Are You a Good Advertisement for Yourself?

TWO men whom I know tried this experiment: They dressed themselves in their best clothes and went to a prominent New York hotel for dinner.

The head waiter received them deferentially: the waiter hurried to take their order; they received the very best that the hotel affords in food and service. And as they passed out the captain helped them on with their coats and expressed the hope that they would come again.

A few nights later they put on shabby clothes, old shoes, tattered shirts and neckties, and went back to the same dining-room.

Their entrance created a mild sensation. Nobody came forward to show them to a table. They were left to find a place for themselves. The waiter seemed oblivious of their presence. After they had waited fifteen or twenty minutes he came up sulkily, threw a menu card in front of them, and took their order, eyeing them suspiciously all the while.

When they came to pay their checks and he saw that they had real money, his manner changed a little, but not much.

From first to last their experience was thoroughly unpleasant.

They were the same men who had been there a few nights before. Morally, financially, humanly, there had been no change in them. But nobody recognized them as the same men.

Neither their character nor their money could gain the respect that had been eagerly accorded them because of their good clothes.

A few months ago I quoted the investigation which was made by Dr. G. Stanley Hall and one of his associates on the psychology of dress.

A series of questions was sent to one hundred and seventy young people. One of the questions was:

How are you affected by the dress of others? Does it affect your estimate of them?

To this they answered:

As a rule I like to have people well dressed. I judge character by the style of apparel. I often form hasty judgments of people, basing the judgment on their dress.

Every one of these one hundred and seventy young people testified that when they looked successful they found it easy to feel and act successful. When they felt shabby their ability to deal successfully with other men and women took a decided drop.

When they were poorly dressed, they shrank from facing other people; they felt themselves at a disadvantage; they instinctively met other men on terms of inequality when they ought to have met them on terms of equality.

Advertising men have discovered that an advertisement that is properly dressed—that is, one that is pleasing to the eye—will sell almost twice as much goods as another advertisement that may present the same goods in the same words, but in an unattractive manner.

That is to say, the well dressed advertisement does its work in the world with half the effort required by the other.

Every man of us in business has something to sell.

Our services, or our ideas, or our goods.

Some of us wonder why other men "deliver the goods" with so much less effort.

One reason is that they appear successful, and men take them at their face value.

A good question to ask yourself occasionally is: Do I look as good as I really am?

What kind of an advertisement am I for myself?

Bruce Barton, Editor.

The Captive Woman

By CHARLES SAXBY

Illustrations by J. C. Coll

IT was with the dusk that the Governor had come to the castle at Grand Jack, slipping in at its gate as quietly, but as inexorably, as the shadows that stole across the courtyard.

The dusk had now deepened into night, overcast and sullen. To Wilton, waiting rigidly through dinner for the other to say whatever it might be that he had come to say, it seemed that even Africa had never before produced such a darkness. Town, beach, and bush had all been wiped out; even those massive lower walls beneath them had disappeared, and the top platform, on which his quarters stood, seemed to hang unsupported, like some lantern picture projected on a black screen by the lamps in the dining-room behind them. Only the line of the surf showed a faint gleam of green fire that defined the curve of the beach; then, there showed, at the extreme end of that curve, a single spot of light.

Steady and golden it shone, without flicker or increasing, as if it had been burning a long time behind some shutter whose sudden opening revealed it. To the Governor, sitting silently in his chair, it might have been a signal for which he was waiting; for at the sight of it he turned quietly to the other.

"You may as well speak, Wilton."

"What would you have me say, sir?" asked Wilton wearily.

The Governor glanced keenly at him, taking in the details of his wire-drawn thinness; his face white with the pallor of the tropics; the bright hair and feverishly brilliant eyes, that seemed like the outbreaking of some secret inner flame that he was cherishing to his own consuming.

"Mrs. Hugo talked a great deal when she returned to Accrome," the Governor suggested.

Wilton nodded. He had known that Mrs. Hugo would talk. He glanced involuntarily back through the open arches of the dining-room. He could almost see her still at that table, with her ash-blond hair, her large, pale eyes, the blue-green gown half slipping from her bare, shrugging shoulders. A haggard woman, saved only by her high position from being exactly what she was. A hungry woman, snatching greedily at new sensations. It was for those that she had to come to the West Coast of Africa—for new sensations. Well, she had had them in plenty, Wilton thought grimly.

"So Mrs. Hugo talked." He nodded again. "And just what did she say in Accrome?"

"Never mind that," the Governor answered. "I am here to-night to listen to you."

WILTON understood now: he was to be given a chance. That was generally the meaning of these unheralded, unattended advents of the Governor. Time and again he had been known to slip, just as quietly, into one or another of these third-rate outposts scattered along the steaming coast of the Bight of Benin; and always his coming had meant a chance for somebody. So now it was to be his story against hers: the word of an obscure official against the word of this woman, so powerful, brilliant, and unscrupulous, who never forgot an affront to her vanity; who would never rest until she had avenged the terrible memory that lay between them.

"You must make me understand," went on the Governor. "That is why I am here—to understand. So far, I have heard rumors; for months I have been hearing those. I have heard that scourge of the Coast, the gossip of men. And I have now heard a woman—an excited woman, bitter with the sense of wrong, to be sure; but still, a woman too highly placed to be disregarded. Now I am here to listen to you."

He rose and, with a slight gesture toward that far-off spot of golden light, asked a question:

"By whose authority did Mrs. Hugo Vesey ever enter the House of the Old Mensah?"

From the edge of the lamplight where he hovered, near the ramparts, almost ghostlike in his tropical white, Wilton's answer came back—another question:

"Am I speaking to His Excellency the Governor?"

"You are speaking to one who wishes to understand."

"Then this is not official?" persisted Wilton.

"My trip to Grand Jack has not been entered in the Government Gazette."

"Very well, then." Wilton began pacing the flag-stones. "This is with the gloves off, I suppose: the raw truth, even if it is about—a woman."

He stood as if lost in thought for a moment. When at last he began to speak, it was in a low, dragging tone, almost as if he were rehearsing something to himself.

"I found Mrs. Hugo here one afternoon when I returned from the bush," he said. "She had come on that day from Half-Pram, and the courtyard down there was a riot with her Kru-boys and baggage. She was sitting here under the arches, still in her traveling costume of boots, breeches, and hunting coat. I thought she was a boy at first, she was so slim and straight and sprawled out. Then she looked up. It may be the light of later knowledge that makes me think it, but it seems now that the instant I saw her face in the searching light of the afternoon, I knew her. Even before I heard her voice, with that husky-hard sweetness in it, like honey smeared on a nail-file, I knew her; for I had met her type at home.

"Even her greeting told me I was right. 'Oh—how-de-do,' she said, without moving, playing over me with those enormous, pale eyes. 'I suppose you are the local big-wig. We must introduce ourselves. I'm Mrs. Hugo Vesey.'

"I had recognized her type," Wilton went on; "but when I heard her name I knew the woman. Mrs. Hugo Vesey—the famous 'Mrs. Hugo'—the half-great lady, the political intrigante, her fingers always tangled in the wires, her portrait always in the illustrated papers, some rising youngster always trailing in her wake, and half a dozen ruined political reputations to her credit. She meant to put me in my place by that greeting; I saw that. What was I, a mere minor official of an obscure colony, to her—the daughter of a Cabinet minister, married to a great name, and always so tremendously in the midst of things?

"I was nothing to her. If you are going to understand anything you must understand that. To her I was a mere convenience, something to whom there was not even the necessity of being civil, unless it suited her. As a person, a member of society, I was non-existent to her. And yet—queerly enough—even so, she had to feel her power over me as a man. That power over men for which she was so hungry—the exercise of it seemed like a stimulant to her, a daily drug on which she relied.

"That came later on—that evening, in fact. She was a different woman by night, I found: something even of a beauty, in a hard, stunning way. She wore a wonderful gown, or so it seemed to me, flashing suddenly upon me after three years of this place—a trailing sea-green affair, with gleaming sparks caught in it, like the fires of that surf down there. She sat at the table, against those open arches, with her thin, rouged face, her shrugging shoulders, her hard, mirthless wit. And behind her, framed in the arch, the moon shone through the fronds of the cocoanut palms; and from the beach came the throb of the tom-toms where her Kru-boys were dancing.

"SHE was so alien to it all that I could hardly believe in her being there. To me she seemed scarcely real: I had a notion of her as the reflection of a woman in a mirror, she seemed so brilliant, so colorful, and so unsatisfying. I had a queer idea that if I put out my hand to touch her, it would encounter only a smooth hardness, like when one puts out one's hand to an image in a looking-glass. She was like coming on an electric sign in the middle of the bush—the dernier cri of Paris patronizingly surveying a land that might have been fresh from chaos.

"I remember how I kept wondering which would win, if it came to the test: that woman, or that blue-hot night out there and all that I knew lay behind it?

"A MAN and a woman—there was only one explanation of that to that town down there, seething in the putrid broth of its own imaginings. Of course, Mrs. Hugo did not care what that town might think of her; why should she? She was merely flashing along the Coast like a meteor, and as brilliantly above it all. Her utter detachment was her safeguard."

"And why were you not above it also?" demanded the Governor. "How did those rumors in the town connect with you? How did they—get under your skin, let us say? Whose ears were you afraid they would reach?"

The eyes of both, in a silent mutuality, turned toward that spot of distant light shining from the curve of the beach below them—the light from the House of the Old Mensah.

"Perhaps I was feverish that night," Wilton resumed. "I had traveled hard in the heat of the day. Then again, I had been here for three years—three years of Grand Jack, the nearest man of my kind forty miles away; the nearest woman—forty hundred, perhaps. Three years practically alone here in the castle. Such times breed strange fancies. I knew it all too well. I seemed to see those rumors, like the rings from a stone cast in the lagoon, spreading on rings of dark space—spreading until they reached that house across the beach."

"Ah—that house," nodded the Governor. "We are beginning now."

"It had all begun months before," Wilton somberly returned. "You know that house and its history. The House of the Old Mensah, built for a three hundred years dead-and-gone native chief by that band of Portuguese adventurers who raised the castle here.

"For three years, as you know, my greatest impossibility here has been to hold tight the doors of that house. And I have done it. My sentries outside them never know at what hour of day or night I may not appear; and, until the coming of Mrs. Hugo, not a soul had stepped in, or out, across its threshold.

"When I first came here I used to hate to pass the place. There was a silence like that of a brooding storm—a hopeless silence, that still could not give up hope.

"Then once, from somewhere deep in the recesses of that house, I caught the voice of that silence—a woman's voice, deep-throated as a bell, raised in one long cry of utter revolt.

"The doors were always closed and

---

guarded. But there is a row of shuttered windows above the blank walls that rise from the beach. Could I hold those shutters, too?

"IT was one afternoon when I was returning from my monthly tour in the bush," Wilton went on, as if speaking from some dream into which he had fallen. "I was very much the official that afternoon, and everything seemed to conspire to fasten it on me. The bobbing deference of the village chiefs; the shouts of the runners clearing my way; the straining chocolate-colored backs of the hammock-men, their white-and-crimson government loin-cloths—all reminded me that I was the Commissioner.

"All day I had been oppressed with a sense of what an invisible thing government is. There I was, being carried along in that primeval jungle, just the same for a thousand miles each way—just mud, trees, and sky. For all one could see, it might have been the first dawn of creation itself. Yet it was all soaked through and through with that unseen white man's law of which I was the representative.

"My personality was gone, for the moment; I was a mere instrument—an official instead of a man. As we swung round the corner of the House of the Old Mensah, I leaned out from under the hammock-top and looked up—it was the first time I had done so—frowning officially as I saw how badly those shutters needed painting. Then—a pair of them swung slowly open, and I saw her—saw the woman whom for three years I had held a prisoner in that house.

"Oh—" Wilton's voice rose almost to a cry that the surrounding darkness beat back, as walls beat back an echo— "It was the suddenness of it, I argued to myself as I paced the ramparts here that night. It was the effect of that caressing light of the late afternoon. It was those soft, revealing swathings of white. It was the contrast between that white-gold skin, that scarlet mouth, and those grinning black apes to whom I was accustomed. It was the green gleam of that band of uncut emeralds about the straight forehead—it was anything, I told myself—anything rather than the woman herself.

"It would pass in another moment, I promised myself, pacing to and fro here in my quarters like a caged beast. That was what I was—a human beast in an official cage. There were bars all about me: bars of duty, bars of race, bars of position. It was the sight of a caged woman that had made me realize the bars of my own cage.

"What could I hope for if I broke through them? What could I hope for her? We should both of us simply be swept off the board by those who play world-chess, with people for pawns.

"You know who she was, that woman at the window. It was Quamina herself. 'The Lady Quamina of Doonqwow'—I have written, and you have read, that name a score of times in my official reports.

"Over and over, to prove to myself the uselessness of it all, I told myself all that I knew about her. Quamina, daughter of old King Yirrah, that fierce, wily old Arab; Quamina of Doonqwow, that bloody city that even Africa could hardly tolerate, where the fires of Islam, pushed south into the watery smother of the bush, burned with such black smoke and strange stenches; Doonqwow, that perpetual cooking-pot of trouble, the city of reputed magic and proved secret poisoners. I remembered, deliberately, all the things I had heard from the men who went on the expedition that finally wiped Doonqwow off the map.

"I knew why Quamina, the last surviving member of her family, had been sent here, a thousand miles away, to Grand Jack. Too dangerous to be freed, by reason of her blood alliance with that secret masonic empire of the Fullahs; a woman, therefore, not to be slain—she had to be kept a prisoner. Two years before I had seen her curtained hammock, and train of women slaves, turn in at the doors of the House of the Old Mensah, which it was my duty to see that she never again left."

"Ah—yes—the doors," murmured the Governor. "We have the shutters open now; and—the doors?"

"Stayed closed," Wilton returned hastily. "Closed more tightly than before, if that were possible. Don't imagine that I gave in easily. Every day the struggle was fought over again. But I had seen her, and her face was burned on the back of my brain, and each afternoon found me again beneath that line of shuttered windows. That was all that I could do for her, don't you see? Just to let her see me, like that, under her windows—to let all the beach see me, if they wished. She understood; it was a triumph for her—the Commissioner under her windows. And sometimes the shutters opened. Not as a reward—understand that as a torment, rather. That silent, gorgeous woman, searing me with all her unuttered hatred for her jailer.

"SIX months of that—then Mrs. Hugo."

Wilton laughed harshly. "She suspected something that first evening, when I failed to respond to her fascinations. I did my best, but she knew; and there came a barb in her smile as she probed, and probed, until she found the wound that barb would enter.

"'Your fair prisoner,' she called Quamina, in that husky drawl of hers. A nigger woman, wasn't she? Oh—an Arab; and was there much difference? I can see the flash from under her lowered lids as she stuck the knife in and turned it in my flesh. She was bored with Africa, and I promised some amusement.

"I had told her that entrance to that house was forbidden; but the words slipped past her ears as if she were too uninterested in the whole affair to hear them. She stayed on and on, for days; mainly, I believe, because for the first time since coming to the Coast she had found something closed to her. I think she had some idea of finding a picturesque cause to take home with her; something about which she could perhaps get questions asked in Parliament—and her own name mentioned in connection with it.

"She stayed; and each day the rumors spread on the beach, and the old house opened its ears; nor did I dare appear beneath its windows, with that watching woman on the ramparts here. I stayed close to the castle and to Mrs. Hugo's side. As an assiduous host, I never allowed her to pass the gate without my escort; and I found places of interest for her to see, all carefully in the other direction from the House of the Old Mensah.

"Then, the fourth day of her visit, came a message from the chief at Bootri that drunken strangers were rioting in his village. I had to go, though it meant at least four hours away, and I could not take Mrs. Hugo on such an errand. But when I reached the village, and found a gang of Mrs. Hugo's own Kru-boys, all gloriously drunk on trade-gin, I realized what she had done. I drove the hammock-men mercilessly on the way back; but, even so, it was dark when I returned. What I had feared I hardly know; but I gasped with relief when I saw her, already dressed for dinner, standing in the lamplight.

"She was in a gracious mood—an insolent grace with a secret triumph in it. I mustn't bother to dress, she said; she knew I was tired; just come to dinner as I was. Her words came rapidly, and her eyes were dark and dilated. I wondered if she ever used drugs; so many of her type do—orchid creatures, without roots, they have to feed their nerves on strange foods. There was a string of something in her hand, and she held it out to me, extending her bare arm into the light, with a request that I would clasp it on for her. I took it. It was a string of uncut emeralds, long enough to go twice about her wrist.

"OVER the dinner, that we neither of us touched, she told me about it, in a jerky, glittering sort of way. She had thought it was only right to 'call.' I sat there, with a sinking heart, marveling at the ignorance that I had thought was bravado. A 'call' at that house—the last refuge of all the black arts of Doonqwow. 'Some sort of a princess,' she said. 'Mere politeness to show the poor thing some attention.'

"From what I saw afterward, I can picture that call, from the moment she passed the grinning Haussa sentry, babblingly eager to please this mysterious white woman from the castle. A squeak of the hinges, then the sun-steeped silence of the courtyard. The amazed eyes of the women; their aimless, frightened rushes, like coveys of quail; their whispers and twitterings. The great hall, hung with remnants of Arab magnificence. Then the silence that overspread the place again—that silence I knew so well.

"Then, at last, Quamina came. Why, heaven knows; yet why not? Who can tell the reasons, or the impulses, that made her gratify the curiosity of this woman of whom she had heard such rumors? Perhaps she had some curiosity of her own to gratify.

"But even I can hardly picture that interview. Quamina on her divan, in barbaric white and gold, as still, and as full of concealed fire, as those dull green gems about her head. And Mrs. Hugo, in full afternoon regalia, playing restlessly with her parasol, a faint, sarcastic smile on her lips. Between them a slave woman who translated back and forth.

"Quamina had asked frank questions; she had actually thought that Mrs. Hugo must be my wife. That was very amusing to Mrs. Hugo; there was contempt in her laughter as she told me of it.

"And then—she leaned forward, and began brushing at the table-cloth. 'Where do all these little white spiders come from?' she asked casually.

"Before I had time to answer—to do more than stare—she laughed and went on with her story.

"'I let Quamina know just exactly who I am,' she told me. 'She was quite polite after that—she understands position.'

"It was after that, it seemed, that Quamina had given her the emeralds.

"'A sort of tribute,' Mrs. Hugo called them. It was very well done, she said. She had admired the gems, and Quamina, detaching them from her veil, had handed them to one of the women, who brought them and dropped them on the floor before Mrs. Hugo. 'Quite picturesque—laid them at my feet and all that,' she rattled on. Of course, I understood it all. She realized my position at home, and made a bid for my influence. I'll do something for the poor thing when I get back—send her some of my old ball gowns, or something.'

"I GROANED inwardly; how could I make her understand the significance, to that scornful Arab woman, of her having actually stooped to pick up from the floor a bauble flung there by a slave woman?

"Just after that, I think, the censers were brought in and placed, one on each side of this supposedly honored guest of the Lady Quamina."

"Censers?" asked the Governor, breaking sharply in on the flood of quick, dry speech; and Wilton nodded somberly.

"Yes—censers. Mrs. Hugo wished she knew what it was they burned in them. Wonderful stuff, she said—so soothing. She felt like an idol, sitting there with those thin spires of smoke curling up about her. There was music from squatting women who played on marimbas, and a girl who danced. Then more music—'Quite good,' she said. 'Like a Bakst ballet setting put to melody.' She wished she could get it for Covent Garden.

"As she spoke she suddenly began brushing again at the table-cloth. She did not see the look that must have come into my face at that; my dawning horror and comprehension.

"Quamina did some magic after that, smiling a great deal as she performed some tricks with a golden bowl, and one of those nest-webs full of blind white baby spiders. She played with it, smiling, and never taking her eyes off the woman who sat there—'like an idol'—with those spirals of scented, soothing smoke coiling about her. The web seemed to grow—large as an egg—as an orange—as a cannon-ball; a throbbing mass of feeble life, seen through the opal meshes of the web. Then it burst, and there were spiders everywhere—nasty, eyeless things that crawled and crawled. It was at that point in her narrative that Mrs. Hugo sprang up from the dinner-table, upsetting her wine-glass in a red streak across the cloth, and screamed.

"It was anger, that first scream. Her face was flushed, and her eyes all black dilated pupils. What did I mean, asking her to sit at such a table—all swarming with those horrible, crawling things? Then she screamed again, this time in terror, tearing at her arms and neck as she fled out on to the ramparts."

As Wilton stopped, the thick silence closed in on them again, and to both that darkness seemed tenanted by the shape his words had evoked: a writhing, frantic woman, with white, convulsive shoulders, beating herself against the stones in an attempt to escape that which existed solely in her own imagination.

"It was ghastly," resumed Wilton hoarsely. "I tried everything, but it was no good. There were moments when I almost thought I saw the things myself, in their blind, feeble insensateness, that knew nothing except to crawl upward. There were hours of it, her nigger women holding her down, lest she throw herself from the ramparts, while I tried remedy after remedy. Then, at last, along toward midnight, I saw that I must go—down across the beach—to Quamina."

WILTON paused again. Now, if ever, he must make the other understand; yet now there was so much that he could never tell. And there was so little to tell, in a way. He found himself divided against himself, half of him eager to speak, the other half on guard over his tongue.

"I was there before I realized it," he said—"there before the doors, with the surprised eyes of the sentry flashing at me from out of the shadows. I was expected, I saw, for one half of the doors stood ajar, and the squeal of its hinges, as I pushed it open, was proof of how well I had kept watch—even against myself. I groped my way in, and, the stale, damp reek of the courtyard rose about me.

"I knew where to go, from Mrs. Hugo's description. She was there, waiting for me, in that hall full of soft light from tiny wicks floating in jars of palm-oil. It seemed almost as if she had not moved since that other woman had left, she was so still, crouching alone on her divan. So deadly still—so vital—so beautiful.

"She spoke first, for I saw that I must make her do that. I just stood there, waiting, and—at last—she spoke. 'Why do you come here, Wilton Arfi?' she asked. And at the sound of that crisp, clean Arabic I knew why she was here in Grand Jack. That woman, free and off to some Fullah stronghold beyond the Tchad, would set the whole desert in a blaze.

"I have the right to come," I answered; and at that she smiled."

Pressing his hands to his eyes, Wilton strove to shut out the vision that tormented them: the shifting shadows of that dim hall; the gold-white woman with the smile on her lips that told him how he would have to pay, to the last bitter drop she chose to exact. But that vision was for himself alone.

"'And the woman?' she asked me. 'Has she also the right to come to Quamina?'

"'She is a great lady,' I told her. One to whom all doors are open.'

"'Is she, then, of the women of your king?' she asked.

"'She is the wife of a great emir,' I replied.

"She laughed at that, and as I heard it I understood something of that interview of the afternoon.

"'Then what does the wife of an emir in the house of another man?' she asked.

"It was hopeless to make her understand—all the more so because she understood some of it too well! Mrs. Hugo and Quamina, worlds apart, yet each with a bitter half-understanding of the other underlying their misconceptions. And it was that half-understanding that was the real trouble. And there was I, between

---

the two, forced to battle with the woman I loved—loved, mind you!—for the sanity, the very life, of the woman I detested. And yet, at that instant I almost worshiped Mrs. Hugo, since it was she who was the cause of my being there at all."

"And for what were you there?" demanded the Governor.

"For Mrs. Hugo's sake alone," Wilton returned steadily. "She had come with me as much as if she were really there. I kept her there, between me and this other woman, with her distraught face and the red marks where she had torn at the skin of her arms and neck. And then—I hated her over again for being there. But I hung on to her, for she was my only hope. I was altogether the Commissioner—but Quamina knew. That was the real trouble all through.

"'What have you done to the Valideh?' I asked. And she smiled again, straight into my eyes, as she dragged the tips of her fingers softly over the strings of a marimba.

"'She came to look upon Quamina,' she half chanted. 'Even so, in Doonqwow, would we go to look upon the slaves brought into the market-place: strange people, brought in chains from the lands beyond the Schotts. She has seen Quamina now—and she will not forget her. Her people have killed my father and trodden Doonqwow into the dust—Doonqwow, that was known as a place of magic even as far as Murzuk itself. But your people said, there is no sorcery, and that the white man's magic is the stronger. Mash'al—I am now a prisoner and a slave—I am now the dust of the earth myself. How, then, should I do harm to the wife of a great white emir? Let her go back, over the sea, to her own land. Is not her own white magic all-powerful? Let her go to that for cure; why does she send you to me?'

"You must remember that I was her only hope, her one door of possible escape from out of that prison House of the Old Mensah. Like all the women of her race, she knew that it is only through men that a woman can ever hope for freedom. I have wondered, since then, if that was why she did it—that I might come there that night?"

WILTON paced nervously up and down, despairing of the inadequacy of speech, even of all those things he could not say, to picture that strange night. He had never moved from his place, nor Quamina from her divan; yet the battle had been as fierce as any physical assault.

Never changing, yet never the same, she had brought forth from some secret treasury a hundred women, each different, yet each herself. A hundred against one, it had been; and he had known that if he gave the slightest sign the victory was hers. And he had so wanted it to be so! That was the traitor within his citadel.

"Then—she sang—" he muttered.

She had sung to him—strange Arabic songs, full of the ring of fire and steel, bringing visions of the pale sands and fierce skies of the north, arid lands, vivid with the clean sting of the sun, that would dry from his body the blue-mold of this sweating, steaming coast. And there was another fire, such as was in this woman; a white-hot flame that would burn from his brain all sense of duties and responsibilities, leaving him free to go forth with her where she pleased. It would be so easy, those songs whispered to him. His word would open those doors out there for himself as well as for her. His word would pass them swiftly through the bush, and, once on the edges of the grass country a thousand miles to the north, her word would take up the trail to that shifting strip of no-man's-land that rims the desert.

Madness, of course; for what could they hope, hiding desperately in the mazes of Africa, with that invisible, mighty hand of civilized government always reaching after them? Then, from out of that treasury of herself, had come other songs; and the sweat stood out on him at the memory of them. Given a year—a month—a day, even, of that, and all else seemed to tilt in the balance.

"She sang," he muttered again, wiping that sweat from his face. "And then—at last—the dawn came."

"And Mrs. Hugo, all this time?"

"Mrs. Hugo!" groaned Wilton. "I hated her, I tell you—yet I was clinging to her, for she stood for all those other things that the madness that was on me would have scorched and seared from my mind. But, just when I thought I could stand it no longer, the dawn came up, gray and ghastly through the banana fronds in the courtyard outside.

"The lamps paled, and I saw how white she was, with great black shadows under her eyes, as if she had emptied herself of all her vitality in vain. I knew then that I had won; it was all so different under that cold grayness. All I felt was pity. She was so alone—so helpless—so hopelessly crushed under that unseen might of our implacable law."

THAT other half of Wilton laid a finger on his lips. That moment of victory, that instant of surrender, had been the most dangerous of all—the singing cadences of her voice, that still held a secret thrill, as if she were almost rejoicing in the strength that had been her own defeat. He wondered, now, if it had been really surrender, or a last, most desperate assault of all. Why should she be glad that he had won? He could not understand that.

"Mrs. Hugo was saved," he went dully on. "She would probably have recovered anyhow in a day or two. The remedy was simple, once you knew it. Just the leaves of the bitter christophine, well boiled. She went to sleep as soon as I gave it to her, and in that sleep the drug magic of Doonqwow dreamed itself away. When she woke she was almost herself. But I saw that I was never to be forgiven. It doesn't matter. Nothing seems to matter much now—"

FOR the moment Wilton was back again in that courtyard, with the banana fronds dropping dew on him under the chill of the dawn—a last backward glance into that hall where the white-and-gold figure lay prostrate on the divan amid the expiring lamps.

"I suppose I must pay the penalty, though," he said bitterly. "An official head on a charger for the appeasing of Mrs. Hugo—eh?"

"I'm afraid so," the Governor evenly replied. "Of course, you are due for promotion, and your past services warrant it. But, in view of Mrs. Hugo's anger and her influence at home, I can hardly—offer you promotion just now."

Wilton drew a deep breath, like a diver coming to the surface.

"You mean that—after all I have told you—I am to remain here as Commissioner—in Grand Jack?"

The Governor nodded.

"I see no reason for putting an untried man in the place of one who has passed through the fire—practically unscathed."

Do Good Clothes Help?

By H. ADDINGTON BRUCE

A GOOD many years ago there arrived in Boston a young man whose total capital to begin business life was less than five dollars. Naturally, this did not carry him far; but it did carry him to a position as oyster-opener in a little all-night restaurant. Here he made the acquaintance of a "night hawk" cab-driver, who became very friendly with him and promised that he would "tip him off" to a better paying place at the first opportunity.

One night the friendly cabby gave him the news he had been anxiously awaiting.

"I've got another job for you," he announced. "They want a man behind the bar at a hotel where I have lots of friends. The job is yours for the asking." And he named one of Boston's leading hotels.

The young oyster-opener handed in his resignation, and hurried around to the hotel. The hotel manager, after one cold, appraising glance, curtly told him:

"I've got nothing for you. Yes, a man was wanted; but we don't want anybody now."

Borrows Sunday Suit

IT took the over-confident young man nearly a month to get back his too hastily resigned place in the restaurant. Meantime, if hungry and homeless, he used his eyes and ears and his mind to good advantage. Accordingly, when the cab driver a little later informed him again that a man was wanted at the hotel where he had already applied vainly, he did not rashly resign the place he held. Instead, he asked for a night off, and hunted up an acquaintance, a man of about his own build, but more prosperous.

"Jack," he said, "I want you to lend me your Sunday clothes, walking-stick and all."

Next morning, after a good night's sleep, well shaved, and dressed better than he had ever been before, he called once more on the hotel manager. The latter, needless to say, did not recognize him.

Politely he inquired what he could do for the well dressed stranger, listened attentively to his application, and expressed regret that he had nothing suitable to offer him.

"But," persisted the applicant, "I understand that you want a man behind the bar."

"That is true. But it is not a place that would suit you. What we want is a man to clean glasses and get rid of empty bottles."

"I'll take that place. When shall I begin work?"

This, I say, happened in Boston a good many years ago. As time passed, the young man prospered until, long before his death, he was the owner of several big hotels. One of these was the very hotel where he had begun work as a glass-washer. You may be sure he never forgot that he owed his start in the hotel business to the wearing of a good—if borrowed—suit of clothes.

And, as an episode from real life of a directly contrasting sort, glance at this:

In a Springfield, Massachusetts, dry-goods store two traveling salesmen were paying a morning call on the head of the firm. One had been with him for perhaps ten minutes, and was evidently having a hard time trying to book an order for the spools and other small goods he carried. The other salesman, a representative of a silk manufacturing company in Maine, sat composedly awaiting his turn, a dignified, well groomed figure of a man.

He had not long to wait. At his entrance the dry-goods merchant had looked up with a cordial smile of greeting and the remark:

"Glad to see you, Mr. Woods. I'll be ready for you in a moment."

He was as good as his word, despite the almost pathetic efforts of the first salesman to hold his attention.

"No," the merchant told him; "I don't care to order anything this morning. I'm sorry; but I'm pretty well stocked up."

As the disappointed salesman left the store, the merchant gazed after his retreating form, and, as he gazed, frowned slightly. Then he turned to the man from Maine.

"Do you know that fellow?" he inquired.

"I can't exactly say that I know him. I've run across him on the road a few times."

"Well," the merchant's frown deepened, "he's not a bad sort. If only he'd wear decent clothes, keep them brushed, and change his linen oftener, I think he'd do some real business."

Clothes Affect the Man

HERE are two instances of the truth that a man's career is influenced for good or for evil by the kind of clothes he wears and the way he wears them. Nor is it only because others are prone to judge us from external appearances that the question of clothes is of great importance. Of even greater significance is the fact that clothes directly and indirectly affect the character of their wearer; so that a man can actually increase or decrease his mental and moral powers by the way he dresses.

Some day—may it be in the not distant future—a new profession will be established, the profession of scientific repairer of damaged characters. This scientific character-builder will be sure to have a good deal to say on the subject of clothes to those who apply to him for advice. Suppose the unsuccessful salesman of our second instance, realizing that something was wrong with him, sought the character-builder's aid, this is about what he would be told:

"It will, of course, take time to find out exactly what you lack. We shall have to inquire into your heredity, early history, personal habits, general outlook on life, and the state of your physical health. But there is one thing I can tell you offhand. If you wish to make more of yourself, it will be wise for you to dress better than you now do.

"You quite evidently, like a good many other men, are not over-particular as to the fit and general appearance of your clothes. Baggy trousers, and loose, ill-fitting, somewhat dusty coat suggest unmistakably that your habits of thought as well as your habits of dress, are a trifle disorderly and slovenly. It is a safe wager that inaccuracy and inattention to detail are characteristic of you. This is fatal to business success. Make it a practice to give some thought to the details of your personal appearance, and you will gradually develop more orderly and efficient ways of thinking about the work you have to do.

"Be careful not to go to the opposite extreme of wearing clothes that fit too well.

Men Shouldn't Lace

"TIGHT coats and waistcoats interfere with breathing; tight trousers act unfavorably on the digestion; and tight shoes, besides disturbing circulation and causing muscular and nervous strain, make one disinclined to take physical exercise. The result of all this is an impoverishing, even a poisoning, of the blood supply to the brain.

Consequently, if you wish to do better work and lead a morally stronger life, it is imperative for you to reduce the pressure on chest, abdomen, and feet.

"The consciousness of being poorly dressed has a profoundly disturbing psychic effect, whereas the consciousness of being well dressed has a vitalizing effect."

That good clothes do indeed have a developmental value, through their psychic influences on the wearer, has been strikingly exemplified in life experiences time and again. A particularly interesting case in point recurs to my mind. It concerns a young man from a Western State who came to Harvard University as a post-graduate student.

It was necessary for him to do outside work, and to be as economical as possible. As one means to this end he hit on the ingenious scheme of persuading a tailor to make him clothes at a nominal price, in consideration of his promising to recommend the tailor to fellow students.

As may be imagined, the tailor saw to it that this clever young man was well dressed. The result was that, as far as externals went, the tailor worked a veritable transformation in him, changing him from an uncouth, awkward-looking youth to one of the best dressed men at Harvard.

His Costumes Change His Customs

THIS young man had been rather abrupt and self-centered in his manner. Now he became noticeably courteous and considerate of others. He made it his custom to use the choicest of language, whereas before he had been careless in this important respect. In other ways his personality expanded and grew more attractive. Students who before had not given him a moment's thought, began to cultivate his acquaintance. He was spoken of flatteringly by members of the faculty. And, before his first year at Harvard ended, he had been appointed to a secretaryship in one of the college departments.

To be sure, clothes alone do not account for this young man's success. He must have had some striking personal qualities before he went to the accommodating tailor. But the point is that the clothes he wore, besides prepossessing other people in his favor, did play a decisive part in bringing out these qualities. As a shabbily dressed man he would not only have been less successful: he would have been handicapped in the important points of self-expression and self-realization.

Even a single detail in one's clothing may have far-reaching developmental consequences, either by affecting the mind directly, or by affecting it through affecting the bodily condition. In New York City there used to be—perhaps there still is—a refuge maintained by philanthropists for the redemption of tramps, drunkards, and other human derelicts. Religious influences were brought to bear on these; but also the attempt was made to give them moral stamina by exceedingly practical measures. Among these measures was the hiring of a cobbler to put good heels on the shoes of the unfortunates who came to the institution.

The theory was that if their heels were mended they would stand straighter physically than they had done before, and that with the improvement in posture brought about by this simple device there would be a gain in moral strength. The actual results vindicated this theory. The men whose heels were repaired showed greater readiness to respond to good advice. They found it easier to assert their will-power. They were, that is to say, much more like real men than they had been when they first shuffled through the doors of the refuge.

Are the heels of your own shoes worn down, my reader? Have them mended. Do you let dust accumulate on shoes, trousers, coat? It is a success-hindering habit. Are you careless about the state of your linen? Become careful. And how about your suits of clothes? Are they of good fabric, of good cut, and neatly pressed? See to it that they are. For of a surety it will pay you to be well dressed.

And by well dressed I mean, of course, dressed in good taste. Freakish and "loud" clothing is almost as disastrous to a man as shabby clothing.

Neat But Not Gaudy"

INTO the office of a banker there walked one morning a man who had an important business proposal to make. It was a project of such importance that he wished to discuss it in detail. And it was a project in which he could reasonably expect the banker to be interested. But after he had talked a few minutes, the banker began drumming nervously on his desk. He was no longer listening to his caller's story. His attention was held by the caller's conspicuously patterned suit, and flaming red necktie with obtrusive stickpin.

Presently the telephone rang. It was to announce another caller.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Roe," said the banker, looking up at the first caller, "but a gentleman is here whose business requires my immediate attention. I must ask you to excuse me."

The two callers passed each other at the door of the office. Said the banker to the newcomer:

"I never was so glad to see you, John. I was wondering how in the world to get rid of him. Couldn't you feel his clothes?"

Neither shabbily nor in fantastic manner, that must be your rule in dressing, if you would have your clothes aid you in achieving success. Dress, in short, according to the maxim of a friend of mine, formerly treasurer of one of the biggest ammunition companies in the United States:

"That man is really well dressed who is so dressed that, after he has left you, it, will be difficult for you to recall just what his clothes looked like."

Jane Jests

By FRANK GOEWEY JONES

Illustrations by Edward L. Chase

THE seven o'clock starting whistle magically transformed the buzz of idleness into the bustle of industry. The comely, plump young forewoman watched with vigilant, suspicious eyes the hundred or more girls who seated themselves noisily before their work-benches. Jane Diekema felt "in her bones" forebodings of trouble. She had been martinet commander of the assemblers and testers in the little factory of the Ajax Electric Company at Kemusgon, Michigan, for three years. Experience had taught her the illimitable potentialities of mischief that innocent-looking girls' heads can hold on April Fools' Day.

Jane always was "strictly business" in work hours. As much as any of her charges, she enjoyed fun—in its proper place, and after quitting time. But on the third floor of the factory, between seven and five-thirty, she was a strict disciplinarian.

Most of her girls were at work on a big "rush" order this morning; and there was an expression of grim alertness on the face of the forewoman as she watched her underlings begin their tasks. It denoted Jane's determination that her promise to the office, of shipment to-night, should not be nullified by any foolery. She would be a "kill-joy" until half past five.

The first sparks of mischief crackled from the "shellac table" less than a minute after the siren screeched. Jane saw four heads turn to catch a whisper from the fifth "fuse-painter." The forewoman instantly strode in the direction of the shellac table. She had traversed half the distance down the aisle when the whisperer stood up and turned toward her, snickering.

"What's the matter, Molly?" Jane called sharply.

There seldom was a prank in the shop to which the black-eyed daughter of the old night watchman was not a party, either as perpetrator or victim of the joke. Molly O'Brien had become a general favorite among her fellow workers, for her fun never was malicious. After half past five Jane, too, liked Molly—until seven o'clock next morning.

"Oh, Miss Diekema!" exclaimed Molly. "Something's funny about my shellac!"

"Lots of funny things are liable to happen to-day—also some that ain't so funny."

JANE had reached the shellac table now. She glanced down at Molly's sticky pot and camel's-hair brush. She circumspectly refrained from "biting." Her hands were plunged deep in her apron pockets, where they were safe. She waited impatiently for the next move.

"I guess it's an April Fool joke, Miss Diekema. Somebody's put grit in my shellac. I can't paint smooth with it. Look a-here!" Molly lifted a pan of mica fuses for the inspection of her superior. "I broke the wire with my brush, the first one I touched."

Jane snatched the tray of fuses and the gummed jar. She dipped two finger-tips into the shellac pot, then, rubbed them together.

"Sand!" Jane snorted.

She turned her back on Molly, and snapped a question at the other fuse-painters:

"Is you girls' shellac gritty, too?"

Their heads bobbed out "Uh-huh!" in a giggling quartette.

"Le' me see the can, Lena," the forewoman commanded a dumpish girl at the farther end of the bench.

The supply receptacle was passed from hand to hand. Titters accompanied its progress up the table.

"What are you all snickering at?" Jane harshly quenched the mirth for a moment.

Molly lighted it again. "I thought it was a April Fool!" she chortled.

The minx turned the back of the can toward the forewoman as she handed it over. A square of paper was gummed on the tin. The two derisive words, awkwardly printed with a soft pencil, seemed to grin at the martinet:

APRIL FOOL

"That's a real comical joke for you all to be grinning at!" Jane exploded with sarcasm. "I don't believe there's any more shellac in the stock-room. You'll just have to sit and giggle until they get another can from downtown. Probably it'll be out in a couple of hours or so. It's a good thing for the company you're all on piece work. You're the ones who are April Fooled. I thought it wouldn't look quite so funny when you realized that!"

A titter sounded from behind her shoulder. Jane whirled on the irrepressible hoyden.

"Molly, you come with me," she ordered brusquely. "I'll give you a requisition, and you can go down and see if there happens to be any shellac in the stockroom."

THE cortège of two traversed the long room to the desk at the rear. Then a shriek from the direction of the testing table startled the department. The forewoman and the fuse-painter wheeled about as if they turned on twin pivots.

"Help! Help! Oh, ouch!"

Jane dropped the shellac can on her desk and ran back down the aisle. A frantic girl struggled in a chair before the electrical testing apparatus. She strained forward as if she were bound to her seat by ropes which she tried with all her might to break. Her bobbed hair streamed straight upward as if sucked by a strong draft overhead. Her arms jerked stiffly in desperate frenzy. In each rigid, cramped hand the shrieking girl clutched a brass terminal to which an insulated flexible wire conductor was soldered.

All the girls in the shop had jumped to their feet. Some screeched in sympathy with the hapless fuse-tester. A few were cataleptic in dumb fright. Most of them ran frenziedly about in a panic.

"Open the switch, somebody!" Jane yelled a command.

It ripped through the general pandemonium; but, instead of galvanizing her underlings, it appeared to root them in fear where they stood, as if they had been paralyzed by a common stroke. When the forewoman shouted, she was fifty yards away from the frantic prisoner of the volts. Jane had dashed to the testing table and jerked the switch handle down before any of the girls moved to obey her order. Then they all surged toward her.

The moment the electrical circuit was broken, the straining figure in the chair dropped the electrodes and slumped back limply. The upstanding hair collapsed like the jets of a fountain from which the water suddenly had been turned off. The straight, bobbed strands appeared to drizzle in brown streams from the fuse-tester's head.

"Oh-h!" the relieved sufferer moaned thankfully, though she still winced from the cramps in her elbows, wrists, and knuckles.

A hundred excited, clamorous girls crowded round to see and hear. Jane pushed them away fiercely. She stilled the tumult with a raucous mandate:

"Quit gawping! Go back to work—every one of you! Sarah's all right. She just got a little shock."

The rabble scrambled to their abandoned places like a demoralized company of soldiers obeying the command of a captain armed with a pistol. Then Jane bent her head and spoke sympathetically to the fuse-tester:

"You got quite a jolt, I guess, Sarah. You'd better lie down on the couch in the wash-room awhile."

"Oh, I'm all right now, Miss Diekema," the girl declared. "I'll just go get a drink." She looked up with a sheepish grin at her forewoman. "I'd ought to 've had more sense than to only sit and yell. If I'd kicked my chair back, I'd have got loose without making all that rumpus."

"'Most any person 'd be liable to get rattled if that spark-coil juice shot into her unexpected," the martinet condoned the fuse-tester's frenzy. "I'm glad you ain't the hysterical kind, Sarah. Go get your drink; then rest in the wash-room until I send for the electrician and have him find out how the wires got crossed."

Then she caught sight of the Irish minx, who still stood at the desk where she had been left when the forewoman ran to Sarah's rescue. The "little devil" was laughing.

UNTIL that moment Jane had no suspicion that the shock to the fuse-tester might not have been accidental.

The stern lips of the forewoman tightened over her clenched teeth. She realized that the girl could not be bluffed into a confession. Jane had no evidence yet to corroborate her suspicions; but she made up her mind, while she glanced the length of the room, to take the sparkle out of those mischievous black eyes.

The electrician came upstairs promptly. In half a minute he confirmed the forewoman's surmise that the dry-battery wires had not been crossed with the spark-coil circuit by accident. He pulled out a cardboard box cover from under the top of the test table, glanced at it, grinned, and handed the placard to Jane.

"Looks like somebody's been playing a joke on Sarah," he chuckled appreciatively.

The forewoman glowered at the two words, printed with a lead pencil, in capital letters:

APRIL FOOL

"It was a mighty neat trick," he praised professionally. "Must have made Sarah sit up sudden and take notice. Who d' you s'pose monkeyed with those wires?"

"I've got my suspicions!" snapped the forewoman. "When I can prove who played that April Fool joke, somebody's going to be darned sorry."

The excitement of Sarah's misadventure scarcely had quieted when the third-floor delivery boy became a victim of he practical joker. When he lifted down from a bench a stock box piled full of loose wire-connectors, the contents were strewn widely over the aisle. The bottom had been unscrewed from the sides and ends of the box. The astounded boy stared at the wreckage for two or three seconds; then he stooped to pick up a square of cardboard buried among the connectors. In penciled print it, too, bore the cabalistic words:

APRIL FOOL

The rekindled rage of the forewoman was so hot that her eyes blazed.

Just then the delivery boy filled a

---

sound stock box with the wire connectors he had spilled, and loaded them on a truck, which he started to trundle toward the elevator. He had gone barely sixty feet when one of the wheels jolted off the axle, from which the jam-nut had been removed. The box tipped and again strewed the floor with copper tubes.

Jane rushed up to the overturned truck. She ripped an oblong of cardboard from the tacks that fastened it under the platform. Her first glance had shown her the now familiar two words of derision. The forewoman savagely crumpled the lettered strip in her hands. She straightened. Her truculent look dared the girls to laugh. But they did.

The martinet was "square." She knew in her heart that she should not discharge Molly for the provocative chuckle alone. The forewoman's real grievance—the succession of practical jokes—she could not yet prove had been perpetrated by the "little devil." She stopped her angry rush toward the desk. She even smiled grimly in appreciation of her own predicament.

The girls evidently mistook her wry grimace for a grin in common with their own uncontrollable hilarity. She wisely let it spend itself. Then she raised both her hands imperiously to command silence.

"That's enough!" she barked. All her suppressed savagery burst out in her voice. "Now go to work—all of you!"

Miraculously Jane was able to snatch up again the lost reins of control. The room quieted to decorum. Five minutes later the forewoman walked deliberately up the aisle to her desk and dipped her stub pen into her ink-well. The pen splashed a blot on the pad, but did not trace a stroke of the initial letter she had attempted to write. Jane lifted the nib and scrutinized it. No ink clung to the greasy-looking steel. She put the pen to her nose and smelled kerosene.

The same instant the forewoman detected the odor of coal-oil, she perceived that a piece of cardboard had been placed under her ink-well. Jane knew intuitively that two words were printed on the white square. She was furious, but only the quivering of the hand that laid down the pen betrayed her pent-up rage. She unlocked the top drawer of her desk, took out a freshly sharpened pencil, and wrote an order for a quart of shellac. She handed the slip of paper over her shoulder to Molly.

"Take that to the stock-room and see if they've got any," she directed coolly. "If they're all out, I'll have the purchasing agent telephone downtown."

Jane nonchalantly tossed the requisition pad and pencil aside, and picked up a sheaf of shop reports.

Molly hesitated a moment or two after she received her order, then walked slowly away. Obviously she was crestfallen. Jane then resumed the guise of a detective.

SUDDENLY her searching mind caught sight of the first tangible clue to Molly's guilt. The forewoman stiffened like a hunter at point. She snatched the pencil she had used a minute before. She made some letters on one of the pieces of cardboard she had collected. The two words she traced were almost perfect replicas of the mischief-maker's printing. The detective leaned back in her chair and smiled triumphantly. She was ready now with incontrovertible proof. Jane waited zestfully for the return of Molly from downstairs.

In a few minutes the cocky messenger came back from her errand.

Jane looked at Molly with the gloatingly hungry eyes of a cat stalking a cornered mouse.

"Let's see," she purred. "Your father is night watchman here at the factory, ain't he?"

The Irish girl was alert in an instant. But she smiled with fearless self-confidence.

"Yes. Why?" she countered dauntlessly.

"Night-watching must be kind of lonesome work, I guess," Jane tantalized.

The hoyden laughed. "Probably it is lonesome," she concurred.

"I suppose your father's glad to have you visit him evenings," the forewoman showed more of her claws. "How long did you stay last night?"

Audacious Molly accepted the challenge daringly. She glanced about first to make sure some of the other girls were looking—she had the actress's craving for the admiration of an audience.

"I just brought dad's hot supper over to him, and then went home after he e't it," Molly declared. "Why?" she provoked again.

JANE also wanted an audience to witness the discomfiture of the adroit strategist. She purposely spoke now in the bullying tones of accusation:

"While your father was eating his supper in the office or down in the engine-room last night, you wandered over here and put sand in the shellac, and mixed up Sarah's wires, and unscrewed the bottom of that box of connectors, and took the jam-nut off the axle of the truck, and maybe cut up a few other smart didos. You left your printed cards around to show how cute you were!"

"Why, the very idea!" Molly's shrill protestation perfectly simulated a cry of outraged innocence. "You're just blaming me because you don't know who did play those tricks. You always pick on me when you're up a stump."

All the girls were straining now to listen. A murmur of excitement made the air palpitant.

"I'm guessing pretty close now, though," the forewoman asserted flatly. "You think you can brass out of your devilment, as usual. But this joke is going to be on you, Miss Molly O'Brien. You've got an idea you are mighty clever, ain't you? You were so careful to cover up your tracks last night! Of course you knew your dad would deny you was out of his sight, if anybody asked him, for fear he might get fired himself if he admitted he'd been in the habit of letting

you run all over the factory after hours. But you wasn't so foxy as you thought you was. You overlooked something."

Jane picked up the pencil on her desk and pointed it at the culprit, who now looked anxious beneath her defiance.

"Yesterday afternoon," the inexorable detective went on, "a few minutes before quitting time, you came to me for a new pencil. The one I gave you happened to be the first I took out of a fresh lot I'd just got from the stock-room. It had a different kind of lead from the pencils we'd been using." Molly started, and Jane smiled tauntingly. "This one of mine, here, which I had locked up in a drawer last night, is from the same lot as yours. When I wrote out that order a few minutes ago, I noticed the marks were exactly like the 'April Fools' you printed. I knew you was the only person on this floor who had a pencil with soft lead. So, of course," the detective concluded, "it wasn't very hard to guess who had been up to all the devilment."

"I didn't, neither, do it!" Molly denied desperately. But her bluff rang false. Plainly she realized she had no defense.

"I knew you'd lie," Jane remarked contemptuously, "but I've caught you."

In the twinkling of an eye the sarcastic detective was transformed into the tartar martinet. She bit off a curt order:

"Get your hat; then go sit on the bench until I have your time made out."

MOLLY was jolted from her aplomb by the shock of discharge. The expression of bravado left her face. The hoyden flung out her hands in mute appeal for undeserved mercy. The next second her fingers clenched into fists. She stiffened with Irish grit. Her cheeks were ghastly, but she marched without flinching to get her hat. She seated herself erectly on the pillory bench at the front of the long room, tossing her head and pretending to grin at the gaping girls.

Jane telephoned up to the paymaster, instructing him to figure the discharged fuse-painter's time and to send the envelop down to her desk. She glanced exultantly at convicted Molly.

All at once the martinet's triumph lost its flavor. Her vindictiveness tasted mean in her mouth. Now that she had fired the "little devil," she was ashamed. After all, Jane reminded herself, one should make allowances for jokes on April Fools' Day.

THE martinet felt in the atmosphere of her department an ominous spirit of general sullenness as she walked the aisles. Her sixth sense told her the other girls resented the dismissal of Molly. Jane had read the involuntary confession on the culprit's face when she sprang the surprise about the soft lead pencil. But the joker had denied her guilt. Her mates doubtless considered the circumstantial evidence against her too weak to warrant conviction. The forewoman sensed trouble brewing. The impulsive girls were likely to put their heads together at the noon hour and decide on a sympathetic strike to force the reëmployment of popular Molly. Jane knitted her brows. If she could only back down without forfeiting her prestige!

She returned to her desk, and fretted there over the dangerous predicament into which she had plunged blindly. She felt the increasing tension of antagonism all about her. Many of the girls were sitting idle and looking their sympathy at their pilloried fellow. The martinet dared not reprimand them. A spark of defiance to her imperiled authority now might blow it to smithereens.

The paymaster's clerk came down to the third floor presently, and brought Molly's envelop to the forewoman. He left the money and the receipt form, then hurried back upstairs. Jane counted the little roll of bills and the few loose coins, in order to gain another minute's respite before the crisis.

An inspiration flashed to her. She dropped Molly's wages into a drawer of her desk. Then she scribbled on a piece of paper, and folded three or four other strips round it. Jane stuffed the wad into the empty envelop. There were some round brass punchings of approximately the size of nickels on her desk; she slipped two of these inside the folded papers. With a grim look on her face, she arose then and stalked down the aisle to Molly. She did not speak to the Irish girl, but handed over the little packet she had prepared, with the receipt form to sign.

The martinet watched the hoyden's trembling fingers draw out the wad from the envelop and unfold it. Jane knew every eye in the room was watching, too. Molly read the two words the forewoman had scribbled. The dazed girl looked up incredulously and met a grin. A smile, tremulous at first, but growing fast to delight, opened her own tightly pressed lips.

"April Fool!" Molly gasped.

"I told you I'd get the joke back on you!" the forewoman chortled.

The smattering of titters behind her swept into a gale of laughter. For two or three minutes grinning Jane let her underlings enjoy her jest on the happy, sheepish victim. Then she became once more the martinet, but not quite the tartar.

"Now, girls, let's quit fooling—all of us—and hustle that rush order out," she commanded.

Giggling Molly shambled back to her recovered place among the fuse-painters.

The Men Behind the Fashions

Warning: Keep to the Left

All parents are divided [?] three kinds: those who don't care what kind [?] moving-picture show you go to; those who won't let you see any movies at all; and those who watch the papers and pick the winners for a fellow. The pictures on the left are the kind that thoughtful parents and teachers are boosting. But they say that the films on the right are definitely bad stuff for youngsters.

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Diggers

Photographs from Brown Brothers

He Does $20,000,000 Worth of Business a Day

By B. C. FORBES

WHO is the man who does the most business in America?

You do not know him, have never heard of him.

Yet his annual transactions are eight times the total income of the billion-dollar Steel Trust, six times the revenue of the United States government, twice the gross receipts of all our railroads, nearly twice the total money in circulation in the country, six times the national debt, fully as much as our combined exports and imports of merchandise, greater than all the wages and salaries paid in America in a year, ten times the estimated wealth of John D. Rockefeller, and several times the gold carried by the central banks of England, Russia, France, and Germany.

The quiet, unassuming, little-known man who handles this unimaginable amount of business is Max May, head of the Guaranty Trust Company's foreign exchange department. His transactions last year totaled $6,403,168,848. In other words, he did $21,343,896 worth of business every working day.

What does this $6,403,168,848 worth of business represent? What does Max May do? Whom does he deal with?

The foreign exchange banker is the man who makes international trade possible.

If a Brazilian wants to sell coffee to an American or a French importer, or an Argentine exporter has hides to send to London, or a Japanese silk-grower finds a buyer for his product here, or a South American rubber-grower desires to ship a cargo to Europe or the United States—no matter what the international sale, it has to be financed, and the business of the foreign exchange banker is to advance funds to the seller, take as security the shipping documents giving title to the merchandise, and collect the amount involved from the buyer.

English money—sterling—used to be the international banking medium; now the American dollar is fast replacing it. Before the war, money was cheaper in London than in New York. To-day New York rates are lower. Hence hundreds of millions of money for settling international dealings are borrowed here instead of in London, and increased deposits, consequently, are carried here. One national bank has over $130,000,000 of foreign deposits, and the Guaranty Trust Company has scores of millions.

The exchange banker has to gauge the always fluctuating value of the currency of each country as compared with the value of the currency in every other country. He has to buy and sell international checks drawn in every part of the globe and payable anywhere from the Arctic to the Antarctic.

Often he has to send gold across the seas. At other times he has to bring gold here. (Max May imported $85,000,000 last year.)

He is the man who has to settle the international balance sheet.

(The cash alone paid into Max May's department last year reached $1,377,879,707.)

And—this is vital—he must know the trustworthiness and standing of every concern with which he deals, whether in the United States or the remote mountains of South America or the interior of China or the center of Africa.

It takes knowledge as well as courage to pass on credits footing up to six thousand million dollars in one year. Upon Max May's shoulders falls that responsibility. Not a dollar's worth of international checks is bought without his O.K. No manufacturer or merchant or importer can figure in the six thousand millions until he is satisfied the party is safe and solid.

"Max Mayer is the best banker by intuition in America," declared one high authority.

"If I were asked my reasons for stopping dealings with a concern, often I could not tell—could not give any concrete facts," Mr. May told me. "But somehow I manage to scent danger ahead."

His losses are in comparison with his turn-over, infinitesimal; his profits eclipse those of any other exchange expert.

Twelve years ago, when he came to the Guaranty Trust Company, there were eight men in the exchange department. To-day there are 125.

To create a business of this magnitude has involved tremendous study, incessant work, and almost superhuman ability.

Mr. May's day begins at 4:30, summer and winter. Before coming to his desk he must needs have studied the effect of the world's happenings as reported in the morning newspapers. Nothing can happen anywhere on the globe, be it to agriculture, industry, finance, or politics, without having an effect upon the international exchanges, for they are the most sensitive organs in the whole body economic.

To give him vim for his day's tasks, Mr. May mounts a horse at five o'clock every morning and rides for two hours. Then he carefully scans several newspapers.

His "Uncanny" Memory

THERE is a saying among the financial newspaper men that Max May is the only man who can answer ten telephones at one time! He does practically all his business over the telephone.

His memory is so abnormal as to be uncanny. He carries practically every detail of his billions of business in his head. He never has to consult books to recall the credit standing of any of the thousands of people and firms and corporations with which he deals.

He has invented his own system of figuring. Calculations that would take the ordinary banker half an hour to figure, Mr. May does in his head; and when real puzzlers come along he simply jots down a few figures on his pad of blotting paper and presto! he has the answer.

The wizard who has so signally facilitated the growth of America's foreign trade from three billions before the war to six billions last fiscal year, landed in this country from Germany thirty-three years ago, could not get a job in any New York bank, went to Chicago, and became man-of-all-work in a private banking house at $5 a week. He balked when his employer asked him to sleep in the office as a night watchman, and shifted to a wholesale boot and shoe store. Then, finding his disagreeable surroundings intolerable, ho took a train to New York, bound for home.

"Hello, have you just landed from Germany?" a Fatherland acquaintance asked him when ho arrived in New York.

"No; I am going back to-morrow," he replied.

His friend took him home, gave him a good dinner and good advice—and sent him back to Chicago "to fight it out."

He Refused to Be Beaten

FOR months the embryonic banker wrestled with boxes and trucks in a wholesale men's furnishings store. His pay was $5 a week, and his board and room cost him $8. His cash reserve was nearing zero before he got a job with a seed company at $12. But he browsed round among the financial institutions until finally a brother German, August Blum, took him into the foreign exchange department of the Union National Bank, at $15 a week.

After eight years he was called to open a foreign exchange department for the Atlas National Bank, and four years later (in 1896) was made exchange manager of the important Union National Bank.

When the great First National Bank of Chicago absorbed the Union, May was taken over as assistant exchange manager, and later became head of that important department. Here his work began to attract national attention, and before long John W. Castles, then president of the Guaranty Trust Company, induced May (in 1904) to come to New York. When Castles went to the Union Trust Company he asked May to come along; but when the Guaranty directors got wind of it they made May a vice-president with a salary greater than that of most bank presidents.

And he earns for his institution more than most bank presidents!

The Friend of Women

HAVE you a little cockroach in your sink, red ants in the sugar, mice in the cracker-barrel, or, perish the idea, rats in your cellar?

Send to Los Angeles for Mr. Charles M. Frey.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin isn't in it with Mr. Frey, because Mr. Frey can catch all rodents, whether they have an ear for music or not. He employs more different kinds of methods than you could shake a trap at. He has asphyxiated rats by the thousands with hydrocyanic acid gas; poisoned them a hundred in a night; caught them by the score in barrel, pit, cage, steel and spring traps, and shot, speared, or electrocuted them.

Mr. Frey's most unusual method of warfare against the rodents is his use of the spear, which he employs when circumstances make it unwise to fire a rifle. However, he often finds it expedient to shoot a rat on an emergency call to the kitchen of the well known Los Angeles hotel where he destroyed 3500 of the rodents in less than one year's time. Frequently he holds the attention of the victim with his powerful electric flashlight while he aims the gun.

A new device for killing rats, also tried by Mr. Frey, is an electric trap. It is designed so that a bait decoys the rodent on a metal base, where its weight automatically releases a deadly electric current from a storage battery. An automatic trap-door opens and the victim falls into a receptacle underneath.

This expert regards the rat as the most cunning of all animals. Further, he attributes to it remarkable destructiveness and efficiency as a carrier of disease. Mr. Frey says every rat that is permitted to live consumes food worth approximately $2.50 and destroys provisions and other property to the value of ten times that amount.

These considerations more than justify to Mr. Frey the ten years he spent in perfecting a rat poison that satisfies him. The secret paste that he uses makes them accommodatingly seek fresh air and open spaces in which to expire, so that their bodies can easily be found.

Mr. Frey's annual income from his unusual calling averages $6000 for the destruction of a variety of unwelcome household visitors—mice, bedbugs, cockroaches, ants, fleas, moths, flies, and mosquitoes.

After being educated in the universities of Europe, Mr. Frey, a native of Switzerland, specialized in entomology and chemistry. A profession hitherto limited in scope and held as being unworthy of the attention of a scholar has afforded vast opportunities for Mr. Prey's scientific knowledge. Labors which have been regarded as uninteresting—if not offensive —have been lightened with humor and Greek philosophy and glorified with accomplishment.

In his nearly a quarter of a century of activity in a peculiar field, Mr. Frey has made discoveries that are of intense practical value to the housewives, hotel, apartment-house, and restaurant managers, and farmers of the country. His secret formula for dealing with troublesome household rodents and insects is worth a small fortune.

The Girl Beyond the Trail

By JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

Wladyslaw T. Benda

"WE must run away! We must hurry!"

At the touch of David's hands Marge went limp and relaxed in his arms. The last of her courage seemed gone. Terrified, she looked up at him with such a strange expression that he was filled with alarm.

"I didn't tell him anything," she whispered, as if afraid he would not believe her. "I didn't tell him you weren't that man, Mc—McKenna. He heard you and Brokaw go when you passed my room. Then he went to the men. I followed—and listened. I heard him telling them about you: that you were a spy; that you belonged to the provincial police—"

A sound in the hall interrupted her. She grew suddenly tense in his arms, then slipped from them and ran noiselessly to the door. There were shuffling steps outside, a thick voice growling unintelligibly. The sounds passed. Marge O'Doone was whiter still when she faced David.

"Hauck—and Brokaw!" She stood with her back to the door. "We must hurry, Sakewawin. We must go—tonight!"

His alarm had passed. He had feared for a moment something more ominous than whatever Hauck might have said to his men. A spy? Police? Quite the first thing for Hauck to suspect, of course. That law of self-preservation again—the same law that would compel them to give up the girl to him to-morrow. He found himself smiling at his frightened little companion, backed there against the door, white as death. His calmness did not reassure her.

"He said—you were a spy," she repeated, as if he must understand what that meant. "They wanted to follow you to Brokaw's cabin—and—and—kill you!"

This was coming to the bottom of her fear with a vengeance. It sent a mild sort of shiver through him, and corroborated with rather disturbing emphasis what he had seen in the men's faces as he passed them.

"And Hauck wouldn't let them? Was that it?" he asked.

She nodded, clutching a hand at her throat.

"He told them to do nothing until he saw Brokaw. He wanted to be certain. And then—"

His amazing and smiling composure in face of this thing that filled her with terror seemed to choke back the words on her lips.

"You must return to your room, Marge." He spoke quickly. "Hauck has seen Brokaw, and there will be no trouble such as you fear—I can promise you that. To-morrow we will leave the Nest openly—and with Hauck's and Brokaw's permission. But should they find you here now I am quite sure we would have immediate trouble on our hands. I've a great deal to tell you—much that will make you glad; but I half expect another visit from Hauck, and you must hurry to your room."

He opened the door slightly, and listened.

"Good night," he whispered, putting a hand for an instant to her hair.

"Good night, Sakewawin."

She hesitated for just a moment in the doorway, and then, with the faintest sobbing breath, was gone. What wonderful eyes she had! There was a small mirror on the table, and David held it up to look at himself. He regarded his reflection with grim amusement. He was not beautiful. The scrub of blond beard on his face gave him rather an outlawish appearance. And the gray hair over his temples had grown quite conspicuous of late. Heredity? Perhaps; but it was confoundedly remindful of the fact that he was thirty-eight!

He went to bed, after placing a table against the door and his automatic under his pillow—absurdly unnecessary details of caution, he assured himself. And while Marge O'Doone sat awake close to the door of her room all that night, with a little rifle that had belonged to Nisikoos across her lap, David slept soundly in the amazing confidence and philosophy of that perilous age, thirty-eight!

A SERIES of sounds, that came to him at first like the booming of a distant cannon, roused David from his slumber. He awoke to find broad day in his room and a knocking at his door. He began to dress, calling out that he would open it in a moment, and was careful to place the automatic in his pocket before he lifted the table, without a sound, to its former position in the room. When he flung open the door he was surprised to find Brokaw standing there instead of Hauck. It was not the Brokaw of last night. A few hours had produced a remarkable change in the man. One would not have thought that he had been recently drunk. He was grinning and holding out one of his huge hands as he looked into David's face.

"Morning, Raine," he greeted affably. "Hauck sent me to wake you up for the fun. You've got just time to swallow your breakfast before we put on the big scrap—the scrap I told you about last night, when I was drunk. Head over heels drunk, wasn't I? Took you for a friend I knew. Funny. You don't look a bit like him!"

David shook hands with him. In his first astonishment Brokaw's manner appeared to him to be quite sincere and his voice full of apology. This impression was gone before he had dropped the man's hand, and he knew why Hauck's partner had come. It was to get a good look at him—to make sure that he was not McKenna; and it was also with the strategic purpose of removing whatever suspicions David might have by an outward show of friendship. For this last bit of work Brokaw was crudely out of place. His eyes, like a bad dog's, could not conceal what lay behind them—hatred, a deep and intense desire to grip his hands at the throat of this man who had tricked him; and his grin was forced, with a subdued sort of malevolence about it. David smiled back.

"You were drunk," he said. "I had a deuce of a time trying to make you understand that I wasn't McKenna."

That amazing lie seemed, for a moment, to daze Brokaw. David realized the audacity of it, and was sure that Brokaw would not believe him. Its effect was what he was after; and if he had had a doubt as to the motive of the other's visit, that doubt disappeared almost as quickly as he had spoken.

The grin went out of Brokaw's face; his jaws tightened; the red came nearer to the surface in his bloodshot eyes. As plainly as if he was giving voice to his thought, he was saying, "You lie!" But he kept back the words. David believed that Hauck was not very far away, and that it was his warning, and the fact that he was possibly listening to them, that restrained Brokaw from betraying himself completely. As it was, the grin returned slowly into his face.

"Hauck says he's sorry he couldn't have breakfast with you," he said. "Couldn't wait any longer. The Indian's going to bring your breakfast here. You'd better hurry if you want to see the fun."

With this he turned and walked heavily to the end of the hall. David glanced across at the door of Marge's room. It was closed. Then he looked at his watch. It was almost nine o'clock! He felt like swearing at the thought that he had missed breakfast with Hauck and the girl. He would undoubtedly have had an opportunity of seeing Hauck alone for a little while—a quarter of an hour would have been enough; or he could have settled the whole matter in Marge's presence. He wondered where she was now.

APPROACHING footsteps caused him to draw back into his room, and a moment later his promised breakfast appeared, carried by an old Indian woman—undoubtedly the woman Marge had told him about. She placed the huge plate on his table and withdrew without looking at him or uttering a sound. He ate hurriedly, and then finished dressing.

It was a quarter after nine when he went into the hall. As he passed Marge's door he knocked, but received no response. He turned and walked through the big room in which he had seen so many unfriendly faces the night before. It was empty.

THE stillness of the place began to fill him with uneasiness, and be hurried outdoors. A low tumult of sound was in the air, unintelligible and yet thrilling. A dozen steps brought him to the end of the building, and he looked toward the cage. For a space after that he stood without moving, filled with a sudden sickening horror as he realized his helplessness in this moment. If he had not overslept, if he had talked with Hauck, he might have prevented this monstrous thing that was happening—might have demanded that Tara be a part of their bargain. It was too late now. An excited yet strangely quiet crowd was gathered about the cage—a crowd so tense and motionless that he knew the battle was on.

A low, growling roar came to him, and again he heard that tumult of human voices, like a great gasp rising spontaneously out of half a hundred throats. In response to the sound he gave a sudden cry of rage. Tara was already battling for his life—Tara, that big-souled brute who had learned to follow his little mistress like a protecting dog, and who had accepted David as a friend—Tara, grown soft and lazy and unwarlike because of his voluntary slavedom.

And the girl! Where was she? He was unconscious of the fact that his hand was gripping hard at the automatic in his pocket. For a space his brain burned red, seething with a physical passion, a consuming anger which in all his life had never been roused so terrifically within him.

He rushed forward and took his place in the thin circle of watching men. He did not look at their faces. He did not know whether he stood next to white men or Indians. He did not see the blaze in their eyes, the joyous trembling of their bodies, their silent, savage exultation in the spectacle.

He was looking at the cage.

It was twenty feet square, built of small trees almost a foot in diameter, with eighteen-inch spaces between. Out of it came a sickening, grinding smash of jaws. The two beasts were down, a ton of flesh and bone, in what seemed to him to be a death embrace. For a moment he could not tell which was Tara and which was Brokaw's grizzly. They separated, gained their feet, and stood facing each other. They must have been fighting for some

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minutes. Tara's jaws were foaming with blood, and out of the throat of Brokaw's bear there rolled a rumbling, snarling roar that was like the deep-chested bellow of an angry bull. With that roar they came together again, Tara waiting stolidly and with panting sides for the rush of his enemy.

It was hard for David to see what was happening in that twisting contortion of huge bodies; but as they rolled heavily to one side he saw a great red pool of blood where they had lain.

A HAND fell on his shoulder. He looked round. Brokaw was leering at him.

"Great scrap, eh?"

There was a look in his red face that revealed the pitiless savagery of a cat. David's clenched hand was as hard as iron and his brain was filled with a wild desire to strike. He fought to hold himself in.

"Where is—the girl?" he demanded.

Brokaw's face revealed his hatred now, the taunting triumph of his power over this spy. He bared his yellow teeth in an exultant grin.

"Tricked her," he snarled. "Tricked her—like you tricked me! Got the Indian woman to steal her clothes, an' she's up there in her room. And she won't have any clothes until I say so, for she's mine—body and soul—"

David's clenched hand shot out, and in his blow was not alone the cumulative force of all his years of training, but also of the one great impulse he had ever had to kill. In that instant he wanted to strike a man dead—a red-visaged monster, a fiend! His blow sent Brokaw's huge body reeling backward, his head twisted as if his neck had been broken. He had no time to see what happened after that blow. He did not see Brokaw fall. A piercing interruption—a scream that startled every drop of blood in his body—turned him toward the cage.

Ten paces from him, standing at the inner edge of that astounded and petrified circle of men, was the girl. Her white arms gleamed bare, her shoulders were bare, her slim body was naked to the waist, about which she had drawn tightly—as if in a wild panic of haste—an old ragged skirt. It was the Indian woman's skirt. He caught the glitter of beads on it, and for a moment he stared with the others, unable to move or cry out her name.

Then a breath of wind flung back her hair, and he saw her face, the color of marble. She was like a piece of glistening statuary, without a quiver of life that his eyes could see, without a movement, without a breath. Only her hair moved, stirred by the air, flooded by the sun, floating about her shoulders in a lucent cloud of red and gold fires. And out of this she was staring at the cage, stunned into a lifeless and unbreathing posture of horror by what she saw.

David did not follow her eyes. He heard the growl and roar and clashing jaws of the fighting beasts. They were down again; one of the six-inch trees that formed the bars of the cage snapped like a walking-stick as their great bodies lurched against it; the earth shook, the very air seemed a tremble with the terrific force of the struggle. And only the girl was looking at that struggle—every eye was on her now. David sprang suddenly forth from the circle of men, calling her name.

TEN paces separated them; half that distance lay between the girl and the cage. With the swiftness of an arrow sprung from the bow, she had leaped into life and crossed that space. The loss of a tenth part of a second, and David would have been at her side. He was that tenth of a second too late. A gleaming shaft, she had passed between the bars; and a tumult of horrified voices rose suddenly above the roar of battle as the girl sprang at the beasts with her bare hands.

Her voice came to David in a scream:

"Tara—Tara—Tara!"

His brain reeled when he saw her down—down!—with her little fists pummeling at a great, shaggy head; and in him was the sickening weakness of a drunken man as he squeezed through that eighteen-inch aperture and almost fell at her side. He did not know that he had drawn his automatic; he scarcely realized that, as fast as his finger could press the trigger, he was firing shot after shot, with the muzzle of his pistol so close to the head of Tara's enemy that the reports of the weapon were deadened as by a thick blanket. It was a heavy gun. A stream of lead burned its way into the grizzly's brain—eleven shots.

When he stood up he had the girl close in his arms. The clasp of his hands against her warm flesh cleared his head; and while Tara was rending at the throat of his dying foe, David flung about her the light jacket he wore and drew her swiftly out of the cage.

"Go to your room," he said. "Tara is safe. I will see that no harm comes to him now."

The cordon of men separated for them as he led her through. The crowd was so silent that they could hear Tara's low throat-growling. And then, breaking that silence in a savage cry, came Brokaw's voice:

"Stop!"

He faced them, huge, terrible, quivering with rage. A step behind him was Hauck. There was no longer in his face an effort to conceal his murderous intentions. And close behind Hauck there gathered his white-faced whiskey-mongers, like a pack of wolves waiting for a lead-cry. David expected that cry to come from Brokaw. The girl expected it, and clung to David's shoulders, her bloodless face turned to the danger.

IT was Brokaw who gave the signal to the men.

"Clear out the cage!" he bellowed. "This spy has killed my bear, and he's got to fight me! Clear out the cage!"

He thrust his head and bull-like shoulders forward until his foul, hot breath touched their faces. His red neck was swollen with the passion of jealousy and hatred.

"And in that fight—I'm going to kill you!" he hissed.

It was Hauck who put his hands on the girl.

"Go with him," whispered David, as her arms tightened about his shoulders. "You must go with him, Marge—if I am to have a chance!"

Her face was against him. She was talking low, swiftly, for his ears alone—

with Hauck already beginning to pull her away:

"I will go to the house. When you see me at that window, fall on your face. I have a rifle. I will shoot him dead—from the window."

Perhaps Hauck heard. David wondered, as he caught the glitter in his eyes when he drew the girl away. He heard the crash of the big gate to the cage, and Tara ambled out and took his way slowly and haltingly toward the edge of the forest. When he saw the girl again, he was standing in the center of the cage, his feet in the pool of bears' blood. She was struggling with Hauck, struggling to break from him and get to the house. And now he knew that Hauck had heard, and that he would hold her there, and that her eyes would be on him when Brokaw killed him. For he knew that Brokaw would fight to kill. It would not be a square fight; it would be murder—if the chance came Brokaw's way.

The thought did not frighten him. He was growing strangely calm. He realized the advantage of being unencumbered, and he stripped off his shirt and tightened his belt. And then Brokaw entered. The giant had stripped himself to the waist, and be stood for a moment looking at David, a monster with the lust of murder red in his eyes. It was frightfully unequal—this combat. David felt it,—he was blind if he did not see it,—and yet he was still unafraid. A great silence fell. Cutting it like a knife came the girl's voice:

"Sakewawin—Sakewawin—"

A brutish growl rose out of Brokaw's chest. He had heard that cry, and it stung him like an asp.

"To-night she will be with me," he taunted David, and lowered his head for battle.

DAVID no longer saw the horde of faces beyond the thick bars of the cage. His last glance, shot past the lowered head and hulking shoulders of his giant adversary, went to the girl. Be noticed that she had ceased her struggling and was looking toward him. After that his eyes never left Brokaw's face. He had not realized that Brokaw was so powerful. Sizing him up in that moment before the first rush, he now saw that his one hope was to keep Brokaw from using his enormous strength at close quarters. A clinch would be fatal; in Brokaw's arms he would be helpless. He was conscious of an unpleasant thrill as be thought how easy it would be for the other to break his back, or snap his neck, if he gave him the opportunity. Science! What would it avail him here, pitted against this mountain of flesh and bone, that looked as if it might stand the beating of clubs without being conquered?

His first blow restored his confidence. Brokaw rushed. It was an easy attack to evade, and David's arm shot out and his fist landed against Brokaw's head with a sound that was like the crack of a whip. Hauck would have gone down under that blow like a log. Brokaw staggered. Even he realized that this was science—the skill of the game—and he was grinning as he advanced again. He could stand a hundred blows like that—a grim and ferocious Achilles with but one vulnerable point, the end of the jaw.

David waited and watched for his opportunity as he gave ground slowly. Twice he circled about the blood-spattered arena, Brokaw following him with leisurely sureness, and yet delaying his attack as if in that steady retreat of his victim he saw a torture too satisfying to put an end to at once. David measured his carelessness, the slow, almost unguarded movement of his great body, his unpreparedness for a coup de main—and like a flash he launched himself forward with all the weight of his body behind his effort.

It missed the other's jaw by two inches, that catapultic blow—striking him full in the mouth, breaking his yellow teeth, and smashing his thick lips so that the blood sprang out in a spray over his hairy chest; and as his head rocked backward David followed with a swift left, and a second time missed the jaw with his right—but drenched his clenched fist in blood. Out of Brokaw there came a cry that was like the roar of a beast; and in an instant he found himself battling, not for victory, not for that opportunity he twice had missed, but for his very life.

Against that rushing bulk, enraged almost to madness, the ingenuity of his training alone saved him from immediate extinction. How many times he struck in the hundred and twenty seconds following his blow to Brokaw's mouth be could never have told. His hands were red with Brokaw's blood. It was like striking at a monstrous thing without the sense of hurt, a fiend that had no brain that blows could sicken, a body that was not a body, but an enormity that had strangely taken human form. Brokaw had struck him once—only once in those two minutes. But blows were not what he feared now. He was beating himself to pieces, literally beating himself to pieces, as a ship might have hammered itself against a reef, and fighting with every breath to keep himself out of the fatal clinch. His efforts were costing him more than they were costing his antagonist. Twice he had reached his jaw; twice Brokaw's head had rocked back on his shoulders—and then he was there again, closing in on him, grinning, unconquerable.

WAS there no fairness out there beyond bars of the cage? Were they all like the man he was fighting—devils? An intermission, only half a minute, enough to give him a chance—

The slow, invincible beast he was hammering almost had him as his thoughts wandered. He only half fended the sledgelike blow that came straight for his face. He ducked, swung up his guard like lightning, and was saved from death by a miracle. That blow would have killed him. He knew it. Brokaw's huge fist landed against the side of his head and grazed off like a bullet that had struck the slanting surface of a rock. Yet the force of it was sufficient to send him crashing back against the bars—and down.

In that moment he thanked God for Brokaw's slowness. He had a clear recollection afterward of almost having spoken the words as he lay dazed and helpless for an infinitesimal space of time. He expected Brokaw to end it there. But Brokaw stood mopping the blood from his face, as if partly blinded by it, while from beyond the cage there came a swiftly growing rumble of voices that ended in a shouting of triumph—white men's shouting.

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He heard a scream. It was that scream—the agonized cry of the girl—that brought him to his feet while Brokaw was still wiping the hot flow from his dripping jaw. It was that cry that cleared his brain, that called out to him in its despair that he, must win—that all was lost for her as well as for himself if he was vanquished. For, more positively than at any other time during the fight, he felt now that defeat would mean death. It had come to him definitely in the savage outcry of joy when he was down. There was to be no mercy from those who were watching. Even in the silence of the Indians he had read an ominous decree. And Brokaw—

He was like a madman as he came toward David again. There was no longer the leer on his face. The grin was gone. There was in his battered and swollen countenance but one emotion. Blood and hurt could not hide it. It blazed like fires in his half closed eyes,—the desire to kill, the passion that quenches itself in the taking of life,—and every fiber in David's brain rose to meet it. He knew that it was no longer a matter of blows on his part—it was like the David of old facing Goliath with his bare hands. Curiously, the thought of Goliath came to him in those flashing moments. Here, too, there must be trickery, something unexpected, a deadly stratagem; and his brain must work out his salvation quickly. Another two or three minutes and it would be over one way or the other.

He made his decision. The tricks of his own art were inadequate, but there was still one hope—one last chance. It was the "knee-break" of the bush-country—a horrible thing, he had thought, when Father Roland had taught it to him.

"Break your opponent's knees," the missioner said, "and you've got him."

The idea had been distasteful to him and he had never practised it. But he knew the method, and he remembered the little missioner's words—"when he's straight facing you, with all your weight, like a cannon-ball!"

Suddenly he shot himself out like that, as Brokaw was about to rush upon him—a hundred and sixty pounds of solid flesh and bone against the joints of Brokaw's knees!

The shock dazed him. There was a sharp pain in his left shoulder, and with that shock and pain he was conscious of a terrible cry as Brokaw crashed over him. He was on his feet when Brokaw was on his knees. And now he struck in—with all the strength in his body he sent his right again and again to the jaw of his enemy. Brokaw reached up and caught him in his huge arms; but that jaw was there, unprotected, and David battered it as he might have broken rock with a hammer. A gasping cry rose out of the giant's throat; his head sank backward; and through a red fury—through blood that spattered up into his face—David continued to strike until the arms relaxed about him, and with a choking gurgle of blood in his throat Brokaw dropped back limply, as if dead.

AND then David looked again beyond the bars. The staring faces had drawn nearer to the cage, bewildered, stupefied, disbelieving, like stone images. For a space it was so quiet that it seemed to him they must hear his panting breath and the choking gurgle that was still in Brokaw's throat. The victor! He flung back his shoulders and held up his head, though he had a great desire to stagger against one of the bars and rest.

He could see the girl and Hauck. The girl was standing alone now, looking at him. She had seen him; she had seen him beat that giant beast. A great pride rose in his breast and spread in a joyous light over his bloody face. Suddenly he lifted his hand and waved it at her. In a flash she was coming to him. She would have broken her way through the cordon of men; but Hauck stopped her. David had seen Hauck talking swiftly to two of the white men. And now Hauck caught the girl and held her back. David knew that he was dripping red, and he was glad that she came no nearer. Hauck was telling her to go to the house, and David nodded and with a movement of his hand made her understand that she must obey. Not until he saw her going did he pick up his shirt and step out among the men.

Three or four of the whites went to Brokaw. The rest stared at him, still in that amazed silence, as he passed among them. He nodded and smiled at them, as though beating Brokaw had not been such a terrible task, after all. He noticed there was scarcely an expression in the faces of the Indians. And then he found himself face to face with Hauck, and a step or two behind Hauck were the two white men he had talked to so hurriedly. There was a grin in Hauck's face, and a grin in the faces of the other men. To David's astonishment, Hauck thrust out his hand.

"Shake, Raine! I'd have bet a thousand to fifty you were loser, but there wasn't a dollar going your way. A great fight!"

He turned to the other two.

"Take Raine to his room, boys. Help 'im wash up. I've got to see to Brokaw—an' this crowd."

David protested. He was all right. He needed only water and soap, both of which were in his room. But Hauck insisted that it wasn't square—and wouldn't look right—if he didn't have friends as well as Brokaw. Brokaw had forced the affair so suddenly that none of them had had time or thought to speak an encouraging or friendly word before the fight. Langdon and Henry would go with him now.

DAVID walked between the two to the Nest, and entered his room with them. Langdon, a tall man who had looked hatred at him last night, poured water into a big tin basin, while Henry, the smaller man, closed his door. They appeared quite companionable.

"Didn't like you last night," Langdon confessed frankly. "Thought you was one of them damned police running your nose into our business, mebbe."

He stood beside David, with the pail of water in his hand; and as David bent over the basin, Henry was behind him. He had drawn something from his pocket, and was edging up close. As David dipped his hands in the water he looked up into Langdon's face, and he saw there a strange and unexpected change—an expression of deadly malignity. In that moment the object in Henry's hand fell with terrific force on his head, and he crumpled down over the basin. He was conscious of a single agonizing pain, like a hot iron thrust suddenly through him; and then a great and engulfing pit of darkness closed him in.

To be continued next week

A Railroad On Your Conscience

By OLIN L. LYMAN

HOW would you like to stagger along with a railroad on your conscience? Own it? No, to owe it, for service it gave you sometime in the sin-swathed past without its knowing it. And any service a railroad renders free of charge, it is safe to assume, is unknown to said railroad.

You take a child with you upon a railroad journey, a very young child that looks younger. You should have paid half fare for said child. You did not, and for years you revel and gloat in secret over having dented a soulless railroad corporation for that much money. Or maybe in the initial royal flush of your youth you were a tramp and hoboed it over earth's green fields between ocean's wave-beat shores. And the railroad was handy and you used it, "unbeknownst." You swung yourself under bumpers with companion cinderfellas; you stowed yourself away with pork barrels or other merchandise. You could never estimate what you owed the railroads for those stolen rides before you became wind-galled and spavined and retired from the road. And for many years you don't care a honking hoot, and in your shady soul you are inclined to be glad of it.

Then there comes a great and abounding difference. Billy Sunday comes to town. There is a wakening, a flood of correspondence. And after many days the bread of the railroad, chuffing along the waters of life, has returned in the convenient form of dough, and the poor struggling corporation is able through the remittances of conscience to keep dubbing along. And the confessed sinner, be he the father of that original child, perhaps now grown to manhood, or be he that hiker of the past who is resting his feet, now walks cheerfully and more erect: for the weight of a whole outraged railroad system is off his conscience.

Billy Sunday Helps the Railroads"

"BILLY SUNDAY is certainly a help to the railroads," declared one of the most prominent officials of the Erie Railroad when interviewed by the writer. "We have noticed, particularly in the last two or three years, that if he is holding one of his monster revivals anywhere in the section traversed by our system, we immediately get a big acceleration in the number of conscience letters and remittances. Of course, this is true in result of all religious revivals, since the emotional disturbance engenders a swelling in volume of the 'still small voice,' but it is particularly true of Billy Sunday. There's no doubt whatever that the athletic revivalist has brought to the tills of the big railroads in this country, in this 'conscience money,' amounts totaling many thousands."

All Kinds of Letters

SURPRISINGLY few of the letters are from ignorant and illiterate persons. By far the great bulk of them are well constructed and well spelled, and the handwriting is uniformly good.

Another development is that in many of the letters the fact is revealed that there is a certain selfishness in salvation, a disregard of the welfare of any one in the round world save the writer of the letter. It is an interesting study of the ego rampant through fear, and it regrettably shows a decided yellow streak on the part of the writers. For many of these people do not scruple to get an innocent conductor, who passed them by, "in wrong" by telling the train and the day upon which the incident of wronging the road happened; but in some cases they actually dig up the name of the conductor as an ignorant party to the transaction!

Against this depressing picture can be placed many an instance of a repentant man or woman brooding over the wrong committed till it assumes magnified proportions, and making honest recompense in a spirit of real justice toward the defrauded corporation, and often at the expense of much of real self-sacrifice.

There's a queer diversity in these conscience customs of the country. For instance, the writer was informed by officials of the Erie that most of their "conscience letters" are unsigned, the writers apparently preferring to hide their darkness under a bushel. In contrast, most of the letters received by the New York Central are signed fully—in some cases with all three names and complete address.

In many cases, however, remitters do not write the roads, but content themselves with calling at some station and handing the amount due to the agent, with or without the name of the repentant refunder being given. The money is then sent in to headquarters. Most of the systems put the proceeds into the earnings of the road in this way: a ticket is purchased to cover the amount, and the revenue thus goes forthwith into the passenger traffic earnings of the company.

A specimen of the communications from agents is found in an instance reported by the Central agent at Buffalo. He said that a man called at his office one morning and told of an unpaid trip over the line forty years previously, for which he owed the road a dollar. The agent accepted it and inclosed a ticket to Middleport and return, indorsed "Conscience Fund," to cover the item.

A pathetic letter came to the Central's New York office from a woman in Oregon. She inclosed a post-office money order for $9.18 to cover fare for her boy many years before from Syracuse, New York, to Chicago. She had suffered since for representing him as younger than he really was, and had learned that the way of the transgessor is hard. She added that there was still more money due, and that she would pay it as soon as she could. "I had to save this money a little at a time," she wrote, "but it does me good to send it to you. My husband feels the same way, as God has saved his soul as well as mine."

As is invariably the custom in these cases, a very cordial and sympathetic letter was written to the woman, urging her to exercise her convenience in regard to the payment of the extra money that she said was due.

A letter came from a man in the South inclosing fifty cents to pay for a stolen ride in central New York many years before. At the time of sending his first letter he did not give his name, but merely signed the letter, "Your repentant friend."

Then conscience began skirling in his soul again, and he put in a couple of more troubled months. He then wrote the Central that he had been thinking it was not right to withhold his name from the system, so he was giving his cognomen and address. He filled in all three of his names for good measure. The Central replied cordially that the debt was now more than squared, and that he need trouble no more about it.

A father wrote during a recent Billy Sunday revival that, having experienced grace himself, he was now also cleaning house. In this occupation he had found that his son, a minor, had two years before departed from the way set for him. He had traveled over a short distance on a Central side line in that region on a pass that he had borrowed from a Central trainman—and the father took pains to give the trainman's name. The sum that the Central should have had was $4.24, and this amount the man inclosed, asking the system's forgiveness for his boy.

Such forgiveness was extended without delay. But here's betting that the average reader will in this particular case be extending more sympathy to the trainman than to the father.

Hope for the Railroad's Salvation

MANY of the letters contain expressions from the Bible, and in some cases expressions are encountered of hope that the railroad company, too, may at some future day experience salvation.

One man sent in a remittance of twenty-two cents last year to cover the amount due on a "blind baggage" ride a year or two previously from Rochester to Chili.

The spirit of a levity appears but seldom. A Syracuse man sent in some mileage due for a ride between that city and Utica. He explained that the conductor had overlooked him, and because he was

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immersed in the pages of a French novel he overlooked the conductor and all other men. Had the conductor been a lady, he was sure he would have noticed her. "You know that after the second chapter of a French novel it is always that way."

An Impassioned Plea to the Lehigh

ONE of the most impassioned letters that the Lehigh ever received in these premises follows. It was sent from a Pennsylvania town. At the top was printed. "EXCUSE POOR WRITING," ample evidence that the poor fellow was doing his best to atone for a sin whose heinousness had assumed untoward proportions through his brooding over it.

E. B. THOMAS,

President of the Lehigh Valley R. R.

Dear Sir:

As I Got right with the God, Our Heavenly Father, on the 5th day of December, 1915.

And since I am saved through the Blood of our dear God and Saviour Jesus Christ, I have a Confession to Confess to you as president of the Lehigh Valley R. R. and the whole System of the Lehigh Valley R. R. As I wronged the whole System of the Lehigh Valley R. R.

I "Hoboed," many many miles over the Lehigh Valley railroad at different times at different points and Different divisions of the Lehigh Valley R. R. between Sayre, Pa., and Easton, Pa., yes many miles I can never be able to tell how many miles I did beat the Lehigh Valley R R. out of car fare and I will never be able to pay the car fare which I beat the Company out of. Of course you may not have known it and the other officials might not have known it. But never the less I know it and above All God knows it.

Now to be right with the Lord we must Confess our Sins to our fellow men (our neighbors) and me and you and each and every human Being in this world are our neighbors or fellow men. Although I never met you as I know of never the less you are my fellow man and neighbor. We must owe no man anything. So as I can never pay back to the Lehigh Valley R. R. what I owe I must Confess where and when I wronged them and I must beg forgiveness as a Christian "saved" man.

I will say from the bottom of my heart and soul that I am sorry for all of my past transgressions against the L. V. R. R.

And again I beg your forgiveness also the entire System's forgiveness.

Hoping that you forgive me,

I am your truly saved friend

(Name and address)

P. S. If you care to write me a letter of forgiveness I shall be more than pleased to receive it.

To show the consideration which those in the president's office extended to this poor suffering wretch, let it be mentioned that this letter was sent out the next day, signed by the assistant secretary to the president:

Your letter without date, addressed to President Thomas, was received yesterday and contents carefully noted.

We are very glad indeed to receive communications written in the spirit which prompted your letter, and I am authorized to say to you that in so far as you may have trespassed against this Company in the past by illegal train riding, such transgression is fully and freely forgiven.

We wish you a peaceful and happy New Year.

It's a ten-to-one shot he had one—at least so until he backslid again.

So Much per "Naw"

THAT was a curious letter received at the Pennsylvania's headquarters in Philadelphia a year ago, and it is the most peculiar angle that the present writer ran across during his researches. It is that of satisfying a wailing conscience on the instalment plan.

Remors naws [wrote a man out in Ohio to a Pennsylvania agent in the Keystone State]. I ow yure ralerode $1.85 and I am sendding $1. Wen she naws some more I'll send the rest.

She must have quit "nawing," for it is not of record that the road ever received the extra eighty-five cents.

A man walked into the office of a Pennsylvania division passenger agent and laid down two fares from New York to Pittsburgh. He explained that the money was due the road for the passage of himself and wife from the metropolis to the city of smoke and pits. He explained that they had boarded a train without preliminary time in which to buy tickets and the conductor overlooked them. He would not state the day nor the train they took, because he said he had no desire "to get the conductor in wrong."

Score one for that fair-minded gentleman! In pursuing this investigation at the headquarters of the several systems the writer read hundreds of letters and reports, and this is the only instance encountered where a supplicant for railroad forgiveness, whether for himself or others, has shown any consideration for the busy conductor who made an essentially human mistake in overlooking a passenger.

In fact, the reverse is true. Consciously or unconsciously, as it may be, the correspondent does his best to get the conductor "in bad."

It is a fact that in most of the letters all the consideration contained is for the selfish sake of the writer. This is by no means true of the whole mass, but it is discouragingly true of many. Most of them pile in all the evidence at hand for the exclusive sake of their own souls; and herein, too, is a curious inconsistency. Their eyes have rested with hope and assurance upon the line in Holy Writ, "Repent, and be saved," but they have altogether skipped the eternal question, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Thanked Them for the Trouble She Made

STANDING "where the brook and river meet," a little maid, living in the "lower tier" of New York State, attended revival meetings. Then she sat down and gravely took stock. A deep red offense glowed sullenly in her memory. And with adorable suddenness she took steps for atonement.

The following letter was received at headquarters in New York:

Inclosed please find forty cents in stamps. A few years ago I went to the —— —— Fair and was overlooked in the train going and coming back, so did not pay my fare either way. There have been revival meetings and the matter has bothered me very much. I at last made up my mind I would have it settled and send you the money for the carfare as I got your address from the agent. Now please don't send it back, as I never want to see it again. Please don't say anything about this to the people at home, as it is very embarrassing for me as it is.

Thanking you very much for the trouble I have made, I remain,

Very sincerely yours,

................

One of the "nicest" letters ever sent out from Erie headquarters was mailed in response to this letter. But it was sent in care of the agent at the little girl's home; the officers of the road respected her desire that they "say nothing to the people at home."

A Study in Hysterics

A PECULIAR sample of chirographical hysterics was received by the Erie, but in it the writer proved his ability to think of others besides himself. Near the close he thought of the poor old Erie. Listen:

In accord with the Holy Spirit I now write the Erie. The Lord has saved and sanctified my soul and so I am able and willing to make restitution to your Company.

About fifteen years ago I was called to ——, N. Y., and as my miens was limited I jumped a freight at —— and rode to —— a distance of twelve mile. Of course this matter is small, but I want to clear my conscience. I enclose in stamps 35 cents, the regular fare as I remember it.

In writing this kindly ask you to have the peace that the world knows not of? Are you ready to meet the Savior of the world who is about to return?

The question must have set the poor old Erie thinking.

Summing up, the "conscience files" are not to be approached in the spirit of unthinking levity. Rather, there is pathos in the attempt of humility and ignorance to express its plea. And the varied contents of the fHes form the babel fusing in the great human wailing voice, the supplication of the struggling, hoping, despairing race groping through the shadows for the promised Grail.

How We Got Ourselves Out of Debt

THIS bit of practical method is not the work of either a professional or an amateur financier. It does not purport to settle all family business difficulties. It is the story of failure—not success. But the message is there.

The writer is past thirty and has been married eight years. His income—very like "all Gaul"—is divided into three parts, five hundred dollars from literary work; twelve hundred from lecture work; with a generous income from heading a department in a Kentucky institution. This should make a living, surely, sufficient for two adults and two babies.

But it didn't!

The Awakening

ABOUT fourteen months ago we suddenly awoke to the fact that we were running farther behind every month. The revelation sickened and distressed us. We were then about twelve hundred dollars in absolute debt.

Panicky—and, I fear, simpering—I strove to find a larger salary in another institution. Failing, I rushed to this friend and that, only to find that money in our community was air-tight and chained in addition.

Then I faced the situation somewhat squarely, and with a brave wife started in to reduce expenses and "pay off." Our methods are so simple that you may scoff at them. But they worked with us. They have paid off a huge amount of debt; at least, huge to us. By the same methods one may accumulate funds.

We Get Our Change

FIRST. We were ordering by telephone. We had one dry-goods bill of $81 which we supposed was about $20. We had a grocery bill of $110 which I honestly thought was about $40 or $50. Not being pressed, we had allowed the butcher to credit us to the amount of $75.

You see, we are reputable citizens. We are church folk. "Sometime they will pay up!" sang the chorus in their varied stores; and they allowed the telephone to keep adding to our misery.

How did we meet the telephone imp? Well, my wife says, "Kindly send us a fifty-cent pork roast and change for a dollar!" We send our maid with cold cash when we wish to buy anything at the dry-goods store. We have slain that abominable little insect!

Nibbling at the Big Bills

SECOND. We had known some bills were large, and therefore left them absolutely alone in their glory. No month ever came when we felt free to say, "Now we'll pay off that furniture bill of forty dollars." No, my friends; such months are rarer far than the proverbial days of June.

True, an occasional statement of our account marred the absolute serenity of home joy; but the first of the month soon ebbs out into those glorious bill-proof days. Undisturbed, we little heeded our danger.

But finally a terse note from a collection agency gave us cold chills. How did we go about to secure a remedy? We began by nibbling at them—the big bills. We paid off a $300 note by compelling ourselves boldly to hand over twenty-five dollars every month. The furniture bill we faced at the rate of five dollars a month.

We kept right after those debts. And fives and tens will eventually pay off anything—even a plumber.

How We Tackled the Small Bills

THIRD. We knew we had a small raft of small debts. We owed one jeweler eight dollars, and promptly changed shops to keep from annoyance. We owed eight here, six-thirty here, seven-twenty at another shop.

Being cultured and not wishing to offend, we slid by these merchants or, like the Levite, more often "passed by on the other side." Now I walk straight past these same stores and their owners.

We quit shamming. We borrowed a large amount of money—large for us—and paid off all the tag-end, no-account bills.

And last. None of our associates entertained as we did. We were locally famous for doing things correctly.

Our printing bill was large. We were kind to the caterer, too. We helped the florist maintain himself, with genial smiles for us. We were strong on "fancy groceries." But the butcher and baker were left unpaid!

So we changed our course. Little by little we surprised ourselves by self-denials. We are not racing our neighbors any more. People have forgotten to compliment our clever dinners and distinctly different parties. We are hospitable, I hope, but with a more wholesome brand of hospitality.

And it's great to be even with the world! It is like an immortal's tonic to get a "receipt" and know that you have been manly and womanly and worth-while. Sacrificing begins to take on a sort of domesticated glamour. The automobile can wait. The grocer must be paid before the corner garage makes money. Even old clothes rest rather comfortably on buoyant shoulders.

How We Built Our House

HERE'S another contest. Three prizes. First, $25; Second, $15; Third, $10. And regular magazine rates for every other letter that we publish.

All the men and women who, out of an ordinary salary, have saved for a home and succeeded in building and paying for it, are eligible for the contest.

I want your whole story in not more than 750 words. The story that wins the prize will win, not because of its literary style, but because of its facts. Give figures—what your income was; how you started saving; how you planned your house; how you met the succeeding payments; and any other information that will help other people to avoid your mistakes.

Your name will not be published: therefore make your letter as frank as you please. This contest closes October 15, 1916.

Address "How We Built Our House Contest"

Care of the Editor of this Magazine

95 Madison Avenue, New York.

He Has Seventeen Jobs

WE nominate for the Iron Cross Mr. J. F. Maloney of Millrift, Pennsylvania, the busiest man in the world. Mr. Maloney is at present giving complete satisfaction in the following seventeen jobs:

Is there any other man or woman in the United States who can compete with Mr. Maloney in teh number of jobs handled? We should like to publish a full page of pictures of these busiest people. Send in your nomination. Meantime the prize will remain with Mr. Maloney.

WHEN I was left alone in the world, I had just $200. Manual labor was out of the question. I set my wits at work and did some hard thinking. I always had been a great reader. I began to notice how hard it was to secure a new book from the public library. The newest books were always out. That gave e my idea. There must be many more of the reading public who were also waiting.

I thought it all out. I would spend half my capital for books, keeping the rest for expenses. I would rent out books at two cents a day.

When I told people what I was about to do, I received no encouragement. "It is a crazy project," they said. "You will lose what little you have."

However, I went ahead.

I rented space in a small store, and paid my rent by acting as cashier. I invested my hundred dollars in books of fiction.

The first day I was in business I rented three books. Two of them were to clerks in the store. For the first two months I did not make expenses. The third month I cleared all expenses and made ten cents.

After that the growth was slow but steady. Every months I added new books, and soon outgrew my quarters.

Then I secured space in a department store across the street, and my business increased by leaps and bounds. One hundred and fifty books on Saturday was a common occurence, while often the number went as high as two hundred.

People thought iw strange that there could be any money made in this way. A woman, a stranger in town, came in one day, took a book, and returned it the next morning. AS she paid me the tow cents she remarked, "I shouldn't think that you would earn your salt." "Nor would I," I quickly responded, "if every one were like you."

Customers who kept books but one day were few. More often, books were out from five days to two weeks. If I found one that was very popular, I bought several copies, and for nearly a year they were always moving. As the library became crowded, I selected books from the shelves and sold them for a quarter apiece.

After fifteen years, I was forced to retire on account of ill health. I sold my library for a very good price. I am now living comfortably on the income derived from that first outlay of $200.Mrs. G. A. Dunn

THE EDITOR.

Look Out, Men: The Widows are Organized

LED by Mrs. Bessie C. Turpin of Omaha, Nebraska, widows have found a union. The purpose is to prepare for the avalanche of widows that will sweep down upon this country at the end of the European war, and to better those widows in countless numbers who are already in this man-made world.

"All classes in the world except widows are organized," says Mrs. Turpin. "Yet there is no class more in need of the help that comes through this co-operation.

"Most widows are mothers, and when these women are suddenly thrown upon the world to support themselves and there children, they find almost insurmountable obstacles.

"We are organizing to help them solve [?] problems."

[?] e Society of American Widows is no [?] It has a real program, and Mrs. [?] Turpin has taken up the work so seriously that she has lost her job as book-keeper at the Booth fisheries.

But she has not allowed a little thing like that to block her campaign to organize the millions of widows throughout the country.

Here are some of the things the widows' society plans to do:

Obtain from merchants a ten per cent. discount on all purchases.

Establish a sewing department, an employment bureau, reading, rest, and lunch rooms, and a day nursery in the business districts of all large cities.

Build profit-sharing apartment houses, including gymnasium, music and assembly rooms, to be occupied by widows and their families at [?] rentals.

[?]