”

“Yes,” said Jennie. “We’d be getting the Drake Hotel now.”

“I’d like to see the New York company in Abie’s Irish Rose,” said Jennie at breakfast next morning. “I’d like to compare them with the companies that’s in Chicago.”

“Did you see it in Chicago?” asked Stu.

“Three times,” said Jennie.

“You must be sick of it,” said Stu.

“I couldn’t get sick of it,” replied Jennie, “not if I saw it every night in the year.”

After breakfast Bob tried to read the Herald-Tribune, the World, and the Times, but couldn’t make head or tail of them. He wished he had a copy of the Chi Trib, even if it was two or three days old.

“Do you go to pictures much?” inquired Jennie of her hostess.

“Hardly ever,” said Rita.

“We’re very fond of them,” said Jennie. “You know, we lived in Los Angeles for a long time, and that’s right near Hollywood. So we often saw different stars in person. And some friends of ours knew Harold Lloyd and introduced us to him. You’d never know him without those glasses. He’s really handsome! And democratic!”

“What is he running for?” asked Stu.

“Nothing that I know of,” said Jennie. “Is he running for anything, Bob?”

“I don’t think so,” said Bob.

The morning dragged along and finally it was time for lunch and Stu broke a precedent by having seven highballs with his meal.

“They’ll make you sleepy,” warned Rita.

“What of it?” he said, and there seemed to be no answer.

Sure enough, Stu slept on the porch swing all afternoon while Jennie struggled with the first volume of The Peasants and Rita took Bob for a walk.

“Do you remember Tom Allen?” Bob asked her.

“I don’t believe so,” she answered.

“Oh, you must remember the Allens! They lived next door to the Deans. Well, anyway, Tom had a daughter, Louise, about our age, and she ran away with Doc Marshall and got married. Everybody thought old Tom would shoot Doc on sight, but when they met and Doc asked Tom to forgive him, old Tom said he was the one that ought to be asking forgiveness. So Doc said forgiveness for what, and old Tom said, for not killing Louise when she was a baby.”

Near the end of their walk, Bob asked:

“Don’t you never go to New York?”

“Hardly ever, and especially at this time of year. It’s so hot! But I suppose you and Jennie would like to see something of it. We’ll arrange to drive in before you go home.”

Stu woke up a little after five and took on a fresh cargo of Scotch before dinner.

“You certainly ought to get a radio!” said Bob as the clock struck nine.

At half past, everybody went to bed.

“This will be our third day here,” said Bob, dressing. “We don’t start home till a week from next Thursday.”

“Yes,” said Jennie absently.

“I’d wear my other suit today, but it’s all wrinkled up,” said Bob.

“I’ll ask Rita for an iron and press it out for you. Or maybe we could send it to a tailor.”

“Tailor! There’s no tailor within miles of here, or anything else as far as I can see!”

Stu wasn’t up for breakfast, but joined the party on the porch a little before lunch time. He had started in on a new bottle.

“Bob,” he said, “you ought to fall off the wagon. I’ve got some of the most able-bodied Scotch on Long Island.”

“Thanks,” said his brother-in-law. “I may be tempted before long.”

It was late in the afternoon when Bob said to Rita:

“Do you remember old Tom Allen?”

“I think so,” his sister replied. “Didn’t his daughter run away with some doctor?”

“Yes,” said Bob, “and⁠—”

He was interrupted by Stu’s voice, calling Rita from upstairs.

“Listen,” said Stu when she had answered his summons, “A telegram is coming for me tonight, saying that my grandfather is sick up in Bennington, Vermont, or some place, and for me to come at once. And he’s going to stay sick for at least ten days, so sick that I can’t leave him.”

“No, sir!” said Rita firmly. “You don’t do that to me!”

“Well, then, how about this? Suppose it’s one of our dearest friends that’s sick and we’ve both got to go. Do you think they’d go home? You see, we could pack up some baggage and run in to New York and stay over night if necessary, and come back here after they’re gone.”

“If they ever found out, I couldn’t forgive myself.”

“They won’t. You let me plan it and we’ll spring it after dinner. I wouldn’t be so desperate if I hadn’t just got so I could break an eighty-five and if I don’t keep after it I’ll be back in the nineties.”

But after dinner, while Rita and Stu were sparring for an opening, Jennie said:

“Folks, I hope you won’t think we are crazy, but Bob is, almost. He’s worried to death about his garden. He read in the paper this morning that there’s a regular drought threatened all through southern Michigan. We were afraid of it, because it hadn’t rained for a long time before we left. And now it looks like everything would be ruined unless he gets back there and tends to things himself. We left old Jimmy Preston to look out for things, but you can’t trust things to an outsider. Bob feels like if he was there, he could see that things were taken care of. The garden will get plenty of water if Bob is there to see to it, but if he isn’t, there’s no telling what will happen. So if you’ll forgive us, we’re thinking about starting home on The Wolverine tomorrow afternoon.”

“Well!” said Rita.

“Well!” said Stu.

“Of course,” said Rita, “you know best, and it would be a shame to have your whole garden spoiled. But it does seem⁠—But of course we wouldn’t dream of urging⁠—”

“We’ve simply got to go, sis,” said Bob. “And another thing: Don’t bother about coming in to New York with us. Just send us in your car tomorrow forenoon, say, and we’ll have time to look around a little before we catch the train.”

The Masons were in their room at the Biltmore.

“It’s eight dollars a day without meals,” said Bob, “but we can eat out, some place where it’s not expensive, and besides, it’s only for a week. Tonight,” he went on, “Abie’s Irish Rose. Tomorrow morning the top of the Woolworth Building. Tomorrow afternoon, Coney. Thursday night, Abie again. After that, we’ll see.”

Jennie laughed nervously.

“I’ll be petrified every time we leave the hotel,” she said. “Suppose we should meet them on the street!”

“There’s no danger of that,” said Bob. “Sis never comes to town in summer and Stuart is taking a vacation. What I’m afraid of is that they’ll run acrost some article on the weather conditions in the Middle West and see where we’ve had the rainiest summer since 1902.”

Who Dealt?

You know, this is the first time Tom and I have been with real friends since we were married. I suppose you’ll think it’s funny for me to call you my friends when we’ve never met before, but Tom has talked about you so much and how much he thought of you and how crazy he was to see you and everything⁠—well, it’s just as if I’d known you all my life, like he has.

We’ve got our little crowd out there, play bridge and dance with them; but of course we’ve only been there three months, at least I have, and people you’ve known that length of time, well, it isn’t like knowing people all your life, like you and Tom. How often I’ve heard Tom say he’d give any amount of money to be with Arthur and Helen, and how bored he was out there with just poor little me and his new friends!

Arthur and Helen, Arthur and Helen⁠—he talks about you so much that it’s a wonder I’m not jealous; especially of you, Helen. You must have been his real pal when you were kids.

Nearly all of his kid books, they have your name in front⁠—to Thomas Cannon from Helen Bird Strong. This is a wonderful treat for him to see you! And a treat for me, too. Just think, I’ve at last met the wonderful Helen and Arthur! You must forgive me calling you by your first names; that’s how I always think of you and I simply can’t say Mr. and Mrs. Gratz.

No, thank you, Arthur; no more. Two is my limit and I’ve already exceeded it, with two cocktails before dinner and now this. But it’s a special occasion, meeting Tom’s best friends. I bet Tom wishes he could celebrate too, don’t you, dear? Of course he could if he wanted to, but when he once makes up his mind to a thing, there’s nothing in the world can shake him. He’s got the strongest will power of any person I ever saw.

I do think it’s wonderful, him staying on the wagon this long, a man that used to⁠—well, you know as well as I do; probably a whole lot better, because you were with him so much in the old days, and all I know is just what he’s told me. He told me about once in Pittsburgh⁠—All right, Tommie; I won’t say another word. But it’s all over now, thank heavens! Not a drop since we’ve been married; three whole months! And he says it’s forever, don’t you, dear? Though I don’t mind a person drinking if they do it in moderation. But you know Tom! He goes the limit in everything he does. Like he used to in athletics⁠—

All right, dear; I won’t make you blush. I know how you hate the limelight. It’s terrible, though, not to be able to boast about your own husband; everything he does or ever has done seems so wonderful. But is that only because we’ve been married such a short time? Do you feel the same way about Arthur, Helen? You do? And you married him four years ago, isn’t that right? And you eloped, didn’t you? You see I know all about you.

Oh, are you waiting for me? Do we cut for partners? Why can’t we play families? I don’t feel so bad if I do something dumb when it’s Tom I’m playing with. He never scolds, though he does give me some terrible looks. But not very often lately; I don’t make the silly mistakes I used to. I’m pretty good now, aren’t I, Tom? You better say so, because if I’m not, it’s your fault. You know Tom had to teach me the game. I never played at all till we were engaged. Imagine! And I guess I was pretty awful at first, but Tom was a dear, so patient! I know he thought I never would learn, but I fooled you, didn’t I, Tommie?

No, indeed, I’d rather play than do almost anything. But you’ll sing for us, won’t you, Helen? I mean after a while. Tom has raved to me about your voice and I’m dying to hear it.

What are we playing for? Yes, a penny’s perfectly all right. Out there we generally play for half a cent a piece, a penny a family. But a penny apiece is all right. I guess we can afford it now, can’t we, dear? Tom hasn’t told you about his raise. He was⁠—All right, Tommie; I’ll shut up. I know you hate to be talked about, but your wife can’t help being just a teeny bit proud of you. And I think your best friends are interested in your affairs, aren’t you, folks?

But Tom is the most secretive person I ever knew. I believe he even keeps things from me! Not very many, though. I can usually tell when he’s hiding something and I keep after him till he confesses. He often says I should have been a lawyer or a detective, the way I can worm things out of people. Don’t you, Tom?

For instance, I never would have known about his experience with those horrid football people at Yale if I hadn’t just made him tell me. Didn’t you know about that? No, Tom, I’m going to tell Arthur even if you hate me for it. I know you’d be interested, Arthur, not only because you’re Tom’s friend, but on account of you being such a famous athlete yourself. Let me see, how was it, Tom? You must help me out. Well, if I don’t get it right, you correct me.

Well, Tom’s friends at Yale had heard what a wonderful football player he was in high school so they made him try for a place on the Yale nine. Tom had always played halfback. You have to be a fast runner to be a halfback and Tom could run awfully fast. He can yet. When we were engaged we used to run races and the prize was⁠—All right, Tommie, I won’t give away our secrets. Anyway, he can beat me to pieces.

Well, he wanted to play halfback at Yale and he was getting along fine and the other men on the team said he would be a wonder and then one day they were having their practice and Tex Jones, no, Ted Jones⁠—he’s the main coach⁠—he scolded Tom for having the signal wrong and Tom proved that Jones was wrong and he was right and Jones never forgave him. He made Tom quit playing halfback and put him tackle or end or some place like that where you can’t do anything and being a fast runner doesn’t count. So Tom saw that Jones had it in for him and he quit. Wasn’t that it, Tom? Well, anyway, it was something.

Oh, are you waiting for me? I’m sorry. What did you bid, Helen? And you, Tom? You doubled her? And Arthur passed? Well, let’s see. I wish I could remember what that means. I know that sometimes when he doubles he means one thing and sometimes another. But I always forget which is which. Let me see; it was two spades that he doubled, wasn’t it? That means I’m to leave him in, I’m pretty sure. Well, I’ll pass. Oh, I’m sorry, Tommie! I knew I’d get it wrong. Please forgive me. But maybe we’ll set them anyway. Whose lead?

I’ll stop talking now and try and keep my mind on the game. You needn’t look that way, Tommie. I can stop talking if I try. It’s kind of hard to concentrate though, when you’re, well, excited. It’s not only meeting you people, but I always get excited traveling. I was just terrible on our honeymoon, but then I guess a honeymoon’s enough to make anybody nervous. I’ll never forget when we went into the hotel in Chicago⁠—All right, Tommie, I won’t. But I can tell about meeting the Bakers.

They’re a couple about our age that I’ve known all my life. They were the last people in the world I wanted to see, but we ran into them on State Street and they insisted on us coming to their hotel for dinner and before dinner they took us up to their room and Ken⁠—that’s Mr. Baker⁠—Ken made some cocktails, though I didn’t want any and Tom was on the wagon. He said a honeymoon was a fine time to be on the wagon! Ken said.

“Don’t tempt him, Ken,” I said. “Tom isn’t a drinker like you and Gertie and the rest of us. When he starts, he can’t stop.” Gertie is Mrs. Baker.

So Ken said why should he stop and I said there was good reason why he should because he had promised me he would and he told me the day we were married that if I ever saw him take another drink I would know that⁠—

What did you make? Two odd? Well, thank heavens that isn’t a game! Oh, that does make a game, doesn’t it? Because Tom doubled and I left him in. Isn’t that wicked! Oh, dearie, please forgive me and I’ll promise to pay attention from now on! What do I do with these? Oh, yes, I make them for Arthur.

I was telling you about the Bakers. Finally Ken saw he couldn’t make Tom take a drink, so he gave up in disgust. But imagine meeting them on our honeymoon, when we didn’t want to see anybody! I don’t suppose anybody does unless they’re already tired of each other, and we certainly weren’t, were we, Tommie? And aren’t yet, are we, dear? And never will be. But I guess I better speak for myself.

There! I’m talking again! But you see it’s the first time we’ve been with anybody we really cared about; I mean, you’re Tom’s best friends and it’s so nice to get a chance to talk to somebody who’s known him a long time. Out there the people we run around with are almost strangers and they don’t talk about anything but themselves and how much money their husbands make. You never can talk to them about things that are worth while, like books. I’m wild about books, but I honestly don’t believe half the women we know out there can read. Or at least they don’t. If you mention some really worth while novel like, say, Black Oxen, they think you’re trying to put on the Ritz.

You said a no-trump, didn’t you, Tom? And Arthur passed. Let me see; I wish I knew what to do. I haven’t any five-card⁠—it’s terrible! Just a minute. I wish somebody could⁠—I know I ought to take⁠—but⁠—well, I’ll pass. Oh, Tom, this is the worst you ever saw, but I don’t know what I could have done.

I do hold the most terrible cards! I certainly believe in the saying, “Unlucky at cards, lucky in love.” Whoever made it up must have been thinking of me. I hate to lay them down, dear. I know you’ll say I ought to have done something. Well, there they are! Let’s see your hand, Helen. Oh, Tom, she’s⁠—but I mustn’t tell, must I? Anyway, I’m dummy. That’s one comfort. I can’t make a mistake when I’m dummy. I believe Tom overbids lots of times so I’ll be dummy and can’t do anything ridiculous. But at that I’m much better than I used to be, aren’t I, dear?

Helen, do you mind telling me where you got that gown? Crandall and Nelsons’s? I’ve heard of them, but I heard they were terribly expensive. Of course a person can’t expect to get a gown like that without paying for it. I’ve got to get some things while I’m here and I suppose that’s where I better go, if their things aren’t too horribly dear. I haven’t had a thing new since I was married and I’ve worn this so much I’m sick of it.

Tom’s always after me to buy clothes, but I can’t seem to get used to spending somebody else’s money, though it was dad’s money I spent before I did Tom’s, but that’s different, don’t you think so? And of course at first we didn’t have very much to spend, did we, dear? But now that we’ve had our raise⁠—All right, Tommie, I won’t say another word.

Oh, did you know they tried to get Tom to run for mayor? Tom is making faces at me to shut up, but I don’t see any harm in telling it to his best friends. They know we’re not the kind that brag, Tommie. I do think it was quite a tribute; he’d only lived there a little over a year. It came up one night when the Guthries were at our house, playing bridge. Mr. Guthrie⁠—that’s A. L. Guthrie⁠—he’s one of the big lumbermen out there. He owns⁠—just what does he own, Tom? Oh, I’m sorry. Anyway, he’s got millions. Well, at least thousands.

He and his wife were at our house playing bridge. She’s the queerest woman! If you just saw her, you’d think she was a janitor or something; she wears the most hideous clothes. Why, that night she had on a⁠—honestly you’d have sworn it was a maternity gown, and for no reason. And the first time I met her⁠—well, I just can’t describe it. And she’s a graduate of Bryn Mawr and one of the oldest families in Philadelphia. You’d never believe it!

She and her husband are terribly funny in a bridge game. He doesn’t think there ought to be any conventions; he says a person might just as well tell each other what they’ve got. So he won’t pay any attention to what-do-you-call-’em, informatory, doubles and so forth. And she plays all the conventions, so you can imagine how they get along. Fight! Not really fight, you know, but argue. That is, he does. It’s horribly embarrassing to whoever is playing with them. Honestly, if Tom ever spoke to me like Mr. Guthrie does to his wife, well⁠—aren’t they terrible, Tom? Oh, I’m sorry!

She was the first woman in Portland that called on me and I thought it was awfully nice of her, though when I saw her at the door I would have sworn she was a book agent or maybe a cook looking for work. She had on a⁠—well, I can’t describe it. But it was sweet of her to call, she being one of the real people there and me⁠—well, that was before Tom was made a vice-president. What? Oh, I never dreamed he hadn’t written you about that!

But Mrs. Guthrie acted just like it was a great honor for her to meet me, and I like people to act that way even when I know it’s all apple sauce. Isn’t that a funny expression, “apple sauce”? Some man said it in a vaudeville show in Portland the Monday night before we left. He was a comedian⁠—Jack Brooks or Ned Frawley or something. It means⁠—well, I don’t know how to describe it. But we had a terrible time after the first few minutes. She is the silentest person I ever knew and I’m kind of bashful myself with strangers. What are you grinning about, Tommie? I am, too, bashful when I don’t know people. Not exactly bashful, maybe, but, well, bashful.

It was one of the most embarrassing things I ever went through. Neither of us could say a word and I could hardly help from laughing at what she had on. But after you get to know her you don’t mind her clothes, though it’s a terrible temptation all the time not to tell her how much nicer⁠—And her hair! But she plays a dandy game of bridge, lots better than her husband. You know he won’t play conventions. He says it’s just like telling you what’s in each other’s hand. And they have awful arguments in a game. That is, he does. She’s nice and quiet and it’s a kind of mystery how they ever fell in love. Though there’s a saying or a proverb or something, isn’t there, about like not liking like? Or is it just the other way?

But I was going to tell you about them wanting Tom to be mayor. Oh, Tom, only two down? Why, I think you did splendidly! I gave you a miserable hand and Helen had⁠—what didn’t you have, Helen? You had the ace, king of clubs. No, Tom had the king. No, Tom had the queen. Or was it spades? And you had the ace of hearts. No, Tom had that. No, he didn’t. What did you have, Tom? I don’t exactly see what you bid on. Of course I was terrible, but⁠—what’s the difference anyway?

What was I saying? Oh, yes, about Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie. It’s funny for a couple like that to get married when they are so different in every way. I never saw two people with such different tastes. For instance, Mr. Guthrie is keen about motoring and Mrs. Guthrie just hates it. She simply suffers all the time she’s in a car. He likes a good time, dancing, golfing, fishing, shows, things like that. She isn’t interested in anything but church work and bridge work.

“Bridge work.” I meant bridge, not bridge work. That’s funny, isn’t it? And yet they get along awfully well; that is when they’re not playing cards or doing something else together. But it does seem queer that they picked each other out. Still, I guess hardly any husband and wife agree on anything.

You take Tom and me, though, and you’d think we were made for each other. It seems like we feel just the same about everything. That is, almost everything. The things we don’t agree on are little things that don’t matter. Like music. Tom is wild about jazz and blues and dance music. He adores Irving Berlin and Gershwin and Jack Kearns. He’s always after those kind of things on the radio and I just want serious, classical things like “Humoresque” and “Indian Love Lyrics.” And then there’s shows. Tom is crazy over Ed Wynn and I can’t see anything in him. Just the way he laughs at his own jokes is enough to spoil him for me. If I’m going to spend time and money on a theater I want to see something worth while⁠—The Fool or Lightnin’.

And things to eat. Tom insists, or that is he did insist, on a great big breakfast⁠—fruit, cereal, eggs, toast, and coffee. All I want is a little fruit and dry toast and coffee. I think it’s a great deal better for a person. So that’s one habit I broke Tom of, was big breakfasts. And another thing he did when we were first married was to take off his shoes as soon as he got home from the office and put on bedroom slippers. I believe a person ought not to get sloppy just because they’re married.

But the worst of all was pajamas! What’s the difference, Tommie? Helen and Arthur don’t mind. And I think it’s kind of funny, you being so old-fashioned. I mean Tom had always worn a nightgown till I made him give it up. And it was a struggle, believe me! I had to threaten to leave him if he didn’t buy pajamas. He certainly hated it. And now he’s mad at me for telling, aren’t you, Tommie? I just couldn’t help it. I think it’s so funny in this day and age. I hope Arthur doesn’t wear them; nightgowns, I mean. You don’t, do you, Arthur? I knew you didn’t.

Oh, are you waiting for me? What did you say, Arthur? Two diamonds? Let’s see what that means. When Tom makes an original bid of two it means he hasn’t got the tops. I wonder⁠—but of course you couldn’t have the⁠—heavens! What am I saying! I guess I better just keep still and pass.

But what was I going to tell you? Something about⁠—oh, did I tell you about Tom being an author? I had no idea he was talented that way till after we were married and I was unpacking his old papers and things and came across a poem he’d written, the saddest, mushiest poem! Of course it was a long time ago he wrote it; it was dated four years ago, long before he met me, so it didn’t make me very jealous, though it was about some other girl. You didn’t know I found it, did you, Tommie?

But that wasn’t what I refer to. He’s written a story, too, and he’s sent it to four different magazines and they all sent it back. I tell him though, that that doesn’t mean anything. When you see some of the things the magazines do print, why, it’s an honor to have them not like yours. The only thing is that Tom worked so hard over it and sat up nights writing and rewriting, it’s a kind of a disappointment to have them turn it down.

It’s a story about two men and a girl and they were all brought up together and one of the men was awfully popular and well off and good-looking and a great athlete⁠—a man like Arthur. There, Arthur! How is that for a T.L.? The other man was just an ordinary man with not much money, but the girl seemed to like him better and she promised to wait for him. Then this man worked hard and got money enough to see him through Yale.

The other man, the well-off one, went to Princeton and made a big hit as an athlete and everything and he was through college long before his friend because his friend had to earn the money first. And the well-off man kept after the girl to marry him. He didn’t know she had promised the other one. Anyway she got tired waiting for the man she was engaged to and eloped with the other one. And the story ends up by the man she threw down welcoming the couple when they came home and pretending everything was all right, though his heart was broken.

What are you blushing about, Tommie? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I thought it was very well written and if the editors had any sense they’d have taken it.

Still, I don’t believe the real editors see half the stories that are sent to them. In fact I know they don’t. You’ve either got to have a name or a pull to get your things published. Or else pay the magazines to publish them. Of course if you are Robert Chambers or Irving R. Cobb, they will print whatever you write whether it’s good or bad. But you haven’t got a chance if you are an unknown like Tom. They just keep your story long enough so you will think they are considering it and then they send it back with a form letter saying it’s not available for their magazine and they don’t even tell why.

You remember, Tom, that Mr. Hastings we met at the Hammonds’. He’s a writer and knows all about it. He was telling me of an experience he had with one of the magazines; I forget which one, but it was one of the big ones. He wrote a story and sent it to them and they sent it back and said they couldn’t use it.

Well, sometime after that Mr. Hastings was in a hotel in Chicago and a bellboy went around the lobby paging Mr.⁠—I forget the name, but it was the name of the editor of this magazine that had sent back the story, Runkle, or Byers, or some such name. So the man, whatever his name was, he was really there and answered the page and afterwards Mr. Hastings went up to him and introduced himself and told the man about sending a story to his magazine and the man said he didn’t remember anything about it. And he was the editor! Of course he’d never seen it. No wonder Tom’s story keeps coming back!

He says he is through sending it and just the other day he was going to tear it up, but I made him keep it because we may meet somebody sometime who knows the inside ropes and can get a hearing with some big editor. I’m sure it’s just a question of pull. Some of the things that get into the magazines sound like they had been written by the editor’s friends or relatives or somebody whom they didn’t want to hurt their feelings. And Tom really can write!

I wish I could remember that poem of his I found. I memorized it once, but⁠—wait! I believe I can still say it! Hush, Tommie! What hurt will it do anybody? Let me see; it goes:

I thought the sweetness of her song
Would ever, ever more belong
To me; I thought (O thought divine!)
My bird was really mine!

But promises are made, it seems,
Just to be broken. All my dreams
Fade out and leave me crushed, alone.
My bird, alas, has flown!

Isn’t that pretty. He wrote it four years ago. Why, Helen, you revoked! And, Tom, do you know that’s Scotch you’re drinking? You said⁠—Why, Tom!

Rhythm

This story is slightly immoral, but so, I guess, are all stories based on truth. It concerns, principally, Harry Hart, whose frankness and naturalness were the traits that endeared him to fellow members of the Friars’ Club and all red-blooded she-girls who met him in and out of show business. Music writers have never been noted for self-loathing and Harry was a refreshing exception to the general run. That was before Upsy Daisy began its year’s tenancy of the Casino.

You can judge what sort of person he was by listening in on a talk he had at the club one night with Sam Rose, lyricist of “Nora’s Nightie,” “Sheila’s Shirt” and a hundred popular songs. They were sitting alone at the table nearest the senile piano.

“Sam,” said Harry, “I was wondering if they’s a chance of you and I getting together.”

“What’s happened to Kane?” asked Sam.

“It’s off between he and I,” Harry replied. “That dame ruined him. I guess she married him to make an honest man of him. Anyways, he got so honest that I couldn’t stand it no more. You know how I am, Sam⁠—live and let live. I don’t question nobody’s ethics or whatever you call them, as long as they don’t question mine. We’re all trying to get along; that’s the way I look at it. At that, I’ve heard better lyrics than he wrote for those two rhythm numbers of mine in Lottie; in fact, between you and I, I thought he made a bum out of those two numbers. They sold like hymns, so I was really able to bear up when we reached the parting of the ways.

“But I’ll tell you the climax just to show you how silly a guy can get. You remember our Yes, Yes, Eulalie. Well, they was a spot for a swell love duet near the end of the first act and I had a tune for it that was a smash. You know I’m not bragging when I say that; I don’t claim it as my tune, but it was and is a smash. I mean the ‘Catch Me’ number.”

“I’ll say it’s a smash!” agreed Sam.

“But a smash in spite of the words,” said Harry.

“You’re right,” said Sam.

“Well, the first time I played this tune for him, he went nuts over it and I gave him a lead sheet and he showed it to his wife. It seems she plays piano a little and she played this melody and she told him I had stole it from some opera; she thought it was Gioconda, but she wasn’t sure. So the next day Kane spoke to me about it and I told him it wasn’t Gioconda; it was Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix. Well, he said he didn’t feel like it was right to work on a melody that had been swiped from somewhere. So I said, ‘Ain’t it kind of late for you to be having all those scruples?’ So he said, ‘Maybe it is, but better late than never.’ So I said, ‘Listen, Benny⁠—this is your wife talking, not you.’ And he said, ‘Let’s leave her out of this,’ and I said, ‘I wished to heaven we could.’

“I said, ‘Benny, you’ll admit that’s a pretty melody,’ and he said yes, he admitted it. So I said: ‘Well, how many of the dumbbells that goes to our shows has ever heard Linda di Chamounix or ever will hear it? When I put this melody in our troupe I’m doing a million people a favor; I’m giving them a chance to hear a beautiful piece of music that they wouldn’t never hear otherwise. Not only that, but they’ll hear it at its best because I’ve improved it.’ So Benny said, ‘The first four bars is exactly the same and that’s where people will notice.’

“So then I said: ‘Now listen here, Benny⁠—up to the present you haven’t never criticized my music and I haven’t criticized your lyrics. But now you say I’m a tune thief. I don’t deny it, but if I wasn’t, you’d of had a sweet time making a living for yourself, let alone get married. However, laying that to one side, I was over to my sister’s house the other night and she had a soprano singer there and she sung a song something about “I love you, I love you; ’tis all my heart can say.” It was a mighty pretty song and it come out about twenty or thirty years ago.’

“So then Benny said, ‘What of it?’ So I said, ‘Just this: I can recall four or five lyrics of yours where “I love you” comes in and I bet you’ve used the words “heart” and “say” and “all” at least twice apiece during your remarkable career as a song writer. Well, did you make those words up or did you hear them somewhere?’ That’s what I said to him and of course he was stopped. But his ethics was ravaged just the same and it was understood we’d split up right after Eulalie. And as I say, his words wasn’t no help to my Donizetti number; they’d of slayed it if it could of been slayed.”

“Well?” said Sam.

“Well,” said Harry, “Conrad Green wired me yesterday to come and see him, so I was up there today. He’s so dumb that he thinks I’m better than Friml. And he’s got a book by Jack Prendergast that he wanted Kane and I to work on. So I told him I wouldn’t work with Kane and he said to get who I wanted. So that’s why I gave you a ring.”

“It sounds good to me,” said Sam. “How is the book?”

“I only skimmed it through, but I guess it’s all right. It’s based on ‘Cinderella,’ so what with that idear combined with your lyrics and my tunes, it looks like we ought to give the public a novelty at least.”

“Have you got any new tunes?”

“New?” Hart laughed. “I’m dirty with them.” He sat down at the piano. “Get this rhythm number. If it ain’t a smash, I’m Gatti-Casazza!”

He played it, beautifully, first in F sharp⁠—a catchy refrain that seemed to be waltz time in the right hand and two-four in the left.

“It’s pretty down here, too,” he said, and played it again, just as surely, in B natural, a key whose mere mention is henbane to the average pianist.

“A wow!” enthused Sam Rose. “What is it?”

“Don’t you know?”

“The Volga boat song.”

“No,” said Hart. “It’s part of Aida’s number when she finds out the fella is going to war. And nobody that comes to our shows will spot it except maybe Deems Taylor and Alma Gluck.”

“It’s so pretty,” said Sam, “that it’s a wonder it never goes popular.”

“The answer is that Verdi didn’t know rhythm!” said Hart.

Or go back and observe our hero at the Bucks’ house on Long Island. Several of the boys and girls were there and thrilled to hear that Harry Hart was coming. He hardly had time to taste his first cocktail before they were after him to play something.

“Something of your own!” pleaded the enraptured Helen Morse.

“If you mean something I made up,” he replied with engaging frankness, “why, that’s impossible; not exactly impossible, but it would be the homeliest tune you ever listened to. However, my name is signed to some mighty pretty things and I’ll play you one or two of those.”

Thus, without the conventional show of reluctance, Harry played the two “rhythm numbers” and the love-song that were making Conrad Green’s Upsy Daisy the hit of the season. And he was starting in on another, a thing his informal audience did not recognize, when he overheard his hostess introducing somebody to Mr. Rudolph Friml.

“Good night!” exclaimed Hart. “Let somebody play that can play!” And he resigned his seat at the piano to the newcomer and moved to a far corner of the room.

“I hope Friml didn’t hear me,” he confided to a Miss Silloh. “I was playing a thing he wrote himself and letting you people believe it was mine.”

Or catch him in the old days at a football game with Rita Marlowe of Goldwyn. One of the college bands was playing “Yes, Sir! That’s My Baby!”

“Walter Donaldson. There’s the boy that can write the hits!” said Hart.

“Just as if you couldn’t!” said his companion.

“I don’t class with him,” replied her modest escort.

Later on, Rita remarked that he must have been recognized by people in the crowd. Many had stared.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, girlie,” he said. “They’re staring at you, not me.”

Still later, on the way home from the game, he told her he had saved over $25,000 and expected to average at least $40,000 a year income while his vogue lasted.

“I’m good as long as I don’t run out of pretty tunes,” he said, “and they’s no reason why I should with all those old masters to draw from. I’m telling you my financial status because⁠—well, I guess you know why.”

Rita did know, and it was the general opinion, shared by the two principals, that she and Harry were engaged.

When Upsy Daisy had been running two months and its hit numbers were being sung, played, and whistled almost to cloyment, Hart was discovered by Spencer Deal. That he was the pioneer in a new American jazz, that his rhythms would revolutionize our music⁠—these things and many more were set forth by Deal in a four-thousand-word article called “Harry Hart, Harbinger,” printed by the erudite Webster’s Weekly. And Harry ate it up, though some of the words nearly choked him.

Interesting people were wont to grace Peggy Leech’s drawing-room on Sunday afternoons. Max Reinhardt had been there. Reinald Werrenrath had been there. So had Heifetz and Jeritza and Michael Arlen, and Noel Coward and Dudley Malone. And Charlie Chaplin, and Gene Tunney. In fact, Peggy’s Sunday afternoons could be spoken of as salons and her apartment as a hotbed of culture.

It was to Peggy’s that Spencer Deal escorted Hart a few weeks after the appearance of the article in Webster’s. Deal, in presenting him, announced that he was at work on a “blue” symphony that would make George Gershwin’s ultra rhythms and near dissonants sound like the doxology. “Oh!” exclaimed pretty Myra Hampton. “Will he play some of it for us?”

“Play, play, play!” said Hart querulously. “Don’t you think I ever want a rest! Last night it was a party at Broun’s and they kept after me and wouldn’t take ‘No’ and finally I played just as rotten as I could, to learn them a lesson. But they didn’t even know it was rotten. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m an actress,” confessed the embarrassed young lady.

“Well, would you like it if, every time you went anywhere socially, people asked you to act?”

“Yes,” she answered, but he had moved away.

He seemed to be seeking seclusion; sat down as far as possible from the crowd and looked hurt. He accepted a highball proffered by his hostess, but neglected to thank her. Not a bit discouraged, she brought him Signor Parelli of the Metropolitan.

“Mr. Hart,” she said, “this is Mr. Parelli, one of the Metropolitan’s conductors.”

“Yay?” said Hart.

“Perhaps some day Mr. Parelli will conduct one of your operas.”

“I hope so,” said the polite Parelli.

“Do you?” said Hart. “Well, if I ever write an opera, I’ll conduct it myself, or at least I won’t take no chance of having it ruined by a foreigner.”

The late war increased people’s capacity for punishment and in about twenty minutes Peggy’s guests began to act as if they would live in spite of Harry’s refusal to perform. In fact, one of them, Roy Lattimer, full of Scotch courage and not so full of musical ability, went to the piano himself and began to play.

“Began” is all, for he had not completed four bars before Hart plunged across the room and jostled him off the bench.

“I hope you don’t call yourself a pianist!” he said, pronouncing it as if it meant a cultivator of, or dealer in, peonies. And for two hours, during which everybody but Spencer Deal and the unfortunate hostess walked out on him, Harry played and played and played. Nor in all that time did he play anything by Kern, Gershwin, Stephen Jones, or Isham Jones, Samuels, Youmans, Friml, Stamper, Tours, Berlin, Tierney, Hubbell, Hein, or Gitz-Rice.

It was during this epoch that Harry had occasion one day to walk up Fifth Avenue from Forty-fifth Street to the Plaza. He noticed that almost everyone he passed on the line of march gazed at him intently. He recalled that his picture had been in two rotogravure sections the previous Sunday. It must have been a better likeness than he had thought.

New York was burning soft coal that winter and when Hart arrived in the Plaza washroom he discovered a smudge on the left side of his upper lip. It made him look as if he had had a mustache, had decided to get it removed and then had changed his mind when the barber was half through.

Harry’s date at the Plaza was with Rita Marlowe. He had put it off as long as he could. If the girl had any pride or sense, she’d have taken a hint. Why should he waste his time on a second-rate picture actress when he was hobnobbing with women like Elinor Deal and Thelma Warren and was promised an introduction to Mrs. Wallace Gerard? Girls ought to know that when a fella who has been taking them out three and four times a week and giving them a ring every morning, night and noon between whiles⁠—they ought to know that when a fella stops calling them up and taking them out and won’t even talk to them when they call up, there is only one possible answer. Yet this dame insists on you meeting her and probably having a scene. Well, she’ll get a scene. No, she won’t. No use being brutal. Just make it apparent in a nice way that things ain’t like they used to be and get it over as quick as possible.

“Where can we go?” asked Rita. “I mean, to talk.”

“Nowheres that’ll take much time,” said Harry. “I’ve got a date with Paul Whiteman to look over part of my symphony.”

“I don’t want to interrupt your work,” said Rita. “Maybe it would be better if you came up to the house tonight.”

“I can’t tonight,” he told her.

“When can you?”

“I’ll give you a ring. It’s hard to get away. You see⁠—”

“I think I do,” said Rita, and left him.

“About time,” said Harry to himself.

His symphony went over fairly “big.” The critics seemed less impressed than with the modern compositions of Gershwin and Deems Taylor. “But then,” Harry reflected, “Gershwin was ahead of me and of course Taylor has friends on the paper.”

A party instigated by Spencer Deal followed the concert and Harry met Mrs. Wallace Gerard, who took a great interest in young composers and had been known to give them substantial aid. Hart accepted an invitation to play to her at her Park Avenue apartment. He made the mistake of thinking she wanted to be petted, not played to, and his first visit was his last.

He had been engaged by Conrad Green to do the music for a new show, with a book by Guy Bolton. He balked at working again with Sam Rose, whose lyrics were hopelessly proletarian. Green told him to pick his own lyricist and Harry chose Spencer Deal. The result of the collaboration was a score that required a new signature at the beginning of each bar, and a collection of six-syllable rhymes that has as much chance of being unriddled, let alone sung, by chorus girls as a pandect on biotaxy by Ernest Boyd.

“Terrible!” was Green’s comment on advice of his musical adviser, Frank Tours.

“You’re a fine judge!” said Hart. “But it don’t make no difference what you think. Our contract with you is to write music and lyrics for this show and that’s what we’ve done. If you don’t like it, you can talk to my lawyer.”

“Your lawyer is probably one of mine, too,” replied Green. “He must be if he practises in New York. But that is neither here or there. If you think you can compel me to accept a score which Tours tells me that if it was orchestrated, Stokowski himself couldn’t even read the triangle part, to say nothing of lyrics which you would have to ring up every night at seven o’clock to get the words in the opening chorus all pronounced in time for Bayside people to catch the one-twenty train⁠—well, Hart, go along home now, because you and I are going to see each other in court every day for the next forty years.”

A year or so later, Harry’s total cash on hand and in bank amounted to $214.60, including the $56 he had cleaned up on the sale of sheet music and mechanical records of his symphony. He read in the Sunday papers that Otto Harbach had undertaken a book for Willis Merwin and the latter was looking around for a composer. Merwin was one of the younger producers and had been a pal of Harry’s at the Friars’. Hart sought him there. He found Merwin and came to the point at once.

“It’s too late,” said the young entrepreneur. “I did consider you at first, but⁠—well, I didn’t think you were interested now in anything short of oratorio. The stuff you used to write would have been great, but this piece couldn’t stand the ponderous junk you’ve been turning out lately. It needs light treatment and I’ve signed Donaldson and Gus Kahn.”

“Maybe I could interpolate⁠—” Harry began.

“I don’t believe so,” Merwin interrupted. “I don’t recall a spot where we could use either a fugue or a dirge.”

On his way out, Hart saw Benny Kane, his collaborator of other years. Benny made as if to get up and greet him, but changed his mind and sank back in his sequestered chair.

“He don’t look as cocky as he used to,” thought Harry, and wished that Kane had been more cordial. “What I’ll have to do is turn out a hit song, just to tide me over. Of course I can write the words myself, but Benny had good idears once in a while.”

Hart stopped in at his old publishers’ where, in the halcyon days, he had been as welcome as more beer at the Pastry Cooks’ Ball. He had left them for a more esthetic firm at the suggestion of Spencer Deal.

“Well, Harry,” said Max Wise, one of the partners, “you’re quite a stranger. We don’t hear much of you lately.”

“Maybe you will again,” said Hart. “What would you say if I was to write another smash?”

“I’d say,” replied Wise, “that it wasn’t any too soon.”

“How would you like to have me back here?”

“With a smash, yes. Go get one and you’ll find the door wide open. Who are you working with?”

“I haven’t nobody.”

“You could do a lot worse,” said Wise, “than team up again with Benny Kane. You and him parting company was like separating Baltimore and Ohio or pork and beans.”

“He hasn’t done nothing since he left me,” said Hart.

“No,” replied Wise, “but you can’t hardly claim to have been glutting the country with sensations yourself!”

Hart went back to his hotel and wished there was no such thing as pride. He’d like to give Benny a ring.

He answered the telephone and recognized Benny’s voice.

“I seen you at the Friars’ today,” said Benny, “and it reminded me of an idear. Where could we get together?”

“At the club,” Harry replied. “I’ll be there in a half-hour.”

“I was thinking,” said Benny, when they were seated at the table near the piano, “that nobody has wrote a rhythm song lately about ‘I love you’; that is, not in the last two or three months. And one time you was telling me about being over to your sister’s and they was a soprano there that sung a song that went ‘I love you, I love you; ’tis all my heart can say.’ ”

“What of it?”

“Well,” said Benny, “let’s take that song and I’ll just fix up the words a little and you can take the tune and put it into your rhythm and we’re all set. That is, if the tune’s OK. What is it like?”

“Oh, ‘Arcady’ and ‘Marcheta’ and maybe that ‘Buzz Around’ song of Dave Stamper’s. But then, what ain’t?”

“Well, let’s go to it.”

“Where is your ethics?”

“Listen,” said Benny Kane⁠—“I and Rae was talking this afternoon, and we didn’t disgust ethics. She was just saying she thought that all God’s children had shoes except her.”

“All right,” said Hart. “I can remember enough of the tune. But I’ll look the song up tomorrow and give it to you and you can rewrite the words.”

“Fine! And now how about putting on the feed bag?”

“No,” said Harry. “I promised to call up a dame.”

Whereupon he kept his ancient promise.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” said Rita at the other end of the wire, “imagining a girl would wait for you this long. And I’d say ‘No’ and say it good and loud, except that my piano has just been tuned and you’ve never played me your symphony.”

“I ain’t going to, neither,” said Harry. “But I want to try out a new rhythm number that ought to be a smash. It starts off ‘I love you, I love you.’ ”

“It sounds wonderful!” said Rita.

Travelogue

They met for the first time at luncheon in the diner of the westbound limited that had left Chicago the night before. The girls, it turned out, were Hazel Dignan and her friend Mildred Orr. The man was Dan Chapman.

He it was who broke the ice by asking if they minded riding backwards. It was Hazel who answered. She was a seasoned traveler and knew how to talk to strangers. Mildred had been hardly anywhere and had little to say, even when she knew people.

“Not at all,” was Hazel’s reply to his polite query. “I’m so used to trains that I believe I could ride on top of them and not be uncomfortable.”

“Imagine,” put in Mildred, “riding on top of a train!”

“Many’s the time I’ve done it!” said their new acquaintance. “Freight-trains, though; not passenger-trains. And it was when I was a kid.”

“I don’t see how you dared,” said Mildred.

“I guess I was a kind of a reckless, wild kid,” he said. “It’s a wonder I didn’t get killed, the chances I took. Some kids takes lots of chances; that is, boys.”

“Girls do, too,” said Hazel quickly. “Girls take just as many chances as boys.”

“Oh, no, Hazel!” remonstrated her friend, and received an approving look from the male.

“Where are you headed for?” he asked.

“Frisco first and then Los Angeles,” Hazel replied.

“Listen⁠—let me give you a tip. Don’t say ‘Frisco’ in front of them native sons. They don’t like that nickname.”

“I should worry what they like and don’t like!” said Hazel, rather snootily, Mildred thought.

“This your first trip out there?” Chapman inquired.

“No,” Hazel answered to Mildred’s surprise, for the purpose of the journey, she had been led to believe, was to give Hazel a glimpse of one of the few parts of America that she had never visited.

“How long since you was out there last?” asked Chapman.

“Let’s see,” said Hazel. “It’s been⁠—” She was embarrassed by Mildred’s wondering look. “I don’t know exactly. I’ve forgotten.”

“This is about my fiftieth trip,” said Chapman. “If you haven’t been⁠—”

“I like Florida better,” interrupted Hazel. “I generally go there in the winter.”

“ ‘Generally!’ ” thought Mildred, who had reliable information that the previous winter had been her friend’s first in the South.

“I used to go to Palm Beach every year,” said Chapman, “but that was before it got common. It seems to be that the people that goes to Florida now, well, they’re just riffraff.”

“The people that go to Tampa aren’t riffraff,” said Hazel. “I met some lovely people there last winter, especially one couple, the Babcocks. From Racine. They were perfectly lovely to me. We played Mah Jongg nearly every evening. They wanted me to come up and visit them in Racine this last summer, but something happened. Oh, yes; Sis’s nurse got married. She was a Swedish girl. Just perfect! And Sis had absolute confidence in her.

“I always say that when a Swede is good, they’re good! Now she’s got a young girl about nineteen that’s wild about movie actors and so absentminded that Sis is scared to death she’ll give Junior coffee and drink his milk herself. Just crazy! Jennie, her name is. So I didn’t get up to Racine.”

“Ever been out to Yellowstone?”

“Oh, isn’t it wonderful!” responded Hazel. “Isn’t Old Faithful just fascinating! You see,” she explained to Mildred, “It’s one of the geysers and they call it ‘Old Faithful’ because it spouts every hour and ten minutes or something, just as regular as clockwork. Wonderful! And the different falls and canyons! Wonderful! And what a wonderful view from Inspiration Point!”

“Ever been to the Thousand Islands?” asked Chapman.

“Wonderful! And I was going up there again last summer with a girlfriend of mine, Bess Eldridge. She was engaged to a man named Harley Bateman. A wonderful fellow when he wasn’t drinking, but when he’d had a few drinks, he was just terrible. So Bess and I were in Chicago and we went to a show; Eddie Cantor. It was the first time I ever saw him when he wasn’t blacked up. Well, we were walking out of the theater that night and who should we run into but Harley Bateman, terribly boiled, and a girl from Elkhart, Joan Killian. So Bess broke off her engagement and last fall she married a man named Wannop who’s interested in flour-mills or something up in Minneapolis. So I didn’t get to the Thousand Islands after all. That is, a second time.

“But I always think that if a person hasn’t taken that trip, they haven’t seen anything. And Bess would have certainly enjoyed it. She used to bite her fingernails till she didn’t have any left. But she married this man from Minneapolis.”

After luncheon the three moved to the observation-car and made a brave effort to be interested in what passes for scenery in Nebraska.

For no possible reason, it reminded Chapman of Northern Michigan.

“Have you ever been up in Northern Michigan?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Hazel. “I visited a week once in Petoskey. Some friends of mine named Gilbert. They had their own launch. Ina Gilbert⁠—that’s Mrs. Gilbert⁠—her hair used to be the loveliest thing in the world and she had typhoid or something and lost nearly all of it. So we played Mah Jongg every afternoon and evening.”

“I mean way up,” said Chapman. “Mackinac Island and the Upper Peninsula, the Copper Country.”

“Oh, wonderful!” said Hazel. “Calumet and Houghton and Hancock! Wonderful! And the boat trip is wonderful! Though I guess I was about the only one that thought so. Everybody else was sick. The captain said it was the roughest trip he’d ever been on, and he had lived on the Great Lakes for forty years. And another time I went across from Chicago to St. Joseph. But that wasn’t so rough. We visited the House of David in Benton Harbor. They wear long beards. We were almost in hysterics, Marjorie Trumbull and I. But the time I went to Petoskey, I went alone.”

“You see a lot of Finns up in that Northern Peninsula,” remarked Chapman.

“Yes, and Sis had a Finnish maid once. She couldn’t hardly understand a word of English. She was a Finn. Sis finally had to let her go. Now she has an Irish girl for a maid and Jennie takes care of the kiddies. Poor little Dickie, my nephew, he’s nearly seven and of course he’s lost all his front teeth. He looks terrible! Teeth do make such a difference! My friends always say they envy me my teeth.”

“Talking about teeth,” said Chapman, “you see this?” He opened his mouth and pointed to a large, dark vacancy where once had dwelt a molar. “I had that one pulled in Milwaukee the day before yesterday. The fella said I better take gas, but I said no. So he said, ‘Well, you must be pretty game.’ I said I faced German shellfire for sixteen months and I guess I ain’t going to be a-scared of a little forceps. Well, he said afterwards that it was one of the toughest teeth he ever pulled. The roots were the size of your little finger. And the tooth itself was full of⁠—”

“I only had one tooth pulled in my life,” said Hazel. “I’d been suffering from rheumatism and somebody suggested that it might be from a tooth, but I couldn’t believe it at first because my teeth are so perfect. But I hadn’t slept in months on account of these pains in my arms and limbs. So finally, just to make sure, I went to a dentist, old Doctor Platt, and he pulled this tooth”⁠—she showed him where it had been⁠—“and my rheumatism disappeared just like that. It was terrible not to be able to sleep because I generally sleep like a log. And I do now, since I got my tooth pulled.”

“I don’t sleep very good on trains,” said Chapman.

“Oh, I do. Probably on account of being so used to it. I slept just beautifully last night. Mildred here insisted on taking the upper. She said if she was where she could look out the window, she never would go to sleep. Personally, I’d just as lief have the upper. I don’t mind it a bit. I like it really better. But this is Mildred’s first long trip and I thought she ought to have her choice. We tried to get a compartment or drawing-room, but they were all gone. Sis and I had a compartment the time we went to New Orleans. I slept in the upper.”

Mildred wished she had gone places so she could take part in the conversation. Mr. Chapman must think she was terribly dumb.

She had nothing to talk about that people would care to hear, and it was kind of hard to keep awake when you weren’t talking yourself, even with such interesting, traveled people to listen to as Mr. Chapman and Hazel. Mr. Chapman was a dandy-looking man and it was terrible to have to appear dumb in front of him.

But after all, she was dumb and Hazel’s erudition made her seem all the dumber. No wonder their new acquaintance had scarcely looked at her since luncheon.

“Have you ever been to San Antone?” Chapman asked his companions.

“Isn’t it wonderful!” Hazel exclaimed. “The Alamo! Wonderful! And those dirty Mexicans! And Salt Lake City is wonderful, too! That temple! And swimming in the lake itself is one of the most fascinating experiences! You know, Mildred, the water is so salt that you can’t sink in it. You just lie right on top of it like it was a floor. You can’t sink. And another wonderful place is Lake Placid. I was going back there last summer with Bess Eldridge, but she was engaged at the time to Harley Bateman, an awfully nice boy when he wasn’t drinking, but perfectly terrible when he’d had a few drinks. He went to college with my brother, to Michigan. Harley tried for the football nine, but the coach hated him. His father was a druggist and owned the first automobile in Berrien County. So we didn’t go to Placid last summer, but I’m going next summer sure. And it’s wonderful in winter, too!”

“It feels funny, where that tooth was,” said Chapman.

“Outside of one experience,” said Hazel, “I’ve never had any trouble with my teeth. I’d been suffering from rheumatism and somebody suggested it might be a bad tooth, but I couldn’t believe it because my teeth are perfect⁠—”

“This was all shot to pieces,” said Chapman.

“But my friends always say they envy me my teeth; my teeth and my complexion. I try to keep my mouth clean and my face clean, and I guess that’s the answer. But it’s hard to keep clean on a train.”

“Where are you going? Out to the coast?”

“Yes. Frisco and then Los Angeles.”

“Don’t call it Frisco in front of them Californians. They don’t like their city to be called Frisco. Is this your first trip out there?”

“No. I was there a good many years ago.”

She turned to Mildred.

“You didn’t know that, did you?” she said. But Mildred was asleep. “Poor Mildred! She’s worn out. She isn’t used to traveling. She’s quite a pretty girl, don’t you think so?”

“Very pretty!”

“Maybe not exactly pretty,” said her friend, “but kind of sweet-looking, like a baby. You’d think all the men would be crazy about her, but they aren’t. Lots of people don’t even think she’s pretty and I suppose you can’t be really pretty unless you have more expression in your face than she’s got. Poor Mildred hasn’t had many advantages.”

“At this time of year, I’d rather be in Atlantic City than San Francisco.”

“Oh, isn’t Atlantic City wonderful! There’s only one Atlantic City! And I really like it better in the winter. Nobody but nice people go there in the winter. In the summertime it’s different. I’m no snob, but I don’t mind saying that I hate to mix up with some people a person has to meet at these resort places. Terrible! Two years ago I went to Atlantic City with Bess Eldridge. Like a fool I left it to her to make the reservations and she wired the Traymore, she says, but they didn’t have anything for us. We tried the Ritz and the Ambassador and everywhere else, but we couldn’t get in anywhere, that is, anywhere a person would want to stay. Bess was engaged to Harley Bateman at the time. Now she’s married a man named Wannop from Minneapolis. But this time I speak of, we went to Philadelphia and stayed all night with my aunt and we had scrapple and liver and bacon for breakfast. Harley was a dandy boy when he wasn’t drinking. But give me Atlantic City any time of the year!”

“I’ve got to send a telegram at Grand Island.”

“Oh, if I sent one from there, when would it get to Elkhart?”

“Tonight or tomorrow morning.”

“I want to wire my sister.”

“Well, wire her from Grand Island.”

“I think I’ll wait and wire her from Frisco.”

“But we won’t be in San Francisco for over two days yet.”

“But we change time before then, don’t we?”

“Yes, we change at North Platte.”

“Then I think I’ll wire her from Grand Island.”

“Your sister, you say?”

“Yes. My sister Lucy. She married Jack Kingston, the Kingston tire people.”

“It certainly feels empty, where that tooth was,” said Chapman.

As the train pulled out of North Platte, later in the afternoon, Chapman rejoined the two girls in the observation-car.

“Now, girls,” he said, “you can set your watches back an hour. We change time here. We were Central time and now we’re Mountain time.”

“Mountain time,” repeated Mildred. “I suppose that’s where the expression started, ‘it’s high time.’ ”

Hazel and Chapman looked blank and Mildred blushed. She felt she had made a mistake saying anything at all. She opened her book, “Carlyle on Cromwell and Others,” which Rev. N. L. Veach had given her for Christmas.

“Have you ever been to Washington?” Chapman asked Hazel.

“Oh, isn’t it beautiful! ‘The City of Magnificent Distances.’ Wonderful! I was there two years ago with Bess Eldridge. We were going to meet the President, but something happened. Oh, yes; Bess got a wire from Harley Bateman that he was going to get in that afternoon. And he never came at all. He was awfully nice when he wasn’t drinking, and just terrible when he drank. Bess broke off her engagement to him and married a man named Wannop, who owned some flour-mills in Minneapolis. She was a dandy girl, but bit her fingernails just terribly. So we didn’t get to see the President, but we sat through two or three sessions of the Senate and House. Do you see how they ever get anything done? And we went to Rock Creek Park and Mount Vernon and Arlington Cemetery and Keith’s.

“Moran and Mack were there; you know, the blackface comedians. Moran, or maybe it’s Mack, whichever is the little one, he says to the other⁠—I’ve forgotten just how it went, but they were simply screaming and I thought Bess and I would be put out. We just howled. And the last night we were there we saw Thomas Meighan in Old Home Week. Wonderful! Harley Bateman knows Thomas Meighan personally. He’s got a beautiful home out on Long Island. He invited Harley out there to dinner one night, but something happened. Oh, yes; Harley lost a front tooth once and he had a false one put in and this day he ate some caramels and the tooth came out⁠—”

“Look here,” said Chapman, opening his mouth and pointing in it. “I got that one pulled in Milwaukee⁠—”

“Harley was a perfect peach when he was sober, but terrible when⁠—”

It occurred to Mildred that her presence might be embarrassing. Here were evidently kindred spirits, two people who had been everywhere and seen everything. But of course they couldn’t talk anything but geography and dentistry before her.

“I think I’ll go to our car and take a little nap,” she said.

“Oh, don’t⁠—” began Chapman surprisingly, but stopped there.

She was gone and the kindred spirits were alone.

“I suppose,” said Chapman, “you’ve been to Lake Louise.”

“Wonderful!” Hazel responded. “Did you ever see anything as pretty in your life? They talk about the lakes of Ireland and Scotland and Switzerland, but I don’t believe they can compare with Lake Louise. I was there with Bess Eldridge just before she got engaged to Harley Bateman. He was⁠—”

“Your friend’s a mighty pretty girl.”

“I suppose some people would think her pretty. It’s a matter of individual taste.”

“Very quiet, isn’t she?”

“Poor Mildred hasn’t much to say. You see, she’s never had any advantages and there’s really nothing she can talk about. But what was I saying? Oh, yes; about Harley Bateman⁠—”

“I think that’s a good idea, taking a little nap. I believe I’ll try it, too.”

Hazel and Chapman lunched alone next day.

“I’m afraid Mildred is a little train sick,” said Hazel. “She says she is all right but just isn’t hungry. I guess the trip has been a little too much for her. You see, this is the first time she’s ever been anywhere at all.”

The fact was that Mildred did not like to be stared at and Chapman had stared at her all through dinner the night before, stared at her, she thought, as if she were a curiosity, as if he doubted that one so dumb could be real. She liked him, too, and it would have been so nice if she had been more like Hazel, never at a loss for something to say and able to interest him in her conversation.

“We’ll be in Ogden in half an hour,” said Chapman. “We stay there twenty-five minutes. That ought to give your friend a chance to get over whatever ails her. She should get out and walk around and get some air.”

“You seem quite interested in Mildred,” Hazel said.

“She’s a mighty attractive girl,” he replied. “And besides, I feel sorry for anybody that⁠—”

“Men don’t usually find her attractive. She’s pretty in a way, but it’s a kind of a babyish face.”

“I don’t think so at all⁠—”

“We change time here again, don’t we?”

“Yes. Another hour back. We’ve been on Mountain time and now we go to Pacific time. Some people say it’s bad for a watch to turn it backwards, but it never seemed to hurt mine any. This watch⁠—”

“I bought this watch of mine in New York,” said Hazel. “It was about two years ago, the last time Bess Eldridge and I went East. Let’s see; was that before or after she broke her engagement to Harley Bateman? It was before. But Harley said he knew the manager of the Belmont and he would wire him and get us a good room. Well, of course, he forgot to wire, so we finally got into the Pennsylvania, Room 1012. No, Room 1014. It was some people from Pittsburgh, a Mr. and Mrs. Bradbury, in 1012. He was lame. Bess wanted to see Jeanne Eagels in Rain and we tried to get tickets at the newsstand, but they said fifteenth row. We finally went to the Palace that night. Ina Claire was on the bill. So the next morning we came down to breakfast and who should we run into but Dave Homan! We’d met him at French Lick in the spring. Isn’t French Lick wonderful!

“Well, Dave insisted on ‘showing’ us New York, like we didn’t know it backwards. But we did have a dandy time. Dave kept us in hysterics. I remember he took us to the Aquarium and of course a lot of other people were in there and Dave gave one of the attendants a quarter to page Mr. Fish. I thought they’d put us out, we screamed so! Dave asked me to marry him once, just jokingly, and I told him I wouldn’t think of it because I had heard it made people fat to laugh and if I lived with him I would soon have to buy my clothes from a tentmaker. Dave said we would make a great pair as we both have such a keen sense of humor. Honestly, I wouldn’t give up my sense of humor for all the money in the world. I don’t see how people can live without a sense of humor. Mildred, for instance; she never sees the funny side of things unless you make her a diagram and even then she looks at you like she thought you were deranged.

“But I was telling you about Dave Homan. We were talking along about one thing and another and I happened to mention Harley Bateman and Dave said, ‘Harley Bateman! Do you know Harley Bateman?’ and Bess and I smiled at each other and I said I guessed we did. Well, it seems that Dave and Harley had been at Atlantic City together at a Lions’ convention or something and they had some drinks and Dave had a terrible time keeping a policeman from locking Harley up. He’s just as different when he’s drinking as day and night. Dave got him out of it all right and they met again later on, in Chicago. Or was it Duluth? So the next day was Wednesday and Dave asked Bess and I to go to the matinée of Rain, but Bess had an engagement with a dentist⁠—”

“Do you see this?” interrupted Chapman, opening his mouth wide.

“So Dave took me alone and he said he had been hoping for that chance right along. He said three was a crowd. I believe if I had given him any encouragement⁠—But the man I marry must be something more than clever and witty. I like men that have been around and seen things and studied human nature and have a background. Of course they must see the funny side, too. That’s the trouble with Dave Homan⁠—he can’t be serious. Harley Bateman is twice as much of a man if he wouldn’t drink. It’s like two different people when he drinks. He’s terrible! Bess Eldridge was engaged to him, but she broke it off after we happened to see him in Chicago one time with Joan Killian, from Elkhart. Bess is married now, to a man named Wannop, a flour man from Minneapolis. So after the matinée we met Bess. She’d been to the dentist⁠—”

“Three days ago, in Milwaukee⁠—” began Chapman.

“So the next afternoon we were taking the boat for Boston. I’d been to Boston before, of course, but never by boat. Harley Bateman told us it was a dandy trip, so we decided to try it. Well, we left New York at five o’clock and Bess and I were up on deck when somebody came up behind us and put their hands over my eyes and said, ‘Guess who it is?’ Well, I couldn’t have guessed in a hundred years. It was Clint Poole from South Bend. Imagine! Harley Bateman’s brother-in-law!”

“Here’s Ogden,” said Chapman as the train slowed down.

“Oh, and I’ve got to send Sis a telegram! My sister Lucy Kingston.”

“I think I’ll get out and get some air,” said Chapman, but he went first to the car where Mildred sat reading.

“Miss Mildred,” he said, “suppose you have breakfast with me early tomorrow morning. I’d like to show you the snow-sheds.”

“That would be wonderful!” said Mildred. “I’ll tell Hazel.”

“No,” said Chapman. “Please don’t tell Hazel. I’d like to show them to you alone.”

Well, even if Mildred had been used to trains, that remark would have interfered seriously with her night’s sleep.

Mildred found Chapman awaiting her in the diner next morning, an hour west of Truckee.

“Are those the snow-sheds you spoke of?”

“Yes,” he replied, “but we’ll talk about them later. First I want to ask you a few questions.”

“Ask me questions!” said Mildred. “Well, they’ll have to be simple ones or I won’t be able to answer them.”

“They’re simple enough,” said Chapman. “The first one is, do you know Harley Bateman?”

“I know of him, but I don’t know him.”

“Do you know Bess Eldridge?”

“Just to speak to; that’s all.”

“What other trips have you taken besides this?”

“None at all. This is really the first time I’ve ever been anywhere.”

“Has your friend ever been engaged?”

“Yes; twice. It was broken off both times.”

“I bet I know why. There was no place to take her on a honeymoon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing. Say, did I tell you about getting my tooth pulled in Milwaukee?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Mildred.

“Well, I had a terrible toothache. It was four days ago. And I thought there was no use fooling with it, so I went to a dentist and told him to pull it. He said I’d better take gas, but I wouldn’t. So he pulled it and it pretty near killed me, but I never batted an eye. He said it was one of the toughest teeth he’d ever seen; roots as big as your little finger. And the tooth itself full of poison.”

“How terrible! You must be awfully brave!”

“Look here, at the hole,” said Chapman, opening his mouth.

“Why, Mr. Chapman, it must have hurt horribly!”

“Call me Dan.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Well, listen⁠—are you going to be with Miss Hazel all the time you’re in San Francisco?”

“Why, no,” said Mildred. “Hazel is going to visit her aunt in Berkeley part of the time. And I’m going to stop at the Fairmont.”

“When is she going to Berkeley?”

“Next Tuesday, I think.”

“Can I phone you next Wednesday?”

“But Hazel will be gone then.”

“Yes, I know,” said Chapman, “but if you don’t mind, I’ll phone you just the same. Now about these snow-sheds⁠—”

I Can’t Breathe

July 12

I am staying here at the Inn for two weeks with my Uncle Nat and Aunt Jule and I think I will keep a kind of a diary while I am here to help pass the time and so I can have a record of things that happen though goodness knows there isn’t lightly to anything happen, that is anything exciting with Uncle Nat and Aunt Jule making the plans as they are both at least 35 years old and maybe older.

Dad and mother are abroad to be gone a month and me coming here is supposed to be a recompence for them not taking me with them. A fine recompence to be left with old people that come to a place like this to rest. Still it would be a heavenly place under different conditions, for instance if Walter were here, too. It would be heavenly if he were here, the very thought of it makes my heart stop.

I can’t stand it. I won’t think about it.

This is our first separation since we have been engaged, nearly 17 days. It will be 17 days tomorrow. And the hotel orchestra at dinner this evening played that old thing “Oh how I miss you tonight” and it seemed as if they must be playing it for my benefit though of course the person in that song is talking about how they miss their mother though of course I miss mother too, but a person gets used to missing their mother and it isn’t like Walter or the person you are engaged to.

But there won’t be any more seperations much longer, we are going to be married in December even if mother does laugh when I talk to her about it because she says I am crazy to even think of getting married at 18.

She got married herself when she was 18, but of course that was “different,” she wasn’t crazy like I am, she knew whom she was marrying. As if Walter were a policeman or a foreigner or something. And she says she was only engaged once while I have been engaged at least five times a year since I was 14, of course it really isn’t as bad as that and I have really only been really what I call engaged six times altogether, but is getting engaged my fault when they keep insisting and hammering at you and if you didn’t say yes they would never go home.

But it is different with Walter. I honestly believe if he had not asked me I would have asked him. Of course I wouldn’t have, but I would have died. And this is the first time I have ever been engaged to be really married. The other times when they talked about when should we get married I just laughed at them, but I hadn’t been engaged to Walter ten minutes when he brought up the subject of marriage and I didn’t laugh. I wouldn’t be engaged to him unless it was to be married. I couldn’t stand it.

Anyway mother may as well get used to the idea because it is “No Foolin’ ” this time and we have got our plans all made and I am going to be married at home and go out to California and Hollywood on our honeymoon. December, five months away. I can’t stand it. I can’t wait.

There were a couple of awfully nice looking boys sitting together alone in the dining-room tonight. One of them wasn’t so much, but the other was cute. And he⁠—

There’s the dance orchestra playing “Always,” what they played at the Biltmore the day I met Walter. “Not for just an hour not for just a day.” I can’t live. I can’t breathe.

July 13

This has been a much more exciting day than I expected under the circumstances. In the first place I got two long night letters, one from Walter and one from Gordon Flint. I don’t see how Walter ever had the nerve to send his, there was everything in it and it must have been horribly embarrassing for him while the telegraph operator was reading it over and counting the words to say nothing of embarrassing for the operator.

But the one from Gordon was a kind of a shock. He just got back from a trip around the world, left last December to go on it and got back yesterday and called up our house and Helga gave him my address, and his telegram, well it was nearly as bad as Walter’s. The trouble is that Gordon and I were engaged when he went away, or at least he thought so and he wrote to me right along all the time he was away and sent cables and things and for a while I answered his letters, but then I lost track of his itinery and couldn’t write to him anymore and when I got really engaged to Walter I couldn’t let Gordon know because I had no idea where he was besides not wanting to spoil his trip.

And now he still thinks we are engaged and he is going to call me up tomorrow from Chicago and how in the world can I explain things and get him to understand because he is really serious and I like him ever and ever so much and in lots of ways he is nicer than Walter, not really nicer but better looking and there is no comparison between their dancing. Walter simply can’t learn to dance, that is really dance. He says it is because he is flat footed, he says that as a joke, but it is true and I wish to heavens it wasn’t.

All forenoon I thought and thought and thought about what to say to Gordon when he calls up and finally I couldn’t stand thinking about it anymore and just made up my mind I wouldn’t think about it anymore. But I will tell the truth though it will kill me to hurt him.

I went down to lunch with Uncle Nat and Aunt Jule and they were going out to play golf this afternoon and were insisting that I go with them, but I told them I had a headache and then I had a terrible time getting them to go without me. I didn’t have a headache at all and just wanted to be alone to think about Walter and besides when you play with Uncle Nat he is always correcting your stance or your swing or something and always puts his hands on my arms or shoulders to show me the right way and I can’t stand it to have old men touch me, even if they are your uncle.

I finally got rid of them and I was sitting watching the tennis when that boy that I saw last night, the cute one, came and sat right next to me and of course I didn’t look at him and I was going to smoke a cigarette and found I had left my lighter upstairs and I started to get up and go after it when all of a sudden he was offering me his lighter and I couldn’t very well refuse it without being rude. So we got to talking and he is even cuter than he looks, the most original and wittiest person I believe I ever met and I haven’t laughed so much in I don’t know how long.

For one thing he asked me if I had heard Rockefeller’s song and I said no and he began singing “Oil alone.” Then he asked me if I knew the orange juice song and I told him no again and he said it was “Orange juice sorry you made me cry.” I was in hysterics before we had been together ten minutes.

His name is Frank Caswell and he has been out of Darthmouth a year and is 24 years old. That isn’t so terribly old, only two years older than Walter and three years older than Gordon. I hate the name Frank, but Caswell is all right and he is so cute.

He was out in California last winter and visited Hollywood and met everybody in the world and it is fascinating to listen to him. He met Norma Shearer and he said he thought she was the prettiest thing he had ever seen. What he said was “I did think she was the prettiest girl in the world, till today.” I was going to pretend I didn’t get it, but I finally told him to be sensible or I would never be able to believe anything he said.

Well, he wanted me to dance with him tonight after dinner and the next question was how to explain how we had met each other to Uncle Nat and Aunt Jule. Frank said he would fix that all right and sure enough he got himself introduced to Uncle Nat when Uncle Nat came in from golf and after dinner Uncle Nat introduced him to me and Aunt Jule too and we danced together all evening, that is not Aunt Jule. They went to bed, thank heavens.

He is a heavenly dancer, as good as Gordon. One dance we were dancing and for one of the encores the orchestra played “In a cottage small by a waterfall” and I simply couldn’t dance to it. I just stopped still and said “Listen, I can’t bear it, I can’t breathe” and poor Frank thought I was sick or something and I had to explain that that was the tune the orchestra played the night I sat at the next table to Jack Barrymore at Barney Gallant’s.

I made him sit out that encore and wouldn’t let him talk till they got through playing it. Then they played something else and I was all right again and Frank told me about meeting Jack Barrymore. Imagine meeting him. I couldn’t live.

I promised Aunt Jule I would go to bed at eleven and it is way past that now, but I am all ready for bed and have just been writing this. Tomorrow Gordon is going to call up and what will I say to him? I just won’t think about it.

July 14

Gordon called up this morning from Chicago and it was wonderful to hear his voice again though the connection was terrible. He asked me if I still loved him and I tried to tell him no, but I knew that would mean an explanation and the connection was so bad that I never could make him understand so I said yes, but I almost whispered it purposely, thinking he wouldn’t hear me, but he heard me all right and he said that made everything all right with the world. He said he thought I had stopped loving him because I had stopped writing.

I wish the connection had been decent and I could have told him how things were, but now it is terrible because he is planning to get to New York the day I get there and heaven knows what I will do because Walter will be there, too. I just won’t think about it.

Aunt Jule came in my room just after I was through talking to Gordon, thank heavens. The room was full of flowers. Walter had sent me some and so had Frank. I got another long night letter from Walter, just as silly as the first one. I wish he would say those things in letters instead of night letters so everybody in the world wouldn’t see them. Aunt Jule wanted me to read it aloud to her. I would have died.

While she was still in the room, Frank called up and asked me to play golf with him and I said all right and Aunt Jule said she was glad my headache was gone. She was trying to be funny.

I played golf with Frank this afternoon. He is a beautiful golfer and it is thrilling to watch him drive, his swing is so much more graceful than Walter’s. I asked him to watch me swing and tell me what was the matter with me, but he said he couldn’t look at anything but my face and there wasn’t anything the matter with that.

He told me the boy who was here with him had been called home and he was glad of it because I might have liked him, the other boy, better than himself. I told him that couldn’t be possible and he asked me if I really meant that and I said of course, but I smiled when I said it so he wouldn’t take it too seriously.

We danced again tonight and Uncle Nat and Aunt Jule sat with us a while and danced a couple of dances themselves, but they were really there to get better acquainted with Frank and see if he was all right for me to be with. I know they certainly couldn’t have enjoyed their own dancing, no old people really can enjoy it because they can’t really do anything.

They were favorably impressed with Frank I think, at least Aunt Jule didn’t say I must be in bed at eleven, but just not to stay up too late. I guess it is a big surprise to a girl’s parents and aunts and uncles to find out that the boys you go around with are all right, they always seem to think that if I seem to like somebody and the person pays a little attention to me, why he must be a convict or a policeman or a drunkard or something queer.

Frank had some more songs for me tonight. He asked me if I knew the asthma song and I said I didn’t and he said “Oh, you must know that. It goes yes, sir, asthma baby.” Then he told me about the underwear song, “I underwear my baby is tonight.” He keeps you in hysterics and yet he has his serious side, in fact he was awfully serious when he said good night to me and his eyes simply shown. I wish Walter were more like him in some ways, but I mustn’t think about that.

July 15

I simply can’t live and I know I’ll never sleep tonight. I am in a terrible predicament or rather I won’t know whether I really am or not till tomorrow and that is what makes it so terrible.

After we had danced two or three dances, Frank asked me to go for a ride with him and we went for a ride in his car and he had had some cocktails and during the ride he had some drinks out of a flask and finally he told me he loved me and I said not to be silly, but he said he was perfectly serious and he certainly acted that way. He asked me if I loved anybody else and I said yes and he asked if I didn’t love him more than anybody else and I said yes, but only because I thought he had probably had too much to drink and wouldn’t remember it anyway and the best thing to do was humor him under the circumstances.

Then all of a sudden he asked me when I could marry him and I said, just as a joke, that I couldn’t possibly marry him before December. He said that was a long time to wait, but I was certainly worth waiting for and he said a lot of other things and maybe I humored him a little too much, but that is just the trouble, I don’t know.

I was absolutely sure he was tight and would forget the whole thing, but that was early in the evening, and when we said good night he was a whole lot more sober than he had been and now I am not sure how it stands. If he doesn’t remember anything about it, of course I am all right. But if he does remember and if he took me seriously, I will simply have to tell him about Walter and maybe about Gordon, too. And it isn’t going to be easy. The suspense is what is maddening and I know I’ll never live through this night.

July 16

I can’t stand it, I can’t breathe, life is impossible. Frank remembered everything about last night and firmly believes we are engaged and going to be married in December. His people live in New York and he says he is going back when I do and have them meet me.

Of course it can’t go on and tomorrow I will tell him about Walter or Gordon or both of them. I know it is going to hurt him terribly, perhaps spoil his life and I would give anything in the world not to have had it happen. I hate so to hurt him because he is so nice besides being so cute and attractive.

He sent me the loveliest flowers this morning and called up at ten and wanted to know how soon he could see me and I hope the girl wasn’t listening in because the things he said were, well, like Walter’s night letters.

And that is another terrible thing, today I didn’t get a night letter from Walter, but there was a regular letter instead and I carried it around in my purse all this afternoon and evening and never remembered to read it till ten minutes ago when I came up in the room. Walter is worried because I have only sent him two telegrams and written him one letter since I have been here, he would be a lot more worried if he knew what has happened now, though of course it can’t make any difference because he is the one I am really engaged to be married to and the one I told mother I was going to marry in December and I wouldn’t dare tell her it was somebody else.

I met Frank for lunch and we went for a ride this afternoon and he was so much in love and so lovely to me that I simply did not have the heart to tell him the truth, I am surely going to tell him tomorrow and telling him today would have just meant one more day of unhappiness for both of us.

He said his people had plenty of money and his father had offered to take him into partnership and he might accept, but he thinks his true vocation is journalism with a view to eventually writing novels and if I was willing to undergo a few hardships just at first we would probably both be happier later on if he was doing something he really liked. I didn’t know what to say, but finally I said I wanted him to suit himself and money wasn’t everything.

He asked me where I would like to go on my honeymoon and I suppose I ought to have told him my honeymoon was all planned, that I was going to California, with Walter, but all I said was that I had always wanted to go to California and he was enthusiastic and said that is where we would surely go and he would take me to Hollywood and introduce me to all those wonderful people he met there last winter. It nearly takes my breath away to think of it, going there with someone who really knows people and has the entrée.

We danced again tonight, just two or three dances, and then went out and sat in the tennis-court, but I came upstairs early because Aunt Jule had acted kind of funny at dinner. And I wanted to be alone, too, and think, but the more I think the worse it gets.

Sometimes I wish I were dead, maybe that is the only solution and it would be best for everyone concerned. I will die if things keep on the way they have been. But of course tomorrow it will be all over, with Frank I mean, for I must tell him the truth no matter how much it hurts us both. Though I don’t care how much it hurts me. The thought of hurting him is what is driving me mad. I can’t bear it.

July 18

I have skipped a day. I was busy every minute of yesterday and so exhausted when I came upstairs that I was tempted to fall into bed with all my clothes on. First Gordon called me up from Chicago to remind me that he would be in New York the day I got there and that when he comes he wants me all to himself all the time and we can make plans for our wedding. The connection was bad again and I just couldn’t explain to him about Walter.

I had an engagement with Frank for lunch and just as we were going in another long distance call came, from Walter this time. He wanted to know why I haven’t written more letters and sent him more telegrams and asked me if I still loved him and of course I told him yes because I really do. Then he asked if I had met any men here and I told him I had met one, a friend of Uncle Nat’s. After all it was Uncle Nat who introduced me to Frank. He reminded me that he would be in New York on the 25th which is the day I expect to get home, and said he would have theater tickets for that night and we would go somewhere afterwards and dance.

Frank insisted on knowing who had kept me talking so long and I told him it was a boy I had known a long while, a very dear friend of mine and a friend of my family’s. Frank was jealous and kept asking questions till I thought I would go mad. He was so serious and kind of cross and gruff that I gave up the plan of telling him the truth till sometime when he is in better spirits.

I played golf with Frank in the afternoon and we took a ride last night and I wanted to get in early because I had promised both Walter and Gordon that I would write them long letters, but Frank wouldn’t bring me back to the Inn till I had named a definite date in December. I finally told him the 10th and he said all right if I was sure that wasn’t a Sunday. I said I would have to look it up, but as a matter of fact I know the 10th falls on a Friday because the date Walter and I have agreed on for our wedding is Saturday the 11th.

Today has just been the same thing over again, two more night letters, a long distance call from Chicago, golf and a ride with Frank, and the room full of flowers. But tomorrow I am going to tell Frank and I am going to write Gordon a long letter and tell him, too, because this simply can’t go on any longer. I can’t breathe. I can’t live.

July 21

I wrote to Gordon yesterday, but I didn’t say anything about Walter because I don’t think it is a thing a person ought to do by letter. I can tell him when he gets to New York and then I will be sure that he doesn’t take it too hard and I can promise him that I will be friends with him always and make him promise not to do anything silly, while if I told it to him in a letter there is no telling what he would do, there all alone.

And I haven’t told Frank because he hasn’t been feeling well, he is terribly sunburned and it hurts him terribly so he can hardly play golf or dance, and I want him to be feeling his best when I do tell him, but whether he is all right or not I simply must tell him tomorrow because he is actually planning to leave here on the same train with us Saturday night and I can’t let him do that.

Life is so hopeless and it could be so wonderful. For instance how heavenly it would be if I could marry Frank first and stay married to him five years and he would be the one who would take me to Hollywood and maybe we could go on parties with Norman Kerry and Jack Barrymore and Buster Collier and Marion Davies and Lois Moran.

And at the end of five years Frank could go into journalism and write novels and I would only be 23 and I could marry Gordon and he would be ready for another trip around the world and he could show me things better than someone who had never seen them before.

Gordon and I would separate at the end of five years and I would be 28 and I know of lots of women that never even got married the first time till they were 28 though I don’t suppose that was their fault, but I would marry Walter then, for after all he is the one I really love and want to spend most of my life with and I wouldn’t care whether he could dance or not when I was that old. Before long we would be as old as Uncle Nat and Aunt Jule and I certainly wouldn’t want to dance at their age when all you can do is just hobble around the floor. But Walter is so wonderful as a companion and we would enjoy the same things and be pals and maybe we would begin to have children.

But that is all impossible though it wouldn’t be if older people just had sense and would look at things the right way.

It is only half past ten, the earliest I have gone to bed in weeks, but I am worn out and Frank went to bed early so he could put cold cream on his sunburn.

Listen, diary, the orchestra is playing “Limehouse Blues.” The first tune I danced to with Merle Oliver, two years ago. I can’t stand it. And how funny that they should play that old tune tonight of all nights, when I have been thinking of Merle off and on all day, and I hadn’t thought of him before in weeks and weeks. I wonder where he is, I wonder if it is just an accident or if it means I am going to see him again. I simply mustn’t think about it or I’ll die.

July 22

I knew it wasn’t an accident. I knew it must mean something, and it did.

Merle is coming here today, here to this Inn, and just to see me. And there can only be one reason. And only one answer. I knew that when I heard his voice calling from Boston. How could I ever had thought I loved anyone else? How could he ever have thought I meant it when I told him I was engaged to George Morse?

A whole year and he still cares and I still care. That shows we were always intended for each other and for no one else. I won’t make him wait till December. I doubt if we even wait till dad and mother get home. And as for a honeymoon I will go with him to Long Beach or the Bronx Zoo, wherever he wants to take me.

After all this is the best way out of it, the only way. I won’t have to say anything to Frank, he will guess when he sees me with Merle. And when I get home Sunday and Walter and Gordon call me up, I will invite them both to dinner and Merle can tell them himself, with two of them there it will only hurt each one half as much as if they were alone.

The train is due at 2:40, almost three hours from now. I can’t wait. And what if it should be late? I can’t stand it.

The Jade Necklace

No, I’m not with the Griffin people anymore. I’m in the picture business⁠—Colossal Films Incorporated. Class, hey? I don’t know what you’d call my job; I’m a kind of a half secretary and half valet to Bauer, L. N. Bauer, you know, the big boss. The big fella⁠—that’s what they call him around the joint, either that or L. N.

I don’t get much more dough than the Griffin people gave me, but honest to God, the things that happen up there would make a book if somebody wanted to write it. You take for instance what they’ve been pulling off just the last couple of months⁠—well, you won’t believe it, but I’m telling you it happened.

Of course you saw Danny Darling, the show Dennis Byrne was in. Al Smith pretty near had to call out the militia to keep the flappers from smothering him every time he left the theater. Well, the Supreme people signed him up to a contract at $7,000 a week, win, lose or draw, figuring he’d make any film sheik look like a cartoon. And when L. N. and Wolf, our vice-president, when they heard about it, they went around for a day or two with their faces so long that their chin tripped them up.

Finally Wolf said there was only one thing to do and that was go and grab some other beautiful Mick, get him all the publicity possible and beat the Supreme people to their first Byrne release. The next question was who, and there didn’t seem to be any answer. A few Irish juveniles were in different shows around town, but none that were liable to make the women forget Byrne. They’d have hired a policeman or a white wings if they could have found one pretty enough, but this Byrne is a tough baby to equal, let alone top.

Well, L. N. cabled to a friend of his in Dublin, a fella in show business there, and asked him to recommend who was the handsomest actor in Ireland and the fella cabled back that there was a young actor named Maurice Kavanaugh who was the handsomest actor in Ireland or anywhere else. L. N. cabled Kavanaugh, asking him what he’d take to come to America and do a picture and Kavanaugh named the modest little stipend of $8,000 a week. I think he was afraid of the ocean. But what does L. N. do but cable him to come at that figure and he showed up at the office two weeks later, as sweet a looking young divil as ever vamped a colleen bawn.

Bauer and Wolf all but kissed him. Now they had Supreme at least tied if not beat. Just under six feet tall, built like Dempsey, black, wavy hair, blue eyes, perfect features and teeth so white that you had to wear smoked glasses when he smiled. Every time he walked in or out of the joint, all the stenographers swooned.

“We’ve showed them up again.” That’s what L. N. said.

“Yes,” says Wolf, “but we haven’t got a story for him and for all we know, Harrison”⁠—that’s the big guy at Supreme⁠—“for all we know, Harrison’s all set with a story for Byrne and ready to shoot.”

“I know different,” says L. N. “I got it pretty straight that they’ve been hunting high and low for a story and haven’t found anything that even comes close.”

So Wolf said: “They’re that much ahead of us, though. We’ve still got to look through a lot of junk that they’ve probably eliminated already.”

“Don’t you worry,” says Bauer. “We won’t waste time on stuff that’s no good. I’ve got a couple of friends of mine⁠—you know; fellas like Paul Wells and Quinn Martin⁠—that whenever we’ve wanted a certain type of story to fit a certain star, they’ve always told me and told me right. Remember when we needed a vehicle for Kate Hollis and I called up Martin and he said ‘Jane Eyre’ without a minute’s hesitation, and you know what a sensation it was. I’ll get a hold of he or Wells right now and tell them who we’ve got and one of them is bound to come across.”

But Martin and Wells were both on their vacation and couldn’t be located. That same day, Harry Salsinger, that works on the paper, he happened to drift in the office and Bauer said to him, he said:

“Harry, do you know any good Irish stories?”

So Harry says: “Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard this one or not, but one night Pat and Mike got lit and went up to a supper club⁠—”

He didn’t get any further with it. L. N. explained that he wasn’t looking for a gag, but a real Irish romance that you could use as a vehicle for a fine-looking Paddy. Harry made a couple of suggestions⁠—I forget what they were, and L. N. couldn’t spell them so he didn’t write them down.

The two big boys kept getting more and more nervous till they had us all jumping sideways and ready to quit; nothing we did suited them. They’re generally pretty good people to work for, but they were so scared Supreme was going to put Byrne over that they began ranting around like a couple of motorcycle cops.

Then one day L. N. was sitting at his desk spelling out the picture news in the morning paper and all of a sudden he gave a yell and told me to run and get Wolf. When Wolf came in, Bauer was so excited that his voice shook.

“Look here!” he says. “Read this! We’ve got to act quick!”

“What does it say?” says Wolf after reading it.

“I’ll read it out to you,” says L. N. “It says, ‘Supreme Pictures is reported to have offered David Wallace twenty-five thousand dollars for the film rights to his novel Harridan. This book is the best seller of the spring season and its author has already been approached by Broadway theatrical managers who believe it could be successfully molded into play form. Which of Supreme’s stars it is wanted for is, apparently, a secret.’ ”

“Well,” said Wolf.

“Well!” Bauer hollers. “Is that all you got to say⁠—‘Well’? I tell you we ain’t got any time to lose!”

“But explain what you mean,” says Wolf. “Supreme Pictures is offering somebody twenty-five thousand dollars for some book and they’re going to make it into a picture⁠—what of it?”

“Didn’t you hear the name of the book?” says Bauer. “Harridan. Who could they want it for but Byrne?”

“Oh, I get you,” Wolf says.

“It’s about time you got me,” said Bauer, “and it’s about time we got a hold of this Wallace and nailed him down.”

“But listen,” says Wolf, “why not buy the book first and read it and see if it’s what we want?”

“There ain’t time to read it now,” said L. N. “While we’re reading it, Supreme goes ahead and buys the rights and we’re sunk. Besides, they’ve read it and they know it fits Byrne or they wouldn’t have made the offer. And if it fits Byrne, it fits Kavanaugh. So we’re suckers if we don’t sew it up.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Wolf. “There’s no use taking chances.”

So they spent that whole day trying to locate Wallace and raving because they couldn’t, but the next morning they did and he showed up in the office and they asked him what he’d take for the rights to his book.

“That depends,” he says. “I wouldn’t want my story changed and I’d want to see the picture before it was released. And I’d like to know if my name would be used.”

“You’re a pretty famous author, ain’t you?” says L. N., who hadn’t ever heard of him. “We’d be glad to use your name.”

“I’m not sure I want it used,” said Wallace. “But if you used the title Harridan, you’d pretty near have to use my name because everybody knows I wrote the book.”

“We’ll certainly use Harridan,” said Wolf.

“And what girl would play in it?” Wallace asked them.

“That will have to be a secret for the present,” says L. N.

Then they asked him again to name a price.

“I tell you I’m a little particular,” he says. “I take pride in my work and I don’t want to see it made ridiculous. Money isn’t everything.”

He was going on with his speech, but Bauer interrupted him.

“Well, we’ll give you fifty thousand dollars cash,” he said.

Wallace fainted and when he came to, his scruples were all gone.

L. N. and Wolf had put another one over on Supreme and they spent the rest of the morning holding hands and slapping each other on the back. L. N. sent me out to buy him a copy of Harridan and after he came back from lunch, he began to read it. But on the first page he crashed right into three great, big, long words, words like “beatific,” “solecism” and “torture.” And the book was over three hundred pages long. So he said he was going on a party that night and would I mind reading the book and giving him a synopsis of it the next day.

I don’t know if you read the book or not. It was about a family that the mother was dead and her two daughters and one son had idolized her and a year after she died, the father had gone abroad and pretty soon he cabled back that he had married a Mrs. Garrett. They didn’t know who she was, but some of their friends knew her by reputation; she was supposed to have been a kind of a loose woman and they said she was old besides and their father must have been drunk when he married her. They were sore anyway on account of him getting married again, so they were ready to treat her like dirt when he brought her home.

Well, she hadn’t been a nun by any means, but she wasn’t old and she was so pretty and so attractive and nice to them that they couldn’t help liking her. The son fell in love with her, but she told him to behave himself and stick to the nice little flapper he was engaged to. That’s about all there was to it.

So the next morning I told it to L. N. and after I got through, he looked kind of dumb. Then he asked me which part would suit Kavanaugh, the son or the father. I told him the father was a man fifty-five or sixty years old and the son’s part was so small that you could give it to an extra.

“Well, then,” he said, “who is ‘Harridan’?”

“That’s the second wife,” I told him.

So he said he thought her name was Garrett.

“ ‘Harridan’ isn’t a name,” I told him. “It’s just a word and in this book it’s used kind of sarcastically.”

Then he asked me what it meant.

“Well,” I said, “it means two or three different things.”

“Look it up and find out what it means,” he says.

So there was a little dictionary there in the office and I looked it up and read it off to him: “Formerly a loose woman; now commonly a vixen.” Or something like that.

“Well, what’s a vixen?” he asked me.

So I looked that up⁠—“A female fox (obsolete); a cross, ill-tempered person, now used only of women; a jade.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s a cinch Kavanaugh couldn’t play a female fox or a grouchy woman. I guess we’ll have to write in a part for him.”

So I said: “If I were you, I’d have Harridan’ fixed up for some woman star and leave Kavanaugh out of it.”

“That’d be a swell idea, wouldn’t it!” he says. “Here is a story that Supreme was trying to get for Dennis Byrne and we beat them to it and buy it for Kavanaugh and you want us to leave him out of it!”

I told him I didn’t believe Supreme had Byrne in mind when they made the offer for the book, if they ever did make an offer.

“You’re crazy!” he said. “Those fellas at Supreme are just dumb enough to think ‘Harridan’ is an Irish name and you can bet they were wild when Wallace told them we’d beat them to it. And they’ll be wilder yet when we spring a handsomer Irishman than they’ve got in the very story they were trying to land for Byrne.”

A day or two later, L. N. announced that he and Kavanaugh were going out to Hollywood. He’d talk over the story with Driscoll, our star director, and Earl Benham, who he’d picked to write the scenario, and he thought that by seeing Kavanaugh and getting acquainted with him, they’d have a better idea what he wanted.

So that’s the last I saw of him for a month. Day before yesterday he got home and the first thing he asked me was to get a hold of Wallace again. So when Wallace came in, he says: “Wallace,” he said, “I want to get your permission to not use your name in connection with that picture.”

“But as I told you before, Mr. Bauer,” said Wallace, “everybody knows I wrote Harridan and if you call your picture Harridan, people will naturally think of me.”

“We’re not going to call it Harridan,” says L. N. “We’re calling it The Jade Necklace.”

Wallace and I were both goggle-eyed.

“We’ve changed your story a little,” says L. N., “but we’re basing it on your idea; that is, I got the idea for the picture we’re making from the title of your story. One of the meanings of ‘Harridan’ is ‘vixen’ or ‘jade.’ Well, I couldn’t figure out anything along the lines of a vixen, but jade was a setup. Everybody knows what jade is. So I gave Driscoll and Benham a rough outline of what I had in mind and the picture’s about half done already. The gang sails the day after tomorrow to shoot the balance of it⁠—in Japan.”

“Japan!” said Wallace.

“Yes,” says L. N. “Of course a person naturally thinks of China when you think of jade, but somehow or other, Japan seems like a more romantic place and they’ll be there just in time to get some beautiful shots of the cherry blossoms.”

“I’d kind of like to hear the story,” says Wallace.

“I’ll give you an outline,” says L. N., “but I’m going to ask you to keep it under your hat. The story starts with the Pacific fleet of our navy⁠—they’re going to cruise across the Pacific and look in at Japan and China and those places. Across the Pacific. Well, the story starts where they are leaving on this cruise. The hero is a lieutenant in the navy. Gifford Dean plays the part and you ought to see him in a naval uniform. Immense! The story starts where they are leaving on this cruise, across the Pacific, and they are saying goodbye to their Wives and sweethearts. The lieutenant⁠—that’s the part Gifford Dean plays⁠—he’s supposed to be married. Thelma Bowen Plays the wife, the lieutenant’s wife. They say goodbye to each other⁠—she’s crying and hates to see him go. He tells her he’ll think of her every minute; that is, while he’s gone.

“We see the fleet leave after all the farewells and everything, and then we shoot over to Japan and we see them landing there. The sailors are going to enjoy themselves. And the officers, too. The lieutenant⁠—that’s the hero, the part Gifford Dean plays⁠—he is lonesome and he doesn’t go and drink or cut up with the rest of the men; that is, officers. He’s lonesome and he happens to meet a beautiful Japanese girl. And you ought to see Maida Guthrie as a Japanese! She’ll be a sensation! Maida’s playing the Japanese girl, the heroine in the picture, that falls in love with the lieutenant. That’s Gifford Dean.

“Well, the love-affair goes on; that is, he’s just homesick and misses his wife, but it’s a serious thing with the girl, the Japanese girl. That’s Maida Guthrie’s part. Finally the lieutenant sees that he can’t possess the girl unless he goes through with a Japanese marriage; naturally the marriage don’t mean anything to him, especially as he is already married, but he goes through with it in order to possess the girl, though one of his brother officers tells him it ain’t right. But he goes through with it.

“They pull off the Japanese: wedding, with the girl’s father and mother, both of them Japs, both there. And a girlfriend of the girl, another Japanese. And the lieutenant’s officer pal.

“Pretty soon the fleet sails away, back to America. The lieutenant: promises he’ll return to his Japanese ‘wife.’ Then we’ll show she and her Japanese girlfriend pining away for the lieutenant and after a while there’s a baby born and we’ll show the girl comforting herself with the baby and telling the baby that its daddy will come back some day.

“Then the fleet lands back in America, out on the Coast, and we show the lieutenant being welcomed home by his regular wife⁠—Thelma Bowen. Then there’s some home shots and then the fleet takes another cruise across the Pacific, only this time the lieutenant’s wife goes along. And it winds up with the lieutenant’s real wife⁠—the American wife⁠—she meets the Japanese girl that only thinks she’s his wife, and when she finds out she ain’t his real wife, she kills herself and the kid. Or maybe we’ll end it a little happier.”

“One question,” says Wallace. “What do you call the lieutenant in the play? Do you call him Pinkerton?”

“No,” said L. N., “but we’ve got a detective in it. That’s the part Kavanaugh plays. It ain’t much of a part⁠—he just helps recover the jade necklace.”

“What jade necklace?” says Wallace.

“I guess I didn’t tell you about that,” said L. N. “When the lieutenant went through with this mock marriage with the little Jap girl, he gave her a jade necklace that belonged to his real wife and that’s how the real wife happened to run across the Japanese girl, was on account of looking for her lost necklace.”

“Well,” said Wallace, “it ought to be a sensation if the photography is as good as the story.”

“Don’t you worry about the photography!” says L. N. “We’ve got some marvelous shots of the fleet going away and coming back and those shots of Japan in cherry blossom time will be worth all the money we’re spending to go over there and get them. But how about your name? Can we leave it out?”

“I don’t mind,” said Wallace. “But I do think you ought to keep the title Harridan.”

“No,” says L. N. “Both Wolf and myself think my title is better.”

He told me, L. N. told me, afterwards that the picture is going to cost a half a million dollars, not counting the $50,000 they gave Wallace for his book and his name. And I’m not sure his estimate includes the $8,000 a week detective.

So I wouldn’t go back to the Griffin people for any amount of dough. I’m going to stay in pictures. It’s fascinating!

The Story of a Wonder Man

Being the Autobiography of Ring Lardner

Foreword

By Sarah E. Spooldripper

The publication of this autobiography is entirely without the late Master’s sanction. He wrote it as a pastime and burnt up each chapter as soon as it was written; the salvaging was accomplished by ghouls who haunted the Lardners’ ash bbl. during my whole tenure of office as night nurse to their dromedary.

Some of the copy was so badly charred as to be illegible. The ghouls took the liberty of filling in these hiatuses with “stuff” of their own, which can be readily distinguished from the Master’s as it is not nearly as good. Readers and critics are therefore asked to bear in mind that those portions of the book which they find entertaining are the work of the Master himself; those which bore them or sound forced are interpolations by milksops.

Another request which I know the Master would have wished me to make is that neither reader nor critic read the book through at one sitting (Cries of “Fat chance!” and “Hold ’em, Stanford!”). It was written a chapter at a time and should be perused the same way with, say, a rest of from seven weeks to two months between chapters. It might even be advisable to read one chapter and then take the book back to the exchange desk, saying you had made a mistake.

Mr. Lardner’s friends will regret that he omitted from these memoirs reference to his encounter with Mussolini, the Tiger of France and Italy. The two happened to be occupying the same compartment on “The Dixie Flyer” between Cannes and Mentone.

“Great golf weather,” remarked the Tiger.

“I beg your pardon,” replied the writer. “Je ne parle pas le Wop.”

I forget what else happened.

Introduction

By the employment of methods amounting almost to the so-called third degree, the heads of the publishers syndicate who I am under contract has finally got me to write my autobiography, a task which I shrink from it like Pola from a camera, yet which the doing of which I feel I owe it to my public.

This then is the first installment, but will precede same with a brief acct. of the comical scene in the publishing offices which culminated in me undertaking to do the work under certain conditions. In the first place I was decoyed into the offices by a letter from the boss saying they was a package waiting there for me from a admire in Yuma that looked like salt water taffy. This was a hoax and I hadn’t no sooner than entered the door when I was bashed in the stomach by some blunt instrument, probably a wardrobe trunk. When I regained conscious I was laying on my back in the gun room while the head of a midiron had been shoved into my mouth with the heel resting vs. the roof of same and the toe on the tongue, and a Mr. Perkins the manager had began to pull my teeth with some blunt instrument. When this had got past the amusing stage I told them I would do what they wanted provided the work was not published prior to my death.

“That suits us,” said the boss, “if you’ll promise to die by the Fourth of July.”

The others took up the refrain:

If you’ll promise to die
By the Fourth of July.

Agreements were then signed and I hurried home to exhume diaries and notes containing the material necessary for a accurate autobiography and will now begin writing it with a determination to stick to facts and to not let the truth be interfered with by a personal modesty never excelled and perhaps only equalled in this generation by well, maybe Oscar Wilde and Belasco.

I

The Birth of a Wonder Man

The first week in March, 1885, was a gala week throughout the civilized world, the United States in general and the latter’s great middle west in particular. In this one week there was an unfounded rumor of a royal betrothal between Queen Victoria and King Gillette; a young Washington dentist, Dr. Ghoul, watched a mixed fivesome tee off at Chevy Chase and predicted that four of them would have pyorrhea; the Lardners of Niles, Mich., announced the birth of a fourteen pound man child, and almost on the same date twenty-nine years later, or maybe it was 28th of June, the Archduke Ferdinand was shot down at Serajevo.

These events occurred before there were telephones or telegraphs and the news of the Lardner boy’s birth had to be flashed to the world by runners. Sparing no expense, the parents hired Paavo Nurmi to notify distant relatives and engaged Charlie Paddock for the sprints. In less than two weeks the Niles post office began to be flooded with letters of all kinds, most of them being circulars from strangers advocating the installation of an oil heater. “They pay for themselves in what you save on coal,” was the general gist. But there were also more personal letters of which I will take the liberty of printing one from Clarence Mackay:

Don’t write. Telegraph! Flowers telegraphed to all parts of the world.

And one from a travel service company:

I understand that your little boy is contemplating a trip to Egypt and I am writing to ask if you will not help me to secure his booking and plan an independent trip for him, if that is what he wants. I supply you with steamship tickets, issue travelers’ checks, letters of credit and baggage insurance, etc.

And one from a hotel training school in Washington, saying:

There is a nationwide demand for trained men and women in hotels, clubs, restaurants, cafeterias.

Also came a request from Edward Bok for the baby’s autograph and a letter from Ray Long, asking for first chance at any short stories the newcomer might write. Excitement ran high and even to this day the first week in March is set aside in Niles as “Have a Baby Week.”

As a result of careful living and a strict adherence to the doctor’s orders, the child was able to take his first meal at table early in June. Both the haute and demimonde of Niles were asked in and when the dishes had been cleared away, a bath tub was set in the middle of the room and little Ring, au naturel, was bathed in pure alcohol, the guests afterwards dipping pipes into the tub and blowing soap bubbles. This was in the days before they had horses and boats and when you wanted to go from one town to another, you had to take a train.

II

The Boy Grew Older

This autobiography started out to follow the style of Edward Bok and Henry (Peaches) Adams and refer to the hero in the third person, but the idea has been abandoned because in my case it would be confusing on account of two of my interminable brothers also being named Ring (inspiring a Niles wag, Charles Quimby, to call our family the Three Ring Circus) and if I were to write that Ring did this or Ring said that, the reader would not know whether I meant myself or one of the other boys unless in each instance I gave the full designation, a practice that would eat up too much space. For my oldest brother was christened Ring Once For Ice Water; another one, Ring Twice For Towels, and I, Ring Three Times For Good Luck. So from now on the author will be spoken of as I, provided it ain’t too hard to locate that unaccustomed key on my typewriter.

As all we boys began being born one after another it became necessary to take drastical action in regards to the intramural traffic problem. For example there was so many mouths to feed that only a third of same could be accommodated in the dining room at one time and the confusion and congestion was something fierce when those that had had their meal was trying to get out and those that was still hungry trying to get in.

A new door was cut into the wall to be used for eat-bound traffic only and my sisters took a course in barking and served as traffic cops, but the situation would of soon gotten intolerable only for nine of the boys suddenly deciding to leave home. Five went to Leavenworth, two to Atlanta and two to San Quentin. The roving spirit proved contagious and soon a tenth, Gregory, entered Yale and won his Y as coxcomb on the varsity crew. Still another, Polycarp, obtained employment as a Chicago caddy. A Chicago caddy is a boy who carries your ordnance bag, retrieves sliced or hooked bullets and replaces divots in bystanders.

None of we children was ever allowed to talk at table, but as soon as a meal was over we were encouraged to talk as much as we liked and in that way I got quite a reputation as an after dinner speaker. This was in my third year, 1888, when Taylor and Presser were running for President and Vice President against Polk and Beans. The Taylors lived right across the street from us, but it was a different family. The Taylor who was elected President was Zachary Taylor, while the Taylor near us was H. N. Taylor, the feed man. No relation to the other Taylor.

H. N. Taylor had a daughter, Livid Taylor, who suffered from contusions by a prior marriage. Livid was my first sweetheart, which she will learn for the first time if she reads this. I was too young (only three) to know the exact wording of a formal declaration and so kept my love a secret, but many is the night I cried myself to sleep in regards to Livid Taylor and her contusions.

In March, 1891, a few days before my sixth birthday, the postman brought an invitation, for our whole family, to attend the Inaugural Ball. In those days the event was held not in Washington, but in Seattle, to make it more exclusive, as it was figured that very few congressmen and foreign diplomats would have the money to go way out there, or the inclination either, the train running only as far as Duluth and from that point you had the choice of walking or creeping on all fours. Those who chose the former method of locomotion usually relieved the tedium of the journey by rolling a hoop.

The invitations were always purposely sent out so late that only people who lived right near Seattle could hope to get there in time, and they were not invited. You may imagine that our home was a scene of bustling activity from the instant the card reached us till it was time to board the train for Duluth. I was taken along because there was no one to leave me with, and to help open the car windows.

We left Niles at noon on the third day of March and did not reach Duluth till the morning of the sixth. This was before the era of patent couplers and the cars of a train were fastened to one another with gay ribbons. (It was in 1895 that the Santa Fe adopted hooks and eyes.) The result was that every mile or so, the engineer would feel a lightening of the pull on his “iron horse” and would find on investigating that two or more cars or even the entire train had been left far behind, in fact four hours after the “start” of the trip it was discovered that the engine was way up in Wisconsin while the train was still standing in the station at Chicago with the conductor hoarse from shouting “What’s the matter?”

Everybody felt kind of blue when we arrived in Duluth at last and realized that we were already thirty-six hours late for the ball and with at least three weeks separating us from Seattle. Some were in favor of returning at once to Niles, but wiser counsel prevailed and we prepared to complete the trip in the hope that the difference in time between Minnesota and the Coast would work to our advantage.

III

Young Man Goes West

The trip from Duluth to Seattle was rather uneventful and can be dismissed in a few well rounded paragraphs. In those days, as I pointed out in the preceding chapter, no trains ran west of Minnesota and neither boats nor horses had been invented. It was believed that the only possible way to cover the mileage between the new Scandinavia and the Pacific Coast was afoot or on all fours. But a few moments before we were about to set out by one of the last named methods, my Uncle Walrus learned from the telephone girl at the hotel, a Miss Scurvy, that other travelers had successfully negotiated the distance on sleds drawn by teams of dogs and we decided that nothing could be lost by trying this innovation, for if it proved a flop (an expression of my grandfather’s) we could still get off and walk or crawl.

So many of the other guests had been tipped off to the sled gag that all but one of the dogs in Duluth were already chartered by that time, so we had no choice but to engage the remaining one, which turned out, to his mother’s surprise, to be a four months old Sealyham. We hitched him up to two sleds, the front one for our party and the trailer for suitcases, mess kits, golf bags, etc. We were insured against thirst by Uncle Walrus, who in playing thirty-six holes of golf during our stay in Duluth, had luckily acquired a handful of water blisters.

It was a gay crowd for the first two hundred miles. My sister Ann, an accomplished musician though otherwise an oaf, played chords on the dulcimer to such songs as “Promise Me,” “Killarney” and “What’ll I Do?” and my fresh young voice made the welcome ring and the Ring welcome all through the Dakotas. We stopped for the night at Bismarck, where my little brother Croup insisted on fishing for herring. Luck was with us and we didn’t have a bite, though the Sealyham kept scratching himself.

Next morning the latter began to complain of glanders, brought on, he said, by working like a horse, and it was a relief to him and the rest of us when Uncle Walrus and Aunt Chloe and their two children died of exposure and had to be pushed off the sled. With the load thus lightened, we made Butte the second night and registered at the Montana-Biltmore, where Jack Bowman was then head bell beagle. News got out that I was in the city and the fire whistle blew from eleven o’clock till ten minutes after. We learned in the morning that it was just a grass fire.

“It was just a grass fire,” Jack told us.

On Saturday night, March 9, we arrived in Seattle and found with joy that, through a stroke of good fortune, the ball was still in progress. It seems that Young Stribling was dancing with Dolly Madison, had been dancing with her, in fact, since the night of the fourth, and they couldn’t end the ball because they couldn’t make him let go.

I was recognized by Texas Guinan, led to the middle of the floor and introduced to Mrs. Madison. “And,” said the latter, “I want you to shake hands with my partner, whom I have nicknamed the Georgia Clinging Vine.”

Without thinking, Stribling loosened his hold with his right arm to shake hands with me and Miss Guinan at the same time grabbed his left and jerked it away. Mrs. Madison was free and I whirled her away to the strains of “Nervous Breakdown.” Paul Whiteman2 was leading the orchestra.

“Well, Mrs. Madison,” I said, “you look kind of peaked. You look like you was suffering from the grip.”

“Anybody that battles with Young Stribling suffers from the grip,” was the reply of Old Hickory’s madam.3

Before the second encore, I was calling my partner “Dolly” and she was calling me “Lard” and that night marked the beginning of a friendship that soon ripened into apathy.

Seattle in 1891! In the morning, tram rides to the French market; at noon, luncheon in Limehouse; five o’clock tea in the Presidio; at night, baseball results, dinner music and the Dickens Hour.4

The day after the Inaugural Ball, my family started back east, leaving me at the hotel in lieu of a check. My next seven years, between my sixth and thirteenth birthdays, were spent up and down the Pacific Coast and I would not trade the experiences of that period for a passport picture of Bull Montana.

IV

Bright College Years

Alone in Seattle at the age of six, broke, and indebted to the hotel in the amount of $26.50 for board and room. How many kids would have faced a situation like this with equanimity! But I never lost confidence that I would find a way out. I forget just now what I did do; suffice it to say that inside of seven years I was in San Francisco, playing a cornet, evenings, at Tait’s on the beach, and in the daytime working in the park as a squirrel-tender. In those days there were no benches in the parks and a squirrel-tender’s job was to keep the squirrels out of the trees so the people would have some place to sit. Inasmuch as there were 186 squirrels in this particular park and I had only one assistant, you may imagine that I was kept hustling; squirrels get mighty tired of staying on the ground and would employ every imaginable subterfuge in their efforts to climb the tempting trees with which the park was plentifully supplied. Outwitting them and keeping them on terra firma developed both my brains and speed and ten years later, when my three runs of the length of the field won Yale a championship game, 4 to 2, an Associated Press commentator said “Harvard was beaten in the parks of San Francisco.”

In the fall of this year an SOS was broadcast from Chicago⁠—that gargantuan metropolis was in flames as a result of a cow named O’Leary dropping a lighted cigarette in a roll of films.5

Every city of importance sent a volunteer fire company to the rescue. The company organized in San Francisco was composed of myself and Bill Lange, later to become famous as a ball player and dancing instructor. This, of course, was before horses or camels were thought of and Bill and I had to drag our hose cart east afoot. Bill was very little help and by the time we reached our destination, the fire was out and I was sixteen years of age.

It was now time to think of college. Stories of my all-around athletic prowess had appeared in all the papers and I received tempting offers from virtually every university of standing. I thought first of entering the Harvard Law School.6

Finally I decided to divide up my first year to the best advantage, going in the fall to Michigan, which needed a half back with a sextuple threat, spending the winter at Amherst, where a high class basketball guard was wanted, and winding up in the spring at Tulane, which was anxious to land a good pitcher who could also pole vault, hurdle, throw the javelin and run as anchor man in the relay. With a schedule thus outlined I had leisure to write and enjoy myself in a social way during the summer months.7

It was now that the Spanish war broke out and I enlisted as a general.

V

How Spanish War Ended

The chief difficulty about the Spanish war lay in finding out where it was being held. The censorship was so strict that even we who had enlisted as generals were kept in the dark as to the location of hostilities and there was some talk of mutiny unless the government came across and at least confided in us whether to march our divisions north, south, east or west.

It was all right to have some civilian come up to you and say “How is the war, General?” because then you could reply, “Fine, thank you,” but when they asked you “Where is it?” that was a horse with another collar. We all had to have two sets of uniforms, white for home and gray for traveling, because there was no telling if the battles were to take place at our park or on the road.

While we were still in this chaotic state, three big pieces of news reached Chicago on successive days⁠—one that Grant had taken Vicksburg, the second that Admiral Farragut had vanquished the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, and the third that General Miles had surrendered to Lee Shubert at Appomattox. The war was over and there was such a divergence among the opinions of the fight experts that no historian has a right to say who win.

Excursion trains were now run from all points in the United States to Washington to accommodate the applicants for pensions. I will never forget my first ride on a sleeping car. In those days it was against the law to have berths run the length of the train; they had to be crosswise, and inasmuch as it was necessary for them to occupy the entire width of the car and also, on account of the uppers, extend from the floor to within a couple of inches from the roof, why you can see that both passengers and crew had their troubles when there was occasion to walk from end to end of one car or from one car to another.

As a rule, passengers gave it up entirely and from the time the berths were made up till they were taken down, why the best bet was to stay right in your berth; that is provided you were there when it was made up; otherwise there was no way for anybody but Houdini or a veritable sliver of a man to get to bed. The railroads offered huge wages for conductors, trainmen and porters measuring so little in circumference that they could make progress through the infinitesimal crack between the top of the uppers and the top of the cars and after dark it became customary for the members of the crew to strip themselves and grease their entire carcasses to facilitate fore and aft intramural travel.

It was owing to these conditions that I made the acquaintance of Professor Ashley Snoot. Prof. Snoot had Lower 6, and I was supposed to be right above him in Upper 6.

“Prof. Snoot,” I said, “how do you pronounce your name?”

“Through the nose,” replied the pedagogue, calling long distance. “But I thought you would want to talk to me about biology, as I am Professor of Biology at the University of Chicago.”8

“All right, Prof.,” I said. “What do you think of biology?”

“It’s a wonderful idea,” replied Prof. Snoot, “but can they enforce it? We have had it now since January 1920, and they tell me there is more drunkenness than ever; why, I understand that women, who never drank before, are now insisting on a cocktail before dinner.”

“Where do they get it, Prof. Snoot?” I inquired.

“Call Main 2461,” said the Prof.

We were now entering the station at Washington. In those days all trains stopped in the White House garage and it was up to me to get cleaned up for my presentation to President Hayes.

VI

How I Threw Big Party for Jane Austen

It was at a petting party in the White House that I first met Jane Austen. The beautiful little Englishwoman had come to our shores in response to an attractive offer from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer people, one of whose officers had spelled out her novel Pride and Prejudice and considered it good material for a seven reel comedy. Syd Chaplin was at that time with this firm and was slated for the title role.

Miss Austen had a few weeks’ time to spare before she was due in Hollywood and it fell to my lot to entertain her. I postponed my engagement with President Pierce, whom I intended to interview in regard to my pension as general in the Spanish war, and placed myself entirely at the disposal of the little authoress. She expressed a desire to see the night life of New York and I organized a party to visit Texas Guinan’s. In the party, besides myself and Miss Austen, or Janey as we called her, were Brinck Thorne, then captain of the Yale football nine, and Harry Wills.9

After two or three rounds of drinks we decided we had had enough and a waiter brought us a check for $22.75. The other two men seemed to have paralysis of the arms and as I found only $1.50 in my pocket, I asked Miss Guinan if she would take my check. She said yes and I made out a check on the Great Neck Trust Company, but knowing my balance there was only $7.00, I purposely neglected to affix my signature. Miss Guinan’s sharp eyes noticed the oversight and asked for my autograph. This piqued Miss Austen as she was really more famous than I at that time, so to smooth matters over I suggested that we all give Miss Guinan our autographs and start an album for her.

I next took Miss Austen to Albany to meet Gov. Al (“Peaches”) Smith. The governor received us with his usual simplicity and said he was a great admirer of Miss Austen’s work.

“I thought The Green Hat was a scream,” he complimented her.

Miss Austen wanted to go to Hollywood by way of Pittsburgh, but at that time there was a federal law forbidding any railroad to run a train near that city. President Pierce was a born hater of Pittsburgh and remained in that frame of mind to his dying day. “Janey” was obliged to make the journey via Niagara Falls. She eventually reached Hollywood and supervised the screening of Pride and Prejudice, which made a big success under its new title, The Bath in Champagne.

It was about a month subsequent to my affair with Jane that the world was startled by Robert Fulton’s invention of the taxicab. The first taxi now would seem a crude vehicle, but at the time it was hailed as a marvel. It was a sidewheeler and was steered from the rear seat, by the passenger, thus insuring at least, its arrival at the point where the passenger wanted to go. The driver sat in front and warned pedestrians out of the way. He generally did this by cupping his hands to his mouth and shouting, almost continuously, “Halloa! Halloa!” For a while the new conveyances were known as “Halloa cabs.”10

The strain on the driver’s voices was so great that very few of them were able to hold their jobs after a week or two. There was danger of the whole thing falling through because of the dearth of leather-lunged shouters and to obviate this, Fulton invented a musical instrument called the slide trombone and drivers were taught to play Berlin’s “All Alone,” the inference being that the cab wanted the street to itself. The instrument was so constructed that in case the pedestrians did not take warning from the melody, the driver could push the slide to its extreme length and knock them out of the way.

Fulton’s achievements made him so popular in New York that he was given the keys to the city of Boston and a one way ticket to San Diego. It is estimated that the earnings of his taxicabs had run well over fifty dollars when they were suddenly cut off by the invention of the horse.

Horses were very uncertain at first. For example, you would bet on one that was a favorite at some such price as 3 to 5 and seemed to have far and away the best chance to win and along would come an 8 to 1 shot and make your horse look like a sucker.11

I recall once visiting the Saratoga racecourse in the administration of President Fillmore and meeting a man named Bud Fisher, a portrait painter and fancier of horse flesh. He had just paid $12.00 or $12,000, I forget which, for a horse named Hyperion, had engaged a star jockey, Earl Sande, to ride him and advised me and other acquaintances to bet on him. We followed the advice, and the horse ran a very good race, but the jockey was left at the post, sitting in the middle of the track. It was quite laughable.

VII

New York’s Noon Life

The furore over the invention of horses by Thomas A. Edison had no sooner abated than the country was thrown into a new ferment of grape juice by John F. (“Peaches”) Hylan’s discovery of the subway. People who now ride in subways in various cities and complain of strap-hanging, overcrowding, etc., would scarcely believe the facts concerning that first New York subway, or tuber as it was called on account of its resemblance to a potato. Instead of being obliged to pay a nickel apiece for a ride, passengers were sent engraved invitations and the number of same was limited to the seating, or rather, lying down, capacity of the trains; say forty or fifty individuals who expected to be particularly busy at their office on Monday received subway cards for that day; forty or fifty others, whose busy day was Tuesday, were invited to ride that day, and so on through the week.

Each car was equipped with half a dozen four poster beds, half a dozen twin beds, three or four easy chairs and a chaise lounge. Later the twin beds were taken out of the equipment because so few twins seemed to be in business in New York; more correctly, many sets of twins were in business, but not in the same line and not particularly busy on the same day. For example, the Kitchell twins, Howell and Growell; they both had offices downtown, but Howell was a fishmonger with an exclusive Friday trade, while Growell sold welts and by tacit agreement, out-of-town welt buyers visited New York Mondays only. And it was the same with other sets of twins.12

These early subway cars had straps, stout leather straps, but they were not fastened to the roofs of the cars. They were loose and were used either for sharpening razors or for amusement purposes. Passengers used to play a game called “Have You Heard This One?” Each passenger was required to tell a story and if any of the other passengers had heard it before, the raconteur was given a hiding with the straps. This was where Growell Kitchell picked up most of his welts.

It was during the early days of the subway that Emile Zola visited New York and remarked in broken French: “Why, you New Yorkers are like ze little animals, what you call them, ze moles. You are always burrowing in ze ground.” Horace Greeley was much taken with this comment and made a suggestion that was afterwards put into effect⁠—that the city be divided into burrows, the Burrow of Brooklyn, the Burrow of the Bronx, etc.13

At this time Lily Langtry was the toast of New York. Co-starred with the Marx Brothers in A Texas Steer, she swept Broadway and was next given a job sweeping the cross streets. Mayor Walker presented her with the keys to St. Louis, but she refused to take the hint and it became my duty to show her around Gotham.14

Unlike Jane Austen, who had insisted on visiting the night clubs, Lily wanted to see the city’s noon life. Nothing gave her more of a thrill than to lunch at one of the sidewalk tables outside the Pennsylvania station and watch the zinc-workers and hatters at their midday revels.

“Vive!” she would shout as some particularly daring peasant girl tossed a ringer or a leaner, or an extra hilarious traffic policeman successfully coaxed a perambulator in front of a taxi or Halloa cab as they were then called.

“But listen, Lil,” I often remonstrated, “don’t you want to even get an impression of what goes on in places like the Knickerbocker Club or the Lambs or Sophie Tucker’s or places like that?”

“No, Lardy,” she would reply.15

So a party of four or five of us, usually consisting of H. L. Mencken, the Marx Brothers, Ward and Vokes, Barnum and Bailey, the Duncan Sisters, the Striblings, the Bison City Quartet, the Happiness Boys and the Four Horsemen, besides myself and the Langtry, would daily engage a corner table at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third street and, as I have said, enjoy the antics of the tradesmen out for their noon lark.

At length Mayor Walker asked me to take Lil to Atlantic City as she had never seen an auction sale. But it happened that just at this period a law had been passed against auctions, said to be the only law ever passed in New Jersey. So all that the Langtry and I could find to do was walk up and down, walk up and down. I noticed that she grew more and more uninterested and one day she yawned several times and then uttered an exclamation of tedium.

“No wonder,” she said, “they call this the Bored Walk.”

VIII

Football Trick Uncorked

All this happened in the summer of my seventeenth year and in the fall I made up my mind to go to college. As told in a previous chapter, I had decided to start in at the University of Michigan, but at the last moment I received a better offer from Yale and the first day of September found me in Lancaster, where Yale was then located, ready to take my entrance examinations.

Entrance requirements at that time were a great deal more exacting than at the present day. One had to pass with a grade of fifty in at least three major studies. I selected spelling, arithmetic, and English literature. I can still recall the five words we were asked to spell, namely Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Scotty Fitzgerald (their daughter), Rube Goldberg (one of their friends), and St. Paul (where Mr. Fitzgerald came from). I spelled two and a half of the words right, giving me the required mark of fifty.

The arithmetic test consisted of two questions, the first of which was, If four sailors go into a corner grocery and buy three cakes of soap at five cents a cake, what is it? The answer was tar soap. The other question was, Give the telephone numbers, residence and business, of five successful stevedores. In this test I scored one hundred, or as the examiners called it, a sweep.

In English literature we were required to name the criminal in the three following stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes⁠—“The Speckled Band,” “The Engineer’s Thumb,” and “The Copper Beeches.” I got the first two all right, but by the time I came to the third, the gin which was then passed around between every two questions, began to make me sleepy and I wrote down “Never mind.” However, I had won low medal score and the next thing on the programme was football.

I shall never forget the first day I reported for football practice. Now, at New Haven, they have a field so big that they call it the Bowl. Our field at Lancaster was so small that they called it the Ash Tray. The Yale team was then being coached by John Paul Jones, a grandfather of Tad Jones. Ted Coy was the captain, but there was a rule that if, on the first day of practice, any candidate appeared who was more beautiful than the captain, he supplanted the last named. Thus it was that I captained Yale in my freshman year.

I will omit the details of the first week’s practice, which embraced the usual fundamentals, such as pumping up the ball, mending holes in the bladder, lacing and unlacing, and throwing your hat over the cross bar of the goal. We were scheduled to play Harvard the first Saturday, as it was then figured, and correctly, that if the hardest game came first, there was much less of a strain on the players through the balance of the season. In fact, as soon as the Harvard game was over, the squad used to let up gradually week by week until by the time of the final game of the season, usually with Maine or Harrisburg High School, the majority of the athletes were so stewed that they came to the field in their pajamas or went to the wrong field entirely.

On the Friday before the Harvard game, I overcame my natural diffidence and began to inspire the men with such expressions as “Come on, men!” “Keep at them, men!” etc., and when one of our players made a particularly good stroke, I never failed to say “Bravo!” or, if it was a girl, “Brava!”

All the chairs were taken half an hour before the big game started. There must have been a hundred and twelve people in the Ash Tray. First the Harvard partisans would give their cry⁠—“Mind over matter, men! Mind over matter!”⁠—and from across the Tray the Yalensians would shout back: “Fight for Old Eli and Root for Elihu, Root!” The rival bands played their battle hymns, Harvard’s melodious “Break the News to Mother” vying with the Yale classic, “Ridi, Pagliacci.” The two teams, each shy one man, who was drunk, tiptoed on the field so as not to let the crowd know they were there, and thus avoid the danger of rioting.

I hardly tried in the first half and we failed to score. Harvard was also held scoreless. In our dressing room, between the halves, Coach Jones lit into some of the men mercilessly, telling them their faults. “Heffelfinger,” he shouted at a big guard, “you didn’t clean your nails this morning. As for you, Coy, you quit tickling Thorne in the back of the neck from now on.” And so forth. He criticised everybody but me.

Most of the second half went by and still there was no score. The crowd had gone home stiff.16

Finally the field judge stopped the game to find out what time it was. He was a painter and could not work after four thirty. The players’ watches all disagreed and the official ruled that it was four twenty-nine, which was what his cousin, Charley Brickley’s, watch said. With a minute to play, I uncorked the trick I had been holding in reserve all through the game. I neglected to mention that two days prior to the battle, we had sent Harvard a set of our signals and they, knowing every play as it was called, were able to stop it. But now I called a signal that was not in the set we had sent them. It was for Jim Braden to deflate the ball, pack it up and send it back to the manufacturers with a complaint that it was defective. The mail box was back of Harvard’s goal line and the Harvard team stood aside and allowed him to make the touchdown, never suspecting that the ball was in that neatly wrapped bundle. That is the true story of my first big victory over Harvard, 5 to 1.

IX

Yale, Beaten by Blind Boys

After the Harvard game I tendered my resignation as Yale captain because my incumbency was making some of the men so miserable. Every night when they were put to bed, Thorne and Coy and Butterworth cried with such plaintiveness that none of the other athletes could sleep. Coach Jones frequently walked the floor with them all night; he even gave them an extra bottle at bedtime, but to no avail. However, the rest of the squad would not stand for my retirement and the problem was ultimately solved by our trading the three malcontents to Dartmouth for a practice ball.

With the team thus strengthened we went on and won the Trinity and Villa Nova games and reached the big annual Thanksgiving Day battle against Miss Spence’s School with a record of three victories and four defeats, having been nosed out on successive Saturdays by Moler’s Barber College, the War College of Washington, La Salle Extension University and the Weehawken School for the Blind.

I might say in passing that the last named institution beat us by trickery. When we came on the field, our opponents were sitting at various corners with their eyes closed and tin cups in their hands in which passers by were expected to drop coins. I was taken in and would surely have dropped a dime in the opposing captain’s cup had it not been a habit of mine never to carry more money in a game than was necessary to tip the officials. Some of the other boys loosened up, however, and as soon as the cups were filled, the “blind” men opened their eyes with a whoop and proceeded to give us a licking. At that we might have trimmed them if, the night before the game, we hadn’t gone out and got blind ourselves to make it more even. The Weehawken team’s college color was light yellow and this was the origin of the expression blind man’s buff.17

With the approach of Christmas I was swamped with invitations from classmates to spend the Holidays at their homes. I accepted the invitation of Jack Grudge, son of Henry Grudge, then president of U.S. Steel. Grudge père’s fortune was estimated in the hundreds and Mrs. Grudge was social dictator of New York and Staten Island; no one could claim to have “made” Society until he had been in the Grudges’ palatial town house at West Sixteenth street and the river.18

There were two daughters in the family, Vera and Bera Grudge, co-eds at Princeton. Vera was a pretty, interesting girl, but Bera, besides always wearing rompers, was what the French would euphemistically call nutté. To whatever remark you addressed to her, she would reply “Sis-Boom-Ah! Tiger!” Her father rented a covey of tigers from the Bronx Zoo and had them there in the house, hoping she would get disgusted with them, but she would lie right down in front of them, look them in the eye and sis-boom them ad Nassaum. Her father said to me one night:

“Lardy,” he said, “I’d give anything to get Bera married off.”

“All you have to do,” I replied, “is get her married. She is already off.”

“The trouble is,” he continued, when the laughter had died down to a certain extent, “that she is tiger mad. She won’t look at a human.”

“Well,” I said, “about your only chance is to marry her to a blind tiger.”

Jack Grudge afterwards told me that his father certainly enjoyed my visit.

The Grudges had so many house guests that Christmas that it was necessary to institute a first and second table system for meals. I sat at the second table between Bera and the laundress, a Mrs. Stevens. Our banter would often be interrupted by Bera just when Lydia (Mrs. Stevens) and I were “going good.”

“Mrs. Stevens,” I would say, “I once had a sister who was quite fond of one of her gowns, but she would wear it only in the front yard.”

“Why?” This from Mrs. Stevens.

“She said it was her laundress.”

“Sis-boom-ah! Tiger!” This from Bera.

On another occasion Mrs. Stevens told me that another guest, a Mr. Spurl, brought his laundry down to her and bet her she couldn’t “do it up” in four hours.

“Did he win?” I inquired.

“He lost his shirt,” said Mrs. Stevens (Lydia).

“Sis-boom-ah! Tiger!” This from Bera.

X

A Gay Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve at the Grudges’! No Christmas Eve since has seemed like anything at all. With all their wealth and position, my host and hostess and their children were intensely democratic and their servants joined in the festivities on an equal footing with the family and guests. In fact, Mrs. Stevens (Lydia), the laundress who sat beside me at meals, was quite the life of the party and kept us in spasms of laughter. For example⁠—

“Mr. Lardner,” she said to me as we watched Bera Grudge and the hostler trim the tree, “I suppose I may expect a present from you.”

“Yes,” I replied, “and it will be something appropriate for a person of your calling. I am going to give you a cuff in the neck.”

“If you do,” she retorted without an instant’s hesitation, “I will be hot under the collar.”

“Underwear, did you say?” I put in.

“Sis-boom-ah! Tiger!” murmured Bera.

This was before the invention of evergreens and the baubles and candles were hung on a shoe tree.

When the tree had been trimmed, the question arose as to who would hang up the stockings.

“Why not Mrs. Stevens?” I said jokingly. “She certainly ought to be an expert.”

“I’ll hang one on your jaw in a minute,” teased the laundress.

A few moments later, Mr. Grudge, whom his friends called Doc because his home overhung the river, suggested:

“Let’s have some carols.”

“But don’t bring Earl!” said the laundress.

The singing was interrupted by the noise of an infant’s cries upstairs.

“Is that your baby?” I asked Mrs. Stevens.

“Yes, sir,” she replied, and Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson,19 who were at the party, got their idea for a song hit from those two simple lines.

As we were all separating for the night, Mrs. Grudge asked me whether I would care to accompany her and Vera and Bera on a mission of charity early Christmas morning.

“Every Christmas,” said Mrs. Grudge, “the two girls and I visit some worthy poor family and try to take the curse off what would otherwise be for them a dismal day.”

I assured her I would be delighted, so at five o’clock next morning, the four of us set out on a dog sled (This was before the days of surf boards) and drove to the home of an Italian family named Chianti who lived in penury.20

There were fourteen Chianti children, so Mrs. Grudge kissed their father and then handed him an odd-shaped bundle.

“I’ve brought you a bird,” she said, “and I wish you a merry Christmas.”

Afterwards, on the sled, she asked me what kind of bird I thought she had given him.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose a family of that nationality would prefer a guinea hen.”

“Nevertheless,” said Mrs. Grudge, “what I gave him was a gull. He will open the bundle thinking it is a turkey or something else edible, and when he sees what it is, he will tell his kiddies the joke and the laughter will be general all day.”

“Last year,” spoke up Vera, “mother pulled an even better one than that. She gave a great big package to a starving family by the name of Weaf, saying ‘Here is a goose for you,’ and there was nothing in the package but a picture of Goose Goslin of the Washington ball club.”

“Sis-boom-ah!” commented Bera.

When we got back to the Grudge home, there were three horses in the living room, Doc’s gift to his two daughters and son Jack.

“Oh, father!” shrieked Jack. “Just think! Three of them!”

“A horse apiece,” remarked Mrs. Stevens, peeping in from the laundry.

It was now time to examine the stockings. In mine I found an orange, a flashlight, a mechanical toy (A Negro that did the Charleston), a box of crayons, some candy and a miniature chess set.

“Oh, Mrs. Stevens,” I cried excitedly, “see what I found in my stocking!”

“And see what I found in mine,” she replied.

I looked. It was a run.

XI

How I Swam the Hudson

The Holidays were over and it was time to go back to Yale, then located, as I have said in a previous chapter, at Lancaster, PA. The first hazard was the Hudson River, which was quite difficult to cross in those days of no boats. I asked a handsome, big traffic policeman how to set about it.

“Take the Desbrosses Street ferry,” he advised.

At Desbrosses Street and the River, however, I learned that no ferries were running because no boats of any kind had yet been invented. I found out afterwards that the traffic policeman was none other than A. D. Lasker, famous two years later as the designer and builder of the first boat. At the time he spoke to me, he was doubtless so full of his dream of boats that he thought they were already actually in existence.

On the corner of Hudson and Spring Streets, I asked directions of a friendly looking vendor of shoe laces.21

He told me to walk way up past Troy on the East bank of the river, and look for a Ford. After what seemed to me a rather tedious stroll, I passed through Troy and began looking all over for a Ford, but couldn’t find one⁠—or any other kind for that matter. I told my troubles to a farmer, who laughed heartily and said:

“Mon, mon! (He was a Scotchman) Ye are long before ze day of ze automobile. When your New York friend said ‘Ford,’ he meant ‘a place in a river where it may be crossed by wading.’ ”

Embarrassed and chagrinned, I walked down to the river bank and removed my shoes, stockings and plasters, as this seemed as narrow and shoal a point as any other.

“What’s the idea?” inquired a deep voice which I discovered belonged to a white-bearded old fisherman who was dredging for chocolate covered almonds.

When I told him my plan, he tried hard to discourage me.

“You will never make it. No Yale man ever has, and only five Princetonians.”

“What Princeton can do, so can Yale!” I replied, and sang two stanzas of the Yale song⁠—“Beulah, Beulah!”

Covering myself from head to foot with grease, I stepped boldly into the treacherous stream, which at that juncture is twenty-eight feet wide and knee deep. In less than half a day, I was on the west bank, but wish to state that I owe my success quite as much to the encouragement given me by Whiteman’s orchestra, which accompanied me in a tug, continuously playing “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” and “Abide with Me,” as to my fine physique and mastery of the crawl stroke.22

Unable to break off the habit all at once, I crawled down to Albany and caught the night boat back to New York.23

From New York, I crossed to Jersey by ferry and decided to enter Princeton, as it was closer and I had heard there were vacancies there on the hockey team and the mandolin eleven. Also I was attracted by the promise of an occasional glimpse of my late host’s daughters, Vera and Bera Grudge, co-eds at Old Nassau.

Our hockey season began inauspiciously. In the first place, the athletic association had neglected to provide a Puck and the local newsstands had sold out. On the opening night of practice, we played with a copy of Godey’s Lady’s Book, but it proved unwieldy. Moreover, it was an open winter in New Jersey and the lake was not frozen over.

“There is no ice,” I said one evening to Bera Grudge, who had inquired how we were doing. “We ought to have some ice.”

“Ring for a bellboy,” was her view of the episode.

Perhaps I ought to explain, before proceeding, that hockey was not played quite the same in those days as it is now. The players numbered only two and their positions were, respectively, Go Way Back and Sit Down. The records will bear me out when I say that I was best Sit Down Princeton ever had, not even barring F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Our first big game that season was with Wesleyan and we lost it by default, both my teammate, Carson Hull (later known as Big Bill Edwards), and I forgetting all about it. Some of the undergraduates got very angry at us for this, and for many days, every time we would appear on the campus, they would point at us and shout: “You bad men, you!”

XII

I Transfer from Princeton to Medicine

After the Wesleyan game fiasco, there was some talk of firing myself and Big Bill Edwards off the team and selecting other players to represent Princeton at hockey, but this idea was given up when it was found that we were the only two men in college who had skates.

Our second game was with my former alumna, Yale, and Big Bill, who was then known as Hull on account of his resemblance to that part of a ship, broke it up the moment he stepped on the ice. The balance of the hockey season was spent trying to get him out of the lake, where the fish were making vigorous complaints about the congestion. The lake was called Lake Carnegie after the library of that name, it being used as a receptacle for the students’ books.

Owing to my success on the mandolin club, where I played E string on one of the banjos, my name came to the ears of the Dean.

“Have you registered?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Well,” said Dean Cornwell, “you register and we’ll fix you up the best we can. But you can’t have a bath because there is an Odd Fellows’ convention here this week.”

“What is his name?” I asked. “And why does he object to people’s having baths?”

The Dean was greatly amused at my simplicity and in after years we met again and got a hearty laugh out of the episode.24

Dean Cornwell next inquired regarding my choice of a course.

“Well,” I said, “six thousand yards is plenty if it’s well trapped.”

Once more I had displayed my naivete and the Dean was in hysterics.

“Lardner,” said he, “I wish you would stay at Princeton all your life. You are a yell!”25

Aided by the Dean’s influence, I soon became a member of the Dekes, the Alpha Delts, the Phi Beta Kappas, the Kiwanis, and Realty Board and was rushed by the Triangle Club, the most exclusive of Princeton’s social organizations. They rushed me as far as Trenton and then relinquished the chase on my promise to enter the University of Illinois.

At Illinois I took up the study of medicine, a six months’ course in those days, unless you were bright. Among my classmates were Harold (Red) Grange, L. M. (Mike) Tobin, C. C. (Chamber of Commerce) Pyle, and Fred (Peaches) Nymeyer. Illinois had the right idea about that bane of most medical students’ existences⁠—anatomy. It was the custom at that time for the instructors to employ some prominent undergraduate or alumnus and dissect him with a view to showing, for the pupils’ benefit, his general structure and the location and function of his various organs.

Yale, for example, used Mr. Taft and it took two years to go all over him, even in a hurry. And the same at Michigan, where Germany Schulz was selected as the subject. At Illinois, on the other hand, we dissected one of Singer’s Midgets and got through the course in one day, with an hour off for glee club rehearsal.

I was graduated in medicine and awarded my M.D. after only two months of study; moreover, I passed the final examination with a perfect mark of 100 and still have a copy of the questions and answers of that examination, which may be of interest to medical students and practicing physicians of the present day:

Q. Where is your appendix located? A. In Washington Park Hospital, Chicago, unless the cleaning woman has been in.

Q. How does the stomach act when you eat regularly? A. Surprised.

Q. What has been your hospital experience? A. Terrible.

Q. What would you do in a case of an epileptic fit? A. Call a doctor.

Q. What would you do if somebody had a stroke? A. See that they counted it.

XIII

My Medical Career

Most young doctors make the mistake of hanging out their shingles in large or small cities where there are already more medicos than can earn a comfortable living. At the time I received my degree, automobiles were just coming into vogue and after giving the subject considerable thought, I evolved the following scheme⁠—to establish a gasoline station on a popular motor highway, far from any town; to run a restaurant in connection with it, and to keep secret the fact that I was an M.D. I selected a site halfway between Kansas City and Pittsburgh, put up two gasoline pumps and an attractive roadhouse and painted a sign, “Filling Station for Man and Motor.” The sign itself amused everybody.26

For a wage of four dollars a week, I hired a fifteen-year-old boy who, in infancy, had fallen through an open stopper in a wash basin and spent a week in the waste pipe, and ever since had had a horror of water in any form. By now he was so soiled and blurred that people began to languish the instant they saw him.

It was Roach’s (this boy’s) task to stand out in front by the gasoline pumps and as soon as customers stopped for gas, got a good look at him and started to droop, he would say, “Madam, or Sir (as the case might be), you ain’t well. Fortunately, there is a doctor stopping with us,” whereupon I would be summoned and would minister to my patient or patients, charging huge fees and getting away with it because Kansas City and Pittsburgh, the nearest points where another doctor might be reached, were so far distant. The only trouble with my plan was that my patients treated me as they would their own doctor and did not pay cash, but asked me to send them my bill, and invariably they gave me fictitious names and addresses. Occasionally, however, one of them paid for a meal and at the end of the first two months, my books showed a profit of $4.50, not counting the $20.00 which I owed Roach.

With this stake I moved to Chicago and rented a suite of offices at the corner of Madison and Paulina Streets, then the heart of the shooting belt. The suite comprised a reception room and a silo. There was no need of a consultation or operating room because by the time my patients reached the outer door, they were so full of stray bullets that it was too late to do anything but identify them. I made my money by keeping them in the silo until a reward was offered for information as to their whereabouts. Sometimes it was years or even never, owing to a way Chicago husbands and wives had in those days of leaving home on interminable bats, and as a rule, the party left behind either took the prolonged absences as a matter of course or was not aware of same.

The following incident is typical of the Chicago of that time:

A boy named “Hi” Fever was trying to acquire enough money to attend college by selling subscriptions to Risky Stories. His father had suggested that he call on one L. H. Tweek. The boy rang the doorbell at the Tweeks’ and Mrs. Tweek answered it. “Hi” asked if her husband was at home.

“I don’t know,” replied Mrs. Tweek. “I have a vague recollection that he said something about going to the Follies opening at the Colonial.”

“But,” said the Fever boy, “that show’s opening was in December and it is now August.”

“Is it?” exclaimed Mrs. Tweek. “Well, in another month we can have oysters again!”

My silo was finally filled to overflowing by unclaimed cases and it seemed advisable to move to another part of town. I put up a tent in Grant Park and hung out a shingle inscribed, “Surgeon. Cold Cuts a Specialty.” The park was always popular with employees of Loop offices and department stores during their lunch hour and thousands of them took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy their midday meal and undergo some necessary operation at the same time. The potato salad which I served with the cold cuts was covered with a sort of ether dressing and from each patron I managed to remove at least his tonsils without his being any the wiser. A certified public accountant once estimated that if all the tonsils I cut out during lunch hours were laid end to end, it would be a nuisance.

I was now nineteen years of age and thinking of getting married. I consulted a friend of mine, Dr. Flip.

“Dr. Flip,” I said, “I was thinking about getting married.”

“I wish I had,” was his reply.

“What? Got married?”

“No,” he said. “Just thought about it.”

XIV

My 2 Big Inventions

America was now taking its place with the rest of the world in the arts and sciences and the year 1899 saw two great inventions, by citizens of the United States, which were universally hailed as revolutionary and daring. The first of these was the invention of the straw, by Paul Whelton, a Boston newspaper man. Mr. Whelton worked on the paper nights and in the daytime held a position as lifeguard at Revere Beach. In those days the Atlantic Ocean in the vicinity of Boston was way over your head and Revere bathers were being drowned by the thousands despite the courage and resourcefulness of Mr. Whelton and his two assistants, Nick Flatley and Mel Webb.

The chief lifeguard sat on the beach day after day, for months and months, watching the drowners drown and trying to figure out what was the matter. The idea came to him all of a heap.

“The idea came to me all of a heap,” was the way he afterwards expressed it.

It occurred to him all of a heap that as each drowner was drowning for the third time, he seemed to appear to be clutching. And there was nothing to clutch at!

“If they just had something to clutch at!” thought Mr. Whelton, and that night, as he worked at the copy desk in the newspaper office, he thought suddenly of a straw, and the problem was solved.

Resigning from the paper, he started the quantity manufacture of straw and in a few days appeared on the beach with an armload of the new commodity. As each bather came out of the bathhouse, Mr. Whelton approached him in a friendly way and said, smilingly: “Have a straw.”27

People kept on drowning, but it was soon established that there was less danger if they bathed in straw stacks than in the ocean.

Mr. Whelton would not take money for the straws doled out for clutching purposes, but he soon found two other uses for his invention in which his conscience did not prevent acceptance of financial return. He began selling straws to the weather bureau and to sailors, outfielders and golfers, so they could tell which way the wind was blowing. And also, along about this time, the sport of camel hunting became quite popular through New England. “The ship of the desert” was very good eating as well as sufficiently foxy and elusive to make the pursuit interesting. New England camels, however, were deathly afraid of horses, horses, horses and you had to hunt them on foot.

And after you had walked miles and miles for a camel and finally caught up with him, there was no sure way of bringing him down. He scoffed at bullets, sniggered over knife thrusts and turned up his nose at lethal poisons. After endless experimenting by the wealthy nimrods of Beacon Street, Brookline and South Boston, it was found that a straw would reek havioc with his vertebrae, and Mr. Whelton’s fortune was made.

The other invention of that year was the telephone. They are still trying to find the guy.

The first telephone exchange had only one number, Central 1. All the subscribers had to take that for their number and when you called up, there was no telling whom you would get.28

There was no rate by the month, each subscriber being charged a nickel per call. It made interesting gambling, dropping your nickel in the slot and then waiting to find out who would answer; if you expected, for example, to talk to, say, Flo Ziegfeld and a sweet voice at the other end of the line announced “This is Neysa McMein,” or “This is Florence O’Denishawn,” you had the same thrill as when a 50 to 1 shot which you have bet on at the track finishes first. Personally I always played in tough luck. I would call up Marilyn Miller and get Heywood Broun; or try for one of the Dolly Sisters and obtain Percy Hammond. It was an outrage.

The nickel a call system lasted until the repeal of the law preventing women from talking to one another. When women were at length permitted to call each other up, the company went into the hands of a telephone receiver because it was taking in only five cents a day.

In 1900, Robert Fulton invented and tried to introduce the automatic or dial telephone. His invention was turned down, unwillingly, by the phone trust in compliance with a petition from people in the then infantile motion picture industry, who argued that the strain of attempting to learn the alphabet would reek havioc with their Art.

XV

Sport Writer on The Rabies

In 1900 I turned over my medical practice to a bystander and went to work as a sport writer on The Rabies, one of the first of the so-called tabloid newspapers. This was long before the tabloids became so painfully reticent and dignified, and the editors of the various departments were annually selected from the graduating class of the Oklahoma School of Oafs. The sporting editor under whom I worked was an unrecognized cousin of Will Rogers named Haney Thwack. He had been sent to the school to be cured of a penchant for oatmeal and was given his diploma in spite of the very obvious fact that the cure was nowhere near complete. In fact, the first day I reported at his desk, I found the same covered with receptacles of all kinds filled with the pompous cereal in different stages of preparation. “Oatmeal Haney” was what the boys called him behind his back, and once or twice he overheard and just smiled. There was no offending “Oatmeal Haney.”29

“Lardner,” he said to me, “there’s a coming golf champion down in Georgia named Bobby Jones. He is now a year old, or will be in a few years. I want you to get a picture of him in the bathtub and a good human nature, personality interview.”

“But, Mr. Thwack,” I remonstrated, “how can I get an interview with a man that age? Why, I don’t suppose he can even talk plain.”

“Age makes no difference with most Georgians,” replied my superior, testing the cereal with his knee. “They hardly ever get so they can talk plain.”

Bobby was splashing at a great rate when I was admitted to the lavatory.

“What are you doing, Mr. Jones?” was my first question.

“Me take baff,” he lisped. “Me no lika baff. Min’s me of a watah hazard.”

It was comical to hear him.30

“How are you getting along with your golf?” I asked.

“Ah is jes’ tryin’ to mastah the spoon,” he said. “Dis mo’nin’ at bretfus Ah used it fo’ de fustes’ time an’⁠—an’⁠—(he laughed at the memory) Ah spilt evahthing.”

The youngster then posed for flashlights, with the stopper out, with the stopper in, with the tub full and with the tub empty. “Oatmeal Haney” congratulated me on my handling of the assignment and I was sent to interview Neysa McMein.

Miss McMein proved an interesting talker, once you could understand her dialect, as different from the Jones boy’s as a couple of eighth notes.

I asked her where she had got the idea of drawing covers.

“Me getty idee from ol’ Mis’ Pukkins,” she said. “Ol’ Mis’ Pukkins, she use’ draw covers fo’ de big hotel in Quincy, Illinois. Soon as de gues’ leave dere room in de mo’nin’, she draw all de covers and let de beds air.”

Miss McMein recounted the difficulties of her early career. I forget just what she did say. She overcame them some way or other and today her cover charge is $1,500.00. The friendship begun at that time ripened into something grotesque and right now there is a saying along Broadway that wherever you find Neysa McMein, Ring Lardner is probably home working.

One of the rules in The Rabies office provided that members of the sporting department get weighed every day before reporting for work and if they weighed over 135 pounds stripped (as most of them usually were), they would have to go into some other department. This was in the days prior to Prohibition and I was drinking a great deal of water, with the result that one afternoon I tipped the beam at 141.31

“Oatmeal Haney” was loath to let me go and when I was ordered to report to the city editor, he made a scene, which he afterwards tried to sell to the Follies.

The city editor, Tom Bilgewater, regarded me at first wonderingly, then tenderly.

“Well,” he said, when he had regained the use of his voice, “you are a very likely looking fellow.”32

XVI

Star Reporter for The Rabies

Old timers will have no difficulty in recalling the Helsh murder, and veteran newspaper men have never tired of complimenting me on my work in connection therewith. It was my first assignment as star reporter for The Rabies and the fact that I was chosen for the task speaks volumes for my city editor, who was violently drunk at the time.

For the benefit of half-witted readers, I will recount the Helsh case in brief. Wallace Helsh was a wealthy barn tearer in Pennsylvania. He went all over the state tearing down barns so horses could get more air. Mrs. Helsh was the former Minnie Blaggy, prominent in Philadelphia society and the daughter of Blotho Blaggy, who was in charge of one of the switches in the Broad Street railroad yards. Young Helsh and Miss Blaggy became acquainted on one of the former’s barnstorming tours and were married two weeks after their first meeting. At the time of the murder, they had been married three years and Mrs. Helsh (née Blaggy) was expecting a baby, the child of one of her sisters. The baby was supposed to arrive on the 12:09 (midnight) train and the police first believed that the murder had grown out of a quarrel between the Helshes over which of them should sit up and meet it. This theory was based on the testimony of a neighbor, Basil Kidney, who said he had been hiding behind a book in the Helsh living room and overheard the following conversation:

“Will you sit up and meet our niece?” This from Mrs. Helsh.

“No.” This from Helsh.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t water meter.”

The witness did not hear any more of the conversation because it was then time for him to go on to another neighbor’s house, the Quimbys, and hide in their living room. He was an habitual living room hider. But half an hour after his departure from the Helsh home, a mysterious voice called up the police headquarters at Bryn Mawr and announced that there had been a murder at 24 Vine Street. This was not where the Helshes lived, which made it all the more puzzling.

“Dig right into this!” said my city editor. “Comb Philadelphia, find out who did it and get lots of pictures.”

“How about my transportation?” I inquired.

“You can have carte blanche,” was his reply.

But thinking he referred to a dog cart and an old horse named Blanche, which conveyed our society reporter to and from her work every day, I declined his offer and went to Philadelphia by rail. My mistake was profitable, for the first man I met when I rolled from under the train at Broad Street was Blotho Blaggy, Mrs. Helsh’s father.

“How about the murder, Mr. Blaggy?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said. “They have arrested my little four-year-old grandchild, who was on her way to visit her aunt and uncle, but they can’t pin anything on her. She hates pins; says she is too old for them.”

Next morning, The Rabies made all the other tabloids look silly. Across the front page we had a streamer, “Child Murder Suspect Balks at Pins!” and under it were pictures of Lillian Gish, who had appeared on the screen at a Chestnut Street theatre that week, and of Chief Bender, making a balk. On Page 2 was my story of the murder and on Page 3, the first chapter of Mrs. Helsh’s diary, of which I have preserved a copy and will reprint a few paragraphs:

“Oo, Oo, diary, I am going to keep oo and write in oo every day and when I am a ole, ole lady bug, I will read oo and live over the days of my honeymoon.

“Daddy was a baddy, baddy boy today. I asked um to bwing me a ittsy bittsy diamond wing and he fordotted all about it and when I scolded um he swang for my jaw and knocked out some toofums that my real honest to goodness daddy had give me for a wedding pwesent.

“Oo never can tell what a red hot daddy will do‑oo‑oo.”

I have perhaps forgotten to mention that when the police finally reached the Helsh home, Helsh was nowhere to be seen and Mrs. Helsh (née Blaggy) was playing a game of Bemis with her little niece. Asked when she expected her husband, she said the hour of his arrival always depended on the number and toughness of the barns he had visited, but he usually got back about six o’clock. The police then arrested the niece and left a guard to receive Helsh if and when he showed up. Sure enough, just at six o’clock he reached home and found dinner ready.

On the following morning, The Rabies printed pictures of Georges Carpentier, June Walker and Miss Omaha on the beach at Atlantic City and a portrait of the bathtub in which Mrs. Helsh’s sister had bathed her little girl before sending her on the fatal visit. I was given a bonus of $50 and spent it and the next two weeks waiting around for some more excitement.

XVII

Promoted to Contest Editor

In the days of which I am now writing, Horace Greeley and Ben Hecht were joint editors of The Rabies. They edited all the news that came in about different joints around town. They received only a small salary, but were given a share of the paper’s profits; therefore it was to their interest that the circulation and, consequently, the advertising be built up. One evening Mr. Greely called me into his private bath.33

As I entered he said, “Young man, go wash,” and pointed to the bowl.34

When I had dried the both of us, Mr. Greeley said:

“Kid” (he called me kid), “the more people that buys this paper, the better for I and Ben. Now the best circulation getters is contests and we are going to make you contest editor with carte blanche to offer whatever prizes you like in every kind of contest you can think of. Est-ce que c’est claire de lune?” (“Is it clear?”)

I nodded my head and left him. On my way back to the city room, I encountered Charley Cautious, a fellow reporter.

“Whose private bath have you been in?” he inquired.

“Horace’s,” I replied.

“Horace’s?” he repeated.

“Horace’s,” I said.35

After a rubdown, I went to work contriving contests. My first idea was an essay contest on “Why I Married Mr. Hopper,” but it proved a failure as, at that time, there were only three persons eligible to the competition and two of the three would not, or could not, reply. The next one went over with a bang. It was a guessing contest of famous men. The names of the men, with a few of the letters left out, were printed in groups of five a day and prizes amounting to $50,000 were offered to those sending the most nearly correct answers, accompanied by a twelve thousand word article on boo scorpions.36

In the paper the first day we had “Abr‑ham L‑nc‑ln; Th‑mas Edis‑n; Charl‑s Ch‑plin; Jac‑ B‑rrymore; Charl‑s D‑ckens.”

On the second day⁠—“J‑mes A. G‑rfield; U. S. Gra‑t; Robert E. L‑e; M‑rk Antony; H‑rry K. Th‑w.”

And on the third day⁠—“G‑orge Ade; J‑seph J‑fferson; Irvin S. Co‑b; H. L. M‑ncken; J‑hn P‑ul J‑nes.”

Prior to the inauguration of this contest, The Rabies had a paid circulation of 126. To be eligible to compete, you had to subscribe to the paper for at least six months, and an even half million people entered the competition, raising our total circulation to 500,126.

Now comes the strange part of it. Of the half million articles on boo scorpions, every one seemed to be the work of a master of the subject; in fact, the articles were so uniformly convincing and scathingly denunciatory that Congress started a nationwide campaign against these ribald vermin and succeeded in exterminating them. Today one speaks of a boo scorpion much the same as of a dinosaur or a mah jongg fiend.37

But it was unnecessary, not to say impossible, to award any of the prizes, because none of the 500,000 competitors came anywhere near guessing the names of the famous men. Almost without exception the answers sent in were Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Charles Chaplin, Jack Barrymore, Charles Dickens, James A. Garfield, U. S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mark Antony, Harry K. Thaw, George Ade, Joseph Jefferson, Irvin S. Cobb, H. L. Mencken and John Paul Jones. Whereas the correct answers were⁠—Abroham Luncalm, Thamas Edisun, Charlus Choplin, Jace Burrymore, Charlas Duckens, etc., every one of them a real person, known to me by hearsay and each famous in the locality in which he lived. For example, the tenth one, guessed by all the competitors as Harry K. Thaw, was in reality a man named Hurry K. Thew, a well known Kansas City bossop tamperer, who drove half the K.C. housewives crazy by sneaking through their gardens by night, tampering with their bossops.

This contest virtually made The Rabies and nearly wrecked me. For months afterwards I lay in a hospital, at death’s door from the strain I had gone through.

XVIII

Halloween in Polyandry Hospital

Arrangements were made by the proprietors of The Rabies to have me examined by two of the most eminent diagnosticians then in New York, Dr. Pine and Dr. Gasp. Dr. Gasp had 104 degrees, while his partner’s temperature was normal. Dr. Pine explained that Dr. Gasp had been drinking heavenly.38

The two doctors made me strip to my nightgown and went all over me with a horoscope. Their diagnosis was chronic alfalfa and they said I must be rushed to a hospital and tattooed.

On the third day of October, 1896, I was ridden on a rail to the Polyandry Hospital and taken in charge by Dr. Barnacle, who immediately put me under the ether. The janitor found me there two days later and lifted me onto a bed. That night I was removed to the operating room and tattooed in three places. On my right knee they did a picture of Whiteman’s band playing before the Chesapeake and Ohio station agent at Clifton Forge; on my chest, the first Battle of the Marne, and on my (at that time) rather high forehead, the piano score of Parsifal.

Operations in those days were quite painful as the anesthetics employed were not nearly so effective as those now in use. In my case, and all other major surgical operations such as appendicitis, internal ulsters, etc., the patient was allowed to suck a lemon; it was not until 1899 that they gave you an aspirin tablet in cases of the removal of a leg or an arm.39

I recovered so wonderfully that after the third day Dr. Barnacle ceased his daily visits to me and left me in the care of the interns (so called because every time you wanted one of them, he had just turned in). My room, which I shared with the Marx brothers, the Dolly sisters and the Fairbanks twins, was a veritable paunch of flowers and I received so many telegrams that the company sent them in separate envelopes.

On the thirtieth of the month I was pronounced cured and told I could go home, but the nurses, who had taken quite a fancy to me, persuaded me to remain and participate in the Halloween pranks, which were then a feature of hospital life.40

Well, the things we didn’t do would be easier to tell than the things we did.41

Among the pranks I recall particularly are the following:

The patient in Room 18 had been almost fatally burned in an apartment house fire. A crowd of twenty other patients and nurses gathered outside his door and yelled “Fire!” till he jumped out the window. As Room 18 was on the fifth floor, you can imagine his surprise.

In Room 4 was a man who had fallen out of a rug and broken three ribs. We sent him spareribs for his supper.

Room 6A was occupied by a ball player with Charley horse. We sent him some oats.

I have forgotten what ailed the woman in Room 11 and what we did to her.

Those are just a few of the pranks we played in Polyandry Hospital on Halloween, 1896.

XIX

A Soft Job

Dr. Pearson, on the day of my release from the hospital, warned me that I would have to be careful for at least a year and advised me not to return to the nerve wracking profession of journalism.

“Get into some calmer line of work,” he said, “something that won’t be much of a physical or mental strain.”

“What, for instance, Duck?”42 I inquired.

“The calmest, most leisurely calling I can think of,” replied the doctor, “is that of a ticket agent in a large railroad terminal.”

In compliance with this hint, I investigated and found that applicants for such a position were required to take a week’s training. The training outfit consisted of a ticket rack in which were tickets to every town in the country, arranged in alphabetical order; a flat shelf equipped with date stamps, pencils and pens, and an iron grating which separated the student from the practice customers.

The applicant had to report at 8 o’clock in the morning. His first duty was to break the points of the pens and pencils and set the date stamp either six months behind or ahead of the current date. Then, all day long until 6 in the evening, crowds of practice customers kept coming up and standing in front of the grating. The applicant was instructed to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the floor except twice during the day, when he might look at a customer and wait on him, there being a rule that no one agent might sell more than two tickets per diem.

The first practice customer whom the applicant deigned to notice would, we will say, ask for a ticket to Baltimore. The applicant would look through the T’s, M’s, K’s and any other six letters; then turn his attention to the B part of the rack and produce a ticket to Baltimore. He would then twirl his date stamp six months ahead or behind as the case might be, and stamp the ticket. If the fare to Baltimore was $4.10, he would have to borrow a good pencil or pen from another applicant and write one under the other, the figures $4.00 and .10, on an envelope; then scratch his head and add them and write down the total⁠—$4.10. The practice customer would then submit a five dollar bill and the applicant would repeat to himself the names of all his friends in a painstaking effort to think of somebody who might have change.

I learned all these tricks easily and was given a position at one of the windows in Grand Central Station, New York. On the first day I lived up to the rules, looked at only two people and sold two tickets. But after that, my natural imaginativeness and individuality overcame my sense of duty and I proceeded to revolutionize the ticket selling industry. One or two samples of my methods, and their results, may prove interesting.

A beautiful widow with two children asked for tickets to Peekskill.

“Madam,” I said, “Peekskill has many attractions, but I think you would find Ardsley just as nice, and it’s nearer and cheaper.”

“All right, make it Ardsley,” said she. “And how about my kiddies? Are they half fare?”

“Not half as fair as their mummy,” said I. “But joking to one side, I think it is a mistake to take them at all. I know a fellow in Ardsley who wants to marry a widow and I will gladly give you a letter of introduction to him. But he hates children and if you were to show up with those two, well, to put it mildly, whelps, your chances of matrimony would go glimmering.”

“Mamma,” whined one of the whelps, “let’s go glimmering.”

This remark may have settled the issue; at any rate, the little lady made the trip alone, leaving her children in the waiting room, where, I heard later, they were quite a nuisance for a couple of days; after which they disappeared. Their mother married the Ardsley wight, who left her, in four years, with three new children, or one up on what she had before, to say nothing of the superior quality of the later litter.

On another occasion, my frankness led me into a lasting comradeship with Nora Bayes, who came to my window one afternoon and demanded a ticket to Albany and a lower berth to Syracuse.

“But, Miss Bayes,” I remonstrated, “if you are only going to Albany, why do you want a berth to Syracuse?”

“Because I always sleep past my station,” was her reply.

This struck me as so comical that I hurried up to the athletic field of the University of Columbia and watched some of the men practice broad jumping.

XX

Dan Boone’s Joke

One of the traits or characteristics for which the writer has been noted in recent years is dignity, self-possession. Only the other day I was complimented on this by no less a personage than Mr. Charles M. Schwab.

“Lardy,” he said in his enchanting southern drawl, “you certainly have a lot of poise.”

“Yes,” I replied lightly. “Three are at home and one is away at school.”

But at the time of which I am now writing, I was so playful and “flighty” that it had never occurred to me to enter a vocation where solemnity and composure were deemed essential and it was a shock to me when my good friend Daniel Boone suggested that I go into politics.

“Lardy,” he said, “why don’t you run for an office?”

“Why? Do you think it is going to rain?” was my laughing retort.

Boone resented my levity and never spoke to me again, and every night for several months thereafter, he attempted to “get even” by ringing my front doorbell, then hiding behind some bushes in the yard and shouting “Pretty fellow!” when I came to the door. It is my firm belief that if I had taken his suggestion seriously that day, he would, by the tremendous force of his personality, have pushed me into a judgeship or at least got me on a jury. As it was, through reading The Americanization of Edward Bok, I became interested in the collection of autographs and found it, for a time, the most engrossing sport in which I had ever participated.

In emulation of Mr. Bok, I started right after the “big fellows,” my first “objective” being Senator Smoot. A servant informed me that the Senator was taking a bath. Luckily (for me) he had neglected to lock the bathroom door, so when I walked in on him, took all the towels and told him firmly that he could not have one until he had signed my autograph album, there was nothing for him to do but comply. He was greatly amused at what he termed my bonhomie.

My next quarry was Madame Modjeska whose signature I obtained by tickling her feet with a sprig of holly until she was glad to do anything to get rid of me. By similar pranks and pleasantries I landed all the Presidents. I became known as a kind of a pest, but just the same I am the owner today of the greatest collection of famous autographs in the world and the only question is what to do with it.

It was for the purpose of adding to this collection that I visited Philadelphia in September of 1926; notables from all over the country were there at the time to witness the great heavyweight championship prizefight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, but it developed that very few of them could write their names. The fight went ten rounds and the judges gave the decision to Mr. Tunney and a lot of us boys thought it would have been a horse on Mr. Dempsey if they hadn’t. It was reported after the fight that the winner was considering an offer from C. C. Pyle to join the ranks of the professionals.

This was my first trip to the City of Brotherly Love43 since Gen. Smedley Butler was sent there to clean it up. The result of his work was a revelation. Unless you had brought your own liquor, you could no longer get a drink in Philadelphia without asking for it.

Philadelphia at that time had a boxing commission something like New York’s (No offense meant). The commission, which was appointed by the Governor, named the judges that decided the outcome of fights. On this occasion Gov. Pinchot said he would like to see Mr. Tunney win and it may have been to save the commission and its judges from embarrassment that Mr. Dempsey acted as if the whole party was a big surprise to him. He seemed to have at last mastered the boxing style of Farmer Lodge who helped him prepare for his fight with Firpo some years before.

A man sitting right back of me kept insisting that Mr. Dempsey ought to be disqualified for violating Pennsylvania’s boxing code, which barred the rabbit punch. I was not familiar with the rules, but Jack certainly punched like a rabbit.

XXI

I First Marry in Central Park⁠—Lapland Lady for Bride

We now come to my first marriage. The girl was a born Laplander and landed in my lap during the course of a quiet weekend party at the Curley estate on Long Island. I suppose I was fascinated by the music of her broken English as much as by the blonde perfection of her 212 pounds of bubbling youth.

“Listen, hon’,” were her first words: “Ise mahty thusty. Is you-all goin’ to fetch me some mo’ dat dere gin?”

As she Lapped the fresh made spirits, I made her tell me of herself. Her name was Hugga⁠—Hugga Much⁠—and she was the daughter of an Eskimo society woman who had fallen in love with her family’s Lap dog trainer.

“Mah mammy was sho ’nough ‘folks’ ” she said proudly.

When the party was over and I had gone back to New York, she obtained my address and began showering me with mash notes, written in the same stertorous drawl. She was the most persistent of all the women who have ever marked me as their goal and it soon became evident that fighting her off was a waste of time. I finally said yes, and the scene that followed defies description. Dignified men marched the streets ringing cowbells and fairly reeking with confetti; women tore each other’s clothes, and even little children asked, “Where is nurse?” and “What is all the hullabaloo?”

Now followed preparations for the wedding. I was for having some of my friends as ushers and got as far as selecting Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, two beggars of Life, but Hugga, always strong for system and efficiency, insisted on my engaging the ushers from Madison Square Garden. I wanted the ceremony held at Old Trinity; Hugga said it was below her station⁠—she usually got off at Columbus Circle. So we decided to put it on in Central Park, which was convenient for both of us and big enough to accommodate most of our buddies.44

My best man was Paul Whelton of the Boston Wheltons. He was then employed at Sing Sing prison as an electric chair tester, his duties being to sit in the chair just before an execution and inform the electrician regarding the current, whether it was just right or too strong or not strong enough. “Volts” Whelton, his buddies45 called him.

Hugga’s bridesmaid was Texas Guinan and her maid of honor was Elizabeth Barrett (Peaches) Browning.46

It rained the night before the wedding, but the park had been covered with tarpaulin and when this had been removed, Judge Landis examined the turf and ruled that the ceremony must go on. Hugga was greeted with commingled boos and cheers. She seemed perfectly calm. I learned afterward that this was the sixth time she had tempted Hymen. Mayor Walker of New York and Dudley Field Malone presented her with the keys to Key West and McKeesport and everybody stood up and bared their chests while the band played the Lapland national anthem.47

Nick Altrook and Al Schacht next put on their comical burlesque channel swim and then I entered leaning on the arm of a taxi driver. It was all he could do to hold me up.48

The one ring service was read by an official of the Lotus club and we adjourned to the wedding breakfast, consisting of half a grapefruit, cereal, choice of bacon or ham and eggs, or country sausage and wheat cakes, toast, rolls or muffins, coffee, tea, milk, cocoa, Kaffee Hag, open 7 to 9:30. Sundays, 7:30 to 10.

XXII

On My Honeymoon

After the wedding breakfast, my first act was to get a shave and a shine. Then I sought out my bride and broached her on the subject of a honeymoon.

“Where would you like to go on your honeymoon?” I broached her.

“I don’t care,” she rebroached, “as long as it is a place where we can be by ourselves.”

So I hailed a taxi and we caught the eleven o’clock express for Philadelphia and visited the Sesquicentennial Exposition. Hugga remarked that it reminded her of her native town, Skulk, in Lapland.49

We strolled up and down the Gladway and she asked me why it was so named. I replied that it was named in honor of the people who had backed the Exposition.

“And when is it going to open?” she asked.

“Who?” I rejoined.

“The Exposition,” said Hugga.

“It opened early last summer,” I told her.

“Oh!” said Hugga.

She was always making mistakes, but was always quick to acknowledge them.

I showed her the huge stadium in which Jack Dempsey had lost his title and I my shirt. I pointed out the spot where the ring had been located and the spot, six feet away from it, where I had sat. She was amazed when I informed her that the “house” had been sold out that night and exclaimed at the vast distance between the scene of battle and the most remote seats.

“Why, the people in some of those seats,” she said, “couldn’t really tell whether it was a fight or a schottische!”

“Neither could I,” I replied, laughingly.

Hugga had brought me a dowry of $3,500 and as we both preferred small towns to large, we decided to invest in some business in a desirable residential community upstate from New York. Through a friend of Hugga’s father we learned that the post office in a place called Gluten was for sale. Gluten had a population of nearly two thousand, of whom more than eight hundred were dogs.

“It’s a great little town!” said Hugga’s father’s friend. “It’s got running water and two spigots.”

Hugga was quite practical.

“Don’t let’s be carried away by blurbs,” she said. “It seems to me that the post office in a town where the inhabitants are forty percent dogs is not likely to be very profitable. Dogs, or at least the dogs I have known (she flushed) are not great letter writers.”

“But the dogs of Gluten are male dogs,” retorted her father’s friend.50

“Of course,” put in my father-in-law, Mr. Much, “you can’t expect big profits from a small town post office if you run it solely as a post office. The idea is to sell stamps, post cards, envelopes, etc., only when necessary and depend on other kinds of merchandise for your main source of revenue.”

“And the town being what it is, I would advise you to carry a large line of canine accessories,” added his friend.51

Thus it was that my young wife and I began a mercantile career which netted us over a thousand dollars the first year and attracted the attention of the then Postmaster General, Basil Paunch. On our front window was inscribed a small sign, “United States Post Office,” and under it, a much larger sign, “Everything for the Dog.” It was a simple matter to divert customers from their original intention of purchasing stamps and persuade them to buy something doggy, at a much greater profit to us. One example of our method will suffice. On our first day, a Mrs. Femur came in and asked for a two-cent stamp.

“You don’t want a stamp,” said Hugga. “What you need is a muzzle.”

“Perhaps you are right,” said Mrs. Femur, and before she had left the place we had sold her a $12.00 amber muzzle which netted us $10.45.

Another of our big winners, which we usually sold in place of post cards, was fleabane concocted by Hugga herself out of drippings from Queen Marie’s diary.

XXIII

My Romance Blasted

This chapter is one I would not have written but for the insistence of my relatives and friends who are aware of the injustice done me by the press and have persuaded me that it is only fair to myself and them that I state, for once and all, the true facts of the case.

The subject is my divorce from my first wife, Hugga Much, or rather (thanks to perjured evidence and a “judge” so crooked that the state automobile association had fairly plastered his body with signs reading “Danger! Reverse Curve Ahead!”) her divorce from me.

We had been married only a few years when the storm broke. We were living in Gluten, NY, and while nominally proprietors of the post office there, were cleaning up a tidy fortune through the barter of dog muzzles, assorted leashes and fleabane. It netted us so little profit to conduct the regular business of a post office that we had discouraged Glutenites from buying such things as envelopes and stamps, telling them either that we were just out of those commodities or that the ones we had in stock were infected, or otherwise damaged.

This finally, through some jealous busybody, was called to the attention of Postmaster General Basil Paunch and that official personally came up from Washington to investigate. At his first sight of Hugga, he forgot all about the business that had brought him and fell violently in love. His love was returned and one day I stumbled upon the ungainly pair playing “Nine Men’s Morris” at the municipal filling station. To avoid a scene, I ordered Paunch to visit me at my office and when I met him there, we had quite a talk.

He told me it got awfully hot in Washington in the summer months, but the springs and falls were lovely and the winters much milder than in New York. The principal streets, he said, were named after states or letters of the alphabet.52

I started my divorce suit in Sullivan County, but my wife asked for a change of venue as the doctor said it would do her good. Neither of us had ever been to Chicago for a really long stay, so we chose the Crescent City for the scene of action. We found it much the same as New York except that the citizens carried muskets instead of canes. State Street had just been provided with a blazing new system of lights as a result of complaints of machine gunners that because of poor visibility, hundreds of harmless matricides had been mistaken for bystanders and shot down or up.

On the day preceding the opening of the case, forty-six special trainloads of corespondents reached the city. In the forenoon they were received by the then Mayor, Gifford Pelk, and given the keys to their trunks, which had been opened by mistake. A tour of the Stockyards and breweries took up the balance of the day, and then came the problem of sleeping accommodations. Even with cots lining all the halls, the hotels were unable to take care of the corespondents named either by Hugga or me and a panic was averted only by a great idea born in the brain of a well-known newspaper man, James Crusinberry.

“First,” he said, “get everybody to bed that has a bed. Then assemble the leftovers and tell them to take a walk around the block. Thus they will all be provided with a lodging.”

“Where?” inquired a man with a pointed beard.

“In the Morgue,” replied Mr. Crusinberry.

“One time,” put in another stranger, “we had a case somewhat similar to this in my hometown, Cincinnati. There were so many corespondents that the hotels could not accommodate half of them. So a committee of citizens went to the outskirts of town and put up tents for the overflow. They called it the Tent City.”

“That wouldn’t do here,” said a man whose name turned out to be Frank Bering.

“Why not?” asked the stranger.

“Because,” said Mr. Bering, “Chicago is the Second City, not the Tent.”

XXIV

My Divorce Trial

The day of my divorce hearing dawned bright and clear. By the time court opened, it was just right for the spectators, but a little warm for the litigants. The vast crowd was on hand early and appeared highly entertained at the antics of the rival bands. The twelve thousand corespondents named by me made a tremendous hit when they marched into the courtroom, stopped and formed a C and pointing at my wife, sang their alma mater, “Yes Sir,” That’s! My Baby!

Hugga and I were called to the centre of the room, where we first shook hands and then cut for positions. Hugga cut the high card and chose to sit near the west window, where there was a slight breeze. The officials were Judge Ogle, Attorney Dumb for me, the plaintiff, and Attorney Wheedle for Hugga, the defendant.53

A transcript of the testimony will best show what a raw deal I got. The only witness was Clena Sheets, a chambermaid in the Baldwin Hotel at Curve, Tenn.

Direct examination by Attorney Dumb:

Q. Did you ever see this defendant? A. Yes.

Q. Where? A. Who?

Q. This defendant. A. I seen her at the Baldwin Hotel, in Curve.

Q. Who? A. This defendant.

Q. Was she alone? A. Why, I suppose so. I don’t think they ever was a time when we had more than one guest.

Q. Did you know she was married? A. I know she wasn’t. She had a single room.

Q. What was the number of her room? A 502.

Cross examination by Attorney Wheedle:

Q. Miss Sheets, how is it that you remember the number of this defendant’s room? A. I remember it because it’s the only room in the hotel.

Q. If there is only one room, in the hotel, why is it numbered 502? A. That’s his favorite number.

Q. Who? A. Jack Downey, who runs the hotel.

Re-direct examination by Attorney Dumb:

Q. Miss Sheets, you are under oath and you will find it to your advantage to tell the truth. Kindly give the honest reason why the only room in your hotel is numbered 502. A. All the other rooms were burned up in the big fire.

Q. Leaving only Room 502 standing? A. That’s right.

Q. Was Room 502 on the fifth floor? A. Where and the he‑ll do you think it would be? (Laughter.)

Q. And were the office floor and the mezzanine and all the rooms below, above and on the same floor as 502 destroyed by the fire? A. Yes. (Catcalls.)

Q. And Room 502 alone was unscathed. How do you account for that? A. I have nothing to do with the accounting. That is attended to by the bookkeeper. (Bird calls and bugle calls.)

Q. Was this defendant in Room 502 at the time of the fire? A. Yes.

Q. How do you know? A. If she wasn’t, she’d of been burned. (Violins, violoncellos, etc., pizzicato.)

Q. Have you ever seen any of these corespondents? A. Yes, all of them.

Q. Where? A. In the writing room of the hotel.

Q. What were they doing? A. Co-responding. (Cries of “Goodness!” and “Touchdown! Touchdown!”)

Judge Ogle: “It seems to me that this defendant proved herself a woman of extraordinary acumen in selecting the only fireproof room in the hotel. If she had used half as sound judgment in choosing a husband, the less said about it the better. The court finds for the defendant, awards her $12.00 per week alimony, a Colonial house within walking distance of a golf course, half a mile from the railroad station, five master bedrooms, three baths, four servants’ rooms with bath, three-car garage, electricity, water and gas, and might add that if she has no engagement for this evening, why neither has the court.”

Thus ended my first marital venture and I will state here that I bear no ill will toward Hugga, who, I am told, is doing very well as an elevator starter at the Olympic Games.

XXV

Even Judge Ogle Smiled

In recounting the trial I forgot to include a couple of examples of the sparkling repartee between counsel for the opposing sides, which, I believe, are well worth publication. At one stage of the proceedings, my lawyer, Attorney Dumb, made the remark that Hugga’s lawyer, Mr. Wheedle, looked as if he had forgotten to shave that morning.

“So do you!” replied Attorney Wheedle without an instant’s hesitation.

“I’ll bet your wife wishes she was single,” said Attorney Dumb.

“Yours is!” retorted his opponent.

Not long after this tour de force Mr. Wheedle objected to Mr. Dumb’s habit (amounting almost to a knack) of snapping the various court attendants’ suspenders. It really was annoying, both to the attendants and the rest of us; the noise was deafening.54

“If the court pleases,” said Mr. Wheedle, “I believe this trial could be gotten through with a great deal more pleasantly if counsel for the plaintiff would pay less attention to the attendants’ suspenders.”

“I presume counsel for the defense wears a belt,” retorted Mr. Dumb sarcastically.

“I would like to belt you in the jaw!” exclaimed Mr. Wheedle.

“You look like a horse!” said Mr. Dumb.

“Is that why you keep riding me?” asked Mr. Wheedle.

Even Judge Ogle could not suppress a smile, but quickly recovered his dignity and pounded on his desk with dental floss.

This badinage probably had no effect on the outcome of the trial, but as a result of it, the two attorneys were later persuaded to give up the profession of law and join the staff of the Harvard Lampoon.

Like Jack Dempsey, I became popular in defeat and when I returned to New York I found awaiting me an invitation to attend an exclusive luncheon at the Plaza in honor of the Queen of Romania. Those excluded were the assistant bell captain and Joe Muriosi of the men’s washroom.

I found Marie a woman of a ready quick wit, a woman who spoke Romanian with only a trace of accent. She was plainly dressed in a Mother Hubbard and Plus Fours.

“Po’k chops; dat’s ma dish,” she said to the waiter. “Bring me some o’ dem po’k chops and sweet potato. An’ make de po’k chops nice an’ brown. Nice, brown po’k chops is somethin’ Marie don’t like nothin’ else but.”

“The watermelon is good today,” suggested the waiter.

“Oh, dat watahmelon! Oh, dat watahmelyon hangin’ on de vine!” sang her majesty, beating time with an oyster opener.

After dessert, the head porter introduced Col. William Grenfall, who helps open taxi doors at the Fifty-eighth Street entrance.

“Friends,” said Col. Grenfall, “it is a coincidence that royalty should visit America in this year of all years, the year of the Sesquicentennial Exposition as well as the hundredth anniversary of the Youth’s Companion. This reminds me of a story told me last night by my good friend Junius Gabbett who calls trains at the Grand Central Station.”

“What does he call them?” interrupted the Queen.

“Trains,” replied Col. Grenfall with an amused smile. “You will stop me, I trust, if you have heard the story before. It seems there were⁠—”

Col. Grenfall was paged at this point; it developed there was a taxi at the Fifty-eighth Street entrance and the door stuck.55

The Queen, responding, said the only disturbing feature of her trip had been the announcement of the athletic break between Harvard and Princeton, which had apparently plunged the entire country in gloom and which she called the most important event in United States history since Marc Connelly, playing alone at Coldstream, missed a putt that would have given him a 124.

XXVI

I Revolutionize Theatre Business

My memoirs are now drawing to a close. (Cries of “Touchdown! Touchdown!” and “We want Borah!”) But it would be little less than criminal were I to complete the story of my life without explaining why I selected Great Neck, Long’s Island, as the place to end my days. My second wife, a tall, gangling Swiss girl named Emma Geezle, whose father had made his money in Alpine stock, said she had lived all her life in a little haunch at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second street and she was sick of the bright lights.

“Take me,” she said, “to some town where we won’t be dazzled by the lights.”

So I asked a prominent realtor to recommend a town where there would be no danger of being blinded by electricity.

“Great Neck,” was his reply. “You will find that some of the people out there get lit up quite often, but the houses hardly ever. If the weather report reads ‘Cloudy,’ or ‘Light southwest winds,’ the current becomes so affected that many a wife, attempting to dress for a party, has found herself frantically trying to complete her accouterment by donning a wing collar and a dinner jacket.”

So Emma and I bought ourselves a love nook in Great Neck, christened it “The House of a Dozen Candles” and are now devoting most of our time to keeping the house in order, no small task when your ménage consists of five servants, six children, four rooms and bath, a police dog, three mechanics and a full-grown leopard.

In my spare moments I devised a scheme which for a time revolutionized the musical comedy business in New York. In those days it was customary for producers of revues and other musical plays to seek to attract patronage by having their performers wear hardly any costumes.

The tights worn by chorus girls in old time burlesque shows came to be regarded as too cumbersome and various committees on public morals were at their wits’ ends for methods to compel the theater men to observe what they called the elements of decorum and attire their dancers and coryphees in something more tangible than a square inch of gauze.

It was Mayor Walker who called me in to make suggestions. After a day’s thought I concocted the following plan: To make it compulsory for all members of the audience to disrobe utterly before entering the theater.

At first, the Mayor could not see that this would make matters any better, but I quickly convinced him. As soon as the ordinance was passed, attendance at shows fell off so lamentably that most of the productions were obliged to close. It was really surprising, even to me, to note the number of citizens who refused to undress before presenting their seat checks to the ushers. Most of them complained that the play houses were too drafty.

At any rate, the producing managers’ association soon petitioned the Mayor to have the ordinance wiped off the books and a compromise was readily effected whereby the audiences were permitted to remain clothed again provided the actors did likewise.

A banquet was given with me as the guest of honor and David Belasco, often referred to as the Master because he occupies the Master’s bedroom at the Belasco home, presented me with a lock of his hair.

In the concluding chapter I will tell of my declining years in Great Neck and the accident that resulted in my death.

XXVII

A Postmortem Message

Before recounting the accident, it will be necessary to describe the locale of our Great Neck home and to name and picture a few of our then neighbors. As is perhaps known to a few of my less dumb readers, Great Neck is something of a literary and theatrical center.

Not far from us, on Cow Lane, lived Ed Streeter, author of the Dere Mable letters, for which I received many congratulations. In “the Estates” resided Sam Hellman, writer of short stories and inventor of the popular dessert, “Rind Wine,” consisting of watermelon soaked in champagne.

Up the hill was the home of Gene Buck boasting a living room of such dimensions that fifty or one hundred guests often visited the Bucks in a single evening, each thinking he was the only one that had come. Mr. Buck had formerly lived in a hovel of sixteen rooms, but when the first baby came, decided it was necessary to branch out. A second little Buck has since been added to the family and Gene is negotiating for the purchase or rental of the Paramount Building.

Our next door neighbors in the summer time were the H. B. Swopes. H. B. (Silent) Swope was the executive editor of The New York World. He and his madam had Company every weekend, Company being used in the military sense, full strength.

It got noised about that Emma and I had chow every Sunday about one o’clock and three or four platoons of our neighbors’ Company, having gone breakfastless owing to the sleeping prowess of mine host and hostess, acquired the quaint habit of dropping in at our haunch at about that hour and making complimentary remarks about our children. When this ruse had been seen through at the expense of several fragments of chicken and cups of coffee, Emma stamped out the practice by posting a sign which read, “Try Our Table d’hôte $3.00.”

In other parts of our village lived Bobby North, of the original Floradora Sextette; Ed Wynn, female impersonator; Raymond Hitchcock, soft shoe hoofer; Joe Santley, trap and drums; Arthur Hopkins, eccentric dancer; Sam Harris, the bridge authority; Ernest Truex, the Welsh comic; Oscar Shaw, gigolo; Frank Craven, the Tattooed Man; Bob Woolsey, proprietor of the Flea Circus; Tad Dorgan, designer of farm implements, and Thomas Meighan, “Is It a Man or Wolf?”

To say nothing of one of the Marx Brothers, who had recently bought a house, and Eddie Cantor, who had done the same and it was said that neither of them had come anywhere near paying cash.

It was doubtless as a result of this environment that the thing happened to me. I got up one morning and after my customary plunge down the staircase, I took my finger exercises, consisting of pointing first one finger and then the other at my wife. She made the remark that it would be a nice day to go out in the bay and fish for hake.56

Getting into my rowboat, I put on a No. 2 bait, a combination of a cockroach and the kind of salad they serve you in hospitals. I thought perhaps a hake would eat it, as nobody else would. I had hardly made my first cast when⁠—57

Sun Cured

It seems there were two New Yorkers, C. L. Walters and Ernie Fretts. They met on a train Florida bound. Fretts was in the insurance business, over in Brooklyn.

“I’m in the insurance business, over in Brooklyn,” said Fretts. “Handle all kinds of insurance. I started when I was just a kid, twenty years ago, and now I’ve got it built up so’s I don’t need to worry. It runs itself. I guess that’s the trouble. I mean I got too much time on my hands, and I play around too much. Why, say, it’s a wonder I ain’t dead, the way I been going. I bet I ain’t been to bed before two, three o’clock the last six months. You can’t go that pace and not feel it.”

“It’s bound to tell on a man after a w’ile,” said Walters. “Now you take me⁠—”

“So I’m about all in,” said Fretts. “And the funny part of it is I didn’t realize it. I wouldn’t of thought nothing about it only for the girl I got in my office. You couldn’t hardly call her a girl, either; she’s a woman about fifty-three and looks like a Channel swimmer. That’s the kind to have in your office. I had a regular Miss America once, the first year I was in business for myself, and we were so busy petting each other that we couldn’t even answer the phone. I didn’t sell enough insurance that year to keep her in typewriter erl. The smartest play I ever made in my life was getting rid of her.

“This woman I got now⁠—well, you’d about as soon think of making love to a horse. And she’s as smart as a man; you don’t have to tell her nothing. And where do you think I got her? In an emplerment agency.”

“Now you take me⁠—” said Walters.

“So as I was telling you, I come in the office one day last week, along about noon, and hadn’t been to bed in thirty-six hours, and Miss Clancy⁠—that’s the woman I got in the office⁠—she give me one look and said, ‘Mr. Fretts,’ she said, ‘don’t think I am butting in on your private affairs, but you better be careful or you will kill yourself. If you will take my advice,’ she said, ‘lay off for a month or two and go to Florida or somewheres and rest up. Get away from these friends of yours for a w’ile.’

“She said, ‘You know you can trust me to handle the business,’ she said, ‘and if you will take a vacation for a month or two, you will feel like a new man. You use’ to play golf and tennis and enjer yourself in things that was good for you,’ she said, ‘and now look at you! I bet you ain’t taken no real exercise in four years. And you don’t sleep and you don’t eat. Just pack up and go down to Palm Beach or Miami or some place and take a little exercise and lay around in the sun and read, or just lay there and relax yourself. You got nothing in the world to worry about and if something does come up that needs your personal attention, I will let you know. But I won’t anner you,’ she said, ‘unless it’s absolutely necessary and I don’t think it will be.’

“She knows me so well that she could see what kind of shape I was in. I tell you I was a wreck, but wouldn’t of thought nothing of it only for her calling my attention. I tell you I was a wreck.”

“You and me both,” said Walters. “Now in my case⁠—”

“So I promised her I’d think it over and that night I went on another party⁠—without a wink of sleep, mind you⁠—and I told a pal of mine, Ben Drew⁠—he’s in the furniture business in Brooklyn, in partners with his brother, and a great pal of mine⁠—I told him what Miss Clancy had said, and they was a couple of girls with us. Bonnie Werner, the girl I been going around with, she was with us, and a girl named Stevens that Ben had picked up somewheres; they were both along on the party.

“The Werner girl thinks I’m going to marry her. Fine chance!

“Anyway, she overheard me telling Ben about this Florida idear and she was all ears. She made some crack about Palm Beach being a grand place for a honeymoon. I guess she thought I was steweder than I really was. I kept right on talking to Ben and he was cockeyed and got all steamed up over the idear and said he would go along with me. He would of been right on this train, too, only for his brother getting sick. But he’s going to jern me next week.”

“I tried to persuade a friend of mine⁠—”

“We got rid of the girls and sat up all that night in a poker game and I was half asleep, and at that I win over seven hundred dollars. We was playing deuces wild and they was one hand where I had three deuces and drew to them and caught a five and nine of clubs. Well, I and a fella named Garvey bet back and forth and he finally called me and laid down a deuce and three tens. I was so gone by this time that I couldn’t talk, so I just throwed down my hand face up and somebody said, ‘My Lord! A straight flush!’ So they give me the pot and I thought all the w’ile that what I had was four nines. That shows⁠—”

“I don’t like deuces wild,” said Walters. “What’s the⁠—”

“I finally got home about noon and called up the office and then slept five or six hours and by that time I was ready for another party. But when I showed up at the office on Wednesday, Miss Clancy bawled me out again and I promised I’d take her advice. Well, I hadn’t played golf or tennis for years and meanw’ile I’d moved three or four times and when I come to look for my golf-clubs and tennis racket, well, they’d disappeared. And I couldn’t find a bathing-suit either, or my fishing-tackle. So all this stuff I’m taking along, it’s all new; I had to buy an entire new outfit⁠—seventy-some dollars for a set of golf-clubs and a bag, fourteen dollars for a tennis racket, and thirty-odd dollars for fishing-tackle. And besides that, a bathing-suit that I paid thirty-two dollars for it, but it’ll knock ’em dead.

“I don’t know how my golf game will be after laying off so long; I expect it’ll come back to me after the first couple of days. The last time I played was out on Long Island, at the Engineers’; must of been four, five years ago. I remember I shot an eighty-seven and win over a hundred dollars. Tennis is my game, though, and I can’t hardly wait to get at it again. What I’m planning to do is get up early in the morning, have breakfast, play two or three sets of tennis, then go swimming and maybe lay around on the beach for an hour; have lunch and then get in eighteen holes of golf and another little swim; then have my dinner, probably up in my room, and go to bed around nine, ten o’clock. Three weeks and I’ll be in the pink!”

“Now you take me,” said Walters, “and⁠—”

“Yes,” said Fretts, “but you probably use some judgment, or maybe you’re married and don’t⁠—”

“No, I’m⁠—”

“I don’t believe they’s a man living could of went the pace I been going and stood up under it. Ben Drew⁠—he’s a pal of mine⁠—he says I’m a marvel. He said, ‘Ernie, you’re a marvel!’ Why listen: Here’s what I did three weeks ago, just for an example. That was right after New Year’s eve. Of course I was on parties morning, night and noon all through the holidays and wound up with a bat that started New Year’s eve and lasted till Monday morning, the third. I slept a w’ile Monday forenoon and showed up at the office about three o’clock. Miss Clancy⁠—the girl I got in the office⁠—she give me a message to call up a pal of mine, Ben Drew.

“I called him up and he had a date with a girl he had picked up somewhere named Stevens, and would I and my girl come along. That’s a girl named Bonnie Werner that I been going with. She thinks I’m going to marry her, and I suppose everybody’s entitled to their opinion. Anyway, I couldn’t leave Ben in a hole so I said all right and he and I got together around five o’clock and loaded up on cocktails and later we jerned the girls and made the rounds and wound up at a Black and Tan, and I and Ben both got pie-eyed and finally sent the girls home mad and we stayed and got in a crap game and I win two three hundred dollars. The game broke up at noon.

“I went straight to the office and Miss Clancy give me a message to call up Miss Werner; that’s the girl I was with the night before, Monday. She was sore on account of me not seeing her home and said if I didn’t take her out this night⁠—Tuesday⁠—why, it was all off between her and I. Well, Tuesday nights we always have a big poker game and I told her I couldn’t get out of the game, but I would see her Wednesday night. I was praying she’d stay sore and carry out her threat and I wouldn’t have to bother with her no more. But no; she backed down and said Wednesday would be k. o.

“So I got in the poker game and it not only lasted all Tuesday night and all day Wednesday, but all night Wednesday night. I got outside of five, six bottles of Ben Drew’s Scotch and win a hundred and seventy dollars. I snatched three, four hours sleep Thursday forenoon and when I showed up at the office, the girl, the Werner girl, was waiting for me.

“To keep her from making a scene I had to promise to devote the rest of the week to her, and the next three nights, we made the rounds of all the different jernts, dancing and drinking rat-poison. Now that’s just one week, but it’s like all the other weeks. No wonder Miss Clancy said I looked terrible!”

“A man can’t go that pace and not feel it. I know in my case⁠—”

“So I need just this kind of a trip⁠—go down there where I don’t know nobody and no girls pestering me all the w’ile, and be outdoors all day and exercise and breathe God’s fresh air. Three, four weeks of that life and the boys in Brooklyn and New York won’t recognize me. And besides that, I never been to Florida and I’m anxious to look it over and see if it’s all they claim. They tell me a man can pick up some great bargains there now and if I find something I like, I’m liable to grab off a piece of it, not for speculation, but maybe build myself a little place to spend the winter months. I hate cold weather and snow and they’s no sense in a man in my position hanging around New York and freezing to death when I could just as well be enjering myself in a clean, wholesome way, in the sunshine.”

“You take me, now⁠—”

“You’re probably a fella that uses some judgment and eat regular, or maybe you got a wife and family to make you behave. But I got nobody only my friends, though I guess I got more of them than any man in Brooklyn. That’s one of my troubles, having too many friends, but only for them, I wouldn’t be where I am, I mean in business. A man in my business has got to have friends, or they wouldn’t have no business.”

“In my business, too. I’m⁠—”

“This must be Fayetteville we’re coming to,” said Fretts. “I’ve got to send a wire to a pal of mine, Ben Drew. He’s in Brooklyn now, but he’s going to jern me next week down in Miami.”

It seems that the two New Yorkers happened to be on the same train a month later, northward bound from Jacksonville.

“Hello, there,” said Walters.

“Fine,” replied Fretts, regarding the other somewhat vaguely.

“I come down on the same train with you a month ago,” said Walters.

“That’s right,” said Fretts. “We come down on the same train together.”

“Well, what do you think of Florida?”

“No place like it in the world!” said Fretts, warming up. “Say, I could write a book! I wished I’d kept a diary of the month I been there. Only nobody would believe it.”

“Where was you? Palm Beach?”

“No, Miami. That is, I guess we drove up to Palm Beach one night. I don’t know.”

“Where did you stop in Miami?”

“Over at the Beach, at the Flamingo.”

“What did they charge you there?”

“I’ve got no idear. I paid them with a check,” said Fretts.

“It’s American plan, ain’t it?”

“No. Yes, yes, it’s American plan.”

“And how was the meals?”

“Meals! I don’t know. I didn’t hear anybody say anything about them.”

“I thought⁠—”

“After this, I’m going to take all my vacations in the winter and spend them right there. That’s the Garden Spot of God’s Green Footstool!”

“So you bought yourself a place?”

“No, I didn’t buy nothing; that is, no real estate. I met some guy the second day that was talking about a big bargain in some development he was interested in, and I promised I’d go out and look at it. He called up a couple of times to remind me of my promise, so to keep him from pestering me, I finally did go out there, but they was no moon, so I couldn’t tell much about it.”

“I thought⁠—”

“Listen till you hear something funny. When I got to the hotel, they told me my room was still occupied, but the guy was just moving out and I could move in inside of an hour. Well, they made the fella pack up in a hurry and he overlooked two bottles of Plymouth gin. So there was the two bottles staring me in the eye and I was afraid he’d come back after them, so I phoned up to another fella’s room that had rode over with me in the taxi from the station and he come down and we had ten, eleven Tom Collinses just as fast as we could drink them.

“Then we filled up the both bottles with water and fixed them like they hadn’t been opened, and sure enough, the bird come back for his treasure. He said he was on his way to Key West and had got clear over near to Miami station when he recalled leaving the gin and he had enough time to come back for it and still catch his train yet. That’s one thing about Florida trains⁠—you can’t miss them no matter what time you get there. He said it was a good thing for him that his room had been inherited by an honest man. I’d like to heard what he said when he took his first swig out of those bottles.

“Well, I and the other fella, the fella that split the gin with me⁠—he’s a fella named Leo Hargrave, from Cleveland; got a foundry there or something⁠—the two of us went up in his room and polished off a bottle of Scotch and then it was time to dress for dinner. That’s all I done about dinner the whole month I was in Miami⁠—I dressed for it, but I never got it. Hargrave said he knew a swell jernt out near Hialeah and we hired a car and drove out there and it was a place where you dined and danced, but we wasn’t hungry and we didn’t have nobody to dance with. So we just ordered some drinks⁠—”

“Did you have any trouble getting drinks?”

“Yes. You had to call a waiter. Well, we stayed there till pretty close to midnight and then drove back towards the beach and stopped at another jernt where you play roulette. There’s a game I always been wild about and I’d of been satisfied to send for my baggage and settle right down for the month. But Hargrave was dance mad and he said we would have to find some girls to travel around with. He said he knew one girl; he would call her up in the morning, and maybe she had a friend.

“I told him to never mind about a friend, because it’s been my experience that when you ask a girl to bring along a girlfriend, the girlfriend generally always looks like she had charge of the linen room at a two dollar hotel. So we stayed up till the telegraph office was open and then I sent a letter to New York, to a girl I been going around with, a girl named Bonnie Werner, and told her to jump in an upper and jern me.”

“Did she come?”

“Sure, she come. She thinks I’m going to marry her. But she couldn’t get there till two, three days later and in the meanwhile, I run around with Hargrave and his dame. I wasn’t lonesome, though; not as long as they was plenty of Scotch and a roulette w’eel, and besides that, I found a poker game, to say nothing about a couple dandy fellas lives there at the Beach and love to just sit around and hit up the old barber shop harmony⁠—Jim Allison and Jess Andrew.

“But I didn’t really strike my stride till Miss Werner got in. From that time on, I went some pace! And of course it was even worse when Ben Drew showed up. He’s a pal of mine, in partners with his brother in the furniture business in Brooklyn. He was going to come down with me, but his brother got sick and held him up a week. He brought a girl named Stevens that he picked up somewheres, and with Miss Werner and I, and Ben Drew and the Stevens dame, and Hargrave and his girl, that made six of us that stuck together all the w’ile; that is, for the first few nights. After that, we’d get the girls all wore out by one, two o’clock and chase them home and then I and Ben and Hargrave, we’d play the w’eel or sit in a game of stud.

“It was the same schedule, day after day, the whole time I was there. The party would start out along about seven, eight o’clock in the evening and go to whatever place we hadn’t been to the night before. We’d dance till, say, one o’clock and then chase the women home and do a little serious gambling. The poker game generally broke up a little before noon. That would give us fellas the afternoon to sleep, w’ile the girls would do their shopping or go to the polo or waste their time some way another. About six o’clock, I’d get up and have the barber come in and shave me and then I’d dress and be all set for the roll-call.”

“But I thought⁠—”

“From the first day, I didn’t wear nothing but dinner clothes. And I brought along a trunk full of white pants and knickers that I never even unpacked.

“You’d have to get Miss Werner or one of the other girls to tell you the different places we went. They all looked alike to me⁠—just jernts, with tables and waiters and an orchestra.”

“But the weather was beautiful⁠—”

“So I heard somebody say. I guess it’s a great climate, if that’s what a man is looking for. They say California’s another garden spot and that’s another place I’ve always intended to go. But of course it takes longer.”

“The California climate,” said Walters, “is probably just as good⁠—”

“I’ve always intended to go out there. But of course it takes longer. Four, five days on a train is too much. A fella don’t get no sun or air. I always feel cooped up on a train.”

“How was the golf?”

“I didn’t get to play golf; never had my clubs out of the bag. But I heard somebody telling Ben Drew that they had four, five fine courses around Miami.”

“Play any tennis?”

“No, I didn’t have time for tennis. They got some swell courts right by the hotel, but even at that, when you change into your tennis clothes and play four, five sets and then take a bath and dress again, why, it means a waste of two hours.”

“Go fishing?”

“Fishing! That’s a whole day! And as far as bathing is concerned, why, it looks like they was a law that you couldn’t swim only at noon time, just when a man’s ready for the hay.”

“How far is the ocean from the hotel where you stopped?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get over there. You see you can’t do everything at a place like that. It would wear you out. I’m thirty-eight years old and when a man gets that age, you’ve got to watch your step. You can’t go in for athaletics like you was a kid.

“I’m in the insurance business in Brooklyn, and one of the things we learn in our business is that a man is taking chances if he goes in too strong for sports after a certain age. You can’t be a youngster all your life.”

“Did your friends go home ahead of you?”

“Do you mean Ben Drew and Miss Werner and the Stevens girl? No, Ben, he’s back there in a compartment dead to the world and he said he’d shoot anybody that woke him up this side of Manhattan Transfer.

“And the girls⁠—they look like they’d just stepped out of a wastepipe.”

“You look pretty good yourself, better than last time I seen you.”

“I should! A trip like this was just what I needed⁠—away from the office a whole month and longer and ain’t even given business a thought.

“That’s where so many men make mistakes⁠—not taking a vacation; or if they do take one, they keep in touch with their office all the time and sperl the whole trip, worrying. I got a girl that can run my business pretty near as good as I can myself⁠—not a girl, either; a woman about fifty-three years old; a Miss Clancy.

“She’s the one that realized the shape I was in and insisted on me taking this trip. And how her face will light up when I walk in that office Monday morning⁠—or maybe Monday afternoon⁠—and she sees what this has done for me!”

Hurry Kane

It says here: “Another great race may be expected in the American League, for Philadelphia and New York have evidently added enough strength to give them a fighting chance with the White Sox and Yankees. But if the fans are looking for as ‘nervous’ a finish as last year’s, with a climax such as the Chicago and New York clubs staged on the memorable first day of October, they are doubtless in for a disappointment. That was a regular Webster ‘thrill that comes once in a lifetime,’ and no oftener.”

“Thrill” is right, but they don’t know the half of it. Nobody knows the whole of it only myself, not even the fella that told me. I mean the big sap, Kane, who you might call him, I suppose, the hero of the story, but he’s too dumb to have realized all that went on, and besides, I got some of the angles from other sources and seen a few things with my own eyes.

If you wasn’t the closest-mouthed bird I ever run acrost, I wouldn’t spill this to you. But I know it won’t go no further and I think it may give you a kick.

Well, the year before last, it didn’t take no witch to figure out what was going to happen to our club if Dave couldn’t land a pitcher or two to help out Carney and Olds. Jake Lewis hurt his arm and was never no good after that and the rest of the staff belonged in the Soldiers’ Home. Their aim was perfect, but they were always shooting at the pressbox or somebody’s bat. On hot days I often felt like leaving my mask and protector in the clubhouse; what those fellas were throwing up there was either eighty feet over my head or else the outfielders had to chase it. I could have caught naked except on the days when Olds and Carney worked.

In the fall⁠—that’s a year and a half ago⁠—Dave pulled the trade with Boston and St. Louis that brought us Frank Miller and Lefty Glaze in exchange for Robinson, Bullard and Roy Smith. The three he gave away weren’t worth a dime to us or to the clubs that got them, and that made it just an even thing, as Miller showed up in the spring with a waistline that was eight laps to the mile and kept getting bigger and bigger till it took half the Atlantic cable to hold up his baseball pants, while Glaze wanted more money than Landis and didn’t report till the middle of June, and then tried to condition himself on wood alcohol. When the deal was made, it looked like Dave had all the best of it, but as it turned out, him and the other two clubs might as well have exchanged photographs of their kids in Girl Scout uniforms.

But Dave never lost no sleep over Glaze or Miller. We hadn’t been in Florida three days before him and everybody on the ball club was absolutely nuts about big Kane. Here was a twenty-year-old boy that had only pitched half a season in Waco and we had put in a draft for him on the recommendation of an old friend of Dave’s, Billy Moore. Billy was just a fan and didn’t know much baseball, but he had made some money for Dave in Texas oil leases and Dave took this tip on Kane more because he didn’t want to hurt Billy’s feelings than out of respect for his judgment. So when the big sapper showed up at Fort Gregg, he didn’t get much of a welcome. What he did get was a laugh. You couldn’t look at him and not laugh; anyway, not till you got kind of used to him.

You’ve probably seen lots of pictures of him in a uniform, but they can’t give you no idear of the sight he was the first day he blew in the hotel, after that clean, restful little train ride all the way from Yuma. Standing six foot three in what was left of his stockings, he was wearing a suit of Arizona store clothes that would have been a fair fit for Singer’s youngest Midget and looked like he had pressed it with a tractor that had been parked on a river bottom.

He had used up both the collars that he figured would see him through his first year in the big league. This left you a clear view of his Adam’s apple, which would make half a dozen pies. You’d have thought from his shoes that he had just managed to grab hold of the rail on the back platform of his train and been dragged from Yuma to Jacksonville. But when you seen his shirt, you wondered if he hadn’t rode in the cab and loaned it to the fireman for a washcloth. He had a brown paper suitcase held together by bandages. Some of them had slipped and the raw wounds was exposed. But if the whole thing had fell to pieces, he could have packed the contents in two of his vest pockets without bulging them much.

One of the funniest things about him was his walk and I’ll never forget the first time we seen him go out to take his turn pitching to the batters. He acted like he was barefooted and afraid of stepping on burrs. He’d lift one dog and hold it in the air a minute till he could locate a safe place to put it down. Then he’d do the same thing with the other, and it would seem about a half-hour from the time he left the bench till he got to his position. Of course Dave soon had him pretty well cured of that, or that is, Dave didn’t, but Kid Farrell did. For a whole week, the Kid followed him every step he took and if he wasn’t going fast enough, he either got spiked in the heel or kicked in the calf of his hind leg. People think he walks slow yet, but he’s a shooting star now compared with when he broke in.

Well, everybody was in hysterics watching him make that first trip and he looked so silly that we didn’t expect him to be any good to us except as a kind of a show. But we were in for a big surprise.

Before he threw a ball, Dave said to him: “Now, go easy. Don’t cut loose and take a chance till you’re in shape.”

“All right,” says Kane.

And all of a sudden, without no warning, he whammed a fast ball acrost that old plate that blew Tierney’s cap off and pretty near knocked me down. Tierney hollered murder and ran for the bench. All of us were pop-eyed and it was quite a while before Dave could speak. Then he said:

“Boy, your fast one is a fast one! But I just got through telling you not to cut loose. The other fellas ain’t ready for it and neither are you. I don’t want nobody killed this time of year.”

So Kane said: “I didn’t cut loose. I can send them through there twice as fast as that. I’m scared to yet, because I ain’t sure of my control. I’ll show you something in a couple more days.”

Well when he said “twice as fast,” he was making it a little strong. But his real fast one was faster than that first one he threw, and before the week was over we looked at speed that made it seem like Johnson had never pitched nothing but toy balloons. What had us all puzzled was why none of the other clubs had tried to grab him. I found out by asking him one night at supper. I asked him if he’d been just as good the year before as he was now.

“I had the same stuff,” he said, “but I never showed it, except once.”

I asked him why he hadn’t showed it. He said:

“Because I was always scared they would be a big league scout in the stand and I didn’t want to go ‘up.’ ”

Then I said why not, and he told me he was stuck on a gal in Waco and wanted to be near her.

“Yes,” I said, “but your hometown, Yuma, is a long ways from Waco and you couldn’t see much of her winters even if you stayed in the Texas League.”

“I got a gal in Yuma for winters,” he says. “This other gal was just for during the season.”

“How about that one time you showed your stuff?” I asked him. “How did you happen to do it?”

“Well,” he said, “the Dallas club was playing a series in Waco and I went to a picture show and seen the gal with Fred Kruger. He’s Dallas’s manager. So the next day I made a monkey out of his ball club. I struck out fifteen of them and give them one hit⁠—a fly ball that Smitty could have caught in a hollow tooth if he hadn’t drunk his lunch.”

Of course that was the game Dave’s friend seen him pitch and we were lucky he happened to be in Waco just then. And it was Kane’s last game in that league. Him and his “during the season” gal had a brawl and he played sick and got himself sent home.

Well, everybody knows now what a whale of a pitcher he turned out to be. He had a good, fast-breaking curve and Carney learned him how to throw a slow ball. Old Kid Farrell worked like a horse with him and got him so he could move around and field his position. At first he seemed to think he was moored out there. And another cute habit that had to be cured was his full windup with men on bases. The Kid starved him out of this.

Maybe I didn’t tell you what an eater he was. Before Dave caught on to it, he was ordering one breakfast in his room and having another downstairs, and besides pretty near choking himself to death at lunch and supper, he’d sneak out to some lunchroom before bedtime, put away a Hamburger steak and eggs and bring back three or four sandwiches to snap at during the night.

He was rooming at the start with Joe Bonham and Joe finally told on him, thinking it was funny. But it wasn’t funny to Dave and he named the Kid and Johnny Abbott a committee of two to see that Kane didn’t explode. The Kid watched over him at table and Johnny succeeded Bonham as his roommate. And the way the Kid got him to cut out his windup was by telling him, “Now if you forget yourself and use it with a man on, your supper’s going to be two olives and a finger-bowl, but if you hold up those runners, you can eat the chef.”

As I say, the whole world knows what he is now. But they don’t know how hard we worked with him, they don’t know how close we came to losing him altogether, and they don’t know the real story of that final game last year, which I’ll tell you in a little while.

First, about pretty near losing him: As soon as Dave seen his possibilities and his value to us, he warned the boys not to ride him or play too many jokes on him because he was simple enough to take everything in dead earnest, and if he ever found out we were laughing at him, he might either lay down and quit trying or blow us entirely. Dave’s dope was good, but you can’t no more prevent a bunch of ball players from kidding a goofer like Kane than you can stop the Century at Herkimer by hollering “Whoa!” He was always saying things and doing things that left him wide open and the gang took full advantage, especially Bull Wade.

I remember one night everybody was sitting on the porch and Bull was on the railing, right in front of Kane’s chair.

“What’s your first name, Steve?” Bull asked him.

“Well,” says Kane, “it ain’t Steve at all. It’s Elmer.”

“It would be!” says Bull. “It fits you like your suit. And that reminds me, I was going to inquire where you got that suit.”

“In Yuma,” said Kane. “In a store.”

“A store!” says Bull.

“A clothing store,” says Kane. “They sell all kinds of clothes.”

“I see they do,” said Bull.

“If you want a suit like it, I’ll write and find out if they’ve got another one,” says Kane.

“They couldn’t be two of them,” says Bull, “and if they was, I’ll bet Ed Wynn’s bought the other. But anyway, I’ve already got a suit, and what I wanted to ask you was what the boys out West call you. I mean, what’s your nickname?”

“ ‘Hurry,’ ” says the sap. “ ‘Hurry’ Kane. Lefty Condon named me that.”

“He seen you on your way to the dining-room,” said Bull.

Kane didn’t get it.

“No,” he said. “It ain’t nothing to do with a dining-room. A hurricane is a kind of a storm. My last name is Kane, so Lefty called me ‘Hurry’ Kane. It’s a kind of a storm.”

“A brainstorm,” says Bull.

“No,” said Kane. “A hurricane is a big windstorm.”

“Does it blow up all of a sudden?” asked Bull.

“Yeah, that’s it,” says Kane.

“We had three or four of them on this club last year,” said Bull. “All pitchers, too. Dave got rid of them and he must be figuring on you to take their place.”

“Do you mean you had four pitchers named Kane?” says the big busher.

“No,” said Bull. “I mean we had four pitchers that could blow up all of a sudden. It was their hobby. Dave used to work them in turn, the same afternoon; on days when Olds and Carney needed a rest. Each one of the four would pitch an innings and a half.”

Kane thought quite a while and then said: “But if they was four of them, and they pitched an innings and a half apiece, that’s only six innings. Who pitched the other three?”

“Nobody,” says Bull. “It was always too dark. By the way, what innings is your favorite? I mean, to blow in?”

“I don’t blow,” says the sap.

“Then,” said Bull, “why was it that fella called you ‘Hurry’ Kane?”

“It was Lefty Condon called me ‘Hurry,’ ” says the sap. “My last name is Kane, and a hurricane is a big wind.”

“Don’t a wind blow?” says Bull.

And so on. I swear they kept it up for two hours, Kane trying to explain his nickname and Bull leading him on, and Joe Bonham said that Kane asked him up in the room who that was he had been talking to, and when Joe told him it was Wade, one of the smartest ball players in the league, Hurry said: “Well, then, he must be either stewed or else this is a damn sight dumber league than the one I came from.”

Bull and some of the rest of the boys pulled all the old gags on him that’s been in baseball since the days when you couldn’t get on a club unless you had a walrus mustache. And Kane never disappointed them.

They made him go to the clubhouse after the key to the batter’s box; they wrote him mash notes with fake names signed to them and had him spending half his evenings on some corner, waiting to meet gals that never lived; when he held Florida University to two hits in five innings, they sent him telegrams of congratulation from Coolidge and Al Smith, and he showed the telegrams to everybody in the hotel; they had him report at the ball park at six thirty one morning for a secret “pitchers’ conference”; they told him the Ritz was where all the unmarried ball players on the club lived while we were home, and they got him to write and ask for a parlor, bedroom and bath for the whole season. They was nothing he wouldn’t fall for till Dave finally tipped him off that he was being kidded, and even then he didn’t half believe it.

Now I never could figure how a man can fool themself about their own looks, but this bird was certain that he and Tommy Meighan were practically twins. Of course the boys soon found this out and strung him along. They advised him to quit baseball and go into pictures. They sat around his room and had him strike different poses and fix his hair different ways to see how he could show off his beauty to the best advantage. Johnny Abbott told me, after he began rooming with him, that for an hour before he went to bed and when he got up, Kane would stand in front of the mirror staring at himself and practising smiles and scowls and all kinds of silly faces, while Johnny pretended he was asleep.

Well, it wasn’t hard to kid a fella like that into believing the dames were mad about him and when Bull Wade said that Evelyn Corey had asked who he was, his chest broke right through his shirt.

I know more about Evelyn now, but I didn’t know nothing than except that she was a beautiful gal who had been in Broadway shows a couple of seasons and didn’t have to be in them no more. Her room was two doors down the hall from Johnny’s and Kane’s. She was in Florida all alone, probably because her man friend, whoever he was at that time, had had to go abroad or somewheres with the family. All the ball players were willing to meet her, but she wasn’t thrilled over the idear of getting acquainted with a bunch of guys who hadn’t had a pay day in four or five months. Bull got Kane to write her a note; then Bull stole the note and wrote an answer, asking him to call. Hurry went and knocked at her door. She opened it and slammed it in his face.

“It was kind of dark,” he said to Johnny, “and I guess she failed to recognize me.” But he didn’t have the nerve to call again.

He showed Johnny a picture of his gal in Yuma, a gal named Minnie Olson, who looked like she patronized the same store where Kane had bought his suit. He said she was wild about him and would marry him the minute he said the word and probably she was crying her eyes out right now, wishing he was home. He asked if Johnny had a gal and Johnny loosened up and showed him the picture of the gal he was engaged to. (Johnny married her last November.) She’s a peach, but all Kane would say was, “Kind of skinny, ain’t she?” Johnny laughed and said most gals liked to be that way.

“Not if they want me,” says Kane.

“Well,” said Johnny, “I don’t think this one does. But how about your friend, that Miss Corey? You certainly can’t call her plump, yet you’re anxious to meet her.”

“She’s got class!” said Kane.

Johnny laughed that off, too. This gal of his, that he’s married to now, she’s so far ahead of Corey as far as class is concerned⁠—well, they ain’t no comparison. Johnny, you know, went to Cornell a couple of years and his wife is a college gal he met at a big house-party. If you put her and Evelyn beside of each other you wouldn’t have no trouble telling which of them belonged on Park Avenue and which Broadway.

Kane kept on moaning more and more about his gal out West and acting glummer and glummer. Johnny did his best to cheer him up, as he seen what was liable to happen. But they wasn’t no use. The big rube “lost” his fast ball and told Dave he had strained his arm and probably wouldn’t be no good all season. Dave bawled him out and accused him of stalling. Kane stalled just the same. Then Dave soft-soaped him, told him how he’d burn up the league and how we were all depending on him to put us in the race and keep us there. But he might as well have been talking to a mounted policeman.

Finally, one day during the last week at Fort Gregg, Johnny Abbott got homesick himself and put in a long-distance call for his gal in New York. It was a rainy day and him and Kane had been just laying around the room. Before the call went through Johnny hinted that he would like to be alone while he talked. Kane paid no attention and began undressing to take a nap. So Johnny had to speak before an audience and not only that, but as soon as Kane heard him say “Darling” or “Sweetheart,” or whatever he called her, he moved right over close to the phone where he wouldn’t miss nothing. Johnny was kind of embarrassed and hung up before he was ready to; then he gave Kane a dirty look and went to the window and stared out at the rain, dreaming about the gal he’d just talked with.

Kane laid down on his bed, but he didn’t go to sleep. In four or five minutes he was at the phone asking the operator to get Minnie Olson in Yuma. Then he laid down again and tossed a while, and then he sat up on the edge of the bed.

“Johnny,” he says, “how far is it from here to New York?”

“About a thousand miles,” said Johnny.

“And how far to Yuma?” said Kane.

“Oh,” says Johnny, “that must be three thousand miles at least.”

“How much did that New York call cost you?” asked Kane.

“I don’t know yet,” said Johnny. “I suppose it was around seven bucks.”

Kane went to the writing table and done a little arithmetic. From there he went back to the phone.

“Listen, girlie,” he said to the operator, “you can cancel that Yuma call. I just happened to remember that the party I wanted won’t be home. She’s taking her mandolin lesson, way the other side of town.”

Johnny told me afterwards that he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Before he had a chance to do either, Kane says to him:

“This is my last day on this ball club.”

“What do you mean?” said Johnny.

“I mean I’m through; I’m going home,” says Kane.

“Don’t be a fool!” says Johnny. “Don’t throw away the chance of a lifetime just because you’re a little lonesome. If you stay in this league and pitch like you can pitch, you’ll be getting the big money next year and you can marry that gal and bring her East with you. You may not have to wait till next year. You may pitch us into the world’s series and grab a chunk of dough this fall.”

“We won’t be in no world’s series,” says Kane.

“What makes you think so?” said Johnny.

“I can’t work every day,” says Kane.

“You’ll have help,” says Johnny. “With you and Carney and Olds taking turns, we can be right up in that old fight. Without you, we can’t even finish in the league. If you won’t do it for yourself or for Dave, do it for me, your roomy. You just seen me spend seven or eight bucks on a phone call, but that’s no sign I’m reeking with jack. I spent that money because I’d have died if I hadn’t. I’ve got none to throw away and if we don’t win the pennant, I can’t marry this year and maybe not next year or the year after.”

“I’ve got to look out for myself,” says Kane. “I tell you I’m through and that’s all there is to it. I’m going home where my gal is, where they ain’t no smart Alecks kidding me all the while, and where I can eat without no assistant manager holding me down to a sprig of parsley, and a thimbleful of soup. For your sake, Johnny,” he says, “I’d like to see this club finish on top, but I can’t stick it out and I’m afraid your only hope is for the other seven clubs to all be riding on the same train and hit an open bridge.”

Well, of course Johnny didn’t lose no time getting to Dave with the bad news, and Dave and Kid Farrell rushed to the sapper’s room. They threatened him and they coaxed him. They promised him he could eat all he wanted. They swore that anybody who tried to play jokes on him would either be fined or fired off the club. They reminded him that it cost a lot of money to go from Florida to Yuma, and he would have to pay his own way. They offered him a new contract with a five-hundred-dollar raise if he would stay. They argued and pleaded with him from four in the afternoon till midnight. When they finally quit, they were just where they’d been when they started. He was through.

“All right!” Dave hollered. “Be through and go to hell! If you ain’t out of here by tomorrow noon, I’ll have you chased out! And don’t forget that you’ll never pitch in organized baseball again!”

“That suits me,” says Kane, and went to bed.

When Johnny Abbott woke up about seven the next morning, Hurry was putting his extra collar and comb in the leaky suitcase. He said:

“I’m going to grab the eleven-something train for Jacksonville. I got money enough to take me from here to New Orleans and I know a fella there that will see me the rest of the way⁠—if I can find him and he ain’t broke.”

Well, Johnny couldn’t stand for that and he got up and dressed and was starting out to borrow two hundred dollars from me to lend to Kane, when the phone rang loud and long. Kane took off the receiver, listened a second, and then said “Uh-huh” and hung up.

“Who was it?” asked Johnny.

“Nobody,” says Kane. “Just one of Bull Wade’s gags.”

“What did he say?” Johnny asked him.

“It was a gal, probably the telephone operator,” said Kane. “She said the hotel was on fire and not to get excited, but that we better move out.”

“You fool!” yelled Johnny and run to the phone.

They was no gag about it. The hotel had really caught fire in the basement and everybody was being warned to take the air. Johnny tossed some of his stuff in a bag and started out, telling Kane to follow him quick. Hurry got out in the hall and then remembered that he had left his gal’s picture on the dresser and went back after it. Just as he turned towards the door again, in dashed a dame with a kimono throwed over her nightgown. It was Evelyn Corey herself, almost in the flesh.

“Oh, please!” she said, or screamed. “Come and help me carry my things!”

Well, here was once that the name “Hurry” was on the square. He dropped his own suitcase and was in her room in nothing and no-fifths. He grabbed her four pieces of hand baggage and was staggering to the hall with them when a bellhop bounced in and told them the danger was over, the fire was out.

This seemed to be more of a disappointment than Evelyn could stand. Anyway, she fainted⁠—onto a couch⁠—and for a few minutes she was too unconscious to do anything but ask Kane to pour her a drink. He also poured himself one and settled down in the easy chair like he was there for the day. But by now she had come to and got a good look at him.

“I thank you very much,” she said, “and I’m so exhausted with all this excitement that I think I’ll go back to bed.”

Kane took his hint and got up.

“But ain’t I going to see you again?” he asked her.

“I’m afraid not,” says Evelyn. “I’m leaving here this evening and I’ll be getting ready from now till then.”

“Where are you headed for?” Kane asked her.

“For home, New York,” she said.

“Can’t I have your address?” said Kane.

“Why, yes,” said Evelyn without batting an eye. “I live at the Ritz.”

“The Ritz!” says Kane. “That’s where I’m going to live, if they ain’t filled up.”

“How wonderful!” said Evelyn. “Then we’ll probably see each other every day.”

Kane beat it down to the dining-room and straight to Dave’s table.

“Boss,” he said, “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Your what!” says Dave.

“My mind,” says Kane. “I’ve decided to stick.”

It was all Dave could do not to kiss him. But he thought it was best to act calm.

“That’s fine, Hurry!” he said. “And I’ll see that you get that extra five hundred bucks.”

“What five hundred bucks?” says Kane.

“The five hundred I promised you if you’d stay,” says Dave.

“I hadn’t heard about it,” said Kane. “But as long as I ain’t going home, I’m in no rush for money. Though I’m liable to need it,” he says, “as soon as we hit New York.”

And he smiled the silliest smile you ever seen.

I don’t have to tell you that he didn’t live at the Ritz. Or that Evelyn Corey didn’t live there neither. He found out she hadn’t never lived there, but he figured she’d intended to and had to give it up because they didn’t have a suite good enough for her.

I got him a room in my boardinghouse in the Bronx and for the first few days he spent all his spare time looking through city directories and different telephone directories and bothering the life out of Information, trying to locate his lost lady. It was when he had practically give up hope that he told me his secret and asked for help.

“She’s all I came here for,” he said, “and if I can’t find her, I ain’t going to stay.”

Well, of course if you went at it the right way, you wouldn’t have much trouble tracing her. Pretty near anybody in the theatrical business, or the people that run the big night clubs, or the head waiters at the hotels and restaurants⁠—they could have put you on the right track. The thing was that it would be worse to get a hold of her than not to, because she’d have give him the air so strong that he would have caught his death of cold.

So I just said that they was no question but what she had gone away somewheres, maybe to Europe, and he would hear from her as soon as she got back. I had to repeat this over and over and make it strong or he’d have left us flatter than his own feet before he pitched two games. As it was, we held him till the end of May without being obliged to try any tricks, but you could see he was getting more impatient and restless all the while and the situation got desperate just as we were starting on our first trip West. He asked me when would we hit St. Louis and I told him the date and said:

“What do you want to know for?”

“Because,” he says, “I’m going home from there.”

I repeated this sweet news to Dave and Kid Farrell. We finally called in Bull Wade and it was him that saved the day. You remember Bull had faked up a note from Evelyn to Kane down at Fort Gregg; now he suggested that he write some more notes, say one every two or three weeks, sign her name to them, send them to Bull’s brother in Montreal and have the brother mail them from there. It was a kind of a dirty, mean thing to do, but it worked. The notes all read about the same⁠—

Dear Mr. Kane:⁠—I am keeping track of your wonderful pitching and looking forward to seeing you when I return to New York, which will be early in the fall. I hope you haven’t forgotten me.

And so on, signed “Your friend and admirer, Evelyn Corey.”

Hurry didn’t answer only about half of them as it was a real chore for him to write. He addressed his answers in care of Mr. Harry Wade, such and such a street number, Montreal, and when Bull’s brother got them, he forwarded them to Bull, so he’d know if they was anything special he ought to reply to.

The boys took turns entertaining Kane evenings, playing cards with him and staking him to picture shows. Johnny Abbott done more than his share. You see the pennant meant more to Johnny than to anybody else; it meant the world’s series money and a fall wedding, instead of a couple of years’ wait. And Johnny’s gal, Helen Kerslake, worked, too. She had him to her house to supper⁠—when her folks were out⁠—and made him feel like he was even handsomer and more important than he thought. She went so far as to try and get some of her gal friends to play with him, but he always wanted to pet and that was a little too much.

Well, if Kane hadn’t stuck with us and turned out to be the marvel he is, the White Sox would have been so far ahead by the Fourth of July that they could have sat in the stand the rest of the season and let the Bloomer Girls play in their place. But Hurry had their number from the first time he faced them till the finish. Out of eleven games he worked against them all last year, he won ten and the other was a nothing to nothing tie. And look at the rest of his record! As I recall it, he took part in fifty-eight games. He pitched forty-three full games, winning thirty-six, losing five and tying two. And God knows how many games he saved! He had that free, easy sidearm motion that didn’t take much out of him and he could pitch every third day and be at his best.

But don’t let me forget to credit myself with an assist. Late in August, Kane told me he couldn’t stand it no longer to just get short notes from the Corey gal and never see her, and when we started on our September trip West, he was going to steal a week off and run up to Montreal; he would join us later, but he must see Evelyn. Well, for once in my life I had an idear hit me right between the eyes.

The Yuma gal, Minnie Olson, had been writing to him once a week and though he hardly ever wrote to her and seemed to only be thinking of Corey, still I noticed that he could hardly help from crying when Minnie’s letters came. So I suggested to Dave that he telegraph Minnie to come East and visit with all her expenses paid, wire her money for her transportation, tell her it would be doing Kane a big favor as well as the rest of us, and ask her to send Kane a telegram, saying when she would reach New York, but to be sure and never mention that she wasn’t doing it on her own hook.

Two days after Dave’s message was sent, Kane got a wire from El Paso. She was on her way and would he meet her at the Pennsylvania Station on such and such a date. I never seen a man as happy as Hurry was when he read that telegram.

“I knew she was stuck on me,” he said, “but I didn’t know it was that strong. She must have worked in a store or something since spring to save up money for this trip.”

You would have thought he’d never heard of or seen a gal by the name of Evelyn Corey.

Minnie arrived and was just what we expected: a plain, honest, good-hearted, small-town gal, dressed for a masquerade. We had supper with her and Kane her first night in town⁠—I and Johnny and Helen. She was trembling like a leaf, partly from excitement over being in New York and amongst strangers, but mostly on account of seeing the big sap again. He wasn’t no sap to her and I wished they was some dame would look at me the way she kept looking at Hurry.

The next morning Helen took her on a shopping tour and got her fixed up so cute that you couldn’t hardly recognize her. In the afternoon she went to the ball game and seen Kane shut the Detroit club out with two hits.

When Hurry got a glimpse of her in her Fifth Avenue clothes, he was as proud as if he had bought them himself and it didn’t seem to occur to him that they must have cost more than she could have paid.

Well, with Kane happy and no danger of him walking out on us, all we had to worry about was that the White Sox still led us by three games, with less than twenty left to play. And the schedule was different than usual⁠—we had to wind up with a Western trip and play our last thirteen games on the road. I and Johnny and Dave was talking it over one day and the three of us agreed that we would be suckers not to insist on Miss Olson going along. But Dave wondered if she wouldn’t feel funny, being the only girl.

“I’ll make my gal go, too,” said Johnny.

And that’s the way it was fixed.

We opened in St. Louis and beat them two out of three. Olds was trimmed, but Carney and Kane both won. We didn’t gain no ground, because the White Sox grabbed two out of three from Washington. We made a sweep of our four games in Detroit, while the Sox was winning three from Philadelphia. That moved us up to two and a half games from first place. We beat Cleveland three straight, Kane licking them 6 to 1 and holding Carney’s one run lead through the eighth and ninth innings of another game. At the same time, Chicago took three from Boston.

So we finally struck old Chi, where the fans was already counting the pennant won, two and a half games behind and three to go⁠—meaning we had to win all three or be sunk.

I told you how Kane had the Chicago club’s number. But I didn’t tell you how Eddie Brainard had been making a monkey of us. He had only worked against us six times and had beat us five. His other game was the nothing to nothing tie with Hurry. Eddie is one sweet pitcher and if he had been the horse for work that Kane was, that last series wouldn’t have got us nowheres. But Eddie needs his full rest and it was a cinch he wouldn’t be in there for more than one game and maybe part of another.

In Brainard’s six games against us, he had give us a total of four runs, shutting us out three times and trimming us 3 to 2, 4 to 1 and 2 to 1. As the White Sox only needed one game, it was a cinch that they wouldn’t start Eddie against Kane, who was so tough for them, but would save him for Carney or Olds, whichever one worked first. Carney hadn’t been able to finish a game with Chicago and Olds’ record wasn’t much better.

Well, we was having breakfast in our hotel the morning we got in from Cleveland, and Kane sent for Dave to come to the table where him and Johnny Abbott and the two gals was eating.

“Boss,” he says, “I’m thinking of getting married and so is Johnny here, but they ain’t neither of us can do it, not now anyway, unless we grab some of that world’s series jack. And we can’t get into the series without we win these three games. So if I was managing this ball club, I’d figure on that and know just how to work my pitchers.”

“Maybe I’ve thought about it a little myself,” says Dave. “But I’d like to listen to your idears.”

“All right,” says Kane. “I’d start Kane today, and I’d start Kane tomorrow, and I’d start Kane the day after that.”

“My plan is a little different,” said Dave. “Of course you start today, and if you win, why, I want to play a joke on them tomorrow. I intend to start Olds so they’ll start Brainard. And if the game is anywheres near close at the end of the third or fourth innings, you’re going in. It will be too late for them to take Brainard out and expect him to be as good the third day. And if we win that second game, why, you won’t have to beg me to pitch the last one.”

You’ll think I’m getting long-winded, but they ain’t much more to tell. You probably heard the details of those first two games even if you was on the Other Side. Hurry beat them the first one, 7 to 1, and their one run was my fault. Claymore was on second base with two men out in the sixth innings. King hit a foul ball right straight up and I dropped it. And then he pulled a base-hit inside of Bull, and Claymore scored. Olds and Brainard started the second game and at the end of our half of the fourth innings, the score was one and one. Hurry had been warming up easy right along, but it certainly was a big surprise to the Chicago club and pretty near everybody else when Dave motioned him in to relieve Olds. The White Sox never came close to another run and we got to Brainard for one in the eighth, just enought to beat him.

Eddie had pitched his head off and it was a tough one for him to lose. But the best part of it was, he was through and out of the way.

Well, Johnny and Kane had their usual date with the two gals for supper. Johnny was in his bathroom, washing up, when the phone rang. Kane answered it, but he talked kind of low and Johnny didn’t hear what he was saying. But when Hurry had hung up, he acted kind of nervous and Johnny asked him what was the matter.

“It’s hard luck,” said Kane. “They’s a friend of mine from Yuma here, and he’s in trouble and I’ve got to go over on the North Side and see him. Will you take both the gals to supper yourself? Because I may not be back till late. And don’t tell Min who I’m going to see.”

“How could I tell her when you ain’t told me?” said Johnny.

“Well,” said Kane, “just tell her I’m wore out from working so hard two days in a row and I went right to bed so I’d be all right for tomorrow.”

Johnny was kind of worried and tried to coax him not to go. But Kane ducked out and didn’t come in till midnight. Johnny tried to find out where he’d been and what had happened, but he said he was too sleepy to talk. Just the same, Johnny says, he tossed around and moaned all night like he was having a nightmare, and he usually slept like a corpse.

Kane got up early and went down to breakfast before Johnny was dressed. But Johnny was still worried, and hustled up and caught him before he was out of the dining-room. He was hoping Hurry would explain his getting in late and not sleeping. Kane wouldn’t talk, though, and still acted nervous. So Johnny finally said:

“Hurry, you know what this game today means to me and you ought to know what it means to you. If we get trimmed, a lot of people besides ourselves will be disappointed, but they won’t nobody be as disappointed as me. I wished you’d have had a good sleep last night and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll go up in the room and rest till it’s time to go to the ball yard. If you’re anywheres near yourself, this Chicago club is licked. And for heaven’s sakes, be yourself, or your roomy is liable to walk out into Lake Michigan tonight so far that I can’t get back!”

“I’m myself,” says Kane and got up and left the table, but not quick enough so that Johnny didn’t see tears in his eyes.

That afternoon’s crowd beat all records and I was tickled to death to see it, because Hurry had always done his best work in front of crowds that was pulling against him. He warmed up fine and they wasn’t nobody on our club, nobody but Kane himself and two others, who didn’t feel perfectly confident that we were “in.”

The White Sox were starting Sam Bonner and while he had beat us three or four times, we’d always got runs off him, and they’d always been lucky to score at all against Kane.

Bonner went through the first innings without no trouble. And then we got the shock of our lives. The first ball Hurry pitched was high and outside and it felt funny when I caught it. I was used to that old “zip” and I could have caught this one in my bare hand. Claymore took a cut at the next one and hit it a mile to left center for three bases. King hit for two bases, Welsh was safe when Digman threw a ground ball into the seats, and Kramer slapped one out of the park for a homer. Four runs. The crowd was wild and we were wilder.

You ought to have heard us on that bench. “Yellow so-and-so” was the mildest name Hurry got called. Dave couldn’t do nothing but just mumble and shake his fists at Kane. We was all raving and asking each other what in hell was going on. Hurry stood in front facing us, but he was looking up in the stand and he acted like he didn’t hear one word of the sweet remarks meant for his ears.

Johnny Abbott pulled me aside.

“Listen,” he says. “This kid ain’t yellow and he ain’t wore out. They’s something wrong here.”

By this time Dave had found his voice and he yelled at Kane: “You so-and-so so-and-so! You’re going to stay right in there and pitch till this game is over! And if you don’t pitch like you can pitch, I’ll shoot you dead tonight just as sure as you’re a yellow, quitting⁠—!”

We’d forgot it was our turn to bat and Hildebrand was threatening to forfeit the game before he could get Bull Wade to go up there. Kane still stood in front of us, staring. But pretty soon Dave told young Topping to run out to the bull pen and warn Carney and Olds to both be ready. I seen Topping stop a minute alongside of Kane and look up in the stand where Kane was looking. I seen Topping say something to Kane and I heard Kane call him a liar. Then Topping said something more and Hurry turned white as a sheet and pretty near fell into the dugout. I noticed his hand shake as he took a drink of water. And then he went over to Dave and I heard him say:

“I’m sorry, Boss. I had a bad inning. But I’ll be all right from now on.”

“You’d better!” says Dave.

“Get me some runs is all I ask,” says Kane.

And the words wasn’t no sooner out of his mouth when Bull smacked one a mile over Claymore’s head and came into the plate standing up. They was another tune on the bench now. We were yelling for blood, and we got it. Before they relieved Bonner, we’d got to him for three singles and a double⁠—mine, if you must know⁠—and the score was tied.

Say, if you think you ever seen pitching, you ought to have watched Kane cut them through there the rest of that day. Fourteen strikeouts in the last eight innings! And the only man to reach first base was Kramer, when Stout dropped an easy fly ball in the fifth.

Well, to shorten it up, Bull and Johnny Abbott and myself had some luck against Pierce in the seventh innings. Bull and Johnny scored and we licked them, 6 to 4.

In the clubhouse, Dave went to Hurry and said:

“Have you got anything to tell me, any explanation of the way you looked at the start of that game?”

“Boss,” said Kane, “I didn’t sleep good last night. Johnny will be a witness to that. I felt terrible in that first innings. I seemed to have lost my ‘fast.’ In the second innings it came back and I was all right.”

And that’s all he would say.

You know how we went ahead and took the big series, four games out of five, and how Hurry gave them one run in the three games he pitched. And now you’re going to know what I promised to tell you when we first sat down, and I hope I ain’t keeping you from a date with that gal from St. Joe.

The world’s series ended in St. Louis and naturally I didn’t come back East when it was over. Neither did Kane, because he was going home to Yuma, along with his Minnie. Well, they were leaving the next night, though most of the other boys had ducked out right after the final game. Hurry called me up at my house three or four hours before his train was due to leave and asked me would I come and see him and give him some advice. So I went to the hotel and he got me in his room and locked the door.

Here is what he had to say:

On the night before that last game in Chi, a gal called him up and it was nobody but our old friend Evelyn Corey. She asked him to come out to a certain hotel on the North Side and have supper with her. He went because he felt kind of sorry for her. But when he seen her, he lost his head and was just as nuts about her as he’d been at Fort Gregg. She encouraged him and strung him along till he forgot all about poor Minnie. Evelyn told him she knew he could have his pick of a hundred gals and she was brokenhearted because they was no chance for her. He asked her what made her think that, and she put her handkerchief to her eyes and pretended she was crying and that drove him wild and he said he wouldn’t marry nobody but her.

Then she told him they had better forget it, that she was broke now, but had been used to luxury, and he promised he would work hard and save up till he had three or four thousand dollars and that would be enough for a start.

“Four thousand dollars!” she says. “Why, that wouldn’t buy the runs in my stockings! I wouldn’t think of marrying a man who had less than twenty thousand. I would want a honeymoon in Europe and we’d buy a car over there and tour the whole continent, and then come home and settle down in some nice suburb of New York. And so,” she says, “I am going to get up and leave you right now because I see that my dream won’t never come true.”

She left him sitting in the restaurant and he was the only person there outside of the waiters. But after he’d sat a little while⁠—he was waiting till the first shock of his disappointment had wore off⁠—a black-haired bird with a waxed mustache came up to him and asked if he wasn’t Hurry Kane, the great pitcher. Then he said: “I suppose you’ll pitch again tomorrow,” and Kane said yes.

“I haven’t nothing against you,” says the stranger, “but I hope you lose. It will cost me a lot of money if you win.”

“How much?” said Kane.

“So much,” says the stranger, “that I will give you twenty thousand dollars if you get beat.”

“I can’t throw my pals,” said Kane.

“Well,” said the stranger, “two of your pals has already agreed to throw you.”

Kane asked him who he referred to, but he wouldn’t tell. Kane don’t know yet, but I do. It was Dignan and Stout, our shortstopper and first baseman, and you’ll notice they ain’t with our club no more.

Hurry held out as long as he could, but he thought of Evelyn and that honeymoon in Europe broke him down. He took five thousand dollars’ advance and was to come to the same place and get the balance right after the game.

He said that after Johnny Abbott had give him that talk at the breakfast table, he went out and rode around in a taxi so he could cry without being seen.

Well, I’ve told you about that terrible first innings. And I’ve told you about young Topping talking to him before he went down to the bull pen to deliver Dave’s message to Carney and Olds. Topping asked him what he was staring at and Hurry pointed Evelyn out to him and said she was his gal.

“Your gal’s grandmother!” said Topping. “That’s Evelyn Corey and she belongs to Sam Morris, the bookie. If I was you, I’d lay off. You needn’t tell Dave, but I was in Ike Bloom’s at one o’clock this morning, and Sam and she were there, too. And one of the waiters told me that Sam had bet twenty thousand dollars on the White Sox way last spring and had got six to one for his money.”

Hurry quit talking and I started to bawl him out. But I couldn’t stay mad at him, especially when I realized that they was a fifty-three-hundred-dollar check in my pocket which I’d never have had only for him. Besides, they ain’t nothing crooked about him. He’s just a boneheaded sap.

“I won’t tell Dave on you,” I said, and I got up to go.

“Wait a minute,” says Kane. “I confessed so I could ask you a question. I’ve still got that five thousand which Morris paid me in advance. With that dough and the fifty-three hundred from the series, I and Min could buy ourself a nice little home in Yuma. But do you think I should ought to give it back to that crook?”

“No,” said I. “What you ought to do is split it with young Topping. He was your good luck!”

I run acrost Topping right here in town not long ago. And the first thing he said was, “What do you think of that goofy Kane? I had a letter from him and a check. He said the check was what he owed me.”

“Twenty-five hundred dollars?” I says.

“Two hundred,” said Topping, “and if I ever lent him two hundred or two cents, I’ll roll a hoop from here to Yuma.”

Now and Then

Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 3.

Dearest Esther:

Bob is asleep and I will snatch these few minutes to write you a letter, but it may not be very long because he is liable to wake up any moment and insist that I stop writing and “pay some attention” to him. He is honestly jealous of you and I being friends or of me caring for anybody besides him enough to write to them. Isn’t that too silly for words and yet it thrills me to have him be that way and shows that I am really everything in his life. He is a regular child where I am concerned and can’t bear to have me even mention my old friends or things that happened before I met him.

Esther, I am tickled to death now that we didn’t go on our honeymoon right after we were married, but waited these seven months when Bob can have a real vacation and don’t have to be worrying about business all of the time. Just think we might never have seen this place if we hadn’t made up our minds to wait and Esther it is just heaven, so beautiful and quaint that it is like a place in some other world.

Well I will begin at the beginning and tell you everything about our trip like I promised though I am afraid it won’t be very interesting as in the first place I was deathly seasick all the way down on the boat, but it may sound funny but I am honestly glad I was because Bob was so perfectly dear and would not leave me for a minute though he is a wonderful sailor himself and I being sick must have simply ruined the trip for him. Well I was just in misery for three nights and two days, but as soon as the boat stopped Monday morning I was all right again and able to take in all the sights.

The boat has to anchor out in the harbor on account of the water being too shallow near land so we were all loaded on to a tender and brought to the dock here and then we had to wait around while they inspected our baggage because this is a British port though they didn’t open anything at all but just put chalk marks on it and Bob says about the only thing the customs inspectors look for these days is liquor and they realize nobody would try and smuggle liquor to this place as it would be like bringing coal to New Castle, PA.

Next we got into a two seated carriage and drove to the hotel and Bob talked to the Negro driver and of course all the drivers and people like that here are Negros but not like our Negros at home, they talk with a kind of English accent and you can’t hardly understand them half the time. Our room is wonderful and faces on the water which is wonderful, all different shades of green and blue and purple, it makes a person wish they were a painter it is so wonderful in coloring.

At lunch time Bob told the head waiter to put us as far as he could from other people. Bob says he used to be one of the most sociable men in the world but since he married me he don’t want anything to do with other people and the more we can keep to ourselves just we two the better he likes it. The head waiter gave us a table in a corner near a window and when another couple came in and sat at the next table Bob actually got mad at them like nobody had a right to be in the same dining room with us almost.

After lunch I unpacked or rather I directed the unpacking and Bob did the real work as he won’t let me lift my hand to really do anything as he says he would never forgive himself if I overdid. At five o’clock the hotel orchestra began playing out on the lawn where they have a dance floor and serve tea and drinks and Bob and I had some tea and cakes and danced four dances.

Most of the other people around us were drinking highballs and things and Bob said he didn’t blame them, if he had to dance with some of the women here he would want to drink enough first to blind him. But he said he wanted his eyes clear when he looked at me and as for drinking anything why just being with me and touching me made him intoxicated. He does say the nicest things and puts them so differently.

He is beginning to wake up so this will have to be “continued in our next.”

With love,
Irma.

Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 6.

Dearest Esther:

We are having such a heavenly time that it seems criminal to not share it with somebody but of course it is just us being here together alone that makes it so heavenly. It is simply heavenly here and I don’t see why people go other places when they can come here and I guess maybe they don’t know about this place or perhaps it seems more wonderful to me than it really is on account of being here with Bob and that is what makes it so wonderful. Anyway I was never so happy in my life and am already dreading the time when it will be time to start home.

The first day we got here there was a young couple introduced themselves to Bob after dinner that evening and wanted to know did we want to play bridge with them. As you know I don’t play bridge and Bob says he can’t take any interest in games unless I am in them so he told these people we were going out for a sail and after we were alone he said he hated to tell a lie so we would have to go out for a sail so he would not have told those people a lie, so he hired a sail boat and it was simply heavenly sailing in the moonlight just Bob and I and the man sailing the boat who never looked at us.

The moonlight here is heavenly and I don’t believe there is any other place where it is so wonderful and it was so wonderful that Bob and I had to laugh at the idea of staying in a stuffy hotel and playing cards when you could be out sailing in the moonlight though I suppose it would bore some people.

The next morning we got on the hotel boat and went over to the bathing beach and went in swimming and the water was wonderful but Bob didn’t like it at first as he said there was too many people around and he hated to have other men see me in my bathing suit so he and I walked away along the beach where there was nobody else and we went in the water there. It was kind of weedy and not as nice as the regular beach as there was also some rocks in the place we went in and I stubbed my toe on one of them, but Bob said he would rather I stubbed my toe than have a lot of men staring at me, but he was awfully nice about my toe and kept asking me how it felt.

Bob is a wonderful swimmer and I tried to make him go out and enjoy himself in the deep water, but he wouldn’t leave me for a second and he said he would never forgive himself if he left me and something happened to me. I told him I would stay in shallow water and there would be no danger, but he said he had heard that sharks and baracudas sometimes came right up to the beach and bit women if they were alone.

We came back to the hotel for lunch and in the afternoon we took a ride on the glass bottom boat to the sea garden. It is a boat with a glass bottom and you can see right through it and they took us to a place where the bottom of the sea is just like a garden with things growing in it and fish. It was simply heavenly, but Bob got kind of mad because there was a man that spoke to me, the man didn’t mean anything, but Bob gave him a terrible look and the incident kind of spoiled the trip.

We had dinner in our room as Bob said there was too many people in the dining room. We went to bed early and the orchestra was playing out on the lawn and it was heavenly just lying there listening and finally they sang some native Bahamian songs and Bob just loved them and is going to try and get them to take home with us.

He is through shaving and all dressed and this will have to be “continued in our next” as he gets impatient if I am not ready to do things with him when he is ready to do them.

Yours,
Irma.

Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 10.

Dearest Esther:

What do you think I did today? Well you will never guess so I may as well tell you. I played golf. I suppose I ought not to say I really played it but I played at it though Bob said I had a beautiful swing and he was amazed at how quickly I picked it up.

Bob of course is a splendid golf player and brought his clubs along, but up to today I couldn’t make him play as he said it was no fun for him to do anything if I was not doing it with him, but yesterday we took a carriage ride and went past the golf course and Bob said he would like to try it and I said why didn’t he and then he said he would if I would go along and play with him. Well at first I thought he was joking, but he was in dead earnest and he said he did not see any reason why I did not learn the game and then in the summer time we could play together and he would not have to play around with a lot of stupid men who always wanted to bet and then get sore when he beats them.

Well I finally agreed to try it and he borrowed some clubs from Jock Hutchinson who is the teacher down here and we went out on the linx and the first time I swang at the ball I missed it entirely, but I hit it the next time and did better after that and we played nine holes and Bob said my score was 92 which was good for a beginner. We are going to play again tomorrow and every day we are down here. It is really wonderful exercise and as long as Bob won’t play without me I feel like I really ought to play with him because he really enjoys the game so much.

It took us an hour to get out there and an hour to get back, but we could have made it in ten minutes each way if we had gone in an automobile, but Bob won’t use the automobiles here as he says the carriages look more in keeping with the place they are so quaint and it would be sacrilegious to use the automobiles. Well Esther won’t you be proud of me when I am a real golfer and maybe I will have a chance to teach you the game sometime when Bob is away on business.

We had a narrow escape when we got back to the hotel. Just as we were coming in the door a man got out of a car right behind us that Bob knows and it was just luck that he didn’t see Bob. He is from Chicago and Bob says he is an awfully nice man and he does business with him sometimes, but he says our whole trip would be ruined if we couldn’t be alone just by ourselves all the time we are here and not see anybody else, that is to talk to them. So we are having dinner in our room again so as not to take any chance of seeing this man and maybe his wife is here with him and we would have to spend an evening with them or something. I hope they will go away soon and not bother us.

I had some pictures taken the second day we were here by a man who takes pictures of all the hotel guests and then if you like them you can buy some of them. They were finished today and the man showed them to us and I wanted to buy two or three of each as they were awfully good, but Bob said I could only buy one of each and that would be for him and he didn’t want me sending my pictures around to other people, so I guess you will just have to remember what I look like and get along without my picture.

Last night the orchestra played out on the lawn and Bob and I danced a couple of dances and were sitting there watching the others and the assistant manager of the hotel was there and he came to our table and asked me to dance and I almost started to get up when Bob answered for me and said he was sorry but I had turned my ankle in swimming.

I know the man had seen me dancing just a few minutes before and I don’t know what he thought, but he was awfully nice about it and said maybe we could have a dance some other time.

After he had gone away Bob said I wasn’t to speak to him next time I saw him or he would take it as an encouragement and ask me to dance with him again.

Must close now as Bob has finished the letters he was writing and wants to be read aloud to. I don’t read aloud very well, but he says he loves to have me as he can sit and look at me while I read and it don’t make any difference if I read well or not because he is too busy looking at me to pay any attention to what I am reading.

Love,
Irma

Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 13.

Dearest Esther:

I know I promised to write you every other day while we were down here, but I am afraid I will have to ask you to release me from my promise. I suppose I could tell you a fib and say I don’t have time to write, but that would be a fib and the real reason I can’t write to you anymore is because it makes Bob mad and I won’t do anything behind his back so I know you will understand if you don’t hear from me again and as soon as I get home and Bob’s vacation is over, I will come and see you and tell you about the rest of our trip, that is anything that might be interesting.

Bob don’t like to have me write for two reasons, in the first place he is jealous of all my old friends and he says I am his wife now and all my time belongs to him and he don’t want me wasting it writing to other people even if they are old friends and secondly he don’t like the idea of me telling anybody the things we do down here as he says this belated honeymoon as he calls it is sacred between him and me and it is nobody’s else business what we do down here.

Please try and understand Esther and forgive me and you know I love you and wouldn’t do anything in the world to hurt your feelings, but I am married to Bob now and his feelings are to be considered above everything else. We are having such a heavenly time that I simply can’t do anything that would spoil it in any way.

Your friend,
Irma

Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 5.

Dearest Esther:

Well Esther here we are Bob and I “honeymooning” again and it hardly seems possible that three years have gone by since we were in Nassau before, but don’t you think it was a wonderful idea coming back to the place where we had such a heavenly time the winter after we were married and this is the first time Bob has had a real vacation since then and he has certainly earned it and I know he will enjoy every minute down here even if we keep to ourselves and just rest and “loaf.”

I am feeling all right again after being terribly seasick all the way down from New York. I thought it was quite rough, but Bob said it was just like a billiard table and he was quite provoked at me being sick and threatened to leave me home the next time he was going anywhere on a boat. He said he did not see how I ever sat through a dinner party as he would think the waves in the finger bowl would upset me. Bob just loves to tease me.

When we went in the dining room for lunch today the same head waiter was there as the last time and he remembered us after three years and gave us the same corner table we had the last time. Imagine him remembering us after three years, but after lunch Bob stopped and talked to him about giving us another table in the middle of the room and not so far off from everybody as he said it would not seem like we were in a big hotel way off from everybody like that. So tonight he is going to change us.

I have had quite a busy afternoon unpacking and getting settled. Bob went out with some men he met on the boat to play golf as he said he couldn’t very well get out of it and he thought I would be too worn out to play with him after my seasickness. I am afraid he will be bothered to death by all the different people he met on the boat which he couldn’t help because of course I was unable to leave my stateroom for meals and they put him at a big table with a lot of other people but he can always manage to discourage new acquaintances if they begin to make a nuisance of themselves.

Will have to close as Bob promised he would be back in time for a few dances before it is time to dress for dinner, but it is after six now and the orchestra will soon stop playing, but I suppose they were slow getting their golf game started the first day or maybe he has had trouble getting away from those other men.

With love,
Irma

Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 7.

Dearest Esther:

Well it is nearly bed time but I don’t feel like going to bed till Bob comes in and he is downstairs playing bridge with a woman and her husband and the woman’s sister that he met on the boat. I have hardly seen him at all today as he was not feeling well this morning and would not go to the beach swimming as he said he thought it had upset his stomach swallowing the salt water, but he insisted on me going without him and he introduced me to a friend of his from Chicago a Mr. Granville who was here three years ago with his wife but his wife has since died. Bob said Mr. Granville was a great swimmer and would see that I did not drown and would teach me to swim.

Well I wouldn’t let him teach me to swim because I hate to have a strange man come near me in swimming, but he was awfully nice to me, but I didn’t stay in long as I hate to enjoy myself when Bob is not feeling well.

Bob and I had lunch together and he felt better and arranged a golf game with some people he met on the boat. I asked him if he was sure he ought to play when he didn’t feel well, but he said it was swimming that upset him and not golf. I asked him if he wasn’t ever going to play golf again with me and he said yes sometime, but he said it wasn’t much fun playing with me as I am so terrible that we can’t play any kind of a match and he likes to play with people he can bet with and he also said I look so awkward when I try to play that he is afraid people will laugh at me.

Yesterday I asked him if he didn’t want to go out in the glass bottom boat and look at the sea garden as we did when we were here before and he said yes we would go tomorrow, meaning today, but when I reminded him of it he told me to go alone or find somebody else to go with as he couldn’t get any thrill out of looking at a bunch of dirty sea weed. He did keep his promise to take me to tea out on the lawn where they dance.

The golf match had tired him out though and he wouldn’t dance but he would not admit he was tired but said he didn’t like the music and wished the orchestra would get up to date and play something besides old native tunes that the Negros down here made up. They really only played the native songs for one dance, but Bob has no ear and don’t know one tune from another. He insisted on me dancing with Mr. Granville whom he invited to our table.

We had tea and Bob said he felt like he needed something stronger than tea and he drank four highballs so I knew he wasn’t telling the truth when he said the golf hadn’t made him tired.

I was really very tired myself and I suggested that it would be a good thing for both of us if we had dinner in our room and we would go to bed right after and I would read to him. He said he wouldn’t like anything better though he could hardly understand me when I read because I mumble my words so, but he had asked some people he met on the boat to have a cocktail with him and they were people who might help him in a business way so he couldn’t get out of it, but if I met them too why it would mean we would probably have them on our hands the rest of the time we are here so he thought it would be a good idea for me to have dinner by myself and go to bed when I felt like it.

After dinner he phoned up to say that he got tangled up in a bridge game with these people and I had better go to bed and not wait for him. But I know he will have some things to tell me about these people when he comes in and he tells things in such an amusing way that I hate to miss it and maybe by tomorrow morning he won’t remember half the things that happened.

The weather has been heavenly and we are having a simply wonderful time and I wish sometime you could come down here and spend a week or two as it is simply heavenly and I don’t believe there is another place like it in the world.

Am out of stationery so this will have to be “continued in our next.”

Love,
Irma

Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 8.

Dearest Esther:

I have been having dinner in the room again as I did not feel like dressing up and going downstairs. Bob was tired out too and wanted to stay here with me, but those people he met on the boat insisted on him having a cocktail with them and as long as he had to get dressed for that he thought he might as well eat in the dining room and now he is playing bridge with them again as they couldn’t find a fourth without him. They are a Mr. and Mrs. Griffin and Mrs. Griffin’s sister, Miss Cutts, and he met them on the boat coming down. Mr. Griffin is in a position to do Bob some good in a business way and that is why Bob don’t like to refuse their invitations.

This morning I went over to the beach with Mr. Granville and Bob played golf with some people he met on the boat. As we were coming back from the beach a man stopped us who takes pictures and he wanted to take a picture of Mr. Granville and me together but I thought that wouldn’t look right so I let him take my picture alone and while he was taking it Bob came along and he had just come back from his golf game and when he saw me getting my picture taken he teased me about it and said I must think I was a movie star, or somebody, getting my picture taken all the time.

I said I was just having it taken for him and he said I needn’t waste money on pictures of myself for him as he already had enough of them and I better send these to my friends who were always asking me for my picture. So if they are good I will send you one and send some to the other girls too.

This afternoon Bob went out to play golf and I was sitting on the porch reading and Mr. Granville came along and invited me to take a drive with him and I was tired reading so I accepted and we took a carriage though Bob says it is silly to ride in the old broken down carriages they have got here when you can get a car and get to places ten times as fast but we were in no hurry so we took a carriage and drove past the golf club and they have got a bathing beach out there too and we stopped for a minute to watch the people in swimming and there was Bob swimming with Miss Cutts whom he met on the boat coming down.

Well he didn’t see us and I didn’t say anything to him about it when he came home but he is just a child Esther and he knew I would think it was bad for him to go in swimming when the salt water affects him so and that is why he went in swimming where he thought I wouldn’t see him and I only hope he don’t get sick again.

He had promised to take me for a moonlight sail tonight, but I could see that his golf and his swim had worn him out and besides that the Griffins made him stay down on the lawn when they got back from the golf club and he didn’t want to offend them but felt so tired that he had to take some highballs and then Miss Cutts practically made him dance with her twice and he was tired enough without that, but he never would have told me all the things he had had to do and probably would have gone sailing with me if I had reminded him of it, but I had watched him dancing from my window which fronts on the lawn and I knew how he must feel so I pretended I had forgotten all about our sail.

Poor Bob he wasn’t a bit like his usual cheerful self when he got up in the room and he would have given anything to get out of his engagement tonight and he was so cross that when I tried to persuade him to stay here by hinting that I was getting lonesome staying all by myself with nothing to do, he said, “What would you do if I was here? All you ever do is read or write letters. Why don’t you write to your friend Esther and tell her your troubles?”

So I just laughed it off but I do get a little lonesome sometimes and wish he could get rid of these people he met on the boat. It is so heavenly here and such a wonderful place and we could be having such a heavenly time if it wasn’t for the Griffins. Isn’t it a darn shame that a man can’t get away from business even on his vacation when he hasn’t had one in three years?

With love,
Irma.

Miami, Fla., Feb. 11.

Dearest Esther:

You will probably be surprised at me writing to you from this place. I arrived here by boat from Nassau this morning and was sick all the way and now I am waiting for train time. I leave here tonight for home and will arrive there Thursday forenoon. I am crazy to see you Esther and I am writing to know if you can’t come and visit me for a few days next week. We will go to a show every night or do anything you want to do. I just want to see you and have a nice visit.

Bob is staying on at Nassau for two more weeks as he loves it there and it agrees with him so well. I love it too and think it is the most heavenly place I ever went to, but there is so much to do there that a person simply gets worn out and both Bob and I agreed that I wasn’t strong enough to stand the pace and would be better off at home.

I will be expecting a wire from you as soon as you get this. Wire me at home and I will try and get tickets for things I know you will want to see. Please come Esther. Any day will do and the sooner the better, but don’t disappoint me.

Your friend,
Irma.

The Spinning Wheel

Did you notice the bald-headed, pimply-faced old egg with the fade-away chin that was talking to the boss just as you come in, a half or three-quarters of an hour ago? I’d like to heard what the boss told him; I bet it was plenty! He was lucky to escape without a bust in the jaw. Probably not having no jaw was what saved him.

That fella is a director in one of the biggest banks in New York City. They’s been articles printed about his brains, how they made him what he is today⁠—a giant of finance and a fella that the Morgans call him up and ask his opinion before they buy a new package of pipe-cleaners.

Well, he blew in here three nights ago and he come to this table and bought a hundred dollars’ worth of five-dollar checks. He didn’t play till I’d made ten or a dozen rolls, but he marked down the colors as they come up. Then he played two checks on the red, and it was black, so he doubled up, and it was red, and he kept going along that way till he was two hundred winner, and he quit. The next night he done the same thing over there at Harry’s table, only he win three hundred instead of two.

I suppose he went back to the hotel pretty near kissing himself for discovering a system that couldn’t lose and planning what he was going to do to us with it. He figured: They’s just as many red numbers as they is black numbers, so the red is bound to come as often as the black, and if you keep doubling up every time the red don’t come, why, you’re bound to be ahead at the finish. I guess it was Columbus that played this system first and that’s why he didn’t have money enough to pay his own way over here. Personally I’ve seen the black come nineteen times in succession and with people playing it most of the time, too.

Last night in strolled our friend⁠—Macomber’s his name⁠—and he brought a couple of ladies with him to witness the big coup. He probably thought I and Harry would be scared of him and not let him play, and he went to the table in that corner, where Joe was dealing. This time he didn’t buy no checks, but he waited till the black had come twice in a row and then laid a hundred-dollar bill on the red. Joe rolled a single O. Macomber played two hundred on the red, and it come black. Then he played four hundred on the red, and it was black again. He bet eight hundred, and it come single O.

Then he said to Joe: “I’m out of ready money,” he said, “but I guess my credit’s good. I’m betting sixteen hundred on the red.”

“Your credit’s fine,” said Joe, “but the limit is a thousand dollars.”

The ball was spinning and they wasn’t no time to argue.

“All right,” says Macomber. “A thousand on the red.”

“Thirteen, black,” said Joe, and Mr. Macomber and his cheerleaders walked out on us.

Well, Joe was playing golf this morning and Macomber seen him and recognized him. He says:

“I don’t know whether to speak to you or not.”

“What do you mean?” says Joe.

“That business last night didn’t look good to me,” says Macomber. “When they’s just as many red numbers as black numbers, it seems to me like red ought to show up on an average of every other time.”

“In the town in Georgia where I come from,” says Joe, “they’s just as many white people as they is colored people. But lots of times I’ve walked two and three blocks and met nothing but dinges.”

“That’s very cute,” said Macomber. “Just the same, it’s my opinion that I was fleeced.”

“I’m going to see that the boss hears that,” said Joe.

“Don’t say a word to him!” says Macomber. “If you do, I’ll deny I ever talked to you.”

“I think he’ll believe me,” says Joe, and went on with his golf game.

So Joe told the boss and the boss was madder than hades, the more so because Macomber’s supposed to be stoop-shouldered from holding up them brains of his.

“I’ll give him an earful,” he told Joe.

“Go as far as you like,” said Joe, “but get the thousand he owes us first.”

Well, I don’t know if Macomber paid the thousand or not, but I do know that he got called something besides Mr. Macomber. When the boss is really sore, he can think of more funny short words than one of these here puzzle experts.

Macomber might be interested in how Jarvis Ralston, the automobile man, got “fleeced” here last month; at the same table, too, with Joe dealing. Ralston was playing twenty-five-dollar checks. He played for an hour, lost fifteen thousand dollars and started away. They was one check that he’d overlooked, or maybe he’d meant to play it on the thirty-six, because it was close to the thirty-six, but it was off the board, not on no number or nothing. Joe called to him about it and Ralston says:

“All right. Play it on Number Eleven.”

So Joe put the check on No. 11, and No. 11 come up. Ralston begin to play again and in twenty minutes he had his fifteen thousand back and five hundred more, and he quit.

Ralston, though, is a nice fella and even the boss didn’t mind much seeing him get better than even after he was so far out. But if he hadn’t got even, you wouldn’t of heard no squawk from him. He’s been around too long to talk about being fleeced in a roulette game.

And yet, being a nice fella and a smart fella, too, don’t seem to mean nothing when it comes to roulette. You will hear sixty percent of all the men you know, smart or otherwise, and ninety-five percent of the women, talking about crooked wheels, and how so-and-so was “robbed” of so much at such and such a place. They’ll lose their shirt on a championship fight that’s been in the bag for a year, and never question it, no matter how raw it looks.

But let them see the black come up four times running, while they’re playing the red, and it’s “wrong.” Or let somebody tell them about this or that roulette house being crooked and they swallow it whole.

Here’s one thing that always gets them. We’ll say you’ve been playing the numbers and winning or losing a little, and you decide to make a good bet and you put, say, $25 on No. 28. I spin the ball and it lights in No. 28 and jumps out again and lights somewheres else and stays there. Then they’re all convinced that the ball belonged in No. 28 and wanted to be let alone, but I made a face at it or something and frightened it to wherever it finally stayed. They don’t seem to realize that ninety-eight times out of a hundred the ball jumps out of the first number it lands in. And oftener than not, it comes to rest in a number that’s a mile from where it lit first.

Listen: I’m fifty-six years old and I’ve been dealing for thirty years. I’ve dealt at Palm Beach, Miami, Havana, New York, French Lick, Saratoga and here, and I never yet seen a crooked wheel. Furthermore, I don’t know how you’d go about it to make it “wrong.” I’ve dealt for some fellas that would steal if they could, but they couldn’t for several reasons: They didn’t know how; they’d be at the mercy of their employees, who they’d have to take into the secret; they’d be closed up the minute they was suspected, even in places where they pay out pretty near a quarter of their receipts in graft.

Why, I worked a while in Cuba for a fella that would of used a blackjack if he hadn’t been able to make a big living out of his game. I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me. I knew he was a crook at heart, but I also knew his wheels was straight because they couldn’t be nothing else.

Well, one night they was a drunk in the place and he was playing hazard and squawking all the time and we all wanted him to lose his dough and go home. Finally he quit the hazard game and come to my table and put three one-hundred-dollar bills on No. 32. He asked me could he play that much. I said no, the limit was twenty-five.

Then he says to let him play it just once, so I looked up at the boss, who was standing near, and he nodded his head yes, to let her go. No. 32 it was, and the drunk staggered out with $10,500 of “our” money. The boss was wild and denied that he had ever give me the nod. I talked back to him and then he fired me.

Mind, I ain’t recommending you or nobody else to try and beat roulette. It’s a tough game, so tough that we wouldn’t have to cheat even if we could. But I’m saying that when you hear talk about some wheel somewheres being crooked, you can put it down as apple sauce and whoever’s telling it to you belongs at the County Goose Farm.

I’ll admit I’ve seen cheating, but it’s all done on your side of the table. We had a tricky pair, a man and a woman, here last season who was way ahead of the game before the boss give them the air. The man done the playing and the woman watched the ball. Here was their gag:

You’ll notice that the numbers 16, 19, 18, 21, 31 and 33 is all right close together on the wheel. Well, the fella would play a full stack of dollar checks between the 16 and 19, another stack between the 18 and 21 and a full stack each on 31 and 33. The gal would keep her eye on the ball till it was slowed down pretty near ready to drop. If it wasn’t going to drop in that section, she’d give the man the office and quick as a flash he’d grab all but three or four checks off each of the stacks he’d bet. If it was going to drop in that section, why of course he’d leave them all ride and make a nice profit.

I could name you a dozen ways that people like that try to beat us, and get away with it lots of times, too. To say nothing of the players, mostly women, who would be surprised and hurt if anybody questioned their honesty, but who will quietly sneak a check off a losing number or sneak one on a winning number after the ball has stopped rolling.

But now I’m going to tell you about a woman that cheated herself and her friends, and it happened right at this table the night after we opened up. The woman was a Mrs. Walter Hunt from Boston. It was her birthday and her husband give her a big dinner-party over at the hotel.

The party must of been wringing wet because everybody was feeling great when they got here.

Mrs. Hunt and three or four of her friends bought checks and for a while the game went along as usual with none of them winning or losing much. Then Hunt, who was playing at Joe’s table, sent some drinks over to his wife’s crowd and after they’d drunk them, they seemed to have a little more courage. One of the men in the gang said to Mrs. Hunt, he said:

“I’ve got an idear. Instead of us all piking along with dollar checks, let’s the five of us buy a couple of stacks of five-dollar checks and you play them and we will split.”

So Mrs. Hunt asked why she should play them and he said because it was her birthday.

“All right,” she said, “but don’t get mad at me if I lose your money.”

So they bought two stacks of five-dollar checks and she was going to play ten dollars on the red, but they stopped her.

“Play numbers,” they told her. “That’s the only way to get action.”

“But I don’t know what numbers to play,” she said.

Then another fella in her crowd spoke up.

“Play your age,” he says. “You wouldn’t tell us at dinner how old you are. But you just play number twenty-seven or twenty-eight or whatever it is and I bet it’ll come for you.”

The others said it was a great hunch.

“But you’re flattering me,” says Mrs. Hunt. “I hate to confess it, but I’ll have to play Number Thirty.”

So she put two five-dollar checks on No. 30. The ball stopped in No. 34.

“Double up on ’em,” says the fella that had had the hunch.

So she played twenty dollars on No. 30 and No. 34 repeated. Then she begin playing twenty-five dollars at a crack, always on No. 30, and she kept playing it till the first two stacks and two more was all gone. In all, she made fifteen plays. No. 30 never showed up, and No. 34 come five times. She and the four people with her quit and went out in the other room to have some more drinks and play bridge or something.

After a while her husband and another man in the party left Joe’s table and come to mine.

“I won’t bother you long,” Hunt says to me. “I’ve got fifty dollars left and I’m only going to make two plays.”

I gave him two twenty-five-dollar checks and he turned to the fella with him.

“What shall I play?” he says.

“Well,” says the fella, “this is your wife’s birthday. Why don’t you play her age?”

“That’s a good idear,” says Hunt, and he laid a check on No. 34. Plop! went the ball into No. 34 and Hunt was $875 ahead, probably four or five times as much as the party had cost him. And right there he cashed and quit and went out to tell the news to Mrs. Hunt and the four that had been “in” with her.

You asked me a while ago what had think became of Jess Dorsey. I told you he wasn’t dealing anymore, but I didn’t want to tell you, in front of them other people, what stopped him.

Jess never had no business behind a wheel. He was all right if some millionaire was playing, but he hated to see anybody lose that he thought couldn’t afford it. Many is the night he laid awake worrying because somebody, usually a dame, had dropped fifty or sixty dollars at his table and acted like it hurt them. He wouldn’t of lasted much longer at this game anyway, but the thing that happened to him was enough to break fellas a lot harder-boiled than Jess.

You know he never was a very cheerful fella and he had the blues so bad when his wife died, three years ago, that we used to take turns sitting up with him and trying to keep him entertained after working hours.

We was scared he’d do something to himself if he was left alone too much.

Well, the season before last started out terribly dull. The hotel was less than half full and except one or two nights a week, all we done was play pinochle there in the other room. Only for a couple of live regulars, like Jarvis Ralston, the boss might of been tempted to let us all go and close the house.

One night early a beautiful young gal come in and registered and got her card at the desk. We all scurried to our tables. She glanced around the room and then went to the table where Jess was dealing. It was his good looks that drew them. She bought ten dollars’ worth of fifty-cent checks, made them last about half an hour and then sat for half an hour more, talking to Jess.

She was a gal about twenty-two or twenty-three, kind of quiet and soft-spoken, and, as I say, beautiful, especially her eyes. She used them for all they was worth and when she looked right at you in a kind of a pleading way, well, you couldn’t help liking her and feeling sorry for her, though for all we knew, she didn’t need no sympathy from us or anybody else.

She showed up again the next night, lost another ten dollars and spent some more time talking. We asked Jess what they talked about and he said just the climate and the bathing and different places they’d both been, and so forth.

“Her name is Bennett, Amy Bennett,” said Jess. “She’s here all alone.”

“Well, you can fix that for her,” I said.

“No,” says Jess. “She wouldn’t have nothing to do with a fella like me. But I like to have her around. She reminds me of my wife.”

After he’d said that, none of us felt like kidding him about her, and when she’d come in nights and play, we’d leave them to themselves.

She come in every night for almost a week and went through the same performance, losing her ten dollars and then sitting there, talking.

Towards the end of the week, he made a date to meet her on the beach one morning and when he showed up for work that night, he acted like he was still under water.

I said to him: “Jess,” I said, “are you falling in love?”

“It’s past that,” he says. “I’ve already fell. I didn’t think I’d ever be interested in a woman again, but this one is different than any I ever met, except my wife.”

“What do you know about her?” I asked him.

“They ain’t much to know,” he said.

“She lives in Hartford, and she ain’t got much money.”

“Well,” I says, “she won’t have as much as she’s got if she keeps playing roulette. Ten dollars a night runs into important figures if you stick at it long enough.”

“I’ve told her she ought not to play,” he said, “but she likes the excitement and she always thinks her luck is going to change. And besides,” he said, “it wouldn’t look good, her coming here and not playing.”

Well, she interrupted us herself and after she’d lost a couple of bets, she asked Jess to pick out some number for her to play.

He says, “Try Number thirty-five.” She put two checks on No. 35, and No. 35 it was.

And that’s the worst thing in the world that could of happened.

Jess told her she’d better quit for that time, as he couldn’t be expected to guess as lucky for her again. So she smiled and said thanks and cashed in.

She talked to him a while, as usual, and made another date to meet him on the beach.

The devil was still playing tricks on Jess that night and when she asked him what to bet on, he told her to split the O’s.

The most she’d bet before was a dollar at a crack, but this time she stuck six half-dollar checks between the O’s and the single O come.

Well, you take a normal woman and if a thing like that had happened, they’d scream or at least show some signs of excitement. But this dame just looked at Jess and said: “You’re a darling!” without raising her voice. He made her quit again and now she was seventy or eighty dollars to the good.

“I wish I’d been playing more,” she said. “It seems silly to just be piking when I can’t lose.”

“Can’t lose!” says Jess. “Don’t get that idear into your head! I’ve picked you a winner two nights in succession, that’s as much as you can hope for. You better quit while you’re winner.”

“You like me, don’t you?” she said.

“You know I do,” said Jess.

“Well, then,” said the gal, “I know you’ll keep picking them right. You see you can’t fool me.”

Jess said he didn’t realize then what she meant; he was too far gone to really think.

He asked her if she’d go swimming with him in the morning. She said no, that her brother was coming on the boat and she had to meet him.

“But listen,” she says: “If you’re awfully good to me tomorrow night, even better than tonight or last, why, I’ll run away from my brother the day after tomorrow and we’ll have a party all to ourselves.”

She started to leave, but changed her mind and sat down again.

“Isn’t there some kind of a limit in roulette?” she asked im.

“Yes,” says Jess. “We have a limit of twenty-five dollars flat on a number, but you can star it or make a wall around it, and besides that, you can play big on the color and the odd or even, and so forth, to say nothing of bets on the three numbers, across the board, that includes your number, and the five numbers that surrounds your number on all sides. But I hope you ain’t going to plunge like that.”

“Not me,” said the gal. “But my brother might. And I want you to remember that he’s my brother.”

“I wish him luck,” says Jess.

“He’ll have it if you wish it,” says the gal.

Then she made him lay out the checks so as they’d be placed right for a limit bet. He took No. 26 as an example and used twenty-five-dollar checks.

He put one flat on 26 and “walled” it with eight more.

He laid three checks on the line here, covering the numbers 25, 26, and 27. And six checks each on these two spots, covering besides them three numbers, the 22, 23, and 24, and the 28, 29, and 30.

“That’s all,” he says, “except that you can play a thousand on the even, a thousand on the black, another thousand on the last eighteen, five hundred on the third dozen and five hundred more on the middle column. Altogether, you’re playing $4,600 and you stand to win $10,700.”

“And do you think,” she says, “that twenty-six will be a good number tomorrow night?”

“As good as any,” said Jess. “However, don’t ever imagine that that kind of playing is for you.”

“Of course not,” said the dame. “But I can’t control my brother and he always splits with me.”

And she smiled and walked out.

You know how it’s going to wind up. The fella wasn’t no more her brother than I am, and anybody but poor, simple Jess would of guessed it as soon as you seen them together. But whoever he was, he had the snappy idear lots of people gets⁠—that the dealer can spin any number he wants⁠—and he believed the gal when she told him Jess was so stuck on her that they was no chance for them to lose.

The moron didn’t lay the big bets on the even, the black, the last eighteen, and so on. But he bought enough twenty-five-dollar checks to cover No. 26 in every other way. His investment was $600 and his winnings was $5,700. That is, they would of been $5,700 if the ball hadn’t dropped in No. 4.

Before we had wrestled them out of the place, the gal had just missed poor Jess’s head with a heavy glass ashtray and had called him names that she’d never learned from a brother.

That’s how Jess come to quit dealing. I heard he was starting elevators in some office building way down on lower Broadway. I forget the address. Maybe it’s No. 26.

The Venomous Viper of the Volga

In early October, Luke Lewis, prominent promoter in what Bill McGeehan calls the cauliflower industry, conferred with little Sandy King, his press-agent and right-hand man.

“We got to make different plans,” said Luke. “I figured the new champ would be good for one sellout in the Arena this winter and at least one big outdoor show in May or June. But you seen what happened last night. He makes his first public appearance since winning the title, and he gets booed. People don’t want a champion that’s interested in this here anesthetic dancing and bee culture. Match him with anybody but Ryan and he wouldn’t draw flies. What we got to do is leave him lay for a year, till we can put him and Ryan on in a return match.”

“If I was a fighter,” said Sandy, “I wouldn’t want to rest a whole year. I’d be afraid I’d forget all I knew about fighting.”

“It would hurt some fighters,” said the boss, “but they’s others that ain’t got nothing to forget. That’s none of my business, though,” he continued. “What’s bothering me is how to keep the public awake till next fall without giving them a championship bout.”

“Too bad you can’t match Burton and Cook,” said Sandy.

The Cook he referred to was Jem Cook, a colored gentleman known as the Black Bull of Biloxi. He had never whipped anyone but his children, he was middle-aged and slow, his “fighting” was in such flagrant violation of all rules that even the referees found fault with it, and yet a large portion of Fistic Fandom, or Moronia, had long regarded him as the logical contender for the title recently wrested from Jack Ryan by Beau Burton, the Student Prince.

“They’s no place you could hold it,” Luke said. “And further and more, Cook is going to fight Teddy Walsh in Buffalo next week and that means good night Cook. Larry Woltz is the referee. He was born in the South and he’ll see that it’s a fair fight even if he has to tape the black boy’s wrists with a pair of handcuffs.”

“How about a series of trials? Make a list of all the heavyweights we can think of, match them up with each other through the winter and spring, and then, whoever comes through, why, he can meet Ryan. And whichever wins between he and Ryan gets the big match with the Beau.”

“Of course that idear has occurred to me,” said Luke. “I guess it’s the only solution. But you know they ain’t three heavies in the country that could knock the ashes off a cigar, and the public don’t like big fellas that can’t hit.”

“Jimmy Donohue can hit.”

“I said big fellas. Donohue claims one hundred and seventy-five pounds, but I bet you could put him and a cow on the scales together and they wouldn’t weigh one-seventy. Suppose I was to let him in the competition and he beat all these hams, why, it would be a joke to match him with Ryan.”

“Well, there was Carpenteer and Dempsey.”

“Carpenteer was a frog and that makes all the difference. Just tell people that So-and-So is champion of France or Paraguay and they’ll break down your gates even if they know the fella had to be brought off the ship in a wheelchair. Get me a guy from some place abroad and I’m all set. I mean any place but England; when you mention an English champ, everybody thinks of Joe Beckett and takes it as a joke. If somebody would spring up in Spain or Greece or somewheres⁠—But as long as none of those birds are in sight, we better begin figuring on what we’ve got here, and then it’ll be a tough job to fix up some preliminary matches for them that ain’t too silly and yet not too dangerous. Who do you suggest?”

“I was thinking of Fitzgerald and Moran.”

Frankie Fitzgerald, a Romanian known as Fitchburg’s Fighting Fool, and Mike Moran, the Malden Murderer, were a pair of 200-pounders who had been seen together in so many New England rings that Dame Rumor whispered they must be betrothed. It was said that on one occasion, three or four years ago, the Murderer, who had got his sobriquet from a childhood practise of stepping on ants, had tripped in a tear in the canvas and sunk to one knee, but the Fighting Fool had restored him to plumb before the astounded referee began to count. This was the only incident remembered by patient eyewitnesses of the couple’s hundred-odd rounds of petting.

“We’ll have to include them because of the general shortage,” said Luke. “But we’ll also have to find somebody for each of them to lick before we dast bring them together again. And that’s going to be quite a chore.”

“Why not have Fitzgerald beat Donohue, and Moran win from Eddie Brock?”

“Donohue and Brock would have to foul them.”

“Well, they wouldn’t mind doing that if it was worth their while. Donohue is really a middleweight and Brock is a welter, and it wouldn’t hurt neither of their reputations to lose to guys that outweighs the entire Notre Dame football squad.”

“All right,” agreed Luke. “We’ll start to work along those lines and hope for the best. But meanw’ile, you watch the papers and if you run acrost any news from abroad that might relieve the situation, remember where you get your pay. And in order so you won’t overlook nothing, I’ll make you a proposition: Find me a foreigner that ain’t absolutely impossible, and I’ll give you a cash bonus of five grand.”

The conference was over and the diminutive Sandy left the office to keep a luncheon engagement with one Mabel Ives, to whom, for no apparent reason, he was paying court. On the way, he thought a great deal about Mabel and very little about his employer’s talk, until suddenly Luke’s last words recurred to him.

“Five grand!” he said to himself. “Why, with that amount of money in one lump, I could marry her without going into debt. I’ll certainly dig him up a wop or an Armenian if I have to comb Newark!”

But such a desperate measure proved unnecessary, thanks to Miss Ives. She insisted on spending the afternoon at the Palace, though Sandy would much rather have gone to a picture theater because picture theaters are dark. (Miss Ives’ style of beauty was shown to its best advantage in the dark, but that wasn’t why Sandy wanted her there.) Anyway, she made him take her to the Palace and it was lucky she did, from Sandy’s astigmatic point of view, for the third number on the bill brought him to the end of his quest, if so brief and inert a search may be dignified by that term.

“Prentiss, Master Ventriloquist” was the title of the act, but it was not Prentiss and his laryngeal chicanery that impressed little King. It was the physique and diabolic and exotic appearance of an anonymous member of Prentiss’s scant troupe, who played, none too well, the part of a silent sentry in the unusually elaborate Arabian scene which the Master evidently considered essential to proper exposition of high-class ventriloquism.

“There’s the big fella I want!” said Sandy.

“Shut up and let me enjoy the show, or you won’t be the little fella I want!” said his girlfriend.

Sandy sat impatiently through the rest of the bill and was actually glad Mabel had a date that evening with her ukulele teacher.

Harry Soule, stage-manager at the Palace, was a hot fight fan and Sandy had often given him tickets to Arena shows. So it was easy to get backstage and arrange a meeting with Prentiss’s big aid.

“But what do you want of the big bum?” asked the curious Soule. “Are you thinking of making a fighter out of him?”

“No, no,” replied Sandy with a mendacious laugh. “I’m trying to locate his brother, who used to work for us.”

“The big bum,” Henry Goetz by name, was shy at first. He was not accustomed to being wanted by anybody and it seemed unlikely that the little visitor boded well. However, Sandy managed to coax him to a thinly disguised saloon and there to warm him into a less diffident mood.

It developed that he was twenty-four years old, that he had been born in Pennsylvania, that his father’s ancestors were German and that his mother’s people, way back, had lived in Russia. Prentiss was paying him thirty dollars a week, but his engagement was for one week only, as the Master found it possible and economical to break in a new silent sentry at each stand. He had graduated from school at the age of nine and since then had sold newspapers, washed cars, painted barns, worked in a mine and enjoyed vacations lasting anywhere from one to four years. He was six feet two, weighed 208 pounds and had not been in a fight since he was old enough to apologize.

“I don’t suppose you’d mind making a lot of money,” said Sandy.

“How?”

“Boxing. A fella with your build and stren’th is a sucker not to go in the fight game. Especially when they look as much like a fighter as you do. When I seen you on the stage this afternoon, I thought you must be a champion fighter from somewheres in Europe, just doing this thing for fun.”

“Who would I have to fight?”

“Nobody you can’t lick. That is, at first. You’d be matched with a couple of pushovers and you’d make twenty or thirty thousand dollars. And then you’d be in line for the big cleanup, seventy-five or a hundred thousand at least.”

“What cleanup?”

“A match with Jack Ryan.”

“Jack Ryan! Say, my parents is both dead and I ain’t got no other heirs.”

“Don’t be silly! It’s very seldom a man is killed boxing.”

“Just once would be more than enough.”

“Listen: You’ve got a great chance to make a barrel of money with very little work. If you do as I say, in less than a year from now you’ll be fixed so as you won’t never have to think of another job. And I’ll guarantee that Ryan won’t do anything to you that you can’t get over in two days’ time. You look like a pretty bright fella, but if you’re even half-witted, you can’t turn down a proposition like this.”

Well, influenced by Mr. King’s eloquence, the speakeasy’s thirty-proof Scotch and probably by a desire to prove himself half-witted, Henry Goetz finally said yes and promised to put his immediate future in Sandy’s small hands, his salary to be fifty dollars a week until the heavy money began to roll in.

Inasmuch as Sandy’s own pay was only a hundred and it took every cent of it to buy his clothes, lodging and food, and entertainment for Miss Ives, he realized he could not swing his undertaking without help. And next afternoon found him closeted with Willie Troy, a boxing impresario with a bankroll, a real ability to develop “prospects” and a boyish delight in pranks.

Troy was interested and became more so when introduced to Goetz. The latter was certainly big enough and, in spite of his Pennsylvania nativity, looked as alien and homicidal as a taxi driver.

“Have you got any friends?” Troy asked him.

“No,” said the erstwhile trouper.

“I didn’t think so,” said Troy. “But if you had, I was going to warn you to keep away from them and not let them know where you’re at or what you’re doing. From now on you’re a Russian, your name is Ivan Ivanovitch and your nickname is ‘The Venomous Viper of the Volga.’ ”

“You no spika de English,” put in Sandy.

“No,” agreed Troy. “You don’t talk at all. Whatever remarks are addressed to you, you shake your head and act dumb. I don’t believe that will take many rehearsals.”

The Viper became an inmate of the Troy home in the Bronx, which boasted gymnasium space and paraphernalia necessary to a primary education in the manly art. And Sandy King wrote himself a long letter from a mythical friend in Berlin, describing a recent bout between Franz Reum, leading Teutonic heavyweight, and Ivan Ivanovitch, young champion of all the Russias, wherein the German had been knocked cold in Round Two and had remained unconscious for an hour and twelve minutes. Enclosed were snapshots of the new Slav fistic marvel, posed in the almost altogether and displaying a muscular development that reminded one of Monty Munn and the elder Zbyszko.

“Funny they ain’t been nothing in the papers about this guy,” said Luke Lewis when he had read the letter and studied the pictures.

“There will be,” said Sandy. “I hear he’s coming to this country the first of the year.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“From Willie Troy. Willie has known about him quite a w’ile. And he’s been in correspondence with his manager in regards to the American rights.”

The promoter looked his little employee straight in the eye.

“Listen, Sandy,” he said: “I don’t care if your Russian is a Dane from Milwaukee or a Mexican from Montreal, or if his name is Ginsberg or Mussolini. Judging from these photos, he’s just about what I want⁠—a big, tough numskull with the face of an assassin and foreign labels stuck all over him. When you and Willie are ready, bring him around and if he’s anything like his pictures, I’ll give you your five grand and do business with Troy.”

“I forgot to tell you what they call him⁠—the Venomous Viper of the Volga.”

“Who calls him?”

“The fight fans over in Russia.”

“Well, it’s a good name even if you and Troy did make it up. It’s enough to sell him if he didn’t have that build and mush to go with it. On second thoughts, I’ll take a chance on him sight unseen. I’ll give you your check now and I don’t want to look at your fighter till I go down with Troy to meet him at the boat. You realize, of course, that he can’t land here from Russia without getting off a boat.”

“No trouble about that. Troy has been over and back a hundred times and knows most of the captains. The Viper will be taken on at Quarantine, during the night. And by that time he’ll have a Russian manager who can talk enough broken English to entertain the newspaper boys.”

“One more suggestion⁠—you ought to get him tattooed. Pretty near all foreigners is tattooed.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, I got an idear that Ivan can’t stand pain.”

“That’s a good trait in a fighter,” said Luke.

“It means quick knockouts, which is what people wants to see.”

In the Sunday papers there were pictures of the new Russian peril, with stories of his impressive triumphs at home and announcements of his impending American visit. These appeared in December, just after football, when the sport editors were glad to print anything that was not a final, last, conclusive ultimatum from Judge Landis to Ban Johnson, or vice versa.

And up in the Bronx, Willie Troy was patiently trying to instruct the Viper in the fundamentals of boxing, a sport which the late Mr. Goetz took to as naturally as a walrus to needlework.

“I’m afraid,” the teacher told Sandy, “that when the newspaper boys sees him in the ring, they’ll give him a new nickname. They’ll call him Ivan the Terrible.”

The first of the trial battles was put on after the usual petty annoyances. Principals in this match were Eddie Brock and the Malden Murderer, Moran. The boxing solons came out in flatfooted, flat-headed opposition to the encounter. It seemed there was too great a disparity in size. Moran weighed 206 and Brock about 149. Much discussion and deep thought were required before the masterminds found a solution that ought to have been obvious from the start, namely that Brock, a welterweight, be obliged to train down to the welterweight limit of 147 pounds.

Then, a week prior to the date of the bout, the Murderer’s manager announced it was all off⁠—his man had eaten a bedridden oyster. The truth was that a report had reached camp that Brock, who promised to commit all the fouls in the book no later than the third round, was betting on himself not only to win, but to win by a knockout. The welter was indignant when this came to his ears and he hastened to dispel the effects of the ptomaine poisoning by visiting Moran’s quarters and assuring the coy Murderer that he was not that kind of crook.

“Why, I’m betting on you, big boy,” he said. “I’m betting five thousand dollars of my own money and I had to give two to one. Do you think I’d lay odds against myself if I wasn’t sure to lose!”

And Brock won his wager and speeded Moran on his way to another well-lined purse by punching him three times just above the knee and climaxing the performance with a blow that broke skin already frayed by a garter’s metal. It had to be done a round ahead of schedule, too, for the Murderer had trained on roast goose, mince pie and caramels and would have foundered in another three minutes.

The Viper of the Volga “arrived” in this country early in January. He was accompanied by his native manager and interpreter, Dmitri Sashoff, who in a former existence had been Fred Lister, a head waiter in a café of Troy’s at Providence, and whose Russian vocabulary consisted of the word “ruble.” Luke Lewis, Sandy King, Troy and a crowd of writers, camera men and fans were on hand to welcome the latest European sensation, but the latter, it seemed, had not slept well on board and his present ambition was to hurry to his hotel and rest. Troy, who was to handle him here, would not allow him to go to a hotel, where he might be pestered by enthusiastic admirers, but insisted on taking him at once to his own home in the Bronx, where reporters would be welcome to see him in a few days. The Viper emitted a couple of growls which were interpreted as regrets that he could speak no English and expressions of good will to those who had come to meet him, and was then whisked out to the Troy establishment, which he had left the previous afternoon.

“He’ll have to be introduced from the ring,” said Luke to Willie Troy. “We may as well do that Thursday night, just before Burke and Williams come on.”

“I’ll bring him in for the introduction and take him out right afterwards,” said Troy. “He never seen a fight in his life and he mustn’t see one yet, not till I’ve got him more in hand. What I’m trying to do is make him scareder of me than of fighting itself. I’ll have him that way in a couple more weeks, but if we don’t handle him carefully we’ll lose our meal ticket before it’s punched full of holes.”

“How about announcing that he’s matched to box Teddy Walsh in the next big show?” said Luke.

“Announce it if you want to as long as you don’t mean it.”

“Of course I don’t mean it. But people will take more notice of him if he’s got a good match in sight. And I’ll get Walsh to sprain his wrist or something and force an indefinite postponement.”

“The postponement will have to be more than indefinite. It’ll have to be endless. Because no matter how hard Walsh tried not to, he’d just naturally murder my pet snake.”

“What time of day does he work?”

“The Viper? All day long, three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. I don’t let up on him a minute.”

“I’d like to see him box sometime.”

“So would I,” said Willie Troy.

The clash between Barney Williams and Red Burke was supposed to be one of the trials, though Luke Lewis had no intention of allowing either of them to cut in on the big money that the outdoor season promised. They were at least as good as any of the other contenders⁠—barring Donohue and Brock, whose poverty of bulk made them undesirable⁠—but they had not always been loyal to Luke. So he hoped their engagement would result in a double knockout, eliminating them both.

However, he temporarily forgot his grudge against them in delight over the ovation accorded the immigrant Ivan when the latter was conducted into the Arena ring by Willie Troy and introduced by the official announcer as “The Ven-ominous Viper of the Vodka.” Ivan all but took his first dive while trying to negotiate the unaccustomed ropes, but the fans overlooked his awkwardness and cheered him to the echo because he was new and bore such a striking resemblance to a fight crowd’s common grandpa, the ape.

Ivan wanted to stay and see the windup, but Troy hustled him out of the building, saying the Arena air was bad for a man in training, and besides it was way past his bedtime. This strategy was well advised, for the Williams-Burke battle would have dissuaded a much stouter-hearted youth than the Viper from pursuing the manly art as a means of livelihood. The contestants were in dead earnest and went at it like a pair of vicious dogs. There were four spills and much letting of blood before Burke ended it by knocking his opponent into the lap of one of the judges. All this in the first, and last, round of fighting.

Willie Troy had long since given up hope of imbuing his pupil either with gladiatorial spirit or sparring skill. He was a clever boxer himself and had been a successful instructor of many green and awkward but willing young men. The Viper was as unwilling as he was awkward and green and Troy soon came to the conclusion that it was a waste of time and effort to try to teach him blocking, ducking, footwork or any of the other requisites of an effective defense. He decided to concentrate on the development of a punch, which seemed comparatively simple in the case of a man with arm and shoulder muscles as mighty as Ivan’s. However, it took all Willie’s powers of persuasion to get his charge to cut loose and strike with his full strength, and even then the only dangerous wallop educed was a roundhouse swing that only a sound sleeper or a paralytic could have failed to evade.

Luke Lewis was becoming impatient and it was impossible to stall him any longer.

“Here it is February, the winter is half gone and your Viper ain’t even matched,” he complained.

“Well, go ahead and match him,” said Willie resignedly. “But I warn you that they ain’t a man living he can beat without the man’s consent.”

“I’ll get the consent all right,” promised Luke. “All I ask is for you to have your fella ready to show the newspaper boys something. If they don’t see him work out, they’ll smell a rat.”

“They’ll smell a whole lot less fragranter rat if they do,” said Troy.

At this stage of the proceedings they got a lucky break. Duke Wallace, manager of Manuel Martinez, paid Troy a visit. Martinez, an import from Indiana, had “come over” three or four years ago and won high public favor by beating all the domestic setups in a series of bouts marked by brevity and bloodshed. With a glowing future, he had suddenly announced his retirement and had given no reason. Now, said Wallace, he wanted to reenter the ring.

“He’s hard up,” his manager explained. “He wants just one more match so his family won’t starve. I heard you was developing some new foreigner and I wondered if we couldn’t get together.”

They could and did.

“Luke will favor fifteen rounds,” said Wallace, “but if it’s the same to you, we’ll hold out for ten. The truth is that the Rugged Rock has got galloping consumption and it might be risky to keep him in there too long.”

“It would certainly be a bad thing for the game in this state to have a man die fighting,” said Troy, “but it looks to me like the best idea is to let both Luke and the public think the bout is for fifteen rounds and Martinez can save himself a lot of punishment by taking his dive in Round One.”

This arrangement proved satisfactory to the Rock’s manager.

“And listen,” added Troy. “It’s understood that your man mustn’t hit mine under any circumstances, and he must stand perfectly still or my man is sure to miss him.”

Wallace said this was all right provided Troy would come across afterwards with five thousand dollars of whatever amount Lewis gave the Viper.

The fans were delighted with the news that at last they were going to get a look at the Russian marvel and particularly that they would see him in action against a fighter who had always given them a run for their money. A packed Arena was assured the instant the bout was scheduled. It was given out that the men had been secretly training so long and so hard that very little additional preparation would be necessary and the managers both took leaves from Carpentier’s book and announced that their charges would put on the finishing touches behind closed doors as they were planning trick attacks and were afraid of spies.

One exhibition was given by each, for newspaper men only. Martinez was a little drawn, but showed much of his old-time speed and artistry in the two brief rounds he sparred. For the Viper’s first non-private demonstration, Willie Troy engaged four big hams who were to get fifty dollars apiece if Ivan floored them and nothing if he didn’t. They all earned their pay. But one or two of the hypercritical scribes remarked that the Russian seemed clumsy and slow.

“That’s in his favor,” said Troy quickly. “He looks like such a big, gawky bum that the other fella thinks he ain’t got nothing, and the next minute, the other fella is laying in the rosin not thinking at all.”

On the night of the fight, the big crowd gave Martinez a rousing cheer for old time’s sake. But they nearly tore the roof off the building with their welcome to the Viper. His appearance in street clothes had charmed them before. In the nearly nude, with a lady’s figure tattooed on each huge arm and a picture of the Easter Parade on the Nevsky Prospect at the corner of Fiftieth Street, Petrograd, covering his ample chest, he was nothing short of irresistible.

Yet the storm of applause and yells that marked his entrance was nothing compared with the pandemonium which followed his quick disposal of the former Rugged Rock, who, appearing mystified by Ivan’s clumsy, amateurish advance, stood perfectly still with his arms at his sides and received on the point of his jaw a carefully aimed right-hand swing that might easily have toppled Roxy’s Theater.

Manuel’s seconds did not wait for a count but climbed through the ropes and carried their unconscious burden to an exit where an ambulance was waiting to take him to a more comfortable bed than the one on which he had flopped so emphatically. And the gulls fought one another and trampled each other under foot in their mad scramble to get close to the new Killer, a foreigner with a punch that made Luis Ángel Firpo’s lethal thump seem like Mrs. Coolidge’s gentlest handshake.

Luke Lewis was riding on top of the world. Little difference did it make to him now whether or not the former champ, Jack Ryan, would consent to come out of his retirement. The Viper was a man who, matched with Beau Burton, would draw the fifty-million-dollar gate that had long been Luke’s dream. And the Viper would be the man to survive the remaining trials even if all the Fitzgeralds and Morans in New England had to be given an annuity. Fitchburg’s Fighting Fool and the Malden Murderer would open the outdoor season, the winner would be knocked for a loop by the Viper, probably early in July, and then it would only be necessary to lease acreage enough to seat 50,000 of America’s most distinguished oafs at a thousand dollars per oaf, for the grand September finale between Beau Burton and Ivan Ivanovitch in what⁠—well, you could hardly call it less than the Battle of the Millennium.

A few details must be arranged. First, there must be a cancellation of a silly match between Fitzgerald, Moran’s New England rival, and Jimmy Donohue, the 170-pounder, who had suddenly become unreasonable and refused to promise to lie down unless he was sleepy. With this matter disposed of, it was deemed wise to assure the public that the Viper would be unable to fight again until he faced the Fitzgerald-Moran winner, for the reason that he could not get anyone to take the chance that had resulted in the death of the poor old Rugged Rock. Several “logical contenders” rose to deny this, but were not believed by a public gone Viper mad.

Came lovely May and the bout between the Fraternal Order of 200-pound New Englanders, a bout regarded in advance as a practical joke, but one which brought the Fighting Fool forward as a greatly improved athlete and an impressive winner over the Murderer from Malden. The Murderer, in fact, was sent to the chair in Round Five, using the crawl stroke to reach his destination.

In the papers of May 24 was a column story to the effect that Frankie Fitzgerald and Ivan Ivanovitch had been signed for the semifinal match in the big elimination tournament of heavyweights and that the match, for the privilege of fighting Beau Burton for the world’s championship, would take place on the evening of July 8.

On the evening of July 7, Sandy King, Luke Lewis’s dapper little press-agent, called up the number of Mabel Ives and was told by Mabel’s mother that Mabel had gone out driving; she didn’t know with whom or when she would be back. Sandy had made the same call and had received the same reply on innumerable previous evenings and had been growing more and more depressed.

Tonight his depression was so great that he felt nothing but a long taxi ride would relieve it. The taxi deposited his 123 pounds of youth and sartorial perfection at an address in the Bronx⁠—the combination dwelling and gymnasium of Willie Troy.

The colored man who answered the door said the Viper had retired.

“He hasn’t retired yet,” said Sandy, “but he’s about to.”

Whereupon he brushed unceremoniously past the guard and found Ivan Ivanovitch alone in the living-room, trying to spell out some of the shorter words on the sporting page.

“Where’s my gal?” said Sandy.

“What do you mean?” asked the Viper.

“What I mean and who I mean is Mabel Ives,” replied Mr. King. “I know all about it.”

“Well,” said the Viper, “she’s went home. But if you knowed all about it, you wouldn’t be calling her your gal. She’s been my gal pretty near ever since I bashed that poor Espagnola. It was them tattoo pictures that made her love me.”

“Would you like her to love you a little stronger?”

“You bet I would! She’s a fine gal.”

“Well, then,” said Sandy, “stand up ’cause I’m going to tattoo you some more.”

When, half an hour later, Willie Troy returned from a final conference with Luke Lewis and the manager of Frankie Fitzgerald, he found the Venomous Viper moaning on the lounge while a retainer tried with various lotions and compresses to reduce the swelling of two discolored eyes and check the insistent flow of what is sometimes called the carmine, from a remodeled and unbecoming mouth and nose.

And next day Luke Lewis was begging Jack Ryan by telegraph to state his lowest terms for an early match with Fitchburg’s Fighting Fool.

Man Not Overboard

Ben Brainard posed for the newspaper photographers on the deck of the Gargantua, saying to himself: “There’s a picture for page one⁠—‘Young Novelist Kills Himself at Sea.’ ”

He went into his cabin and opened his two bags. In one were a couple of clean handkerchiefs. The other was empty. He would tell the steward he had come in a terrible hurry, had not had time to pack. The truth was that after eleven o’clock that night he would need nothing in the world, not even the clothes he was wearing. He wondered vacantly how long a man’s clothes outlasted his body in salt water.

He sat down on the bed and felt pressing against him the little gun he had bought on Third Avenue a week ago, the day when he had planned this thing he was going to do. He would have been a week dead now but for his not exceptional aversion to funerals and his preference to die at sea, and the added fact that it was not quite a year since he had taken out insurance for $10,000 in favor of his mother and sister and the suicide clause would still, five days ago, have been in force. The mother and sister had very little and he realized that he was hurting them enough by just killing himself without, in addition, leaving them penniless.

His plan had been carefully made. The Gargantua, on which his friend Phil Runyon was purser, would dock on the eighth and sail again on the tenth, just a week after his Third Avenue shopping tour. He would be on board and would have Phil for a witness of his death to avoid any balking on the part of the insurance company. And he would spend the intervening days and nights in boundless drinking, such as would cause him to be remembered around New York as something more than the writer of two popular books and one which no publisher would accept. (Perhaps they would accept it when he had made his name better known by doing what he was about to do; if so, the royalties would help his poor mother and sister.)

Well, he had had his orgy, opening and closing day clubs and night clubs till early yesterday morning, when he had been taken home and put to bed by his friend the purser after a party of whose details he remembered nothing at all.

The Gargantua was gliding smoothly out of New York Harbor. Ben Brainard went into the lounge and ordered three quick drinks to steady his hand so that he might write farewell letters to the members of his family and to the Girl whose heartless treatment of him had made life intolerable. His last act would be to entrust these letters to good old Phil Runyon, just previous to his embarkation to another World.

To his mother and sister he explained the reasons for his deed⁠—the failure of his latest and greatest work to win appreciation, and the loss of the most wonderful and lovable of all girls. He asked their forgiveness. He knew they would understand.

To the Girl he wrote over two thousand words that would make her at least a little bit sorry even if she were really as hard-hearted as she had appeared at their last meeting. (The Girl was Pauline Lannin of the chorus of Hit the Deck and he might have known that a chorus girl, what with making quick changes and one thing and another, would never have time to digest two thousand words, especially as the ordinary daily extent of her reading was the captions in an evening tabloid.)

The bugle blew for dinner, but of what use was dinner to a man who had only four hours more to live? What Brainard needed was enough Scotch to sustain his resolution, for it really is tough to pass out at the age of thirty, when you are a genius and there is so much good writing God wants you to do. It was this fear of weakening at the last moment that had influenced him to buy a gun. He was an excellent swimmer and if he toppled overboard without shooting himself first, a natural instinct of self-preservation might keep him afloat until the Gargantua’s sailors had rescued him.

He had had one drink and was about to order another when a stranger stopped at his table, a man of robust health, apparently about fifty-five years old.

“Do you mind if I join you?” he asked. “I am all alone and I like company when I have a drink.”

Brainard was going to lie and say he expected a friend, but it occurred to him that the time would pass more quickly if he had someone to talk to; listen to, rather, for he was not in a mood to do much talking himself.

“Sit down,” he invited. “I am ordering a Scotch highball. Perhaps you’d rather have a cocktail.”

“No, make it two highballs,” said the stranger, and added to the waiter, “Bring me the check.”

“You can buy the next one,” Brainard said. “I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves. I am Benjamin Brainard, of New York.”

“Not Benjamin Brainard the author!” the other exclaimed. “Why, I read two of your books and enjoyed them immensely. But I certainly never would have guessed you were such a young man; your novels show such a wide knowledge of life.”

“I guess I’ve lived!” said Brainard with a bitter smile.

“My name,” said his new companion, “is Fred Lemp. I’m just a plain business man, with very little business,” he added good-naturedly.

“Where are you bound for?” Brainard inquired.

“Paris,” said Lemp. “Paris and Château-Thierry. And you?”

Brainard’s face wore a queer expression. “I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know!”

“I only know that it’s a long way off,” said Brainard.

“Oh, I suppose you are just wandering around, in search of material for a new book.”

“I have written my last book.”

“You mustn’t say that! A man your age and with your talent! You owe it to the world to keep on writing.”

“Thank you, but I am sure I don’t owe the world anything.”

They had had four drinks and Brainard was now ordering another.

“I don’t know whether I’d better or not,” said Lemp hesitantly. “I hardly ever drink more than three, because after three I get talky and bore everybody to death.”

“It doesn’t matter to me if you get talky,” said Brainard, and added to himself: “I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Well, it’s on your own head,” said Lemp, and ordered his fifth highball.

“Mr. Lemp,” Brainard said, “what would you do⁠—Never mind. I guess I’m getting too talky myself.”

“Not at all,” said Lemp. “I’d like to hear what you were going to ask me.”

“Well, I was going to ask what you would do if you were an artist in a certain line and nobody appreciated your work⁠—”

“I’d keep at it anyway if I knew it was good work.”

“I wasn’t through. What would you do if you suddenly realized you were an unappreciated artist, and then, on top of that, a Girl broke your heart?”

“Is this autobiographical?”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, I’d try my best to forget her and I’d go ahead and do such masterful work that she would be very sorry for what she had done to me.”

“Forget her!” Brainard’s tone was bitter in the extreme.

They were awaiting a sixth drink.

“You said you were going to Château-Thierry. I was in the fight there. I wish I’d been killed!”

“My boy was,” said Lemp.

“Are you going to visit the grave?”

“Yes, and also to visit a little Frenchwoman who ought to have been his wife. Every year I pay her a call, to see if there is anything I can do for her and her child. Every year I try to coax her back to America with me, but she won’t leave France. I wish she would. I’m all alone now and the youngster⁠—he’s nine years old⁠—he’s a mighty cute kid and would be company for me. A man gets lonesome sometimes. And my wife is worse than dead. She has lost her mind and has to be kept in a private sanitarium.”

“Are you allowed to see her?”

“I do see her twice a year, on her birthday and on our anniversary. But I might as well stay away. She has no idea who I am. Poor Margaret! She is almost as beautiful as the day I met her.”

“What type?”

“I suppose you would call her an Irish type⁠—black hair and blue eyes. Just the type my first wife was; in fact, I believe it was her resemblance to Edith that made me fall in love with her.”

“How old was your first wife when she died?”

“She didn’t die. Poor Edith! I guess it was mostly my fault. She was too young to marry, too young to know her own mind. When we had lived together a little over a year, she fell desperately in love with a man I used to invite frequently to the house, a business acquaintance.”

“Did she run away with him?”

“Yes. He had more money than I. I don’t mean to say that Edith was money-mad, but she did like good times and our marriage came just at a period when I was in desperate financial straits; rather, just before that period, for naturally, if I had known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have married her.”

“What did happen?” asked Brainard, sipping his eighth drink.

“You are an inquisitive young man.”

“Oh, if you’d rather not tell me⁠—”

“I might as well. I warned you I’d get talky. Well, my youngest brother went wrong. He was cashier in a small bank, out on Long Island, and he embezzled to the extent of twenty thousand dollars. He had gambled it all away at the racetracks and in order to keep him out of jail, I liquidated all my assets and borrowed three thousand from a friend to make up the amount. I did it more for my mother’s sake than for his; I knew that if she heard that he had stolen, it would kill her.” Lemp brushed a hand across his eyes. “She found out about it anyway, and it did kill her.”

“Horrible!”

“I worked like the devil to get back on my feet, and I did it. But it was too late. Edith had gone.”

“What do you say if we have a drink?”

“I say yes.”

“And how long after that did you get married the second time?”

“Four years, and the same thing nearly happened again. My other brother, older than I, fell in love with a woman in Garden City, another man’s wife. The husband found it out and there was a fight in which my brother shot the husband dead. There was no chance in the world of my brother’s getting off, but I felt it my duty to give him the best counsel obtainable. He had no money himself. I paid two lawyers forty thousand and my brother went to the chair. Well, I learned afterwards that on the very same day my brother committed murder, Margaret, my second wife, became friendly with a piano tuner. Of course he had nothing except his wages and she was not fool enough to give me up for him. But when those lawyers had taken all my capital she would have left me if Providence had not intervened. The piano tuner was hit by a truck on the Fifty-ninth Street bridge and lost his hearing.”

“Did you have any other children besides the boy killed in the war?”

“Yes, a girl. But I’d rather not talk about her. Oh, well, what does it matter? Miriam was our firstborn, a year and a half older than my son. One day she was driving a car up in Westchester County, going forty or fifty miles an hour, when she was stopped by a handsome young motorcycle policeman, and the rascal told her he would let her off if she would be his girl.

“She said to him, ‘I don’t know what you mean by being your girl, but I think you’re awfully nice-looking and I’d just as soon be your wife.’ They were married and had three children. Then it was discovered that he had another wife and family in Ardsley. He was sent to jail, she is a stenographer in an insurance office downtown and I am supporting the kiddies.”

Brainard consumed his twelfth drink, then fumbled awkwardly in his pocket and drew out his gun.

“Mr. Lumps,” he said, “I’m going to ask you to do me a favor. Put this right in your mouth, aim it upwards and shoot.”

“What are you talking about, boy? Do you want me to commit suicide? Why, I’m only sixty-one years old and having a damn good time!”

“You do as I say and do it right in here so we won’t lose the gun. I’m going to need it myself at eleven o’clock.”

“What for?”

“To do the same thing you’re going to do.”

“But I’m not going to do anything except go to bed. What you intend to do is none of my business, though I would suggest that as you still have over two hours and a half to wait, you go to your cabin and take a nap and leave a call for eleven. I’ve always heard that the time to kill yourself with the best results is right after a nice nap.”

Brainard had already started on one, but Lemp and a steward managed to get his room key out of his pocket and arouse him sufficiently to be conducted to the cabin, partly undressed and laid on his bed. Lemp then returned to the lounge and was soon joined by Phil Runyon.

“He’s safe for the night anyway,” said Lemp.

“You’ve done a good job, Fred, and I’m grateful to you,” said the purser.

“I made him cry twice, and there were three or four times when I nearly broke down myself. Here’s his gun.”

“All right; I’ll take charge of it if you’re sure you don’t want it. Though I don’t know what good it would do you, as I emptied it yesterday morning after I’d got him to sleep, and I don’t think we’re selling any ammunition on the Gargantua, except what comes in bottles. That was a great party he took me on night before last. He insisted on dragging me to some night club and who should be there but this dame that’s turned him down. She was with a man who could have been her father, but wouldn’t want to if he was sober. I swear, Fred, she must be the manager’s wife’s sister ever to land a job in what they tell me is a pretty chorus.

“He was going to their table and make a scene, but I told him it would be cowardly to pick on a man as old as that. I finally got her eye and gave her the office to duck, and when she saw who was with me, she didn’t hesitate a minute.

“Pretty soon Ben was worse than I ever saw him. He had his suicide plan all worked out and he gave me the details, thinking I was somebody else. He talked like this:

“ ‘I haven’t much longer to live,’ he said. ‘In fact, this is the last time you’ll see me. I’ve got it all fixed up to kill myself and a good old pal of mine is going to help me. I’ve bought a gun; it’s over in my room now, all loaded and waiting for me. Well, this pal of mine is Phil Runyon, purser on the Gargantua, and she sails day after tomorrow. I’m going to be aboard and I’ll make a date to meet Phil when we’re out at sea and I’ll coax him to one of the decks, telling him I want to discuss something with him where we can’t be overheard. Then I’ll sit up on the rail and I’ll sit so that when I shoot myself, I’ll be bound to fall overboard. You see, I’ve got to have him there, or somebody else that knows me, so there won’t be any trouble about my insurance. How is that for an idea?’

“Imagine him asking me what kind of an idea I thought it was!

“And the funny part, along about five o’clock, when I finally succeeded in getting him out of the place, he knew me and was calling me Phil and talking about other times we’d been out together.

“Yesterday afternoon I called up his hotel and made sure he was out; then I went there and fixed it with a bellhop and porter to go up in his room after he left this morning and pack up enough stuff for him to make the trip with and have it sent down to the ship in my name. He thinks he hasn’t any baggage, but he’s got enough to go over and back with, and I really think the crossing will do him a lot of good. Though writers are mostly all nutty and you never know what to expect of them.”

“I haven’t told you,” said Lemp, “that when I was through with my story, he gave me the gun and ordered me to use it on myself.”

“Oh, Ben was always a generous boy,” said Runyon. “It surprises me that he didn’t offer to take you out on deck, shoot you and throw you off the ship.”

“Listen,” said Lemp: “I need one more drink for courage and then I’ve got to find my wife and take my scolding. I explained to her that I’d met a man I thought I could do some business with and I might not be in for dinner. But what good is that explanation going to be when she sees me?”

“Probably none,” Runyon said cheerfully. “But the drink is on me.”

About noon next day Brainard woke up, summoned his steward and ordered him to send the purser to his cabin.

“Phil,” he said when Runyon arrived, “didn’t we have an engagement last night?”

“Yes, but you went to bed long before your bedtime.”

“Phil, where did that steamer trunk come from?”

“I suppose it came from your hotel.”

“I didn’t bring any baggage except those two empty bags.”

“Did you plan crossing the ocean without baggage?”

“I didn’t plan crossing the ocean. And another thing, who was the fella I was with all evening, a fella about sixty years old, named Limp or Lemp or something?”

“Oh,” said Runyon, “that’s Fred Lemp, a big hosiery manufacturer from upstate.”

“Say, he’s had a tough life. He told me all about it. He told me stuff enough for a whale of a novel.”

“Why don’t you write it?”

“Because I can’t remember a word he said.”

“Well,” said Runyon, “we’ll get you together again sometime.”

“Do that, Phil,” said Brainard. “But make it out on deck where he can’t order so many drinks. A man as old as he ought not to drink so much. It’s liable to get him.”

Anniversary

Mrs. Taylor shuffled a worn pack of cards and began her evening session at solitaire. She would play probably forty games before she went to bed, and she would win thirty of them. What harm if she cheated a little? Russian Bank was more fun, but it cannot be played alone, and her husband was bored by it. He had been unable to learn bridge in spite of the patient and more or less expert teaching of the Hammonds, who lived three blocks away.

The thirty-four-dollar synthetic radio had done nothing but croak since the day following its installation. The cheap piano’s D and G above middle C were mute. The town’s Carnegie Library acquired very few “hot” books and the few were nearly always out. Picture plays hurt Louis’ eyes and he would not let her go out nights by herself, though he had no scruples against leaving her at home from eight to eleven Wednesdays, when he attended lodge and bowled.

So Mrs. Taylor shuffled her cards and tried to listen when Louis read aloud from the Milton Daily Star or the Milton Weekly Democrat, or recounted stories she had heard six times before and would hear six times again.

She had awakened this morning to the realization that it was the twelfth day of November, the ninth anniversary of her marriage. Louis had remembered that date for the first six years of their life together; for the last three years it had been to him just November the twelfth.

Nine years ago the Star and the Democrat had called her one of Milton’s most charming and beautiful young women, and they had been right. They had referred to Louis as a model young man, sober, industrious and “solid”; a young man whom any girl should be proud and glad to have as a husband. They were right again.

Now Mrs. Taylor, at thirty-three, was good-looking, but in a cold, indifferent sort of way. She no longer bothered to embellish her natural attractiveness and she lacked the warmth and vivacity which had won the adoration of most of Milton’s male youth, notably Walter Frayne, Jim Satterly and Louis Taylor himself.

Louis was still a model young man, sober, industrious and “solid.” When you thought of the precarious existence of the women who had married his chief rivals, you couldn’t help feeling that wisdom and good luck had been on Mrs. Taylor’s side when she made her choice.

Walter had attended college for one semester, at the end of which he came home with a perfect record of studies, 4; Flunks, 4. He had run amuck in Milton and ultimately, turned down by the girl he really cared for, had married an orphan whose parents had left her $150,000⁠—but not for long. After this tidy sum had been poured away Walter was almost continuously unemployed and people wondered how he and his wife lived. And why.

There was nothing of the gay dog about Jim Satterly. He had graduated from high school and gone into the Milton Gas Company’s office as bookkeeper at eight dollars per week. He was now thirty-five years old and still with the gas company, but his salary had been steadily increased until it was twenty-two dollars. His wife gave weekly piano lessons to a class of four pupils at fifty cents a half-hour each. She had borne Jim three children, or kiddies. The Satterlys seemed to enjoy their kiddies and an occasional picture show, but no magazine editor had ever sent a staff man to get a success story out of Jim.

Louis Taylor was secretary to the town’s only wealthy man, old Thomas Parvis, who owned a controlling interest in the Interurban Railway. Louis worked long hours and was paid four thousand a year, big money in Milton. It was enough to keep the childless Taylors in comfort; in comparative luxury, even. Couples with smaller incomes owned cars, took trips to nearby lake resorts and to Harper City, where a stock company presented worthwhile plays. But Louis was saving for a rainy day and his wife had long ago given up praying for rain.

Mrs. Taylor was winning her fourth successive victory over solitaire by the simple expedient of pretending that a black queen was red.

“It says here,” stated her husband, “that there are 27,650,267 automobiles in the world, according to a census just completed.”

It was Mrs. Taylor’s own fault that Louis had contracted the habit of reciting interesting tidbits from the paper. Back in May, 1924, he had asked her whether she would like to hear the news of the Loeb-Leopold case. She had already read it, but she said yes, thinking it would be more thrilling, even in repetition, than one of Louis’ own experiences, also in repetition. Since then, she had listened every evening⁠—except Wednesday, when Louis went out, and Sundays, when there was no paper⁠—to excerpts from the Star, consisting principally of what is known in newspaper offices as filler⁠—incontrovertible statistics about men and things in all parts of the world, facts that seemed to smite her husband like a bolt from the blue.

“Think of it!” he said. “Nearly twenty-eight million automobiles!”

“Heavens!” said Mrs. Taylor.

“And speaking of automobiles: ‘Storms have made roads so bad in parts of Chile that drivers have not dared to go into the rural districts.’ That’s the trouble with owning a car. If you don’t stay right on the paved streets or paved roads, you’re liable to get stuck and maybe walk home. Besides that, you’ve got to be a mechanic yourself or else, when there’s something wrong, you have to take it to a garage and lay it up a week till they consent to look at it and find out what’s the matter, and then they don’t know themselves nine times out of ten. But they charge you just the same and they charge you plenty. Did I tell you about Walter Trumbull’s trip to Harper City?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Taylor.

“I don’t believe I did. It was only last Friday night; no, Thursday night, the night after the Spartans beat us by one pin, when I had a chance to get a 202 and hit the head pin just a little too full and they split on me. That was the night Berger showed up so drunk he couldn’t bowl and we had to use Tommy and he shot 123.

“So it was the night after that when Walter and Marjorie started over to the City to see the Seventh Heaven, and about five miles the other side of Two Oaks the engine died and Walter couldn’t get it going again. His flashlight wouldn’t work and Marjorie wouldn’t let him strike matches with the hood up to see what the trouble was. As it turned out, it wouldn’t have done him any good anyway.

“Finally he left poor Marjorie in the car and walked way back to Two Oaks, but the garage was closed up for the night and the whole town was asleep, so he went back to the car and by that time of course it was too late to see the show. He hailed three or four cars coming from the other way, trying to get a ride home, but it wasn’t till after ten o’clock that he could get a car to stop and pick them up. The next morning he sent Charlie Thomas out to fix up the car so it would run or else tow it in, and Charlie found out there was nothing the matter with it except it was out of gas. When Walter told me about it, I said that was what he deserved for not patronizing the Interurban.”

“We don’t patronize it ourselves.”

“I hear enough about it in the daytime without riding on it at night.”

Mrs. Taylor shuffled the cards and Louis resumed perusal of the Star.

“The old U.S. is a pretty good country after all,” he said presently. “Listen to this: ‘The Netherlands’ unemployed now include 26,000 skilled and 24,000 unskilled workers.’ And listen: ‘A large proportion of Belgium’s population still wear wooden shoes.’ You wouldn’t think that was possible in this day and age!”

“I imagine,” said Mrs. Taylor, “that there are some places in the United States where people don’t wear any shoes at all.”

“Oh, sure, but not a large proportion; probably a few of those backwoods Tennessee mountaineers. And of course the colored people in the small towns in Georgia and South Carolina. You see lots of them, passing through on the train, that never had a shoe on in their life. I remember a place named Jesup, Georgia, a kind of junction. There was⁠—No, that wasn’t Jesup; it was some other place, some place the boss and I went through on the way to Daytona that time. I guess I told you about it.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Taylor.

“You wouldn’t believe the way some of those people live. Not all colored people, either; white people, too. Poor white trash, they call them. Or rather, ‘po’ white trash.’ Families of four and five in one room. Mr. Parvis said it was a crime and kept wishing he could do something for them.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Well, he’s hardly got money enough to house and clothe the whole South and it wouldn’t do any good to just pick out some one town and try and better conditions there.”

“Why not?”

“It would be a drop in the bucket, and besides, other towns would hear about it and pester the life out of him. I reminded him he was taking the trip to get away from care and worry for a while and he ought not to fret himself about other people’s business. Then, too, if he was going to practise some of his philanthrophy down there, I’d probably be put in charge of it. We might have even had to live there a year or two. I guess you wouldn’t like that, would you?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference to me,” said Mrs. Taylor.

“What! Live in one of those Godforsaken holes, without any friends or anybody you’d want to make friends with! Nothing to do all day and all night but eat and sleep and⁠—”

“Play solitaire,” suggested Mrs. Taylor.

“You may think you wouldn’t mind it, but that’s because you’ve never seen it. Those Georgia villages are an interesting study, but as for making your home in one of them, you’d die of loneliness. Of course there’s some spots in Florida that are pretty close to heaven. Take Daytona, for instance. But I’ve told you what it’s like.”

“Yes.”

“They’ve got a beach that’s so hard and smooth that they have automobile races on it. It’s beautiful. And it’s right close to Ormond, where Rockefeller spends his winters. Mr. Parvis and I saw him playing golf on the Ormond course. I can’t see anything in golf myself, but maybe I would if I had a chance to get interested in it. When I’m as old as he is, I’ll try it out, providing I’ve got as much time and one-millionth as much money.”

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have fully as much money.”

“I know what you mean by that. You’re digging at my thriftiness, though I suppose you call it stinginess. You’ll look at it differently when we’re old.”

“I hope I won’t be here to look at it at all.”

“No, you don’t. But what was I saying? Oh, yes. Daytona is where I’d like to live in winter, if I had the means. I must have told you about running into Harry Riker down there.”

“You did.”

“It certainly was a funny thing, running into him! We hadn’t seen each other for twenty-two years and he recognized me the minute he set eyes on me. I wouldn’t have known him from Adam’s off ox.

“It sure did take me back, running into Harry. He recalled one time, just before I left Shelbyville, when his father and mother were away on a visit somewhere. Harry’s aunt, Mr. Riker’s sister, was supposed to be taking care of Harry while his father and mother was away, but she was kind of old and she used to go to sleep right after supper.

“Well, there were a couple of girls, sisters, named Lindsay. They lived out in the country, but came in town to school. Harry and I thought we were stuck on them, so one night after supper, when Harry’s aunt had gone to sleep, we hitched up Mr. Riker’s horse and buggy and drove seven miles out in the country to call on the Lindsay girls. When we got out there it was raining, so we unhitched the horse and put him in the barn and⁠—”

“He got loose, didn’t he? And ran all the way home?”

“Yes, but that comes later. We put him in Lindsay’s barn and we thought we had him tied all right, and Harry and I went in the house and sat around with the girls. Mrs. Lindsay stayed right in the room with us and did most of the talking⁠—”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I certainly am! She was one of these women that talk all the time. She never stopped. So about half past nine she said the girls would have to go to bed, and that was telling us to get out. Well, to make a long story short, the horse wasn’t in the barn and Harry and I walked home seven miles in the pouring rain. We found the horse in his own stall and Harry had to ride him out to Lindsay’s next day and get the buggy. That was the last time we ever called on the Lindsay girls.”

“Kind of hard on them,” said Mrs. Taylor.

“Oh, we were all just kids and there wasn’t anything serious between us. Harry’s in the insurance business now in Indianapolis, doing fine, he told me.”

Louis was almost, but not quite, through with his paper.

“Here’s a funny thing,” he said. “Although Edinburgh, Scotland, had only 237 ice-cream parlors last season, the number was fifty more than were in the city a year ago.”

“I should think that was enough ice-cream parlors.”

“Not for the size of the town. Let’s see. How big is Edinburgh? I’ll have to look it up.”

He was on his way to the bookcase when the doorbell rang. He went to the door and admitted Florence Hammond.

“Hello, Louis. Hello, Bess. This isn’t a social call. We’re out here with a flat tire and Perce wants to borrow your flash.”

“There’s automobiles for you!” said Louis. “More trouble than they’re worth.”

“I tried to persuade Perce to take it to the garage and have them fix it, but he’s afraid driving it even that far would ruin the rim or the shoe or whatever you call it.”

“I’ll get the flash and see if I can help him,” said Louis.

“And you sit down, Florence, and keep me company,” said Mrs. Taylor. “I haven’t been out of the house for three days and I’m dying to hear what’s going on in Milton.”

“You take the Star, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid we do, but it hasn’t been very thrilling lately.”

“You can’t blame the paper for that,” said Mrs. Hammond. “Nothing exciting has happened; that is, in Milton.”

“Has anything happened anywhere?”

“Yes. In Clyde.”

“Clyde. That’s where your sister lives, isn’t it?”

“If you call it living. I’d rather be dead! Honestly, Bess, you and I ought to thank the Lord that we married men who are at least sane and normal. Louis and Perce may not be as good-looking or ‘brilliant’ as Ed, but anyway we always know where they are and what to expect of them.”

“That’s true,” said Mrs. Taylor.

“I wrote Grace a letter today and told her she was simply crazy not to leave him, especially after this last mess. But she won’t give him up. I believe he’s got her hypnotized. And she still loves him. She admits his faults and excuses him and expects everybody to do the same. If she didn’t, she’d keep her troubles to herself and not write me all the details. I realize everybody has their weakness, but it seems to me there are some things I couldn’t forgive. And one of them is a punch in the eye.”

“You don’t mean⁠—”

“Yes, I do. And Grace took it and accepted his apology when he made one. When I think of it, I simply boil!”

“What was the occasion?”

“No special occasion. Just Saturday night. Everybody in Clyde goes to the Yacht Club Saturday nights. There’s no river or lake and no yachts, but they have a sunset gun, so I suppose they’re entitled to call it a yacht club. Grace hated it at first and let Ed go alone, but that only made him drink more and get home later Sunday mornings. Besides, she’s always been a little jealous, and probably with reason. So she decided to go with him and try to enjoy herself. Grace loves to dance and there are some awfully good dancers in Clyde; that is, early in the evening, before they begin to flounder and reel.

“Of course nobody can say Ed married her under false pretenses. She went into it with her eyes wide open. She saw him for the first time at one of those parties and she fell in love with him when he got mad at a man and knocked him down for cutting in on a dance. The man was about half Ed’s size and Ed hit him when he wasn’t looking. That didn’t make any difference to Grace. And it didn’t seem to make any difference to the Yacht Club. Anybody else would have been expelled, but Ed begged everyone’s pardon and wasn’t even scolded.

“That first night he asked Grace to let him drive her home. She was visiting Helen Morse, and Helen advised her not to take the chance. Ed didn’t seem to be in very good driving condition. But Grace was so crazy about him that she told him yes. And then he forgot all about it, went home with another girl and left Grace at the club with some people she hardly knew. She had to call up the Morses and get them to come back after her.

“Well, they met again the next week and Grace thought she would put him in his place by ignoring him entirely, but that didn’t work because he didn’t remember having seen her before. He was comparatively sober this time and awfully nice and attentive. I’ll admit Ed can be nice when he wants to. After that they played tennis together two or three times and then Ed proposed and Grace accepted him and he said he couldn’t wait for a big wedding and she agreed to marry him secretly at Colby, a town about thirty miles from Clyde. She was to be in front of the Clyde post-office at twelve o’clock on a certain day and he was to pick her up in his car and drive to Colby and be married.

“The day came and she waited for him an hour and then went back to the Morses’. That evening he telephoned that he had made a mistake in the day and had just discovered it, and would she please forgive him and meet him the next day at the same place. I blush to say she succumbed, though she suspected what she found out later to be true⁠—Ed had been on a bat and was sleeping it off at the time he was supposed to do his eloping.

“They were married and Ed behaved beautifully on the honeymoon. They spent two weeks in New York and went to the theatre every night and sightseeing in the mornings and afternoons. He had men friends of his to dinner once or twice and gave them all they wanted to drink, but wouldn’t touch anything himself.

“When they got back to Clyde, Ed bought a lovely house already furnished, and the furniture was just what Grace would have picked out. Grace was so happy it seemed as if it couldn’t last, and it didn’t.

“They had been in Clyde a week when Ed announced that he had to go away on a trip. He didn’t trouble to say where or why or how long. He just went, stayed away five days and came home looking as if he had had five or six operations. Grace tried to get him to tell her where he had been, but he just laughed and said it was a secret.

“And that’s the way things have gone on ever since. Ed’s got plenty of money and he gives Grace all she can possibly spend, besides buying her presents that are always lovely and terribly expensive. He’ll be as good as pie for weeks and weeks⁠—except for the Saturday night carousal⁠—and then he’ll disappear for a few days and she won’t know where he is or when to expect him home. Her life is one surprise after another. But when he suddenly hits her in the eye, it’s more than a surprise. It’s a kind of a shock. At least it would be to me.”

“When did it happen?” asked Mrs. Taylor.

“A week ago Saturday,” said Mrs. Hammond. “There was the usual party at the Yacht Club and Ed took more than his usual amount to drink. Along about midnight he disappeared, and so did a girl named Eva Grayson.

“Finally Grace went home, but she sat up and waited for Ed. He came in about four o’clock, pie-eyed. He walked right to where Grace was sitting and without saying anything at all, he hit her, not hard enough to knock her out of her chair but with enough force to really hurt. Then, still not saying anything, he went to bed without taking the time to undress.

“In the morning, or whenever he woke up, he noticed that Grace’s eye was discolored and asked her what had happened. She told him and he made no attempt to deny it. All he said was, ‘Dearest, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. You must believe me when I say I had no idea it was you. I thought it was Eva Grayson. And she deserved to be hit.’

“Can you imagine forgiving a man for a thing like that? Can you imagine continuing to live with him and love him? I’d kill myself before I’d stand it! And Grace excuses him and writes me the full details, just as if it were something she was proud of. I tell you, Bess, you and I can consider ourselves lucky⁠—”

The front door opened and Louis came in with his flashlight.

“You’re all set, Florence,” said he. “I asked Perce in, but he thinks it’s time to drive on.”

“I know it is,” said Mrs. Hammond. “We’re going to play bridge out at the Cobbs’ and we’re terribly late. I ought to have phoned them, but I guess they’ll sit up for us. Good night, Bess. I hope I didn’t bore you with my long monologue.”

“You didn’t,” said Mrs. Taylor.

Louis sat down to finish the Star. Mrs. Taylor shuffled her cards and started a new game, but in the middle of it she rose from the table and went close to her husband’s chair.

“Do you know what day this is?” she said.

“Why, yes,” Louis replied. “It’s Tuesday.”

“It’s Tuesday, November twelfth. Our anniversary.”

“Gosh! That’s right! I wish I’d remembered it. I’d have bought you some flowers. Will it do tomorrow?”

“I don’t want any flowers. But there is something I would like you to give me. And you don’t have to wait till tomorrow.”

“What is it?”

“A punch in the eye,” said Mrs. Taylor.

“You’re feeling kind of funny, aren’t you? Did Florence have a shot of their homemade gin in her bag?”

“No. And I’m not feeling funny. I’m just sleepy. I think I’ll go to bed.”

Louis was reading again.

“It says: ‘Experiments in the raising of sisal are being made in Haiti.’ I don’t suppose you happen to know what sisal is.”

But Mrs. Taylor was on her way upstairs.

Nora

“Mr. Hazlett, shake hands with Jerry Morris and Frank Moon. I guess you’ve heard of the both of them.”

The speaker was Louie Brock, producer of musical shows, who had cleared over half a million dollars in two years through the popularity of Jersey Jane, tunes by Morris and lyrics by Moon.

They were in Brock’s inner office, the walls of which were adorned with autographed pictures of six or seven of the more celebrated musical comedy stars and a too-perfect likeness of Brock’s wife, whom he had evidently married in a dense fog.

“Mr. Hazlett,” continued Brock, “has got a book which he wrote as a straight play, but it struck me right off that it was great material for a musical, especially with you two fellas to do the numbers. It’s a brand-new idear, entirely opposite from most of these here musical comedy books that’s all the same thing and the public must be getting sick of them by this time. Don’t you think so, Jerry?”

“I certainly do,” the tunesmith replied. “Give us a good novelty story, and with what I and Frank can throw in there to jazz it up, we’ll run till the theatre falls down.”

“Well, Mr. Hazlett,” said Brock, “suppose you read us the book and we’ll see what the boys thinks of it.”

Hazlett was quite nervous in spite of Brock’s approval of his work and the fact that friends to whom he had shown it had given it high praise and congratulated him on his good fortune in getting a chance to collaborate with Morris and Moon⁠—Morris, who had set a new style in melodies and rhythms and whose tunes made up sixty percent of all dance programs, and Moon, the ideal lyricist who could fit Jerry’s fast triplets with such cute-sounding three-syllable rhymes that no one ever went to the considerable trouble of trying to find out what they meant.

“I’ve tried to stay away from the stereotyped Cinderella theme,” said Hazlett. “In my story, the girl starts out just moderately well off and winds up poor. She sacrifices everything for love and the end finds her alone with her lover, impoverished but happy. She⁠—”

“Let’s hear the book,” said the producer.

Hazlett, with trembling fingers, opened to the first page of his script.

“Well,” he began, “the title is Nora and the first scene⁠—”

“Excuse me a minute,” Morris interrupted. “I promised a fella that I’d come over and look at a big secondhand Trinidad Twelve. Only eight grand and a bargain if there ever was one, hey, Frank?”

“I’ll say it’s a bargain,” Moon agreed.

“The fella is going to hold it for me till half-past three and its nearly three o’clock now. So if you don’t mind, Mr. Hazlett, I wish that instead of reading the book clear through, you’d kind of give us a kind of a synopsis and it will save time and we can tell just as good, hey, Frank?”

“Just as good,” said Moon.

“All right, Mr. Hazlett,” Brock put in. “Suppose you tell the story in your own way, with just the main idear and the situations.”

“Well,” said Hazlett, “of course, as a straight play, I wrote it in three acts, but when Mr. Brock suggested that I make a musical show out of it, I cut it to two. To start with, the old man, the girl’s uncle, is an Irishman who came to this country when he was about twenty years old. He worked hard and he was thrifty and finally he got into the building business for himself. He’s pretty well-to-do, but he’s avaricious and not satisfied with the three or four hundred thousand he’s saved up. He meets another Irish immigrant about his own age, a politician who has a lot to say about the letting of big city building contracts. This man, Collins, had a handsome young son, John, twenty-three or twenty-four.

“The old man, the girl’s uncle⁠—their name is Crowley⁠—he tries his hardest to get in strong with old Collins so Collins will land him some of the city contracts, but Collins, though he’s very friendly all the while, he doesn’t do Crowley a bit of good in a business way.

“Well, Crowley gives a party at his house for a crowd of his Irish friends in New York, young people and people his own age, and during the party young John Collins sees a picture of Crowley’s beautiful niece, Nora. She’s still in Ireland and has never been to this country. Young Collins asks Crowley who it is and he tells him and young Collins says she is the only girl he will ever marry.

“Crowley then figures to himself that if he can connect up with the Collinses by having his niece marry young John, he can land just about all the good contracts there are. So he cables for Nora to come over and pay him a visit. She comes and things happen just as Crowley planned⁠—John and Nora fall in love.

“Now there’s a big dinner and dance in honor of the Mayor and one of the guests is Dick Percival, a transplanted Englishman who has made fifty million dollars in the sugar business. He also falls in love with Nora and confesses it to her uncle. Old Crowley has always hated Englishmen, but his avarice is so strong that he decides Nora must get rid of John and marry Dick. Nora refuses to do this, saying John is ‘her man’ and that she will marry him or nobody.

“Crowley forbids her to see John, but she meets him whenever she can get out. The uncle and niece had a long, stubborn battle of wills, neither yielding an inch. Finally John’s father, old Collins, is caught red-handed in a big bribery scandal and sent to the penitentiary. It is also found out that he has gambled away all his money and John is left without a dime.

“Crowley, of course, thinks this settles the argument, that Nora won’t have anything more to do with a man whose father is a crook and broke besides, and he gets up a party to announce the engagement between her and Dick. Nora doesn’t interfere at all, but insists that young John Collins be invited. When the announcement is made, Nora says her uncle has got the name of her fiancé wrong; she has been engaged to John Collins since the first day she came to the United States, and if he will still have her, she is his. Then she and John walk out alone into the world, leaving Dick disappointed and Crowley in a good old-fashioned Irish rage.”

“Well, boys,” said Brock, after a pause, “what do you think of it?”

The “boys” were silent.

“You see,” said Brock, “for natural ensembles, you got the first party at What’s-his-name’s, the scene on the pier when the gal lands from Ireland, the Mayor’s party at some hotel maybe, and another party at What’s-his-name’s, only this time it’s outdoors at his country place. You can have the boy sing a love-song to the picture before he ever sees the gal; you can make that the melody you want to carry clear through. You can have love duets between she and the boy and she and the Englishman. You can write a song like ‘East Side, West Side’ for the Mayor’s party.

“You can write a corking good number for the pier scene, where the people of all nationalities are meeting their relatives and friends. And you can run wild with all the good Irish tunes in the world.”

“Where’s your comic?” inquired Morris.

“Mr. Hazlett forgot to mention the comic,” Brock said. “He’s an old Irishman, a pal of What’s-his-name’s, a kind of a Jiggs.”

“People don’t want an Irish comic these days,” said Morris. “Can’t you make him a Wop or a Heeb?”

“I’d have to rewrite the part,” said Hazlett.

“No you wouldn’t,” said Morris. “Give him the same lines with a different twist to them.”

“It really would be better,” Brock put in, “if you could change him to a Heeb or even a Dutchman. I’ve got to have a spot for Joe Stein and he’d be a terrible flop as a Turkey.”

“And listen,” said Morris. “What are you going to do with Enriqueta?”

“Gosh! I’d forgot her entirely!” said Brock. “Of course we’ll have to make room for her.”

“Who is she?” Hazlett inquired.

“The best gal in Spain,” said Brock. “I brought her over here and I’m paying her two thousand dollars every week, with nothing for her to do. You’ll have to write in a part for her.”

“Write in a part!” exclaimed Morris. “She’ll play the lead or she won’t play.”

“But how is a Spanish girl going to play Nora Crowley?” asked Hazlett.

“Why does your dame have to be Nora Crowley?” Morris retorted. “Why does she have to be Irish at all?”

“Because her uncle is Irish.”

“Make him a Spaniard, too.”

“Yes, and listen,” said Moon. “While you’re making the gal and her uncle Spaniards, make your boy a wop. If you do that, I and Jerry have got a number that’ll put your troupe over with a bang! Play it for them, Jerry.”

Morris went to the piano and played some introductory chords.

“This is a great break of luck,” said Moon, “to have a number already written that fits right into the picture. Of course, I’ll polish the lyric up a little more and I want to explain that the boy sings part of the lines, the gal the rest. But here’s about how it is. Let’s go, Jerry!”

Morris repeated his introduction and Moon began to sing:

Somewhere in the old world
You and I belong.
It will be a gold world,
Full of light and song.
Why not let’s divide our time
Between your native land and mine?
Move from Italy to Spain,
Then back to Italy again?

In sunny Italy,
My Spanish queen,
You’ll fit so prettily
In that glorious scene.
You will sing me “La Paloma”;
I will sing you “Cara Roma”;
We will build a little home, a
Bungalow serene.
Then in the Pyrenees,
Somewhere in Spain,
We’ll rest our weary knees
Down in Lovers’ Lane,
And when the breakers roll a-
Cross the azure sea,
Espanola, Gorgonzola;
Spain and Italy.

“A wow!” cried Brock. “Congratulations, Jerry! You, too, Frank! What do you think of that one, Mr. Hazlett?”

“Very nice,” said Hazlett. “The tune sounds like ‘Sole Mio’ and ‘La Paloma.’ ”

“It sounds like them both and it’s better than either,” said the composer.

“That one number makes our troupe, Jerry,” said Brock. “You don’t need anything else.”

“But we’ve got something else, hey, Frank?”

“You mean ‘Montgomery’?” said Moon.

“Yeh.”

“Let’s hear it,” requested Brock.

“It’ll take a dinge comic to sing it.”

“Well, Joe Stein can do a dinge.”

“I’ll say he can! I like him best in blackface. And he’s just the boy to put over a number like this.”

Morris played another introduction, strains that Hazlett was sure he had heard a hundred times before, and Moon was off again:

I want to go to Alabam’.
That’s where my lovin’ sweetheart am,
And won’t she shout and dance for joy
To see once more her lovin’ boy!
I’ve got enough saved up, I guess,
To buy her shoes and a bran’-new dress.
She’s black as coal, and yet I think
When I walk in, she’ll be tickled pink.

Take me to Montgomery
Where it’s always summery.
New York’s just a mummery.
Give me life that’s real.
New York fields are rotten fields.
Give me those forgotten fields;
I mean those there cotton fields,
Selma and Mobile.
I done been away so long;
Never thought I’d stay so long.
Train, you’d better race along
To my honey lamb.
Train, you make it snappy till
(’Cause I won’t be happy till)
I am in the capital,
Montgomery, Alabam’.

“Another knockout!” said Brock enthusiastically. “Boys, either one of those numbers are better than anything in Jersey Jane. Either one of them will put our troupe over. And the two of them together in one show! Well, it’s in!”

Hazlett mustered all his courage.

“They’re a couple of mighty good songs,” he said. “But I don’t exactly see how they’ll fit.”

“Mr. Hazlett,” said Jerry Morris. “I understand this is your first experience with a musical comedy. I’ve had five successes in four years and could have had five more if I wanted to work that hard. I know the game backwards and I hope you won’t take offense if I tell you a little something about it.”

“I’m always glad to learn,” said Hazlett.

“Well, then,” said Morris, “you’ve got a great book there, with a good novelty idear, but it won’t go without a few changes, changes that you can make in a half-hour and not detract anything from the novelty. In fact, they will add to it. While you were telling your story, I was thinking of it from the practical angle, the angle of show business, and I believe I can put my finger right on the spots that have got to be fixed.

“In the first place, as Louie has told you, he’s got a contract with Enriqueta and she won’t play any secondary parts. That means your heroine must be Spanish. Well, why not make her uncle her father and have him a Spaniard, running a Spanish restaurant somewhere downtown? It’s a small restaurant and he just gets by. He has to use her as cashier and she sits in the window where the people going past can see her.

“One day the boy, who is really an Italian count⁠—we’ll call him Count Pizzola⁠—he is riding alone in a taxi and he happens to look in the window and see the gal. He falls in love with her at first sight, orders the driver to stop and gets out and goes in the restaurant. He sits down and has his lunch, and while he is eating we can put in a novelty dance number with the boys and gals from the offices that are also lunching in this place.

“When the number is over, I’d have a comedy scene between Stein, who plays a dinge waiter, and, say, a German customer who isn’t satisfied with the food or the check or something. Louie, who would you suggest for that part?”

“How about Charlie Williams?” said Brock.

“Great!” said Morris. “Well, they have this argument and the dinge throws the waiter out. The scrap amuses Pizzola and the gal, too, and they both laugh and that brings them together. He doesn’t tell her he is a count, but she likes him pretty near as well as he likes her. They gab a while and then go into the Spanish number I just played for you.

“Now, in your story, you’ve got a boat scene where the gal is landing from Ireland. You’d better forget that scene. There was a boat scene in Sunny and a boat scene in Hit the Deck, and a lot of other troupes. We don’t wan’t anything that isn’t our own. But Pizzola is anxious to take the gal out somewhere and let’s see⁠—Frank, where can he take her?”

“Why not a yacht?” suggested Moon.

“Great! He invites her out on a yacht, but he’s got to pretend it isn’t his own yacht. He borrowed it from a friend. She refuses at first, saying she hasn’t anything to wear. She’s poor, see? So he tells her his sister has got some sport clothes that will fit her. He gets the clothes for her and then we have a scene in her room where she is putting them on with a bunch of girlfriends helping her. We’ll write a number for that.

“Now the clothes he gave her are really his sister’s clothes and the sister has carelessly left a beautiful brooch pinned in them. We go to the yacht and the Spanish dame knocks everybody dead. They put on an amateur show. That will give Enriqueta a chance for a couple more numbers. She and Pizzola are getting more and more stuck on each other and they repeat the Spanish song on the yacht, in the moonlight.

“There’s a Frenchman along on the party who is greatly attracted by Enriqueta’s looks. The Frenchman hates Pizzola. He has found out in some way that Enriqueta is wearing Pizzola’s sister’s clothes and he notices the diamond brooch. He figures that if he can steal it off of her, why, suspicion will be cast on the gal herself on account of her being poor, and Pizzola, thinking her a thief, won’t have anything more to do with her and he, the Frenchman, can have her. So, during a dance, he manages to steal the brooch and he puts it in his pocket.

“Of course Pizzola’s sister is also on the yachting party. All of a sudden she misses her brooch. She recalls having left it in the clothes she lent to Enriqueta. She goes to Enriqueta and asks her for it and the poor Spanish dame can’t find it. Then Pizzola’s sister calls her a thief and Pizzola himself can’t help thinking she is one.

“They demand that she be searched, but rather than submit to that indignity, she bribes a sailor to take her off the yacht in a small launch and the last we see of her she’s climbing overboard to get into the launch while the rest of the party are all abusing her. That’s your first act curtain.

“I’d open the second act with a paddock scene at the Saratoga racetrack. We’ll write a jockey number and have about eight boys and maybe twenty-four gals in jockey suits. Enriqueta’s father has gone broke in the restaurant business and he’s up here looking for a job as assistant trainer or something. He used to train horses for the bullfights in Spain.

“The gal is along with him and they run into the Frenchman that stole the brooch. The Frenchman tries to make love to the gal, but she won’t have anything to do with him. While they are talking, who should come up but Pizzola! He is willing to make up with Enriqueta even though he still thinks her a thief. She won’t meet his advances.

“He asks the Frenchman for a light. The Frenchman has a patent lighter and in pulling it out of his pocket, he pulls the brooch out, too. Then Pizzola realizes what an injustice he has done the gal and he pretty near goes down on his knees to her, but she has been badly hurt and won’t forgive him yet.

“Now we have a scene in the café in the clubhouse and Stein is one of the waiters there. He sings the Montgomery number with a chorus of waiters and lunchers and at the end of the number he and the Spanish gal are alone on the stage.

“She asks him if he is really going to Montgomery and he says yes, and she says she and her father will go with him. She is anxious to go some place where there is no danger of running into the Frenchman or Pizzola.

“The third scene in the second act ought to be a plantation in Alabama. Stein is working there and the negroes are having a celebration or revival of some kind. Louie, you can get a male quartet to sing us some spirituals.

“Enriqueta’s father has landed a job as cook at the plantation and she is helping with the housework. Pizzola and his sister follow her to Montgomery and come out to see her at the plantation.

“They are about to go up on the porch and inquire for her when they hear her singing the Spanish number. This proves to Pizzola that she still loves him and he finally gets his sister to plead with her for forgiveness. She forgives him. He tells her who he really is and how much dough he’s got. And that pretty near washes us up.”

“But how about our Japanese number?” said Moon.

“That’s right,” Morris said. “We’ll have to send them to Japan before we end it. I’ve got a cherry-blossom number that must have the right setting. But that’s easy to fix. You make these few changes I’ve suggested, Mr. Hazlett, and I feel that we’ve got a hit.

“And I want to say that your book is a whole lot better than most of the books they hand us. About the fella falling in love with the gal’s picture⁠—that’s a novelty idear.”

Hazlett said goodbye to his producer and collaborators, went home by taxi and called up his bootlegger.

“Harry,” he said, “what kind of whiskey have you got?”

“Well, Mr. Hazlett, I can sell you some good Scotch, but I ain’t so sure of the rye. In fact, I’m kind of scared of it.”

“How soon can you bring me a case?”

“Right off quick. It’s the Scotch you want, ain’t it?”

“No,” said Hazlett. “I want the rye.”

Liberty Hall

My husband is in Atlantic City, where they are trying out Dear Dora, the musical version of David Copperfield. My husband wrote the score. He used to take me along for these out-of-town openings, but not anymore.

He, of course, has to spend almost all his time in the theater and that leaves me alone in the hotel, and pretty soon people find out whose wife I am and introduce themselves, and the next thing you know they are inviting us for a week or a weekend at Dobbs Ferry or Oyster Bay. Then it is up to me to think of some legitimate-sounding reason why we can’t come.

In lots of cases they say, “Well, if you can’t make it the twenty-second, how about the twenty-ninth?” and so on till you simply have to accept. And Ben gets mad and stays mad for days.

He absolutely abhors visiting and thinks there ought to be a law against invitations that go beyond dinner and bridge. He doesn’t mind hotels where there is a decent light for reading in bed and one for shaving, and where you can order meals, with coffee, any time you want them. But I really believe he would rather spend a week in the death house at Sing Sing than in somebody else’s home.

Three or four years ago we went around quite a lot with a couple whom I will call the Buckleys. We liked them and they liked us. We had dinner together at least twice a week and after dinner we played bridge or went to a show or just sat and talked.

Ben never turned down their invitations and often actually called them up himself and suggested parties. Finally they moved to Albany on account of Mr. Buckley’s business. We missed them a great deal, and when Mrs. Buckley wrote for us to come up there for the holidays we were tickled pink.

Well, their guestroom was terribly cold; it took hours to fill the bathtub; there was no reading-lamp by the bed; three reporters called to interview Ben, two of them kittenish young girls; the breakfasts were just fruit and cereal and toast; coffee was not served at luncheon; the faucets in the washbasin were the kind that won’t run unless you keep pressing them; four important keys on the piano were stuck and people were invited in every night to hear Ben play, and the Buckley family had been augmented by a tremendous police dog, who was “just a puppy and never growled or snapped at anyone he knew,” but couldn’t seem to remember that Ben was not an utter stranger.

On the fourth awful day Ben gave out the news⁠—news to him and to me as well as to our host and hostess⁠—that he had lost a filling which he would not trust any but his own New York dentist to replace. We came home and we have never seen the Buckleys since. If we do see them it will be an accident. They will hardly ask us there unless we ask them here, and we won’t ask them here for fear they would ask us there. And they were honestly the most congenial people we ever met.

It was after our visit to the Craigs at Stamford that Ben originated what he calls his “emergency exit.” We had such a horrible time at the Craigs’ and such a worse time getting away that Ben swore he would pay no more visits until he could think up a graceful method of curtailing them in the event they proved unbearable.

Here is the scheme he hit on: He would write himself a telegram and sign it with the name Ziegfeld or Gene Buck or Dillingham or George M. Cohan. The telegram would say that he must return to New York at once, and it would give a reason. Then, the day we started out, he would leave it with Irene, the girl at Harms’, his publishers, with instructions to have it sent to him twenty-four hours later.

When it arrived at whatever town we were in, he would either have the host or hostess take it over the telephone or ask the telegraph company to deliver it so he could show it around. We would put on long faces and say how sorry we were, but of course business was business, so goodbye and so forth. There was never a breath of suspicion even when the telegram was ridiculous, like the one Ben had sent to himself at Spring Lake, where we were staying with the Marshalls just after Betty’s Birthday opened at the Globe. The Marshalls loved musical shows, but knew less than nothing about music and swallowed this one whole:

Shaw and Miss Miller both suffering from laryngitis Stop Entire score must be rewritten half tone lower Stop Come at once Stop.

C. B. Dillingham.

If, miraculously, Ben had ever happened to be enjoying himself, he would, of course, have kept the contents of his message a secret or else displayed it and remarked swaggeringly that he guessed he wasn’t going to let any so-and-so theatrical producer spoil his fun.

Ben is in Atlantic City now and I have read every book in the house and am writing this just because there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. And also because we have a friend, Joe Frazier, who is a magazine editor and the other day I told him I would like to try my hand at a short story, but I was terrible at plots, and he said plots weren’t essential; look at Ernest Hemingway; most of his stories have hardly any plot; it’s his style that counts. And he⁠—I mean Mr. Frazier⁠—suggested that I write about our visit to Mr. and Mrs. Thayer in Lansdowne, outside of Philadelphia, which Mr. Frazier said, might be termed the visit that ended visits and which is the principal reason why I am here alone.

Well, it was a beautiful night a year ago last September. Ben was conducting the performance⁠—“Step Lively”⁠—and I was standing at the railing of the Boardwalk in front of the theater, watching the moonlight on the ocean. A couple whom I had noticed in the hotel dining-room stopped alongside of me and pretty soon the woman spoke to me, something about how pretty it was. Then came the old question, wasn’t I Mrs. Ben Drake? I said I was, and the woman went on:

“My name is Mrs. Thayer⁠—Hilda Thayer. And this is my husband. We are both simply crazy about Mr. Drake’s music and just dying to meet him personally. We wondered if you and he would have supper with us after the performance tonight.”

“Oh, I’m afraid that’s impossible,” I replied. “You see when they are having a tryout, he and the librettists and the lyric writers work all night every night until they get everything in shape for the New York opening. They never have time for more than a sandwich and they eat that right in the theater.”

“Well, how about luncheon tomorrow?”

“He’ll be rehearsing all day.”

“How about dinner tomorrow evening?”

“Honestly, Mrs. Thayer, it’s out of the question. Mr. Drake never makes engagements during a tryout week.”

“And I guess he doesn’t want to meet us anyway,” put in Mr. Thayer. “What use would a genius like Ben Drake have for a couple of common-no-account admirers like Mrs. Thayer and myself! If we were ‘somebody’ too, it would be different!”

“Not at all!” said I. “Mr. Drake is perfectly human. He loves to have his music praised and I am sure he would be delighted to meet you if he weren’t so terribly busy.”

“Can you lunch with us yourself?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Any day.”

Well, whatever Ben and other husbands may think, there is no decent way of turning down an invitation like that. And besides I was lonesome and the Thayers looked like awfully nice people.

I lunched with them and I dined with them, not only the next day but all the rest of the week. And on Friday I got Ben to lunch with them and he liked them, too; they were not half as gushing and silly as most of his fans.

At dinner on Saturday night, they cross-examined me about our immediate plans. I told them that as soon as the show was over in New York, I was going to try to make Ben stay home and do nothing for a whole month.

“I should think,” said Mrs. Thayer, “it would be very hard for him to rest there in the city, with the producers and publishers and phonograph people calling him up all the time.”

I admitted that he was bothered a lot.

“Listen, dearie,” said Mrs. Thayer. “Why don’t you come to Landsdowne and spend a week with us? I’ll promise you faithfully that you won’t be disturbed at all. I won’t let anyone know you are there and if any of our friends call on us I’ll pretend we’re not at home. I won’t allow Mr. Drake to even touch the piano. If he wants exercise, there are miles of room in our yard to walk around in, and nobody can see him from the street. All day and all night, he can do nothing or anything, just as he pleases. It will be ‘Liberty Hall’ for you both. He needn’t tell anybody where he is, but if some of his friends or business acquaintances find out and try to get in touch with him, I’ll frighten them away. How does that sound?”

“It sounds wonderful,” I said, “but⁠—”

“It’s settled then,” said Mrs. Thayer, “and we’ll expect you on Sunday, October eleventh.”

“Oh, but the show may not be set by that time,” I remonstrated.

“How about the eighteenth?” said Mr. Thayer.

Well, it ended by my accepting for the week of the twenty-fifth and Ben took it quite cheerfully.

“If they stick to their promise to keep us under cover,” he said, “it may be a lot better than staying in New York. I know that Buck and the Shuberts and Ziegfeld want me while I’m hot and they wouldn’t give me a minute’s peace if they could find me. And of course if things aren’t as good as they look, Irene’s telegram will provide us with an easy out.”

On the way over to Philadelphia he hummed me an awfully pretty melody which had been running through his head since we left the apartment. “I think it’s sure fire,” he said. “I’m crazy to get to a piano and fool with it.”

“That isn’t resting, dear.”

“Well, you don’t want me to throw away a perfectly good tune! They aren’t so plentiful that I can afford to waste one. It won’t take me five minutes at a piano to get it fixed in my mind.”

The Thayers met us in an expensive-looking limousine.

“Ralph,” said Mrs. Thayer to her husband, “you sit in one of the little seats and Mr. and Mrs. Drake will sit back here with me.”

“I’d really prefer one of the little seats myself,” said Ben and he meant it, for he hates to get his clothes mussed and being squeezed in beside two such substantial objects as our hostess and myself was bound to rumple him.

“No, sir!” said Mrs. Thayer positively. “You came to us for a rest and we’re not going to start you off uncomfortable.”

“But I’d honestly rather⁠—”

It was no use. Ben was wedged between us and throughout the drive maintained a morose silence, unable to think of anything but how terrible his coat would look when he got out.

The Thayers had a very pretty home and the room assigned to us was close to perfection. There were comfortable twin beds with a small stand and convenient reading-lamp between; a big dresser and chiffonier; an ample closet with plenty of hangers; a bathroom with hot water that was hot, towels that were not too new and faucets that stayed on when turned on, and an ashtray within reach of wherever you happened to be. If only we could have spent all our time in that guestroom, it would have been ideal.

But presently we were summoned downstairs to luncheon. I had warned Mrs. Thayer in advance and Ben was served with coffee. He drinks it black.

“Don’t you take cream, Mr. Drake?”

“No. Never.”

“But that’s because you don’t get good cream in New York.”

“No. It’s because I don’t like cream in coffee.”

“You would like our cream. We have our own cows and the cream is so rich that it’s almost like butter. Won’t you try just a little?”

“No, thanks.”

“But just a little, to see how rich it is.”

She poured about a tablespoonful of cream into his coffee-cup and for a second I was afraid he was going to pick up the cup and throw it in her face. But he kept hold of himself, forced a smile and declined a second chop.

“You haven’t tasted your coffee,” said Mrs. Thayer.

“Yes, I have,” lied Ben. “The cream is wonderful. I’m sorry it doesn’t agree with me.”

“I don’t believe coffee agrees with anyone,” said Mrs. Thayer. “While you are here, not doing any work, why don’t you try to give it up?”

“I’d be so irritable you wouldn’t have me in the house. Besides, it isn’t plain coffee that disagrees with me; it’s coffee with cream.”

“Pure, rich cream like ours couldn’t hurt you,” said Mrs. Thayer, and Ben, defeated, refused to answer.

He started to light a Jaguar cigarette, the brand he had been smoking for years.

“Here! Wait a minute!” said Mr. Thayer. “Try one of mine.”

“What are they?” asked Ben.

“Trumps,” said our host, holding out his case. “They’re mild and won’t irritate the throat.”

“I’ll sample one later,” said Ben.

“You’ve simply got to try one now,” said Mrs. Thayer. “You may as well get used to them because you’ll have to smoke them all the time you’re here. We can’t have guests providing their own cigarettes.” So Ben had to discard his Jaguar and smoke a Trump, and it was even worse than he had anticipated.

After luncheon we adjourned to the living-room and Ben went straight to the piano.

“Here! Here! None of that!” said Mrs. Thayer. “I haven’t forgotten my promise.”

“What promise?” asked Ben.

“Didn’t your wife tell you? I promised her faithfully that if you visited us, you wouldn’t be allowed to touch the piano.”

“But I want to,” said Ben. “There’s a melody in my head that I’d like to try.”

“Oh, yes, I know all about that,” said Mrs. Thayer. “You just think you’ve got to entertain us! Nothing doing! We invited you here for yourself, not to enjoy your talent. I’d be a fine one to ask you to my home for a rest and then make you perform.”

“You’re not making me,” said Ben. “Honestly I want to play for just five or ten minutes. I’ve got a tune that I might do something with and I’m anxious to run it over.”

“I don’t believe you, you naughty man!” said our hostess. “Your wife has told you how wild we are about your music and you’re determined to be nice to us. But I’m just as stubborn as you are. Not one note do you play as long as you’re our guest!”

Ben favored me with a stricken look, mumbled something about unpacking his suitcase⁠—it was already unpacked⁠—and went up to our room, where he stayed nearly an hour, jotting down his new tune, smoking Jaguar after Jaguar and wishing that black coffee flowed from bathtub faucets.

About a quarter of four Mr. Thayer insisted on taking him around the place and showing him the shrubbery, something that held in Ben’s mind a place of equal importance to the grade of wire used in hairpins.

“I’ll have to go to business tomorrow,” said Mr. Thayer, “and you will be left to amuse yourself. I thought you might enjoy this planting more if you knew a little about it. Of course it’s much prettier in the spring of the year.”

“I can imagine so.”

“You must come over next spring and see it.”

“I’m usually busy in the spring,” said Ben.

“Before we go in,” said Mr. Thayer, “I’d like to ask you one question: Do tunes come into your mind and then you write them down, or do you just sit at the piano and improvise until you strike something good?”

“Sometimes one way and sometimes the other,” said Ben.

“That’s very interesting,” said Mr. Thayer. “I’ve often wondered how it was done. And another question: Do you write the tunes first and then give them to the men who write the words, or do the men write the words first and then give them to you to make up the music to them?”

“Sometimes one way and sometimes the other,” said Ben.

“That’s very interesting,” said Mr. Thayer. “It’s something I’m glad to know. And now we’d better join the ladies or my wife will say I’m monopolizing you.”

They joined us, much to my relief. I had just reached a point where I would either have had to tell “Hilda” exactly how much Ben earned per annum or that it was none of her business.

“Well!” said Mrs. Thayer to Ben. “I was afraid Ralph had kidnapped you.”

“He was showing me the shrubbery,” said Ben.

“What did you think of it?”

“It’s great shrubbery,” said Ben, striving to put some warmth into his voice.

“You must come and see it in the spring.”

“I’m usually busy in the spring.”

“Ralph and I are mighty proud of our shrubbery.”

“You have a right to be.”

Ben was taking a book out of the bookcase.

“What book is that?” asked Mrs. Thayer.

“The Great Gatsby,” said Ben. “I’ve always wanted to read it but never got around to it.”

“Heavens!” said Mrs. Thayer as she took it away from him. “That’s old! You’ll find the newest ones there on the table. We keep pretty well up to date. Ralph and I are both great readers. Just try any one of those books in that pile. They’re all good.”

Ben glanced them over and selected Chevrons. He sat down and opened it.

“Man! Man!” exclaimed Mrs. Thayer. “You’ve picked the most uncomfortable chair in the house!”

“He likes straight chairs,” I said.

“That’s on the square,” said Ben.

“But you mustn’t sit there,” said Mrs. Thayer. “It makes me uncomfortable just to look at you. Take this chair here. It’s the softest, nicest chair you’ve ever sat in.”

“I like hard straight chairs,” said Ben, but he sank into the soft, nice one and again opened his book.

“Oh, you never can see there!” said Mrs. Thayer. “You’ll ruin your eyes! Get up just a minute and let Ralph move your chair by that lamp.”

“I can see perfectly well.”

“I know better! Ralph, move his chair so he can see.”

“I don’t believe I want to read just now anyway,” said Ben, and went to the phonograph. “Bess,” he said, putting on a record, “here’s that ‘Oh! Miss Hannah!’ by the Revelers.”

Mrs. Thayer fairly leaped to his side, and herded Miss Hannah back into her stall.

“We’ve got lots later ones than that,” she said. “Let me play you the new Gershwins.”

It was at this juncture that I began to suspect our hostess of a lack of finesse. After all, Gershwin is a rival of my husband’s and, in some folks’ opinion, a worthy one. However, Ben had a word of praise for each record as it ended and did not even hint that any of the tunes were based on melodies of his own.

“Mr. Drake,” said our host at length, “would you like a gin cocktail or a Bacardi?”

“I don’t like Bacardi at all,” said Ben.

“I’ll bet you will like the kind I’ve got,” said Mr. Thayer. “It was brought to me by a friend of mine who just got back from Cuba. It’s the real stuff!”

“I don’t like Bacardi,” said Ben.

“Wait till you taste this,” said Mr. Thayer.

Well, we had Bacardi cocktails. I drank mine and it wasn’t so good. Ben took a sip of his and pretended it was all right. But he had told the truth when he said he didn’t like Bacardi.

I won’t go into details regarding the dinner except to relate that three separate items were highly flavored with cheese, and Ben despises cheese.

“Don’t you care for cheese, Mr. Drake?” asked Mr. Thayer, noticing that Ben was not exactly bolting his food.

“No,” replied the guest of honor.

“He’s spoofing you, Ralph,” said Mrs. Thayer. “Everybody likes cheese.”

There was coffee, and Ben managed to guzzle a cup before it was desecrated with pure cream.

We sat down to bridge.

“Do you like to play families or divide up?”

“Oh, we like to play together,” said I.

“I’ll bet you don’t,” said Mrs. Thayer. “Suppose Ralph and you play Mr. Drake and me. I think it’s a mistake for husbands and wives to be partners. They’re likely to criticize one another and say things that leave a scar.”

Well, Mr. Thayer and I played against Ben and Mrs. Thayer and I lost sixty cents at a tenth of a cent a point. Long before the evening was over I could readily see why Mrs. Thayer thought it was a mistake to play with her husband and if it had been possible I’d have left him a complete set of scars.

Just as we were getting to sleep, Mrs. Thayer knocked on our door.

“I’m afraid you haven’t covers enough,” she called. “There are extra blankets on the shelf in your closet.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’re as warm as toast.”

“I’m afraid you aren’t,” said Mrs. Thayer.

“Lock the door,” said Ben, “before she comes in and feels our feet.”

All through breakfast next morning we waited in vain for the telephone call that would yield Irene’s message. The phone rang once and Mrs. Thayer answered, but we couldn’t hear what she said. At noon Ben signalled me to meet him upstairs and there he stated grimly that I might do as I choose, but he was leaving Liberty Hall ere another sun had set.

“You haven’t any excuse,” I reminded him.

“I’m a genius,” he said, “and geniuses are notoriously eccentric.”

“Geniuses’ wives sometimes get eccentric, too,” said I, and began to pack up.

Mr. Thayer had gone to Philadelphia and we were alone with our hostess at luncheon.

“Mrs. Thayer,” said Ben, “do you ever have premonitions or hunches?”

She looked frightened. “Why, no. Do you?”

“I had one not half an hour ago. Something told me that I positively must be in New York tonight. I don’t know whether it’s business or illness or what, but I’ve just got to be there!”

“That’s the strangest thing I ever heard of,” said Mrs. Thayer. “It scares me to death!”

“It’s nothing you need be scared of,” said Ben. “It only concerns me.”

“Yes, but listen,” said Mrs. Thayer. “A telegram came for you at breakfast time this morning. I wasn’t going to tell you about it because I had promised that you wouldn’t be disturbed. And it didn’t seem so terribly important. But this hunch of yours puts the matter in a different light. I’m sorry now that I didn’t give you the message when I got it, but I memorized it and can repeat it word for word: Mr. Ben Drake, care of Mr. Ralph Thayer, Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. In Nile song, second bar of refrain, bass drum part reads A flat which makes discord. Should it be A natural? Would appreciate your coming to theater tonight to straighten this out as harmony must be restored in orchestra if troupe is to be success. Regards, Gene Buck.”

“It sounds silly, doesn’t it?” said Ben. “And yet I have known productions to fail and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars just because an author or composer left town too soon. I can well understand that you considered the message trivial. At the same time I can thank my stars that this instinct, or divination, or whatever you want to call it, told me to go home.”

Just as the trainmen were shouting “Board!” Mrs. Thayer said:

“I have one more confession to make. I answered Mr. Buck’s telegram. I wired him. Mr. Ben Drake resting at my home. Must not be bothered. Suggest that you keep bass drums still for a week. And I signed my name. Please forgive me if I have done something terrible. Remember, it was for you.”

Small wonder that Ben was credited at the Lambs’ Club with that month’s most interesting bender.

There Are Smiles

At the busy corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street there was, last summer, a traffic policeman who made you feel that he didn’t have such a terrible job after all. Lots of traffic policemen seem to enjoy abusing you, sadistic complex induced by exposure to bad weather and worse drivers, and, possibly, brutal wives. But Ben Collins just naturally appeared to be having a good time whether he was scolding you or not; his large freckled face fairly beamed with joviality and refused to cloud up even under the most trying conditions.

It heartened you to look at him. It amused you to hear him talk. If what he said wasn’t always so bright, the way he said it was.

Ben was around thirty years old. He was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and eighteen pounds. This describes about eighty percent of all the traffic officers between Thirty-second Street and the Park. But Ben was distinguished from the rest by his habitual good humor and⁠—well, I guess you’d have to call it his subtlety.

For example, where Noonan or Wurtz or Carmody was content with the stock “Hey! Get over where you belong!” or “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Ben was wont to finesse.

“How are you, Barney?” he would say to a victim halted at the curb.

“My name isn’t Barney.”

“I beg your pardon. The way you was stepping along, I figured you must be Barney Oldfield.”

Or, “I suppose you didn’t see that red light.”

“No.”

“Well, what did you think the other cars was stopped for? Did you think they’d all ran out of gas at once?”

Or, “What business are you in?”

“I’m a contractor.”

“Well, that’s a good, honorable business and, if I was you, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. I’d quit trying to make people believe I was in the fire department.”

Or, “How do you like London?”

“Me? I’ve never been there.”

“I thought that’s where you got the habit of driving on the wrong side of the street.”

Transgressions at Ben’s corner, unless they resulted seriously, were seldom punished beyond these sly rebukes, which were delivered in such a nice way that you were kind of glad you had done wrong.

Off duty he was “a big good-natured boy,” willing to take Grace to a picture, or go over to the Arnolds’ and play cards, or just stay at home and do nothing.

And then one morning in September, a dazzingly new Cadillac roadster, blue with yellow trimmings, flashed down from the north, violating all the laws of common sense and of the State and City of New York. Shouts and whistles from Carmody and Noonan, at Forty-eighth and Forty-seventh, failed to check its crazy career, but Ben, first planting his huge bulk directly in its path, giving the driver the choice of slackening speed or running into him, and then, with an alertness surprising in one so massive, sidestepping and jumping onto the running-board, succeeded in forcing a surrender at the curb halfway between his post and Forty-fifth Street.

He was almost mad and about to speak his mind in words beginning with capitals when he got his first look at the miscreant’s face. It was the prettiest face he had ever seen and it wore a most impudent, ill-timed, irresistible smile, a smile that spoiled other smiles for you once for all.

“Well⁠—” Ben began falteringly; then recovering something of his stage presence: “Where’s your helmet?”

She made no reply, but continued to smile.

“If you’re in the fire department,” said Ben, “you ought to wear a helmet and a badge. Or paint your car red and get a sireen.”

Still no reply.

“Maybe I look like a bobby. Maybe you thought you was in London where they drive on the left side of the street.”

“You’re cute,” she said, and her voice was as thrilling as her smile. “I could stay here all morning and listen to you. That is I could, but I can’t. I’ve got a date down on Eighth Street and I’m late for it now. And I know you’re busy, too. So we mustn’t keep each other any longer now. But I’d like to hear your whole line some day.”

“Oh, you would!”

“Where do you live?”

“At home.”

“That isn’t very polite, is it? I was thinking you might live in the Bronx⁠—”

“I do.”

“⁠—and that’s on the way to Rye, where I live, so I might drive you.”

“Thanks. When I die, I want to die of old age.”

“Oh, I’m not a bad driver, really. I do like to go fast, but I’m careful. In Buffalo, where we lived before, the policemen all knew I was careful and they generally let me go as fast as I wanted to.”

“This ain’t Buffalo. And this ain’t no speedway. If you want to go fast, stay off Fifth Avenue.”

The girl looked him right in the eye. “Would you like that?”

“No,” said Ben.

She smiled at him again. “What time are you through?”

“Four o’clock,” said Ben.

“Well,” said the girl, “some afternoon I may be going home about then⁠—”

“I told you I wasn’t ready to die.”

“I’d be extra careful.”

Ben suddenly realized that they were playing to a large staring audience and that, for once, he was not the star.

“Drive on!” he said in his gruffest tone. “I’m letting you go because you’re a stranger, but you won’t get off so easy next time.”

“I’m very, very grateful,” said the girl. “Just the same I don’t like being a stranger and I hope you won’t excuse me on that ground again.”

Which remark, accompanied by her radiant smile, caused Mr. Collins, hitherto only a bathroom singer, to hum quite loudly all the rest of his working day snatches of a gay Ohman and Arden record that his wife had played over and over the night before.

His relief, Tim Martin, appeared promptly at four, but Ben seemed in no hurry to go home. He pretended to listen to two new ones Tim had heard on the way in from Flushing, one about a Scotchman and some hotel towels and one about two Heebs in a night club. He managed to laugh in the right place, but his attention was on the northbound traffic, which was now none of his business.

At twenty minutes past four he said goodbye to Martin and walked slowly south on the east side of the street. He walked as far as Thirty-sixth, in vain. Usually he caught a ride home with some Bronx or north suburban motorist, but now he was late and had to pay for his folly by hurrying to Grand Central and standing up in a subway express.

“I was a sucker!” he thought. “She probably drove up some other street on purpose to miss me. Or she might have came in on one of them cross streets after I’d walked past it. I ought to stuck at Forty-fourth a while longer. Or maybe some other fella done his duty and had her locked up. Not if she smiled at him, though.”

But she wouldn’t smile like that at everybody. She had smiled at him because she liked him, because she really thought he was cute. Yes, she did! That was her regular line. That was how she had worked on them Buffalo fellas. “Cute!” A fine word to use on a human Woolworth Building. She was kidding. No, she wasn’t; not entirely. She’d liked his looks as plenty other gals had, and maybe that stuff about the fire department and London had tickled her.

Anyway, he had seen the most wonderful smile in the world and he still felt warm from it when he got home, so warm that he kissed his wife with a fervor that surprised her.

When Ben was on the day shift, he sometimes entertained Grace at supper with an amusing incident or two of his work. Sometimes his stories were pure fiction and she suspected as much, but what difference did it make? They were things that ought to have happened even if they hadn’t.

On this occasion he was wild to talk about the girl from Rye, but he had learned that his wife did not care much for anecdotes concerning pretty women. So he recounted one-sided arguments with bungling drivers of his own sex which had very little foundation in fact.

“There was a fella coming south in a 1922 Buick and the light changed and when it was time to go again, he thought he was starting in second, and it was reverse instead, and he backed into a big Pierce from Greenwich. He didn’t do no damage to the Pierce and only bent himself a little. But they’d have held up the parade ten minutes talking it over if I hadn’t bore down.

“I got the Buick fella over to the curb and I said to him, ‘What’s the matter? Are you homesick?’ So he said what did I mean, homesick, and I said, ‘Well, you was so anxious to get back to wherever you come from that you couldn’t even wait to turn around.’

“Then he tried to explain what was the matter, just like I didn’t know. He said this was his first trip in a Buick and he was used to a regular gear shift.

“I said, ‘That’s fine, but this ain’t no training-camp. The place to practice driving is four blocks farther down, at Forty-second. You’ll find more automobiles there and twicet as many pedestrians and policemen, and besides, they’ve got streetcars and a tower to back into.’

“I said, ‘You won’t never learn nothing in a desert like this.’ You ought to heard the people laugh.”

“I can imagine!” said Grace.

“Then there was a Jordan, an old guy with a gray beard. He was going to park right in front of Kaskel’s. He said he wouldn’t be more than half an hour. I said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad! I wished you could spend the weekend.’ I said, ‘If you’d let us knew you was coming, we’d have arranged some parties for you.’ So he said, ‘I’ve got a notion to report you for being too fresh.’

“So I said, ‘If you do that, I’ll have you arrested for driving without your parents’ consent.’ You ought to have heard them laugh. I said, ‘Roll, Jordan, roll!’ You ought to have heard them.”

“I’ll bet!” said Grace.

Ben fell into a long, unaccustomed silence.

“What are you thinking about?”

It came out against his better judgment. “There was a gal in a blue Cadillac.”

“Oh! There was! What about her?”

“Nothing. Only she acted like it was her Avenue and I give her hell.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I forget.”

“Was she pretty?”

“I didn’t notice. I was sore.”

“You!”

“She all but knocked me for a corpse.”

“And you probably just smiled at her.”

“No. She done the smiling. She smiled⁠—” He broke off and rose from the table. “Come on, babe. Let’s go to the Franklin. Joe Frisco’s there. And a Chaplin picture.”

Ben saw nothing of the blue Cadillac or its mistress the rest of that week, but in all his polemics he was rehearsing lines aimed to strengthen her belief in his “cuteness.” When she suddenly appeared, however, late on the following Tuesday afternoon, he was too excited to do anything but stare, and he would have lost an opportunity of hearing her enchanting voice if she hadn’t taken the initiative. Northbound, she stopped at the curb a few feet above his corner and beckoned to him.

“It’s after four,” she said. “Can’t I drive you home?”

What a break! It was his week on the late shift.

“I just come to work. I won’t be off till midnight.”

“You’re mean! You didn’t tell me you were going to change.”

“I change every week. Last week, eight to four; this week, four to twelve.”

“And next week eight to four?”

“Yes’m.”

“Well, I’ll just have to wait.”

He couldn’t say a word.

“Next Monday?”

He made an effort. “If you live.”

She smiled that smile. “I’ll live,” she said. “There’s an incentive.”

She was on her way and Ben returned to his station, dizzy.

“Incentive, incentive, incentive,” he repeated to himself, memorizing it, but when he got home at half past one, he couldn’t find it in Grace’s abridged Webster; he thought it was spelled with an s.

The longest week in history ended. A little before noon on Monday the Cadillac whizzed past him going south and he caught the word “later.” At quitting time, while Tim Martin was still in the midst of his first new one about two or more Heebs, Ben was all at once aware that she had stopped right beside him, was blocking the traffic, waiting for him.

Then he was in her car, constricting his huge bulk to fit it and laughing like a child at Tim’s indelicate ejaculation of surprise.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing. I just feel good.”

“Are you glad to be through?”

“Yes. Today.”

“Not always?”

“I don’t generally care much.”

“I don’t believe you do. I believe you enjoy your job. And I don’t see how you can because it seems to me such a hard job. I’m going to make you tell me all about it as soon as we get out of this jam.”

A red light stopped them at Fifty-first Street and she turned and looked at him amusedly.

“It’s a good thing the top is down,” she said. “You’d have been hideously uncomfortable in one more fold.”

“When I get a car of my own,” said Ben, “it’ll have to be a Mack, and even then I’ll have to hire a man to drive it.”

“Why a man?”

“Men ain’t all crazy.”

“Honestly, I’m not crazy. Have I come near hitting anything?”

“You’ve just missed everything. You drive too fast and you take too many chances. But I knew it before I got in, so I can’t kick.”

“There isn’t room for you to, anyway. Do you want to get out?”

“No.”

“I doubt if you could. Where do you live?”

“Hundred and sixty-fourth, near the Concourse,” said Ben.

“How do you usually go home?”

“Like this.”

“And I thought I was saving you from a tiresome subway ride or something. I ought to have known you’d never lack invitations. Do you?”

“Hardly ever.”

“Do the people ask you all kinds of questions?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. Because I wanted to and now I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You must be tired of answering.”

“I don’t always answer the same.”

“Do you mean you lie to people, to amuse yourself?”

“Sometimes.”

“Oh, that’s grand! Come on, lie to me! I’ll ask you questions, probably the same questions they all ask, and you answer them as if I were a fool. Will you?”

“I’ll try.”

“Well, let’s see. What shall I ask first? Oh, yes. Don’t you get terribly cold in winter?”

He repeated a reply he had first made to an elderly lady, obviously a visitor in the city, whose curiosity had prompted her to cross-examine him for over twenty minutes on one of the busiest days he had ever known.

“No. When I feel chilly, I stop a car and lean against the radiator.”

His present interviewer rewarded him with more laughter than was deserved.

“That’s wonderful!” she said. “And I suppose when your ears are cold, you stop another car and borrow its hood.”

“I’ll remember that one.”

“Now what next? Do you ever get hit?”

“Right along, but only glancing blows. I very seldom get knocked down and run over.”

“Doesn’t it almost kill you, standing on your feet all day?”

“It ain’t near as bad as if it was my hands. Seriously, Madam, I get so used to it that I sleep that way nights.”

“Don’t the gasoline fumes make you sick?”

“They did at first, but now I can’t live without them. I have an apartment near a public garage so I can run over there any time and re-fume myself.”

“How tall are you?”

“Six feet ten.”

“Not really!”

“You know better, don’t you? I’m six feet four, but when women ask me, I tell them anything from six feet eight to seven feet two. And they always say, ‘Heavens!’ ”

“Which do you have the most trouble with, men drivers or women drivers?”

“Men drivers.”

“Honestly?”

“Sure. There’s fifty times as many of them.”

“Do lots of people ask you questions?”

“No. You’re the first one.”

“Were you mad at me for calling you cute the other day?”

“I couldn’t be mad at you.”

A silence of many blocks followed. The girl certainly did drive fast and Ben might have been more nervous if he had looked ahead, but mostly his eyes were on her profile which was only a little less alluring than her smile.

“Look where we are!” she exclaimed as they approached Fordham Road. “And you live at a Hundred and sixty-fourth! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Don’t get out. I’ll drive you back.”

“No, you won’t. I’ll catch a ride. There’s a fella up this way I want to see.”

“You were nice to take a chance with me and not to act scared. Will you do it again?”

“Whenever you say.”

“I drive in once a week. I go down to Greenwich Village to visit my sister. Generally on Mondays.”

“Next Monday I’ll be on the late shift.”

“Let’s make it the Monday after.”

“That’s a long ways off.”

“The time will pass. It always does.”

It did, but so haltingly! And the day arrived with such a threat of rain that Ben was afraid she wouldn’t come in. Later on, when the threat was fulfilled and the perils of motoring trebled by a steady drizzle and slippery pavements, he was afraid she would. Prudence, he knew, was not in her makeup and if she had an engagement with her sister, nothing short of a flood would prevent her keeping it.

Just before his luncheon time, the Cadillac passed, going south. Its top was up and its squeegee flying back and forth across the front glass.

Through the rain he saw the girl smile and wave at him briefly. Traffic was thick and treacherous and both must keep their minds on it.

It was still drizzling when she reappeared and stopped for him at four.

“Isn’t this a terrible day?” she said.

“Not now!”

She smiled, and in an instant he forgot all the annoyance and discomfort of the preceding hours.

“If we leave the top up, you’ll get stoop-shouldered, and if we take it down, we’ll be drowned.”

“Leave it up. I’m all right.”

“Do you mind if we don’t talk much? I feel quiet.”

He didn’t answer and nothing more was said until they turned east at Mount Morris Park. Then:

“I could find out your name,” she said, “by remembering your number and having somebody look it up. But you can save me the trouble by telling me.”

“My name is Ben Collins. And I could learn yours by demanding to see your driver’s license.”

“Heavens! Don’t do that! I haven’t any. But my name is Edith Dole.”

“Edith Dole. Edith Dole,” said Ben.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s pretty.”

“It’s a funny combination. Edith means happiness and Dole means grief.”

“Well,” said Ben, “you’ll have plenty of grief if you drive without a license. You’ll have it anyway if you drive fast on these kind of streets. There’s nothing skiddier than car-tracks when it’s raining.”

They were on upper Madison and the going was dangerous. But that was not the only reason he wanted her to slow down.

Silence again until they were on the Concourse.

“Are you married?” she asked him suddenly.

“No,” he lied. “Are you?”

“I will be soon.”

“Who to?”

“A man in Buffalo.”

“Are you stuck on him?”

“I don’t know. But he wants me and my father wants him to have me.”

“Will you live in Buffalo?”

“No. He’s coming here to be my father’s partner.”

“And yours.”

“Yes. Oh, dear! Here’s a Hundred and sixty-fourth and I mustn’t take you past it today, not in this weather. Do you think you can extricate yourself?”

He managed it with some difficulty.

“I don’t suppose I’ll see you again for two weeks.”

“I’m afraid not,” she said.

He choked down the words that wanted to come out. “Miss Dole,” he said, “take my advice and don’t try for no records getting home. Just loaf along and you’ll be there an hour before your supper’s ready. Will you? For that guy’s sake in Buffalo?”

“Yes.”

“And my sake, too.”

Gosh! What a smile to remember!

He must walk slow and give himself a chance to calm down before he saw Grace. Why had he told the girl he wasn’t married? What did she care?

Grace’s greeting was a sharp command. “Take a hot bath right away! And wear your bathrobe afterwards. We won’t be going anywhere tonight.”

She and Mary Arnold had been in Mount Vernon at a card-party. They had got soaked coming home. She talked about it all through supper, thank the Lord!

After supper he tried to read, but couldn’t. He listened awhile to the Ohman and Arden record which his wife couldn’t get enough of. He went to bed, wishing he could sleep and dream, wishing he could sleep two weeks.

He was up early, early enough to look at the paper before breakfast. “Woman Motorist Killed By Streetcar in Bronx.” His eyes felt funny as he read: “Miss Edith Dole, twenty-two, of Rye, was instantly killed when the automobile she was driving skidded and struck a streetcar at the corner of Fordham Road and Webster Avenue, the Bronx, shortly after four thirty yesterday afternoon.

“Grace,” he said in a voice that was not his own, “I forgot. I’m supposed to be on the job at seven this morning. There’s some kind of a parade.”

Out of the house, alone, he talked aloud to himself for the first time since he was a kid.

“I can’t feel as bad as I think I do. I only seen her four or five times. I can’t really feel this bad.”

Well, on an afternoon two or three weeks later, a man named Hughes from White Plains, driving a Studebaker, started across Forty-sixth Street out of turn and obeyed a stern order to pull over to the curb.

“What’s your hurry?” demanded the grim-faced traffic policeman. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? What’s the matter with you, you so-and-so!”

“I forgot myself for a minute. I’m sorry,” said Mr. Hughes. “If you’ll overlook it, I’ll pick you up on my way home and take you to the Bronx. Remember, I give you a ride home last month? Remember? That is, it was a fella that looked like you. That is, he looked something like you. I can see now it wasn’t you. It was a different fella.”

Mr. Frisbie

I am Mr. Allen Frisbie’s chauffeur. Allen Frisbie is a name I made up because they tell me that if I used the real name of the man I am employed by that he might take offense and start trouble though I am sure he will never see what I am writing as he does not read anything except the American Golfer but of course some of his friends might call his attention to it. If you knew who the real name of the man is it would make more interesting reading as he is one of the 10 most wealthiest men in the United States and a man who everybody is interested in because he is so famous and the newspapers are always writing articles about him and sending high salary reporters to interview him but he is a very hard man to reproach or get an interview with and when they do he never tells them anything.

That is how I come to be writing this article because about two weeks ago a Mr. Kirk had an appointment to interview Mr. Frisbie for one of the newspapers and I drove him to the station after the interview was over and he said to me your boss is certainly a tough egg to interview and getting a word out of him is like pulling turnips.

“The public do not know anything about the man,” said Mr. Kirk. “They know he is very rich and has got a wife and a son and a daughter and what their names are but as to his private life and his likes and dislikes he might just as well be a monk in a convent.”

“The public knows he likes golf,” I said.

“They do not know what kind of a game he plays.”

“He plays pretty good,” I said.

“How good?” said Mr. Kirk.

“About 88 or 90,” I said.

“So is your grandmother,” said Mr. Kirk.

He only meant the remark as a comparison but had either of my grandmothers lived they would both have been over 90. Mr. Kirk did not believe I was telling the truth about Mr. Frisbie’s game and he was right though was I using real names I would not admit it as Mr. Frisbie is very sensitive in regards to his golf.

Mr. Kirk kept pumping at me but I am used to being pumped at and Mr. Kirk finally gave up pumping at me as he found me as closed mouth as Mr. Frisbie himself but he made the remark that he wished he was in my place for a few days and as close to the old man as I am and he would then be able to write the first real article which had ever been written about the old man. He called Mr. Frisbie the old man.

He said it was too bad I am not a writer so I could write up a few instance about Mr. Frisbie from the human side on account of being his caddy at golf and some paper or magazine would pay me big. He said if you would tell me a few instance I would write them up and split with you but I said no I could not think of anything which would make an article but after Mr. Kirk had gone I got to thinking it over and thought to myself maybe I could be a writer if I tried and at least there is no harm in trying so for the week after Mr. Kirk’s visit I spent all my spare time writing down about Mr. Frisbie only at first I used his real name but when I showed the article they said for me not to use real names but the public would guess who it was anyway and that was just as good as using real names.

So I have gone over the writing again and changed the name to Allen Frisbie and other changes and here is the article using Allen Frisbie.

When I say I am Mr. Frisbie’s chauffeur I mean I am his personal chauffeur. There are two other chauffeurs who drive for the rest of the family and run errands. Had I nothing else to do only drive I might well be turned a man of leisure as Mr. Frisbie seldom never goes in to the city more than twice a week and even less oftener than that does he pay social visits.

His golf links is right on the place an easy walk from the house to the first tee and here is where he spends a good part of each and every day playing alone with myself in the roll of caddy. So one would not be far from amiss to refer to me as Mr. Frisbie’s caddy rather than his chauffeur but it was as a chauffeur that I was engaged and can flatter myself that there are very few men of my calling who would not gladly exchange their salary and position for mine.

Mr. Frisbie is a man just this side of 60 years of age. Almost 10 years ago he retired from active business with money enough to put him in a class with the richest men in the United States and since then his investments have increased their value to such an extent so that now he is in a class with the richest men in the United States.

It was soon after his retirement that he bought the Peter Vischer estate near Westbury, Long Island. On this estate there was a 9 hole golf course in good condition and considered one of the best private 9 hole golf courses in the United States but Mr. Frisbie would have had it plowed up and the land used for some other usage only for a stroke of chance which was when Mrs. Frisbie’s brother came over from England for a visit.

It was during while this brother-in-law was visiting Mr. Frisbie that I entered the last named employee and was an onlooker when Mr. Frisbie’s brother-in-law persuaded his brother-in-law to try the game of golf. As luck would have it Mr. Frisbie’s first drive was so good that his brother-in-law would not believe he was a new beginner till he had seen Mr. Frisbie shoot again but that first perfect drive made Mr. Frisbie a slave of the game and without which there would be no such instance as I am about to relate.

I would better explain at this junction that I am not a golfer but I have learned quite a lot of knowledge about the game by cadding for Mr. Frisbie and also once or twice in company with my employer have picked up some knowledge of the game by witnessing players like Bobby Jones and Hagen and Sarazen and Smith in some of their matches. I have only tried it myself on a very few occasions when I was sure Mr. Frisbie could not observe me and will confide that in my own mind I am convinced that with a little practise that I would have little trouble defeating Mr. Frisbie but will never seek to prove same for reasons which I will leave it to the reader to guess the reasons.

One day shortly after Mr. Frisbie’s brother-in-law had ended his visit I was cadding for Mr. Frisbie and as had become my custom keeping the score for him when a question arose as to whether he had taken 7 or 8 strokes on the last hole. A 7 would have given him a total of 63 for the 9 holes while a 8 would have made it 64. Mr. Frisbie tried to recall the different strokes but was not certain and asked me to help him.

As I remembered it he had sliced his 4th wooden shot in to a trap but had recovered well and got on to the green and then had taken 3 putts which would make him a 8 but by some slip of the tongue when I started to say 8 I said 7 and before I could correct myself Mr. Frisbie said yes you are right it was a 7.

“That is even 7s,” said Mr. Frisbie.

“Yes,” I said.

On the way back to the house he asked me what was my salary which I told him and he said well I think you are worth more than that and from now on you will get $25.00 more per week.

On another occasion when 9 more holes had been added to the course and Mr. Frisbie was playing the 18 holes regular every day he came to the last hole needing a 5 to break 112 which was his best score.

The 18th hole is only 120 yards with a big green but a brook in front and traps in back of it. Mr. Frisbie got across the brook with his second but the ball went over in to the trap and it looked like bad business because Mr. Frisbie is even worse with a niblick than almost any other club except maybe the No. 3 and 4 irons and the wood.

Well I happened to get to the ball ahead of him and it laid there burred in the deep sand about a foot from a straight up and down bank 8 foot high where it would have been impossible for any man alive to oust it in one stroke but as luck would have it I stumbled and gave the ball a little kick and by chance it struck the side of the bank and stuck in the grass and Mr. Frisbie got it up on the green in one stroke and was down in 2 putts for his 5.

“Well that is my record 111 or 3 over 6s,” he said.

Now my brother had a couple of tickets for the polo at Meadowbrook the next afternoon and I am a great lover of horses flesh so I said to Mr. Frisbie can I go to the polo tomorrow afternoon and he said certainly any time you want a afternoon off do not hesitate to ask me but a little while later there was a friend of mine going to get married at Atlantic City and Mr. Frisbie had just shot a 128 and broke his spoon besides and when I mentioned about going to Atlantic City for my friend’s wedding he snapped at me like a wolf and said what did I think it was the xmas holidays.

Personally I am a man of simple tastes and few wants and it is very seldom when I am not satisfied to take my life and work as they come and not seek fear or favor but of course there are times in every man’s life when they desire something a little out of the ordinary in the way of a little vacation or perhaps a financial accommodation of some kind and in such cases I have found Mr. Frisbie a king amongst men provide it one uses discretion in choosing the moment of their reproach but a variable tyrant if one uses bad judgment in choosing the moment of their reproach.

You can count on him granting any reasonable request just after he has made a good score or even a good shot where as a person seeking a favor when he is off his game might just swell ask President Coolidge to do the split.

I wish to state that having learned my lesson along these lines I did not use my knowledge to benefit myself alone but have on the other hand utilized same mostly to the advantage of others especially the members of Mr. Frisbie’s own family. Mr. Frisbie’s wife and son and daughter all realized early in my employment that I could handle Mr. Frisbie better than anyone else and without me ever exactly divulging the secret of my methods they just naturally began to take it for granted that I could succeed with him where they failed and it became their habit when they sought something from their respective spouse and father to summons me as their adviser and advocate.

As an example of the above I will first sight an example in connection with Mrs. Frisbie. This occurred many years ago and was the instance which convinced her beyond all doubt that I was a expert on the subject of managing her husband.

Mrs. Frisbie is a great lover of music but unable to perform on any instrument herself. It was her hope that one of the children would be a pianiste and a great deal of money was spent on piano lessons for both Robert the son and Florence the daughter but all in vain as neither of the two showed any talent and their teachers one after another gave them up in despair.

Mrs. Frisbie at last became desirous of purchasing a player piano and of course would consider none but the best but when she brooched the subject to Mr. Frisbie he turned a deaf ear as he said pianos were made to be played by hand and people who could not learn same did not deserve music in the home.

I do not know how often Mr. and Mrs. Frisbie disgust the matter pro and con.

Personally they disgust it in my presence any number of times and finally being a great admirer of music myself and seeing no reason why a man of Mr. Frisbie’s great wealth should deny his wife a harmless pleasure such as a player piano I suggested to the madam that possibly if she would leave matters to me the entire proposition might be put over. I can no more than fail I told her and I do not think I will fail so she instructed me to go ahead as I could not do worse than fail which she had already done herself.

I will relate the success of my plan as briefly as possible. Between the house and the golf course there was a summer house in which Mrs. Frisbie sat reading while Mr. Frisbie played golf. In this summer house she could sit so as to not be visible from the golf course. She was to sit there till she heard me whistle the strains of “Over There” where at she was to appear on the scene like she had come direct from the house and the fruits of our scheme would then be known.

For two days Mrs. Frisbie had to console herself with her book as Mr. Frisbie’s golf was terrible and there was no moment when I felt like it would not be courting disaster to summons her on the scene but during the 3rd afternoon his game suddenly improved and he had shot the 1st 9 holes in 53 and started out on the 10th with a pretty drive when I realized the time had come.

Mrs. Frisbie appeared promptly in answer to my whistling and walked rapidly up to Mr. Frisbie like she had hurried from the house and said there is a man at the house from that player piano company and he says he will take $50.00 off the regular price if I order today and please let me order one as I want one so much.

“Why certainly dear go ahead and get it dear,” said Mr. Frisbie and that is the way Mrs. Frisbie got her way in regards to a player piano. Had I not whistled when I did but waited a little longer it would have spelt ruination to our schemes as Mr. Frisbie took a 12 on the 11th hole and would have bashed his wife over the head with a No. 1 iron had she even asked him for a toy drum.

I have been of assistance to young Mr. Robert Frisbie the son with reference to several items of which I will only take time to touch on one item with reference to Mr. Robert wanting to drive a car. Before Mr. Robert was 16 years of age he was always after Mr. Frisbie to allow him to drive one of the cars and Mr. Frisbie always said him nay on the grounds that it is against the law for a person under 16 years of age to drive a car.

When Mr. Robert reached the age of 16 years old however this excuse no longer held good and yet Mr. Frisbie continued to say Mr. Robert nay in regards to driving a car. There is plenty of chauffeurs at your beckon call said Mr. Frisbie to drive you where ever and when ever you wish to go but of course Mr. Robert like all youngsters wanted to drive himself and personally I could see no harm in it as I personally could not drive for him and the other 2 chauffeurs in Mr. Frisbie’s employee at the time were just as lightly to wreck a car as Mr. Robert so I promised Mr. Robert that I would do my best towards helping him towards obtaining permission to drive one of the cars.

“Leave it to me” was my bequest to Mr. Robert and sure enough my little strategy turned the trick though Mr. Robert did not have the patience like his mother to wait in the summer house till a favorable moment arrived so it was necessary for me to carry through the entire proposition by myself.

The 16th hole on our course is perhaps the most difficult hole on our course at least it has always been a variable tartar for Mr. Frisbie.

It is about 350 yards long in lenth and it is what is called a blind hole as you can not see the green from the tee as you drive from the tee up over a hill with a direction flag as the only guide and down at the bottom of the hill there is a brook a little over 225 yards from the tee which is the same brook which you come to again on the last hole and in all the times Mr. Frisbie has played around the course he has seldom never made this 16th hole in less than 7 strokes or more as his tee shot just barely skins the top of the hill giving him a down hill lie which upsets him so that he will miss the 2nd shot entirely or top it and go in to the brook.

Well I generally always stand up on top of the hill to watch where his tee shot goes and on the occasion referred to he got a pretty good tee shot which struck on top of the hill and rolled halfway down and I hurried to the ball before he could see me and I picked it up and threw it across the brook and when he climbed to the top of the hill I pointed to where the ball laid the other side of the brook and shouted good shot Mr. Frisbie. He was overjoyed and beamed with joy and did not suspect anything out of the way though in realty he could not hit a ball more than 160 yards if it was teed on the summit of Pike’s Peak.

Fate was on my side at this junction and Mr. Frisbie hit a perfect mashie shot on to the green and sunk his 2nd putt for the only 4 of his career on this hole. He was almost delirious with joy and you may be sure I took advantage of the situation and before we were fairly off the green I said to him Mr. Frisbie if you do not need me tomorrow morning do you not think it would be a good time for me to learn Mr. Robert to drive a car.

“Why certainly he is old enough now to drive a car and it is time he learned.”

I now come to the main instance of my article which is in regards to Miss Florence Frisbie who is now Mrs. Henry Craig and of course Craig is not the real name but you will soon see that what I was able to do for her was no such childs play like gaining consent for Mr. Robert to run a automobile or Mrs. Frisbie to purchase a player piano but this was a matter of the up most importance and I am sure the reader will not consider me a vain bragger when I claim that I handled it with some skill.

Miss Florence is a very pretty and handsome girl who has always had a host of suiters who paid court to her on account of being pretty as much as her great wealth and I believe there has been times when no less than half a dozen or more young men were paying court to her at one time. Well about 2 years ago she lost her heart to young Henry Craig and at the same time Mr. Frisbie told her in no uncertain turns that she must throw young Craig over board and marry his own choice young Junior Holt or he would cut her off without a dime.

Holt and Craig are not the real names of the two young men referred to though I am using their real first names namely Junior and Henry. Young Holt is a son of Mr. Frisbie’s former partner in business and a young man who does not drink or smoke and has got plenty of money in his own rights and a young man who any father would feel safe in trusting their daughter in the bands of matrimony. Young Craig at that time had no money and no position and his parents had both died leaving nothing but debts.

“Craig is just a tramp and will never amount to anything,” said Mr. Frisbie. “I have had inquirys made and I understand he drinks when anyone will furnish him the drinks. He has never worked and never will. Junior Holt is a model young man from all accounts and comes of good stock and is the only young man I know whose conduct and habits are such that I would consider him fit to marry my daughter.”

Miss Florence said that Craig was not a tramp and she loved him and would not marry anyone else and as for Holt he was terrible but even if he was not terrible she would never consider undergoing the bands of matrimony with a man named Junior.

“I will elope with Henry if you do not give in,” she said.

Mr. Frisbie was not alarmed by this threat as Miss Florence has a little common sense and would not be lightly to elope with a young man who could hardly finance a honeymoon trip on the subway. But neither was she showing any signs of yielding in regards to his wishes in regards to young Holt and things began to take on the appearance of a dead lock between father and daughter with neither side showing any signs of yielding.

Miss Florence grew pale and thin and spent most of her time in her room instead of seeking enjoyment amongst her friends as was her custom. As for Mr. Frisbie he was always a man of iron will and things began to take on the appearance of a dead lock with neither side showing any signs of yielding.

It was when it looked like Miss Florence was on the verge of a serious illness when Mrs. Frisbie came to me and said we all realize that you have more influence with Mr. Frisbie than anyone else and is there any way you can think of to get him to change his status towards Florence and these 2 young men because if something is not done right away I am afraid of what will happen. Miss Florence likes you and has a great deal of confidence in you said Mrs. Frisbie so will you see her and talk matters over with her and see if you can not think up some plan between you which will put a end to this situation before my poor little girl dies.

So I went to see Miss Florence in her bedroom and she was a sad sight with her eyes red from weeping and so pale and thin and yet her face lit up with a smile when I entered the room and she shook hands with me like I was a long lost friend.

“I asked my mother to send you,” said Miss Florence. “This case looks hopeless but I know you are a great fixer as far as Father is concerned and you can fix it if anyone can. Now I have got a idea which I will tell you and if you like it it will be up to you to carry it out.”

“What is your idea?”

“Well,” said Miss Florence, “I think that if Mr. Craig the man I love could do Father a favor why Father would not be so set against him.”

“What kind of a favor?”

“Well Mr. Craig plays a very good game of golf and he might give Father some pointers which would improve Father’s game.”

“Your father will not play golf with anyone and certainly not with a good player and besides that your father is not the kind of a man that wants anyone giving him pointers. Personally I would just as leaf go up and tickle him as tell him that his stance is wrong.”

“Then I guess my idea is not so good.”

“No,” I said and then all of a sudden I had a idea of my own. “Listen Miss Florence does the other one play golf?”

“Who?”

“Young Junior Holt.”

“Even better than Mr. Craig.”

“Does your father know that?”

“Father does not know anything about him or he would not like him so well.”

Well I said I have got a scheme which may work or may not work but no harm to try and the first thing to be done is for you to spruce up and pretend like you do not feel so unkindly towards young Holt after all. The next thing is to tell your father that Mr. Holt never played golf and never even saw it played but would like to watch your father play so he can get the hang of the game.

And then after that you must get Mr. Holt to ask your father to let him follow him around the course and very secretly you must tip Mr. Holt off that your father wants his advice. When ever your father does anything wrong Mr. Holt is to correct him. Tell him your father is crazy to improve his golf but is shy in regards to asking for help.

There is a lot of things that may happen to this scheme but if it should go through why I will guarantee that at least half your troubles will be over.

Well as I said there was a lot of things that might have happened to spoil my scheme but nothing did happen and the very next afternoon Mr. Frisbie confided in me that Miss Florence seemed to feel much better and seemed to have changed her mind in regards to Mr. Holt and also said that the last named had expressed a desire to follow Mr. Frisbie around the golf course and learn something about the game.

Mr. Holt was a kind of a fat pudgy young man with a kind of a sneering smile and the first minute I saw him I wished him the worst.

For a second before Mr. Frisbie started to play I was certain we were lost as Mr. Frisbie remarked where have you been keeping yourself Junior that you never watched golf before. But luckily young Holt took the remark as a joke and made no reply. Right afterwards the storm clouds began to gather in the sky. Mr. Frisbie sliced his tee shot.

“Mr. Frisbie,” said young Holt, “there was several things the matter with you then but the main trouble was that you stood too close to the ball and cut across it with your club head and besides that you swang back faster than Alex Smith and you were off your balance and you gripped too hard and you jerked instead of hitting with a smooth follow through.”

Well, Mr. Frisbie gave him a queer look and then made up his mind that Junior was trying to be humorous and he frowned at him so as he would not try it again but when we located the ball in the rough and Mr. Frisbie asked me for his spoon young Holt said Oh take your mashie Mr. Frisbie never use a wooden club in a place like that and Mr. Frisbie scowled and mumbled under his breath and missed the ball with his spoon and missed it again and then took a midiron and just dribbled it on to the fairway and finally got on the green in 7 and took 3 putts.

I suppose you might say that this was one of the quickest golf matches on record as it ended on the 2nd tee. Mr. Frisbie tried to drive and sliced again. Then young Holt took a ball from my pocket and a club from the bag and said here let me show you the swing and drove the ball 250 yards straight down the middle of the course.

I looked at Mr. Frisbie’s face and it was puffed out and a kind of a purple black color. Then he burst and I will only repeat a few of the more friendlier of his remarks.

“Get to hell and gone of my place. Do not never darken my doors again. Just show up around here one more time and I will blow out what you have got instead of brains. You lied to my girl and you tried to make a fool out of me. Get out before I sick my dogs on you and tear you to pieces.”

Junior most lightly wanted to offer some word of explanation or to demand one on his own account but saw at a glance how useless same would be. I heard later that he saw Miss Florence and that she just laughed at him.

“I made a mistake about Junior Holt,” said Mr. Frisbie that evening. “He is no good and must never come to this house again.”

“Oh Father and just when I was beginning to like him,” said Miss Florence.

Well like him or not like him she and the other young man Henry Craig were married soon afterwards which I suppose Mr. Frisbie permitted the bands in the hopes that same would rile Junior Holt.

Mr. Frisbie admitted he had made a mistake in regards to the last named but he certainly was not mistaken when he said that young Craig was a tramp and would never amount to anything.

Well I guess I have rambled on long enough about Mr. Frisbie.

Wedding Day

Ruth was sorry her sister was sick. But she was glad she was going to the wedding, and she wouldn’t have been going if Alice had not had this touch of flu. There were to be only six guests and Ruth was Alice’s last-minute substitute. She suspected that Ed, her brother-in-law, would rather have gone alone or with some girl who didn’t cramp his style (as if it mattered to her whether he took twelve drinks or twelve dozen; he must think her men friends in Detroit had all had their throats cut).

He had not exactly jumped for joy when Alice suggested her as proxy. However, he hadn’t said no and she was going and that was all that mattered. It would give her something to talk about for weeks, back home.

For the bride was Brownie Burt, musical comedy’s bright star. And the groom Jimmy Shane, considered, in New York as well as the provinces, one of the funniest men on stage or screen.

Ed was a publicity man for the Shuberts. He and Alice apparently knew everybody in the world and in the two weeks Ruth had been visiting them they had introduced her to celebrities by the carton. But Brownie Burt and Jimmy Shane were two she hadn’t met and was dying to meet; that she would be “in on” their wedding seemed an incredible piece of luck.

“What I can’t understand,” she told Ed as they taxied to the church, “is how he could ever be serious long enough to propose.”

“There’s nothing as serious as some comics off the stage,” said her brother-in-law. “If I wanted amusing companionship, I’d rather pal round with a ghoul or a moving-picture magnate.”

“Do you mean Mr. Shane isn’t funny at all?”

“Not deliberately.”

Ruth didn’t believe it and looked forward to a few giggles, though it was not likely that even a great comedian would be at his drollest on an occasion like this.

She intended to learn more about the romance and the leading characters in same, but Ed’s memoirs of tedious comics lasted till they reached their destination.

The other guests were all of the theatrical world⁠—Ben Seaton, a juvenile; Wallie Roach, an eccentric dancer; Dorothy Drew, a soubrette, and Josie King, said to be the highest-salaried chorus girl in show business. Seaton, Roach and Miss King were waiting in front of the church and while Ruth was being presented, Brownie and her bridesmaid, Miss Drew, appeared.

Brownie, in a flowered chiffon dress and picture hat, was beautiful; more beautiful, Ruth thought, than she had ever been on the stage. She was nervous, but not more so than was natural in a bride, and her unposed perturbation added to her charm.

“Of course Jimmy will be late,” she said.

“Are you sure he knows it’s today?” asked Wallie Roach.

“Yes. I called him up and reminded him an hour ago.”

“It’s just five o’clock,” said Ed. “If he were here now, he’d be on time, and if he were on time, he wouldn’t be Jimmy.”

“I won’t even begin to worry, for half an hour,” Brownie said.

But Jimmy surprised them all. His big car pulled up at eight minutes after five. He got out unhurriedly, kissed his bride, acknowledged an introduction to Ruth and shook hands with the others.

There was not the slightest trace of nervousness about him and, in spite of his rather foppish attire, he looked so much like the Jimmy Shane she had seen from “out front” that Ruth expected him to say something laughable.

Instead of which:

“Well, if we’re all set, let’s go. Dinner is on the ice.”

The party entered the church and Jimmy introduced them to the minister, getting the name wrong. Wallie and Dorothy “stood up” with the couple and Ben Seaton gave the bride away. The ceremony was brief. Everybody kissed the bride and Jimmy kissed everybody, including Ruth. Names were signed and the required documents delivered.

“We’ll meet at my place,” Ben announced. “Jimmy’ll take Brownie and Dorothy and Wallie and Ed in his car. Josie and Miss Richards will have the pleasure of riding with me.”

In the taxi Josie said: “Do you live in New York, Miss Richards?”

“No. Detroit,” said Ruth.

“That’s one town I never was in. Were you, Ben?”

“Yes. I played there two weeks with The Girl from Childs⁠—they tell me.”

“I saw you in it,” said Ruth.

“Didn’t you get lonesome?”

“What do you mean?”

“All by yourself in that big theater?”

“There was a crowd the night I was there.”

“That was a rehearsal.”

“What was wrong with that troupe, Ben?” asked Josie.

“The musical director killed it. He stopped playing the overture and somebody rang up the curtain.”

Ruth had attended a great many weddings in Detroit and elsewhere and she seemed to remember that the conversation following the ceremony had usually been about the bride or groom, or both.

Miss King and Mr. Seaton, close friends of the newlyweds, went from a discussion of the ill-fated Childs’ Girl to reminiscences of past Follies and colloquy concerning the new musical for which both had been engaged and rehearsals begun.

The outsider finally ventured a remark designed to remind them of the day’s event. “Didn’t Miss Burt look perfectly lovely?”

“Great!” said Ben.

“It’s too bad more people couldn’t have seen her,” said Ruth. “Didn’t she want a big wedding?”

“No. Just a wedding.”

“It isn’t supposed to be a secret, is it?”

“There wouldn’t be any sense to it if it was a secret. It’ll be in the morning papers.”

“Of course,” said Ruth, “I live in ‘the hinterlands’ and we don’t hear all the Broadway gossip. So I never even knew they were engaged.”

This brought no response, but she persisted:

“Is it just recent?”

“Oh, no,” said Ben. “They’ve been engaged for years. How many years, Jo?”

“Five or six anyway.”

“Why did they wait so long?”

“I have no idea.”

“It couldn’t have been financial, could it? I mean they both must have plenty of money.”

“No. Jim never saved anything but Joe Miller’s books and Brownie bought a half interest in Florida in 1925.”

“They get huge salaries, don’t they?”

“They’ve each worked on percentage in their last couple of shows. I imagine Jim has averaged close to four thousand a week, and Brownie thirty-five hundred.”

“Well, heavens! You can’t spend that much!” said Ruth.

“You can if you apply yourself. As far as Brownie is concerned, there was the Florida thing and, besides, her last troupe only ran fifteen weeks. And it’s no trick for Jim to keep both ends strangers. You saw that car of his. There’s two others just like it, only different colors, so his driver won’t be bored.

“His big ace in the hole, though, is the horses. He hardly ever gets up in time to go to the track, but some of his best pals are jockeys and he plays their mounts and they always stay back where they can watch the race and describe it to him afterwards. They claim that fourth position is the best place to watch a race from. If you’re farther up front than that, you have to depend on hearsay.”

The taxi stopped in front of an apartment hotel on Fifty-fifth Street.

“Here’s the shack,” said Ben. “And there’s Jim’s car.”

They rode the elevator to Ben’s suite, consisting of living-room, bedroom and bath.

Two photographers were taking a flashlight of the bride and groom, holding hands. Wallie, Ed, Dorothy, and three reporters were having a cocktail.

“Well, men,” said Jim to the reporters, “you’ve got the church and the minister’s name and the names of the guests. That’s about all there is to it.”

“Where are you going on your honeymoon?”

“It’s a secret.”

“Here’s something that isn’t,” said Brownie, and showed them a bracelet of diamonds and sapphires.

Jim frowned. “You can leave that out,” he said.

“Why?” said Brownie.

“It sounds like boasting.”

“But I want to boast. I want people to know how nice you are.”

“How nice is he?” said one of the reporters.

“I mean, would you mind telling us about how much it cost? I’m not up in jewelry when it gets beyond Ingersoll watches.”

“I’m funny,” Jimmy said, “but not funny enough to tell what I spend on presents for my wife.”

“We’ll have to guess then. Is ten thousand close?”

“Close enough,” said Jimmy.

“It’s a mild estimate,” said Wallie Roach.

“Whatever it cost,” said Brownie, “it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. Isn’t it, girls?”

The girls spoke enthusiastic agreement. The reporters left, Jimmy accompanying them into the hall.

“Put on a record, Ben,” he said when he came back. “It’s too early to eat.”

They all danced. The bride and groom danced together. Ben danced with Ruth. They had some more cocktails and danced again. This time Jimmy danced with Ruth.

“So you’re Alice’s sister.”

“Yes.”

“Alice ought to have gone in show business. You, too. You’ve got the looks. You’re one of the best-looking girls I ever saw.”

“You’ve just married one of the best-looking girls I ever saw.”

“Brownie is pretty, and prettier than ever today. Getting married seems to agree with her.”

“I love that bracelet you gave her!”

“Maybe I can find one like it. Would you wear it if I could?”

“You’re just as funny off the stage as on.”

“I don’t mean it funny.”

“It is, though.”

“We’ll have another dance after a while.”

“That’s something to live for.”

“You’re funny yourself, aren’t you? Let’s drink to our funniness.”

They, and the others, had more drinks and more dances. Ben called room service and two waiters eventually appeared with the dinner. It was a rather elaborate meal, but largely unappreciated except for the wine.

“Let’s drink to the bride,” said Wallie.

“She’s a good excuse,” said Ed.

“For a bride?”

“For a drink.”

They rose and drank to Brownie and then to the groom.

“Speech!” said Ruth, who was feeling more at home.

“Don’t!” said Dorothy. “He’ll think you mean it.”

“I do,” said Ruth. “I want to be amused.”

“You picked out a swell method!”

“Can I talk sitting down?” said Jimmy.

“Is there any way you can’t?” said Dorothy.

“You oughtn’t to drink any more. It makes you sour. Or are you just jealous?”

“Jealous! Of what?”

“Of Brownie getting married.”

“Listen: I wish I had Brownie’s looks and her voice and her figure. But her taste in men is laughable.”

“I suppose yours is great!”

“You’re there with the repartee! And you told Harriette Underhill you wrote most of your own lines. If you did, they’d have to remodel the theater and put in couches.”

“The young lady from Detroit wants me to make a speech. Maybe she’ll call on you later.”

“It would be a tough spot, following you, with the audience completely laughed out.”

Jimmy was not to be held off any longer. He got up, took a swallow of wine and began:

“Girls and boys, I don’t have to tell you that this is the happiest day of my life. You all know what I think of Brownie and how happy I am over she and I finally being married, but to complete our happiness we wanted you good pals with us to share our happiness.

“Brownie and I have been sweethearts a long time and I consider her one of the finest characters I have ever met and consider myself lucky in winning such a fine character. If there was more characters like Brownie in the world, we would all be better off and especially show business.

“There may be those who are jealous of Brownie on account of being the outstanding star in her line of work, but I have never yet met the man or woman in our profession who did not love her after they became acquainted or had a word to say against her personally, though if they did, they would not dare say it around me. Brownie is one of the great personalities of show business and if any performer ever richly deserved their success in show business, that person is Brownie.

“Personally I guess I have been lucky or at least a great many people seems to think so anyway. A man can never get to the top in this or any other profession without they call him lucky and speak of them derogatory behind their back.

“They think their remarks will not reach your ears, but I happen to know of things that have been said about me by certain people who claim to be my closest pals, and I am not referring to anybody here as I know you are my real pals and there is nobody here who would talk about me behind my back, though Dorothy has been razzing me a little, but I realize she is just kidding and I guess I ought to be able to stand a little kidding as I do plenty of it myself.

“I hope Brownie and I will be lucky enough to troupe together this season or at least she will be in a success so the both of us can be here in New York. I don’t know much yet about my next troupe, but I guess if I was a sensation in Silly Billy, with what they gave me⁠—”

After ten or twelve minutes more of it, Josie King turned on a record.

“I’m going into my dance,” she said.

And she gave an exhibition of tap dancing that was easily as entertaining as the act it rudely interrupted.

Dinner was over, the tables were taken out and the four girls retired to the bedroom to renew their makeups.

Ruth held the others back after Brownie had joined the men.

“Does anyone know their honeymoon plans?” she asked.

“I don’t believe they have any,” said Dorothy.

“Well,” said Ruth, “don’t you think we ought to break up the party so they can be alone?”

“For the novelty, do you mean?”

“If they wanted to be alone, they didn’t have to have a party,” said Josie. “But regardless of what they want, I’m going home to bed. I rehearsed all night and four hours today and I’ve got to rehearse all day tomorrow. Besides, this isn’t so hot that I can’t bear to tear myself away.”

Jimmy protested that it was early, only nine o’clock, but the rest, including Ben, the host, were all for adjournment.

Dorothy and Josie kissed the bride good night. The bride kissed Ruth, and Jimmy tried to, but she eluded him.

“You were sweet to come,” said Brownie. “Tell Alice how sorry I am that she couldn’t be with us, and I hope she’ll get well soon.”

Dorothy and Josie and Wallie and Ben got in one taxi; Ed and Ruth in another after declining Jimmy’s offer to take them home. They saw the bride and groom start off in Jimmy’s car.

Ruth would have given a great deal to accompany them, invisibly, for a few blocks. She would have been surprised, and annoyed, at Jimmy’s first remark.

“Alice’s sister is cute-looking, but dumber than Alice.”

“I didn’t talk to her much.”

“Neither did I, only while we were dancing. She’s got no personality.”

There was a silence. Then Brownie found her husband’s hand.

“Jim,” she said, “you were nice to give me the bracelet. It’s lovely. But it’s terribly expensive and I know you can’t afford it.”

“Well, I don’t mind telling you it isn’t paid for.”

“Then please take it back.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“I’d much rather you would. Let me keep it a day or two, to show people. After that, you return it.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

“You could return it, couldn’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“You’ve got to then. You can give me something else, when you’re playing again.”

“We’ll see.”

“You started to tell me at dinner about⁠—”

“About what?”

“About a date with Kennedy.”

“Oh, yes. He’s got an idea for a scene in a barber shop. He wants to talk it over with me before he writes it. He’s going to Southampton tomorrow morning for the weekend and if I like the idea, he’ll work on it there. If I see him, he won’t have any excuse not to work. So I told him I’d be at the club. He’s at some banquet, but he promised he’d leave early. I’ll drop you if you don’t mind, and go on down there. If I see it’s going to take long, I’ll give you a ring. Would you like to go some place and dance, provided I get away?”

“I don’t believe so, not tonight. I’m kind of tired.”

“Well, maybe you’ll feel better tomorrow night and we can see a show or something.”

“All right.”

“Here you are. Maybe if you’re tired, I’d better not ring you.”

“Do just as you like.”

“Well, good night⁠—Mrs. Shane.”

“Good night, Jim.”

The driver turned his back on their kiss.

“Take me to the club, Fred. Then you can go home.”

Ruth, in the taxi with her brother-in-law, vainly sought enlightenment.

“That,” she began, “was the queerest wedding I ever went to.”

“It was kind of queer.”

“Aren’t you going to explain it to me?”

“It’s hard to explain. They’re a queer couple; that’s all.”

“She’s a lot too good for him.”

“She probably is. But he certainly didn’t force her into the marriage at the point of a revolver.”

Alice, however, was prevailed on to talk while Ed was out in the kitchen, fixing himself a highball.

“Ed wouldn’t tell you about it because he doesn’t like you to think our friends are funny. He didn’t want you to go but I knew it would be an experience for you.”

“I’m glad I went. But I don’t want to remain mystified.”

“Well, you see Brownie and Jim have been going together a long, long time. I don’t know whether she still loves him or not, but she’s used to him and she couldn’t give him up without a struggle. And she’s terribly proud.

“She can’t bear to have anybody feel sorry for her and she was afraid they would if she and Jim didn’t keep on. So when it began to look as if she might lose him, she got desperate and threatened to sue him for breach of promise. In fact, she had a lawyer threaten him. The suit was to be for some terrible amount like two hundred thousand.”

“But could she have won it?”

“Undoubtedly, and tied his salary up for heaven knows how long. But he beat that game by saying he’d marry her and he’s gone through with it, leaving her, of course, with no ground for a suit.”

“But can’t she divorce him and get alimony? I mean, if he doesn’t behave,” said Ruth.

“Her pride will keep her from that, for a couple of years at least. And I suppose he figures that by then he’ll find some way of getting out of it cheaper.”

Jimmy Shane entered his club and stopped at the desk.

“I’m expecting a long-distance from Philadelphia,” he said. “I’ll be playing billiards.”

He played three cushions with Frank Kennedy, who was to do the book for his next show. Neither of them appeared to remember that there was a barbershop scene to discuss.

Jimmy was called to the telephone at eleven.

“Hello, dear.”

“Hello, dear.”

“Did it happen?”

“Yes. It’s all over.”

“Do you feel any different?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Playing billiards with Kennedy.”

“Will you be over tomorrow?”

“If I possibly can. But I don’t know.”

“You can if you want to.”

“I’ll try.”

“Try hard.”

“I will.”

“What did they say about my bracelet?”

“It’ll be all right. The clasp was sprung a little. It’s no job to fix, but they’re flooded with work. And I told them to clean it up. So you can’t have it till sometime next week.”

“Are you going to call me in the morning?”

“About noon. As soon as I know if I can come.”

Jimmy went back to his game.

“Your shot,” said Kennedy.

“Yes, and I hope I don’t get another phone call. You couldn’t have left them tougher if you’d placed them with your hands.”

Dinner

Harry Barton was thirty-three years old, unmarried and good-looking. Young matrons liked him as a filler-in at dinner parties, but he hated dinner parties unless they promised an evening of contract. So it was with a heavy heart that he heard Grace Halpern’s voice on the telephone.

“You’ve just got to do this for me! I know you’ll hate it. There won’t be any bridge. But Frank backed out at the last minute and I can’t get anybody else. I honestly tried. I tried Bill; I even tried Lester Graham, but neither of them can come. And I must have two bachelors because there are going to be two girls from out of town, girls who were in my class in boarding school. They really are peaches and I can’t disappoint them. Please say⁠—”

Harry was a bad liar and, besides, he liked Grace. He had had lots of good times at her house. He said yes and wished all the rest of the day that he hadn’t.

He arrived late at the Halperns’, too late to get half enough cocktails. He knew everybody there excepting the two peaches, a Miss Coakley and a Miss Rell. They were strikingly pretty, Miss Coakley a pony brunette and Miss Rell a rather tall, slender blonde. Harry thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

His hostess drew him aside before dinner was announced.

“I’m going to reward you for this. I’m going to let you sit between them at dinner. And remember, they’re both free.”

“What do you mean, free?”

“Not engaged or anything. And I think it’s about time you were settling down.”

The other bachelor, Dave Wallace, sat on Miss Coakley’s left, with Harry, as Grace had promised, between Miss Coakley and Miss Rell.

“Grace tells me you’re a great bridge player,” Miss Rell said.

“No, but I like⁠—”

“Which do you consider the greatest authority, Lenz or Works or Whitehall? I don’t know anything about it myself, but I hear people arguing about it at home, I mean I live in Chicago. I belong to a bridge club there and I was just getting so the others didn’t laugh at me when somebody introduced this horrible contract and I simply gave up. That’s the game, you know, where you don’t bid anything but slams and I just haven’t the nerve, I mean in bridge. I don’t want you to think I’m a coward in everything.”

“I⁠—”

“Because I’m not. I made a flight with Lindbergh in Washington. It was arranged through Congressman Burleigh. He’s a great friend of my father’s. You know, Burleigh the paint people in South Chicago. Oh, it was too thrilling for words! But I felt just as safe as if I’d been in a car, safer because once I was in a terrible smash-up out in Lake Forest and the doctor said I was lucky to escape without at least a few broken ribs.

“I was a little bit scared when we first started, but then I thought to myself this is the man who flew from Detroit to Paris and why should anybody be frightened just flying twenty minutes over Washington with him at the wheel. Have you ever been up?”

“Yes, I⁠—”

“Then you don’t know what a real thrill is. Honestly, it just makes you gasp, like the first time you dive in Lake Michigan. I really dive and I swim awfully well and some of the men say I swim awfully well for a girl. There’s one man in Chicago, Lee Roberts⁠—he and his wife are our best friends, I mean my brother’s and mine⁠—Lee calls me Gertrude Ederle; you know she’s the girl who swam across the English Channel and back.

“Of course he says it just joking because naturally I’m not in her class. She’s quite fat, isn’t she? Or haven’t you ever seen her? She looks fat in her pictures. But then you can’t always tell from pictures. There was a picture of me in the rotogravure section that made me look simply hideous.”

Mr. Halpern, on Miss Rell’s right, spoke to her and Harry found himself attacked by Miss Coakley.

“Mr. Burton, I was just telling Mr. Walters about⁠—I don’t know whether you’d be interested or not⁠—maybe you don’t⁠—but still everybody I’ve told, they think⁠—it’s probably⁠—”

“I’m sure I’d like to hear it,” said Harry.

“I hate to bore people with⁠—you know how it is⁠—you’d be too polite to⁠—and this is so awfully⁠—well, it isn’t a thing that⁠—it’s just interesting if you happen⁠—people in Baltimore⁠—though we’ve only lived there a few⁠—”

“If,” said Harry to himself, “she doesn’t complete a sentence in the next two minutes, I’m going to ask Grace for a highball.”

“⁠—it was some people who lived⁠—well, our apartment was just two buildings⁠—they were people you wouldn’t want⁠—but it was in a kind of secluded⁠—not many apartments⁠—it’s a neighborhood that’s just⁠—and my sister’s little boy goes to the same school as⁠—”

“Grace,” said Harry, “am I an old enough customer here to ask for a drink?”

“Whatever you like,” said his hostess.

“I’d like a highball. I had a pretty tough day.”

Miss Rell turned on him.

“Oh, are you in the Street? That’s what they call Wall Street, isn’t it? I should think it would be just thrilling! But I suppose it is hard work, too. You stand there all day and shout at other men, don’t you, and they shout back at you? It must ruin your voice. Why, I know we went to the Illinois-Chicago game last fall and I got excited and yelled so for Illinois that I couldn’t talk for a week.”

“That must have⁠—”

“Do you have football here in the East? Oh, certainly you do! I’d forgotten⁠—Yale and Harvard. And which are the Giants? I never can keep them straight. My father and Lou⁠—that’s my brother; we’re great pals⁠—he and Father read the sporting page religiously every day. I tease them about it and they tease me about reading the society news and the movies. We have great tiffs over it, all in fun of course.

“Father is a great golfer, I mean really. He’s fifty-four years old and he plays the Onwentsia course in sixty, or maybe it’s a hundred and sixty. Which would be right? He wanted me to take it up and begged and begged till finally one day I went out and played nine holes with him.

“I made some wonderful shots, I mean I really did, and he said I had a perfect natural swing and if I would take lessons from the professor it wouldn’t be long before I could be playing in tournaments, just for women I mean. Wouldn’t that be exciting! But I just couldn’t do it; I’d die!

“And besides, it seems to me that girls who win things in sports are always queer looking, at least most of them, and what chance would⁠—I mean it would be almost unheard of if⁠—Well, I just don’t believe I could ever be a champion of anything. Do you play golf?”

“Yes.”

“You ought to try it. It’s lots of fun, especially for a man. I mean men seem to have such good times playing together, the nineteenth hole and all that. And I should think it would be such wonderful relaxation for you over the weekend after that Wall Street grind.”

“I’m not in Wall Street.”

“Oh, now I’ve got an expert here, I wish you’d tell me what are bulls and what are bears? Father’s tried to explain it to me, but I can’t get it straight.”

“Well, a bull is⁠—”

“Have you ever been to bullfights, I mean in Spain or Mexico? They say they are terribly thrilling, but terribly cruel. I mean about the horses. You know what they do, don’t you?”

“No. I never heard of them.”

“Well, they bring out three or four old horses into the ring and men with spears spear the bull and get him mad at the horses and he goes after them and kills them and the blood makes him mad at everybody and then the man comes out and kills him. They call them toreadors.”

“Who?”

“The man that fights the bull. Haven’t you ever heard Carmen, I mean the opera? There’s a toreador in that. He sings a song; it goes, ‘Toreador, en garde.’ That’s the French. It’s a French opera. Carmen is the girl; she works in a cigarette factory. First she falls in love with a soldier and then this toreador wins her away from him, but the soldier kills himself and her.

“I haven’t heard it for years; I like to go to ones I haven’t heard so much. We’ve got a simply gorgeous opera company in Chicago. Everybody says it’s better than the Metropolitan. And Rosa Raisa is the greatest dramatic soprano I ever heard. She’s Ruffo’s wife. No, I guess she’s Rimini’s. Anyway, they’re both baritones.”

Again Mr. Halpern intervened and Harry took on Miss Coakley for another round.

“Mr. Walters and I were just⁠—Don’t you like Nassau better than⁠—I mean for climate⁠—and the different colors of the water⁠—and it’s ideal bathing, hardly any surf⁠—of course lots of people prefer heavy surf⁠—but for people like me who can’t⁠—and I think the crowd that goes there⁠—and the tennis. Then there’s that lovely garden, with the orchestra.

“Three of us girls⁠—I think it was four winters⁠—it was three winters ago. One night we went⁠—it’s the Holy Rollers⁠—honestly they do the craziest⁠—a man told us they were just⁠—but I couldn’t believe it, they were so⁠—I think⁠—Have you ever been there, Mr. Burton?”

“No.”

“We went by land to⁠—and then from Miami⁠—when you wake up⁠—it’s the most beautiful⁠—with the sun just rising over the islands⁠—it’s simply heavenly⁠—it’s just⁠—Well, you have no idea!”

“Yes, I have,” said Harry to himself, and aloud: “Grace, I’d like a highball. I had a tough day.”

“The days are getting shorter,” said his hostess.

“I imagine every day must be pretty hard for you men in the Street,” said Miss Rell.

“I’m not in any street,” said Harry. “Not even a path.”

“I know how secretive you Wall Street men are,” said Miss Rell, “but I wonder if you would do me a favor. Just before I left home, I heard Father talking about some stock that I think he said he had a tip on⁠—he’s got a lot of influential friends that tell him things like that, but of course nobody like you who is right in Wall Street. Now it would be perfectly wonderful if you would tell me whether this stock is any good or not and then when I go home, I can tell Father what you said and who you are and he’ll think his child isn’t so dumb after all. Will you?”

“What’s the stock?”

“Isn’t it marvelous that I remember the name of it? It’s General Motors.”

“General Motors! Well, listen, if you’ll keep this under your hat⁠—”

“Oh, that reminds me, I saw your Mayor Jimmy Walker in the parade today and I told Grace I thought he was the only man in the world who could wear a high hat without looking silly. Do you know him? I’ll bet he’s fascinating to know. He’s cute! I wish we had a cute mayor. I suppose you New Yorkers must think our town is a regular wild West show. It really isn’t as bad as all that.

“Lou⁠—that’s my brother⁠—he said the funniest thing the night before I came away. No, it was Wednesday night he said it and I didn’t leave till Friday noon on the Century. What was I saying? Oh, yes, Father and Lou and I were waiting for dinner⁠—you know we live on the North Side, just a block south of the park⁠—and anyway there were some noises out on the street that sounded just like pistol-shots and Father hurried to the window and looked out and announced that it was just backfire from a truck.

“Then Lou said, ‘Well, I’m glad they’re beginning to defend themselves.’ He meant the trucks were firing back at whoever was shooting at them. Or would it be whomever? I never can get who and whom straight. But Lou is awfully witty; I mean he really is. He has had two or three things in College Humor. What was your college?”

“The Electoral College.”

“Oh, you’re an engineer! And what are you doing on Wall Street? I suppose you gave up your profession ‘for gold.’ You ought to be ashamed of yourself! You might be accomplishing big things like building bridges. Which reminds me, do you play bridge?”

“Yes.”

“You ought to, honestly. I’m not very good, but it’s lots of fun. I belong to a club and we just have a circus. The other girls used to laugh at me, I was so dumb, but this last winter I got good; I mean really not bad at all. And then, just when I was doing so well, they decided to play this contract and I can’t get it at all. You don’t bid anything but slams and I just can’t do that. I simply haven’t the nerve.”

“Have you ever been up with Lindbergh?” asked Harry.

“Yes. I’m not joking. I really mean it. It was while he was in Washington. My father arranged it through Congressman Burleigh. That’s the Burleigh Paint Company in South Chicago. Mr. Burleigh is a congressman and one of Father’s closest friends. It was the most thrilling experience I ever had in my life. And I wasn’t frightened at all, only a little bit, like when you go in swimming and dive for the first time.”

“Can you dive?”

“You ought to see me! Honestly, not boasting, I’m a regular Gertrude Ederle; you know, the girl that swam across the English Channel so many times. I wouldn’t want to swim that Channel, though. It’s bad enough in a boat. I’m a pretty good sailor, but the last time my brother and I crossed from Calais to Dover, well, ‘it happens in the best of families,’ as Briggs says, or is it Mutt and Jeff?

“Do you read the funny pages? I suppose I oughtn’t to confess it, but I read them religiously. Father often jokes me about it and pretends the money he spent sending me to college was all wasted because all I got out of it was a taste for ‘the funnies.’ I answer him back by saying he went to college, too, and all he cares anything about now is golf. It’s all joking of course. Father and I are the best friends and chums! What was your college?”

“The War College.”

“Oh, West Point! I’d just love to go up there and watch them drill sometime! I’ve seen it across the river going by on the train and it looks lovely. And fall before last, Father and Lou and I went to the big football game between West Point and the Annapolis Navy. You know they had it in Chicago, at Soldiers’ Field, in Grant Park. It’s an enormous place and lots of people couldn’t see the game at all, but our seats were grand. Father got them through Congressman Burleigh.”

“Is that,” asked Harry, “the Burleigh who’s in the paint business in South Chicago?”

“Do you know him?”

“I bought a can of paint from him once when I was redecorating my garage.”

“Why, he’s one of Father’s best friends. He’s in Congress. How funny that you should really know him!”

“You can meet congressmen if you go at it the right way.”

Miss Coakley was talking.

“Oh, Mr. Buckley, will you⁠—? Mr. Walsh and I⁠—Just what was it you said, Mr.⁠—?”

“I don’t remember saying anything,” replied Dave Wallace on her left.

“Why, you⁠—He did, too, Mr.⁠—He said the Mauretania was the⁠—And I said the Paris or the Majestic, or the Berengaria⁠—Now we want you to give us your honest⁠—”

“I never crossed on anything but the Santa Maria,” said Harry.

“Oh, Italy, how I love it! I could simply⁠—There’s no other country⁠—it just seems as if⁠—If it weren’t for my sister in Baltimore⁠—maybe some day⁠—But a girl is foolish⁠—”

“Grace,” said Harry, “how’s the Scotch holding out?”

“The whole week must have been tough,” said Grace.

“I don’t see how you men live through it,” said Miss Rell, “standing there on the floor of the Exchange all day, shouting at each other. Why, it simply kills me just to stand and wait five minutes in a shop! To have to do it all day, I’d perish! How do you endure it?”

“Well, you know those little stools that golf fans carry around with them. I never go on the floor without one,” said Harry.

“My father is the greatest golf fan in the world; I mean I really believe he is, without exception. He never plays less than four times a week and he’s a fine player, I mean for a man his age. He’s fifty-four years old and he goes around Onwentsia in a hundred and twenty. Can that be right?”

“Easily.”

Dinner was over and they went into the living-room. Harry and Dave Wallace were together a moment.

“I notice you didn’t talk much,” remarked Dave.

“But what I said made a big impression.”

“I’d have traded you Coakley for your dame. Your gal just goes along as if she were speaking into a mike, but Miss Coakley is a perpetual missing-word contest and it’s impossible to keep out of it⁠—every little while you feel as if you just had to guess what’s left out.”

“She called me Burton and Buckley.”

“She called me everything from Welling to Wolheim.”

Harry tried to hide behind the piano, but Miss Rell soon found him.

“If we could get two more, don’t you think Grace would let us play bridge?”

“I don’t know the game,” said Harry.

“But I’d just love to teach you. I can teach you regular auction, but not this new contract, where you just bid and bid till you’re dizzy.”

“I haven’t any card sense and besides, I think that liquor Grace gave me was bad.”

“Oh, truly?”

“I’m going to ask her where she got it.”

“I know a man, or at least my father does, who gets the real thing straight from Canada. Only he’s out in Chicago.”

Harry peremptorily summoned Grace into the hall.

“Grace, that’s terrible Scotch you’ve got. It’s given me the first headache I’ve had in years.”

“I understand, and I’ll tell them you were sick and had to go home. You were a darling to come and I’ll never forget it.”

“Neither will I.”

At the door he said:

“Remember, old girl, I’ve left your schoolmates just as I found them. They’re still free.”

The Maysville Minstrel

Maysville was a town of five thousand inhabitants and its gas company served eight hundred homes, offices and stores.

The company’s office force consisted of two men⁠—Ed Hunter, trouble shooter and reader of meters, and Stephen Gale, whose title was bookkeeper, but whose job was a lot harder than that sounds.

From the first to the tenth of the month, Stephen stayed in the office, accepted checks and money from the few thrifty customers who wanted their discount of five percent, soft-soaped and argued with the many customers who thought they were being robbed, and tried to sell new stoves, plates and lamps to customers who were constantly complaining of defects in the stoves, plates and lamps they had bought fifteen or twenty years ago.

After the tenth, he kept the front door locked and went all over town calling on delinquents, many of whom were a year or more behind and had no intention of trying to catch up. This tiring, futile task usually lasted until the twenty-seventh, when Hunter started reading meters and Stephen copied the readings and made out the bills.

On the twenty-ninth, Hunter usually got drunk and Stephen had to hustle out and read the unread meters and hustle back and make out the rest of the bills.

When Townsend, the Old Man, who owned the business and five other gas businesses in larger towns, paid his semimonthly visit to Maysville, Stephen had to take a severe bawling out for failing to squeeze blood from Maysville’s turnips and allowing Hunter to get drunk.

All in all, Stephen earned the $22.50 per week which he had been getting the eight years he had worked for the gas company.

He was now thirty-one. At twelve, he had been obliged to quit school and go to work as a Western Union messenger boy. His father was dead and his mother, who established herself, without much profit as a dressmaker, easily could use the few dollars Stephen drew from the telegraph company. Later on he had jobs as driver of a grocery wagon, soda clerk in a drug store and freight wrestler at the Lackawanna depot.

The $22.50 offer from the gas office was manna from somewhere; it topped his highest previous salary by seven dollars and a half.

Stephen’s mother died and Stephen married Stella Nichols, to whom lack of money was no novelty. But they had a couple of children and soon fell into debt, which made Stephen less efficient than ever as a collector of the company’s back bills. He couldn’t blame other people for not settling when he was stalling off creditors himself.

All he could do was wish to heaven that the Old Man would come across with a substantial raise, and he knew there was as much chance of that as of Stella’s swimming the English Channel with a kid under each arm.

The Gales were too poor to go to picture shows; besides, there was no one to leave the children with. So Stephen and Stella stayed at home evenings and read books from the town library. The books Stephen read were books of poetry.

And often, after Stella had gone to bed, he wrote poetry of his own.

He wrote a poem to Stella and gave it to her on one of her birthdays and she said it was great and he ought to quit the darn old gas company and write poetry for a living.

He laughed that off, remarking that he was as poor now as he cared to be.

He didn’t show Stella his other poems⁠—poems about Nature, flowers, the Lackawanna Railroad, the beauties of Maysville, et cetera⁠—but kept them locked in a drawer of his desk at the gas office.

There was a man named Charley Roberts who traveled out of New York for an instantaneous water-heater concern. For years he had been trying to sell old Townsend, but old Townsend said the heater ate up too much gas and would make the customers squawk. They squawked enough as it was. Roberts was a determined young man and kept after Townsend in spite of the latter’s discouraging attitude.

Roberts was also a wisecracking, kidding New Yorker, who, when at home, lunched where his heroes lunched, just to be near them, look at them and overhear some of their wisecracks which he could repeat to his fellow drummers on the road. These heroes of his were comic-strip artists, playwrights and editors of humorous columns in the metropolitan press.

His favorite column was the one conducted by George Balch in the Standard and when he was in the small towns, he frequently clipped silly items from the local papers and sent them to George, who substituted his own captions for Charley’s and pasted them up.

Charley had a tip that Old Man Townsend would be in Maysville on a certain day, and as he was in the neighborhood, he took an interurban car thither and called at the gas office. Stephen had just got back from a fruitless tour among the deadheads and was in the shop, behind the office, telling Ed Hunter that Mrs. Harper’s pilot-light wouldn’t stay lighted.

Roberts, alone in the office, looked idly at Stephen’s desk and saw a book.

It was a volume of poems by Amy Lowell. A moment later Stephen reentered from the shop.

“Hello there, Gale,” said Roberts.

“How are you, Mr. Roberts?” said Stephen.

“I heard the Old Man was here,” said Roberts.

“You’ve missed him,” said Stephen. “He was here yesterday afternoon and left for Haines City last night.”

“Will he be here tomorrow?”

“I couldn’t tell you. He’s hard to keep track of.”

“He’s hard to sell, too. But I’ll run over there and take a chance. I notice you’ve been reading highbrow poetry.”

“I got this from the library.”

“How do you like it?”

“I’m not strong for poetry that don’t rhyme,” said Stephen.

“I guess it’s easier to write,” said Roberts.

“I don’t believe so. It isn’t much trouble rhyming if you’ve got it in you. Look at Edgar Guest.”

“How do you know he doesn’t have trouble?”

“His works don’t read like it,” said Stephen, and after a pause: “Besides, I’ve tried it myself.”

“Oh, so you’re a poet, are you?” asked Roberts.

“I wouldn’t exactly claim that, but I’ve written a few verses and it was more like fun than work. Maybe other people would think they were rotten, but I get pleasure writing them just the same.”

“I’d like to read them, Gale,” said Roberts eagerly.

“I don’t know if I’d like you to or not. And I don’t know if I’ve saved any. I wrote a poem to my wife on her birthday three years ago. She thought it was pretty good. I might let you read that, only I don’t know if I’ve got a copy of it around here.”

He knew very well he had a copy of it around there.

“See if you can find it,” said Roberts.

Stephen looked in two or three drawers before he unlocked the one that contained his manuscripts.

“It’s just a little thing I wrote for my wife on her birthday. You’ll probably think it’s rotten. It’s called ‘To Stella.’ That’s my wife’s first name.”

Charley Roberts read the poem:

Stella you today are twenty-three years old
And yet your hair is still pure gold.
Stella they tell me your name in Latin means a star
And to me that is what you are
With your eyes and your hair so yellow
I rate myself a lucky fellow Stella.
You know I cannot afford a costly gift
As you know it costs us all I make to live
And as you know we are already in debt,
But if you will stay well and healthy
Until I am rich and wealthy
Maybe I will be more able then to give you a present
Better than I can at present.
So now Stella goodbye for the present
And I hope next year I can make things more pleasant.
May you live to be old and ripe and mellow
Is my kind birthday wish for you Stella.

“Do you mean to tell me,” said Roberts, “that it was no trouble to write that?”

“It only took me less than a half-hour,” said Stephen.

“Listen,” said Roberts. “Let me have it.”

“What do you want with it?”

“I can get it published for you.”

“Where at?”

“In the New York Standard. I’ve got a friend, George Balch, who would run it in his column. He doesn’t pay anything, but if this was printed and your name signed to it, it might attract attention from people who do pay for poetry. Then you could make a lot of money on the side.”

“How much do they pay?”

“Well, some of the big magazines pay as high as a dollar a line.”

“I forget how many lines there is in that.”

Roberts counted them.

“Seventeen,” he said. “And from what I’ve seen of old Townsend, I bet he doesn’t pay you much more a week.”

“And it only took me less than a half-hour to write,” said Stephen.

“Will you let me send it to Balch?”

“I don’t know if I’ve got another copy.”

“Your wife must have a copy.”

“I guess maybe she has.”

He wasn’t just guessing.

“I’ll mail this to Balch tonight, along with a note. If he prints it, I’ll send you the paper.”

“I’ve got one that’s even longer than that,” said Stephen.

“Well, let’s have it.”

“No, I guess I’d better hang onto it⁠—if your friend don’t pay for them.”

“You’re absolutely right. A man’s a sucker to work for nothing. You keep your other stuff till this is published and you hear from some magazine editor, as I’m sure you will. Then you can sell what you’ve already written, and write more, till you’re making so much dough that you can buy the Maysville Gas Company from that old skinflint.”

“I don’t want any gas company. I want to get out of it. I just want to write.”

“Why shouldn’t you!”

“I’ve got to be sure of a living.”

“Living! If you can make seventeen dollars in half an hour, that’s thirty-four dollars an hour, or⁠—How many hours do you put in here?”

“Ten.”

“Three hundred and forty dollars a day! If that isn’t a living, I’m selling manicure sets to fish.”

“I couldn’t keep up no such a pace. I have to wait for inspiration,” said Stephen.

“A dollar a line would be enough inspiration for me. But the times when you didn’t feel like doing it yourself, you could hire somebody to do it for you.”

“That wouldn’t be square, and people would know the difference anyway. It’s hard to imitate another man’s style. I tried once to write like Edgar Guest, but it wouldn’t have fooled people that was familiar with his works.”

“Nobody can write like Guest. And you don’t need to. Your own style is just as good as his and maybe better. And speaking of Guest, do you think he’s starving to death? He gives away dimes to the Fords.”

Stephen was wild to tell Stella what had happened, but he was afraid this Balch might not like the poem as well as Roberts had; might not think it worth publishing, and she would be disappointed.

He would wait until he actually had it in print, if ever, and then show it to her.

He didn’t have to wait long. In less than a week he received by mail from New York a copy of the Standard, and in George Balch’s column was his verse with his name signed to it and a caption reading “To Stella⁠—A Maysville Minstrel Gives His Mrs. a Birthday Treat.”

For the first time in his career at the gas office, Stephen quit five minutes early and almost ran home. His wife was as excited as he had hoped she would be.

“But why does he call you a minstrel?” she asked. “He must have heard some way about that night at the Elks.”

Stephen told her the rest of the story⁠—how Roberts had predicted that the poem would attract the attention of magazine editors and create a demand for his verses at a dollar a line. And he confessed that he had other poems all ready to send when the call came.

He had brought two of them home from the office and he read them aloud for her approval:

1. The Lackawanna Railroad.

The Lackawanna Railroad where does it go?
It goes from Jersey City to Buffalo.
Some of the trains stop at Maysville but they are few
Most of them go right through
Except the 8:22
Going west but the 10:12 bound for Jersey City
That is the train we like the best
As it takes you to Jersey City
Where you can take a ferry or tube for New York City.
The Lackawanna runs many freights
Sometimes they run late
But that does not make so much difference with a freight
Except the people who have to wait for their freight.
Maysville people patronize the Interurban a specially the farmers
So the Interurban cuts into the business of the Lackawanna,
But if you are going to New York City or Buffalo
The Lackawanna is the way to go.
Will say in conclusion that we consider it an honor
That the City of Maysville is on the Lackawanna.

2. The Gas Business.

The Maysville Gas Co. has eight hundred meters
The biggest consumer in town is Mrs. Arnold Peters
Who owns the big house on Taylor Hill
And is always giving parties come who will.
Our collections amount to about $2,600.00 per month
Five percent discount if paid before the tenth of the month.
Mr. Townsend the owner considers people a fool
Who do not at least use gas for fuel.
As for lighting he claims it beats electricity
As electric storms often cut off the electricity
And when you have no light at night
And have to burn candles all night.
This is hardly right
A specially if you have company
Who will ask you what is the matter with the electricity.
So patronize the Gas Company which storms do not effect
And your friends will have no reason to object.

Stella raved over both the poems, but made a very practical suggestion.

“You are cheating yourself, dear,” she said. “The poem about the railroad, for instance, the way you have got it, it is nineteen lines, or nineteen dollars if they really pay a dollar a line. But it would be almost double the amount if you would fix the lines different.”

“How do you mean?”

She got a pencil and piece of paper and showed him:

The Lackawanna Railroad
Where does it go?
It goes from Jersey City
To Buffalo.

“You see,” she said, “you could cut most of the lines in half and make thirty-eight dollars instead of nineteen.”

But Stephen, with one eye on profit and the other on Art, could only increase the lines of “The Lackawanna” from nineteen to thirty and those of “The Gas Business” from seventeen to twenty-one.

Three days later a special delivery came for Stephen.

It said:

Dear Mr. Gale:

On September second there was a poem entitled “To Stella” in the New York Standard. The poem was signed by you. It impressed me greatly and if you have written or will write others as good, our magazine will be glad to buy them, paying you one dollar a line.

Please let me hear from you and send along any poems you may have on hand.

Sincerely,
Wallace James,
Editor, James’s Weekly,
New York City.

Stephen had never heard of James’s Weekly and did not notice that the letter was postmarked Philadelphia and written on the stationery of a Philadelphia hotel.

He rushed to his house, addressed and mailed the railroad and gas verses, and after a brief and excited conference with Stella, decided to resign his job.

Old Man Townsend, dropping into Maysville the following morning, heard the decision and was not a bit pleased. He realized he never could get anyone else to do Stephen’s work at Stephen’s salary.

“I’ll raise you to twenty-four dollars,” he said.

“I’m not asking for a raise. I’ve got to quit so I can devote all my time to my poetry.”

“Your poetry!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you mean to say you’re going to write poetry for a living?” asked the Old Man.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll starve to death.”

“Edgar Guest is still alive.”

“I don’t care if he is or not,” said the Old Man. “It’s the twelfth of the month and Hunter can tend to his job and yours both for a couple of weeks. If you want to come back at the end of that time, I’ll raise you to twenty-three dollars.”

It was Stephen’s intention to polish up some of his older poems and write one or two fresh ones so his supply would be ready for “James’s” demand.

But he found it next to impossible to write while the fate of the two verses he had sent in was uncertain and, deciding to leave the old manuscripts as they were, he was able to make only a feeble start on a new one:

The Delaware River.

Not a great many miles from Maysville is the Delaware River
But there is no fish in this part of the River.
The upper part of the River is narrow and shallow
But they claim it is much wider near Philadelphia.

On the twentieth the envelope containing “The Lackawanna Railroad” and “The Gas Business” was returned from New York. There were several inscriptions stamped and written on it, such as “Not Found” and “Not in Directory.”

And it dawned on Stephen that he was the victim of quite a joke.

To the accompaniment of Stella’s sobs, he proceeded to tear up all his manuscripts save “To Stella,” which she had hidden away where he couldn’t find it.

“Mr. Townsend came in on the eight-thirty interurban,” he said. “I’ll have to go see him.”

“All right,” said the Old Man when Stephen walked into the office. “I’ll take you back at your old salary, but don’t let’s have no more foolishness. Get out now and try and coax a little money out of that Harper woman. She ain’t paid a nickel for eight months.”

“I wanted to speak to you about those instantaneous water-heaters,” said Stephen.

“What about them?”

“I was going to advise you not to buy them. They eat up too much gas.”

“Thanks for your advice, but I ordered some from Roberts in Haines City. I told him to send half a dozen of them here,” said the Old Man.

“Will he be here to demonstrate them?” asked Stephen grimly.

“He said he would.”

“I hope he will.”

But even as he spoke, Stephen realized there was nothing he could do about it.

Ex Parte

Most always when a man leaves his wife, there’s no excuse in the world for him. She may have made whoop-whoop-whoopee with the whole ten commandments, but if he shows his disapproval to the extent of walking out on her, he will thereafter be a total stranger to all his friends excepting the two or three bums who will tour the night clubs with him so long as he sticks to his habits of paying for everything.

When a woman leaves her husband, she must have good and sufficient reasons. He drinks all the time, or he runs around, or he doesn’t give her any money, or he uses her as the heavy bag in his home gymnasium work. No more is he invited to his former playmates’ houses for dinner and bridge. He is an outcast just the same as if he had done the deserting. Whichever way it happens, it’s his fault. He can state his side of the case if he wants to, but there is nobody around listening.

Now I claim to have a little chivalry in me, as well as a little pride. So in spite of the fact that Florence has broadcast her grievances over the red and blue network both, I intend to keep mine to myself till death do me part.

But after I’m gone, I want some of my old pals to know that this thing wasn’t as lopsided as she has made out, so I will write the true story, put it in an envelope with my will and appoint Ed Osborne executor. He used to be my best friend and would be yet if his wife would let him. He’ll have to read all my papers, including this, and he’ll tell everybody else about it and maybe they’ll be a little sorry that they treated me like an open manhole.

(Ed, please don’t consider this an attempt to be literary. You know I haven’t written for publication since our days on The Crimson and White, and I wasn’t so hot then. Just look on it as a statement of facts. If I were still alive, I’d take a bible oath that nothing herein is exaggerated. And whatever else may have been my imperfections, I never lied save to shield a woman or myself.)

Well, a year ago last May I had to go to New York. I called up Joe Paxton and he asked me out to dinner. I went, and met Florence. She and Marjorie Paxton had been at school together and she was there for a visit. We fell in love with each other and got engaged. I stopped off in Chicago on the way home, to see her people. They liked me all right, but they hated to have Florence marry a man who lived so far away. They wanted to postpone her leaving home as long as possible and they made us wait till April this year.

I had a room at the Belden and Florence and I agreed that when we were married, we would stay there awhile and take our time about picking out a house. But the last day of March, two weeks before the date of our wedding, I ran into Jeff Cooper and he told me his news, that the Standard Oil was sending him to China in some big job that looked permanent.

“I’m perfectly willing to go,” he said. “So is Bess. It’s a lot more money and we think it will be an interesting experience. But here I am with a brand-new place on my hands that cost me $45,000, including the furniture, and no chance to sell it in a hurry except at a loss. We were just beginning to feel settled. Otherwise we would have no regrets about leaving this town. Bess hasn’t any real friends here and you’re the only one I can claim.”

“How much would you take for your house, furniture and all?” I asked him.

“I’d take a loss of $5,000,” he said. “I’d take $40,000 with the buyer assuming my mortgage of $15,000, held by the Phillips Trust and Mortgage Company in Seattle.”

I asked him if he would show me the place. They had only been living there a month and I hadn’t had time to call. He said, what did I want to look at it for and I told him I would buy it if it looked OK. Then I confessed that I was going to be married; you know I had kept it a secret around here.

Well, he took me home with him and he and Bess showed me everything, all new and shiny and a bargain if you ever saw one. In the first place, there’s the location, on the best residential street in town, handy to my office and yet with a whole acre of ground, and a bed of cannas coming up in the front yard that Bess had planted when they bought the property last fall. As for the house, I always liked stucco, and this one is built! You could depend on old Jeff to see to that.

But the furniture was what decided me. Jeff had done the smart thing and ordered the whole works from Wolfe Brothers, taking their advice on most of the stuff, as neither he nor Bess knew much about it. Their total bill, furnishing the entire place, rugs, beds, tables, chairs, everything, was only $8,500, including a mahogany upright player-piano that they ordered from Seattle. I had my mother’s old mahogany piano in storage and I kind of hoped Jeff wouldn’t want me to buy this, but it was all or nothing, and with a bargain like that staring me in the face, I didn’t stop to argue, not when I looked over the rest of the furniture and saw what I was getting.

The living-room had, and still has, three big easy chairs and a couch, all overstuffed, as they call it, to say nothing of an Oriental rug that alone had cost $500. There was a long mahogany table behind the couch, with lamps at both ends in case you wanted to lie down and read. The dining-room set was solid mahogany⁠—a table and eight chairs that had separated Jeff from $1,000.

The floors downstairs were all oak parquet. Also he had blown himself to an oak mantelpiece and oak woodwork that must have run into heavy dough. Jeff told me what it cost him extra, but I don’t recall the amount.

The Coopers were strong for mahogany and wanted another set for their bedroom, but Jake Wolfe told them it would get monotonous if there was too much of it. So he sold them five pieces⁠—a bed, two chairs, a chiffonier and a dresser⁠—of some kind of wood tinted green, with flowers painted on it. This was $1,000 more, but it certainly was worth it. You never saw anything prettier than that bed when the lace spreads were on.

Well, we closed the deal and at first I thought I wouldn’t tell Florence, but would let her believe we were going to live at the Belden and then give her a surprise by taking her right from the train to our own home. When I got to Chicago, though, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I gave it away and it was I, not she, that had the surprise.

Instead of acting tickled to death, as I figured she would, she just looked kind of funny and said she hoped I had as good taste in houses as I had in clothes. She tried to make me describe the house and the furniture to her, but I wouldn’t do it. To appreciate a layout like that, you have to see it for yourself.

We were married and stopped in Yellowstone for a week on our way here. That was the only really happy week we had together. From the minute we arrived home till she left for good, she was a different woman than the one I thought I knew. She never smiled and several times I caught her crying. She wouldn’t tell me what ailed her and when I asked if she was just homesick, she said no and choked up and cried some more.

You can imagine that things were not as I expected they would be. In New York and in Chicago and Yellowstone, she had had more life than any girl I ever met. Now she acted all the while as if she were playing the title role at a funeral.

One night late in May the telephone rang. It was Mrs. Dwan and she wanted Florence. If I had known what this was going to mean, I would have slapped the receiver back on the hook and let her keep on wanting.

I had met Dwan a couple of times and had heard about their place out on the Turnpike. But I had never seen it or his wife either.

Well, it developed that Mildred Dwan had gone to school with Florence and Marjorie Paxton, and she had just learned from Marjorie that Florence was my wife and living here. She said she and her husband would be in town and call on us the next Sunday afternoon.

Florence didn’t seem to like the idea and kind of discouraged it. She said we would drive out and call on them instead. Mrs. Dwan said no, that Florence was the newcomer and it was her (Mrs. Dwan’s) first move. So Florence gave in.

They came and they hadn’t been in the house more than a minute when Florence began to cry. Mrs. Dwan cried, too, and Dwan and I stood there first on one foot and then the other, trying to pretend we didn’t know the girls were crying. Finally, to relieve the tension, I invited him to come and see the rest of the place. I showed him all over and he was quite enthusiastic. When we returned to the living-room, the girls had dried their eyes and were back in school together.

Florence accepted an invitation for one-o’clock dinner a week from that day. I told her, after they had left, that I would go along only on condition that she and our hostess would both control their tear-ducts. I was so accustomed to solo sobbing that I didn’t mind it anymore, but I couldn’t stand a duet of it either in harmony or unison.

Well, when we got out there and had driven down their private lane through the trees and caught a glimpse of their house, which people around town had been talking about as something wonderful, I laughed harder than any time since I was single. It looked just like what it was, a reorganized barn. Florence asked me what was funny, and when I told her, she pulled even a longer face than usual.

“I think it’s beautiful,” she said.

Tie that!

I insisted on her going up the steps alone. I was afraid if the two of us stood on the porch at once, we’d fall through and maybe founder before help came. I warned her not to smack the knocker too hard or the door might crash in and frighten the horses.

“If you make jokes like that in front of the Dwans,” she said, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

“I’d forgotten you ever did,” said I.

I was expecting a hostler to let us in, but Mrs. Dwan came in person.

“Are we late?” said Florence.

“A little,” said Mrs. Dwan, “but so is dinner. Helga didn’t get home from church till half past twelve.”

“I’m glad of it,” said Florence. “I want you to take me all through this beautiful, beautiful house right this minute.”

Mrs. Dwan called her husband and insisted that he stop in the middle of mixing a cocktail so he could join us in a tour of the beautiful, beautiful house.

“You wouldn’t guess it,” said Mrs. Dwan, “but it used to be a barn.”

I was going to say I had guessed it. Florence gave me a look that changed my mind.

“When Jim and I first came here,” said Mrs. Dwan, “we lived in an ugly little rented house on Oliver Street. It was only temporary, of course; we were just waiting till we found what we really wanted. We used to drive around the country Saturday afternoons and Sundays, hoping we would run across the right sort of thing. It was in the late fall when we first saw this place. The leaves were off the trees and it was visible from the Turnpike.

“ ‘Oh, Jim!’ I exclaimed. ‘Look at that simply gorgeous old barn! With those wide shingles! And I’ll bet you it’s got hand-hewn beams in that middle, main section.’ Jim bet me I was wrong, so we left the car, walked up the driveway, found the door open and came brazenly in. I won my bet as you can see.”

She pointed to some dirty old rotten beams that ran across the living-room ceiling and looked as if five or six generations of rats had used them for gnawing practise.

“They’re beautiful!” said Florence.

“The instant I saw them,” said Mrs. Dwan, “I knew this was going to be our home!”

“I can imagine!” said Florence.

“We made inquiries and learned that the place belonged to a family named Taylor,” said Mrs. Dwan. “The house had burned down and they had moved away. It was suspected that they had started the fire themselves, as they were terribly hard up and it was insured. Jim wrote to old Mr. Taylor in Seattle and asked him to set a price on the barn and the land, which is about four acres. They exchanged several letters and finally Mr. Taylor accepted Jim’s offer. We got it for a song.”

“Wonderful!” said Florence.

“And then, of course,” Mrs. Dwan continued, “we engaged a house-wrecking company to tear down the other four sections of the barn⁠—the stalls, the cowshed, the tool-shed, and so forth⁠—and take them away, leaving us just this one room. We had a man from Seattle come and put in these old pine walls and the flooring, and plaster the ceiling. He was recommended by a friend of Jim’s and he certainly knew his business.”

“I can see he did,” said Florence.

“He made the hayloft over for us, too, and we got the wings built by day-labor, with Jim and me supervising. It was so much fun that I was honestly sorry when it was finished.”

“I can imagine!” said Florence.

Well, I am not very well up in Early American, which was the name they had for pretty nearly everything in the place, but for the benefit of those who are not on terms with the Dwans I will try and describe from memory the objets d’art they bragged of the most and which brought forth the loudest squeals from Florence.

The living-room walls were brown bare boards without a picture or scrap of wallpaper. On the floor were two or three “hooked rugs,” whatever that means, but they needed five or six more of them, or one big carpet, to cover up all the knots in the wood. There was a maple “lowboy”; a “dough-trough” table they didn’t have space for in the kitchen; a pine “stretcher” table with sticks connecting the four legs near the bottom so you couldn’t put your feet anywhere; a “Dutch” chest that looked as if it had been ordered from the undertaker by one of Singer’s Midgets, but he got well; and some “Windsor” chairs in which the only position you could get comfortable was to stand up behind them and lean your elbows on their back.

Not one piece that matched another, and not one piece of mahogany anywhere. And the ceiling, between the beams, had apparently been plastered by a workman who was that way, too.

“Some day soon I hope to have a piano,” said Mrs. Dwan. “I can’t live much longer without one. But so far I haven’t been able to find one that would fit in.”

“Listen,” I said. “I’ve got a piano in storage that belonged to my mother. It’s a mahogany upright and not so big that it wouldn’t fit in this room, especially when you get that ‘trough’ table out. It isn’t doing me any good and I’ll sell it to you for $250. Mother paid $1,250 for it new.”

“Oh, I couldn’t think of taking it!” said Mrs. Dwan.

“I’ll make it $200 even just because you’re a friend of Florence’s,” I said.

“Really, I couldn’t!” said Mrs. Dwan.

“You wouldn’t have to pay for it all at once,” I said.

“Don’t you see,” said Florence, “that a mahogany upright piano would be a perfect horror in here? Mildred wouldn’t have it as a gift, let alone buy it. It isn’t in the period.”

“She could get it tuned,” I said.

The answer to this was, “I’ll show you the upstairs now and we can look at the dining-room later on.”

We were led to the guest-chamber. The bed was a maple four-poster, with pineapple posts, and a “tester” running from pillar to post. You would think a “tester” might be a man that went around trying out beds, but it’s really a kind of frame that holds a canopy over the bed in case it rains and the roof leaks. There was a quilt made by Mrs. Dwan’s great-grandmother, Mrs. Anthony Adams, in 1859, at Lowell, Mass. How is that for a memory?

“This used to be the hayloft,” said Mrs. Dwan.

“You ought to have left some of the hay so the guests could hit it,” I said.

The dressers, or chests of drawers, and the chairs were all made of maple. And the same in the Dwans’ own room; everything maple.

“If you had maple in one room and mahogany in the other,” I said, “people wouldn’t get confused when you told them that so-and-so was up in Maple’s room.”

Dwan laughed, but the women didn’t.

The maid hollered up that dinner was ready.

“The cocktails aren’t ready,” said Dwan.

“You will have to go without them,” said Mrs. Dwan. “The soup will be cold.”

This put me in a great mood to admire the “sawbuck” table and the “slat back” chairs, which were evidently the chef d’oeuvre and the pièce de résistance of the chez Dwan.

“It came all the way from Pennsylvania,” said Mildred, when Florence’s outcries, brought on by her first look at the table, had died down. “Mother picked it up at a little place near Stroudsburg and sent it to me. It only cost $550, and the chairs were $45 apiece.”

“How reasonable!” exclaimed Florence.

That was before she had sat in one of them. Only one thing was more unreasonable than the chairs, and that was the table itself, consisting of big planks nailed together and laid onto a railroad tie, supported underneath by a whole forest of crosspieces and beams. The surface was as smooth on top as the trip to Catalina Island and all around the edges, great big divots had been taken out with some blunt instrument, probably a bayonet. There were stains and scorch marks that Florence fairly crowed over, but when I tried to add to the general ensemble by laying a lighted cigarette right down beside my soup-plate, she and both the Dwans yelled murder and made me take it off.

They planted me in an end seat, a location just right for a man who had stretched himself across a railway track and had both legs cut off at the abdomen. Not being that kind of man, I had to sit so far back that very few of my comestibles carried more than halfway to their target.

After dinner I was all ready to go home and get something to eat, but it had been darkening up outdoors for half an hour and now such a storm broke that I knew it was useless trying to persuade Florence to make a start.

“We’ll play some bridge,” said Dwan, and to my surprise he produced a card-table that was nowhere near “in the period.”

At my house there was a big center chandelier that lighted up a bridge game no matter in what part of the room the table was put. But here we had to waste forty minutes moving lamps and wires and stands and when they were all fixed, you could tell a red suit from a black suit, but not a spade from a club. Aside from that and the granite-bottomed “Windsor” chairs and the fact that we played “families” for a cent a point and Florence and I won $12 and didn’t get paid, it was one of the pleasantest afternoons I ever spent gambling.

The rain stopped at five o’clock and as we splashed through the puddles of Dwan’s driveway, I remarked to Florence that I had never known she was such a kidder.

“What do you mean?” she asked me.

“Why, your pretending to admire all that junk,” I said.

“Junk!” said Florence. “That is one of the most beautifully furnished homes I have ever seen!”

And so far as I can recall, that was her last utterance in my presence for six nights and five days.

At lunch on Saturday I said: “You know I like the silent drama one evening a week, but not twenty-four hours a day every day. What’s the matter with you? If it’s laryngitis, you might write me notes.”

“I’ll tell you what’s the matter!” she burst out. “I hate this house and everything in it! It’s too new! Everything shines! I loathe new things! I want a home like Mildred’s, with things in it that I can look at without blushing for shame. I can’t invite anyone here. It’s too hideous. And I’ll never be happy here a single minute as long as I live!”

Well, I don’t mind telling that this kind of got under my skin. As if I hadn’t intended to give her a pleasant surprise! As if Wolfe Brothers, in business thirty years, didn’t know how to furnish a home complete! I was pretty badly hurt, but I choked it down and said, as calmly as I could:

“If you’ll be a little patient, I’ll try to sell this house and its contents for what I paid for it and them. It oughtn’t to be much trouble; there are plenty of people around who know a bargain. But it’s too bad you didn’t confess your barn complex to me long ago. Only last February, old Ken Garrett had to sell his establishment and the men who bought it turned it into a garage. It was a livery-stable which I could have got for the introduction of a song, or maybe just the vamp. And we wouldn’t have had to spend a nickel to make it as nice and comfortable and homey as your friend Mildred’s dump.”

Florence was on her way upstairs before I had finished my speech.

I went down to Earl Benham’s to see if my new suit was ready. It was and I put it on and left the old one to be cleaned and pressed.

On the street I met Harry Cross.

“Come up to my office,” he said. “There’s something in my desk that may interest you.”

I accepted his invitation and from three different drawers he pulled out three different quart bottles of Early American rye.

Just before six o’clock I dropped in Kane’s store and bought myself a pair of shears, a blow torch and an ax. I started home, but stopped among the trees inside my front gate and cut big holes in my coat and trousers. Alongside the path to the house was a sizable mud puddle. I waded in it. And I bathed my gray felt hat.

Florence was sitting on the floor of the living-room, reading. She seemed a little upset by my appearance.

“Good heavens! What’s happened?”

“Nothing much,” said I. “I just didn’t want to look too new.”

“What are those things you’re carrying?”

“Just a pair of shears, a blow torch and an ax. I’m going to try and antique this place and I think I’ll begin on the dining-room table.”

Florence went into her scream, dashed upstairs and locked herself in. I went about my work and had the dinner-table looking pretty Early when the maid smelled fire and rushed in. She rushed out again and came back with a pitcher of water. But using my vest as a snuffer, I had had the flames under control all the while and there was nothing for her to do.

“I’ll just nick it up a little with this ax,” I told her, “and by the time I’m through, dinner ought to be ready.”

“It will never be ready as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “I’m leaving just as soon as I can pack.”

And Florence had the same idea⁠—vindicating the old adage about great minds.

I heard the front door slam and the back door slam, and I felt kind of tired and sleepy, so I knocked off work and went up to bed.

That’s my side of the story, Eddie, and it’s true so help me my bootlegger. Which reminds me that the man who sold Harry the rye makes this town once a week, or did when this was written. He’s at the Belden every Tuesday from nine to six and his name is Mike Farrell.

Old Folks’ Christmas

Tom and Grace Carter sat in their living-room on Christmas Eve, sometimes talking, sometimes pretending to read and all the time thinking things they didn’t want to think. Their two children, Junior, aged nineteen, and Grace, two years younger, had come home that day from their schools for the Christmas vacation. Junior was in his first year at the university and Grace attending a boarding-school that would fit her for college.

I won’t call them Grace and Junior anymore, though that is the way they had been christened. Junior had changed his name to Ted and Grace was now Caroline, and thus they insisted on being addressed, even by their parents. This was one of the things Tom and Grace the elder were thinking of as they sat in their living-room Christmas Eve.

Other university freshmen who had lived here had returned on the twenty-first, the day when the vacation was supposed to begin. Ted had telegraphed that he would be three days late owing to a special examination which, if he passed it, would lighten the terrific burden of the next term. He had arrived at home looking so pale, heavy-eyed and shaky that his mother doubted the wisdom of the concentrated mental effort, while his father secretly hoped the stuff had been nonpoisonous and would not have lasting effects. Caroline, too, had been behind schedule, explaining that her laundry had gone astray and she had not dared trust others to trace it for her.

Grace and Tom had attempted, with fair success, to conceal their disappointment over this delayed homecoming and had continued with their preparations for a Christmas that would thrill their children and consequently themselves. They had bought an imposing lot of presents, costing twice or three times as much as had been Tom’s father’s annual income when Tom was Ted’s age, or Tom’s own income a year ago, before General Motors’ acceptance of his new weatherproof paint had enabled him to buy this suburban home and luxuries such as his own parents and Grace’s had never dreamed of, and to give Ted and Caroline advantages that he and Grace had perforce gone without.

Behind the closed door of the music-room was the elaborately decked tree. The piano and piano bench and the floor around the tree were covered with beribboned packages of all sizes, shapes and weights, one of them addressed to Tom, another to Grace, a few to the servants and the rest to Ted and Caroline. A huge box contained a sealskin coat for Caroline, a coat that had cost as much as the Carters had formerly paid a year for rent. Even more expensive was a “set” of jewelry consisting of an opal brooch, a bracelet of opals and gold filigree, and an opal ring surrounded by diamonds.

Grace always had preferred opals to any other stone, but now that she could afford them, some inhibition prevented her from buying them for herself; she could enjoy them much more adorning her pretty daughter. There were boxes of silk stockings, lingerie, gloves and handkerchiefs. And for Ted, a three-hundred-dollar watch, a deluxe edition of Balzac, an expensive bag of shiny, new steel-shafted golf-clubs and the last word in portable phonographs.

But the big surprise for the boy was locked in the garage, a black Gorham sedan, a model more up to date and better-looking than Tom’s own year-old car that stood beside it. Ted could use it during the vacation if the mild weather continued and could look forward to driving it around home next spring and summer, there being a rule at the university forbidding undergraduates the possession or use of private automobiles.

Every year for sixteen years, since Ted was three and Caroline one, it had been the Christmas Eve custom of the Carter’s to hang up their children’s stockings and fill them with inexpensive toys. Tom and Grace had thought it would be fun to continue the custom this year; the contents of the stockings⁠—a mechanical negro dancing doll, music-boxes, a kitten that meowed when you pressed a spot on her back, et cetera⁠—would make the “kids” laugh. And one of Grace’s first pronouncements to her returned offspring was that they must go to bed early so Santa Claus would not be frightened away.

But it seemed they couldn’t promise to make it so terribly early. They both had long-standing dates in town. Caroline was going to dinner and a play with Beatrice Murdock and Beatrice’s nineteen-year-old brother Paul. The latter would call for her in his car at half past six. Ted had accepted an invitation to see the hockey match with two classmates, Herb Castle and Bernard King. He wanted to take his father’s Gorham, but Tom told him untruthfully that the foot-brake was not working; Ted must be kept out of the garage till tomorrow morning.

Ted and Caroline had taken naps in the afternoon and gone off together in Paul Murdock’s stylish roadster, giving their word that they would be back by midnight or a little later and that tomorrow night they would stay home.

And now their mother and father were sitting up for them, because the stockings could not be filled and hung till they were safely in bed, and also because trying to go to sleep is a painful and hopeless business when you are kind of jumpy.

“What time is it?” asked Grace, looking up from the third page of a book that she had begun to “read” soon after dinner.

“Half past two,” said her husband. (He had answered the same question every fifteen or twenty minutes since midnight.)

“You don’t suppose anything could have happened?” said Grace.

“We’d have heard if there had,” said Tom.

“It isn’t likely, of course,” said Grace, “but they might have had an accident some place where nobody was there to report it or telephone or anything. We don’t know what kind of a driver the Murdock boy is.”

“He’s Ted’s age. Boys that age may be inclined to drive too fast, but they drive pretty well.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I’ve watched some of them drive.”

“Yes, but not all of them.”

“I doubt whether anybody in the world has seen every nineteen-year-old boy drive.”

“Boys these days seem so kind of irresponsible.”

“Oh, don’t worry! They probably met some of their young friends and stopped for a bite to eat or something.” Tom got up and walked to the window with studied carelessness. “It’s a pretty night,” he said. “You can see every star in the sky.”

But he wasn’t looking at the stars. He was looking down the road for headlights. There were none in sight and after a few moments he returned to his chair.

“What time is it?” asked Grace.

“Twenty-two of,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of three.”

“Your watch must have stopped. Nearly an hour ago you told me it was half past two.”

“My watch is all right. You probably dozed off.”

“I haven’t closed my eyes.”

“Well, it’s time you did. Why don’t you go to bed?”

“Why don’t you?”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“Neither am I. But honestly, Tom, it’s silly for you to stay up. I’m just doing it so I can fix the stockings, and because I feel so wakeful. But there’s no use of your losing your sleep.”

“I couldn’t sleep a wink till they’re home.”

“That’s foolishness! There’s nothing to worry about. They’re just having a good time. You were young once yourself.”

“That’s just it! When I was young, I was young.” He picked up his paper and tried to get interested in the shipping news.

“What time is it?” asked Grace.

“Five minutes of three.”

“Maybe they’re staying at the Murdocks’ all night.”

“They’d have let us know.”

“They were afraid to wake us up, telephoning.”

At three twenty a car stopped at the front gate.

“There they are!”

“I told you there was nothing to worry about.”

Tom went to the window. He could just discern the outlines of the Murdock boy’s roadster, whose lighting system seemed to have broken down.

“He hasn’t any lights,” said Tom. “Maybe I’d better go out and see if I can fix them.”

“No, don’t!” said Grace sharply. “He can fix them himself. He’s just saving them while he stands still.”

“Why don’t they come in?”

“They’re probably making plans.”

“They can make them in here. I’ll go out and tell them we’re still up.”

“No, don’t!” said Grace as before, and Tom obediently remained at the window.

It was nearly four when the car lights flashed on and the car drove away. Caroline walked into the house and stared dazedly at her parents.

“Heavens! What are you doing up?”

Tom was about to say something, but Grace forestalled him.

“We were talking over old Christmases,” she said. “Is it very late?”

“I haven’t any idea,” said Caroline.

“Where is Ted?”

“Isn’t he home? I haven’t seen him since we dropped him at the hockey place.”

“Well, you go right to bed,” said her mother. “You must be worn out.”

“I am, kind of. We danced after the play. What time is breakfast?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Oh, Mother, can’t you make it nine?”

“I guess so. You used to want to get up early on Christmas.”

“I know, but⁠—”

“Who brought you home?” asked Tom.

“Why, Paul Murdock⁠—and Beatrice.”

“You look rumpled.”

“They made me sit in the ‘rumple’ seat.”

She laughed at her joke, said good night and went upstairs. She had not come even within handshaking distance of her father and mother.

“The Murdocks,” said Tom, “must have great manners, making their guest ride in that uncomfortable seat.”

Grace was silent.

“You go to bed, too,” said Tom. “I’ll wait for Ted.”

“You couldn’t fix the stockings.”

“I won’t try. We’ll have time for that in the morning; I mean, later in the morning.”

“I’m not going to bed till you do,” said Grace.

“All right, we’ll both go. Ted ought not to be long now. I suppose his friends will bring him home. We’ll hear him when he comes in.”

There was no chance not to hear him when, at ten minutes before six, he came in. He had done his Christmas shopping late and brought home a package.

Grace was downstairs again at half past seven, telling the servants breakfast would be postponed till nine. She nailed the stockings beside the fireplace, went into the music-room to see that nothing had been disturbed and removed Ted’s hat and overcoat from where he had carefully hung them on the hall floor.

Tom appeared a little before nine and suggested that the children ought to be awakened.

“I’ll wake them,” said Grace, and went upstairs. She opened Ted’s door, looked, and softly closed it again. She entered her daughter’s room and found Caroline semiconscious.

“Do I have to get up now? Honestly I can’t eat anything. If you could just have Molla bring me some coffee. Ted and I are both invited to the Murdock’s for breakfast at half past twelve, and I could sleep for another hour or two.”

“But dearie, don’t you know we have Christmas dinner at one?”

“It’s a shame, Mother, but I thought of course our dinner would be at night.”

“Don’t you want to see your presents?”

“Certainly I do, but can’t they wait?”

Grace was about to go to the kitchen to tell the cook that dinner would be at seven instead of one, but she remembered having promised Signe the afternoon and evening off, as a cold, light supper would be all anyone wanted after the heavy midday meal.

Tom and Grace breakfasted alone and once more sat in the living-room, talking, thinking and pretending to read.

“You ought to speak to Caroline,” said Tom.

“I will, but not today. It’s Christmas.”

“And I intend to say a few words to Ted.”

“Yes, dear, you must. But not today.”

“I suppose they’ll be out again tonight.”

“No, they promised to stay home. We’ll have a nice cozy evening.”

“Don’t bet too much on that,” said Tom.

At noon the “children” made their entrance and responded to their parents’ salutations with almost the proper warmth. Ted declined a cup of coffee and he and Caroline apologized for making a “breakfast” date at the Murdocks’.

“Sis and I both thought you’d be having dinner at seven, as usual.”

“We’ve always had it at one o’clock on Christmas,” said Tom.

“I’d forgotten it was Christmas,” said Ted.

“Well, those stockings ought to remind you.”

Ted and Caroline looked at the bulging stockings.

“Isn’t there a tree?” asked Caroline.

“Of course,” said her mother. “But the stockings come first.”

“We’ve only a little time,” said Caroline. “We’ll be terribly late as it is. So can’t we see the tree now?”

“I guess so,” said Grace, and led the way into the music-room.

The servants were summoned and the tree stared at and admired.

“You must open your presents,” said Grace to her daughter.

“I can’t open them all now,” said Caroline. “Tell me which is special.”

The cover was removed from the huge box and Grace held up the coat.

“Oh, Mother!” said Caroline. “A sealskin coat!”

“Put it on,” said her father.

“Not now. We haven’t time.”

“Then look at this!” said Grace, and opened the case of jewels.

“Oh, Mother! Opals!” said Caroline.

“They’re my favorite stone,” said Grace quietly.

“If nobody minds,” said Ted, “I’ll postpone my personal investigation till we get back. I know I’ll like everything you’ve given me. But if we have no car in working order, I’ve got to call a taxi and catch a train.”

“You can drive in,” said his father.

“Did you fix the brake?”

“I think it’s all right. Come up to the garage and we’ll see.”

Ted got his hat and coat and kissed his mother goodbye.

“Mother,” he said, “I know you’ll forgive me for not having any presents for you and Dad. I was so rushed the last three days at school. And I thought I’d have time to shop a little when we got in yesterday, but I was in too much of a hurry to be home. Last night, everything was closed.”

“Don’t worry,” said Grace. “Christmas is for young people. Dad and I have everything we want.”

The servants had found their gifts and disappeared, expressing effusive Scandinavian thanks.

Caroline and her mother were left alone.

“Mother, where did the coat come from?”

“Lloyd and Henry’s.”

“They keep all kinds of furs, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind horribly if I exchanged this?”

“Certainly not, dear. You pick out anything you like, and if it’s a little more expensive, it won’t make any difference. We can go in town tomorrow or next day. But don’t you want to wear your opals to the Murdocks’?”

“I don’t believe so. They might get lost or something. And I’m not⁠—well, I’m not so crazy about⁠—”

“I think they can be exchanged, too,” said Grace. “You run along now and get ready to start.”

Caroline obeyed with alacrity, and Grace spent a welcome moment by herself.

Tom opened the garage door.

“Why, you’ve got two cars!” said Ted.

“The new one isn’t mine,” said Tom.

“Whose is it?”

“Yours. It’s the new model.”

“Dad, that’s wonderful! But it looks just like the old one.”

“Well, the old one’s pretty good. Just the same, yours is better. You’ll find that out when you drive it. Hop in and get started. I had her filled with gas.”

“I think I’d rather drive the old one.”

“Why?”

“Well, what I really wanted, Dad, was a Barnes sport roadster, something like Paul Murdock’s, only a different color scheme. And if I don’t drive this Gorham at all, maybe you could get them to take it back or make some kind of a deal with the Barnes people.”

Tom didn’t speak till he was sure of his voice. Then: “All right, son. Take my car and I’ll see what can be done about yours.”

Caroline, waiting for Ted, remembered something and called to her mother. “Here’s what I got for you and Dad,” she said. “It’s two tickets to Jolly Jane, the play I saw last night. You’ll love it!”

“When are they for?” asked Grace.

“Tonight,” said Caroline.

“But dearie,” said her mother, “we don’t want to go out tonight, when you promised to stay home.”

“We’ll keep our promise,” said Caroline, “but the Murdocks may drop in and bring some friends and we’ll dance and there’ll be music. And Ted and I both thought you’d rather be away somewhere so our noise wouldn’t disturb you.”

“It was sweet of you to do this,” said her mother, “but your father and I don’t mind noise as long as you’re enjoying yourselves.”

“It’s time anyway that you and Dad had a treat.”

“The real treat,” said Grace, “would be to spend a quiet evening here with just you two.”

“The Murdocks practically invited themselves and I couldn’t say no after they’d been so nice to me. And honestly, Mother, you’ll love this play!”

“Will you be home for supper?”

“I’m pretty sure we will, but if we’re a little late, don’t you and Dad wait for us. Take the seven-twenty so you won’t miss anything. The first act is really the best. We probably won’t be hungry, but have Signe leave something out for us in case we are.”

Tom and Grace sat down to the elaborate Christmas dinner and didn’t make much impression on it. Even if they had had any appetite, the sixteen-pound turkey would have looked almost like new when they had eaten their fill. Conversation was intermittent and related chiefly to Signe’s excellence as a cook and the mildness of the weather. Children and Christmas were barely touched on.

Tom merely suggested that on account of its being a holiday and their having theatre tickets, they ought to take the six-ten and eat supper at the Metropole. His wife said no; Ted and Caroline might come home and be disappointed at not finding them. Tom seemed about to make some remark, but changed his mind.

The afternoon was the longest Grace had ever known. The children were still absent at seven and she and Tom taxied to the train. Neither talked much on the way to town. As for the play, which Grace was sure to love, it turned out to be a rehash of Cradle Snatchers and Sex, retaining the worst features of each.

When it was over, Tom said: “Now I’m inviting you to the Cove Club. You didn’t eat any breakfast or dinner or supper and I can’t have you starving to death on a feast-day. Besides, I’m thirsty as well as hungry.”

They ordered the special table d’hôte and struggled hard to get away with it. Tom drank six highballs, but they failed to produce the usual effect of making him jovial. Grace had one highball and some kind of cordial that gave her a warm, contented feeling for a moment. But the warmth and contentment left her before the train was halfway home.

The living-room looked as if Von Kluck’s army had just passed through. Ted and Caroline had kept their promise up to a certain point. They had spent part of the evening at home, and the Murdocks must have brought all their own friends and everybody else’s, judging from the results. The tables and floors were strewn with empty glasses, ashes and cigarette stubs. The stockings had been torn off their nails and the wrecked contents were all over the place. Two sizable holes had been burnt in Grace’s favorite rug.

Tom took his wife by the arm and led her into the music-room.

“You never took the trouble to open your own present,” he said.

“And I think there’s one for you, too,” said Grace. “They didn’t come in here,” she added, “so I guess there wasn’t much dancing or music.”

Tom found his gift from Grace, a set of diamond studs and cuff buttons for festive wear. Grace’s present from him was an opal ring.

“Oh, Tom!” she said.

“We’ll have to go out somewhere tomorrow night, so I can break these in,” said Tom.

“Well, if we do that, we’d better get a good night’s rest.”

“I’ll beat you upstairs,” said Tom.

Contract

When the Sheltons were settled in their new home in the pretty little suburb of Linden, Mrs. Shelton was afraid nobody would call on them. Her husband was afraid somebody would. For ages Mrs. Shelton had bravely pretended to share her husband’s aversion to a social life; he hated parties that numbered more than four people and she had convincingly, so she thought, played the role of indifference while declining invitations she would have given her right eye to accept. Shelton had not been fooled much, but his dislike of “crowds” was so great that he seldom sought to relieve her martyrdom by insisting that they “go” somewhere.

This was during the first six years of their connubial existence, while it was necessary to live, rather economically, in town. Recently, however, Shelton’s magazine had advanced him to a position as associate editor and he was able, with the assistance of a benignant bond and mortgage company, to move into a house in Linden. Mrs. Shelton was sure suburbanites would be less tedious and unattractive than people they had known in the city and that it would not be fatal to her spouse to get acquainted and play around a little; anyway she could make friends with other wives, if they were willing, and perhaps enjoy afternoons of contract bridge, a game she had learned to love in three lessons. At the same time Shelton resolved to turn over a new leaf for his wife’s sake and give her to understand that he was open for engagements, secretly hoping, as I have hinted, that Linden’s denizens would treat them as if they were quarantined.

Mrs. Shelton’s fears were banished, and Shelton’s resolution put to a test, on an evening of their second week in the new house. They were dropped in on by Mr. and Mrs. Robert French who lived three blocks away. Mrs. French was pretty and Shelton felt inclined to like her until she remarked how fascinating it must be to edit a magazine and meet Michael Arlen. French had little to say, being occupied most of the while in a petting party with his mustache.

Mrs. Shelton showed Mrs. French her seven hooked rugs. Mrs. French said, “Perfectly darling!” seven times, inquired where each of the seven had been procured and did not listen to the answers. Shelton served highballs of eighty dollar Scotch he had bought from a Linden bootlegger. French commented favorably on the Scotch. Shelton thought it was terrible himself and that French was a poor judge, or was being polite, or was deceived by some flavor lurking in the mustache. Mrs. Shelton ran out of hooked rugs and Mrs. French asked whether they played contract. Mrs. Shelton hesitated from habit. Shelton swallowed hard and replied that they did, and liked it very much.

“That’s wonderful!” said Mrs. French. “Because the Wilsons have moved to Chicago. They were crazy about contract and we used to have a party every Wednesday night; two tables⁠—the Wilsons, ourselves, and the Dittmars and Camerons. It would be just grand if you two would take the Wilsons’ place. We have dinner at somebody’s house and next Wednesday is our turn. Could you come?”

Mrs. Shelton again hesitated and Shelton (to quote O. O. McIntyre) once more took the bull by the horns.

“It sounds fine!” he said. “We haven’t anything else on for that night, have we, dear?”

His wife uttered an astonished no and the Frenches left.

“What in the world has happened to you?” demanded Mrs. Shelton.

“Nothing at all. They seem like nice people and we’ve got to make friends here. Besides, it won’t be bad playing cards.”

“I don’t know about contract,” said Mrs. Shelton doubtfully. “You’ve got good card sense, and the only time you played it, you were all right. But I’m afraid I’ll make hideous mistakes.”

“Why should you? And even if you do, what of it?”

“These people are probably whizzes.”

“I don’t care if they’re Lenz’s mother-in-law.”

“But you’ll care if they criticise you.”

“Of course I will. People, and especially strangers, have no more right to criticise your bridge playing than your clothes or your complexion.”

“You know that’s silly. Bridge is a game.”

“Tennis is a game, too. But how often do you hear one tennis player say to another, ‘You played that like an old fool!’?”

“You’re not partners in tennis.”

“You are in doubles. However, criticism in bridge is not confined to partners. I’ve made bonehead plays in bridge (I’ll admit it), and been laughed at and scolded for them by opponents who ought to have kissed me. It’s a conviction of most bridge players, and some golf players, that God sent them into the world to teach. At that, what they tell you isn’t intended for your edification and future good. It’s just a way of announcing ‘I’m smart and you’re a lunkhead.’ And to my mind it’s a revelation of bad manners and bad sportsmanship. If I ask somebody what I did wrong, that’s different. But when they volunteer⁠—”

It was an old argument and Mrs. Shelton did not care to continue it. She knew she couldn’t win and she was sleepy. Moreover, she was so glad they were “going out” on her husband’s own insistence that she felt quite kindly toward him. She did hope, though, that their new acquaintances would suppress their educational complex if any.

On Wednesday night this hope was knocked for a double row of early June peas. Mrs. Shelton was elected to play with French, Mrs. Cameron and Mr. Dittmar. Mrs. Cameron was what is referred to as a statuesque blonde, but until you were used to her you could think of nothing but her nostrils, where she might easily have carried two after dinner mints. Mr. Dittmar appeared to be continuing to enjoy his meal long after it was over. And French had to deal one-handed to be sure his mustache remained loyal. These details distracted Mrs. Shelton’s mind to such an extent that she made a few errors and was called for them. But she didn’t mind that and her greatest distraction was caused by words and phrases that came from the other table, where her husband was engaged with Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Dittmar and the hostess.

The French cocktails had been poured from an eye-dropper and Shelton maintained perfect control of his temper and tongue. His polite reception of each criticism was taken as a confession of ignorance and a willingness to learn, and his three table-mates were quick to assume the role of faculty, with him as the entire student-body. He was stepped on even when he was dummy, his partner at the time, Mrs. Dittmar, attributing the loss of a trick to the manner in which he had laid out his cards, the light striking the nine of diamonds in such a way as to make her think it was an honor.

Mrs. Dittmar had married a man much younger than herself and was trying to disguise that fact by acting much younger than he. An eight-year-old child who is kind of backward hardly ever plays contract bridge; otherwise, if you didn’t look at Mrs. Dittmar and judged only by her antics and manner of speech, you would have thought Dittmar had spent the final hours of his courtship waiting outside the sub-primary to take her home. Mrs. French, when she was not picking flaws in Shelton’s play, sought to make him feel at home by asking intelligent questions about his work⁠—“Do the people who draw the illustrations read the stories first?” “Does H. C. Witwer talk Negro dialect all the time?” And “How old is Peter B. Kinney?” Cameron, from whom Work, Lenz, Whitehead and Shepard had plagiarized the game, was frankly uninterested in anything not connected with it. The stake was half a cent a point and the pains he took to see that his side’s score was correct or better proved all the rumors about the two Scotchmen.

Mrs. Shelton was well aware that her husband was the politest man in the world when sober; yet he truly amazed her that evening by his smiling acquiescence to all that was said. From the snatches she overheard, she knew he must be afire inside and it was really wonderful of him not to show it.

There was a time when Mrs. Dittmar passed and he passed and Cameron bid two spades. Mrs. French passed and Mrs. Dittmar bid three hearts, a denial of her partner’s spades if Shelton ever heard one. Shelton passed and Cameron went three hearts, which stood. Shelton held four spades to the nine, four diamonds to the king, two small hearts and the eight, six and five of clubs. He led the trey of diamonds. I am not broadcasting the battle play by play, but when it was over, “Oh, partner! Any other opening and we could have set them,” said Mrs. French.

“My! My! My! My! Leading away from a king!” gurgled the child-wife.

“That lead was all that saved us,” said Cameron.

They waited for Shelton to apologize and explain, all prepared to scrunch him if he did either.

“I guess I made a mistake,” he said.

“Haven’t you played much bridge?” asked Mrs. French.

“Evidently not enough,” he replied.

“It’s a game you can’t learn in a minute,” said Cameron.

“Never you mind!” said Mrs. Dittmar. “I’ve played contract ever since it came out, and Daddy still scolds me terribly for some of the things I do.”

Shelton presumed that Daddy was her husband. Her father must be dead or at least too feeble to scold.

There was a time when a hand was passed around.

“Oh! A goulash!” crowed Mrs. Dittmar.

“Do you play them, Mr. Shelton?” asked his hostess.

“Yes,” said Shelton.

“Mrs. Shelton,” called Mrs. Dittmar to the other table, “does your big man play goulashes?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Shelton.

“You’re sure you know what they are,” said Cameron to Shelton.

“I’ve played them often,” said the latter.

“A goulash,” said the hostess, “is where the hand is passed and then we all put our hands together like this and cut them and the dealer deals five around twice and then three. It makes crazy hands, but it’s thrilling.”

“And the bidding is different,” said Mrs. Dittmar, his partner at this stage. “Big mans musn’t get too wild.”

Shelton, who had dealt, looked at his hand and saw no temptation to get wild; at least, not any wilder than he was. He had the king, queen and jack of spades, four silly hearts, four very young clubs and two diamonds of no standing. He passed. Cameron bid three clubs and Mrs. Dittmar four diamonds. That was enough to make game (they already had thirty), and when Mrs. French went by, Shelton unhesitatingly did the same. So did Cameron. It developed that Mrs. Dittmar had the ace, king, jack, ten and another diamond. Cameron had none and Mrs. French reeked with them. The bidder was set two. Her honors counted one hundred and the opponents’ net profit was two hundred, Mrs. Dittmar being vulnerable, or “venerable,” as Mrs. French laughingly, but not very tactfully, called it.

Cameron lighted into Mrs. French for not doubling Mrs. Dittmar and Mrs. French observed that she guessed she knew what she was doing. Shelton hoped this would develop into a brawl, but it was forgotten when Mrs. Dittmar asked him querulously why he had not shown her his spades, a suit of which she had held the ace, ten to five.

“We’re lucky, partner,” said Mrs. French to Cameron. “They could have made four spades like a breeze.”

“I’d have lost only the ace of hearts and queen of diamonds,” said Mrs. Dittmar, doubtless figuring that the maid would have disposed of her two losing clubs when she swept next morning.

“In this game, everything depends on the bidding,” said Mrs. French to Shelton. “You must give your partner all the information you can.”

“Don’t coach him!” said Cameron with an exasperating laugh. “He’s treating us pretty good.”

“Maybe,” said Mrs. French to Mrs. Dittmar, “he would have shown you his spades if you had bid three diamonds instead of four.”

“But you see,” said Mrs. Dittmar, “we needed four for game and I didn’t know if he’d think of that.”

And there was a time when Shelton bid a fair no trump and was raised to three by his partner, Cameron, who held king, queen, ten to five hearts and the ace of clubs for a reentry. The outstanding hearts were bunched in Mrs. French’s hand, Shelton himself having the lone ace. After he had taken a spade trick, led his ace of hearts and then a low club to make all of dummy’s hearts good (which turned out to be impossible), he put over two deep sea finesses of the eight and nine of diamonds from the dummy hand, made four odd and heard Cameron murmur, “A fool for luck!”

“My! What a waste of good hearts!” said Mrs. Dittmar, ignoring the facts that they weren’t good hearts, that if he had continued with them, Mrs. French would have taken the jack and led to her (Mrs. Dittmar’s) four good spade tricks, and that with the ace of clubs gone, Shelton couldn’t have got back in the dummy’s hands with a pass from Judge Landis.

At the close of a perfect evening, the Sheltons were six dollars ahead and invited to the Dittmars’ the following Wednesday. Mrs. Shelton expected an explosion on the way home, but was agreeably disappointed. Shelton seemed quite cheerful. He had a few jocose remarks to make about their new pals, but gave the impression that he had enjoyed himself. Knowing him as she did, she might have suspected that a plot was hatching in his mind. However, his behavior was disarming and she thought he had at last found a “crowd” he didn’t object to, that they would now be neighborly and gregarious for the first time in their married life.

On the train from the city Friday afternoon, Shelton encountered Gale Bartlett, the writer, just returned from abroad. Bartlett was one of the star contributors to Shelton’s magazine and it was he who had first suggested Linden when Shelton was considering a suburban home. He had a place there himself though most of his time was spent in Paris and he was back now for only a brief stay.

“How do you like it?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Shelton.

“Whom have you met?”

“Three married couples, the Camerons, the Frenches and the Dittmars.”

“Good Lord!” said Bartlett. “I don’t know the Dittmars but otherwise you’re slumming. Cameron and French are new rich who probably made their money in a hotel washroom. I think they met their wives on an excursion to Far Rockaway. How did you happen to get acquainted?”

“The Frenches called on us, and Wednesday night we went to their house for dinner and bridge.”

“Bridge!”

“Contract bridge at that.”

“Well, maybe Dittmar’s a contractor. But from what I’ve seen of the Frenches and Camerons, they couldn’t even cut the cards without smearing them with shoe polish. You break loose from them before they forget themselves and hand you a towel.”

“We’re going to the Dittmars’ next Wednesday night.”

“Either call it off or keep it under your hat. I’ll introduce you to people that are people! I happen to know them because my wife went to their sisters’ boarding school. I’ll see that you get the entrée and then you can play bridge with bridge players.”

Shelton brightened at the prospect. He knew his wife was too kindhearted to wound the Camerons et al. by quitting them cold and it was part of his scheme, all of it in fact, to make them do the quitting. With the conviction that she would be more than compensated by the promised acquaintance of people they both could really like, he lost what few scruples he had against separating her from people who sooner or later would drive him to the electric chair. The thing must be done at the first opportunity, next Wednesday at the Dittmars’. It would be kind of fun, but unpleasant, too, the unpleasant part consisting in the mental anguish it would cause her and the subsequent days, not many he hoped, when she wouldn’t be speaking to him at all.

Fate, in the form of one of Mrs. Shelton’s two-day headaches, brought about the elimination of the unpleasant part. The ache began Wednesday afternoon and from past experience, she knew she would not be able to sit through a dinner or play cards that night. She telephoned her husband.

“Say we can’t come,” was his advice.

“But I hate to do that. They’ll think we don’t want to and they won’t ask us again. I wish you’d go, and maybe they could ask somebody in to take my place. I don’t suppose you’d consider that, would you?”

Shelton thought it over a moment and said yes, he would.

Before retiring to her darkened room and her bed, Mrs. Shelton called up Mrs. Dittmar. Mrs. Dittmar expressed her sympathy in baby talk and said it was all right for Mr. Shelton to come alone; it was more than all right, Mrs. Shelton gathered, because Mrs. Dittmar’s brother was visiting her and they would be just eight.

Shelton, who had learned long ago that his wife did not want him around when her head was threatening to burst open, stayed in town until six o’clock, preparing himself for the evening’s task with liberal doses of the business manager’s week-old rye. He was not going to be tortured by any drought such as he had endured at the Frenches’. He arrived at the party in grand shape and, to his surprise, was plied with cocktails potent enough to keep him on edge.

Mrs. Dittmar’s brother (she called him her dreat, big B’udder) was an amateur jazz pianist. Or rather, peeanist. He was proving his amateur standing when Shelton got there and something in the way he treated “Rhapsody in Blue” made Shelton resolve to open fire at once. His eagerness was increased when, on the way to the dining room, Mrs. Dittmar observed that her b’udder had not played much contract “either” and she must be sure and not put them (Shelton and B’udder) at the same table, for they might draw each other as partners and that would hardly be fair.

Dinner began and so did Shelton.

“A week ago,” he said, “you folks criticised my bridge playing.”

The Camerons, Dittmars and Frenches looked queer.

“You didn’t mind it, I hope,” said Mrs. Dittmar. “We were just trying to teach you.”

“I didn’t mind it much,” said Shelton. “But I was just wondering whether it was good manners for one person to point out another person’s mistakes when the other person didn’t ask to have them pointed out.”

“Why,” said Cameron, “when one person don’t know as much about a thing as other people, it’s their duty to correct him.”

“You mean just in bridge,” said Shelton.

“I mean in everything,” said Cameron.

“And the person criticised or corrected has no right to resent it?” said Shelton.

“Certainly not!”

“Does everybody here agree with that?”

“Yes,” “Of course,” “Sure,” came from the others.

“Well, then,” said Shelton, “I think it’s my duty to tell you, Mr. Cameron, that soup should be dipped away from you and not toward you.”

There was a puzzled silence, then a laugh, to which Cameron contributed feebly.

“If that’s right I’m glad to know it, and I certainly don’t resent your telling me,” he said.

“It looks like Mr. Shelton was out for revenge,” said Mrs. Cameron.

“And I must inform you, Mrs. Cameron,” said Shelton, “that ‘like’ is not a conjunction. ‘It looks as if Mr. Shelton were out for revenge’ would be the correct phrasing.”

A smothered laugh at the expense of Mrs. Cameron, whose embarrassment showed itself in a terrifying distension of the nostrils. Shelton decided not to pick on her again.

“Let’s change the subject,” said Mrs. Dittmar. “Mr. Shelton’s a mean, bad man and he’ll make us cwy.”

“That verb,” said Shelton, “is cry, not cwy. It is spelled c-r-y.”

“Tell a story, Bob,” said Mrs. French to her husband.

“Well, let’s see,” said French. “I’ll tell the one about the Scotchman and the Jew playing golf. Stop me if anybody’s heard it.”

“I have, for one,” said Shelton.

“Maybe the others haven’t,” said French.

“They must have been unconscious for years,” said Shelton. “But go ahead and tell it. I knew I couldn’t stop you.”

French went ahead and told it, and the others laughed as a rebuke to Shelton.

Cameron wanted things understood.

“You see,” he said, “the reason we made a few little criticisms of your bridge game was because we judged you were a new beginner.”

“I think ‘beginner’ is enough, without the ‘new,’ ” said Shelton. “I don’t know any old beginners excepting, perhaps, people old in years who are doing something or taking up something for the first time. But probably you judged I was a beginner at bridge because of mistakes I made, and you considered my apparent inexperience justified you in criticising me.”

“Yes,” said Cameron.

“Well,” said Shelton, “I judge from observing Mrs. French eat her fish that she is a new beginner at eating and I take the liberty of stating that the fork ought never to be conveyed to the mouth with the left hand, even by a left-handed eater. To be sure, these forks are salad forks, not fish forks, as Mrs. Dittmar may believe. But even salad forks, substituting for fish forks, must not be carried mouthward by the left hand.”

A storm was gathering and Mrs. Cameron sought to ward it off. She asked Mrs. Dittmar what had become of Peterson, a butler.

“He just up and left me last week,” said Mrs. Dittmar. “He was getting too impudent, though, and you can bet I didn’t object to him going.”

“ ‘His going,’ ” said Shelton. “A participle used as a substantive is modified in the possessive.”

Everyone pretended not to hear him.

“This new one is grand!” said Mrs. Dittmar. “I didn’t get up till nearly eleven o’clock this morning⁠—”

“Eleven!” exclaimed Mrs. French.

“Yes. Imagine!” said Mrs. Dittmar. “The itta girl just overslept herself, that’s all.”

“Mrs. Dittmar,” said Shelton, “I have no idea who the itta girl is, but I am interested in your statement that she overslept herself. Would it be possible for her, or any other itta girl, to oversleep somebody else? If it were a sleeping contest, I should think ‘outsleep’ would be preferable, but even so I can’t understand how a girl of any size outsleeps herself.”

The storm broke. Dittmar sprang to his feet.

“That’s enough, Shelton!” he bellowed. “We’ve had enough of this nonsense! More than enough!”

“I think,” said Shelton, “that the use of the word ‘enough’ three times in one short speech is more than enough. It grates on me to hear or read a word reiterated like that. I suggest as synonyms ‘plenty,’ ‘a sufficiency,’ ‘an abundance,’ ‘a plethora.’ ”

“Shut your smart aleck mouth and get out!”

“Carl! Carl! Mustn’t lose temper!” said Mrs. Dittmar. “Lose temper and can’t digest food. Daddy mustn’t lose temper and be sick all nighty night.”

“Shelton just thinks he’s funny,” said Cameron.

“He’s drunk and he’ll leave my house at once!” said Dittmar.

“If that’s the way you feel about it,” said Shelton.

He stopped on the way out to bid Mrs. Dittmar’s brother good night.

“Good night, B’udder old boy,” he said. “I’m glad to have met you, but sorry to learn you’re deaf.”

“Deaf! What makes you think I’m deaf?”

“I understood your sister to say you played the piano by ear.”

Knowing his wife would have taken something to make her sleep, and therefore not afraid of disturbing her, Shelton went home, got out a bottle of Linden Scotch and put the finishing touches on his bender. In the morning Mrs. Shelton was a little better and came to the breakfast table where he was fighting an egg.

“Well, what kind of time did you have?”

“Glorious! Much more exciting than at the Frenches’. Mrs. Dittmar’s brother is a piano playing fool.”

“Oh, wasn’t there any bridge then?”

“No. Just music and banter.”

“Maybe the brother can’t play contract and I spoiled the party by not going.”

“Oh, no. You didn’t spoil the party!”

“And do we go to the Camerons’ next Wednesday?”

“I don’t believe so. Nothing was said.”

They did go next Wednesday night to the palatial home of E. M. Pardee, a friend of Gale Bartlett’s and one of the real aristocrats of Linden. After dinner, Mrs. Pardee asked the Sheltons whether they played contract, and they said they did. The Pardees, not wishing to impoverish the young immigrants, refused to play “families.” They insisted on cutting and Shelton cut Mrs. Pardee.

“Oh, Mr. Shevlin,” she said at the end of the first hand, “why didn’t you lead me a club? You must watch the discards!”

Author’s Postscript: This story won’t get me anything but the money I am paid for it. Even if it be read by those with whom I usually play⁠—Mr. C., Mrs. W., Mr. T., Mrs. R. and the rest⁠—they will think I mean two other fellows and tear into me like wolves next time I bid a slam and make one odd.

Absentminded Beggar

This is about John Knowles. When his sister Charlotte was nine years old, she heard her mother tell Mrs. Prendergast that John, then aged twelve, was a wool-gatherer, just like his father before him. Mr. Knowles had died when Charlotte was too young to know or care what business he was in, but it kind of surprised her to learn that he had gathered wool for a living; she didn’t see how a man could make much money at that, yet her father had left his family fairly well off.

And it certainly puzzled her when her mother said John was in the same line, for John went to school every day, had a hard struggle keeping up and was obliged to study, with Mrs. Knowles’ help, evenings; or when Mrs. Knowles had company or went out to dinner, John sat in his room and wrote endless lines of poetry. Charlotte decided that Mrs. Prendergast was being kidded.

John’s teachers had nothing but words of praise for his efforts in English and English literature, and later for his English translations of Greek and Latin verse, but things like mathematics, history and physics interested him not at all and he was hardly ever able to answer a question in class. Sometimes he ignored the questions entirely, seeming not to have heard them. The women teachers were lenient with him because of his good looks and it was for this reason and the fact that he memorized whole pages of textbooks just before examination time that he was able to get by.

His absentmindedness seemed to grow worse and worse as the years passed and on his high-school commencement night he afforded his classmates much glee by appearing at the church in dinner shirt and trousers and a dark brown coat. A girl, Beth Beasley, who had loved him madly for four years, though he had never given her the slightest hope, grabbed him by the arm, led him away from the rest, explained the error in his costume and urged him to hurry home and get the right coat.

He went home and found Nora, the maid, who asked what on earth he was doing away from the church when it was just about time for the ceremonies to begin.

“There’s something the matter with my clothes,” he said.

“A hole in the trousers? I can patch it in a second.”

“No. It’s something about my coat. They told me it was the wrong color.”

“Of course!” exclaimed Nora. “You’ve got on brown when it ought to be black. Well, let’s hurry and find the black one. And you’ll have to run all the way back there.”

She found his black coat and left him in his room to make the change. He took off the brown coat, sat down on his bed a moment, mumbling what sounded like poetry; then rose and put the brown coat on again. Nora was not around to see him off.

He set out for the church once more, walking slowly. When he came to the little city park, he sat on one of the benches and mumbled more verse, much more verse. The ceremonies had been long under way and his mother and Charlotte, to say nothing of Beth Beasley, were panicky at his nonappearance among his classmates.

At length he got up and walked on. He came to a big arc-light and noted that he had not made the proper change in coats. “Well,” he said to himself, “it’s too late now. I’ll just go home and wait for Mother and Charlotte. They can tell me what happened.”

Mrs. Knowles and Charlotte appeared at half past ten and found him in the living-room, writing.

“Why, John! What was the matter with you? You’ve frightened us to death!”

“You oughtn’t to have left home ahead of me,” said John. “I was there on time, but that Beasley girl discovered I’d put on this coat with my black pants and white vest and insisted that I come home and change.”

“But you could have hurried home and changed and still have been only a little late.”

“I did hurry home and Nora hunted up the right coat for me, but she didn’t stay to see me put it on and I happened to get into this one again. I found it out just the other side of Wilson Park. And of course there was nothing to do then but come here and wait for you.”

“He’s crazy, Mother!” said Charlotte.

“I honestly believe he is! John, John, what am I going to do?”

“Well, you might tell me what went on.”

“Oh, there were prayers and singing and the baccalaureate address by Doctor Stetson. He was perfectly wonderful!”

“What did he say?”

“He told why this was called ‘Commencement’; that while you young men and women were ending your high-school careers, you were really just commencing life. And that’s why it’s called ‘Commencement.’ He was wonderful!”

“And they presented the diplomas,” said Charlotte. “I suppose Beth Beasley got yours.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s wild about you and that will give her an excuse to see you again soon.”

“Does she need an excuse?”

“Girls don’t like⁠—”

“Listen,” interrupted John. “Does this sound any good?”

He read from the scrap paper on which he had been writing:

But let no man who does not court quick death
So much as whisper, breathe the softest breath
Of scandal in the presence of De Setto
Against this sloe-eyed princess of the Ghetto,
Whose infidelity has been notorious,
But who, to him, is pure, angelic, glorious.
Not those who’ve given him for years their loyalty
Dare hint that she is something less than royalty.

“It sounds pretty,” said Mrs. Knowles. “What is it?”

“It’s a thing I’ve been working on for over eight months. It’s part of a libretto.”

“A libretto for what?”

“For an American grand opera.”

“Who’s going to write the music?”

“How can I tell? How can I know whether any of our great composers will like it? But when it is finished, which I will be in three or four months more, I intend to take it to New York and try to get somebody interested.”

“In three months you’ll be going to college.”

“Mother, I don’t want to go to college.”

“But I want you to, John. You must do this one thing for me. Your high-school diploma saves you the bother of an entrance examination and I understand that the university practically allows you your choice of subjects. You can take the literary course, which certainly won’t hurt your writing talent, and you can find time to work slowly and carefully on this opera thing until you have it perfect. You’ve got to do this, John. Your father wanted you to. He didn’t go himself and was always sorry. Please say you will.”

So John said he would and in mid-September he started for the station to catch the train for his state university, Michigan. His mother was not feeling well and neither she nor Charlotte, who had a tennis date with her boyfriend, Wallie Blair, came down to see him off. This proved unfortunate. There were two trains in the station and John, without questioning anyone, boarded the one westbound.

The conductor, taking his ticket, informed him that he was going in the wrong direction for Ann Arbor and advised him to get off at Niles and catch the next train east. John took the advice, but left his handbag and suitcase on the Chicago train. As he had also lost his trunk check, it was some days before he really got settled.

We will be brief about his one year in college. It was terribly hard to escape a complete flunk. It was harder to live alone. He never remembered to send out laundry until there was nothing left to wear. He was never able to concentrate on what went on in the classroom and never listened to a lecture. One day he wore one black shoe and one tan shoe, and four or five of his classmates followed him across the campus, reciting:

Diddle-diddle dumpling, my son Jack;
One shoe brown and one shoe black.

He was always late in paying for his board and lodging because his mind was on something else.

He went home at Christmas and for spring vacation, but forgot to take along certain garments in need of a woman’s tender care.

June came at last and John miraculously managed to get away from Ann Arbor with the loss of one spring overcoat, four shirts, a pair of shoes, half a dozen ties and the mates of a dozen socks. He had packed in a hurry because he knew that a co-ed living next door would be over to bid goodbye if he didn’t leave way ahead of time. She was not the only co-ed who had tried to become friendly. In spite of the occasional eccentricity of his attire, the girls were strong for him.

One day in July, John read in a Chicago paper that a famous American composer, whom we will call Deems Taylor, had sailed for Europe, where he intended to hide until he had written a libretto of his own.

John excitedly summoned his mother, asked her whether she could afford to send he abroad, told her why he wanted to go, gained her consent and bought his ticket for New York. This time Mrs. Knowles and Charlotte put him on the right train.

The paper had not given a hint of the composer’s hideaway excepting that it would be somewhere in Europe, but to John, Europe and Paris were synonymous and he went direct to the steamship offices to find out when the next boat left for Cherbourg. It was there that he learned he must have a passport, and at the passport office that it was necessary to supply a certificate of birth. It was five days before he had received the document from his mother, had got his passport and passage and was ready to go.

The boat was to leave at midnight and to make sure of being on time, John left his hotel and entered a taxi at half past ten. That is, he thought it was half past ten. His watch had always kept perfect time and he trusted it implicitly, paying no attention to the New York clocks. Actually it was half past eleven in New York, whatever it was in Michigan.

Moreover, the driver of the taxi he selected was very drunk. He did not help with the baggage; merely waited till John had put it in the car and then asked, “Where to, buddy?”

“The Cunard docks.”

“Oh, crossing the old pond, hey?”

“Yes.”

“America’s good enough for me.”

The starter wouldn’t work and the driver had to get out and crank. The first three attempts resulted in the crank slipping out of the cranker’s hand and the cranker sitting down abruptly on the pavement. In about twelve minutes he had the engine going.

“Now then, where did you say?”

“The Cunard Line.”

“Where is it at? What street? What pier?”

“I suppose I’ve got the number of the pier on my ticket, but it’s a lot of trouble to get it out. I don’t know what street it’s on, but you certainly ought to.”

“What do you want to see Europe for? Ain’t America good enough for you?”

“Come on; let’s go.”

“What’s the use of going if you don’t know where?”

“Ask somebody where the Cunard pier is.”

“Oh, we can do it easier than that. Let’s see, we’re at Seventieth Street. I’ll run over to the river and then cruise downtown till we see the sign. We can’t miss it that way.”

Well, the story goes that they got as far as Pier 97 and a big liner was just whistling its last warning, and by running as fast as he could with his heavy bags, John just managed to dash up the gangplank before they pulled it in.

In five minutes he learned from the purser that his watch was an hour slow, that he was aboard an Italian boat bound for Naples and that under no circumstances would the boat stop at any port in France and drop him off.

We know nothing of his experiences abroad excepting that he spent four months searching Paris for the composer and learned later that the latter had been in Naples all the time, but had completed his libretto and gone back to America; that this was such a blow to John that he stayed in Paris four years, drinking and writing French libretti, two of which were accepted, set to music and tried out at the Opéra Comique, where they were terrible flops; that he never found his trunk which had come to Cherbourg on the Cunard Line, and that he grew better-looking and more absentminded every day of his life.

He finally went to Havre and boarded a boat for home. Some of his friends said he probably thought the boat was bound for Finland. But the truth was that his mother had written to warn him that her investments had gone bad and she couldn’t send him any more money.

At the hometown station to meet him were his sister Charlotte and Beth Beasley, the latter squeezing his hand until it hurt and giving him a barrage of adoring looks that made him feel silly. He learned from Charlotte that his mother was bedridden and nearly broke. (She did not add that a great deal of the Knowles money had been burnt up in supplying her with sport cars, sport clothes, evening boyfriends, notably Wallie Blair.) It was, gowns and liquor with which to entertain her however, Miss Beasley’s car that they were using now, a car that couldn’t have cost under twelve thousand.

For Miss Beasley was the daughter of one of the town’s two wealthiest men, J. L. Beasley and H. N. Comerford. I mean she was J. L.’s daughter and not the daughter of both of them. H. N. had a daughter of his own, Irene. The Comerfords had moved to town a year or so after John Knowles’ departure, and Comerford and Beasley had established a brokerage office, with ticker service and a blackboard and everything. They couldn’t count the money they were making.

“Wait till you meet Irene Comerford,” said Charlotte. “She’s simply beautiful and all the men are crazy about her.”

“But you’d better not let yourself be,” said Beth. “She’s engaged to Sam Drake.”

“How long has Mother been sick?” asked John.

“Oh, since last winter.”

“Sam Drake is a regular Ed Wynn,” said Beth. “You’ll die!”

They were at the house. John jumped out, corralled his baggage and rushed in, forgetting to thank Miss Beasley for the ride.

“He’s just as absentminded as ever,” said Charlotte apologetically. “More so, I believe.”

“But oh! how wonderful-looking!” said Beth in a voice that contained a tear.

“You’ll come in a minute, won’t you?”

“Well, only for a minute, if you think I won’t be in the way. I’ve got to go for Daddy in a quarter of an hour.”

But if “Daddy” was really waiting for her, he waited two hours and a quarter, for Beth was not going to leave until she had seen John again, and John was upstairs a long time, talking to his mother.

When he came down, Charlotte went up, leaving Beth and him alone.

“Oh, John, it’s so heavenly to have you home again! We all missed you terribly, and I guess you know who missed you most.”

“Mother did seem glad to see me.”

“I wasn’t speaking of your mother.”

“Did you get over to Chicago during the opera season?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I was wondering if they did Taylor’s new opera there and how it went.”

“Did you fall in love with a French girl?”

“The only ones I saw were opera-singers and I’m not blind.”

“You’ll fall head over heels in love with Irene Comerford. She’s the most attractive girl I ever met.”

There seemed to be no reply to this.

“John, tell me who’s the most attractive girl you ever met.”

“I never thought about it.”

“Do you think I’m terribly unattractive?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Why, John! I believe you’re warming up.”

“A fella that’s lived in those Paris pensions four years won’t have any trouble warming up over here.”

“John, will you bring me an ashtray?”

He wasn’t listening and Miss Beasley had to get it herself. But when she sat down again, it was in a chair almost touching his and an instant later she was holding his hand.

“John, dear, I want to know all about you. I want to know your plans.”

“Well, we don’t seem to be overwhelmed with money, so my first plan is to get a job.”

“That’s just what I wanted you to say.”

“Why?”

“Because it gives me a chance to help you.”

“How?”

“Daddy wants a young man in his office and I’ll see that you’re the one.”

“Me in a broker’s office! I’d certainly go over big!”

“You could learn. Besides, the work wouldn’t be hard. It’s youth and good looks he wants more than anything else.”

“What for?”

“To attract women customers.”

“Listen, I’d drive more of them away than I’d attract. I can’t talk to women.”

“Oh, Johnny, not even to me?”

Charlotte had descended the stairs quietly and Beth, seeing her, released John’s hand.

“You caught us in the act, Charley,” said Beth, trying to be embarrassed. “But it isn’t really serious. Just a reunion of two good pals.” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, I must rush! Daddy will kill me! Goodbye, Charley. Goodbye, John. You might tell your sister our scheme.”

“What’s the matter with her?” asked John.

“You know perfectly well,” said Charlotte. “But tell me, what’s the scheme?”

“She said her father wanted a young man in his office and that she could get me the job.”

“Are you going to take it?”

“No! What do I know about business?”

“John, you’ve got to take it! It doesn’t make any difference what you know. They’ll tell you what they want you to do. And they’ll pay you good money. That’s what’s important right now. Mother is flat broke and she needs special food, special nursing; she’ll worry herself to death over our financial status. You can save her, John, and you’ve got to do it! It would be criminal of you not to. Oh, Johnny, please! Say you will!”

“I’ll think about it.”

“And I know you’ll think right. Now I’ve got to run over to Butch Harper’s and get some gin. Wallie’s coming in from the lake for dinner. And Irene Comerford and Sam Drake said they might stop for cocktails. It’s a shame Irene’s engaged, though I’m afraid she wouldn’t⁠—I mean she likes men who talk a lot and are funny. That’s what attracts her to Sam. He’s full of the devil, telling stories all the time or getting up practical jokes on somebody. If they should come before I get back, you’ll entertain them, won’t you?”

“I shouldn’t think she’d need any more entertainment than he can give her.”

“Well, don’t forget to laugh at his stories. And another thing, John. If Wallie should call up while I’m gone you take the message. And please, John, decide to accept that offer.”

John, left alone, sat and stared at the empty fireplace for five minutes. Then he went to a table, took a cigarette from the box and lighted it. A few puffs and he took another, igniting the second from the first. It surprised him to find he was smoking two at once and it embarrassed him when a young couple entered without knocking and caught him at it.

“And I thought I was a fiend!” said the man who John knew at once was Sam Drake.

“Honey,” he said to the girl, “you get sore at me lots of times for smoking one cigarette after another. What would you do if I smoked them in pairs?”

John was looking into the girl’s eyes. Beautiful! Attractive! What silly words!

She spoke: “I’m Irene Comerford and this is Mr. Sam Drake. I presume you are Mr. Knowles. Charlotte asked us in for a cocktail.”

John was dumb.

“Is Charlotte out?”

He managed to answer yes.

“Oh, then we’ll run along.”

“She told me you were to wait,” said John.

“Well, if we’re going to wait, let’s sit down and take a load off our dogs,” said Sam.

The callers seated themselves on the couch and John, after laying both his cigarettes on the tray, sat in a chair facing them. Never once did he take his eyes off Miss Comerford’s face.

“You’re just back from gay Paree, I hear,” said Sam.

“Yes.”

“How long were you over there?”

“I don’t know.”

Irene suppressed a smile at Sam’s evident discomfiture. Then she spoke again:

“I think Charlotte was right.”

She waited for John’s question, but he asked none.

“Beth and I were talking one day,” she continued, “and we were talking about men, for a change. We agreed that they were all alike. Charlotte said we would eat our words if we knew you as well as she did. Then Beth said that⁠—Well, I won’t make you blush.”

The telephone rang, but John made no move. It continued to ring and Irene asked whether he intended to answer it. He was still silent.

“Shall I answer it, then?”

“If you like.”

It was Wallie Blair and he wanted Charlotte to be told that his boat had been stalled on the lake for two hours and he couldn’t possibly be there before half past eight. Irene sat down again and delivered the message to John, in case she and Sam would have to go before Charlotte came back. John seemed to be paying attention, but he was not.

“Well, Knowles,” said Sam, “if you’re just back in the country, maybe you haven’t heard all the new stories; I mean parlor stories; Irene won’t let me tell the other kind. Did you hear the one about the two colored caddies at Palm Beach last winter?”

“No.”

“Well, a couple of the big boys⁠—I think it was Replogle and Hutton or somebody like that⁠—started a round out at the Everglades Club and they happened to get two caddies who were twice as big as they were⁠—”

He was interrupted by a laugh, John’s laugh. It came so unexpectedly that Sam and Irene Comerford were frightened.

“Not time to laugh yet,” said the raconteur.

“I’m sorry,” said John.

“Well, one of the players hit the ball into an unplayable lie and asked his caddy to pick it up. The caddy grinned at him and said⁠—”

Again an interruption, but this time not a laugh. John, looking straight at the girl, softly recited:

I’ll never know the glory of the moon
Until I see it shining in your eyes;
I’ll never know the loveliness of June
Till we look up together at its clear, magnificent, azure skies.
Each day will be just morning, night and noon
Till you are mine, my loved one, sweetheart, wife,
And then I’ll know the glory of the moon,
And then I’ll know the loveliness of life.

“Well, for!” exclaimed Sam Drake. “Come on, Irene. I want to get you away from this bird. I can’t compete with Eddie Guest.”

Miss Comerford got up. “I do think we ought to go,” she said. “Please tell Charlotte how sorry we were not to see her.”

John rose and began to act the polite host.

“Don’t let me drive you away with my doggerel! Charlotte won’t forgive me.”

“Honestly we must go,” said Irene. “I would like you to tell me what that was.”

“I think it will be part of a libretto I’m writing, a libretto I’ve been writing for five years.”

“When did you make up those lines?”

“Since you came, most of them.”

“Hot apple sauce! Come on, Irene. You’re supposed to be my inspiration, not his,” said Sam.

“Just a second,” said John. “Do you often go to your father’s office?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Oh, never mind.”

“I go there once or twice a week.”

“Whenever she’s flat,” said Sam.

They saw one of John’s infrequent smiles.

“Here’s hoping you’re frequently flat.”

“Why?”

But he had started up the stairs without waiting to bow them out.

Charlotte came home about half past six, hot and in a bad temper. She had had two blowouts, one of them halfway home from her bootlegger’s, two miles out in the country, and five cars had disregarded her SOS. The sixth one’s occupant was an old farmer who knew as much about changing tires as she did. It had taken them half an hour to do the job. John told her Miss Comerford and Mr. Drake had been in for a while. She asked him what he thought of Irene. He made no reply at all, but Charlotte was used to that. Then she asked him whether Wallie Blair had telephoned and he said no, really thinking he was telling the truth.

At seven she gave Wallie up and dined alone with John. But when Wallie came a little after eight swore he had talked with Irene and that the latter had promised to deliver the message, there was a further display of temper, first directed toward Miss Comerford and then toward John, when John, to save Irene, admitted that she might have given him the message and he might have forgotten about it. Charlotte was pacified by his promise that he would accept Mr. Beasley’s offer if Mr. Beasley made one.

Mr. Beasley made one next morning, a salary of two hundred dollars a week for work that could be taught him easily. He was given a private office with a desk and two chairs. No one came in to instruct him in his duties and he would have been happy polishing up his libretto if Beth Beasley had not made his room a second home.

“Do you like me now?” she asked, perched on his desk too close for comfort. It was his fourth day on the “job.”

“Why now?”

“I mean because I got you this chance.”

“I liked you before that,” he said.

“Dear, do you know what you’re saying?”

“Certainly.”

“Can’t you say it more plainly, that you’re fond of me, that you care a little? I know how shy you are and I have to do the talking for you. I hate to. But you won’t do it yourself.”

“What am I to say?”

“Just that you care for me.”

“I do.”

“John, does that mean it’s an understanding?”

“What kind of understanding?”

“That we care for one another.”

“I guess we do.”

“Aren’t you going to be⁠—not so cold and distant?”

“Listen, Beth,” said John nervously, “I don’t know whether I can make good here or not. And until I am sure of myself and where I stand, I can’t think of⁠—of other things.”

“Daddy would never turn you out.”

“I’ll turn myself out if I can’t do what he wants me to. I’ve got to make good on my own account, without any outside influence. If you’ll just understand that!”

“I’ve waited this long, I guess I can wait a little longer,” said Beth, and left him.

Well, the fifth day was something entirely different. One of the partners. H. N. Comerford, was in Chicago. At a quarter of nine, the other partner, J. L. Beasley, called up to say he was going fishing; he knew that old Fred Howard, his chief and only clerk unless you counted John Knowles was capable of running the whole works single-handed. The rest of the office force was made up of the telegraph operator the telephone girl, the marker and the pretty new stenographer Miss Davenport.

Old Howard was usually on deck at nine o’clock sharp. This morning his wife telephoned at ten after nine that he had broken a leg trying to get on a streetcar. Miss Davenport came into John’s room to tell him the news and he nearly fainted. When he had pulled himself together, he rushed into the main office and instructed the telephone girl to put all calls on his wire; he would keep Miss Davenport with him and when orders came in, he would write them down and repeat them aloud so she could write them down, too, and there would be less chance of mistakes.

The telegraph operator reminded him that the daily market letter must be got out and sent to all customers and prospective customers. John decided that it was best to start this letter at once; his ignorance of what a market letter should contain was colossal and it would take all his spare time to write it.

“Make it optimistical,” was the only hint the operator offered.

He hoped for help from Miss Davenport, but that good-looking young lady was proof of the saying, “You can’t have everything.”

“Did Mr. Howard ever dictate one to you?” John asked her.

“Yes, every day since I’ve been here, but that’s only a week.”

“How does he start them?”

“I forget.”

It never occurred to John that there must be dozens or hundreds of old ones around the office. He must work out one of his own.

“Well,” he said, “get me a paper with the market reports and we’ll see what we can do.”

She brought him the paper and sat down at the desk opposite him ready to take dictation.

“Here we go,” he said. “To customers of Beasley and Comerford: We do not like to advise you to buy stocks that are not likely to go higher or at least not go lower⁠—”

The telephone rang. It was Wallie Blair asking him to come to the lake Saturday afternoon and stay over Sunday. He said he couldn’t leave his mother alone.

“Charlotte’s going to stay with her.”

“Well, let me think it over.”

“No. You’ve got to say yes right now. You’ve got no excuse in the world. I’m in the Maynard cottage and anybody can tell you where it is. I’ll expect you Saturday afternoon.”

Perhaps if it hadn’t been for the market letter, John would have argued. As it was he said all right, so he could go on with his work.

“All right, Miss Davenport. What have we said?”

“ ‘We do not like to advise you to buy stocks that are not likely to go higher or at least not go lower.’ ”

“But we cannot help feeling a feeling of optimism.”

“How do you spell that last word?”

“O-p-t-i-m-i-s-m. As the summer promises to be hot, we might recommend the purchase of American Ice preferred; still, one cannot always depend on the weather predictions. General Motors is another good stock.” The telephone rang. It was J. M. McInerny and he wanted to place an order for two hundred shares of Murray Corporation at the market. John wrote down the order, repeated it aloud as it was given to him so Miss Davenport could get it, too. She took the slip to the telegraph operator and returned for more dictation. But the telephone was ringing again.

“This is Irene Comerford.”

“Yes,” in a voice that shook a little.

“I just wanted to speak to the telephone girl, but she gave me you. Aren’t you Mr. Knowles?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I expected to drop in the office today and my father was going to send me a telegram there. If one comes, will you mail it to me at the lake? In care of Mrs. Charles Parrish. I’ll be there over the weekend.”

“I’ll attend to it, Miss Comerford.”

“Thanks. Goodbye.”

He wrote down Mrs. Charles Parrish’s name and then looked out the window. Miss Davenport waited five minutes before she asked whether the market letter was all done.

“No. I was figuring what to put in next.” The telegraph operator came in and suggested that as business seemed to be slow, the telephone operator might call him instead of John to take the orders and he would keep a record of them and give it to John later.

“I’ll just take this one,” said John as the telephone rang again. “Then you can handle them the rest of the day.”

“K.O.,” said the operator.

A man named Francis Elliott wanted six hundred shares of American Linseed. John and Miss Davenport wrote it down. Then John looked at the paper to be sure there was such a stock.

“Great heavens!” he exclaimed. “There are two of them, common and preferred. I’m pretty sure he said common. No, I’m sure he said preferred.”

“Why not call back and ask him?”

“That would be silly, because I’m positive he said preferred.”

Miss Davenport took the order out to the operator and came back to John’s desk.

“Where were we?”

“ ‘General Motors is another good stock,’ ” read Miss Davenport.

“Oh, yes. Well, U.S. Steel is always a good buy. So are the railroads, as people do a great deal of traveling these days especially during the summer. People go south in the winter and north in the summer, so at this time of year the stocks of the northbound railroads would be the best ones to buy. Automobile stocks are also pretty good stocks to buy at this time of year as many of the tourists and vacationists travel by motor rather than by rail. They prefer it. Railroad travel is perhaps safer, but that does not affect the value of the stocks.”

He ran on in this way for nearly a thousand words, four times as many as the letter usually contained. He made a tremendous effort to talk sensibly to customers and was immensely relieved when four o’clock struck.

On the way home he worried a little about that American Linseed order, but decided that a man who would order as many as six hundred shares would certainly deal in preferred stock instead of common.

He told Charlotte about his invitation from her friend Wallie Blair. It was no news to her. He didn’t want to go, but she said he must or Wallie would feel hurt.

Mr. Beasley was back next morning, which was Friday, and congratulated John on his smooth work in a pinch. Luckily, he did not see the market letter and more luckily he was shut up in his office when Francis Elliott came in to how his Linseed was going. The telegraph operator told John who he was and John invited Mr. Elliott into his own room.

“Mr. Elliott,” he said, “I’m a novice at this game and I am likely to make mistakes. Would you mind telling me what your order was yesterday? Was it for the common or preferred?”

“For the common, of course,” said Mr. Elliott, “and it’s off two and a quarter points.”

“But the preferred,” said John, “is up eight points, and that is what I bought you.”

For an instant young Mr. Knowles was in imminent danger of being kissed by a man with a mustache. But he dodged behind the desk and asked Mr. Elliott if he would mind not telling either of the partners of the error. “Tell! No, sir. What I’ll do is sell. And you’re going to get a hundred dollars for being a novice.”

At three o’clock Saturday afternoon, John started for the lake in Charlotte’s car.

He had not foreseen the problem that would upset him almost as soon as he had left the city limits; namely, which cottage Wallie Blair was living in, the Maynards’ or the Parrishes’. He knew he had made notes of both those names, but simply could not remember which one had been told him by Wallie and which by Miss Comerford.

Two miles from the lake he was sure his destination was the Maynards’. A mile more and he was convinced it was the Parrishes’. This conviction held and after asking directions from a cottager mowing his lawn, he soon pulled up in front of the wrong place.

A male servant came out to the car and grabbed his two pieces of baggage.

“What name, sir?”

“John Knowles.”

Without another word, the servant carried the baggage onto the porch, opened the screen door to permit John to enter, and followed him in. A woman rose at his entrance.

“Mr. John Knowles,” said the servant. “Is he to have the south room?”

“John Knowles!” said the woman half under her breath. “I’m afraid there is some⁠—But wait a minute till I run upstairs.”

Upstairs she rapped briskly on Irene’s door and went in. “Dearie,” she said, “did you invite here a beautiful sheik named John Knowles?”

Irene gasped. “I did not!”

“Well, he’s downstairs and he’s brought his baggage and he seems to think he was expected.”

“Heavens! What in the world could make him think that?”

“Do you know him?”

“I’ve met him once. He works in Father’s office. But I certainly never asked him to come here or anywhere else.”

“Well, there’s evidently a misunderstanding. I wish you would go down and talk to him.”

“I’ll see him and find out how it happened,” said Irene.

She was cross with him for what she believed his freshness and thought of sarcastic things to tell him as she hurried downstairs. But when she saw him, with the servant near by standing over his bags, she knew he never could be a “crasher” and that it was truly a mistake that had brought him there. She smiled and said:

“It’s nice to see you again, Mr. Knowles.”

John stared at her as if she were a ghost. Then he found his voice.

“I suppose I’m the world’s biggest sap. I want to explain this intrusion and then I’ll get right out. Last Thursday, the day you telephoned, a friend of mine here at the lake also telephoned and asked me out for the weekend. He gave me the name of the cottage where he is staying and you gave me the name of yours. I wrote the names down, but left the slips in the office and I couldn’t remember which was which. The two names were Maynard and Parrish. On the way out here I thought and thought and thought, and of course came to the wrong conclusion. And I never can tell you how sorry and humiliated I am.”

Irene heard herself saying: “But I’m glad you did guess wrong because now we can have you and you can visit your friend some other time.”

“Not for anything in the world!”

“Not even if I beg you?”

“There’s no reason you should beg me, no reason you should want me.”

“It happens that I do.”

“If I could believe that, I’d tell my friend to let me off.”

Irene noticed the servant still hovering.

“Edward, take Mr. Knowles’ bags to the south room.” And when Edward had gone upstairs, “We’re going on a party tonight, you and I and Mrs. Parrish and Sam Drake. It won’t be a late party and I don’t believe it will bore you much.”

“I can’t do that, Miss Comerford. I brought no dinner clothes.”

“Nobody will care.”

“I would. No, Miss Comerford, you’d better let me take my bags and go over to Wallie’s.”

“It’s already settled. You’re not going there.”

“And I’m not going to any party.”

“All right then. Sit here quietly and read. No. Write more of your libretto and I can boast that you got your inspiration from me.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be much to boast of.”

“Oh, hush! Come up now and I’ll show you your room. And of course you won’t have to dress because you’ll be dining all alone.”

He followed her up the stairs and was properly introduced to Mrs. Parrish, whom they met in the hall. Explanations followed and the hostess acted as if she were glad he had come.

John went to his room, changed into some clothes that were not quite so wrinkled, then sat and waited for events. He was not in the least conscience-stricken about Wallie Blair.

He would go over after dinner and give a special version of what had happened. What really had happened was that he was in love for the first time in his life and it was impossible for him to resist Irene’s voice and eyes.

He was summoned downstairs, where he found Mrs. Parrish, Sam Drake and Irene in evening dress. They all had cocktails, Sam drinking five as fast as he could get them down. He had greeted John very coldly and had not uttered a word during his exhibition of rapid guzzling. Mrs. Parrish took him to task:

“Sam, you’re an old grouch! Get happy and tell us a story.”

“I’ll tell no story in the presence of a so-and-so cheap poet who hasn’t the manners to keep his mouth shut.”

“Sam!” said Irene sharply.

“I don’t like to be around with a so-and-so tramp and grafter who crashes into places where he is not invited or wanted.”

“I assure you he is wanted.”

“By whom?”

“By me!”

“Well, you don’t want me if you want him. We may as well get that straight right now!”

“Just as you say.”

“Miss Comerford,” said John, “I really ought to go over to my friend’s.”

“I want you to stay right here, and what’s more, I’m going to stay here with you. I don’t intend to go anywhere with Sam in his present condition.”

“If I leave here without you, I’ll never come back.”

“Suit yourself about that. I’m not going!”

“Irene, dear,” said Mrs. Parrish, “you know I’ve got to go, don’t you? It’s the Tuttles and I’ve refused them so often.”

“Of course, Ellen, you must. I’m only sorry you haven’t a decent escort.”

“Her escort,” said Sam, “is at least as decent as the snake you’re throwing him over for.”

“I’m not throwing anyone over.”

“You are! You love this guttersnipe and I guess you’re welcome to him.”

“Come on, Sam,” said Mrs. Parrish.

“And in parting, Mr. Drake,” said John, “let me warn you that the first time we meet where no ladies are present, you’ll go home looking like the late Tom Heeney.”

Irene Comerford and John were alone.

“Mr. Knowles, please tell me you didn’t believe what he said about my loving you.”

“He said you loved a guttersnipe.”

“He was referring to you and you know it. And I don’t want you to believe him.”

“There’s no danger, dear. But oh, how I’d like to!”

“Why?”

“Because I love you so.”

“And what about Beth?”

The man servant announced dinner.

“Well,” said John when they were seated at a table too big for two, “what about Beth?”

“She told me you were engaged.”

“She told me that, too, but I was in a position to know better.”

John asked the servant where the Maynard cottage was and learned it was only four cottages away. “I’d like to go down there and square myself with Wallie Blair.”

“You must go right after dinner,” said Irene, “but you mustn’t stay too long.”

“No danger.”

But there was danger, danger John should have foreseen and avoided by staying right where he was. He mixed with Blair’s ribald crew for only half an hour, but on the way back the moon on the lake brought the accursed libretto back into his head and drove Irene entirely out of it. He sat on somebody’s dock and outlined a whole new scene, and when he finally returned, it was eleven o’clock and Miss Comerford had disappeared.

He was sorry, but it didn’t seem strange to him. Nor did her failure to acknowledge his greeting when he found her alone in the dining-room next morning strike him as queer. And after five or ten minutes of silence, he said:

“You’re a lot like me. There are times when you don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“Mr. Knowles, it isn’t ‘anybody’ I don’t want to talk to. It’s you.”

“But why?”

“Can you ask after what you did last night?”

“Do you mean my staying out so long?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what I was doing?”

“I can imagine.”

“Well, I wasn’t at Blair’s, drinking. I was sitting on a dock, blocking out a new scene for my silly opera.”

“Couldn’t you have done it here?”

“Do you think I could concentrate on work if I were with you?”

“You did, at least you said you did, the other day. You said you made up that verse while I was right there with you.”

“Dear, you know I am crazy and absentminded and of a queer temperament. Can’t you care for me as I am?”

“I’m afraid I can.”

“How soon will Mrs. Parrish be down?”

“Any minute.”

“Then let’s settle this thing quick. I’m not engaged to Beth. You’re not engaged to Sam. Let’s be engaged to each other.”

“I’m afraid you’re engaged to your work.”

“I’ll tear it up.”

“I won’t let you do that. But I’ll insist on your doing whatever is left to be done right in my presence, looking right at me.”

“I don’t believe it’s possible, but I’ll try.”

“Then we’re engaged.”

“And remember, Miss Comerford, that being engaged to you means the loss of my job.”

“What for? Maybe you don’t know it, but my father owns more stock than Mr. Beasley.”

High-Rollers

When Walter Finch received and accepted an offer of $30,000 a year from Bernard and Craig, Publicity Engineers, his wife, Marion, declared that now they must certainly buy, build or rent a place in the suburbs for the summer; it was nothing less than criminal to keep the kiddies cooped up in a cauldron like New York during July, August and September.

“Just think, dear,” she said, “you’re going to make twice as much as you did at Ripley’s and we’ve managed to save a little on what they gave you, besides carrying all that silly insurance. Now we can save nearly twice as much as we have been and still have enough left to enjoy ourselves a little.

“I don’t mean you and me especially, though I do believe in people having fun before they get too old. But the children will be so much better physically and in every way if they can spend three months in the country. Isn’t that true, dear?”

“Yes, dear. I suppose it is,” replied Walter. “Some Saturday or Sunday, we’ll take a run over to Jersey or up in Westchester somewhere and see what we can find. But we must rent, not build or buy, because in the first place, I don’t know if I can make good or not in this job, and in the second place, we don’t want to establish ourselves permanently anywhere till we are sure we like the people.”

“I think that’s wise, dear. People do make all the difference. That’s why we ought to pick out some place where we already know somebody and like them; for instance, Hampton Dunes. You’ve always been fond of Jack Bowen and there’s no one I’d rather be neighbors with than Peggy. The four of us would have a perfect circus together and the kids would get along beautifully with little Jack.

“Last time I saw Peggy, she said why didn’t we come out there this summer and at least rent, but of course then I knew it was impossible. Now, though⁠—Well, I can’t imagine anything more ideal.”

Walter had been married ten years and his record of arguments was, total⁠—3,650; won, 0; lost, 3,650. So it was only half-heartedly that he pointed out the objections to his wife’s plan: That Hampton Dunes was one of the “swellest” and most expensive places on Long Island; that while the Finches and Bowens went to the theater and played bridge together about once a month in town, Jack Bowen’s annual income was five times as big as the salary Bernard and Craig were going to pay Walter and that the Bowens’ friends at the Dunes were all wealthy and much too fast for the Finches to travel around with; that the village was too far away from New York (nearly three hours on the good trains) to permit Walter to make the round trip daily, and that people living in Hampton Dunes without a car were virtually becalmed for the summer.

Walter and Marion and Junior and Anne packed up and moved out there in the latter part of June. Marion had rented a small furnished cottage for four thousand dollars. It was nearly half a mile from the beach, but directly behind the Bowens’ big house right on the ocean and the Finches were welcome to the use of the Bowen beach at any and all times.

Walter would have to go into New York early Monday mornings and stay there till Friday afternoon, but on Saturdays and Sundays he could make up for it by loafing, playing with the kids, swimming, golfing (a membership in the club was only five hundred dollars), enjoying himself in any way he saw fit. They bought a secondhand sedan for eight hundred and life for Marion, at least, became something more than a tedious struggle to keep herself and the kids from megrims and doldrums.

Junior and Anne, chaperoned by a safe and rather inexpensive nurse, went to the beach at the Bowens’ every morning, came home for luncheon and went back to the beach in the afternoon. For the first two weeks, their mother had luncheon with them and sat with them while they ate their supper, but after that she was elected a member of a contract bridge foursome that took all her afternoons and half her nights and made her so sleepy that she barely managed to get up in time to start all over.

Peggy Bowen, Mrs. Dick Parker and Mrs. Kenneth Hart were the others in the quartet and Marion owed her membership to the fact that Mrs. Spears was abroad for the summer. Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Hart were the wives of extremely rich men, men who had inherited money, gone through college and then enjoyed phenomenal luck in the stock market.

The women played for five cents a point, sometimes ten. Marion’s limit previously had been a penny, but in Hampton Dunes she raised it to two-and-a-half cents at first, the others “carrying” her for the balance, and soon was gambling for the same stakes as her companions, with a prayer that Walter would never hear about it.

She was a good player and a good holder, and by the middle of July was over eight hundred dollars ahead. But hadn’t been paid.

When her grocery and meat bills came at the end of the first month, she swooned. The prices were terrific. She resolved not to tell Walter the facts and to economize thereafter. She wrote checks and sent them to the grocer and butcher, who, in their turn, fainted dead away when they received them. They were not used to clients who settled their June and July bills before the following April.

Walter arrived home in time for dinner Friday nights. It was nice to get away from the stuffy, dirty, hot city and he made the most of his weekends by golfing, swimming and just lolling on the beach.

At first he golfed alone, but Jack Bowen at length persuaded him to make a fourth in a regular set game that lasted all through Saturday and Sunday. The others concerned were Jack and Kenneth Hart and Dick Parker. It seemed that Walter was filling in for Mr. Spears, who had accompanied his wife to Europe.

It soon became an understood thing that the four families⁠—the Parkers, Harts, Bowens and Finches⁠—would spend their Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings playing contract, at some house other than the Finches’, which was too small. The men always played together at one table and the women at another.

Walter announced that he couldn’t go higher than five cents a point; in fact, that was much higher than he ever had gone before. The other men said that was all right, but they were playing among themselves for ten, which Walter thought at first meant ten cents, but soon discovered was a hundred times that much. He got a shock one night when the totals were announced and it was found that Parker was three thousand points up on Hart. Just a matter of thirty thousand dollars.

“I’ll play you a cold hand for it, Dick,” suggested the loser.

“All right; just one,” said Parker.

Two poker hands were dealt and Parker won with two pair against four clubs and a spade.

“Another one?” asked Hart.

“Not tonight,” said Parker.

“OK. That’s sixty thousand,” said Hart, and set about getting his wife started for home.

This took place at the Bowens’, and Walter and Marion stayed on a while after the Parkers and Harts had gone.

“Are those fellas crazy?” asked Walter.

“No,” replied Jack Bowen, “but I am, to be playing with them. Sixty thousand is less than a month’s income to either Ken or Dick. They’ve both got so much that there’s no thrill for them unless the stakes are up in five figures. Old Spears coaxed me into the game and I was scared stiff when I learned what they were playing for.

“But I’ve had good luck right from the start and I’m pretty well ahead. If I weren’t, I’d have quit long ago. And they know better than to suggest one of those cold hands to me.”

Walter himself had won over three hundred on this particular evening, his debtor being Hart. He hoped there would be a check waiting for him the next weekend. But there wasn’t.

The four were pretty good golfers, one of them occasionally breaking eighty while the average was around eighty-five. Walter considered himself plunging when he agreed to a ten-dollar Nassau. The other three always had quantities of side bets besides the ones laid extemporaneously as the play progressed.

For example, there was an afternoon when they were at the National and Hart and Parker were battling each other for a thousand dollars a hole and a Nassau of five thousand. The two were even on the eighteenth green. Parker left with a four-foot putt and Hart with a six-footer for a par five.

Hart sank his six-footer.

“That means a wasted afternoon for both of us,” remarked Parker.

“Why?” said Hart.

“You’ll concede me this putt, won’t you?”

“I’ll not only not concede it, but I’ll bet you five thousand you don’t sink it.”

Parker took the bet and missed the putt, which meant sixteen thousand dollars.

One Sunday morning, Walter got cocky and raised his limit to a hundred dollars for the Nassau. He went off his game and lost three hundred, the beneficiary being Dick Parker.

That night he mailed a check to Parker and it was duly endorsed, cashed and canceled. But no check had come to Walter for his winnings. He couldn’t mention it to Jack because Jack owed him over two hundred.

The four golfers lunched together nearly every Saturday and Sunday. And they and their wives dined together Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays before opening four new decks.

Walter knew that Parker was a graduate of Harvard and Hart of Yale; also that Mrs. Hart had gone to Vassar and Mrs. Parker to Smith. Yet there was never any talk that would lead one to believe the talkers had so much as matriculated in the sub-primary.

The English language was maimed and bruised; the men apparently had never read anything but the market reports and the women had concentrated on J. S. Fletcher and Sidney Lenz. When no one was relating a suggestive story, the conversation dealt with the future of General Motors and Sinclair Oil, things that had happened that day or last night at golf or bridge, and the quality and price of whatever beverages were being served.

Everybody excepting the Finches had made the acquaintance of an honest bootlegger who had access to some mysterious and never-to-be-exhausted supply of antediluvian Scotch, champagne and gin. You had to pay high, but wasn’t it worth it? Just taste that!

Walter, riding in on the train with Jack Bowen, said: “Did these people really get college degrees?”

“Sure.”

“And how?” asked Walter.

“The faculty was sick of them,” said Bowen.

Jack admitted freely that neither Hart nor Parker was an intellectual giant, but he had a tremendous admiration for their courage, their willingness to risk, against odds, amounts that would seem like fortunes to most men, and the unruffled manner in which they took their losses.

“Why, last summer I sat in a no-limit poker game with Ken and Dick and Alex Spears and Bob Morton. Spears opened a pot for ten thousand. Ken stayed with a pair of kings. Spears drew one card and Ken took three, but didn’t help his pair. Then Spears bet two hundred thousand dollars. And Ken called him! Spears had two jacks, an ace, a king and an eight-spot. Ken’s hunch had been right and his kings won.”

“Did Spears pay him?”

“Well, if he didn’t, he will. They keep track and settle later on.”

“How much later on?”

“I don’t know,” said Bowen. “Nobody ever worries about not getting paid. They’re all good for it.”

“How do you stand with them?”

“Me? I’m around seventy thousand to the good. That covers three years.”

“Have you ever got any of it?”

“No, not yet. But I’m not worrying. By the way, Dick Parker thinks you’re a queer guy, sending him that three hundred the day after you lost it.”

“He cashed the check.”

“Why wouldn’t he? But he wondered why you were in such a hurry. He said he’d trust any friend of mine.”

Walter and Marion decided they must give a party at the club to repay some of their playmates’ hospitality.

“I suppose we’ve got to,” said Walter. “But we certainly can’t afford it. We haven’t saved a dime all summer. If⁠—”

“If what?” demanded Marion.

“If Jack and Hart and Parker would come across with what they owe me for bridge and golf⁠—”

“How much do they owe you?”

“Just under two thousand dollars.”

“Heavens! You must have been playing for big stakes!”

“Big stakes for me; chicken feed for them.”

“Well,” said Marion, “I may as well make a confession to you. I’ve played bridge for five and ten cents a point, and I’ve won nearly eight hundred dollars.”

“Where is it?”

“I haven’t got it yet.”

“Of course,” said Walter after a pause, “these people are perfectly good. Jack swears to that. They’ll pay us, probably, before we move back to town. What we want to do now is gamble conservatively and hold on to what we’ve got.”

“Or rather,” said Marion, “what we haven’t got. As far as I’m concerned, I could live comfortably without ever seeing another pack of cards.”

“Well, we’ll give the party and charge it and maybe by the time we get the bill our pals will have liquidated.”

But before the dinner at the club had been in progress three minutes, this dream was shattered by a long, argumentative, mathematical conversation between Parker and Hart, both of them slightly squiffy on Walter’s cocktails, made of gin so young that it didn’t even have a name or a birth certificate.

“This is our last weekend, Ken,” said Parker. “You’ve only got tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow night to get even with me on the season.”

“What do you figure I owe you?”

“This season or altogether?”

“Just this season.”

“I make it $180,000.”

“Well,” said Hart, “you’re $45,000 off. It’s really only $135,000.”

“I think you’re wrong,” said Parker, “but I’ll split the difference with you and call it $157.500.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Marion. “Don’t they keep any record?”

“Just in their heads,” said Mrs. Hart.

“All right,” said Hart. “Make it $157,500, and that’s giving you all the best of it. You must have forgot the $25,000 you laid me on the Harvard crew against Yale. Anyway, making you a present of the $45,000 or $25,000 or $22,500 or whatever it is, you still owe me $240,000.”

“What do you mean, I owe you!”

“I mean since we began betting, in 1911.”

“You know that ain’t right. You owe me, not I owe you. And what you owe me is about $200,000 even. If that ain’t so, when you asked me what I figured you owed me and I asked you if you meant this season or altogether, why didn’t you speak up and say that you naturally meant just this season, because altogether I owed you, not you owed me?”

“I didn’t put it that way.”

“What way?”

“Whatever way you claim I put it.”

“Do you still claim I owe you $240,000?”

“I certainly do!”

“Well, let’s go back and I’ll show you how wrong you are. In 1911, I bet you $100,000 Yale wouldn’t score in the Harvard game, and they didn’t.”

“Neither did Harvard.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it. But that was the first bet we made, and that starts me off $100,000 to the good.”

“You don’t have to go back that far. We figured it up in the fall of 1918 and agreed that you then owed me $185,000.”

“And in 1919, I beat you for $225,000 at golf and cards and $65,000 on the World’s Series.”

“Do you mean to say you’re going to hold me to a bet on a crooked series?”

“All right. We’ll throw out the $65,000. That still leaves you $40,000 to the bad going into the year 1920.”

“Yes, and in 1920 I won $150,000 from you in golf and bridge and $40,000 that Lowden wouldn’t be nominated.”

“But you bet me $80,000 that Brooklyn would beat Cleveland and you lost that.”

“That still gives me a margin of $70,000 at the start of 1921.”

“Wait a minute!” said Parker. “If I remember right, we totaled it up two years ago and you owed me just an even $20,000. And that was before I bet you $150,000 on Tooney against Dempsey. So I was $170,000 up on you a year ago last spring, but that summer you cut it down to $42,500 and with the $157,500 I win from you this year, that makes it $200,000, just as I said in the first place.”

“I suppose you don’t count the $300,000 you bet me on the Argentines.”

“When did I bet you that?”

“In August. You were tight, but Jack will bear witness you made the bet and you said next morning that it went. Ain’t I right, Jack?”

“He bet you,” said Jack, “but I thought it was $150,000 instead of $300,000.”

“I’ll concede it,” said Parker, “and if it’s true, that makes us so close to even that we might as well start all over.”

“Even my foot!” objected Hart. “You either owe me $240,000⁠—”

“Or else,” interrupted Parker, “you owe me $200,000. Now which is it?”

“Well, there’s no use discussing it tonight. Let’s get down to business.”

As they rose from the table Walter called Jack Bowen aside.

“Does this mean that they have been making those bets for seventeen years and no money has ever changed hands?”

“I’m afraid it does,” said Jack.

“Well,” said Walter, “before this night is over, I’m going to be even with everybody.”

When he and Marion had reached their home at three o’clock and Marion had reported a loss, on the night’s play, of only two dollars, Walter triumphantly told her how he not only had wiped out the debt the others owed to her and to himself, but had actually finished $8,400 to the good.

“You see,” he explained, “after listening to that argument, I decided to do a little plunging of my own. I announced I was playing for five dollars a point and I lost twenty-eight hundred. Then I said to Parker, ‘If you’ll give me 2 to 1, or $5,600 against $2,800, I’ll bet you I can cut a spade.’ He took me and I cut a diamond.

“Then I bet Hart $5,600 to $2,800 that he couldn’t cut a spade, and he did. The first $2,800, that I lost at bridge, squared their previous indebtedness. And the $8,400 I lost afterwards is clear profit.”

Marion didn’t quite understand. In fact, she was too sleepy to try.

Stop Me⁠—If You’ve Heard This One

On a certain day in the year 1927, Jerry Blades and Luke Garner, young playwrights, entered the Lambs’ Club at the luncheon hour and were beckoned to a corner table by an actor friend, Charley Speed. Charley had a guest, recognized at once by the newcomers as Henry Wild Osborne, famous globetrotter, raconteur and banquet-hall fixture.

“Sit down, boys,” said Charley after he had introduced them to the celebrity. “I’m due at a house committee meeting and you can keep Harry entertained.”

But “Harry” proved perfectly capable of providing his own entertainment and theirs, and he opened up with a barrage of Pats and Mikes, Ikeys and Jakeys, and MacPhersons and MacDonalds that were not only comparatively new but also quite funny, at least so Blades and Garner judged from the wholehearted laughter of the narrator himself.

When he had displayed his mastery of all the different dialects of both hemispheres, he related a few personal adventures, in some of which other big men had played parts and which, to his small audience, were much more interesting than the chronicles concerning fictional Mikes, Sandys and Abes. He told them of Lindbergh, who had accepted an invitation to dine with him in his apartment and had come wearing a hat that did not fit, explaining he had borrowed it at his hotel, not having had a hat of his own since he was a child.

“He’s a man of one idea. He will talk about aviation and nothing else. He dislikes crowds and has had difficulty maintaining a show of good nature in the face of unwelcome attention. He has managed to do so, however, excepting when addressed or referred to as ‘Lucky Lindy,’ a nickname he just can’t stand.

“He was kind enough to ask me to fly with him on Long Island and naturally I jumped at the chance. We took a taxi out to the field and every traffic cop on the way stopped us so they could shake hands with him and pat him on the back. I thought we’d never get there, and when we did get there, that we wouldn’t be able to leave the ground without killing two or three hundred people.

“He said it was like that every time he attempted to go up or land, hundreds of wild-eyed fans crowding around him in spite of the danger. But we did finally get started and it was wonderful. I felt as safe as if I’d been riding in a chair at Atlantic City.”

He told them of Fred Stone, of an occasion when he and Fred had dined together at old Rector’s. At the next table were two famous Princeton football players, each over six feet tall and weighing two hundred and twenty pounds. The sons of Old Nassau had been drinking something contentious and tried to pick a quarrel with him and Stone, though they had no idea who Stone and Osborne were and certainly could have had no reason to “fuss” at either of them.

Fred did not want to make a scene and ignored the athletes’ slurring remarks, but when he and Osborne got up to leave and the Princeton boys followed them and jostled them, the comedian lost his temper, grasped a collegiate throat in each hand, lifted the pair up bodily and knocked their heads together till they were unconscious, and then tossed them into the checkroom.

He told them of having been in the Metropole at supper with Herman Rosenthal the night the gambler was called away from the table and shot to death by four gangsters; of having warned Jim Jeffries not to drink the tea that “poisoned” him just prior to the fight with Jack Johnson; of having tipped off Kid Gleason in 1919 that some of his ballplayers were throwing him down; of having accompanied General Pershing to Marshal Foch’s headquarters when the American commander offered his armies to the Frenchman to do with as he pleased; of having escaped death by eight inches when the Germans dropped their first bombs on Paris; of having taught Lloyd Waner how to avoid always hitting to left field; of having taken Irving Berlin out of “Nigger Mike’s” place and set him to writing songs; of having advised Flo Ziegfeld to dress his chorus in skirts instead of tights; of having suggested and helped organize the Actors’ Equity, and of having informed the Indiana police where to find Gerald Chapman.

He had been everywhere and seen everything, and Blades and Garner envied him his wealth of experience.

He hoped he hadn’t bored them.

“Not at all!” said Blades.

“It’s a treat to listen to you,” said Garner.

“You ought to write a book of memoirs,” said Blades.

“I’ve been urged to many times,” said Osborne, “but I’m never in one place long enough to get at it. I’ve got chronic Wanderlust.”

“So have I,” said Garner, “but it doesn’t do me any good.”

“Poor Luke!” said Blades. “He’d like to live on trains, but he’s only been out of the state once.”

“Not counting two or three trips to Newark,” said Garner.

“Travel is a great thing!” observed Osborne. “It has its drawbacks and discomforts, but one’s experiences and adventures are worth a lot more than they cost.”

“Luke had a queer little experience the only time he went anywhere,” said Blades. “Tell Mr. Osborne about it, Luke.”

“Oh, it’s nothing much. Just a kind of mystery I was mixed up in on the way out to Chicago.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Osborne, assuming a polite interest.

“Well,” said young Garner, “I’ll try to make it brief. About a year ago I had an idea for a play. I wrote one act and read it to George Cohan. He liked it and told me to finish it and bring it to him. When I had finished it, I learned he was in Chicago. I couldn’t wait for him to get back so I decided to go out there and see him, though I had to borrow money for the trip. I was impatient and took the Century.

“In the section across from me there was one of the most beautiful women I ever saw, a young woman about twenty-five, dark, well dressed, full of class, nice-looking. She had a book, one of Fletcher’s detective stories, but I noticed she didn’t turn more than three pages between New York and Albany. Most of the time she just stared at the river.

“She was going to Chicago, too, and I’ll confess that I wished we would become acquainted long before we got there. I wished it, but didn’t believe it, because she was evidently not the kind you could meet unconventionally.

“I went in the diner about seven and was given the only vacant chair at a table for four. My table companions were an elderly couple and a man a little older than I, a man of striking appearance, handsome, and dark enough to suggest Spanish or Italian ancestry.

“The elderly couple finished their meal and left. The ‘Spaniard’ was just beginning to eat when the girl from my car came in and took one of the seats just vacated.

“Her glance and the ‘Spaniard’s’ met. There was mutual recognition and an emotion close to panic on both sides. The man got up hurriedly, put a five-dollar bill on the table and went out of the diner, toward the front end of the train. The girl grasped the table as if she must have something to hang on to. She was quite white and I thought she was going to faint. She didn’t, but her hands shook violently as she wrote her order.

“I pretended I had not observed the little scene and did my best not to look in her direction. I got through as quickly as I I could and relieved her of the embarrassment of my presence. As I was paying my check the waiter asked me if I knew whether the other man was coming back. Before I could reply, the girl said, ‘No’; then bit her lip as if mad at herself for speaking.

“She returned to her section after a long time, over an hour. She sat staring out into the darkness for a half-hour more. Then she got up and stepped across the aisle to me. She said:

“ ‘I must ask you to do me a favor. You will think it’s queer, but I can’t help it. You saw the man leave the table when I sat down. I want you to find him and give him this note. I would ask the porter, but I am afraid he might give it to the wrong person. The man is probably in the club car. Just hand him the note. Then come back and tell me. Will you do it?’

“I found him in the club car, delivered the note she had entrusted to me, and returned and reported.

“She said: ‘I am very, very grateful.’

“And then I went forward to the club car again and sat down to be out of the way when he came to her, as I felt sure he would.

“He was at the desk writing, but soon he rose and left. I was in quite a fever of curiosity and it strained my willpower to stay where I was and not follow him and witness ‘Act Two.’ I tried to read and couldn’t. When I finally turned in, close to midnight, the girl’s berth was dark and the curtains drawn.

“I got up at Elkhart. The curtains were open across the aisle, but there was no sign of the girl. There was still no sign of her as we pulled into Englewood. I called the porter and asked whether he had seen her since the night before. He said why, yes, he had seen her around five o’clock, when he had helped her off the train at Toledo. ‘Toledo!’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought she was going through.’ The porter said he had thought so, too, but she must have changed her mind. I inquired if he had seen her talking with a handsome dark man. He said no; that the only real dark man he had seen on that car was himself, and he wasn’t so handsome.

“I stood on the platform in the La Salle Street Station till all the passengers were off. The girl was not among them; I’m sure of that. But the ‘Spaniard’ was, and escorting him were two men obviously detectives, if they have detectives in Chicago.

“In the two days I was there, I read every story in every paper, trying to find a solution to ‘my mystery,’ but without success. And that’s all there is to it, except that Cohan turned down my play.”

“Very interesting!” Mr. Osborne remarked. “I believe if I had been you, I’d have followed the man and his escort, just to satisfy my curiosity.”

“I’d have done that,” said Garner, “if I hadn’t thought there was still a chance that the girl would appear.”

Charley Speed was back from the committee meeting. He and his guest bade the young playwrights goodbye and went out. Blades and Garner discussed the man they had just met.

“He tells dialect stories well,” said Blades.

“If that’s possible,” said Garner. “To me, his own experiences are a lot more interesting.”

“But I think,” said Blades slowly, “I think somebody else told me that same stuff about Lindbergh and⁠—”

“Yes,” interrupted Garner, “and I’m under the impression that the one about Fred Stone isn’t new to me. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard it from Rex Beach and that Rex was with Stone when it happened.”

Two years later Blades and Garner, now credited with a couple of Broadway hits, were guests at a “small” dinner party given by Wallace Gore, the publisher. Their host presented them to Mr. Henry Wild Osborne, who acknowledged the introduction as if it were a novelty.

Osborne sat between two adoring women who managed to keep him to themselves through the soup. But he was everybody’s property and soon was regaling the whole table with up-to-the-minute episodes in the careers of O’Brien and Berlinsky. He ran out of them at last and his host said: “Harry, I wonder if you’d mind telling these people about your Chicago trip.”

“What Chicago trip?”

“About the girl and the foreigner.”

“Oh, that!” said Osborne. “Well, if you think they’d be interested.”

“Of course they would!”

“Please, Mr. Osborne!”

“All right, then,” said Osborne; “but I trust you folks not to spread it around. The Chicago police made a secret of the real facts and I promised them I wouldn’t divulge it to any of my friends of the Fourth Estate.”

He took a swallow of wine and began:

“It was a month ago I had a wire from Charles Dawes, asking me to come out there and advise him in a little matter⁠—Well, we won’t go into that. I boarded the Broadway Limited and was settling down to a little session with de Maupassant when I noticed a beautiful girl, an authentic, perfect blonde, in the section across from me.

“I am past the age for train flirtations but this girl held my attention by the expression on her face, a look of ineffable sadness, of tragic longing for⁠—I knew not what.

“I was weaving in my mind a blighted romance with her as its sorrowing heroine, when Andy Mellon, walking through the car, saw me and stopped for a chat. He was with me till dinnertime, when he invited me to dine in his drawing-room, but I declined, saying I had eaten a late luncheon and would do without another meal. In reality, I was in no mood for talk, and shortly after he had gone, I made my way to the diner, trusting he would not uncover my mendacity.

“I told the steward I had no objections to sitting with others provided they were strangers, so he placed me at a table for four. A gray-haired, florid-faced old man and his comfortable fat wife were two of my companions. The third was a splendid, healthy specimen of young manhood, Scandinavian young manhood, a yellow-haired, sturdy son of vikings.

“The old couple finished their simple repast and left. I was ordering and the handsome young giant was beginning to eat when the beautiful blond girl I had observed in the sleeper came in and took one of the seats I just vacated.

“The girl’s eyes and the man’s eyes met, and not for the first time, I could see. For their glance was charged with electricity, a bolt of lightning that struck something akin to terror in each. An instant afterwards, the young man was up from the table, laying a ten-dollar note beside his plate, and then he was gone, fleeing from the mysterious horror of this chance encounter with a woman whom God had never intended to inspire young manhood with anything but burning love.

“And the girl, the young woman⁠—I started from my chair, ready to catch her if she swooned. For it seemed she must swoon, so pale she was. But with a marvelous show of courage she forced herself into a state of pseudo-calmness.

“I bolted my meal in a manner that would have caused my doctor intense mental anguish. I asked the waiter for my check and he, observing the young man’s money lying there, inquired if I knew whether he was coming back. Before I could speak, the girl uttered a sharp, ‘No’; then bit her lip as if in rage that she had said it.

“We were between Harrisburg and Altoona when she appeared again in the sleeper. She stopped beside me and put an unsealed, unaddressed envelope in my hand.

“ ‘It kills me to do this,’ she said in a voice barely audible. ‘I am not accustomed to asking favors from a stranger, but it is necessary and you look kind. I am sure you noticed the man, the young man, who was with us in the dining car, who got up and left when I sat down. I think you will find him in the club car and I want you to give him this. I cannot trust it to the porter. Don’t wait for a reply. Just give it to him, and then come back here and tell me. Will you?’

“I answered, of course I would, and I begged her to inform me if there was something more I could do. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘nothing.’

“The young man was easily found. He was in the club car as she had guessed, staring straight ahead of him.

“Without a word I handed him the envelope, and returned to her and reported. She expressed gratitude with a smile that was more heartrending than tears.

“My instinct, or sense of decency, ordered me not to pry. I took my book to the club car and tried vainly to read, for my brain was consumed with curiosity and anxiety as to what was going on between those two torn souls.

“When at length I turned in, at Pittsburgh, the berth opposite mine was dark and its curtains drawn.

“I rose in the morning as we were rushing through the Indiana town of Plymouth. The curtains across the aisle were open now, but there was no sign of the girl. Nor had she appeared as we slowed up for Englewood. My inquiry of the porter, had he seen her since the preceding night, was answered in the affirmative. ‘Yes, suh. She done leave us three hours ago, at Fort Wayne.’

“I remarked I had thought she was bound for Chicago. ‘She sho’ was Chicago bound,’ said George, ‘but young gals, dey got a “unailable” right to change deir min’.’ I then asked if he had seen her conversing with a big, blond, handsome young man. ‘No, suh. De only man she co’versed to was maself, and ma bes’ frien’s don’t call me handsome or blond neithuh one.’

“I waited on the platform in the Union Station and watched all the passengers as they left the train. The girl was not among them, but the man was, and as he walked out to the taxi stand, I followed him unobtrusively, saw him enter a cab and heard the starter say, ‘Stevens House.’ I went to the Sherman and bathed and changed, and awaited word from my friend the General.

“But I could not get my mind off the queer incidents of the trip and you can imagine the shock it gave me to read, in an afternoon paper, the story of a well-dressed, unidentified young woman who had committed suicide by throwing herself in front of the second section of the Broadway Limited at Fort Wayne.

“My duty was clear. I hurried to police headquarters, stated my name and was received by the chief. I told him I was sure he could earn the thanks of the Fort Wayne authorities and officials of the railroad by sending one of his men with me to the hotel where I believed my ‘friend’ of the train was stopping; that if I could find him, I was sure we would be able to learn the unfortunate girl’s identity and perhaps the reason for her ghastly deed.

“The chief delegated Captain Byrne to accompany me. As we drove up to the door of the hotel we saw policemen dispersing a crowd and other policemen lifting from the sidewalk the body of a man, the young viking, with a bullet wound in his head, a revolver lying near where he had lain and a newspaper clasped in his left hand.

“There were letters in his pocket, merely business letters, addressed to John Janssen, and the initials on his baggage were J. J. He was the son of one of the richest men in Chicago, and he, the young man now dead, had a wife and children in Lake Forest.

“I know who the girl was, too; the police found her name and her picture in young Janssen’s possession. But they didn’t tell his family and no one besides a few policemen and myself is aware that there was a girl in the case. The published reason for his act was temporary insanity induced by illness. And if he was sick, I have been dead for twenty years.”

Osborne’s narrative was over. Dinner was over, too, and Garner and Blades lingered behind the others in the march toward the card room.

“What do you suppose he’s got against brunettes?” said Blades.

“And why,” said Garner, “do you suppose he won’t use the New York Central Lines?”

Pity Is Akin⁠—

Mr. and Mrs. Henry Spalding, of Toledo, dressed for the evening, were admitted without question into the Cozy Club, which had lately become one of the most popular night clubs in New York’s Fifties, owing to the engagement of Marian Moore as hostess. It was early, only a few minutes after twelve, and more than half the tables were unoccupied, but “Reserved” signs were displayed on the vacant ones.

“I guess we’re out of luck,” said Henry, and he and his wife were surprised when a smiling head waiter removed the sign from a table in the second row off the dance floor and seated them there.

“Well,” said Henry, “I didn’t order this. He either thinks we’re somebody else or we look like live ones.”

Mrs. Spalding laughed a little stock laugh, her usual response to remarks by her husband. She was not loquacious as a rule, save on the subject of children, and more often than not, she paid no attention to other people’s talk.

The head waiter brought two menu cards and stood at attention. The sight of a menu, especially an expensive one, always enhanced Mrs. Spalding’s gift of silence and she would pretend not to hear Henry the first five or six times he urged her to order; then, when he began to get cross, she would name viands she had no more taste for than she had for the flu. On this occasion she chose, or was driven to choose, brook trout meunière, broccoli and baked Alaska. The head waiter observed that the baked Alaska would take quite a while.

“We’re in no hurry,” said Henry. “But you can send us a drink.”

“We serve only soft drinks⁠—ginger ale, orangeade⁠—”

Henry handed him two one-dollar bills. “I guess you don’t remember me,” he said.

“I do recall your face, but I see so many people that I forget some of their names.”

“We’d like a couple of dry Martinis,” said Henry.

“I’m sorry, but we only serve Scotch or rye or gin or wine, and all by the bottle.”

“Well, fetch a pint of rye and a bottle of ginger ale.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mrs. Spalding’s first highball led her to wonder out loud whether Betty, their three-year-old, was lonely without them.

“She don’t even know we’re gone,” said Henry.

“She may not know you’re gone.”

“Anyway, she ain’t missing us now, because she’s asleep.”

“Lots of times she’s wokened up in the night and called me.”

“I must have been away.”

“No, you were there, but you sleep so sound that you’d sleep through Judgment Day.”

“I hope so,” said Henry. “Let me pour you another libation. We’ve got a long ways to go.”

“Not as much as you gave me before. It might not be good stuff.”

“They’re careful what they serve in a high-class place like this. Besides, I don’t get fooled. I can tell good liquor from bad liquor almost by looking at it. There’d be no deaths from wood alcohol if⁠—”

“Look! Here’s the orchestra!”

It was a “hot” orchestra composed of twelve negro musicians who had made records the previous morning and practiced between afternoon and evening performances at the Palace. But they were still “hot” and the small dance floor was soon jammed, for patrons of the “club” had been arriving in droves and all the “reservations” were taken up.

“I’d ask you to dance,” said Henry to his wife, “only it’s so crowded it wouldn’t be any fun.” They both knew it wouldn’t be any fun anyway. No one had ever nicknamed them Moss and Fontana.

A good-looking young man in a Bunny Granville getup sang a song dealing with the different kinds of treatment one receives from young ladies in London, Paris, Port Said, Stockholm, Yokohama and Bombay. He was assisted by a dancing chorus of pretty girls, almost entirely dismantled.

The customers, by insistent pounding of small mallets on the tables, made them do it over. It was better the first time. A negro tap-dancer of real merit responded to one encore and could have had many more, but it’s tiresome work.

Just as Mrs. Spalding was finishing her baked Alaska and thinking how much better it would have tasted without the prologue of rye, the customers burst into wild applause and Miss Moore, followed at a distance by her personal pianist, walked smilingly into the glare of the spot. The smile was a little crooked, giving her face a childish appearance, though she could have voted for Hughes. The face was queerly pale, looking (so Henry whispered) as if she were hopped up. It was not a beautiful face, but it had, in repose, the woebegone, pity-me quality that never fails to appeal to sob-loving New York.

Evenings (and two matinées a week) she played a leading part and sang the hit song⁠—“Where Is My Man Gone?”⁠—in the current musical smash, the producer having wisely selected her in preference to a pretty young girl with a pretty young voice. Her chief, perhaps only, virtue as a vocalist was bulldog courage. She hung onto a song until the orchestra or pianist made her quit. The words dragged out in fractions of syllables and those playing her accompaniments were continually asked to stop, go back a line or two and pick her up.

She was not popular with librettists, because by the time she had completed a number it was necessary to start plot exposition all over. Her voice was pitched low and was “husky,” the sort of voice that metropolitan show-goers rave about and which a doctor would consider curable by the frequent use (externally) of silver nitrate and a year’s total abstinence from liquor and cigarettes.

On this occasion she dawdled through a number called “Lonely Nights,” which left most of her female auditors helpless, and then, by unanimous request, did the familiar “Where Is My Man Gone?” at a pace that would have permitted her personal pianist to go out and wash his hands between chords.

Miss Moore did not disappear into her dressing room. She first sat down at a table with two men, one a tall, powerful-looking fellow who was evidently the Cozy Club’s manager.

She had two drinks there, then moved to other tables and drank with the customers, many of whom she seemed to know well and a few of whom introduced themselves to her.

The big manager strolled around the room, stopping now and then to speak to an acquaintance or to ask patrons if they were receiving proper attention. He came to the Spaldings’ table.

“Well,” he said to Henry, “everything all right?”

“Fine,” said Henry. “This is my wife, Mr.⁠—”

“Schwartz.”

“Mr. Schwartz,” said Henry. “My name is Travers.”

“Glad to welcome you, Mr. Travers. And Mrs. Travers. How do you like our show?”

“Miss Moore had me almost in tears,” said Mrs. Spalding, now Travers.

“She gets them all, men and women alike,” said Mr. Schwartz. “Well, Mr. Travers, let me know if everything ain’t satisfactory.”

“I wonder,” said Henry, “if we could meet Miss Moore.”

“Sure!” said Mr. Schwartz. “You’ll find her one of the most charming girls you’ve ever come acrost. And democratic. To hear her talk, you’d think she was just one of us. She ain’t left her success go to her head. I’ll bring her over.”

It was after three o’clock when Mr. Schwartz escorted Miss Moore to the Spaldings’ table.

“Marian,” he said, “this is Mrs. Travers and Mr. Travers. They just wanted to meet you before they went home.”

“That’s mighty sweet!” said Miss Moore.

“The pleasure is ours,” replied Henry.

“Of course you have to say that, but it’s mighty sweet just the same. What about a little drink?”

“I was just going to order another bottle of rye.”

“Well, that’s mighty sweet, but if you don’t mind, you drink the rye yourself and Joe’ll get me a special drink out of my own private locker. I bet you didn’t know I’ve got a private locker. A locker for liquor. A liquor locker. Joe gave it to me and he’s mighty sweet.”

Joe (Mr. Schwartz) went out to procure the special drink while a waiter brought Henry his fourth pint of rye.

“Do you live here in New York?” asked Marian.

“We’re from Toledo.”

“Toledo! Well, that’s all right, too. People has to come from somewheres. But Toledo! It’s hard to believe.”

“Were you ever there?”

“Was I ever where? Listen, Mrs. Who’s-this, your sweetie’s asking me was I ever there! What does that mean?”

Mrs. Spalding had dozed off and could not explain.

“Look! Your wife’s asleep!”

“She’s worn out. She’s had a long day.”

“I’d think she’d be used to long days in Toledo.”

“Were you ever there?”

“You’re asking that again. Here comes Joe with my bottle. We’ll find out from him.”

Mr. Schwartz poured Marian a drink.

“Look at this, Mr. Toledo! It’s hundred-year-old rum; that’s all; a hundred years old. Prewar. I won’t let you taste it because you asked me was I ever in Toledo. And your wife can’t have any because she’s went to sleep on us. When it’s bedtime in Toledo, it’s only Thursday here. Joe, was I ever in Toledo?”

“How do I know?”

“You ought to know everything about me. You think you do, anyway. But I’ve foxed you this time. I was in Toledo in vaudeville with Bill Abbott. What’s your name again?”

“Travers,” said Henry.

“Well, Travers or not, I was with Bill Abbott in Toledo. But I didn’t meet no Travers. Or no Mrs. Travers, if she really is your wife.”

“Don’t be funny, Marian!” said Mr. Schwartz.

“That ain’t funny. What’s funny is for a man to come all the way from Toledo and bring his own wife to my club. And she thinks it’s a hotel. That’s the funniest part of it. Bill Abbott would see how funny that is even if you don’t.”

“I’ll tell you what let’s do, Marian. You have one more drink and then get a taxi and go home.”

“Do you think I’m going home alone? Well, listen! Mr. Travers will escort me home and you stay here and give Travers’ baby a bottle when she wakes up.”

“Wake up, Edith!” cried Henry.

Mrs. Spalding opened her eyes. “I went to sleep.”

“Take a sip of my hundred-year-old prewar rum,” said Marian. “It’ll wake you up.”

“I don’t want anything more to drink.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“I’m ready to go home.”

“So are the rest of us, Mrs. Travers,” said the manager.

“Isn’t it funny, I was just asleep a second, but I dreamed about my children!”

“Children!” said Marian, and in another moment was sobbing on Mrs. Spalding’s breast.

“She’s had a little too much,” said Mr. Schwartz. “If you folks will be good enough to leave now, I’ll take care of her.”

Henry paid his check, a small matter of seventy-three dollars, and he and Mrs. Spalding took a taxi to their hotel.

“She was pretty fresh at first. She got me sore,” said Henry. “But when you mentioned children and she broke down, I couldn’t help from feeling sorry for her.”

“Don’t waste your sympathy! She was ready to break down, whatever I said, or anybody else. If I’d mentioned ringworm, she’d have acted just the same.”

“Tell it in your own way, Mr. Spalding,” said Mr. Porter, government prosecutor.

“Well, my wife was with me and we were in evening clothes. That is, I had on my tuxedo and she was wearing low neck. We didn’t have no trouble getting in and were shown to a table near the dance floor. I asked a waiter to bring some rye and he brought a pint bottle. I bought four pints altogether. It was ten dollars a pint. Miss Moore sung a couple of songs.

“Then the manager, Mr. Schwartz, come to our table and introduced himself. I give him my name as Travers. I asked him could we meet Miss Moore and he said he would bring her to our table. She had been drinking at other tables and when she got to our table she was pretty well gone. I offered to buy a drink. She said she didn’t want rye, but Mr. Schwartz would fetch her some rum from her locker. He did so. I bought another pint of rye and drunk it while she drunk the rum.”

“Did she know you were buying it?”

Henry’s eyes happened to stray to where Marian sat. Her head was bowed low and her body was shaking with sobs. Henry felt a lump in his throat.

“I think she did.”

“You just think so?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wasn’t she right there when you ordered it and when it was brought in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then how could she help knowing you had bought it on the premises?”

“I don’t suppose she could.”

“Take the witness.”

“Now, Mr. Spalding,” said Mr. English for the defense, “you say Miss Moore was pretty well gone when she came to your table. Do you mean she was drunk?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How do you know?”

“She talked silly.”

“Haven’t you ever heard a woman talk silly when she wasn’t drunk?”

“I suppose I have.”

“Then isn’t it stretching a point to say Miss Moore was drunk just because she talked silly?”

“They talk entirely different when they’re drunk than sober.”

“Did you ever, on any other occasion, hear Miss Moore talk?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you taste Miss Moore’s drink?”

“No, sir.”

“How do you know it was rum?”

“She said so. She said it was a hundred years old.”

“Do you believe all that people say these days about their own liquor?”

“No, sir.”

“You bought four pints of rye. How much of it did your wife drink?”

“She had two highballs.”

“Did Mr. Schwartz drink any?”

“No, sir.”

“Did Miss Moore drink any?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you drank four pints, or two quarts, yourself; that is, all but the ounce or two that your wife drank?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In what length of time?”

“About three hours.”

“And you went home sober?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did your wife think you were sober?”

“I object, your Honor,” interrupted Mr. Porter. “A wife is no judge of her husband’s sobriety.”

“Sustained,” said the court.

“Was there anything,” continued Mr. English, “that would lead you to believe Miss Moore was financially interested in the club?”

“She spoke of it as ‘her club.’ ”

“Do you belong to any club in Toledo?”

“Yes, sir. The Elks.”

“What do you call it?”

“The Elks.”

“That will do.”

“We rest,” said Mr. Porter.

“I move for dismissal, your Honor.”

“The trial will proceed,” said the court.

“Miss Moore, please take the stand.”

Marian was still sobbing violently and Henry felt awful.

“Miss Moore,” said Mr. English, “I know what an ordeal this is for a hardworking, innocent, unprotected girl like you and I will ask you only two questions. Did you have a financial interest in the Cozy Club?”

Marian, unable to speak, shook her head.

“On the night you met this Spalding, or Travers, were you under the influence of liquor?”

“Your Honor,” Marian said, turning to the court, “I wasn’t never under the influence of liquor because I never tasted a drop of it in my life.”

“Take the witness,” said Mr. English.

“Miss Moore,” said Mr. Porter, “if you never tasted liquor, what was in the bottle Mr. Schwartz brought you?”

“Cough medicine.”

“Do you suffer from coughs?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why do you take cough medicine?”

“So I won’t suffer from coughs.”

Mr. Porter and Mr. English made eloquent summations, the former arguing for enforcement of the law and against the credibility of the defense’s only witness, while Miss Moore’s counsel spoke feelingly of the sanctity of womanhood, and wolves in evening clothes.

Marian sobbed all through both speeches and the judge’s charge and was still sobbing when the jury returned with a verdict of not guilty. She then recovered her composure, kissed her lawyer and the twelve brave men and true, and rushed to the ladies’ dressing room where her maid awaited her with some cough syrup.

“Gosh, this air feels good!” said Juryman No. 4 as he reached the street. “Her breath had me reeling!”

For three nights Henry Spalding tried in vain to muster enough courage to visit The Snug, where Marian had been employed since the padlocking of the Cozy Club. He knew now that he loved her and had done her a great wrong. He had never been able to resist a woman’s tears.

He was not sucker enough to believe the one about the cough medicine, but wasn’t a woman justified in lying to keep out of jail?

Liar or no liar, Marian was the only woman for him now and he knew he would never go back to Toledo and resume practice on his clarinet until he had seen her and begged her forgiveness.

On the fourth night, he ordered two quarts of Scotch from a bell boy and drank it as he made notes for a report against the hotel. Two o’clock in the morning found him inside the Snug, beckoning Marian to his table.

“Hello, Spalding, or Travers. Set down and buy me a drink. I’m out of rum, and I’ve got to have something while I wait for a friend that’s bringing me supplies.”

“I came to apologize,” said Henry. “I’m sorrier than I ever can tell you and I want you to forgive me for what I done. When I saw you crying in court the other day, my heart just about broke. And I realized⁠—”

“What did you realize?”

“I can’t tell you yet. Not till you forgive me.”

“I got nothing to forgive you for, Spalding, or Travers. All you done to me was get me on the first page of every paper in the country and land me a job here at twicet what the Cozy was paying me. I ain’t sore at you. I really ought to love you.”

“Don’t say that! I mean, as a joke.”

“Why not?”

“Because I do love you. I think I begun loving you the time you leaned over on my wife and cried. And I knew it was the real thing when you cried in the court room. If there’s any chance for me⁠—”

“You seem to only love people when they’re miserable. Maybe it might work the same way with me. Maybe if you could cry⁠—”

“I wish I could. But I don’t cry easy. Anyway, it’s a great thing to know you don’t bear a grudge.”

“Why should I? The only people that’s got a license to be sore at you is the partners that owned the Cozy, and poor Joe Schwartz. You cost him a job and two thousand bucks. And speaking of the devil, here he is now with my rum.”

Schwartz saw them and approached.

“Joe, here’s Mr. Travers-Spalding.”

“I can see it is.”

“He come to apologize for doing me what he thought was a dirty trick. And listen, Joe. Not only that, but he loves me because he seen me cry. Do you think if I seen him cry, I could love him back?”

“It’s worth a trial.”

“But he don’t cry easy.”

“Sing him one of those dirges.”

“He wouldn’t cry at a song. See if you can make him cry, Joe.”

“Get up, Spalding!” said Mr. Schwartz, and Henry rose unsteadily⁠ ⁠…

“Oh, Joe!” said Marian, bending over to look. “He can only cry out of one eye from now on.”

That Old Sweetheart of Mine

Stella Crane had a maid, but preferred answering the telephone herself when she was at home, which was most of the time. Calls came infrequently and were welcome⁠—an invitation to go to the theater with the Smalls, or to play bridge at Bess Cooper’s, or to dine with the Fields. Aside from two or three of her husband’s business acquaintances, whom he had had at the house for evening conferences, the Fields, Smalls and Coopers were about the only people in New York Stella had met.

There was nothing wrong with her or Ralph; they both dressed well and behaved respectably, and Stella played a fair game of contract. But they were not asked out much because Ralph, a patent lawyer, did a great deal of work after hours and was anything but hospitable. If you refrain from inviting people to your house, they are going to invite you less and less often to theirs.

It was hard on Stella, whose life in the city was not what she had expected. Her husband realized this and deluded himself and her with the promise that in the near future he would be able to afford more leisure, and then they’d repay their social indebtedness and make lots of new friends, and Stella would have no cause to complain of loneliness and boredom.

She answered the telephone because the maid had a tendency to confuse names as similar as Gillespie and Hammond; and on this particular morning, the vaguely familiar male voice at the other end of the wire began the conversation with the intriguing challenge, “I’ll bet you don’t know who this is.”

“You sound like somebody,” said Stella. “Just give me a second to think. I do know. Isn’t it Will?”

“You win! I had no idea you’d remember me after all these years.”

“I’d have recognized you sooner if I had thought there was any possibility of your being here.”

“Well, it took me a long time to get here, but I made it.”

“And how long do you expect to stay?”

“Not more than a day or two. It’s just a business trip.”

“Well, tell me something about yourself. Are you married?”

“Not yet.”

“I thought I’d have heard if you were,” said Stella.

“I guess you knew I wouldn’t be.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Oh, Will! You’re the same old Will!”

“I wish I was.”

“I’d like to see you.”

“It’s perfectly mutual.”

“I’d ask you to dinner, but Ralph’s in Washington and won’t be home till day after tomorrow.”

“I’m not crazy about seeing Ralph.”

“I know, but⁠—”

“Can’t two old friends like us get together and talk? I’m not inviting myself to your place, but I wish you’d have lunch with me, and we could go to a matinée.”

“It sounds wonderful!” said Stella. “Let me think.”

Fifteen years ago, Ralph and Will had been rivals for her love; not exactly her love either, for Will had won that before Ralph appeared on the scene, and though she had married Ralph, because he was “new” and persistent, and chiefly because he was capable of supporting a wife, she had never been quite sure that she was as fond of him as of Will.

Since she had become Mrs. Crane, she had not been alone with any man except her husband, her dentist and the elevator operators in various buildings in which she had lived. Ralph was not of a jealous disposition; she thought he wasn’t, anyway. She had never given him cause to feel jealousy, so she couldn’t be sure.

She had heard him comment on wives who “went around” with other men and had gathered that he disapproved of them, but surely he wouldn’t find fault with her even if the man happened to be an old flame and his former rival. Besides, how would he know? And she was lonely.

“Why, yes, Will. I guess it will be all right.”

“That a girl! I’ll call for you at a quarter of one.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Stella, thinking of the maid. “I’ll meet you at one, wherever you say.”

“You name the place. Remember, I’m a yokel.”

“Well, the Biltmore, in the lobby, if that suits you.”

“Any place suits me. The Biltmore lobby, then.”

“But have you changed much? Will I know you?”

“I’ll wear shoes.”

“Oh, Will! You’re the same old Will!”

“What show would you like to see today?”

“Oh, anything. I haven’t been to one for months.”

“All right. I’ll use my own judgment. One o’clock, then, at the Biltmore.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, dear.”

Stella’s heart skipped a beat. That “dear” didn’t sound like old friends. It didn’t sound safe, and she knew she was glad he had said it.

She dressed carefully and spent a long time in front of her mirror. It told her that although she had changed a lot since twenty-four, her age when she and Will had parted, she certainly did not look thirty-nine, not within four or five years of it. Her face was unlined and her figure still good, almost youthful, she thought, despite the ten or twelve pounds she had taken on as Mrs. Crane. There was not the same sparkle in her eyes, perhaps, and her smile was less engaging, more artificial; it was a smile she had cultivated for use when one of the Fields, Coopers or Smalls had related a rough story or joke which she hadn’t understood or liked or listened to.

Of course she was not conscious of this or of the difference in her eyes. She felt she could still arouse a man’s interest, particularly the interest of a man who hinted that he had remained single because he could not have her.

Will was more than a little excited. There had been fifty girls and women in his life since Stella had gone out of it, but none who had been able to hold him, none who had seemed as desirable as his sweetheart of fifteen years ago.

He believed she had still cared a great deal for him when she married Crane, and he believed that a woman who had cared for him once never could get entirely over it. Look at Fannie Towns, and May Judson, and most of the others! All he had to do was to whistle and they would come back.

Now he was going to meet the only one he had ever really loved and wanted. She had been easily persuaded to see him, and her husband was out of town. The day would not end with the matinée.

He called up Endicott 9546. “Betty? This is Will again. Say, I’m sorry about tonight, but I just had a wire from Charlie Prince, from Buffalo. He’s getting in at seven o’clock and wants me to meet him and stick around with him all evening. No, it’s business; I can’t get out of it. I’ll call you tomorrow, and meanwhile, don’t forget me.”

He and Stella had no trouble identifying each other. Will immediately noted her plumpness, but was glad it was no worse. He observed, too, the new smile, but charged it to embarrassment. Stella saw that his hair was thin and his face bore the marks of dissipation. Otherwise, he was the same old Will.

He said they had plenty of time and she must order something special to celebrate the occasion.

“I don’t feel like eating,” said Stella. “I just want to talk and hear you talk.”

“And I just want to look at you. That’s feast enough for me.”

But the waiter was hovering, and to get rid of him they had to make a choice.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” said Will, after ordering.

“I’ve changed more than you have. I’m heavier.”

“Very little. And look at my hair, or what’s left of it.”

“I don’t think you’ve lost much⁠—not much.”

“I’m not worrying about it, anyway,” said Will, who worried about it a great deal. “It’s too late for me to care whether I’m handsome or not.”

“I think you’re just as handsome as ever.”

“That’s all that matters.”

“But I want to hear about you, Will. Are you still with Boyer?”

“I’m back with Boyer. I quit them for a while; gave them a chance to miss me. They hired me back for fifteen thousand a year, five thousand more than my old contract.”

Fifteen thousand a year was big money in Will’s eyes; it was three thousand more than he was getting, and he didn’t relish Stella’s comment:

“That ought to be plenty for you, a bachelor with no responsibilities. If you were married and living in a place like New York⁠—well, Ralph makes nearly thirty thousand and we aren’t able to save much. We don’t spend much either, but it goes. Food and clothes and rent⁠—everything’s so frightfully high.”

It didn’t occur to Will that she might have overestimated Ralph’s income as he had his own, and he was not interested in the cost of New York living. He changed the subject.

“I got tickets for Journey’s End.”

“Oh, you’ll love it,” said Stella after the briefest of pauses. “Everybody’s mad about it, especially the men.”

“You haven’t seen it, have you?”

“Yes, I have, but I don’t mind a bit.”

“You told me you hadn’t seen anything.”

“I didn’t think you’d pick it out. I thought you liked musical shows. But it honestly doesn’t make any difference.”

“It does, too. I’m going to see if I can’t get something else.”

“Please, Will, don’t! For one thing, it’s late, and I swear I’d just as soon see this again. If it wasn’t so good, I’d let you change. But I wouldn’t have you miss it for the world. There’s no girl in it and it’s a war play and probably more interesting to men than women, but I don’t care.”

“I do. Let me see if I can’t get something for Follow Thru.”

“Oh, they say that’s wonderful, but I know they’d be sold out. And I really want to see Journey’s End again; I may get more out of it the second time.”

“I wish you’d told me. Maybe we can go to Follow Thru tonight.”

“Don’t let’s talk about it any more. Let’s talk about you.”

“That won’t be very interesting.”

“It will to me. I want to hear all about your business affairs and your love affairs, and everything.”

“Well,” said Will, “I’ve done pretty well in business; that is, for me. Nothing like Ralph, I suppose, but I’m satisfied. As for love affairs, you ought to know as much about that as I do.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I haven’t had any since you.”

Now this was the sort of conversation that appealed to Stella and would have kept her in her most attractive role, that of an interested, almost mute audience. Unfortunately the waiter arrived with food and Will was diverted from his “line,” his appetite for victuals being the one thing powerful enough to make him forget Romance.

“These scallops are great!” he said. “Don’t you like scallops?”

“Yes, indeed! I often order them. I love the way they fix them at the Ritz.”

“Is the Ritz a better place to eat?”

“I don’t know. I guess they’re about the same, only the Ritz is more expensive. Maybe it isn’t either, but you think of it as more expensive. That’s why I didn’t suggest meeting you there.”

“Listen, I’m not a pauper!”

“Of course not, Will. Just the same, I’d feel guilty if you spent more on me than you can afford.”

“A man making fifteen thousand a year⁠—”

Stella laughed. “You’re the same old Will! You talk like a millionaire. Why, the men I know, Ralph’s friends and mine, men who make even a bigger income than Ralph, you don’t see them spending five or six dollars on lunch. They appreciate the value of money, and that’s what you never did, Will. I hate stingy people, but there’s a big difference between stinginess and thrift, and it’s the thrifty ones who get along in this world.”

Will could not boast that he was thrifty, but he did think he had got along and Stella’s theory that he hadn’t would have made him pretty mad if the food had been short of delicious.

“You didn’t answer my question,” said Stella at length.

“What question?”

“I asked about your love affairs.”

“I told you I hadn’t had any since you ditched me.”

“Don’t say I ditched’ you, Will. It was just⁠—well, I liked Ralph a lot, and he was serious, and marrying him meant getting away from that deadly place. And you must admit you couldn’t have married anybody in those days. I did care for you, Will. I still do⁠—”

She stopped as if in embarrassment. She hoped he would sustain the sentimental note and his next remark sounded encouraging.

“Not like you used to.”

“How do you know?” she said softly.

“What?”

“I won’t repeat it.”

“I wish you would.”

“No. I mustn’t.”

Will was too intent on his spumoni to insist.

“It will be dark in the theater,” he thought. “I’ll hold her hand and see how she takes it.”

“It will be dark in the theater,” thought Stella, “and maybe he’ll call me ‘dear’ again.”

Her lecture on economy cost the waiter fifty cents, Will giving him half a dollar instead of a whole one as he had planned. He could not help regarding her as a bit inconsistent when she vetoed his suggestion that they walk to the Henry Miller, not four blocks away.

“I’m frightfully lazy,” she said, not mentioning the fact that her shoes hurt.

“All right,” said Will, “but if you’re going to let me buy a taxi, you’ve got to let me take you to dinner at the Ritz.”

“I couldn’t think of it!” said Stella. “For one thing, I’d be sure to see somebody I know. And haven’t you business to attend to, people to look up? I mustn’t take too much of your time.”

“I’ll postpone business till Ralph gets back.”

“I can’t decide just now.”

“You want to be sure you like me.”

“It isn’t that. You know I like you. But there are things to be considered.”

The seats were in the twelfth row.

“These are rotten seats!” said Will.

“You can’t get good ones at the box office.”

“I got these at my hotel.”

“Well, they’re all right. You mustn’t worry on my account. I told you I’d seen it before. We had the fourth row that night, right in the center, just perfect. Herb Small got them through the University Club. He always gets grand seats.”

The curtain rose.

“This is the British front, in the war,” explained Stella. “It’s what they call a dugout, where the officers stay. The whole three acts all take place in the one scene.

“That officer, that lieutenant or whatever he is,” she continued, “he’s a schoolteacher in England. I mean he was, before the war. He gets killed later on. It’s a terribly depressing play. Lillian Fields cried the night we saw it.”

A customer in the eleventh row turned round and gave Stella a nasty look, after which she whispered.

“This young boy, he’s a new officer, he hasn’t been at the front before; at least, not at this front. He’s been transferred or something. And the hero, the captain, is in love with the boy’s sister.

“Not this captain, I don’t mean,” she went on. “The other captain, the leading man, takes this one’s place. He gets mad when he sees his sweetheart’s brother. He doesn’t want anybody that he knows around, because he’s really a coward and of course he’s afraid people will find it out, especially his girl.”

The man in front of them turned round again and said “Ssh!” in none too friendly a manner. Stella thought he must be ssh-ing someone else.

“The only way he can ‘carry on,’ as they call it, is by drinking, so he drinks hard all the time.”

“That man wants us to quit talking,” said Will, and congratulated himself on the diplomatic plural.

“It’s somebody back of us he’s complaining of,” said Stella. “Now when the other captain comes in, you notice him, notice how big he looks. And they say he isn’t really big at all; I mean, off the stage. Some friends of ours, the Coopers, they met him at a party and they say he’s not nearly as big as he looks. He wears some kind of shoes or something that make him look big; I mean, on the stage. You notice when he comes in.”

The theater was dark, but Will seemed to have forgotten the hand-holding test.

“The hero, the captain, the man that’s in love with the young boy’s sister, he went to the same school the young boy went to, and he was the idol of the school. The boy, the girl’s brother, worships him. Of course he doesn’t know he’s a coward and drinks to hide it.

“That other officer there, that young one, he’s a coward, too, and he pretends he’s sick so they’ll send him away from the front. But the hero threatens to kill him unless he quits pretending he’s sick. He points a revolver right at him and says he’ll shoot him dead if he doesn’t ‘buck up.’

“I was frightened to death that he really would shoot him, the night I saw it. I don’t like that part of it at all, and it hasn’t anything to do with the rest of the play, but the play would have been too short without it. It’s awfully short as it is. It doesn’t begin till nearly nine; I mean, at night, and it’s over about half past ten; that’s half past four for a matinée.”

Will wished he had brought a box of molasses taffy.

“Here’s the real captain now, the hero. See how big he looks? And he really isn’t big at all off the stage. He’s mad at the girl’s brother being there. After a while the brother writes a letter to his sister and the captain is afraid he’ll tell her about his drinking and so forth. So he wants to read the letter and the boy doesn’t want him to, but he says he has a right to censor all mail. Finally the schoolteacher reads the letter out loud and it’s so complimentary to the captain that he’s ashamed of having made him read it.

“Isn’t the sergeant funny? I guess he’s a sergeant. It makes you laugh just to look at him. They’re all English, the whole company. I think there are other companies playing it out West or somewhere, and they’re all English, too. And it’s going to be a picture, a talking picture. Do you like talking pictures?”

“No,” said Will. “Or people.”

“After a while the colonel comes in and tells the captain that they want to find out who the Germans are in the trench facing them; that is, the number of the German regiment or something. I don’t see what difference it makes as long as they’re Germans, but Ralph says they always want to know so they can figure out the distribution of the German troops, how they’re distributed. So the captain has to send some men over to the German trenches, across No Man’s Land, and they’re supposed to capture a German prisoner and bring him back and then they’ll know what regiment is facing them.

“The captain hates to send anybody because it’s almost sure death, but he’s got to obey orders. He sends the young boy, the brother, the girl’s brother, and that schoolteacher, and the young boy gets a prisoner and the schoolteacher gets killed.

“The funny thing about it is that you kind of wish it was the boy that got killed in place of the schoolteacher. But the boy gets killed later.

“Of course they know what it means to do it and the boy is terribly nervous, but still he’s glad of a chance to do something important. He and the schoolteacher recite Alice in Wonderland before they go; not all of it; just quotations from it so as not to think of what’s before them. That’s the schoolteacher’s way of keeping his mind off danger, instead of drinking, like the captain.

“You wait till you see how the captain drinks. It must be colored water or tea or something. If it were real whisky he’d fall off the stage. It can’t even be tea or he’d get sick. Do you drink much, Will?”

“I’ve been on the wagon,” said Will, “but I think I’m going to fall off tonight; maybe this afternoon.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. You used to get so silly when you drank.”

“I still do.”

“But you were kind of funny and amusing, too. And then you usually got very affectionate.”

“I’m different now. I get silly at first; not funny at all. Then I get brutal and want to fight people, whoever is with me, my best friends, even girls.”

“You don’t mean really fight them!”

“Yes, I do. The reason why I got on the wagon is because I was with a girl, a girl I cared quite a lot for; we went on a party and I had about four drinks, and for no reason at all, I socked her in the mouth and knocked her down. It’s whoever I happen to be with when I get that way.”

“Then you ought never to drink anything.”

“That’s good advice, but sometimes I just have to. And it doesn’t seem right not to enjoy myself, my first time in New York.”

“You certainly don’t call it enjoying yourself, to hit women!”

“I do, though. I get quite a kick out of it. I don’t mean I pick on women especially, but this girl just happened to be there.”

For the sake of those readers who have not seen Journey’s End and who hope to, I will not divulge any more of its content, but will merely state that there were at least two men in the audience who wished they could borrow the captain’s gun.

“Will,” said Stella as they went out, “I don’t believe we’d better have dinner together. I’m tired and you look tired yourself.”

“I’m not tired,” said Will. “Even if I was, a few shots of rye will fix me up.”

“But I’m afraid. I’m afraid Ralph might come home.”

“You said he wouldn’t be home till day after tomorrow.”

“He changes his mind sometimes. He never stays away longer than he has to.”

“That’s what he tells you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing at all. But I’m not going to urge you against your better judgment. Do exactly as you like.”

“Well, I really think you’d better send me home. It’s been grand⁠—”

“I’ll take you home.”

“No, that isn’t necessary at all,” she said. “And the maid might see you and wonder.”

“All right, Stell’. We mustn’t let the maid wonder.”

“I’ll get in this taxi. Goodbye, Will. It was wonderful of you to give me such a treat.”

“I’m the one that got the treat.”

“You’re the same old Will!”

The taxi drove off and Will hurried to his hotel, where he immediately called Endicott 9546.

“Betty? Say, I just had another wire from Charlie Prince. He was driving from Buffalo and he burnt out a bearing at Binghamton and can’t get here till tomorrow. You haven’t made another date, have you? That a girl!”

Great Blessings

“The season again approaches,” proclaimed the President in one of his proclaiming moods, “when it has been the custom for years to set apart a day of Thanksgiving for the blessings which the Giver of All Good and Perfect Gifts has bestowed upon us during the year. It is most becoming that we should do this, for the goodness and mercy of God, which have followed us through the year, deserve our grateful recognition and acknowledgment.

“Our fields have been abundantly productive, our industries have flourished, our commerce has increased, wages have been lucrative, and comfort and contentment have followed the undisturbed pursuit of honest toil. As we have prospered in material things, so have we also grown and expanded in things spiritual.

“Wherefore I hereby set aside Thursday, the twenty-eighth day of November, as a day of general thanksgiving and prayer, and I recommend that on that day the people shall cease from their daily work and in their homes and accustomed places of worship devoutly give thanks to the Almighty for the many and great blessings they have received, and seek His guidance that they may deserve a continuance of His favor.”

Myrtle Stewart, aged ten, asked her mother for more cranberry sauce.

“Oh, no, dear! You don’t want to get sick.”

“I won’t get sick.”

“You will if you have more cranberry sauce. Remember, you must leave room for pumpkin pie.”

“I don’t want pumpkin pie. I want more cranberry sauce.”

“Let her have it, Clara. It can’t hurt her.”

This was the elder Mrs. Stewart speaking, Clara’s mother-in-law.

“She shouldn’t eat any sweets at all. Doctor Fred says that’s what’s the matter with her stomach.”

“There’s nothing the matter with her stomach. How does Doctor Fred know? He never had any children of his own. When Tod and Harry were Myrtle’s age, I didn’t refuse them anything, and I can’t see that they’re any the worse for it.”

Tod was Clara’s husband and Harry her brother-in-law, who had gone away to Detroit five years ago and was doing well there as a hotel manager with the liquor concession, just for the hotel, not the entire city. His salary was a small part of his income, but his parents didn’t know this. His stomach and Tod’s were in such condition that they could digest nothing but gin, which had no connection, of course, with the fact that Mother Stewart had indulged them when they were Myrtle’s age.

During the first six years of the married life of Clara and Tod, the family Thanksgiving dinner had been at Harry’s house. It was bigger and the Harry Stewarts usually could afford a maid. Grace, Harry’s wife, had not allowed a hostess’ responsibilities to weigh her down. Mother Stewart had disapproved of her because she drank a little, smoked when she liked, and was childless, but her mother-in-law’s thinly veiled hostility amused her up to a certain point, and when that point was reached, she walked out on her guests, saying she had promised to play bridge awhile at the Browns’.

Clara neither smoked nor drank, and had brought Myrtle into the world. This had made her the preferred daughter-in-law, but only temporarily. Tod’s inability to hold a good job was his wife’s fault, and she was too strict with Myrtle. And Grace’s depravity was forgotten as soon as she and Harry moved to Detroit and Harry began making fifteen thousand a year, of which he sent home a hundred dollars every Christmas.

Grace had perhaps been wise not to have a child. A hotel was no place in which to bring one up. Besides, she was not strong⁠—compared with Tunney.

This was the fifth Thanksgiving Father and Mother Stewart had come to Clara’s house. It was a habit now and they came without an invitation.

Clara, not blessed with a temperament like Grace’s, stood it as well as she could. At the end of the day she always wished she could drink enough gin to revive her spirits, but one small shot made her sick and she had to stay well to take care of Myrtle and Tod, both of whom invariably suffered a decline following a visit from the old people.

However, Clara would not have minded Thanksgiving if it had been the only day in the year when her mother-in-law and father-in-law swooped down on her. They dropped in three or four times a month, usually just before a meal, and Myrtle’s grandfather brought a particularly brutal brand of candy.

Worst of all, they had dropped in one evening in July, when Tod and Clara had left Myrtle at home alone while they attended the first show at the Gem. Their voices had awakened Myrtle and she had cried. No wonder, left alone without a light in the house.

“It isn’t sweet things that upset her,” asserted Mother Stewart now. “It’s nervousness. She isn’t over her fright and I doubt if she ever gets over it.”

“What fright?” said Tod.

“Waking up and finding herself alone in the dark.”

“That was nearly five months ago. And she wouldn’t have waked up if you hadn’t waked her.”

“I’m glad we did wake her. Almost anything could have happened. Tramps might have walked right in. They won’t stop at anything when they’re starving.”

“I think they’d stop at Myrtle,” said Tod. “She’s tough.”

“That’s a nice way for a father to speak of his child! A dear child like Myrtle!”

“Myrtle’s a dear child, all right,” Tod conceded, “and I imagine she seems even dearer than she is when you don’t have to live with her all the time.”

“I’d ask nothing better than to have her with me,” said Mother Stewart. “I guess her grandmother appreciates her, even if her parents don’t.”

“Tod isn’t both of her parents,” said Clara. “I appreciate her.”

“But you forget she’s just a child. It breaks her spirit, being so strict with her.”

“Strict! I don’t have a chance to be strict.”

“After all, Clara’s her mother,” said the elder Stewart, slipping his grandchild a chocolate cream under the table.

He felt it was time to change the subject, even if the change were for the worse.

“How’s things at the office, Tod?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said his son.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Well, Dad, I haven’t been there since last Saturday. They let me out.”

“What was the matter?”

“They didn’t like me, I guess.”

“You were only there two weeks.”

“That’s plenty of time for people to tell whether they like you or not.”

“Don’t talk so foolishly, Tod!” said Mother Stewart. “Myrtle isn’t old enough to understand your nonsense, and children repeat things outside.”

“It’s only the truth.”

“It’s not the truth and you know it! Old Kendall hasn’t brains enough to appreciate you. Or maybe that boy of his is jealous. And you weren’t well, anyway. How could you do yourself justice when you felt so miserable? Besides, it was no place for you, a hot, stuffy, dirty office like that! I don’t believe anyone even dusts. I wouldn’t worry about losing that kind of a position.”

“I don’t worry, Mother. I don’t worry enough. But Clara worries and I don’t blame her.”

“I didn’t say I was worried.”

“There’s no reason why you should be,” said her mother-in-law. “A woman who has a husband like Tod ought to be just proud and nothing else. Though she ought to worry a little about his health and see that he gets proper food and rest.”

“That reminds me, I forgot to take my medicine,” said Tod, and went to his bedroom, to the chiffonier where he kept his medicine in a large bottle which someone had labeled Gordon in a spirit of levity.

Mother Stewart took advantage of his absence to inquire whether he had any prospect of another job, wording her inquiry vaguely so Myrtle would think they were discussing bulbs. It was a waste of subtlety, for Myrtle was too busy stuffing herself to care what the talk was about.

Clara said the only thing in sight was a position with a Chicago firm, getting subscriptions in this territory for a new twenty-volume encyclopedia.

“He would work on a commission, no salary.”

“Well, I should think he’d make lots more money that way. Tod has so much charm, people are all so fond of him that I guess they’d buy nearly anything he asked them to.”

She had forgotten (but Clara remembered) that Tod had tried out many times before as a salesman and had proved conclusively that he couldn’t sell ant eggs to a wealthy turtle.

“Of course you mustn’t allow him to take it if it means much walking around, or lugging twenty big books everywhere he goes. He can describe the books and not carry them. Or he could have a set of them here at the house and invite people to come and see them. Maybe you could help by serving sandwiches and ginger ale.”

“They aren’t even published yet. There’s just a prospectus.”

“Well, it would save him walking and tiring himself out if you kept that here and invited people in. Harry’s feet got terribly calloused once, taking the census.”

“Couldn’t he have made people come to the house and give their names?” said Clara. “I should think they’d have been more willing when they didn’t have to buy anything.”

But it was necessary to change the subject again, for Tod was back at the table.

“Myrtle,” said Clara, “will you get your grandfather some more water while Mother clears the table?”

“Oh, the poor child! Don’t make a servant of her! Maybe that’s why she has trouble with her digestion, having to jump up and wait on people in the middle of a meal. Ben doesn’t want any more water, and Tod hasn’t finished his turkey.”

“I can’t eat any more, Mother. I’m full.”

“Why, you haven’t eaten anything at all.”

“I’ve eaten all I wanted.”

“Maybe⁠—Still, Clara’s getting to be a pretty good cook. You are a much better cook than you were, Clara.”

“Thanks. Oh, Mother Stewart, don’t get up! What do you want?”

“I thought if Ben has to have more water⁠—”

“I’ll get him some. You sit still.”

“Well, all right,” said Mother Stewart, resuming her seat; “but rather than see Myrtle⁠—”

“We used to have wine Thanksgivings at Harry’s,” recalled Father Stewart. “Claret wine. I don’t get it anymore.”

“I’ll never forget the Thanksgiving when Grace was so pie-eyed.”

“That’s enough, Tod!” his mother warned. “Little pitchers, you know.”

“I’ll bet Myrtle remembers it herself. Do you, Myrt?”

“Remember what?” said Myrtle.

“Little girls mustn’t try to understand their father’s silly jokes. They must just eat and get big and strong.”

Clara hoped Myrtle would not eat all her pie, but she did, though the last few mouthfuls were taken without enthusiasm.

“I’ll help you with the dishes,” said Mother Stewart.

“No, indeed! It’s nice of you to offer, but I couldn’t think of letting you. If you’ll amuse Myrtle⁠—”

The same two speeches had followed every meal her parents-in-law had eaten at Clara’s in seven or eight years.

When Clara was through in the kitchen, she went into the living room and found Father Stewart dozing in his favorite chair. Tod was absent after more medicine. Myrtle was lying on the couch and her grandmother sat beside her, stroking her forehead.

“I don’t think she feels very good. She complains of stomach ache. It will take her a long time to get over that fright.”

Myrtle slept and Clara wished she could sleep, too, but she had to listen to Mother Stewart.

“I had a letter from Grace Saturday. She apologized for not writing oftener; she said she had so little time. I imagine she helps Harry a great deal. She said she and Harry would love to have us come and pay them a visit, but the hotel was full all the while and we wouldn’t be comfortable with the noise and everything.

“Grace has turned out to be just the right kind of a wife for Harry. He was very patient with her at the start, always sure she would improve. And she certainly has. It means a lot to a man to have a wife like Grace. Most women don’t realize their responsibility.

“I sometimes wonder what would have become of Ben if I had been less understanding. With Tod and Harry to take care of, and doing my own housework, I was pretty busy, but I always found time⁠—”

And so on. Clara interrupted the monologue twice. She went to see how Tod’s medicine was affecting him. He was on the bed, taking a nap. Later on, the doorbell rang. It was the twelve-year-old Butler kid. He had a message for Tod from his brother. He wouldn’t give it to Clara.

Tod woke up and came to the door and the boy gave him the message. Not in Clara’s hearing. The boy’s brother was Frank Butler, who supplied Tod with medicine and trusted him for the money.

Also in the Butler family was Mamie Butler, a girl about twenty-five, quite pretty and with a reputation for looseness. Clara had seen her talking with Tod on the corner one day. And hadn’t she heard Frank say he was going to the football game this afternoon?

Father Stewart was awake again. Tod sat down in the living room.

“Ben,” said Mother Stewart, “you might as well tell them our news now.”

“I suppose I might. Well, it’s just that it looks like we’re liable to lose our home.”

“How’s that?” said Tod.

“Well, Mrs. Davis told us a month ago that we better be looking for new quarters. It seems her boy and his wife are planning on giving up housekeeping and moving in with the old lady. Of course they’d have to have our rooms and⁠—Well, that’s the story.”

“When do you have to get out?”

“In a couple of weeks; sooner, if we can find a place.”

“It’ll be pretty hard,” said Mother Stewart, “to find just what we want. It’s got to be a place where we can board, too. I can’t cook anymore and I certainly can’t do all the housework, though I could help a little.”

“I’d ask you to come here, but there’s no room,” said Tod.

“We wouldn’t want to impose on you and Clara.”

“It wouldn’t be imposing, but we’ve only got the two bedrooms. We couldn’t take Myrtle in with us. The light would wake her up when we went to bed.”

“As far as that’s concerned,” said Mother Stewart, “we wouldn’t mind sharing a room with Myrtle. I’d know she was safe if I was there with her. And Ben and I usually undress in the dark. If we could come here till we find something else, we’d pay our share⁠—”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll fix it up some way. Clara and I’ll talk it over. Right now I got to run over to Frank Butler’s for a few minutes. There’s some job he’s got lined up for me.”

“It’s lucky we never sold our old bed,” said Mother Stewart.

“Well, Myrtle,” said Father Stewart, “you had quite a nap. Maybe your mother would let me give you a piece of candy now.”

“She mustn’t have anything more now,” said Clara. “She has a stomach ache.”

“It’s gone,” said Myrtle.

“But it won’t stay gone if you eat any more.”

“One piece of candy wouldn’t hurt her.”

“Honestly, Father Stewart, she has lots of trouble with her stomach.”

“I’m sure it’s all the result of nervousness,” said Mother Stewart. “A child with her imagination ought never to be left alone, especially at night.”

After the guests left Myrtle had cramps and Clara summoned Doctor Fred.

“You’ve just got to regulate her diet,” he said. “She’ll never be a healthy child till you make her eat right. I know it’s hard for a mother to say, ‘You can’t have this or that,’ but you owe it to her and yourself to be strict.”

Clara put Myrtle to bed. Tod came back from the Butlers’ very late and she had to help him undress. She lay awake a long time.

She knew Father Stewart owed Mrs. Davis for several months’ board. He owed her because he spent so much of his small income on tobacco and candy.

The dinner had cost nearly ten dollars and no one had taken the trouble to say it was good. She had had to pay cash for the turkey because Berger’s was a cash market and she couldn’t get any more credit at Sloan’s.

She and Myrtle and Tod were all desperately in need of new clothes, but there was no prospect of having any. Every day brought threats from the gas company, the telephone company and assorted merchants. Doctor Fred hadn’t been paid anything for two years.

Clara was thirty-five. At twenty-three she had accepted Tod in preference to Dave Bonham. Tod had gone through college and had interesting ambitions, to go to Chicago or New York and be a journalist or write plays. Dave had graduated from high school and gone to work in his father’s garage. When his father had died, he had run the garage for several years and then sold it for a lot of money.

Dave had gone to Detroit and into the real estate business. He had invested in building lots on the edge of the city and now he was said to be worth over eight hundred thousand dollars, and was really worth nearly half that sum.

He had been quite broken up when Clara took Tod, and had remained single. He had no one to support but himself. He didn’t drink and it was impossible for him to spend more than a small part of his income. He had heard of Tod’s “tough breaks” and offered to lend Clara money, but she had refused.

In the days when Tod had dressed well and taken care of himself, he had been a much better-looking man than Dave. But poverty and a steady diet of gin had made him careless of his appearance and now no woman, except, perhaps, the easygoing Miss Butler, could possibly consider him attractive.

Dave had come back to town in October. He had intended spending a week, but had left after one day. He had called on Tod and Clara and talked pleasantly about old times.

The years had not made him handsome. But he dressed so well and looked so clean. He had romped with Myrtle and she cried when he left, though he hadn’t brought her any candy. And another thing, he was an orphan.

Second-Act Curtain

They were trying out a play in Newark. The play was to open in New York the following week. Washington had liked it pretty well and business had been picking up in the big New Jersey metropolis until a full house at a rainy Wednesday matinée had just about convinced the authors and the manager that they had something.

The three were standing in the lobby before the evening performance.

“We’d be all set,” said Mr. Rose, the manager, “if we just had a curtain for the second act.”

The authors, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Booth, walked away from him as fast as they could go. Neither of them wanted the blood, even of a manager, on his hands; and they had been told so often⁠—by the manager, the company manager, various house managers, the entire office staff, every member of the cast and the citizens of New Jersey and the District of Columbia⁠—that they lacked a second-act curtain (just as if it were news to them), that both had spent most of their prospective profits on scimitars, stiletti, grenades and sawed-off shotguns, and it was only a question of time before some of these trinkets would be brought into play.

After a while the good folks from the Oranges and Montclair began looming up in such numbers that Chambers and Booth thought Mr. Rose’s mind might be on some other subject and they ventured back into the lobby. “Boys,” said Mr. Rose, “we’ve got a hit. If we only⁠—”

Chambers grabbed Booth by the arm.

“Come here a minute,” he commanded, and Booth obeyed.

“Now, listen,” said Chambers, “we’re not going to find a second-act curtain by watching another performance of this clambake. Let’s leave it flat for tonight and go to our respective homes and do a little real thinking.”

Chambers’ respective home was a mansion in the lower sixties. Booth’s was a hotel room in which he had spent nearly all of the summer working, because he found it impossible to work out on Long Island where everybody else was having a good time. The collaborators parted at the Thirty-third Street terminal of the Hudson Tube and Booth went first to a speakeasy to buy himself some thinking powders and then to his room⁠—the number doesn’t make any difference because each is equipped with radio, and all you have to do to avoid it is not open the drawer of the table by the bed.

Booth’s room was not an expensive room. It was a $4.00 room and opened on a court, and the people in the other rooms opening on the court were nice and friendly and hardly ever pulled down their window shades, no matter what they were doing. For three days the room right across the court from Booth’s had been occupied by a comely and frank lady of about twenty-six, so Booth took a powder before settling down to real thinking. The room across the court was dark. Booth got into his thinking costume, consisting of pajamas, slippers and bathrobe, had another powder and decided he had better eat something.

Enter the Heroine

While waiting for the food, he began a letter to somebody at Syracuse University who didn’t know him and wanted him to make a speech. He discovered that the I key on the typewriter had gone blooey from overwork, rendering him mute. The food came and he sat on the bed to eat it. There was a knock at the door and in scampered a chambermaid not a day over fifty.

“Are you sick?” she said.

“No,” said Booth. “Why?”

“Well,” said the chambermaid, “there was a woman sick in this room a couple of weeks ago and I thought maybe she was still here.”

“You’re the only woman in this room,” said Booth, “and I hope you’re not too sick to leave.”

“It’s a funny thing,” said the chambermaid, “but I came in a room along this hall one time, it must have been last spring, and there was a man and a woman both in there, both sick. And they knew me because I worked in a hospital once and they were both there, too.”

“Marriage might regain something of its former sanctity,” observed Booth, “if husbands and wives were always both sick together.”

“I’ll just turn down your bed.”

“No. Let it alone. I’ll fix it when I get ready.”

“Well, I wouldn’t sit around like that or you’ll catch cold.”

“Good night.”

Booth finished eating and looked around the room for reading matter.

There were three books⁠—Heart Throbs, a collection, by Joe Mitchell Chapple of Boston, of favorite bits of verse or prose of well-known Americans; Holy Bible, anonymous, but a palpable steal of Gideon’s novel of the same name, and the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, by Sax Rohmer. Booth had seen them on the desk all summer, but had been too busy to read when the I key was working.

He took another powder and started in on the insidious Chink, but the author’s quaint method of handling direct discourse (“Too small by inches!” he jerked; “The pigtail again!” rapped Weymouth; “Is ‘Parson Dan’?” rapped Smith; “But,” rapped Smith; “Got any theory?” he jerked) was a little too much for frayed nerves. “It is all right,” he rapped to himself, “for a guest to bring a book like this with him, but there certainly ought to be a penalty for leaving it in the room.”

Inspiration from the Muse

Holy Bible began too slow and after another powder Booth dived into Heart Throbs, only to be confronted by the complete text of “Home, Sweet Home.” Now out in the town where Booth’s family was spending the summer the natives had pointed with pride to the house where Mr. Payne, who wrote this famous lyric, used to live. If the natives had ever read the whole thing, they probably would have burned the house instead of pointing to it.

Turning over a few pages, however, Booth came across a poem that soon had him fighting to keep back the tears. It told about a mother who often cried at the memory of the good times she used to have, before she was married and gave birth to a little one, but who felt all right again when the little one reminded her of her present blessings by climbing on her knee⁠—

And she says and twists a curl:
“I am Mamma’s baby dirl!”
And the while I bless my lot
Whispers: “Mamma had fordot!”

And another whose first stanza ran:

When you see a man in woe,
Walk right up and say, “Hello!”
Say, “Hello!” and “How d’ye do?
How’s the world been using you?”
Slap the fellow on his back,
Bring your hand down with a whack;
Waltz straight up and don’t go slow,
Shake his hand and say, “Hullo!”

For a brief moment Booth considered dressing again, engaging a taxi, driving to Chambers’ house, waltzing straight up to Chambers’ room, bringing his hand down with a whack on Chambers’ shoulder and saying, “Hullo, and how d’ye do, and how’s your second-act curtain?” But he hadn’t had enough powders.

While the waiter was removing the tray, he took another one and looked across at the opposite room. Strangely, the shade was down.

Booth lay on his bed, with glass and bottle beside him, for half an hour. Inspiration came to him. The second act should end with a song. But he’d better call up Chambers and get his approval.

“It’s Got to Be Funny”

“Why, sure,” said Chambers. “Only it’s got to be damn funny.”

“Have you had any ideas yourself?”

“Not yet. I’ve been reading. You realize, of course, that a line or a piece of business would be better than a song unless the song’s damn funny.”

“But I can’t think of a line or a piece of business.”

“Then go ahead with your song, and be sure it’s damn funny.”

Booth hung up and took a drink. In a room devoid of musical instruments he had to compose a song that would be a curtain, would make an audience laugh, would be damn funny.

He looked across the court and saw the light in the girl’s room flash on and then off.

He pictured her as a buyer from St. Louis or Cincinnati. She worked hard all day while he attended rehearsals, or while he sat there in his own room and attempted to think up lines dumb audiences would laugh at, as substitutes for lines that they wouldn’t. He wondered whether she was dumb.

In the evening she came back to her $4.00 cell, and perhaps changed her clothes and went to a picture, or sat in the grill or on the roof and dined alone and wished there were someone for her to dance with when the orchestra played “Here Am I.”

After her solitary dinner or the pictures, she probably went to bed and read the confessions of John Gilbert and Rudy Vallée until she fell asleep.

It was a shame, thought Booth, that the conventions and his arduous work kept him from calling her up and perhaps taking her to dinner or a show, or merely carrying on friendly conversations with her so she would not be quite so homesick.

Wasted Sympathy

He fell asleep and was awakened by the telephone at half past two.

“Listen,” said the voice of Mr. Rose, “we’ve got a show if we find a curtain for that second act. They liked everything but that tonight. You fellas have got to dig up a curtain by tomorrow.”

“I think I’ve got an idea.”

“Well, I hope it’s good.”

Booth began to hum different people’s tunes to himself. Tunes lots of times suggest words; it’s customary and much more satisfactory to get the tune first⁠—

He looked across the court once more. The lights were on, only the thin shade was down, and he could see a man in shirt sleeves standing in the middle of the room.

“Well,” thought Booth, “she’s married and I’ve been wasting all my sympathy. A girl that’s married may not be having a good time, but at least she isn’t alone.”

For some reason, however, he felt resentful and the drink he took was three times as big as its predecessors. So, she was married⁠—

Suddenly there flashed into his head one of the prettiest tunes he had ever heard. He grabbed a piece of music manuscript paper and wrote a lead sheet of half the refrain.

“It will be all the better,” he thought, “if I can get some silly, incongruous words to such a pretty melody as this.”

He set down what he considered an amusing line and was at work on a second when the telephone rang again.

“This is Rose. I was thinking maybe you’d better tell me something about your idea for a curtain.”

“It’s a song. I’ve got it half done.”

“You might just as well quit working on it. We can’t drop on a song. It’s got to be a gag.”

“But suppose the song is a gag⁠—”

“No, I tell you we can’t ring down on a song. We’ve got too many of them. This is no musical. Just forget that idea and work on another.”

Booth tried to answer, but Mr. Rose had hung up.

“Whether we ring down on it or not,” Booth said to the bottle, “we can use it somewhere.”

But in the middle of the third line of the lyric a terrible hunch came to him. He had heard the tune before. Where? Why, back at home in the Episcopal church choir. Only there it had been in nine-eight or something, and now it was four-four. “The strife is o’er, the battle done.”

“I won’t give up till I’m sure,” he said to himself.

There was one composer in town who, chances were, would be up at this time of night, five or ten minutes past three. It was quite a job to grab hold of the telephone, but Booth finally managed it.

“Well, whistle it or hum it, but do it quick because I’m working,” said Mr. Youmans.

Booth whistled the refrain, though whistling was difficult.

“I like it very much,” said Mr. Youmans.

“But isn’t it a hymn? I seem to have heard it in church.”

“It’s a hymn all right,” said Mr. Youmans, “but I don’t think you heard it in church. I’m sure I never did.”

“No. I can imagine that.”

“But I can tell you where you did hear it.”

“Where?”

“Do you remember the morning you came to my Great Day rehearsal? That’s where you heard it. It’s the Negroes’ hymn that opens the second act.”

Booth tore up his sheet of music paper and looked across the court. Clearly visible was the silhouette of the gentleman putting on his coat and hat.

Booth lunged for the telephone again.

“I’ll call her up,” he thought. “I’ll tell her I’m sorry her husband has to go to work so early.”

The operator answered in a voice as thick and sleepy as his own.

“Listen,” he said, “what’s the number of the room right across the court from me?”

“I don’t know, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

“But I’ve got something important to say.”

“You sound like it. Anyway, you tell it to me and I’ll deliver the message.”

“All right,” said Booth. “You tell her I’ve been in my room alone all evening, trying to think up a second-act curtain. And I can’t think of one.”

At seven in the morning he was aroused by strange noises that issued forth from the telephone receiver, which was off the hook, and the cord of which was looped around his neck.

Detected!

“Will you please hang up your receiver?” said the operator.

“I will if you’ll send me the house detective.”

“All right.”

A house detective appeared before Booth had a chance to get back to sleep.

“Officer,” said the latter, “there was somebody in this room last night.”

“It looks it.”

“When I came in, I brought a full bottle of pretty good stuff. I had my dinner, I worked a little and read a little, and then I went to sleep. Ten minutes ago I woke up to find the bottle empty and the telephone cord twisted around my neck as if someone had tried to strangle me.”

“Go back to sleep,” said the detective, “and give me time to run down clues. I think we will find that both crimes⁠—the emptying of the bottle and the displacement of the telephone receiver⁠—were the work of one man.”

Mamma

The crosstown car came to a stop at the east end of Forty-second Street. One passenger stayed on, a woman of about thirty who had been riding, the conductor thought, from as far west as Broadway.

“We go back now, lady,” he said.

She smiled at him, but made no reply.

“This is the end of the line,” he said.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, you must get off.”

She smiled again, but was silent. The conductor went to the motorman.

“Should I put her off?”

“What is she, pickled?”

“I didn’t smell no liquor.”

“She must be crazy or a hophead. Or maybe she just enjoys the ride. You might ask her where she wants to go.”

The conductor returned to the woman.

“Where do you want to go, lady?”

“Home,” said the woman. “I must get home and bake a cake.”

“Where is your home?” asked the conductor.

The woman just smiled vaguely.

“Do you live in New York?”

“I think so.”

“Whereabouts in New York?”

She shook her head.

“In the city or in one of the suburbs?”

“I think so.”

“Do you live over in Jersey?”

No answer.

“Out on Long Island?”

No answer.

“Up in Westchester somewheres?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Do you want to get off at Grand Central Station?” asked the conductor.

“Oh, yes!” She said it almost eagerly.

“Where is your purse?” asked the conductor.

“The woman took it, the woman that was standing next to me.”

“Whereabouts?”

“In the store. She stood next to me in the store and took my purse.”

“Haven’t you any money or any ticket?”

“My husband will take care of me.”

When the car, now well filled, stopped in front of the Grand Central Station, the conductor came to the woman and touched her on the arm.

“Here’s where you get off,” he said.

He escorted her to the platform and watched her alight and enter the station. He thought perhaps he ought to have put her in the care of a policeman. Still, if she did not “come out of it,” someone in the station would notice her and take her in charge. There was no danger of her being robbed if she had nothing.

The woman, who would have been rather pretty if she had had more color and had not looked so tired, wandered uncertainly along the lane into the upper-level concourse. She acted like a sightseer, walking around the several times and stopping every little while to regard attentively some prosaic object such as a ticket window, a closed gate, the information booth. At length she went up the slope that led to the waiting room. She sat on a bench, sometimes observing the people near her, sometimes dozing, sometimes smiling to herself as if her thoughts were pleasant.

Late at night, when the waiting room was nearly empty, a policeman found her asleep and awakened her.

“It’s time to go home,” he said.

“I’m waiting for my husband,” said the woman.

“Where is he?”

“At the office. He’s going to stop for me and take me home.”

“Where do you live?”

“My husband knows.”

“Don’t you know, yourself?”

“He’ll take care of me.”

“Do you live in the city?”

“I think so.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name? My name’s Mamma.”

“What’s your last name?” asked the policeman.

“That’s all⁠—just Mamma.”

“What’s your husband’s name?”

“Dad. He’s at the office, but he’ll stop for me; pretty soon, I hope. I must get home and bake a cake.”

“I think you’d better come with me,” said the policeman. “We’ll try and find your husband.”

The woman got up willingly enough, and the policeman took her outside and turned her over to a colleague.

“Steve, here’s a lady named Mamma, and she’s waiting for her husband, a fella named Dad. He was supposed to come for her when he got out of the office, but I figure he’s been detained. You take her over to the Guest House, and if he comes here, I’ll tell him where she is.”

In the Travelers’ Aid Guest House, the woman was given a bath, a nightgown, and a bed. But these comforts and a good breakfast failed to refresh her memory. At eleven o’clock next day she was still Mamma, waiting for Dad and eager to get home and bake a cake. And they took her to the city hospital’s psychopathic ward.

“You must know where you live,” said Miss Fraser.

“Yes,” replied the woman.

“Well, tell me. We can’t send you home till we know where it is.”

“My husband knows where it is.”

“Yes, but he isn’t here.”

“He’ll be here this afternoon. He’s coming for me, and he’s coming early because it’s my birthday. They’re going to give me a surprise.”

“Who are?”

“My husband and Brother and Betty.”

“Who are Brother and Betty?”

“Why do you ask so many questions?”

“I’m interested in you,” said Miss Fraser.

“Well, Brother is my little boy, and Betty is my little girl. They both had the flu. And Dad had it. And Doctor was frightened. He thought they were all going to die. But we fooled him. They all got well.”

“What’s the doctor’s name?”

“My husband knows his name. My husband remembers everything.”

“But we can’t learn anything from him if you don’t tell us where he lives.”

“He lives at home, with me and Brother and Betty⁠—at night, that is. In the daytime he’s at his office.”

“Where is his office?”

“He’ll tell you that when he comes.”

“But you see,” explained Miss Fraser, “he isn’t very likely to come because he doesn’t know you’re here. If you’ll just tell me his name and how to reach him⁠—”

“His name is Dad, and he’s in his office because this is daytime.”

“What does he do?”

“He’ll tell you that, too. He remembers everything.”

Miss Fraser gave way to Miss Parnell.

“I understand this is your birthday.”

“Yes, and Brother said that he and Betty and Dad would surprise me with something if I would bake them a cake. I told them the surprise mustn’t be very expensive, because we must save up to pay Doctor. Doctor will have a big bill, because he was there three and four times a day for nearly two weeks. But as long as everybody got well, what do we care how big his bill is? Are you a nurse?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, I’m not a nurse. I mean I’m not a trained nurse, but Doctor said I should have been a trained nurse. He said I seemed to do the right thing by instinct. He said if it hadn’t been for me, all three of them would have died⁠—Brother and Dad and Betty. I didn’t go to bed for a whole week. Sometimes I went to sleep standing up. Did you ever do that? It’s a funny experience. But when it’s all over, you don’t mind what you went through, as long as everybody got well.”

“Have you got any money? I mean, has your husband got any?”

“He makes a good salary, but we haven’t saved. We have too much fun, I guess. The amount we spend for food, it’s a disgrace for a family the size of ours. And Dad always wants me to look nice.”

“Well, you need some new clothes and some new shoes and stockings.”

“I guess you’re right, but it’s a queer thing, because I just bought what I’m wearing.”

“How long ago?”

“Day before yesterday. And yesterday I was looking for some things for Betty when my purse was stolen.”

“What store were you in?”

“I can’t remember the name of the store⁠—it’s the same place I usually go. If I had my purse, I could tell you. But never mind; my husband will know. He keeps track.”

The woman took a nap, and after it Miss Fraser renewed the siege.

“Can’t you tell me now what your name is?”

“It’s funny; everybody asks me that.”

“But you don’t tell anybody.”

“Yes, I do. My name is Mamma. I told your sister.”

“I have no sister,” said Miss Fraser.

“She looked enough like you to be your sister, and she kept nagging the same as you do.”

“Honestly I’m not nagging, but I do want to know your name and address so I can send you home. Brother and Betty are probably wondering what has become of you.”

“No, they’re not. They’re at school.”

“What school?”

“It’s two blocks from where we live.”

“What’s the name of it?”

“Do you want to send your children there?”

“I have no children.”

“Then why do you want to know the name of a school? You ask too many questions. When my husband comes, you can ask him anything you want to, but I’m tired of being nagged.”

Dr. Phillips took a turn at “nagging.” “Aren’t you anxious to get home?”

“Yes, I am. I’ve got to bake a cake.”

“Then why don’t you try to remember your name and where you live?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Phillips.”

“Well, thank goodness we don’t need a doctor. We did need one, but they all got well⁠—Betty and Brother and Dad.”

“Will you try to describe the house where you live?”

“House! We’re not rich! We live in an apartment.”

“Where is it?”

“That’s all right. My husband will take me there. He’s coming for me this afternoon.”

“He can’t very well do that, because it’s evening now, and besides he doesn’t know where you are.”

“You’re too fresh! We have our own doctor, and we’re satisfied with him. If we want to make a change, my husband will send you word.”

“Is your husband in business for himself, or does he work for somebody?”

“He’s in an office. He has an office all to himself, and you can’t get in to see him till the boy tells him who you are and what you want. And then he’s liable to say he’s out, if you’re somebody he doesn’t want to see. I don’t imagine he’d want to see you; you ask too many questions. And those girls ask too many questions. It’s people like you that make him so late. He has to stay at the office and answer questions, and it makes him late. He’d have been here long ago, if it wasn’t for you. And I’ve got to get home and bake a cake.”

That night Mamma boasted a little about her children and didn’t seem to care whether anyone was listening.

“Betty is smarter and gets along faster in school. She can skim through a lesson once and almost know it by heart. She finishes her homework in fifteen or twenty minutes and then helps Brother do his. Brother has brains enough, but he dreams a lot. He doesn’t concentrate like Betty. He is more on the lines of a genius of some kind. Everybody says he’ll be an artist or a poet or maybe a great actor. I don’t believe he’d ever pass in school if the teachers weren’t so crazy about him. That and the way Betty helps him with his homework. My husband says Betty will make a better businessman than Brother. I hope neither one of them will have to work as hard as my husband does. I suppose they will, though, if we don’t turn over a new leaf and economize. We’ll have to for a while, to pay what we owe Doctor. I don’t imagine he’ll charge us as much as he would if he wasn’t so fond of the children. Betty’s his favorite, and I think my husband likes Brother best. I don’t know which I like best. They’re both lovely!”

During her second day at the hospital Mamma answered (if you could call it answering) most of the questions put to her, occasionally losing her temper and scolding her questioners for their inquisitiveness. For two weeks thereafter she would not open her mouth in the presence of a doctor, a nurse, or a volunteer social worker. She cried a little, smiled a great deal, and several times daily told other patients that her husband was coming for her “this afternoon.”

In vain her picture was published in all the papers, along with the scant details of the case⁠—the date she had been found, her approximate age, a description of her clothing. There were no inquiries for her at the police stations, the other hospitals, or the morgue, and policemen assigned to the task of discovering her alleged family reported failure. The psychopathic ward was beginning to regard her as part of its permanent equipment. And then⁠—suddenly she recalled her other name.

“Carns,” she said, and said it again, “Carns.”

She said it loudly, and Miss Fraser heard.

“What is that you’re saying? Is it your name?”

“Yes. That’s it⁠—Carns.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“I don’t know, but my husband will remember. He’ll tell you when he comes for me this afternoon.”

To Miss Fraser “Carns” sounded unreal, but in the telephone book she found five “Carnses.” Four of them reported that all members of their families were present or accounted for. The telephone of the fifth was no longer in service.

Miss Fraser got off the West Side subway on upper Broadway and walked downhill to Riverside Drive. She stopped at an address listed in the telephone book the address of the Carnses whose telephone had been disconnected.

It was an old apartment building, but the doorman was new.

“No, I never heard of nobody by that name,” he said. “But you might maybe find out from the janitor. He’s been here all his life.”

The janitor was away⁠—had gone up to the hardware store. Miss Fraser talked to his wife, who first wanted it understood that her husband was not a janitor but a superintendent.

“The man at the door told me you had been here a long time,” said Miss Fraser. “Did you know a family in the building named Carns?”

“Yes, and mighty fine people. A young man and his wife and two kiddies, a boy and a girl. The little girl was as smart as a whip, and the boy was so handsome that everybody turned around in the street to look at him. I never felt sorrier for nobody than poor Mrs. Carns. She was going to send me a postcard to tell me how she got along, but I guess it slipped her mind.”

“Why were you sorry for her?”

“For losing her husband and two kids.”

“Losing them?”

“They all three died of the flu two months ago.”

Miss Fraser swallowed before she spoke again. “Where did Mrs. Carns say she was going?”

“No place specially. She was going to look for work, though I can’t think of nothing she’d be fitted for. She couldn’t be very choosey anyway, because I doubt if she had ten dollars when she left here, and she had to support herself besides satisfying all her creditors.”

“Did she owe much?”

“She owed at least a month’s rent, and she owed the doctor and the nurse.”

“Oh, did she have a nurse?”

“The doctor told her she had to get one. She herself was the most useless, helpless woman you ever seen in a sick room.”

Miss Fraser related her findings at the hospital.

“Well,” said Dr. Phillips, “it’s just a question of time till everything comes back to her. If she recalls her name, it won’t be long till she remembers the whole business. And then she’s liable to have something a lot worse than what she’s got.”

Mamma spotted Miss Fraser as she came into the ward, and called to her.

“Did you telephone my husband?”

“How could I?” said Miss Fraser. “I don’t know his name.”

“I told you his name. It’s Carns.”

“There’s no such name,” said Miss Fraser. “I looked in the book and couldn’t find it.”

“Maybe I’ve got it wrong,” said Mamma. “Anyway he’s coming for me this afternoon.

Words and Music

Hilda Harper’s lunch hour was from half past twelve to half past one. Unfortunately it coincided with the daytime personal appearance of Roman Starr at the Royal; unfortunately, because Hilda was underweight and ought to have eaten lunch, but would have starved rather than miss one moment of Roman’s seductive crooning.

Regularly every weekday she rushed from the office to the Royal, bought her ticket with the right change (to save time), and sank into a seat breathless but blissful. She hoped that the ushers and the girl at the ticket window did not notice her or guess her secret. They did, but she was just one of a hundred “repeaters” of her age and sex, distinguished only by the fact that she came six days a week instead of four or five.

Through the long, hungry afternoons she took dictation or typed without a conscious thought of what she was doing. Though there was no room in her mind for anything save Roman’s beautiful face, devastating smile, and plaintive gurgling, she was able to accomplish her work with very few errors, none of them glaring enough to be detected by her boss, Mr. Lincke, who had graduated from a Vienna grammar school in his freshman year.

Hilda and an older girl, Margaret Quinlan, lived in the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Reade. The Reades had a radio, and the girls were welcome to listen in as often as they chose, which, in Hilda’s case, was every evening from seven till eight, when Roman Starr and his Starr-Light Orchestra took the air. Hilda had several pictures of Roman, clipped from newspapers and magazines, and always she kept one concealed in her hand to look at surreptitiously while Roman purled or cooed. Margaret pretended not to know this and was too kindhearted to kid her roommate about the one sided romance. And inasmuch as Margaret liked conversation, and Hilda would neither converse nor listen except when Roman was the topic, the older girl feigned more interest in him than she really felt.

Margaret was rather musical in an amateur way. She wondered, to herself, what you would call Roman’s voice. It was not a tenor or a baritone, or even a contralto. Sometimes it was the hum of a mosquito a foot from one’s ear; sometimes the drone of a bee that had taken an anesthetic. She wondered, too, at the enraptured reception, by Hilda and others, of his every new opus. It seemed to her that he turned out at least two a week, but the titles and the words and the music were so much alike that his announcement, “Tonight I am going to sing you a little number that I have just composed,” was quite necessary. Necessary, that is, to Margaret. Hilda thought they were all different and all beautiful, but her favorite was “My Bride-to-Be.”

The words of the refrain were written indelibly on Hilda’s heart, and she whispered them a thousand times a day:

My bride-to-be, my only true love;
There’s none so fair, so sweet as she,
My bride-to-be; I never knew love
Until she came and conquered me.
You ask me to describe her, but I will not even try.
Could one describe the fairest of God’s angels in the sky?
I’ll only say she’s just like you, love,
For you are she, my bride-to-be!

Margaret went with Hilda when Roman’s first sound picture, Amourette, was shown. She guessed why Hilda was not anxious to go a second time. For one thing, Roman’s voice did not screen well. But the scenes between the hero and the lovely Lydia Languish, with whom he did his amouretting, were what ruined the evening. They were simply unbearable, if you felt like Hilda and thousands of her fellow-sufferers.

Nearly every day, in nearly every paper, there was mention of Roman, and the theatrical, moving-picture, and radio publications were full of him. Hilda’s dresser overflowed with clippings. The one she liked best and read most frequently was from Wave Lengths⁠—a half-page story under his own signature, a story in which he bared his soul.

“I feel,” it said in part, “that I shall never attain the artistic heights to which I aspire until I have experienced a great love; perhaps, probably, a love that is unrequited.

“I believe Art thrives on love, that the appealing emotional quality which, kind friends assure me, is now present in my voice would be increased an hundredfold were I suddenly to find myself submerged in a sea of Passion.

“ ’Twere futile to go in search of this inspiring rapture. Nor am I sure the impetus to my art would be worth the pain it might bring me. Yet I will not retreat from love’s advance. When I meet the one girl, the woman I have dreamed of, my arms will be open. If she turns away, so much the worse for me. And, I fancy, so much the better for my career.”

Hilda hoped he was wrong about the advantages of disappointment. Because if she happened to be the woman he had dreamed of, and if his arms happened to be open when they met⁠—well, she certainly would never detour for his Art’s sake.

It was natural that Roman should receive mash notes, hundreds of them a day. The first one Hilda wrote him was so warm that she lacked the nerve to sign it and was therefore not surprised when no answer came. Her name and address went with the second one, which by a great effort she kept comparatively cool. It read:

My dear Mr. Starr:

You will probably be surprised to get a letter from me and will probably think me bold to be writing to a man to whom I have never been introduced, but I can not resist the temptation to tell you how much I admire your singing and your looks and everything about you and how wonderful it must be to be so talented and so good-looking and have everybody admire you the way they do you. I hope you will believe me, Mr. Starr, when I assure you that I am not in the habit of writing to men to whom I have never been introduced, but I feel like I know you, as I never miss one of your personal appearances at the Royal, but attend them every day and also listen to you every evening on the air and clip out all the clippings I can find about you in the newspapers and magazines, and there is hardly any room in my dresser for my things, as I have so many clippings of you, including pictures.

One of my favorite clippings is the article you wrote for Wave Lengths, but, dear Mr. Starr, how can you ever think that if you fall in love you will be unrequited? Because I am sure that all the girls who have ever seen you or heard you sing must feel a good deal like myself only perhaps not so strongly, and if I⁠—But I guess I would better not continue on that topic, or you will think I am too bold.

Now, Mr. Starr, I know you must get millions of letters from feminine admirers like myself, and I know you are too busy to answer all of them, but could not you make an exception in my case and answer this letter with a little note, no matter how brief, and tell me some things about yourself which I am dying to know, and one of them is how do you think of so many beautiful songs⁠—do they just come into your head and you write them down? I am sure it must be a natural gift, but still I think it is wonderful that you should be able to write so many beautiful songs which the words and music go right to my heart, and my favorite of all your songs is “My Bride-to-Be.” I would like to ask you many other questions, but you would think they were too personal. I mean things like how do you keep your hair so wavy and your teeth so white and about your complexion and your eyelashes. But I am sure you must be sick and tired of reading this letter, and you have probably torn it up long ago and are wondering what kind of a silly girl could write such a letter. Well, Mr. Starr, I guess I am a silly girl all right, at least on one subject, but will let you guess what that subject is.

And now I will close this silly letter and will not even read it over to myself for fear I would think it too silly and tear it up without sending it, so please excuse all mistakes and also my handwriting as I am use to writing on a typewriter as that is what I am, Mr. Starr, a stenographer and have to work for my own living, but I know you are not the kind of a man who would look down on a girl because they had to earn their own living, so may I hope you will answer this letter with just a little note and please answer it soon as I will be sick with nervousness wondering if you are going to answer it at all.

After five weeks of hell upon earth, Hilda realized that he was not going to answer it at all.

One morning, Miss Claire Richardson’s column in the Bulletin was devoted to Roman, whom she had met and interviewed at the Minuit Club, where he was being featured. Roman, it seemed, had reluctantly consented to come to Miss Richardson’s table and talk about himself. But Miss Richardson had either failed to get much out of him or else was more interested in her own style than in what he had to say. Anyway there was not nearly enough direct quotation from Roman to satisfy his fans; moreover, the writer had evidently covered her assignment in a spirit of levity. Hilda was only one of an army of readers who felt like slapping her face.

Hilda clipped the column and squeezed it into her dresser. She did not like it, but it was about him and therefore must be saved.

On a morning a few days later, she woke up with an idea so daring that it made her tremble. It was an idea which she must immediately put out of her head. It was an impossible idea. But was it?

She said to Margaret at breakfast, “How do you suppose reporters go about it to get interviews with people?”

“What kind of people?” said Margaret.

“Actors and movie stars⁠—people like that.”

“I should think,” said Margaret, “that it would be harder not to get them than to get them. People whose success depends on publicity want all the publicity they can get.”

“Yes, but how do the reporters make engagements with them?”

“If they have to make engagements, I imagine they do it by telephone or telegraph or the good old U.S. mails. I guess, though, that the reporters simply go to where the people are and tell them what they want. Those kind of people won’t put any obstacles in the way of seeing themselves in print, even if it’s in connection with murder.”

Well, of course Roman was not one of “those kind of people.” Yet he was of the class that can not avoid the limelight and, though undoubtedly an exception to all rules, a person whose ambition, as well as his innate courtesy, would conduce to render him “nice” to interviewers, in spite of Miss Richardson’s perfidy.

Hilda wanted very much to go to the Minuit Club and have him come to her table, but there were too many difficulties. Her one evening gown was unstylishly short. Night clubs had terrible cover charges. You required a male escort, and you didn’t know one with enough money. And a dressed-up midnight excursion from your room would be impossible to explain to Margaret. The best bet was the lunch hour at the Royal. They must have a stage door, and a doorkeeper who would be polite to you if you told him you were a newspaper woman.

Flora Campion of the Gazette, alias Hilda Harper of Lincke Brothers, announced herself and her errand at the Royal’s stage entrance. The aged doorman disappeared and returned shortly with the information that Mr. Starr was dressing. He would be with her in a few moments. The doorman sat down and “Miss Campion” stood up on legs that were acting crazy.

Three or four of Roman’s musicians came out, carrying their instruments in cases. They were in a hurry. And then Roman himself came out, and he was in a hurry, too.

“Were you waiting for me, little girl?”

Hilda managed a shaky “Yes.”

“Is it an interview? Because we’re going to do some recording this afternoon, and I’m late already. Is it something that can wait?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Hilda shakily. “Not very long.”

“Well, drop up to the Minuit tonight, or if you can’t do that, how about tomorrow morning? Come to my apartment at ten thirty or a quarter to eleven. Just tell my secretary who you are, and I’ll see you. Oke?”

“I don’t know where your apartment is.”

“Eight-ten Park. And now I’ve got to rush!”

Hilda watched him push his way through the crowd, mostly girls, that was waiting for a closeup. Then she staggered back to the office of the Lincke Brothers, who had granted her an extra half-hour off to go to the dentist, and took a score of letters that meant absolutely nothing to anybody.

“Mr. Lincke,” she said to one of the Mr. Linckes, “I hate to ask you, but the dentist wants me to come back tomorrow forenoon. He can finish up with me then, and I could be here by half past eleven or twelve, and I wouldn’t go out to lunch.”

“All right, all right,” said Mr. Lincke, trying to be gruff, but secretly pleased because it promised him a few hours’ freedom from dictating letters.

Hilda could not sleep a wink that night. Several times she wished she were rooming alone so she could switch on a light and read her clippings and memorize the few which she did not already know by heart. It might make quite a difference to Roman Starr to learn that she had memorized all his clippings.

From where Hilda lived to Eight-ten Park Avenue was about a mile and a half. If she walked, she would have a red nose, for it was cold. If she took a taxi, her clothes would get rumpled. Perhaps if she sat up perfectly straight in the taxi, she could keep her clothes smooth. Anyway it was harder to conceal a nose than a couple of wrinkles. She took a taxi.

The taxi covered the mile and a half in under four minutes. When she got out, it was only ten minutes after ten. This would never do. She walked a few blocks away and back again, and she had a red nose as well as a couple of wrinkles, and still it was only twenty minutes after. What was the matter with time today?

A tall man in uniform asked whether she had an appointment. She told him “Yes.”

“What name?” he said.

“Flora. I mean I’m Flora Campion from the Gazette. Mr. Starr said I was just to let his secretary know I was here.”

“Mr. Starr’s secretary isn’t up there. I seen him go out five, ten minutes ago. But if you got an appointment, I guess it’s all right.”

The elevator boy discharged his passenger at the proper floor. It was unnecessary for him to point out Mr. Starr’s apartment. The secretary had left the door open, and Mr. Starr was doing his daily dozen arpeggios.

For a moment Hilda stood outside the door, listening. Then she yielded to temptation and went in.

She found herself in a small reception hall. The living-room with its grand piano was in plain sight. But the arpeggios came from another room beyond. Hilda ventured a few feet farther and sat down on the piano bench.

“O‑o‑o‑O‑o‑o‑O.”

How beautiful his voice was, just singing O’s!

Then, from still another room, came the sound of another voice not so beautiful, a voice that was rough, raucous, and unmistakably female. “Hey! Hey, Gus!” it bawled.

The arpeggios ceased.

“Did you finally wake up?” said Roman Starr.

“Well, I wouldn’t be awake if there was a chance to sleep. If you’ve got to yodel at this time in the morning, why don’t you go in the living-room and shut the door?”

“Why don’t you sleep nights?”

“I slept all right till you burst in, but it wasn’t long enough. I know one thing⁠—the next artist I marry will be a fella that can doze off without making me homesick for the Ninth Avenue Elevated. They call you a tenor, but if you could stay asleep all the while, Gatti-Cazoozis would have you doubling for Chaliapin’s grandfather. Aren’t you through breakfast yet?”

“Pretty near. She’s bringing me more toast.”

“Wasn’t there enough to soak up all the coffee? Where is Bennett?”

“I had to send him for Newman’s lyric, for the canoe number. I forgot it last night.”

“I thought you were going to break it in to day.”

“I am. I won’t have any trouble. It’s practically the same as ‘Pacific Moon,’ and Ketter’s rewritten his bride melody.”

There was a brief pause and then, “Say, you big bum, didn’t I tell you not to use my stockings for a shoe cloth?”

“I thought they were soiled.”

“They are now!”

Hilda, having got noiselessly out of the apartment and reached the street, knew she would have to do something desperate. She had no idea how to go about it to buy poison, or where to buy a drink.

She had never smoked a cigarette in her life. She went over to Madison Avenue and found a cigarette store. She bought a package of cigarettes and walked around the corner, out of the wind, to light one.

But she had made her purchase in the kind of store that does not give you matches unless you ask for them. So she threw her cigarettes away.

Endnotes

Although the byline credits Ring W. Lardner, Jr., the story was in fact written by his father. The attribution is part of the story’s humor; Lardner Jr. was only four years old at the time of publication. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

Editor’s note: This must be a mistake. In 1891, Paul Whiteman was only a year old.
Author’s note: It was a different Paul Whiteman.
Editor’s note: Must have been.
Author’s note: Was. ↩

Editor’s note: Presumably another mistake. James Madison was known as “Sunny Jim,” never as “Old Hickory.”
Author’s note: Your father died of electricity. ↩

Editor’s note: The last eight words seem to refer to radio. Radio was unheard of in 1891.
Author’s note: You’re an old fool. ↩

Editor’s note: This must be a mistake. Mr. Lardner is writing about the year 1898; the Chicago fire occurred in 1871.
Author’s note: There is a considerable difference of time between Chicago and San Francisco. ↩

Editor’s note: It would have been impossible for Mr. Lardner at his age and with his credits, or lack of credits, to enter the Harvard Law School.
Author’s note: That’s why I thought of it first. ↩

Editor’s note: Mr. Lardner, asked to explain the meaning of sextuple threat as applied to a half back, said it meant a half back who could not only kick, pass and run forwards, but also run backwards, act as field judge and announce the results of out-of-town games. He said that in all football history there had been only four really great sextuple threaters⁠—himself, Marilyn Miller and the Mayo Brothers. ↩

Editor’s note: Prof. Snoot was never connected with the University of Chicago.
Author’s note: That is the telephone company’s fault. The number is Midway 100.
Operator’s note: The number has been changed to Midway 2,000.
Author’s note: Well, let’s have that number, please. ↩

Editor’s note: The author evidently means “eleven,” not “nine.”
Author’s note: Other teams would not play against Mr. Thorne unless he limited himself to eight helpers instead of the regulation ten. ↩

Editor’s note: They still are in some cities. ↩

Editor’s note: “Sucker” was a slang invention of the author’s, meaning probably in this case, “dub” or “flop.” ↩

Editor’s note: These facts are brought out in other autobiographies of the early nineties.
Author’s note: What of it? ↩

Editor’s note: The Oakland Mole in San Francisco Bay got its name in much the same way. ↩

Editor’s note: A pseudonym for New York. ↩

Editor’s note: She called him Lardy. ↩

Editor’s note: The author probably means “bored stiff.”
Author’s note: The h‑ll I do! ↩

Editor’s note: The above paragraph is followed in the manuscript by a description of the game between Yale and Spence. It is vulgar.
Author’s note: So is your old man. ↩

Editor’s note: This house is now occupied by the Cunards. ↩

Editor’s note: Kahn and Donaldson claim they were not there.
Author’s note: Were too! ↩

Editor’s note: A suburb of Brooklyn. ↩

Editor’s note: This was undoubtedly Mary Lewis.
Author’s note: No. It was a man.
Editor’s note: My mistake. ↩

Editor’s note: Mr. Lardner was the first to employ the crawl stroke, covering the entire twenty-eight feet on his hands and knees. ↩

Editor’s note: Boats had, by this time, been invented. ↩

Editor’s note: I didn’t. ↩

Editor’s note: If Lardner had stayed there all his life, which he would have done if he had waited for his degree, he doubtless would have become known as the Princeton yell. ↩

Editor’s note: Not me. ↩

Editor’s note: Haverstraw, New Jersey, is said to have been named after Mr. Whelton. ↩

Editor’s note: This is still true today.
Author’s note: You spoke a full quart. ↩

Editor’s note: Unless you deprived him of the cereal.
Author’s note: That is understood. ↩

Editor’s note: Was it? ↩

Editor’s note: There was also a rule against tipping the beam. ↩

Editor’s note: Bilgewater was known among his intimates as “Blind” Bilgewater.
Author’s note: You have him confused with some other Bilgewater. This Bilgewater was known as “Keen Eye” Bilgewater.
Wife’s note: Dinner is ready. ↩

Editor’s note: Tabloid editors then worked in private baths instead of private offices ↩

Editor’s note: This remark of Mr. Greeley’s has often been misquoted as “Young man, go west,” and “Young man, go mah jongg,” and sometimes even as “Young man, go get my slippers.”
Author’s note: Some of the misquotations have been laughable. ↩

Editor’s note: This was probably the origin of the song, “Horace’s, Horace’s, Horace’s.” ↩

Editor’s note: A boo scorpion was a sort of spider that went around booing ball players, actors and cockeyed spaniels. ↩

Editor’s note: The author was probably not aware of the fact that the last named pixy is still running amuck in many places, notably East Hampton, Long Island, in spite of the vigilance of the narcotic squad. ↩

Editor’s note: The author evidently means “heavily.”
Author’s note: The editor is evidently a f⁠⸺⁠l. ↩

Illinois: 491; Shields v. Shields. ↩

Editor’s note: And still are.
Author’s note: I didn’t know that. ↩

Editor’s note: Then why not tell the things you didn’t do?
Author’s note: Why not shut up? ↩

Editor’s note: The author doubtless meant to say “Doc.”
Author’s note: The author meant what he said. Pearson was a notorious quack. ↩

Editor’s note: Philadelphia. ↩

Editor’s note: “Buddies” is not in any dictionary and may be a colloquialism meaning, perhaps, clowns or funny men. ↩

Editor’s note: There is that word again. ↩

Author’s note: At this point I wish to correct an error that was made by the New York newspapers in their account of the wedding. I was repeatedly referred to as the groom, though I have had nothing to do with the care of a horse since I was twelve years old, and then only as a favor. The mistake probably was due to a misunderstanding by an Associated Press reporter, who, when my engagement was announced, called up Hugga’s mother, Sitta Much, and asked if she was satisfied with me as a son-in-law. Mrs. Much replied: “I certainly am. He is a hustler.” The reporter, no doubt, thought she said “hostler.” The two words “hostler” and “hustler” sound a great deal alike, especially in Eskimo.
Editor’s note: Another amusing incident is told concerning that same telephone conversation. When the reporter first got the bride’s mother on the wire, he said: “Mrs. Much?” and she replied: “Yes. A great deal.” ↩

Editor’s note: A custom. The anthem referred to begins, “Lap and the world laps with you.” ↩

Driver’s note: I never held nobody up. ↩

Author’s note: Skulk is not really a town at all; merely a fishing smack. ↩

Author’s note: His name, we found out afterwards, was Webster.
Editor’s note: There was a family of Websters in Elmira.
Author’s note: This was a different Webster.
Editor’s note: The same spelling. ↩

Editor’s note: Presumably Webster.
Author’s note: Not related to the Elmira Websters. ↩

Editor’s note: My sister Cora, who visited Washington at the time of President McKinley’s inauguration, wrote me that G street was one of the main business thoroughfares.
Author’s note: It was, and still is.
Editor’s note: It was during this trip that Cora became acquainted with Wayne Pardee.
Author’s note: Not the Wayne Pardee!
Editor’s note: A nephew. ↩

Editor’s note: According to newspaper accounts, Mr. Lardner turned down a suggestion of his counsel’s that the case be tried before a petty jury, saying that if Hugga found out they were the least bit petty, she would insist on a party instead of a trial. ↩

Editor’s note: Consult William Holabird on “What Shall We Do With Suspender Snappers” ↩

Editor’s note: Probably something the matter with it.
Author’s note: Must have been. ↩

Editor’s note: There has always been fine hake fishing in the bay on which the Lardner home fronts.
Author’s note: Nobody ever caught a hake there yet.
Editor’s note: Makes the chance of catching one all the better. ↩

Editor’s note: At this point the author’s memoirs are abruptly terminated. The coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of “death by being hit in the stomach by a hake.”
Author’s note: Or death from stomach hake. ↩

Colophon

Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories and novellas published between 1914 and 1930 by
Ring Lardner.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Jonathan Erdman,
and is based on transcriptions from
various sources
and on digital scans from
various sources.

The cover page is adapted from
Early Sunday Morning,
a painting completed in 1930 by
Edward Hopper.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

This edition was released on
April 2, 2026, 7:49 p.m.
and is based on
revision eac45fd.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
April 2, 2026, 6:53 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/ring-lardner/short-fiction.

The volunteer-driven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org.

Uncopyright

May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

Copyright pages exist to tell you that you can’t do something. Unlike them, this Uncopyright page exists to tell you that the writing and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. The United States public domain represents our collective cultural heritage, and items in it are free for anyone in the United States to do almost anything at all with, without having to get permission.

Copyright laws are different all over the world, and the source text or artwork in this ebook may still be copyrighted in other countries. If you’re not located in the United States, you must check your local laws before using this ebook. Standard Ebooks makes no representations regarding the copyright status of the source text or artwork in this ebook in any country other than the United States.

Non-authorship activities performed on items that are in the public domain⁠—so-called “sweat of the brow” work⁠—don’t create a new copyright. That means that nobody can claim a new copyright on an item that is in the public domain for, among other things, work like digitization, markup, or typography. Regardless, the contributors to this ebook release their contributions under the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, thus dedicating to the worldwide public domain all of the work they’ve done on this ebook, including but not limited to metadata, the titlepage, imprint, colophon, this Uncopyright, and any changes or enhancements to, or markup on, the original text and artwork. This dedication doesn’t change the copyright status of the source text or artwork. We make this dedication in the interest of enriching our global cultural heritage, to promote free and libre culture around the world, and to give back to the unrestricted culture that has given all of us so much.