How May I Improve My Complexion?

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

THERE are a number of causes for sallow complexion, and an equal number—or perhaps a few more—methods of "getting rid of it." If the skin is merely colorless and sallow, and the "whites" of the eyes remain unstained, the cause is usually anemia and sluggish circulation.

If, however, the whites of the eyes are yellow, it is more than likely that the condition is due to jaundice.

In very severe cases (the so-called "black jaundice'") the skin may darken to a bronze or greenish brown. And there is likely to be considerable itching of the skin, frequently accompanied by hives and boils.

Jaundice is usually caused by a catarrhal swelling of the gall-duct—the small duct that conveys the bile from the gall-bladder into the upper intestine. When this little tube (not much thicker than a lead pencil) is dammed up, the bile can not be properly excreted, and a considerable portion of it is absorbed into the circulation. This paints the skin saffron. It also produces the dejection, or even melancholia, that results from the toxic action of excess bile. In this condition the liver also develops pain and swelling.

Worry, mental shock, or fright are frequently responsible for jaundice. But the most common cause of this thickening of the gall-duct is malaria. A judicious avoidance of mosquito bites is the best preventive for this variety of jaundice, although quinine and other remedies—taken under a physician's direction may be necessary, if the bitten one fails to slap the mosquito in time. (Mosquitos, it is hardly necessary to say, are the first and only cause of malaria.)

Rules for Anemics

BUT if the sallowness be due to anemia, you must first cure the anemia. Eat plenty of good, wholesome food—including meat. And remember that lobster, ice-cream, candy, pickles, pie, and pudding should never be eaten at one meal. Also that tea and coffee, used in excess, darken the skin.

Get sufficient fresh air, day and night. Drink plenty of pure water. Leave alcohol for those who don't care what becomes of their health and complexions.

Avoid the rocking-chair habit, and cultivate instead the love for exercise—particularly exercise taken out-of-doors.

Loosen corset strings and remove the weight of constricting clothes. Secure plenty of refreshing sleep.

Keep all the physiological functions at concert-pitch; for to be clean outside, with the flush of a rose in the cheeks, it is absolutely necessary to be clean inside.

What More Could I Have Done?

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

I WAS not hasty before I invested," writes a painfully astonished reader who signs himself G. E. "About two months ago I made an investment in the ——— Company. At the present time it is in financial difficulties. Their rating in Dun and Bradstreet was AA1. I understand they were highly recommended by the ——— Bank. What could I have further done to protect myself?"

This is a pretty tough question to answer. It is one of the hardest that has ever come to me. The company in question was a large concern, with a steadily growing business. Now that it has fallen upon evil days, any one van see why its stock was a poor investment. Hindsight in financial matters is strikingly more common than foresight. By way of illustration, it is now pretty well established that the reason this particular company reported such big earnings year after year was because the expense that was incurred in placing certain lines of goods upon the market was carried as an asset even after those particular goods were no longer popular and salable.

In other words, the company did not set aside from its earnings enough to write off obsolete and worn-out goods. Thus the earnings appeared larger than they really were. But only the insiders knew that this species of gutting was going on,. and even financial experts who were otherwise suspicious of the stock had to admit grudgingly that the earnings were large. I do not know of any way to prevent "insiders"' from wrecking a company by failure to write off enough for depreciation, except perhaps where the Interstate Commerce Commission or some unusually strict public utilities commission has authority.

G. E. says he looked up the concern in Dun and Bradstreet, and he understood that a prominent bank spoke well of it. The true function of Dun and Bradstreet is to supply trade information, not that for the benefit of small investors. They indicate the amount of capital employed by a firm, and its general standing in its trade, which really means—and this is what the sub-scribers to Dun and Bradstreet want to know—whether the concern is prompt pay with dealers who sell it supplies, and so on. A company may have a big bank account, may pay its bills promptly, and yet its stock may prove a poor investment. In fact, often the most unscrupulous promoters keep the largest bank account and pay with the greatest promptitude, just to keep up a front.

As for the ——— Bank recommending this stock. probably what the bank really did—and this is all a bank reference frequently amounts to—was merely to state that the company kept a large account with it.

Three Signs of Danger

THE company was engaged in a profit-able, legitimate. and extensive business. But the president, not satisfied with his great success, promoted almost a score of other concerns in all manner of diverse. unrelated enterprises, many of them risky in the extreme. This was the first danger sign. The second appeared when it was learned that customers of the original successful company were being exhorted to buy stock in the new and as yet untried enterprises.

But the one symptom that made financial people most wary was a certain sensationalism, a certain yellowness, employed in selling stock. To illustrate, elaborate charts were published to show that the stock was better in every way than that of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Now, when a promoter tries to palm off his own wares by attacking standard, established institutions, it is a danger sign. If any one pointed out that reputable brokers and investment bankers never recommended the company's stock. the answer probably was that these brokers and bankers were jealous because the stock was being sold directly by the company instead of through them.

The failure of the ——— Company is a large subject, and can not he adequately covered in this short article. In general I should say to G. E.: The next time you make an investment, don't mistake the function of the commercial rating agencies; consult your own bank rather than rely on the purported indorsement of some other bank, which may mean much or little; and, finally, it is a pretty safe rule that any stock is dangerous whose promoters use up much white paper in denouncing established financial institutions.

One Minute with the Editor

We Really Mean It

READ the announcement with which we open our new serial story on the opposite page. It means exactly what it says. There is $500 waiting for the first man, woman, or child who foretells the solution of this remarkable mystery. No one is barred, and we extend a special invitation to Mr. William J. Burns.

How was Mrs. Fisher murdered, and by whom?

Changing Styles in Love

WE have just gathered together a dozen pictures showing how love used to be made on the stage and how love is made to-day. Talk about the efficiency of modern methods! These pictures prove it. We'll have them ready in a couple of weeks.

The Rest of Us Do It Sometimes

DEAR EDITOR: In a recent story one of your authors speaks of the "four richest women" in the world. Of course there can be only one richest woman.

Right. And do you know that Charles Dickens in one of his novels has Captain Cuttle put both hands to his mouth and give a lusty "Haloo!"—forgetting entirely that the gallant tar had lost both hands two chapters before?

The Real Original Deadwood Dick

By WALT MASON

THE years have flown—three score and ten—since into this gray world of men came Deadwood Dick, to play his game and win a large enduring fame, to thrill the souls of countless boys with tales of frontier griefs and joys.

There have been many plated bricks who advertised as Deadwood Dicks—base imitations of the one who has his trophies by the ton, who at Los Angeles reclines beneath his fig-trees and his vines, and sees again through golden haze the swaying coach of olden days.

He sits and fishes from a pier, the while he lives o'er yester-year; and he will talk of many things,—of cabbages, perhaps, and kings, —and he will talk about the crops, or of the goods they sell in shops, of poets who have punched the lyre, or of the navy we require; but if you ask him for it tale of days when he was young and hale, the hero of a hundred scraps, the conversation's full of gaps. He'll talk of most things good and quick, but hates to talk of Deadwood Dick.

Perchance, if you have made a hit, he'll tell a yarn before you quit, of how, as guard, he sat beside the driver on the coach-seat wide, a loaded gull in either fist—the good old gun that never missed—and kept his wary eagle eye upon the landscape they passed by—that eye upon the roadside heist, quite anxious to behold the gent who might, with base, ignoble rage, desire to loot the Deadwood stage.

"I carried gold enough that way," you hear the hero mildly say, "upon those divers ancient trips, to build a fleet of battleships. Once in a fortnight I would go, unless the roads were blocked with snow; Dakota highways were the worst o'er which a driver ever cursed. No good roads movements were on deck, and every acre was a wreck. Dead bulls were strewn along the track—they started out and ne'er got back."

Then Deadwood Dick, before he hikes,—if you're the kind of guy he likes,—may show you his collection grand of weapons, greatest in the land. All kinds of' guns are huddled there: the kind our grandsires used to wear, and swords and other things that kill, when they are wielded with a will.

Thus, fishing from the sunlit piers, he spends his cal, declining years, an aged man, but blithe and quick—the "one and only" Deadwood Dick.

Behind the Bolted Door?

By ARTHUR E. McFARLANE

Illustrations by Henry Raleigh

"WONDERFUL, Holmes, wonderful!" said Judge Bishop. "Sherlock, you astonish me!"

The Judge was a big man. He looked like Tom Reed, and he laughed like him.

Laneham grinned the tight-lipped grin of challenged battle, and worked the car through into snow-pyramided Broadway.

"Take Zancray's postulate, too," said he. "Zancray says that practically never does any friend of the victim tell every-thing. Either for his own good, or for the good name of the gentleman murdered, the helpful friend will always hold out something. Learn what those hold-outs are, Zancray shows, and five times out of six you will have the solution of your mystery."

"All right," laughed the Judge. "Bring on old Doc Zancray, and we'll give him a job."

In their professions they were both of them big men. Laneham, alert, trim, professionally vandyked, possessed among neuropaths a name fast becoming international. The other man, smooth, dew-lapped, benign, was Judge Fulton Bishop, lately of the Appeals Bench, at present of the notable firm of Bishop, Potter & Bishop, and soon—with the morrow and the New Year—to be the great city's new District Attorney.

They were big men. But, being old friends and Americans, their manner to each other was almost exactly that of two kidding sophomores. And they were on their way up to Laneham's winter bungalow in Westchester to see the year out fitly, playing Kelley pool.

Why, then, had the Doctor branched off on so deep a subject? First, because, as a genuine representative of the newest medicine, "psychanalysis," he thoroughly believed in it. Second, because he knew well it was one of Bishop's fighting subjects; and he was now availing himself of the occasion to explain to the Judge at length, and with all the necessary proofs, why the newest medicine must, in the scientific future, become the sole and logical medium for the detection of crime.

With determination he continued: "Did you ever stop to ask yourself, for instance, why people are sent to medicos of my particular sort at all?"

"Often. Oh, often."

"They're sent because, while not crazy in any ordinary sense,—most of them are a good deal too keen,—they have morbid psychoses: from certain troubles in their bodies, their minds are kinked. And when we've had 'em under observation for a while, they begin to hang out signs that tell us all about it. Well, your criminal—at any rate, at the moment of his crime—is simply a johnny with a kink. For the competent psychist he leaves his signs behind him. And any of us worth his salt ought to be able to take those signs and reconstruct him."

"As to how?"

"Why, tell you lawyer bats how he'll most likely try to make his get-away, of course, and whether he's going to come back again; how he'll try to cover up, and what sort of evidence he's going to destroy. Take that one thing alone: the sort of evidence destroyed—' the evidence in the destruction of evidence,' as we say—is one of the things that begin to differentiate morbid kinks at once."

"Hellup! Hellup!" cried the Judge; but Laneham would not be swerved.

"Or take the detective-bureau examination," he continued. "In place of a bullying, elephant-footed third degree, sometime you may come to realize the possibilities of the confrontation—the French are using it already—of auto-suggestion, of hypnosis, or even of a well controlled trance and medium."

BISHOP lifted his legal hands and waved as if for aid.

"Or go back again to the arrest. When the regulation present-order detective makes it, in general he thinks he knows from the prisoner's actions in the first half minute whether he is innocent or

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guilty. But could he offer a jury any valid reasons for his belief? Never. Yet I suppose I could offer you half a dozen, and every one of them cleanly and basically scientific."

"Laney, "—the Judge gave in,—"there's only one thing for it. The first dark, bloody mystery of crime that comes my way—!"

"All right!" Laneham smiled brightly and grimly. "And, granted the leisure, I think I'd pretty near take you up."

"Gad!" said Bishop, falling back into fat reflection. "We might easily find use for you, at that. For we've surely got to get rid of MeGloyne."

"McGloyne?"

"Our chief of detectives."

"Oh, yes. Crooked?"

The Judge heaved his Tom-Reedian dew-lap from his collar points, and blew.

"Or just stupid. And he tries to get away with it by playing Hell-Roaring Jake to the gallery."

"Naturally."

"But Boyce—the Police Commissioner, you know—is greasing the ways for him right now, and we won't mar the hour by dwelling any more upon him."

He looked up into the high, blue, popcorn-clouded sky, and filled his lungs luxuriously with air that was still clean-washed from the morning's snow.

"Some day, old man; some day!"

Laneham missed a five-ton truck by half an inch; and his face showed that it was a thing he enjoyed doing.

"You say you've got to stop and see Mrs. Fisher," he said. "Why?"

"Heaven knows. I only got her note at three. And when I telephoned her apartment then, no one seemed to be on the 'phone. But I've always had her private business. It's right on our way—the Casa Grande—and I won't let her keep me more'n a jiff."

"It's all right—it's all right. And I'll have to run in to 390 to make sure I'm clear myself."

"If it hadn't been Miss Daphne Hope's afternoon off, I'd have had her go up and take care of her."

"Ah, Miss D. Hope!"

And thereupon, and with obvious pleasure, they began to talk of her.

"Has she enough law yet for suffrage purposes?"

"Enough? She's running the whole office now! We just stick around to make things legal."

"And has she ever told you exactly why she left Atlanta? Quarreled with her dad because he had too much money or something like that, didn't she?"

"Something like that. He's the boss employer of child labor in those parts. And when D. Hope awakened to that fact, she gave him his ultimatum, disinherited herself between lunch and dinner, and came on here to live for a dollar a day and board at the Hudson Street Settlement. Spirit of the century, my son—spirit of the century!"

And then they found themselves stalled behind some live hundred other cars by the snow-cleaners' wagons and the new subway work at Fourteenth Street. And for a time they could not talk, not even of Miss D. Hope.

WHAT they didn't know was that, less than an hour before, the young woman herself had been seeing a young man into the old subway station at Fourteenth Street. And if she herself was not going up to Mrs. Fisher's and the Casa Grande, the young man was.

He was thin and dark, with the long under jaw of war and humor. And he wore a pair of large, round, black-rimmed glasses, which from his boys' club in that Hudson Street Settlement had promptly won him the name of "Owly." His other name was Willings—Walter Willings.

As for Miss D. or Daphne Hope,—it was "D. Hope" that she signed herself,—she was, first of all, exceedingly good to look at. But details of that sort can he left till later. She was, secondly and obviously, of the new or muscular type of femininity. Being born to tennis and golf and motoring and surf-bathing and mountain-climbing may, as is well known, damage one fearfully in some ways. But it like-wise leaves one with a physique that can not be seriously injured even by a year of Hudson Street. Thirdly, she was, at the present moment, very much in earnest. It was clear that "Owly" Willings had some sort of mission with Mrs. Fisher that afternoon, and with anxiety she was giving him final counsel.

"And don't, above all things," she commanded, "don't feel that you're asking too much."

"Trust me, D. Hope. I intend to he very firm and direct with her."

"Firm and direct? What do you mean?"

"Sure; something like this." And he began to throw it into melodrama.

"'Madam,' I hiss, 'we must have one hundred thousand dollars, and at once!' 'What, one hundred thousand dollars? But if I can not?' 'Then death-th-th!' Business of choking and death rattle. 'And your justly famous azur-r-re pear-r-ls!''

"Mr. Willings!" D. Hope looked at him half like a baffled big sister, half with the expression of the woman who sees again in a man the thing that made her like him first. But a young patrolman, almost at her elbow, had evidently over-heard. He was staring at them wonderingly. And, dropping her voice, she could only say: "It'd just serve you right if you suddenly got nervous aphasia, or whatever it is, and actually found yourself saying something like that, up there."

"Oh, I'm nervous enough now, inside."

And at that they both became serious again.

"Well, then," said the girl downrightly, "you just needn't be. I know, from the way Mrs. Fisher spoke last week, that she's going to do it. All she'll ask is how much we need."

"And you're making me go alone to give me all the glory of it!"

Which she immediately began to deny. But at last he said good-by and descended those Fourteenth Street subway stairs.

For all his outward jesting, the journey on which he was launched was one that with reason made his heart pound rapidly. After weeks of conclave and planning, this was the end: He, Mr. "Owly" Willings, was on his way formally to ask that rich Mrs. Hansi Fisher of the Casa Grande for the endowment—more than $100,000 might be needed—which would alone enable Hudson Street Settlement, his home as well as D. Hope's, to go on with its work untrammeled. A hundred thousand dollars—and he meant to get it too.

MEANWHILE Dr. Henry Laneham and Judge Fulton Bishop had entered the triple traffic lines of the rippling, gonging Avenue. And their talk, too, was again of that same Mrs. Hansi Fisher.

"But I hadn't any idea," the Judge was saying, "that your practice ever took you to Mrs. Fisher's apartment."

"It's years since I've even seen her," replied the Doctor; "and she's changed a good deal lately, hasn't she?"

"Changed! Yes; but it's merely your woman evolution in another phase; this time the big, wealthy, idle, childless one who at last has found herself."

He waggled greetings at some one in a landaulet.

"A few years ago, I remember, her whole world was jewelry."

"Oh, yes; you mean when she bought those famous azure pearls. Well, she's incorrigibly romantic still. You never know where she'll break out next. But now, thanks largely to Miss Daphne Hope, she's spending her money on 'the cause,' and factory inspection, and fresh-air funds and prison reform! She won't even have a servant on the premises now who isn't 'prison gate.' She has only two at present—the Casa Grande service takes care of almost everything; but her two—an Englishman and an Italian maid, I believe—have both done time!"

"Fine! I like that."

"And, by the way, you'll have to come in with me, if it's only to see Jimmy."

"Jimmy?"

"The man. A sort of general-utility butler, a little Cockney. He's not only under-sized, but he wears a mrstache, and he calls me 'Judge your lordship.'"

"Ha!"

"Then, too, there's the new swimming-pool. You'll have to see that."

"No," said Laneham; "I won't go in even to see the new swimming-pool. My only call is here."

They had swung across town, turned into West Seventy-second Street, and stopped at 390, the Doctor's city house.

HE let himself out. "There's always the chance," he explained again, "of something having been sent on at the last moment from the office."

And, evidently, something had been.

The Judge could see that, even from the car. For Miss Hunt, the doctor's assistant, had come out and met Laneham with her call-book.

When the Doctor turned back, it was with an expression wholly nonplussed.

"Well, Laney," asked Bishop, "what is it? What is it?"

"I think I could give you five million guesses, and then be safe."

A look of curious presentiment flashed across the Judge's face.

"Laney," he cried, "you don't mean to say that you've been called to Mrs. Fisher's too!"

"You've hit it the first time, Bish."

"Lord—and it was a 'hurry,' too, wasn't it?"

"Oh, yes, it was a hurry all right; but you mustn't let that trouble you. They're all hurries, over the 'phone."

The Judge was already starting the machine.

"Get in," he called. "You just said you wouldn't go into the Casa Grande with me, and now you've got to go. Lord, what do you suppose has happened? Didn't your office give you any particulars?"

"No, but Miss Hunt didn't get the message direct, of course. It was sent from the office downtown."

He threw the clutch into high, and the car leaped forward into the snowy drive. Both men sat tense and silent for a moment, each with a presentiment which he would have found it impossible to explain. Finally the silence grew unbearable.

"What's Fisher doing now—her husband?" asked the Doctor. "He sold his patent-medicine business, didn't he?"

"Oh, yes; and now he busies himself managing the estate, as he calls it. But with that patent-medicine face of his—"

"See much of him now?"

"He's been down at the office all day. And he's taking Potter, my partner, home with him to dinner."

In the falling dusk they pushed rapidly on up to the big Riverside block formed by the great twin apartment houses, the Casa Reale and the Casa Grande.

The Fishers had seventeen rooms on the ninth floor of the Casa Grande, or, more accurately, on the ninth and tenth; for their apartment was "duplex." Stepping from the swiftly moving elevator, the Doctor followed Bishop down fifty yards of the padded French-gray corridor that led to the right.

They stopped at the Fishers' door and rang. As they rang both could have sworn that they heard some one passing along the corridor behind the door. Yet minute followed minute, and the ring remained unanswered.

It was Laneham who pressed the button a second time.

"Considering that, after all, it was a hurry call—" he began.

Again some one seemed to approach, and again to turn back or go on again.

"Really, this is absurd!" said Bishop impatiently, giving the button a vigorous push. Far back in the servants' quarters they could hear a faint ring.

And, this time, the door was opened.

It was opened by Jimmy, a pale, nervous-looking little Britisher. And, even in the half darkness of that inner hall, the explanation of his delay was plain enough. He had been changing into his street clothes; and, at the last moment, he had apparently been trying to choke himself into his tie—it was still awry. He was swallowing whitely and spasmodically.

"I beg y' pardon, Judge your lordship," he gasped; "but I thought as the maid— It's rightly' 'er afternoon on the door—'

"All right, Jimmy, all right. So long as we've seared you a-plenty. And how's the good lady?"

"I'll see, sir. If you'll just go in, sir. I'll see." And, taking their cards, he started hastily toward the mezzanine—the floor above.

"I should say there's nothing very much to he anxious over," said Laneham, and turned to the windows.

THEY heard themselves announced. And then Jimmy came down the stairs again—as they thought, to switch on the lights, for the dusk was deeper now. Outside, another snow squall, black as a thunder-cloud, was blowing up. And the big, beamed, Jacobean living-room was fast becoming like night itself.

But the man went on past their door, and back to the service rooms beyond.

"After candles, no doubt," explained Bishop. "She's always had a pretty taste in things like that."

Still they waited, while the room grew dark.

Two, three, five minutes passed, and no candles came. Nor did any maid come down to bring a message from Mrs. Fisher; nor was there any sign of Jimmy.

In a darkness every moment growing deeper, they still waited.

There was something uncanny about it all—the great silent room, the slow gathering darkness, the desertion of the little ex-convict butler. They were both men of action: they hated suspense. They began to stride back and forth in the room. It was Laneham who finally spoke.

"Well, Jove," he said, "if this is a sample of your prison-gate service—"

The Judge took it a bit sheepishly. "I suppose I can find a switch without him," he said.

He began running his hand along the wall, but his fingers failed of their object. The Doctor turned and walked back to the windows.

"It would seem from the silence," he said, "that every one has gone to—"

And then, suddenly, his voice took on a startled note.

"Well, by the Lord! Bishy, will you look here!"

He was pointing out of the window and downward. On the other side of the street a man, carrying an overcoat and a suit-ease, was half running toward the Avenue. And, even at that distance and through

---

the snow, the figure was unmistakable. It was that of their little Cockney butler.

Both men gasped, and in the deep shadow looked searchingly into each other's eyes.

"Well," said Bishop at last, but unconvincingly, "he said it was his day off."

Laneham looked at him.

"With or without the silver?"

"Nonsense. The little devil's honest enough. But I'll go up and try to locate the lady myself."

Again, though, he tried first, and Laneham with him, to find the switch buttons. But it was concealed wiring, and it kept its secret.

"Bother it!" cried the Judge; and, half groping, he mounted the stairs.

"Mrs. Fisher!" he called. "Mrs. Fisher!"

There was no answer. And, still groping, he laid his hand upon the nearest door.

Even as he touched the door, from the inside it was quietly and deliberately locked.

The sinister speaks to every sense at once. The Judge's hand dropped. He felt himself grow cold.

"Mrs. Fisher," he called again—"Mrs. Fisher! It's I—Judge Bishop."

Again, in a silence that had become death-like, his call was unanswered.

But, a few steps farther on, he made out a second door.

He stumbled on to it, reached it, lifted his hand; and even as he touched the knob, its lock, turned from the other side, clicked smoothly fast.

Some one inside who would not answer a call, some one who was not Mrs. Fisher, and who apparently had his own reasons for wanting to keep them out—some one had shut and bolted two doors in the faces of the two men.

"Doctor!" cried the Judge. He could not now entirely control his voice. "Doctor, will you come up here? Or, no; first find a 'phone and call the house!"

"I'm doing it," Laneham answered from the floor below, where the servants' quarters were. "And, Bish—I say, Bish, there's something wrong, I tell you! Both your English Jimmy and your Italian maid have cleared out, bag and baggage!"

The Judge hardly heard him. In the creeping darkness at the end of that little upper hall, there was still a third door. And, his skin rising in goose-flesh, he got himself on to it.

For the third time, as he reached it, there came the same soft and horrid click. That third door was locked! In a sheer nervous reaction he threw himself against it. It was too much for flesh and bone to bear.

"Mrs. Fisher!" he cried once more. "We're right here! And we'll be inside in a moment.. Oh, Mrs. Fisher!"

If he was no longer muscular, he was a big and heavy man. And he put all his heaving weight behind his drive. But the door was of solid, bronze-set oak, and his first attempt showed him the futility of this.

By then, too, somewhere below, Laneham had found a telephone. The Judge heard him speaking: "Yes—yes. . . . The Fisher apartment. . . . On the ninth, I tell you. Are you deaf or foolish! . . . And get an officer—a policeman!"

Again and again—cold sweat beading him—the Judge hurled himself against that third door.

"Whoever you are," he cried, "I warn you that at least you can't get out! Doctor," he gasped over his shoulder, "will you watch the stairs? It's his only way. Lord, if we only had a little light!"

BUT help was coming now. At the end of the long outside corridor elevators were stopping. And to the Doctor's voice there were adding themselves half a dozen more.

Above them all rose the voice of a woman—a woman half hysterical.

"I knew it!" she kept repeating. "I knew it! And how I could ever be such a fool! But I told myself it might be just some sort of argument. as you might say, between Mrs. Fisher and a servant. And

you know how it is if you go shoving into a thing like that!"

"Laneham," the Judge's voice boomed down among them, "will you come up here—at once!"

At last the Doctor seemed to get himself away.

"It's all right, old man. We'll be with you now in a shake. Some of you boys find'the light switches. Two of you—you two—stay down here at the foot of the stairs. And the rest of you—"

"Boss," —a hallman was speaking,—"we cain't find the switches! Mrs. Fisher, suh, the way she had these here lights connected—"

Then the hysterical woman began again: "I couldn't hear what she was saying. But the other person, whoever it was,—and I never heard any voice like that before,—just kept saying, "See!—See!—See!" to raise your hair. And after that, "No, no, no!" so fast, like they was dying of it!"

"Doctor," cried Bishop again, "for God's sake! Never mind the lights. Never mind anything else. Get those boys up here and help me force a door!"

"We're comin', boss; we'll be right there!"

And soon, stumbling and jostling one another, half a dozen West Indian hall-men and elevator-boys were putting themselves against all the doors.

They moved them no more than had the Judge himself.

"I guess we sure got to have some tools for it, boss," one of them gasped. "It's a job for the superintendent or the engineer. "

"Get them then," cried the Judge. "Get them!"

In his turn, the Doctor began to call: "Mrs. Fisher! Mrs. Fisher!"

But they had given up hope of getting any answer.

OUTSIDE, another elevator was stopping. And this time came a new voice, panting and anxious: "Why, I was here only an hour ago. And I've just found that an envelop—some money she'd left for me, for our Settlement—had been tampered with. But I'd made up my mind—I'd come back, anyway. Something was queer when I was here. Only I wouldn't let myself—believe it. I never saw her— And just when I was leaving—"

The Doctor turned in amazement, stirred by a certain familiarity in the voice. In the thick gloom, he made out a white, firm face. The newcomer who was protesting so earnestly that he had left Mrs. Fisher's apartment only an hour before was Walter Willings.

The minutes seemed to the Judge like hours. How inefficient humanity is when thrown face to face with a crisis! Behind those doors might be happening God only knew what, and they were forced to stand there outside—

"How long, how long!" he muttered. "How long?"

And in his nervousness he went to the head of the stairs.

"Will you, whoever you may be down there—will you please he quiet for a moment! Laneham—all of you—listen! Can you hear anything in there now?"

All fell unbreathingly to silence. And then, halting them where they stood, from far within, and as if given by the muffled. bony hand of death itself, an unaccountable knocking could he heard.

A sound of somebody, or something, that moved stealthily, and of a door that opened. Then, sounding nearer, that hand knocked a second time.

Rap—rap—rap—

A third time, still nearer, it sounded. And then from behind that locked door, hollowly, sighingly, moaningly,—one would have said a soul being led already to everlasting torture,—there breathed out to them: "Oh, God—oh, my God, my God!"

AT the foot of the stairs the woman in hysterics uttered shriek on shriek.

"Down with those doors!" shouted Bishop. "Down with them, some way!"

But as, shaken and quivering, once more he hurled his flaccid hulk against the nearest one, suddenly a wafty reek of oil and engine grease came up to them. And—"All, right, Cap," called some one thickly. "Comin'! Comin'!"

It was the engineer.

`"Here's an E. P. man—an Electric Protection officer—too, Cap." he puffed. "They've just had a wire alarm—from the inside. Some one tryin' to crack the jew'lry box."

The "E. P." man—he looked like a bicycle patrolman—was lighting the way with a pocket flash.

"Have you—have you a weapon with you?" asked the Judge.

For answer the man turned the light on his other hand and showed it.

"Good! And we're all of us with you—all of us with you!"

The man of oil and grease had brought a sledge. "Just hold the light steady, now, Cap," he said, "on that there lock."

He swung. With a snapping crash of bolt and casing, the door fell open.

"Some of youse fellers stay outside." The hall-men were very willing to.

Meanwhile, following the little wheeling searchlight, the others found themselves looking here and there in Mrs. Fisher's morning-room.

Clearly, it was empty and deserted.

"All right, Bill," said the E. P. man. "Come on to the next."

The next room was a library.

"Nobody here!"

From the library there opened—the last of the suite in that direction—a tiny paneled writing-room.

"Nothin' doin' here, neither. Nor no place for him to hide!"

They took hold of themselves again, and turned back to the rooms on the right.

"You boys stay on the door now. An', Colonel, ready with your little joker!"

The first room on the right was the bedroom; the second, Mrs. Fisher's dressingroom. Both alike were ordered and undisturbed, clean and fragrant.

The third, and in that direction the last, was the big "two-floor" room that contained the swimming-pool. Its door was closed.

"All right, bo's, he's in there. He's got to be!"

"Ain't no other way out?"

"Only to the hall. An' it's covered now, twice over."

"Then come along."

The E. P. patrolman opened the door just wide enough to admit his weapon.

"Come out of it now, friend. We've got you lined!"

There was no answer, and he pushed inside. For once, too, there was a switch button at the door, and he threw it on. Above the pool itself—for which the rest of the room was merely a frame and setting—hung a great, closed, moon-like alabaster bell, glowing with electric bulbs. Its light shone softly down through the quiet water, bringing out every blue and white tile of floor and walls, and throwing a heavy shadow from the lip-like marble brim of the pool, which rose some two feet above the floor itself. To the right, the alcove of a big bay window was screened by a wide stand of plants. The E. P. man turned to the left, and started around them pool.

Scarcely had he taken three steps when he stopped. His face blanched. He reached out to a near-by pillar for support.

"It's here!" he gasped.

Slowly, step by step, as if fascinated by the sight before him, he began to look away. For on the floor at his feet, and almost beneath the creamy, curving brim of the pool, was one great iridescent, crimson blot. And more of that terrible stain led them on and around those screening plants.

ON a low rattan sun-couch in the alcove lay the body of Mrs. Fisher, clothed and girdled in her bath-robe. Her temple had been crushed in by some small round implement. Her throat was blue-black, banded, and horridly tumid. Upon the whiteness of her left arm, where her sleeve had fallen back, were other markings, only too clearly made by fingers. And she had been dead, Laneham told them, for probably two hours.

But that was only a part of it.

The door from the swimming-pool to the hall was locked. The key was on the inside. Every door in the apartment was locked; every window. And whatever hand had knocked, whoever had called so terribly upon his God, no detailed searching, taken up again and again from doors to windows and from windows to every closet and corner where a man might hide, revealed either murderer or madman, or any way in which he could have made his escape!

To be continued next week

The Tale of the Tip

By EDWARD HUNGERFORD

"You Americans—you do not know how to tip. You are generous—yes. But that is all. You do not give as those who are to the manor born."

So complained an elegant Englishman sitting in his London club a year or more ago—in those days when Englishmen had time and thought for little elegancies.

In that ranting of a Briton, in his role of preacher, there is a measure of truth. We do not tip either easily or gracefully—at least, those of us who have not had the advantage of repeated round trips to Europe. Even some of these are our worst offenders.

We Do Our Tipping Cheerfully

YET we have an excuse. The tip is not at heart an American institution. It is an exotic—transplanted. There are some who call it by far harder names. But these are not accepted. A "good sport," in the real Yankee sense, does not scold at tipping. He accepts it—grinningly if resignedly—just as he accepts a tedious rain on the day of the big game or a three-point drop of a temperamental market in his favorite but thin-margined stock. If we Americans do not tip as do those to the purple born, we do it magnificently and cheerfully—which is more than the average Britisher does.

As an institution transplanted, the tip has been carefully nurtured by those very persons who expected to gather its most luscious fruit. Just recall the last time you went into a barber-shop and handed the cashier girl the "two bits" for your

fifteen-cent shave. Did she hand you back a crisp little dime? She did not. She gave you back two nickels. She saw that you had already handed a dime to the man who committed the bloodless crime upon your jowls, and she gave you the two nickels for a purpose.

For how can Tony, the irrepressible wielder of the whisk, ever marry dark-eyed Bennita, who lives in the tenement high over the fruit store, without a pocket full of jingling gold pieces? Tony has no salary. Like his fellow citizen's, the pocketless, uniformed, sad-eyed youth or girl who cheeks your hat at the door of the restaurant, his life is a perpetual brigand-age. And the cashier is forced to become his abettor, just as the restaurant cashier becomes the accomplice of the waiter, and so ingeniously plans the change that you are held between the rank extravagance of a quarter tip or the bald meanness of a badly battered buffalo nickel.

The Coat-Room Scandal

THE scandal of the coat-room has been exposed long since. It has been discovered that a man who is a habitual patron of those places who frown upon their customers bringing their "lids" into the dining-room, in a fortnight practically duplicates the original cost of a good derby. Yet the sad-eyed youth or girl who stands as guardian of the gate does not gain the value of the lid. Oh, no—no, indeed. We have just mentioned the fact that their uniforms are pocketless. And there is a low limit to the amount of dirty coin that one may hold in one's mouth for any considerable period of time. Moreover, the padrone, who keeps a watchful eye on the little box that becomes heavy through the cheery tingle of the tipping dimes, keeps an eye on bulgy cheeks as well.

That is the scandal. The sad-eyed child does not really receive the tip. He is the middleman. Only, he does not share the traditional prosperity of the middleman. The padrone takes good care as to that. He has paid the restaurateur a round sum for the privilege of taking toll from the pockets of his guests. And, if it is a hotel, the cheery innkeeper may have sold the porterage privilege as well. It is often done. In such a way has the casual tip, formerly the expression of a personal satisfaction in service rendered, become commercialized and standardized.

It is only fair to say, however, that there are many hotel-keepers who do not stoop to this sort of thing. But there are the others. You yourself know them.

How Louis Hill Taught His Porters a Lesson

THERE are porters in the old shell of a union station at St. Paul who well recall Mr. Louis Hill's anger one day when an aged woman, poorly dressed and burdened with luggage, came into the place from an arriving train. The porters did not see her. They sometimes do not see her kind. But they saw Hill—the old man's son is a conspicuous figure in the Twin Cities. And they saw the president of the Great Northern Railroad go across the concourse, pick up the woman's baggage, and carry it after her until she had boarded a street-car. After which he returned, and the standard color of "red-cap" porters in the big station became several shades lighter.

And when one thinks of tips and porters he must think of the Pullman service—of the six thousand parlor-cars and sleeping-cars in which six thousand negroes daily stand, smiling and expectant. The Pullman porter's tip has narrowly escaped being an issue. TheFederal Industrial Relations Commission recently gave it several days of sharp scrutiny, and the proportions of the passenger's contribution to the living cost of the sable-skinned attendant of the Pullman chariot was shown to be high. The company paid him from $27.50 to $40 a month—the passengers from two to three times that amount. Yet the investigation brought forth no outcry—no burst of popular indignation. The tip is too firmly transplanted to be uprooted, even by a Federal commission with penitentiary powers. And we Yankees are pretty good sports, after all—even if we have to say it ourselves.

One often hears stories of the fortunes that have had their beginnings in the careful hoarding of tips, of hotel porters and headwaiters who have become small princes, not alone through the steady putting away of quarters and half dollars, but quite as much through whispered advice given by kind friends on the "inside" of the real estate or the stock market. Each of the old fellows who used to tend the elliptical food-counter in the lobby of the Astor House in New York was reputed a Croesus. And one of the pet newspaper yarns in that town is that of the head waiter in a big uptown hotel (the name is never given) who found a former patron and giver of tips—both cash and market advice—"broke," and put him on his financial feet once again.

As a rule, these stories are much exaggerated, as the man said when a flip reporter brought him a telegraphic report of his death. The average tip-taker does not die a richer man than the tip-giver. They are good livers, and they must practise what they preach.

The head barber in a big Chicago shop turned to me the other day, when a customer had just left his chair, and said: "There's the most generous patron that walks into this place. Every man is anxious to get hold of him."

"What's his business?" I asked. "He's head waiter at the ——— Hotel over on Michigan Avenue."

The head barber waited a moment, then laughed: "He gets it back. When I take the missus there after the show, I know enough to slip him an iron man or two. It's tit for tat, you know."

Of course it is tit for tat. And, while there are a few branches of service that have the old-fashioned Yankee habit of disdaining tips,—among these bartenders, shop clerks, trolley-men, railroad conductors, telephone operators,—yet they are growing fewer each year. And the tip each year grows more nearly universal. If you are entertained in even the simplest of homes, tips to the servants are in order—your hostess may be trembling in fear that they may not be forthcoming. The man in the garage demands backsheesh for taking even ordinary care of your car; the manicure, the masseuse, the bootblack, the baggagemen, the theater usher—many, many others share the Pullman man's idea that a tip is degrading only to the one who gives it—when it is not large enough.

There is nothing degrading in the tip that comes as the outspoken and spontaneous recognition of good service rendered. But, alas, not all tips come under this classification.

For there are tips that are sinister, tips that are not honest, tips that are, to use a plain word plainly, graft. A man riding home on an Eastern railroad not long ago

had this last sort brought home to him in a vivid fashion. He was tired when he boarded the night train, and was disappointed at finding all the lower berths sold or engaged. He did not like upper berths; few folks do. And he handed the Pullman conductor a crisp dollar bill, with a whispered request to see if he could not find a lower before bedtime. The conductor accepted the dollar and said that he would see what he could do in the matter. And a little later the traveling salesman had his lower—Lower Four.

Before he retired, the salesman had his good-night cigar in the smoking compartment, and there fell into a brisk conversation with one of his fellow travelers. The other was a French Canadian, a parish priest making his first trip in "the States" —a delightful little old man to whom travel was a novelty and a delight.

"But I do not understand one thing," said the priest. "I thought that I had purchased a lower berth at Montreal, and just now the porter tells me that it was a mistake; I have an upper berth instead."

The drummer looked at him quizzically.

"What berth did you think you had purchased, father?" he asked.

"Lower Four was the berth they told me."

The drummer spoke up quickly.

"There was a mistake," he said. "You are going to have Lower Four, and I am going to take your upper. No, no; I would really rather have it."

The Tip Sinister

HIS tip was in the same class as the tip of the man who goes into a theater and tries to engage a seat higher in price than the one for which he holds a ticket by the simple process of bribing an usher with a quarter of a dollar. For the tip sinister is almost invariably a bribe—graft in its most insidious form. And it almost invariably hits some innocent third party. That is the tip that men hate—and should despise it. It is the thoroughly un-American tip—the absolutely inexcusable one. It is the form of gratuity to which the legislatures of Mississippi and Oklahoma and Wisconsin, or any of the other States that are trying to bring the tip under the ban of statute law, should devote their energies. It is useless to try to make an outcast of the honest tip given as a reward for honest service rendered. That vine is too firmly transplanted now for any complete uprooting. And, even though transplanted, it has become one of our solid institutions. As such, it can not be torn away either quickly or easily.

Where the Lightning Struck

By MARION PUGH READ

Illustrations by Wilson Dexter

WHEN word came back to Little Stoney that Arch Chappell had been killed in the mine at Benham, Betts Nolan was her own judge and jury. "I kilt him," she said; and from her verdict she admitted no appeal. In vain Little Stoney, mourning him as its "prettiest" boy and its cleverest woodsman, strove to mitigate her harshness against herself.

"'Twasn't you kilt him," old Uncle Sol reiterated patiently for the hundredth time. "'Twas a combustion o' them 'ere gases in the mine."

"If 'twasn't fer me he'd never ha' been in the mine," she returned. And to that Little Stoney had no answer.

The last person on Little Stoney to see him was Mary Blanten, at dawn of the morning after the dance that followed an all-day log-rolling. She had just come out from her little cabin at the foot of the mountain, to gather wood for her morning fire. She called out to him, but he never turned around. She didn't think anything of it at the time, but afterward she remembered. Every one remembered afterward.

The men remembered how all day long at the log-rolling he had worked as ten men, felling the trees, hewing the logs, and steering them on their course down the mountain-side. They remembered how, in the little intervals of rest, when they chaffed him about his hopeless passion for Betts, he had smiled.

"She's a-comin' here to the dance to-night," he told them: They remembered how Betts had come, and how, while she had smiles and favor for every boy but him, he had eyes for no one but her.

The girls remembered how handsome he looked at the dance, as he stood there against the wall: how his great brown eyes seemed now to burn with fire, now to plead with her in despair.

It was Betts who remembered the cause of his despair.

"Ev'ry time he come near me I said somethin' hateful. Atter a while, when I seen him comin', I jest turned my hack on him without a word. An' then, 'long toward the end, Arch come over an' he took holt o' my arm—not rough, but he wouldn't let me go.

"'You're drunk,' I says. I knowed he wasn't. He never was a drinkin' boy.

"`No,' he says. 'I hain't drunk—not that-a-way—you know hit.'

"'I don't know nary thing 'bout ye,' I says. 'Nor I don't want to.'

"'If ye'd jest run one set with me, Betts—jest one. Will ye, Betts? Jest one.'

"'If thar wasn't nary 'nother boy in the whole room, I wouldn't stand up with you,' I says.

"Betts,' he says, 'if ye don't treat me different, I'm a-goin' away from here.'

"'I wish to God ye would!' I says.

"'If I go,' he says, kind o' slow an' to himself, 'I hain't never comin' back.'

"'Who wants ye to come back?' I says.

"He looked at me jest a minute. Then he let go my hand like hit was somethin' he's fergot he had. I turned away, an' when I looked back he was gone. Fer what ye do in this life ye got to pay. Al Hensley was always sayin' that in his preachin'. I didn't take no 'count of hit then, but now I know hit's so. One way I got to pay is to remember, jest as if it was burned into me, ev'ry hateful word I said, an' ev'ry look in his eye when I said hit."

"Ye got to pay," they agreed; "but ye don't got to pay that-a-way."

"Ye got to pay whatever way's laid down fer ye," she decreed sternly.

IN vain Al Hensley himself strove to lead her into the path of peace. She lifted her tortured eyes to his.

"Thar hain't no peace fer me," she said. "I kilt him."

"No, that's hit, ye didn't," he reasoned. "If he was 'p'inted to die, he'd ha' died, no matter who or what. If his time had come, he'd ha' died over here jest the same."

She shook her head.

"Anyhow, thar's peace fer ye if ye re-pent," Al reminded her. "Thar's peace fer the blackest sinner on earth if so be he seeks hit—peace an' fergiveness."

"Not fer me," Betts said.

It was early fall when she said it first, and she was still saying it, in her heart, when winter settled down in earnest; for it was seldom that she would speak of it, or permit any one to speak to her. If only they had upbraided her! But they were all so wonderfully gentle with her. Even his own mother absolved her from all blame.

"You hain't to blame, dearie," she said. "God knows, I'd rether have had ye fer a daughter than ary other gal 'twere ever borned. 'Twould ha' been the sweetest thing on earth. But, 'twasn't your fault. 'Tain't any woman's fault. Love don't come that-a-ways fer the askin'. Hit's got to take hits own start. Hit's jest like a little spring hid in the deep woods. All of a sudden ye come on hit.

"Some day," she went on, "you'll find your'n. 'Fore ye know what ye're doin', yell be bendin' over to drink. An' then—ye kin fergit all this an' be happy."

But Betts only shook her head and went her lonely way more sadly than ever.

HER despair was dumb. She turned from every friend she ever had into herself. Once she had been the life of her little circle. Now, whenever the crowd gathered, she was absent. Once she had been a daredevil, but there were no pranks now. She had always been called a Hirt. She didn't flirt now. Her manner was so forbidding that a little silence fell when-ever they saw her coming.

"I'm a reg'lar kill-joy," she would say, more hateful in her own sight than ever.

But, if her mind was sick, her body was well, relentlessly well. In vain she sought to tire it. It was she, not her mother, who was the family drudge now. "Set down an' eat with the rest; I'll stand an' wait"; or, "Go an' rest," she would command, taking the work from her mother's hands.

There was plenty to do, with seven younger children in the family. But all the drudgery she could give herself up to failed to bring her forgetfulness or rest.

Her new patience touched and worried her mother. "She's fixin' to die," she would say to herself anxiously.

After a while, as the weeks went by, and no one could lift the gloom that hung over her, they all came to one conclusion. She had loved Arch Chappell after all, and now she wished she had him back. One by one, the other boys stopped coming—all except Chad Evarts: he came still. But that was all right. Betts didn't care how often he came, for it was Pop he came to see. Often all evening long he never spoke a word to her. She almost liked it better when he came, it was so lonely now for Pop. He liked young people around him.

Yes, it was nice for Pop when Chad came. First one, then the other, would tell a tale. The children, in their bed over in the dark corner of the room, would sit up to listen. Betts, spinning in front of the fire, would listen without looking up, not missing a word, yet not really knowing that she was listening, conscious only in a vague little way of being grateful to him for making the evening so pleasant for Pop. She could see why Pop liked him. His voice was so nice, and his laugh. There was something about the whole man so simple and natural and kindly. She and Pop always did like the same people. Before he had chosen Pop for a friend he had been just one in a crowd, and she had always looked upon him as old. But, after all, he was only four years older than herself, and his face wasn't old, nor his eyes. Instinctively she knew how they looked at every turn of a story, though she hardly glanced up once from her spinning. It was something that went on quite apart from her. That was why she liked it.

THEN, one night,—the winter was nearly over then,—when he was telling a story, she forgot everything, for once, and laughed—the first time she had really laughed since her trouble came upon her. Looking up from her corner, she met his eyes squarely for a moment. An expression of such pleasure, such heartfelt delight, came to his face that

in that one look his love was revealed.

At last she knew. How his heart ached for her! Not with pity, but with love. And something, still warm, deep down in the frozen depths of her heart, answered the call. Quickly she dropped her eyes again; but she could hardly make her fingers work. She could hardly hear another word that was said, for thinking of all the times he must have looked over, all those other nights, for the smile that wasn't there; and yet, how he hadn't been discouraged, but had come, and come.

That night she looked into her little mirror. She had grown altogether care-less of her dress and her looks. Harshly and forbiddingly her face stared back at her.

"I hain't twenty yet, an' I look like some old critter a'ready," she declared. "I hain't fitten fer him to love."

It was when she realized that she loved him, in spite of that, that her anguish began.

"I hain't fitten fer no man—least of all fer him," she decreed.

Her love clamored and cried for happiness, but she drove her longing back. "Hit wouldn't be right," she told herself. "He kin come jest the same, an' I'll set thar, an' I won't take no more notice of him than if he wasn't thar."

But she couldn't. She heard his hand on the gate-latch before anybody else did; and all the time he was there she had to struggle with herself to keep her love from showing. She stood it as long as she could. Then, one afternoon when she saw him coming, she went out to meet him.

"Let's walk out a ways," she said, and led the way to the steep little trail up from the hollow.

When they came to the place where the trail leaves the branch and turns off sharply into the deep woods over toward Big Stoney, she stopped a moment.

"Thar's somethin' out here I want to show ye," she said briefly. "Thar 'tis." She pointed as they came nearer. "See hit, all black ag'in' the snow? Hit's the trunk o' that old poplar the lightnin' struck down.

"A black, ugly thing 'tis, hain't hit?" she went on, as they came up beside it. "A broken, blasted, ugly thing—no use to hitself nor any one else. Two years ago the lightnin' struck hit, an' thar hit stands, an' thar hit'll stand, jest like that, till hit draps. Hit's jest like me. I hain't no more use than hit is, an' I won't never be, not if I live till a hunderd. I seen hit this mornin', when I was up here otter some squirrels Pop shot an' fergot to bring in. That's why I brung ye up too—'cause I could show ye a whole lot better'n I could tell ye. I want ye to give it up. Don't never think o' me ag'in. Thar's plenty other gals."

"Thar's only one fer me."

"You kin fergit."

"Are you fergittin', Betts?"

"That's differ'nt. When a thing's burnt in on ye, an' left a black scar, ye can't. But if ye take hit in time, an' put hit from ye gentle an' easy, as somethin' that hadn't ought to be an' hain't ever goin' to—why, then—then ye kin fergit, all right," she urged eagerly. "I hain't never goin' to treat nary 'nother boy as I

---

treated Arch Chappell. But now ye see," she went on. "Don't think no more o' me than ye would o' that black shaft. What used to be me's burnt an' shriveled an' dead."

"Betts," he said, "did ye love him that much?"

She bent her head in shame.

"No, I didn't love him nary bit. That's hit. If I was missin' him that-a-way, then I'd be payin' up some now. Hit'd he a little mite fairer then. But I didn't. He give his whole heart to nme, an' I didn't give nary hit o' anything to him. He worshiped the ground I stepped on, an' I treated him like he was too mean to tread on."

"But, Betts, if ye didn't love him, why can't ye love me? Why, Betts, I'd give my life fer you—you know—"

"Yes, I know," she broke in harshly. "That's why ye got to stop afore hit's too late. I ain't what I was, no more'n that tree. Hit looks black now ag'in' the snow. Hit'Il look a whole lot blacker when spring comes, an' all the other trees turn green. Hit was the purtiest tree! Many a time I've stood in under hit jest to watch hits little leaves a-blowin'. They was the happiest, danciest leaves! They hain't danein' now!" she broke off bitterly, looking up to the bare black shaft. "Look in under any other tree an' see the tracks o' all the little wild things, birds an' squirrels an' sech. There hain't a mark under hit. Hain't a critter een near. The snow's as smooth as the day hit fell. The very rabbits shun hit."

"That's 'cause thar hain't no little nuts an' acorns fer 'em to find."

"Hit's 'cause they're feared. Hit's like me. Folks stop laffin' when they see me comin'. See how hit stands off by hitself! Even the trees has drawed theirselves away from hit."

"They're growin' jest as close to hit as ever they was. Hit don't come so near to them as hit did, 'cause hits branches air gone. Ilain't that hit? They'd like nothin' better'n fer to have hit come up close like hit used to; but hit won't."

"Hit can't!" she returned bitterly.

A quick little hope sprang up in his heart; for her sternness, wasn't it for herself—for some longing she was trying to stifle? But, when he began to urge her further, she broke away angrily.

"That's all I got to say!" she cried. "Don't never speak to me o' love ag'in. Don't never think o' me! If ever I come into yer mind, jest think o' that 'ere black old tree. I'm more like hit than hit's like hitself. Don't come home with me now—don't never come. I'll go down the mounting this-a-way, an' you kin go that."

After that he didn't come back any more to the cabin.

"What have ye done with him?" Pop demanded, losing patience at last. "Don't he hateful to ev'ry boy jest because ye was to one."

She turned her blazing eyes upon him. "Don't say that ag'in!" she cautioned.

IT was now that her real suffering began. Before that she had been stunned by the blow. Now she was waking up, coming back to herself; and the waking was painful. There was each day to be met as it came—each long, lonely, unsatisfying day, and all the days to come. It never once occurred to her to summon Chad back. If they met on the road, he did not try to stop her. She didn't dream of the love that followed after her.

"I showed him," she thought grimly. "L'arned easy, he did. Got over it soon," she reflected bitterly.

Sometimes she almost repented of her work that day; but, as sure as she did, then she would turn around and hate herself for repenting: for the only bright spot in all her struggle was the victory she had attained over herself that day when she had sent him away. But it wasn't a cheerful victory. She had never gone hack to the tree on the mountain, but the image of it persisted. It was always there in the background of her mind, bare and gaunt and isolated.

"I'm more like hit than hit's like hitself," she would repeat to herself.

If her heart had been stone before, it was flint to all her longings, now that she believed herself unloved.

IT was late in February when Betts sent Chad away, but the few weeks that were left of winter seemed longer than all the rest. Spring, slow to appear, came at last with a bound. After a cold, wet April there followed such a month of May as Little Stoney had never seen. "Hain't hit the growin'est day you ever seed?" they asked of each glorious day in turn. The best part of it was that the joy of it was so contagious. Even Betts felt it.

Like every woman on the mountain who could be spared, she left the house to work in the fields. Only a year before Betts had een lighter-hearted than any of them. She wasn't light-hearted now;

but gradually, day after day, as she worked out under the open sky, a change was going on within her, not unlike that on the face of the hills—a transformation that was covering up all the hideousness of winter, and making them more wonderful, more beautiful, with every day.

With her delight in its loveliness there was a wistfulness and a yearning that she might be lovely as the earth was lovely, and that all the ugliness of the past might he blotted out. And then sometimes, in her moments of keenest joy, when she had stopped her work to listen to the song of some bird, or to look down and catch a glimpse of spring in some little valley far below, or to marvel at the perfect beauty of a laden hush of pink and white laurel near at hand—just when she was almost succeeding in forgetting, the image of that burnt, black shaft would impose itself, and her quick little thrill of joy would change to sharper pain.

IT was scarcely "peep o' day" when Betts left the cabin and started for the field. The others had gone to the big field across the branch, but she took her way to the little field in the bottom, where she had left some unfinished rows the night before. She was almost glad to be alone, for somehow she couldn't fall to work immediately, the morning was so lovely.

"Hit's a new day," she said to herself, as she looked at the sun just rising over Big Stoney; and in her voice was a note of wonder.

From the valleys and the folds of the hills little burnished mists were rising to the sun. Betts's eyes followed them to that little point of effulgence on the crest of Big Stoney where they seemed to gather and melt into each other, as if to adorn the sun and magnify its glory.

"Hit's a new day!" Betts said again.

The wonder was deeper in her voice, and in her wonder was a note of hopefulness, as if the new day were ushering in a new epoch. In the winter, one day had followed another in dreary monotony, one so like another as to be almost a part of it. But now each day was a unit, a cycle, full, complete, perfect within itself. It was as if each day that began so gloriously had a right to go on as gloriously to be itself, as it was meant to be, with no accounting of days past and gone.

Something of all this was in Betts's mind as she stood and watched the new day breaking over Big Stoney. And then, glancing down into the valley, she saw something that drove the thoughts from her mind and left it in confusion. Up the trail from the valley Chad Evarts was approaching. He looked up at the corn-field on the ridge where Pop and the others were working, paused uncertainly, glanced over at the field in the bottom where Betts was standing, then came across the fields to her.

"Betts!" he cried.

There was a glad note in his voice that made her heart leap in answer; but she didn't look around.

"Betts!" he went on. "One day you asked me to walk up the mountain with you, an' I went. Will you go now with me? I got somethin' thar to show ye."

Betts fought with herself to say no; but she couldn't. Just a minute she waited to still the throbbing of her heart; then, without a word, she put down her hoe and joined him.

This time it was he who led the way and she who followed. Neither spoke, but this time there was not silence, for the birds—how they sang!—bobolink, red-bird, lark, and wren. From every hush and covert their song came bubbling forth, down from the lofty summit of the tallest oak and black-gum, up from the lowest, leafiest thicket of laurel and rhododendron, till it seemed as if it was the earth itself that was singing.

If Chad didn't speak, his step was glad, as his voice had been—as the birds were glad. But for Betts it would have been easier to be glad if he had been taking her anywhere else than in the direction of the lightning-struck tree. She didn't want ever to see again that bare, black tree that had come to be so hideous a thing in her memory.

Involuntarily, though, as step by step they retraced their path, her eye kept searching for it, but in vain.

"The trees have growed up around hit," she said to herself. "Mebbe hit's blowed over. But hit couldn't," she marveled.

She would have liked to slow her step; she would have liked to turn away altogether. But the nearer they came, the faster he went, as if he couldn't wait. Soon they would be past, then it would be easier. By the rocks and the trees and the little landmarks of the way she knew they were almost there. In another moment it would burst upon their sight, more black and dead than ever in the midst of all the living green. Instinctively she lowered her eyes so that she need not see. Then she became aware that he had taken her hand and stopped her.

"Thar!" he said joyously. "That's what I brung ye to see!"

Betts lifted her eyes, and saw—not the charred old tree, but a column of living beauty, a pillar of green, indescribably delicate and lovely. Around the base of the tree hundreds of vines had been planted—woodbine, honeysuckle, wild grape. Clinging to the tree for support, they had grown around and around it, interlacing with each other and making of their leaves a strong network of verdure, till of the charred surface beneath there was nothing to be seen. It was transformed into a column of soft spring verdure, of waving tendrils, of full-blown flowers, of peeping buds. Everything was loveliness in a different form, from the tiny clusters of pale green grapes just taking form, to the exquisite bells of the morning-glories. And the morning sun, shining full on it, seemed to illuminate each leaf and bud and give them a glory not their own.

In the deep grass of the little clearing around it multitudes of flowers had sprung up, roses and violets, tiny clumps of azalea and laurel, heart-leaf, and never-still. Close up around it crowded seedlings of oak and pine and maple.

"YOU did hit!" Betts murmured brokenly.

She could see how he had planned it all long ago—that other day, perhaps. How, while it was still too early to plant, he had brought loam, and loosened the soil around the base of the tree, and enriched it ready for the seeds. How he had gone through the woods, gathering the roots of all the creeping, clinging things that grew, and bringing them here. How he had thought of one thing after another, how he had brought things from his mother's garden—and even from old Granny Evarts', away over on the divide. How he had tended them and watched their growth as he had never watched a crop in his own fields before. How he had come night after night,—the long way round, so she wouldn't see him,—coaxing the little tendrils along, training them one upon another, bringing up water from the branch when the tender roots were dry. And all the time keeping the perfect vision of it in his mind—the vision of it as it stood here now before them, a thing of wondrous beauty, touched with the morning light.

Oh, the love, the wisdom, the protecting tenderness of the man! The faithfulness, the beauty of soul.

"You said you was like hit," he was saying. "Is ary thing on all the mounting half so purty? Was hit ever so purty hitself till now?"

She was too near tears to speak. All through her trouble she hadn't shed a tear. There was a whirr of iridescence above their heads.

"You said nothin' 'u'd ever come near hit," he said. He parted the leaves and showed her where a bluebird had built her nest.

On a tree inside the forest depths a bird burst into song. Pulsing, insistent, rapturously sweet was its love note; but sweeter to Chad's ears was the little catch of Betts's breath in a sob.

Why Shouldn't Women Wear Trousers

WHY shouldn't a woman wear trousers if she wants to? If she works, and if trousers contribute to the ease, economy, and efficiency, of her work, isn't she entitled to the same freedom in choosing her garb that men claim for themselves? Surely she is! exclaim the half dozen girls whose pictures adorn this page. They wear trousers at their work, and are proud of it.

A woman who is a sculptor, and who has to climb up on scaffoldings and work in ticklish places, much as does a house-painter or a carpenter, can't wear skirts because of the danger of a fall. That is the reason Rene Prahar has worn men's clothes in her studio for years.

Doris Gomez is a dancer who is making a reputation in New York City, and overalls come naturally to her. Of course, when Miss Gomez dances she does not wear skirts, tight, full, hoop, or any other kind. So why wear them in her studio when she builds home-made furniture?

Margaret Gale was the first cross-country automobile tourist to arrive at the San Francisco Exposition, and when she rolled into the city she was wearing trousers. "It is no joke climbing around a big car in skirts. I discovered the fact about two days out of New York, in a Pennsylvania mud-hole. I have emulated my brother on all long trips since."

Clara Tice and Tony Nell are painters who have discarded skirts for studio wear. Miss Tice wears riding-breeches because they were the first trousers she wore. She came in from a ride one day and went into her studio to paint without changing her clothes, and she has used that costume at work ever since. Miss Nell is a water-color artist, and is perhaps the only one of this group who wears trousers because she feels she ought to, in order to express her individuality.

And Miss Ruth Sturtevant. who isn't a sculptor or automobile driver, but just a regular girl, is an advocate of the trouser petticoat because she can walk in it with ease, and at the same time be dressed ostensibly as are the women she meets. Besides, she says, it is very fashionable.

These Rich Kids Helped These Poor Ones

ALL the children on the left-hand page went away to the country this summer: all those on the opposite page stayed home. "And the moral of that is," as the Duchess should have said in "Alice in Wonderland," "take care to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth." But each of the silver-spoon babies pictured here has chipped in a dollar a piece toward ice and clean milk and a nurse's attention for these other

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children left behind in the heat of a great city. All the children on page 10, together with several hundred more, belong to either the Babies' or the Children's Auxiliary of the New York Diet Kitchen Association.

Marriage Below Zero

THIS is the story of a man and a girl, and the Arctic Circle, and Enniskillen, which is three counties north of Tipperary. And the moral is the same old moral—that true love will manage to find the carfare somehow.

With which word of introduction, we introduce the hero of the story, Mr. Jack Carruthers, late of Seattle, Washington.

Stevenson, inviting Barry to Samoa, said: "Take a boat at San Francisco, and my place is the first on the left." A similar direction will enable you to locate the present abode of Jack Carruthers. You take a boat at Seattle, then you take a train, then you ride by dog-sled for forty miles into Alaska, and his place is the first on the left.

But when Jack left for the Yukon the directions were not so simple. The picture in the upper left-hand corner of the page shows Jack—one of the long stream of pack-laden men who pushed their way over the mountains at the first cry of gold. Jack is there—all of him, that is, but his heart. At the time this picture

was taken, his heart was behind in Enniskillen, Ireland.

Which brings us naturally to the heroine of the story, Miss Gail Porter, once of Enniskillen. When Jack started to seek his fortune he had Gail's promise that she would follow after.

In the meantime the railroad pushed its shining length across the snowbanks into Alaska; and Jack, plugging away at the gravel banks, had found what he came to Alaska for. So he wrote a letter, which took a month and more to be deivered, to the girl he had left behind.

In the lower picture at the right one sees the railway train that carried Miss Porter the last few thousand miles of her journey, and above it the little church around the corner—a corner of the Yukon River.

So they were married on June 21, 1915, the day—in the Arctic Circle—when the sun does not set.

Yes, it may be a long way to Tipperary (and longer to Enniskillen, which is three counties north); but there are several young men in Fort Yukon, Alaska, who are thinking of making the trip.

Peach King Hale

WHEN J. H. Hale was eleven years old his mother was left a widow, with one other boy on her hands, and no other assets except a sandy farm weighted down with a $2000 mortgage. Young Hale left school and went to work for the neighboring farmers, cutting corn and doing "chores." His pay was twelve dollars and fifty cents a month.

There is a tradition that the boy first thought of growing peaches when he was sitting under a tree one noon, munching one. At any rate, he isolated a few dollars from the general fund and bought several thousand peach-tree whips.

Then developed an interesting situation. The first crop ripened and the mortgage fell due at practically the same time. The good deacons who held the papers wanted to know what the prospects were of getting their money. Young Hale put them off until he was able to get his fruit to market; then he handed over the cash in full, greatly to their surprise.

He has been raising peaches and buying land and surprising people ever since. He has taken semi-abandoned land by the hundreds of acres and made it blossom like the rose. He prepares the land with dynamite, and plants between the stones. Altogether he is cultivating 900 acres of peaches and other fruits in

Connecticut, and 2000 acres in Georgia.

He went to Georgia when it was extremely difficult to get the fruit to market at the proper time, because the railroads would not provide freight cars. Other growers were plotting retaliation; but he hied himself directly to the biggest railroad official in that part of the country, dragged him down to the peach orchards, where tons of half-ripened fruit dangled before his eyes, and gave him an object lesson which resulted in a service that made it possible for the peach express to sidetrack the Southern Limited. That is the Hale way of doing business.

The syndicate of which he is now the head owns orchards capitalized at a million dollars or more. He has been known to harvest nearly a million peaches in a day—each peach being handled three times in picking, sorting, and packing. In the peach season, refrigerator-cars take the ripe fruit to every part of the Northern States. He depends on colored labor in the South and largely on Italian labor in the North.

Mr. Hale is a fascinating speaker, because he has a homely wit and drives home the most solemn truths with mirth-provoking illustrations. Just as side crops, he grows 300 tons of hay, 100 acres of oats, and 10,000 bushels of corn each season.

The Doll Baby

By GERTRUDE BROOKE HAMILTON

Illustrations by Wladyslaw T. Benda

ELSIE MADDERN was curled in miserable ball on her bed. Her oval face was fever flushed, her dark eyes were fever bright; one slim hand held her throbbing throat; her shoulder-length hair spread over the pillow in a gold fluff. In bed with an attack of tonsillitis, nineteen-year-old Elsie Maddern looked about nine years old. Generations of lives running in a zigzag hit-or-miss had bred Elsie. She was just tinged with slackness. The Maddern family was modern with a vengeance. Every one of them made money. Stephen, the father, was a motion-picture magnate; Jeffries, the mother, accepted only Manhattan engagements in her high-priced character delineations; Mary Helen, the oldest daughter, sang at the Metropolitan during the opera season; Marian was a successful real estate broker with a hustling office on lower Broadway; Stephanie was getting ten cents a word for her vivid Broadway fiction.

The sumptuously furnished nine-room studio was never very tidy, and as happy-go-lucky in its atmosphere as a house full of romping children. It was seldom that a Maddern was ill. In selecting a doctor for Elsie, they had taken an "M.D." at random from the telephone book.

Stephanie had a story to finish that day; her typewriter was going at top speed in her room. Mary Helen had a high C to perfect; her piano and voice were trying to meet in her room. Katie, the rosy-checked Irish maid, answered young Wilkins' ring.

She pulled back the dragon-embroidered portieres of Elsie's bedroom. "Sure, the chickie is not her swate self the day!" exclaimed Katie with sisterly sympathy, beating up a pillow beside Elsie.

"I feel awful!" said Elsie, sitting bolt upright, her bright hair standing out from her will-o'-the-wisp face.

"Here's the docthor, macushla," comforted Katie, taking herself away with a heavy, flat-footed tread.

In her place appeared Doctor Wilkins. Generations of lives running in a smooth groove had bred young Wilkins. Well-bred, well-to-do, he was an upstanding sort of young fellow in spite of his blue blood: and the celebrated Doctor McDonald had taken him in as assistant in a practice grown too large to handle.

YOUNG Wilkins removed a pink-and-blue kimono and a tasseled bedroom slipper from a chair, and sat down be-side Elsie's bed.

"Head ache?" he questioned, taking her wrist in his hand.

"Yes," she scowled. She suddenly flounced in the bed. "I feel awful!" she repeated petulantly.

"Where's your mother?" he asked her, her wrist between his fingers, eyes on his watch.

"Playing a matinee," answered Elsie.

He let go of her wrist and took out his thermometer. "This goes under your tongue," he said. "Close your lips on it."

Elsie opened her mouth. With the glass tube under her tongue, she sat forlornly, knees drawn up under the bed-clothing to her dimpled chin.

Young Wilkins' eyes rested on her gravely. "Is your mother an actress?" he questioned.

She nodded, and pulled out the tube to add: "I am, too."

"Hold on!" he protested, putting the tube back. "Not so fast! Answer me by nods. Are you playing now?"

The tube popped from her mouth. "Am I—" Elsie began eagerly.

"Here!" he ejaculated. "I see I can't ask questions." He pulled one of her yellow curls. It seemed barbarous to him that a frail little twelve-year-old with a feverish sore throat should be left alone in this way. He looked at the thermometer.

"Have I got scarlet fever?" Elsie asked ingenuously.

He laughed. "Not a bit of it. But you must stay in bed for a few days. Do you go to school?"

Elsie giggled. She had caught on to the doctor's mistake. No Maddern ever let an opportunity for histrionic demonstration pass. Elsie opened her dark eyes with the candor of babyhood, and shook her bright head from side to side.

"Don't you study any lessons?" he inquired compassionately.

"I used to," she lisped. "But I'm playing now. I make two hundred dollars a week!" She bridled with self-pride.

"Poor kid!" he said under his breath. He went to the window and sent the shade to the top.

"Now let's have a look at the throat," he added briskly, coming back to her bed.

Elsie tilted back her head and opened her mouth, showing perfect teeth, a little red tongue, and a pink, inflamed cavern.

"My!" he said. "I bet that hurts!"

"It does!" She swallowed.

"We'll fix it up all right," he soothed. He took out his pen and wrote a prescription. "Tell your mother to have this filled out; it's a nice tasting gargle," he told her. "You'll be fine as a fiddle to-morrow, but you must stay in bed. How soon will your mother be home?"

He lowered the shade and picked up his hat.

Elsie drew her knees closer to her chin and began to snivel. Her soft under lip curled out, her eyes blinked and filled with big tears.

"I don't know when my mother will be home!" she gulped.

He laid down his hat. "Don't cry," he said sympathetically.

Elsie suddenly put her fists in her eyes and wailed: "I—haven't got anything to play with! I—I'm—lonesome!"

"Poor little tike!" muttered young Wilkins, with an imprecation for the matinee-playing mother.

He sat down on the bed and put a big-brother arm about Elsie.

"Don't cry, kid!" he begged. "You'll feel all right to-morrow. What do you want to play with—a doll?"

"Uh-huh," sobbed Elsie.

"Well, you wait till to-morrow," he said. "Doctors know how to cure lonesomeness. You wait till to-morrow. By ginger, you shall have a doll! Now, quit crying, kid. Lie quiet and go to sleep."

Elsie obediently laid her head on the pillow and shut her eyes. She looked like a cherub. Young Wilkins stayed for a minute or two, drew the shade all the way down, placed a glass of water within reach of the small hand, and, assured that his little patient was safe in the land of doll-baby dreams, tiptoed from her room and out of the Maddern apartment. Elsie waited until the front door of the apartment had closed. Then she sat up in bed and kicked a pink toe at the dragon-embroidered portieres.

Doctor Wilkins went straightway to a big toy shop, bought a doll with real eyelashes and a permanent smile, and sent it to "Little Miss Maddern" at the West Fifty-seventh Street address. In reply came a note in a childish hand:

A baby with a big part in "Flirtation" struck Doctor Wilkins as plaintive.

ON Elsie's opening night young Wilkins sat in the end seat of the fifth row in the orchestra.

There were six flirts in "Flirtation." Elsie Maddern played one of them.

Young Wilkins, brows drawn, studied the program: "Vashti Vanity—Elsie Maddern. " His astounded eyes then pursued the bright-haired feminine figure working masculine havoc on the stage.

Elsie, glimpsing his outraged face among the blurred rows of admiring ones, outdid her Maddern intuitions on the subject of coquetry.

At the most delightful part of the third act, young Wilkins suddenly arose from the end seat of the fifth row in the orchestra and stalked up the darkened aisle.

Elsie, noting this, fully expected that he would be waiting at her dressing-room door to laugh over the affair. But when the curtain had fallen, and when Elsie had flung a kiss to the stage-box—from which her mother and father, Mary Helen, Marian, Stephanie, and Stephanie's fiance, Floyd Drake, had zealously led the applause—and run off-stage to her dressing-room, young Wilkins was no-where in sight.

Arrived home, Elsie slapped the face of Lonesome Lassie and relegated her to ignominious Coventry under the bed. "Old poke!" she flouted.

THE second night of "Flirtation" found the end seat of the fifth row in the orchestra again occupied by young Wilkins. This time he stayed doggedly to the flippant end, in which Elsie took the heart of the house by storm with a unique and fascinating fashion of bestowing a kiss on the man of her choice.

How might young Wilkins, backed by conservative ancestry, know that Elsie and her mother had practised and perfected this method of osculation before an inner circle of family critics? And how might Elsie, with the blood of the Madderns in her veins, understand the cynical flush that darkened young Wilkins' handsome features? Elsie confidently expected him behind the scenes that evening. And because he did not come, Lonesome Lassie was dragged from under Elsie's bed and viciously spanked!

For seven performances the end seat of the fifth row in the orchestra was occupied by young Wilkins. Elsie played to, at, and around him. She made him laugh in spite of himself and the unhumorous generations backing him. But the footlights stayed between them. So, one night, Elsie very graphically toppled over in a stage faint.

She came to in her dressing-room, in young Wilkins' arms.

"Don't try to talk," he said. "Have

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you an under-study?" He took her wrist between his steady fingers.

"I feel better now," she murmured, resting with spent breath against his broad shoulder.

"Yes, your pulse is normal," he agreed. His face reflected the glow dawning on hers, but he pulled himself together with a peremptory "You mustn't go on again to-night; I'll take you home."

They went out and got into Elsie's car.

Broadway seethed with night rioting. Under the vulgarly splendid electric signs, the crowds were having what they called a good time.

At Forty-third Street the car was halted. A drunken girl was being arrested—a girl hardly more than a child.

"That's a shame!" ejaculated Elsie, bending forward. "My mother says that's the way they get started." She swung open the limousine door. "Officer!" she called.

"Sh—sh!" expostulated young Wilkins, conscious of the rabble.

"Officer!" repeated Elsie loudly.

The big Broadway policeman, his hand on the girl's shoulder, turned. He knew Elsie Maddern, of the Maddern family, by sight, and he touched his hat respectfully.

"What has she done, officer?" called Elsie.

"I'm locking her up for safety, Miss Maddern," replied the arm of the law. "She was spilled out of a taxi."

"Too young to go to the night court, officer," vetoed Elsie. "I'll take charge of her. Bring her here."

"Miss Maddern!" interfered young Wilkins.

The officer, evidently familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the Maddern family, made a majestic way through the gaping crowd, holding up the girl.

"Put her in here, officer," commanded Elsie. "We'll keep her overnight and lecture her in the morning—you know how my mother can talk to them. Put her in, officer."

A REPORTER on the edge of the crowd made rapid notes. The rabble was avid. The officer deposited the helpless girl on the rear seat of the limousine, touched his hat, and closed the door. In the same moment the whistle of the crossing policeman sounded, and the blockade broke.

"I do this lots of times," Elsie told young Wilkins. "My mother says there's more joy in our studio over one drunk saved than the ninety-and-nine sober. Once my sister Stephanie brought in a half frozen hag, and when the hag thawed out she tried to kidnap me. And once my sister Marian hauled in a stray dog, and he went mad and bit Katie—the maid, you know.

"And once Floyd Drake—he and Stephanie are going to be married next month—once Floyd brought in a starving legless boy, and next day the legless boy stole my mother's diamonds, and got away with them! We have some awfully funny times!" Elsie laughed gaily.

Young Wilkins looked at the unconcerned figure beside him. Publicity, tonic for the Maddern family, was marked with cross-bones and a skull on his family shelf.

But when Elsie smiled up at him, his face lost its austerity.

When the car stopped, Elsie said to her chauffeur: "Jimmie, come around and get her out." And to young Wilkins, "You help." She directed the operation.

The chauffeur held up his end with cheerful solidity. Young Wilkins strove to appear professionally impersonal with his.

The Madderns received the Broadway outcast with open arms. Elsie volunteered to curl up that night on a divan, and the dubious guest was laid away in Elsie's bed, and the dragon-embroidered portieres were drawn on her.

YOUNG Wilkins was introduced to Elsie's family, and invited to supper. Every night the Maddern assembly had a midnight collation served from a little restaurant around the corner, each person selecting his own dish. Elsie expressed a desire for strawberry ice-cream and chocolate cake.

"You take it, too," she told young Wilkins.

There was a running fire of up-to-the-minute theatrical gossip as sauce for the conglomerate feast. Elsie and young Wilkins sat on the divan and ate ice-cream and cake.

Young Wilkins put his saucer down beside Elsie's. A shadow was settling on his face. He glanced about the sumptuously furnished room—at the beringed Jeffries heartily eating shrimps; at the fair and florid Mary Helen studying a music score and sometimes missing her mouth with her club sandwich; at Marian, eating chops and English muffins in shirt-waist and stiff linen collar; at Stephanie, discussing a sex-problem plot with Floyd Drake. Young Wilkins' mouth went down.

Elsie saw the sneer, and drew back in her corner of the divan.

"I must be going," young Wilkins said briefly, and stood up.

He crossed the room to Jeffries.

"Good night, Mrs. Maddern," he said, holding out his hand. His adieux to Elsie's people held a barely perceptible hint of condescension. He shook hands hurriedly with Elsie. His departure had an air of finality.

Elsie's dark eyes followed him out.

THE end seat of the fifth row in the orchestra was now occupied each night and matinee by a stranger. Elsie learned to overlook it, as she coquetted through Vashti Vanity. The Maddern pride, the Maddern temper, the Maddern bluff, ran strong through Elsie's veins. But, like the poor old clown Punchinello, when the play was over and the public shut out, Elsie crept off to solitude.

The Maddern family held a council. Versed in affairs of the heart, they did not say that Elsie was overworked or over-strung. Young Wilkins was ardently discussed. The wrath of the Maddern family rose. Young Wilkins was set down as a snob and a snipe.

Elsie came in at the height of the confab. Jeffries told her what they had been talking about. "Oh, don't!" said Elsie, her lip quivering.

"You care about him, don't you, honey?" questioned Mary Helen solicitously.

Elsie nodded.

"A doggoned shame!" ejaculated Marian. "What do you like about him?"

"I don't know," confessed Elsie.

"He's pretty good-looking," admitted Stephanie. "But pretty is as pretty does! From cold conceit, ye gods, deliver us!"

"Now, see here, baby," Jeffries said briskly to Elsie. "We don't want to see you balled up in a hopeless love affair. Love is all right when it goes right—when it goes wrong it's h-e-l-l! I didn't mind this Wilkins, myself. I liked his eye; and he was clean. But if he's the stony, pass-by-on-the-other-side type, cut him out, baby; cut him out! I don't want to see any of my girls tangoing to the Little Church Around the Corner with a man who has his heart under such control that he never loses his head.

"Poise is all right, baby—but you want to be dead sure that underneath the poise there's a big, warm, human pump working."

"Mother is right," upheld Mary Helen. "The question is, has honey been taken in by a set of fine manners?"

"Ten to one, she has!" declared Marian. "What did you see in him?"

"Lots!" defended Elsie, beginning to look defiant.

"He was on-whom-the-ladies-dote, all right," agreed Stephanie. "But from idols with arched feet, good Lord, spare us!"

Elsie stood looking at them with hot quivers going over her expressive face. "I don't care!" she began; and suddenly rebelled against their wise saws and admonitions. "He's fine!" she cried. "I know it! He's not a set of fine manners. He's a man! I know it! He's—sweet! I know it. When he first came to see me because I had a sore throat, he thought I was a little girl, and he was—lovely! Men that are kind to children are kind inside. He is human! I know it. I don't blame him for getting his heart under control. I played tricks on him. He's fine. He's lots better than I am. I know! I—"

Her words were cut short by a storm of sobs. She flung herself in a heap on the divan and buried her bright curly head in the velvet and gold-embroidered cushions.

YOUNG Wilkins and Doctor McDonald were talking in the doctor's den. Young Wilkins' face had the haggard look of a person who has lost sleep. His eyes were those of a drowning man. He was as nervous as a weathercock in the wind.

The old doctor had been watching him for some weeks with affectionate concern. To-night he put an arm about his shoulder and said: "Sonny, who is the woman?"

Young Wilkins broke down and put his head in his hands.

"Is she married?" asked the old doctor.

"No." Young Wilkins' head came up. In a suppressed voice he told his old friend that the woman was Elsie Maddern, playing in "Flirtation."

Doctor McDonald had heard of the Madderns. He gave a puzzled whistle. A Maddern and a Wilkins took several moments to link together. Finally he said, "Well? What's the obstacle, sonny?"

Young Wilkins' mouth set in a fastidious line. "I don't trust her," he said shortly.

The old doctor's tufty eyebrows went up.

"She's a mechanical little flirt!" said young Wilkins between his teeth. "She puts on the baby pose. She knows how to do it, all right—just how far to carry it: wistful little smile that goes straight to your heart and turns it over. She's a jollier. She's not sincere."

The old doctor's eyebrows came down. "Proof?" he asked.

"Proof in her lies and lineage!" exploded young Wilkins. He jumped up and began to walk up and down the den. "I don't trust her. I can't! Oh, she's charming, all right. She suggests nothing but naiveté." His face went crimson. He pounded his hands together. "Doc, she's a little trickster. She fools you every minute. She never stops acting. Can a man believe in a girl who knows every twist and turn of deviltry on the stage, and off the stage is an innocent? Can a man pick his wife from a set of Bohemians? Can a man dare such deep water?"

Young Wilkins fiercely stalked the den.

"Yes," said the old doctor unexpectedly —"he can. He can go to the bottom of the sea to find a pearl. My boy, you're hasty. The Madderns are good stock; theatrical, but plenty of wholesome American blood. You want to be sure before you judge. Many a man has passed up a jewel because of its sparkle, and taken a toad because of its solidity. Proof, sonny; don't judge the little girl unless you have proof."

Young Wilkins halted. "What do you call `proof'?" he barked miserably.

"Her eyes," answered the old doctor.

Young Wilkins' strong face softened. He

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drew a deep sigh. His mouth quirked, and he smiled.

"There you are!" said the old doctor triumphantly. "Rot, with your pessimistic glooming! Take your heart out and give it a dose of fresh air. Dress it in its best and send it a-courting! Let the Wilkins tone down the Maddern, and the Maddern tone up the Wilkins. No better combination than red blood and blue."

The old doctor caught young Wilkins by the shoulders and looked at him affectionately.

Young Wilkins straightened, and the glow slowly spread over his face.

IT was after midnight when the young doctor left the old one. He ran buoyantly down the steps and walked in a whistling mood toward his bachelor apartment on Park Avenue. As his key clicked in the door, he sang to himself. He closed the door and felt along the wall for the electric button, punched it, and—looked into the muzzle of a revolver.

A drawer of the center table in young Wilkins' living-room was open; the desk drawers were pulled out. Heaped up in the middle of a black silk handkerchief spread on the floor were his cuff-buttons, scarf-pins, rings, and watches.

The revolver covering young Wilkins was in a small grimy hand. The taut wrist and arm protruded from a ragged black cloth sleeve—a livid scar seared the forearm. The body belonging to the arm was rat-like, dressed in rusty black. The face, a girl's, was ghastly, ferocious, distorted; a ravenous mouth, lowering dark brows, yellowish skin; the hair, under a man's felt hat, showed in a murky knot.

Young Wilkins' finger was still on the electric button. He punched again, and in the dark room shot down behind a high-backed chair.

The revolver switched to the chair. The criminal intruder was a black blotch in the gloom. Young Wilkins measured the distance between. He saw her free hand grope down for the black handkerchief containing her spoils. She taloned the four corners and drew them together. With the black silk lump in one hand and the other holding at bay the man behind the high-backed chair, the girl crook began to move stealthily forward. Around the center table, between the Morris chair and the smoking-stand, across the rug, the creeping figure came. The high-backed chair stood between the thief and the door. With each step, the crouching body turned, keeping young Wilkins covered.

As the hand carrying the loot fumbled for the door knob, young Wilkins, within reach of her now, caught simultaneously her ankle and wrist. It was child's play to wrench the weapon from her stiffened hand.

The girl dropped the jewelry and struggled madly for the door.

Young Wilkins, hand like a circlet of steel about her ankle, skidded the revolver across the floor. "I've got you!" he said.

She strained again to reach the door, and to get her foot out of the trap.

"You're caught," he said grimly.

She smothered a squeak with her free hand. "Don't cop me!" she panted hoarsely. "Lemme go!"

"How did you get in here?" he demanded.

"Up de fire-escape," huskily. "Lemme go!"

"What will you do if I let you go? Steal the rest of the night?"

"Lemme go!"

Young Wilkins got hold of her wrists and handcuffed them with one of his hands. He stood up. The telephone was within reach of his free arm.

She bit at his hand—she struggled. The felt hat dropped off.

"Don't do that," he said, "you pitiful little thing! You're young, aren't you? Too young to go to the night court." He released her.

She pulled back, holding her wrists. She seemed dazed. Her panting breath sounded animal-like in the semi-darkness. She began to back toward the door.

"Don't go like that," he said. "Straighten up. I'm not going to have you arrested. What's the matter? What are you crying about? Did I hurt your wrists?"

"Yep. Yer did." Her voice was gruff.

"Wait a minute. I'll bandage them. Wait—you poor little devil." His voice was humane. He reached out and snapped on the electric light.

The girl stood hunched down on one hip. Her unkempt hair hung dankly about her face. Her eyes were down and her mouth was sullenly contorted. She shot an underhand glance about the comfortable room.

YOUNG Wilkins stepped into his laboratory for lint and a healing lotion. He stumbled over the handkerchief of jewelry as he came back to her, and kicked it out of his way.

Head hanging, she held out her wrists. They were red and blue.

"Great Scott!" he said. "Did I do that? Wait; I'll get some warm water."

She kept her arms out, like a brute thing capable only of sensing obedience.

He brought warm water and absorbent cotton, washed the wrists, and laid cool, lotion-soaked cloths over them, then hound them tight with strips of lint.

"There," he said, straightening. "Does that help any?" He looked down at her.

She nodded, and—between the matted brown locks, over one ear, protruded a wisp of bright yellow hair. It bobbed as she kept on nodding.

Young Wilkins swallowed. "You—may—go," he said slowly.

She gave a guttural sound in her throat and swooped on her dirty felt hat. At the door she turned.

She yanked off the brown wig, and a bright fluff fell to her shoulders, framing her smudged, wonderfully made-up face in pure gold. Elsie Maddern's childish laughter echoed through his rooms. "I told them you had a heart!" she trilled. "Oh!" She hugged herself. "I've found out!" Her eyes, blackened and shadowed by grease-paint, became clearly her own. She made a sublime gesture.

ACROSS the table, piled with lint and healing paraphernalia, young Wilkins looked deep at the Maddern flirt, at the black rusty rags, the angelic top-knot, the pure mouth, the spoiled chin—the eyes.

"Little tike!" said young Wilkins brokenly.

Elsie jumped. "I must go home now," she said, twisting her hair up under her hat. "My mother will be missing me."

"I'll take you home," he said.

"Like this?" she inquired, pointing two fingers at her rags.

"Yes," said young Wilkins.

"Oh!" she gurgled. "But you won't have to, because my coat is out on your fire-escape, and Jimmie is waiting around the corner with my car."

"Did you honestly climb up?" he asked, opening a window.

"Uh-huh. I was a crook. I thought up the test myself. I was going to let you send me to the station house—but I knew you wouldn't!"

He brought her coat and she slipped into it, her shining face lifted to his.

IF her eyes had not already convinced him of her integrity, her lips would have routed the last doubt—her kiss was so simple. She slipped her hand in his.

"Let's go home and tell Lonesome Lassie," she suggested.

Young Wilkins kissed Elsie again. They went from his apartment and down the long corridor to the elevator. They waited for it hand in hand, like happy children.

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

By BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

Illustration by Harvey T. Dunn

SINCE they did not seem to be doing any harm to our carrier beyond pinching him to see how much fat he had, I left him to himself for the present, and joined Red Bob and Isola, who were standing together in the middle of the village.

"Can we get quietly away, do you think?" I asked Red Bob.

"We'll try," he said, with a cheerful countenance.

I looked round the open space, dotted with huts, that seemed to constitute the village. It was small enough, in all conscience—I do not think there were twenty houses scattered about the clearing; but I saw, at a rough guess, that there must be nearly two hundred men present, with thirty or forty women. Plainly, we had intruded on some sort of gathering: a savage "at home," including all the "people who belonged" in the immediate neighborhood.

Ugly black women, shockingly dirty, and clothed only in a ragged fringe of leaves, were walking about, with babies like monkeys held in their arms or slung on their backs in a net. Men, short, hairy, and sturdy, with eyes sunk under deep eaves of heavy brow, and a strange, half-fierce expression which I was to know as the typical look of the cannibal, stood in herded groups like wild animals, and stared ceaselessly.

A few in the crowd about us fingered their long ironwood spears and kept their hands set tight on their great bows—weapons such as those the English fought with at Crécy and Agincourt, and to the full as deadly.

"Don't you mind them," I said to Isola, taking my place at her side. "You need never be uneasy about natives as long as their women are kept in sight. That's so, isn't it?"

"It is," said Red Bob. "Is that black donkey of yours able to talk to them?"

"Bo, can you talk along this fellow?" I asked, pulling him away from what looked like rather rough usage on the part of the natives.

"'Fore God, Master, I no savvy him talk," declared Bo, the whites of his eyes rolling with fear. "Altogether I no savvy him; he no my people. This fellow man he plenty bad man. Me too much fright along him."

IT had grown quite dark by now, but the cooking fires that had been lit all over the village showed the place clearly enough. The women were busy burying yams and sweet potatoes under hot stones. There were great piles of bananas heaped together here and there, and some kind of mess was being concocted in wooden bowls. The amount of food that had been collected, the colored leaves, flowers, and feathers worn in the heads of the men, and especially the number of them gathered together, seemed to point to a public feast.

"Can we get away?" asked Isola of Gore.

She kept her head and her courage wonderfully; but I felt her hand—her poor little roughened, sunburned hand—steal into mine and stay there.

Red Bob, as calm as if he had been on the deck of the Empress of Singapore in Liverpool docks, stood rolling a cigarette and looking about him.

"If they don't seem likely to show fight, I think we can," he said. "Corbet, have you a match left? Thanks. We can't attempt to fight our way out. Two revolvers with four spare cartridges against two hundred bows and spears is not impossible odds in daylight with a clear get-away. In the dark, surrounded by bush you don't know, it's insanity. No, our game for the present is peace. Keep edging toward the entrance, talking as we go."

We did as he directed. We were standing some fifty yards from the rock staircase that led up into the town. Step by step we strolled toward it, stopping altogether now and then, talking as we went, and looking at the preparations for the feast and the dance with an interest that I, at any rate, certainly did not feel. But, before we had covered half the distance, a party of young fighting-men, armed with bows taller than themselves, had strolled between us and the opening.

"May be a chance; keep going," said Gore.

WE edged along till we were close to the band of warriors, who looked very ugly when you came near them, and—I must say it—smelt, like Kipling's camel, "most awful vile." Quietly and politely, we tried to press through their ranks. At least, Gore and I did, keeping Isola behind us. I could feel her trembling, but she did not say a word.

The warriors did not move. At first they seemed unaware that we were trying to get through; they shifted and shuffled about in such a way as to block us, and yet it all seemed to be done by accident. Then Gore took one of them lightly by the arm, and tried to press him aside. Instantly, as if that had been a signal, the whole body of them—some forty or fifty —massed themselves in front of the opening, thumped the ends of their great bows on the ground, and sent forth one loud shout.

We were prisoners.

QUIETLY, without any appearance of hurry, Red Bob drew us back toward the center of the square. I kept tight hold of Isola. She put her head close to mine for a moment, and whispered to me: "Paul, will you shoot me before you die yourself? Will you promise?"

"I promise," I answered. "But it won't be necessary; none of us are going to die."

She was silent.

"Bluff it out till daylight; that's our best plan," said Gore cheerily. "See me get some supper out of those fellows. Now, don't you worry, little girl; I know the brutes, and they've no mischief in their heads at this minute. Look at the women and children. They're keeping us for some reason of their own. Blessed if I know what it is at this minute, but I'll find out—I know enough sign language to do that. Here, you Paul, kick that beggar till he stops howling,—it isn't healthy for any of us,—and look after your girl till I see the chief. That's the fellow over there, I reckon."

He strode across the square, and walked in among the biggest group of savages, a crowd of men more highly painted and decorated than the rest, who had massed themselves about one tallish, elderly man. Gore's air of confidence seemed to impress them, and they drew aside to let him pass. I saw him take the handkerchief from his neck—a dirty rag enough, but red in color, and color goes a long way with these matters—and present it to the chief with the air of one offering a noble gift. The elderly man took it, smelt it, touched it with his tongue, and then twisted it

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around his head. The other native closed in round them after this, and I could see little; but I thought that Gore was gesticulating with his hands and making signs, and that there was a good deal of general chattering among the group.

By and by he came back, walking across the square with the easy, care-free step of a man who has not a trouble in the world.

"I made out something," he reported. "I know a few words of several of these confounded dialects of theirs. Sign business helped it along, too. It's pretty mysterious; dashed if I can make it all out. They told me there was very big fighting in the places where the white men were, and that everybody was going to be killed with guns. I can't make it out."

"Make Bo have a try," I suggested. "His language must be fairly near theirs, since he isn't twenty miles from his own place."

WE had some trouble in kicking Bo up off the ground and setting him to work; in fact, it took the muzzle of my revolver to persuade him. But in the end he gave in, and, trembling all over, tried his linguistic acquirements on the chief. His report was that all the white men were killing everybody, and the chief of the town thought we had been sent to kill him. It was apparently his intention to keep us under observation for a little while, and if no reinforcements followed us, Bo thought he would probably give orders to have the party eaten.

"Good hearing," said Red Bob. "I don't know what the row can be down on the coast,—sounds as if all New Britain had risen together,—but, whatever it is, there seems to be so much shooting going on that this beast of a chief is afraid to attack us right away. Isola, my dear, we'll get out of this all right; there's twice the chance I thought there was five minutes ago. Now for supper. Corbet, I'll do the looking-out while you go among those women and take what you think is a fair share of yams and potatoes. Don't ask; just lift what you need."

I put the boldest face on that I could, walked in among the women,—what hideous old hags they were, one and all!— and loaded myself with food. No objection was made, but the old beldames sat back on their haunches and stared at me with a kind of cruel curiosity that I did not altogether care for. It seemed almost as if they knew a lot of unpleasant things about me and about my party that they didn't choose to tell.

We sat down on the ground and ate, leaving our own stores unopened, by Red Bob's advice.

"Trouble among natives, eight cases out of ten," he said, "begins by looting. We won't tempt them."

We were hardly through our meal when a man advanced toward us, holding a green branch in his hand—the sign of peace. He motioned to us to get up and follow him. I saw Gore calculating the chances of making a rush; but the square was hemmed in two deep with fighting-men, and what we might have attempted as a forlorn hope, had we been alone, could not be thought of for Isola.

We followed the man to a house near one end of the village—a low, thatched building with walls of sago palm and pointed grass roof. It had a door, but no windows, after the fashion of their houses. Into this retreat he led us, showing the way with a torch; and when he had seen all four safely inside, he went away, shutting the door behind him.

IT was, of course, contemptible, viewed in the light of a prison. Any one could have cut a way out in five minutes with a pen-knife. But I judged that our guards were to be the entire village, and it was not likely that they would permit us to escape.

"I don't like their dancing," said Gore. "Nasty beggars when they dance. Get all worked up. Is there any more tobacco?"

"One small piece," I said.

"I need it," said Gore. "I want to think. Don't you chatter for a bit, Paul, or you, Isola. Go to sleep. You may want it."

He leaned comfortably against the sago wall, smoked, and fixed his eyes on the low ceiling.

Meantime, in the square outside something new was preparing, and it sounded, to my inexperienced ears, as if half a dozen liners with sirens in good order, and fifty strong donkeys in fine voice, had entered the village and begun a competition against one another.

"Lord, I must have a look at this!" I exclaimed.

I got my eye to a crack in the flimsy sago sheath door, and saw that nearly, every man in the place had got either a set of pan-pipes made of different lengths of bamboo, or a single long pipe, or else a section of bamboo trunk as big around as a main drain-pipe—these last furnishing the extraordinary booming noises that dominated all the rest.

THE savages were dancing as they played—dancing in a solid circle that went round and round on itself like cattle "milling" when they swim across a stream. They held their heads low to play on their pipes; they lifted their legs till knees almost struck on chins; they looked less like human beings, and more like prancing, bellowing bisons, than I had ever seen them look yet. I would not give Isola a place at the hole, for I thought by their appearance that they were "working up," as Red Bob had said, and I began to see we were in a tighter place than any of us had supposed. If they got themselves up to the proper point of bloodthirsty excitement before morning, no questions of prudence were likely to restrain them from knocking us on the head.

I told Isola that the men were playing on bamboos, and that it wasn't particularly interesting. Whether she believed me or not I can not say; but she did not try to look out. Silence fell for a little while inside the dark brown house; we saw each other only as shadows stirring faintly in the dark; we heard nothing but the inhuman honking and hooting of the savage music in the square.

Presently I heard Red Rob strike a match, and saw him standing up, inspecting our prison closely. I watched him with an interest that was almost feverish; and I think Isola, and even Bo, watched him too. We all three felt his greatness and his dominance of the party, and we felt that if he could not save us, nothing and no one could. It had come to that by now: each one of us knew that we were in serious danger, and that the sun that had sunk two hours ago behind the unknown forest ranges might never rise for us—unless Red Bob could help.

I don't really know what I expected him to say or do, but I was horribly disappointed when I saw that he was turning over a heap of old native dancing dresses in the corner, examining them with all the ardor of the ethnologist.

Presently he selected out of the heap a few that looked like large old-fashioned beehives. examining them with anxious care—yes, actually trying them on.

"Corbet," he said presently, his head half muffled in a mass of something like hay, "look out and see if there are any dresses like this in the dance."

"There is one," I said, peering through the hole.

"A thing like a beehive on two feet—you can't see anything but the dress itself, and an ugly mask stuck on top?"

"Yes, that's it."

"What's the dancer doing? Hopping round and round?"

"Yes."

"Let Isola take her turn and watch the dancer. Watch him, both of you, as if your lives depended on it. See what he does—what steps he takes."

WE did as he told us. I cut the hole a little larger, so that all three might peep cautiously out together, and Gore came and joined us.

"Yes," he said, after a glance: "it's the duk-duk dance. You may be glad it is."

The duk-duk was performing a solemn chassé down the middle of the village, looking, I must say, like the maddest and most horrible figure that ever escaped from a nightmare dance. Its formlessness, and the blank, inhuman mask that topped the shuffling figure, took from it all semblance to a human being, and, strangely enough, seemed to terrify or

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overawe the natives almost as if they had never seen it before.

The duk-duk is the goblin of New Britain life; its appearances in the village dance are always cleverly calculated by the sorcerers for some unexpected moment; no one knows who is hidden beneath the shuffling beehive with the grisly face on top, and murder often follows on its pointing out of a victim.

In and out, in and out of the hopping pan-pipe players it went, a thing of horror, faceless, limbless, apparently deaf and blind—yet we knew well that a clever sorcerer must be concealed beneath the sinister disguise, watching his opportunity to mark down a victim.

I saw that the women had hidden their faces on the ground,—it is death to them to look upon a duk-duk,—and that they trembled and burrowed lower into the earth every time the wind of its going passed them. The men with the pipes pretended they did not notice the hideous thing; but wherever it went by the ranks of the dancers shrank and winced away, as from the swaying scythe of Death itself.

I WATCHED it, fascinated beyond words. When I looked round again. Red Bob was busy with one of the dresses, putting it on.

"Listen to what I say," he said, "and be careful. When the next duk-duk comes out—there will be another by and by, perhaps more—I am going to cut through the wall at the back of the hut and join it. You must keep your eye on me, and, when I have been dancing for a little, get into three of the dresses that are left, blacken your feet well with ashes (you'll have to carry your boots under your dress), and come after me. Do exactly as the other duk-duks are doing, and then dance to the rock stairway and go down it. You see, the first duk-duk did that, and came back again, more than once. We can't take any baggage, but tie a little food about you—so—quickly. Now, if this heathen doesn't queer us—Bo, do you understand what we are doing?"

"My God, Master, me savvy plenty," answered Bo unexpectedly. "'Long my village one time I makem duk-duk; I makem kill plenty man."

"Then we can trust him to play his part. Good business. I thought he would be a difficulty. Now, do you understand, and can Isola manage it? Yes? Then I'll make a start. Isola can come next, and you two after. And, Paul, remember, if things go wrong, shoot, but don't shoot till you have to, for with the cartridges we've got its a last chance."

"I understand," I said.

Gore took my hand in his and shook it. I understood that, too: he was saying good-by in case "things went wrong."

We cut a slab or two of the pithlike sago stems out in a couple of minutes, and reconnoitered carefully. On this side there was no guard; the projections of stone that appeared here and there among the trees explained why—clearly, it was inaccessible. Only a few women were visible, lying with their faces on the ground and their arms over their heads.

"Let's hope they don't peep," laughed Gore.

He seemed in excellent spirits. I do not think the man ever knew what fear meant.

IN a moment he had slipped through the opening and was advancing down the square. We rushed to the other side to watch him. He danced as the other dukduks danced,—there were two of them now,—and before him, as before the others, the ranks of the pipers shrank and quivered as he passed, and the women moaned when they heard his feet shuffling by.

It was time to make our move.

How well I remember the stuffy, dirty smell of the dress when I put it over my head, after seeing Isola and Bo into theirs! It was wonderfully light, in spite of its size; and the hideous mask on the top, as I had anticipated, had two small holes through which one could see quite well. I wondered what insanitary beast had worn the dress before me, and hoped that none of us would get leprosy or something.

Then I had not time to think any more; for Isola was out, and making the perilous pass of the square. God, how my heart beat as I watched her! How loose I kept my finger on the trigger of my revolver!

Her coolness was wonderful. On her little blackened feet she shuffled and chasséed along exactly as the other duk-duks had done, even pausing once or twice to make the hideous "point" from which the savages shrank back so nervously (I judged that any man thus "pointed stood in imminent danger of the cooking-oven).

I saw her near the rock staircase; saw the ranks of warriors part, as the sea parts before the bow of a ship, to let her through; saw that Red Bob followed her closely—or was it one of the other duk-duks? For the life of me, I could not tell.

"Now, Bo!" I whispered.

And together we danced out from behind the hut, shuffling along without haste and weaving in and out among the dancers as we had seen the other duk-duks do.

The fires leaped and glowed; the black figures of the piping men "milled" continually round and round in a circle. "Oom-oom," went the pipes. "Oom-ty. oom-ty, ai-ai, ai-ai!" The air was full of dust; everything was seen as in a cloud; the dust was like snuff in one's nostrils. I could hardly keep from sneezing. Bo and I danced on. The stone stairs were close to us; we were hopping and skipping down them.

We had reached the foot, and stood in the dark, leafy, wet-smelling track below. I could just see two duk-duk dresses in front of me. I stretched out my hand and felt for the hand of the nearest. It snatched at me fiercely, and then seized my arm.

I had got one of the real ones!

ONE thinks quickly in such moments, and luckily I remembered Red Bob's counsel: "Fire only as a last resort." I drew the long bush knife from my belt with my free arm, thrust aside the grass of the duk-duk dress, and drove the blade through the dancer's ribs. He stopped in the very beginning of a cry, coughed, "Och!" once, like the buffaloes, and fell down at my feet. Gore had him by the legs in an instant, and slung him quietly among the trees. I thought, by the movement of his arm as it came up from the cape, that he made assurance surer with his own good knife; but it was too dark to see.

We made off down the track, very slowly at first, and dancing as we went, in case we should meet any more of this infernal corps de ballet. But soon we threw aside our hampering disguises, put on our boots, and, taking Isola between us (for the track was a good one and unusually wide), ran as hard as we could.

When we had put a mile between ourselves and the village, Gore called a halt. We listened standing in the drip of dew from enormous cottonwoods over-head, and hearing the great green frogs of New Britain bleat like goats in the under-brush, and once, a long way off, an alligator belling in a swamp. But of the savages we heard nothing.

After a little rest we went on, guided by Bo, who seemed to know where he was, or at least to guess, as a native sometimes can. Isola's endurance was wonderful. She leaned upon my arm, and sometimes took Red Bob's also for a while; but she never once faltered or complained. We went on till near daylight, and then, finding a nook among some rocks, slept for a while, Gore and I taking turns to watch.

The sun came up, red and rainy-looking, over the outline of a dark blue ridge not many miles away. Gore looked at it, laughed, and clapped me on the back.

"My boy, we've done it!" said he. "That's the range above the Sachs plantation country, and we'll be into the settlement to-night."

I do not think we should have been, however, had we not chanced upon a buffalo wallowing in a marsh—a tame one this time, obviously not long escaped from the nearest settlement, and with a fresh hole in its nostril—and pressed it into our service to carry Isola.

We must have made an odd-looking procession—Gore striding along in front, chewing a bit of stick for want of his usual smoke, Bo trotting along behind him, and last Isola on the great gray buffalo, with me walking beside her—a ragged, dirty party, sunburned almost as black as Bo, muddy, torn, and sadly in need of a wash.

It began to rain in water-spouts before we got to the settlement; and when we came out at last on a range that over-looked green, orderly ranks of palms and shining woods of rubber trees, we saw the welcome sight through a veil of streaming wet. As for ourselves, nothing could have made us look more draggled than we were.

Red Bob paused on the crest of the hill, and drew a sigh of relief.

"Well through!" he said. "And now to invade Sachs's bungalow, get cleaned and fed, and hear how the world has been going without us all these weeks."

SACHS'S plantation was the farthest back of all the settled districts. It was a place where very few white men came, and no white women. Sachs him-self lived a lonely life with his boys and one overseer, riding a long way down to Kori, the nearest place to his own, when he wished for a little society.

We were therefore somewhat astonished to see, as we went down the zigzag pathway leading to the bungalow, that there were white dresses visible on the sheltered side of the veranda, and that temporary cots had been put up here and there, evidently for the accommodation of an unusual number of visitors.

"Seems to be rather a run on Sachs's

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place," said Red Bob, twisting his mustache and looking down at the house with a thoughtful expression. "Seems to have some sport going on, too."

I had already seen what he pointed out to me with one finger: sentries—white men, with rifles in their hands, pacing up and down in front of the house.

It rained and rained as we went down the interminable zigzags of the path; red waterfalls poured from every bank and boulder; the ground sent up a spray of rainy spume.

The people sat in their chairs and watched us. In front of the house, the armed sentries walked hack and forward; we could see them at each end as we went down.

"Sachs! Hello, Sachs!" bellowed Red Bob, in his great bull voice, as we came on to the last turn. "Here's a lost party for you. Have you any room?"

Sachs came out on to the veranda—a tall, stout Prussian with a grizzly heard—and eyed us, with his hands in his pockets.

"I don't know," he answered in German.

I began to realize that something had happened, but I could not for the life of me think what.

GORE did not seem entirely surprised.

He told me afterward that he had guessed at the state of the ease as far back as the cannibal village.

"Oh, yes, I think you have," he said cheerily. "We've got a lady with us, and she is very badly done up. Can you let her go right off to bed?"

"I suppose I can," answered Sachs, melting a little. "There are four women here; they can take care of her, no doubt."

We reached the house, and walked up on the veranda—three muddy, wretched-looking objects, with Bo, outside in the rain, very much at an advantage over us, owing to his lack of clothes.

Sachs still remained in the same place, his hands in his pockets. He said nothing at all.

The women exclaimed loudly when they saw Isola.

"Why, it is Fran Richter!" they cried.

"Ach! See, you there!" screamed the fattest and lightest-haired. "See then, she is dying!"

Isola was not dying, but she had sunk into the nearest chair and quietly fainted away.

When one of the German women had lifted her into a bedroom, shut the door, and ministered to her, I turned to Sachs.

"What's going on here?" I broke out.

THAT something big had happened somewhere, I could not doubt. Why, it even seemed to prevent people from being interested in our affairs!

The answer came from an unexpected source.

Round the corner of the veranda walked a tall figure in military uniform, clinking spurs as it moved. It paused, looked, and greeted me with: "Powl!"

"Why, Hahn, is it you?" I said, glad to see him—I always had an odd sort of liking for the man who had so nearly succeeded in shooting me, that morning in Kronprinzhaven. "What's going on about here?"

"War, my nut," said Hahn.

"War! I did hear something about a lot of fighting; but it was so confused—which of the tribes are out?"

"The tribes that are out, my nut," said Hahn,—and, in spite of his slang, I recognized a new gravity in his bearing, a seriousness in the once gay and debonair young face,—"the tribes that are out are the Germans, the Austrians, the English, the French, the Belgians, the Russians, and the Servians."

"Good Lord!" I said. "Are we at war with you?"

"You are, Powl," said Hahn.

"Then I suppose Gore and I are your prisoners?"

"No," said Sachs, taking his hands out of his pockets at last and coming forward. "We are yours."

Sachs, I must say, behaved decently enough, all things considered. He agreed to give us room for the night, and to sell us some clothes against a cheque on the bank of New South Wales. Next day, if Isola was rested enough, we intended to journey on down to Rabaul with her (since persecution from the man she had married was one of the least likely things in the world to happen now) and report ourselves to the troops in possession.

Things had changed considerably for us, and all to the good, in those months of absence from telegrams and news.

"We weren't pearl-poaching, after all, if we'd only known it," said Gore to me that night, when we had put up our cots side by side in a quiet corner of the veranda. "And, by the way, you've never asked me yet, you unbusinesslike young beggar, what your share in the venture was to be. Of course we'll go back and rake the place out as soon as possible; there's a big fortune in it."

"If I am entitled to anything," I said, "it can be what you please; but I don't want to be paid for—for—"

"For backing me out in a row or two—no, naturally. You will be paid for taking your part in an illegal, dangerous, discreditable poaching adventure, which fortunately turned up trumps. I propose to give you twenty per cent. of the takings, and, if I'm any judge of an atoll, it ought to be a pretty decent little independence for you—in case you want such a thing for yourself or any one else."

"What do you mean?" I said excitedly, sitting up in my cot.

It was late at night. The moon had sunk far down the sky, and shone in streaks and patches through the grapeless vine that Sachs had trained about the inclosing lattice, in memory of his Rhineland home. The other men were sleeping on the side that looked down toward the Herbertshöhe road. I don't know what they expected in the way of attack or surprise, but it was well for our quiet conversation that they had left us alone.

"I can't quite say what I mean myself; time must show that," said Gore. "But I got a curious admission out of Isola, not very long ago. She referred, quite innocently, to the fact that her impulsive Italian papa had overcome her objections to a marriage with a dying cholera patient by violent means. In fact, when he found she was disinclined to do his bidding and secure the New Guinea plantation for her deserving family, he took her by the hair, shook her and boxed her ears, and threatened to shut her up without food."

"The brute!" I said indignantly. "Wish I had had the chance of boxing his ears—once!"

"Is that all you have to say?" asked Gore, turning on his pillow and looking at me with the moon full on his strange, brilliant eyes.

"Well, that's about all you could have done to a man who happened to be her father."

"I don't mean that. Do you not see—why, man, a marriage under compulsion, especially if the parties don't live together afterward, is breakable."

I SPRANG out of my cot and plumped myself down on the foot of Gore's.

"Say that again!" I exclaimed, drumming on his chest with my fists in my excitement. "Say it again! She isn't married—oh, Lord!"

"Stop acting the goat, or you'll have the sentries up here. I never said anything of the kind. She's married, all right, at this moment. You'll have to bring a suit in the Dutch courts."

"I'll bring twenty," I said joyously.

"I don't think Richter will appeal to quite that extent. If you bring one or two, it'll probably meet the case," said Gore dryly. "Whether it'll all be plain sailing or not I can't say."

Next morning there was no question of Isola going on. She was in bed, and, according to the good German women, bound in common prudence to remain there at least another day.

She sent me a pitiful little note begging us not to abandon her; and we decided to wait, though both of us were wild to be down in Herbertshöhe, seeing the meaning of war—perhaps even joining in it.

As soon as Isola was able to travel again we borrowed a horse and buggy, and set off down the long road leading to Herbertshöhe, with spirits excited by the prospect of seeing real war, or at least its aftermath.

An hour or two after leaving, we met a body of khaki-clad young Australians, marching up to the plantation country, and singing gaily as they went.

We stopped to greet them and to hear the news. There had been a skirmish that day—not much harm done to any one. The soldiers thought it would be the last: German New Guinea was settling down peaceably enough to the new occupation.

"Is there anything to avoid on the way?" I asked of one young fellow, aside.

He looked at Isola.

"No," he said. "They're burying some dead men, but it's nothing. The casualties have been very small—very small indeed. You needn't be uneasy about the young lady."

We drove on. The afternoon sun shot low among the ranks of palms, and laid long golden spears across the dusty road. Green parrots chattered in the leaves, and huge, slow butterflies sailed past, as peacefully as if no war-storm had struck the isolated, far, strange island of New Britain.

A few miles on, we came to a turn in the road, where some Germans engaged in carrying coffins to the grave-yard of Herbertshöhe had stopped to rest.

"There are three coffins," said Isola, her dark eyes wide with horror. "It may be people that I know, Paul. Will you stop and let me ask?"

The men were strangers to all of us, and they looked sullenly at the three English people who were driving freely about the land, gloating, no doubt, over the triumph of their countrymen. They answered shortly when Isola spoke.

"Right Germans, all three," was their answer. "But what can it matter to you?"

"Tell her," said Red Bob, leaning down with the reins in his hands.

And, because he was a man whom most people obeyed, these men obeyed also.

"It is Friederichs, Reuss, and Richter," said one of the bearers.

ISOLA sat still and white for a minute, and then asked: "Justus Schultz Richter?"

"Did you know him?" asked the man, looking up at her.

"I was married to him," she said. "Drive on!"

Red Bob whipped up the horse and we drove fast.

"I can't feel sorry," said Isola, looking at me piteously.

She drew out her pocket-handkerchief as she spoke, and began to cry.

Red Bob was sitting on the front seat of the buggy, while Isola and I occupied the back. I put my arm round her waist and consoled her as I liked best; and now she did not repulse me.

"It's like dancing on a grave," Isola said; but she crept closer to me as she said it.

And the sun sank low and golden on the sea, where, before the port of Herbertshöhe, an Australian liner lay waiting.

THE END

Money No Good at This Resort

BONE CITY, they call it—and it is one of the most exclusive summer and fall resorts in the world. It is located away off in the Bad Lands country of northwestern Nebraska, not far from the Wyoming and South Dakota boundary lines. It is some twenty miles from a railroad, with no stage to take one to the station. Neither are there any restaurants or hotels. There is only a group of tents and shanties set out among the scraggy grass of the Bad Lands.

For all that, it is a summer resort, and a very exclusive one. You could try for months to get in with the people there, and your money wouldn't help you a bit. But it's all very easy to become a member of the colony when you have the password: in fact, answering one or two pointed questions will give you social standing enough. For instance, can you tell a prehistoric rhinoceros from a member of the Miohippus family, or maybe a dinosaur from a queer-looking cat that lived several million years ago? If you can, and are able to talk about those things, the people of Bone City will readily find you a bunk in one of the tents or shanties.

You see, it is a scientists' playground, and not a place for the millionaire who would sit around on a hotel veranda. Captain James Henry Cook, who owns a big ranch in the Bad Lands, has given a standing invitation to all the paleontologists in the United States to spend their summers there. Every year twenty or more professors from such institutions as the American Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Museum, and Yale University forget all about their winter lectures, pack their grips, and hie them to Bone City.

The Scientists' Playground

ALL summer and well into the fall they wield sledges, and pry away at the rocky hills near their camp, expecting every minute to turn up a giant dog or cat, or some other strange animal that roamed about the Middle West millions of years ago. It's great fun, say the scientists, digging into the hills, and later on fitting up their museums with all sorts of queer skeletons. Vacation hunting in this spot has furnished a large number of the animal skeletons exhibited in Eastern museums.

The scientists shout with glee when they uncover the skeleton of an ancestor of the modern horse, or that of the pig that lived a few million years ago—he could have swallowed two or three of the ordinary barn-yard hogs and still have had room for more, say the cheery vacationists of Bone City.

This House Was Built with Biscuits

MRS. ANNIE FISHER couldn't (consistently) get cross if some one did tell her that her beaten biscuit were like bricks, because she lives in a house built with them. Moreover, she collects the rent from fourteen others also built with them.

Mrs. Fisher's biscuit always just naturally melted in the mouth. No one in Columbia ever has been able to describe them, any more than a rainbow or a bird-song or any other natural wonder can be described. The only outlet for the emotion which the eating of one of Mrs. Fisher's biscuits evoked was telling the next person one met: "You certainly ought to taste those biscuits."

And, of course, that was how it all started, this biscuit business that bought so much real estate and solid independence.

One person told about them. and an-other fellow did likewise; and so Mrs. Fisher's fame grew and grew, and flowed over the State line, and trickled into the four corners of the States, and finally went meandering across the ocean.

She Keeps Her Sleeves Rolled Up

AS the receipts from grateful diners kept coming in, Mrs. Fisher turned them all into real estate, and stayed right on the job, only rolling down her sleeves long enough to have her picture taken the other morning. Another odd thing about Mrs. Fisher is that she doesn't raise her prices "on account of the war" or the high cost of living, or even for the commonest reason of all—success. Those biscuits of hers started their career at twelve and a half cents per dozen, and at twelve and a half cents they have stayed.

While her biscuits are her mainstay, on the side Mrs. Fisher makes fruit cake and wedding cake and other symbolic and dangerous concoctions, and also on the side she carries on quite a large catering business.

This pleasant home of Mrs. Fisher's has fourteen rooms, and is equipped with all the modern conveniences.

Professions for Colored Women

OF course colored women are the traditional "best cooks," and it isn't strange that numbers of them have very successfully entered the catering business. Another profession for which their race traditionally fits them is that of nursing; but, so far at least, ambitious young colored nurses have had a hard row to hoe in our hospitals, because of the race antagonism they meet there.

A colored woman who has broken all precedents and walked successfully into an unusual profession is Mrs. Maggie B. Walker of Richmond, Virginia, who is the president of the St. Luke's Savings Bank. Her bank is largely supported by the Industrial Insurance Society, and is capitalized at $50,000.

Mobilizing the Jail

EAST POINT, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, has gained the distinction of being the most accommodating little city in the South. Besides having all the conveniences of city life, East Point has provided the law-breaking element with a jail on wheels; and, instead of dragging an obstreperous drunk to prison, the town constable hitches a couple of mules to the prison, and drives over and loads up. On trial day the load of malefactors is towed over to the court-room. This portable prison has accommodations for twelve prisoners, and is seven feet wide, seven feet four inches high, and thirteen feet long. Georgia works its convicts on the road, and this cage conveys them from place to place.