Poisoning by Automobile

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

"I HAVE heard that automobile gas is dangerous. Is this true, and why?" When a gas engine is running it generate a variety of deadly gases. One of these is unexploded gasolene or benzene vapor, another is carbon-monoxid—which is the same deadly gas that human beings or animals throw off from the lungs.

Last spring a Chicago doctor was overcome by this vapor while in his garage "tinkering" with the engine, and died before help could reach him. Dr. Mary O'Malley, speaking recently before the International Congress of Hygiene, reported the case of a patient overcome by gas poisoning. This patient recovered from the immediate toxemia, but became mentally unbalanced a week later.

The chief danger, of course, lies in working with the engines in close, unventilated rooms or cabins, where the victim gets a large and concentrated dose from the engine exhaust.

And lately it has been contended that many of the fatal accidents sustained by aëroplane from temporary unconsciousness caused by inhaling the poisonous gases generated by their engines.

One peculiar thing about this gas poisoning is that resistance to it does not depend upon mere physical strength. A weak slip of a woman may withstand a saturation in gasolene fumes that would completely "floor" a robust man.

In the event of one being overcome by gas poisoning, the same measures should be taken as with any other case of asphyxiation. The clothing should immediately be loosened, and if a pulmotor and its crew is not available, artificial respiration should be resorted to.

The face and chest should be slapped smartly with towels wrung out in cold water, and stimulants—such as hot black coffee—should be administered, pending such time as a doctor or a nurse with hypodermics of strychnia or nitroglycerin may reach the patient.

But it were far better to prevent the condition. So, if an automobile engine proves refractory, open the garage door while working with it. Or, better still, run the machine out into the open air.

Penalizing Thrift

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

A SUBJECT that investors rarely think about until too late, and which bond salesman and financial writers allude to but sparingly, is the question of taxation. The following letter was received by a large firm of investment bankers, from a man to whom they had tried to sell bonds:

I invested my money in government bonds, and I will explain why. It was not because I distrusted the safety of your bonds, because I do not, but on account of the outrageous tax laws of this State. The total tax of city, county and State amounts to between 4 and 5 per cent. The assessor administers an oath to all taxpayers that hey have given an exact statement of all their bonds, so you see an honest man can to hold your bonds. The reason the tax is so high is because real estate is listed at only 20 to 30 per cent. of its value.

This is an extreme case, but there are many places where the tax rate is 3 per cent., so that a man with a 4 per cent. bond would net only 1 per cent. if her paid the full tax.

Now, the tax situation in this country is complicated and confused in the extreme. Each one of the States has a different set of laws, and I am convinced that very few small investors, at least, know much if anything about the tax regulations of their own State as regards securities, and nothing whatever about those of other States. People seldom make inquiries when they purchase bonds, only to be penalized after the assessor has found out about their investment. So it may be stated as an absolute essential of sound investment: don't put yourself in a position where your income will be taken away from you. Find out beforehand what the laws are and the practice is.

Of course, every good citizen wants to pay a reasonable sum to support the government, but the trouble is that taxation as a whole in this country has become a confused jumble of inequalities, exemptions, evasions and conflicts. There is no fairness or equality about it. Thousands of persons who out to pay large taxes pay one at all, and the poor widow with a tiny cottage or a single bond pays exorbitantly. What is known as the general property tax, upon which the whole structure of taxation rests, has practically broken down under pressure of modern conditions. The new Federal Income Act, with all its faults, points the way to fairness and simplicity, and so great an authority as Professor E. R. A. Seligman of Columbia University urges that the income tax be introduced for State and local purposes as well, abolishing, of course, the old general property tax.

Tax Laws Vary in Different States

THE taxation of bonds, stocks, and mortgages in the hands of the investor is perhaps the most complicated and uneven branch of the whole subject of taxation. Here are a few general facts taken from a perfect vast wilderness on the subject, facts of tangible assistance, I trust, to the individual investor. Savings bank deposits and insurance policies are under pretty nearly all circumstances free from taxation in the hands of the holder. This fact renders these apparently low interest-yielding investments much more desirable in comparison with bonds and mortgages, and stocks in many cases, than they appear to be on the surface or are generally given credit for.

In several States, notably New York and New Jersey, nearly all stocks are free from State and local taxation. Stocks also are not taxed under the Federal Income Act, unless the income is a very large one. In other States, notably Massachusetts, only stocks of domestic corporations are exempt.

Under the Federal Income Law, all State and municipal bonds are exempt; in many States the bonds are exempt; in many States the bonds of the State itself and of its municipalities are free from tax, while the bonds of other States and outside cities and towns are heavily taxed. In still other States, even the obligations of the State itself are levied upon.

But in general a State is inclined to exempt not only its own obligations, but bonds and stocks of a number of its domestic corporations. Law and practice in this respect differ tremendously, but usually an investor can obtain tax-exempt securities by applying to a dealer in his State. In still other jurisdictions there are laws that exempt bonds from all taxation, either permanently or for a period of years, by paying a small recoding fee. In New York, for example, by paying 3/4 of 1 per cent. on certain classes of bonds, the owner does not have to pay anything more for five years.

Then, there are States that do not tax bonds and stocks at all. But this is the greatest possible evil, because this allows a group of unprincipled rich individuals in other places to employ skilful lawyers and form a trust company in the easy-going jurisdiction and move their holdings to it; or, simpler yet, move their "legal residence" to the paradise of freedom.

It is a horrible muddle. But your banker can tell you how to keep from being soaked for more than your share.

One Minute With the Editor

Twice in Succession

LAST week's issue was—like the world—so full of a number of things that who should be left behind but our old friend Shorty? Here he is this week, and, by the way of compensation, there's a Torchy story in our next number, giving you Sewell Ford twice in succession.

Suffragettes

FOR ourselves, we're neutral, waiting for the ladies of the family to make up their minds. But that doesn't prevent us from furnishing munitions to the suffrage cause in the shape of a double page of pictures next week. For the women who are interested we give half a dozen pictures of suffrage "stunts"—and for the men, what? All around the sides and bottom we've made a border of the best-looking suffragettes (or ists). Looking the page over as it lies before us, we are inclined to believe the cause is making progress.

Watch Dr. Laneham

WE believe that Dr. Laneham is going to find out who or what it was that murdered Mrs. Fisher. Keep your eyes on the Doctor: get all the tips you can from him, and you will have just as good a chance as any one to win $500. Right now—this minute—is a good time to sit down and read this instalment of "Behind the Bolted Door?:—before the "plot thickens."

Mrs. Mattie Coleman

By WALT MASON

MRS. COLEMAN looked around her—this occurred five years ago, ere the inspiration found her—and beheld much ill and woe. 'Twas in Oklahoma sunny that her assets she surveyed; she had but ten bones in money, and a shotgun and a spade, and a pair of naps and wagon, with the harness and the whip; Poverty, the grisly dragon, had the widow on the hip.

Children five, the gifts of heaven, filled the future with alarms, and the oldest was eleven, and the youngest one in arms. She was small, her age was thirty, weight a hundred in the shade; Fortune's deal was surely dirty, but she stood there undismayed.

She had read in some stray paper of free lands in Oregon. "That," she said, "will be the caper; I'll hitch up and travel on." In the wagon then she bundled bedclothes, frying-pans, and kids, and along the road she trundled,cheerful as the katydids. O'er two thousand miles of highway she propelled her ponies lame, stopping at some wood or byway, with her gun, to shoot some game. Rabbits, quails, and ducks she potted with her trusty fowling-piece; squirrels, grouse, and things she swatted, and then cooked them in their grease. And her meat bill on her travels came to thirty cents, that's it; and surely no romance unravels aught to beat that widows grit!

She was always looking, looking for a chance to earn some loot; and she'd stop and do some cooking, washing duds, or canning fruit. Slow and painful was the journey, but she faced things, brave and stout as the knight who at the tourney has his face knocked inside out. Eighteen months of weary driving over mountain, vale, and plain and we see her then arriving at the little town of Drain.

Here she left her traps in keeping of some people who were kind, left the children (doubtless weeping) with a homestead in her mind. To the dark Siuslaw Forest, in the show dark and dense, traveled she, where trails were sorest; and her pile of forty cents! Where Dame Nature freely squandered on the landscape every trick, miles three hundred thus she wandered, reaching Upper Maple Creek.

"Here I'll build my little palace," said the dauntless widow then, "and abide till Fortune's malice comes to knock me out again."

Then she cooked for logging campers for some months to earn a roll, working oven doors and dampers, still with sunshine in her soul. Now she farms her acres sunny, and of course you'll all be glad that she's taking in the money, salting down the plunk and scad.

No Longer a Handcuff King

By "MIGHTY" OAKS

I WAS the youngest handcuff king in the world, but I am a handcuff king no longer. I have been confined in strait-jackets, nailed up in wooden cases, padlocked into glass cages, and thrown into rivers all over the country. I made money—big money for a man of twenty-two; but you could not coax me into a pair of handcuffs to-day with a king's ransom. I know when I have had enough, and I am through.

Even at nine years of age I was credited with an uncanny familiarity with the ways of locks and bolts; and at fifteen I felt advanced enough to try a real stunt. I lived in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (yes, that's a real town). We awoke one morning to read in our Oshkosh paper that a notorious criminal had escaped from the lock-up of a nearby city. Could such a thing happen in Oshkosh? the reporters asked our local chief, and he responded sturdily that it never could. The next day I publicly challenged the chief to keep me in the local jail; and he, protesting that he hated to take money from a child, accepted my challenge.

Everybody in town knew us both, of course. A crowd stood in front of the jail to watch me handcuffed, thumb-cuffed, and manacled. Then the door was locked upon me, and the crowd waited breathlessly to see whether anything would happen.

Something did happen. In exactly twenty-six minutes I appeared at the front door of the jail, to the joy of the crowd and the great confusion of the chief. From that moment my fame was established. Everybody called me the "Handcuff King."

Since then I have escaped from more than 350 jails throughout the country, and it never takes me more than thirteen minutes. I am not speaking of electrically controlled jails; I realize how impossible an escape is under up-to-date conditions.

Keeping Our Stunts Secret

RIGHT here I must assert that, in spite of all the so-called exposures, no handcuff king has ever really told how he does it. The reason for this suppression is the American Society of Magicians. This secret benevolent organization aims to prevent the exposure of tricks, with all the idea of retaining the lucrative secrets and mysteries of the profession. Weekly bulletins are issued to members from the New York headquarters, detailing the latest stunts. But should a member forget his honor so far as to expose his rival's secret, he will find all audiences "locoed" and his best efforts "queered."

On the last day of November, 1911, the Palace Theater opened in St. Paul, where I played to capacity houses. While there I accepted a strange challenge from an old locksmith, a sallow, wrinkled man who had acquired his craft in Europe. This mechanic wrote me a letter saying he had a pair of peculiar Spanish handcuffs that he would wager a hundred dollars I could not open after he had locked and prepared them on me. Talking it over with the manager, I decided to accept, and the letter was read before the afternoon and evening audiences. The old fellow showed up to carry out the terms of the wager, and when he had sprung the lock of the cuffs, he poured molten lead into the keyhole to seal it. This was harder than I had anticipated. I worked and puzzled fully eleven minutes before gaining my release.

After that I was booked as a boy handcuff king on a vaudeville circuit through twenty large cities. In one place the sheriff, a mean, disagreeable fellow, met me at the hotel lobby as I finished supper, and held out a fierce, spike-lined, double-locking hand-restraint iron. This man was extremely unpopular with the boys of the town, because he was continually threatening and bullying them. With apparent reluctance, I agreed to let him place the intricate lock on my wrist, as I stood nonchalantly chewing a tooth-pick. Then I raised the cuffs to my lips, poked a little with the tooth-pick in my mouth, and the lock sprang open. I took the cuffs away as a souvenir, and he had to spend $7.50 for new ones, besides enduring the gibes of his enemies.

Again, at Calumet, Michigan, an old doctor brought pair of ancient shackles that he said had been used by officers of the Old Guard in the Napoleonic wars. I let him clamp them on and lock the spring catch; then, going to a safe standing in the office, I struck the manacles a sharp rap in the right place. They flew open!

I learned early in the game that free advertising paid, and I worked out a specialty to attract the curious. While in Canton, Ohio, I gave it the first try-out, posting an offer to the effect that I would remove any standard make of handcuffs while being conveyed from the theater to the police-station in the patrol. This led me into trouble, for I just escaped being cast into the cell. The jogging of the wagon prevented my work from going on at the usual speed, and I had to hide my method from the police in the patrol as well as from the crowd that followed.

At Mankato, Minnesota, I first performed a spectacular handcuffed dive from the highest ironwork on the bridge, coming up in the water in a few seconds free.

My last performance for some months was at Lincoln, Nebraska, where the sheriff placed me in a maniac's strait-jacket. Now, this strait-jacket had a slit, or pocket, for the hands, that was lined with fur, and the more you endeavored to get out, the sweatier your hands became—and the smaller your chance of being released. I rested for a long time after this escape; for, to tell the truth, it was a narrow piece of luck.

While on tour in Ohio I developed the escape before an approaching train that afterward made me famous; but when I tried it in Louisiana, the station agent wired New Orleans for instructions. He received this reply:

Man insane. Arrest at once for trespassing if he attempts to lie across rails.

Next I invented a trick on the order of the Davenport Brothers' spiritualist cabinet; only mine was a waterproof glass fitted with a padlock, while I was shackled, and made my escape in full view of the audience. In a large Pennsylvania town the major received repeated requests to stop the act, because a number of women fainted.

I also learned the tricks of the Ten Ichi Jap Troupe, and found a rare book disclosing the secrets of Maskelyn and the Philstals in Europe. From these I worked out the mammoth milk-can stunt, whereby I escaped from a great galvanized receptacle filled with water, after I had been manacled and the cover of the can padlocked down.

My closest experience to being exposed and losing a hundred-dollar forfeit was at Marion, Indiana. A man who followed me from Greencastle, Indiana, brought a devilish-looking pair of cuffs up on the stage, when I offered to open any lock. These cuffs had spikes on the inside, and the more you strove to break away the tighter they clinched; and he had put them on upside down, with my hands behind my back! I gave Hamer, my assistant, the sign of distress; then, looking sharply at a man in the audience, I remarked, to cover my confusion:

"There is a man who says these cuffs are not locked."

I blandly called Hamer to come over and open them, and then let somebody else place them on right, while Hamer quickly slipped me the key. Nobody suspected us, and I "shook" the cuffs off.

I have spoken of the sensational escape from in front of a moving train, which was one of my most successful bits of advertising. Sensational it was—too sensational, indeed, for it pretty nearly cost me my life.

The stunt was to have the local police handcuff me and chain me to the railroad track just a few minutes before the fast train was due. Of course, the announcement that a man's life was to be endangered always drew a tremendous crowd of people, many of whom would be sufficiently interested to come afterward to the evening performance.

How I Lost My Nerve

IT was in a little town in Iowa that the tragedy—or near-tragedy—occurred. The crowd was surging up to the tracks on both sides. I had been manacled, strapped to the rails, and my assistant had thrown a blanket over me to cover the mechanics of my escape. Usually escape was simple enough. A quick blow on the handcuffs given in just the right way and at the right spot, a little twisting of the chains, and I was up while the train was still a hundred feet or more away.

But to-day something happened. The handcuffs stuck against one of the ties in way that made the proper blow impossible. Furiously I dug at them, writhing and sweating in agony. Along the rails I could hear the pound of the great engine; I could feel the ground quiver. The crowd drew hack in terror; a woman shrieked; I gave myself up for lost. Then suddenly, almost as the engine reached me, the spring gave, I shook the chains off, and drew back just in time.

I had saved my life, but—

"Mighty, you've lost your nerve," said Bill Hamer, my confederate, looking me straight in the eye.

And he was right.

Because I declined to produce this free act again, five managers in succession turned me down. Finally, at Bemidji, Minnesota, I secured an engagement—my last engagement on the stage. A part of my act was a glass cage stunt. The cage was filled with water, and I, manacled and plunged into it, would proceed to make my escape. One evening, while I struggled at the bottom of the cage, I was suddenly seized with cramps. Bill Hamer, seeing I was in trouble, grasped the emergency ax and smashed the side of the cage. The water spouted over the floor, while women and children screamed in horror. They carried me to the local hospital and resuscitated me after an hour's work with the pulmotor.

So, at twenty-two, ended my career as the youngest handcuff king. I'm not superstitious; but when death reaches out and takes me firmly by the collar twice in one month, I take it as a sign that if I want to enjoy a ripe old age, I'd better be moving along.

One Kind of a Honeymoon—

NOBODY wanted him any more. There was no place for him anywhere in the world. France couldn't use him in her army—a fellow with only one good leg; and even Germany was through with him—a prisoner who was no longer dangerous.

And so he was shipped back to the city that had cheered him to the trenches months before—shipped back, crippled and finished, to face an aimless future. For he was one of those in whose faces one may read the worst of war—to wounds and disfigurement had been added the heavy humiliation of imprisonment. He was one of the grands blessés—"gravely wounded"—returned from the prisons and lazarets of Germany as the result of the exchange of the wounded arranged through the efforts of the commission in Switzerland.

Nobody wanted him, and he could not blame them. That was what he thought, until he saw her face at La Chapelle—her face above the armful of flowers she had carried to the station,—the face of the girl he had left behind.

Like a mother France is opening her arms to the grands blessés like the chap in the picture. The very term grands blessé is said softly, with a sort of tenderness.

Those who have come back from the other side of the Rhine are different from those in the hospitals in France or hobbling about the streets of Paris. For months—some of them for nearly a year—they have lived under the yoke of an enemy, and their faces tell the tale of cowed, broken spirits.

The Driftwood of War

THEY are the driftwood that the storm of war has beaten up on the shore. The list of the afflictions that pass under the regulations of the agreement of exchange is in itself sinister.

To come back to his country, into some semblance of freedom, a prisoner must have been robbed of any possibility of activity that might give him value as a fighter. He must have lost one or more important members, be blind in both eyes, have serious brain trouble, be mutilated, or have tuberculosis in an advanced stage. It is too terrible to enumerate further.

But for the moment, for a brief flare, these grands blessés are being made happy, are being fêted, are walking through paths of flowers. Every train that brings them back to the soil of France is decked with flowers by the sympathetic neighbors of the little country next door.

Some are on crutches, some have limp, sleeveless arms; others are sightless, led by the guiding arms of comrades. Now and again one dies on the way, living no longer than to breathe the air of his native land. They pass through cheering throngs, hailed by trumpets and escorted by cuirassiers, and they find awaiting them groaning feasts, such as they have not had for many a day, served by the eager hands of Red Cross nurses and women of high rank and low.

The Little White Tag of Freedom

THEY form a drooping, battered, ragged regiment, wearing odds and ends of old uniforms,—now and then one in a long German coat,—all tagged with the little white tag of identification and freedom. For the moment they lift their heads and drink in the free air of France, and with it the unaccustomed reverence and adulation of the waiting crowds. Into their crippled walk comes some semblance of the old military gait. Pathetically eager, they chat with the able soldiers that come to greet them, assuming a brave air of comradeship.

Sometimes they wipe frank tears from their eyes; sometimes they laugh for joy or try to chant the "Marseillaise" in choking voices as the bands play. And sometimes they are silent and apathetic, as if their spirits have not yet left those prison camps, while for many it needs but the sight of their own country, the tonic air of freedom, to revive hope, to summon visions of health and vigor. If a passer-by stops to sympathize, these brave ones would nod their heads and say, "We shall make a new beginning."

In Paris, at the station of La Chapelle and at the stations of other cities to which the grands blessés scatter from Lyons, there is a constant repetition of flowers and feasting and welcome. And from those final destinations the returning soldiers are sent to hospitals, to convalescent stations, or to waiting homes, to be nursed and tended and won back to some semblance of activity.

One Day of Triumph

IT is enough for them now to feel the tenderness with which their countrymen welcome them. But one finds himself wondering if with the lapse of time, as inevitably as the flowers on their coats fade, some of the veneration will pass from the hearts of their neighbors. For when the uniform is exchanged for the civilian's clothes, and the wound now so gently cared for becomes a handicap in the race of life, there will come back to these soldiers who hate lost in the game of war some of the oppression of bondage from which they have escaped temporarily in leaving the prison camp.

But it is enough, for the time, that they are free of the yoke of imprisonment; that they are once more French citizens on French soil; that France welcomes them to her heart.

And the Girl Who Waited

AND for others or them, like this chap on the steps of the church, life—the life that they threw on the table and lost and so strangely regained—holds still more. It holds a sweetheart who bravely said good-by, as bravely did a man's work in the waiting, and who will still bravely, nay gaily, shoulder two thirds of the work or reconstruction.

They are starting on their honey-moon, these two in the picture, with an equipment consisting of three things—the decoration of the Legion of Honor, the Medaille Militaire, and the bride's singing heart.

—Katherine Glover.

—And Another Kind

WHO wouldn't be twenty-one, just married, and caravaning on a three-year honeymoon to the Southland? Staid, sober folk, for whom the savor of romance is dispelled by the High Cost of Living, envy Billy Schmelke, a young business man, and his charming bride, Berenice Logue, whose witching face was at once the joy and despair of artists for whom she posed.

Seated in their gypsy wagon, drawn by an old white horse that "whoas" to the name of Oswald, Mr. and Mrs. Schmelke have left all cares behind them.

Commissions are a nightmare of the past to the young man, while the bride, whose piquant face used to illustrate thrilling love stories, is busy illustrating one of her very own.

As to the most important "wherewithal," a few days' work now and then on the farms along their route provides money enough for food; and, as the bride naïvely inquires, until their clothes wear out what more do they need?

The exercise is good for "Billy," and "Chub" is a good cook.

Five hundred dollars was the cost of their entire outfit, with a dog thrown in for good measure. Chub and Billy admit that they had been in love for a long time—ever since they were children. But the dread H. C. of L. hung over them

like the sword of Damocles. There didn't really seem to be any way out, until Chub thought of playing gypsy and giving the aforesaid H.C. of L. a solar-plexus blow. Within six weeks the young people had their wagon built after their own design. Truly it is a marvel of compactness. A burlap-covered couch turns into a double cot at night, while underneath it reposes a box containing Billy's best suits and Chub's best frocks. There is a chintz-covered dressing-table, with space for more clothes beneath, and a miniature wood-stove, with pots and pans in a large dish-pan tinder it. A box of dishes takes up half the room under the driver's seat, and is covered by a lid which can be turned into an ironing-board at a minute's notice.

Both young persons "adore dancing," and, since they left New York early in July, have added piquancy to many dances in the towns and villages through which they have passed.

Care-free, happy-go-lucky, a thirst for , the young people say they may never settle down.

"Why live in the city, the ugly, smelly city, growing gray and weary in the effort to keep the wolf from the door?" they ask. And echo answers "Why?"

The Everlasting Miracle

By WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY

Illustrations by W. Aylward

MY Gawd, what a man he was for gatherin' junk!"

And with this resentful exclamation Mrs. Storm emerged from her dead husband's room and threw on the Pleiades' cabin table an armful of Jon Storm's treasures—an ancient chart, a cross-staff, and an ebony quadrant.

Curt Chase, the Pleiades' chief mate, straightening from where he bent over a packing-case, started to speak, and then, with an effort that whitened the bronze of his strong young face, held his peace.

Magna Storm, coming aft from the forward cabin, stopped short, her blue eyes fixed balefully on her stepmother.

"Just junk! Wouldn't give any of it house room," Mrs. Storm went on, a sneer wrinkling her thin nose.

"But Cap'n Storm loved all these things, and he—" Chase began angrily.

"Maybe he did, my boy; but it's his life insurance, not trash like this, that's goin' to buy bread for me an' his daughter," the woman's full red lips returned; and as she spoke her greenish eyes were making a catlike assessment of Curt Chase's six feet of lusty manhood.

"Say, Curt, how old are you?"

"Twenty-four."

"You carry any life insurance?"

"No; I've no one depending on me."

"Huh! A fine-lookin' fellow like you can't be stayin' single very much longer."

She drew herself up so that her silk mourning dress clung with new insinuation to a form that belied her age. It was a trick that she had exhibited in Chase's presence more than once in the six months that Jon Storm had called this boarding-house mistress wife. With a barely concealed repulsion and not a little embarrassment, Curt bent again to his task.

"I'm goin' up on deck, Curt," announced Mrs. Storm, "to see if the launch is comin' back for us an' the things."

Curt wondered, for the hundredth time, why the old Norseman had ever mated with the henna-headed harridan to whom he had bequeathed by will and assignment all of his possessions. Chase believed he could trace the beginning of his friend's entanglement with the boarding-house mistress to the time when Storm had suddenly discovered Herbert Spencer and become obsessed by the "infinitude of space."

HIS name, repeated twice in a half whisper, was what lifted Curt's head. Ragna Storm was standing beside the cabin table, holding the cross-staff and the quadrant pressed to her young bosom. A flood of midday sunshine, pouring through the skylight upon her, turned the think plaits of her golden mane into a vivid crown of gold, and exhibited in all its glory the litheness of her youthful body; and with a shock Curt Chase realized that this was no longer the little girl he had first met when he had joined the Pleiades six years before.

"These, Curt, belonged to my father's people," said Ragna. "This quadrant was my great-grandfather's. They are not junk. Will you not keep them for me until—until—"

"No more, Ragna. I understand. I meant to—"

Curt paused. Laying the cross-staff and the quadrant on the table, he took both of the girl's hands in his.

"Ragna," he said, "I don't like to think of your going to live with that—with your stepmother. I have nearly two thousand dollars saved. You take it and go to a business college. It will make you independent. You do not have to stay in San Francisco."

The girl tried to interrupt him, but he went on: "If these dogs of strikers had not killed your father, things would have been different. To take this money from me would be just the same as taking it from him."

"You are a good man, Curt, but it would not be the same. I could not—"

"But, Ragna, your father was my friend, the truest a man ever had. You've known me ever since you were a little girl—ever since I came as a boy into this ship."

"But, Curt, I am no longer a child." A glow suffused her cheeks. "I am eighteen now—a woman. And my father always said that it is not right that a woman should take money from a man who—who is not her husband."

And straightway, under the impulse of youth's fine chivalry, he answered:

"If you would marry me, Ragna, it would be all right then." He did not see that she thrilled with expectancy at the words. "We could be married, and you could go away just the same."

"Oh!" she gasped, drawing back from him as if she had been struck. "That could never be. That—"

"Hurry, Curt!" called Mrs. Storm, flashing in from the companionway. "The launch is half way here. Your hat, Ragna! Hurry! It's going to rain again!"

Curt was sure she must have overheard.

Fifteen minutes later Curt Chase was standing against the Pleiades' quarter-rail, watching the launch carry shoreward all that was not "junk" of Jon Storm's belongings. Twice the yellow-haired woman waved a handkerchief at him; but Ragna did not look back.

The next day at noon John Laysan, the Pleiades' managing owner, summoned Chase to his office and said to him:

"You're master of the Pleiades, if you can keep her from being blown out of the water until this strike is over."

Laysan said many other things to this youngest captain in his employ; but what he wished to say most he had given his word to Ragna Storm never to repeat. Two days before, Jon Storm's daughter, with the unmistakable light of love in her eyes, had asked that the Pleiades' chief mate be made her father's successor.

"I think Ragna Storm is going to be pleased over your promotion, Captain Chase," Layson concluded impersonally.

"Yes," answered Curt. "I'm going straight from here to tell her."

As straight as his speech, Curt Chase went to Mrs. Storm's boarding-house. A slattern opened the door for him, and as he entered two voices, raised bibulously in song, burst from the open transom of a room at the end of the hall. One was a man's, the other Mrs. Storm's.

RAGNA, dressed for the street and descending the stairs at that moment from the floor overhead, found Curt, whitefaced and tense, staring down the hallway.

"I have come to take you away from this place, Ragna," he said in a lone of finality. Then, noting the whiteness of her face, he asked fiercely: "Has anybody attempted to hurt you?"

"No, Curt; but—"

A shriek of laughter from Mrs Storm ended the song.

"Who is in there with that woman, Ragna?" Chase asked.

The girl shuddered.

"Somebody who came in late last night. I did not see him. I locked myself in my room and went to bed."

Taking her hand, Curt Chase opened the street door, and he and Ragna Storm passed out into the sunshine.

In that hour, and without other wooing,

---

Curt Chase made Ragna Storm his wife, and took her back to the Pleiades, which had cradled her. That night he wrote a letter to Mrs. Storm that brought a prompt delivery of Ragna's personal belongings. It was the one answer he expected; but it was not the only one the green-eyed woman returned.

Pinned to a shirtwaist, where on opening her trunk she could not help seeing it, Ragna found a card on which her stepmother had scrawled:

"You threw yourself at that boob's head, and he took you out of pity. Wait till he wakes up."

Defensively, shamefully, the girl destroyed the card, but not its sting.

March roared out with the strike mounting in fury and bitterness. April heard dynamite used for the first time. Laysan suggested to Chase that he send Ragna ashore to remain with Mrs. Laysan until all danger had passed. Ragna overheard him.

"My place is here with my husband," she said; and they could not change this determination.

THE beginning of May brought a lull, which, however, was only the calm of the storm's vortex. The end of the month saw the port paralyzed and gorged with idle coastwise shipping.

"We should be carrying cargo, Curt," Ragna began to murmur, with the coming of June. She was not herself, and a great and growing uneasiness for her filled Curt.

"Oh, but I'm not afraid, Curt. To be out in the open again is all that I wish."

That was the sum of her answers to his repeated urgings that she go ashore with Mrs. Laysan. The last time he mentioned her leaving him, she said, with a fierce pride: "I am no shore woman!"

That was on an evening when, with no thought of the two armed watchmen who guarded the ship, she suddenly put her arms round her husband's neck and kissed him. Her wonderful golden mane was down that evening, hanging below her hips in two braids as thick as Curt's sinewy wrists.

"My husband, you do love me, don't you?" she asked, clinging to him; but as she spoke a shudder went through her warm body. The round, half-bare arms became as ice against his neck.

And, instead of answering her question with the lover's assurance that was on his lips, the boy exclaimed in all tenderness:

"Ragna, you are cold! You are not well!"

"Oh, I'm well," she answered, with a little laugh of bitterness, and drawing away from him. "But I am tired; I will go below."

The thought that excluded all else from her mind was that never in so many words had Curt said: "Ragna, I love you."

Mid-June brought a truce in the labor war, and John Laysan snatched at a deep-water charter for the Pleiades—railroad supplies to Fremantle, the port of Perth in western Australia.

Without let-up, the lading of the Pleiades was driven until, in the midst of a young July morning, manned by a crew put aboard under the cover of night,—dregs of the port churned to the surface by the strife ashore and for the most part shanghaied,—she passed out through the Golden Gate. Even the two mates, signed on at the last minute, were strangers to Chase and to each other. Clayton, the chief, a grizzled, leather-faced down East relic of the Cape Horn trade, came with a note from Laysan; and in his stress Curt did not mark that Clayton was an old man. Besides, he desired very much to please his managing owner. Corlinnsen, the second, a blond-headed young Norse giant, had been taken on his own application.

AT eight o'clock that night the Pleiades was fleeing from the land under reefed topgallant-sails, and Curt Chase was pacing a bitter watch in his first command. It had been a day of strife, of man-handling and man-driving. There was everything but sailors forward—tinkers and tailors and waiters and teamsters. There was one, even—a wedge- faced fellow built like a poplar sapling—who admitted the avocation of a street-corner evangelist.

As the wheel was being relieved at four bells, Ragna appeared in the companionway to say that she was tired and would sit up no longer.

"Good night," Curt said, with a brusqueness of which he was not conscious. He did not see that his wife had reached up to kiss him.

Turning aft from the companionway, Curt saw that the wheel had been relieved by a sailor who had been shipped by Wilson's boarding-house. This tow-headed, ox-thewed follow called himself John Sandstrom. But he was a sailor, one of five by actual count who knew stem from stern. The possibilities of strength in him had challenged the young master. Now a vagrant gleam of moonlight picked from under the helmsman's sou'wester the point of a prognathous jaw, and a thick upper lip that had recently been shaved.

"Carrying a press o' sail, that fellow. Shaved in a hurry or I miss my guess."

This observation, made by Clayton during the morning, came back to Curt now, just as Sandstrom, seemingly conscious of scrutiny, let the ship yaw badly. One stride and Chase was beside him, snapping close to his ear:

"Don't let the police worry you! They can't get at you here!"

It was a quarter-deck sarcasm of ancient and common use in American deep-water ships.

"I'm not afraid of the police, sir," answered the sailor boldly enough. But somehow the Pleiades' master felt that he had flicked him on the raw, and he warned Clayton and Corlinnsen to keep an eye on Sandstrom.

IT was on the following day that Curt put the last tier on the barrier that separated him from Ragna. He ordered the fitting up of one of the spare after cabin state-rooms for his use.

"I think, Ragna," he explained, "you feel as you do because I've been coming and going at all hours and you haven't been getting your proper sleep. But I've got to get this gang whipped into shape."

The girl made no comment, but he caught a flash in the depths of her eyes that made him ask her if he had said anything that hurt her feelings.

"No—indeed, no, Curt," she answered. But a voice somewhere within her was repeating over and over again, "What pity takes pity rarely keeps." It was a line upon which she had stumbled that morning in a Norwegian novel.

The Pleiades swept down the northeast trades. Chase kept telling his mates that they and he would prove that ships could be got through a passage despite all the labor unions that ever existed. Thus he communicated to them some of the spirit of terrible bitterness that the strike and Jon Storm's assassination had implanted in him.

Suddenly, in an hour, the Pleiades lost the trades. Followed a week of baffling airs. And then days were upon the ship whose noons made her deck seams spit pitch and her rigging weep splattering drops of tar.

It was on the fifty-eighth day after losing the northeast trades that Curt Chase finally pulley-hauled the Pleiades into a fair breeze. In that time the ship had made only six hundred and sixty miles. Then, four degrees north of where he had expected to fall in with the southeast trades, these winds suddenly filled the ship's long baffled wings and swung her into the island-strewn track below the line which sailing vessels follow from the Pacific Coast toward Australia. But this unexpected good fortune lessened by not so much as one turn of the screws the tension at which life was strung fore and aft.

For Ragna Chase was at one pole, her husband at the other.

"'What pity takes pity rarely keeps,'" had become the wife's abiding thought in the brooding, fearful silences in which for days at a time it had become her wont to take refuge. Curt, beset by a responsibility that he could not divide, harassed by incompetency and inefficiency, imagined, as youth is so prone to do, that he stood alone against the world.

Going below in the first watch of the night after entering the southeast trades, to get his sextant,—the ship was coming up with Caroline Island,—Curt discovered Ragna asleep in a chair at the cabin table. He bent to kiss her smooth white forehead, then straightened with a shock that made him gulp. Lying open in her lap was her father's copy of Spencer —the book that had started the brave old man cogitating about the "infinitude of space." At last Curt had an explanation of Ragna's moroseness.

WITH the deftness of a thief, he slipped the book out from under the hand resting on it, and stole up on deck. As he flung it overboard, the second mate, returning from a sweating down of the fore-braces, joined him.

"Ay got de street-preacher faller on do fo'c'sle lookout, sir, and two more fallers bane on do foret'gallun yard vit yarp eyes open for de ayland," Corlinnsen reported. "Everybody bane lookin' yarp to-night. Bay yimminy, sir, you vould tank dey all axpec' t' go ayore."

"We ought to be getting the loom of the breakers within the next ten or fifteen minutes, about two points off—"

The cabin clock struck five bells; but the man at the wheel, who had been listening with straining ears, struck six.

"What do you mean by striking six bells?" demanded Chase, whirling round. "You—"

In that second a babel started, forward.

"Silence, for'ard! Silence!" Curt shouted, springing away from Corlinnsen's side to the break of the poop.

A taunting laugh answered him. In its wake followed a stream of insulting epithet. Curt, snatching up a belaying-pin, cleared the poop and started forward on a run. A warning cry from Corlinnsen was drowned by a violent ringing of the wheel bell, but anyway it would have failed.

As Chase reached the break of the forward house, the trap into which he had flung himself closed. Four, five, six men—all with blackened faces—sprang upon him. One dropped on him from the top of the house. Others sprang out of the shadow of the bulwarks and surrounded him. The ship, flying into the wind and aback, filled the night with a racket of threshing canvas and shivering spars. And the youngster at bay had but one thought: if these beasts should finish him, they would have Ragna at their mercy.

A knife slipped in and out of his thigh. Another pierced his arm—stuck there. Thus steel came into his hands to meet steel. He saw Corlinnsen running forward on one side of the deck and the helmsman on the other. He drove his knife into Sandstrom's side, and as he pulled it out he saw a flash of white emerge from the cabin.

It was Ragna running along the moon-white deck. He took another knife—thrust in his arm in order to cry to her to go back and lock herself in. But as that warning left his lips a handful of red pepper struck him full in the face and blinded him. His head became a flaming torch, and he gave way.

Yet no earthly power could have stayed the girl. With the passion of a tigress going to the succor of a whelp, she flung herself into the midst of the mutineers. She tore a capstan-bar from a sailor. In her hands it became as the spokes of an engine's fly-wheel. She fought pitilessly, relentlessly. She was a fury—a primordial, terrific thing. She won to her husband's side, and beat back the black faces. And this girl overwhelmed them.

AT dawn, Curt Chase, blinded by cayenne pepper and nearly bloodless, was murmuring out of a slowly returning consciousness: "I've lost my first ship!"

Ragna, in the act of completing a deft dressing of his wounds, had to bend very close to catch the words. And they stung. This husband who had taken her to wife out of pity was thinking of the ship, not of her!

There was a long silence, which Curt, with a stronger voice, broke by asking for Corlinnsen.

"He is busy on deck," answered Ragna; and then, for the first time, he recognized who it was that was ministering to him.

"You are not hurt, Ragna?" he asked.

"No—oh, no." And she hastily put hand over a knife slash on her head, getting that he could not see.

Again there was a silence, which the husband ended by saying: "Tell Corlinnsen to get under way for Apia—Apia. Understand?"

"I understand," she answered.

"If I didn't have you aboard, Ragna, I'd stand on into hell with this gang just as I am."

"Yes," was all that she could say to this, and she started from the room.

A MOMENT later she was standing at the break of the poop, calling to Corlinnsen. Stark across the main hatch lay the sailor Sandstrom, and beside him the fellow who had said he was a street-corner preacher. It was the second mate who had done for them—the two who had plotted to leave the Pleiades in her small boats.

Along the coaming of the hatch stretched a third body—the mulatto cook who had fought with pepper. Corlinnsen had had to pry Curt's fingers from his throat.

"Get under way at once—for Fremantle, Mr. Corlinnsen," said Ragna, as the mate came toward her.

The men heard her and looked up in wonderment.

"Ve are going not to Apia—to de Samoan Aylands?" Corlinnsen asked in astonishment. "It is de nearest port. Ve might have help."

"You—you win—" she began, only to pause with a sharp gasp. Her hands went to her throat. For perhaps a minute she stood as one hearing voices from afar, and the while a swiftly changing light came and went in her blue eyes—a light mixed of the elements of joy, of awe, of wonder, of happiness, of the ecstasy of life, of fear.

A silence fell upon the bestial lot below her, and their hard faces filled slowly with wonder, becoming chastened, like faces of men beholding a miracle.

"You will get under way for Fremantle, Mr. Corlinnsen," said Ragna, catching her breath. "At once!"

The mate offered a protest.

"Corlinnsen, nothing must stop us from going on," she said—using, as if unconsciously, their own Norse speech. "This is Curt's—my husband's—first command. Nothing must happen to it. Men who have ill luck in their maiden ships, who make expense and trouble for their owners, got short shrift."

"But you, dear woman—you—" he stammered in embarrassment.

"I am my husband's wife!" she retorted fiercely. "His right arm to strike! His eyes to see for him! I am he until he is well again!"

The words fell from her lips with a majesty that fired his Scandinavian imagination. She was of his own blood and breed, this girl with the golden hair.

"By Thor, we go to Fremantle!" swore Corlinnsen.

THEREAFTER, in fair weather and foul, she stood watch and watch with him. Yet it was she who commanded the ship, for, good seaman though Corlinnsen was, he was a tyro in exact navigation. And withal she was nursing Curt back to strength. None save herself entered her husband's room; her hands alone ministered to him; her lips alone lied as to the course the vessel held.

A fortnight of this, and she had to confess. The Pleiades plunged out of the province of the trades and into the maul of a succession of southwesterlies. No longer could she conceal the fact that they were not headed for Apia. But she gave Corlinnsen all the credit.

"He's done a big thing for you and me, Ragna," Curt said, when she had told him "There's more to him than I thought."

"Yes," she answered. "Usually there

---

is more to people than just what we see in the beginning."

Toward the end of October, Ragna smashed the Pleiades through into the Tasman Sea. A mid-November break o' day found the ship becalmed to the westward of Leeuwin, the promontory in which the southwestern extremity of the great island continent of Australia sprawls into the Indian Ocean. For nearly a fortnight Curt Chase had been about decks, raving at his blindness and inwardly at the insurmountable barrier that stood between him and his wife. He and Ragna might have been at opposite ends of the world. From Corlinnsen, racially proud of Ragna, he had learned of all that she had done the night of the mutiny and since. But there was one thing that the Norwegian did not tell him; and that he assumed, of course, the husband must know.

"WE'RE going to get a blow out of this, Mr. Corlinnsen!" exclaimed Curt, starting suddenly from the chair against the taffrail, where his wife had left him a little while before. "Lay all gear down for running and—"

With a cry, he put a hand to his head.

"Something's breaking in—my—head. Oh! Oh!" He tore the bandage from his eyes and reeled under the glare of the rising sun. A moment he stood staring about him, and then he shouted: "Corlinnsen, I can see—I can see!"

Staggering over to the companionway, he called below:

"Ragna, I can see again! I can see! Come!"

His wife came out of the cabin; and as he looked down at her a mystery was unveiled to Curt Chase, and he understood many things, but not all.

"Ragna, Ragna!" he cried, starting to descend. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I am no shore woman!" she answered fiercely; and, then, sobbing, she fled and locked herself in the state-room that so long had been her lonely castle.

To all his pleadings the only answer she gave back through the closed door was: "Let me alone and take your ship."

On a December afternoon three weeks Fremantle a liner two hundred miles west of Fremantle saw a wild ship under whole tops'ls fly by on the wings of a gale. There was just time for the steamer's folk to make out the vessel's name before she was swallowed by a gray squall of rain. But they knew they had seen the Ship Pleiades, long overdue and given up for lost.

As the liner's bridge wondered thereat, a silent, white-faced crew, armed with knives and axes, was standing about the overdue ship's decks, ready at a word to slash away straining sheets and halliards. Yet the pallor of these men was not borne of fear, but of expectancy. Death had been among them. Now life perhaps was coming to abide with them.

Aft stood Corlinnsen, the second mate, beside two men at the wheel. Every now and then he would leave them to walk over to the companionway and bend an ear to the half opened hood. Suddenly above the sounds of the ship's laboring and the roar of the wind there came to him and to the two helmsmen a piercing cry—a cry that no man in the Pleiades had ever heard before.

Half an hour afterward, Curt Chase, bare-headed and bare-armed, staggered up on deck.

"Set your t'gallan's'ls! She'll stand it!"

As the second mate started to obey, Curt Chase lifted his arms in supplication toward the leaden sky and cried aloud:

"Good Christ, forgive me and let me make the land by morning!"

THROUGH that night the Pleiades was driven so that, even to this day, deep-wise men marvel that she held together. The following day at noon she entered the Swan River, flying the signal for urgent medical attendance. Fremantle answered it. Two constables bore the doctor company, with a warrant for a sailor named Johnson, alias Sandstrom, wanted in San Francisco for the murder of his divorced wife—a boarding-house mistress named Storm.

But the Pleiades' master cared nothing about the law of which these men spoke, or its requirements; he fled below, to wait at his wife's door.

It was a full half hour before that door opened and the physician, a blue-eyed Scot, confronted Chase. As he put a hand tenderly and familiarly on the boy's shoulder—he was no more than a boy, this ship-master—he closed the door again. And at that, with a moan, Curt covered his face and slumped into a chair.

"Na, na, laddie. Dinna gie way. Ye mus' na make it harrd for her. But before you gang in I want t' say a warrd t' ye." Curt uncovered his face. "Na, na, 'tis no deith! Ye ken the sea and its great deepness an' all its wonders, but ye dinna ken weemen. Th' wife thinks ye dinna lo' her—only your shup—"

"But I do! Better than life! With all my soul!" cried the boy.

"I knaw tha' varra well, ma son. An' tha's th' way ye want t' tellet her ye lo' her—with fire in your tone. Ye hae had a harrd, harrd time, ye two. But no matter hoo harrd th' tasks may coom, ye must pause noo an' then t' say, 'I lo' ye, lassie.' Weemen—well, theirs be th' burrden o' life, son. An' when th' struggle o' th' everlastin' miracle o' mitherhood be upon 'em, a mon must needs keep telleeng 'em a' th' while tha' he lo's 'em or they'll no believe it. Gang in to her th' noo an' th' bonnie bairn she's gi'en thee."

And as the wise old Scot closed the door again, Curt Chase was on his knees at his wife's bedside, and, with a radiant smile, Ragna was snuggling his bowed head in her arms as if he too were a child of hers.

Behind the Bolted Door?

By ARTHUR E. McFARLANE

Illustration by Henry Raleigh

The Characters:

JUDGE BISHOP, Mrs. Fisher's lawyer. DOCTOR LANEHAM, her physician. Miss DAPHNE HOPE, a lawyer in the Judge's office. Mr. WALTER WILLINGS, a settlement worker and friend of Miss Hope. McGLOYNE, Chief of Detectives.

"GOOD! Light up now. And we're going to stay here, too, for an hour if need be—till our nerves are right again!"

It was the Doctor who was speaking. Taking Judge Bishop with him, he had gone back for the time to his house and office in Seventy-second Street. The horror of the thing was still upon them both.

It was as if they had been present at the murder itself—as if with their own eyes they had seen it. Again, in imagination, they walked along that corridor outside Mrs. Fisher's little private suite, laying their hands on one door after another, only to have each one locked from within even as their fingers touched it. Again—once, twice, three times—they seemed to hear that ghastly rapping. Again, as at last they broke their way in, there had breathed out to them that "My God, my God!" as from a soul in torture. Again in memory they found what had seemed at first to be only an empty apartment, with every door and window locked, and by the swimming-pool there lay awaiting them the body of Mrs. Fisher, dead an hour or more! That memory would be with them till they died.

"And, Bishy," said the Doctor, "you ask if, after all, it mightn't in some way have been an accident? Then, before we go further, I'll have to show you this."

He took something from his wallet.

"I hadn't intended to bring it out till later. But I guess you'll have to get it here. I picked it up behind the desk in Mrs. Fisher's writing-room."

It was a three-inch square of grayish bond note-paper, such as is often made up into memorandum pads. And it bore a memorandum now. For beneath a death's-head in red ink, drawn like a school-boy's caricature,—and somehow the more horrible for that,—somebody had written, with the same pen apparently, the following:

We have now reached the point where it must be either murder or suicide.

And beneath that, in black ink and in another hand:

Couldn't it be made to look like an accident?

"Do you know the writing below?" the Doctor asked.

At that moment the Judge was only the murdered woman's family lawyer and confidant. "Laney," he said, aghast, "it's—it's Mrs. Fisher's own!"

"I thought so. But you don't know the writing at the top?"

"No." Bishop's fat round face looked sick and gray. "But that note proves it—it's no accident. It's murder—murder, even if she believed she was consenting. And the cruel devil seems to have written without a tremor!"

"Well, there's this: at least, the writing's recognizable enough."

It was. The script in red ink at the top had the fine, elzevir-type distinction

---

seen sometimes in the label-writing of old druggists.

The Judge had let himself weakly down in a chair, mopping his face. He was beginning to feel bewildered.

"Old man," he said, "is there any part of this that we'll ever be able to understand? Even my note from her—why should she have sent for me on this day of all others? And have you learned yet who sent the hurry call that took you to her apartment?"

"No. It went first to the downtown office, you remember. And Miss McCollum has gone for the night."

"What do you make of the woman who rushed in from across the court when we smashed the door down—the one in hysterics—who said she heard an 'argument' in Mrs. Fisher's apartment?"

"I had her show me where her windows are. She couldn't have heard anything within ten rooms of the swimming-pool. And the Fisher servants' quarters look on hers."

"And that alarm to the Electric Protection people from the jewel safe?"

"They're blocked there too, absolutely. So far, they haven't even been able to locate the safe! The thing's worked into the wall or the built-in furniture somewhere. They always hide them now. But until the E. P. diagram boss gets back from Baltimore—"

"I know, I know. But, at bottom, what has all that to do with it? Wall safes and pearls, and a cheap, every-day attempt at robbery! All that is outside—utterly beside the mark!"

Once more Bishop got to his feet.

"I—I don't know what that knocking—that knocking alone—seemed to say to you. But it took me straight back to stories my nurse used to tell me of people who'd sold their souls, and then, at the dreadfully appointed hour—"

"Lord, yes! That's the feeling it put in me."

"And then, the voice! If that was not the voice of the lost man's spirit— But— lost man's? After that, Doctor, after that?" And he pointed to where, behind him on the table, there still lay that little memorandum of murder. "Shall I not rather say lost woman's?"

"Easy, now, Bishy. Easy! You know, in a few minutes we'll have to be going back again. Tell me about Fisher. It was you who had to meet him, wasn't it?"

"Yes—yes." Bishop tried to smoke again. "Laney, you know they never hit it off—no woman could with a man like him. But, at times like this, I think it's sometimes hardest on the man when he has—when he hasn't played the game."

"No doubt of it."

"I've always detested him, and said so. Even when he comes to the office on business, I make Potter take him. And he'd been at the office all to-day—since morning. I heard him 'phoning her at noon. Daphne Hope was speaking to her, too. And he tried to get her again when I did, about three. It seems he'd been getting himself in bad again, only yesterday. She'd threatened to leave him. He kept telling me about it, over and over again, when I met him. I couldn't get away from it. But they'd made it up. That's how he came to be bringing Potter home for dinner. And afterward they were all going to 'Carmen'!"

"Could he help you any?"

"He wouldn't believe the half of it—any more than the police would. But would any one? Think of how it sounds. The doors bolted. Some one—or something—still there, and yet not there—to disappear next moment into thin air! And the poor woman dead perhaps for hours!"

He turned and smiled at Laneham wanly.

"And do you remember what our talk was about, on the way up to-day? Crimes and mysteries! You were asking for one."

"No, no, thank you!" The Doctor drank again. "I prefer something more human and less—"

THE telephone was ringing. He crossed to the desk and answered it.

"Yes, yes, speaking... Why, Miss Hope!... Oh, it's the Judge you want? No? Both of us?— Then I'll put him on at the other receiver."

He motioned to Bishop that there was a second instrument behind his chair.

"I'm at the Casa Grande,"—the strong young voice came to them vibrantly,—"and I was one of Mrs. Fisher's friends, you know. But it isn't only that. They—the police—the head detective—is holding Mr. Willings."

"Mr. Willings?"

"He's in our settlement. And he was up here to see Mrs. Fisher just before you were, this afternoon. He came back while you were here. You must have seen him—the young man with the big glasses."

"Oh—oh, yes. Now we know. But holding him? What for?"

"Why, just because he was here, and because no one saw him leaving again—and some money has been taken. And there's something else, too—something absurd—that they can twist into looking a great deal worse!"

"We'll be up there immediately."

Already she was ringing off. Puzzled and wondering, Laneham turned to the Judge.

"Holding young Willings!" he muttered. "A fine start your friend McGloyne is making! Come on; let's get back there."

Once more it was storming—a wild drive of sleet and snow. But, with an officer, the girl was waiting for them, coat open and wide of eye, at the crowded curb.

"Come in—this way." And she hurried them to an elevator. When they pushed out again, she led them straight down the corridor, through more reporters and patrolmen and plain-clothes men, to the big Fisher reception-room.

Police officers half filled it. At a table in the center sat Inspector McGloyne, Chief of the Detective Bureau. Boyce, the Commissioner, was present too. But, plainly,—for the time, at any rate,—he was leaving full authority to the Inspector, whom the Judge had christened "Hell-Roaring Jake."

And because Bishop was to be the new District Attorney, the man, bloaty of jowl and filling his uniform tightly, lifted his chin in a half-greeting as they entered.

"Glad to see you, Judge, glad to see you."

Then he turned back, jaw out, to young Willings, who stood, white and very quiet, in front of him.

Miss Hope, thrusting herself through, had gone back and was standing at his side.

"An' now, young people, now maybe we can start again."

McGloyne's hand was big and puffy and red-haired and toad-freckled. He kept lifting it from the table and, in a sort of punctuation, dropping it again. "We won't, say anything about this, Mr. Willings."

He picked up a large blue bank envelop.

"By your own say-so, Mrs. Fisher had likely put $500 of nice new money in it for your settlement house. But when you look into it the money is gone and there's this."

He pulled out of the envelop some folded sheets of bill-sized blank paper, and tossed them contemptuously on the table. "An' we won't say any more about just, when an' how you left this apartment an apartment-house when you were through. No, we won't say nothing about that. I'll just ask you and the young lady to repeat your pretty little good-by talk at the corner of Fourteenth Street. All just jokin', of course—just pure jokin'."

"Any one would know that it was!"

This from Miss Hope; and she flamed it.

"Please!" Willings tried to stop her. "You can see what a rotter he is."

Continued on page 17

Some of the Sons of Our Presidents

Ladies and Gentlemen, Here are Nine New Plays

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Seeing England on a Dollar a Day

By LUCIAN S. KIRTLAND

YOU can't see Merrie England on a dollar a day if you travel in a motor-car and stop at the hotels starred in the guide-book. But you can see as much as you can possibly digest, and have the many pleasant adventures that come from being close to things, if you are willing to travel third class on the railway, with no more luggage than you can carry comfortably yourself.

You can get away from the railway as easily as the motorcar if you are willing to walk the shady highways between the hawthorn and the hedges, or you can go back to the bicycle, which has never gone out of fashion in England.

It sometimes seems as if England had been created for the express use of good Americans on a vagabondage. They have taught the Britisher himself how his own country can be seen appreciatively at a very small expense. I have known many Americans who have been able to get at the heart of the English countryside, chatting with the picturesque farm laborers and villagers, and discovering for themselves a typical "Dickens character" every time they sat down by the wayside to rest; and I have known many an Englishman who was fully convinced that everything interesting in his own country had dried up and disappeared long ago, until some American came along and discovered for him that his fellow countrymen often have something more tucked away than "good morning" and "thank you."

I HAVE found that I can easily carry everything I need for a walking trip in England and Scotland in a rucksack. I wear a light-weight brown suit, a brown cloth hat, and light-weight shoes with heavy soles. This sort of uniform is respectable enough to secure entrance to any inn, and at the same time is sufficiently democratic to allow one to sit down under the hedge and gain Hodge's confidence for a long talk about what he would do if he were the King.

Fancy walking suits are for week-ends, not for the highway.

One can buy silk pajamas and a silk shirt in London very reasonably, and they fold very compactly.

The shirt is for the change in the evening. A light flannel shirt is best for the walk. Toilet articles, a couple of cakes of sweet chocolate, an ordnance map giving the distance between villages and towns and showing the roads and lanes accurately, a change of underwear, perhaps a book—and that is about all you need, together with the tongue in your head. If there are women in the party, a suit-case can be forwarded from place to place by the excellent parcels-post so as to be get-at-able once or twice a week.

WITH the first-class hotels debarred, the question is where to eat and sleep. If you have a fraction of the adventurous in you, that question will be the spice of life. The difficulty will be settling down to a choice.

A satisfactory list of private houses that take guests, boardinghouses and comfortable inns, is issued by the Teachers' Guild in London; really, the best way is to put off your choice until fancy or fate decides for you at the approach of evening. Along the highway you will find the "Boar's Head," or the "Seven Stars," looking just as hospitable as when Tom Weller and Mr. Pickwick went coaching.

It is quite polite (and advantageous) to make inquiry about prices. Quite often you talk over what you wish to eat, and the mistress orders accordingly from the shopkeeper. This thrift saves your pocket. With the heavy English breakfast, and the substantial dinner, and sometimes afternoon tea, I was glad to leave out luncheon. Dinner served at six o'clock is often called high tea, and the meat course is generally cold roast beef at that hour. This is just the sort of meal one wishes after a fine walking day, as there is no stinting of fresh vegetables and country fare. For breakfast one has eggs and ham, a cereal, jam and bread and coffee, and stewed fruit rather than fresh. The beds are clean, although sometimes hummocky. The bills at such good inns vary from seventy-five cents to a dollar and a quarter. I shall never forget the fascinating vine-covered cottage at Clovelly, where I lingered for four days for sixteen shillings, or one dollar a day.

Despite any one's telling you that there is no "off the trail" in England, there are a hundred interesting excursions off the tourist's conventional path. I discovered a village, within fifty miles of London—we had a dinner fit for Pickwick—where the village wiseacres

would not believe that we were Americans because we spoke English. This was in the East Coast country of Norfolk and Suffolk.

A little imagination (and round and about a dollar a day) is the magic key to unlock the door to a trip where every day is as plotful as a romance, and the whole is as adventurous as the childhood dreams which always turn out right.

Getting Dora Into High

By SEWELL FORD

Illustration by F. Vaux Wilson

"I'm appointed to round 'em up. No, I didn't forget. But as we trails through the station to get the five-sixteen, I was wishin' I had."

"DON'T forget," says Sadie that mornin', as I'm about to make a sprint for the eight-three. "You are to pick up Miss Peaslee and her niece and bring them home with you. They're at the Lady Louise, you know."

"Eh!" says I. "Sendin' me to pluck another sample from the Old Maids' Retreat? I hope she ain't one of the giddy kind."

"Miss Ann is an old dear," says Sadie. "You'll say so, too, when you know her."

"Catch me!" says I, grabbin' my hat.

One of Sadie's usual offhand stunts, this was, invitin' out a party she'd met casual up in Vermont last summer. Seems Miss Peaslee had put Sadie on the track of some antique junk—a four-poster bed with pineapple tops, and an overgrown mahogany bureau that she calls a high-boy. The old girl had a houseful of such truck herself. That's how Sadie got to know her. She'd no sooner heard of Miss Peaslee's antiques than she hunts her up, feeds her a good jolly, I expect, and gets shown over the house.

You should have heard her rave afterwards about gate-legged tables and sleigh-bedsteads and so on. And when Miss Peaslee negotiated this trade for Sadie, and she'd got the stuff refinished and stowed in our east guest-room, Sadie was just bustin' with gratitude. So, when she hears that Miss Ann and her niece are in town, she calls her up and insists on their comin' out to Rockhurst for a week anyway. And me, I'm appointed to round 'em up.

No, I didn't forget. But, as we trails through Grand Central that evenin' to get the five-sixteen, I was wishin' I had. Not that Miss Ann mightn't have looked all right up at Sorrell Center, Vermont, standin' on her front porch, with the white paneled door and the green-shuttered side-lights as a background; but here amongst our swell commuter bunch—well, no wonder I was gettin' the grin right and left.

ONE of these tall, straight old girls, Miss Ann is, with Baldwin-apple cheeks and gray hair. She's dressed neat and modest, too, in a costume that dates back to about '65, I should say. Anyway, it's a stiff black silk, with a long white jigamaree draped over her shoulders and fastened in front with a cameo pin the size of a fried egg. The jet bonnet with the black velvet chin-straps must have been a curio, too.

Then, there's the niece—a high-colored, big-eyed young thing of eighteen or nineteen. Reg'lar dairy-maid complexion, she had—almost vivid enough, with its streaks of pink and white, to be mistaken for a stage make-up. Nearly as tall and straight as Auntie, Miss Dora is, only slimmer, and I expect if it hadn't been

for the home dressmakin' outfit she wouldn't have looked so bad. But, in that meal-sack skirt and the jacket with the puckered seams, there's no more doubt about her bein' just in from the country than if she'd been labeled.

Add to our line of march a grinnin' porter luggin' an old bag that looked like it had been in the attic since the Centennial, a brand-new extension grip, and a paper parcel done up in a shawl-strap, and you can guess how comic some of them plute brokers must have classed themselves when they tips me the passin' wink.

WE had a nice, chatty time on the way out, though, Miss Peaslee and me. She says they've been so much on the go that it'll be sort of restful to get where they can really breathe without havin' to dodge a taxi-cab.

"Been sort of doin' the town, eh?" says I.

She admits they have.

"I expect you've seen all the new chicken shows along Broadway?" says I.

"No," says she; "I never did take much interest in poultry-raising."

"These Broadway chickens raise themselves," says I. "But I guess you've seen enough of 'em at the midnight cabarets and at the trot shops?"

She stares at me puzzled.

"My niece and I," says she, "have been spending most of our time at the Art and Natural History Museums. We have been studying the Cerollas and Homers. Wonderful, aren't they?"

I didn't deny it. Maybe they are.

"Of course," she goes on, "we have found time, too, to visit Grant's Tomb and the Statue of Liberty and the new Library. Then, on Sundays, we have attended at least two of the more prominent churches. What an intellectual treat Merle St. Croix Wright is! I suppose you hear him often?"

"Eh?" says I, gawpin'. "Well, not so often as you might think."

Called for more or less scientific duckin' on my part, but I wa'n't goin' to let any old girl from Vermont tell me things about New York I'd never heard of. Reg'lar Cook's tourin' they'd been at; takin' in cathedrals, public buildin's, and homes of the wealthy; also historical spots.

"We even found the site where Burr and Hamilton fought," says she.

At which I pricks up my ears.

"Let's see," says I. "That must have been before John L. won the belt. Welter or heavy-weights, were they?"

I had her starin' again. "I'm sure I don't know," says she. "But my niece will. Dora, you have the guide-book, haven't you? Find that about the Burr-Hamilton duel."

And; if you'll believe it, this was a shootin' scrape pulled off over near Fort Lee back in the days of George Washington. Think of diggin' up a ripe old scandal like that!

SEEMS they'd been doin' all this mainly on Dora's account. She'd finished up at the Academy, and now Auntie was blowin' her to a month's sight-seein' orgy, so her education would be complete. For next fall Dora was slated to tackle a teacher's job back at the Center, and maybe, in the course of fifteen or twenty years, work up to be assistant principal in the Academy.

"A position which I held," says Miss Ann, "for a long period. That is Dora's ambition, too."

"Oh, she'll be gettin' married one of these days," says I, "and that program will be ditched."

Auntie shakes her head.

"I think not," says she. "Dora is an Allen, you know, and our girls are quite apt to become spinsters."

I might have hinted that Dora wouldn't run any risks while she stuck to New York and that costume, but I didn't. I saved it to whisper to Sadie after she'd towed 'em to their rooms. Maybe I chuckled over it a bit, too.

"For shame, Shorty!" says she. "A lot you know about girls, don't you? Now, I think she is real sweet. Of course, the way she's dressed— But if I could have her for a couple of weeks—"

"Bet you," says I, "a set of blue fox against a mink-lined overcoat."

She's a true sport, Sadie. She only stares dreamy for a second.

"I'll take you, Shorty," says she.

And, say, I was all but wearin' that coat from then on. I wouldn't have sold my ticket for ninety per cent. And when I notices the quiet, mouselike ways of Miss Allen at dinner I was surer than ever that, for once, I had a cinch.

It wa'n't that she seemed just plain scared. That was her natural way: sort of dumb—tongue-tied, for all I could tell. Anyway, she hardly took her eyes off her plate, and all Sadie could get out of her was a nod or a "No, ma'am," now and then. Yet, if you took Auntie's word for it, Dora knew a lot. She's been president of her class; had read a piece, all in Latin, that she'd done herself, at the graduating exercises; and could paint watercolor sketches that you could almost tell what they was meant for.

"You know, I started out to be an artist," adds Miss Peaslee. "Yes, I was studying in Paris when father's health broke down and he retired from the ministry. Then, of course, I was obliged to return and go to teaching. That is how I earned the money to buy Bald Mountain Farm for the old folks to live on. If only we had known sooner about the Marble!"

"Marble?" echoes Sadie.

"Solid," says Miss Peaslee. "The whole mountain. A very good quality, too. We have quarried tons of it every year since. So, you see, I was able to quit teaching before the Board voted me too old."

"Oh!" says, smilin' significant across the tabe at me,

I got the idea. Most likely the marble works would come to Dora. Well, she needed 'em, and more. Course, back in Vermont that might qualify her in the heiress class, but not so near Fifth Avenue as this. I could still get the feel of that mink linin'.

ANYWAY, Sadie and I was enjoyin' our little joke on the side, and she was mostly in fun about tryin' to wish a steady onto Miss Allen until— Well, things do take queer turns, don't they? Here we was, settin' quiet around the livin'-room

---

fireplace, Sadie and Miss Peaslee chattin' enthusiastic about discoverin' old mahogany dressers and Hepplewhite chairs stowed away in barns and attics; Miss Dora, she's listenin' polite, with her hands folded proper in her lap; and me, I'm runnin' through the war news in the evenin' papers; when an automobile siren cuts loose outside, the front door-bell is rung violent, and in blows Pinckney with a party of friends. Nothin' special, only he'd been givin' a little dinner party at some gasolene joint up the line, and on the way back he'd taken a notion to drop in on us.

"Charmed, aren't you?" says he to Sadie. "But it turned cold so quickly that the Countess was getting quite chilled. By the way, Mrs. McCabe, you've met the Countess Zitkoff, haven't you? Yes, I was sure you had. Think of a Russian minding a little frost!"

"Lit-tle!" says the Countess, stretchin' her toes out on the fender. "But I am perished. Br-r-r-r! Listen, Mrs. McCabe. Forty miles in an open motor! He is an assassin. See! I shiver in all my bones."

"Meaning," adds Pinckney, with a wink at me, "that the Countess would not look with scorn on a nip of brandy."

It was a good guess. "Ma foi!" says she, as I rushes the pain-killer at her. "Cognac! I am rescued!"

Some sizable nip that was she pours out, too. But then, there was such a lot of the Countess to warm up. I've seen countesses before that didn't look the part at all. But this one did, believe me. Not the lumpy, squatty kind, but tall as well as wide. A reg'lar whale of an old girl. And in her day I should say she must have been quite a stunner, too.

"Ah-h-h!" says she, handin' back the glass. "If I am ever permitted to return to my dear Petrograd, you must visit me for a year. Only so can I repay. And now—"

Here she dives into a gold mesh bag and produces a ruby-set case full of long, gold-tipped cigarettes; she don't even have to borrow a match.

And just as she's blowin' out the first few puffs I happens to get a glimpse of Dora, watchin' bug-eyed from the background. Her education was comin' on fast.

About the same time, too, I notices Miss Peaslee.

She'd been introduced, of course, but kind of hasty across the room, and she'd sidled off quiet. Now she's edgin' up, though, for a good look at the Countess. Viewin' the cigarette smokin', I judged. So I'm a little jarred when all of a sudden she marches right up to our sporty guest.

"Why!" says she, sort of gaspy. "It—it's Zara, isn't it? You have probably forgotten me, though—Ann Peaslee."

The Countess Zitkoff poises her bare forearm half lifted, the cigarette between her fingers, and stares through the smokering.

Only for a minute, though.

"Eh?" says she. "What is that you tell me? Not—not La Petite Parfait! Mais oui! It is—Ann! Attend, all of you. From the past she comes to me thus. Ma chérie! Ah-h-h-h!"

And before Miss Peaslee can do a duck she's been clinched, her straight cut nose tucked under the Countess's second chin among the pearl ropes, with the Countess's cigarette wavin' just clear of her back hair.

SOME grand little reunion that was, take it from me. No great mystery about their knowin' each other, either. They'd done the art-student trick together for a couple of years, got to be great chums, and had finally roomed in the same house, the noble young Russian occupyin' the whole second floor, and the Vermont girl livin' in a six by nine cubby-hole up under the roof.

An odd combination they must have been, too.

"Such an innocent you were—at first," exclaims the Countess. "Drink the vin ordinaire? No, no! Or go to the great bal masque? Never! Or fumer la— But I am stupid. Pardon!

And what does she do but shove out the gold tips generous.

Miss Peaslee shakes her head. "No, thank you," says she.

"But," urges the Countess, "your favorites. Real Romanoffs, such as my brother used to bring us!"

"I—I've forgotten how," says Miss Ann.

"Perhaps, too," suggests the Countess insinuatin', "you have forgotten Ivan also?"

And, say, if that don't get her all tinted up. We all saw it and passed around the grin.

"Not quite," says she. "I hope he—he is—"

"Ah, poor Ivan!" sighs the Countess. "Wounded, leading his regiment against the Japanese, years ago. He got home, that is all. And now two of his sons are at the front. God knows! Another, the youngest, I have here with me—an attaché. A dear boy—you must see him. We shall have a dinner-party, just us three."

Miss Peaslee suggests that she couldn't leave her niece.

"What! A niece?" says the Countess. "Ah, one must be careful. These romantic youths, you know. Michel is so much like his father, too. But where is she, this niece?"

So Dora, actin' more dumb and scared than ever, is led out for inspection. The Countess gives her a shrewd, quick glance.

"Oh!" says she. "That one? Then she must come too. We will arrange it, will we not? I have taken a villa. It is not far. Mrs. McCabe will spare you for one evening, eh?"

"To be sure," says Sadie. "But, in return, you and your nephew must dine with us also."

REAL, cordial she seems about it, too, and pats the Countess friendly on the shoulder. But afterwards, on the side, she lets out to me:

"The absurd old person! As though some one might steal her precious nephew! Didn't you see them together one day, Shorty? What is he like?"

"Why," says I, "he looked to me a good deal like a young Russian gent."

"But how?" insists Sadie. "His hair, his eyes, and so on?"

"Kind of sad hair," says I, "but real pleasant feet."

"Please!" says Sadie. "No vaudeville. I want to know about him."

"Say," says I, "you don't think I store up mental snap-shots of young foreigners I see whizzin' by in limousines, do you?"

I might have guessed, though, from the set of Sadie's chin, that she was plottin' somethin' or other. She couldn't have had much time to frame up anything, for they pulled off that get-together party the very next night. I don't know if it was a success or not. I guess Miss Peaslee had a good time, but I gathered that Miss Dora continued her clam act uninterrupted, and that the romantic Michel got through the evenin' without losin' his heart.

"In fact," adds Sadie, "I'm sure he hardly noticed the girl. The poor thing! In that ridiculous silk waist and with her hair done in that quaint fashion! But I mean to show him. They're coining here Saturday night. I'm going to have a talk with Miss Peaslee about Dora's clothes. It's a shame, with all her money!"

"Huh!" says I. "It'll take the profits from more'n one marble quarry to doll up Dora so she can qualify for anything but the back row."

"You wait!" says Sadie.

Whether she had any trouble inducin' Miss Ann to loosen up or not I don't know, but for the next few days they spent most of the time in town. I'll admit there was quite a change in Dora, too. She shows up with her hair landscaped different, there's more or less zip to her new hat and street costume, and she's beginnin' to lift her chin off her wishbone at meal-time. Once or twice she even makes a remark all on her own, and now and then she indulges in a smile that brings out her cheek dimples. For a sample of maple-sugar-and-doughnut-belt queen, she wa'n't so bad. That's about all that could be said, though.

Anyway, I wa'n't on the lookout for anything special from her on the night of the return party at our house. Maybe I was a little fussed myself, gettin' gussied up just right; for we don't have Russian countesses common at dinner,—not even for breakfast,—and I was wonderin' if I should have to tackle carvin' with white gloves on. Then, when they finally arrives, along about seven-thirty, I'm so near starved, my one idea is to shoo 'em in where the nourishment is.

"Don't be in a rush," whispers Sadie. "Do let them get their wraps off. Besides, Dora isn't down yet, and—oh, here she comes!"

"Wha-a-a-at !" I gasps, gettin' a glimpse of the fairy floatin' down the stairs. "Say, you don't mean—"

"Hush!" says Sadie, givin' me the nudge.

SAY, she'd put it over. You know how they're buildin' some of the new evenin' dresses now—out of steen yards of transparent black net and blamed little else? Sort of an X-ray photo effect. Well, that was Dora's outfit. And, say, with her slim white neck and her white shoulders, and her dark hair and her big black eyes with the long lashes, and the roses bloomin' in her cheeks—well, maybe I'm no beauty judge, but she had me blinkin', all right. And if young Mr. Sneezowski, or whatever his name was, didn't get any thrill, then he must have been a dead one.

The Countess Zitkoff don't miss any of this presto-change business, at least. She whirls accusin' on Miss Peaslee at once.

"Ann," says she, "what have you been doing with your niece?"

Miss Peaslee smiles sort of satisfied.

"The poor child!" says she. "We have had no time for shopping before, and I had not realized how sadly she needed something to wear."

"Humph!" says the Countess, eyein' her nephew as he promptly comes to life and begins discoverin' that Miss Dora exists.

"Say," I puts in, "couldn't we—"

"Oh, yes," breaks in Sadie, chokin' me off. "Let's go in."

I don't know whether it's part of the campaign or not, but we had the tallest and bushiest bunch of roses for a centerpiece that I'd ever known Sadie to decorate a table with. And on one side is the Countess Zitkoff and Miss Peaslee, while on the other are the young folks. I could see 'em plain enough, of course, and so could Sadie; but when the Countess wanted a peek she had to do some neck-stretchin'.

And, somehow, Dora and Michel don't seem to mind bein' behind the screen. From the very start, after she'd got over her blushin' fit, Dora acts like a different girl. Chat? Why, inside of five minutes she was givin' him back as good as he sent, and I judged from the admirin' glances the young gent aimed her way that he was lettin' some of his thoughts leak through into his conversation.

Anyway, they had a good time, from the Lynnhayvens clear through to the biscuit tortoni. And when Sadie suggests, as the kirsch is bein' served, that they needn't linger if they don't want to, they makes a cheerful exit to the livin'-room. A minute later we could hear Dora unlimberin' her fingers on some classic piano piece.

MEANWHILE the Countess has been gettin' more and more restless. She's an old girl that's apt to speak right out, too, anything she happens to have on her mind.

"Ann Peaslee," says she, "you have taken notice, I suppose?" and she nods towards the other room.

"Oh, yes," says Miss Peaslee. "They seem to be enjoying themselves, don't they?"

"But I wish it stopped," announces the Countess.

Miss Ann is one of the cool, calm kind. She raises her white eyebrows a trifle, and then asks placid: "Do you, Zara?"

"Certainly," says the Countess. "Don't you?"

Miss Peaslee twists the slim little glass in her fingers, gazin' at it thoughtful before she answers.

"You didn't say that," she finally comes back at her, "when Ivan—when your brother came to see me so often, there in the Rue Parnasse."

"Oh, then!" says the Countess, wavin' her cigarette careless. "But you were such an innocent. That was such—such nonsense."

"Was it?" says Miss Peaslee, smilin' quiet. "I didn't know. Ivan said he wanted to marry me."

"He—he did!" gasps the Countess. "Ivan?"

Miss Ann nods. "For two hours one evening he pleaded and urged," she goes on. "He asked me to run off with him. He had made all the arrangements—the civil papers were ready, a priest of his church waiting."

"And you—you would not?" demands the Countess.

Miss Peaslee shakes her head.

"I thought it wouldn't be right," says she. "There was my mother—my father. He was a minister, you know. And they had both scrimped and worked so hard to send me over. Besides, I considered I was too young. I was nearly twenty then. Dora was twenty last June. And this—this is her first chance to know any one but country boys."

The Countess Zitkoff shrugs her shoulders impatient.

"You forget. Ann," says she. "My nephew is an Orloff. His father was a general in the imperial army. While your niece—"

"Is an Allen," breaks in Miss Peaslee, liftin' her head and givin' the Countess a quick flash from her clear eyes. "A Green Mountain Allen, and direct descendant of Colonel Ethan Allen, who captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British in the name of Jehovah and the Continental Congress."

THINK of havin' a chunk of hist'ry like that chucked at you across a demitasse!

And, believe me, the way she hands it out, it listens some impressive, too. The Countess might have been posted on the Revolution, or she might not, but she couldn't help gettin' the idea that Miss Dora was no four-flusher when it came to ancestors. And that seems to figure with the old girl.

"Ah!" says she. "A soldier too? A hero, perhaps?"

Miss Peaslee springs that quiet smile of hers again. She unfastens a heavy silver pin from her waist and passes it over.

"A facsimile of one of the Ethan Allen monuments," says she. "Ugly enough, isn't it? I wear it sometimes, however. You see, my mother was an Allen, too. And that time when I told her about Ivan—how good and how handsome he was, and how much I—I thought of him—I think she was sorry for me. As for Dora, I hardly thought anything of the kind would ever come to her. If it should, I trust I may be near. But, of course, if you object to those young people getting better acquainted—"

"I am a silly old woman," breaks in the Countess. "Pouff! It is nothing, after all. And your Dora—ah, I must make the joke: she is adorable. So were you, La Petite Parfait. And my poor Ivan did not make so good a choice in the end. Perhaps if you had said yes— Well, who knows? Listen! Michel is singing."

So he was—some Romeo song or other; and doin' it fairly well, too. Which wa'n't such slow work, either for him or Dora, was it?

No, nothin' definite yet, only Miss Peaslee and her niece have settled down in New York for the winter, with Sorrell Center crossed off the map.

And me? I'm gettin' a line on the price of blue fox furs.

Greed

By ELIA W. PEATTIE

Illustrations by George E. Wolfe

A YEAR and a day after Fanny's divorce from Stephen Gowan, she was married to Jules Areson. The wedding took place in New York, with some of Areson's friends in attendance. That they were persons of more manner and distinction than she had been accustomed to associate with filled her with a naïve joy. It seemed to put behind her those hard, heavy years with Stephen, when they had been poor and strangers in a strange city, and when the children, Philip and Sara, had claimed her day and night. She wondered now how she had lived through those years.

It is true that her thoughts wandered for a swift second, now and then, to the children. But what would have been the sense, she angrily asked herself, of keeping up the pretense of a home for them? They were better where they were, in their good schools, with leave to spend alternate vacations with her.

The others, of course, would be spent with their father. Nor did she grudge him so much of comfort as could be derived from seeing them for that short time. She did not want him to be unhappy. She merely asked the right to be happy herself. She wanted happiness in as many forms as she could get it. She had beauty, and with it she had secured a man of power, a fortune, opportunity. She was on the broad avenue of life now, and the by-ways were no longer her necessity.

ARESON took her to Paris for their honeymoon, and there she came to a full realization of his importance in the world of business. When she learned of the place he held in the engineering world, of the value attached to his opinion even in Europe, she glowed for the first time in her life with intense pride, commingled of unselfish love and contented Parasitism. She asked no further glory for herself than to be adored by this influential man, who—she was dazzled to learn—received for two hours' consultation with specialists in Paris an honorarium which would have paid twice over for their trip.

That their journey was so brief was the penalty paid for success. Areson was needed at home, where he was putting in a three-branched tunnel to provide his city—or a portion of it—with water. The scheme had dramatic features, considered from an engineering standpoint, and Areson counted it the most important piece of work he had yet undertaken. His competitors had been many, but he had secured the five-million-dollar enterprise by his skilful estimate of cost.

"It would be easy enough to lose on the job yet," Areson told Fanny, by way of apologizing for the brevity of their wedding journey. "I've got to watch every turn of the wheel. The figuring was mighty close, and if I'm to wrench my profit out of it I've got to stay on the bridge. It's too bad to break into our holiday, my charming one; but we'll come back to Europe some day, and stay as long as you like."

SO Areson and his bride returned to America, and to Areson's home city. Areson glowed with pride of his wife. He was glad he had "settled down" at last, and the second day of his return found him in the office of a well known architect, arranging for a home that should house this beautiful woman fittingly.

He took Fanny on excursions about the city, determined on having an ideal situation for their new home. It was on one of these journeys of reconnaissance that Areson pointed out to her the temporary crib he had built out in the lake for the accommodation of the men who were digging the tunnel beneath the waters of the lake. A trolley a mile long, supported on high steel trestles, ran from the shore to this crib for the purpose of conveying to land the limestone extracted from the tunnel, which, Areson explained, was valuable in road construction.

"That stone is one of the tricks by which I recoup myself," Areson said. "I've got to make money out of this thing, Fanny. You need money, and I need it. We'll get everything we can out of this life. It's the only one we're sure of."

One day he took her out in the tug that carried supplies to the crib, and she was permitted to go down into the tunnel. She was amazed at the magnitude of the enterprise. The tunnel declared itself an achievement even to her uneducated eyes; and the sight of the activity there, with scores of men at work beneath the waters, impressed her imagination powerfully. It diverted her, too, to be shown over the crib, where the men lived day and night— each man being allowed only one night out of fourteen at home.

"But it seems very bewildering to have no yard or street," she said laughingly. "Stepping out of the front door into deep water certainly would get on my nerves."

Areson pointed out the narrow wharf at which the tug had drawn up, where the men—or at least a few of them at a time—could sit if they pleased. But they were working day and night, and at high tension, and there was little time for leisure. Exhausted, they sank into their beds, to arise at the last possible moment and return to their subterranean labors. But they were fed, Areson said, like fighting cocks. The Swedish chef had, indeed, been presented to Mrs. Areson, and had insisted on serving her some excellent little cakes and delicious coffee.

As the tug bore Areson and Fanny away from the place, she remarked casually:

"I hope there's no chance for fire there, Jules. The building is only wood, after all."

"Oh, there's mighty little chance of fire," Areson declared. "I built it of the cheapest material, naturally. It's only a temporary thing."

"Wouldn't it be safer to keep boats moored at the wharf?" Fanny inquired. "Then, if anything happened, the men could get safely away."

"What are you worrying your pretty head about?" Areson demanded. "There is a boat or two belonging to the place besides, of course, this tug. But of course I can't keep boats right under the men's noses. It wouldn't do to be placing temptation in their way. They'd be sneaking off to shore whenever the fit seized them. This tug is kept fired up day and night, ready to run out if there's need."

"There's a telephone?"

"Of course."

He seemed a little annoyed, and she adroitly changed the conversation. There had been, in the old days, a certain satisfaction in disturbing Stephen. She had liked to rouse him out of his indifference. But she was wary where Areson was concerned. She knew that he was eager to do everything for her comfort; and she adored luxury.

In the old days she had had to scramble out of bed early in the morning to dress the children and herself, and to see that breakfast was properly served. Now, when she awoke, a maid drew her bath and served breakfast to her in her room. She lunched with Areson downtown, shopping or going to a matinee afterward. At dinner she deliberately fascinated Areson with her gaiety and her gentle impudences. Afterward they went to the theater or to a concert; or Areson, perhaps, had a man or two in. Fanny had few women friends.

ABOUT five o'clock one morning there came a sharp ring at the telephone. Fanny, who had not slept well, threw on her gown and herself ran to the instrument.

Some one seemed to have been shouting into it even before she put it to her ear—some one who was incoherently conveying some terrible news.

"What is it? What is it?" she shrilled. "I can't understand. Please talk distinctly."

"Get Mr. Areson to the 'phone, for God's sake!" the thick voice importuned. "Quick—for God's sake, ma'am!"

She flew to Areson's bedside.

"It's something terrible, Jules!" she cried. "They need you at the telephone. Quick, quick!"

Fanny watched him as he took up the receiver and listened to that stammering voice. When he dropped the receiver and dashed for his clothes, she flew to help him, only asking:

"Can't you tell me what it is, Jules?"

"It's the crib," said Areson, biting off his words. "It's burning. There are a hundred and fifty men there. And no boat—the tug is ashore. There's ice all around. There's—there's dynamite there."

He gave her some rapid directions before he dashed out of the house. She was to ring up the captain of the tug. The life-saving station—she was to call up that, too. After carrying out these orders she wanted to run down to the shore to see what could be seen. She wondered if the flames of the burning building were visible over the ice; wondered how long it would take the tug to get up steam; wondered if it could cut its way through the drifting floes. But she could not go. She crept into bed and lay there trembling.

Hours passed while she lay there, thinking and trying not to think. Would they blame him—blame her husband? If the men died, would it be counted his fault? She remembered that structure built of wood. Jules had assured her that the tug

---

was kept ready day and night to speed to the crib should it be needed.

"I thought of fire," said Fanny to the walls, "the day I was there!"

HOURS later Areson came home. Fanny heard him fitting the key in the door, and ran to him. In those few hours his skin had turned gray, his eyes had become veiled, his muscles had sagged. He looked at Fanny strangely, as if she were some one he could not quite remember. Then, when she cried out, he put his arms about her.

"It's gone," he said briefly. "Burned to the water's edge."

"And the men—"

"Forty gone."

"Forty!"

He nodded.

Fanny found herself screaming, and unable to stop it. She heard Areson say, "Hysterics!" and call her maid.

On the day that the fire victims were buried, Areson rode in a carriage as chief mourner behind that tragic, seemingly endless line of hearses. The widows who might have cursed him, the orphans who might have loathed him, did not do so. He was too haggard, too bowed—and too generous. The check he had sent to each afflicted household seemed like wealth to those who received it.

The tragedy had swept over Fanny like a searing flame, and for days she seemed numb. But after a little while she began to long to return to her old estate of happiness.

"All that mortal man could do you have done, Jules," she said to her husband. "Anyway, every one has to die. These men went a little sooner than they expected, of course, but, when you come to think of it, they couldn't have been enjoying life very much, could they? Oh, let us promise never, never to speak of it again!"

"Very well," replied Areson shortly. The fire ceased to be a topic of conversation between them.

THE new house occupied Fanny's thoughts now. She plunged into the shopping for its furnishings. After the first time or two, she ceased to resent the sharp look the clerks in the shops gave her when they learned her name. Who were they, that they should look at her with sudden, cold dislike? She was once more installed on her little throne, beautiful, with a full purse, and with a man of power to labor for her. There was only one thing she did resent, and that was Areson's taciturnity. He reminded her sometimes of Stephen. It made her rage to think that she could not get away from care and responsibility.

It was she who proposed, six weeks, perhaps, after the disaster, that they should dine one evening at the Deer Lick Country Club, a pleasant place on the shore of the lake. Areson had consented—he seldom opposed any suggestion of hers. She attired herself carefully, and when she viewed herself in her mirror she thrilled with satisfaction, not only because she rejoiced to be beautiful, but for Areson's sake, too. He had paid the price, and was entitled to the best she could give him. She noticed, when he joined her, that he was more like himself than he had been since—since the telephone had rung in that bleak dawning.

The club was nearly empty, and Fanny felt disappointed—she had been longing for something brilliant. However, Areson ordered a specially well chosen feast, and they were prepared to enjoy it. If Fanny was not brilliant, at least she often felt that she was, and people usually took her at her own valuation. Areson, keen as he was, did so unquestionably, and he took to himself much of the credit of her evolution. What a wistful, ill-placed, unappreciated creature she had been when he met her first! But he had known, almost at the first glance, that she would fight for happiness, even to the extent of putting conventionality beneath her feet. They lingered over their coffee, looking out over the frozen lake.

SUDDENLY a curious thing happened.

Fanny saw Areson's eyes close for a moment—only for a moment. His head drooped a little to one side, his eyes rolled in their sockets. But it was only while the minute-hand made one circuit. The third time Fanny spoke, he answered her.

"How far away your voice sounded," he said. "What is it?"

"You seemed ill, dearest!" Fanny cried. "You—you are different even now. Oh, what is it?"

He was different indeed. His face was ashen. He had risen and, breathing hard, was straining anguished eyes toward the windows.

"Look," he cried, pointing a shaking finger. "Look!"

Fanny arose too and stared through a semicircle of glass. The mist, broken and blown about by the wind, had taken on weird shapes. Writhing mist-wraiths flung about mimic arms and tossed fleecy heads like things in torment.

Yes, like burning men, like betrayed and forsaken men, they gesticulated, tossing shadowy hands to an unheeding heaven, cursing with unheard voices the monster who had left them in their helplessness to die!

FANNY saw what Areson saw, and, though she knew those accusing figures for creatures of the mist, she realized with horror that Areson saw them as real men.

"Count!" commanded Areson suddenly.

"Count?" gasped Fanny. "Oh, Jules, what, shall I count? Come, dear—come away with me."

But he shook her grasp from his arm.

"Count!" he shouted.

And he himself began to count.

"Thirty," he announced at last, turning to her. "Why don't the other ten come? Are they afraid? Do they think I'm afraid? Where are the other ten?"

Fanny somehow, with the waiter's help, got him to the car. But as they raced down the boulevard, he was tortured by the hallucination of the wraiths running after them, tossing their mutilated arms.

"There are too many!" he shrieked. "It isn't fair, Fanny: Tell them it isn't fair. Ten more—that's all that ought to come."

Fanny took the whimpering man in her arms and comforted him. But as they whirled along the silent, misted streets, she asked herself if she had left a husband who was a nonentity—poor Stephen—only to be tied to one who was mad.

Her dismayed soul could hardly support the inquiry. For a moment, she too seemed to lapse into something like sleep; a fatigue of the nerves that grew irresistible overcame her, and through the confusion of her senses something flamed like a torch before her—the terrible torch of Truth.

In that moment she knew that it was greed that had carried her thus far along the path she had regarded as triumphal. It had lifted her from poverty, from obscurity, from longing. She had been a glutton at the table of life, and she had sought out and enthralled a greater glutton than herself—greater because of larger capacity. Yes, he too, the strong man who was now no more than a frightened baby in her arms, had moved to the drum-beats of greed. He was an officer in that countless army of those who take what they want. She knew it now—knew it as those at the judgment seat know the truth. A shuddering disgust of life overtook her. The aspect of it was loathsome. Incoherent exclamations of repulsion arose to her lips.

ARESON lay tormented on his bed for a fortnight, then, convalescing slowly, was ordered on a sea trip.

"Quiet—that's his medicine," said the physician. "Let him have all he can assimilate of it. The turning-point will come, and then he'll need activity."

"But it will come again, doctor?" Fanny pleaded. "Will he—"

"I can't tell," the physician answered. "The strain he suffered revealed a hidden tendency. It may not return."

Fanny took her husband away. On the steamer she fell into the way of thinking of her children, and often dreamed that she held little Philip again in her arms. She wondered at night if the children were covered well in their beds. Then she would start up in her bunk, and would see the misty sea without and wraith-forms drifting by. The pulsations of the steamer shook her soul as well as her body.

"Greed, greed, greed, greed!" they seemed to say. "Greed, greed, greed, greed!"

BUT finally, amid all these discords, she began to hear a faint strain of harmony. She could not name it, she could not hold it; but it returned again and again, promising something that was peace. She began to understand a saying that she had heard—that he who seeks his joy shall not find it, and he who loses it for another's sake shall see it shining in his path. When these thoughts came to her, though they seemed no nearer than the beating of the wings of sea-birds high above the ship, she turned to her husband with a new meaning in her solicitude. And when she saw his weary eyes meeting hers with a patient wistfulness she wondered if he, too, had not caught strains of that distant, exquisitely sweet music. She wanted to ask him, but she could not. They had never talked of such things.

But, very slowly, certain impulses from the core of her being were shaping themselves. She, knew that sometime she should have the courage to ask him if there were not paths unknown to them—rocky paths and lonely ones—that led at last to happiness.

More of the mystery

Behind the Bolted Door

Continued from page 8

And at that Hell-Roaring Jake suddenly began to live up to his name.

"Oh, sure—sure you can! An' sure you were just jokin'! That's why you two smooth little silk-stockin's never bothered mentionin' it yourselves. An' not Meehan,"—he swiveled about to a young patrolman at his right,—"will you just repeat said talk for us again?"

"Why," began that young patrolman worriedly, "I've got to say, Chief, that took it for kiddin' myself. An' I only brought it up—"

"Now, kill that—see—kill that! All you got to repeat for us is your evidence.

"Well, they"—pointing to Willings an Miss Hope—"they were talkin' about Mrs Fisher—anyways, some Mrs. Fisher—"

"Sure. Sure. Some Mrs. Fisher—"

"And she—the girl—asks him how he was goin' to get somethin' from her—from Mrs. Fisher—money, it was. A hundred thousand, he mentioned. And he said he'd ask her first, and then, if she didn't give up, he—but, Chief now it was just kiddin', and nothin' but—he made out he was goin' to choke her for the pearls."

Both Laneham and the Judge started forward together. And then they saw that Boyce, the Commissioner, was intervening, too.

"McGloyne," he was saying, "I told you at the start—and I had your promise—"

"Mr. Commissioner," said Bishop, "this young woman is my confidential secretary. To suspect her is absurd—and the boy!"

"I know, I know." Boyce was a lean clean, gray ex-army man. "McGloyne, will you let me have a moment with them alone? Judge, and Dr. Laneham, won't you come too?"

THEY had only to pass on to the big, empty dining-room.

"The beast!" said Willings. "The beast! And he said he'd leave you out of it." He was speaking to Miss Hope.

"Why, you don't think I cared for myself?"

But here the Commissioner took charge of it.

"Judge, of course I can dismiss them both on your recognizance, and I will. But that's only a beginning. We can't keep them from getting a lot of unpleasant publicity now, in any case."

"Oh, no escape from that."

"It's a shame—a shame!" Boyce protested. "And when I thought I'd shown McGloyne clearly— Of course, if there were any probability of the thing being cleaned up at once—"

"Do you think it likely?"

"Could any one? And yet, suspicion will point at them until it is! The worst part of it, too, is here. Granting McGloyne to be ever so honest and well meaning,—and I think he is, he's an old-line detective, and what we're taking away from him is his clue. No matter what else opens, he won't believe in it."

"But, surely," said Laneham.

"It'll be his King Charles's head to the end. He won't be able to work on any other line. Virtually he'll refuse to, and McGloyne is simply the Detective Bureau."

"Boyce," asked the Judge, "there are reliable detective agencies, aren't there?"

"Certainly. But hardly for us, you know."

"Then leave out the regular agency. Supposing some competent private vidual, working largely sub rosa—"

Boyce laughed and snapped his teeth on it.

"Bring him to me. He's some one we've long been looking for."

The judge did not point to Laneham, or indicate in any way that it was he he meant. But a moment later Boyce was called to the door, and Bishop had chance to speak to the Doctor unnoticed.

"What do you say, Laney? You were asking for a crime case. And if the gods have answered you at once—?"

"Bishop! Impossible. Under any ordinary circumstances—"

"We can't pick the circumstances. And if you can get at the truth only in part— You can see in the youngsters here how much is going to depend—"

He got no further. Cursing and crying out half inarticulately, some one was foreing his way past Boyce and into the room.

It was Professor Fisher himself. And even a first glance would have shown them that the man was beside himself. He had what Bishop had called a "patent-medicine face"—the eyes too large and magnetic, the richly curling beard, the too exotic good looks—a face that ten million people had seen printed a thousand times in the advertisements of his yellow-journal remedy.

But now, with his wife's body lying in that room beyond, his eyes were blood-shot and his cheeks pastily colorless. More than ever, too, did his Danish accent come out.

"I desire to ask," he cried, leveling his finger at Willings— "I desire to ask if, after all, you are going to let him go? He vas here. He came—he came to demand money from my wife for his settlement. He vas the last one to see her alife— You are going to led him go! And the girl the girl—is liddle better!"

"They're dismissed on my recognizance," answered the Judge shortly. "It was unpardonable ever to attach suspicion to them."

"Unpardonable! Unpardonable! Then I gif you notice right away now, if you think all law and justice can be stopped in the first hour—"

"Judge," said Boyce, "will you help me, please?"

And at last, between them, they got him out again.

As they did, the Doctor asked his first question of Willings.

"I think I understand pretty nearly everything, old chap," he said; "but can you tell me your story from the beginning?"

"Oh, don't ask me," he said, "to go back to that wretched foolishness at Fourteenth Street! You can get idea enough of it from what the poor cop in there told. At the very moment, probably, when some devil's fingers were around her throat, I was doing a burlesque of holding her up. 'Choking her for the pearls—in case she didn't give up the money,' that was it, all right! My Lord, how it sounds now! I had a fine time horrifying Miss Hope here! I'll tell you about my call at the apartment."

And he did.

HE had reached the Casa Grande, he said, about four. He had waited, expecting every moment that Mrs. Fisher would come down, for almost an hour. But in the end he had had to give up and leave again. Why had no one seen him leaving? Because he'd walked down the stairs. There was some tie-up in the elevators, and he'd waited another five minutes at them. As he remembered it now, he hadn't seen any Casa Grande people, even in the lower hall.

The knockings? He'd heard them just as he was leaving; but at that time there was no voice. Had he seen Jimmy—Mrs. Fisher's Cockney servant? Yes, and the little chap had been acting queerly then.

More than that, it was Jimmy who'd brought him out the big bank envelop. He hadn't opened it then, because he'd taken it for granted that he knew what it contained—Mrs. Fisher's regular quarterly subscription to the settlement—yes, five hundred. She'd paid it several times before like that, and always in actual cash. He hadn't opened the envelop till half an hour later, and then he'd discovered that instead of bank-notes there was a blank paper. It was that discovery that had brought him back again.

So much in explanation of lesser things. And then he and Miss Hope together told again of what, that day, he had really gone to Mrs. Fisher's for.

"She had asked me, a week ago," said the girl, "to have Mr. Willings draw up an estimate of how much would be needed to clear the House of debt and endow it for all time to come. I'd told her it would be at least $100,000; and she had said she had expected it would be more."

"We'd been keeping it between us till—till we could be sure there'd be no possible slip up," said Willings again. "It was something so big we couldn't take the chance. And we'd been planning to give the old House its surprise to-night. Well, at any rate, she intended it."

"And—no doubt it's against all reason and logic," the girl broke in again, "but from the first I've had the feeling that it's as if some hateful, evil demon had simply resolved to prevent her doing all that good—and if once we could discover everything that's behind her death—"

"D. Hope," the Doctor smiled at her, "the Judge wants me to take it up."

"Oh—and won't you? Won't you? You've so often said—"

"On one condition." He turned to Willings again. "And you live at the settlement, too?"

"I have been. But after all the notoriety that this'll bring on it—"

D. Hope flushed. For the first time she seemed to think of that herself.

Laneham looked from one to the other.

"Exactly," he said. "For a while, I'm afraid, life is going to have its difficulties for both of you. And as for me, you want me to turn detective. Very well, supposing I ask you—ask you both—to come up and live and work along with me?"

"Dr. Laneham!"

"Why not? Can you give me one good reason? As long as we have Mrs. Neilson on the job as housekeeper, and Jacobs, the chaperonage will be more than adequate. And you two people could simply give me all the help there is."

THE Judge was returning. He heard the last few words, and the Doctor told him what had gone before.

"Why, surely!" he said. "Surely! the finest idea I ever heard!"

"I'll be taking away some one's confidential secretary, remember," the Doctor warned him.

"That's all right. I'll be willing to stand for that."

They did not wait for the young people to consent in words, for consent was in their faces. It was all done within two minutes.

"I'll go and see Boyce again," said the Judge, "and instead of getting credentials for one special deputy, I'll have him make 'em out for three."

He reappeared a moment later, the Commissioner at his side.

"It's all right, Doctor," said the Commissioner. "I'll have your credentials sent over—and if you'd like to take a preliminary look around at once—"

"I should, very much."

"For the present, it'd he just as well to stay away from the Inspector."

"Of course."

"And I've promised Fisher—his private rooms are up there, to the right—that he'll be left untroubled. But, for the

---

rest, go anywhere in the apartment."

Asking Willings and Miss Hope to remain for the time behind, Laneham and the Judge began to walk through together.

"Is there anything you can really hope to get offhand?" asked Bishop. "I mean, anything that McGloyne's men won't be looking for?"

"Probably not. But there is one thing—something I think I was speaking of this afternoon: what we chaps call the evidence in the destruction of evidence.' A root difference between the normal, honest man and the criminal is this: The honest man leaves his tracks uncovered. He makes no attempt to cover them. But the criminal—and the homicidal maniac as well—will try to cover them—will, in general, go so far out of his way to destroy evidence that he creates evidence by his efforts at destruction."

"I see."

"Not that there's a whole lot of likelihood of our chancing on it here. But, in any case, we'll be able to get the general arrangement and the look of things."

The general arrangement of those Fisher rooms was one that, to any one familiar with the big modern two-story apartment de luxe, revealed itself at once. Above, to right and left, the suites of the master and the mistress. Below, the big common rooms. And, in the court wing, first the service rooms and then the living quarters of the servants themselves. All was perfectly simple. There were neither unlooked-for doors nor unsuspected passages. The swimming-pool alone was out of the common. And the Doctor began by leading the way to it.

IT was as they had seen it first. There had been no evidence of destroyed evidence then, and there was none now. The coroner's physician gravely pointed out to Laneham that death would have resulted from the blow on the temple alone; and that, though the markings on the throat were, in a sense, almost identical with those often caused by asphyxiation or even electric shock, the finger-marks on the arm made it needless to go so far afield. All of which had been seen and said before. Nor was any new light given, Bishop told himself, by the great bell-like light hanging over the pool. He waited till the Doctor had gone to and fro once more. Then they went on to the rooms beyond.

They could now see Mrs. Fisher's little private suite from end to end. And it, too, told no more than it had told at first. It had showed no slightest evidence of disturbance then, and it showed none now. It was a small, tragic vision of lovely old rose and dull blue and creamy egg-shell white. Two Electric Protection men were still searching for proof that the hidden wall safe had been tampered with. Near the old French fireplace in the little library some Central Office men were turning out the drawers of a fine old Washington desk.

"The boss"—he meant Professor Fisher—"told us to make it thorough; no bars up anywhere," said one of them. "An' we are."

Another had again opened the window of the tiny writing-room, on the theory, perhaps, that, even without a fire-escape or connecting balcony, some one might have entered from the apartment next door. But the snow on the outer sill was a soft, unbroken crust of sleet.

They descended the stairs again to the common rooms. And then they went on through to the service rooms. In none of them was there either evidence of evidence destroyed, or of the unusual in any other form.

There still remained the private living quarters of those two "prison-gate" Fisher servants. Each of them had two rooms. And if both those servants had fled, the mere condition of their rooms at least established this difference between them: Maddalina, the Italian maid, had had her warning. The events, whatever they were, of that day had not taken her by surprise—the proof being that she had removed all her belongings, to the last old shoe. And to do that it was a fair inference she must have been "getting out" for a week before.

But in the little English butler's rooms, on the contrary, everywhere were the indications of flight with almost no warning whatever. On all sides was the litter of rejected belongings left by a man who has had to pack frenziedly and get away in a matter of minutes.

Here, too, more Central Office men were at work, thumbing their way through the contents of a disordered dresser.

"Have you found anything in the way of torn paper, or signs of anything having been burnt?" asked Laneham.

They looked at him, but the Judge was warrant enough, and one of them produced a scrap of paper.

"It ain't tore or burnt," he said; "but it gives us a look at the fist he writes."

It was a duplicate deposit slip—the small mutual receipt one has to make out when depositing without a pass-book. It was on the West Side Bank for Savings. It showed that forty dollars had been deposited on December the second preceding, that Jimmy's name in full—as given there—was James H. Higham, and that the "fist" he wrote was quite as scrawling and characterless as might have been expected.

"Nothing else?"

"Not a thing."

"All right," said Bishop; "I guess we might as well go back and try to cheer up the youngsters again."

In the corridor they encountered Boyce. And, though he let the Judge go on, he stopped Laneham for a moment to speak to him.

"Nothing so far, Doctor?"

"Nothing so far."

While they talked they heard a footstep behind them, and turned to see Professor Fisher coming down the stairs from his rooms. He passed on, hat in hand, to the outer hall. Boyce had a sudden idea.

"I barred you out up there before," he said, pointing to Fisher's rooms. "But now that he's out of them, and if it'll only take a minute—?"

"Oh, never mind. Never mind."

"Better go. For our friend Jimmy would have the run of those rooms, you know."

So Laneham mounted to the master's suite.

There were four rooms in all. He was leaving the second, a sort of lounging and gun room, when his eyes were drawn to the fireplace. There was burnt paper there, a little heap of it. But it was where it ought to be; and, though he turned back to it, he did so incuriously.

Incuriously, at least, until he bent down over it. "Evidence in the destruction of evidence?"

Again, and more fixedly, he examined those fluttering brown fragments. Then, spreading his handkerchief, he dropped some of them into it and put them in his pocket.

A few minutes later he was seeking Boyce again.

"Tell me, Mr. Commissioner, the E. P. people haven't located the wall safe yet?"

"I believe not. But, of course, it's only a sort of hidden pigeonhole. Fisher himself doesn't know where she had it put in, and it wouldn't be fair to the E. P. men to let the press—"

"Exactly. And I'm coming to that. In the meantime, you can't even say that the pearls were in the apartment at all?"

"N-no—no, I suppose we can't."

"Good. Then can the newspapers just print that and nothing more?— 'The pearls were supposed to have been kept in a sort of wall safe in Mrs. Fisher's private rooms, but so far nothing has been found.' Can you tell them just that and no more, than that, even if we should locate the safe in the next half hour?"

"Why?" Boyce's brows became one wrinkle. "But, yes, I think we might be able to fix it so—if you can get the E. P. to do team work too."

"I'll answer for that. And now may I send Miss Hope and Willings home?"

"As soon as you like."

The Judge was still, apparently, "cheering them up."

"Laneham," he said, "they're beginning already to take the proper view of it. And once they learn what you can really produce from your bag of tricks!

"Let's see, what were some of those basic principles you were laying down for me this afternoon? That Zancray lad, now, what was his method of getting at the truth?"

"Zancray's postulate? Why, Zancray," he explained to the others, "is a French psychologist who's been making a study of crime and criminal investigations. And Zancray bases everything on a theory that in general no friend of—of the victim ever tells everything. Either for what they imagine are the victim's best interests, or for their own, they always hold out something."

At the moment he was looking at Willings; and it was his expression that began first to bring him to a halt. "They always hold out something," he repeated, "and if you could only get all those holdouts and fit them together—"

He did not really finish at all. For from Willings' face he had turned his eyes incredibly to Miss Hope's, to the Judge's. And upon all three—it was absurd, it was impossible; but it was there—upon the faces of all of them there was the selfsame betrayal. In the psychological laboratory he had heard it given a name—"the Zancray look"! Next moment, indeed, seeing one another, all three had realized that it was there.

The Judge was the first to recover himself.

"Well, really, Laneham, really! You know how long I have been Mrs. Fisher's private attorney! And every professional man is intrusted with certain confidences—certain secrets, if you like. But if you can imagine for one moment—"

"Bishy!"

But by then young Willings, as white as he had been an hour before, was speaking:

"Dr. Laneham, if I give you my word of honor that anything I may be 'holding out'—"

The Doctor could only wave at him imploringly to stop. And, for that matter, it was at D. Hope that he was looking now. For if ever nerves were plainly reaching their breaking-point—

"Doctor," she began intensely, "when I tell you that the incident in my mind—the thing I'm holding out—was the merest trifle—"

"D. Hope," he ordered her, "you go home. And, Willings, you go too! I'm so thoroughly ashamed of myself and Zancray and his postulate! Just say we've decided to forget it—or to file it for future reference—or anything you please to get it buried! Judge, they're quite free to go, so far as you're concerned?"

"Oh, the sooner the better! And, Laneham, allow me to say again—" Again he stopped to gulp his indignation.

"Then," said Laneham, "won't you just help me send them off in the car?"

He followed them, Bishop behind him, to the street.

"Everything comfy? And you're going to forget, really? For that's only fair to me, you know. Then back to your settlement with you, and be up at Seventy-second Street as early as possible tomorrow for our real beginning!"

HE saw them go, and his hand dropped back into his pocket, where, in a handkerchief, lay a few fragments of brown and flimsy paper ash. And bad Dr. Henry Laneham confessed in that moment to his own thought, it was this: that already he was "holding something out" himself!

To be continued next week

Birds Not of a Feather Flock to Him

THE fact that a Havemeyer, an Armour, or an Astor will pay $1200 apiece for rare cranes for their cranes for their country places, or will pay a price high enough to make a profit possible on a pink pelican brought with endless trouble from some unheard -of sport, made it possible for Mr. G. D. Tilley, of Darien, Connecticut, to turn his pet fad into a business. That is why he has

seventy acres of land and water stocked with birds hailing all the way from Siberia to South America, from Timbuctoo to Tahiti.

Among all his birds, ranging from twelve feet high down to two inches, and from no real color at all to all colors at once, there is just one that is not for sale. It is a seriema. It has no song, and looks like a worn feather duster. It has the right of way in the streets of Darien, and has broken the inhabitants to its ways. When it wanders casually into a drug store, the clerk knows his duty. He places a glass of soda water on the floor, and never bats an eye when the bird imbibes it to the last gas-bubble.

If you make a noise he doesn't like, he'll bark at you like a dog. If you please him, he'll let you see him play ball with himself. This talent was acquired through the seriema's liking for hard boiled eggs, which he would dash down repeatedly till the shell was all chipped off. One day a child left a hard rubber ball on the lawn. Up in his beak it was snatched, down on the lawn it was dashed—and the seriema became a ball enthusiast from that moment, his ability limited only by the fact that he has a game leg, acquired during the excitement of his capture in the wilds of West Africa.

The people who are anxious to adopt the European custom of ornamenting their grounds with unusual fowl, but who jump in blind, give Mr. Tilley his comedy moments.

There was the man who bought two swans for his lake, but sent them back next day. The "lake" was a cent thimbleful in the front yard, and when the swans went in—splash! out went the lake.

Another customer also wanted to stock his lake. He had heard of "teal duck," and they sounded good. So he bought a pair. And this time the fuss was made because the teal (one of the smallest varieties of duck) not only didn't populate the lake immediately, but were not even visible on what turned out to be 150 acres of water.

Why They Cost So Much

THERE is more than one reason why Mr. Tilley's business is a gamble. He tells of a millionaire who wanted a pink-headed duck, just because it is one of the rarest things there is. It took Mr. Tilley's agents two years to get one, and Lloyds charged him $160 just to insure its passage here. It arrived in Darien on a Monday, and Mr. Tilley sent his millionaire a telegram. "Will come after duck Wednesday at three," came the answer. And on Wednesday at noon the pink-headed duck expired!

Yes, he could sell it stuffed to a museum. It would cost five dollars to stuff, and he'd get eight dollars for it.

Maybe that's one of the reasons why the rare cranes cost their buyers twelve hundred dollars each.

Ask Mr. Foster—She Knows

Not long since, and English noblemen, with is secretary, was passing through the room in Lord & Taylor's Fifth Avenue store, in New York, where "Ask Mr. Foster" has her office. Seeing the array of time-tables, he stopped and made inquiries as to whether it would be necessary for him to return to England in order to arrange for his trip, guides, and transportation for a hunting trip to the African jungle.

Mr. Foster (who is Mrs. Hood Waters) assured him that she would take charge of hte entire matter, and in the course of a short time the Englishman received at his hotel plans that were absolutely satisfactory in all details. His Lordship sailed from America instead of from England.

Mr. Foster Gives Her Services Free

MR. FOSTER charges nothing for her services, and, since before the Fair opened, she has planned an average of thirty trips and talked to more than two hundred and fifty people a day.

She has traveled all over the world, and that fact gives a decidedly personal and intimate tone to her expert advice on everything connected with travel.

Speaking of women traveling alone, says Mr. Foster: "A woman can go alone to any part of the world and be treated with the utmost courtesy."

When Old Wives' Tales Prove True

SUPERSTITION is generally regarded as evidence of a benighted state of mind. But once in a while an ancient superstition is found to be based on a modern scientific fact.

An interesting example of this is the old-time belief that a smallpox patient had better chances of recovery if his bed was hung with red curtains.

Effect of Colors on the Sick

IN the days when smallpox was the scourge of Europe,—when epidemics of it attacked whole towns, taking an enormous toll in death and leaving those who recovered frightfully disfigured,—it was firmly believed that red bed hangings were the best thing to safeguard the sufferers.

The study of light therapy has shown that the effect of light is of the utmost importance in many diseases. Sunlight is made up of rays of the colors of the spectrum. The violet rays are the strongest, and capable of doing the most harm. The red rays are mild, and counteract the effect of the violet rays. It is the effect of the violet rays that causes the skin to become inflamed in cases of sunburn.

Recent experiments prove that by excluding the violet rays from a smallpox patient the effect of the rash may be mitigated. A number of European hospitals have fitted up pavilions for smallpox patients, wherein the window-panes are made of red glass, and all the light that reaches the patient passes through a red shade, thus nullifying the effects of the violet rays.

Patients treated by this method do not suffer nearly as great an irritation of the skin, and the rash leaves them without the severe pock-marks so generally dreaded.