How Do I Know It Is Safe

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

"WILL you please tell me," writes a man in Boston, "how you determine the value of a bond when looking over the average bond circular—that is, what points in the statement make you think it a good or a poor bond?"

There is only one complete answer to this question, and it is a very unsatisfactory answer. It would be somewhat like the reply that is made to the young man who asks how he can become an artist or a poet. Which is to say, he must have natural aptitude, training, and experience.

But this won't do. Men and women must invest money, and they can not all be experts.

A Bond Is Known by the Company It Keeps

TO begin with, always judge a bond by the company it keeps. This rule knows no exception. Other things being equal, bond sold by honest, reliable dealers are certain to be better than those sold by persons of another stripe. Of course, there are securities so will known and established that the fact they are sold by brokers of doubtful reputation can not injure their standing. But, in this particular case, the joker to look out for is that the "broker" delivers the bond at all, or, if he does, beware lest he charge you too much. In other words, be sure first of all that the game is being played according to honest rules, which means by an honest man. There are enough risks in the investment of money, even when one deals with the strongest of firms. Don't add an unnecessary peril by dealing with shady characters. Your broker can advise you about this.

Having eliminated as far as possible the personal element of hazard, the next point to discover is whether the property upon which the bond is secured is itself of fairly permanent and stable value. Only a dunce would purchase a bond secured by a factory erected to manufacture some new article, unless the factory easily could be turned to some other use or the company had accumulated, in cash or other readily negotiable property, a sum equivalent to the bond issue.

Now, of course the manufacture of that particular article might prove so profitable that the company could pay off all its bonds at a premium and declare huge dividends on its stock. But then again the article might not take with the public at all, and the whole proposition, and they should be secured by something for which there is a fairly certain, regular, and fixed demand.

The bond circular should next show just exactly what form of security is behind the bond. Relatively few bonds in these days are offered to investors that are secured by first mortgages. Most bonds are really second- or third-mortgage security, although those opprobrious terms are rarely used. Such bonds are called "general and refunding" and other more or less meaningful names.

Find Out About the Earnings

NOW, a second-mortgage bond may be strong and safe enough, but the point is that bond circulars should always show exactly what their security is. If the circular does not tell how many bonds come ahead of those that are offered to you, throw it into the waste basket at once. Indeed, the circular should tell in detail about the mortgages that come ahead of yours, and upon which pieces of property they are secured.

The question of the exact relation of your bond to other debts (and the bond circular should show whether there is any floating debt as well), the question of its priority or posterity, as the case may be, depends in turn largely upon another question—that of earnings. Even if a bond is not a first-mortgage issue, if the earnings are enough every year to pay interest upon it five or six times over it may be just as good as a first mortgage.

As a general rule, no bond is conservative unless interest charges upon it are earned at least twice over, and if you really ant to lean over backward you will insist that such a ratio has been established for several years before you make the purchase.

One thing the circular is not likely to tell you, and that is whether the bond can be sold again if you desire or need to take such a step. But that is information which you should have, and it can be had only by making inquiry among banks, bankers, and other persons familiar with such subjects.

Next week Mr. Atwood will answer the question: "What About the Preferred Shares of Big Railroads?"

Is There Any Risk in Camping Out?

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

ON the same basis that more people died from overeating than form starvation, so more have lost their lives because of taking vacations than from lack of them.

The chief reason for this is the return by civilized man to primitive life without first insuring the purity of the primitive life.

This applies more particularly to those who "camp out," subjecting themselves for a term during the hot weather to that serious threefold danger of flies, fingers, and filth.

Unless ordinary common-sense precautions are taken scrupulously to avoid drinking contaminated water, adequately to dispose of garbage, and strictly to observe hygienic and sanitary measures, disease in some form is almost inevitable.

Decaying garbage furnishes the breeding-ground for the typhoid fly, which contaminates the food supply. A very large percentage of the typhoid that flares up every autumn is due to infection contracted during the vacation period.

Exposure to the bites of the anopheles mosquito is the sole cause of malaria. This, in its ultimate effects upon the blood-stream and on the blood-purifying organs,—notably the spleen and the liver,—is a serious and life-shortening condition.

The drinking of impure water causes dysentery and various other grave intestinal troubles. It does not necessarily follow, because water is clear and sparkling, that it is invariably pure. It may be absolutely free for inorganic contamination, and et be loaded with dangerous bacterial life.

Therefore, if one would observe Falstaff's admonition to have a most reverent care of one's health, all decaying matter should be quick-lined and buried, and all food should be carefully protected from flies. A dozen boxes of chloride of lime, or a supply of some adequate disinfectant—as a solution of copperas—should be an indispensable part of the equipment of all campers.

Sleeping quarters should be carefully screened against mosquitoes.

And if the drinking water supply is of surface origin—spring, brook, or lake—and there is the slightest suspicion concerning its purity, it should invariably be boiled.

Remember also that he effects of undue sun exposure at the shore or in the country are almost as dangerous as in the city.

Observance of these simple precautions will greatly diminish the perils of the vacation period. "Safety first" rules are quite as important for the vacationist as for any one else.

Each week Dr. Bowers answers the most interesting question. Next week: "Is Olive Oil Good for Me?"

Back-Yard Hunting

I HAVE never shot a lion. For that matter, I have never shot a mouse or an English sparrow, and most of the fish I have eaten came from the market. But I have tasted adventure. I have lived!

We moved into a cottage, our first after eight years of apartment-house life. There were two sagging clothes poles in the twenty by thirty feet of back yard.

It was spring, and, actuated by spring madness, we began a decorative garden, a sort of cool summer retreat, including an ornamental lake about the size of a generous wash basin, built of rocks and cement, and fed by an old pickle keg. As a finishing touch we put bird houses on the clothes-line poles.

I Became a Bird Photographer

IT was the robins' bold friendliness that gave me the idea of photographing the birds. Of course I have since been told that naturalists have cameras especially built for this work; but for the birds of a city back yard I found my cheap little plate camera with a focusing glass very successful.

I set up the camera (lashed to ladder or choir or pole), a few feet from the place where I fondly expected the birds to appear. The spot itself was brought into sharp focus, the plate-holder slide was drawn, the shutter set, and a coat thrown over the camera to keep off the sun. I fastened a long string to the shutter trigger, trailing it across the back yard to a convenient window or door.

Of all the sitters before a camera, a bird can be most exasperating. He poses proudly just in focus while the sun bathes him in light and the string has tightened to spring the shutter; then—the feathered model spies a worm, turns his back, and probably hops with it on to the camera.

The few good negatives I have were taken in fair fight. To him who must depend upon his back yard for adventure I recommend this game. It's a liberal education, and good, clean sport.

One Minute with the Editor

Twenty Ways of Money-Making for Women

YOU will be surprised, when you read Edward Mott Woolley's article next week, to discover how many different businesses there are in which women can be successful.

This, by the wasy, is the third in the series by Mr. Woolley, the first and second being "Women in Business for Themselves" and "Women Who Earn $10,000 a Year." Another series of articles by Mr. Woolley is to begin shortly.

Risking Their Lives to Make Their Living

SUPPOSE you had to spend your working day suspended twenty stories above the pavement, on a six-inch iron girder; or, perhaps, under thirty feet of water—you'd almost rather not live than to have to risk your life for a living. But hundreds of men risk their lives cheerfully every day, and think nothing of it. We have gathered together some pictures of workers in the most thrilling occupations. Look for them next week.

Roy Norton

ROY NORTON won the $1,000 first prize offered last year for the best fiction story submitted to the Associated Sunday Magazines. Next week we publish a story by him.

We Were Just Thinking

WE don't see how this country can ever have another war. Where would we put the hero statuary? Most American towns have only one public square, and there's a soldiers' monument in that already.

Wireless Boys Who Went Down with Their Ships

By WILLA SIBERT CATHER

ON the twelfth day of May a monument was unveiled in Battery Park, New York, to commemorate the courage Of the ten wireless operators who have perished in waters about the American continent.

THE most familiar name on the monument is that of Jack Phillips, who went down on the Titanic, and who stood over his instrument until every life-boat was gone, sending to the Carpathia directions as to how to reach the sinking vessel. But for his courage and persistence, the death list of the Titanic would have been 2,350 instead of 1,595.

Harold Bride, the assistant operator, was among those of the crew picked up by the Carpathia, and his story of Phillips' end was printed in the New York Times when the Carpathia arrived. Bride had been asleep in the cabin behind the operating-room, and had come in in his nightclothes to relieve Phillips. Neither Bride or Phillips had felt a jar or shock of any kind, when Captain Smith appeared at the door of the wireless house and said: "We've struck an iceberg. I'm having an inspection made to see how much we are damaged. Be ready to send a call for assistance." Then he disappeared, leaving the two operators astonished. In ten minutes he returned, stuck his head into the operating-room, and merely said: "Send out the call for assistance."

Phillips began to send the C. Q. D. Bride jokingly told him to send the new call, S. O. S., as it might be the last chance he would get to use it. Phillips laughed and changed the call. He got the Frankfurd, and told them the Titanic was sinking by the head. By this time the list forward was perceptible. Then Phillips got the Carpathia, who said she was putting about and making for them. Phillips sent Bride to tell the Captain the Carpathia was coming. When Bride came back, he heard Phillips giving the Carpathia directions as to where to find the Titanic. He told Bride to get his clothes on, and Bride realized for the first time that he was in his nightclothes. He dressed, put on an overcoat, and brought another overcoat and put it around Phillips' shoulders as he worked. Captain Smith came to the door again, and told Phillips to send the Carpathia word that the engine-room was taking water and the dynamos couldn't last.

The life-boats had been going off for some time now. The deck was in a turmoil, and for the last fifteen minutes Phillips sent under a terrible strain, amid the general scramble. Bride got a life-belt, for himself, and strapped one around Phillips, who was still standing at his instrument, urging on and directing the Carpathia. He told Bride to see if there were any life-boats left. Bride went out and helped some men launch the last collapsible, then came back and told Phillips that the last boat was gone. The Captain and told them to abandon the operating-room, and take care of themselves if they could. Phillips kept send-

CLIFTON J. FLEMING and Harry Fred Otto were lost in the three lumber schooner Francis J. Leggett last September, sixty miles out at sea from the mouth of the Columbia River. In this wreck eighty persons were drowned, and there were only two survivors. One of the two survivors caught a piece of lumber, and hung to it for ten hours in the icy water before he was rescued. He said one of the wireless men swam up and caught the same tie to which he was clinging, and hung there for several hours, but was so exhausted and so benumbed by the cold that he finally let go and sank.

STEPHEN SCZEPANEK, a Pole from Worcester, Massachusetts, went down when the Pere Marquette, flagship of the fleet of five car ferries owned by the Pere Marquette Railroad, sank in four hundred feet of water in Lake Michigan, twenty miles from land. He sat at his desk flashing, "Car ferry 18 sinking—help," until the boat sank under him. His message was caught by the station at Ludington, and another car ferry was sent out and saved thirty-three passengers.

ADOLPH J. SVENDSON, a Scandinavian, went out under more terrible circumstances when the schooner Hanalei, last November, struck Duxbury Reef, off the coast of California. Life-savers came from Fort Point life station, brought a mortar and lines, and out line after line; but each one fell short, and the boat was breaking to pieces. The life-savers were so wrought up by their failures that they put in a double charge—and burst the mortar. They sent out a life-boat, but it was smashed in the breakers and the volunteer crew drowned. A brave sailor from the Hanalei tried to swim ashore with a line. He made a wonderful swim of it, but when he reached the breakers he disappeared. Fifty-eight passengers and all of the crew were lost.

WALTER REKER was lost in Puget Sound last August, on the Admiral Sampson. The steamship was rammed in a fog by a Canadian vessel, the Princess Victoria. The bow of the Victoria entered the hull of the Sampson just at the point where a large amount of fuel oil was stored, crushed several of the containers, and set them on fire. In a few moments both vessels were wrapped in flames. The Victoria drew off, put out the fire, and lay by to pick up the boats from the Admiral Sampson. All the passengers and most of the crew were saved. Reker, the wireless operator, the Captain, and the chief engineer were the last to leave the ship; and they went down while they were trying to launch the last life-boat.

DONALD C. PERKINS perished in the wreck of the steamship State of California, two years ago. The steamer, running at full speed, struck an uncharted rock in Gambier Bay, ninety miles south of Juneau, Alaska. The entire bottom of the vessel was torn off, and she filled and sank in three minutes. Within that three minutes Perkins got out his call for help several times, otherwise there would not have been it single survivor. As it was, twenty-five passengers were drowned, and seven of the crew. Of these seven, the wireless operator was one.

LAWRENCE PRUDHUNT, wireless operator on the oil-tank steamer Rosecrans, was drowned when the steamer was sunk on Peacock Split, in the mouth of the Columbia River, in January, 1913. The tank-boat was caught in a sixty-mile gale with 18,000 gallons of oil on board. The Weather Bureau station at Northead picked up Prudhunt's C. Q. D. He said the steamer was being driven toward the shore by currents and a terrific gale. His second message was interrupted. Nothing more was ever heard or seen of the vessel, except two men, lashed to the upper rigging, who were lost in the end.

GEORGE C. ECCLES was lost on the steamship Ohio, sunk off Steep Point, near Ketchikan, Alaska, August 26, 1909. Wireless Operator Booth was sitting in his operating-room at the wireless station at Ketchikan, with his receiver on his ears, and had just finished talking with Eccles of the Ohio. He was amazed when he suddenly got a C. Q. D. call from Eccles. He answered it, and got from Eccles the following:

Booth was dazed for a moment. Just then the steamships Humboldt and Rupert called the Ohio, and asked for her latitude. Booth heard the call, and he heard Eccles flash back the answer. In a few moments Booth heard Eccles again, and this time he said:

Humboldt and Rupert both replied they were making for the Ohio at their utmost speed and would pick up passengers. Eccles flashed back another message:

The message was never finished. Operator Booth sent call after call to the Ohio, but got no answer. The Ohio had suddenly broken loose from the rock on which she had been hanging. She sank instantly, and Eccles was trapped in his wireless house.

FREDERICK J. KUEHN, a New York boy, only twenty years old, one of the youngest men in the wireless service, gave his life to save a woman, when the Old Dominion coast liner Monroe was rammed and sunk by the Nantucket off the Virginia Capes.

The accident happened at two in the morning. Kuehn stayed at his instrument until he was told to go; then he snapped off his call and adjusted his life-preserver. He left the wireless house and went to boat 3, which was just being launched. A woman came running along the slanting deck, crying. Kuehn asked her where her life-belt was, and then said: "Here, take this. I'll get another." He tooks off his life-preserver. Just as he finished buckling it around her body, the Monroe took its long downward plunge, and those who were still on deck were swept into the sea. Thirty-nine were drowned; the Nantucket saved 101. Kuehn was never seen again.

The pleasant fountain, the seats, and the monolith in Battery Park are a reminder of all these stories, and bring together the names of these men who never saw one another, but who possessed one common quality. Probably not one of them ever intended to be a hero. They were all young men, and went into wireless because it was a new and exciting business and appealed to the imagination. In a new form of service they found an old opportunity. They met it in such a way that, though this profession is less than a dozen years old, it has already a fine tradition.

When Butterflies Are Jewels

IT was reserved for a Boston woman, Mrs. Moray Wootton, to invent a method whereby the butterfly's beauty could be utilized in art. She uses butterflies in jewelry, and in decorating a great variety of useful things, from tea-trays to boxes for candy.

She has made such a success of the business that its expenses are already more than fifty thousand dollars a year. Although she started her enterprise only a few years ago, Mrs. Wootten now employs twelve young women to help her; the demand for her products, especially by jewelers, is steadily on the increase. Most of her expense is in the purchase of butterflies, some of which are fabulously priced.

Fifty dollars for a single butterfly is not too much to pay, from Mrs. Wootten's point of view, if it be rare and specially beautiful. She simply adds the cost to the price of the decorative plaque or what-not that it is used to adorn. And jewelers who market her goods find their customers willing to pay large prices when butterflies are correspondingly splendid.

Real Butterflies Form Motifs for Designs

THE butterfly, however, is in each case only the motif of the design. Delicate, silky fibers of milkweed make an exquisite background. Dainty grasses, also, are introduced. And, the cases being of gold or enamel, covered with glass, the result is altogether delightful.

Getting the butterflies is Mrs. Wootton's biggest problem. Some of them she catches herself, going forth in pursuit of them with net, and cyanide bottle. Others she buys from enterprising boys, paying seven cents apiece for them. But most of them she obtains from the tropics, purchasing them from dealers who make a business of importing the insects from professional collectors in far-away countries.

Butterfly-collecting, indeed, is a vastly more important industry than most people imagine. At every important seaport in tropical America there are butterfly-buyers, whose agents employ natives to hunt for butterflies. It is a worth-while business, inasmuch as a single specimen, if sufficiently rare, may be worth five hundred dollars, or even twice that sum. In European countries a fad for butterflies seems to be permanently established; auctions for their sale are held at regular intervals in London.

They Must Be Beautiful in Artificial Light

THE butterflies used by Mrs. Wootton must have colors that are as brilliant in artificial light as in the daytime. One recently secured by her came from an island off the coast of Africa. It was of a species found nowhere in the world except on that particular piece of the earth, a gorgeous creature, measuring seven inches from wing-tip to wing-tip, its coloring gold and emerald-green, with a background resembling black velvet and a gleam of deep ruby where the wings joined. Such a butterfly, of course, mounted by itself, and with a background of milkweed and grasses, would be an adequate decoration for an art object.

Milkweed silk in any quantity is readily obtained. But to prepare it for Mrs. Wootton's purpose is it difficult matter. The fibers are attached to seeds, many fibers for each seed nature's object in this arrangement being to accomplish the distribution of the seeds, which are carried by the breezes through the air, the silky filaments serving as parachutes. It is necessary to comb out the filaments so that no two of them shall cross, in order to make a background of shimmering smoothness. The grasses are a problem in themselves. Only certain kinds will serve, and most of those used by Mrs. Wootton she is obliged to import from foreign countries.

Americans have not yet learned to appreciate the butterfly, so that Mrs. Wootton's work may he regarded as possessing an educational value. That it accomplishes this object may be judged from the rapidity with which a market for it has developed. A French connoisseur and expert recently remarked that it was the only art work he had found in the United States that showed no mark of European origin or influence.

The natives in tropical countries who collect most of the butterflies that Mrs. Wootton buys adopt for the purpose methods that are more than curious. Many of the most desired species, because they are rare and big and of brilliant coloring, seem never to come near the ground. They fly about among the tops of the tallest trees, and to catch them is an affair of extreme difficulty.

One method adopted by the native butterfly-hunters is to erect rude platforms in the tree-tops, and there to await the approach of the dainty prey. They smear the trunks of the trees with banana pulp, which, when it is decayed, attracts the insects. Butterflies delight in nothing so much as a bad smell. An orange grove in blossom, with its intense fragrance, has no attraction for them; but a stale fish, if it be really very far gone, is an irresistible bait.

The resourceful natives of tropical America, however, have yet another device for the capture of butterflies. They shoot them with balls of pith discharged from "blow-guns" made of hollow reeds. By these relatively harmless projectiles the insects are stunned or otherwise disabled without being seriously injured, and, falling to the ground, are gathered in by the hunter.

How the Butterflies Are Marketed

MOST of Mrs. Wootton's butterflies, no matter where they come from, reach her by way of Europe, where, in many of the largest cities, there are big commercial establishments that deal in them. The insects, as they reach the dealers, are usually packed in a curious may, each specimen being done up separately in a cocked hat of folded paper. Arranged in this manner, an immense number of them can be shipped in a wooden box of moderate size.

The art works made by Mrs. Wootton are so contrived that in every case the design beneath the cover-glass is water-proof and air-proof, the sealing of the cover being hermetical. Thus, unless the plaque, box, or other object is broken, the butterfly, with its background of milk-weed silk and grasses, is imperishable; it will retain its brilliancy of coloring forever. Perhaps her most exquisite work is in the jewelry, such as brooches and lavallieres, in which a single butterfly, selected for its brilliancy of hue, though necessarily of no great size, is the central feature.

The Oldest Woman in the World

THEY found her only a short time ago—the oldest woman in the world. She could not very well object to this descriptive remark, because at least three hundred thousand years (according to the scientists' reckoning) have elapsed since she was born.

Her home was a hole in the rocks, very picturesquely located above a little stream that brawled over its pebbly bottom through a valley of France, a few miles to the northeast of the present-day city of Bordeaux.

Close by the stream was an almost vertical cliff, in which were a number of caverns of no great size, but big enough to make dwellings that might well be esteemed very comfortable in an age when house-building was an art unknown. As an additional advantage, the caverns were overhung by a sort of rock-shelf, which protected their entrances against rain and snow.

The reason so much interest attaches to the female person here described is that she is the only very ancient woman whose bones have ever been discovered. Hers was an epoch when man was as yet it wild beast, his body covered with long hair and his physical aspect extremely horrific.

This picture of him is no mere product of guess-work, for several of these ancestors of ours have been dug up within recent, years in various parts of Europe—their skeletons, that is to say, and in particular their astonishing jaws, massively huge and adorned with teeth much greater in size than we, their descendants, can boast. Doubtless they used their teeth in combat at close quarters.

Such were the characteristics of the "Neanderthal man," the "man of Spy, and other famous individuals whose re' mains have been unearthed. Up to date, a sufficient number of these representatives of the world's oldest families have been disinterred to establish them as a type primeval. They show us what our remote forebears really looked like; and the caves they dwelt in, considered together with the weapons and utensils they left behind, and the accompanying hones of the animals they ate, afford a vivid idea of the conditions under which they lived.

The "oldest woman" above mentioned seems to have been about forty-five years of age. It is evident (judging from the shape of her skull) that she shared the lack of mental development that characterized the folk of her period. Her huge teeth (their enamel still well preserved) are a good deal worn—possibly from much gnawing of bones.

She Was Found Near the Bones of Extinct Animals.

The rocky mass containing the osseous remains was taken out in as perfect a condition as possible and shipped to Paris, where scientific experts with the utmost care worked the bones out of the enveloping "matrix." Pressure had caused the different parts of the skull to overlap; but, fortunately, the greater portion of the cranium was preserved, and in the jaws fourteen teeth, remarkably white, remained.

In the clayey sand, together with the skeleton of the "oldest woman," were found lance-points, knives, and scrapers—also bones of the horse, the reindeer, and the mammoth. To ancient man the horse was useful only as a food animal. The reindeer and the mammoth, of course, have been extinct for uncounted centuries in Europe—a fact that in itself suffices to suggest the extreme remoteness of the time in which the "oldest woman" lived.

Curly Locks

By OCTAVUS ROY COHEN

Illustrations by Harvey Emrich

ONE word can make a heap of difference in the meaning of a thing. One of the best and manliest chaps I ever ran across in my life was called Curly. He was a big, two-fisted guy, with a love for women and all that sort of thing. The nickname Curly fitted him to a T, just as the nickname Curly Locks fitted T. Walter Burney.

When T. Walter first joined the outfit we called him T. Walter, which seemed pretty appropriate, all things considered. But it didn't take the least observant of us more than an hour or so to discover that he was stuck on that initial-and-name combination, and then Lonny Haslett, one of the operators, hit on the name of Curly Locks. It was passed unanimously.

Of course, we knew all about T. Walter before he joined the company; that is we had all been filled full of the bunk handed out by the moving picture monthlies every issue. We'd seen pictures of him in every sort of costume and garb, and we knew his family history, the various romances through which he had been (in the mind of a good press agent); we'd absorbed thrilling accounts of his adventures, and we had seen his work on the screen. There was no doubt about it, he was a great moving picture actor!

Of course I'm not saying that he had Warren Kerrigan and Maurice Costello and Arthur Johnson and Francis Bushman shaded when it came to sure-'nough acting; but he was there with the matinee idol stuff, and then some. So when we heard that our people had got him to stick his John Hancock at the bottom of a fat and juicy contract, covering the period of three calendar years, we rejoiced. Then we heard that he was coming down to join our North Carolina bunch, and that tickled its more than ever—me especially.

You see, it was this way with me,—it was my first season as a managing director and I was dead anxious to make good. The Takagraph Company (those are the princes I work for) had sent me down me to the wilds of North Carolina with a batch of scenarios from staff writers and free lances, with orders to take 'em, and also to picturize three novels of a certain well known writer, the scenes of which were laid in the mountains thereabouts. I ain't a beginner in the game; but I was a mite nervous. Pretty big assignment that was, seeing that, it was the first time I'd been away from the eyes of the Big Noises.

They gave me a good enough cast, all things considered,—principally players who were fitted for stock, playing a moon-shiner to-day and a city gentleman to-morrow, and all of them able to ride and swim and do things that outdoor movie folks need to do. But we didn't have any one particular star with us, and that was where I was working under a handicap—because, no matter what you think, I know that the name of a movie star helps to popularize a picture.

In one way I was glad they shouldered all that responsibility off on me. I wanted to introduce a few things in the motion-picture-taking business. I wanted to have a villain who wasn't forever wearing a Norfolk jacket and puttees, and didn't have a two-for-a-nickel mustache. I wanted to work some soldiers into the picture, and dress 'em like the United States government dresses 'em, instead of dolling them up in blue uniforms of the '61 vintage and broad-brimmed felt hats. I wonder why it is some of the other directors don't notice that American soldiers wear caps and not hats, and that they don't wear felt or khaki with blue uniforms, and that styles have changed a bit since the Civil War was fought?

But to wise you up to our location in the first place. I'll tell you where we were.

Twenty-two miles south of Asheville, North Carolina, is a summer resort known as Hendersonville, noted chiefly for being the seat of pretty nearly the only Republican county in the South. It's a little place, with a wide main street, a few in auction shops, and five or six hotels. Everything else in the place is a boarding-house or soda-water stand.

FIFTEEN miles out from there, over one of the prettiest roads man ever traveled east of the Rockies, is a little burg with the name of Edneyville, and just above there is Bats Cave. We were at Bats Cave. Thank goodness the company had sent down an advance man and things were fixed up for us by the time we got there! It was summer too, and a crowd of visitors at the boarding-houses around there made me feel easy about getting supes for the bigger pictures.

As I say, we didn't have a star, and I need one the worst way; which, incidentally, was the way I got one. Then came the rural rider from Hendersonville one morning bringing me a wire from Tompkins which told me that T. Walter Burney was even then en route to join us. He had jumped a big firm and had left their Coast studio that day.

Burney was just the style of man who impresses the girls in the audience with an "Oh! ain't he grand?" feeling,—tall and broad and straight and classic of features, and with long, curly hair; and the way he could make love in pantomime? We knew only those things about him that the admiring interviewers and mercenary press agents had collected and printed in the magazines. And we prepared for him the corkiest little reception!

We met him in Hendersonville with carryalls and buggies and handshakes and welcome-homes, and before we'd been talking to him five minutes we were sorry. Why that confound chap took everything as a matter of course! He seemed to think it was natural that we should tender him an ovatio, and before we'd passed the livery stable on our way from town to the Bats Cave headquarters he was telling us what a great deal the Takagraph people in landing him as their stellar feature.

IT was before we hit the first climb that Bill Travers looked him straight in the face and called him "T. Walter." Some of us snickered openly, because we were a democratic bunch, and we were dead sore at the airs he was putting on. And he didn't even turn a hair, except to flush in a rather pleased manner. It remained for Lonny Haslett to give him the lasting nickname. We were winding up a mountain where the view was pretty good, and Lonny, who was riding on the rear seat of our rig, leaned over to Burney and says, loud enough for every one near there to hear:

"Great view, ain't it, Curly Locks?"

I kind of caught my breath there, because Lonny is a little chap, and I was afraid Curly Locks might make a pass at him. But he didn't. He just smiled, brushed his right hand through his hair, and remarked that it was; but not nearly so pretty as the far West.

The longer Curly Locks stayed with us the less I wondered that the other company had let him go. He was absolutely the limit to get along with, and he made love to every girl within range.

He was a funny nut that way, too. Didn't try to flirt with any of the girls in the company—probably was wise enough to see that they wouldn't fall for him. No, I take that back. Curly Locks had an idea that he could marry a Russian Princess if he wanted to. But anyway he instinctively let the professionals alone and confined his love-making to every other pretty girl that came within sight.

It was sickening. We'd get out in the morning to film a few scenes while the sun was good, and Curly Locks would be dolled up in a good-looking, picturesque mountain costume, posing with his hands on his hips and that gentle smile on his mug,—the smile that put about a thousand on his contract,—and then the summer girls would come up in bunches to watch us work, and they'd gang close, and he'd lead 'em on to talk to him, and before they'd been chatting five minutes he'd have dates with half of 'em.

I tried every way in my power to queer him with the dames; and I think I'd have got away with it, but for the calm, unruffled way he took the worst of my gibes. For instance, he was jollying a bunch of them one morning when we were doing some scenes in "The Moonshiner's Wife." Lonny made his set-up, and I was ready to rehearse. So I sings out loud:

"Hey, Lothario! On the job for this scene. Quick!"

He never flickered—though I learned afterward he never heard of that Lothario chap before. That was the way he put it. And when Lonny took pains to explain to him who and whit Lothario was the boob took my nickname as a compliment, and wanted to chum with me in thanks for it.

WHAT could I do? He was a bird of an actor, even if he wasn't any too amenable to discipline, and wanted to do every scene his own way, 'stead of mine, and his salary was enough to give a normally paid person the jimjams, and the public was screaming for pictures starring him, and the Big Bosses up North didn't know what a personal lemon he was, and there wasn't a dad-blamed thing for me to do but to grit my teeth and bear it and get what little satisfaction I could in the knowledge that I was slamming him verbally all the time, and giving the rest of the company a run for their money. Believe me, if there was one thing that made the rest of our crowd a happy family, it was the general dislike of Curly Locks!

And so one night I called a mass meeting. Curly Locks had ridden down to Edneywille to call on a native girl (sure! he liked 'em all to love him, mountain girl or summer visitor—s'long as they were pretty and young!), and I considered it the appointed time.

When I got 'em together down there in the grove, with the big full moon

Page 6

I told 'em that it wasn't, no use mincing matters,—we just simply had to take Curly Locks down about seven pegs, and we had to keep him down. And there wasn't a way to do it that I could see. I asked suggestions from the bunch, and Lonny Haslett, as usual, got into the heart of the matter.

"Before you get your think tanks in action," says Lonny, "get yourself wise to this dope. There ain't but one way to get this here Curly Locks, and that is by laughing at him so he'll know you're laughing at him. Which heretofore has been the trouble with Mr. Curly Locks. We've given him the ha-ha time and time again, and he hasn't realized that we've been doing it. The thing for us to do is to humble him, abash him, drag him in the dust, and make him look so silly that he'll never want to look the world in the face again."

Then Lonny bowed and sat down.

"I'll tell you one thing that ought to be done," growled Croxton Miller, our heavy man. "Some one ought to poke his face in."

I looked Miller over pretty closely. He'd always seemed to more than merely dislike Curly Locks. "How?"

"Cinch! Work a fake picture with a fight. Make him put on the fight scene with some husky, and let that husky larrup the tar out of him. Make 'em use gloves, so his everlasting features won't be hurt too much; but be sure that that whole crowd of girls from Edneyville and thereabouts are up here to take in the show. Film the scene, and then maybe when he gets too obstreperous in the future we can flash it as a local exhibition."

We gave him three cheers and a tiger on that.

"Who's to do the licking of him?" I asked.

He smiled very grimly. "Me," he says. "I'm there with the gloves. Used to be considered 'most good enough for the professional ranks."

ANYWAY, just to show you what a cinch job we had, I pulled the stunt off just two days later—and believe me we had arranged things so that the Edneyville bunch was there, and we'd even managed to see that some girls came out from Hendersonville to take in the orgy of humiliation for which Curly Locks was scheduled.

I'd told Curly Locks that this was a picture that had as its big scene an open-air prize fight. I told him that I'd instructed Miller to scrap hard, and that he was to do the same, as the picture must be realistic.

"Remember that fight William Farnuinn had in 'The Spoilers,'" I said. "Well, make it harder'n that!"

He just smiled. We got ready and posed the picture. Lonny made his set-up carefully, and then I gave 'em the word. This scene didn't need a rehearsal.

Now I ain't saying that Croxton Miller was a liar when he said he could handle the mitts; but what I am saying is that he didn't show it. That Curly Locks was a freak. I'l1 bet he could finish Jess Willard inside of six rounds! He jabbed and swung and hooked and pounded and slammed and banged until, as Miller said afterward, he thought the mountains were falling on him.

In the middle of the very first round Curly Locks says to me over his shoulder, "Am I goin' too hard?"

I didn't say anything. I was speechless. "When does the knockout come?" asks Curly Locks.

With that Miller gamely waded in and commenced slamming weakly for the stomach.

"Now!" he says.

"A'right," says Curly Locks, and he hooks his right to the side of the jaw. The blow didn't travel more'n six inches, and Croxton Miller went down and out.

Then Curly Locks turns to me and says superciliously:

"I'm afraid I was a bit rough with him, Tommy,"—he always called me Tommy, confound his nerve!—"but he wouldn't, go down when his cue came!" Then he puts on his sweater over the gym shirt he was wearing and joins thc bunch of girls under the trees.

Believe me, kid, we were up against it—and then some!

He was too much stuck on himself to think that we had a contempt for him, and he'd proved that there were mighty few ways we might approach him so it'd make an impression.

AND then, a telegram came from head-quarters, brief and deliciously to the point. It just said:

And before I had finished reading the telegram I was doing a hootch around the grove. I knew that my problem was solved,—had the plan and all,—and the best part of it was that I knew the girl. I knew Eunice was as sweet as they make 'em, and that she was a dead game sport—and a consummate actress. There never was a doubt in my mind that she'd enter into the plan, and when I wised the others up to it they fairly howled with glee.

And the most important feature of the plot was that Curly Locks wasn't to know that Eunice was coming. We knew that the news wouldn't get down there in the theatrical journals for at least three or four weeks, and by that time the work would have been done, and Curly Locks would have become tractable—or he'd have skipped out and the Big Uns couldn't lay the blame on me. It was a ticklish position for a new director, believe me! Up in the Northern studios the big fellows can see for themselves how the land lies when these little internal dissensions come along; but the longest and best letter ever written would never have wised them up to the truth of the thing down in Bats Cave.

To make a long story short, Eunice stepped off the observation platform of the south-hound Carolina Special at eleven o'clock Wednesday morning, and, take it from me, she made the natives stare! I needn't describe Eunice: you're all familiar with her. Her name is plastered over every respectable moving-picture theater front, and she's liked by women as well as men. And an actress—Eunice is there with the goods all right and then some! Why, when she deserted the movies for the legit one season we all had heart failure, or pretty nearly that.

I'd fixed Curly Locks up for the day all right, by putting Tom Sayers in charge of a couple of mountaineer scenes which were necessary and in which Curly Locks was the whole cheese, and the bunch, with Lonny Haslett, had gone out toward Sugar Loaf Mountain to spend the day. And the first thing I did with Eunice was to cart her up to the Kentucky Home hotel with me, appropriate a corner of the little music room, and begin my spiel.

SHE listened attentively,—as she always does, bless her!—and before I finished my little plan her eyes were shining like twin stars,—that's the way her press agent talks about her, and for once a publicity man is up against a game he can't exaggerate,—and I could see that she was with me heart, soul, and so forth—especially and so forth.

"To sum it up," I finished after spieling for about an hour, "this here Curly Locks would make love to a wooden Indian, provided that Indian was a female. He thinks every skirt the Lord ever fashioned is stuck on him, and he's open and fair in his favors. Girls are fair game to him, and he'll chase a pretty one from here to Jericho—North Carolina. I can't understand it. Seems like he'd get enough of 'em, or else get tangled in a matrimonial venture; but so far there's been nothing doing."

"He—" started Eunice; but I cut her short.

"No! Never heard a breath of scandal against him, else I wonldn't ask you to try this little game. He just simply is addlepated enough to love love and to love to love—some mixup in loves, eh? But that's Curly Locks from the word go. All a mixup in loves. I believe he'd starve to death without it.

"He doesn't know a thing about your coming here, and I'll see to it that he doesn't find out. There isn't the slightest danger of any of the company spilling the good news, principally because only those I can trust have been wised up to it, and secondarily because they're as dead anxious to take a fall out of Curly Locks as I am.

"I've framed things with Sam Harding. He's a great old fellow, is Sam, and I know I was safe in trusting him with the whole business. Sam and his wife live there on the mountain, and they're as nice and respectable as can be. You're to be their niece. Incidentally I'm going to stay over there as long as you do—sort of protector and all that, although of course we'll have nothing whatever to do with each other. You'll pose as a mountain girl with a one-year college veneer and a world of ambition. You'll go wild over Curly Locks—"

"But suppose he recognizes me?"

I laughed. "Never a chance. How in the world would he ever associate the simply dressed, very pretty niece"—she bowed at that—"of Sam Harding with Eunice Bailey, the most popular and accomplished screen artist in the world? Never! It isn't like he suspected that you were coming: he doesn't. And remember he's never seen you except in the pictures and magazines; so you're safe as they make 'em."

"And the finale will be—"

"Make a fool of him. You're clever, and you're playing a game. Make him propose, and then plan an elopement. We'll be on the job when the elopement is going to take place, and we'll let him know who you are and give him the merry ha-ha. No one will have any kick coming, because if they have we'll say that it was all just a harmless joke done in the best of humors; but if we work the cards right, he'll be the most humbled man you ever saw in your life. He's a good actor; but when that revelation comes he'll show his true feelings, and after that we'll have him under our thumbs. That's been my idea right along,—we want to laugh at him. A man like him can be reached only in that way,—by laughing and by letting him know what you're laughing at. Are you on?"

Her eyes laughed straight into mine. "I wouldn't miss it for the world," she replied smilingly, and I knew that she meant what she said. Some queen, Eunice is!

TWO days before her arrival I'd moved from the imitation hotel where we were staying to Sam Harding's two-story frame house. It was neat and clean as wax. The old man was a war veteran. That's prima facie evidence of decency in the South.

Next morning we were rehearsing the opening scenes of "The Mountain Feud," a three-reeler, when Eunice hove into view. She was dolled out in a blue skirt and a middy blouse. Her hair was hanging in two great long braids over her shoulders, and she stood there at the edge of the clearing with her big brown eyes shining in wonder and looking about a million times as pretty as she'd ever looked before in her life. Even though there was plenty doing in that open space, Eunice, hidden in the trees, had a way of compelling your eyes. And when Curly Locks lamped her he capitulated right off. I don't much blame him. Me, I'm a married man, but if I had been single that day down there at Bats Cove, and had seen this little mountain girl under the trees, I'd have laid my future prospects at her feet with nary a whimper. She was the best looking thing—but pshaw! that's unseemly for a benedict!

"Who is she, Tommy?" he asks me.

"Who?" I retorted, and he withered me with a look.

"The princess under the trees."

I tried to be very casual, and answered while turning away: "Dunno. Think she's Sam Harding's niece. Anyway, she's staying over where I do!" And with that I started away.

But no sooner had I reached Harding's place than Curly Locks showed up, still in his costume, and looking handsome enough to shoot.

"What's the dope?" I asked.

"Nothing," he countered easily. "Just thought I'd sit awhile."

Little while later Eunice came up the walk. She let her eyes grow wide as they met Curly Locks', and then—clever little minx that she is—she circled the house and entered the back way. I never saw a man so crestfallen as Curly Locks was at that minute, and to save my life I couldn't resist the opportunity it offered.

"I see how you stand there, all right, all right!" I said.

BUT, to bridge another gap of time, he met her the next day by going direct to the place and getting in strong with Sam Harding. Old Sam, as I have explained, was onto the frame-up, and with true mountaineer sagacity he worked a box of fine cigars out of Curly Locks before he ponied the introduction.

After that everything was chicken, and we just lay back and prepared for the big laugh that was coming pretty soon; for, believe me, Eunice didn't lose any tricks in having that big boob trailing her on every and all occasions.

And she didn't overdo it—not a speck she didn't! She was too much of an artist for that. When he wanted her to come and see him pose for pictures he had to call for her, and many's the time I've waited from twenty minutes to a half-hour for him to show up with Eunice on his arm. And time counts in making pictures—principally because every day isn't a good day, and up there in the mountains you're liable to have a couple of showers any old time, and that breaks things up considerably.

That was another reason why Eunice had to work quickly, and couldn't afford to let any tricks get away from her. The Big Uns in the North would begin pretty soon to ask for Bailey-Burney's releases, and it was up to us to furnish them. Two weeks was the limit I'd set for her, and I saw by the way she was going that that was ample time. She wasn't letting a trick get away.

Four days from the time they met cut flowers began to come down from Asheville via Hendersonville, and Curly Locks had rented a buggy by the week from a Hendersonville livery stable. And along about that time the moon was full, and every night the mountain ranges around were silver-tinted, and they used to stroll in the evening down to the little river that sizzled over the rocks about a qnarter of a mile from Sam's place, and there they'd sit and talk. Great work, I tell you!

And then, ten days from the time Eunice stepped off the Carolina Special in Hendersonville, Curly Locks came to me and asked for a day off. I sort of reniged at that until he told me that he planned to go into Hendersonville next day with Eunice. Then I said yes; for I knew that the Grand Slam was about to be played.

NEXT morning bright and early they started off, Eunice flushed and happy looking over the victory she'd won, and tipped her the wink as they drove away. Then I selected a bunch of trusties such as Lonny Haslett and Croxton Miller and a couple of the women in the cast, and we hitched up and followed them. Somehow they managed to keep out of sight of us; but then that was probably because they had a light-running buggy and the road wasn't calculated to give speed to the type of vehicles we were using.

We were in a gale of spirits, because we knew well enough that Eunice wasn't going to give the game away until we got there. Once across the tracks in Hendersonville, I headed the procession straight for the Wheeler, where it had been prearranged the couple would go if anything like this was attempted. You can wager I hadn't overlooked any

Page 7

Sure enough, when we drove up the high winding road that leads under the porte-cochère of the Wheeler, there they were on the veranda, and Curly Locks' eyes opened a mile and a half or so when he saw us coming. I believe that was the first time he suspected that everything wasn't as he might like to have had it.

We stalked up on the veranda and joined them. Eunice was flushed and a wee mite uncomfortable, it seemed to me. But I pretended surprise. I shook hands with Curly Locks, and asked him what he was doing there.

"That's my business," he says curtly.

"Don't got huffy," I remarks, biding my time for the showdown. "What's the rub?"

"I repeat," he says haughtily, "that's my business."

I nodded to Eunice. "May I speak to you a second?" I asked.

She joined me.

Is this the time?" I asks.

"In a minute," she says.

"Why not now?"

"The minister's on his way here."

She said it calmly, but her eyes were twinkling. And then I understood. Bless her! She was sure doing the trick up brown. Actually going to get the minister there and then give him the laugh! I chuckled all over, and Eunice and I exchanged winks.

AND then finally the minister came, and we repaired to a parlor that Curly Locks had hired. Even then I think he was sore at our being there. Thought maybe we imagined his intentions weren't all they should have been. And then, when the whole bunch was gathered round, and the doors were closed, I winked at Eunice and she winked back at me. I stepped forward.

"T. Walter Burney," I says, trying hard to conceal the chuckle in my voice, "are You going to marry this young lady?"

"I am," he says aggressively.

I could hardly control my grin. "Sam Harding's niece?" I says.

I turned to the bunch, and nodded them forward. Then I faced Curly Locks once more.

"Curly Locks," I says happily, "you're the victim of the biggest frame-up that has ever been framed in this world. You've always imagined that every girl you have met has fallen in love with you, and you make love to all of 'em. You made us sick—the whole bunch of us.

"What do you mean?" he asked grimly. "I'm not letting any two-by-four movie director inquire into my most personal affairs. And what's the frame-up?"

"Do you know who she is?" I asks, indicating the blushing Eunice.

"Sam Harding's niece," he replies. That was my time. I struck a Mansfield pose.

"She is Miss Eunice Bailey, the cleverest actress in the world!" I says impressively.

EUNICE didn't meet his eyes just then.

He crossed the room to her side, and slipped his arm about her waist. For the first time since I'd seen him he looked like a man instead of a model. His voice was deadly serious too.

"You never told me!" he says softly.

She hung her head.

"And it's all a frame-up?" he repeats. "And you don't love me, Miriam?" She's previously given her name as Miriam Harding.

"I—" she starts, and then she chokes. "I—I—"

Somehow we didn't feel like laughing just then. It was a kind of rotten deal to hand out, even to Curly Locks. I reckon we all felt a mite sorry for him.

"Will you marry me now?" he says quietly. "I love you."

She looks up at that and her eyes are teary. "You were really going to marry me?" she says wanly.

"I've told you how I feel toward you," he says with real dignity. "But of course if this is a frame-up, I'll just have to take my medicine the best way possible."

She glanced at him then,—all the rest of us were dead silent,—and he looked so game and so manly—not at all like Curly Locks. Then suddenly she broke down and buried her face in his coat.

"I'll marry you," she sobs. "I will! I will! I will! And I don't care what any one says about you!"

With that he pats her head gently and turns to the puzzled minister. "Proceed with the ceremony," he says happily. And then to us, "I will ask you to witness the marriage." And for a wonder there wasn't a triumph in his tone. A woman can have a wonderful effect on a man.

The minister stepped forward and extended his hand. "The license?" he asked.

With that Curly Locks produced the marriage license. It was dated three days before—and it was made out in the names of T. Walter Burney and Miss Eunice Bailey.

Elephants I Have Known

By Dr. W. E. AUGHINBAUGH

THROUGHOUT the far East the elephant has always played an important role, and has been to the natives everything from a god to a servant. No matter what was its station, it has always been credited with having a mentality second only to man's in keenness and reasoning power. Many are the stories told of the sagacity and cunning of the elephant.

In India and the near-by colonies the British Army uses elephants in its transport service, and especially for moving heavy artillery. The beasts come to know the orders and bugle calls as well as do members of the battery. Every now and then one of them goes "must," or mad, and kills or attempts to kill a soldier. For such a crime the punishment is death.

I happened to be at the big army camp in Rawal Pindi at a time to witness the execution of one of these rogue elephants which had been a veteran in the service. His almost human demeanor seemed to show that he was aware of his fate; but he met the end bravely, as becomes a soldier. When he was led before the firing squad, and when the sergeant in commmand gave the order, "Ready!" the elephant raised the tip of his trunk to his forehead in the attitude of saluting his executioners and remained in this position until the volley of shots rolled him over dead.

The Elephant as Nursemaid

IN Burma the elephant is used in every capacity. I have seen the small Burmese elephant pounding rice, holding the pestle with its trunk, and every now and then scattering the husks with a blast of air from the same organ. When not thus occupied, it may be swinging its master's hammock or rocking the baby's cradle with one foot, while driving away the flies with a fan held in its wonderful trunk.

In Rangoon, and in many places in the teak forests and lumber yards, the elephant performs all kinds of manual labor, such as carrying and piling logs. It is interesting to see an old tusker place a timber on a pile, then stand off to one side, squint his eye to see if it is in alignment, and if not approach it and push it into position with his head. They are all strict members of the labor union too, beginning and stopping work promptly with the sawmill whistle. Under no circumstances will they work on Sundays or holidays.

Before the British took Burma, a white elephant ruled the country, holding the dual office of god and king. A man's position in society in Burma is known by the number of roofs on his house. The peasant or farmer, the lowest rung in the social scale, has one roof over his head. The Prime Minister had five, the King six. But the Sacred White Elephant's abode was protected by seven roofs. Thebaw, the last King of Burma, as well as his predecessors, were supposed to rule only under the control and with the approval of this White Elephant.

An Elephant that Ruled a Nation

I HAVE visited the ex-home of this wonderful animal in Mandalay. It occupied the center of a stately grove, and was protected from the gaze of the vulgar by a moat, inside of which was a high-walled fortress. Under a seven-roofed, superbly carved teakwood building, or palace, lived this animal god and king. Colored glass lamps hung about inside. On a raised stall or dais, protected by a magnificent crystal railing and covered by a red silk canopy, reposed this worshipped beast.

To the king he gave a daily audience, while an army of servants of noble blood formed his retinue and catered to his every whim. Each morning his breakfast consisted of milk from the breasts of twenty-four Burmese women. Thousands of these women daily surrounded his palace, clamoring and offering bribes to the courtiers to obtain for them this sacred privilege; for they believed that the child of such a mother received special spiritual benefits for this sacrifice.

Dr. O'Mally, the Irish surgeon for old King Thebaw, was on hand at each ceremony to administer restoratives to the women after their ordeal; for most of them fainted or were so overcome with emotion that they needed the services of a physician.

When the British took Burma, King Thebaw was deposed and sent to an island in the Bay of Bengal, and the Sacred White Elephant was put in the Rangoon Zoo, where he may be seen to-day plaintively holding out his trunk for a ripe banana. Of him it may be truly said, "How have the mighty fallen!"

Conchita

By FLORENCE RYERSON

Illustrations by Troy Kinney

YOUNG J. J. hailed ftom New York. And the fact that his machine broke down in the center of a muddy California road instead of the paved streets of Hoboken or Jersey City was proof positive that fate was behind it all. In the first place, he was John Joshua Simpson, Junior, and his name was indissolubly linked with that famous commodity, 'Simpson's Steamed Sausage. Succulent! Soul-Satisfying!'"

His father, old Joshua, had started with one sausage machine and a pig, and from that rudimentary beginning had built up the Simpson Sausage Factory, a thing of gigantic proportions and still mote gigantic profits. A large part of the Simpson fortune had been expended in removing the fatal sausage taint from old Simpson's son and heir, John Joshua, Junior. J. J. had spent four years on the Harvard Gold Coast, and had accumulated a sufficient amount of snobbishness to render him, at twenty-two, the pride of his father's heart. If old Joshua was sometimes hurt by his son's aversion to the Simpson Sausage in all its stages of construction, he salved the wound with the knowledge that down in the depths of his nature, below the substrata of Harvardism, J. J. was a chip off the old block.

After his four years at Cambridge, J. J. was sent on a world-wide trip; and, California being among the places considered necessary to be visited by all educated persons, his itinerary wound up with a month's tour of the Golden State.

Therefore, behold him, fair of hair and blue of eye, changing the front tire of his machine in a rose-bordered roadway, and whistling a cheerful accompaniment of the latest Broadway success, while upon the other side of the hedge, in the Casa de Mille Flores, Conchita swayed dreamily to the strains of a guitar.

NOW, the Casa de Mille Flores is a deliberate anachronism. Somehow, in the forward rush of time, this house and garden have remained stationary; and hidden behind the hedge is a bit of old Spain, a fragment of the past so rare and exquisite that the few patrons who know it guard it jealously, and watch the occasional stranger with a suspicions eye.

The Casa de Mille Flores is not an inn. It is a private dwelling, where Donna Josepha, the last of her kind, dispenses hospitality for a small but necessary consideration, and where Conchita once whirled between the small white tables in the patio, or sat, breathlessly aquiver, in her corner behind the oleander.

Conchita did not dance for the sake of the diners at the little tables. She danced because, just so, for countless generations her forebears had danced in the arched patios of Andalusia; and when Miguel, the troubadour of the Casa, struck a minor chord from his guitar, and began in his throaty tenor,

Conchita must needs glide to her place and dance as naturally as a lily sways upon its stem. A lily? No, Conchita could not be likened to a lily. She was a crimson tulip, or a flaming eucalyptus. She was a slender scarlet poppy dancing in the breeze. For Conchita was a thing of flame and shadow, with crimson lips and blue-black hair and a hint of gold in the tint of her skin; and her eyes were twin pools of shadow, veiled by the sweep of her lashes.

Conchita was a child of Spain, with only the thin veneer of her mother's discipline to cover the pure flame of her spirit; and she lived and danced, coquetting a little with Miguel through sheet force of heredity, and looking over the heads of the diners with eyes that were dreamily wise. Conchita did not mingle with her mother's guests. They were things apart from her life, incidents in the routine of her dream days, and she regarded them all with eyes that saw nothing—until the arrival of Joshua, Junior.

His coming was anything but romantic. There had been a rain-storm, and by the time his tire was in order J. J. was mud to his elbows. He turned into the nearest house to search for a garden faucet, and the nearest house was the Casa de Mille Flores. Across the green of the garden J. J. beheld the twinkling of tiny brass lampara, the gleam of white tables, and to his ears came the melancholy strains of Miguel's guitar.

Being from New York, he was constitutionally in search of novelty. He walked slowly up the path, looked vainly about for a head waiter, and then sat down at one of the little tables.

From her corner behind the oleander, Conchita watched him as he bent his blond head above his plate, and quite simply, just as one of her Andalusian ancestors might have done, she gave her fiery little heart into his keeping.

Miguel sang a song full of plaintive "Aie, aie's," and then changed into the merry "Love Song of the Matadores"; and Conchita sprang into the center of the patio, a whirling, stamping mass of crimson and gold. It was a Carmenesque little dance she performed, a dance with a dagger and a rose. The habitues of the Casa began to be thrilled with a sort of electric shock; for Conchita was dancing for J. J., and he, in his turn, was gazing at her wide-eyed over his soup.

Conchita finished with a final flourish, and as she turned toward her corner J.J. committed a faux pas. He clapped his hands long and enthusiastically. Now, the complicated etiquette of the Casa does not admit of clapping. One may raise one's glass and cry "Brava! Brava!" in subdued and gracious tones; once may even throw a flower from the cluster that ornaments the center of each table; but clapping is vulgar, and altogether to be frowned upon.

J.J. did not know this. He clapped with the whole-hearted enthusiasm of youth. And Conchita, instead of shrugging her shoulders and suppressing a scornful "barbarian" between her white teeth, or staring coolly at the stranger with half-closed eyelids—Conchita turned, with a little whirling curtsy, and threw him the rose from her hair. With a unanimous gasp, the patrons saw him raise the rose and put it in his buttonhole.

In her room that night, Conchita discussed the matter with her mother. That is, Donna Josepha did the talking with voluble proficiency, while Conchita stared dreamily out into the moonlit garden. Only once did she contribute to the conversation. Into the midst of her mother's disapproval she quoted dreamily from one of Miguel's songs:

"'His hair is of spun gold, and his eyes hold the blue of the sky'"—which had nothing to do with the subject in hand.

Donna Josepha retired into the hall, slamming the door, with the expressed hope that her daughter would regain her senses by morning.

Her hope was not realized. All day Conchita was nervous and distraught, and after she had arranged the tables for supper the patrons found the tiny brass salt dishes filled with sugar.

WHEN a red machine drew up before the hedge she breathed a sigh of relief and turned her back upon the tables, being very busily occupied in twisting a wreath of yellow jasmine for her hair.

From afar Donna Josepha watched the scene helplessly. She could not eject the Señor without reason, and, after all, Conchita was ignoring his presence with praise-worthy intentness. How was the Donna to know that Conchita, the guile of her ancestors rising within her, was making play with her lashes and giving the attentive J. J. to understand that she saw him out of the corner of her eye, even if she appeared to be busy twisting the wiry stems of jasmine?

J. J. grinned to himself and took it all as a great adventure. Later you may blame him, if you like; but thus far he was innocent of any wrong-doing. It scarcely seemed real to him, that he, J. J., of upper Fifth Avenue, should he sitting in a Spanish patio, watching this flaming orchid of a girl weave a wreath of flowers with which to delight him.

Later Conchita danced, and J. J. did not again make the mistake of clapping. Instead he threw her a crimson rose from the mass in the center of his table; and Conchita trampled without compunction

Later she disappeared from her accustomed place and J.J., leaving somewhat sulkily, discovered her lingering in the garden. From sheer force of habit, he made love to her; and Conchita smiled and sparkled and gave him the full play of her eyes with such perfect effect that he did not dream it was her first real love affair. How could he know that Conchita had been guarded as carefully from men of his kind as the roses about them were covered from the frost? It was the Donna who discovered them standing, hand in hand, looking through the break in the hedge to where the mountains rose, lilac and silver, in the moonlight.

That night Donna Josepha did not argue with her daughter. Instead she locked her in her room. The next day she held conference with the family priest, who volunteered to talk with Conchita.

His interview was lengthy, but disappointing. Conchita said nothing—and said it most expressively. The good father left her presence with the feeling that he had been trying to see into the depths of a very deep pool.

That night, when J. J. came to the Casa, there was no Conchita in evidence. He was leaving, disappointed and somewhat sulky, when a rose fell at his feet. Conchita was again living up to her ancestors. She stood in the embrasure of a vine-bordered window, her figure outlined against the dull gold of the light behind.

J. J. picked up the rose and put it to his lips, not because of any particular sentiment, but because, under the circumstances, it seemed the proper thing to do.

Around its stem he found a twisted bit of paper. He held it up, and the window above closed noiselessly. Evidently Conchita had been waiting to make sure that he found it.

J.J. walked slowly to his car, and read the note by the aid of its headlights. It was a sad little note. It told him that Conchita was a prisoner on his account; that he must come no more to the Casa for dinner, or she would be locked in her room forever, presumably to grow gray and decrepit in its depths. If he wished to see her, he must come to the syringa bush at the foot of the garden at midnight.

RIGHT here, if you like, J. J.'s wrong-doing began. He detected in the letter a note that was deeper than coquetry, and by some instinctive divination he knew that the heart of the little dancer lay in his hand, while his own was quite untouched. He did not take counsel with his conscience and ride away from the Casa forever, leaving Conchita to get over her little romance before it was too late. Instead, he drove rapidly down the road and turned his car into the garage, with orders that he would want it again the next evening; and at twelve o'clock he was prepared to greet Conchita by the white syringa bush.

Conchita came on the moment. There she showed the wisdom of her silence. If she had protested to her mother and the priest that the young American was nothing to her, her actions would have disproved it; while if she had openly rebelled she would have been safely locked in her room for the ensuing month. By dint of looking dreamily uninterested through all their arguments, she had so baffled their simple wits that they were ready to believe anything. So, when the evening passed and no J. J. appeared to ruffle the smooth-flowing current of life at the Casa, Conchita was once more allowed her freedom. When the clock struck twelve she crept through the hall of the sleeping house and across the silent patio to keep her tryst with J. J.

It was an innocent enough affair—a sort of spring idyl, with a few moments of youthful ardor, a stolen kiss or so, and the planting of a rose bush at the bottom of the garden to symbolize their enduring love. Only by a sort of super-consciousness could J.J. discover that he was acting the part of a cad; and for a time even that was dulled. In the romantic half-light and fragrance of the spring garden anything seemed possible, and he deceived himself into thinking that he really cared—or was it later that he drugged his soul into thinking that he did not?

For of course it ended, as all dreams

Continued on page 13

Kings and Queens Who Are Out of Business

Actresses Who Keep House

Page 11

Capturing Waterfalls

WATERFALL hunting isn't exactly a parlor game, and it won't appeal to the people that like to get home every night in time to dress for dinner. But, according to Stanley Washburn,—and he has played it over a course thousands of miles square in western Canada, all the way from Edmonton, Alberta, to the backbone of the Rockies in British Columbia, it is the great American sport.

Imagine, first, an empire embracing one of the superb mountain ranges of the world, the slopes covered with unbroken forest, the valleys hiding unguessed-at mineral wealth, the plains almost unknown to the plow. Next, imagine six men winding their way into the heart of this wilderness, their shouts to the pack-ponies the only sound breaking the silence of the eternal hills.

Imagine these men, whose combined personal wealth could probably not purchase a business block in a New England village, armed with a couple of cameras and a few engineering instruments, sketching pencil maps of this empire, lining in a railroad here, saying that in that spot will be a power plant, or that sixty thousand horse-power will be harnessed there, and proceeding with a total disregard for the millions of money involved in the carrying out of their plans.

What Came of a Day Spent in Dreaming

THIS new style of hunting came of a sort of dream young Washburn had. He was on a camping trip in the Alberta Rockies, and one eventful day he pitched camp on the banks of the Athabasca. The wind, following the valley, carried a sound deeper than the soughing of the pine boughs, and Washburn started out to investigate. The sound grew into a thunderous booming. The wide river began to narrow. Suddenly it swung around a bend, and pitched with magnificent abandon into a roaring, pitiless gorge.

A shelf of rook reaches out, almost touching the face of the waters in their fall. On this rock Washburn spent the day, dreaming. When evening came he hewed out some pine posts and staked a claim around the falls. When he returned to civilization, he journeyed to the canons of lower New York. He brought with him his dream. His task was to interest practical men in what his imagination had pictured on the banks of the Athabasca. And he fired the imagination of those practical, hard-headed hearers. While he could offer no six per cent. returns on an investment for that year, or for many years to come, he could offer the possibility of a gigantic, immeasurable conquest for the future. Said his listeners:

"If you can prove the existence of enough potential water-power sites in the wilderness to make it pay for transporting the power, we might afford to play the long game."

"I'll hunt them out," said Washburn.

On this basis they financed the hunting expedition.

Indians Tell Tales of Mighty Falls

THERE were Indian tales of mighty falls in the upper waters of the mountain rivers. The plan was to follow back from the lower waters, pursuing the streams through the drainage areas. It was a contest as alluring as the pursuit of gold; for there was no knowing at what hour the oar might catch the distant booming, or whether disappointment might follow disappointment.

It was man's work swimming the horses across the turbulent streams, rafting over the precious supplies, fording unknowable rapids, dragging the ponies along precipices.

Every day was a fight and a struggle.

The first reward was on the Brazeau. One evening there came the faint sound of distant pounding. It was too late to push on that night; but before daybreak they were off, on foot. When the valley opened up to their eyes, it looked as if nature had conspired to create a perfect basin for a reservoir, an ideal site for man to harness a mighty power that had been awaiting his coming for thousands of years.

Altogether the Brazeau, the San Wapiti (with its two falls), and the Athabasca were explored, the drainage areas calculated, and the estimates of horse-power made, and hunting was over. The hunter's dream could then be turned over to the dreamers in finance.

Here is the rest of Mrs. Ryerson's story

Conchita

Continued from page 8

must end sometime. Old Joshua received a hint of danger in J. J.'s somewhat ingenuous letters, and old Joshua was not the one to stand calmly by and watch his son form a másalliance. The name of Simpson, famous from constant repetition upon cans of sausage, must not be lowered by union with the mere lineal descendant of grandees. He sent an ultimatum in the form of a telegram, and J. J. was recalled to New York.

J. J. broke the news to Conchita with a sort of selfish relief in the bottom of his heart. He had a vaguely guilty feeling that the whole affair meant more to her than it did to him, and he soothed her fears with a desperate tenderness. It was upon that last night they planted the rose bush, and Conchita, tearfully passionate, kissed its one poor little blossom and gave it to J.J. to wear next his heart.

J. J. walked slowly down the road to his machine looking back now and then to wave to the little figure that stood beneath the blossoming crown of syringa.

LATER, in the din and bustle of New York, a stray breath of fragrance would come to him, and the scene would rise before his eyes like a picture flashed upon a screen; but New York is a busy place, and the whole episode had been too perfect, too dreamlike, to seem real. Almost he began to feel that he had dreamed it. Rapidly it became a mere memory—a pretty memory, it is true, with a clash of pathos and romance about it, but still a memory, with no relation to real life, or his growing circle of friends.

For J. J. was breaking into society, not by means of his father's money, but in spite of it, and by the charm of his smile and the force of his ready tongue. Willing to be a mere background, old Joshua watched the boy's progress with a smile of satisfaction upon his wrinkled face. So J. J., being twenty-two and somewhat spoiled by the attention he was receiving, had no thought of returning to the Casa de Mille Flores; and Conchita, watching the syringa flowers flutter to the ground, bud and bloom again,—poor little Conchita, with the passionate heart she had inherited front her race,—wilted like a rose in the sun; and Donna Josepha watched her, anxious and helpless.

IT was when J. J. had been gone many months, and the little rose hush had already sent forth a mist of green leaves, that Stanley Grant discovered the Casa. Grant's name was well known along roadway as the man who could hold up a larger number of musical comedy successes than any of his contemporaries. His reviews made no pretense of reaching the inner recesses of the brain, but, they were a charitable, and highly lucrative, attempt to lift the weight of care from the brow of the tired business man. Naturally, Grant was constantly on the lookout for that jewel beyond price, something new.

The Casa appealed to him as a setting even before Conchita appeared, and after her dance he felt that here was something worth while. He rose from the table and entered into a lively conversation with Donna Josepha. From her corner Conchita listened, breathless.

To the Donna the idea of a Lopez upon a stage was unthinkable. The more Grant pictured the future of her daughter, the more voluble and theatric became her wrath. Grant was baffled but helpless, and took up his hat to depart as Donna Josepha, with a final scornful wave of her hand and shrug of her shoulders, flounced into the house.

In the garden he was met by Conchita herself. She had not stayed to hear the noisy argument between Donna Josepha and the manager. Long acquaintance with her mother's conversational methods left her no doubt as to its outcome. Instead she slipped into the garden to think it over. The manager had spoken two words that had settled the matter. He had said, "New York."

To Conchita's mind New York meant J. J., and she was going to him as simply as a flower turns to the sun. When Grant met her in the garden, she told him she would be glad to dance any of her dances he wished. Should she bring her costume or come as she was?

GRANT was not the usual villain-manager of fiction. He was a remarkably decent sort, with a wife and family at home. The helplessness of Conchita both amused and touched him. He felt that it would be almost a sin to transplant this tropic flower to the cold and sterile soil of New York. At the same time, she was undeniably a good business venture. He was silent a minute, considering, and Conchita unconsciously clinched the matter by adding:

"I have a friend in New York, Señor—one who is very dear to me, that I would see."

Grant breathed a sigh of relief. Of course, if she had friends it was another matter. It shifted the responsibility from his shoulders. After all, the child had a future before her, and it would be a shame to let her impossible mother interfere. So he told her to meet him the next day, and gave her the name of his hotel, then chug-chugged away in his machine. That night a slender figure stole through the silent patio and down the long road toward the lighted patch of sky that hung over Los Angeles.

The next day Grant, with the mingled feelings of guardian and keeper, turned Conchita over to a woman of his staff, with instructions that she was a jewel and must be guarded as such; with the result that three days later, while Donna Josepha at the Casa, was wringing her helpless bands, Conchita was on her way East under the watchful eye of her protector.

Once in New York, she wrote J. J. a little letter, pathetic with gladness, and despatched it to his residence. But J. J. did not receive either that or the two that followed; for he was on a yachting trip around the Bermudas, and before he could return the watchful eye of old Joshua had found and intercepted the notes.

J.J. was deep in the siege of one of New York's most sought after debutantes, and it would never do to distract his mind at this crucial moment; so the little notes went into the waste-basket, and the dread that had slowly grown in the heart of Conchita became a certainty.

J. J., her lover, her betrothed, was dead!

She had little time for grieving. Rehearsals were going full blast, and Grant was a hard taskmaster. He felt vaguely that something was wrong with Conchita, and he wrestled with her long and prayerfully.

"You've lost all your pep!" he would roar. "What's the matter with you?"

Conchita would answer dutifully, "I do not know, Señor," and trudge back to the starting-place to go wearily through the figures.

Finally he gave her up as hopeless. He would try her the first night, the costume and scenery might make a difference; and if it did not take, he would ship her home as a bad investment. His head was too full of other worries to spend much time over Conchita.

Came the opening night. Conchita, with the light dead in her eyes, sat in her crimson-and-gold dress and waited for her cue. In her mind, she was dropping red roses into J. J.'s grave. And on the other side of the curtain J. J. was sitting in the stage-box, with his mother, his father, and a girl.

The girl was the debutante in question, and J. J. had almost asked her to become Mrs. Simpson—almost, but not quite; for something, rising from the depths of his honest nature, kept him from this final unfaithfulness to the little dream figure in crimson and gold.

The girl herself was perfectly willing to share the Simpson fortune, and waited with a sort of placid sureness. She was not in love with J. J.—there was a half-effaced memory of a certain doctor, young and ineligible, that kept her from giving herself to J. J. quite whole-heartedly; but she had been reared in a circle that did not question the gods bearing gifts of coin, and she felt that she could be quite happy with J. J. and his millions.

Just to show that he belonged to her, she made him hold her gloves and negligently allowed her scarf to trail across his shoulder. J. J., punctiliously correct, was dividing his attention equally between the stage and the girl, when the curtain went up for the third act.

THE scene that disclosed itself was as familiar to J. J. as the palm of his hand. About a vine-trellised patio were grouped little white-covered tables crowned with gold and red poppies, that glimmered in the light of the brass lampara. The music died down to an accompaniment of stringed instruments, the strumming of

In a dream, she danced her mantilla dance, swaying to the music, coquetting with the invisible audience through the shadowy lace. The audience gave a gasp of pure joy and leaned forward as one man. As she whirled from the stage it clapped enthusiastically, and she turned to come on for an encore.

It was then that she saw J. J., leaning forward in his chair so that the full glory of the footlights fell upon his face, upon the two white gloves that he unconsciously dangled in his hands, upon the girl who sat beside him with a proprietary air. And in Conchita the spirit of her ancestors rose in a sort of madness.

She sprang upon the stage and whirled through a maze of dance, with a dagger and a rose that left the audience breath-less. She stood poised for an instant before the stage-box, flung the rose beneath her feet, and, with a quick movement, buried the jeweled dagger in her own white breast.

After which, with a little sobbing sigh, she collapsed in a tinseled heap of crimson and gold.

There was an instant of breathless suspense. Then J. J., climbing over the girl beside him in his excitement, sprang upon the stage, seized Conchita in his arms, and carried her back of the scenes.

The chorus stood aghast; the stage manager, blasphemous and helpless, dashed in and out of the prompter's box; and over it all rose the roar of the audience, begging its new favorite to come back and do it again.

After that, to all intents and purposes, the main drama left the stage. Somebody rang down the curtain, and before the audience could guess that anything was wrong the tiny pool of red in the down stage left was wiped up, the demoralized chorus was marshaled into place, and the curtain rose again to the strains of "My Alabama Honeymoon."

Come what may, the tired business man must be amused. Only, the left stage-box was vacant, and behind the scenes a doctor was battling: for Conchita's life and fighting off J. J., who alternately pleaded, threatened, and bribed the man at the door.

AS a matter of fact, the wound was not so serious as it seemed at first. The dagger was too blunt to do much damage. And after a proper length of time J. J. was admitted to Conchita's presence, and went down on his knees beside the bed, with a gulping sob, to bury his face in her cloud of black hair. After all, this was the best thing he could have done, under the circumstances.

Old Joshua, outside the dressing-room door, raged up and down, or pressed his ear to the key-hole, although there was nothing to be heard.

In the end, it was Mrs. Joshua who settled the whole matter. She had not appeared before, for the reason that she never did appear until crucial moments. From the dreadful day when Joshua's one sausage machine had broken down and she had mended it with a hair-pin and a button-hook, straight down through the ensuing thirty years of married life, she had stayed in the background until such moments as these, when she stepped quietly into the breach and took command. Without looking at Joshua, she opened the closed door, stepped into the room, and surveyed J. J., on his knees beside the bed, with calm satisfaction.

"It's about time some one brought him there," was her inward comment as she turned to the doctor.

"We've come to take her home," she said. "Shall I call an ambulance, or can she come in the machine?"

The doctor breathed a sigh of relief.

"I think we can move her now," he said, and Mrs. Joshua was departing in search of suitable wraps when she ran into her husband, perspiring and wrathful.

"Pa," she said calmly, "Chita's ready to go home with us now. Go and get a rug from the car—'n' don't forgit t' bring a cushion!" she added, as he disappeared dutifully through the stage door.

Joshua knew when it was his time to obey.

LATER, in the bosom of his family, old Joshua tried to regain his authority; but it was too late. He might fool J. J., who defied him in the age-old manner, but he could not fool Mrs. Joshua.

In the bottom of his soul he was conscious of the fact that he would be disappointed in J. J. if he obeyed, and with this consciousness came the knowledge that Mrs. Joshua had known it all the time. After that there was nothing for him to do but give in as gracefully as he could, and spoil Conchita, as all the rest of the household was spoiling her.

In the end, Mr. and Mrs. J. J. started of their wedding tour to California, duly heralded by the press.

Beal Pulls a Blinger

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by F. Vaux Wilson

ALONG at first, too, I'll admit I didn't care such a lot for this Curtis Beal. Course I hardly had a show to get any right slant on him, with him livin' down on the Neck and not bein' much of a mixer. The Beals didn't belong to the Yacht Club, never went to tea fights or gave any, but kept to themselves in their big house facin' the Sound.

Some said it was because Mrs. Beal wa'n't very well. There was a couple of girls in the family; bright, lively-lookin' kids that often drove down to the station with their father. Also I'd heard there was a crippled boy—meningitis or something.

ANYWAY, there was nothing folksy about 'em. Why, Beal must have been goin' down on the eight-three with me for more'n two years, and he'd never so much as nodded! So I was some jarred, here a month or so back, to have him give me the hail as we was pilin' out at Grand Central.

"Professor McCabe, isn't it?" says he.

"Good guess," says I.

"I understand," says he, "that you conduct sort of a human repair shop."

"Physical Culture Studio is my name for it," says I, a little crisp maybe.

"Oh, very well," says he. "Studio it is then. I guess that's what I need. When may I—er—apply?"

"'Most any old time," says I.

"This afternoon at four, then," says he, and swings off towards the subway.

Just like that, you know, sort of offhand and casual. Not that I cared. I was plannin' to turn him over to Swifty Joe and pay no more attention to him.

It happens, though, that when this Mr. Beal shows up Swifty is busy in the gym; so I has to get on the job myself.

"I've an idea," says he, "that a good lively boxing bout once or twice a week would be the thing for me. I used to do quite a bit of that, you know."

"Did, eh?" says I. "About how long ago?"

"Oh, I haven't had the gloves on," says he, "for— Why, it must have been twenty or twenty-five years."

"Huh!" says I, lookin' at him critical.

One of these thick-barreled, short-legged, chunky-necked gents, Mr. Beal is, with signs of high blood pressure and a bit puffy under the eyes.

"Gettin' along towards fifty, ain't you?" I goes on.

"Guilty," says he.

"Shed the coat and vest," says I.

"Just as you say," says he.

Then I puts my ear to his chest and listens. You know the pound of loose connectin' rods in your car? That was it. I shakes my head.

"No mitt exercise for you;" says I. "Not here, anyway!"

"Something wrong?" says he.

"Blood pump carryin' too heavy a load, that's all," says I. "How have you been takin' your exercise these last few years?"

"Sitting at a desk from four to twelve hours a day," says he.

"And feeding hearty right along?"

"Fairly so," says he.

"And now you'd like to jump in and do three or four fast rounds, eh?" I goes on sarcastic. "Say, can't you think of any easier way of breakin' into the obituary column?"

HE don't even bat an eye. "As bad as that, is it?" says he. "Can't I take up a little work on the rings or the parallel bars?"

"A mild drill with the wands and a few medicine-ball stunts would be the limit," says I.

"Oh, very well," says he.

That seems to be his fav'rite reply, no matter how rough I put things to him. He sure was game about it! Seems he'd been quite a husky boy once,—rowed on the freshman crew, and all that. But he hadn't been on a real vacation for a dozen years, and now—well, in five 'minutes of wand wavin' I had him puffin' and purple in the face.

"That's enough," I sings out. "It's a session with the fam'ly doc and a revised grub list for you, Mr. Beal."

"Oh, very well," says he.

THAT'S how we come to get acquainted so well. Next time he reports I finds he's started in on a strict diet. "What are they havin' you cut out?" says I.

"About everything except drugged buttermilk and various brands of prepared hay," says he. "Simplifies the dish washing, anyway. I'm thinking of fitting up a feed box for myself in the garage and not going to the table at all."

He had a trick of shootin' off dry stuff like that. First thing I knew I got to sort of likin' Beal, and he seems to enjoy the half-hour seances in the gym, always joshin' more or less about the ladylike moves I put him through, and sittin' around for a while afterwards chattin' sociable.

It was durin' one of these confabs that I mentions how I'm being stung on this Nutmeg Transportation deal. You see, back about a year ago I'd been tipped off where a block of Nutmeg common could be picked up at a bargain, and I'd bought in. Then I got notice of the reorganization, which I chucked in the waste basket, and next thing I knew they begun passin' dividends.

"Oh yes," says Beal. "That is some of Olney Griggs' finesse. His company has taken over Nutmeg Transportation, and the profits are being—well, diverted."

"But where do I get off?" says I. "If I unload I'm out a wad, and if I hang on—"

"As a minority stockholder," says he, "you haven't much show. But I might find a way of—yes, I think I can. If you like, I'll see what can be done."

"G'wan!" says I. "Wouldn't that be throwin' good money after bad? You know I can't afford to splurge on high-priced legal talent like you."

Beal chuckles easy. "If I get any fee," says he, "it will come out of Griggs."

"Then you'll break the record," says I; "for from all I hear anybody that goes against him comes out bearin' the marks."

"So I've understood," says he. "But at least we might furnish him with a little pleasant excitement."

Which is the last I hear about the affair for quite some time. In fact, I'd almost forgotten our little talk and concluded he'd let the matter drop. Then here the other afternoon, just as I about shuttin' the studio and callin' it a day, up rolls a limousine out front, and as I'm springin' the hall lock there appears this pompous party with the serious face and the gray side-boards.

"I WAS told, sir," says he, "that I might find Curtis Beal here."

"So you might if you'd been a couple of hours earlier," says I.

"Ah!" says he, sniffin' sort of annoyed. "Those stupid office clerks of his! Then may I see Professor McCabe?"

"If you look straight ahead, you can't miss him," says I.

That perky come-back seems to jam him a little; but after a puzzled stare he goes on: "Then you are the person in whose name suit has been brought to dissolve the Colonial Tractions merger."

"You don't mean it!" says I.

"Is it possible," says he, "that you are unaware of it?"

"Me?" says I. "Why, I start so many things it's hard to keep track of 'em all. I guess I'm the party. What then?"

"My name," says he, pausin' impressive, "is T. Olney Griggs."

"Oh!" says I. "Then you're the main belt?"

"I am president of Colonial Tractions," says he, swellin out a bit. "In that

Page 15

"Why, that's pleasant of you," says I. "Shoot it over."

"You will do well, sir," says he, "to withdraw this suit at once."

"Sorry," says I, "but, come to remember, this is my pet suit."

"Perhaps you fail to realize, Mr. McCabe," he goes on, "that by continuing such litigation you are jeopardizing not only your own interests, but those of hundreds of other minority stockholders, many of them widows and orphans."

"That's a good old gag, Mr. Griggs," says I; "but it don't get by with me. There ain't any close season on widows and orphans that I ever heard of. If there was, I expect a lot of you share jugglers would go out of business. No. sir! If I've started any suit, I'm goin' to stay with it."

Business with the shoulders from Griggs indicating that I'm a hopeless case. "Where," says he, "may I find your counsel, Mr. Beal?"

"I expect he'll be down at his rooms in the Pyramid Life about nine-thirty to-morrow mornin'," says I.

"But I am leaving for Washington at Midnight" says Griggs. "If I am to see Mr. Beal at all, it must be to-night. Where does he live?"

"Beal?" says I. "Why, out at Rockhurst-on-the-Sound, where I do. I'm just startin' for there."

This is extremely annoying!" says Griggs, hesitatin'. "But—well, I suppose I'd best settle this now."

"Excuse me," says I, "but I've heard Mr. Beal say how he never bothered with business out of office hours. My guess is that you'd make the trip for nothing."

Griggs he smiles unpleasant and taps his inside coat pocket. "In this instance," says he, "I have reason to believe that Mr. Beal will be glad to make an exception. And if it happens that he is your friend, as well as your attorney, you should be informed, Mr. McCabe, of the circumstances. Mr. Beal is general counsel for two corporations with whose directors I have more or less influence. I fear it would seriously impair his income if he were to lose those positions. Also he is living in rather an expensive home, isn't he? At least, there is a heavy encumbrance on it, something like thirty thousand. Not a good investment, considering the stagnant real estate market; but I thought best to acquire that paper myself. So, you see?"

And, say, with a set of frosted face Panels like that, I might have known!

"Couldn't you hold this up for a few days," says I, "until we have a chance chew it over?"

Griggs shakes his head decided. "Rumors of this suit have already interfered seriously with the development of our policy. It must be withdrawn at once."

"All right," says I; "call it scratched."

He smiles patronizin'. "I must have written assurance from your counsel that the action is to be abandoned," says he. "And I have no time to waste. Come! Will you accompany me, or not?"

I WA'NT strong for playin' gallery while he shakes the stick over Beal's head; but it looked like I ought to be on hand. Besides, there might be some excuse for this T. Olney Griggs something swift durin' the mix-up. He sure needed it. Such a chesty, cocksure party he was!

"Sure I'll go," says I. "But if I was you, Mr. Griggs, I'd sort of break it to him easy. He—he is a little tender about heart.”

"Let us trust, then," says T. Olney, what Mr. Beal will realize at once that what I demand is for the best interests of many."

Honest, a stiffer-necked plute I never had any dealin's with.

When we got to Rockhurst, he condescends to climb into a tin taxi, and by five forty-five, we're bein' unloaded at the porte-cochère of Beal's near-Moorish mansion. The maid that answers the ring looks us over doubtful; but Griggs shoves his card at her commandin'.

"On important business," says he. "You may also add that a Mr. McCabe is with me."

I don't care for the way he puts that, either—"a Mr. McCabe,"—as if he'd picked me casual out of a job lot. But I lets it pass.

"If you please," says the maid, openin' the door again, "Mr. Beal makes it a rule never to transact business at his home. He says if you will call at his offices to-morrow he—"

"Impossible!" snaps Griggs. "Tell him I insist on seeing him to-night!"

"Oh, very well," sings out Beal from inside. "If the gentleman insists."

So in pushes Griggs, with me trailin' along. But, say, if he don't get the surprise of his life, then he's some grand little Sphinx! I know it had me gaspin'. Instead of discoverin' a quiet domestic scene, what we butts into is—well, here's a whale of a livin'-room—forty by thirty or more, I should judge. And in the middle of it, on his hands and knees and draped with a leather table cover, also wearin' a couple of curtain rods projectin' from either side of his collar, and with a twisted tail pinned to the back of his cutaway, is Mr. Curtis Beal, the prominent legal light. He's surrounded by a circle of chairs, mostly upside down, a carpet sweeper, and an umbrella jar.

In the background, also decorated fantastic with fur rugs and paper tails, are a couple of half-grown girls; while to one side, propped up with pillows in a wheelchair, is a pale-faced, bright-eyed boy of ten or a dozen maybe, who's frownin' at us for crashin' in.

Course one look at Beal has me gaspin'. Griggs, he just gazes bug-eyed—and no wonder!

"Pardon us if we continue," says Beal; "but this is our play hour—too sacred an institution to be interrupted. Cheerful participants, however, are always welcome. No doubt you recognize the plot of the piece. This is night in the jungle—for complete stage directions see Kipling. I am impersonating his Lordship the Elephant. My tusks may be a trifle unconvincing; but my tail, I am told, is a triumph of realism. Behind me I hear a tiger and a rhinoceros. In the chair, of course, is Mowgli. Newcomers, Mowgli—to the water-hole! What manner of beasts shall they be?"

"Let the young one be a panther, a roaring panther," says the boy.

"That's you, McCabe," says Beal. "Get down and roar!"

"Eh?" says I, gawpin'.

"You're a panther, you know," he insists, "a slinking, roaring panther."

"In that case," says I, "here goes." With which I drops on all fours and goes boundin' idiotic around the room, roarin' my best, and endin' with a leap onto a big davenport, where I crouches sleuthy. Delighted giggles from the two girls.

"Good, good!" pipes the boy in the chair. "Now the other must be Boo-Boo, the baboon who walks like a man."

"Your turn, Mr. Griggs," says Beal.

And you should have seen the look of pained disgust on T. Olney's face. "I beg pardon," says he; "but I do not care to indulge in such a ridiculous proceeding. I came here, sir, to—"

"Then you shouldn't have come," says Beal. "Remember, Mowgli's word is law in the jungle. Go on; be a baboon!"

Think of that, will you? Orderin' a haughty, dignified plute like him to play monkey! Why, Griggs ain't got any more playfulness about him than a bronze statue. He turns purple in the gills and tries to protest indignant.

"I would have you know, Mr. Beal," he begins, "that I came here on serious business, and that I—"

"Hear that, Mowgli?" calls out Beal. "He defies the jungle! What's the penalty?"

"Drive him out!" says the youngster. "At him, Tiger! At him, Panther! Up, Rhino. Sick him!"

Say, we didn't need to be urged. The girls roared and capered around menacin'. Beal lumbers at him, wavin' his tusks and trumpetin'. Then one of the youngsters grabs a sofa pillow and chucks it accurate. It takes T. Olney just where his vest bulges most.

"Ugh!" remarks Griggs.

"Soak him!" urges the boy, clappin' his hands. "Gee!" thinks I. "Me for this!" With which I whirls a red leather cushion around my head and lets it fly.

"Good shot!" says Beal. "Keep it up while I tusk him."

Did we? Say, for a couple of minutes there the air was full of sofa pillows and seat cushions, fired energetic and gleeful. And Griggs is too big a mark to miss. "Biff!" he gets one full in the face, dislodgin' his glasses. "Swat!" I wings him in the side, and he drops his silk hat and cane. "Tir-r-r-rump!" snorts Beal, insertin' the curtain rods skilful between T. Olney's legs, bringin' him down with a crash, plunk on the shiny lid. The girls had grabbed him by either foot, and was slidin' him over the hardwood floor towards the front hall when the big grandfather's clock booms out seven.

"All over!" says Beal, shakin' off his table cover and standin' up. "The moon is high. All beasts back to their lairs. Good-night, kiddies. Good-night!"

AND a minute later they've disappeared and we're helpin' the rumpled Mr. Griggs to his feet. Mad? He's so wrathy he can only sputter!

"Sorry," says Beal; "but any one who intrudes during the youngsters' nonsense hour must take the consequences. I tried to warn you, you know. Now perhaps we had best adjourn to my study, if you've anything further to say."

Mr. Griggs had, a lot more.

"In less than twenty-four hours, sir," he pants out husky, "I will make a beggar of you—a beggar, sir!"

But if he expects anything panicky from Curtis Beal, he's mistaken. Beal listens to him patient until he's all through, only smilin' in that dry way of his and drummin' his fingertips restless.

"Oh, very well," says Beal at the end. "But I very much doubt, Mr. Griggs, if you will find it best to do anything so melodramatic."

"And why not, sir?" demands Griggs.

"In the first place," says Beal, "I am prepared to take care of that mortgage. A little windfall from a patent case, quite opportune. As for using your interlocking directors to depose me as general counsel—well, that would compel me to submit to the Attorney General certain facts relating to the financing of the N. H. & G. Holding Company, now under federal investigation. Of course, as counsel for the corporation, I couldn't do such a thing. As an outsider, Mr. Griggs, I might throw considerable light on the mystery of what became of those missing two millions. Your indictment would likely follow."

Griggs' jaw goes limp.

"But—but see here, my dear sir," says he, "you have only to withdraw this suit and—"

"The suit stands," says Beal, crisp and snappy. "Moreover, it is quite possible that it will be a joint action, the other petitioner being one Theresa Ryan."

"Tessie—again!" gasps Griggs. "But I—I—"

"True, you made a settlement on her," says Beal; "but naturally she is unsatisfied with a block of stock that has ceased to pay dividends. Rather an extravagant person, Miss Ryan, and somewhat fond of notoriety. The opportunity to couple your name with hers—"

"Stop!" groans T. Olney, coverin' his face with his hands. "Not another word about her! I—I'll agree to give her different shares—anything."

"Which hardly helps my other client—Professor McCabe," goes on Beal. "Would he be included in the transfer?"

"Yes, yes!" groans Griggs.

"Oh, very well," says Beal. "Just a moment while I prepare a memorandum to that effect."

AND inside of ten minutes Mr. T. Olney Griggs has signed and is bein' helped into the tin taxi, with a somewhat damaged silk lid jammed desperate down over his fevered brow. He had got his'n, good and proper.

"Say, Mr. Beal," says I, as we stands watchin' the taxi chug off, "that blood pump of yours must be improvin'. No feeble invalid could have put over a smear like that. It was a blinger!"

"Oh, no," says he modest. "You see, our friend Griggs isn't really the imposing personage he's supposed to be. Accidents of birth and fortune have put him where he is. Takes himself seriously though, doesn't he? I fear, Shorty, that he hardly appreciated the joys of a jungle hour."

"He ought to next time," says I. "You've qualified him for the monkey house, anyway."

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

By BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

Illustration by Harvey T. Dunn

I FOUND her on the boat-deck. She was reading, and did not hear my approach, so I was able to get a good look at her before she saw me. I should not have thought her to be so old as Gore had said; but she was certainly not far from forty, and she could never, at any age, have been pretty. She was smallish, and her figure— Was there, or was there not, anything wrong with it? I thought not, at a second glance. Her feet were small, but flat and ill shod. Her hands, roughened by exposure without gloves, were what the palmists call "spatulate."

She looked up as I came nearer. I saw then that she had a—was it a squint? No, after all, it was not. Her smile was the one thing about which there could be no doubt: it was undeniably false. On the whole, I did not like her.

She spoke at once.

"Oh, you are Mr. Corbet—I saw your name in the purser's list. It's so nice to have a couple of Englishmen on board among all these foreigners. And then, such a celebrity as Mr. Vincent Gore!"

HER voice did not match her person; it was soft and pleasant—a misfit voice that should have belonged to a pretty woman. A pretty woman, however, would not have had that carneying manner.

Her hair was of no particular color. Her dress, as far as I can describe it, seemed to be something squashy, with tags and bobs about it. By force of contrast, it brought to my mind something very different—the green floating robe, fresh and soft as a leaf, worn by the oread of the mountain woods. I pulled myself together and took a seat near the lady from Banda. After all, she had come from the island inhabited by the oread; she might even be able to tell me something about her.

The lady looked at me over the top of her novel. I saw her eyes now. They were grayish, small and very keen, and they seemed to be adding me up with considerable acuteness. There was no familiarity in her address. I should have wondered if Red Bob had not been dreaming if I had not seen the unmistakable marks of terror produced by the lady's attention to him only half an hour before.

As for what she said, it was simply the inevitable British comment on the weather. She informed me that it was a fine day. I, in my turn, informed her that the fine days thereabouts averaged some three hundred a year. She smiled a slightly one-sided smile, as I have noticed women do who are uncertain of their charms, and said gently that I knew all about those matters, no doubt, but she was just a stupid little thing who had to ask everything she wanted to know. It seemed to me that the remark was rather a clever one—supposing that she had summed me up as a man with more worldly keenness than Vincent Gore was possessed of. I knew then, and know now, that I had not a tenth part of his brains; but for mere commonplace sharpness I was easily his master.

"You don't know my name," she said.

"I'm Miss Siddis—Mabel Siddis. You've never heard of me—no one ever has. I'm nobody. I'm just a little governess going back to my work in Herberts-höhe. They wanted an English governess, and I saw the advertisement in Sydney. I can't afford to take holidays in Australia or Singapore, so I came down as far as Banda, because I have kind English friends there—or, rather, I had. It was a Mrs. Ravenna, an Englishwoman married to an Italian who settled there years and years ago. And she died while I was there—poor dear Margaret! But this is all a bore to you."

It was, but I couldn't say so. I made the inevitable contradiction, lit a cigarette, by special permission, and resigned myself to my duty. I didn't see that it demanded attention on my part, if I could only manage to look attentive. So I let my mind wander off toward Hahn and the "next stopping place," while Miss Siddis babbled gently on at my side.

I gathered that she was giving me the family history of the Ravennas—why the original Ravenna had come to Banda and settled there; why his wife had married him; how he had died; how she had followed him. There was somebody called Schultz in the story, also Schultz's wife. I remembered that Gore had told me the Schultz woman was on board. I knew exactly what she was like. All middle-class German women are the same woman, and I rather thought I had seen her as I came on deck—a fat gray cotton back, below an area of barren neck leading to a small plot of scraped-up hair. She didn't seem to be the sort of person one wanted very passionately to hear about. I smoked, and looked blankly at Miss Siddis, letting my imagination run before me to the mysterious land of New Guinea, now so near.

Then I woke to attention with a jump. What was Miss Siddis saying?

"As for mourning, of course no one in

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"Saw who?" I asked, with sudden sharp interest.

"Isola, of course—Mrs. Ravenna daughter—as I've been telling you," say Miss Siddis.

"Isola! What a curious name!"

It was her father. He called her 'Isola Bella' because he said Banda was an isola bella—that's Italian, you know, for 'beautiful island'; and she was born there. So he called her that. A very fanciful name."

"A beautiful name," I said, determining to know more about it, and about its owner.

"Oh, yes!" said Miss Siddis, with instant pliability. "Fanciful and beautiful—that's what I meant."

"She should be a beautiful girl herself if she matches her name," I added.

Miss Siddis fingered her novel, and I saw something ugly look out of her small eyes. But her voice was gentler and pleasanter than ever as she answered:

"Now, that's so nice of you! I can see you are one of the people who like to think the very best of every one right away. Yes, poor Isola—yes I should certainly say she is pretty. Oh, yes; you might call her that."

"Why do you call her poor?" I asked

"Oh, I've just told you!"

"Yes, of course," I said, cursing my own stupidity.

WHAT had she told me about the girl? Only her parents' death, and something about Frau Schultz, who seemed to be a worry to some one, as far as I could recollect the scraps of Miss Siddis's yarn that had penetrated to my consciousness. It seemed, then, that the oread of the mountain was an orphan, and that Frau Shultz, somehow or other, was an annoyance in her life. I resolved that, employer or no employer, I was not going to make myself pleasant to Frau Schultz.

I was quite prepared to stick by Miss Siddis now, being determined to get out of her all there was to be got about the girl in green. But nature and the Pacific Ocean willed otherwise. We were well out from under the shelter of Ceram now, and in the open sea. The Afzelia felt the coming swell of the great ocean, though we were not in it yet, and began to dip and roll—not very much, but it was enough for Miss Siddis.

She gathered up her novel and her work-bag, murmured an apology, and fled.

I remained alone on the boat-deck, sitting astride a boat to watch the blue shadow on the water that was New Guinea,—New Guinea at last!—and thinking about Miss Siddis and the girl in green. I had a notion that the former was more dangerous than she might seem to be. Her carneying voice and depreciating manner, her skill in flattery, the hidden hardness of will that I sensed beneath all her clinging and purring, it might be dangerous to a man like Gore. I knew her kind. It is a pathetic sort of creature, in a way,—the woman who has proved too unattractive to secure an "establishment" in England, and who, in consequence, roams that world's waste places, seeking whom she may devour,—but I was not going to let any pity for Miss Siddis influence me in my duty as the watch-dog of Vincent Gore.

Besides—besides, she was an insinuating little crooked creature. She was curious, as all inferior minds are curious. What was the hidden object of our journey? What might happen if she found it out?

I came to a resolve there and then. I would know the secret myself, before I slept that night. It was time—and more than time—that Gore should take me into his confidence.

Late in the afternoon we came to New Guinea.

It was not in the least what I had imagined. I had expected huge rivers with painted war-canoes dashing forth from them, immense peaky mountains overhanging the sea, stilt-legged villages with wonderful temples, black marshes full of crocodiles and crabs.

Instead I saw only a group of islands of moderate size and height, cut through by calm dark straits. There were no villages, no houses, no rivers, no canoes; just that smear of dusky, lonely islands lying on a darkening sea. The mainland was not yet in sight. All the land we saw was hidden under a blanket of black forest, that swept from the summits of the hills down to the lip of the water. We heard no sound but the beating of the ship's steel heart, echoed back by the walls of the strait as she ran through. We saw no lights on the black, furry blanket of forest, untouched, unbroken.

If there was any living thing upon those islands, it hid itself well. We listened to the silence of New Guinea, we smelled its mystery. For there was a new smell on the sea air—subtle, cold, the sunset smell of Papua.

GORE came up to me where I was standing in the ship's head, away from passengers and sailors, and sat himself down upon the opposite side of the bulwark, holding on by a stay.

"New Guinea," he said. "Feel her stretching out to you. She's your love. Her lips have blood on them, but you'll kiss her. You'll leave her, and come back to her. We all do. New Guinea calls.

As he spoke, a breath of air crept across the bows, so cold, so penetrating, that it made me shudder in my thin, heat-soaked drill.

"Get your coat," said Gore. "You'll be down with fever if you don't. We're passing the great snow mountains of Dutch Guinea. You couldn't see them in broad daylight, but they can make themselves felt, though they're right in the interior. Get your coat, and we'll talk."

"Shall we?" I asked, pausing with my foot on the deck.

"I promise you," said Gore. "I always meant to when we sighted New Guinea."

I brought his own as well, but he would not take it.

"An old dog for a hard road," he said. "Nothing can kill me. There's the second bell. They'll all have gone in to dinner in a few minutes, and we can talk quietly."

I might have mentioned that it was one of his peculiarities to leave out any meal that happened to interfere with what he might be doing at the moment. I saw myself deprived of dinner for that evening; but the occasion was worth it. Gore lit one of the huge Burmese cheroots which always seemed dinner or lunch enough for him. It glowed in a sharp point of scarlet against the mysterious outlines of New Guinea, the unknown land. The ship slid on in the dark. They had put out the lights on the boat-deck to assist the steersman, and drawn the curtains in the saloon. We could not see ourselves, or the water, or anything of the land but that faint, looming shadow, blackness against the black.

RED BOB said nothing at all for what seemed to me quite to long while. I lit a cigarette to keep him company, and waited as patiently as I could—which was more patiently than usual; for so many things had happened that day that my mind had been beaten into weariness. The first sight of New Guinea; the duel; Red Bob's amazing cowardice concerning Miss Siddis; the news I had managed to pick up about Isola Ravenna—all these things had moved and excited me.

By and by Red Bob spoke, jumping home to the heart of his subject, as was always his way:

"I'm out—and you're out—after the pearls of Willem Corneliszoon Schouten."

"The—what!" I said.

"The pearls," he repeated, "of Willem Corneliszoon Schouten. I should feel more certain I was going to get them if you could avoid the habit of jumping and exclaiming when anything astonishes you."

"I will," I said, swallowing my annoyance.

"You've got to," replied Red Bob. "This is no sort of a picnic for babes; and there are likely to be times when your life and mine—if either of them's worth anything—will hang on your keeping your head. Well, I suppose you remember who Schouten was; you ought to."

We had been working on the population question for a few days, and the observation of all the Dutch navigators had been tabulated by use for Vincent Gore's reference.

"Schouten and Lemaire," I said, "sailed from the Texel in 1615 to look for a passage to the South Seas south of Magellan's Strait. They discover Cape Horn, and then they went wandering about the Pacific, came up round this way and got to Batavia, when one of their ships was seized."

"It was," said Gore. "They were trying to evade the law that gave the monopoly of all trading voyages made through the Straits of Magellan, or round the Cape, to the Dutch East India Company. Spilbergen took Schouten and Lemaire home with him, and Lemaire died of vexation before they got to Holland. Schouten didn't; he was made of harder stuff."

There was a pause here. It had grown darker. We could tell by the echoing beat of the screw that we were somewhere near land.

"I was here before—more than once," went on Gore's quiet voice, "tracing the incidence of the different waves of immigration. I spent most of my time about the north and northeast coasts," he went on, "Kaiser Wilhelm Land and the Bismarcks. I went out to places at the end of everywhere places the Germans didn't know they'd got, and don't know yet. And I ran across something that made me think—not about culture drifts. Something else."

WE were running very quietly now, with a steady slight roll. The night was too black for us to see beyond the gaping hawse-pipes and the V-shaped end of the bow, but I could smell the land—a new smell now, with a marshy flavor in it.

"I'll tell you what it was another time. You know, young Paul, I've warned you about what this sort of life means—danger and hardship and accident and all that; but there's one thing perhaps I didn't rub in enough. Want of cash, my son. Being hard up. Money enough to rub along with while you're fit—because any man who can knock around the back stairs of the world and not find little things lying about that nobody's thought of picking up must be a bigger fool than me—or you. But when age comes, or breakdown, the tame beasts of burden have the best of it."

"I dare say," I said. "But when one has only oneself to think of—"

"I haven't," said Gore. "I have my daughter."

After the previous lesson, I did save myself from answering, "Your what?" But I only did it by biting my cigarette clean through.

Gore seemed pleased by my silence—or so the tone of his voice suggested as he went on:

"I have to think of her,—I sha'n't be always here,—and it worries. Eats in."

"I didn't know you were ever married," I ventured, wondering how many more revelations I was to hear that day.

Gore pushed his cheroot into the corner of his mouth as he answered:

"I never was."

"Oh!" I said feebly.

He went on, in a tone completely devoid of expression:

"She is nineteen. Very pretty—very pretty indeed—like— She is delicate. Crippled. Doesn't walk. Bath chair and all that sort of thing."

There was a silence. I felt it incumbent on me to say something, but could think of nothing save the banal question:

"Was it an accident?"

"No," said Gore, still quite inexpressively. He did not even stop smoking.

"Done on purpose. Her mother was thrown downstairs the night the child was born.

This time I forgot my lesson and said, "Good Lord!" adding: "Who did it?"

"Her husband," replied Gore calmly. "You might give me a snatch; this dashed thing has gone out at last."

I gave it, mentally ejaculating, "Good Lord!" again.

"She died," went on Gore conversationally, unsnapping his cigar-case and scraping a match on the bulwark.

I could see his hard, lean face, with the brilliant eyes—"the brow of an angel and the jaw of a devil," as someone said of Sir Richard Burton—lit up by the small red flame as he shielded it with his hands and set it to the cigar.

"So did he," went on Red Bob, when the great roll of tobacco had caught.

"Died?" I asked. "How?"

Red Bob burst out into a great fit of laughter, as he had done in my cabin my earlier on that day.

"Ostend," he said. "Thirty paces. Smaller intestine shot through, one lumbar vertebra smashed. Lived a week, howling except when they had him under morphia. I used to call, to listen to him. Have a cheroot, youngster; those cigarettes of yours are filthy things to ruin your nerve."

I TOOK it, feeling—there is no elegant word for the condition—flabergasted.

"So," said Gore, with the air of one taking up a conversation at the exact point where it had been abandoned, "it happens that I'm greedier after money than most people might suppose—for reasons. Always on the smell after it, even when I'm busy with something else. And this last time the scent was hot—so hot, I'd have run it down, only I wanted some one to work with me, and—as I told you—the fellow I had talked. Merry didn't. He was a good sort; he'd have done just as well as yourself."

Whoever looked for smooth sayings from Red Bob was fishing in Dead Sea waters. I held my tongue, though I thought—no matter.

"I was spending a summer in Holland," went on Gore, as if no interlude had occurred in his narrative, "poking about museums and picture galleries. In that fine one at The Hague there's a picture of the girl old Schouten wanted to marry and didn't. She has a magnificent pearl necklace, with a sort of pearl cipher hanging on to the end of it—a monogram, but a very complicated one, and not made any easier by the age of the picture. I got it photographed, and took the photo away with me, because I fancied the face. It was pretty—very pretty—like some one I used to know. Before I went to Holland, it happened that I'd already come across the tracks of old Schouten about German Guinea. Now, you know—or you don't that pearls, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were nearly all obtained from what they called the "Indies"—a pretty big term, but it didn't include the Pacific, except a bit about Panama. Of course, the islands were chock-full of pearls, every here and there, as they are now, but those old explorers never seem to have suspected it—went hunting about for mythical islands called Rica de Plata and Rica de Oro, when there were hundreds of Ricas de Perlas everywhere, if they'd only known it. Schouten found things they didn't know he found. But I'd never have got on the scent, if it hadn't been for that girl with the pearl necklace in the picture gallery at The Hague."

GORE stopped, and glanced about him in the dark. There was no one near; I think he would have managed, somehow or other, to see any one that had been—he always seemed to me to have sharper senses than anybody else.

"One day, when I was puzzling about what I had seen, I happened to come on her picture in one of my boxes. I was looking at it—carelessly—when all at once the reading of the monogram jumped straight at my eyes, and I saw—without the shadows that had perplexed me, mind you; that was what had been doing the mischief—that it was 'W. C. S.'

"Well, it told me the whole thing, for a

Page 18

"I've no doubt he meant to come back again, but he never did. Till the latter part of the nineteenth century, no one went looking for pearls in the Western Pacific again. And no one ever found the remains of Schouten's pearls—but me. And I haven't found them yet. That's all, youngster—for the present."

It was too late for dinner. I went out on deck, and found a long chair where I could lie and think.

"Going to be fun!" was the result of my thinking. "Going to be jolly fun. How glad—how very glad I am that I punched Sterry, and that he didn't punch me!

"Now, I should not be surprised," I meditated further, "if Red Bob never said another word about his daughter again. It would be like him."

It seemed I was right, for he never did.

NORTH New Guinea is out of the hurricane zone; but nevertheless the Pacific, that ill-named ocean, welcomed us to the neighborhood of the Schoutens with a blow that would have given the average steamship passenger something to talk about for the rest of his life.

Most of the night I had listened to the roar and wash of the great Pacific combers, as we swept through the Schoutens in the dark. And as the stormy dawn began to break over Papua, I stood clinging to the rail, all wet with spray, to see the black hills of the unknown land spread out their beckoning hands.

Somehow, I could not get the girl of the nutmeg island out of my mind. I looked up from the white decks of the Afzelia, and saw—Isola of the nutmeg island—Isola Ravenna—Isola Bella—coming round the corner of the dining saloon!

"Why didn't Miss Siddis tell me?" I wondered. "She was free enough with her yarns about Frau Baumgartner and Frau Schultz, but never a word about Miss Ravenna."

It was evident that the girl was no bad sailor. The oread of Banda mountain, sure-footed, as an oread should be, began to pace up and down the narrow deck, balancing to the roll of the ship as lightly as a flower in the wind. She was not dressed in green to-day. She wore a suit of very thin white wool, girdled with a green ribbon; there was another green ribbon tied about the wide-leafed hat she wore.

As she passed me on the deck, I noticed the faintest possible perfume of fresh flower-petals.

WE were running far out now, and there was nothing to be seen of New Guinea but a long, blue serrated line to starboard. The sky was the thin hot blue of the tropics; the sea pale blue, with intolerable diamond sparklings in every wave. Blue and diamond was the whole morning, hard, relentless, and, with the following wind, distressingly hot. Unseasoned as I was, I felt it somewhat. But Isola Ravenna, true flower of the tropics, seemed to enjoy the heat. At all events, she paced lightly up and down the decks, from shade to sun, and back again, and her ivory-pale small face, the exact shade and texture of a magnolia petal, did not seem to be affected in any way by the fierce glare from the sea.

I remembered the redness of poor Miss Siddis's nose, and the roughness of her ungloved hands, and wondered if all white women born in the tropics, and only they, were armed, like Isola, against the arrows of the sun.

Inside the smoking-room, watching her through the windows, I sat and enjoyed myself unobserved. What luck it was that she should be traveling on the Afzelia! I never asked myself why it should be so lucky; nor did I even pause to wonder why she, a young girl without relations or friends, should be journeying along this wild north coast of New Guinea toward a German settlement where (I knew) no foreigner was especially welcome. I can not account for such stupidity; God knows, it cost me dear enough in the end!

WHILE I was pleasing my eyes with the sight of Isola walking up and down, who should come forth from the saloon but the elderly man with the gray-green eyes, the owner of the head that had protested so strongly against my duel. I had not seen him before, and judged that the heavy rolling of the steamer on the first day and night had kept him in his cabin. At all events, there he was, spruce, shaved, and fresh, with a grizzly head cropped so close that the skin shone through, a thick figure barely restrained by his loose shirt and belt, and, in unexpected contradiction to his short, weighty build, with a light walk that was singularly well drilled and smart, even for a German.

"Good morning!" he said, with a pleasant smile.

I noticed another contradiction as he spoke. The pleasantness of his address did not agree with the cold watchfulness of his unsmiling gray-green eyes, deep and chill as the Baltic of his Prussian home.

"Good morning!" I replied.

I wondered how much he knew. I had ascertained already that the "next stopping place" would be reached on the day after to-morrow.

"So you will visit Kaiser Wilhelm Land?" he asked agreeably, seating himself at one of the small leather-covered tables and offering me his cigar-case.

I helped myself to a cigar of uncommon quality and fragrance.

"The old gentleman does himself well," I thought as I lit it.

I had already noticed that his shirt was of thick Assam silk, and that he wore a tie-pin of one perfect sapphire about the size of a pea.

"Yes," I said. "I'm secretary to Mr. Vincent Gore."

"So!" he said, as if the statement were news to him—which I was assured it was not. "Then you are also a man of science?"

"By no means," I assured him. "I don't care a rap about it."

"Ah!" he said, holding his own cigar in a hand that was delicately white and smooth, and adorned with a heavy diamond-set ring. "Youth loves adventure above all things. In company with Mr. Vincent Gore, adventure will run to meet you; is it not true?"

His manner was careless, but those greenish eyes, hard with the hardness of eyes that have seen cruel things, watchful as eyes that have had to guard their owner's life, betrayed him; and I thought he listened too carefully for my reply.

It is a good rule—I thought to myself—when one asks you a question that you do not choose to answer, to put the very same question in reply.

"But tell me," I begged. "Are there really adventures to be had in New Guinea, and does Mr. Gore manage to hunt them out? It's been mighty dull up to the present, I can tell you. Does he do anything after he gets there besides mess around after moldy old skulls and write up tribal customs?"

"What does he do?" repeated Herr Richter—as I afterward knew him to be called. "What does Mr. Vincent Gore do in the Bismarcks and Kaiser Wilhelm Land?"

He looked carefully at the diamond in his ring, and polished it on his silk sleeve.

"There is nothing for any man to do there but to study science, as you say. We Germans, we do not want English settlers or traders. You have many colonies of your own. As for adventures, you must not believe everything you shall hear. You can not expect adventure. We do not encourage men to outwander in the bush and make trouble for the government. No; I fear that German New Guinea will disappoint you."

He seemed glad of it, on the whole. I liked his cigars, but I did not like himself, besides, I was anxious to get to the door way again, and see where Isola Ravenna had gone to. She had stopped walking up and down, and she was not sitting on any of the seats outside. So I excused myself as soon as I could, and went off hunting after the oread of Banda. She was, I told myself, quite the most interesting girl I had ever seen.

I DID not find her. It grew dusk, it turned to dark, and she had not reappeared. Some one told me that Miss Siddis had succumbed to the roll of the ship and gone back to her cabin; I guessed that Miss Ravenna was keeping her company.

The evening passed stupidly. The Germans were playing cards in the saloon. Vincent Gore was reading; Richter was padding up and down the decks—it seemed to me, looking out for something I could not settle to cards, to a book, even to the endless tramping up and down on deck that is the solace of most sea voyagers. Like Richter, I was looking for something.

I did not find it. Richter disappeared: the card party broke up in the saloon. It grew toward the hour when the electric light was turned off. I wandered into the bows, and stood with my hands in my pockets, staring at the thick darkness that we were plowing through and wondering what lay beyond it. It struck me, with a sensation of incredible strangeness, that in two days more I might not be anywhere: I, Paul Corbet, who stood here in the bows of the Afzelia with the wind from the wide Pacific blowing in his face.

It was the first time I had though, death—the first time that the feeling and realization of man as a passing shadow struck home to my heart.

"It is true," I thought, "all true, what the old Jews and the Romans and the rest of them said. I am a shadow, and I shall pass like one, perhaps the day after tommorrow, perhaps in fifty years. It doesn't seem to make much difference. But whichever it is, I'm not afraid. Glory be to—" I did not want to say "God," for some odd, shamefaced reason; I think perhaps it was the idea of the bloodthirsty business between myself and Hahn that held me back; yet the word would come—"Glory be to God, I'm not afraid of anything!"

A small, sweet, pointed face, magnolia-white, seemed to rise before me in the darkness. I shut my hands on the steel of the bulwark, cold with night and dew."

"Not even for that," I thought. I am not afraid—for anything. The splendor of life—why, it is death! I wonder why I never saw that before."

Now, in another minute the word seemed meaningless to me; yet they have had, for the moment, all the force of a revelation.

A WINDOW shut. It seemed to me that I had been thinking things with out significance or sense. Man was dust and shadow—yes, every one said it; there was nothing in that. I was going to fight a duel in two days—in one day and two nights, rather. Well, that was good fun, and I hoped I'd come out on top. Was there any supper going in the saloon?

I never found out if there was. I had come back from the bows, and was strolling toward the companion, when a voice said very near to me in the darkness:

"May I—may I speak to you?"

To be continued next week

He's the Official Joy-Maker

CHARLES L. BOYER is an apostle of joy. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she lives, he is known to everybody as a matter of course, but more particularly to the children, the invalids, the cripples, and the poor. As between Boyer and Santa Claus, most of the children in the Keystone capital would choose Boyer. Santa Claus is more or less of an unknown quantity, but Boyer is a solid fact. Doesn't the Boyer joy-giving automobile course up and down the city streets and out onto the country roads and over the hills of the park all summer? And isn't it always filled with smiling children, except on occasions when it is filled with wan-faced yet smiling cripples?

That joy-giving car is sufficient to win enduring fame for Mr. Boyer, even if he ha done nothing else but bring it into existence. It is a big, roomy machine, designed especially for its joy-gibing purpose. The money to buy it was raised by popular subscription, and even the children contributed their pennies, for they had entire confidence in Mr. Boyer. And that gentleman must have breathed a secret sigh of relief when he climbed aboard; for previously he had spent many hours pedaling about the streets in a tricycle, pulling behind him a miscellaneous line of vehicles.

Although Mr. Boyer is the recognized if unofficial smile-maker of the community, all of his work is not done in this public manner. One of his several enterprises is the Home Invalids' Union, all the members of which are invalids and shut-ins. Several times a week, if not daily, the members are visited by Mr. Boyer or one of his helpers, and an hour more or less is given over to reading, singing, or a rehearsal of the world's events for the benefit of those who can not follow the papers. Sometimes the member visited is taken out in a wheel chair or given an hour in the park.

This is an old plan of Mr. Boyer's. He has always had a fondness for toting folks about. Some years ago a man came to him and said: "See here, Boyer, when you want to take some of your folks out into the country, use my motor ear; and don't hesitate any time you need it. Perhaps you don't remember how you used to drag me around on a sled when I was a boy, but I do. this is where I get even.

Career of the "Apostle of Joy"

MR. BOYER is a Harrisburg man by birth, but spent many years in London, England, where he had a similar joy-giving career, and came to be recognized friend of 30,000 children and 400 cripples. And before he left he started a permanent work by organizing the Drift Children's Mission, with a chorus made of crippled singers.

It would be impossible to summarize in figures the work of this wonderful joy apostle; but his activity may be judged by the fact that in one season he took 2,700 children on a local merry-go-round, and trundled 6,000 on his tricycle or one some vehicle attached to it.

My Friends the Wild Sheep

WHEN you've lived among animals for a long time, as I have, you learn that they all have certain individual characteristics, just like human beings. Bears have their special characteristics; wolves theirs; and mountain sheep have one trait that stands out above all others. Their bump of curiosity is the biggest bump in the animal kingdom.

Playing on the Sheep's Curiosity

A STRANGE sound, a wandering animal of another tribe, or the distant doings in another valley will always arouse their curiosity to the highest pitch. Like the rest of us, their curiosity sometimes get them into trouble. For, if one can appeal to this domain trait strongly enough, he may walk almost into the heart of a flock of mountain sheep—wild as they are.

Often I have overcame the nervous instinct of the old rams by performing some unusual stunt. One day I used a small reflecting mirror, flashing the gleam into their eyes. One another occasion I was stalking a band of sheep that was unusually wild. They were on top of a mountain with no obstructions. When I had come withing three hundred yards, the leaders indicated that they were about to run away. At once I stopped and began to walk in a small circle. When the sheep were again quiet, I slowly edged nearer.

This performance I repeated several times. At length, when the fascination had worn off this trick, I lay down, rolled over, and crawled on my hands and knees, muttering a jargon of talk. The sheep, with heads high, actually advanced nearer to see what it was all about. And after an hour's work I was withing fifty feet of one of the wildest bands of the region.