Generally Speaking, a Job Is Good in Proportion to the Amount of Study Required to Master It

YESTERDAY morning, when I rode up in the elevator, the starter was breaking in a new elevator-boy.

At noon, when I went out to lunch, the new boy was running the car alone. He had on a uniform, and was starting and stopping with the confidence of a veteran.

From apprentice to professional in a couple of hours.

Last week I saw a veteran motorman breaking in a youngster. On Tuesday and Wednesday the two were on the front platform together: on Thursday the new man was operating the car alone.

It is a sight I have seen very often: yet I never see it without a feeling of wonder.

What thoughts are in that young fellow's head as he receives his instructions from the gray-haired veteran?

How can he fail to look forward and see in the older man a picture of himself twenty year from now?

He is taking up a low paid job—a job with no future. Twenty years from now he will be just where he is to-day—only older, with a grasp on the job somewhat less secure. His experience will count for nothing, because it is experience that any other man can gain in a couple of days.

He may, by walking out on strike, force an increase in his pay of a few cents a week. But the increase will not be large. Why?

Because he learned the job in two days. And in any other two days the company can get plenty of men who will learn just as fast and take the job away from him.

On the same day I met in a hotel restaurant a friend of mine who has just come back from England after taking special work in surgery under some of the greatest men in the world.

He is thirty-one years old: it is fourteen years since he entered college.

For ten of those fourteen years he has been in medical schools, in hospitals, and in foreign countries studying.

The rest of us—his class-mates—have been in business ten years. He has in all that time never been able entirely to support himself. Always his education was costing him a little more than he earned.

Yet with what result?

He has acquired a specialized training such as only a few other men in New York possess.

He will begin his life with an income of several thousands; he will pay back his educational debts in a couple of years; in ten years his income will be tens of thousands.

It took him fourteen years to master his profession. But he need have no fear of losing what he has gained. No other man can displace him, except at the cost of fourteen years of work.

I have nothing but sympathy for the old man who finds himself condemned for the rest of his life to a no-account job. But I find it hard to be patient when I see young men blithely dancing into jobs with no future, simply because they are too lazy to fit themselves by study for jobs worth while.

Every young man in the United States ought to read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

See with what painful diligence he taught himself to write good English. Watch him, at fourteen, attacking again the arithmetic that he had three times failed to pass in school, and conquering it.

See Michelangelo, old and blind, still being wheeled into the great galleries, that he might with his fingers trace the outlines of the statuary—still true to his life's motto: Ancora impara—"Still learning."

"The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price," said Emerson.

And when he said it he epitomized the philosophy of Business.

The job that the gods sell for two hours' training is worth just what it costs.

Only that job is worth while which has tied to it the price-tag of constant, unceasing study and work.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

THROWING OFF THE BOOZE-CONSTRICTOR

Drawn by James Montgomery Flagg

YOU have seen the statue of Laocoon and his two sons, struggling in the toils of the serpents. The serpents did for Laocoon. But the serpent that Prohibitionists have so long pictured as threatening the life of civilization is finally losing its hold. The most destructive war that the world has ever known has brought with it a blessing in the world-wide defeat of alcohol.

At the beginning of the war, Russia—where forty per cent. of the school-children drank regularly, where at least a hundred drunkards were arrested daily in the streets of Petrograd alone, where the government derived an income of $400,000,000 from the sale of vodka—Russia cut off the sale of vodka in forty-eight hours. Formerly, at every wedding peasants drank 100 rubles' worth of vodka; now they are content with a feast of lamb costing only a trifle. Liquor-drugged men can not stand in battle against men with clear brains. Even backward Russia was quick to recognize that.

The liquor problem in France arose only fifty years ago with the discovery of absinthe. To-day the manufacture of absinthe is forbidden; tea is taking its place, one canteen serving 25,000 cups a day.

The United States has not needed a war to speed the prohibition reform. Half of the country that our ancestors pledged so vigorously in Jamaica rum is already under prohibition laws: 60,000,000 people can not buy alcohol without a doctor's prescription. Congress has appropriated $3,500,000 for recreation depots at army posts as substitutes for the canteen. And the Anti-Saloon League has a membership of millions of men and women.

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WILL THE UNITED STATES GO DRY?

By BURTON J. HENDRICK

THERE are many people living in Kansas City who still recall the glimpses that they used to obtain, about twenty-five years ago, of a somewhat gaunt and agitated figure who was a familiar sight on the most crowded streets. This figure would pass along, part of the time absorbed in his own thoughts, part of it giving untoward manifestations of the zeal that possessed his soul. His daily path compelled him to pass many of the city's largest breweries. "O God!" he would murmur, as he raised his hands heavenward and glanced shudderingly at these huge buildings—"O God! Will You not stop this accursed thing!"

The "accursed thing" that absorbed all the emotional energies of the Rev. Howard H. Russell was, of course, the liquor traffic, then definitely established in the height of its glory, and particularly powerful in Kansas City, Missouri.

Most people regarded Russell as one of the wildest cranks west of the Mississippi River. His soul was on fire with apparently only one idea—the destruction of the saloon. He constantly thundered against it from his pulpit; he spent a considerable part of his time pursuing it in the law courts; and he was continually organizing all the good people of the town into "leagues" and "unions" for demolishing alcohol.

Few of the people who found Russell an entertaining object of ridicule knew his history. Yet that history explained his Peter-the-Hermit attitude toward the saloon. In his youth he had barely escaped becoming a drunkard; his brother had actually become one.

"A Man Sent from God Whose Name Was Russell"

RUSSELL had a variegated career as frontiersman, government clerk, newspaper reporter, and lawyer, until he finally entered the Congregational ministry by way of Oberlin, Ohio, and settled down to a lifelong struggle with whisky and beer. From the day Mr. Russell started this crusade, he always regarded himself as divinely appointed to the task. His inspiration came from one source—the Almighty. His method of destroying the monster he always referred to as "God's plan"; and the ultimate realization of his work he invariably described as a "Patmos vision." "'There was a man sent from God, whose name was John,'"—a clergyman once introduced Russell in these words,—"and it is equally true that there was a man sent from God whose name was Russell."

The world has had thousands of cranks in the last few hundred years, filled with all of Mr. Russell's zeal and industry; yet the shabby figure of a quarter century ago is rapidly becoming a historic character. Out of our many thousands of cranks, here and there one survives simply because he delivers the goods. That is what the Rev. Howard H. Russell is now doing.

Last fall, Kansas City, the scene of his stormy pastorate in the eighties and nineties, voted for State-wide prohibition; only the pertinacity of St. Louis kept Missouri in the wet column. The triumphs of prohibition in other sections were almost overwhelming. Four new States, Nebraska, Montana, North Dakota, and Michigan, and one Territory, Alaska, outlawed the saloon. Imagine a frontier and mining country, like Alaska, declaring by an overwhelming majority against rum! In two other States, Utah and Florida, the people elected governors and legislatures on the straight prohibition issue, which means that these communities will adopt prohibition this winter. Here is, therefore, a gain of six States and one Territory at a single election!

Are the Cities Forced into Prohibition?

BUT the popular enthusiasm for this cause was evidenced in even more remarkable ways. The swinging of certain large cities, none of them celebrated as blue-law towns, was the most sensational development. Writers on this subject a few years ago used to emphasize the fact that prohibition was exclusively a rural question; that the cities would never, of their own accord, adopt any such puritanical absurdity. But glance at the results of November elections.

Detroit, one of the largest industrial communities in the country, voted against the saloon. In 1914 certain States, as Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, went dry against the violent protests of their largest cities. This was generally accepted as a clear case of hayseedism forcing its narrow conceptions upon enlightened urban communities. Last fall the same issue, in different forms, came up in these same States again. These hardened cities, therefore, had had two years' trial of a prohibitory law. Denver, which voted against prohibition in 1914, voted for it by a majority of 19,000 in 1916. Tacoma, which went wet by 2300 in 1914, went dry by 10,000 at the last election. Spokane voted wet by 1500 in 1914, and dry by 12,000 last fall.

Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Seattle. If open saloons are essential to the prosperity and happiness of any municipality, Seattle would seem to be that town. In 1914 it gave the wets a majority of 15,000, and raised a loud outcry when the overpowering rural vote made Seattle a saloonless community. After two years' experimentation, however, Seattle cordially accepted the new situation, giving prohibition last fall a majority of 20,000. Portland, Oregon, is another place that voted against the drys in 1914 and gave them a large majority two years later.

A few more facts will show the accelerated pace with which the anti-saloon movement is sweeping the nation. Up to the fall of 1914 the prohibition cause had been a matter of agitation for almost eighty-four years. In that time, as a monument to nearly a century's hard work, nine States had outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The greater part of these were located in the Southern States. In the fall of 1914,

however, nine more States ascended the water-wagon—as many in one election as had permanently joined the procession in the preceding eighty years.

Now the cause ceased to be mainly confined to the South, where prohibition had been adopted as a means of controlling the negro, and swept over the great expanse lying west of the Mississippi. Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Arkansas, Iowa, and Idaho were some of the communities that made the saloon illegal. Last fall, as has been said, six more States accepted the new doctrine. Thus, at the present moment, twenty-five States are virtually prohibition.

Prohibition the Next Presidential Issue

OTHERS, according to the professional workers in this field, are rapidly rushing toward the blue banner. Only the city of San Francisco kept California wet last fall—the wine-growing communities, which have always been regarded as safe against "fanaticism," actually voting for the cause that will destroy their home industries. New Mexico is at present swaying on the verge of the prohibitory law. The anti-saloon map discloses that eighty per cent. of our area is at present legally dry, and that sixty-three per cent, of our people—more than half—are living under some form of prohibition.

Moreover; the "cause" seems likely to capture one of the great political parties. Mr. Bryan, the most popular orator of the Democratic party, says that national prohibition will be the main issue in the presidential campaign of 1920. A comparison of the States carried by Mr. Wilson and those that are already prohibition or likely soon to become so, shows that they are almost identical. The South is not only solidly Democratic: it is also solidly anti-alcohol. The great trans-Mississippi unit that swept Mr. Wilson into the presidency again is likewise becoming almost totally dry. Only the popular Northern and Eastern States, which stood overwhelmingly for Hughes, also stand strongly against the onslaught of antisaloonism. Thus, by sheer force of the popular vote, it seems inevitable that the Democratic party should likewise become the party of teetotalism. And this is the party that a celebrated clergyman thirty years ago denounced as the party of rum and—but I omit the other alliterations.

The Dream of a Saloonless Nation

CERTAINLY, if any organization has ever "cashed in," it is the Anti-Saloon League organized by "Daddy" Russell in 1893. Whatever we may think of it, these energetic clergymen and "busybodies" have achieved success, according to their own ideas of success. But their work has only begun. It will be accomplished only when the amendment to the federal constitution prohibiting "the sale, manufacture for sale, transportation for sale, importation for sale, and exportation for sale of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes in the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof are forever prohibited."

"A saloonless nation by 1920"—the three hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers—is now the goal that absorbs all the energy of Mr. Russell, of his successor as National Superintendent, the Rev. Purley A. Baker, and of other thousands of associated workers all through the United States. What are the forces back of this campaign, and what are the chances that it will succeed?

It is a striking phase of modern American life that in these early days of the twentieth century, usually regarded as a period of fading religious belief, we have a movement, already immensely successful, which draws its main inspiration from the Bible. For the Anti-Saloon League is almost exclusively a church organization; its leaders are nearly all clergymen; its members are practically all taken from the evangelical denominations; and its financial support is derived largely from church collections. It represents a conscious effort to swing the votes of American church members against the saloon. Its frock-coated and white-necktied leaders regard the votes cast for prohibition as the triumphant voice of God asserting Himself against the devil.

The Men Behind the Fight

THE Anti-Saloon League represents, not the "high-toned," "higher criticism" wings of the Christian faith: it represents the revivalistic Methodists and Baptists of the older generation. Bishop Potter of New York used to denounce the League and all its works, whereas Billy Sunday is one of its favorite pulpit exhorters; there you have the spirit that inspires all its work. The birth-place of the Anti-Saloon League was Oberlin, Ohio. In vituperation the Anti-Saloon Leaguers resemble the most unbridled of the old Ohio and New England abolitionists. A saloonkeeper is usually referred to as a "rum-seller"; a saloon is commonly described as a "dirty hole"; a clergyman who does not advocate the anti-saloon ideas is a "fallen preacher."

The men directing the Anti-Saloon League have the Old Testament spirit as intensely as Cromwell's soldiers, and they implicitly believe that their every act is inspired by God.

With this devotional spirit, however, Mr. Baker and his associates combine a worldly wisdom that constantly outwits the cleverest politicians of the whisky interests. Their guiding philosophy may have come from the throne of grace, but their political methods have a practicality that would do credit to the district leaders of Tammany Halt. These reverend wire-pullers admit all this with an engaging frankness. Nor do they hesitate to indicate the source from which they have learned political wisdom—that is, from the politicians of the liquor traffic.

"Daddy" Russell, Mr. Baker, and their fellows carefully studied the ways in which the liquor interests gained their political power, and then adopted them as the most efficacious means of fighting their

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demoniac foe. For many years a certain political organization known as the Prohibition party had fought in the temperance cause, but with little success. The Anti-Saloon Leaguers discovered the cause of the Prohibition party's failure. It was simply because it was a party. It attempted to entice lifelong Republicans and Democrats to leave their affiliations and step into its ranks—a process that could never succeed. The liquor interests had never attempted to form a liquor party—hence their political success. They had simply manipulated the most potent political force that we have—that is, the balance of power. They had thrown their influence with Democrats or Republicans, as these parties showed the greater disposition to serve their ends.

Getting the Church Vote

THIS has been the method of the Anti-Saloon League. Every community, the leaders argued, contains a considerable church vote. That vote, in the main, is opposed to the saloon. It exists in numbers large enough, in most communities, to determine the issue of an election. Any candidate that can obtain this church vote can usually count on being elected.

The scheme of the Anti-Saloon League is therefore simple. It asks this candidate if he favors prohibition. If he answers "yes," that fact is reported to the voting church members. If he says "no," that fact is likewise reported. If he declines to answer the question, he is regarded as having voted in the negative. The church voters then cast their ballots for the candidate who supports their measure, irrespective of their party affiliations. They are in the business of destroying the saloon; that is the only issue they see in the campaign. The candidate, so long as he is right on the liquor question, can entertain any views on protection, the currency, foreign policy, or preparedness.

Americans frequently wonder at the recent progress of prohibition. This simple formula explains the mystery. The Anti-Saloon Leaguers, its leaders say, are not partizan, ex-partizan, or non-partizan. They are omni-partizan. The League supports any party that will further its ends. It would vote the Socialist ticket if the Socialist were the only candidate who stood "right" on the saloon question. And these methods they propose to use in passing the Eighteenth Amendment.

Twenty-five States Won Over

ONCE the amendment is passed by the House and the Senate, the way will be fairly plain sailing. Every candidate for State legislatures will then be asked if he will cast his ballot for ratification. Upon his answer will depend the question as to whether he receives the votes of the prohibition forces.

At the present moment Christian Endeavorers, church members, and other evangelical organizations are raising their hands and taking this oath:

"God helping me, no political candidate or party not declaring for the destruction of the liquor traffic can have my vote."

Church clubs and women's organizations everywhere are pushing federal prohibition. Petitions signed by millions of names are flowing in upon Washington. Every Sunday school and thousands of public schools are headquarters of the fight. Itinerant speakers are addressing factory workers every day, and preachers more than ever are making liquor the subject of their discourses. In particular, the Anti-Saloon forces are working in the smaller States. The vote of New Mexico and Arizona counts for as much as that of New York. Mr. Baker and his associates also have one great advantage, in that the vote of a State, once given, can not be rescinded. But a State that rejects the amendment can change its mind and indorse it.

It will take thirty-six States to pass the prohibition amendment. At present twenty-five have adopted no-license as a State-wide policy. It seems not unlikely, therefore, that in a few years the United States will follow Russia in a policy of nation-wide aridity.

The Label

By CONSTANCE SKINNER

Illustrations by Hawthorne Howland

THIS is a man's story—two men's story, in fact. The life history of every man begins with a woman, sometimes concludes with one—and not infrequently because of one.

Young Neil was as much in love as a Highland Scot can be. That is to say, his passion for Prairie Rose was both a religion and a madness. Since every other single man within the radius of the Canadian Northwestern Fort adored Prairie Rose, she thought it only fair to herself to trifle with young Neil adequately ere she accepted him.

Prairie Rose's black horse, Eagle Plume, was her pride. Even Inspector McNab, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police Station, could boast no steed equal to Eagle Plume. This, however, was not a good reason why Eagle Plume's mistress should have used his equine excellences to aggravate her lover by riding away from him at top speed while he was pouring out his love for her—like a Highlander—in terms of holy humility mingled with primordial menace.

Eagle Plume, the speedy, had been led to his stall, and Prairie Rose was cocked upon a bench on the front stoop when young Neil, with flaming blue eyes and lips paper-white, flung himself from his mount. He stood towering over her—six feet of raw-boned, high-strung Celt with a top-knot of red hair, wet and windtossed—and arraigned her for her sacrilege. Whereupon she mocked him lightly.

"What did ye say, wumman?" he cried.

"Yes, you are. A goose. A Billy goose."

"Take that back and apologize for it."

"I apologize; I meant William Goose. Miss Rose can not accept Mr. William Goose this afternoon."

She curtseyed impudently and danced off to the stables.

"I thank ye for the name, ye wicked wumman," young Neil called after her, dialect coming thick upon his rage. "It's my name frae this hour, and I'll make it a name tae be shouted frae one end tae the ither o' the whole Northwest."

WHEN Prairie Rose came out upon the stoop in the spring twilight, with a tartan sash pinned about her skirt, a posy of wild flowers behind her ear, and a beckoning gleam in each eye, young Neil was nowhere in view. The dusk hid a horseman tearing across the plain.

The snows of the second winter had waned before she saw him again.

In due time young Neil arrived at his objective point. This was Fullerton, the police post on the north shore of Hudson Bay. He was to become one of its three constables. There he could enjoy the anguish of his wound to the full. Moreover, he had set himself the loneliest and hardest task that a harsh and exacting service demands of the men who enter it.

He was listed by a number and the name of William Goose.

"Wherever did you get such a name as that?" Corporal Surrey asked him. "For you're as Scotch as they make them."

"That's nothing against the Scotch, nor yet it's nothing against me," said Constable Goose sternly; and pleasantries were at an end.

When—during the first snowfall—she learned that there was a Constable William Goose at lone Fullerton, Prairie Rose wept. Well she knew that the rash religious nature of the boy would make him carry out the hardest task that instructions plus his own conscience might demand, with entire disregard of his safety. Therefore Prairie Rose was proud and wept; but—she was also Scotch. She would live faithful and die forlorn; but she would not say "Come back" to Constable William Goose, whose opprobrious name was adopted in scornful revenge upon herself.

THIS is the story of two men.

Far to the south of bleak Fullerton, where the "Bad Lands" of Montana come up to the borders of Alberta and Saskatchewan, a woman's hand was driving another man northward, with face set toward the Hudson Bay country.

Lily Alto danced in a northern Montana hamlet where rustlers and smugglers made their headquarters. She was composed of two parts—externally, wild beauty; internally, cold-blooded cupidity. When she told James Jep, alias Utah, that she would go with him and cleave unto him on the day when he could put fifty thousand dollars into her hand, she said it chiefly to be rid of him, that a bediamonded Brazilian, recently arrived, might have his place.

Utah may or may not have believed her, and been blind to the languishing señor; but, since she represented all his desire, he resolved to earn—the word is used by courtesy—the stipulated amount.

He knew that there was one sure way to do this—always provided he was not stopped. If he could reach the northern fur country with a cargo of whisky he could trade the whisky to Indians for a fortune in furs. The difficulties ahead were two: first, to enter Canada with the whisky, and, second, to exit from Canada with the furs. The border patrol of the Northwest Mounted is discouragingly efficient.

Nevertheless, Utah was the type of man designed by nature to grapple with her constructively. He did not know this, because as yet nothing had occurred to break the deep, peaceful slumbers of his moral sense.

Utah acquired three pack-mules and a duplicate order of canned foods showing a preference for quart tins and ten-pound kits. To these he added pork and beans in picnic size for his own consumption. He selected a showy brand with an American flag on the label, and paraded his purchases. Contrariwise, in a mood of hush, he bought keg whisky. Bottles of assorted sizes were added to his collection.

Under cover of the dark he drove out, leading his three mules laden with the food-stuffs. The whisky was in the wagon, hidden beneath canvas and camp utensils.

Screened in a cleft of the Bad Lands, Utah spent joyous and industrious hours in transferring the whisky to the bottles and the bottles to the quart cans. Pint bottles rested nicely in a quart-sized nest of spinach, for instance; and quart bottles elbowed in among the native inhabitants of a ten-pound mackerel kit with the pure spirit of camaraderie. The gum used on can labels is crisp and easy to release. Utah dampened the labeling paper, cut the tops off the cans, sank the bottles, soldered on the tops, and repasted the paper. It was fine and tedious work. He left the wagon in the cleft, gave a mixed load to each mule, and rode over the border unmolested.

AT the little town of Nomo, thirty miles in from the border,—his last calling point within the limits of civilization,—Utah learned, through chance meeting with another smuggler, that the flower of his heart was now worn by the Brazilian señor;, who had put diamonds in her ears "as big as lima beans." Utah sent Miss Alto a humorous and ungrammatical message to the effect that when he returned he would shoot the other gentleman's diamonds out of her ears; and as for the Brazilian himself, he would not leave enough of that señor in any one place to wear either jewels or a coffin.

Utah pushed on to one of the northern trading posts, where he purchased more provisions, dogs and a sled, and sold his mules. Then he acquired an Indian guide—a Cree, much pitted by smallpox, who declared that he held all the Sarcee tribe of trappers in the hollow of his hand—and launched upon the snow waste that stretches toward Hudson Bay.

On New Year's Day he established headquarters north of the sixtieth parallel and a little south of the Circle. He pitched his tent, made of skins, and banked it round with thick snow walls, like an Eskimo's igloo. Then he built a snow counter across the door and froze a sled to it for a top.

On the third day of his intrenchment the Sarcees arrived in force; and Utah was presently up to his chin in furs, for which he paid in whisky eight times diluted. His carbine lay along the inside edge of the counter; hidden under his parki he wore a revolver. The furs were of the best, black fox predominating.

An arbitrary rule, established for his own safety, decreed that each group of Indians must depart as soon as the trade was completed and take the payment elsewhere for consumption. In the beginning the rule worked well; but tasting and tippling in secret presently let loose the insolence of numbers. Utah kept a hand on his rifle and slept with one eye open.

SEVERAL hundred miles to the east of him, Constable William Goose was engaged in examining whaling and other trading vessels. Three policemen—a corporal and two constables—receive the customs, guard the money, and execute justice at Fullerton, besides maintaining order over the surrounding wide "back block of Canada."

The day when, amid shouts and barks, the Sarcees were wont to arrive to trade with the ships came and passed. Several weeks later there entered the post a tall pockmarked Cree who bore the fragrant title of Smoking Bones. He was related to the Sarcees by wedlock, and was esteemed among them for his cunning. As a South Plains tribe says: "Manitou first made the wolf and the serpent for practice, then he made the Cree."

Smoking Bones came as an emissary from a repentant people. He confessed that, against his counsels, the Sarcees had entered a whisky trader's igloo and caroused with him. Now, with aching heads and meek hearts, they waited down the trail until Smoking Bones could assure them their sins would be forgiven. They would then come in with their furs and trade according to their time-honored custom. Otherwise how would they get their supplies? Incidentally, the great King-Chief across the water was their father and the police were their mother. It had always been so; it would be so forever.

The corporal gave the desired word of pardon, and the Sarcees came in, their sleds fur-laden. Now, the corporal's bland look hid guile. He knew that whisky traders sell not their precious stuff for naught. Yet the Indians still had furs.

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Here was a mystery needing other elucidation than the glib oratory of Smoking Bones.

Calling at an unexpected hour, he found the Cree's Sarcee wife and child alone in the tent. The child held a bright piece of paper and was evidently deriving satisfaction from its gaudy colors. The Corporal recognized it as labeling paper such as adorns canned goods. On a garish mustard yellow ground an American flag waved triumphantly over a pile of beans.

Across the beans were the words, in heavy black lettering: "Pure, Invigorating, Sustaining, Humane."

After having frightened the Sarcee woman into minor admissions, the Corporal confronted Smoking Bones with the scrap of paper, and the latter was forced to confess that the trader was still in the country and was, perhaps even now, carrying on his nefarious business with trappers from the Circle. As for himself and the Sarcees, they had come upon him by accident.

The Corporal called Constable Goose.

"Constable, these Indians are lying. What's more, they're scared—hiding something. You will go out and arrest that trader. I gather he's about a hundred and fifty-odd miles northwest of us." He handed the label across the table. "Put that in your pocket, and find out what it means."

Constable William Goose blinked at the label.

"Find out what it means?" he echoed. "From the looks o' it, I'd say 'tis a national anthem about beans."

"Whisky traders don't sell beans. Beans, in this case, are more than a staple; they're a mystery. Take a look through any Indian camp you pass. A hundred and fifty-odd miles—you ought to make it in four days easily."

"The mischief o' it is," Constable Goose burred in reply, "the dogs are worn fine, and so am I—from our last trip."

"Start at once," was the Corporal's only reply.

Only a week before this Constable Goose had completed a five-hundred-mile patrol for the apprehension of two Indians guilty of murdering a woman whom they suspected of enchantments. They had strung her up by the armpits and starved her to death. The constable was not eager to go out again, because of a sharp stabbing pain in his head where it had been struck by a spear shaft in making the arrest.

Constable Goose's instructions were to confiscate the trader's whisky and furs, and to arrest the trader and his customers—if barter were still in progress—and bring them into Fullerton. Judged by the annals of the Mounted, this was not so much to expect of one Scotch lad, aged twenty-four, in the second year of his service, for which he was receiving sixty-five cents per day. William Goose would have departed blithely enough but for that ache in his head, and the morbid mental discomfort that obsessed him when he closed his eyes and could see vividly a woman's skeleton blowing about a tent-pole.

In the lonely blanched Northland imagination quickens dangerously. Under his fur parki the constable wore the scarlet tunic of dress parade, which is by no means the uniform for patrol duty.

"For," said he, "since the worst is about to happen to me, I'll prefer to look handsome when they take me home to Prairie Rose." Inside the tunic he pinned a note to the effect that his body, if found before wolves had devoured it, was to be sent to his father and his sweetheart.

FROM his elevation Utah commanded an excellent view of the country-side. This was included in the plans of the inebriate and fertile-brained Sarcees when they placed him on high. It would be part of his diversion to observe the wolves gathering from east and west out of the blue snow-gloom, to fight and fraternize with his huskies, assist in devouring the fallen, and wait for the sleeping hour of the man-flesh inside the igloo to leap in over the snow counter. The buoyant Sarcees, remembering, even in their cups, that the arm of the law is long and the feet of the Mounted swift, had not killed their victim after a round of pleasing tortures. They had bound him to his sled with thongs. A foot was fastened to each runner. The sled, on end, slanted against the tent-pole. His left hand was free to reach for the pemmican and frozen fish beside him. The supply might last for a week if he ate sparingly, and if—for this also had been considered—the beasts did not enter to dispute for it with him.

Left to himself, Utah found presently that he could reach the strap over his right shoulder with his teeth. In due time—biting the strap faithfully hour after hour—he freed that shoulder. The left shoulder-strap was not within his dental radius, and his right hand could do nothing there without a knife in it. Nevertheless there were several advantages in having his right arm unbound. He could grasp the edge of the snow wall and drag his weight up off his ankles now and then and so relieve his worst physical agony. Also, he could reach the six-shooter in the deep inside pocket of his parki—which the misted Sarcees had overlooked, although they had found and abstracted his cartridge-belt. Four of the shots went to hold back the beasts outside.

Ptarmigan—awkward snow travelers—and the white hare were caught by the huskies, but days came when hungry noses were raised over the ledge and red eyes looked in with hunger. Sometimes, still, the dogs slunk off at the hoarse command in the voice it had been their habit to obey. Sometimes—of late—they defied it. This was when they were inspired by a hump-backed, long-bodied, long-snouted, large brown beast to whose neck the touch of harness was unknown. Utah had seen the wolf appear out of the steel-blue snow haze and bestow her affections on the leader of his team. These two were now paired, offensively and defensively, against the four remaining dogs and the man in the hut.

ONE morning, Utah saw the strange wolf, without apparent reason, slide away across the snowy distance. He wondered if the Indians were returning. Gun in hand, he waited. William Goose came into view.

Utah noticed that the man stumbling along beside the sled was taking a slow zigzag course; that sometimes he stopped, and, probably in obedience to his command, the dogs stood still while he went to them and handled the side trace. Then he would move on a few yards, and perhaps change their direction.

"A drunken Siwash," Utah thought. A moment later he exclaimed aloud:

"No, by hinky! he's snow-blind."

He fired—his last shot but one. The man stopped. Utah began to shout. His dogs barked. The man turned toward the igloo, listened, moved on uncertainly, then came faster toward the sounds he heard, still stumbling and veering. Presently he bumped against the snow ledge.

"Pull yourself up and climb in," Utah said hoarsely. "You're welcome, stranger."

A PAIR of mittens moved along the snow pack and clutched, then a furry peak appeared. In its midst two blazing blue bloodshot eyes peered unseeingly.

"Was it you I heard playing the bagpipes?" the figure inquired interestedly.

"It were not," Utah ejaculated.

"Man, man," the other chided, "ye're murdering it. 'Tis like the wailing of a sucking pig."

He scrambled in.

"For God's sake, cut me down!" Utah cried out, his endurance breaking at the sight of relief.

"I can hear ye fine, but I can't see ye. Up there, eh? Man, man," his voice lowered with dread, "did they freeze ye to a tent-pole and leave ye blowing about it like a flag?"

Utah groaned, in terror that the blind man might depart, leaving him as he was. At last, by dint of coaxing and patient repetition, he persuaded his visitor that he was not a Highland ghost playing bagpipes; and then the blind man cut the thongs and lifted Utah down. At his first attempt to stand, Utah sank to his knees with a roar like a wounded buffalo.

"Ay, man, they are hurting ye, I don't doubt. I'll rub up your ankles for ye and make a bit of fire."

"What is that brogue you use—Russian?" Utah queried between groans.

"Scotch, without a doubt!" was the reply, sternly made over the left shoulder as he scrambled out for sticks from the faggot on his sled.

For an hour he rubbed Utah's swollen limbs and doctored them from his medical case. Once or twice he paused in the

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work, to embark upon a lengthy discussion with some one named Prairie Rose. Later he said:

"Here's a kettle o' snow for the tea. And here's tea and pemmican and such like in the bag. I'll be obliged to you for making the supper whilst I sit quiet a bit and try to remember what I came out for."

"All right, pard!"

It was three days since Utah had dined on anything more substantial than snow. He reached for the skin bag of food with alacrity and both hands. He refreshed himself with a chunk of raw pemmican before attending to the kettle.

"Pard, I'll sure put welcome on the map for you," he mumbled. "Don't bother to knock."

The wild, red-streaked blue eyes stared at him blindly from across the flame.

"Give me the fiddle, Prairie Rose. Ye've no got the swing o' it. Nay, lass; I'll sing it for ye. Hark, now.

"My love is like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June,
My love is like a melody
That's sweetly sung in tune.
So fair art thou, my dearest dear,
So deep in love am I,
That I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry."

"What do you know about that?" Utah queried aloud between mouthfuls.

"Tell me, sir," the minstrel said, leaning forward and warming his palms at the flame as any sane man might. "Have ye ever seen a wumman hangit tae a pole, and her frozen black and stiff and the wind rattlin' her round the pole?"

"Hinky-dam it, no!" answered Utah.

"Then ye've no seen much!"

THE day passed pleasantly. Occasionally the Scot expressed distress for his loss of memory.

"I had a verra particular wee bit o' business that I cam' out for, and I canna remember at all what it was."

"Never you mind, pard," Utah responded encouragingly. "I'm right with you. With your dogs and the sled and my four huskies—that's twelve—and being careful with the food, why, pard, we've got a good fighting chance for life. I don't know where we are or where to head for, but I'll gamble on myself getting us both out of this hole. You'll travel right along with me, so don't you worry."

He chuckled, watching the blind man, who held a finger to his brow, puzzling, trying to remember.

"I didn't get what I came out for, either. By hinky! If I ever get my hands on that pockmarked Cree—"

"I've seen him!" The madman was sitting erect, full of energy. "Pockmarked Cree! I've seen him!" He struggled with this one clue; then it slipped from him, and he sank into his former attitude of puzzled distress.

"Passed him on the trail," Utah muttered. "To-morrow morning we'll be on our way, pard, no matter what these little ankles say."

After a silence the other remarked:

"'Tis always dark behind blind eyes; but if you'll tell me when 'tis night to a seein' man I'll go to bed and thank ye kindly."

"Sure, pard." Utah chuckled. But when night came and he gave the requested notification, he received a shock. The Highlander put off his fur bonnet and knelt in the snow.

"What in hinky are you doing that for?"

"Man, man," disapprovingly, "have ye no religion at all?, And how do ye expect to be taken care of in a wild and lonely land? I'll just be saying my prayers all over again to make up for your deficiencies."

"I guess the two of us can win through almost as easy as one could," was Utah's last thought that night. "And he's such a entertainin' little fella."

IT was at breakfast that memory awoke in the Scot. It came as the dramatic answer to Utah's relation of his own brief but violent history in the land of the igloo. Utah confessed who and what he was with pride; and he strung the string of his narrative with bright beads of blasphemy— as he described the manifold treacheries of a certain Pockmarked Cree "guide." It was the Cree who had leaped on him from the roof of the hut while the Sarcees rushed him. It was the Cree who had suggested his suspension on the sled, and it was the Cree who had tied his feet.

"I've had my neckful of fur-trading and then some," he wound up impressively. "But there's just two pelts I hunger for—that brown wolf's and that brown pitted Cree's. They'd match up great."

"Now, that's verra peculiar," said the staring madman across the fire. "That's verra peculiar. And I'll tell ye why. It brings to mind just the wee business I wasn't remembering, for all my trying. And for that I'm verra much obliged to ye, and so is the King—and the Corporal, too. Utah James Jep, are ye? 'And selling whisky to Indians? Man, ye're the verra hit o' business I came out about."

He rose and drew himself erect.

"Now what?" Utah laughed, unaware that all the offended law was upon him.

"I'm Constable William Goose of M Division, and I arrest ye in the name—"

"And now what?" Utah repeated, but with fading mirth.

Constable William Goose was bringing a pair of handcuffs out of his inner pocket. Under his opened parki was the unmistakable red serge of the R. N. W. M. P. The sight of it brought Utah to his feet.

"In the King's name, I'm coming to fetch ye!"

Utah's hand slipped to his gun, then slipped away again; for the blind man was coming for him, gunless, with the handcuffs open—coming straight through the fire, scattering it as he felt his way.

If one man was blind and daft, the other was weak from hunger and uncertain ankles. The two furry forms in the little igloo tumbled and lashed about like two bears in a pit until Utah worked his right arm out of the Scot's clutches. In that moment Constable Goose snapped the handcuff on his other wrist.

"Ha," he cried, panting and triumphant. "Ye can murder me, maybe, because I'm blind—but ye can't say I didn't arrest ye!"

The touch of the steel was as the touch of magic, and lo, there were two madmen in the igloo. Utah's hand with the revolver in it rose with a swiftness that swung wide of Constable Goose's wild passes. For an instant the muzzle aimed at a vantage point behind the blind eyes, then it turned and the butt came upper-most. There was a dull sound. Constable Goose relaxed his hold and found dreamless rest on the ground.

"Because I wouldn't waste my last shot on you—that's why!" Utah declared.

He strove severely with the offense on his wrist, and presently removed it and

threw it at the unconscious one. His feet hurt, but he ignored them, save for a curse or two, as he gathered up whatever the Sarcees had left that was worth taking.

He clambered out and essayed to reharness the Scot's team with the addition of his own dogs. This proved to be no simple task. Both leaders were determined to have leader's place or eat each other in battling for it. Finally he was obliged to leave his own leader free. When he entered the igloo again to get the supplies, the figure on the ground was stirring.

"Arrest me, would you, you blind ol' bean? Me!" Utah muttered. The discarded handcuff caught his eye, and caused a malicious glee to twinkle there. He joined the Scot's hands and fastened the handcuffs on them.

"Corporal—I have the—honor—to report—" Constable Goose sighed and sank back.

"Maybe some other lunatic'll mosey by and find you," Utah muttered. "You've got the same chance I had."

He climbed out, flung himself on the sled, and lashed the dogs out upon the trackless expanse, southward. Coming on the big brown wolf and his lead dog half mile from camp, Utah whipped out his gun and fired his last shot. The wolf loped away across the snow; but the dog did not move. Utah replaced his empty weapon with the official Colt's .45 of which he had relieved Constable Goose.

Since Utah was free and on his way, he should have been happy. Recurrent rumbles of profanity indicated that he was not. He raised the lash to urge the team into their swiftest pace, but dropped it and brought them to a standstill instead.

"What did he come at me for? He weren't so crazy he didn't know I could fix him."

The regularity and peevishness with which his mind reverted to this fact proved it to be the rub. The deranged Celt, walking blind-eyed through the fire toward a gun's nose,—for neither hate nor personal gain,—had given Utah a moral whiff of a brand of bravery new to him. He did not grasp its motive. But the picture of a big brown wolf setting her fangs in the singing throat of the blind man gave him no satisfaction.

"By hinky, that damned she-wolf ain't going to feed off the little joker. I'll just go and remove her dinner. I sure hate that wolf."

IT was the beginning of the fourth week out that the blizzard struck.

Through the permeating cold and the snow-depths, the sled, dragged, by the reduced dog-team, kept on. The huskies were not making forty miles a day now. Less than half of that was the best they could do with a lusty madman strapped on the sled, with hunger grueling inside them, and a gaunt Utah, mushing along-side more slowly daily.

The trip thus far had not been uneventful. At first unused to the ways of madmen, Utah had bound Constable William Goose to the sled by the waist, thereby almost causing his death when, with a spontaneous mighty leap, he overturned the vehicle and buried himself face downward in the snow, hurling the huskies into a snarling, biting mound of confusion. It required time and no small finesse to disentangle and readjust the outfit. Utah took no more chances. Constable Goose continued his journey bound from ankles to shoulders.

At night Utah had his hands full. There was camp to pitch, the dogs to be fed, as long as food held out, fire to make, and—no easy task—supper (when there was any) to be forced down the warbler's throat.

UTAH bore on, as he believed, south by southwest, confident that when they deflected across Saskatchewan they must find a trading post or Indian or trappers' camp. He did not realize that they had traveled practically due west instead of southwest, then veered south in a sharp line, still bearing westward. Utah wished to bestow his maniac on some white man's post, where he could be nursed back to sanity. To that end, he would risk a call anywhere except at a Police Station.

Utah had apportioned the supplies on the policeman's sled with the wisdom of an old desert wanderer, but by the third week they were dependent on game and his markmanship.

For three days they had crawled ahead foodless, and had lost the third dog, when fate and shot were kind and Utah brought down a rabbit. He had to fight the dogs for it, but the latter had the handicap of the harness and Utah had the advantage of the whip and the butt end of the rifle. There were no more bits of wood for fire-making, even if the dogs had been in a state of mind to permit a man to cook rabbit in their midst. Utah divided the meat as wisdom urged, sharing with the best dogs and leaving only fur for those that gave signs of early defeat.

"One thing in being a nut," he remarked, thrusting red morsels at Constable Goose—"you can kid yourself into believing raw rabbit is fried liver and onions. Say little fella, your eyes don't look so crazy like they did. I know you ain't blind these days. Snow blindness don't last. You've been seeing things for some time; only"—he chuckled briefly—"most of the things you saw wasn't there—you pore ol' bean, you," he wound up affectionately.

Utah did not know that the eyes had watched him with sanity since daybreak.

"I'd like to know what ye're doing this for," Constable William Goose muttered, closing his lids and biting into the rabbit.

"Me too," Utah concurred. "Little fella, you got wished on me—on account of me having to block that wolf. I'd grown to dislike that wolf-lady. Now I'm in for it, I ain't going to be beat. I'll win us through. So chew along, pard. By to-morrow night we'll have fire again. See that hump on the view straight ahead? Of course you don't, you pore ol' bean, you—but it's there. A white little hump. That's a clump of bush—yeh, boy, that's a little bunch of trees! And that means fire, and something to cook, too. Bound to be food living there."

Just then the dogs tried to demolish one another, and Utah leaped at them, swinging the stock of his rifle. Unobserved, the sane head of Constable Goose turned toward the horizon, and the eyes, no longer wild, descried the "hump" on the landscape, then for a brief moment regarded Utah James Jep keenly. Thereafter he lay with closed lids—studying pensively the subject of a certain whisky trader who was worthy of a moral as well as of a bodily salvation—while the sled dragged on slowly through the snow.

That afternoon shortly before dusk the blizzard descended.

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"By hinky, feels like the temperature was going up!"

The words were hardly said when the wind shrieked down on them, bringing the striking weight of leagues of snow. It seemed to reach to the sod, whirl up the six-foot depth of white particles, and wrap them in strangling folds.

Utah fought on blindly, grimly, for an hour, in the hopeless effort to make the shelter of the "clump of trees" he had sighted that morning—the snow-covered shape humping above the horizon. Then the huskies refused to try further, for all his shouts and lashing. They lay down in their traces, and were snowed under before Utah could cut them free.

Blinded, all but smitten down by the storm, which came on with a speed of eighty miles an hour and a weight as if the prairie itself had up-ended, Utah felt his way along the dog line to the sled, unbound William Goose and tied him to his own waist, then worked to release the rugs and sleeping-bags. He could not turn the sled up against the storm to protect them, so he disposed William Goose close to the runners and lay down beside him. The blizzard's caprice would decide whether they were to be sheltered or buried.

"I guess it's good night, pard," he said—not that he expected to be heard, for he could not hear himself. "I hate to cash in, at that; for we've done some Marathon, you and me has." He rolled as close to the other man as possible.

THE sled was high enough to protect them slightly from the hurricane. The white sea, filling all space between earth and sky, raced across the universe and over the two man atoms in almost horizontal billows. The constable, against the runners, was clear of the fall. Utah's body was buried, but he had laid his head on the other man's chest and so saved himself from smothering. The chest was fluctuating with sound—in other words, Constable William Goose was singing. Faintly under the screaming white wind-flood Utah heard:

"Come near and bless us when we wake,
Ere through the world our way we take—"

"We ain't going to need no blessing, pard, 'coz we ain't going to wake! Sing away, little fella—seeing you don't know what you're up against."

Some time later he muttered drowsily:

"Funniest thing—I keep thinking it's warming up! Who ever heard of a warm blizzard? Maybe I've gone beany myself—or I'm getting advance heat waves from the place I'm headed for."

He found himself wondering idly how deep the dogs were buried, and a vague recollection to the effect that he might have made port if he had left the madman in the igloo crossed his mind; then he fell asleep.

Constable William Goose, native son of the Albertan and Saskatchewan prairies,—where Utah was a stranger,—knew the meaning of this blizzard, against which neither man nor beast could stand and which yet blew warmer than the still air that preceded it. It was the chinook, direct from the British Columbian Rockies, with gathered sea-mellowness behind it from the Gulf Stream.

UTAH had fallen asleep with the conviction that he would never wake; he slumbered on past dawn.

Constable William Goose managed to lift himself slightly by the elbow and waist. He looked across the dark brown earth tract, where lingered only the last memories of snow—the watery surface. The chinook had first transformed the prairie into a shallow lake, and was now sucking up the damp from the mud and beating the soil into dust under the flail of its hot wind. A few miles distant a mound lifted its outlines above the plain. The shape of a R. N. W. M. P. Station is not to be mistaken. Constable Goose saluted it with song.

Utah awoke, came back from the grave in which he had laid himself prematurely, and regarded the miracle of clean-swept prairie stretching under a bright sky toward Fort Gordon. The dogs stood with backs to the wind and heads down, letting the warm chinook dry them.

Awed silence held Utah for several minutes; then, his feelings compelling him to expression, he gave vent to his favorite expletive, "By hinky!" He followed this with the biggest whoop he could muster from within his weakened frame. It was a hoarse, cavernous, hungry, petering whoop, but fraught with emotion. He sat beside William Goose on the sled and slapped a hand on his shoulder.

"See that little house over yonder? Yeh, boy! See that little house?" he chanted in enthusiasm.

Constable Goose, feeling the heat, had loosened his fur parki. The uniform was conspicuous. It caught Utah's eye and thought, and held them. A faint sound of music cut across the wind—significant music, the reveillé.

"Pard," Utah said slowly, "I got to do some studying. Yeh, little fella. That's no place for me to take a policeman. They wouldn't know you personally, 'coz it's the other end of the earth from where you started from—but, little fella, your clothes is unfort'nit for me."

In due course he made known the result of his cogitations.

"Pard, you're going to lend me that little coat; see? I kind of hate to do this to you; but, after all, you don't know what's occurring—you pore ol' bean, you. Maybe 'twon't work—but I owe myself a chance. Come, now. Gimme the little red coat. Nice little fella. Nice little coat. Whoa, boy."

By such gentle blandishments, seemingly, did he prevail upon Constable Goose to doff his garment. Constable Goose kept silence. His blond-lashed eyelids were lowered. Behind them, blue eyes gleamed with mirth.

INSPECTOR McNAB and his crony MacLean were sitting down to a midday meal prepared by the women of the MacLean family, when word came of the arrival of a stranger policeman with a prisoner.

"The prisoner is clean daft in the heid, he says," Sandy, the messenger, reported. "And I'm thinking the constable is daft too, for he says his name is William Goose. And if you please, sir,"—here Sandy's voice sank to a shocked hoarseness, "he's on dress parade."

"What!" The Inspector dropped his fork.

"What!" Miss MacLean's voice thrilled wildly. She sped through the doorway like a shot from a gun.

By the steps of Inspector McNab's headquarters stood a tall, strongly made, lean man in an ill-fitting scarlet uniform. His broad shoulders stooped, and his anatomy generally grouped itself in the slanting, unregulated ease of the cattleman. His scared face was gaunt, his crafty twinkling eyes were almost lost in the hollows left by hunger and hardship. Black hair and beard bushed about his neck and head and emphasized the gray tinge in his cheeks. He was provocative of sympathy, but an unlovely object.

Miss MacLean's gaze left him to center upon the man beside him—a man younger in years, with red hair and red stubble over his chin, with blue eyes that flashed lancing looks at her, with carriage erect and military, but with handcuffs on his wrists. The bright bloom faded from her cheeks, her eyes widened, her pale lips faltered.

The constable noted her distress. "Don't you be scared of the prisoner, lady," he remarked urbanely. "He ain't

Continued on page 21

The Other Brown

By ADELE LUEHRMANN

Illustration by Lucius W. Hitchcock

YOU must tell me, Alba—you must!"

Bianca Gil stood before the girl with anguished eyes. She was dressed for the street—indeed, had but that minute come in and gone directly to her guest's room. Her face was white and wasted from the hours of distress through which she had passed since her husband's arrest.

"But I don't know, señora! He didn't tell me his name. Oh, please believe me!" Alba implored. "I don't know."

Bianca turned away with a gesture of impatience. She did not believe the denial—had never believed it. But, until now, the identity of her guest's caller, the mysterious messenger from Brown, had been of no real concern to her. Now everything was changed, and the name and whereabouts of Brown's "friend" had become vital to the Gils, as a possible clue to the whereabouts of Brown himself. For, until Brown was captured and the guilt of the Welles-Hewitt murder fixed upon him, Valentin Gil would be held by the police.

That was the thought that half maddened his wife, when from his cell in the Tombs she rushed back to her home with

frantic questions, only to be met with the same statement as before:

"I don't know his name—he didn't tell me."

"Alba! Alba!" she cried at last despairingly. "How can this man be so much to you that you are willing to make us all suffer for him—a man you have seen only twice in your life!"

"But I'm not, señora—I'm not!" Alba pleaded. It was terrible to see the señora so unhappy, so unlike herself. "I've told you all I know. I can't tell you his friend's name—I don't know it. And I can't say that I signed the papers selling the mine to Señor Gill. I did sign some papers—all that my stepfather told me to. But I don't know what they were—he didn't tell me that. He said they were papers he had to have to take to Mexico—"

"Mexico!"

"That was what he said, and I believed him. And I saw his ticket—he showed it to me. I am sure the express-men made a mistake about the trunk."

"No; it was not a mistake. He meant to cheat my husband and run away with the money."

"Well—I suspected nothing. I have been honest with you," Alba insisted. "I've told you everything. I've told you things I did not tell the police. You know that, señora!"

"The police still believe there was something between you and that French girl," Mrs. Gil answered, catching in her excited state at any opening.

"Because I looked frightened when I thought she was going to tell them about my leaving the church," Alba declared in a patient, reasoning tone. "And I was frightened. I knew that if she told I should have to explain. But I've told you about that, señora. Surely you remember. I thought I had seen Mr. Brown go into a hotel as I was passing it the day before. I wanted to be sure—to know if he were in New York. I only telephoned to ask that. I didn't mean to speak to him. I only wanted to be sure that he was here—that I might see him soon. But how could I explain that to strangers? I told you, because I trusted you. But—no girl wants all the world to know she is in love with a man who—can't marry her."

At the end Alba's voice was hardly audible. She had forced herself to repeat the confession of an act of which she was ashamed. It seemed to her a very bold thing for a girl to telephone to a hotel and make inquiries about a man, and she had been driven to it by the fear that at the convent the message she was expecting from Eric Brown might not reach her.

ALL this Bianca Gil understood. But, obsessed by her own trouble, she saw everything only in its relation to that.

"Alba," she began after a slight hesitation, "have you never wondered why it is he can't marry you?"

"Wondered? Of course I have. I've thought and thought."

"And you could think of no reason?"

"No."

"Has it never occurred to you that he might be already married?"

"Married?"

The word was a startled whisper, and, drawing back, Alba fixed her companion with shocked eyes.

"Isn't that the obvious reason?" Bianca asked. "What other reason could there be that he wouldn't tell you? My poor child, of course he's married."

Alba did not answer. Her wide eyes had drawn together as if she were trying to focus them upon some mental image. After a moment's wait Mrs. Gil went on:

"They told you when you 'phoned to that hotel that there was a Mr. Brown stopping there with his wife, and you took it for granted that it could not be Eric Brown—"

"But it was not! That man's name was Fred Brown—they said so!"

"My dear—Frederick—Eric—don't you see? I am sure they are the same man. They described Fred Brown to me at that hotel. And they described his wife. She was your maid Amélie—I am sure of that. And they told me that on the night of the murder the two left the hotel very hurriedly, without notice—"

"But that doesn't prove anything, señora!" Alba broke in.

"Isn't Eric Brown's running away proof?" Bianca Gil retorted. "If he is innocent, why is he hiding? Oh, can't you see, child, that he has simply used you? He deceived you, and now you're deceiving yourself. But you mustn't be a silly girl and let yourself be played with! For that was what he did—he played with you! Can't you see that? He is unworthy of you. Put him out of your mind and—think of others."

"Others?" Alba echoed, not catching the drift of the plea. "You don't understand, señora. You have made a mistake. I don't know who this other man is—or his wife. But he is not Eric Brown. He is not married to Amélie, or to anybody else. I know that! And, even if I never see him again, I shall never think of any one but him. Why, don't you understand, señora—I love him!"

"Love! What do you know about love?" Bianca exclaimed bitterly, disheartened by the failure of her attempt to goad the girl to a betrayal of the man who filled her heart. "You meet a man twice—a few hours, all told. He tells you he cares for you—kisses you—and you think you know what love is! But wait." She faced around again excitedly. "Wait until you have been married—for years—living all your days with the man you care for. And let trouble come to him—injustice and disgrace; and then—then you can talk about love!"

"Señora!" Alba sprang forward with a cry of pity. For the other, her outburst over, had suddenly succumbed to her despair and was sobbing violently.

"Oh, don't—don't!" begged the girl,

Continued on page 19

WHY NOT GO TO COLLEGE? YOU CAN

SUGGESTIONS WE DO NOT WANT

Photograph by Paul Thompson

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EVERY WEEK'S OWN TRAVELOGUES

SEEING CHICAGO

WHAT SCIENCE IS DOING

To Roll This Old World Along

FROM DREDGE TO PLOW IN A YEAR

ON May 2, 1914, a man with a camera stood on the bank of the Sacramento River and snapped a photograph of the expanse of coffee-colored water. In the photograph was a river steamer

towing the dredge Vulcan. On May 2, 1915, the same photographer stood at the same spot and squeezed the bulb again.

Where, one year previous to the exact day, had been swirling, muddy water, there now waved grain shoulder high. Automobile roads cut across the valley.

In a sense, a miracle had been accomplished; but it was typically a modern-day miracle. The spot, known in the government records as District 1000 of the Overflow, was reclaimed by the National Reclamation Service. Miles of sturdy levees were erected; the water was drained out; grain was planted.

Only when such remarkable photographs as these are exhumed from the files of the modest reclamation department are we given an inkling of the constructive work it is accomplishing.

WHAT IS FOG?

A FOG is a cloud at the earth's surface, and, like the clouds, it generally consists of minute drops of water, though sometimes of particles of ice.

Some novel and interesting studies of fog have recently been made by the government scientists on board the coast guard cutter Seneca, during the international ice patrol carried out by that vessel in the North Atlantic. The famous fogs of the Newfoundland Banks and adjacent regions, which have been the cause of so many marine disasters, were made to yield up some of their secrets. It was learned that these fogs are generally very shallow, hardly ever extending to the masthead of a vessel. Hence it should be possible for a lookout at the masthead of one ship to see a flag or lantern at the masthead of another.

By means of ingenious apparatus constructed by the Bureau of Standards in Washington, it was found that a block of dense fog 3 feet wide, 6 feet high, and 100 feet long contains less than one seventh of a glass of water, which is distributed among 60,000,000,000 drops. The diameter of a drop was found to be about four ten thousandths of an inch.

A NEW CRUTCH FOR THE WOUNDED

THE ordinary type of crutch with its head in the armpit has certain drawbacks. If used continuously it tends to set up irritation.

According to the London Lancet, a French engineer, M. Schlick, hit upon the ingenious idea of doing away with the armpit leverage and replacing it by a support for the forearm and hand. The "forearm lever walking-stick crutch" is the result.

The Schlick walking-stick crutch consists of an almost horizontal handle, which is grasped in the palm of the hand, and of a slightly sloped spring which supports the forearm from the wrist to the elbow when the arm hangs naturally. The greater part of the weight of the body bears on the hand and the wrist, while the forearm resting upon the spring and the elbow, which fits into the semi-bracelet, play rather an accessory part.

In walking, the forearm is partially flexed, but is almost fully extended when taking the weight of the body and thrusting it forward; at the same time, the wounded limb bears more or less on the ground, helping to carry the weight of the body.

A SEARCHLIGHT SENTINEL

A SEARCHLIGHT brilliant enough to dazzle an observer more than half a mile away has recently been installed by the United States government on the aviation field at Hempstead, Long Island, for the purpose of picking out

enemy aeroplanes, should they venture an attack upon this section of the Atlantic coast.

Before the new light is formally accepted by the War Department it will be submitted to a unique and rigorous test. Aviators will go up in biplanes, followed by "enemies." It will be the purpose of the light to find the enemy fliers, and to concentrate the blinding beam upon them for a length of time sufficient for the biplanes to drop bombs and destroy them.

The new searchlight has a radius of four miles—which is adequate, according to experts, to reveal an enemy plane long enough for anti-aircraft guns to destroy it. The light will also be used for guiding friendly planes to land.

Powerful searchlights have been used for a similar purpose in guarding London against Zeppelin and aeroplane attack. It is doubtful, however, if the London defense lights are as powerful as the one installed at the Long Island station. Its candle-power is 1,500,000.

YOUR BRAIN IS A GLUTTON

DR. CHARLES MERCIER, of London, in his lectures on heredity, declares that the common belief that small men have more than average brain power is quite correct.

Caesar, Napoleon, Nelson, Wellington, Grant, and Lee were of moderate size or undersized. The greater the mind the smaller the body, is the rule. Charlemagne is a rather notable exception. Seated, Charlemagne was taller than the average individual, but standing he was shorter.

Dr. Mercier says that the brain and all the rest of the body are rivals through life, each demanding the lion's share of the nourishment supplied by the blood. The brain apparently has no limit to its demands, and when it gets a chance it starves the body to build itself up. The precocious child is almost always undersized. This means that the brain has taken advantage of the body.

It is usually noticed in regard to precocious children that a time comes when their abnormal mental development ceases. They not only cease to make further gains on their fellow school children, but usually lose their previous gains. Parents, in such cases, usually bring the child to a brain specialist. The physician, if he is wise, points to the child's physical growth and explains that nature has suddenly called a halt to the greedy exactions of the brain.

The only way to prevent the brain from over-helping itself seems to be to reduce the circulation of blood in the head. Usually the life of a child is a series of periods in which development of the brain alternates with development of the body.

When nature allows the brain to get more than its usual share of nourishment, we have at maturity an unusually capable mind at the expense of either undersized body or one that is weak.

The large, brilliant man is usually sickly. The giant is notoriously weak-minded.

MACHINE SHOPS ON WHEELS

WHEREVER our army makes up its mind to go, a fleet of strange-looking motor-trucks will follow. Experience on the Mexican border taught our army officers that, while the motortruck for carrying provisions and ammunition is a necessity, it also has its weaknesses. To prevent delays caused by broken-down supply trucks, a fleet of twenty others has been pressed into service.

These traveling repair shops are mounted upon two-ton trucks so compactly that the complete road equipment takes up no more space than is occupied by the

ordinary supply wagon. The sides of the body are designed to open, providing a platform large enough for six mechanics.

The equipment includes an auxiliary gas engine, which generates electricity for the lathes, drill-presses, and emery wheels. Repair work of the most delicate variety can be attended to. A forge, a brazing and welding outfit, and more than a thousand tools are carried.

The advantages of such trucks may be realized when it is mentioned that our trucks in Mexico were obliged to traverse the roughest of roads, and frequently to blaze their own trails.

The army possesses about twenty of these trucks. They were designed by American engineers.

HOW MOTION-PICTURE FILMS ARE EDITED

WHEN "The Birth of a Nation" was produced, more than 200,000 feet of film was used. Edited to its proper length, the 200,000 feet became 10,000. The casual visitor to the average motion picture studio—particularly if the visitor is a business man—will carry away with him the idea that time and film are wasted on a prodigious scale.

The waste of film is not such an extravagance as it seems. Thousands of dollars are often expended in the construction of expensive "sets," and it would be folly to rely upon factors, either or all of which may be faulty, when so much is at stake. The factors are three: the camera, the camera-man and the film. Imperfection in either one may mean tremendous loss. Consequently several cameras are often focused on large scenes.

When all of the film that has been exposed is developed and printed, it may aggregate, as in the case cited, 95 per cent waste.

Assembling the film in its proper length and in its proper sequence is one of the most difficult of the director's tasks. Many films have been ruined, from a dramatic standpoint, by improper editing.

To save time in editing, or "cutting," as it is called, one enterprising film manufacturer makes use of the dictating machine. The director scrutinizes the film in the projection room, and portions that are to be deleted are described briefly.

The wax record is removed to a reproducing machine in the assembling room, where workmen cut out parts of the film and reassemble it according to the director's orders.

"I HAVE NO TIME TO READ"

All Right—We'll Do Your Reading for You. $300 Worth of New Books and Magazines Are Read Every Week for These Two Pages

FOR THE GIRL WHO COULDN'T FINISH SCHOOL

THE girl who left school before she got an A.B. or a B.S. after her name, still has a chance for a U. S.

The United States government has prepared a reading course for girls whose school life has been short.

All you have to do, says the government bulletin, is to write to the Home Education Division of the Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C., giving your name, post-office address, your age, and a brief statement of your education and occupation. Then you will be told how to register, and will receive a list of twenty-two books.

If, at the end of three years or before, you give evidence of having read these books, you are graduated by the United States government.

The books are such old favorites that the course sounds more like one for a reading club than like anything so disagreeable as education. This is the list:

                                         

ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Lewis Carroll.

THE BIRDS' CHRISTMAS CAROL, Kate Douglas Wiggin.

LITTLE WOMEN, Louisa M. Alcott.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Jane Austen.

THE JUNGLE BOOK, Rudyard Kipling.

DAVID COPPERFIELD, Charles Dickens.

LORNA DOONE, R. D. Blackmore.

MILL ON THE FLOSS, George Eliot.

IVANHOE, Sir Walter Scott.

EVANGELINE, Henry W. Longfellow.

IDYLLS OF THE KING, Alfred Tennyson.

MERCHANT OF VENICE, Shakespeare.

ROMEO AND JULIET, Shakespeare.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, Laura E. Richards.

STORY OF MY LIFE, Helen Keller.

SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH PEOPLE, J. R. Green.

SOME SILENT TEACHERS, Elizabeth Harrison.

SHELTER AND CLOTHING, Kinne and Cooley.

THE FURNISHING OF A MODEST HOUSE, Fred Hamilton Daniels.

GIRL AND WOMAN, Caroline W. Latimer, M.D.

WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME? C. Alphonso Smith.

HOW CAN SALESMEN BE MADE TO WORK?

ONE of the biggest problems in business is how to keep salesmen keyed up to high pitch. Merely increasing salaries or commissions will not do it, says A. W. Shaw in An Approach to Business Problems (Harvard University Press).

The trouble is that salesmen, as a rule, have individual conceptions of the amount of money they should earn monthly or yearly. One puts himself down as a "$50-a-week man," another as a "$100-a-week man," etc.; and when they have earned the self-appointed amount the "tendency to self-indulgence is ordinarily so strong that they slacken their efforts, begin to go to ball games, quit their territories on Friday nights, and neglect out-of-the-way prospects."

Mr. Shaw tells of hearing a great sales-manager, now many times a millionaire, tell his experience.

"When I was an agent myself," he said, "I started each month with the thought that I was in debt until I had earned commissions enough to meet my office, home, and traveling expenses. I couldn't rest until I was even with the hoard. Sometimes it took me ten working days, sometimes three weeks or more, to get square. But when I did get square, I simply could not quit, because I realized I was just beginning to work for myself."

THE PAY-AS-YOU-ENTER DRUG CURE

THERE are three kinds of treatment for the drug habit, according to Charles B. Towns in his book, Habits that Handicap (Century Company)—the "don't worry" system, the "forget it" system, and the "brace up" system. Likewise there are three groups of drug-users: those created by the doctor, those created by the druggist, and a third, smaller group made up of people already predisposed to dissipation.

"As to the first, the physician should exhaust every means known to medical science to prevent his patient from knowing what it is that eases pain when his practice makes it absolutely necessary that a substance of the sort should be administered. The moment, for instance, that the hypodermic syringe is taken from the doctor's bag the sufferer is made aware of the means which will be used to give him ease. He remembers it, forming a respect and admiration, almost an affection, for the mere instrument, and with the most intense interest gathers such information as he may find it possible to acquire about this wonder-working little tool and its ammunition of relief.

"Lying before me, as I write, is a communication from a young man in Pennsylvania. He had been hurt, and through improper surgical attention the healing fracture had been left intensely painful. The attending doctor, unable to perfect his imperfect work, had left with him a box of tablets to be taken when the pain became too severe. Promptly and inevitably the youth achieved the drug habit. He felt disgraced. He would not tell any one, until he saw an article of mine and made this pitiful appeal to me.

"The public will have made a long step toward real safety when it realizes that any drug which brings immediate relief from pain or which will artificially induce sleep is an exceedingly dangerous thing."

As to the three treatments for curing the habit, this authority is in favor of a mixture of them all. He approves of the usual sanatorium plan, which consists in a gradual lessening of the amount of the drug taken, together with a careful building up of the patient's general constitution. But he also advises unfamiliar surroundings, strange nurses and doctors, no chumming with the other patients, and an absolute rule of "pay as you enter." He doesn't approve of the sanatorium that keeps its patients "just a few weeks longer" at so much per week.

EAT WITH A QUIET MIND

WHEN we were ten years old, and giggled at table, grandmother used to reach across with her long stick, whack us on the heads, and say, "'Tend to business!" According to Susanna Cocroft in What to Eat and When (G. P. Putnam's Sons), it's a wonder we aren't dyspeptics.

"A calm and cheerful mind is the best aid to good digestion. Anxiety, anger, fear, and disagreeable thoughts cause a tense, unnatural condition of the entire organism. The nerves of the digestive organs are affected by the tenseness of the mind, just as are the nerves of the rest of the body. Disagreeable thoughts affect the chemical activities of digestion and assimilation, resulting in an excess of acid in the blood, and actual illness results. Even the temper shown in a crying baby may affect its digestion by disturbing the normal chemical activity."

The gravest aspect of eating uneasy meals is that when the digestion is impaired the tissues become weakened. There follows a vicious circle: a harassed mind weakens the body, which depresses the mind even more seriously, and so on.

THE STONE WALLS OF FRANCE

SPOILING SHAKESPEARE FOR THE SCHOOL-BOY

SHAKESPEARE'S plays, which are more thrilling than a whole library of detective stories, have become dry text-books for high schools. And it's the fault of the high-school teachers, not Shakespeare, says Walter Prichard Eaton in Plays and Players (Stewart & Kidd Company).

"We boys sat on benches with our red-bound Rolfe's edition before us, and in a sleepy sing-song some boy droned out a passage, and then the instructor asked him questions to see if he had read the notes, and another boy recited and was questioned on the notes, and then the instructor, if he was feeling particularly energetic, gave us a bit of a lecture on the beauty of poetry or the character of Rosalind, and we openly yawned and waited for the bell. By virtue of much repetition we learned that the quality of mercy is not strained, after which we prayed to be delivered from the Bard!

"Now, if I were teaching Shakespeare in a high school,—and I may add I have taught him to many boys and girls,—I should have the teacher's desk shoved back for a balcony. I should then group the class on the sides and directly in front of the desk, and with as much merriment and informality as possible lead the class to pretend that the teacher's platform was the Shakespearean stage, and they the London audience. I should have them come up to the platform to read their roles, and I should see to it that every one had a chance."

A clear-voiced, rhythmic reading of Shakespeare by children is bound to bring out, quicker than anything else, the exciting mysteries, the terrible fights, the good jokes, and the thrilling love stories that fill his plays.

The ideal Shakespeare teacher once said to a studying boy: "Have you come to the act where Portia comes into court dressed as a lawyer and—?"

"My goodness! Miss Ferguson, don't tell what's coming!" was the anguished answer.

"Any pupil who gets a mark of 100 per cent. in Shakespeare, but thereafter hates the plays, has not 'passed' brilliantly: he has dismally failed—or rather his teacher has. For we do not study to pass examinations, but to expand our capacities for useful living and rational enjoyment."

---

HIS ENEMIES LIKED THIS MAN

"CAPTAIN WILSON of the Allies was flying over the German lines when a German aviator rose to meet him. The German out-guessed, out-manoeuvered, and out-shot the Englishman, who, after having a wing broken, dropped safely to the ground. His enemy landed near him, and, in surrendering, the Englishman asked the name of his captor.

"'Boelcke.'

"The chagrin of the capture was forgotten for the moment. The Englishman put out his hand, and as Boelcke shook it said:

"If I had to be shot down, I am glad it was by so good a man.'"

All this happened on the day that Herbert Bayard Swope, the author of Inside the German Empire (Century Company), went to interview Captain Boelcke, the greatest of "big-game hunters," who shot down thirty-eight French and English airmen before his death.

"The day that Boelcke scored his twentieth bag I talked to him. The air was fairly dotted with sky-men, while he, the chief of them all, sat quietly under a hangar and let me learn why he was held in such high esteem by friends and foes. I found him a good-looking young chap, twenty-five years old, of the wiry, quick, graceful type usually associated with aviators. He stood about five feet seven, clean-shaven, red-checked, with gray-blue eyes that never left the questioner. He had a thin Roman nose, a soft voice, and a quick enunciation. In talking of his work he made it plain that he held it to be a duty, not a sport, as do most English men."

When Mr. Swope asked him how many of the twenty he had shot down lived afterward:

"'Only two, unfortunately,' he answered with feeling. 'I think most of the eighteen were killed by bullets from my machine or died in the fall. They died for their country.'

"'By the way,' he added later in the interview, smiling, 'since you write for America, you might straighten out one point. The London papers credit me with having lived in America and been a lift-boy, getting my first flying experience that way. It isn't true. I have never been a lift-boy, and I have never seen America—though, please God, I shall after this war.'"

Three weeks later they dressed him in his shroud: for he was killed behind his own lines by a collision with a German machine. And the English aviators, who had always sought out his neighborhood "to have a go with him because this chap Boelcke was top hole as a flier," sailed over the German lines and threw flowers into the aviation camp in his memory. When he was buried, his casket bore a great wreath from British prisoners in Germany.

ONE INCH OF SKIRT SAVES $10,000,000

SHOE manufacturers may not actually have bribed the great designers to decree short skirts, but when short skirts came in they gave thanks. For, the shorter the skirt, the longer the shoe-top.

Short skirts and the Harvard School of Business, says Commerce and Finance, have put the shoe industry on its feet, where shoes naturally belong. Manufacturers knew how to make shoes, but they didn't know how to make profits. Then the Harvard School of Business studied the situation and offered suggestions.

Just at the time the war broke out, raising the price of leather, fashion broke out, raising the clothes line. Up went skirts, shoe-tops, and profits.

A woman not only pays, without squirming, from $5 to $30 for the shoes that used to cost her from $2 to $10, but she buys white shoes, pink shoes, blue shoes, shoes for tennis, riding, walking, hunting, dancing.

"Some working-girls pay more for shoes that will only give a month or two of wear than they earn in two weeks of labor. The shoes they buy are not enduring, but of the lightest and daintiest character, and for winter wear atrocious. But what does that matter to woman? She defies the elements where style points the way. And she wants all kid. Manufacturers have endeavored, as a matter of economy, to introduce cloth tops; but such shoes are a drug on the market."

Now the manufacturers are trembling for fear shirts will go down, and the price of shoes with them. Every inch added to the skirt means $10,000,000 saved the shoe bill for America.

IS THE AMERICAN PHYSICALLY WEAKER?

THE average prosperous American business man is a self-indulgent, under-exercising glutton, an alcoholic, and drug-user, who dies either by his own nervous hand in his office or in bed by some casual germ at forty-three, the age that should have been his prime.

This was the contention made by E. E. Rittenhouse at the last meeting of Life Insurance Presidents.

"Let us call him the Physical American," says Mr. Rittenhouse. "He looks smooth, pink, and healthy. He is a good liver. He hurries. He has no time to waste. He is trying, with the aid of new knowledge and inventions, to crowd the experiences of two life-times into one. He is having some success, but the strain is telling on him. He is short-winded. He is more than well rounded at the belt, and slightly so at the shoulders. His four-hundred muscles are virtually all soft and weak from lack of use.

"He is designed as an erect, outdoor animal; but he lies down by night and sits down by day.

"He scurries around at his work, gets tired and nerve-worn, and thinks this is physical exercise.

"He points with pride," says Mr. Rittenhouse further, "to the decreased national death rate, not realizing that the rate of deaths due to nervous wear and tear climbs steadily upward.

"And the reason why he looks so smooth, pink, and healthy is only because his signs of deterioration are not yet outwardly visible."

How I Got Out of the Bonehead Class

As told to GEORGE F. WORTS

BONEHEAD!

That is the word the head bookkeeper had used.

"You've got thumbs where your fingers ought to be. The only thing your head is good for is to hang a hat. Now put it on and get out of here—you bonehead!"

Strange to say, I was not resentful. I disliked the way he said it, but I had had the same words, in different equally humorous phrasings, flung at me as long as I could remember. I knew I was a bonehead. I did not deny the fact. I had been trained all of my life by the people I came in contact with to believe that I was a natural-born, dyed-in-the-wool lack-wit. I knew I was heavy and clumsy, and pug-nosed and freckled.

I blush to say that I had been the prize dunce in school. In only one subject was I in the least proficient. That was botany. But my fitful brilliancy there was clouded by my record of other performances. The teachers considered me a sub-normal subject.

I could hardly enter a room without stumbling over a chair or something. When I was eighteen I was six feet two inches in height and weighed two hundred pounds stripped. I was shy. I was embarrassed on the lightest provocation. The immediate nearness of a girl would tie my tongue and fetter my knees.

When I happened to be called on for recitation, I would stand up, shivering with fear, and I much preferred the "failure" that went into the grade book to the amused smiles that challenged any attempt I made. Somehow or other, I never quite failed in my courses. I always slid through "by the skin of my teeth"—"on trial." They were unpleasant moments when the teacher would say:

"Now, Warren, your marks really make me feel that you ought to take this work over again next semester. But you've tried hard and I'm going to give you a chance."

Those words "tried hard" used to make me furious. They meant that I was a bonehead and never could learn. I could only try hard. Now I realize that I had my philosophy twisted. My vicious trying hard was a strong quality.

SOMEHOW I managed to qualify for a high school diploma, but I could not even get through the graduation exercises without one final stupid act. It took place on the platform, when the principal was giving out the diplomas. He called our names, and handed them to us one at a time. We had to march out singly, make a low bow, say "Thank you," and march back to our seats again.

The auditorium was jammed. All our mothers, sisters, brothers were out there. I sat in the back row, because we were seated according to height, and I was tall.

I fell to speculating, as each name was called, upon what the future had in store for my class-mates. I speculated so profoundly that when my name was called I did not recognize it. I sat there pondering. I was imagining what sort of an inauguration speech Charlie Jessup would make when he became President of the United States. Charlie had been a wonder in civics. After a pause my name was repeated. Some one tittered. I came back to earth. I stumbled out, and when I had bowed and said "Thank you" and turned to walk back to my seat, my face was blazing.

When I say I slunk back to my seat, I mean it. I can bring back that feeling and still be ashamed—it was as intense as that. It was the culminating disgrace,—the final act of my boneheadedness,—and my school-mates would remember me by that. No doubt some of them who are earning fifteen or twenty-five dollars a week now recall it whenever my name is mentioned.

"Bonehead!" I heard one of them murmur sarcastically as I passed. I felt so hopeless that nothing they could have said would hurt.

I went home, and at supper shocked my mother as I never shocked her before in my life. I will admit that I was not always stupid before her. She could draw me out occasionally and show both of us that I fostered a gleam of intelligence. But I had never shocked her before.

"Mother," I said, pointing my butter knife directly at her, "I hate this damn town and everybody in it."

"Why, Warren!" she gasped.

"And I'm going away. I don't know where. But I'm going to-morrow."

Somehow, she knew that I meant it.

Next morning I started for Cuba. Why Cuba? Why does any young fool do those things, and why will young fools continue doing them until the end of time? I believe I did it because my money would carry me that far, with a little left over. I wanted to go to some place that had glamour. I wanted to go to some place where the people were entirely different from the people I had known—the people I hated, the people who had made my life miserable. I wanted to start things all over, to have people take me at my new valuation, not with an old debit of boneheadedness to work off.

IT is hardly necessary to do more than touch upon the steps that led to the downfall of my plan, because the main fact is already known. My job was assistant to the bookkeeper in a big warehouse. I tried my best to write into a book the neat, slanting figures which my superior affected. But it was beyond me. It was after I had made my tenth erasure that he fired me, using the uncomplimentary words with which I began this story.

I put on my hat and walked disconsolately out into the street.

I had been walking a long time, with my fists jammed into my pockets, before I realized that the "thumbs" of my left hand were wrapped tightly around every penny I possessed. I banished the thought of doing something desperate, and I asked myself:

"Why can't I find the groove in life for which I am fitted? If I can answer that question truthfully, I certainly will cease to be a bonehead. What am I most interested in? What am I most fitted for? Get busy!"

Just about that time the fine, gleaming black hull of a fruit steamer swung across my vision and silhouetted itself against the bleaching brown walls of Morro Castle. I decided thereupon to go to sea. I recalled simultaneously that botany had been the only subject

in which I had made a favorable showing in school. Perhaps I could put that inclination to work now. So I decided to go to sea in a fruit steamer.

After days spent on the wharves, days of applications and terse denials, there happened to be a ship in port with a vacancy in the purser's crew. In spite of my pug nose, freckles, and awkward height, the purser hired me.

That sixty-a-month job was the real turning-point in my fortunes, although the fact did not become evident until long afterward. The first thing I did was to resurrect my knowledge of botany. Down along the Central American coast the huge groves of bananas, zapotes, mangoes, nisperos, and guavas began to fascinate me. I spent hours ashore every time I could get shore leave, and specialized, for the time being, on bananas. I learned why one was more valuable to the company than another. I talked with every fruit man who was willing to talk.

THAT was the beginning of the complete downfall of my boneheadedness. My shipmates looked on me as more or less of a curiosity. But none of them called me a bonehead! They called me Dud. It was the first time anybody had used that nickname. Back in school I was "Freckles" to everybody, or just plain, painful "Ivory."

I grew tired of sailing, and ships, and the men who worked on them, and I took a shore job at Santa Marta. One day the fruit expert of our company went for a walk in the Colombian jungle, and never came out.

He had been sent down to look over some new fruit lands. I cabled a brief but explicit report to the New York office. Next day an answer came. It ordered me to New York.

The vice-president of the company laughed when he saw me.

"Youngster," he said "tell me, honestly, are you the W. Dudley who cabled that report?"

"I certainly am," I replied.

"What makes you think you know anything about fruit?" he inquired. And the sarcastic way he said it made me hot.

I pointed my finger at him, just the way I had pointed the butter-knife at my mother.

"Fire away!" I said, "and you'll find out."

He picked up a grapefruit that was lying on his desk. He grinned.

"Tell me something about this," he said.

I did. I told him it came from California, was shipped green and ripened in transit; that it came from a tree fertilized with manure, not nitrates; that it had a thick skin, too much pulp. I estimated the buying price, the selling price, and the freight. I summed it all up by saying: "It's a bad buy; you'll lose customers if you handle it."

He took down the telephone receiver, countermanded the order—and hired me. I went to work for five thousand a year.

My confidence took a leap with my salary. And it continued to grow. I could look the millionaire owner of a fruit plantation in the eye and tell him precisely why his oranges were worth to us seventy-five cents less than the price he asked.

As soon as I had this grip on myself, this new and amazing self-confidence, I began to develop. Sometimes I would be talking to

a man or a woman, and our conversation would break. At first I felt that it never happened to anybody but me. It seemed to me that my conversation stopped because I had said all I knew—and I was a bonehead.

But one night I was entertained in the home of a Florida grapefruit grower. For a while we talked of nothing but grapefruit. Soon we had the subject exhausted. I began to feel uneasy; I was at the end of my rope. For a long time neither of us said anything. He was a New Yorker—a man of affairs, or had been before he went broke and came to Florida. He could talk of Broadway and theaters and golf, and I couldn't. The silence, I felt, was awkward. I could feel the mental sweat starting.

Then I said to myself, "Warren Dudley, you're not a bonehead. Get busy. Talk. You know as much as this man."

I started talking of the curious things that I had seen in the little Central American villages; then about the sea—ships; I even quoted an old chantey.

It was the first time on record I had ever forced myself to be entertaining. I knew I had failed miserably. But my host was politely attentive, and so was his wife.

When he showed me the room where I was to sleep and went back downstairs, I strained my ears to hear what he would say to his wife, and what she would say to him about me. And what they said gave me the jolt of my young life!

"He's a comer, that young man," I heard him tell her.

And she answered: "Isn't he interesting!"

I felt like shouting—it made me so happy. And I looked in the mirror above my dresser and—wasn't I a conceited young ass?—grinned back at myself and said, "Warren Dudley, pug nose, freckles, and all, you're out of the bonehead class. Now stay out!"

THE other day the president of our company called me into his office. I had just returned from a month's trip to Mexico, so I brought the reports in with me.

"Never mind the reports just now," said the president. "What I want to know is, are you satisfied with the work you are doing?"

I waited.

"We need a man of experience to take charge of our New Orleans office. Personally, Dudley, I don't like to see a chap of your ability spend all of his life running up and down the Central American coast, haggling over the price of bananas. You've convinced me that you know your business—and our business. Now, unless you prefer to continue running up and down—"

I'd had my eye on that New Orleans office for months, but it was such a long step above the work I was doing that my application for it had seemed a waste of time. Yet, now that it was offered, my confidence immediately adjusted itself.

"I'm sure I can handle it," I said.

"So am I," he replied. "I've watched your work—and your progress. I've followed you closely ever since you came into this organization; and I'm willing to back you up with all of my confidence."

Then he took my breath away when, with a genially paternal grin, he added:

"Dudley, I'll bet you were a mighty bright boy in school!"

The Other Brown

Continued from page 10

taking the shaking form in her arms. "Oh, don't, señora! I can't bear to see you like this. If there is anything I can do, I will. I do want to help you!"

"There is only one way you can help me," sobbed Bianca. "Tell me that man's name."

"But I don't know it—I have said so again and again. You must believe me."

Suddenly Bianca caught the girl's hands and drew her to a chair.

"Sit down, child; I want to talk to you very seriously," she said, pulling up a chair for herself. "I am going to tell you something that, for your sake, I have been keeping to myself. Eric Brown killed your step-father. He hated him. I don't know why, but I know that he did. I met him in Mexico, and I found out then that he hated Mr. Welles-Hewitt."

"You met him—you know him?" Alba questioned, astonished.

As Bianca nodded, a clock in the room struck the hour. She sprang up instantly.

"Eight o'clock!" she exclaimed. "I must go. I have an appointment. Mr. Johansen has promised to see me."

She raised her hands to her tear-reddened eyes.

"I must bathe my face."

At the door she turned.

"I'm sorry to leave you—but you'll call the servants if you want anything—"

And she hurried off.

Alba stared about the room with a feeling of terrible helplessness. It came to her then that there might be many things she did not know—things that were being kept from her because she was a child. A child!

She began to pace the floor excitedly. If only there were something she could do! To sit and wait—it was horrible! She must do something! She would not be treated like a child. They must tell her everything. No doubt they were all deceiving her, the señora, the doctor—Naña even. Naña? She halted, arrested by a sudden thought. What had Dr. Tierney said about Naña—that the police believed she knew Brown? Did she—she too, as well as the señora? Did they all know him?

Well, about Naña she could find out. That, at least, was a thing she could do.

Rapidly she began packing her small traveling bag and making herself ready for the street. Then, bag in hand, she hurried downstairs, where she left her message for Mrs. Gil with the maid.

"Please say," she directed, "that I have gone to the convent to spend the night with Mrs. Martinez."

LARS JOHANSEN sat in his library, waiting. It was past eight, the hour of his appointment with Mrs. Gil, and she had not appeared. Perhaps she would not come. He hoped so fervently. The interview would doubtless be a painful one for him, and quite without value for her. For, of course, she was coming to insist that he uphold her husband's statement about the sale of the Rosalba mine to him. And that he could not do. All he could assert positively about the matter was that Gil, claiming to be the agent of Welles-Hewitt, had offered to sell him the mine at a certain price and on certain conditions, which he had accepted.

For the genuineness of the offer he had no proof except the Mexican's word. No third person had been involved; he had not communicated directly with the owners. Gil had opposed his suggestion of a meeting. That was against him now, though at the time it had been charged to the Englishman's erraticism. Against him, too, was Miss Yznaga's apparent ignorance of the entire affair.

The refusal to give the name and business of the man from whom the money had been obtained, Johansen considered easy to explain. The "business" was obviously gambling. No one but a gambler would have had twenty thousand dollars in cash available after banking hours. To give the man's name would be to bring upon him arrest and indictment—an ungrateful requital of his service. Gil's position on that point was not only not suspiciously against him—it was decidedly in his favor, one might say.

Yes; on the whole, though he could not publicly vouch for the Mexican's story, Johansen was strongly inclined to believe it, and to accept its implications of Welles-Hewitt's dishonesty. For the records of the two men spoke loudly, one for, the other against. Then there was that odd matter of the trunk. A mistake, perhaps—perhaps not. If not, why did the Englishman, after buying a Pennsylvania ticket, send his trunk to the New York Central station? Was he running away, as Gil charged? Had he announced his departure for Mexico City, bought a ticket for the place, and made his identity known to the ticket-seller in a somewhat lengthy talk that the latter remembered, simply to cloak his intended flight in the opposite direction?

A senseless flight, one must think—to abscond with twenty-five thousand dollars got honestly and twenty thousand got dishonestly, becoming thereby a fugitive from justice, when by remaining he would eventually have realized a larger sum legitimately from the sale to the Mexican Mines Company.

And why had he sold to the Mexican Mines? Why not to him?

IN the hall outside a clock softly boomed the quarter hour. Lars Johansen rose to throw a log on the blaze that still contended with the rawness of the April night. He glanced up at the portrait of his son hanging above the fireplace. The youth's white costume and the background of sunlit tennis court made the canvas a high light in the somber room.

But it was not of that that the father thought as he looked at it. He was thinking of the circumstance, distant in time and small, to which was due his present connection with the Welles-Hewitt murder case. A few lines in a note-book, a memorandum of his dead son's—that had been the beginning of his persistent effort to buy the Rosalba mine. Thinking of it now brought other memories in its train, and soon he was far from the present, reliving his time of tragedy and loss—a loss the long years had hardly lessened, leaving him still a lonely man in a great, lonely house.

Suddenly he turned with a start. Some one had spoken. Ah, yes; a servant to say that the lady who was expected had come. He nodded. He would see her at once.

When she entered he met her with outstretched hand. The memory of his own hours of anguish had driven from his mind everything but pity for her unhappiness. All fear of the discomfort he must feel at sight of her distress was gone; he thought only of what he might find to say to cheer and comfort her.

"It's very good of you to see me," she murmured, yielding him her hand mechanically and allowing him to lead her to a chair before the fire.

"Sit here," he said. "You seem to be cold."

Cold? She looked up at him vaguely, then down at the ungloved hand that he had touched. Was it cold? Letting her gloves, crushed and twisted, fall into her lap, she obediently leaned toward the blaze.

"I suppose you know why I've come."

Returning a mere sympathetic assent, Johansen sat down. It was better to let her talk, to say everything just as she had planned to say it. That would be easier for her, shorter for them both. He could see that she was distraught, maintaining her calm with effort.

"I've come to ask you to help me," she said pleadingly. "You know that what my husband says about the mine is true. Tell them so. You are rich and influential—they will believe you!"

"But—I don't know," he forced

---

himself to say; for, with her sad eyes and haggard face before him, it was hard. "I never saw the papers; they were not made out to me—you know that."

"I see," she said, and her voice broke a little. "You won't help us, because you think my husband had no right to buy the mine and then sell it to you for a higher price—"

"No, no! You are entirely mistaken," Lars Johansen protested. "He had every right to do that—if he could." He hesitated, then added: "But I don't see why Mr. Welles-Hewitt should have agreed to sell the mine to your husband when he knew he could get a much higher price for it from me."

HE caught the sudden dilation of her pupils before she dropped her lids. He had taken her by surprise. There was a hidden motive underlying that deal, then. And she knew about it.

"Perhaps you can explain," he suggested. But when she shook her head he let the subject drop. Curious about it as he was, it was, after all, no affair of his. And he had no taste for startling a distraught woman into betrayal of her husband's secrets.

"Mrs. Gil," he said gently, "I should advise you to urge your husband to be frank about his relations with Welles-Hewitt and—about the person from whom he got the money."

"He won't tell that," she answered dejectedly. "I've begged him. You see, he's not afraid. He knows he's innocent—he knows Brown did it."

"Knows!" her hearer caught her up.

"Oh, not as you think!" she denied quickly. "The police believe that he and Brown acted together. But that is not true—I've told them so. I've told them how we came to meet Brown, and how he hated Mr. Welles-Hewitt. But they don't believe me—"

"What! You know this Brown?" Johansen interrupted, surprised.

"Yes; we met him in Mexico only a few weeks ago. I'll tell you about it."

She bent toward him eagerly, as if hopeful that her story might enlist his interest.

"It was in Mexico City. We were there at a hotel, and this young man—Frederick Brown, he called himself—came to see my husband about the Rosalba mine, which he said he had heard was for sale. Well, we thought nothing of the matter then—my husband being agent for various mine-owners—and I don't suppose we should ever have seen Mr. Brown again if he had not happened to find out that I had once been Mr. Welles-Hewitt's secretary. He began to call on me, and sometimes took me motoring in the afternoon, and always—always—he would question me about Welles-Hewitt and the mine."

"The mine?" exclaimed Johansen. "He was interested in that?"

"Very much. At first I thought he was perhaps in love with Miss Yznaga, or was a fortune-hunter. But he said he had never seen her. At the time I doubted that; but now I believe that she had nothing to do with the case at all. It must have been something quite different—I don't know what. My husband thought he might have been fleeced at cards by Welles-Hewitt, and hated him for that reason. Because he did hate him, Mr. Johansen! And it isn't only now, after the murder, that I have discovered it: I thought so at the time, and spoke of it to my husband. It was nothing he said—he never talked against him; but every time he spoke of Welles-Hewitt there was a look in his eyes, something in his voice, that was unmistakable. And he tried to pump me. He had heard the stories—knew about the gambling. You've heard of that, of course?"

Johansen nodded. "Yes; go on."

"Well, that's about all. It's only that he hated Welles-Hewitt—that he had a motive for killing him."

"And you've told the police of this, you say?"

She sank back with a despairing moan.

"They don't believe me. And they don't care. They have some one now to fasten the crime to—that's all they want. They don't care whether he's the murderer or not!"

"No, no; you're unjust," Johansen answered. "The District Attorney is working personally on the case. He is deeply interested. Now, I'll tell you what to do. You go to him. Tell him what you have told me—"

"Then you won't help me?"

"But, Mrs. Gil—what can I do?" he protested kindly.

"Money can do anything," she pleaded. "And you have so much. Think how often it saves a guilty man. Why shouldn't it be used for the innocent? And my husband is innocent! You could make them find Brown. You give away thousands and thousands every year to the poor and sick. Surely no one can be in worse need of help than we are now."

She broke down at the end, and began to sob.

He rose and stood a moment looking down at her, seeking words of comfort; for her tears were harrowing to him.

"You must be brave," he urged at last. "This Brown will certainly be caught. The police of the whole country are on the lookout. And my interference would do only harm—surely you must see that. Your husband will have full justice. You know he is innocent, and that should sustain you, as it does him. His vindication is only a question of time—"

"Time!" she cried hysterically, rising and facing him. "Yes, weeks and months and years, perhaps. And all that time he will be kept in jail like a thief and a murderer. Oh, I can't bear it! I can't bear it!"

She started from him as if to leave, then stopped, her sense of courtesy mastering her emotion, her natural dignity asserting itself.

"I beg your pardon," she said, her voice strained. "I had no right to subject you to such a scene. I had no right to ask anything of you—or even to come here. It was very good of you to le—"

SHE stopped abruptly. Her glance, casting about absently as she offered her apologies, had lighted on the portrait over the fireplace.

With the half spoken word her voice ceased and she became utterly still. Her fingers, which she had been nervously interlacing, stiffened as if petrified. How long she stood so neither she nor her companion knew; for he, struck by her strange demeanor, stood rigid too, and speechless.

Then, of a sudden, she moved, turned her head, and looked at him.

"Whose picture is that?" she asked in a tense whisper.

"My son's," he answered wonderingly.

"Your son!" She stared incredulous. "What was his name?"

"Carl."

"Carl Johansen?" She seemed to listen to the sound the name made. "Carl Joha— Oh!—Oh!"

"What is it?" He took a step toward her. "What's the matter?"

She waved him back.

"Wait!" she commanded. "Wait! Don't speak to me. Let me think—let me think."

Motionless again, with half closed eyes she stood in thought. Now and then her face changed swiftly; and suddenly, to his amazement, she laughed—not with mirth, but excitement. So much was apparent from the look she gave him the next instant. There was even a hint of triumph in the erectness of her body, her lifted head, and in the two red splashes that now stained her cheeks.

"Twenty-one years ago your son was in Mexico—going by the name of Charlie Johnson."

It was an assertion, not a question; but involuntarily the man answered: "Yes."

"He stayed for a while at a boardinghouse kept by a Mrs. Grassi. He met an Italian girl there, and married her. Afterward he went to the mountains to mine. He never came back—he was killed. Then you sent down to find his wife—you had a letter to Charlie from his wife—"

"You knew my son?" Johansen asked, surprised at her use of the given mame.

"Yes." Her glance became suddenly puzzled. "Why didn't the people you sent say he was your son? Why didn't they tell my mother that?"

"Your mother!"

"Mrs. Grassi. They should have told us the truth," she said indignantly. "Why didn't they?"

"Because," said Johansen, after an astonished silence, during which he sought vainly to catch her drift, "we knew if it became known that we were looking for the wife of a rich man's son all sorts of claimants would spring up."

"I see." She nodded understandingly. "But they should have told us. That could have done no harm."

"No—and no good, either."

"It—might have."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," she answered, "that it might have made—a difference."

"A difference!" he echoed. "What difference could it have made? The girl and the child were dead."

"No," she answered sharply. "That's it! The child was not dead."

"What?"

"She's alive now—your grandchild."

He fell back from the shock of her words.

"What do you mean? Is that—true?"

"Yes—I can prove it! And I know where she is—now!"

"Where?" His face had gone white. "Where?" he repeated.

She looked at him, her dark eyes softening at sight of his agitation.

"Mr. Johansen, listen," she said earnestly. "I'm desperate. Fate has put a weapon into my hand to-night, and I am going to use it—against you. Wait; let me explain. I'd like to tell you everything I know at once—to prove to you that the child buried with your son's wife was not hers—to tell you where her child is. I've known for years, only I did not know until to-night that her father was your son. My mother should have been told. It would have changed everything, I think; for what she did she did for the child's good. I can explain—I can prove everything. And I will—if you will help my husband. Wait!" Again she stopped his protest. "I came here to-night to ask you to help us. And you were very kind and courteous; but there was nothing you could do, you said—nothing all your millions could do!"

SHE paused, and her dark eyes, feverishly bright now, challenged him.

"If it were your son's case would you do nothing? Would you leave it all to the police, to the District Attorney, as you advised me to do? Would you? Or would you hire detectives to hunt for Brown—to hunt till they found him? That's what I mean. Find Brown, clear my husband, give him back to me—then I will give you back your granddaughter."

A silence followed. She had said her say; and as for him, he stood dumb

---

with the sense of his helplessness. She had meant what she said, and would not budge an inch from her position—that he was sure of. She had proposed a bargain—he could accept or refuse. Of course he would accept. He could not doubt her sincerity—her own belief in what she had told him. And if it were true—if she could prove it—

"Very well," he said, ending the long wait. "I accept your terms. We will find Brown."

Then, cutting short her thanks, with businesslike decision he asked:

"Have you told me all you know—about the Welles-Hewitt case, I mean? And Brown?"

"No," she said at once, and went on rapidly to tell him of the message sent to Alba Yznaga by Brown, describing as well as she could the messenger.

"About nineteen, a Southerner, rather short and slim, and has red hair," Johansen repeated. "Anything else?"

They reviewed their facts carefully. On the subject of her husband's relations with the dead man, however, she refused to speak more definitely than she had already done. That was not important, she insisted.

It occurred to Johansen to speak of the old housekeeper, recalling what he had heard of her from Redding.

"The man who found her fainting in an upper hall just after the murder is convinced that she not only saw Brown when he was escaping, but that she recognized him and is now shielding him. If she could be made to talk, perhaps—"

"Made to talk?" she echoed wonderingly.

"Yes," he said. "I understand that she is ill from the shock, and the doctor won't allow her to be questioned."

"Oh, I see—the doctor!" she murmured.

Then, as she seemed to be thinking, Johansen waited silently. Quite suddenly she said, with a tone of authority that surprised him:

"I will have her brought from the convent to my house; then we shall find out what she knows."

"An excellent idea," he agreed, staring at her a little. "But—will the doctor permit that?"

"Oh, yes—I think so," Bianca answered quietly, though he noticed that she avoided his eyes. "In fact," she added after a moment, "I'm sure of it."

To be continued next week

A $1 Idea

I AM a farmer's daughter, and I live on a farm some twenty miles from a middle-sized Michigan city. As father and the boys are quite busy often, and as mother has rheumatism, I have to make the weekly trips to town in our battered old flivver for such necessities as we run out of.

I was over at a neighbor's one Saturday morning when this woman, Mrs. Thompson, exclaimed: "Goodness me! I have got to go to town to-day, and I have so much work to do, with harvesting going on, that I don't see how I am going to spare the time."

This woman's remark gave me the idea of becoming the community buyer.

I went right home and, getting out the car, went around from farmhouse to farmhouse within a radius of five miles. I explained to each prospective client that if they were too busy to go to town I would go and do their buying for them. When I came home I had fifteen commissions. I charged each person 10 cents.

Thereafter nearly every trip I made weekly to the city I was well supplied with commissions. My work nets me from twenty-five to forty dollars extra a year, and I transact all kinds of errands. I am busiest in the busiest seasons on the farm.

I might add that the stores at which I trade give me liberal discounts on my own purchases for the big orders I bring in.

Helen C.

The Label

Continued from page 9

dangerous—just crazy as a loon, that's all."

Miss MacLean did not reply. She continued to gaze at the manacled one as if she could never take her eyes from him. The white-haired Inspector stood beside her now. The "prisoner blinked at him once, then looked elsewhere. After some moments of silence the Inspector gained control of the feelings that plainly stirred him, and demanded explanations.

"Cap, I could tell you a heap more on a full stomach," the constable answered wistfully, with a gaunt grin. He did not salute. Again the Inspector mastered an emotion.

"Verra well. Come round to MacLean's. There's dinner on the table."

"Lead me to it!" the constable exclaimed with alacrity. "But I'll have to bring along the little fella. He's starved too, and full of nuts."

"Full of what?"—sharply.

"Nuts. Beans. Bughouse. Crazy as a loon. He don't know enough to feed his own face. What I aim to do with him is get some food in him and then stick him in bed, with some fella that knows something about doctoring—if it's only a hoss doctor—to look into his case. He can be cured—take it from me. He's been blind too, but he sees O.K. now. Some man-size job, believe me, Cap—bringing that little fella into harbor. Guess we've made close on a thousand miles. Caught him near Hudson Bay, up under the Circle."

"What's the offense?"

"Did I hear you whisper dinner?" the uniformed one parried.

"This way."

The Inspector turned off sharply toward MacLean's.

"Come along, pard. Say, I left a perfectly good sled and some huskies about two miles yonder when pard and me beat it for here. Maybe the young lady'd like to go scatter crumbs for the pore doggies."

Ignoring this appeal to her pity, as well as the looks of charm that accompanied it, Miss MacLean stepped up to the constable and slipped the rope from his hand.

"I'll lead the prisoner in and feed him," she said. "I'm not afraid of lunatics. I love them."

"He follows her in like a pet hoss after sugar—or a wolf after the human meat," his former keeper observed, seeing how the madman leaned down to look into the girl's eyes.

CONSTABLE WILLIAM GOOSE the Second, né Jep, had dined abundantly and told his story. Under sharp questioning he had repeated portions of the story several times. In the main it was a true tale, even though identities were treated by him as interchangeable commodities. The kernel of it was clear enough to Inspector McNab; likewise to Miss MacLean, who let tears fall from starry eyes while she plied the demented prisoner with dainties.

On one point the constable had been dumb: he would not state the crime of

---

which the prisoner was "suspected." With what he felt to be a fine cunning, he explained that evidence for conviction lay on the south side of the border, whence the prisoner had originally come. He must depart immediately—in fact, immediately was hardly soon enough—to procure that evidence. As he told it, it appeared that "evidence" was a mercurial or dream substance that would melt overnight unless he were off, within half an hour, on the fleetest steed in the Inspector's stables.

It was then that Miss MacLean spoke up bravely, though with quivering lips.

"If you please, Inspector, he is to have Eagle Plume." Overcome by her feelings she fled from the room precipitately.

LATER, when they had left the bones of the feast, the Inspector bade him farewell.

"Well, Constable, ye've a long ride ahead of ye. That's a big country south of the border to hunt for evidence in—or for men. Ay, it takes time, but there's no man we ever sent after that we didn't catch at last. I've been thinking, if your search takes ye south, ye might have a look at the Texas Rangers. A fine force, that a service for brave, resourceful men. There's verra few chaps so badly yellow-streaked that the right service can't make men o' them."

"Sure. Oh, sure," Utah assented agreeably, not understanding him in the least.

"What's helped set me on thinking of—well, of the Rangers—is this label. 'Twas in the lad's parki. An odd thing. But like most things in life, ye can get both a laugh and a sermon out of it."

He held it out for Utah's inspection.

"'Pure! Invigorating! Sustaining! Humane!' That's what the service makes o' men. Those four words—alluding here to beans—are any great man's epitaph: all he needs. There's Sandy taking a suit o' clothes to my quarters, where ye'll put them on; the uniform ye're wearing is not for detective duty. Ye'll need a little money, likely; so here it is. Too had they'll discount it a bit on the American side. In Canada we don't discount either their money or their manhood. Good-by now—and good luck."

Utah was so bewildered by the success of his strategy and the ensuing extraordinary turn of his fortune that he was speechless. He stumbled down the steps and rushed across to the door where the man and the clothes had disappeared. He endeavored to break all records, even Police Post records, for quick dressing; though the discovery of a gold watch in the pocket of the borrowed coat delayed him slightly. In the end, however, delicacy forbade him to mention the trinket. He would have liked to say farewell to his madman; but—

"No; this is too good to last," he mumbled.

He strode at a running pace to the gate, where his mount awaited him, held by a khaki-clad individual. He wanted to be off at a gallop before he woke up. This was not to be. The khaki-clad individual was Constable William Goose the First.

"What in the—!"

"Be quiet. I'm as sane as yersel', Mr. Utah James Jep; but I'm not telling it—not till ye're over the line."

"Pard," Utah interrupted, with a rush of emotion, "come with me. You're wasting yourself with these Simon Pures. Oh, little fella, I'll show you the life! Yeh-eh, boy! If any time you yearn to come back, we'll round up a dozen little old rustlers and sashay in and take the whole hinky-dam country away from this cluster of mavericks."

The khaki-clad one fixed him with steely blue eyes.

"Ye'll do no more rustling nor whisky trading, Mr. Jep. First let me enlighten your ignorance. Inspector McNab is my father; and Prairie Rose has given ye her horse for a reason ye can guess. Not knowing the charge, the Inspector is within the law—technically—in letting ye go. The gold watch with the name of Neil McNab on the case is to remember me by—"

"By hink—!"

"Be quiet," young Neil shut him off. "For now I'm coming to what's important. You've saved my life at double risk to your own. A watch isn't sufficient reward for that. So, Mr. Utah, James Jep, sometime whisky trader, I'm going to save your soul. Nay, shut your mouth; I'm not done yet. My father's given ye a hint about the Rangers—which I saw ye never meant to take. But it gave me a hint—and so, ye're going to join the Rangers, Mr. Jep."

"Me?" Utah mocked gaily. "Why, you pore ol' bean, you—"

"Ye're going to join the Rangers and make a decent fighting man of yersel'. If ye don't, I'm coming after ye, and I'll never let up till I've got ye, dead or alive. And I'll clap ye in the jail at Regina for ten years. It's liker to be twenty, now I remember some of your history. Selling liquor to Indians, shooting, assault and battery, smuggling, thieving! Why, man dear, ye'd never see the sun again, except through bars!"

Utah opened his mouth twice, but no words came.

"Ye're going to serve your country and save your soul by sweating in a uniform and obeying orders twenty-four hours a day."

Then Utah spoke.

"Have a heart!" he bawled.

"I'll look ye up, mind—and Eagle Plume is an easy horse to trace. Ye wouldn't have a chance. And oh, man dear, it's a grand life—mounted police in a new country with all outdoors to play in! And ye can be as wild as a grizzly bear, when ye've put the law on your side." He studied for a moment the hard, crafty face which he knew could beam like a boy's at a jest; then he struck home. "If ye're thinking your name's against ye—well, I'm not needing the name of William Goose now, and it fits ye fine."

The shaft of humor found the bull's-eye that all moral aims had missed. Utah guffawed until Eagle Plume reared.

"Ranger William Goose! Ho-ho!" He clapped a hand to young Neil's shoulder. "Pard, I'll take you up! The joke's too good."

"Ay, man," grimly; "I'll see ye do. Ye know the motto of the Mounted—'We never fail'? If I found ye when I was crazy in the head and blind, and almost put the bracelets on ye, don't think I'd miss ye, now I've got my senses and my two eyes. While, as a religious man, I'd drive ye to it for your soul's salvation, I'll not deny that I'm paying ye out for bringing me back to Prairie Rose in handcuffs. She'll keep them on me for life, and I'll never be master in my own house. But when she's trampling me down I'll think of ye sweating in harness along the Texas border. It'll be verra comforting." The blue eyes twinkled. "Nay, man dear, I couldn't let ye have a laugh like that on a Scot."

Utah grasped him in a throttling hug.

"Pard," he yelled, "the laugh's on us both—for life!"

Constable William Goose the First flung the gate wide, and Eagle Plume sprang through, bearing William Goose the Second en route to Texas.

UTAH JAMES JEP never saw the sun glint through prison bars; but the day came when Ranger William Goose wore stripes—on his arm. What the wilderness wills, that she does unto men—under the white Circle or on the blazing desert line. She perceives, with the eye of a mother, the substance of the man within the waster; and, in her own good time, through the human kinships her storms and her solitudes arouse and make precious—and not forgetting mirth—she affixes her Label.

Wiping Out $150,000,000

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

BURIED away in the financial pages of the newspapers several weeks ago was a little item that attracted no attention, but that dashed to the ground the last hopes of thousands of investors. Announcement was made by the president of a trust company in New York City that the plan of reorganization of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway had been declared operative. This does not sound especially interesting, but its meaning is that $150,000,000 face value of stock which once had a market value of more than $75,000,000 on the Stock Exchange had been annihilated as cleanly and easily as the pencil marks on a slate are wiped off by a sponge.

"I have 800 shares of the old Rock Island common stock," says a reader of this magazine. "Is there, or will there ever be, any value attached to them? Had I better burn the certificates and get them out of sight?"

This stock was never based on anything but hope, and about thirteen years was required to prove how weak a foundation hope is when that is all a stock rests upon.

Strangely enough, even the most supposedly astute capitalists were taken in. A prominent millionaire in St. Louis who died a few years ago had nearly 9000 shares. The canny Dutch were always large owners, and three years ago forty-two per cent. of all the stock was owned in Europe.

Most curious of all, it is understood that several very wealthy men connected with the enormously successful copper-mining firm of Phelps, Dodge & Company bought $6,000,000 of the stock. Anyway, they had enough of the worthless stuff to elect one of their number chairman of the board of directors, until the company went into receivership and the stock went out of existence. These men were rich enough to charge off several million dollars without feeling it; but there are thousands of small investors who will never recover from their loss.

About fifteen years ago everybody in this country was carried away by the idea that all you had to do to get rich was to merge or consolidate a few companies. So a group of big promoters bought up at fancy prices the stock of the quiet old Rock Island Railway. They exchanged the stock for bonds of a new company known as the Rock Island Railroad, and had this company put out $75,000,000 of stock, and then had that exchanged for $150,000,000 of stock in another new company known as the Rock Island Company. Just remember that the two new companies did not have a cent of property of their own except some office furniture, and did not add anything whatever to the old railway except more than one hundred million dollars in paper.

Nothing whatever was added to the old railway company except a lot of new stock on which the promoters tried hard to pay dividends. This strange scheme was started on July 31, 1902; and, exactly thirteen years later to within one or two days, it went on to the dump heap. It took thirteen years to prove that this triple-decked curiosity was nothing but a bubble. In the meantime the stock was actively bought and sold by all manner of persons in this country and abroad.

A reader of this magazine wants to know how it is possible to avoid stock purchases of this character. All I can say in answer is, stick to realities and don't be carried away by mere hopes.

Don't buy stocks or bonds unless they have some visible relation to realities. Of course, no person with any sense ever supposed that Rock Island Company stock was anything but a speculation. For while people, all the way from multi-millionaires to seamstresses, were dabbling in Rock Island, there were books on the shelves of every big library that pointed out what a hollow thing it was.

Investment mistakes are possible—honest mistakes of judgment. Once in a great while investors are lied to, and conditions misrepresented. There are cases of bad management that no one can foresee. But the great majority of investment losses are due to consciously and wilfully assumed risks. There are very few investors who can not find out when they really want to whether a proposition is sound; but there are legions who take the chance and hope it will turn out alright.

Multimillionaires, having been successful in some other line, foolishly think they can not fail in anything, and are constantly losing their money in rash ventures. Most small investors merely follow the crowd.

Look before you jump next time.

Free Booklets that You May Have for the Asking

Arrangements have been made by which any reader mentioning this magazine may have any or all of the following booklets on request.

Write Slattery & Co., Inc., 40 Exchange Place, New York, for current issue of their fortnightly publication, Investment Opportunities, which describes many sound and attractive investments. Ask for 35-E, including booklet explaining the Twenty-Payment Plan.

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The Bache Review, issued by J. S. Bache & Co., 42 Broadway, New York City, is known throughout the United States and Europe for its sound, unprejudiced opinions of current events. It analyzes underlying cuases that affect the whole financial situation, and is regarded by business men as a reliable authority. Sent on application.

John Muir & Co., members of the New York Stock Exchange, whose main office is at 61 Broadway, New York City, have issued a new circular discounting peace or war. Specific information in the line of six industrial opportunities is also embodied therein. Circular R-33 will be sent on request.

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Investors desiring to acquire $100 bonds of the best known issues, and of a class that is legal for investment by Trustees and Savings Banks, should send for the special list U that has been prepared by Merrill, Lynch & Co., members of the New York Stock Exchange, 7 Wall Street, New York City.

Of special interest to investors is the March Public Utilities Letter, issued by Williams, Troth & Coleman, 60 Wall Street, New York City. This may be secured without charge by writing for Report "JN."

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Have you read Mr. Atwood's financial booklet, "Making Your Money Work for You"? It is written especially for our readers, and if you will write him, inclosing five cents in stamps, at 95 Madison Avenue, New York, he will send you a copy.