Shall I Invest in Oil Stocks?

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

IN every part of the country investors are interested in oil stocks. I frequently receive letters asking about the reliability of this or that oil company, and seeking advice as to the advisability of placing a small sum in its shares. There is one moral that may be drawn from these letters. Perhaps it applies as well to other groups of stocks, but certainly prospective purchasers of "oils" need to be reminded in this wise:

Don't buy stocks in companies whose promoters show a greater eagerness in selling stock than in producing, refining, and selling oil.

Many of the best oil stocks in this country are those of the companies that formerly made up the Standard Oil Trust. There are some thirty-four of them, and the great majority, it may be said without hesitation, are desirable purchases for persons who want to combine a considerable, perhaps high, degree of safety with prospects of large profits. This is because of the record for leadership, ability, profitable operation, and conservatism that this group of companies enjoys.

The "Independents" in Oil

THERE are many large "independent" units in the oil industry, such companies as the Union Oil, Associated Oil, California Petroleum, Mexican Petroleum, Pure Oil, Gulf Refining, Texas Company, Pierce Oil, and so on. Several of these have securities accessible to the general public that are profitable and desirable. But the Standard companies have the years of success behind them, organization, size, aggressiveness, and numerous other qualities that make for premiership.

John D. Rockefeller once described his business as hazardous, and he might have added what the president of a great new film corporation recently said in a public statement: "Any business yielding such amazing profits as this business yields is subject to great risks. It is not the type of investment for the man who can not afford the chance of loss."

An oil-well may give out, just as a mine may give out. That is the hazard of the oil business. But a little study will show that the larger Standard Oil producing companies guard against such hazard by building up enormous surpluses, and that the refining and marketing companies guard against such hazard by building up enormous surpluses, and that the refining and marketing companies do not have this hazard. It is possible to speak of the Standard Oil companies frankly, because they never have had stock for sale.* They ask no one to buy stock, and the "insiders" always own most of it. It can be bought on the market, but the companies themselves have directed their efforts to just one end—making as huge profits as possible for their stockholders. Whatever evil deeds the old Standard Oil may have been guilty of, neither it nor its successors have ever been engaged in "doing" their own stockholders. Rarely is much information given out, but if the stockholder hangs on he gets what is worth more than statistics—fat dividends.

Why Choose Unstable Shares?

WHY is it that so many people buy shares of new oil companies, uncertain, unestablished, likely to be blown away?

It is a weakness of human nature to find pleasure in a lot of paper certificates, even if the stock for which one pays a few cents a share is only an iridescent dream. I know of a company busily selling its own shares at three cents each, with a total capital, conspicuously advertise on its letter-head paper, of more than $50,000,000! The letter-head does not state how much of the $50,000,000 is paid in—a far more important point. But compare this with one of the huge refining and marketing companies, the Standard Oil of Indiana, whose stock at this writing is about $450 a share. You can buy $15,000 shares of three-cent stock for the price of one share of Standard Oil of Indiana. Of course the company is a mighty factor in the oil industry, has one of the largest plants in the world, and has undivided profits in its coffers of fifteen or twenty million dollars, and pays fabulous dividends. The other company is a factor in nothing except the creation of paper; but unthinking humanity would rather have fifteen thousand shares for the price of one.

To those persons who buy real oil stock just one word of admonition is necessary. There is no limit to the profits and dividends that these companies have paid in the past and may pay in the future, but they are stocks which fluctuate violently in price. They are to be purchased outright only, and held for ultimate profits. Many of the stronger ones return only 5 or 6 per cent. on the immediate purchase price, but patience is often rewarded with enviably large extra dividends later on.

*It is not literally correct to say that the Standard Oil never tried to induce people to buy its stock. When Rockefeller first entered the industry half a century ago, he did ask people to join him; but since those early days his enterprises have mostly supplied their own capital out of earnings.

Do Swollen Tonsils Cause Rheumatism?

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

TONSILS are now attracting world-wide, well-deserved, and highly edifying attention. True, we do not yet know exactly what they are designed for; but, whatever it is, it is of small consequence in comparison with the evil that can be—on the best of unprejudiced and authoritative evidence—charged against them.

With their spongy, boggy texture, their innumerable gullies and crannies, their intimate connection with all the neighborly lymph channels in that park of the body where to "get it in the neck" were as easy as lying, they are a constant menace to health.

For the tonsilar tissue, considered as an incubator for hatching out multitudinous breeds of bugs, is more than one hundred per cent. efficient.

Standing at the vital gateway of the body, they hang out the "Welcome" sign to every predatory germ that enters by way of the food, water, or air route.

The consequence is that eh germs which cause rheumatism (particularly the arthritic or deforming type) take a long-term lease, and finally overrun the premises, insinuating themselves into all those vantage points of the body where the circulation is poor and the phagocytes (or defensive scavengers of the blood) are deficient in numbers.

Thus the joints are attacked by what we call "rheumatism," but what, in reality, is a bacterial infection, originating in the tonsils, and completely eradicable only by removing the cause.

Look Out for Swollen Tonsils

REMEMBER also that rheumatism is only a minor consequence of enlarged tonsils. Tuberculosis, asthma, epilepsy, articular rheumatism, goiter, valvular heart diseases, are caused directly, or are materially predisposed to, y infection originating in the tonsils.

The cure is simple. Have them either amputated or atrophied. Radical removal is more effective than slower shrinkage. But get rid of them, in any event, if they persist in occupying more than their proper share of space and attention.

The operation, in efficient hands, is quick, sage, and certain. And if the tonsils reappear, the operation or the shrinking treatment can be repeated.

Perhaps we may lose some great benefit by untimely parting with our tonsils, but our gain in freedom fro many virulent and dangerous sources of toxemia and infection—including rheumatism—will be happily and persistently apparent.

One Minute with the Editor

Who Killed This Woman?

A WEALTHY woman, living in a splendid apartment which she has remodeled to suit her fancy, installing even a private swimming pool, is found dead at the edge of the pool.

There are marks of violence. But every window in the apartment is found securely bolted; every door is locked, and the keys are all on the inside. Who killed this woman?

We begin next week the unfolding of this remarkable mystery story by Arthur McFarlane. It is called "Behind the Bolted Door?"

The Doll Baby

AND— to give the book a bit of sunshine—there;s a charming little love story of a man with plenty of money, and a girl whose "face is her fortune, sir, she said."

What Happens When You Get Angry?

WE have a mighty interesting article on that subject by H. Addington Bruce, the man who makes scientific articles as interesting as fiction. But we'll have to save this until week after next.

$500 for You?

SPEAKING again of the new serial story which we begin next week—this is proof of what we think about it:

WE will pay $500 to the first man, woman, or child who will foretell in five hundred words or less how this mystery ends—how Mrs. Fischer was murdered and by whom. Amy reader, whether a subscriber or not, is eligible. Letters must be mailed by midnight October 31, and the editors will be the judges. Should two or more readers submit a correct solution simultaneously, the award will be equally divided. Address, Bruce Barton, Editor, 95 Madison Avenue, New York.

Little Lessons in Preparedness

ONCE upon a time 9,000 American soldiers, well armed and strongly intrenched, faced half as many trained British troops who had to charge across an exposed area. It was at Bladensburg, in 1814. A British officer thus describes it:

"The Americans, being in possession of a strong position, were of course less exposed, and had they conducted themselves with coolness and resolution it is not conceivable how the day could have been won. But the fact is that, with the exception of a party of sailors from the gunboats under the command of Commander Barney, no troops could behave worse than they did. The skirmishes gave as soon as attacked: the first line gave way without offering the slightest resistance, and the left of the main body was broken withing half an hour after it was seriously engaged. So confident had the residents of Washington been of the success of their troops that few of them had dreamed of quitting their houses; nor was it till the fugitives from the battle began to rush in, filling every place as they came with dismay, that the President himself thought of providing for his safety."

So the dinner which President Madison had made ready for his victorious commanders was eaten by the British, and the Capitol was burned—all because of our pleasant little notion that one American, even without preparation or training,c an like half a dozen enemies.

Where Is All the Money Coming From?

By BURTON J. HENDRICK

OF the many contrivances utilize for fighting this European war one has escaped popular observation. We have heard little about the printing-press. And yet, this engine of warfare is working twenty-four hour a day. It is turning out the money that supplies the armies, pays the troops, and provides the necessary support for trade and industry in Germany, and—in lesser degree—in France and Russia also.

Many nations have financed their military operations with paper money. The United States used it in the Revolution and in the Civil War. In practically all previous instances, however, governments have resorted to the printing-press only after using up all their gold and exhausting their borrowing capacity abroad.

Germany had large stores of gold when the war broke out, and she has added to them largely ever since. But she is not using this gold for military purposes. Practically, it no longer plays any part in her banking system. Merchants can not get it on any terms; even the banks do not use it as a basis for circulation.

Germany's Gold Is Hoarded

NO; Germany has stowed away her hoard of gold—perhaps $600,000,000. As far as the nation itself can see, this great treasure has disappeared. In place of this Germany has issued millions and millions in paper money, which the people, under the impulse of German discipline and German patriotism, are accepting as actual money.

Granted the certainty of German succes, this operation is not inflation. In the case of a great military failure, however, the world will see national bankruptcy on a scale for which history contains no parallel. In case the Allies overwhelm the German nation, Germany may find that she has mobilized all her gold merely for their benefit. England would take the hoard and use it for the reconstruction of Belgium, northern France, and Poland. Then Germany would have, for her economic reconstruction, nothing but mountains of worthless paper.

"There will be plenty of war loans," a great Berlin banker recently said to a correspondent; "but our enemies will pay them all the armies will redeem them."

On the outbreak of war Germany mobilized not only her army, but her paper-money banks. As soon as the armies gathered, new banking institutions, the like of which the world had never seen, sprang up in all parts of the Empire.

The Imperial Loan Fund came into existence overnight. The Berlin War Credit Bank arose in accordance with a stipulated program. This latter was the parent organization of similar institutions in all the Federal States. Municipalities also organized similar headquarters of inflation. These banks had but a single purpose—to issue paper money. Their business was to supply credit in this shape to almost any private person or business concern that demanded it. Consequently practically anybody in Germany who wants money now can obtain it—of a kind. The Imperial Loan Fund issues credit on the basis of securities or merchandise.

These facts throw a new light upon the German bond issues which, apparently, have had such great success. They amount already to nearly $4,000,000,000. In issuing a circular urging the people to subscribe to the government loan, the Wolf Agency, under the approval of Dr. Helfferich, the Minister of Finance, published a remarkable statement. There was no reason why holders of previous loans, this circular said, should not subscribe. All they had to do was to pledge the holdings of such previous loans with the banks, and receive currency with which they could make their new subscriptions. Just what does this mean?

Supposing, for example, that the patriotic German has shares of stock of almost any character. He pledges these at one of the new banks, and receives the new kind of currency. With this he purchases government bonds. The time comes when the Empire issues another loan. The bond-holder takes his bonds to the bank and receives more paper money in exchange, and with this he invests in the new loan. Germany, of course, can keep this scheme up for an indefinite period. The Empire simply issues large quantities of bonds and gets masses of paper money in exchange. With this she pays the expenses of the war. The plan works splendidly if we grant the fundamental German premise—that the victories of her army will compel her enemies to pay the piper. In case of a milltary collapse, however, few people have financial imagination enough to foretell what would happen.

Germans point to the fact that France and Russia also depend largely upon the printing-press. They are certainly doing it. From the banking standpoint, both France and Russia, like Germany, are indulging in hazardous operations.

The present financial weakness of France is not inherently her own. The weak spot is really Russia. From the day that France and Russia became allies, France has invested enormous sums in Russian securities, especially in government bonds. She can not realize on these investments now, owing to Russia's money embarrassments.

The Terrific Cost of This War

BUT France and Russia, financially weak as they are, have one great advantage in the financial backing of England. The one stupendous fact of the present situation is that English bank-notes are still redeemable in gold.

Already England is lending France and Russia money at the rate of $1,000,000,000 a year, or nearly half as much as the cost of our own four years' Civil War. Except for England's financial aid, these countries could not purchase the large supplies of ammunition, food, and other materials they need.

The mechanism of this monster financial operation, the greatest the world has ever known, is simplicity itself. England pays foreigners, for the most part Americans, actual gold for these French and Russian supplies, and takes from France and Russia their own government bonds in payment.

If you have an obliging friend who pays your tailor bill and accepts from you as satisfaction your promissory note, he does precisely what England is doing for France and Russia to-day. No one doubts that France and Russia will ultimately reimburse their ally—if the Allies win. But if the Allies lose?

England, for herself and her allies, is spending $5,000,000,000 a year. She is spending each year twice as much as we spent for the entire Civil War, and considerably more than she spent in her twenty years' struggle with revolutionary France and Napoleon.

Where is England getting all this money? For, in her case, it represents real money.

A study of British wealth reveals an apparent capacity to finance the war indefinitely. In time of war, the British Empire can levy upon this wealth in any way she pleases: if necessary she can send her agents into the banks and directly appropriate it. Financial conscription, appropriating the fortunes of her citizens, is just as legal, in war-time, as military conscription, which appropriates their bodies.

In assessing the financial strength of England, therefore, we must take into consideration the nation's storehouse of wealth. England needs $5,000,000,000 a year to carry on this war. What is the national income?

Statisticians usually figure this at $12,000,000,000 a year. The larger part of it goes, of course, to the support of the English people. With this income 45,000,000 English people pay their house-rent and their butchers' and bakers' bills, educate their children, buy theater tickets and other things. They save about $2,000,000,000, which ordinarily finds its way into permanent investments. These large savings obviously represent the first resource for war purposes. If Englishmen, instead of investing this $2,000,000,000 indiscriminately, will buy government bonds, the Exchequer will already have secured two fifths of the amount needed for its huge war expenses.

But one difficulty immediately presents itself. England derives its twelve billions of revenue in considerable part from the profits of certain gainful occupations. The three greatest items are its foreign trade, its shipping, and its banking profits—for England is normally the world's banker.

War, of course, considerably affects these earnings. How much income England has lost in this way can not now be estimated. In spite of losses, English industry is still going on at a tremendous rate. She is still exporting more than $2,000,000,000 in goods; her shipping is virtually

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unimpaired; and she is still doing the world's banking. While the total income is considerably reduced, therefore, it is still very large.

So much has sea power done for the British Empire; so much has it weakened Germany, which, because of England's naval dominance, has lost practically all of her foreign trade.

In normal times the English people "Spend about ten billions a year in living expenses. Since the war is costing five billions, apparently all that the people have to do is to cut their expenditures in two, and the greatest financial problem ever afflicting any nation is immediately solved. Probably a reduction of twenty-five per cent., added to her peace savings of two billions, would enable England to finance the war without calling for foreign aid.

England's Catch-Word

THIS is the reason that "thrift" is the word that now most conspicuously figures in English print. Statesmen, preachers, journalists, and private exhorters are everywhere demanding reduction in expenditures. "Save your money and buy government bonds!" is the national rallying cry. "Save and lend!" is the perpetual cry of Prime Minister Asquith and of Lloyd-George.

England has twelve billions a year revenue; she is called upon to spend five billions on war: her position, therefore, is that of an individual whose salary has been cut in two. She will have to do just what an individual in such circumstances must do—adjust her expenditures to a new set of facts. If the people don't do it voluntarily, the government will do it for them.

A simple device would be for Parliament to increase the income tax to twenty, thirty, forty per cent., or whatever the public necessities would require. For incomes cashiered in this way the government would give the victims credit in the shape of subscriptions to English securities, an operation that would simply amount to a forced loan.

Before England resorts to drastic methods of this sort, the people will have their chance to subscribe. They have responded well to the first call. Subscriptions of nearly three billions were received on the recent loan—the greatest in the world's history—an amount that will pay the cost of the war for nearly a year. But it is England's first call, and the strain, which has already exhausted the other nations, will he a terrific one also for the United Kingdom. Even if she survives, she will pile a debt upon posterity which will weigh upon them for more than a hundred years.

When the war started, the combined debt of the major powers was $6,000,000,000. It is already $42,000,000,000—and the war has been going only a year.

The Brown Eyes of the Law

By HOLWORTHY HALL

Illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele

MR. WARREN JEFFERSON first stared incredulously at the doctor, who was repacking his bag; and then, in fascinated horror, at the neat system of splints and bandages that adorned his right forearm.

"A very pretty break," repeated the man of medicine, in a tone to imply that Jefferson deserved some credit for the performance. "Very pretty—very clean. No complications. It's only a matter of a few weeks, old man; after that you'll never know it happened."

The patient looked at him with the expression of a paw-fast animal.

"For three solid months," said Jefferson savagely, "I've been collecting material; and now you have the—the blatant indecency to sit there and tell me that it'll be—I don't know how long before I can use a pen again."

"Well," deprecated the doctor, "even a man as big as you are can't expect to stop a motor-truck with one hand, and get away with it! You don't need to act as if it's my fault, Warren."

Jefferson regarded his arm with fierce resentment.

"And I've got to waste weeks sitting around here and getting fat!" he rasped. "If it's any consolation to you, doctor, it's likely to cost me real money, too."

"Oh, go ahead and work! Hire a secretary!"

THE playwright was pained.

"I'm going to be peevish enough, anyway," he stated, "without trying to teach some sweet-scented correspondence-school stenographer how to spell! Look here, Jim—you run your own office, and let me cuss all I want to in mine! It's my arm, isn't it?"

"It sure is your arm," conceded the doctor cheerfully, "and if you behave yourself you'll have it in shape again inside of two months—"

"Oh, get out of here!" said Jefferson miserably. "Hold on! You know I didn't mean it that way! But this couldn't have come at a worse time."

"My advice is to get to work," said the doctor imperturbably. If you can't stand loafing, hire a secretary. There's a sort of cooperative bureau downtown—I've used 'em, and they're all right. I'll leave you the address." He wrote it on a card.

"Here—right on the table. You say I recommended 'em, and they'll send you a good one. Now, don't fret, and keep your mind occupied, and take care of yourself."

"You go to thunder!" growled Jefferson; and grinned at the doctor, who understood him perfectly.

LEFT alone, he relaxed limply and surveyed the apartment with little appreciation, although it was a very comfortable and practical apartment, furnished with mahogany after Chippendale, and etchings after Rembrandt, and rugs from Beirut and South Fifth Avenue, and books and photographs from everywhere.

The windows were open, and through them Jefferson could see the leafy panorama of Central Park, freshly green. Nevertheless, the sight of his desk, with a pile of bond paper on the blotter, and a can of good tobacco on the bond paper, irritated him far beyond the power of the spring season to soothe or comfort.

"Invention of the devil!" he snapped, evidently in reference to the motor-truck.

He rose carefully and made his way to the desk. It was his first unsupported journey since the accident, and he felt that every one of the Chippendales was stretching out all four treacherous claws to waylay and trip him.

He eased himself into the desk-chair, and glanced at the splints. They still held. So, awkwardly he took a pen in his unschooled left hand, and painstakingly traced the title of his forthcoming play.

For a moment he inspected the tipsy characters, almost smiled, scowled suddenly, and flung the pen from him as hard as he could throw it. Instead of volplaning through the open window, it struck squarely upon the dial of the mantel clock, spattered ink on two precious although unframed photographs, and dropped, point downward, on the smallest and most expensive rug.

"Oh—war!" said Jefferson.

He leaned back and pondered.

"By the time I learned how to write on the port side," he estimated, "I'd be in Bloomingdale. Well—anyway—it's a chance to do some reading."

But he made no motion toward the book-shelves.

"Two months—eight weeks," said Jefferson. "Fifty-six days. Fifty-six days is how many hours? Oh, Lord! I can't read anybody else's stuff—it's rotten! All of it's rotten! Mine's rotten! Everything's rotten! Ouch!"

He moved his right arm gingerly, escorting it with the left to a place of comparative safety.

"I've got to get started on that thing," remarked Jefferson in grieved protest.

AFTER a brief silence he began to paw over the books on his desk. When he had found the doctor's memorandum he unhooked the telephone receiver.

"Hello!" he said. "Wait a second, Central—I've got to do some gymnastics."

Here he attempted to hold the receiver to his right ear with his left hand.

"Oh, hello! Take your time! I want Stuyvesant ten thousand."

He listened impatiently.

"Yes? This the Coöperative? Let me talk to the manager, please. . . . Oh, very well—manageress! Well, I want a stenographer. This is Warren Jefferson. . . . She'll have to be a corker. Get this down, please—I don't want any beginners practising on me. . . . Well, I don't want one as fast as all that; I can't talk that fast. . . . And I don't want any of those human marshmallows, either. . . . That's it; a good, businesslike stenographer. . . . That's the idea! No varnish! . . . Can she spell? . . . Punctuate all right? . . . Oh, if she's written a manual about it, I don't want her. . . . No, send somebody else. I don't like experts. . . . That sounds good. . . . Thirty dollars! . . . A week or a month? . . . Oh, all right. Dr. Williamson recommended you—does he get a commission? . . . All right; shoot her up in the subway! Good-by!"

HE was standing at the window, gazing out at the park, when the buzzer over the hall door stirred gently.

"Come in!" he said.

He turned at his leisure, and beheld a girl wavering on the threshold of his living-room. His first impulse was to swear; for, in spite of the restrictive covenants he had laid down with so much care, the Coöperative Bureau had sent him a diminutive, fluffy young person hardly as high as the mantel.

"Is this Mr. Jefferson?" she inquired.

"Yes," he said shortly. "Sit down, please."

Obediently she sank into his own Spanish leather favorite, and waited. He regarded her without enthusiasm. This was no time for romancing, and she seemed far too chic for a working-girl.

"I wish you'd take that veil off," he said irritably. "I like to see people I talk with."

He was just pained and uncomfortable enough not to care that she was embarrassed at that; he merely leaned against the window-frame and watched her.

Uncomfortable as he was, however, he was human enough to be thoroughly disconcerted when she had removed the veil. Through it he had considered her attractive; without it she was strikingly beautiful. Her forehead was very fine, and broad, and low; the chin was soft and round and firm, and a tiny bit suggestive of native determination. But it was especially her complexion that amazed Jefferson.

"Thank you," he said to her; and to himself he added: "Christmas! I'll bet she's a rotten stenographer!"

"I came," she said, "because you mentioned Dr. Williamson. I've worked for him several times."

"Oh, you have, have you?"

He saw that in her eyes—big, generous eyes, with the glint of woodland pools in October—there was a distinct measure of compassion. At that moment nothing could more easily have angered him.

"This isn't any ordinary job. You'll pardon me for asking about your education."

"I—I think I can—"

"What school did you go to? Not the commercial school—the other kind."

"Briarcliff," she faltered.

"What!" he ejaculated. "And—and doing this sort of thing?"

"And—Bryn Mawr," said the girl, as if in deprecation.

Jefferson was no snob; but it was at this precise juncture that he told himself there mustn't be any nonsense.

"And your name?"

"Miss Cloud," she told him.

"This table is for you."

By using his left hand as a combined prop and fender, he accomplished the passage to the chair she had quitted, and took possession of it. Miss Cloud was already at the table, bringing forth note-books and lead-pencils from the little portfolio she carried; but these indications of activity moved Jefferson much less than her profile against a background of springtime.

"Gosh!" he said to himself. "She must be a rotten stenographer!"

He was silent for so long that she had ample time, after a hasty assurance of his preoccupation, to lean forward and taste the perfume of some roses standing on the table. Then, with utter unconsciousness, he said, almost—but not quite—inaudibly: "But you certainly are a beauty!"

EVEN in the instantaneous horror that swept over him, he could appreciate the overtone of color which darkened her cheeks. She had raised her head quickly. He saw now that her eyes held less of anger than of fright. The pupils were dilated, and through her slightly parted lips he sensed the irregular exhalations of outraged dignity. All at once, while their eyes still clung together, she went pale. In the next moment she was reassembling with unsteady hands, the books and pencils she had so recently brought to light.

"Miss Cloud!" he said gently.

There was no answer.

Again: "Miss Cloud, I'm—sorry!"

Still no answer; and the books and pencils tumbled back into the portfolio.

Jefferson got to his feet with difficulty, and moved toward her.

"Please," he urged, "won't you let me, apologize?"

She made no response. The last strap tightened in the last buckle. Jefferson thought—yes, he was sure of it!—a tear of shame was stealing down from beneath her lashes. Then he struck his bandage arm against a smoking-stand just as he was saying:

"Sit down!"

Afterward he maintained that she obeyed him instinctively. She herself claimed to have been unbalanced both physically and mentally, so that his roar had no verbal significance, and she dropped into the chair by reflex. At any rate, the result was exactly the same.

"Look here!" he said. "I said I was sorry!"

"If—if I hadn't expected to find a gentleman—"

"Piffle!" said Jefferson. "You wouldn't have been angry if I'd only thought

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that! You wouldn't have known about it at all! And it was quite accidental."

"S-suppose it was."

"There's no need of supposing! I tell you it was! And I've apologized! And it's perfectly ridiculous to let a little thing like that interfere with—with business!"

"I couldn't stay—now."

"Why not?"

"You ought to know, and—you can't take it back."

"I don't want to take it back!"

"You don't!" she gasped.

"I certainly don't! I'm sorry I said it—which is something entirely different! And I'll apologize as many times as you think I ought to! Very likely you think I've insulted you. That's because I made a slip of the tongue. It wasn't in the thought; it was in giving voice to it. Isn't that true? Would you have felt insulted even if you knew I was sitting over there thinking you're pretty?"

"Mr. Jefferson!"

"Would you?" he persisted.

"I—will you please let me go?"

"No, I won't," he said stubbornly. "We're going to settle this right here! Would you?"

"How can I—answer that?"

"By the truth."

"Don't you think," she faltered, "that you've—you've done enough already—without keeping me here when I want to go?"

Jefferson swung himself around and proceeded gingerly to the hall door, which he opened. On returning, he selected the swivel-chair, which was separated from Miss Cloud by the full width of the room.

"Now," he said, "you can either make a dash for the hall, and get there before I can possibly stop you; or you can scream —and the elevator-man would be up here at the first bleat. If you want to go—"

He waited until the last available instant before he said quietly: "Miss Cloud!" She turned her head. He was smiling at her.

"If I'd been that sort of man," he commented, "would I act like this?"

Puzzled, uncertain, she stared at him earnestly.

"But—you said—"

"For the ninety-ninth time I apologize! You'll have to judge for yourself. All I can do now is to ask you to come here and take some dictation. And, unless you're absolutely confident, I'd advise you not to do it. Would this—engagement—have been a desirable one—otherwise?”

"Oh, yes!"

Jefferson faced around to the desk and found a fresh cigar.

"I'm going to light this," ho said. "Two minutes from now I'll be ready to start work—I hope, with you."

"I—really—shouldn't," said Miss Cloud.

To prove that she shouldn't, she went—after a long scrutiny of Jefferson's back, and a vivid recollection of his expression—slowly, and slower yet, to the table.

BY the afternoon of the tenth day they had completed a small fraction of the first act; and in those ten days they moved somewhat forward from a purely commercial relation. Jefferson was young, caged, restless, and brilliant; Miss Cloud was pretty, intelligent, appreciative. As Dr. Williamson had explained it in his "Scientific Theory of Causation," the natural consequence naturally occurred. And they had begun with a misunderstanding, which is just a little more efficacious than anything else as a basis for acquaintanceship.

On the afternoon of the tenth day Miss Cloud returned from luncheon without enthusiasm.

"Mr. Jefferson," she said, "how long ought it to take to finish this?"

"Why, I don't know—a month or two. Why?”

"There's been some confusion at the office. They want me for another engagement—"

"Not if I know it!" he declared.

"Well—"

"Well—what?"

"It's rather embarrassing, because it seems that the arrangement is made—beginning next week."

"Now, look here!" said Jefferson irritably. "What kind of business do you call that? After I've spent all this time getting you used to my dictation?"

"But the choice isn't mine, you know."

"No—it's mine!"

She shook her head.

"I'm afraid we'll have to compromise, Mr. Jefferson."

After a brief pause he asked:

"Well, what do you mean by that?"

"I've explained about you—and I can stay until your arm's well."

"In other words, the sooner it mends, the sooner you leave?"

She nodded soberly.

"It's the best I can do; truly!"

"You wouldn't consider this a—a permanent engagement?" he asked. "I'd never tried dictating before. It's so easy, I'd like to keep on with it."

"I'll have to keep the other appointment anyway."

"What is it?"

"It's with a lawyer."

He had been looking at her as she talked—he found her extraordinarily easy to look at. He didn't, however, find it easy to contemplate the immediate future without her. The doctor had told him to keep his mind occupied. He had obeyed orders, and even anticipated them—and just at this moment he realized that a new tenant had come to the freehold of his heart, and occupied that as well.

"Miss Cloud—"

"Yes?"

"You've changed your ideas about me, haven't you?"

"Why, I don't understand."

"From the first morning, I mean."

She colored bewilderingly.

"I've tried to forget that."

"Yes, so have I. I mean, you wouldn't misunderstand anything I said now, would you? You can tell when I'm serious and when I'm not?"

"Y-yes."

"You know that I'm not—ordinary—in that sense? On things like that I don't talk carelessly?"

Her face had lost the expression of professional interest. Troubled, she dropped her eyes and said nothing. And then, to her tremendous relief, the telephone rang. She rose and answered. "It's a Miss Lambert and a Mr. Grady," she told Jefferson. "They're downstairs. Can they come up?" She was startled at the change that came over the playwright. At the sound of the names he had winced; then, pulling himself together and forcing to his lips a smile that she didn't like, he laughed—not the laugh she had learned to await, and to carry in her consciousness through the hours that separated them, but the laugh of the villain in the melodrama.

"Tell 'em to come up," said Jefferson. "We might as well get it over with!"

She delivered the message and replaced the receiver. "Shall I—go?"

"You might go in there," he said, indicating the door of his own room. "Take a book with you. It'll be about half an hour, I should judge."

He was still smiling cynically as she collected her notes of the morning and disappeared. The door closed softly. From the living-room Jefferson said: "Come in!"

THOSE who came were a girl, tall and vivacious, confident in her good looks, which had yet three or four years to run, and in her clothes, of a style that had already run not more than a week; and a man who both in garb and in facial lines was a product of Broadway, and Broadway only. As they came in, and saw Jefferson regarding them stiffly, they glanced at each other with mutual comprehension, smiled, sat down, and mentioned the temperature.

"How's the new piece going?" said Jefferson indifferently.

"It'll be a flivver," said Miss Lambert cheerfully. "I was fifteen minutes late yesterday. The manager said: 'Hurry up, dearie, and get in there!' That's no good! If a show's any good the manager says: 'Five minutes late! Get out of here—you're fired!"

"Aw, they'll stand anything from Clarice," objected Mr. Grady. "Nobody with her looks has any kick coming. I told her—"

Miss Lambert giggled intentionally.

"He told me I looked sweet enough to kiss," she said, "and I said that was just how I intended to look. That sound familiar, Jeff?"

"Suppose we—"

"Get down to business," finished Mr. Grady briskly. "Well, that's what we're here for. I'm looking after Clarice's interests, of course. We've just come from a lawyer. Nothing's been done yet—"

"Not yet, but soon," added Miss Lambert, with an encouraging smile at the playwright.

"He says all we need to do is to go through the same old routine. On or about the first of last January, and so forth, you made a special promise to marry Miss Lambert,—Clarice, here,—and since then she's been ready, and willing, and so forth. We're moderate, too. Clarice thinks it's hurt her fifteen thousand dollars' worth—"

"That is moderate," smiled Miss Lambert. "Mrs. Warren Jefferson's good for five hundred a week on the name alone. I get forty!"

"Let's reason it out," said Jefferson. "I'll admit, of course, that on New Year's eve I had a table in a certain restaurant, and that Miss Lambert and some other people I know were at the next. And I'll admit that I've known her for several years, because she's been in several of my productions. And I'll admit that it was a happy evening. But the rest of it—"

"Seven witnesses," said Miss Lambert promptly. "And it doesn't need to be in writing, you know, if there's witnesses."

"It's perfectly possible," said Jefferson, "that on New Year's eve I may have said something foolish. One generally does. But on New Year's day—"

"That won't do!" they said in chorus.

"It'll have to do!" said Jefferson.

The visitors exchanged glances.

"If you feel that way about it," observed Mr. Grady, "it looks as if we'll have to get busy. By the way, the declaration's all drawn. You never heard anybody say I'm a rotten press-agent, did you?"

"Not recently."

"It would hurt you—maybe—to have this get out. You know that. You're different from the rest of the crowd—you've got a bunch of friends that

---

wouldn't like it. Think it over. It's a first-page story. So—I put it up to you as one gentleman to another. What are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing," said Jefferson.

"Come on, Clarice," said Mr. Grady, getting to his feet.

"You go out in the hall and wait a minute," said Miss Lambert.

"What's the idea? If there's going to be any conversation, I ought to be in on it."

"Whose affair is this, anyway? He didn't promise to marry you, did he? Go on out and wait—I won't take three minutes."

"Under protest," said Mr. Grady.

"I don't care how you go, as long as you go!"

The press-agent moved slowly out to the hallway.

"Be careful you don't commit yourself."

Miss Lambert went after him, thrust him into outer darkness, and shut the door. Then she came back, and stood smiling down at Jefferson.

"Say," she said at length, "I'm sorry you hurt yourself."

"So am I," said Jefferson shortly.

"Well—you've got a right to be peevish! I—guess you think I'm a pretty poor sport."

"It had occurred to me."

"I need the money," said Miss Lambert frankly. "We've got you in a hole, and—say, if you'll write me a check for five thousand I'll call the whole thing off! And that won't leave me a fortune at that—Grady gets half of it."

"Only half?"

"Ain't that enough? The—I don't want you to think there's anything personal in this—I'd rather take five and call it square! Right between you and me, I know as well as you do you didn't think it was serious. Say, Grady'd brain me if he knew I was talking this way! But I am a good sport—sometimes! Don't you want to call it off?"

"For five thousand? No—nor for five cents!"

"That's mighty little for me—with Grady and the lawyer! And you'll sure hurt your reputation when the papers get hold of it—"

"That remains to be seen."

"Well, good-by. This is your last chance, you know."

"I don't see why you sent Grady away," said Jefferson coolly. "This sounds rather like his kind of proposition."

"There's more to come. I'm giving you one chance. You won't take it?"

"No," said Jefferson.

Miss Lambert whistled in the universal two-toned summons of femininity. Mr. Grady, throwing open the door he had himself placed on the latch, witnessed his ward on her knees at Jefferson's side, her arms around his neck.

"Bully evidence—bully evidence!" said Mr. Grady happily.

"Is it?" inquired a soft voice from across the room.

Presently Miss Lambert, with a huge sigh, struggled to her feet and shook out her skirts.

"Good afternoon, dearie," Grady said in manifest bravado. "Where did you drop in from?"

Miss Cloud made no reply: she was putting on her hat. The three, fascinated, watched her every motion. She picked up her portfolio.

"Wait!" said Jefferson.

Already she had gained the threshold. Halting there, she included the trio in a long, cool stare of analysis.

"No—no," she declined steadily. "I think, under the circumstances, I've stayed long enough. I'll leave you—with your friends!"

SOMETIME about midnight Jefferson had fallen asleep in his chair. Now he stirred uneasily, and winced, and opened his eyes to the pale light of a new day.

It had all happened with such cruel swiftness. In his disgust and resentment, he had entirely forgotten Miss Cloud until she appeared so climactically; and then, without allowing him a word of explanation, she had quit him surely and definitely; in all fairness, he couldn't blame her.

He looked at the clock, and saw that the hour was five. Another hundred minutes of torture, and coffee would be brought from the breakfast-room. Not a great deal by way of diversion—still, he would welcome it. After that it would be yet another hundred minutes and more before he might telephone to the Coöperative Bureau; where the manager would say, of course, that Miss Cloud was at home, indisposed. He wondered what the manager would think when he asked for her home address.

Coffee in ninety-nine minutes! From watching Central Park, whence no relief could logically be expected, he turned to the door, through which, in the course of time, it was moderately certain—

HE fell asleep again after a while, and was huddled up in his chair, with his bandaged arm against the leather, when the door was gently opened, and Miss Cloud stepped over the breakfast tray on the floor. She hesitated, caught sight of Jefferson, and for a second seemed about to retreat as quietly as she had entered. But Jefferson was sleeping soundly.

The portfolio was in her hand. She unbuckled it with infinite care, and withdrew some sheets of legal cap fastened with metal clips, and a single sheet ornamented with a red seal in one of the corners. On the table by the lamp was a paper-weight. Stealthily, inch by inch, she moved toward it. Almost under his hand it would be when he awoke.

Then, as she stole one last assuring glance at him, his eyes opened wide, and the paper-weight crashed to the floor.

"Oh!" she faltered. "I didn't mean to do that!"

Dazed, incredulous, he frightened her with the suddenness of his gesture.

"You came back!" he said. "You came back!"

"It—it's time—isn't it? It's—past nine."

"After what you must have heard, you came—"

"Yes; you see—"

He was at her side, and both were trembling.

"You'll have to let me explain."

"Please don't try! Please—not now!"

"But I must! You don't know what this moans to me. And to have you come back, when I thought you'd never see me again! You heard us talking, didn't you? All of it?"

"Yes—I heard all of it—"

"Last New Year's eve," said Jefferson rapidly, "I was in a restaurant with some friends—"

"But I don't want you to explain!"

The light died slowly from his eyes;—he lifted his shoulders wearily.

"Oh!" he said. "Then you—believe it?"

"Can't you understand that I'd—perhaps I'd rather take it—on faith?"

"Why—why," he stammered. "You couldn't do that—"

She gathered up the papers and pressed them into his nerveless hands.

"I did hear every word. The walls are so thin. You hadn't said more than two or three sentences before I knew—but you talked so fast sometimes. It took me nearly all night to make a clean copy—"

"You took it down!" he gasped.

"Yes—I'd taken my note-book in with me—and I told you I've worked a lot for lawyers—I've studied law myself. When she said she knew you weren't serious, and when she said the man was to get half—that's champerty and maintenance, and the rest was blackmail,—I've looked it all up to be sure; and—there it is, word for word—and my affidavit—"

"Why did you go away—like that?" he demanded uncertainly. "Why didn't you tell me then?"

"Do you think that kind of man—when I'm just a girl and you're hurt—would have stopped at—at taking it away from me, if he knew I had the proof?"

He arrested himself in the nick of time.

"But I've got to tell you the truth. There was a farce of mine we'd just put on—she was playing in it. One of the scenes was in a restaurant, just as we were. We got to reading the lines back and forth,—fooling, you know,—and the first thing I knew, I said what outsiders might have misunderstood. It was in the part. And it happened to come in one of those awful silences. Everybody heard it; the next minute they were all toasting us—"

"Please don't tell any more!"

"I want you to hear it all."

"But I don't n-need to!"

"Miss Cloud!" he said; then more insistently: "Miss Cloud!"

THE beautiful brown eyes slowly, ever so slowly, fought to equal terms with his own. His sound arm went around her and held her fast. For one tremendous flash of time their lips met. Then she struggled free, wavered, gained the corner by the desk, and leaned upon it, both hands pressed against her heart.

"Don't!" she managed. "Listen! You—you'll hate me."

"Hate you! I love you! I loved you the first day I saw you!"

He had her imprisoned. She shrank back, breathing hard.

"W-wait!—please! You d-don't—I w-wanted you to—"

"I do! If you struggle so, you'll hurt my arm!"

"No! Don't! I wanted you—I tried to—to make you—"

"You tried!" he said, aghast.

"Yes—yes! Don't you understand? Don't look at me like that! I wanted you to l-like me!"

His arm was around her again. All at once she was crying on his shoulder.

"Oh, my dear, dear girl!" said Jefferson, ever so tenderly, although he was inwardly cursing the motor-truck for his disability. "Even after yesterday?"

She nodded, close to his heart.

"I knew you c-couldn't ever l-like any one like her," she whispered. "I w-wasn't afraid, because I—I saw your face—when I told you I couldn't stay. And how could you c-care for any one like her, when I knew you c-cared for somebody—like me?"

At this point, if it had been in one of his own plays, Jefferson would have written: "Curtain."

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

By BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

Illustration by Harvey T. Dunn

WITH these words on his lips, Gore was away down the avenue again, running as few men of his height could have run. I followed Isola, on to the veranda, full of uneasiness as to what she might see or suspect. But there was nothing. The living-room into which we walked was tidy, the furniture undisturbed. This did not surprise me, for I knew that the natives would steal only food and weapons; but I feared to enter any of the bedrooms or pantries. And yet, food was absolutely necessary if we were to continue our boat voyage into the settled districts, perhaps weeks away.

Isola, knowing nothing, ran in and out everywhere, trying the locked doors, exploring the verandas, and even, to my horror, peeping in through closed windows here and there.

"They've shut nearly everything up," she said; "but they are careless people: they've left the sitting-room and pantry open. Or perhaps some of the boys got at the locks."

"Take what you want in the way of clothes, and come on," I said. "Gore told us not to—not to—miss the tide."

There was a heap of woman's apparel thrown down roughly in the sitting-room; Gore, I judged, had put it there. While Isola was turning over the things, filling the deadly silence of the house with her gay chatter as she did so, I busied myself among the few things that were left in the pantry, and flung what I could find into an empty flour-bag. There was not much—I could see the place had been looted; but the looting had been very hurriedly done, and there were tins of one thing and another fallen behind parcels or lying on the floor. I took them all, and stood a moment listening. The heat of the little room was terrible; I had to mop the streams of perspiration that ran down my forehead as I stood.

Isola had stopped talking; I guessed she was trying on clothes. The fowls clucked and scratched in the yard; a low-lying mango branch swept back and forward upon the iron roof of the house with a sleepy, soothing noise. There was not a sound. I gathered up my sack and prepared to start.

AT that moment I heard a fierce, indignant shriek from a big sweet-chestnut tree near the house—the cry of the white cockatoo that is common in all these islands. I remembered that these wild cockatoos always cry out at the approach of strangers. Were strangers approaching, and who?

"Come on," I said to Isola. "I can't wait another minute. Gather up your things; we'll have to trot."

I was in an agony to get her out of the place.

"What a nuisance you and your tides are!" she answered playfully. "Well, I'm not sorry to get out of the place, for it's the stuffiest house I ever was in. I don't think your friend can have kept it very clean. Ugh!" She wrinkled her nose.

"Come on, come on," I said "We'll take hands and run."

We did, carrying our loot in each disengaged hand. Isola, strange to say, suspected nothing. She told me afterward that she thought there might be another gooba coming, and that we were anxious to get off without alarming her. At all events, she half ran, half walked with me all the way down to the beach, and asked no questions.

We were met by Gore. His face was so impenetrable that I knew disaster had struck us yet again.

"Where's the boat?" I asked.

"Gone!" he replied. "No trace of Bo, either. Clear case of New Britain natives on the job."

"What are we going to do?" I asked, feeling that we were indeed in a very tight place.

Isola looked inquiringly from one to the other.

"We have the choice of two things," said Gore. "Stay here till the Inquiry comes along, which may be to-morrow and may be in six months; or start and walk to the nearest settlement."

Isola watched our faces. She saw by this time that something had happened; but she had been through too much in the last few weeks to make the woman's common mistake of asking premature questions.

"How far would that be?" I asked.

"I think about a hundred and twenty miles."

"Is there any road?"

"No. Couldn't keep on the shore all the way; we'd have to branch inland every now and then. There's a third way, but—it would be a big job."

"If you are thinking of me," said Isola, speaking for the first time, "you needn't be uneasy. I can walk splendidly, and I will do anything you tell me."

"Well, then!" said Red Bob, glancing at her approvingly, "we'll chance it. If we can do something between thirty and forty miles of bush, mostly unknown, in the few days before our provisions give out, we will come down on one of the settled districts at the other side of the island. It takes one through country that has a pretty bad reputation, but—"

"If Mr. Corbet is with me—and you, of course," broke in Isola, "I'm not afraid of anything. Paul is so brave. And, of course, so are you."

Even in the straits we were in, Red Bob's eyes twinkled a little over her "of course."

"We'll do our little best," he said. He took out his compass, and looked long and

---

thoughtfully at the blue range lifting above us.

"I see the pass," he pronounced. "Lucky for me, I have New Britain in my head. Well, little lady, you're going to be an explorer, it seems. Few women have so much luck."

"When shall we start?" she asked. "Do you mean to go right off to-morrow?"

"I mean to look for the boat, and, if we don't find it, start now," answered Red Bob. "I have an idea that this is not exactly a healthy place to stop in."

He forgot, I think, the quickness of the mind he was dealing with. Isola turned pale as she looked at him.

"Mr. Gore, did you tell me the truth about those Beyers?" she asked.

"I did."

"That they had gone home?"

"Yes. Don't you worry about them."

"What—home did you mean?"

"The one you do," said Gore, giving in to the inevitable. "Now, now! who's going to cry? Where's our brave explorer who is afraid of nothing? We can't help them; their troubles are over. We've ourselves to look after."

"I didn't mean to," said the girl, struggling against the horror of the situation; "but—there was a baby's little shoe among the things. Did they—"

"Yes," said Gore plainly. "That's enough. Come here and help Corbet and me to sort out our provisions."

Gore divided the tent calico, the axes, the meat and biscuits, carefully loading himself with forty pounds of food, and me with twenty-five. I had found a few boxes of cartridges among the things abandoned in the pantry, and these we divided between us. Isola, at her earnest request, was given the three blankets to carry.

"I could carry twice that load and not feel it," I told Red Bob.

"Could you?" he said drily. "You don't know much about conditions for travel in this part of the world. That delusion of being able to do one's own carrying has made a good few graves in the bush, over Papuasia. You take my word for it, you've got all you'll want there."

We had worked as rapidly as we could while we were talking, and our packs were ready in a few minutes. All that forethought could do, in the circumstances, had been done. It remained only to search for the boat—a forlorn hope indeed. While Gore went off to look I stayed with Isola. I think neither of us was surprised when he returned an hour later with a sinister piece of news. The yawl was beached half a mile down, and burned to ashes.

We were standing on the beach, completing our preparations. The sun was going down in the western sky, and the waters of the bay, cool green in the morning, were now one sheet of blazing brass. There was not a breath of wind to stir the drooping plumes of the palm trees. In the shallow water near the shore you could see them reflected as in a glass. It was astonishingly quiet. Even the birds in the forest seemed to have ceased their chuckling and calling, and the frogs in the marshy ground below the palms, that had been bleating to one another like goats when we came in, were now still as death. We stood and listened, and from far off came a sound that made my blood crisp in my veins. It was only the call of a cockatoo,—an angry, frightened scream,—but I knew, or thought I did, what it portended. So did Red Bob. He swung round and led the way into the forest without another word.

"PAUL!" said a soft voice, almost in my ear.

I turned and saw Isola, like a dim ghost in the dawn, wrapped in her blanket and standing close behind me. It was my watch, the last of the night. Day was coming quickly. The fire of the evening before, dead out, looked like a snow-drift of ash beneath its sheltering log; the pale bamboo trunks showed like frosted silver.

"What is it?" I answered, laying my hand instinctively on my revolver.

"I am almost sure," she said, "that there's some one hidden back in the bamboos. I heard a creeping sound—didn't you?"

"I thought so, but I couldn't be sure," I answered.

I had been listening to this sound for some time, and had not been able to make up my mind whether it was fancy or not. But her words solved the doubt.

"Wake up Gore quietly," I said, covering the clump of bamboo with my pistol.

I heard her steal behind me. No other sound reached my ear, but in two seconds Red Bob was standing beside me.

"Natives?" he asked in an almost soundless whisper.

"I think so," I answered.

We remained motionless for a minute or two, and then the creeping began again. It seemed decidedly nearer.

"Don't fire," whispered Gore. "Stop where you are."

He listened again, bent forward like a wildcat about to spring, and then made one tremendous leap right into the bush.

The young bamboos cracked under his weight like pencils. The feathery foliage parted like a wave when a diver springs into it head foremost.

A fearful yell followed his leap, and a struggle instantly began among the leaves, shaking the bamboo clump to the very top of its limber, hundred-feet-high stems. I could see black legs waving among the green, but I did not dare to fire, for fear I might hit Gore—the white and black seemed inextricably tied together.

Backward, like a tarantula dragging a hornet to its den, came Red Bob out of the bush, hauling at something—something that fought hard and howled loudly, first in native and then in pidgin-English:

"Master! Master! you lettem me go! Master, I no stealem you boat! You no killem me!"

It was Bo.

Gore let go his legs, and he tumbled on the ground, a heap of misery and fright. I suppose we must have been a hardhearted lot, for we all three burst out laughing. It was the first laugh we had enjoyed for many a day, and I think it did us good. It seemed to do Bo some good, too, for he sat up, dashed his bison-like shock of hair out of his eyes, and said:

"You givem kai-kai, you givem kobacco. Me want."

"You talk first," said Gore, standing over him. "What for you steal my boat?"

"'Fore God, Master, I no stealem one-fellow boat belong you. That black swine he stealem. I no savyy fight that fellow. I see him come; very quick I go another-fellow place. I think more better for me."

"Where he take my boat?"

"He puttem fire along him, burn him altogether. By-'n'-by he want to come back, kai-kai altogether Master; but Master he been go away too quick. Me come behind Master all-a-way; Me too much hungry, no catchem plenty thing."

IT was growing light. We could see the shining of the dew on the bamboo stems, fine as hoar-frost on a pane; and the great flags of the wild, bananas glittered, like a green velvet robe a-sprinkle, with diamonds. We had camped for the night in a small bit of clearing on the top of a ridge; and now that the sun was up, we could see through gaps in the netted foliage, a wonderful ocean of softly swelling ranges, blue and purple and warm green, thickly forested, like those through which we had been cutting and crawling our painful way for a whole toilsome week.

The country ahead of us was the district of the most dangerous natives in New Britain—natives who had massacred and killed more than one party of missionaries and recruiters. So far, through Gore's knowledge of New Britain, we had been able to pick out a route that took us through thinly inhabited places, and the few natives we had seen had not been hostile. But now we were approaching the districts that were specially fertile and desirable, according to native ideas, and we knew well that there would in all probability be trouble before we got across to the white men's settlements.

In the circumstances, Bo was a godsend. He was not to be trusted for guard duty, but he could carry, get water, build fires, and in other ways save Gore and me a good deal of unnecessary work—a matter of much importance, when each one of us was going simply "on his pluck," as they used to say—how long ago it seemed!—in the old gymnasium back home where the fights came off.

If I said that Isola kept her beauty through this terrible march, I should be telling a lie. She had not. She was thin, worn, and yellow. No woman can keep her looks when she is worked to the limit, and poorly fed to boot. Isola's pace must necessarily be the pace of all, and she had responded nobly. Not a word of complaint had left her lips since we had started, even though I knew her to be so weary every night that she moaned and sighed in her sleep.

I should never have had the heart to drive her on as Red Bob did—to see her stumble with weariness, when we came near camping time, and to take her by the hand and simply help her on, instead of letting her lie down and rest, as her tired dark eyes so eloquently begged she might do—to wake her in the morning if she slept long through fatigue, and tell her that we must be up and going. Yet I knew it was necessary. If our small stock of food ran out we should be compelled to seek the native villages and trade with them; and that was a resort so desperate that any alternative was safer.

A WEEK before I should have said that I would carry Isola, if necessary—carry her from one side of New Britain to the other. Was I not young and strong, and could I not have run round the whole of Schouten's Island with her small, light figure in my arms, if I had wished?

But I had learned the difficulty of doing your own carrying in Papuasia. In those steaming thickets and swamps, where sweat poured down your back and into your eyes all day long, and your clothes were soaked through from dawn to dusk, up those terrible precipices, where you hung on by trailing vines, and crept slowly from peak to peak, through the riverbeds, jumping from stone to stone till every muscle cried out in weariness, even a twenty-five pound load, increased to thirty by weapons and cartridges, was hatefully, miserably heavy.

Our loads lessened as we went on, since we ate our meat and biscuits day by day; but the canvas that we stretched for a tent at night to keep off the furious mountain rains, and the knives for trade, and our few clothes and belongings, remained. Long before we had crossed the first of the many ranges that rose behind the coast, I had come to the conclusion that carrying in tropic climates was a job for blacks, and for no one else. We had taken even the blankets from Isola after the first hour's walk—taken her small parcel of clothing, which she declared weighed nothing at all. She was anxious to be allowed to help, if ever so little; but we knew better than to let her.

And now here was Bo, good for a fifty-pound load if needs were not affected by the climate, not particularly liable to fever (Gore had dosed us with five grains of quinine regularly every day, and it had so far kept off malaria, but there was no knowing how long that would last), and exceedingly anxious to join himself to our party again.

We accepted him readily, gave him a portion of our small stock of food and the tobacco he begged for, and asked him questions, about the natives who had taken our boat. But he had little to tell, having bolted into the bush, at the first sign of danger. It seemed clear, however, that the band that had burned the boat were the same lot who had murdered Beyer and his wife and child a few days before; and, as far as we could make out, they were the plantation boys themselves—Beyer having made the mistake of recruiting his labor in his own neighborhood. It is a cheap and easy plan, but one that many planters have found only too dear in the end.

Bo did not know the country we were passing through, but he informed us that the "boy who stop out there"—pointing to the ranges ahead—was "countryman belong him," and that he could get us safely through, supposing his tribe were not "making dance." If they were he thought there might be some difficulty.

We were too glad to have a guide and interpreter, however, to trouble much over details, and that day's walk was begun in better spirits than any of us had known since starting. If we could have seen the end!

Bo, laden with most of our goods, and carrying them with an ease that I felt to be almost a personal insult, marched first down the thickly forested slope that led to the first river valley, slashing the way open as he went with his big clearing knife.

Isola came next, very pale and thin, but with the same brave light always in her eyes and a step that had grown more active than ever in this last week of hard climbing. Her dress, kilted up above the knee, was a mass of rags; her head was protected by a sort of mat of plaited palm; and her hair, beginning to grow again, was tied up in a tight bunch of curls at the back of her head, so that the lawyer vines and thorny-edged palm leaves should not catch and tear it as she went.

I followed her, and Red Bob came last. In places like the interior of New Britain, you put your best man in the rear; and Red Bob never made any bones about classifying himself as the best of the party.

I don't know whether we were all "fey" or not, but the fact remains that we were amazingly cheerful throughout that day, and on the next one too. Bo seemed, in spite of his disclaimer, to know or guess something about the country; for on the second morning he led us to a place that none of us would have found without his help—a narrow rocky ravine that seemed to promise nothing, but that widened out by degrees into a deep canon, trending toward the point of the compass where we wanted to go, and, in that pathless land, making the best path we had enjoyed since we started. Of course, there was a river at the bottom of the canon, and of course we had to jump and wade, and go round spits of land; but we got on. By the time it was late enough to begin looking about for a camping place, we had covered about seven miles, according to Red Bob,—far and away the best day's work we had done,—and the settled districts, so we calculated, were no more than two days' march away perhaps even less.

MAKING camp in the wilderness, one does not wait for dark, or even dusk. While the sun is yet well above the horizon, one must begin to look about, to find some spot where there is water within reasonable distance, where there is ground suitable for pitching a tent, and where you can find shelter from a possible storm, without closing yourself in so much as to be easily taken by a rush of enemies.

We began looking early, but no suitable spot appeared at once. As the sun slipped down the sky with the dismaying speed it always shows when you are counting every minute of light, we looked more and more eagerly; but still the forested slopes that had followed on the canon continued; and still there was not a place where one could have pitched a tent. Just as Red Bob was making up his mind, I think, to camp on a slope rather than to go on any farther, we came upon a table-land of open grass, scattered with a few large trees, and sloping down to a central stream.

"Might have been made for us," said Gore, shading his eyes from the dropping sun with one hand as he looked at the little plain. "Camp in the middle of those trees nicely. No chance of a sudden surprise. Stir yourselves and come on; it's farther than it looks."

We stirred ourselves to some purpose, and reached the clump of big trees in a few minutes. Beyond it, only a little way off across the grass, came the forest again. On one side, not the side we were approaching, was a bright green, marshy patch of land, on which, as we came up, the declining sun seemed to cast strange

Continued on page 17

Relatives Who Don't Quarrel

FROM the card of "Jones & Jones, Attorneys at Law," you expect to find two men in partnership. But you don't always. You are apt to find the firm is mother and son, or brother and sister, perhaps two sisters in business together.

In the upper part of New York City Mr. William G. Mulligan and his wife, Agnes Murphy Mulligan, have recently taken their daughter Agnes into business with them. They are real estate experts, and Mrs. Mulligan is the only woman member of the New York Real Estate Exchange.

"My daughter Agnes is twenty-two years old. For the last year she has been associated with her father and me in the real estate business. We did not enter this arrangement as an experiment, for Agnes has long been of value in the work, representing young blood,—new ideas, as it were,—always valuable. There is no reason why a daughter's ability should not be considered as seriously as a son's."

IN the old district of Greenwich Village, New York City, there is to be found a father and daughter who carry on a flourishing hardware concern. Miss Christina Baumgartner has been in business with her father, John Baumgartner, for several years.

"I went into the hardware business with father," she says, "because I liked it better than just being at home. If I had a brother,

I am certain he would not be expected just to stay at home, and neither was I. Hardware is most interesting. There is more in a saw or a stove than the uninitiated realize."

THE Misses Selina and Adéle Seckendorf grew up in a well-to-do family, and, until there came a disastrous turn in their fortunes, knew no more about business than thousands of other women who have always been carefully guarded. When hard times came, however, the sisters proved that they would enter the business world, and make a success of their undertaking. They turned to and began to manufacture hat-frames. Miss Selina Seckendorf, a woman of powerful personality, managed the business end of the concern, while her sister became the head designer.

"Our factory," says Miss Selina. "has been unique in many ways. All of the employees are women. Why should we not employ them, when we find that they do as good work as men, and are even more conscientious? In the years to come there is no doubt but that partnerships between sisters will come more and more into prominence. And Smith Sisters will be as businesslike as Smith Brothers ever were."

WHEN busy Mrs. Sophie Mayer had finished bringing her family of six children to a point where their education was well under way, she began the study of law. Her husband, a lawyer, had been incapacitated for work by a serious illness, and she could not bear to see his practice go to pieces; so she studied, was admitted to the bar, and practised. Later, her son. James J. Mayer, growing up, studied law and was admitted to the bar; and the two formed the partnership of Mayer & Mayer.

Mrs. Mayer takes care of the civil cases, while her son attends to the criminal branch.

THERE is a big studio in South Washington Square, New York, where "the Merrills" work. "The Merrills" are a brother and sister—Fenimore and Katharine Merrill. Though they work at different things, they are really partners. Miss Merrill is a brilliant etcher, a pupil of Frank Brangwyn. Her prints are to be seen in the permanent collections of New York and Washington libraries. Her brother, Fenimore Merrill, writes moving picture plays. He declares that he gets some of his best ideas from his sister.

LIEUTENANT HAROLD CHASE WOODWARD was a clerk in the New York post office. At Harvard, where he graduated, he had been specially interested in chemistry; and during his spare time as a clerk he began to experiment in the compounding of explosives. With his wife at his elbow, he spent nightly sessions in his Harlem flat over a retort, with the result that they brought trotol-gelatin into being.

When the explosive had been perfected the Lieutenant gave it to the government.

When She Said "Yes"

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They Think Before They Speak

PARROTS always think at least once before they speak, Miss Tuttle says; and she ought to know, because she is the first woman in the world to bring the parrot into society as an educated entertainer of the truly polished.

Miss Tuttle's parrots, be it understood, are quite exclusive birds, and would not for the world lose caste by doing tricks for the vulgar public.

There are eight of the Tuttle parrots. Their owner found one day that Dame Fortune had a frown on her face and that things had gone wrong. It was necessary to find the means of making a living. There were but two assets in sight—a piano and the eight green birds.

The Cautious Bird

MISS TUTTLE kept training and working with the birds until they took her into their confidence and taught her something about parrots that she did not previously know. This is what their mistress learned from the solemn eight: A parrot is not a slow, dull bird, but one of the most cautious, deliberative bodies ever known outside of the Ways and Means Committee of the United States Senate. The same thing that causes an elephant to test a bridge with his foot before essaying a step upon it, dictates a parrot's course. It is caution, not stupidity, that governs him.

With this much information as to their character, Miss Tuttle soon got her pets to working on their best roles. Caruso, one of the green fellows, developed musical talent and soon learned to sing in three keys,—high soprano, contralto, and baritone,—and then to make a medley of the three. Three chorus girls were picked from the other parrots, to aid in the singing.

The three comedians of the company, Bill Butt-in-Ski, the Count de Beaufort, and Twister, were taught to do laughing, talking, and crying acts. Another of the green brotherhood learned to play the piano, and still another solemnly pulled a little cart about, with one of the chorus girls posing upon it as dead. All sorts of balancing feats were added to the list of accomplishments by the time the appearance of the company before their exclusive parlor audiences began.

Now Miss Tuttle is able to take life easily because of the success of her parrots. She is pleased with the novel method of winning her way, and is just as much pleased with her birds.

And here is another surprise concerning parrots. Miss Tuttle solemnly avers that a parrot is a scrupulously clean citizen, and that he follows the Mohammedan teaching and demands clean white sand for his toilet. The fact that he does not like water for bathing proves nothing.

He's Opposed to Camp Life

LEONARD PIERPONT MORGAN is violently opposed to living close to nature. But then, he had a particularly unfortunate experience.

A band of Zapatista rebels captured Morgan in La Bonita Cañon, in southern Mexico, just after he and his servant had taken out some $30,000 worth of gold ore. The ore had been shipped to the nearest refinery, and the bandits simply held Morgan until his servant brought back the bullion from the express office, when they confiscated the bullion, killed the servant, and tied Morgan to a tree. The captors had an idea that their prisoner was clever at finding gold, so they decided to board him for a while instead of killing him at once.

Time passed; the Mexicans amused themselves by dressing up in Morgan's dress suit and beating his thumb-nails to make him tell where more gold was.

After about six months of such a life of idleness in the open, there came a rumor of approaching Federals. The bandits changed their camping-ground and untied Morgan. He was by this time so weak and emaciated that two armed guards were deemed sufficient to care for him.

On a stormy night the Federals surprised the camp. In the confusion of the fight Morgan ran for the brink of a canon. A flash of lightning there revealed him to a native skirting the brink. The native gave chase. Morgan leaped over the

brink of the canon, fell, slid, scrambled, and at last sprawled on his back at the bottom. The Mexican came tumbling after him, but, having chosen a more dangerous place, fell some thirty feet sheer upon the rocks. He was so badly injured that he could not rise, and Morgan pounced upon him and took his gun, canteen, and grub-sack.

Then followed a seven nights' walk northward. Morgan got his sleep by day to avoid detection. On the seventh day he fell exhausted in the streets of Mexico City, was picked up, fed, clothed, and enabled to reach Texas and finally Norfolk, Nebraska, where he expressed himself forcibly against camp life.

On the left, Morgan is seen as he looked a few weeks before starting on the mining expedition which proved so full of incident. On the right we have the same Morgan after he was picked up nearly exhausted in Mexico City. Morgan Number I was the sort of fellow who never went anywhere without dinner coat and pumps. Nothing like that for Morgan II.

Fleming the Twice-Born

By WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

Illustrations by S. R. Riesenberg

THIS may be a bit strong for short-story stuff. I told it to a movie man, and he said: "You'll have to tone it down. The police wouldn't let that picture go through."

"But," said I, "this thing went through under the eyes of forty men over in southern Luzon. I couldn't see that they were much different afterward—though perhaps they were different inside. I've carried it in a kind of cold compartment ever since."

There was Knauss, a regular army lieutenant, who didn't live through; and there was young Fleming, a college man before he "took on" in the army. He's probably around somewhere yet, though I haven't seen him for years—haven't heard from him.

I was in the troop when he came; and his coming startled me, because I hailed from his town, and knew him for a fat- cheeked nuisance, whose father was too weak to keep him in order, and whose mother years before had been too weak—one of the lads who had been kept in curls at least three years too long. His father wasn't rich, but he worked like two men to see the boy through college, where there was a "den" to furnish with rugs, pictures, banners, and pillows; and hosts of pretty girls who gladly gave the boy pleasant glances for the expensive and perishable sweets which "just melted," and for the season's most costly blossoms.

Other fellows, who got checks without pleading and threatening correspondence, furnished their dens and lavished presents on the girls, and so—the old father stayed in the home town and plugged and wore in the same old clothes.

Once, in the great wisdom that the college had implanted in him, Fleming wrote home these words:

"One thing I have learned at college, father (and a little knowledge of this kind is good for every fellow): I have learned to be generous with my friends. I'm noted all over this old Col as a prince and a good fellow, and I'm proud of it. No more of your small town stuff for me."

The old man had read these words, smiled sadly, and toiled on.

SO the boy was educated for three years.

Then the father fell ill. Probably tears blinded his eyes when he wrote that he was now no longer able to keep the boy in school. I was home in those days, and saw the wan and white face of the old man, and the clothes hanging loosely from the wasted figure. The boy came back. This I only heard—it may not have been so bad: that the father was leaning on the gate when his college-bred son returned, that he stretched out his arms, and Fleming ducked them, saying:

"Hello, dad—seedy as ever, I see."

The sun didn't hit him, nor the earth swallow him; but Fate drew near and took an interest in the young man's case.

Of course, a boy like that couldn't catch on in the world after his father, the one prop he had known, was taken away. A few men who had known the elder tried to help; but the boy himself made it easy for them to draw in.

He lost all his jobs for the same reason that he couldn't get on with us. We were all "peanuts" and "lobs" to him. But when it really dawned upon him that he couldn't go to a telegraph office and wait for an answer in cash, his education began.

I understand that the last few weeks before the colored sign of a United States recruiting office braced up before his nose, he had been using what remained of his fine raiment in wiping up soiled places of the New York streets. I believe he said something like this, as he read that sign we all fell for once:

"I will be a captain and lead my men into battle."

Now you can see plainly that the college had been partial in the learning. A recruiting sergeant growled at him and blew smoke in his face. An army doctor tore his clothes off and made him do all manner of undignified things without them.

After Fleming had enlisted for three years, they slapped him into a suit of clothes that had little or no "cut," pulled over his face a hat that had no perceptible "block," and stood him to one side without so much as a necktie to top off. His socks did not match his shirt and the shoes they dumped him into broke his heart. Then they marched him up the steep gangway of a big transport and ordered him below, to go to work.

The boy looked about him and muttered: "God help me!" Then the transport sailed to sea, and Mother Fate, very much amused and interested, arranged with us of Troop E to finish the un-education of the boy.

THERE had been a year of fighting when he came. We were down to forty men, and were busily engaged in garrisoning the big town of Lipa, two companies of infantry assisting. Every one knows of Manila, but Lipa belongs to the few. A big, squat place, with palms about it, a river running up and around, little black men in white clothing—but not so many as before we came. There was a bank, a prison, a hospital; in fact, Lipa was a regular town. I imagined the dignified old Spanish gentlemen moving down to business in the morning, and

sending their straws to the cleaner's the day before each holiday. Lipa is not sufficiently considered in the public prints.

E Troop pretty well had its way there. One might walk out any of the trails (with the exception of the garrisoned highway back to Santa Tomas, which the Americans kept open) and begin to attract Remington slugs from the jungles within the first ten minutes of the hike. However, we were tired of that. The troop was now down to a skeleton outfit, and in a recent fight at Santa Tomas our old troop-commander, who had never been a stranger to the quality of mercy, fell down at the head of his men.

The first lieutenant, a then unknown quantity named Knauss, stepped into command of the troop, and it required only one day's march to show the men who rode behind that the devil and all his angels were mounted upon the horse the new leader rode. Knauss was a fireeater—a silent devil whom none of us had ever liked, even though he had always remained in the background until now. Men on the march, eating and sleeping together out in the great open, learn to sense those who belong without words being spoken.

IT was good old Rankin who shared blankets with me in those days—a big, haughty chap who was all mellow sunlight inside; a patrician, too. On the morning after the arrival of the scrub, we were finishing breakfast with the platoon, when Fleming came up behind us.

"Hello, comrades," he remarked.

Veteran cavalrymen, hard from service, dark and haggard from exposure, and ugly from natural necessity, slowly turned their eyes toward this fresh white "rookie."

Then some one started a general target practice by hurling a carbine boot at the head of the new one. In the first place, "comrades" is not an army word; in the second place, the troop was in the field, where homicide is the only diversion barred; lastly, a recruit is a thing to step upon, a thing whose first month's pay belongs to anybody, an atom of no consequence, who must chew up the very voice cords in his throat or get licked—and grin meanwhile.

A number of missiles had found their mark.

"Quit it, I tell you! I'm a college man," shrieked the recruit.

All the hope I had for him died with those words. Far better might he have explained to Filipino bolo-men that be was a member of a certain Greek-letter fraternity. The stuff out of which troopers are molded is as evident in the hulking farmer's boy as it is in the erudite college youth, and the chances are that the former will harbor no fatal notions in his dim wit-chamber. Never, in the three years that were to follow, could the fellow troopers of Private Fleming forget those words in his time of trouble: "I'm a college man."

A leathery old campaigner, with sharp, twinkling eyes almost hidden by overhanging brows, and a still, cemetery kind of humor, arose with a slow, noiseless chuckle, and addressed the boy:

"You seem like a bright, capable young man."

Fleming pricked up his ears at this, and acknowledged that he was glad to be appreciated.

The old man continued:

"There's going to be a vacancy for the rank of lieutenant colonel in this regiment in a few days. I advise you to apply for that vacancy now. Go over to headquarters and tell them who you are—that big shack there with a flag hanging out of the window."

Ten minutes later the troopers standing about heard the officers in headquarters raise a yell. A moment later Private Fleming was ushered out on a running jump, and an armed sentry followed close after.

He accepted his troubles with a quivering under lip. It was insufficient to make him forget that he had been to college. The realization that he was superior to all other officers and men did not leave him. Here and there, where he might have had a friend by keeping his mouth shut or by finding the level, he fell flat, not knowing the trick.

"Great God!" said Rankin solemnly one evening. "Give us a stiff fight for this fool's sake."

IT came on either the fourth or the fifth day after. The natives had kept us awake the latter half of the night, and Knauss was in the saddle within two minutes after reveille—a mean man without sense.

Twenty minutes later would have done. There was nothing to pull us forth without breakfast. I heard a muttering in the platoon, as we saddled, that the Commander had not forgotten his breakfast. He seemed to make it a personal matter, as if he were the only one who had lost sleep.

Just then, Fleming—who hadn't learned the policy of saluting his superior officer—left his mount unsaddled on the picketing line, and approached Knauss, already mounted. We heard his whine:

"This horse isn't fit to ride. Besides, I was awake in the night, and I don't want to go out with you this morning."

The Commander's mount was dancing

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and backing a bit under the stiffly held curb. I saw the bare head of Fleming, that distressing, uplifted face; saw Knauss back his horse close beside the boy and lean down.

"What's that?" he said.

The whining repetition was in the air. Over the withers of my beast, I glanced at the faces of the other men, at the rose- gray dawn among the Lipa palms,—all in a wheel of the head, eye quickly returning to the uplifted face of Fleming just as the blow descended.

"Rankin," I muttered, "I don't like the new troop-commander."

Knauss looked up quickly, ordered silence, his eye moving from face to face. He had not located the voice, and I knew that my secret was as safe as if it lay under a rock in the Pacific.

Fleming rolled over on the ground, the Commander's horse shying from him.

"Lift that thing into the saddle. Tie it on if it won't stay—two of you men," Knauss ordered.

Rankin wasn't beside me. Turning back, I saw him in the last set, with Fleming just in front—Fleming leaning forward like a man at a desk, a coil of black welts on his forehead, the sacs under his eyes filling with black. I wondered at the moment if I saw wrong; for it appeared to me that something of reason

and enlightenment gleamed with the hate and horror from the eyes of Fleming.

Three hours later our scalps were prickling with the heat of high forenoon. When your scalp prickles, you sit in a bit of suspense. So many times it is an omen of darkness and falling. It is different, falling from a saddle. You never hear much cursing in the troop when the scalps are prickling. The fellows forget to talk: they sit in a kind of thrall.

The top-sergeant was riding close to Knauss, the muzzle of his mount at the Commander's knee. The old top-sergeant was used to the former Captain's ways. When a man swayed forward suddenly with the heat, he suggested, as was his custom, that the column halt to let the trooper's head cool. The reply was a cut from the Commander's riding-whip—not at the old sergeant, but at the man who was losing his head. I heard the teeth of the trooper beside me fly together with a snap. The frail turned just then, and we met a scattered volley from the natives.

I think most of the men were glad of that, for it meant getting down on earth; it meant at least one in four of us taking the horses back to shelter; it meant finding cover. Cover meant shade.

The hot heaven was making a fool of me. I had forgotten Fleming, forgotten Rankin and everything except the prickle in the scalp, and the fact that there was too much riding-whip about this new captain. A moment afterward I had three horses beside my own, back at the edge of the jungle. Rankin was there with his four. Presently Fleming joined us, his hand full of bridle-reins, his tongue out with thirst, and the top half of his face as black as a mask.

AHEAD on the trail the men were down, all except Knauss, replying to the fire of the native party, which we could not see around the bend. They were friends of mine ahead, those cavalrymen, and I knew that those little duels always cost a man or two. A couple of horses were already sprawled between us and the firing-line; and yet, I didn't want to see it quickly over.

The hot smell of the horses, as we huddled them against us close into the green bank of palms, was more easily to be borne than the straight rays from above. There was a touch of coolness in the green.

But more than anything, as we waited there out of range, there was a fascination about Fleming. I had forgotten all his fatuousness, put away all hatred. For once in his life, possibly for the first time, Fleming had forgotten himself. If ever murder looked out from a man's eyes, it looked out from his. This was the same thing I had seen hours before, at the edge of Lipa.

The processes that were bringing it about were not clear to him, but he was held in the thrall of the thought of murder. This thought, bad as it was, had turned the self-insanity out of his brain. I remember wondering, as we panted there, without words, if a hero or a devil had been wrapped up in this creature whom I had known as a pampered child and a man in shape only. Rankin was thinking something the same. We had no idea of breaking in, because Knauss took it so damnably for granted that he was fool-proof.

The natives gave way all too soon. Two troop-horses carried double over the next two miles, while we made a little sheltered barrio. This was not because two horses were left back on the trail, but because two troopers were so hard hit that they couldn't sit alone.

Apparently Knauss was ready to call it half a day. He hadn't punished anything, but his steam was blown out. We idled until the cool of the afternoon before hitting the trail back for Lipa. There was forage in the town, which is difficult to poison without showing the trick; and I have a suspicion that some of the men made a meal of what they found in the huts, though Rankin and I confined ourselves to the usual ration—coffee and that noble hot-weather food, pork.

At four in the afternoon, Knauss appeared in the street and called us forth to saddle. Poor Fleming was slow with his hands. I saw him struggling with his cinch; and, though it didn't occur to me to help him, I was glad when Rankin thought of it. I pitied the wounded, too. They had to be tied on. I saw their eyes. A man who lived through such a ride as they were entering upon (after the freshness is gone from their body-wounds) told me that it was the worst kind of torture.

Rankin bent his head for a moment while. Fleming spoke.

When he returned to my set, Rankin said: "There's going to be more to this day than the ride back."

TWO hours afterward, just as the sun was going down, I saw the shoulders of Knauss twitch queerly under his blouse. A day like this takes so much from a man that he is apt to shiver at the first touch of evening cool upon the wet cloth he wears. A moment later we were sinking into a ravine. Half-night closed upon the depths as the troop halted to fill canteens.

It all happened down there in the next three minutes, in the half light.

First, I saw Fleming's horse standing with empty saddle and hanging rein up in the gray of the slope. Then Fleming passed me in the heavy dusk—without a word, his mouth and two hands clenched, his pistol undrawn. He was staring ahead at the Commander.

"Fleming," I said softly, as he brushed me; but there was no answer.

No trooper is allowed to press forward, leaving his horse—no matter how much he needs a drink. All comes to a man in his turn.

Fleming couldn't continue with mouth clenched. He couldn't go and do it quietly. He had to let us know about it, and butcher the whole business. Yet he had done rather well for one day. Though his face was marked like a beast's, it held the look of a man, a stranger to fear.

He had just passed me when I heard him call to the Commander what he had come for. There was a strange silence in the ravine now. Even the sounds of drinking and the trickling of water seemed hushed. The horses stood still. I heard the click of a hammer down at the water's edge—the answer from Knauss, and his command, even as the shot rang out:

"Take him, you men up there!"

Fleming was down. I did not know what he meant to do without his pistol drawn. The bullet had touched his cheek. In the intensity of it, my eyes seemed to strip the dusk away from that face. He crawled forward, the madman, as if to take his enemy in his hands. We drew back from him, loathing the thought of another pistol-shot, yet knowing it would come. Fleming had crawled a man's length forward before it sounded. Then I heard a kind of howl from Knauss in the same breath.

It was all confusion and mystery down there in the dark; but this is what I saw and heard:

Knauss was down on the wet ground, shaking his life out, while Fleming, his pistol still undrawn, crawled toward him, crying:

"Oh, why didn't you let me do it? I would have done it with my hands!"

We kept him off—for the thing had been done very well. Standing over the body of the officer was a trooper who smiled, and seemed in no hurry to put up his gun. It was the man who had swayed in the saddle from the heat seven hours before—the one who had called forth the riding-whip, which is hard for man to take.

"Lift him into the saddle, you men," said the top-sergeant, when the body was quiet.

I heard the moaning of the wounded; and Fleming disturbed us now. They got him into the saddle, and Rankin was taking to him.

WE were just topping the hill and coming into the light, again on the Lipa trail, when some Tagal in the jungle seat a Remington slug whining over our heads.

"Queer, how many commissioned officers the natives are getting nowadays," came with a laugh from up ahead. It was that trooper.

The sergeant turned to him with a puzzled look, and Rankin said:

"If this officer hadn't been a beast and a fool, I'd see you hang by the neck tomorrow morning."

"Hell!" said the trooper, and I saw the mark of a riding-whip across his cheek.

The moon was up when we saw the lights of Lipa. The sergeant halted the troop and rode back to us.

"It's all up to him," he said quietly, crooking his wrist toward Fleming.

I didn't answer; in fact, I wasn't sure whether Fleming could be kept quiet.

The good Rankin answered:

"I'll stay with him to-night. If anything leaks—well, he's touched with the sun, anyway. I think to-morrow he'll be all right. There's something to build on, sergeant. Why, he—wanted to do it with bare hands!"

I missed Rankin that night. He came in just before reveille, cruelly tired, and sank down beside me.

"I just let him go to sleep," he yawned. "I think he's been born again."

The Fool-Maker

By OCTAVUS ROY COHEN

Illustrations by Harvey Emrich

ANY man who says that the director of a moving picture company has a cinch passes up his chance of being father of his country.

Most people think that all a director has to do is to direct. They're dead wrong: that's the smallest task he has. He must be enough of a diplomat to conduct the peace negotiations in Europe; he must know every branch of theatricals, from four-a-day vaudeville to sunnyside burlesque; he must be photographer, clown, fictionist, artist, aviator, equestrian, meteorologist, and an expert on such subjects as optics, landscape-gardening, architecture, history, fashion, women, finance, and a million or so other things.

He must stand ready at all times to be father confessor of any and every member of his company: to patch up quarrels, arrange marriages (and prevent some), cast his characters, kill the green-eyed monster thrice a day, flatter his actors, bully the supes, jolly the camera men, placate the men higher up at their desks in the home office, and see that all the people under his direction have amusement, good board, and plenty of it, and that his quota of pictures is turned out regularly, rain or shine.

I'm thinking that, if I'd known all that before they shipped me from the New Jersey studio down to Bat Cave, North Carolina, in charge of my own company, I probably shouldn't have accepted the commission. But I'm an awfully unsuspicious cuss, and I didn't dream what they were pulling on me—even when they increased my salary thirty per cent.

And from the first week after I hit Bat Cave I had trouble, trouble, nothing but trouble. It was just one durn thing after another; and no sooner did I have one squabble set to rights than another started.

The worst part of it was that, in spite of it all, and with the help of a few guardian angels, I managed to produce good pictures, and the Big Ikes in New Jersey were writing me congratulatory letters and telling me what a big hit I was making, and notifying me that I'd remain in Bat Cave for an indefinite period, seeing as they'd closed a contract with James O. Wood, our star scenario contributor, to furnish special scripts for mountain pictures.

Of course, I did have a good company under me—one of the best in the country: with Curly Locks and his wife, the famous Eunice Bailey, playing the stellar roles—and Frank Tavis as my chief camera man. I'd just reached the point, where I felt I could lean back in contentment when they sent little Doris Burroughs to do thrill stuff.

EVER seen thrill pictures made? Believe me, they thrill a good deal more in the making than they do when you see 'em on the screen and know that it's just picture and that nothing can happen. Lordy! when you see a man jump off an embankment on to the top of a fast freight train—see him miss his grip and slide almost to the edge, and then just by accident grab the iron liar across the top and save himself from being ground under the wheels—when you see it, I say, you live about ten years of your life in the space of a few seconds. And that's what happened to Curly Locks no longer ago than two months.

And when I saw that, picture run off in an Asheville theater. I heard two women back of me remarking that, all that thrill stuff was faked—that the train was standing still when the man tallied, and that he just slid to the edge to add some excitement to the scene.

The thing I didn't like about it was that I had to send the actors on their perilous missions; and when anything happened. no matter how trivial it was, I felt guilty.

Another thing that maybe you don't know: the big movie stars are divided into two classes—first, the class that does straight stuff, legitimate acting; and second, the division which ain't such a much on the acting, but gets by because of an appalling courage and a willingness to risk necks in any and all foolhardy stunts—for the sake of providing the public with excitement.

DORIS BURROUGHS was working in an acrobatic sister act on big-time vaudeville when our bunch got hold of her. She could do anything, from a back flip from standing position to a Gertrude Hoffman symphony in the hanging with her teeth.

She was little, lithe, blonde, vivacious, and pretty as could be, not as deep as the Atlantic Ocean, and the most outrageous flirt I've ever seen in my life.

I don't reckon there was any real harm in her devil-may-care make-up, and she didn't realize half the damage that she caused under various and sundry fifth ribs; but, it was her boast, that she could make a fool out of any man living and she did.

She had every man-jack in our company more or less wild about her, saving and excepting only Curly Locks, and he was still too engrossed with Eunice Bailey, his bride of six weeks, to pay attention to any other skirted being in the world.

But after Doris had been with us for a while we got a little bit tired of her continual flirting and the men began dropping her. The women never had cottoned to her much, although she didn't seem to realize that, and managed to be the life of every gathering we had.

And she certainly was a thrill-woman. I guess her nerves were as icy as her heart. After all, she was nothing but a care-free innocent, grown-up child, and I reckon I was the only person around Bat Cave who understood her. After she'd been with us three weeks she seemed to know that I liked her under the surface, and we became pretty good pals, me being a sort of father to the kid.

Her thrill stuff was great. She'd ride a horse right up to the edge of a cliff, and then rein him in just as calmly as could be—unshaken as a pyramid when even the horse'd be trembling like an aspen. She'd go head first out of a canoe into the rapids of the boiling river near our settlement, with never a thought of consequences or danger, and come out ready for more.

She was as good in her line as Eunice Bailey was in hers—which means the best.

THINGS were settling down into a pleasingly regular rut when I sent out a call for supes to take the big five-reeler, "The Moonshiner's Wife." And one of the first men to apply was Seth Twomley.

The minute I saw that man I know I had a treasure for a supe, provided he didn't prove as awkward as he was handsome. And he certainly was handsome, six foot three if he was an inch, with dark, wavy hair that curled back over his forehead, the frame of a Hercules, and a smile that Mary Pickford would envy. And, in a country where the average native is as handsome as a hickory-nut, he certainly lit the right spot.

I engaged him at three dollars a day, and he almost fell over himself when I mentioned the amount. I could have landed him for three a week, I believe, and he'd have been glad of the chance.

But I must admit that all his good qualities were in his looks. Not that he had any bad ones, but he just didn't seem to have any. His head was made of solid ivory, and he was about as loquacious as a marble sarcophagus. But, he was curious about movies, and that made him possible. Besides, it seems that he knew quite a few of the mountaineers, and he was a world of assistance in recruiting supes.

And they were some typical bunch that he corraled for me: long, lean, lanky, underfed, unkempt, drawling, slouching, fairly good-natured, and universally ignorant and silent. But they furnished tableau backgrounds that just simply couldn't be beat anywhere when it came to the natural stuff.

All well and good until Doris spotted him and singled him out as her own especial prey. And when I saw that she had spotted him I realized that trouble was coming.

Things didn't take long developing. I've often wondered just what methods Doris pursued. I know, for one thing, that she told several other supes that she thought Seth the handsomest man she ever saw, and within a comparatively short time Seth was making certain that she had the pleasure of seeing him very often.

Seth just couldn't understand Doris. As a matter of fact, I don't believe he could understand anything much, he was so dense. But I used to catch him scratching his head and puzzling over the various manners and kinds of ways in which Doris risked her life. One day I overheard him arguing with her. I eavesdropped principally because it was an unbelievable phenomenon to hear him talking at all.

"Hit hain't no sense f'r you-uns to do them thar fool things," he insisted earnestly.

"I get a big salary," she returned.

"Haow much?"

"Ten thousand dollars a year."

"No-o-o!"

"Yep."

He mulled over that for probably four minutes. Then:

"But hit hain't goin' t' do you-uns no good after you-uns is dead."

I peeped around my tree as I heard Doris's laugh ripple out, and I saw her lean close to him, look up at him dazzlingly, and lean confidingly against his knee.

"You great big, dear, silly man!" she gurgled.

I groaned.

"Mister Twomley," I remarked to myself, "she has your number catalogued and safe in her little booklet."

I grew nervous about it. I don't know whether all these stories you read about the North Carolina mountaineers are true or not; but I do know that I didn't have any right to think that they weren't true, and I decided to play it safe. It'd have been a sweet thing to run into if Doris made Seth good and sore, and then he did some of this kidnapping stuff, and—no, sir, I wasn't butting into any lonesome pine trails in search of an abducted thrill-woman!

SO I cornered Doris and had it out with her—paternal-like. I'm getting to be an expert on this paternal stuff now. What a pity I'm a bachelor! But I'm

---

hoping some day I'll be able to make a story out of that. There's a girl in Brooklyn—but pshaw! this is a yarn about Seth Twomley and the thrill-girl, not about a half bald old misanthrope.

"Doris," I said earnestly, "I'm not an eavesdropper, but I happened to witness your courtship of that big boob Twomley out there under the trees near Laurel Mountain, and I'm warning you that you're playing with fire."

SHE looked me squarely in the eyes, and then slowly her eyes crinkled at the corners and her lips turned up, and then she leaned back and just simply giggled and then laughed and then shrieked with merriment. There's something about Doris's laugh that can't be resisted, and pretty soon I found myself laughing too, although I wanted to kick myself for being so weak. When she assumed control of her vocal cords again, she leaned toward me.

"Ain't he a scream?" she giggled. "Ain't he just simply a sugar-dear and the biggest laugh ever?"

"Maybe—and then again maybe not. Did it ever occur to you that he might take you seriously?"

"No!" Her big brown eyes opened wide.

"Yes. He looks up to you, true; but he's getting it through his noodle that you're in love with him, and therefore—well, these mountaineers generally get what they go after."

She fairly sparkled.

"You don't think he'd kidnap me—really?"

"Yes, I do."

With that she clapped her hands like a child with a new toy.

"How grand! What an experience that would be!"

What can you do with a kid like that? She was about as responsible as I was when, as a kid, I rowed out into the Lower Bay in a bateau boat, threw my oars away, and drifted seaward in the hopes that an out-bound trans-Atlantic steamer would pick me up and take me to the Mecca of my dreams—Europe. As a matter of fact, a tug got me, and I was soundly thrashed. But I couldn't very well spank Doris; so I had to terminate the interview with a solemn warning.

"Remember, Doris, whatever happens is up to you. And please think of me, too. Seth Twomley controls my supes, and they're the best bunch I've ever had. If he gets sore at you they'll all jump the job—and me with half a dozen pictures just part finished. Besides, I'm thinking first of all of your safety."

She stepped back and surveyed me critically.

"You know," she remarked, with characteristic naïveté, "if you weren't such a crusty old bachelor I'd kiss you!"

"I ain't—"

But she skipped out of the room with a kiss of the hand.

"Some day," she trilled. "Maybe."

Last thing I saw of her was when she joined Seth Twomley under the trees and strolled with him toward Crystal Spring.

A week passed—two—three. Then, one morning when I went to rehearse a few big scenes in "The Moonshiner's Wife,"—for the picture was giving me a world of trouble and I'd stopped it several times to run off one-reelers that the company happened to be in a hurry for,—Seth Twomley and his whole bunch of silent supernumeraries failed to show up.

I swore; I raved; I tore my hair and stood on my head. At best, all I could do was to get hold of a new crowd of supes, and that meant retaking a bunch of the scenes in which the old crowd had played prominent parts. Maybe you think movie audiences don't notice the change in a bunch of supes, but you're dead wrong. Besides, the motto of the Takagraph Company is accuracy in every detail, and I couldn't make any such radical changes in my cast as that would entail.

When I had spent a little of my vocal fire and brimstone, I grabbed Doris and hauled her under the trees. She was really penitent; but even that didn't soften my heart—which organ is usually of summer-butter consistency.

"Pardon the French," I said caustically, "but you have sure played hell now—"

"And then some," she confessed honestly.

"I warned you about it long ago—"

"I always was too much of a fool to take advice. That's why I'm a thrill-woman."

"And you didn't pay any attention," I went on, ignoring her interruptions. "You went and courted that big, handsome boob and made him fall in love with you—"

"It was such a cinch!"

"And, now that you've amused yourself with him, he's discovered that you were only playing with him, and he's jumped the job. All the money I've spent in salaries gone to the devil, all my time wasted, all the company's time wasted, half the scenes to be re-filmed—and, last of all, a big, honest mountaineer with a broken heart—all because you wanted to have a good time. I'm ashamed of you—and disgusted with you, Doris!"

She gazed straight at me, her eyes brimming with tears.

"Spill it all," she urged. "I got it comin' to me, an' I might's well have it all in one big dose."

So I "spilled it all," and when I finished she was as contrite, as sincerely contrite, as ever an addlepated little woman could be.

"And, leaving me and the company and the money all out of it," I persisted, "think of poor Seth. Think of the dignity of what he's done. Dead in love with you—and you handing him the icy mitten; and now he does like a Laura Jean Libby character—walks off into his haunts rather than suffer further rebuffs at your hands, and"—lugubriously—"all of the supes with him. Why, Doris, you've turned his heart against womankind, and—"

She was blubbering.

"Cut it—cut it, please. I can't stand any more, Bill. I—I— Oh, gee! honest, I never knew what I was doing. I was just trying to kid him along."

"And you succeeded. You bet you succeeded!"

"I didn't mean anything by it. And he was such a boob—I just couldn't pass up the chance."

"No"—sarcastically. "And here I am with about thirty unfinished scenes in a five-reel picture. And my supes gone." I clenched my right fist and slammed it into the left palm. "They've got to come back!"

She jumped about six feet.

"Yes!"

"They've got to!"

"How?"

"You caused the trouble, and you've got to solve the difficulty. You must see Seth—"

"Go out there?"

"Yes—I'll go with you. I won't tip any of the others off to it, if you don't want me to. I'll just declare a holiday, and we'll go out there. I've just simply got to leave it to you to straighten things up with him, and humor him into bringing the bunch back."

"But—but—how—"

"How? How? This ain't a question of how, Doris. It's a question of 'must.' And it's up to you. Get me?"

"I get you. I'll try—"

WITHIN a half hour we were driving out toward the little mountain settlement in which Seth lived. And Doris hadn't passed up any bets in making her preparations. She was dolled out in a bewitching blue-and-white middy, with a navy blue tie in front right where the V of the collar runs into the rest of the blouse; dark blue skirt— She was some stunning looker, all right. And I knew that if she dropped her flirtation tactics this once she could make Seth Twomley, or 'most any other man, for that matter, do anything she wanted him to.

I really felt sorry for the big fellow, and I admired the moral courage he had shown in dropping her after a rebuff. He must have seen that she was playing with him; and, despite rough exteriors, I'd long since discovered that the North Carolina mountaineers are a sensitive lot. I turned to the girl.

"He must've proposed to you yesterday," I hazarded.

She had the grace to flush.

"Y-yes. He did."

"It'd serve you right if you were the director," I came back, with some bitterness. "Everything any fool member of my company does reacts on me. I've got to

---

deliver the goods—excuses can't be shown in the picture houses."

It was a long drive to Cordesville, where Seth lived. And Bat Cave is a pretty good distance out itself. The road narrowed and grew rougher and climbed higher. The trees became scrubby and bent. The white, fleecy clouds were below us. I grew a mite sorry that I hadn't brought a revolver, although I'm not much of a believer in hip-pocket artillery.

But finally we crossed the last big ridge and dipped down into the grassy hollow where squatted about twenty ramshackle cabins. We had struck Cordesville. I made up my mind that if we got away with our lives we'd come out there for some pictures.

I slowed up the team and bumped down the rocky road. Half way down, Doris squealed.

"There's Seth," she said. I pulled the team up short.

HE was sitting on the grass, square chin in his well shaped hand, and the breeze blowing through his wavy hair. When he saw us, he rose and strode toward the rig. I didn't like the cocksure swing of his stride.

"Howdy," he greeted gruffly, his eye fixed menacingly, uneasily, on Doris.

"Howdy," we greeted in chorus.

"What can I do f'r you-uns?" he asked awkwardly.

Doris was silent.

"You—you quit the job at Bat Cave?" I asked.

"Uh-huh."

"We've come to get you to go back with us—and bring the others."

Doris seemed tongue-tied. I had to do all the talking. It's a shame the way they all throw a director down.

"Cain't do hit."

"Can't?"

"Nope.

"But why?"

He glanced uneasily first at me, then at Doris, then at me again.

"Cain't say. Mebbe I c'n tell you alone."

"Tell both of us."

Once more he glanced at Doris.

"Shall I?" he questioned her.

"Certainly," she snapped.

"Wal," he drawled steadily, eyeing the ground studiously, "y' see, hit's thisaway. Ever sense I been in Bat Cave a-workin' f'r you, I been treated right, an' I done my best. But—wal," he paused, then continued desperately. "This yere young gal she goes an' falls in love with me. I tried to git away f'um her, but I couldn't, nohow. I stood it 's long as possible; but, y'see—yestiddy she goes all' proposes to me that I should marry her. An' I cain't—"

"But—"

"They hain't no 'buts,'" he went on relentlessly, avoiding Doris's flashing eyes. "I'm plumb sorry she's in love with me, but I jes' cain't marry her. An' I cain't go back, even ef she'd promise to let me alone, 'case some of the boys done tol' my wife about the way she was pesterin' me—"

That's all there is to the story. You may be interested, though, in knowing that Doris was cured—and that, although Seth Twomley never came himself, he did have the grace to send the others back, so that I was able to film the whole five reels of "The Moonshiner's Wife."

Here is the end of this instalment of

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

Continued from page 8

shadows. Were they queer plants that were growing there amid the mud and water? Were they the fragments of buried or cut down trees, with long, stiff branches still remaining? Were they—

"Run!" said Gore suddenly, picking up Isola like a Sabine wife or a sack of potatoes, and slinging her across his shoulder. He began to run as he spoke, rapidly covering the ground in the direction of the forest, and glancing over his shoulder now and then as he ran. I saw he had got his revolver in his hand.

I looked behind me,—it was time,—and saw that the strange things in the marsh had risen up with one accord and were charging toward us, and that they were neither plants nor trees, but buffaloes—big gray buffaloes with spear-like horns a good two yards across.

"They are escapes," I thought, as I took my heels, Bo running and yelling behind me. "Escapes from the settlements—wild for years. You can not stop charging buffalo. They will follow you till they kill.

"But, all the same," my thoughts ran, one must have a shot—ah!"

Gore had fired as he ran—I don't know how. His shot hit it big bull, and it roared like the last trump, fell on one knee, got up again, and came thundering on, snorting "Och! och!" as it went, and fully determined to exact vengeance.

I am a good shot,—perhaps I have said so before,—but I am not at my best running hard, with or without a girl over my shoulder. I will freely admit that I could not have hit that bull as Gore hit it. But I knew I could kill him if I stopped; so I did stop, and put a .45 bullet through his eye. You should have heard the crash he made as he dropped; he almost turned a somersault.

I had to run faster now—I couldn't, yet I did—and reach cover before the others cane along; they were coming fast. I couldn't see where Red Bob and his burden had gone to, and the light was failing; but I caught sight of a narrow opening in the forest, and made for it. It was a track; at any other moment I should have thought of what the track meant, and avoided it, or at least followed it cautiously. But you can not be cautious with a herd of furious buffalo galloping at your heels. I made along the track as fast as I could, through the growing gloom of the sun-set; saw a rocky cliff rise up in front of me; noticed that it had steps hewn in the rock, scrambled up the steps like a monkey (they were not exactly on the pattern of a villa staircase), and found myself, with Bo behind me, on the top of the rocky plateau, and right in the heart of the one thing we had been trying to avoid all along—a New Britain native village.

At first the buffaloes continued to occupy my thoughts. I looked down, and saw that the herd had gone "och"-ing and trampling by, and also that there was no possible means by which they could get up the rock, which seemed to me a natural fortress of a very high order. Then I looked about me, and realized, with a jump of the heart, that we were "in for it."

SAVAGES were collecting from every side. Gore and Isola—who was on her feet again—were surrounded by a crowd of creatures more like wild beasts than human beings: things with fiery eyes and huge monkey lips; things dressed in mere fringes of bark and leaves, and wearing necklaces of dogs' teeth and human teeth about their necks. Another crowd had collected about me, and six or seven were hanging round Bo, pinching his arms and legs. I do not think it was the trifling pain caused by this operation that induced our solitary carrier to howl as he did; probably he knew that the pinching betokened more interest, in his physical condition than a kindly hospitality could account for.

To be concluded next week

The First Woman Plumber

"HOW did I come to be a plumber?" laughs Mrs. S.C. Tallman, of Rutherford, New Jersey, when asked the secret of her unusual trade. "Why, it was just plumb fate drove me to it. I never wanted to be a plumber—I meant to be a teacher. Queer, how things get twisted, isn't it, now?

"It started, I suppose, when I was a very little girl, because I was always very observant and curious to know the reason of things. My grandfather was a shipbuilder, and, seeing how interested I was, he used to explain things to me—how to caulk a boat, what the tar piles were for, and things like that. Then, as I grew older, I had the same curiosity about more scientific things; and so, when I married at twenty-three,—my husband was a tinsmith,—I was all ready to look into that trade and see how it was done.

"My husband opened a little shop of his own the second year we were married, and I used to sit and watch him at work, because I always wanted to be where he was and took an interest in everything he did. We weren't doing so very well, until one day, when I was sitting in the house, rocking the baby, suddenly the sky seemed to grow dark in a queer sort of way. It kept getting darker and darker. I knew something was going to happen.

"I ran to the stairs and called to my husband, 'Bob, come quick and shut the front door. Something awful's going to happen.'

The Providential Cyclone

"HE hurried up, and almost before we knew it the cyclone was on us. It hit a house across the street, a two-story building, and laid it flat. Then it took off the roof of a house not twenty feet from us, jumped clean over our shop, and unroofed some buildings a block away.

"After it was all over and we had time to think, we saw that nearly every house in town had been unroofed, and we knew we should be kept busy. And we were.

"That was where I began; for we couldn't get enough men to do the work that kept coming in, and I had to take a hand. I used to go down in the shop and watch the men, and I soon learned to edge tin. The men would notch the sheets of tin, and I would edge them. I must have edged thousands of pieces. It is done by a machine, of course, but it is hard, tiring work. I used to hold the baby for a while, and then go down and edge more tin.

"Then, I liked to see what the men were doing; so, little by little, I learned how to do the larger things. I used to go down and practise at night when the men were gone, but I never let them know. I didn't want them to know I thought I'd ever have to do it. But my husband was never very strong, and I didn't know but I might have to help some day, so I wanted to be ready.

"Well, that day came too soon for me, and I found it was either take hold of the business or let the whole thing go. I had five children then, so I concluded to take hold."

How well Mrs. Tallman has taken hold all Rutherford knows. She holds a license to practise plumbing in half a

dozen towns in New Jersey, and is the only woman plumber in the world to hold a water license, which means that she is entitled to tap the mains of the Hackensack Water Company whenever she pleases. There isn't a joint, pipe, or plug in the plumbing business that she isn't familiar with; and she makes her own estimates, draws her own plans, and purchases her own supplies, to say nothing of keeping a set of books and managing her five or six men.

It was Mrs. Tallman who finally succeeded in inducing master plumbers to make their kitchen sinks higher, so that the average woman need not break her back leaning over them. "A master plumber is all very well," she declares; "but it takes a woman to know the exact angle at which another woman's back should bend over a sink."

Mrs. Tallman does not believe that women should be in business. "All honor to the woman who has to be," she says, "but business is too hard for a woman. Besides, it takes the spirit out of a man to watch a woman succeed where he has failed. At least, that is my experience. I would give up this work gladly, now that I have succeeded.

"Yes, I suppose I have prospered. I own several houses, a nice country place in Atlantic Highlands, with a garage and several motor-cars, and my children are all married and settled except two. I work pretty hard, but I enjoy it. I call myself a house surgeon now, since so many women call me in consultation.

"What do I do for amusement? Oh, I go down to the shop when the children are out, and take an engine to pieces, or try to invent a new heating system, just to see what I can develop. One of the gas logs in a house I own burns a red flame instead of a blue; so I'm looking into that just now to find out the reason. There's plenty of work in the plumbing business; but there's a lot of pleasure, too."

Dinner-Time on Pelican Island

PELICAN ISLAND, in the Indian River, Florida, has been set aside by the government as a reservation where pelicans can rear their young in complete safety from molestation by man.

This thrilling dinner scene was witnessed by a bird explorer who watched developments from an artfully constructed "blind." The mother, after having engulfed and swallowed many fish whole out on the lake, returned home.

Several fluffy young pelicans were waiting for her, croaking with impatience. The mother opened her vast beak, pointing it downward. The greediest of the children poked its head into the gaping leathery pouch.

No Harm Done

FARTHER and farther went the youngster until it had pushed its way beyond the beak and down the neck, and actually disappeared from sight. It seemed inevitable that some damage to either mother or child must result; but presently the nestling reappeared, quite happy after its bountiful repast of fish.

$300,000 Worth of Flies

THREE hundred thousand dollars' worth of flies—that is on the average what Alice Sherwin Coleman and her assistants are making every year.

Miss Coleman's flies have very little resemblance to the kind that American school children are taught to swat. They look like tropical flowers, so brilliant are they in color, and their names are as exotic as the rest of them: Hackled Queen of Waters, Blue-Bottled Dragon, Female Black Gnat, Jungle Beaver Kill, Split Wings, Natural Wing Mayflies re only a few. All these flies kiss the water from the end of a fishing-line, and each fascinating fly cunningly conceals a hook—share and sure as death.

For more than a decade, now, Miss Coleman has been making flies. When she began she did not know much about it, and there was no school where she could learn the art of making flies. A few hints and some vivid descriptions by veteran anglers, and the rest she had to work out herself.

Experience is as dear in fly-making as in any other undertaking. After heroically struggling to fill her first big order, it was a staggering blow to learn that the wings of two hundred dozen flies were not reliable—that they would come off! So those twenty-four hundred flies had one by one to be taken painstakingly apart and made over again. But in the remaking of those flies Miss Coleman became and expert fly-maker.

What the Flies Are Made of

EVERYTHING under the sun goes into the making of a fly. Rabbits' fur, deer hair, pigs' bristles, all kinds of feathers, camels' hair, peacock herl, silkworm gut from Spain, toothpick quills, wool, waxed silk, embroidery silk, and tinsel are some of the things.

Miss Coleman uses one large room for her factory. It does not look like any other manufacturing plant. A gorgeous mural decoration is furnished by bundles of peacock feathers which stand against the wall ready for use. Beautiful mallard and teal duck wings, dashed with vivid green, fill common flower-pots and merely wait to be served up, feather by feather.

The stock of the place, valued very highly, is filed away in cabinets. Choice feathers, like precious jewels, are folded in tissue paper and then put in envelops.

The Guinea-Hen's Tropical Feathers

ONCE feathers at a very reasonable price came from India, France, England, Spain, the tropics, everywhere abroad; but now, owing to trade restrictions and the war, Miss Coleman is forced to depend entirely on the United States for feathers. In consequence, she has become so adept in coloring chicken feathers that no one at a casual glance can detect that they are not from the rare birds of tropical forests. The feathers of the farm-yard guinea-hen have most successfully taken the place of these tropical feathers.

Miss Coleman makes three hundred varieties of flies regularly, summer and winter; and odd flies, special orders, bring the number up to fifteen hundred varieties altogether. These high-grade flies, which are in demand from the Atlantic to the Pacific, sell for $1.50 a dozen; but they are said to be worth it, for not infrequently a sportsman reports that one fly caught sixty or seventy fish.

Sometimes Miss Coleman is given decidedly original tasks to perform. Now and then a very exacting fisherman catches some of the flies that hover over a particular stream and sends them alive in a ventilated bottle, so that she may study and reproduce them accurately. But, be it house-fly, or horse-fly, or dragon-fly, or whatever fly in all the world there is, Miss Coleman seems to be able to duplicate it.

Own Your Own Sleeping-Car

LOOKS like a motor delivery wagon, but it isn't. For in this conveyance Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Day, of Lincoln, Nebraska, are speeding across the Western country to the Pacific coast, with all the thrills and exhilaration attendant upon life in the old-time prairie schooner, and with the added advantage of the speed of the modern automobile. Best of all, they are making the trip at little more expense than it would cost them to live at home. This innocent looking automobile has a real sleeping porch, and carries equipment for cooking along the way.

Some time ago, Mr. and Mrs. Day were thinking out a way to have a good three months' vacation. Mr. Day hit upon the plan of building a screened-in compartment on the back of his light automobile. This little porch is six feet long and four and a half feet wide—just the length and breadth of a comfortable bed. And that is exactly what it forms. Bed springs are laid across the bottom of the compartment, and there is as snug a screened-in place to sleep as could be found anywhere. In rainy weather water proof curtains are drawn down over the sides, so that the hardest storm has no terrors.

They Travel Without Trunks

THERE is no trunk, for all the clothes and tools are packed in a drawer just under the bed. All that is necessary is to pull out the drawer, as one would the drawer of a bureau. Mr. Day being something of a sportsman, a fun and fishing-tackle have their place in the equipment.

The only absolutely necessary expenses along the route are food and gasolene. since Mr. and Mrs. Day use the automobile about town when they are at home, the cost of additional gasolene is not appreciable. They are making the trip to the coast by way of Denver and Cañon City, Colorado, and Phœnix and Yuma, Arizona, and will return along the Lincoln highway. Mr and Mrs. Day are planning to use the same little car next year and on a sight-seeing trip to Yellowstone park.