The Reflections of a Grizzled Voter

I WENT down to the fire-house in my precinct on the first Tuesday in November, and voted for woman suffrage, as has been my custom all these years.

And, to my astonishment, the next morning I read in the newspaper that it had carried.

I say astonishment, because almost nothing that I vote for ever does carry. On the day after election I look over the papers, and if a single Road Commissioner or Supervisor of the Poor on my ticket has pulled through, I consider that it has been a successful election for me.

Like Truth, I have grown accustomed to being crushed to earth. It doesn't worry me as much as it used to.

For, having watched many elections and listened to many campaign promises, I have noticed this—that the progress of the world isn't permanently affected very much by turning one set of politicians out and putting another set in.

I continue to vote, as intelligently as I can; but I have ceased to feel as enthusiastic as I used to feel about the power of votes to usher in the millennium.

Maybe it's old age creeping on me: maybe I'm just plain old-fashioned. But I just can't believe that anything is finally going to turn the trick of saving the world but simple individual goodness.

It was Napoleon—a very successful politician—who said:

Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon sheer force. Jesus Christ alone founded his empire upon love: and at this hour millions of men will die for him.

The empires, with all their machinery of election and of legislation, have passed away, leaving hardly a trace behind.

The Carpenter held no elections: He was president of nothing; secretary of nothing; He formed no committees, made no stump speeches, cast no vote. Yet the influence of his simple goodness has outlived all the empires of the earth, and stands to-day the most potent force for righteousness and progress in the world.

I lunched the other day with a celebrated war correspondent, just hack from Europe.

"There's just one thing I'm sure of," he said. "Everything else about the war and the future of the world is problematical. But this I know—the world must be run by heart power after this. We've tried brain power, and it doesn't work. The Germans developed it to its highest point of efficiency, and we have the results to-day. It's got to be heart power from now on, or we're all in; that's all."

And the home is the dynamo out of which heart power flows.

There were thousands of agitators and reformers at work in the United States in the days before the Civil War. They doubtless did much good work. But all their influence added together did not equal that of the simple woman in a log cabin who gave us Abraham Lincoln, with a heart power great enough to reunite his fellow countrymen.

I welcome my sisters to the ballot-box. They will clog up the polling place a little more, and make me a bit later in getting down to the office on election day. But I'll forgive them all that, and I'll vote for all the reforms they think are going to do any good, so long as they will continue to give us sons like the Carpenter and Lincoln.

Meantime, when their pet reforms and candidates are defeated—as often they will be—let me commend to them Sam Walter Foss:

Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by—
The men who are good, and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner's seat,
Or hurl the cynic's ban;
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

Reforms will come and go: Truth will keep right on being crushed and rising again. Politicians will promise and fail to make good. Movements will wax and wane. But if enough of us build our houses alongside of Sam's, we'll gradually turn this old alleyway of a world into a nice, respectable street, no matter who carries our precinct for alderman.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

NEW HOPE FOR MIDDLE AGE

By EDWIN BALMER

"WANTED!" said the words in the advertisement. "Wanted, men skilled or unskilled, of forty-five or over."

Wanted!

Fred Marden, holding more tightly to the page that he had picked up from the park bench, gazed away at the autumn trees and let himself hope again. Wanted! Some one wanted him—or, at least, wanted a man of his age, skilled or unskilled.

Fred Marden was over fifty.

Now suspicion and fear, bred of bitter experience, thrust against the leap of hope. Some money was wanted with the man, undoubtedly: that was the catch in it. The advertisement was probably another cheap swindling scheme to victimize the despairing—a scheme for selling five dollars' worth of "supplies" or "samples" of things that could not possibly be sold at a profit again, or for selling to him two dollars' worth of "equipment" to make something that he could not make. Fred Marden knew all about that. Or else some downright blackguardism would be required—the peddling of quack nostrums from door to door, stealing dollars from the ignorant and sick.

No, Fred Marden considered: this newspaper would not carry such advertisements. The men were wanted, then, for something honest but merely ill paid and distasteful—like carrying "sandwich" sign-boards before and behind one through the streets. Well, that was not so bad.

He got up and, straightening his clothes again and brushing his hat on his sleeve, he started for the address given.

Man of the Family at Fourteen

IT was thirty-six years ago, when Fred Marden was fourteen, that a conduit caved in ahead there where the towering office buildings of Chicago now zigzag their roofs against the sky. Men brought Fred Marden's father from the conduit to the little gray clapboard cottage on old West Madison Street. His mother had some savings—enough to pay funeral expenses. Nothing beyond that; every one knows what liability laws were not thirty-six years ago.

Fred Marden at fourteen found himself the man of a family of six. He had two younger brothers and three little sisters, besides his mother. Fred took the first job offered him, which was in a livery stable, where he got five dollars for sweeping out and cleaning harness and things and helping with the horses. Then, for a time, they let him drive. Next they promoted him to "inside" man, giving him direction of the drivers, making engagements and routing the carriages. He got twenty-five dollars a week on his twenty-fifth birthday; a little later he was raised to thirty; and then the upward curve of Fred Marden's income halts and runs straight.

Just an Average Man

HE was not a trained man, you see; he was not a brilliant man; just an average man—one of the many, many millions—distinguished, in so far as he was distinguished at all, by unusual steadiness and dependability. When taxis and the multitude of private cars began to knock the business to pieces, his boss sold out, but gave Fred so excellent a character that Fred kept his place for a year more. Then the business simply quit.

Fred Marden was forty-six when he went to another livery man for a job; forty-seven when that business quit too, and Fred Marden had to look for a job of some other kind. Forty-seven, with hair somewhat thinned, somewhat gray; forty-seven, with character excellent; domestic situation, a wife, three children, and a sister dependent; experience, thirty-three years in the livery business; savings, three hundred and forty dollars and a small paid-up life policy. Not a thing against him—rather a good lot of evidences and inferences in his favor, in fact, but—forty-seven.

"The man who has not succeeded at forty will never succeed; after forty-five a man can make nothing of himself," met him in men's manner, if not in their words, everywhere he went.

Fred Marden started out searching for a position in a new line with self-respect, if not boldly. But slowly, as he encountered only disparagement and undervaluation everywhere, whatever claims he had to confidence began seeping away. Timidity came—timidity and haunting fear.

He turned at last from the rebuffs of those to whom he offered himself to the welcome of those who "wanted" such men as he; whereby he gained the knowledge hinted at a few paragraphs above.

The Coming of Fear

THESE experiences recurred with bitter vividness as Fred Marden, holding himself straighter now as he passed many people, went on; but—"Wanted!" The lure of the word, the hope of being honestly wanted by some one again, gave him impulse. He observed, as he approached his goal, that other men gray-haired and shabbily clothed, others with undeceivingly dyed brows and mustache, others also trying to hold themselves confidently and to step more alertly, were bound for the same address. These were ill, familiar auspices; Fred Marden almost turned back. But he was there now; he had come a long way; the office seemed different from others to which he had gone. He went on and into an office quite different indeed, and to meet an office manager quite distinct from any he had encountered before.

The business of this office and of this manager—the business of providing permanent, paying positions for men over forty-five—is unique, I believe. This business did not exist, even as a unique experiment, a year ago. Only in November of last year was the idea of systematically encouraging the employment of men past forty-five put on trial by a small group of Chicago business men.

The Business of Finding Work for Men Over Forty-five

AT the start it was privately managed as a philanthropic venture; but its development became so significant that after a couple of months the Employers' Association of Chicago took over the work, and has now established it as a valuable economic enterprise.

Every ten minutes of every working day this employment bureau of the Employers' Association of Chicago places in a permanent position at a living wage some man of the sort usually considered as having outlived his economic usefulness.

In the ten months that the bureau has been operating, more than 93 per cent of the men placed have held their positions. That means that the employers are satisfied; it also means that the men, besides being capable of productive work, are not casuals or drifters. Prior to June 15 the wage average per man per week was eleven dollars; from that date to this, the standard has been raised to over fifteen dollars per man per week. That means advancement for a very large number.

"The gentlemen," says Victor T. J. Gannon, the manager—(he means it, and I should say that having as manager for the bureau a young gentleman who sees old, jobless, timid applicants only as gentlemen is no small part of the success of the bureau)—"the gentlemen register their history with us, and supply references; we match men with the requirements of the employer, and they are immediately sent forth to fill the niche with which their physical and mental measurements are most closely allied.

"Four thousand four hundred and twenty unemployed men visited our offices last month; fourteen hundred and forty-five last week—the ex-bank president; the old jurist; the surgeon whose hand is no longer steady; the neat old book-keeper whose life-long fear of asserting himself brought him to sixty years and no competence; the brawny laborer who at sixty-five and even seventy is still physically able to do fancy shoveling: all these—and hundreds of others—who never did fit in rightly anywhere are given a new start in life.

"What is the chief cause of their unemployment? If we had begun this work twenty years ago, doubtless the number of the unemployed would have been as great and the burden laid at the door of intemperance; but to-day the history of the men passing before us daily shows so little desperation and degradation which can be ascribed to drink

Concluded on page 21

Who is General von Mackensen?

WHO is von Mackensen? Whence comes this most brilliant of the German commanders? You may search a hundred war books and get no answer; for he has never been interviewed by a foreign correspondent. The whole of his life seems to be enveloped in mystery. But there is one fact which throws a strong light upon his origin. It is this:

From the day when Lieutenant Mackensen emerged, creditably enough, from the Franco-Prussian War, to the hour of his crushing stroke at Italy, he has been on curious terms of intimacy with the Imperial family. His standing has been more that of a recognized kinsman than of a court favorite. Originally von Mackensen was not intended for the army. He served in the Franco-Prussian War as a volunteer, and apparently planned to return to civil life when that brief conflict was over. But some one or something interposed; and Mackensen's career was definitely fixed in the army. Later he became military tutor to the present Emperor.

Evidently the some one looking out for him judged rightly that he had the making of a great soldier; for, after a number of years, he was promoted to the important position of Military Governor of Königsberg, the ancient capital of Prussia. There befell a significant incident.

At Königsberg the Crown Prince was stationed, cutting a pretty frivolous path. Perhaps the honest burghers complained to Mackensen about it. Anyway, he summoned the Crown Prince to headquarters, and warned him that he would have to behave himself. It would have been better for the Crown Prince if he had not decided to try a fall with Mackensen. The next time he cut loose, he found himself confined in a fortress, on precisely the same terms as any ordinary officer guilty of breach of discipline. Of course there was a rumpus about it. The Kaiser hustled down to Königsberg to see what could be done. He found Mackensen as steel in his determination to make the Crown Prince serve his full sentence. His orders would be carried out, or there would be another commander of Königsberg. The Kaiser gave in, and the young bloods of the Death's Head Hussars quite suddenly came to time.

Another dramatic episode gives point to the mystery of Mackensen. When he was sent to the relief of Austria, he was received by a galaxy of high Austrian officers, princes, dukes, and what not. After initial formalities, the Austrian chief of staff presented Mackensen with his orders.

"What's this?" demanded Mackensen, barely glancing at the paper.

"Your orders, Excellency."

"From whom?"

"The Emperor."

"What Emperor?"

"The Emperor of Austria."

With a contemptuous gesture, Mackensen tossed the paper on the floor.

"I receive orders," he flashed upon the astonished assembly, "only from the Emperor of Germany. I am here to command, you to obey."

What the Austrians must have thought of this ally, whose contemptuous arrogance smacked of the Kaiser himself, may be left to the imagination.

Who, then, is this Mackensen, who dared to clap the Crown Prince in jail, and keep him there against the appeal of the Emperor himself; who treated the Austrian Emperor with haughty public disdain; who reports directly to the Kaiser, apparently over the heads of the German General Staff? Rumor supplies a possible explanation, and this is how it has filtered out of Germany: Mackensen is said to be the son of a Scotchwoman of the name of Mackenzie, who was a lady-in-waiting at the court of Emperor William I. The other part of him is Hohenzollern of the highest, the rumor goes, so that his blood relationship to the Kaiser is close indeed.

An examination of Mackensen's portrait would seem to lend support to the rumor. Compare it with that of the Kaiser, and there is a resemblance, though Mackensen's features are infinitely stronger. His is not a typically stolid German face, like Hindenburg's; nor has it the sentimental, intellectual cast of Falkenhyn. You can no more associate him with huge lunches of beer and sausage than you can with Wagner music. Alertness, keenness, and swift decision, touched with caution, are written all over Mackensen's features. The Scotch have a habit of preserving mental and physical vigor in first-rate trim until after threescore years and ten. If the rumor of his part Scotch origin be true, it would explain the activity of the man at seventy-two in smashing down over the Italian Alps.

Captain Michael White.

Do You Want to be an Officer?

A Soldier's Last Letter Home

My dear Father: I am writing one of these "in case" letters for the third time; and, of course, I hope you will never have to read it. If you are reading it now, you will know that your youngest son "went under" as proud as Punch on the most glorious day of his life. I am taking my company "over the top" for a mile in the biggest push that has ever been launched in the world.

Dad, you can't imagine the wonderful feeling. A man thinks something like this: "Well, if I am going to die, this is worth it a thousand times."

I have "been over" two or three times before, but never with a company of my own. Think of it—a hundred and fifty officers and men who will follow you to hell, if need be!

I don't want any of you dear people to be sorry for me, although of course you will, in a way. You will miss me, but you will be proud of me. I am not going in the way I did the first time—just for sheer devilment and curiosity. I have seen this game for two years, and I still like it and feel that my place is here.

So much for that. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your loving kindness to me. This war has done wonders to me, and makes me realize lots of things I would not have done otherwise.

Good-by, dear father and mother, and all of you. Again I say that I am proud to be where I am now.

GORDIE.
(Sent by Captain V. G. Tupper to his father in Canada.)

How War Seems to a Woman

"THE dreariness of war never came on us till we went out there to live behind the trenches," writes Mrs. Arthur Gleason, who, with two other women, ran a dressing station behind the front line of trenches in Belgium during the first year of the war. (Golden Lads, by Arthur Gleason, published by the Century Company.)

"To me it was getting up before dawn and washing in ice-cold water, no time to

comb the hair, always carrying a feeling of personal mussiness.

"I suffered from cold, wet feet. I hated it that there was never a moment I could be alone. The tooth-brush was the one article of decency I clung to.

"There was nothing romantic about our work in these first days. It was mostly cooking, peeling hundreds of potatoes, slicing bushels of onions, cutting up chunks of meat, until our arms were aching. These were boiled together in great black pots. Our job, when it wasn't to cook the stew, was to take buckets of it to the trenches.

"Here we ladled it out to each soldier. Always we went early, while mist still hung over the ground; for we could see the Germans on clear days. The mornings were bitterly cold. Early in my career as a nurse, I rid myself of skirts. Boots, covered with rubber boots to the knees in wet weather; breeches; a leather coat; and as many jerseys as I could walk in—these were my clothes. But, as I slept in them, they didn't keep me very warm.

"It is not easy to eat and sleep and live together in close quarters, sometimes with rush work, sometimes through severer hours of aimless waiting. Again and again we became weary of one another, impatient over trifles.

"What war does is to reveal human nature. It does not alter it. It heightens the brutality and the heroism. Selfishness shines out nakedly, and kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace days. War ennobles some men by sacrifice, by heroism. It debases other men by handing over the weak to them for torture and murder. What is in the man comes out under the supreme test."

The Camp Devens' Mascot

Backward Austria

Is there any hope for an ending of the war through revolution in Austria? Not much, according to Wolf von Schierbrand, whose book on Austria-Hungary has just been published by Frederick Stokes Company. If any move for peace comes from that direction, it is much more likely to be prompted by the Emperor, who feels his hold on the polyglot population slipping as the months of suffering and denial drag out.

The trouble with Austria-Hungary is deeply rooted. There is no spirit of nationality in the empire. It was built, not by the common purpose of a great people, but by the addition of one tribe and people after another, before the conquering march of the Hapsburgs.

No common language is spoken. Half the people of the empire can not understand the other half. Of the twenty-six million inhabitants of Austria, more than ten millions are illiterate.

Over the whole conglomerate mass sits the House of Hapsburg, which numbers now about 170 members, with its traditions running back to the Holy Roman Empire, and with customs and habits of thought that have not advanced since the middle ages.

Only one ruler in the whole Hapsburg line—Joseph II—evidenced any feeling whatever for the people over whom he ruled. He opened the imperial hunting grounds near Vienna to the common people. When his courtiers murmured, complaining that henceforth they should not know where to go to be "among themselves," he told them curtly that if that were the guiding principle of life, where should he himself turn to be among his equals?

A century and a half has elapsed since his death, but he is still spoken of in terms of hate by the aristocracy of Vienna.

The present young Emperor is inclined to be democratic: but he is wrapped up in a court etiquette that is stifling. A striking illustration of what that etiquette means is found in the funeral of Francis Ferdinand and his consort, murdered in 1914.

The grave and awful problem had to be solved by the imperial master of ceremonies, Prince Montenuovo, how to conduct the funeral first of the husband and then of the wife. Being his "morganatic" wife, her rank was not equal to his. All the rusty wiseacres of the imperial court were in a state of excitement to solve the knotty problem, which they did finally by declaring that, while the remains of Francis Ferdinand were worthy to receive the state burial due a leading member of the dynastic line, the wife of his bosom and mother of his children could by no means share in them.

So it came about that, even while the world was breaking into the war caused by the death of the Prince and his wife, the two funerals were held—one an elaborate pageant lasting many days, and the other a quiet ceremony, completely hidden from the populace.

"BURN VENICE, BUT DO NOT SURRENDER"

NEVER in modern times has a poet held such a place with the army and the people as D'Annunzio with the Italians in this war. He is the spokesman of Italian feeling, whosoever else may voice her statecraft. The New York Times on November 19 published his thrilling speech on Venice, in which he urged his countrymen to burn her rather than surrender her to Austria:

"Austrians to walk in the piazza of San Marco! I can not think of it. It is agony! It is the ultimate horror, not alone for the fact of it, but for all that it signifies. It must never be! Now, if ever, we Italians must experience the resurrection of our great qualities. We must make a great and immortal gesture, one which shall thrill the world. Rather than devote those stones to the tread of Austria, let us fire the city! Let that beauty, that inspiration, perish in a fire whose glow shall illuminate the pages of your history for all time! Better that than to surrender it!"

Is War "Glorious"?

FIRE and flood are not glorious: all the glory is in the spirit of mankind, which is made of stuff too splendid not to show its mettle even in the worst calamities. And war is not glorious, though oftentimes in war men are.

One who knows what really is happening on European battle-fields to-day and calls war glorious is morally unsound. Says an eye-witness:

"Last night, at an officers' mess, there was great laughter at the story of one of our men who had spent his last cartridge in defending an attack. 'Hand me down your spade, Mike,' he said; and as six Germans came, one by one, round the end of a traverse, he split each man's skull open with a deadly blow."

That is war.

Says a Young Men's Christian Association Secretary:

"Many times these fingers have reached through the skulls of wounded men and felt the throbbing of their brains."

That is war. An officer's letter from the front reads:

"An enemy mine exploded here a few days ago and buried our brigade. Many of the men were killed, but some were not much hurt; so we dug them out and used them over again."

Sons of God and brothers of Jesus Christ—"dug them out and used them over again!"

That is war.

Harry Emerson Fosdick in The Challenge of the Present Crisis (Association Press).

Those New Steel Hats

IT is Ian Hay who stands sponsor for this tale of trench fashions in his latest book, All in It, published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.

Jock did not care for the new steel hat which his superiors saw fit to thrust upon him. Nor did he hesitate to apply it to other and varied uses, or to lose it, if necessary, to avoid wearing it. In fact, not until the Colonel issued orders for his staff to set the style did his honor, the private, even deign to consider its merits. Then the following argument arose:

"I'm tellin' you, Jimmy, the C. O. is no the man for tae mak' a show of himself like that for naething. These tin bonnets must be some use. Wull we pit oors on?"

"Awa' hame and bile your head!" replied James.

But Wullie refused to be advised. And the argument waxed hotter and hotter. Finally they hit on a method of solution. Two helmets were thrust hastily on two heads. (No, reader; these were not lunatics, but just Scotchmen proving the strength of their convictions.)

Simultaneously two heads were thrust over the parapet. Immediately two Boche snipers let fly at two targets. And forthwith two Scotchmen fell heavily backward into the arms of their respective supporters.

And then—

"I tellt ye so!" cried both, when they had recovered their breath.

And indeed it seemed as if both had won a victory, until it was found that Jimmy had bitten his tongue in falling backward. Whereupon the verdict went to Wullie, and the helmets were worn.

Why Winter Fighting is So Difficult

WHY can the Allies fight on the western front such a comparatively small number of days out of the year? Is it because months are required to pile up the munitions that are blown away in a few hours of battle? Partly so. But the chief enemy to winter fighting is mud.

A big shell will make a hole fifteen or twenty feet across and as many deep. Into it pours rain. Other shells fall, churning the ground, until a great lake of mud is formed. The crust that frost forms over it will bear the weight of a man, but not the guns. And even the men fall through sometimes.

"Long after the battle," says the Bystander, "men were still being dug out from the awful cold, clinging, soaking slush. One poor man, recovered two nights later, had sunk right to the neck; many of them were got out with the greatest difficulty, and it is feared that some of the wounded must have been swallowed up before help could arrive; and even a brigade officer, without the fighting man's load, took twenty minutes to struggle through a hundred yards of that unbelievably stodgy Flanders mud."

Bruce Bairnsfather, in Bullets and Billets, describes a typical January night in the trenches:

It was raining, and the trench contained over three feet of water. The men, therefore, were standing up to their waists in water. They were all wet through and through, with a great deal of their equipment below the water at the bottom of the trench. There they were, taking it all as a necessary part of the great game; not a grumble nor a comment.

The Red Cross Cuts Salaries

HOW much of the money that you contribute to the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., and other war relief organizations is applied directly to the work in hand? How much is eaten up in the expenses of administration?

Of course there must be administration: choas would result otherwise. But the interesting thing about these organizations is that in very large measure they are being served by men who give their time without pay: in the Red Cross, for instance, as is shown by the following figures, both the number and the average amount of salaries paid have been reduced since the war began—in spite of the enormous increase in the work. The figures three months after the United States had entered the war were as follows:

    

Membership about	2,500,000
Chapters, nearly	1,800
Paid officers and employees, National Headquarters	700
Salaries $2,000 to $7,000	43

On November 1, 1917, the figures had become:

    

Membership more than	5,000,000
Chapters	3,287
Paid officers and employees, National Headquarters	423
Salaries $2,000 to $7,000	37

Napoleon

By Oliver Herford

I LIKE to draw Napoleon best
Because one hand is in his vest,
The other hand behind his back.
(For drawing hands I have no knack.)

NOTHING ELSE MATTERS

By CONRAD RICHTER

Illustrations by Frank Snapp

IT'S generally considered romantic to be the son of a railroad official. And it is romantic—to nearly everybody but railroad officials and their sons.

"Son," queried R. R. Farr, general manager of the Eastern Railroad, "what's this I hear about you wanting to go out to California to marry that Barrett girl?"

Dick Farr, straight, earnest, just out of college, did not deny it.

"Humph. I have something to say to you," grimly announced his father, ignoring his gold cigar-cutter and biting off the end of his cigar with clean white teeth. "Before I agree to such an important matter as your marriage, you've got to produce a better girl than that. I don't exactly care which one, but she has to pass one specification I hold against her. It isn't her face or her figure or her common sense. Such things help a lot to make a wife, but you can teach them. There's one thing neither you nor I nor anybody else can teach. It's got to be born."

He coughed and waited after this so uncompromisingly that Dick finally felt that he had to speak.

"What might the specification be?"

"That she'd go through hell for you," answered his father crisply. He coughed again—his throaty cigar cough. "The girl you have, son, isn't the girl for you. If she cared a bunch of beets about you, she wouldn't have lit out to California for a whole winter and left you here with the blues. I'd rather had her curse and swear, or eat with her knife, or drink out of her coffee saucer, or never have seen the inside of a book in her life."

Dick was only human; but he tried to speak unexcitedly:

"If you feel that way about the girl who is going to be my wife, father, there isn't much use waiting here at all. I might as well start right away, to-night." He hesitated respectfully. "Under those conditions I don't suppose you'll want to make a practical railroad man out of me. Shall I try to get something in California?"

HE waited a moment. His father did not answer. Dick bowed and went silently out of the room. An hour later, with two bags in his hands, he halted irresolutely at the open library door.

"Good-by, father," he ventured.

"Good-by, son," replied his father. "You are of age. But don't lose sight of the fact that your father and mother—"

"You have no right to speak for mother," said Dick in a low voice. "She would tell me to go, if she were here."

"Your mother," returned his father slowly, "although I wasn't worth it, was willing to go through hell for me. For three years she got up at five o'clock in the morning to pack my lunch and do your baby washing, not to say anything about the washing for herself and me. She darned our stockings and mended our clothing until there were pieces that were more darned than not. She saved the left-overs from this meal and that, and out of them made some of the best dinners I ever tasted.

"She did without new clothes for herself and saved here and skimped there for three whole years. It must have been hell, but she did it more sweet and gentle than any saint in the catalogue."

He coughed convulsively.

"When a bigger job came our way, money wasn't much use. When I had a bank account to buy her silks and furs and pretty house furnishings and all the nice things I often saw her look at in the store windows, I couldn't buy her anything but flowers."

He coughed again, his throaty cigar cough.

"Do you think, son, I could stand to see anybody not half as good and unselfish as she was take her place in this house and get the benefit of things she never had, when she was the one who went through hell to heaven to help get them?"

Hard-faced, he turned his face still farther away.

"Good-by!"

Dick, in the doorway, threw off all the doubts that had flocked upon him. He couldn't back down now. He had said he would go. His bags were packed. "You are the kind of girl my mother was," he worshiped silently across the continent.

THAT night from the depot he wired Miss Florence Barrett, Pasadena, that he was coming as fast as steam could take him, that he would get to Los Angeles Tuesday afternoon at two-thirty-one. He was particular to look up the exact time, so she would be at the station to meet him.

But five days afterward, when he stepped out into the dim train-shed in the Southern California city, there wasn't a soul that he knew in sight. Sending his luggage to his hotel in one of the omnipresent hotel buses, he took a taxicab up the long, dark, curving road to Pasadena.

A cocky-looking Japanese man-servant told him that Miss Barrett was not in, but she had left a note for Mr. Farr. Dick tore it open eagerly, while the Japanese watched with keen eyes.

My Darling Boy:

So sorry to disappoint you. But the Dodsons planned this trip in their yacht weeks ago. And I do want to see Alaska. We're leaving to-morrow morning. And, can you imagine, I am not yet half packed!

Paul Dalsimer and Bobby Miller are going along. They have been rushing me until I am nearly dead for sleep. But, Dick dear, every time either of them held my hand or kissed me I wished it was you.

Maybelle wants me to stay out here with her and not go back East at all. In the winter we would go to the mountains. I should just love to. Perhaps I shall. I suppose you will have to go right back East. Goodness only knows when I shall see you again—if I stay out here. It might be best if we let our engagement go, dear. It was nice as long as it wasn't so horribly inconvenient for us both.

I'm certain I shall not get packed in time. Give my love to everybody back East.

FLORENCE.

Dick remembered getting back to his hotel all right, but a stubborn haze always clouded the remainder of the day and several days and nights afterward. His memory began with the sight of a dying man on the floor of a dimly lighted back room of a saloon near the railroad yards in Pocatello, Idaho. The sunken eyes of the man on the floor were swimming rigidly over the sobered group.

"One of you," he gasped rattlingly—"one of you has got to pay back a obligation I owe. Take out some paper and put it down. To Walter Whitman. He used to be at Port Reading, New Jersey. Seven years ago last March he took his crew in a saloon and got them drunk. Then he gave in their names. His crew was all fired, except himself. He was the conductor. I was the engineman. Here I am, where he put me. To-day he's chief yard-master on the Eastern, at the big Rutherwood yards. I want you to—"

His lips tried to form another word. His eyes strained. Then he shook his head hopelessly and closed his eyes.

Of the little group Dick was the most affected. Whitman was on his father's railroad. Sobered, he struck out of the place. Outside, an inventory revealed that his clothes were a mess, his money gone, his luggage might be in China as far as he could remember, and, worst of all, the stubs of his check-book showed expenditures of a hundred and ten dollars more than he had money in the bank.

He turned his pockets back and struck desperately for the railroad. Almost of a sudden it sprang up before him. He stood still, breathing fairly hard, doing nothing, but looking at it. His eyes drank in its blackened ties, its rock ballast, the broken waves of heat following the glinting rails as they ran dead away to the East.

"Hello, old scout, old scout!" he found himself saying. He wanted to bend down and pat the rails with his hands. The first freight that went East slowly enough for him to catch a rusty handle and step was his.

From Pocatello, Idaho, to Harrisville, Pennsylvania, he obeyed all the rules of the hobo game. He rode flats and lowside-gondolas, high-side-gondolas, hoppers, cruisers, and battleships, and learned the gentle art of springing the sealed door of the older type of box-car, in which he could sleep without fear.

At last, at the big Rutherwood yard near Harrisville, he came in sight of a trap-rock ballast, double-track line with Hall signals. It was his father's own Eastern Railroad. He stayed up in the end of his high-side-gondola loaded with fragrant lumber, while a rider dropped it over the hump down into one of the tracks thirty abreast in the yard.

ON being questioned, the rider answered that, sure enough, a man of the name of Walter Whitman was chief day yard-master. Dick asked the way to his office. It was part of his plan.

For a full two minutes he stood alongside of the yard-master's desk, waiting for him to look up.

"Yes, we want men," the yard-master at last answered coldly, "hut no bums."

He looked back to his desk ignoringly. Dick went out, carrying with him the unpleasant picture of a bony head with plastered black hair and eyes nearly as light as water.

A hundred yards away, in the little, regulation yellow-and-brown office of the assistant yard-master, he found a strikingly different atmosphere. Two or three young fellows in shirt-sleeves were hustling copy into canvas-covered books that looked like a bookkeeper's journals. A sturdy, quiet man of forty, with his back turned toward the door, was flirting car tickets into the slanted pigeonholes above his table-desk with an ease and certainty that never missed.

The remarkable thing about this man, Dick noticed in a moment, was his coolness. Although there was a busy air about the place, he went unhurriedly

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about his work as if we was enjoying every detail of it. At Dick's question, he turned and regarded him with candid eyes.

"Yes, sir," after a moment he declared heartily. "We need a clerk, a booker for the outbound." His eyes wrinkled with friendly interest. "What schooling have you had?"

Dick thought quickly. He had better play the game right.

"Not very much," he confessed, choking as he thought of his college sheepskin. "I can read and write pretty decent, and figure a bit."

At the assistant yard-master's request, he gave him painfully studied samples of writing and reading.

"Good enough," said the yard-master.

"I—I forgot to tell you," stammered Dick. "I saw the chief yard-master a few minutes ago about a job, and he said he had no work for a bum. I don't want to get you into trouble."

"He won't bother us," smiled the assistant cheerfully. "Don't you mind what he said. Sometimes a man forgets for a minute that you can't always tell a lad by the style shirt he has on."

BY evening Dick was booking green, white, red, blue, and yellow car tickets as if he had done it all his life—the green for empties, the white for loaded cars, the red for stock and "perishable," and the blue and yellow from other roads.

Scott, the assistant yard-master, seemed to pay no further attention to him; but after the day's work he took him to a nearby railroaders' boarding-house and volunteered to stand good for him. That was only one of the little things Dick saw this man do from time to time for one or another of the hundred men under him. Dick tried to understand how a man with his signal business and executive ability in the railroad game was being held at the job of assistant yard-master. He began to make inquiries.

"Him!" exclaimed a chunky East Penn Freight conductor with a red face and a shiny green-blue celluloid collar. "He has more brains and nerve than any man his age on the road. No matter how bad he's tied up here, did you ever see him get rattled or without time to answer a question or kid a man? Did you ever see him get himself in a hole or leave the yard in hard shape for the night people, the way they nearly always leave it for him?"

"Then why isn't he chief yard-master or train-master or superintendent or something?" demanded Dick.

"Why?" repeated the conductor. "Why? Why, because he's been trying to get Olson and the night people to quit dropping high explosives down any old track, up against any old car, prop or piping or any old thing, against company rules and against the law. Does Whitman make Olson listen? He does not! Before that, Scott tried to make his own men here in the yard quit cutting off high explosives so they'd have to back them up, like the rules say. Did Whitman back him up? He did nit.

"And before that—about three years ago, when Scott came here from the W. & N.—he handed Whitman and the other yard-masters some quick-fire suggestions on how to hustle up this old muscle-bound, always tied-up yard. Did Whitman say Amen and hand the plans on to the train-master? Not till about a month ago, when the word came from Old Man Farr himself that this yard had positively to move more cars. Then this Whitman hands in as his own dope the suggestions that Scott had given him three years ago. And they say he's going to get promoted for it. Is it any wonder that railroaders go out on strikes?"

DICK was still hearing things when, a few days afterward, he decided to afford better clothes than the old coat and trousers Scott had brought to the office for him. He bought a modest gray suit, a pair of plain shoes, a gray felt hat, a black tie, and several collars. Next day he appeared at work in most of the new outfit. He thought Scott seemed a bit proud of him. That evening the yard-master walked with him as far as his boarding-house.

"Why don't you try to get a little education, lad? I believe you could make something of yourself."

Dick swallowed and nodded.

"Come up to my house to-night around half past seven, and we'll see if we can dope out some plan."

Dick felt disturbed. He couldn't possibly permit the yard-master to sit up nights teaching him spelling, arithmetic, geography, or other things that he had learned when he was a youngster. He sparred for time.

"I'll come up to-night, and much obliged. But maybe I won't be able to take up your offer."

"Why not?" wondered Scott mildly.

"Give me a little time to think something over," stammered Dick. "I'll tell you about it this evening."

About half past seven he went up the narrow board walk in the center of the green Roberts lawn. Then he stepped back and took off his hat in apology as a brown-haired, gray-eyed girl opened the cheerful yellow door.

"I guess I'm at the wrong house," he said. "I wanted Mr. Scott's place."

"You couldn't be nearer right than this," answered the girl, not unpleasantly. "Won't you come in?"

Scott welcomed him inside.

"Rhoda, this is the young man I told you about who we're going to try to help toward an education. Do you know where those spelling and arithmetic books are?"

"Why, I can help teach spelling and arithmetic!" exclaimed Rhoda, and hurried enthusiastically upstairs for the books.

"Well, lad," reminded the yard-master, when they could hear the girl's light steps overhead, "you said you had something to tell. Let's hear it."

An irresistible picture of Rhoda's gray eyes smiling at him across the books and papers of their lamp-lit study table framed itself in Dick's mind.

"I was just bluffing," he stumbled. "I got the idea in my bonehead block that maybe I wouldn't learn fast enough for you, and you'd get sick of me."

"Bonehead nothing," declared Scott. "Your talk shows you've got a good mind. The thing is to get it set on the right thing."

"I think I have now," said Dick, his eyes on Rhoda as, flushed and smiling, with books piled up under her little curving chin, she came down the stairs.

TWO months passed. Three times a week Dick bent under the soft yellow light of the Scott living-room lamp, dutifully reciting such simple lessons as Rhoda or her father had given him. Then, one evening, Scott stunned him by announcing that they were going West—he was quitting his job. Dick bewilderedly asked why.

"I'm not a jealous man," explained the yard-master simply. "I don't want more than my own. But they're promoting Whitman the first of October, and Leffler's to go over my head. He gets the chief night job, while Olson gets Whitman's place. There's no use sticking around if the company doesn't want me."

Dick waited for a further expression, but nothing further came—not a word of reproach for the incompetency of Whitman or the defiant rule-ignoring of Olson. Then, suddenly, he realized that Rhoda was going away.

Half of the given sixty days had passed when Scott, one evening, left Dick and Rhoda at the now familiar study table, to go to his lodge.

"Rhoda," Dick ventured, "did you ever think that—that I'd be wondering how I'm going to learn when you're away?"

"Oh, somebody will help you," Rhoda replied brightly; but she lowered her eyes.

"No matter who," said Dick soberly, "it won't be just the same."

"Why won't it be—just the same?"

Rhoda was making meaningless figures on her tablet paper.

"I daren't tell you why," said Dick. "But it won't."

"Why daren't you tell me why?" The girl bent her head until he could see only a corner of one eye.

"A couple of months ago I was a bum, a hobo, worse than nobody. Neither your father nor you know where I came from or what I ever did."

"You never did anything very much wrong," said Rhoda gently.

"How do you know?"

She looked up. Her eyes were deep gray. Then she looked down again.

"Because I know," she replied unhesitatingly.

"But what if I did?" Dick persisted.

She lifted a white face, but her eyes were steady.

"It wouldn't matter," she said.

The next moment Dick was conscious of his hand starting toward hers. It hardly seemed to move, but he knew it did. It went slowly but not stealthily. Suddenly a thrill passed through him. He had seen her fingers drop the pencil and start slowly toward his.

In another moment she had lifted her face. Their eyes locked. Gently their fingers touched until their warm palms crushed tightly together.

FOR a long time that evening they stood close together on the front porch, with the damp fragrance of the clover lawn in their nostrils. Scott had not yet come.

"What am I going to do here alone after you go away, Rhoda?" Dick asked soberly.

"I won't go if you don't want me to," she said in a low voice.

Dick held her face in a better light.

"You mean you'd leave your father and stay, just to help me?"

"Not to help you this time." She buried her face against him; her voice was muffled. "It's to help me. I couldn't go to California with only daddy along."

"If you stay with me," reminded Dick tenderly, "it will mean we'll have to live for a while in the roughest kind of shack. I don't get hardly any salary."

"Nothing like the place we lived in would matter," faltered Rhoda. "I—I'd make up for my board. I would save on everything. I wouldn't want any new clothes, not for years."

Dick went home that night repeating to himself doggedly that he could never let himself marry Rhoda Scott until he had a position and savings that would insure her escaping the experience and perhaps the fate of his mother. Day after day he kept stubborn control of himself. Then the law of averages compassionately took the situation out of Dick's hands.

Concluded on page 18

Does a Business Woman Make a Good Wife?

MY old chum in the days of studio life and "economic independence" dropped in at our apartment the other day, and sighed heavily over my married state.

"How can you," she queried hopelessly, "bear this deadly housekeeping?"

I grinned at her, and then thought it all out while I was escalloping the potatoes for Dick's 60 h. p. appetite that evening. Housekeeping is for the average woman an end, an aim, a life in itself; but I know from my own experience that it need be only a means toward comfort and happiness and a fuller life, just as the touch system makes typing a mere mechanical device and allows the efficient worker to forget her fingers and use her head. But I never would have learned this lesson if I had not been trained in a business office to save time, to manage my work, to meet emergencies, and to preserve my equilibrium and retain my nerves though the roof fall in and the heavens collapse.

I consider that the mere poise that office experience gives a girl is helpful in her own home. I can not imagine that I could sit down and weep in mid-Victorian fashion because the méringue on the lemon pie was swarthier than the cook book called for.

Once, in an office, I took a full-page advertisement and spread it all over the magazine, only to discover after the issue had been printed that it should have been a one-column affair. It cost the company hundreds of dollars, and I nearly lost my job; but nobody cried, though I writhed in humiliation for weeks. That blunder was a real tragedy; a lemon pie more or less in the world is less than a detail.

Neither can I see myself getting really flustered when I have biscuits in the oven, beefsteak on the stove, a caller at the front door, and a delivery boy at the back, with perhaps the dumb-waiter and the telephone likewise summoning. When I remember how old Parker used to roar above the hum of a hundred typewriters, how the office-boys would dash madly in and out with proofs to be O. K.'d and questions to be answered, how the telephones would clang uninterrupted, and customers would come and come and come and come—well, I really couldn't get excited over little lumps of dough and a chunk of beef, though in those days I sometimes wondered if my wits would last the day through.

But poise is not the only thing in housekeeping any more than it is in any other undertaking. One might have the kind of poise that is blind to error—self-complacency. Definite training in specific directions has been quite as valuable to me in learning the lessons of the kettle and the broom. For example, take that important institution in an office known as a schedule. How could I, after having worked on schedule for four years, suddenly begin, in my new work, to follow the muse? Dick laughs at my typewritten list of the week's duties on the kitchen wall; but he does have his socks mended and his meals on time. It is a very simple little routine, covering the domestic duties that are necessary to make two people physically comfortable; but I like the regularity. "Oh, housework is so monotonous!" complains the business woman. True. So I reduce it to a minimum and take my variety in some other form.

Down at Parker's Advertising Agency we had to do several things at once if the occasion demanded. I never thought of answering the telephone without seizing a pencil to be correcting proof at the same time. Old Parker used to dictate to two stenographers at once, and glower significantly at his assistant meanwhile. So now I can watch the double boiler and clean my silver at the same minute—if, for example, I want to hurry off to an exhibit.

There used to be a choice bit of domestic fiction concerning the lovely young bride who had been making jelly all day—without even stopping to make the beds—when lo, in walked that inconsiderate brute, her husband, with the Influential Employer for dinner. How that girl did take on! She didn't know what to feed him, except jelly, and she hadn't the hardihood to send them to the little restaurant around the corner. So she struggled through somehow, a poor abused female. (The sequel is, however, that the great man was so taken with her charms—not her meal, you understand—that he gave the inconsiderate brute an auriferous new job.)

Dick brought home a fellow employee the other night, and I could not get even the slightest thrill of terror over the horrid bogey, unexpected company. I put a third plate on the table, added bacon to the four chops, carefully giving our guest two, hauled down some asparagus for salad, and the deed was done. Dick and I always eat, and if there is not enough, old King Can to the rescue, and ice cream from the drug store, served elegantly with ice-cream forks and maraschino cherries. Unexpected company is certainly nothing to get excited about, after working for the mighty and temperamental Mr. Pennywood Parker. "Unexpected" was his middle name, and "Anything Can Happen" was our office motto.

Of course, I have also a good many little business habits that make the grocer and the laundryman stare. My account books, orders, lists, bills, receipts, memoranda, are guarded as carefully and kept in as perfect order as my lingerie. I keep my recipes in a card-index file. I have sheets of calorie values tacked inside the door of my kitchen cabinet. They are in simple form, arranged by a school of domestic art. I receive the Department of Agriculture bulletins, and take many a tip from them. Being still in the novice stage, I attend department-store demonstrations of new appliances or new food preparations. I insist on the eight-hour day for my cleaning-woman. I allow myself certain household expenditures, and never exceed them.

These are little things, but they are helpful; and if I could only have carbon copies of my husband's eulogies, I'd pass them around as the final word of proof about the business girl in the kitchen. But, being a woman, I'll have the final word, and that is, no matter how far removed a business girl has been from the cook-stove and the hearth-stone, she can always learn the gentle art of domesticity, provided she has been working in a well regulated office for at least two months.

Your Arteries Can Speak for Themselves

YOU have been told often enough that hurry and worry harden your arteries and so shorten your life. But a more effective method of driving that truth home has been discovered. It is possible now for your arteries to speak for themselves, as this chart clearly shows.

The chart shows two blood-pressure diagrams, representing the maximal tension of the arteries of a typical energetic banker and business man fifty-six years old. He is retired from active affairs, but is restless, fond of automobiling, food, and comfort, possibly to some excess. In these two graphs, each square along the horizontal line represents five minutes of time; and each vertical square ten millimeters of mercury of blood-pressure. The data were secured by the new "continuous" method.

The first record was made at 10:30 P. M. on a day in November, 1916. The man's pulse was 95, which fell within half an hour to 80. He had a cold, was somewhat excited, and was obviously worried about various things. He was drinking coffee thrice or twice a day and smoking to excess.

In the eleventh minute of the upper record he thought of a worrisome business matter, with the usual quick rise in the arterial tension.

The second record, at the bottom, was made at 9 A. M. nine months later, in August, 1917. He had been visiting relatives in California, and, on the advice of physicians, had stopped all use of coffee and of tobacco, and looked, as he felt, like a rational human being who has discovered that life is a place of real comfort.

In the fifteenth minute of the lower graph the quick fall is due to the "release of some regretful ideas from the mind," whose nature is unknown to the observer.

These hemobarograms tell their own story when the accompanying mental data from the man himself are fully in mind. Better habits and rest and the elimination of worry have made the subject a new man—and his arterial records show it as certainly and far more intimately and immediately than could any one thing else.

GEORGE VAN NESS DEARBORN.
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

How to Manage a Father

I HAD frequently noticed that, however little my mother took when she went on a journey, my father seemed to expect her to take less. So I concluded that daddy was the victim of a state of mind—perhaps mother was the real victim—occasioned perhaps by a time when mother might really have taken too much in the line of paraphernalia with her.

On my first trip with my father, I tested this theory. I had decided that a small steamer trunk would be ample.

The day before departure I rushed into my father's study.

"Daddy!" I exclaimed apologetically. "Could I trouble you to ring up the expressman for my trunks?"

"Trunks?" my father echoed. "Trunks? How can you possibly want—?" He stopped in utter consternation. "When you say 'trunks' you don't mean more than two?"

"Two," I assented sweetly.

"But what do you want with even two? We're going on a five days' trip a hundred miles away. You couldn't wear the contents of two trunks in five days' time."

"Yes, I know; but some special occasion may arise that may call for a special costume. You wouldn't like me to look like a frump, would you?"

"Of course not, of course not," daddy agreed. "Don't you think," he began cautiously, "that one big trunk would do? There's that old trunk of mine, the English sole-leather trunk. That held everything your mother and I needed on a fortnight's trip, when you were a little girl—yes, and all your things as well."

I considered. "Perhaps," I admitted reluctantly, "I might make that do."

"Yes, yes," daddy encouraged. "It's surprising how much you can get into it. It gives, you know."

"I wonder,"—I walked to the window, looked out, and meditated,—"I wonder," I speculated, "if it would be possible for me to squeeze all my things into my steamer-trunk."

"Certainly, certainly," daddy assured me—and his tone had a quality of gratitude that was really touching. "I'll ring for the expressman," he hastened to say.

He hurried to the door, but came back and put his head in to say:

"I want to tell you, daughter, that you're going to make a good traveler. You have the right idea of the thing. No unnecessary baggage."

"And you know," I said to my mother, later, "that if I had proposed taking only a tooth-brush and an extra handkerchief, daddy would have wanted me to cut out the extra handkerchief."

The Smallest Store

NOTRE DAME DU BATEAU

(Maxine Elliott)

IT must have been a débutante who christened forty the "dangerous age," for it is an age extremely dangerous to beauty of only a season or two. Aspasia married Pericles at thirty-seven, Cleopatra enraptured Anthony at forty, and Helen was whisked off to Troy at forty-eight. When the sixteen-year-old beauty of Rockland, Maine—Jessie Dermot, a sea captain's daughter—came down to New York, no one bothered much about her. She got some obscure little parts at $20 a week, and made her own clothes and looked after her young sister Gertrude. It was not till years afterward that Whistler and the world generally discovered Maxine Elliott—"the girl with the midnight eyes." At thirty-five Miss Elliott became America's first woman actor-manager, with her own theater named after her. And the years that followed were those of her greatest successes. A breath of relief rose to heaven from dozens of ambitious ingénues when Miss Elliott retired, apparently, to her beautiful home with the Forbes-Robertsons in England. And when, after the war began, she fitted out a house-boat hospital and became "Notre dame du bateau" somewhere in France, young Miss Broadway voted it a perfectly sweet way to spend one's declining years. And then! Without warning, the stately beauty, whom Nat Goodwin once called his "Roman Senator," came back to stageland via the screen. Within the month we are to see her in "The Eternal Magdalene" (a Goldwyn production), the woman of whom a French painter says, "Her beauty resides not alone in the perfect harmony of the various parts of her body, but also in the expression of her countenance and in the mysterious and indefinable je ne sais quoi that emanates from her personality." Cheer up, little Mary Pickford and Marguerite Clark and all the rest. If only you are good children and work hard, perhaps some day when you are grown up you too will acquire some je ne sais quoi!

ANNE HERENDEEN.

DOING THEIR KNIT

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WHY DIDN'T OUR PARENTS TEACH US SOMETHING USEFUL?

THE GOLDEN SNARE

By JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

Illustrations by George Giguère

(Continued)

THAT the Eskimos both to the east and the west were more than likely to come their way, converging toward the central cry that was now silent, Philip was sure. He made no more than a swift observation of the field in these first moments—did not even look for weapons. His thought was entirely of Celie. The smallest of the three forms on the snow was the Kogmollock he had struck down with his club. He dropped on his knees, and took off first the sealskin bashlyk, or hood. Then he began stripping the dead man of other garments. With them in his arms, he hurried back to the girl. It was not a time for fine distinctions. The clothes were a God-send, though they had come from a dead man's back, and an Eskimo's at that.

He returned to the Eskimos. The three were dead—one with a tiny bullet-hole squarely between the eyes, and the others crushed by the blows of the club. His hand fondled Celie's little revolver—the pea-shooter he had laughed at. After all, it had saved his life. And the club—

From the man he had struck with his naked fist he outfitted himself with a hood and temiak, or coat. There were no pockets in the temiak, but at the waist of each of the dead men a narwhal-skin pouch which answered for all pockets. He tossed the three pouches in a little heap on the snow before he searched for weapons. He found two knives and half a dozen murderous little javelins. One of the knives was still clutched in the hand of the Eskimo who had been creeping up to kill him when Celie's revolver saved him. He took this knife because it was longer and sharper than the other.

On his knees he began to examine the contents of the three pouches. In each was the inevitable roll of babiche, or caribou-skin cord, and a second and smaller waterproof narwhal bag in which were the Kogmollock fire materials. There was no food. This fact was evident proof that the Eskimos were in camp somewhere in the vicinity. He had finished his investigation of the pouches when, looking up from his kneeling posture, he saw Celie approaching.

IN spite of the grimness of the situation, he could not repress a smile as he rose to greet her. At fifty paces, even with her face toward him, one would easily make the error of mistaking her for an Eskimo; for the sealskin bashlyk was so large that it almost entirely concealed her face.

Philip rolled back the front of the hood. Then he pulled her thick braid out from under the coat, and unbound the strands of it until her hair enveloped her in a shimmering cloud. It was not conceivable that their enemies could mistake her for a man now, even at a hundred yards. If they ran into an ambuscade, she would at least be saved from the javelins.

He fastened one of the pouches at his waist, picked up his club, and—on second thought—one of the Kogmollock javelins.

With Celie's hand in his, Philip set out due north through the forest.

It was in that direction he knew the cabin must lie. Striking the edge of the timber after crossing the barren, Bram Johnson had turned almost directly south; and as he remembered the last lap of the journey Philip was confident that not more than eight or ten miles had separated the two cabins.

Their immediate necessity was not so much the finding of the cabin as escape from the Eskimos. Within half an hour, perhaps even less, he believed that other eyes would know of the fight. It was inevitable. If the Kogmollocks on either side of them struck the trail before it reached the open, they would very soon run upon the dead, and if they came upon footprints in the snow this side of the open they would back-trail swiftly to learn the source and meaning of the cry of triumph that had not repeated itself. Celie's feet, clad in moccasins twice too big for them, dragged in the snow in a way that would leave no doubt in the Eskimo mind. As Philip saw the situation, there was only one chance for them. Hope depended entirely upon the number of their enemies. If there were only three or four left, they would not attack in the open. In that event, he must watch for ambuscade, and dread the night.

He looked down at Celie, buried in her furry coat and hood, plodding along courageously at his side with her hand in his.

For a quarter of an hour they traveled as swiftly as Celie could walk. Philip was confident that the Eskimos whose cries they had heard would strike directly for the point whence the first call had come, and it was his purpose to cover as much distance as possible in the first few minutes that their enemies might be behind them. It was easier to watch the back trail than to guard against ambuscades ahead. They had progressed another half mile when they came upon a snowshoe trail in the snow.

It had crossed at right angles to their own course; and as Philip bent over it a lump rose in his throat. The other Eskimo had not worn snowshoes. That in itself had not surprised him, for the snow was hard and easily traveled in moccasins. The fact that amazed him now was that the trail under his eyes had not been made by Eskimo usamuks. The tracks were long and narrow. The web imprint in the snow was not that of the broad narwhal strip, but the finer mesh of babiche. It was possible that an Eskimo was wearing them; but they were a white man's shoes!

And then he made another discovery: The man who had made them had taken a longer snowshoe stride than his own by at least nine inches. He could no longer keep the excitement of his discovery from Celie.

"The Eskimo never lived who could make that track," he exclaimed. "They can travel fast enough, but they're a bunch of runts when it comes to leg-swing. It's a white man—or Bram!"

The announcement of the wolf-man's name and Philip's gesture toward the trail drew a quick little cry of understanding from Celie. In a flash she had darted to the snowshoe tracks and was examining them with eager intensity. Then she looked up and shook her head. It wasn't Bram! She pointed to the tail of the shoe, and, catching up a twig, broke it tinder Philip's eyes. He remembered now. The end of one of Bram's shoes was snubbed short off. There was no evidence of that defect in the snow.

"He's going east—and we ought to go north to find the cabin," he said, pointing to the trail. "But we'll follow him. I want his rifle. I want it more than anything else in this world, now that I've got you. We'll follow."

If there had been a shadow of hesitation in his mind, it was ended in that moment. From behind them there came a strange hooting cry. It was not a yell such as they had heard before. It was a far-reaching, booming note that had in it the intonation of a drum—a sound that made one shiver because of its very strangeness. And then, from farther west, it came:

"Hoom—hoom—ho-o-o-o-m-m-m-m—"

In the next half minute it seemed to Philip that the cry was answered from half a dozen different quarters. Again it came from directly behind them.

Celie clung to his hand. She understood as well as he. One of the Eskimos had discovered the dead, and their foes were gathering in behind them.

Before the last of the cries had died away, Philip flung far to one side of the trail the javelin he carried, and after the javelin went his club.

"It's going to be the biggest race I've ever run," he smiled at her. "And we've got to win. If we don't—"

With the swift directness of the trained man-hunter, Philip measured his chances of winning. The Eskimos, first of all, would gather about their dead. After one or two formalities they would join in a chattering council, all of which meant precious time for them. The pursuit would be more or less cautious because of the bullet-hole in the Kogmollock's forehead.

If he had been asked just what he expected to gain by following the strange snowshoe trail, Philip would have had difficulty in answering. But a number of possibilities had suggested themselves to him. It even occurred to him that the man who was hurrying toward the east might be a member of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. Of one thing, however, he was confident. The maker of the tracks would have a rifle. Friend or foe, he was after that rifle.

How much of a lead the stranger had was a matter at which he could guess with considerable accuracy. The freshness of the trail was only slightly dimmed by snow, which was ample proof that it had been made at the tail-end of the storm. He believed that it was not more than an hour old.

They followed it for three quarters of a mile. Then the trail turned abruptly from its easterly course to a point of the compass due north. So sharp was the turn that Philip paused to investigate the sudden change in direction. The stranger had evidently stood for several minutes at this point, which was close to the blasted stub of a dead spruce. In the snow Philip observed for the first time a number of dark brown spots.

"Here is where he took a new bearing—and a chew of tobacco," he said—more to himself than to Celie. "And there's no snow in his tracks. I don't believe he's more than half an hour ahead of us this minute!"

AFTER a time he looked at his watch. Since striking the trail they had traveled forty minutes. In that time they had covered at least three miles, and were a good four miles from the scene of the fight. It was a big start. The Eskimos were undoubtedly a half that distance behind them, and the stranger whom they were following could not be far ahead.

They went on at a walk. For the third time, they came to a point in the trail where the man ahead of them had stopped to make observations. It was apparent to Philip that he was not quite sure of himself; yet he did not hesitate in the course due north.

They were at least five miles from the edge of the open where the fight had occurred when they came to the foot of a ridge, and Philip's heart gave a sudden thump of hope. He remembered that ridge. He and Bram had crossed it soon after passing the first cabin. He had not tried to tell Celie of this cabin. Time had been too precious. But now, in a short interval of rest he allowed themselves, he drew a picture of it in the snow and made her understand that it was somewhere close to the ridge and that it looked as if the stranger was making for it. He half carried her up the ridge after that. Exhaustion showed in her face.

"It can't be much farther," he encouraged her. "We've got to overtake him pretty soon, dear. Mighty soon."

They went on. And then they came upon the cabin. It was not a hundred yards from them when they first saw it. It was no longer abandoned. A thin spiral of smoke was rising from the chimney.

"We're in time," he breathed. "You—you stay here."

She understood. Her hands clutched at him as he left her. A gulp rose in her throat. She wanted to call out. She wanted to hold him back—or go with him. Yet she obeyed. Sobbingly she breathed his name. It was a prayer. For she knew what would happen in the cabin.

Philip came up behind the windowless end of the cabin. He had noticed, in passing with Bram, that on the opposite side was a trap-window of saplings; and toward this he moved swiftly, but with caution. It was still closed when he came where he could see. With his ear close to the chinks, he heard the sound of some one moving inside. For an instant he looked over his shoulder. Celie was standing where he had left her. He could almost feel the terrible suspense that was in her eyes as she watched him.

He moved around toward the door. There was in him an intense desire to have it over with quickly. His pulse quickened as the thought grew in him that the maker of the strange snowshoe trail might be a friend, after all. But how was he to discover that fact? He had decided to take no chances. The seconds of misplaced faith in the stranger might prove fatal. Not until he held a gun in his hands would he be in a position to wait for introductions and explanations. Until then, with their Eskimo enemies close at their heels—

HIS mind did not finish that final argument. The end of it smashed upon him in another way. The door came within his vision. As it swung inward he could not at first see whether it was open or closed. Leaning against the logs close to the door were a pair of long snowshoes and a bundle of javelins. A sickening disappointment swept over him as he stared at the javelins. A giant Eskimo, and not a white man, must have made the trail they had followed.

Then, for an instant, he held his breath and sniffed the air like a dog getting the wind. The cabin door was open. And out through that door came the mingling aroma of coffee and tobacco! An Eskimo might have tobacco, or even tea. But coffee—never.

He crossed silently and swiftly the short space between the corner of the cabin and the open door. It was a small cabin. It was possibly not more than ten feet square inside, and at the far end of it was a fireplace from which rose the chimney through the roof.

At first Philip saw nothing except the dim outlines of things. It was a moment or two before he made out the figure of a man stooping over the fire. He stepped over the threshold, making no sound. The occupant of the cabin straightened himself slowly, lifting with extreme care a pot of coffee from the embers. He turned.

It was a white man's face—a face almost hidden in a thick growth of beard and a tangle of hair that fell to the shoulders. Another instant, and he had seen the intruder, and stood like one turned suddenly into stone.

Philip leveled Celie's little revolver.

"I am Philip Brant of his Majesty's

---

service, the Royal Mounted," he said. "Throw up your hands!"

The arm holding the pot of steaming coffee shot out, and the boiling deluge hissed straight at Philip's face. He ducked to escape it, and fired. Before he could throw back the hammer of the little single-action weapon for a second shot, the stranger was at him. The force of the attack sent them both crashing back against the wall of the cabin, and in the few moments that followed Philip blessed the providential forethought that had made him throw off his fur coat and strip for action. His antagonist was not an ordinary man. A growl like that of a beast rose in his throat as they went to the floor, and in that death-grip Philip thought of Bram.

This man was Bram's equal in size and strength. He realized, with the swift judgment of the trained boxer, that open fighting and the evasion of the other's crushing brute strength was his one hope. On his knees, he flung himself backward and struck out. The blow caught his antagonist squarely in the face before he had succeeded in getting a firm clinch, and as he bent backward under the force of the blow Philip exerted every ounce of his strength, broke the other's hold, and sprang to his feet.

The stranger was scarcely on his feet before he was at him with a straight shoulder blow that landed on the giant's jaw with crushing force. It would have put an ordinary man down in a limp heap. The other's weight saved him. A second blow sent him reeling against the log wall like a sack of grain. And then, in the half gloom of the cabin, Philip missed. He put all his effort in that third blow, and as his clenched fist shot over the other's shoulder he was carried off his balance and found himself again in the clutch of his enemy's arms. This time a huge hand found his throat. To escape the certain result of two hands gripping at his throat, he took a sudden foot-lock on his adversary, flung all his weight forward, and they went to the floor.

NEITHER man saw the girl standing wide-eyed and terrified in the door. They rolled almost to her feet. Full in the light she saw the battered, bleeding face of the strange giant, and Philip's fist striking it again and again. Then she saw the giant's two hands, and why he was suffering that punishment. They were at Philip's throat.

A cry rose to her lips, and the blue in her eyes darkened with a fighting fire. She darted across the room, and in an instant was back with a heavy stick of wood in her hands. Philip saw her then—her streaming hair and white face above them. And then her club fell, and the hands at his throat relaxed.

He swayed to his feet, and with dazed eyes and a weird sort of laugh opened his arms. Celie ran into them. He felt her sobbing and panting against him. Then, looking down, he saw that for the present the man who had made the strange snowshoe trail was as good as dead.

The air he was taking into his half strangled lungs cleared his head, and he began a search of the room. His eyes were more accustomed to the gloom, and suddenly he gave a cry of exultation. Against the end of the mud and stone fireplace stood a rifle, and over the muzzle of this hung a belt and holster. In the holster was a revolver. In his excitement and joy his breath was almost a sob as he snatched it from the holster and broke it in the light of the door. It was a big Colt forty-five—and loaded to the brim.

"Watch!" he cried, sweeping his arm to the open. "Just two minutes more. That's all I want—two minutes—and then—"

He was counting the cartridges in the belt as he fastened it about his waist. There were at least forty, two thirds of them soft-nosed rifle. The caliber was .303, and the gun was modern up to the minute. As he threw down the lever enough to let him glimpse inside the breech, he caught the glisten of cartridges ready for action. He wanted nothing more.

With the rifle in his hands, he ran past Celie out into the day. For a moment the excitement pounding in his body had got beyond his power of control.

"Come on, you devils! Come on, come on!" he cried. And then, powerless to restrain what was in him, he let out a yell.

From the door Celie was staring at him. From her own heart welled up a cry, a revelation of that wonderful thing throbbing in her breast which must have reached Philip's ears had there not in that same instant come another sound to startle them both into listening silence.

It was not far off. And it was unmistakably an answer to Philip's challenge.

AS they listened the cry came again. This time Philip caught in it a note that he had not detected before. It was not a challenge, but the long-drawn ma-too-ee of an Eskimo who answers the inquiring hail of a comrade.

Another sound had drawn Celie back to the door. When she looked in, the man she had stunned with the club was moving. Her call brought Philip, and, placing her in the open door to keep watch, he set swiftly to work to make sure of their prisoner. With the babiche thong he had taken from his enemies, he bound him, hand and foot. A shaft of light fell full on the giant's face and naked chest where it had been laid bare in the struggle, and Philip was about to rise when a purplish patch of tattooing caught his eyes. He made out the almost invisible letters of a name. He made them out one by one—B-l-a-k-e. Before the surname was the letter G.

"Blake," he repeated, rising to his feet. "George Blake—a sailor—and a white man!"

Blake, returning to consciousness, mumbled incoherently. In the same instant Celie cried out excitedly at the door:

Oo-ee, Philip—Philip! Se det! Se! Se!"

She drew back with a sudden movement and pointed out of the door. Concealing himself as much as possible from outside observation, Philip peered forth. Not more than a hundred and fifty yards away, a dog team was approaching. There were eight dogs, and instantly he recognized them as the small fox-faced Eskimo breed from the coast. They were dragging a heavily laden sledge.

From the floor came a groan, and for an instant Philip turned to find Blake's bloodshot eyes wide open and staring at him. In that same moment Philip caught a glimpse of Celie. She too was staring—at Blake. For the first time, she saw Blake's face with the light full upon it. Her lips were parted; her eyes were big with amazement; and as she looked she clutched her hands convulsively at her breast and uttered a low, strange cry. At the sound of her cry Blake's eyes went to her, and for the space of a second the imprisoned beast on the floor and the girl looking down on him made up a tableau that held Philip spellbound.

Swift as a flash, Philip thrust the muzzle of the big Colt against his prisoner's head.

"Make a sound and you're a dead man, Blake!" he warned. "We need that team, and if you so much as whisper during the next ten seconds I'll scatter your brains over the floor!"

They could hear the cold creak of the sledge-runners, and a moment later the patter of many feet out in the snow. In a single leap Philip was at the door. Another, and he was outside; and an amazed Eskimo was looking into the round black eye of his revolver. It required no common language to make him understand what was required of him. He backed into the cabin, with the revolver within two feet of his breast.

Celie had caught up the rifle, and was

standing guard over Blake as if fearful that he might snap his bonds. Philip laughed joyously when he saw how quickly she understood that she was to level the rifle at the Kogmollock's breast and hold it there until he had made him a prisoner.

From the floor Blake had noticed that her little white finger was pressing gently against the trigger of the rifle. It had made him shudder. It made the Eskimo cringe a bit now as Philip tied his hands behind him.

It was over inside of two minutes, and with an audible sigh of relief she lowered her rifle. Then she leaned it against the wall and ran to Blake. From her Philip looked at Blake. The look in the prisoner's face sent a cold shiver through him. There was no fear in it. It was filled with a deep and undisguised exultation. Then Blake looked at Philip, and laughed outright.

"Can't understand her, eh?" he chuckled. "Well, neither can I. But I know what she's trying to tell you. Damned funny, ain't it?"

It was impossible for him to keep his eyes from shifting to the door. There was expectancy in that glance. "Then his glance shot almost fiercely at Philip.

"So you're Philip Brant, of the R. N. M. P., eh? Well, you've got me guessed out. My name is Blake, but the G don't stand for George. If you'll cut the cord off'n my legs so I can stand up or sit down, I'll tell you something. I can't do very much damage with my hands hitched the way they are, and I can't talk layin' down, 'cause of my Adam's apple chokin' me."

Philip seized the rifle and placed it again in Celie's hands, stationing her once more at the door.

"Watch—and listen," he said.

He cut the thongs that bound his prisoner's ankles, and Blake struggled to his feet. When he fronted Philip, the big Colt was covering his heart.

"Now—talk!" commanded Philip. "You've brought the Eskimos down. What do you want of this girl, and what have you done with her people?"

He had never looked into the eyes of a cooler man than Blake.

"I ain't built to be frightened," he said, taking his time about it. "I know your little games, an' I've throwed a good many bluffs of my own in my time. You're lyin' when you say you'll shoot, an' you know you are. I may talk and I may not. Before I make up my mind I'm going to give you a bit of brotherly advice. Take that team out there and hit across the barren—alone. Understand? Alone. Leave the girl here. It's your one chance of missing what happened to—"

He grinned and shrugged his huge shoulders.

"You mean Anderson—Olaf Anderson—and the others up at Bathurst Inlet?" questioned Philip chokingly.

Blake nodded.

Philip wondered if the other could hear the pounding of his heart. He had discovered in this moment what the Department had been trying to learn for two years. It was this man—Blake—who was the mysterious white leader of the Kogmollocks, and responsible for the growing criminal record of the natives along Coronation Gulf. And he had just confessed himself the murderer of Olaf Anderson! His finger trembled for an instant against the trigger of his revolver. Then, staring into Blake's face, he slowly lowered the weapon until it hung at his side. Blake's eyes gleamed as he saw what he thought was his triumph.

"It's your one chance," he urged. "And there ain't no time to lose."

Philip had judged his man, and now he prayed for the precious minutes in which to play out his game.

"Maybe you're right, Blake," he said hesitatingly. "I think, after her experience with Bram Johnson, that she is about willing to return to her father. Where is he?"

Blake made no effort to disguise his eagerness. In the droop of Philip's shoulder, the laxness of the hand that held the revolver, and the change in his voice, Blake saw in his captor an apparent desire to get out of the mess he was in. A glimpse of Celie's frightened face, turned for an instant, gave weight to his conviction.

"He's down the Coppermine—about a hundred miles. So Bram Johnson—"

His eyes were a sudden blaze of fire.

"Took care of her until your little rats waylaid him on the trail and murdered him," interrupted Philip. "See here, Blake. You be square with me and I'll be square with you. Tell me who she is, and why you haven't killed her father, and what you're going to do with her, and I won't waste another minute."

Blake leaned forward until Philip felt the heat of his breath.

"What do I want of her?" he demanded slowly. "Why, if you'd been five years without sight of a white woman, an' then you woke up one morning to meet an angel like her on the train two thousand miles up in nowhere, what would you want of her? I was stunned, plumb stunned, or I'd had her then. And after that, if it hadn't been for that devil with his wolves—"

"Bram ran away with her just as you were about to get her into your hands," supplied Philip, fighting to save time. "She didn't even know that you wanted her, Blake, so far as I can find out. It's all a mystery to her. I don't believe she's guessed the truth even now. How the devil did you do it? Playing the friend stunt—eh? And keeping yourself in the background while your Kogmollocks did the work? Was that it?

Blake nodded. His face was darkening as he looked at Philip, and the light in his eyes was changing to a deep and steady glare. In that moment Philip had failed to keep the exultation out of his voice.

In that interval Philip spoke.

"If I never sent up a real prayer to God before, I'm sending it now, Blake," he said. "I'm thanking Him that Bram Johnson had a soul in his body in spite of his warped brain and his misshapen carcass. And now I'm going to keep my word. I'm not going to lose another minute. Come!"

"You—you mean—"

"No, you haven't guessed it. We're not going over the barren. We're going back to that cabin on the Coppermine, and you're going with us. Do I make myself clear? I'll shoot you deader than a salt mackerel the instant one of your little murderers shows up on the trail. So tell this owl-faced heathen here to spread the glad tidings when his brothers come in—and spread it good. Quick about it! I'm not bluffing now."

IN Philip's eyes Blake saw his match now—and more. For three quarters of a minute he talked swiftly to the Eskimo. Philip knew that he was giving the Kogmollock definite instructions as to the manner in which his rescue must he accomplished. But he knew also that Blake would emphasize the fact that it must not be in open attack, no matter how numerous his followers might be.

He hurried Blake through the door to the sledge and team. The sledge was heavily laden with the meat of a fresh caribou kill, and from the quantity of flesh he dragged off into the snow Philip surmised that the cabin would very soon be the rendezvous of a small army of Eskimos. Retaining only a single quarter of this, he made Celie comfortable and turned his attention to Blake. With babiche cord he re-secured his prisoner with the "manacle-hitch," which gave him free play of one hand and arm—his left. Then he secured the Eskimo's whip, and gave it to Blake.

"Now drive!" he commanded. "Straight for the Coppermine, and by the shortest

---

cut. The moment I see a sign of anything wrong, you're a dead man!"

"And you—are a fool!" gritted Blake. "Good God, what a fool!"

"Drive—and shut up!"

Blake snapped his whip and gave a short, angry command in Eskimo.

"Blake's right—I'm a fool," Philip cried down at Celie in a low voice that thrilled with his worship of her. "I'm a fool for risking you, sweetheart. By going the other way I'd have you forever. Maybe you don't realize what we're doing by hitting back to that father of yours. Do you?"

She smiled.

"And maybe when we get there we'll find him dead," he added. "Dead or alive, everything is up to Blake now, and you must help me watch him."

They were following the trail already made by the meat-laden sledge, and the direction was northwest. It was evident that Blake was heading in the right direction, and Philip believed that it would be but a short time before they would strike the Coppermine.

Where the forest thinned out and the edge of the barren crept in, Philip ran at Celie's side; but when the timber thickened and possible hiding places for their enemies appeared in the trail ahead, he was always close to Blake, with the Colt held openly in his hand. At these times Celie watched the back trail. For three quarters of an hour they had followed the single sledge trail, when Blake suddenly gave a command that stopped the dogs. Blake pointed toward the timber. Out of it was rising a dark column of resinous smoke.

"It's up to you," he said coolly to Philip. "Our trail crosses through that timber—and you see the smoke. I imagine there are about twenty of Upi's men there, feeding on caribou. Now, if we go on they're most likely to see us or their dogs get wind of us—and Upi is a bloodthirsty old cutthroat. I don't want that bullet through my gizzard, so I'm tellin' you."

Far back in Blake's eyes lurked a gleam that Philip did not like.

He came a step nearer, and said in a lower voice:

"Brant, that's just one of Upi's crowds. If you go on to the cabin we're heading for, there'll be two hundred fighting men after you before the day is over, and they'll get you whether you kill me or not. Give me the girl—an' you hit out across the barren with the team."

"We're going on," replied Philip, meeting the other's gaze steadily. "You know your little murderers, Blake. If any one can get past them without being seen, it's you. And you've got to do it. I'll kill you if you don't. The Eskimo may get us after that, but they won't harm her. Understand?"

With a grunt and a shrug of his shoulders, Blake stirred up the dogs with a crack of his whip, and struck out at their head due west.

After a long silence Blake suddenly pointed ahead over an open plain and said:

"There is the Coppermine."

A CRY from Celie turned his gaze from the broad white trail of ice that was the Coppermine, and as he looked she pointed eagerly toward a huge pinnacle of rock that rose like an oddly placed cenotaph out of the unbroken plain.

"She's tellin' you that Bram Johnson brought her this way," Blake chuckled. "Bram was a fool—like you!"

He seemed not to expect a reply from Philip, but urged the dogs down the slope into the plain. Fifteen minutes later they were on the surface of the river.

Philip watched Blake—watched him more and more closely as they buried themselves deeper in that unending chaos of the north. And Blake, it seemed to him, was unconscious of that increasing watchfulness. He increased his speed. They were traveling side by side when he suddenly laughed. There was an unmistakable irony in his voice when he said:

"It's funny, Brant, that I should like you, ain't it? A man who's mauled you an' threatened to kill you! I guess it's because I'm so cussed sorry for you. You're

heading straight for the gates of hell, an' they're open—wide open.'

"And you?"

This time Blake's laugh was harsher.

"I don't count—now," he said. "I guess you're thinking I can hold Upi's tribe back. Well, I can't—not when you're getting this far up in their country. If we split the difference, and you gave me her, Upi would meet me half way. God, but you've spoiled a nice dream!

"A dream?"

Blake uttered a command to the dogs.

"Yes—more'n that. I've got an igloo up there even finer than Upi's—all built of whalebone and ship's timbers. Think of her in that, Brant—with me! That's the dream you smashed!"

"And her father—and the others—"

"Don't you know how these Kogmollock heathen look on a father-in-law?" he asked. "He's sort of walkin' delegate over the whole bloomin' family. A god with two legs. The others? Why, we killed them. But Upi and his heathen wouldn't see anything happen to the old man when they found I was going to take the girl. That's why he's alive up there in the cabin now. Lord, what a mess you're heading into, Brant! And I'm wondering, after you kill me and they kill you, who'll have the girl? There's a half-breed in the tribe, an' she'll probably go to him. The heathen themselves don't give a flip for women, you know. So it's certain to be the half-breed."

For several hours after this brief fit of talking, Blake made no effort to resume the conversation, nor did he show any desire to answer Philip when the latter spoke to him. A number of times it struck Philip that he was going the pace that would tire out both man and beast before night.

By three o'clock in the afternoon they were thirty-five miles from the cabin in which Blake had become a prisoner. All that distance they had traveled through a treeless barren without a sign of life. It was between three and four when they began to strike timber once more. In places the spruce and banskian pine thickened until they formed dark walls of forest; and whenever they approached these patches Philip commanded Blake to take the middle of the river. The width of the stream was a comforting protection. From the possible ambuscades they passed only a rifle could be used effectively; and whenever there appeared to be the possibility of that danger Philip traveled close to Blake, with the revolver in his hand. The crack of a rifle, even if the bullet should find its way home, meant Blake's life.

For an hour before the gray dusk of Arctic night began to gather about them, Philip began to feel the effect of their strenuous pace. Since middle afternoon the dogs had dragged at times in their traces. Blake alone seemed tireless.

It was six o'clock when they entered a country that was mostly plain, with a thin fringe of timber along the shores. They had raced for nine hours, and had traveled fifty miles. It was here, in a wide reach of river, that Philip gave the command to halt.

His first caution was to secure Blake, hand and foot, with his back resting against a frozen snow hummock a dozen paces from the sledge. The fire he built was small, and concealed as much as possible by the sledge. Ten minutes sufficed to cook the meat for their supper. Then he stamped out the fire, fed the dogs, and made a nest of bearskins for himself and Celie, facing Blake.

In the darkness he drew Celie close up into his arms. Her head lay on his breast. He buried his lips in the smothering sweetness of her hair, and her arms crept around his neck. Even then he did not take his eyes from Blake.

After a little he observed that Blake's head was drooping upon his chest, and that his breathing had become deeper. And Celie, nestling on his breast, was soon in slumber. He alone was awake—and watching.

And then Philip found himself fighting—fighting desperately to keep awake. Again and again his eyes closed, and he forced them open with an effort. Two hours were gone when, for the twentieth time, his eyes shot open and he looked at Blake. The outlaw had not moved. His head hung still lower on his breast, and again—slowly—irresistibly—exhaustion closed Philip's eyes.

Suddenly his eyes opened, and he stared in a dazed way toward Blake. The night was still. A dozen paces from him was the snow hummock.

But Blake—Blake—

His heart leaped into his throat.

Blake was gone!

(To be concluded next week)

Here Ends
Nothing Else Matters

"Lad," said Scott one morning, in the little yard office, "book these forty tickets till I go down and see if the cars are on Twenty-eight. Can you clean them up till I get back?"

"Yours truly," clicked back Dick.

Scott had not been gone twenty minutes, however, when a detonation as abrupt and hard as a near-by clap of thunder, but deeper and heavier, seemingly from the ground, rocked the little office. Dick and his companions glanced dumbly at each other and hurried to the door. A pall of smoke was lifting down near Number Seven ladder.

After a moment's stare the other bookers started to run. Dick thought they merely intended circling around to get a better view of what had happened. He itched to follow, but remembered the tickets. He looked back. He had only a few. He ran to his table. Without sitting down, he bent hurriedly over it and scribbled away. They went fast. There was just one more line to fill in, when a second, nearer explosion occurred.

He straightened up instinctively, paling. The next moment, almost at his window, there were two nearly simultaneous crashes. A solid tongue of fire licked in through the window-sashes. The frame walls of the little office, together with the roof, seemed to lift from their fastenings and then fall upon him.

FOR an interminable time, it seemed, Dick lay powerless in the dark. Tons must be resting on him. They pressed him hardest at his left ankle, his left forearm, and his head just where the hair began. Every moment he expected to hear his arm or ankle crack or feel the bones of his head give away. The only things he could stir were his eyelids, his jaw and tongue, and his right hand.

Up to this time the air he had been able to suck up into his nostrils had been hot but pure. Now he began to smell a rich seasoned smoke like oak in a fireplace and a dry pungent something that tasted like the Fourth of July. And, instead of darkness, a dull red reflection flickered from somewhere before his eyes. He wondered how soon the fire would get to him. Then a growing numbness at his head and body overtook him.

When he came to, he was lying in the goldenrod at the upper side of the yard. A ragged stick of car-board, with the letter P painted in white on its red surface, stood upright in the sod a few feet away, like a javelin thrown there by a giant. The tall dry grass and goldenrod shut off his view farther, but he could see a twisted ear-frame to the right, and great quantities of smoke pouring up from about the center of the yard. He twisted his aching neck so he could see the person who had a hand on his forehead. It was Scott, hatless, coatless, his white shirt streaked with soot.

"What happened?" asked Dick weakly, trying to smile.

"They cut off one car of high explosives too many. They dropped it down on Number Seven, the only track I had open where the car could stand by itself. But the rider didn't get it stopped on Number Seven. He says its brakes wouldn't take hold. It went plumb through the ladder into a flat loaded with bridge iron."

"Jimmy!" whispered Dick.

"A beam of bridge iron stove in the end of the box-car. The boxes of dynamite did the rest. A car of black powder the night people had dropped down was standing on Number Four, and two more on Number Two. Those four cars didn't do a thing to the yard—smashed things up all the way from the running track to Sixteen ladder. The two cars on Number Two were what hit you. The office is about a barrelful of ashes."

Dick's face was grave.

"What can I say to you for getting me out?"

"Not much to me," said Scott. "I was away down on Twenty-eight when the first crack came. Till I got half way up the third one had happened, and when I got to where the office used to be, I saw it was knocked half way over to the ditch nearly as flat as a pancake. Right in there, pulling up burning boards with her bare hands, was Rhoda. The boys said she came running up just before me. They told her they thought you were still in. Then they said she jumped in the ditch and ducked water all over herself, and before they could grab her she went in over the fire. The rest of us followed suit. But she had got to you when we got there, and we were only good to carry you out."

Dick twisted his neck, trying vainly to find her.

"She isn't here," explained Scott. "Doc Metzger said you were all right except for bunging you up a bit and singeing off your eyebrows and some of your hair. So he took her up in his machine to dress her hands. Where she took hold of those burning boards they look like frizzled dry beef."

Dick tried to sit up.

"I never told you, Mr. Scott," he announced tremblingly. "But I love your daughter. She's the most wonderful girl in the world, just like my mother was."

The yard-master was sober.

"The little girl went through hell for you," he agreed gently.

"I loved her before that," Dick answered.

In a day or two Dick heard a persistent rumor that Scott was going to be prosecuted by the railroad company for criminal neglect in handling high explosives contrary to rules. When the assistant yard-master left on Sixty-nine for the investigation in the general manager's office at Reading, Dick said nothing. But he hobbled to the Rutherwood bank, and then hobbled to the yellow Scott house. On Number Eleven, he and Rhoda went to Reading, Rhoda as gray as a mouse, her white-bandaged hands motionless in her lap. She also had heard the rumors.

At the Reading station Dick guided her upstairs to a door lettered "General Manager." Rhoda read the words with sobered eyes. She asked no questions.

Inside, Carson, the general manager's chief clerk, rushed forward in surprise.

"We're going to sit down here a few moments, if we may," said Dick in a low voice, paying no further attention to Carson, who backed to his desk uncertainly.

DICK had chosen chairs from which they could look into his father's private office. Through the doorway the backs of five or six men were visible. Dick saw Hocking, the Harrisville division superintendent, another man who was probably the division train-master, and the four Rutherwood yard-masters. Nearly all were smoking. The big broad desk of the general manager was partially in view, but the man behind it could not be seen, except for a hand which at moments wandered restlessly across the desk.

For nearly half an hour Dick listened to the report of the division superintendent, whom the yard-masters, excepting Scott, would from time to time interrupt to amend or agree with. Quietly Scott sat in his chair, a red spot burning in the cheek turned toward the door. At last there was a throaty cigar cough.

"It seems to me, Scott, that for letting your men cut off cars of high explosives as well as letting them place such cars on tracks with any sort of car, all contrary to distinct rulings, mere discharge would be rather light for you, especially so since I understand that you contemplate leaving the company's employ. Can you give me reasons why this company should not institute criminal suit against you?"

Scott got to his feet slowly. Dick could still see the flush in the cheek turned toward them.

"It never sounded well to me," pleaded the assistant yard-master, "for a man to exonerate himself by blaming others. Perhaps Mr. Whitman or Mr. Olson or Mr. Leffler will explain what I mean."

The three men referred to looked up coolly.

"I think Mr. Hocking covered the subject thoroughly," stated Whitman.

"I can't think of anything else," said Olson.

"Nor I," added Leffler.

"You will have to make a more definite and tangible statement than that," observed the general manager to Scott.

Scott's cheek had gone a dull white.

"Just at present I have nothing to say," he said quietly, sitting down.

THE next moment Dick jumped to his feet and hobbled into the room, closing the door behind him.

"I have!" he announced.

His father half rose from his chair in surprise. Then he sank back, nervously pulling at his mustache.

"What do you know about this?" he queried. His mouth twitched once or twice.

"I know," said Dick warmly, "that this man Scott never placed a car of high explosives anywhere except on a track by itself. Instead he kicked for more than a year to Whitman and the night people, who absolutely made a practice of placing high explosives against a car or prop or piping or one without a steel underframe."

"That's utterly ridiculous," snorted Whitman.

"The conductor's books on the hump will prove it," said Dick.

No one answered that.

"I also know," he went on, "that ever since Scott has been with this railroad company he has tried to get the chief day yard-master to stop the night and day yard-men from cutting off high explosives; but Whitman and Olson said they couldn't bother to make the men take the time to back all the high explosives that were going through the last three years."

Olson started to say something, but Dick cut him off.

"I also know that when this man Scott came to Rutherwood from the W. & N. three years ago, he told Whitman the yard ought to have the very changes that Whitman a couple months ago gave you as if they were his own—the plans he's to he promoted for. They were good enough for Whitman when you sent word that something had to be done to move more cars; but three years before that they were so worthless that he told Scott to mind his own business, which was to run the Eastbound yard.

"For three years these men who call themselves yard-masters have been letting an average of ten crews be held up in the yard for an hour apiece every twenty-four hours. Count two dollars and a quarter an hour for the crew, and a hundred dollars for the tie-up of your engine and cars, and multiply it by three years, and you have one million one hundred and twenty thousand dollars—what these three yard-masters turned their backs on saving for the company that paid them to work for it.

"I respectfully agree that criminal suit be started against somebody; but the name should be changed from W. K. Scott to Walter Whitman, the chief day yard-master at the Rutherwood yard."

"You must not take this boy seriously, Mr. Farr," declared Whitman, rising to his feet nervously. "He is one of Scott's toadies. A few months ago he was a hobo. He came to me for work, and I turned him down. That's probably why he's sore at me. I wouldn't have trusted him thirty yards. But he appealed to Scott as one of his own kind, and Scott picked him up. I leave it to you to judge whether or not he talks like a liar."

"No," said the general manager of the Eastern Railroad; "he never was a liar."

"But you don't know him like we do," persisted Whitman sharply. "If you had seen him three or four months ago, when I did—"

"I saw him twenty-four years ago," interrupted the general manager quietly. "He's my son."

He took a fresh cigar from the open box on his desk and bit off the end cleanly.

Then he coughed, his throaty cigar cough.

"We'll adjourn this investigation until to-morrow. By that time I hope to be better able to mention the one of us who will be named in the company's criminal suit. All of you kindly be here promptly at two o'clock to-morrow afternoon."

He stood up, and the men turned to go.

"Wait in the outer office," whispered Dick to Scott; "but don't tell anything to Rhoda. Not a word—remember."

Scott nodded bewilderedly. As the latch clicked behind him, Dick took a package of Rutherwood bank bills from his inside pocket, and laid it in front of his father on the big desk.

"If there's any interest on that hundred and ten you made good at the bank for me, I want to pay it," he said. Then he looked soberly at the floor. "I don't know whether you're interested in me any more, but I want to tell you that I found you were right about getting mother's kind of a girl."

The general manager of the Eastern Railroad laid down his cigar and silently gripped his son's hand.

"I've got her, too," Dick added. "You know you told me it didn't matter if she cursed or swore or ate with her knife or drank coffee out of her saucer or never saw the inside of a school a day in her life—just so she'd go through hell for me, you said."

His father did not flinch.

"Nothing else matters very much, son," he said steadily. "You can help make the other things right."

"She's out here now," declared Dick softly. "I'll bring her in. You won't be ashamed, no matter how she dresses or talks?"

If you're sure she would go through hell for you, I know I'll be proud of her," said his father firmly.

"I don't have to be sure. She's already gone through hell for me," said Dick. Then he told his story.

WHEN Rhoda came in, the general manager of the Eastern Railroad silently noted her well set head, her quiet gray eyes, her slim tailored suit, and her simple speech and carriage. He took both bandaged hands tenderly into his own.

"You'll never know how I feel to have a daughter like you," he said.

"And this," cried Dick happily, dragging up Scott, "is Rhoda's father—and, excepting you, the brainiest railroad man on the Eastern."

"If what this youngster says is half true," remarked the general manager, "I know where for three years we've been hiding a superintendent under a bushel."

Wait a Day or Two Before Mailing Your Complaint

Mail trains—like freight and passenger trains—are often late these days. It's part of the price of war.

Therefore don't sit right down immediately and write to us if your copy of EVERY WEEK does not arrive at the hour when you expect it. Wait twenty-four hours, or better forty-eight. The chances are that it's safely on its way to you, but delayed by the enormous pressure of traffic incident to the war.

What Aunt Abbie Has Coming

By SEWELL FORD

"WELL, Miss?" says I, throwin' it over my shoulder sort of crisp and important.

Not that I was tryin' to be any more like a crab than usual, but just to give her the quick hunch that she's pushed through the wrong door.

You'd 'most think, with a sign on the door in big black letters, that women would have better sense than to come crashin' into a physical culture studio at all hours. Most of 'em do, too, but there are enough who don't to make it interestin'—stray stenographers trailin' down new jobs, and young ladies collectin' for various war funds, or huntin' for Mme. Riley, the corsetière, whose place is across the street. But generally they dash out again about as quick as they dodge in, mostly without stoppin' to explain, specially if Swifty happens to be loafin' around the front office in his low-cut gym suit.

Not this one, though. Instead of retreatin' panicky, or even answerin' my snappy hail, she stands there quiet, sizin' us both up. She's a high, skimpy built party, with a waist about a yard long and a neck like a turkey. Maybe she wasn't six feet, but she didn't lack much of it. Her cheek-bones are kind of prominent; likewise her upper front teeth; and one of her eyes don't exactly track with the other.

"Yes?" I goes on, winkin' humorous at Swifty. "What'll it be?"

At that she comes out of the spell. "How do I find Mr. Zubel?" she demands.

And say, hearin' this deep, full voice come from that skinny throat almost gives me the jumps. It's so unexpected.

"Eh?" says I. "The Honorable Abe Zubel? His offices are on the next floor up."

"I know," says she. "And I suppose he is in them somewhere. But how does one get past that frowzy-headed person in the outer room?"

I hunches my shoulders careless.

"It's by me," says I. "What I don't know about theatrical managers in general and Mr. Abe Zubel in particular is amazin'. I've always understood, though, that they were shy birds. And as that's the limit of my valuable information, why—"

Here I waves invitin' towards the fresh air.

She hadn't come in to be shunted out with a mere wave of the hand, though. She only steps up nearer the desk.

"You're Professor McCabe, aren't you?" she asks.

"You've guessed it," says I.

"Then, with rooms right on the next floor to his," she goes on, "you ought to know of some way that I could get to see him."

"Young lady," I protests, "didn't I—"

"Tuttle is my name," she cuts in. "Pansy Tuttle."

Course that chokes off the sarcastic remark I was about to spring. For, while she says it quiet and easy enough, some way she makes you stop and listen to her.

"Oh, yes," says I. "Pansy Tuttle, eh? You did say Pansy, didn't you?"

She nods.

"Hollyhock would have suited better, I suppose," says she, "but I was quite small when they chose Pansy. Go on; smile. I'm quite used to it.

"I've spent nearly a week tryin' to get in touch with Mr. Zubel," she goes on, "and now somebody must help."

"But why me?" says I.

"Why not you?" asks Pansy.

That brings out a snicker from Swifty.

"Young lady—" says I.

"Tuttle," says she.

"Well, then, Miss Tuttle," I begins again, "maybe it ain't occurred to you that I might have something better to do than—"

"You don't seem remarkably busy," says she, glancin' at my elevated heels.

"Camouflage," says I.

"If you mean you're only pretending not to be busy, you do it very well," says she. "But surely it wouldn't take you long to suggest some way that—"

"See here!" says I. "If Zubel don't want to see you, I can't think of any way you can make him."

"Then," says Miss "Tuttle, settlin' back in her chair, "I shall wait here until you do."

"Wha-a-a-at!" I gasps.

"Oh, you will have a splendid idea presently," says she.

"Say, what is this, a siege?" says I.

She nods and favors me with a quirky smile. It's about as folksy and chummy a smile as I ever saw executed. And say, when she does it that face of hers changes so you'd hardly know her for the same party.

"Tryin' to land a typist's job with him, eh?" I asks.

"Oh, no," says Miss Tuttle. "Mr. Zubel is engaging people for a new musical review. I want a place in the chorus."

"You—you do?" says I, gawpin' at her.

COURSE, driftin' up and down the stairs, I see some odd specimens that are candidates for the hi-yi-yip ranks. But this Miss Pansy Tuttle looks about as much like a chorus girl recruit as I do like a lounge lizard. She's the kind that would be safe anywhere.

"Say," I goes on, "where'd you drift in from, anyway?"

"Cohasset," says she.

"Co-which?" says I. "Eh? Oh, yes! Is it in Indiana or Maine?"

"Massachusetts," says Pansy.

"Good!" says I. In that case you can be home by to-morrow morning."

Pansy smiles and shakes her head.

"I've left Cohasset forever," says she. "I came to New York to go on the stage, and I mean to do it."

She don't say it cocky or

---

braggy; just states it quiet and determined, like she was tellin' cook how she'd have her eggs.

"Listens like you meant it," says I. "Are you always like that?"

"It's the Tuttle way, I suppose," says she.

"Oh!" says I. "You're from one of them old baked-bean families, eh, such as we read about?"

"We go back far enough, goodness knows," says she. "I have been told that father was a direct descendant from Deacon Jedediah Tuttle, who was expelled from Plymouth colony in sixteen seventy something for taking off his boots in church. We've been doing such things ever since. Father, for instance, was educated for the law; but after losing his first case he never went into his office again. Instead, he started in to make a living as a locksmith and bell-hanger. The village boys used to call him 'Hellbanger Tuttle,' so he had it painted on his cart, and kept it there in defiance of the selectmen, who tried to make him paint it out. And I—well, I'm a Tuttle, you see."

"I get a glimmer," says I. "You got to do something different, too. But why not tackle something easy? Why get the chorus-girl bug?'

Pansy shrugs her shoulders.

"It isn't that I'm stage-struck," says she. "It—it's—well, if you must know, it is the only thing I can do that will really satisfy Aunt Abbie."

Naturally, that leaves me with my mouth open, so Miss Tuttle goes on to explain. This Aunt Abbie was some one she'd been livin' with ever since she was sixteen. She's a well meanin' old girl, Auntie, so far as that goes. She had lots of good points—swell cook, A1 housekeeper, strong on church work, and her plum preserves couldn't be beat. But her tongue-brake wouldn't hold.

"Suppose you had to live with some one," goes on Miss "Tuttle, "who was forever and everlastingly discussing your faults and failures, your weaknesses and your shortcomings? That's what I used to get from Aunt Abbie. Now, I am fully aware that I'm plain, to say the least. Yet it wasn't cheering to he told, at least once every twenty-four hours, that my chin wasn't what it should be, or that the cast in my eye showed plainer when I was tired. And it didn't help to be eternally assured that I was cut out for an old maid."

"Oh, well," says I, "we all have to have relations."

"Aunt Abbie was more than that," says Pansy. "She was an affliction. And the worst of it was that she was not satisfied to say such things to me in private. At sewing circles, at church sociables, at little afternoon gatherings for tea and cake and gossip, I was dished up—oh, yes, rather entertainingly, I admit. 'Yes,' Aunt Abbie would end up with, 'when Pansy gets too old to sing in the choir or give music lessons, she'll open a tea-room in the old house here, and sell braided rugs and bayberry candles to the summer folks.' And they would all nod their heads as if it had been settled.

"But it hasn't. I despise tea-rooms. I loathe bayberry candles. I may have to stay an old maid, but I'm not going to be that kind. Not while I'm a Tuttle. Not while there's any hope of escape. I've gotten this far, anyway. I'm supposed to be visiting a cousin in Portland—and here I am. More than that, here I stay until I have given Aunt Abbie and all her friends something that they can talk about until their jaws ache. So there!"

She straightens back in her chair, smooths the ugly brown plaid dress over her knees with her long fingers, and gives me another of them quirky smiles.

"Miss Tuttle," says I, "I get you. You're out to hand Auntie a jolt, and I guess jumpin' from a church choir into the chorus would do the trick. And all I got to say is, go to it."

"Thank you, Mr. McCabe," says she.

"Still," I adds, "I don't see how I can help you with Abe Zubel. Honest, I don't. For, if you don't mind my sayin' so, you ain't just the style they pick out. He's sure to turn you down."

"Perhaps," says she. "But I want him to hear what I have to say first. It wouldn't hurt him to listen, would it?"

"That's reasonable enough," says I; "but—"

"I'll tell you," breaks in Miss Tuttle. "Send for him to come down here."

"Eh?" says I, gawpin'.

"He knows you, doesn't he? she goes on. "He would think—Well, never mind. He'd come. And that seems to be my only chance. Just think of my having to go back to Aunt Abbie."

"You win," says I. "Hey, Swifty! Go up and tell Zubel that Professor McCabe wants him to come down here right away. If he asks why, give him one of them nobody home looks of yours and do a repeat. Get me?"

Swifty grins, which is a sure sign he's rootin' for Pansy.

SURE enough, too, in a couple of minutes back he comes, towin' Mr. Abe Zubel. For a party who has his name printed so conspicuous on the bill-boards, Abe ain't impressive to view. There's only about five feet one of him up and down, and a little less from east to west. Also, the top of his head is squared off graceful, like the roof of a freight-car, with about as much hair on it. He spots Pansy, sittin' over there by the desk, right off the bat. And just from one glance at the back of her head he seems to work up suspicions.

"Vell?" says he, cockin' his head on one side. "You vant to see me, Professor, and you can't climb the stairs?"

"Not exactly the idea," says I. "It's the young lady."

"Ach!" he snorts. "So you got a friend too? They all got one. Yes, even the bootblack on the corner. But they should see Mr. Werner first. What does he tell her, eh?"

"The one with the frizzly hair?" says I. "Why, he tells her she won't do, I expect. But—"

"No!" roars Abe, explosive. "That's enough. Werner knows. I won't be bothered, I tell you."

With that he turns for a quick exit. But Swifty Joe is quicker. He puts his back against the door. Zubel almost butts into him.

"One side, low-brow!" snaps Abie.

"Ah, why the panic, old slate-roof?" says Swifty, glarin' down at him. "Just come, ain't yer? Can't yer stick an ear out for the lady a minute or so?"

AT which Pansy catches her cue, rejoints herself into her full five feet ten and joins the group.

"Please, Mr. Zubel," she begins, "can't you use me somewhere in your new piece?"

Abie stares at her bug-eyed, takin' in all the details of her build—the juttin' front teeth, the periscope neck effect, and so on.

"You?" he gurgles throaty. "Use you? Am I bug-house completely? No, no, no!"

"But why couldn't you?" asks Miss Tuttle, steady and quiet.

I knew about what was comin' then. I'd heard more or less of how rough Zubel was with his show people, specially women.

"Why?" he snarls, rollin' his eyes and workin' his heavy jaws. "Young woman, one of the songs we're going to do calls for the whole chorus as diving Venuses. Vell? How would you look as a diving Venus? Hey? You'd be a joke."

"Aren't you looking for jokes?" she asks. "It strikes me that as a diving Venus I—"

With that, she hunches up one shoulder, sticks her long arms out awkward, with her fingers spread, and throws him one of her reverse-English smiles.

And I'll bet that Zubel himself couldn't tell you now what crisp come-back he was about to counter with. For he never got it out. Just then we hears this spluttery, choky sound over by the door.

It comes from Swifty Joe. You might think he was havin' a fit, but he's only

---

registerin' mirth. Pansy had scored her first hit.

Another thing I've heard about Abe Zubel is that he's the sportiest plunger of the whole producin' bunch. I forget whether it's four or five really new acts that have been tried out in musical shows durin' the past ten years. Anyway, they credit Abie with havin' been the first to take a chance on most of 'em. He may be no mental Colossus, but he's a shifty thinker. Them restless little shoe-button eyes of his flashes back and forth between Swifty and Miss Tuttle only a couple of times before he's made the connection.

"Hah!" says he. "Hold it! Now, that business from the side of your mouth again. Good! Very good! It would get over. Yes. But it would be in the wrong place. It isn't a funny song."

"That's too bad, isn't it?" says Pansy.

"No!" snaps Zubel. "It don't matter. Not at all. The words— Bah! We can make 'em funny. The music, too. It's only the costumes that cost, and they're all ordered. But see here: can you sing?"

"I make my living that way," says Pansy.

"Let's hear," demands Zubel. "Oh, anything—la-la-la."

She's right there with the vocal stuff, Miss Tuttle. And with a speedy performance, too. Never even plays for an openin', but takes him at his word and proceeds to trill out the la-la-la's, trippin' light across the floor as she does it, and almost throwin' Swifty into another convulsion by that burlesque finish of hers.

"Fine!" roars Zubel, clappin' his fat hands. "We'll have that Venus song changed to a comic, and we'll use it to close the second act. You'll do it in black silk Annettes, as a solo, with forty show girls in white as a background, and if it ain't a sure-fire skookum, then I don't know a pinochle deck from a cheese sandwich. Come! I want you to meet Mr. Werner."

AND say, I guess Abie's picked another winner. The other day he breezes in with this bulletin about the try-out in Troy.

"Honest," says Abie, tappin' me enthusiastic on the chest, "she's a female De Wolf Hopper. Funny! Why, they begin to laugh so soon as she comes on. And they never stop. I've got to fill in a week in Boston with her, and then—Broadway for a two-year run."

"Boston first, eh?" says I. "But say, does she really wear them—er—that—"

"Wait!" says Abie. "I'll send you down the new two-sheet of her in costume. It's a perfect likeness."

Swifty Joe was stretchin' his neck over my shoulder when I unrolled the poster.

"Swifty," says I, doin' it up hasty, "run out and get me a map of Massachusetts."

"Map?" says he. "What's the idea?"

"Why," says I, "seein' how Pansy's usin' her own name and all makes it interestin' to locate Aunt Abbie. I want to see how near Tremont Street this Cohasset place is."

Yes, we saw. Just a trolley ride out. And now I'm figurin' if it wouldn't be worth while takin' the trip, just on the chance of spottin' Auntie at a matinée.

New Hope for Middle Age

concluded from page 5

that the percentage is not worth considering. The causes that I have to consider most often are ignorance of the value of a dollar, the curse of following the will-o'-the-wisp of politics, physical ills, the garrulous boss, domestic troubles,—particularly ungrateful sons and daughters who had been depended on in trouble,—the lack of keeping abreast of the times, and the scourge of a timid heart."

The scourge of a timid heart! It is Mr. Gannon's phrase for the greatest difficulty he has to combat. It is because this Employment Bureau of the Employers' Association of Chicago, under his direction, sets itself so definitely to fight that scourge, and is so successful in its struggle, that its work is winning the widest report. Many individuals and many corporations have philanthropically given work to men past forty-five; but none of which I have heard has made the regulated, systematic, successful effort of this bureau to raise the morale of men past their youth.

As soon as a discouraged or despairing man enters the door of the offices—indeed, before he is well in—he sees before him a stanza of Mr. Cannon's, printed in large letters that the dimmest eye can read:

Smile through all your worry and pain;
Brace up! You have not lived in vain;
Hold yourself with a strong, tight rein;
Say to yourself, "I'm young again."

The 72-Year-Old Bookkeeper Gets a Job

IT is impossible here, of course, even to outline any considerable number of individual experiences of men placed by the Employers' Association of Chicago; but it is possible to say that there has been a great scattering of the scourge of the timid heart—the timid heart of the employer afraid to try out an old man as well as the timid heart of the man who has lost confidence in himself after many rebuffs; and the figures, which speak for themselves, that every one is profiting.

One concern that employed a 72-year-old bookkeeper sent by the bureau—and did it first in a spirit of philanthropy— soon wrote in that the man had installed new systems of such decided merit that they were raising his salary. Another large company, employing thousands of men, volunteers its "desire to express satisfaction and appreciation for the character of applicants for employment you have sent. We will, in the future, give special and preferred attention to all you send over to us."

The next sheet in the files is a letter from a concern employing a night force of thirty-five stock and freight shifters which gave great trouble and were constantly quitting work until the concern, sending in a requsition for a new superintendent, found the man among the unemployed over forty-five.

There is reason for the morale of men, though past forty-five and unemployed, improving! And there never was a time when all people—the general public as well as employers—had as great a stake as now in further raising that morale everywhere. "As a man thinks, so is he." Make a man think he is down and out if he has not succceded at a certain age, and you certainly make it extremely difficult for him to succeed. It is the tritest of truisms that we are embarrassed by a labor shortage, and that the whole world faces a man famine after the war.

We can not further call upon our youth to make up the shortage without further sacrificing the future. We are calling out our women to a greater and greater degree. With the proper restrictions, that undoubtedly is good. But one of the greatest advantages that may yet accrue from the present situation may he the discovery and the full utilization of the work of men who have come to think of themselves as "through" because we have been ignorant or careless enough to think them so—the tens and hundreds of thousands of men past their youth who are either not employed at all or who have been put at employment inferior to their real strength and capacities. There is gain and advancement not only for them but for all who will merely believe in the ability of men to go far forward even after forty-five!

THE EDITOR ANSWERS

FIVE or six weeks ago New York woke up to find itself deluged by the hardest rain of years. Garage roofs blew off; houses that had never leaked before leaked good and plenty: and no sort of protection could keep a man really dry.

Of the men in the city who could "afford to take things a bit easier," as the saying goes, I venture to guess that ninety per cent looked out of the window and decided that it was a very good day to take things just that way. I managed to get down to work after a while, and at luncheon time scurried across to a little restaurant near the office. And we had hardly seated ourself before there arrived another young man, with white flowing whiskers. I looked up and discovered Dr. Lyman Abbott.

I thought, as I looked at him, of the article which he wrote for this magazine on being young and well at fourscore. I remembered that he said in it that, even now, he had a great ambition to ride in an aëroplane.

Eighty-two, and wanting to ride in an aëroplane! Eighty-two, and down to work in the deluge. What an object lesson for the roan who at forty is satisfied with life, for whom life holds no new mysteries, no stimulus to curiosity and expectation. "Most men," said William James,—and I have quoted it many times,—"most men are old fogies at twenty-five." Is anything more to be desired than this—that a man should keep his mind so alert, his interest in life so clean-cut and polished, that, even when death catches up with him in very old age, it finds him still doing, still young?

Well, with these few reflections, let's see what's in the mail.

From a High School Principal

Dear Editor:

We get mad as an old hen when EVERY WEEK doesn't arrive on time, 'cause it is the "livest" magazine among a bunch of twelve or fifteen that we take.

Fall City, Washington. F. H. B.

Thank you, F. H. B. And, while we're on the subject, let me say that we have finally got our machinery moved into our own big new plant, and you're going to get EVERY WEEK on time every week from now on. If you don't get it, don't bother with these circulation fellows: take it up with me.

Where is Zelienople, Bill?

Dear Friend Bruce:

In this note you will find both a knock and a boost. I am very economical, killing two birds with one stone, as it were. I think your magazine is one hundred per cent pep. But why not make it larger and let us have about a jitney's worth at a time?

The only thing I can knock about old E. W. is that I never get it on time. So start the music, professor, and we will start our knock.

I say, Bruce, you need some juice
Behind your transportation.
You need more speed, for we must read
To be an efficient nation.
Zelienople, Pa. Yours, BILL.

Read the paragraph just above, Bill, for an explanation of the delays in delivery—which, by the way, are a thing of the past. And good luck to you. But where, Bill, is Zelienople?

Some One is Always Taking the Joy Out of Life

Ye Hon. Ed.:

Say! Listen! I've got a "mad on"! You spoiled my best form of recreation by publishing your article on "What your right hand does when you telephone." I had that delightful habit until I read the example; in fact, I had just finished throwing a sheet from my pad into the waste basket. I immediately rescued it, and inclose same herewith. But—the trouble is this: it made me so conscious of this failing that I can not start writing before I think of it. Then the fun quits. What's the use of doing it when you are thinking of how foolish it is?

How do you do it? Get all these little interesting articles, I mean.

Keep it up. Good luck to you and EVERY WEEK.

Chicago. H. A. B.

The Five-Cent Price Wins

Dear Editor:

I asked my news-dealer whether he thought he could sell as many EVERY WEEKS at five cents; and he said that he thought he could sell even more. People hate to bother with pennies, he said; and, besides, the paper is worth the jitney. Why don't you?

CHARLES BERGEN.

We did it, Charles, last week, as you noticed. And there is every evidence that it is going to go big. I've worked around on magazines quite a bit in my life and seen all sorts of editorial mail. There never was a magazine so bad that somebody wouldn't write to it and say, "I couldn't keep house without it." But I honestly never saw mail that in friendliness and enthusiasm equals the kind of letters I get. I tell you, Charles, that if you and the rest will stick along for another year and boost at the news-stands the way you are doing, we'll have something here in 1919 that in bigness and success will surprise you.

Make an E. W. Scrap Book

We have achieved fame at last. An actress has inaugurated a campaign with us as the central feature. Miss Gertrude McCoy is making up scrap books from old copies of EVERY WEEK, and shipping them to the hospitals in France for the entertainment and instruction of the wounded American soldiers.

Readers of the magazine who would like to coöperate in this worthy enterprise are invited to secure a good strong book,—an ordinary ledger or day book is satisfactory,—cut out every other leaf, so that the book will not bulk too large, and fill it with pasted extracts from the magazine.

When completed the books may be sent to Miss Gertrude McCoy, care Hoffman-Foursquare Pictures, 729 Seventh Avenue, New York. Miss McCoy has made arrangements to forward them to France.

On Lunching with Prominent Man

I lunched the other day with a prominent man who was in Paris on the very eve of war. He told me about the tension in the American Embassy at that time. He said that Ambassador Herrick called the German Ambassador on the telephone, and told him—in the language of plain, old-fashioned business, not the language of diplomacy—that what his government was doing would incur the hatred of all mankind.

Think back to those days. Remember that for a period of forty-eight hours or so the fate of the whole world hung on the decision of half a dozen men. Those half dozen could have saved the blood of millions: yes, even one of them could have done it.

When this war is over, we must fix things so that never again can the peace of the world be dangled from the fingers of any little group or any little groups.

He Made the Liberty Motor

A YOUNG engineer hurrying through the executive offices of a motor company in Detroit three years ago stopped fora word with his chief.

"The United States is going to get into this war before it's over," he said.

"I shouldn't be surprised."

"It's up to us to get busy, then," said the energetic young man.

"Of course; but what do you figure on on doing?"

"Building an aëroplane motor."

"What's your idea?"

"Don't know yet, but I'm going to work at it."

Out of that conversation has come the Liberty Motor. Jesse Gurney Vincent is the young engineer. He is one of the two men who made the now famous engine for fighting aircraft hailed by the government board of experts as the most perfect thing of its kind. The other is E. J. Hall, of the Hall-Scott Motor Company of Berkeley, California. Thanks to their work, it was officially announced recently that there are now "no demands of this Government or the Allies that can not be met after next July."

After that talk in the shop Mr. Vincent went to work. He kept at it day and night for nearly three years, and the Packard Motor Company—of which he is vice-president—spent $400,000 on his experiments.

Young Vincent—he is only thirty-eight—puts it all up to hard work. As he looks at it, he was bound to get results if he kept plugging. The fear that his country might go to war with his particular link in the preparedness chain missing only made him work faster. He is an engineer who gained knowledge first in the school of hard experience and backed it up later with hard study.

When he was seventeen Vincent left his father's home and got a job as bookkeeper in a St. Louis store. But that kind of figuring didn't appeal to him, and after a year he quit his white-collar job to put on the flannel shirt and overalls of an apprentice in a machine shop. He became an expert machinist and toolmaker, and in 1902 the Universal Adding Machine Company of St. Louis took him on as a toolmaker. It wasn't very long before he had charge of his department.

From there he went to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. He hadn't worked there long as a tool designer before he was made superintendent of inventions. He reorganized this department, and most of the improvements on this adding machine are his work. He not only had ideas, but he could carry them out and could put to practical use the ideas of others.

Eight years ago Vincent joined the engineering staff of the Hudson Motor Car Company, and after that his rise was rapid. He went shortly to the Packard Company as chief engineer. As vice-president of the company he still has charge of the engineering department.

Unlike many inventors, Vincent isn't satisfied with inventing things. He insists upon putting his inventions to the test of service himself. Probably by this time he has been up with an aëroplane equipped with the Liberty, and has proved to himself that it will do what he wants it to.

Anyway, when he built a 12-cylinder automobile motor now in use he was the first to try out its speed qualities. He circled the Sheepshead Bay Speedway in New York at the rate of 102¼ miles an hour, breaking all records for touring types of motors.

Vincent is now a major in the Signal Corps.

A Man Whom Every Week Helped

DO you remember the letters we published a few weeks ago from men who had passed the fifty mark? There was one from a minister among them, and he said in effect: "There may be a chance for men of my age in other lines of business, but what can I do? What chance is there for me?"

Four readers, to whom that letter appealed, sat down and wrote the minister out of their own experience, suggesting ways in which he might turn his education and training to advantage.

We print his letter below, because it's interesting, and because, in days like these, when there is so much of cruelty between men, we like to give publicity to every evidence of the fact that common, ordinary folks still have in them enormous capacities for being kind.

The Letter

Dear Editor:

I can not fully express either my appreciation or feelings in reference to the letters forwarded to me by you, written in response to the letter in EVERY WEEK. I thank you personally and as representing the paper.

I felt the depths of me moved as I read them. Thoughts thronged, demanding recognition. The most outstanding and dominant one was the disclosure of a deep undercurrent of sympathy and fellow feeling that was sweeping on toward brotherhood, down beneath the turbid jetsam and flotsam burdened surface of civilization. Heart does answer to heart.

If it would not be presuming too much upon that spirit, I would like through the columns of EVERY WEEK to thank the writers who have reached out this hand of sympathy and fellowship. The spirit is worth even more than the suggestions made.

May you and yours be enriched with all things, especially those that abide.

Yours sincerely, W. H. H.