Strictly business, more stories of the four million

Jl/JAN is the hardest
•** *~ proposition a wo
man has to go up against.

Biographical
Edition

STRICTLY BUSINESS

O. HENRY

BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION

STRICTLY
BUSINESS

MORE STORIES OF
THE FOUR MILLION

WITH A NOTE BY WILLIAM JOHNSTON

VOLUME I

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1925

COPYRIGHT, 1903, I9O4, I9OS, I9O6, I9O8, I9IO,
BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED. COPYRIGHT, I9O7, BY THE RIDGWAY
COMPANY. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y,

Stack
Annex

\

v ,\
CONTENTS

PAGB

I. STRICTLY BUSINESS ..... I

II. THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED ... 19

III. BABES IN THE JUNGLE ..... 31

IV. THE DAY RESURGENT ..... 40
V. THE FIFTH WHEEL ...... 50

VI. THE POET AND THE PEASANT . . 68

VII. THE ROBE OF PEACE ..... 77

VIII. THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT ... 84

IX. THE CALL OF THE TAME .... 93

X. THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY .... 102

XI. THE THING'S THE PLAY . . . . in

XII. A RAMBLE IN APHASIA . 122

DISCIPLINING O. HENRY*

THERE was once a Western artist, come to
New York, who at first wrote home glowing
letters about the various literary celebrities he
was meeting, but there came a time when to a
brother artist he ruefully remarked:

"It's best to know these chaps only by their
writings. Once you get acquainted with them,
they're just like everybody else."

With equal truth it may be said that no recol
lections of intimate friends ever give the insight
into a departed author's real personality half so
well as do his letters. Especially does this apply
to a man of innate shyness who perpetually
cloaked his personality with a gentle reserve
that seldom was penetrated. Indeed, each time
I read some new recollections of "an intimate
friend of O. Henry," I always picture his ghost
sitting somewhere over a celestial highball —
they must have highballs there or it wouldn't be
Heaven for him — smiling sarcastically. For
Sydney Porter, gentle, lovable, talented though
he was, had no intimate friends. Stunned per
haps by the hard blows that life had dealt him,
there was none to whom he revealed himself
without reserve, to whom he confided his hopes,
his ambitions, his estimate of himself.

While the writer (for a period of nearly three

*Copyright, 1921, by Geo. H. Doran Company.
vii

viii DISCIPLINING O. HENRY

years his editorial taskmaster, exacting from
him a story a week as per contract) perforce saw
him often, and while this acquaintanceship was
further cemented by frequent luncheons and
dinners, and by evenings spent over the pool
table or in the bowling alleys, nothing in the
memories of this personal contact is half so re
vealing of the real O. Henry as some cherished
letters, fragments of an almost daily correspond
ence carried on for many months.

The task of providing an original story each
week was an arduous one for even as prolific a
writer as O. Henry; yet his letters explaining
wrhy the stories were late in being delivered,
show almost as much his powers of invention as
do the tales themselves. Sometimes his excuse
was a visitor who stayed overlong. The next
time it would be something about "dizziness
on rising," and again a thrilling account of
"Colonel Bright and his justly celebrated dis
ease," candor compelling him to say in conclu
sion: "Good old doc says it ain't the genuine
thing but it took six prescriptions and wasn't
any slouch of an imitation."

At another time a stern editorial demand,
"Where's this week's story?" would be replied
to with a whimsical note that likely as not would
read:

What you say? Let's take an evening off and strike
the Cafe Francis for a slight refection. I like to be waked
up suddenly there by the music and look across at the
red-haired woman eating smelts under an original by
Glackens.

Peace for Yours,

S. P.

DISCIPLINING O. HENRY ix

By way of explaining his dilatoriness in de
livering a story when due, he wrote :

Being entirely out of tune with the Muse, I went out and
ameliorated the condition of a shop girl as far as a planked
steak &c could do so.

Nearly always his letters would be written in
his round, regular hand, sometimes in pencil,
more often with ink, and generally they were
signed "Sydney Porter"; but there is one in the
writer's collection, typed, and signed merely
with the initials O. H., that is perhaps the
brightest gem of all. It was written under the
following circumstances. His weekly story had
been delivered, late as usual. It was "The
Guilty Party," since become one of the most
celebrated of his tales, describing an episode be
fore the judgment bar. On receiving it, I wrote
him to this effect:

There was once a celebrated author who appeared be
fore the judgment bar. A host of people were there say
ing nice things about him, when up spoke a weary editor
and said, "He never kept a promise in his life."

In reply to this there came from him by spe
cial messenger a note which read:

Guilty, m'lud.

And yet —

Some time ago a magazine editor to whom I had prom
ised a story at a certain minute (and strangely enough
didn't get there with it) wrote to me: "I am coming down
to-morrow to kick you thoroughly with a pair of heavy-
soled shoes. / never go back on my promises." And I
lifted up my voice and said unto him: "It's easy to keep
promises that can be pulled off with your feet."

jc DISCIPLINING O. HENRY

And always, looking back at these letters, the
sight of them reviving vividly recollections of
their writer, a gentle, shy, whimsical soul, who
when fame came stubbornly refused to be lion
ized, who abhorred a dress suit, who viewed
with alarm any gathering that included more
than three persons, there comes the memory of
his imposing funeral, with all the pall-bearers
celebrities of the metropolis, but — so the story
goes — half of them men who never had even laid
eyes on the writer whose body they bore to its
resting place.

Always it has seemed to me that this was a
commentary, but a commentary on what, I
never have been able to decide. It may have
been a commentary on the greatness of New
York, or perhaps on our funeral customs. I
like to think it was a commentary on the great
ness and simplicity of O. Henry.

And this one thing more I know — of all the
joys of authorship that have come to me since
the days of my acquaintance with Sydney Porter
there has been none sweeter nor more appre
ciated than that of a note from him when years
ago he discovered a short story of mine in an
obscure Southern magazine.

"I wish I'd written that story," was his gal
lant — and I have always tried to believe, sincere
— phrase.

WILLIAM JOHNSTON.

STRICTLY BUSINESS

STRICTLY BUSINESS

STRICTLY BUSINESS

I SUPPOSE you know all about the stage and
stage people. You've been touched with and
by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms
and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto
and the chorus girls and the long-haired trage
dians. And I suppose that a condensed list of
your ideas about the mysterious stageland
would boil down to something like this:

Leading ladies have five husbands, paste
diamonds, and figures no better than your own
(madam) if they weren't padded. Chorus
girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards,
and Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New
York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irre
proachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady
part for their mothers on Broadway and their
step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew's real
name is Boyle O'Kelley. The ravings of John
McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from
the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe
Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern; but
Henry Miller is getting older than he was.

2 STRICTLY BUSINESS

All theatrical people on leaving the theatre
at night drink champagne and eat lobsters until
noon the next day. After all, the moving
pictures have got the whole bunch pounded to a
pulp.

Now, few of us know the real life of the stage
people. If we did, the profession might be
more overcrowded than it is. We look askance
at the players with an eye full of patronizing
superiority — and we go home and practise all
sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our
looking glasses.

Latterly there has been much talk of the actor
people in a new light. It seems to have been
divulged that instead of being motoring baccha
nalians and diamond-hungry loreleis they are
businesslike folk, students and ascetics with
childer and homes and libraries, owning real
estate, and conducting their private affairs in as
orderly and unsensational a manner as any of us
good citizens who are bound to the chariot
wheels of the gas, rent, coal, ice, and wardmen.

Whether the old or the new report of the sock-
and-buskiners be the true one is a surmise that
has no place here. I offer you merely this little
story of two strollers; and for proof of its truth
I can show you only the dark patch above the
cast-iron handle of the stage-entrance door of
Keetor's old vaudeville theatre made there by
the petulant push of gloved hands too impatient
to finger the clumsy thumb-latch — and where
I last saw Cherry whisking through like a
swallow into her nest, on time to the minute, as
usual, to dress for her act.

STRICTLY BUSINESS 3

The vaudeville team of Hart & Cherry was an
inspiration. Bob Hart had been roaming
through the Eastern and Western circuits for
four years with a mixed-up act comprising a
monologue, three lightning changes with songs,
a couple of imitations of celebrated imitators,
and a buck-and-wing dance that had drawn a
glance of approval from the bass-viol player in
more than one house — than which no performer
ever received more satisfactory evidence of
good work.

The greatest treat an actor can have is to
witness the pitiful performance with which all
other actors desecrate the stage. In order to
give himself this pleasure he will often forsake
the sunniest Broadway corner between Thirty-
fourth and Forty-fourth to attend a matinee
offering by his less gifted brothers. Once during
the lifetime of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff
and remains to go through with that most
difficult exercise of Thespian muscles — the
audible contact of the palm of one hand against
the palm of the other.

One afternoon Bob Hart presented his sol
vent, serious, well-known vaudevillian face at
the box-office window of a rival attraction and
got his d. h. coupon for an orchestra seat.

A, B, C, and D glowed successively on the
announcement spaces and passed into oblivion,
each plunging Mr. Hart deeper into gloom.
Others of the audience shrieked, squirmed,
whistled and applauded; but Bob Hart, "All
the Mustard and a Whole Show in Himself,"
sat with his face as long and his hands as far

apart as a boy holding a hank of yarn for his
grandmother to wind into a ball.

But when H came on, "The Mustard" sud
denly sat up straight. H was the happy alpha
betical prognosticator of Winona Cherry, in
Character Songs and Impersonations. There
were scarcely more than two bites to Cherry;
but she delivered the merchandise tied with a
pink cord and charged to the old man's account.
She first showed you a deliciously dewy and
ginghamy country girl with a basket of property
daisies who informed you ingenuously that
there were other things to be learned at the old
log school-house besides cipherin' and nouns,
especially "When the Teach-er Kept Me in."
Vanishing, with a quick flirt of gingham apron-
strings, she .reappeared in considerably less
than a "trice" as a fluffy "Parisienne" — so
near does Art bring the old red mill to the
Moulin Rouge. And then—

But you know the rest. And so did Bob
Hart; but he saw somebody else. He thought
he saw that Cherry was the only professional
on the short order stage that he had seen who
seemed exactly to fit the part of "Helen
Grimes" in the sketch he had written and kept
tucked away in the tray of his trunk. Of
course Bob Hart, as well as every other normal
actor, grocer, newspaper man, professor, curb
broker, and farmer, has a play tucked (away
somewhere. They tuck 'em in trays of trunks,
trunks of trees, desks, haymows, pigeonholes,
inside pockets, safe-deposit vaults, handboxes,
and coal cellars, waiting for Mr. Frohman to

STRICTLY BUSINESS 5

call. They belong among the fifty-seven dif
ferent kinds.

But Bob Hart's sketch was not destined to
end in a pickle jar. He called it "Mice Will
Play." He had kept it quiet and hidden away
ever since he wrote it, waiting to find a partner
who fitted his conception of "Helen Grimes."
And here was "Helen" herself, with all the
innocent abandon, the youth, the sprightliness,
and the flawless stage art that his critical
taste demanded.

After the act was over Hart found the
manager in the box office, and got Cherry's
address. At five the next afternoon he called
at the musty old house in the West Forties and
sent up his professional card.

By daylight, in a secular shirtwaist and plain
voile skirt, with her hair curbed and her Sister
of Charity eyes, Winona Cherry might have
been playing the part of Prudence Wise, the
deacon's daughter, in the great (unwritten)
New England drama not yet entitled anything.

"I know your act, Mr. Hart," she said after
she had looked over his card carefully. "What
did you wish to see me about?"

"I saw you work last night," said Hart.
"I've written a sketch that I've been saving
up. It's for two; and I think you can do the
other part. I thought I'd see you about it."

"Come in the parlor," said Miss Cherry.
"I've been wishing for something of the sort.
I think I'd like to act instead of doing turns."

Bob Hart drew his cherished "Mice Will
Play" from his pocket, and read it to her.

6 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"Read it again, please," said Miss Cherry.

And then she pointed out to him clearly how
it could be improved by introducing a messenger
instead of a telephone call, and cutting the
dialogue just before the climax while they were
struggling with the pistol, and by completely
changing the lines and business of Helen Grimes
at the point where her jealousy overcomes her.
Hart yielded to all her strictures without argu
ment. She had at once put her finger on the
sketch's weaker points. That was her woman's
intuition that he had lacked. At the end of
their talk Hart was willing to stake the judg
ment, experience, and savings of his four years
of vaudeville that "Mice Will Play" would
blossom into a perennial flower in the garden
of the circuits. Miss Cherry was slower to
decide. After many puckerings of her smooth
young brow and tappings on her small, white
teeth with the end of a lead pencil she gave out
her dictum.

"Mr. Hart," said she, "I believe your sketch
is going to win out. That Grimes part fits me
like a shrinkable flannel after its first trip to a
handless hand laundry. I can make it stand
out like the colonel of the Forty-fourth Regi
ment at a Little Mothers' Bazaar. And I've
seen you work. I know what you can do with
the other part. But business is business. How
much do you get a week for the stunt you do
now?"

"Two hundred," answered Hart.

"I get one hundred for mine," said Cherry.
"That's about the natural discount for a woman.

STRICTLY BUSINESS 7

But I live on it and put a few simoleons every
week under the loose brick in the old kitchen
hearth. The stage is all right. I love it; but
there's something else I love better — that's a
little country home, some day, with Plymouth
Rock chickens and six ducks wandering around
the yard.

"Now, let me tell you, Mr. Hart, I am
STRICTLY BUSINESS. If you want me to play
the opposite part in your sketch, I'll do it. And I
believe we can make it go. And there's some
thing else I want to say: There's no nonsense
in my make-up; I'm on the level, and I'm on the
stage for what it pays me, just as other girls
work in stores and offices. I'm going to save
my money to keep me when I'm past doing my
stunts. No Old Ladies' Home or Retreat for
Imprudent Actresses for me.

"If you want to make this a business partner
ship, Mr. Hart, with all nonsense cut out of it,
I'm in on it. I know something about vaude
ville teams in general; but this would have to be
one in particular. I want you to know that I'm
on the stage for what I can cart away from it
every pay-day in a little manila envelope with
nicotine stains on it, where the cashier has
licked the flap. It's kind of a hobby of mine to
want to cravenette myself for plenty of rainy
days in the future. I want you to know just
how I arru I don't know what an all-night
restaurant looks like; I drink only weak tea;
I never spoke to a man at a stage entrance in
my life, and I've got money in five savings
banks."

8 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"Miss Cherry," said Bob Hart in his smooth,
serious tones, "you're in on your own terms.
I've got 'strictly business' pasted in my hat and
stenciled on my make-up box. When I dream
of nights I always see a five-room bungalow on
the north shore of Long Island, with a Jap
cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen,
and me with the title deeds to the place in my
pongee coat pocket, swinging in a hammock on
the side porch, reading Stanley's 'Explorations
into Africa/ And nobody else around. You
never was interested in Africa, was you, Miss
Cherry?"

"Not any,""said Cherry. "What I'm going
to do with my money is to bank it. You can
get four per cent, on deposits. Even at the
salary I've been earning, I've figured out that in
ten years I'd have an income of about $50 a
month just from the interest alone. Well, I
might invest some of the principal in a little
business — say, trimming hats or a beauty parlor,
and make more."

"Well," said Hart, "you've got the proper
idea all right, all right, anyhow. There are
mighty few actors that amount to anything at
all who couldn't fix themselves for the wet days
to come if they'd save their money instead of
blowing it. I'm glad you've got the correct
business idea of it, Miss Cherry. I think the
same way; and I believe this sketch will more
than double what both of us earn now when we
get it shaped up."

The subsequent history of "Mice W7ill Play"
is the history of all successful writings for the

STRICTLY BUSINESS 9

stage. Hart & Cherry cut it, pieced it, re-
modeled it, performed surgical operations on the
dialogue and business, changed the lines, re
stored 'em, added more, cut 'em out, renamed
it, gave it back the old name, rewrote it, sub
stituted a dagger for the pistol, restored the
pistol — put the sketch through all the known
processes of condensation and improvement.

They rehearsed it by the old-fashioned board
ing-house clock in the rarely used parlor until
its warning click at five minutes to the hour
would occur every time exactly half a second be
fore the click of the unloaded revolver that Helen
Grimes used in rehearsing the thrilling climax of
the sketch.

Yes, that was a thriller and a piece of excel
lent work. In the act a real 32-caliber revolver
was used loaded with a real cartridge. Helen
Grimes, who is a Western girl of decidedly
Buffalo Billish skill and daring, is tempestuously
in love with P rank Desmond, the private secre
tary and confidential prospective son-in-law of
her father, " Arapahoe" Grimes, quarter-million-
dollar cattle king, owning a ranch that, judging
by the scenery, is in either the Bad Lands or
Amagansett, L. I. Desmond (in private life
Mr. Bob Hart) wears puttees and Meadow
Brook Hunt riding trousers, and gives his ad
dress as New York, leaving you to wonder why
he comes to the Bad Lands or Amagansett (as
the case may be) and at the same time to con
jecture mildly why a cattleman should want
puttees about his ranch with a secretary in
'em.

io STRICTLY BUSINESS

Well, anyhow, you know as well as I do that
we all like that kind of play, whether we admit
it or not — something along in between "Blue
beard, Jr.," and "Cymbeline" played in the
Russian.

There were only two parts and a half in "Mice
Will Play." Hart and Cherry were the two,
of course; and the half was a minor part always
played by a stage hand, who merely came in
once in a Tuxedo coat and a panic to announce
that the house was surrounded by Indians, and
to turn down the gas fire in the grate by the
manager's orders.

There was another girl in the sketch — a Fifth
Avenue society swelless — who was visiting the
ranch and who had sirened Jack Valentine when
he was a wealthy clubman on lower Third
Avenue before he lost his money. This girl
appeared on the stage only in the photographic
state — Jack had her Sarony stuck up on the
mantel of the Amagan — of the Bad Lands
droring room. Helen was jealous, of course.

And now for the thriller. Old "Arapahoe"
Grimes dies of angina pectoris one night — so
Helen informs us in a stage-ferryboat whisper
over the footlights — while only his secretary
was present. And that same day he was known
to have had $647,000 in cash in his (ranch)
library just received for the sale of a drove of
beeves in the East (that accounts for the prices
we pay for steak!). The cash disappears at the
same time. Jack Valentine was the only person
with the ranchman when he made his (alleged)
croak.

STRICTLY BUSINESS 11

"Gawd knows I love him; but if he has done
this deed— ' you sabe, don't you? And then
there are some mean things said about the
Fifth Avenue girl — who doesn't come on the
stage — and can we blame her, with the vaude
ville trust holding down prices until one actually
must be buttoned in the back by a call boy,
maids cost so much ?

But, wait. Here's the climax. Helen Grimes,
chaparralish as she can be, is goaded beyond
imprudence. She convinces herself that Jack
Valentine is not only a falsetto, but a financier.
To lose at one fell swoop $647,000 and a lover
in riding trousers with angles in the sides like
the variations on the chart of a typhoid-fever
patient is enough to make any perfect lady mad.
So, then!

They stand in the (ranch) library, which is
furnished with mounted elk heads (didn't the
Elks have a fish fry in Amagansett once?), and
the denouement begins. J know of no more
interesting time in the run of a play unless it be
when the prologue ends.

Helen thinks Jack has taken the money.
Who else was there to take it ? The box-office
manager was at the front on his job; the orches
tra hadn't left their seats; and no man could get
past "Old Jimmy," the stage door-man, unless
he could show a Skye terrier or an automobile
as a guarantee of eligibility.

Goaded beyond imprudence (as before said),
Helen says to Jack Valentine: "Robber and
thief — and worse yet, stealer of trusting hearts,
this should be your fate!"

12 STRICTLY BUSINESS

With that out she whips, of course, the trusty
32-caliber.

"But I will be merciful," goes on Helen.
"You shall live — that will be your punishment.
I will show you how easily I could have sent you
to the death that you deserve. There is her
picture on the mantel. I will send through her
more beautiful face the bullet that should have
pierced your craven heart."

And she does it. And there's no fake blank
cartridges or assistants pulling strings. Helen
fires. The bullet — the actual bullet — goes
through the face of the photograph — and then
strikes the hidden spring of the sliding panel in
the wall — and lo! the panel slides, and there is
the missing $647,000 in convincing stacks of
currency and bags of gold. It's great. You
know how it is. Cherry practised for two
months at a target on the roof of her boarding
house. It took good shooting. In the sketch
she had to hit a brass disk only three inches in
diameter, covered by wall paper in the panel;
and she had to stand in exactly the same spot
every night, and the photo had to be in exactly
the same spot, and she had to shoot steady and
true every time.

Of course old "Arapahoe" had tucked the
funds away there in the secret place; and, of
course, Jack hadn't taken anything except his
salary (which really might have come under the
head of "obtaining money under"; but that is
neither here nor there); and, of course, the New
York girl was really engaged to a concrete house
contractor in the Bronx; and, necessarily, Jack

STRICTLY BUSINESS 13

and Helen ended in a half-Nelson — and there
you are.

After Hart and Cherry had gotten "Mice Will
Play" flawless, they had a try-out at a vaude
ville house that accommodates. The sketch
was a house wrecker. It was one of those rare
strokes of talent that inundates a theatre from
the roof down. The gallery wept; and the
orchestra seats, being dressed for it, swam in
tears.

After the show the booking agents signed
blank checks and pressed fountain pens upon
Hart and Cherry. Five hundred dollars a week
was what it panned out.

That night at 1 1 130 Bob Hart took off his hat
and bade Cherry good-night at her boarding-
house door.

"Mr. Hart," said she thoughtfully, "come
inside just a few minutes. We've got our
chance now to make good and to make money.
What we want to do is to cut expenses every
cent we can, and save all we can."

"Right," said Bob. "It's business with me.
You've got your scheme for banking yours; and
I dream every night of that bungalow with the
Jap cook and nobody around to raise trouble.
Anything to enlarge the net receipts will engage
my attention."

"Come inside just a few minutes," repeated
Cherry, deeply thoughtful. "I've got a propo
sition to make to you that will reduce our
expenses a lot and help you work out your own
future and help me to work out mine — and all on
business principles."

i4 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"Mice Will Play" had a tremendously
successful run in New York for ten weeks —
rather neat for a vaudeville sketch — and then it
started on the circuits. Without following it,
it may be said that it was a solid drawing card
for two years without a sign of abated popu
larity.

Sam Packard, manager of one of Keetor's
New York houses, said of Hart & Cherry:

"As square and high-toned a little team as ever
came over the circuit. It's a pleasureto read their
names on the booking list. Quiet, hard work
ers, no Johnny and Mabel nonsense, on the
job to the minute, straight home after their
act, and each of 'em as gentlemanlike as a lady.
I don't expect to handle any attractions that
give me less trouble or more respect for the pro
fession."

And now, after so much cracking of a nut
shell, here is the kernel of the story:

At the end of its second season "Mice Will
Play" came back to New York for another run
at the roof gardens and summer theatres. There
was never any trouble in booking it at the top-
notch price. Bob Hart had his bungalow
nearly paid for, and Cherry had so many savings
deposit bank books that she had begun to buy
sectional bookcases on the instalment plan to
hold them.

I tell you these things to assure you, even if
you can't believe it, that many, very many of
the stage people are workers with abiding
ambitions — just the same as the man who

STRICTLY BUSINESS 15

wants to be president, or the grocery clerk who
wants a home in Flatbush, or a lady who is
anxious to flop out of the Count-pan into the
Prince-fire. And I hope I may be allowed to
say, without chipping into the contribution
basket, that they often move in a mysterious
way their wonders to perform.

But, listen.

At the first performance of "Mice Will Play "
in New York at the new Westphalia (no hams
alluded to) Theatre, Winona Cherry was
nervous. When she fired at the photograph
of the Eastern beauty on the mantel, the bullet,
instead of penetrating the photo and then
striking the disk, went into the lower left side
of Bob Hart's neck. Not expecting to get it
there, Hart collapsed neatly, while Cherry
fainted in a most artistic manner.

The audience, surmising that they viewed a
comedy instead of a tragedy in which the
principals were married or reconciled, applauded
with great enjoyment. The Cool Head, who
always graces such occasions, rang the curtain
down, and two platoons of scene shifters
respectively and more or less respectfully re
moved Hart & Cherry from the stage. The
next turn went on, and all went as merry as an
alimony bell.

The stage hands found a young doctor at the
stage entrance who was waiting for a patient
with a decoction of Am. B'ty roses. The doctor
examined Hart carefully and laughed heartily.

"No headlines for you, Old Sport," was his

16 STRICTLY BUSINESS

diagnosis. "If it had been two inches to the
left it would have undermined the carotid
artery as far as the Red Front Drug Store in
Flatbush and Back Again. As it is, you just
get the property man to bind it up with a
flounce torn from any one of the girls' Val
enciennes and go home and get it dressed by
the parlor-floor practitioner on your block, and
you'll be all right. Excuse me; I've got a
serious case outside to look after."

After that Bob Hart looked up and felt better.
And then to where he lay come Vincente, the
Tramp Juggler, great in his line. Vincente, a
solemn man from Brattleboro, Vt., named Sam
Griggs at home, sent toys and maple sugar home
to two small daughters from every town he
played. Vincente had moved on the same
circuits with Hart & Cherry, and was their
peripatetic friend.

"Bob," said Vincente in his serious way,
"I'm glad it's no worse. The little lady is wild
about you."

"Who?" asked Hart.

"Cherry," said the juggler. "We didn't
know how bad you were hurt; and we kept her
away. It's taking the manager and three girls
to hold her."

"It was an accident, of course," said Hart.
"Cherry's all right. She wasn't feeling in good
trim or she couldn't have done it. There's no
hard feelings. She's strictly business. The
doctor says I'll be on the job again in three
days. Don't let her worry."

"Man," said Sam Griggs severely, puckering

STRICTLY BUSINESS 17

his old, smooth, lined face, "are you a chess
automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry's
crying her heart out for you — calling ' Bob, Bob/
every second, with them holding her hands and
keeping her' from coming to you."

"What's the matter with her?" asked Hart,
with wide-open eyes. "The sketch'll go on
again in three days. I'm not hurt bad, the
doctor says. She won't lose out half a week's
salary. I know it was an accident. What's
the matter with her?"

"You seem to be blind, or a sort of a fool,"
said Vincente. "The girl loves you and is al
most mad about your hurt. What's the matter
with you ? Is she nothing to you ? I wish you
could hear her call you."

"Loves me?" asked Bob Hart, rising from
the stack of scenery on which he lay. "Cherry
loves me? Why, it's impossible."

"I wish you could see her and hear her," said
Griggs.

"But, man," said Bob Hart, sitting up,
"it's impossible. It's impossible, I tell you.
I never dreamed of such a thing."

"No human being," said the Tramp Juggler,
"could mistake it. She's wild for love of you.
How have you been so blind?"

"But, my God," said Bob Hart, rising to his
feet, "it's too late. It's too late, I tell you,
Sam; it's too late. It can't be. You must be
wrong. It's impossible. There's some mis
take."

"She's crying for you," said the Tramp
Juggler. " For love of you she's fighting three,

1 8 STRICTLY BUSINESS

and calling your name so loud they don't dare
to raise the curtain. Wake up, man."

"For love of me?" said Bob Hart with staring
eyes. "Don't I tell you it's too late? It's
too late, man. Why, Cherry and I have been
married two years /"

II

THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED

A STORY with a moral appended is like the
bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then
injects a stingingdrop to irritate your conscience.
Therefore let us have the moral first and be done
with it. All is not gold that glitters, but it is
a wise child that keeps the stopper in his bottle
of testing acid.

Where Broadway skirts the corner of the
square presided over by George the Veracious is
the Little Rialto. Here stand the actors of
that quarter, and this is their shibboleth:
"Nit/ says I to Frohman, 'you can't touch
me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,' and
out I walks."

Westward and southward from the Thespian
glare are one or two streets where a Spanish-
American colony has huddled for a little tropical
warmth in the nipping North. The centre of
life in this precinct is "El Refugio," a cafe and
restaurant that caters to the volatile exiles from
the South. Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia,
the rolling republics of Central America and the
ireful islands of the Western Indies flit the
cloaked and sombreroed senores, who are
scattered like burning lava by the politicar

19

20 STRICTLY BUSINESS

eruptions of their several countries. Hither
they come to lay counterplots, to bide their time,
to solicit funds, to enlist filibustered, to smuggle
out arms and ammunitions, to play the game at
long taw. In El Refugio they find the atmos
phere in which they thrive.

In the restaurant of El Refugio are served
compounds delightful to the palate of the man
from Capricorn or Cancer. Altruism must
halt the story thus long. Oh, diner, weary of the
culinary subterfuges of the Gallic chef, hie thee
to El Refugio ! There only will you find a fish —
bluefish, shad, or pompano from the Gulf —
baked after the Spanish method. Tomatoes
give it color, individuality, and soul; chili
Colorado bestows upon it zest, originality, and
fervor; unknown herbs furnish piquancy and
mystery, and — but its crowning glory deserves
a new sentence. Around it, above it, beneath
it, in its vicinity — but never in it — hovers an
ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and deli
cate that only the Society for Psychical Re
search could note its origin. Do not say that
garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not
otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting
past, has wafted one kiss that lingers in the
parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those kisses
in life, "by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that
are for others." And then, when Conchito,
the waiter, brings you a plate of brown frijoles
and a carafe of wine that has never stood still
between Oporto and El Refugio — ah, Dios!

One day a Hamburg-American liner deposited
upon Pier No. 55 Gen. Perrico Zimenes Villa-

THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED 21

blanca Falcon, a passenger from Cartagena.
The General was between a claybank and a bay
in complexion, had a 42-inch waist and stood 5
feet 4 with his Du Barry heels. He had the
mustache of. a shooting-gallery proprietor, he
wore the full dress of a Texas congressman, and
had the important aspect of an uninstructed
delegate.

Gen. Falcon had enough English under his
hat to enable him to inquire his way to the
street in which El Refugio stood. When he
reached that neighborhood he saw a sign before
a respectable red-brick house that read, "Hotel
Espanol." In the window was a card in
Spanish, "Aqui se habla Espanol." The
General entered, sure of a congenial port.

In the cozy office was Mrs. O'Brien, the
proprietress. She had blonde — oh, unimpeach-
ably blonde hair. For the rest she was amia
bility, and ran largely to inches around. Gen.
Falcon brushed the floor with his broad-
brimmed hat, and emitted a quantity of Spanish,
the syllables sounding like firecrackers gently
popping their way down the string of a bunch.

"Spanish or Dago?" asked Mrs. O'Brien,
pleasantly.

"I am a Colombian, madam," said the
General proudly. "I speak the Spanish. The
advisement in your window say the Spanish he
is spoken here. How is that?"

"Well, you've been speaking it, ain't your"
said the madam. "I'm sure I can't."

At the Hotel Espanol General Falcon engaged
rooms and established himself. At dusk he

22 STRICTLY BUSINESS

sauntered out upon the streets to view the
wonders of this roaring city of the North. As
he walked he thought of the wonderful golden
hair of Mme. O'Brien. "It is here," said the
General to himself, no doubt in his own lan
guage, "that one shall find the most beautiful
senoras in the world. I have not in my Colom
bia viewed among our beauties one so fair.
But no! It is not for the General Falcon to
think of beauty. It is my country that claims
my devotion."

At the corner of Broadway and the Little
Rialto the General became involved. The
street cars bewildered him, and the fender of
one upset him against a pushcart laden with
oranges. A cab driver missed him an inch with
a hub, and poured barbarous execrations upon
his head. He scrambled to the sidewalk and
skipped again in terror when the whistle of a
peanut-roaster puffed a hot scream into his ear.
"Valgame Dios! What devil's city is this?"

As the General fluttered out of the streamers
of passers like a wounded snipe he was marked
simultaneously as game by two hunters. One
was "Bully" McGuire, whose system of sport
required the use of a strong arm and the misuse
of an eight-inch piece of lead pipe. The other
Nimrod of the asphalt was "Spider" Kelley, a
sportsman with more refined methods.

In pouncing upon their self-evident prey, Mr.
Kelley was a shade the quicker. His elbow
fended accurately the onslaught of Mr. McGuire.

"G'wan!" he commanded harshly. "I saw

THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED 23

it first." McGuire slunk away, awed by
superior intelligence.

"Pardon me," said Mr. Kelley, to the
General, "but you got balled up in the shuffle,
didn't you? • Let me assist you." He picked
up the General's hat and brushed the dust from
it.

The ways of Mr. Kelley could not but suc
ceed. The General, bewildered and dismayed
by the resounding streets, welcomed his de
liverer as a caballero with a most disinterested
heart.

"I have a desire," said the General, "to re
turn to the hotel of O'Brien, in which I am stop.
Caramba! senor, there is a loudness and rapid-
ness of going and coming in the city of this
Nueva York."

Mr. Kelley 's politeness would not suffer the
distinguished Colombian to brave the dangers
of the return unaccompanied. At the door of
the Hotel Espanol they paused. A little lower
down on the opposite side of the street shone
the modest illuminated sign of El Refugio.
Mr. Kelley, to whom few streets were unfamiliar,
knew the place exteriorly as a "Dago joint."
All foreigners Mr. Kelley classed under the two
heads of "Dagoes" and Frenchmen. He pro
posed to the General that they repair thither
and substantiate their acquaintance with a
liquid foundation.

An hour later found General Falcon and
Mr. Kelley seated at a table in the conspirator's
corner of El Refugio. Bottles and glasses were

24 STRICTLY BUSINESS

between them. For the tenth time the General
confided the secret of his mission to the Estados
Unidos. He was here, he declared, to purchase
arms — 2,000 stands of Winchester rifles — for
the Colombian revolutionists. He had drafts in
his pocket drawn by the Cartagena Bank on its
New York correspondent for $25,000. At
other tables other revolutionists were shouting
their political secrets to their fellow-plotters;
but none was as loud as the General. He
pounded the table; he hallooed for some wine;
he roared to his friend that his errand was a
secret one, and not to be hinted at to a living
soul. Mr. Kelley himself was stirred to sympa
thetic enthusiasm. He grasped the General's
hand across the table,

"Monseer," he said, earnestly, "I don't
know where this country of yours is, but I'm for
it. I guess it must be a branch of the United
States, though, for the poetry guys and the
schoolmarms call us Columbia, too, sometimes.
It's a lucky thing for you that you butted into
me to-night. I'm the only man in New York
that can get this gun deal through for you.
The Secretary of War of the United States is
me best friend. He's in the city now, and I'll
see him for you to-morrow. In the mean
time, monseer, you keep them drafts tight in
your inside pocket. I'll call for you to-morrow,
and take you to see him. Say! that ain't the
District of Columbia you're talking about, is
it?" concluded Mr. Kelley, with a sudden
qualm. "You can't capture that with 110
2,000 guns — it's been tried with more."

THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED 25

"No, no, no!" exclaimed the General. "It
is the Republic of Colombia — it is a g-r-reat
republic on the top side of America of the South.
Yes. Yes."

"All right/' said Mr. Kelley, reassured.
"Now suppose we trek along home and go by-by.
I'll write to the Secretary to-night and make a
date with him. It's a ticklish job to get guns
out of New York. McClusky himself can't
do it."

They parted at the door of the Hotel Espanol.
The General rolled his eyes at the moon and
sighed.

"It is a great country, your Nueva York," he
said. "Truly the cars in the streets devastate
one, and the engine that cooks the nuts terribly
makes a squeak in the ear. But, ah, Senor
Kelley — the senoras with hair of much goldness,
and admirable fatness — they are magnificas!
Muy magnificas!"

Kelley went to the nearest telephone booth
and called up McCrary's cafe, far up on Broad
way. He asked for Jimmy Dunn.

"Is that Jimmy Dunn?" asked Kelley. f

"Yes," came the answer.

"You're a liar," sang back Kelley, joyfully.
"You're the Secretary of War. Wait there till
I come up. I've got the finest thing down here
in the way of a fish you ever baited for. It's a
Colorado-maduro, with a gold band around it
and free coupons enough to buy a red hall lamp
and a statuette of Psyche rubbering in the brook.
I'll be up on the next car."

Jimmy Dunn was an A. M. of Crookdom. He

26 STRICTLY BUSINESS

was an artist in the confidence line. He never
saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knock
out drops. In fact, he would have set nothing
before an intended victim but the purest of
drinks, if it had been possible to procure such
a thing in New York. It was the ambition of
"Spider" Kelley to elevate himself into Jimmy's
class.

These two gentlemen held a conference that
night at McCrary's. Kelley explained.

"He's as easy as a gum shoe. He's from the
Island of Colombia, where there's a strike, or a
feud, or something going on, and they've sent
him up here to buy 2,000 Winchesters to arbi
trate the thing with. He showed me two
drafts for $10,000 each, and one for $5,000 on a
bank here. 'S truth, Jimmy, I felt real mad
with him because he didn't have it in thousand-
dollar bills, and hand it to me on a silver waiter.
Now, we've got to wait till he goes to the bank
and gets the money for us.'*

They talked it over for two hours, and then
Dunn said: "Bring him to No. — Broadway, at
four o'clock to-morrow afternoon."

In due time Kelley called at the Hotel
Espanol for the General. He found that wily
warrior engaged in delectable conversation with
Mrs. O'Brien.

"The Secretary of War is waitin' for us,'*
said Kelley.

The General tore himself away with an effort.

"Ay, senor," he said, with a sigh, "duty
makes a call. But, senor, the senoras of your
Estados Unidos — how beauties! For exemplifi-

THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED 27

cation, take you la Madame O'Brien — que
magnifica! She is one goddess — one Juno — •
what you call one ox-eyed Juno."

Now Mr. Kelley was a wit; and better men
have been shriveled by the fire of their own
imagination.

"Sure!" he said with a grin; "but you mean
a peroxide Juno, don't you?"

Mrs. O'Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous
head. Her businesslike eye rested for an instant
upon the disappearing form of Mr. Kelley.
Except in street cars one should never be un
necessarily rude to a lady.

When the gallant Colombian and his escort
arrived at the Broadway address, they were held
in an anteroom for half an hour, and then ad
mitted into a well-equipped office where a
distinguished looking man, with a smooth face,
wrote at a desk. General Falcon was presented
to the Secretary of War of the United States,
and his mission made known by his old friend,
Mr. Kelley.

* "Ah — Colombia!" said the Secretary, signifi
cantly, when he was made to understand; "I'm
afraid there will be a little difficulty in that case.
The President and I differ in our sympathies
there. He prefers the established government,
while I — The Secretary gave the General a

mysterious but encouraging smile. "You, of
course, know, General Falcon, that since the
Tammany war, an act of Congress has been
passed requiring all manufactured arms and
ammunition exported from this country to pass
through the War Department. Now, if I can

28 STRICTLY BUSINESS

do anything for you I will be glad to do so to
oblige my old friend, Mr. Kelley. But it must
be in absolute secrecy, as the President, as I
have said, does not regard favorably the efforts
of your revolutionary party in Colombia. I
will have my orderly bring a list of the available
arms now in the warehouse."

The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly
with the letters A. D. T. on his cap stepped
promptly into the room.

"Bring me Schedule B of the small arms
inventory," said the Secretary.

The orderly quickly returned with a printed
paper. The Secretary studied it closely.

"I find," he said, "that in Warehouse 9, of
Government stores, there is a shipment of 2,000
stands of Winchester rifles that were ordered by
the Sultan of Morocco, who forgot to send the
cash with his order. Our rule is that legal-
tender money must be paid down at the time
of purchase. My dear Kelley, your friend,
General Falcon, shall have this lot of arms, if he
desires it, at the manufacturer's price. And
you will forgive me, I am sure, if I curtail our
interview. I am expecting the Japanese Minis
ter and Charles Murphy every moment!"

As one result of this interview, the General
was deeply grateful to his esteemed friend, Mr.
Kelley. As another, the nimble Secretary of
War was extremely busy during the next two
days buying empty rifle cases and filling them
with bricks, which were then stored in a ware
house rented for that purpose. As still another,
when the General returned to the Hotel Es-

THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED 29

panol, Mrs. O'Brien went up to him, plucked a
thread from his lapel, and said:

"Say, senor, I don't want to 'butt in,' but
what does that monkey-faced, cat-eyed, rubber
necked tin horn tough want with you?"

"Sangre de mi vida!" exclaimed the General.
''Impossible it is that you speak of my good
friend, Senor Kelley."

"Come into the summer garden," said Mrs.
O'Brien. "I want to have a talk with you."

Let us suppose that an hour has elapsed.

"And you say," said the General, "that for
the sum of $18,000 can be purchased the furnish-
ment of the house and the lease of one year with
this garden so lovely — so resembling unto the
patios of my cara Colombia?"

"And dirt cheap at that," sighed the lady.

"Ah, Dios!" breathed General Falcon.
"What to me is war and politics? This spot is
one paradise. My country it have other brave
heroes to continue the righting. What to me
should be glory and the shooting of mans ? Ah !
no. It is here I have found one angel. Let us
buy the Hotel Espanol and you shall be mine,
and the money shall not be waste on guns."

Mrs. O'Brien rested her blond pompadour
against the shoulder of the Colombian pa
triot.

"Oh, senor," she sighed, happily, "ain't you
terrible!"

Two days later was the time appointed for
the delivery of the arms to the General. The
boxes of supposed rifles were stacked in the
rented warehouse, and the Secretary of War sat

30 STRICTLY BUSINESS

upon them, waiting for his friend Kelley to
fetch the victim.

Mr. Kelley hurried, at the hour, to the Hotel
Espanol. He found the General behind the desk
adding up accounts.

"I have decide," said the General, "to buy
not guns. I have to-day buy the insides of this
hotel, and there shall be marrying of the General
Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon with la
Madame O'Brien."

Mr. Kelley almost strangled.

"Say, you old bald-headed bottle of shoe
polish," he spluttered, "you're a swindler —
that's what you are! You've bought a boarding
house with money belonging to your infernal
country, wherever it is."

"Ah," said the General, footing up a column,
"that is what you call politics. War and
revolution they are not nice. Yes. It is not
best that one shall always follow Minerva.
No. It is of quite desirable to keep hotels and
be with that Juno — that ox-eyed Juno. Ah!
what hair of the gold it is that she have!"
, Mr. Kelley choked again.

"Ah, Senor Kelley!" said the General,
feelingly and finally, "is it that you have never
eaten of the corned beef hash that Madame
O'Brien she make?"

BABES IN THE JUNGLE

MONTAGUE SILVER, the finest street man
and art grafter in the West, says to me once in
Little Rock: "If you ever lose your mind, Billy,
and get too old to do honest swindling among
grown men, go to New York. In the West
a sucker is born every minute; but in New York
they appear in chunks of roe — you can't count
'em!"

Two years afterward I found that I couldn't
remember the names of the Russian admirals,
and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear;
so I knew the time had arrived for me to take
Silver's advice.

I struck New York about noon one day, and
took a walk up Broadway. And I run against
Silver himself, all encompassed up in a spacious
kind of haberdashery, leaning against a hotel
and rubbing the half-moons on his nails with a
silk handkerchief.

"Paresis or superannuated?" I asks him.

"Hello, Billy," says Silver; "I'm glad to see
you. Yes, it seemed to me that the West was
accumulating a little too^much wiseness. I've
been saving New York for dessert. I know it's
a low-down trick to take things from these

31

32 STRICTLY BUSINESS

people. They only know this and that and pass
to and fro and think ever and anon. I'd hate
for my mother to know I was skinning these
weak-minded ones. She raised me better."

"Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms
of the old doctor that does skin grafting?" I
asks.

"Well, no," says Silver; "you needn't back
Epidermis to win to-day. I've only been here a
month. But I'm ready to begin; and the
members of Willie Manhattan's Sunday School
class, each of whom has volunteered to con
tribute a portion of cuticle toward this re
habilitation, may as well send their photos to
the Evening Daily.

"I've been studying the town," says Silver,
"and reading the papers every day, and I know
it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an
O'Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor
and scream and kick when you are the least bit
slow about taking money from them. Come
up in my room and I'll tell you. We'll work
the town together, Billy, for the sake of old
times."

Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a
quantity of irrelevant objects lying about.

"There's more ways of getting money from
these metropolitan hayseeds," says Silver,
"than there is of cooking rice in Charleston,
S. C. They'll bite at anything. The brains
of most of 'em commute. The wiser they are
in intelligence the less perception of cognizance
they have. Why, didn't a man the other day
sell J. P. Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller,

BABES IN THE JUNGLE 33

Jr., for Andrea del Sarto's celebrated painting
of the young Saint John!

"You see that bundle of printed stuff in the
corner, Billy? That's gold mining stock. I
started out ©ne day to sell that, but I quit it in
two hours. Why? Got arrested for blocking
the street. People fought to buy it. I sold
the policeman a block of it on the way to the
station-house, and then I took it off the market.
I don't want people to give me their money. I
want some little consideration connected with
the transaction to keep my pride from being
hurt. I want 'em to guess the missing letter
in Chic — go, or draw to a pair of nines before
they pay me a cent of money.

"Now there's another little scheme that
worked so easy I had to quit it. You see that
bottle of blue ink on the table? I tattooed an
anchor on the back of my hand and went to a
bank and told 'em I was Admiral Dewey's
nephew. They offered to cash my draft on
him for a thousand, but I didn't know my
uncle's first name. It shows, though, what an
easy town it is. As for burglars, they won't
go in a house now unless there's a hot supper
ready and a few college students to wait on 'em.
They're slugging citizens all over the upper part
of the city and I guess, taking the town from
end to end, it's a plain case of assault and
Battery."

"Monty," says I, when Silver had slacked
up, "you may have Manhattan correctly dis
criminated in your perorative, but I doubt it.
I've only been in town two hours, but it don't

34 STRICTLY BUSINESS

dawn upon me that it's ours with a cherry in
it. There ain't enough rus in urbe about it to
suit me. I'd be a good deal much better
satisfied if the citizens had a straw or more in
their hair, and run more to velveteen vests and
buckeye watch charms. They don't look easy
to me."

'; You've got it, Billy," says^ Silver. "All
emigrants have it. New York's bigger than
Little Rock or Europe, and it frightens a
foreigner. You'll be all right. I tell you I feel
like slapping the people here because they don't
send me all their money in laundry baskets,
'with germicide sprinkled over it. I hate to go
down on the street to get it. Who wears the
diamonds in this town? Why, Winnie, the
Wiretapper's wife, and Bella, the Buncosteerer's
bride. New Yorkers can be worked easier than
a blue rose on a tidy. The only thing that
bothers me is I know I'll break the cigars in my
vest pocket when I get my clothes all full of
twenties."

"I hope you are right, Monty," says I; "but
I wish all the same I had been satisfied with a
small business in Little Rock. The crop of
farmers is never so short out there but what you
can get a few of 'em to sign a petition for a new
post office that you can discount for $200 at
the county bank. The people here appear to
possess instincts of self-preservation and illiber-
ality. I fear me that we are not cultured enough
to tackle this game."

"Don't worry," says Silver. "I've got this
Jayville-near-Tarrytown correctly estimated as

BABES IN THE JUNGLE 35

sure as North River is the Hudson and East
River ain't a river. Why, there are people
living in four blocks of Broadway who never
saw any kind of a building except a skyscraper
in their lives! A good, live hustling Western
man ought ito get conspicuous enough here in
side of three months to incur either Jerome's
clemency or Lawson's displeasure."

"Hyperbole aside," says I, "do you know of
any immediate system of buncoing the com
munity out of a dollar or two except by applying
to the Salvation Army or having a fit on Miss
Helen Gould's doorsteps?"

"Dozens of 'em," says Silver. "How mucn
capital have you got, Billy?"

"A thousand," I told him.

"I've got $1,200," says he. "We'll pool and
do a big piece of business. There's so many
ways we can make a million that I don't know
how to begin."

The next morning Silver meets me at the
hotel and he is all sonorous and stirred with a
kind of silent joy.

"We're to meet J. P. Morgan this afternoon,"
says he. "A man I know in the hotel wants to
introduce us. He's a friend of his. He says
he likes to meet people from the West."

"That sounds nice and plausible," says I.
"I'd like to know Mr. Morgan."

"It won't hurt us a bit," says Silver, "to get
acquainted with a few finance kings. I kind
of like the social way New York has witt
strangers."

The man Silver knew was named Klein. At

36 STRICTLY BUSINESS

three o'clock Klein brought his Wall Street
friend to see us in Silver's room. "Mr. Morgan"
looked some like his pictures, and he had a
Turkish towel wrapped around his left foot, and
he walked with a cane.

"Mr. Silver and Mr. Pescud, says Klein.
"It sounds superfluous," says he, "to mention
the name of the greatest financial—

"Cut it out, Klein," says Mr. Morgan. "I'm
glad to know you gents; I take great interest
in the West. Klein tells me you're from Little
Rock. I think I've a railroad or two out there
somewhere. If either of you guys would like
to deal a hand or two of stud poker I—

"Now, Pierpont," cuts in Klein, "you for-
get!"

"Excuse me, gents!" says Morgan; "since
I've had the gout so bad I sometimes play a
social game of cards at my house. Neither of
you never knew One-eyed Peters, did you,
while you was around Little Rock? He lived
in Seattle, New Mexico."

Before we could answer, Mr. Morgan ham
mers on the floor with his cane and begins to
walk up and down, swearing in a loud tone of
voice.

"They have been pounding your stocks to
day on the Street, Pierpont?" asks Klein,
smiling.

"Stocks! No!" roars Mr. Morgan. "It's
that picture I sent an agent to Europe to buy.
I just thought about it. He cabled me to-day
that it ain't to be found in all Italy. I'd pay
$50,000 to-morrow for that picture — yes,

BABES IN THE JUNGLE 37

$75,000. I give the agent a la carte in purchas
ing it. I cannot understand why the art gal
leries will allow a De Vinchy to —

"Why, Mr. Morgan," says Klein; "I thought
you owned all of the De Vinchy paintings."

"What is' the picture like, Mr. Morgan?"
asks Silver. "It must be as big as the side of
the Flatiron Building."

"I'm afraid your art education is on the bum,
Mr. Silver," says Morgan. "The picture is 27
inches by 42; and it is called 'Love's Idle Hour.'
It represents a number of cloak models doing
the two-step on the bank of a purple river. The
cablegram said it might have been brought to
this country. My collection will never be com
plete without that picture. Well, so long,
gents; us financiers must keep early hours."

Mr. Morgan and Klein went away together in
a cab. Me and Silver talked about how simple
and unsuspecting great people was; and Silver
said what a shame it would be to try to rob a
man like Mr. Morgan; and I said I thought it
would be rather imprudent, myself. Klein
proposes a stroll after dinner; and me and him
and Silver walks down toward Seventh Avenue
to see the sights. Klein sees a pair of cuff links
that instigate his admiration in a pawnshop
window, and we all go in while he buys 'em.

After we got back to the hotel and Klein had
gone, Silver jumps at me and waves his hands.

"Did you see it?" says he. "Did you see it,
Billy?"

"What?" I asks.

"Why, that picture that Morgan wants.

38 STRICTLY BUSINESS

It's hanging in that pawnshop, behind the desk.
I didn't say anything because Klein was there.
It's the article sure as you live. The girls are
as natural as paint can make them, all measur
ing 36 and 25 and 42 skirts, if they had any
skirts, and they're doing a buck-and-wing on
the bank of a river with the blues. What did
Mr. Morgan say he'd give for it? Oh, don't
make me tell you. They can't know what it is
in that pawnshop."

When the pawnshop opened the next morning
me and Silver was standing there as anxious as
if we wanted to soak our Sunday suit to buy a
drink. We sauntered inside, and began to look
at watch-chains.

"That's a violent specimen of a chromo
you've got up there," remarked Silver, casual, to
the pawnbroker. "But I kind of enthuse over
the girl with the shoulder-blades and red bunt
ing. Would an offer of $2.25 for it cause you to
knock over any fragile articles of your stock in
hurrying it off the nail?"

The pawnbroker smiles and goes on showing)
us plate watch-chains.

"That picture," says he, "was pledged a year/
ago by an Italian gentleman. I loaned him
$500 on it. It is called 'Love's Idle Hour,' and
it is by Leonardo de Vinchy. Two days ago
the legal time expired, and it became an un
redeemed pledge. Here is a style of chain that
is worn a great deal now."

At the end of half an hour me and Silver paid
the pawnbroker $2,000 and walked out with
the picture. Silver got into a cab with it and

BABES IN THE JUNGLE 39

started for Morgan's office. I goes to the
hotel and waits for him. In two hours Silver
comes back.

"Did you see Mr. Morgan?" I asks. "How
much did he pay you for it?"

Silver sits down and fools with a tassel on the
table cover.

"I never exactly saw Mr. Morgan," he says,
"because Mr. Morgan's been in Europe for a
month. But what's worrying me, Billy, is
this: The department stores have all got that
same picture on sale, framed, for $3.48. And
they charge $3.50 for the frame alone — that's
what I can't understand."

IV
THE DAY RESURGENT

I CAN see the artist bite the end of his pencil
and frown when it comes to drawing his Easter
picture; for his legitimate pictorial conceptions
of figures pertinent to the festival are but four
in number.

First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring.
Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful
maiden with decorative hair and the proper
number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice
St. Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose
for it in the "Lethergogallagher," or whatever
it was that Trilby called it.

Second — the melancholy lady with upturned
eyes in a framework of lilies. This is magazine-
covery, but reliable.

Third — Miss Manhattan in Fifth Avenue
Easter Sunday parade.

Fourth — Maggie Murphy with a new red
feather in her old straw hat, happy and self-
conscious, in the Grand Street turnout.

Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the
Easter eggs, since the higher criticism has
hard-boiled them.

The limited field of its pictorial possibilities
proves that Easter, of all our festival days, isj

40

THE DAY RESURGENT 41

the most vague and shifting in our conception.
It belongs to all religions, although the pagans
invented it. Going back still further to the
first spring, we can see Eve choosing with pride
a new green leaf from the tree ficus carica.

Now, the object of this critical and learned
preamble is to set forth the theorem that Easter
is neither a date, a season, a festival, a holiday,
nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out
if you follow in the footsteps of Danny McCree.

Easter Sunday dawned as it should, bright
and early, in its place on the calendar between
Saturday and Monday. At 5:24 the sun rose,
and at 10:30 Danny followed its example. He
went into the kitchen and washed his face at the
sink. His mother was frying bacon. She
looked at his hard, smooth, knowing counte
nance as he juggled with the round cake of soap,
and thought of his father when she first saw
him stopping a hot grounder between second
and third twenty-two years before on a vacant
lot in Harlem, where the La Paloma apartment
house now stands. In the front room of the
flat Danny's father sat by an open window
smoking his pipe, with his dishevelled gray hair
tossed about by the breeze. He still clung to
his pipe, although his sight had been taken from
him two years before by a precocious blast of
giant powder that went off without permission.
Very few blind men care for smoking, for the
reason that they cannot see the smoke. Now,
could you enjoy having the news read to you
from an evening newspaper unless you could see
the colors of the headlines?

42 STRICTLY BUSINESS

" Tis Easter Day," said Mrs. McCree.

"Scramble mine," said Danny.

After breakfast he dressed himself in the
Sabbath morning costume of the Canal Street
importing house dray chauffeur — frock coat,
striped trousers, patent leathers, gilded trace
chain across front of vest, and wing collar,
rolled-brim derby and butterfly bow from
Schonstein's (between Fourteenth Street and
Tony's fruit stand) Saturday night sale.

"You'll be goin' out this day, of course,
Danny," said old man McCree, a little wist
fully. 'Tis a kind of holiday, they say.
Well, it's fine spring weather. I can feel it in
the air."

"Why should I not be going out?" demanded
Danny in his grumpiest chest tones. "Should
I stay in? Am I as good as a horse? One day
of rest my team has a week. Who earns the
money for the rent and the breakfast you've
just eat, I'd like to know? Answer me that!"

"All right, lad," said the old man. "I'm not
complainin'. While me two eyes was good there
was nothin' better to my mind than a Sunday
out. There's a smell of turf and burnin' brush
comin' in the windy. I have me tobaccy. A
good fine day and rist to ye, lad. Times I
wished your mother had larned to read, so I
might hear the rest about the hippopotamus —
but let that be."

"Now, what is this foolishness he talks of
hippopotamuses?" asked Danny of his mother,
as he passed through the kitchen. "Have you
been taking him to the Zoo? And for what?"

THE DAY RESURGENT 43

"I have not," said Mrs. McCree. "He sets
by the windy all day. 'Tis little recreation a
blind man among the poor gets at all. I'm
thinkin' they wander in their minds at times.
One day he talks of grease without stoppin' for
the most of an hour. I looks to see if there's
lard burnin' in the fryin' pan. There is not.
He says I do not understand. 'TJs weary days,
Sundays, and holidays and all, for a blind man,
Danny. There was no better nor stronger than
him when he had his two eyes. 'Tis a fine day,
son. Injoy yerself ag'inst the morning. There
will be cold supper at six."

"Have you heard any talk of a hippopota
mus?" asked Danny of Mike, the janitor, as he
went out the door downstairs.

"I have not," said Mike, pulling his shirt
sleeves higher. "But 'tis the only subject in
the animal, natural and illegal lists of outrages
that I've not been complained to about these
two days. See the landlord. Or else move out
if ye like. Have ye hippopotamuses in the
lease? No, then?"

"It was the old man who spoke of it," said
Danny. "Likely there's nothing in it."

Danny walked up the street to the Avenue
and then struck northward into the heart of the
district where Easter — modern Easter, in new,
bright raiment — leads the pascal march. Out
of towering brown churches came the blithe
music of anthems from the living flowers — so
it seemed when your eye looked upon the
Easter girl.

Gentlemen, frock-coated, silk-hatted, garde-

44 STRICTLY BUSINESS

niaed, sustained the background of the tra
dition. Children carried lilies in their hands.
The windows of the brownstone mansions were
packed with the most opulent creations of Flora,
the sister of the Lady of the Lilies.

Around a corner, white-gloved, pink-gilled,
and tightly buttoned, walked Corrigan, the cop,
shield to the curb. Danny knew him.

"Why, Corrigan," he asked, "is Easter? I
know it comes the first time you're full after the
moon rises on the seventeenth of March — but
why? Is it a proper and religious ceremony, or
does the Governor appoint it out of politics?'*
1 'Tis an annual celebration," said Corrigan,
with the judicial air of the Third Deputy
Police Commissioner, "peculiar to New York.
It extends up to Harlem. Sometimes they has
the reserves out at One Hundred and Twenty-
fifth Street. In my opinion 'tis not political."

"Thanks," said Danny. "And say — did you
ever hear a man complain of hippopotamuses?
When not specially in drink, I mean."

"Nothing larger than sea turtles," said Corri
gan, reflecting, "and there was wood alcohol in
that."

Danny wandered. The double, heavy in
cumbency of enjoying simultaneously a Sunday
and a festival day was his.

The sorrows of the hand-toiler fit him easily.
They are worn so often that they hang with
the picturesque lines of the best tailor-made
garments. That is why well-fed artists of
pencil and pen find in the griefs of the common

THE DAY RESURGENT 45

people their most striking models. But when
the Philistine would disport himself, the grim-
ness of Melpomene, herself, attends upon his
capers. Therefore, Danny set his jaw hard at
Easter, and took his pleasure sadly.

The family entrance of Dugan's cafe was
feasible; so Danny yielded to the vernal season
as far as a glass of bock. Seated in a dark,
linoleumed, humid back room, his heart and
mind still groped after the mysterious meaning
of the springtime jubilee.

''Say, Tim," he said to the waiter, "why do
they have Easter?"

"Skiddoo!" said Tim, closing a sophisticated
eye. "Is that a new one? All right. Tony
Pastor's for you last night, I guess. I give it
up. What's the answer — two apples or a yard
and a half?"

From Dugan's Danny turned back eastward.
The April sun seemed to stir in him a vague
feeling that he could not construe. He made a
wrong diagnosis and decided that it was Katy
Conlon.

A block from her house on Avenue A he met
her going to church. They pumped hands on
the corner.

"Gee! but you look dumpish and dressed
up," said Katy. "What's wrong? Come away
with me to church and be cheerful."

"WTiat's doing at church?" asked Danny.

"Why, it's Easter Sunday. Silly! I waited
till after eleven expectin' you might come
around to go."

46 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"What does this Easter stand for, Katy?"
asked Danny gloomily. " Nobody seems to
know."

"Nobody as blind as you," said Katy with
spirit. "You haven't even looked at my new
hat. And skirt. Why, it's when all the girls
put on new spring clothes. Silly! Are you
coming to church with me?"

"I will," said Danny. "If this Easter is
pulled off there, they ought to be able to give
some excuse for it. Not that the hat ain't a
beauty. The green roses are great."

At church the preacher did some expounding
with no pounding. He spoke rapidly, for he
was in a hurry to get home to his early Sabbath
dinner; but he knew his business. There was
one word that controlled his theme — resurrec
tion. Not a new creation; but a new life arising
out of the old. The congregation had heard it
often before. But there was a wonderful hat,
a combination of sweet peas and lavender, in
the sixth pew from the pulpit. It attracted
much attention.

After church Danny lingered on a corner while
Katy waited, with pique in her sky-blue eyes.

"Are you coming along to the house?" she
asked. "But don't mind me. I'll get there
all right. You seem to be studyin' a lot about
something. All right. Will I see you at any
time specially, Mr. McCree?"

"I'll be around Wednesday night as usual,"
said Danny, turning and crossing the street.

Katy walked away with the green roses
dangling indignantly. Danny stopped two

THE DAY RESURGENT 47

blocks away. He stood still with his hands in
his pockets, at the curb on the corner. His
face was that of a graven image. Deep in his
soul something stirred so small, so fine, so keen
and leavening that his hard fibres did not
recognize it. It was something more tender
than the April day, more subtle than the call
of the senses, purer and deeper-rooted than the
love of woman — for had he not turned away
from green roses and eyes that had kept him
chained for a year? And Danny did not know
what it was. The preacher, who was in a
hurry to go to his dinner, had told him, but
Danny had had no libretto with which to follow
the drowsy intonation. But the preacher spoke
the truth.

Suddenly Danny slapped his leg and gave
forth a hoarse yell of delight.

"Hippopotamus!" he shouted to an elevated
road pillar. "Well, how is that for a bum
guess ? Why, blast my skylights ! I know what
he was driving at now.

"Hippopotamus! Wouldn't that send you
to the Bronx! It's been a year since he heard it;
and he didn't miss it so very far. We quit at
469 B. C. and this comes next. Well, a wooden
man wouldn't have guessed what he was trying
to get out of him."

Danny caught a crosstown car and went up
to the rear flat that his labor supported.

Old man McCree was still sitting by the
window. His extinct pipe lay on the sill.

"Will that be you, lad?" he asked.
, Danny flared into the rage of a strong man

48 STRICTLY BUSINESS

who is surprised at the outset of committing a
good deed.

"Who pays the rent and buys the food that
is eaten in this house?" he snapped, viciously.
"Have I no right to come in?'*

"Ye're a faithful lad," said old man McCree,
with a sigh. "Is it evening yet?"

Danny reached up on a shelf and took down
a thick book labeled in gilt letters, "The History
of Greece." Dust was on it half an inch thick.
He laid it on the table and found a place in it
marked by a strip of paper. And then he gave
a short roar at the top of his voice, and said:

"Was it the hippopotamus you wanted to be
read to about then?"

"Did I hear ye open the book?" said old man
McCree. "Many and weary be the months
since my lad has read it to me. I dinno; but I
took a great likings to them Greeks. Ye left
off at a place. 'Tis a fine day outside, lad. Be
out and take rest from your work. I have
gotten used to me chair by the windy and me
pipe."

"Pel-Peloponnesus was the place where we
left off, and not hippopotamus," said Danny.
"The war began there. It kept something
doing for thirty years. The headlines says that
a guy named Philip of Macedon, in 338 B. C.,
got to be boss of Greece by getting the decision
at the battle of Cher-Cheronoea. I'll read it."

With his hand to his ear, rapt in the Pelo-
ponnesian War, old man McCree sat for an hour,
listening.

Then he got up and felt his way to the door

THE DAY RESURGENT 49

of the kitchen. Mrs. McCree was slicing cold
meat. She looked up. Tears were running
from old man McCree s eyes.

"Do ye hear our lad readin' to me?" he said.
"There is none finer in the land. My two eyes
have come back to me again."

After supper he said to Danny: " Tis a happy
day, this Easter. And now ye will be off to see
Katy in the evening. Well enough."

"Who pays the rent and buys the food that
is eaten in this house?" said Danny, angrily.
"Have I no right to stay in it? After supper
there is yet to come the reading of the battle of
Corinth, 146 B. C., when the kingdom, as they
say, became an in-integral portion of the
Roman Empire. Am I nothing in this house?"

THE FIFTH WHEEL

THE ranks of the Bed Line moved closer
together; for it was cold, cold. They were
alluvial deposit of the stream of life lodged
in the delta of Fifth Avenue and Broadway.
The Bed Liners stamped their freezing feet,
looked at the empty benches in Madison Square
whence Jack Frosr had evicted them, and mut-
Itered to one another in a confusion of tongues.
The Flatiron Building, with its impious- cloud-
piercing architecture looming mistily above
them on the opposite delta, might well have
stood for the tower of Babel, whence these poly
glot idlers had been called by the winged walking
delegate of the Lord.

Standing on a pine box a head higher than his
flock of goats, the Preacher exhorted whatever
transient and shifting audience the north
wind doled out to him. It was a slave market.
Fifteen cents bought you a man. You deeded
him to Morpheus; and the recording angel gave
you credit.

The Preacher was incredibly earnest and un
wearied. He had looked over the list of things
one may do for one's fellow man, and had
assumed for himself the task of putting to bed

So

THE FIFTH WHEEL 5i

all who might apply at his soap box on the
nights of Wednesday and Sunday. That left
but five nights for other philanthropists to
handle; and had they done their part as well,
this wicked city might have become a vast
Arcadian dormitory where all might snooze and
snore the happy hours away, letting problem
plays and the rent man and business go to the
deuce.

The hour of eight was but a little while past;
sightseers in a small, dark mass of pay ore were
gathered in the shadow of General Worth's
monument. Now and then, shyly, osten
tatiously, carelessly, or with conscientious
exactness one would step forward and bestow
upon the Preacher small bills or silver. Then
a lieutenant of Scandinavian coloring and
enthusiasm would march away to a lodging
house with a squad of the redeemed. All the
while the Preacher exhorted the crowd in terms
beautifully devoid of eloquence— splendid with
the deadly, accusive monotony of truth. Be
fore the picture of the Bed Liners fades you must
hear one phrase of the Preacher's— the one that
formed his theme that night. It is worthy of
being stenciled on all the white ribbons in the
i world.

"No man ever learned to be a drunkard on five-
cent whisky."

, Think of it, tippler. It covers the ground
from the sprouting rye to the Potter's Field.

A clean-profiled, erect young man in the rear
'rank of the bedless emulated the terrapin, draw
ling his head far down into the shell of his coat

52 STRICTLY BUSINESS

collar. It was a well-cut tweed coat; and the
trousers still showed signs of having flattened
themselves beneath the compelling goose. But,
conscientiously, I must warn the milliner's
apprentice who reads this, expecting a Reginald
Montressor in straits, to peruse no further.
The young man was no other than Thomas
McQuade, ex-coachman, discharged for drunken
ness one month before, and now reduced to the
grimy ranks of the one-night bed seekers.

If you live in smaller New York you must
know the Van Smuythe family carriage, drawn
by the two i,5<DO-pound, 100 to i-shot bays.
The carriage is shaped like a bath-tub. In
each end of it reclines an old lady Van Smuythe
holding a black sunshade the size of a New
Year's Eve feather tickler. Before his downfall
Thomas McQuade drove the Van Smuythe bays
and was himself driven by Annie, the Van
Smuythe lady's maid. But it is one of the
saddest things about romance that a tight shoe
or an empty commissary or an aching tooth
will make a temporary heretic of any Cupid-
worshiper. And Thomas's physical troubles
were not few. Therefore, his soul was less
vexed with thoughts of his lost lady's maid than
it was by the fancied presence of certain non
existent things that his racked nerves almost
convinced him were flying, dancing, crawling,
and wriggling on the asphalt and in the air
above and around the dismal campus of the
Bed Line army. Nearly four weeks of straight
whisky and a diet limited to crackers, bologna,
and pickles often guarantees a psycho-zoological

THE FIFTH WHEEL 53

sequel. Thus desperate, freezing, angry, beset
by phantoms as ne was, he felt the need of
human sympathy and intercourse.

The Bed Liner standing at his right was a
young man of about his own age, shabby but
neat.

"What's the diagnosis of your case, Freddy?"
asked Thomas, with the freemasonic familiarity
of the damned— "Booze? That's mine. You
don't look like a pan-handler. Neither am I.
A month ago I was pushing the lines over the
backs of the finest team of Percheron buffaloes
that ever made their mile down Fifth Avenue
in 2.85. And look at me now! Say; how do
you come to be at this bed bargain-counter
rummage sale?"

; The other young man seemed to welcome the
advances of the airy ex-coachman.

"No," said he, "mine isn't exactly a case of
drink. Unless we allow that Cupid is a bar
tender. I married unwisely, according to the
opinion of my unforgiving relatives. I've been
out of work for a year because I don't know how
to work; and I've been sick in Bellevue and
other hospitals four months. My wife and kid
had to go back to her mother. I was turned out
of the hospital yesterday. And I haven't a
cent. That's my tale of woe."

"Tough luck," said Thomas. "A man alone
can pull through all right. But I hate to see the
wcmen and kids get the worst of it."

Just then there hummed up Fifth Avenue a
motor car so splendid, so red, so smoothly
running, so craftily demolishing the speed regu-

54 STRICTLY BUSINESS

lations that it drew the attention even of the
listless Bed Liners. Suspended and pinioned
on its left side was an extra tire.

When opposite the unfortunate company the
fastenings of this tire became loosed. It fell
to the asphalt, bounded and rolled rapidly in the
wake of the flying car.

Thomas McQuade, scenting an opportunity,
darted from his place among the Preacher's
goats. In thirty seconds he had caught the
rolling tire, swung it over his shoulder, and was
trotting smartly after the car. On both sides
of the avenue people were shouting, whistling,
and waving canes at the red car, pointing to the
enterprising Thomas coming up with the lost tire.

One dollar, Thomas had estimated, was the
smallest guerdon that so grand an automobilist
could offer for the service he had rendered, and
save his pride.

Two blocks away the car had stopped.
There was a little, brown, muffled chauffeur
driving, and an imposing gentleman wearing
a magnificent sealskin coat and a silk hat on a
rear seat.

Thomas proffered the captured tire with his
best ex-coachman manner and a look in the
brighter of his reddened eyes that was meant
to be suggestive to the extent of a silver coin
or two and receptive up to higher denominations.

But the look -was not so construed. The
sealskinned gentleman received the tire, placed
it inside the car, gazed intently at the ex-
coachman, and muttered to himself inscrutable
words.

THE FIFTH WHEEL 55

"Strange — strange!" said he. "Once or twice
even I, myself, have fancied that the Chaldean
Chiroscope has availed. Could it be possible?"

Then he addressed less mysterious words to
the waiting and hopeful Thomas.

"Sir, I t'hank you for your kind rescue of my
tire. And I would ask you, if I may, a question.
Do you know the family of Van Smuythes living
in Washington Square North?"

"Oughtn't I to?" replied Thomas. "I lived
there. Wish I did yet."

The sealskinned gentleman opened a door of
the car.

"Step in, please," he said. "You have been
expected."

Thomas McQuade obeyed with surprise but
without hesitation. A seat in a motor car
seemed better than standing room in the Bed
Line. But after the lap-robe had been tucked
about him and the auto had sped on its course,
the peculiarity of the invitation lingered in his
mind.

"Maybe the guy hasn't got any change," was
his diagnosis. "Lots of these swell rounders
don't lug about any ready money. Guess he'll
dump me out when he gets to some joint where
he can get cash on his mug. Anyhow, it's a
cinch that I've got that open-air bed con
vention beat to a finish."

Submerged in his greatcoat, the mysterious
automobilist seemed, himself, to marvel at
the surprises of life. "Wonderful! amazing!
strange!" he repeated to himself constantly.

When the car had well entered the crosstown

56 STRICTLY BUSINESS

Seventies it swung eastward a half block and
stopped before a row of high-stooped, brown-
stone-front houses.

" Be kind enough to enter my house with me,"
said the sealskinned gentleman when they had
alighted. "He's going to dig up, sure," re
flected Thomas, following him inside.

There was a dim light in the hall. His host
conducted him through a door to the left, closing
it after him and leaving them in absolute dark
ness. Suddenly a luminous globe, strangely
decorated, shone faintly in the centre of an
immense room that seemed to Thomas more
splendidly appointed than any he had ever seen
on the stage or read of in fairy stories.

The walls were hidden by gorgeous red hang
ings embroidered with fantastic gold figures.
At the rear end of the room were draped por
tieres of dull gold spangled with silver crescents
and stars. The furniture was of the costliest
and rarest styles. The ex-coachman's feet sank
into rugs as fleecy and deep as snowdrifts.
There were three or four oddly shaped stands or
tables covered with black velvet drapery.

Thomas McQuade took in the splendors of
this palatial apartment with one eye. With
the other he looked for his imposing conductor —
to find that he had disappeared.

"B'gee!" muttered Thomas, "this listens like
a spook shop. Shouldn't wonder if it ain't
one of these Moravian Nights' adventures that
you read about. Wonder what became of the
furry guy."

Suddenly a stuffed owl that stood on an ebony

THE FIFTH WHEEL 57

perch near the illuminated globe slowly raised
his wings and emitted from his eyes a brilliant
electric glow.

With a fright-born imprecation, Thomas
seized a bronze statuette of Hebe from a cabinet
near by and hurled it with all his might at the
terrifying and impossible fowl. The owl and
his perch went over with a crash. With the
sound there was a click, and the room was
flooded with light from a dozen frosted globes
along the walls and ceiling. The gold portieres
parted and closed, and the mysterious auto-
mobilist entered the room. He was tall and
wore evening dress of perfect cut and accurate
taste. A Vandyke beard of glossy, golden
brown, rather long and wavy hair, smoothly
parted, and large, magnetic, orientally occult
eyes gave him a most impressive and striking
appearance. If you can conceive a Russian
Grand Duke in a Rajah's throne-room advanc
ing to greet a visiting Emperor, you will gather
something of the majesty of his manner. But
Thomas McQuade was too near his d t's to be
mindful of his p's and q s. When he viewed
this silken, polished, and somewhat terrifying
host he thought vaguely of dentists.

"Say, doc," said he resentfully, "that's a
hot bird you keep on tap. I hope I didn't
break anything. But I've nearly got the
williwalloos, and when he threw them 32-
candle-power lamps of his on me, I took a snap
shot at him with that little brass Flatiron Girl
that stood on the sideboard."

"That is merely a mechanical toy," said the

S8 STRICTLY BUSINESS ,

gentleman with a wave of his hand. "May I
ask you to be seated while I explain why I
brought you to my house? Perhaps you would
not understand nor be in sympathy with the
psychological prompting that caused me to do
so. So I will come to the point at once by
venturing to refer to your admission that you
know the Van Smuythe family, of Washington
Square North."

"Any silver missing?" asked Thomas tartly.
"Any joolry displaced ? Of course I know 'em.
Any of the old ladies' sunshades disappeared?
Well, I know 'em. And then what?"

The Grand Duke rubbed his white hands
together softly.

"Wonderful!" he murmured. "Wonderful!
Shall I come to believe in the Chaldean Chiro-
scope myself? Let me assure you," he con
tinued, "that there is nothing for you to fear.
Instead, I think I can promise you that very
good fortune awaits you. We will see."

"Do they want me back?" asked Thomas,
with something of his old professional pride in
his voice. "I'll promise to cut out the booze
and do the right thing if they'll try me again.
But how did you get wise, doc? B'gee, it's the
swellest employment agency I was ever in,
with its flashlight owls and so forth."

With an indulgent smile the gracious host
begged to be excused for two minutes. He went
out to the sidewalk and gave an order to the
chauffeur, who still waited with the car. Re
turning to the mysterious apartment, he sat by

THE FIFTH WHEEL 59

his guest and began to entertain him so well by
his witty and genial converse that the poor Bed
Liner almost forgot the cold streets from which
he had been so recently and so singularly
rescued. A servant brought some tender cold
fowl and tea biscuits and a glass of miraculous
wine; and Thomas felt the glamor of Arabia
envelop him. Thus half an hour sped qrackly;
and then the honk of the returned motor car at
the door suddenly drew the Grand Duke to his
feet, with another soft petition for a brief
absence.

Two women, well muffled against the cold,
were admitted at the front door and suavely
conducted by the master of the house down the
hall through another door to the left and into a
smaller room, which was screened and segre
gated from the larger front room by heavy
double portieres. Here the furnishings were
even more elegant and exquisitely tasteful than
in the other. On a gold-inlaid rosewood table
were scattered sheets of white paper and a
queer, triangular instrument or toy, apparently
of gold, standing on little wheels.

The taller woman threw back her black veil
and loosened her cloak. She was fifty, with a
wrinkled and sad face. The other, young and
plump, took a chair a little distance away and to
the rear as a servant or an attendant might have
done.

"You sent for me, Professor Cherubusco,"
said the elder woman, wearily. "I hope you
have something more definite than usual to say.

60 STRICTLY BUSINESS

I've about lost the little faith I had in your art.
I would not have responded to your call this
evening if my sister had not insisted upon it."

"Madame," said the professor, with his
princeliest smile, "the true Art cannot fail.
To find the true psychic and potential branch
sometimes requires time. We have not suc
ceeded, I admit, with the cards, the crystal, the
stars, the magic formulae of Zarazin, nor the
Oracle of Po. But we have at last discovered
the true psychic route. The Chaldean Chiro-
scope has been successful in our search."

The professor's voice had a ring that seemed
to proclaim his belief in his own words. The
elderly lady looked at him with a little more
interest.

"Why, there was no sense in those words
that it wrote with my hands on it," she said.
"What do you mean?"

"The words were these," said Professor
Cherubusco, rising to his full magnificent
height: "'By the fifth wheel of the chariot he
shall come."

"I haven't seen many chariots," said the
lady, "but I never saw one with five wheels."

"Progress," said the professor — "progress in
science and mechanics has accomplished it —
though, to be exact, we may speak of it only as
an extra tire. Progress in occult art has ad
vanced in proportion. Madame, I repeat that
the Chaldean Chiroscope has succeeded. I can
not only answer the question that you have
propounded, but I can produce before your eyes
the proof thereof."

THE FIFTH WHEEL 61

And now the lady was disturbed both in her
disbelief and in her poise.

"O professor!" she cried, anxiously— "When?
— where? Has he been found? Do not keep
me in suspense."

"I beg you will excuse me for a very few
minutes," said Professor Cherubusco, "and I
think I can demonstrate to you the efficacy of
the true Art."

Thomas was contentedly munching the last
crumbs of the bread and fowl when the en
chanter appeared suddenly at his side.

"Are you willing to return to your old home if
you are assured of a welcome and restoration to
favor?" he asked, with his courteous, royal
smile.

"Do I look bughouse?" answered Thomas.
"Enough of the footback life for me. But will
they have me again? The old lady is as fixed
in her ways as a nut on a new axle."

"My dear young man," said the other, "she
has been searching for you everywhere."

"Great!" said Thomas. "I'm on the job.
That team of dropsical dromedaries they call
horses is a handicap for a first-class coachman
like myself; but I'll take the job back, sure, doc.
They're good people to be with."

And now a change came o'er the suave counte
nance of the Caliph of Bagdad. He looked
keenly and suspiciously at the ex-coachman.

"May I ask what your name is?" he said
shortly.

"You've been looking for me," said Thomas,
"and don't know my name? You're a funny

62 STRICTLY BUSINESS

kind of sleuth. You must be one of the Central
Office gumshoers. I'm Thomas McQuade, of
course; and I've been chauffeur of the Van
Smuythe elephant team for a year. They fired
me a month ago for — well, doc, you saw what I
did to your old owl. I went broke on booze, and
when I saw the tire drop off your whiz wagon I
was standing in that squad of hoboes at the
Worth monument waiting for a free bed. Now,
what's the prize for the best answer to all this ? "

To his intense surprise Thomas felt himself
lifted by the collar and dragged, without a word
of explanation, to the front door. This was
opened, and he was kicked forcibly down the
steps with one heavy, disillusionizing, humiliat
ing impact of the stupendous Arabian's shoe.

As soon as the ex-coachman had recovered his
feet and his wits he hastened as fast as he could
eastward toward Broadway.

"Crazy guy," was his estimate of the mys
terious automobilist. "Just wanted to have
some fun kiddin', I guess. He might have dug
up a dollar, anyhow. Now I've got to hurry
up and get back to that gang of bum bed
hunters before they all get preached to sleep."

When Thomas reached the end of his two-
mile walk he found the ranks of the homeless
reduced to a squad of perhaps eight or ten. He
took the proper place of a newcomer at the left
end of the rear rank. In the file in front of
him was the young man who had spoken to
him of hospitals and something of a wife and
child.

THE FIFTH WHEEL 63

"Sorry to see you back again," said the
young man, turning to speak to him. "I hoped
you had struck something better than this.'*

"Me?" said Thomas. "Oh, I just took a run
around the block to keep warm! I see the
public ain't lending to the Lord very fast to
night."

"In this kind of weather," said the young
man, "charity avails itself of the proverb, and
both begins and ends at home."

And now the Preacher and his vehement
lieutenant struck up a last hymn of petition to
Providence and man. Those of the Bed Liners
whose windpipes still registered above 32 de
grees hopelessly and tunelessly joined in.

In the middle of the second verse Thomas saw
a sturdy girl with wind-tossed drapery battling
against the breeze and coming straight toward
him from the opposite sidewalk. "Annie!" he
yelled, and ran toward her.

"You fool, you fool!" she cried, weeping and
laughing, and hanging upon his neck, "why did
you do it?"

"The Stuff," explained Thomas briefly. "You
know. But subsequently nit. Not a drop."
He led her to the curb. "How did you happen
to see me?"

"I came to find you," said Annie, holding
tight to his sleeve. "Oh, you big fool! Pro
fessor Cherubusco told us that we might find
you here."

"Professor Ch— Don't know the guy.
What saloon does he work in?"

64 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"He's a clearvoyant, Thomas; the greatest
in the world. He found you with the Chaldean
telescope, he said."

"He's a liar," said Thomas. "I never had it.
He never saw me have anybody's telescope."

"And he said you came in a chariot with five
wheels or something."

"Annie," said Thomas solicitously, "you're
giving me the wheels now. If I had a chariot
I'd have gone to bed in it long ago. And with
out any singing and preaching for a nightcap,
either."

"Listen, you big fool. The Missis says she'll
take you back. I begged her to. But you
must behave. And you can go up to the house
to-night; and your old room over the stable is
ready."

"Great!" said Thomas earnestly. "You are
It, Annie. But when did these stunts happen ?"

"To-night at Professor Cherubusco's. He
sent his automobile for the Missis, and she took
me along. I've been there with her before."

"What's the professor's line?"

"He's a clearvoyant and a witch. The
Missis consults him. He knows everything.
But he hasn't done the Missis any good yet,
though she's paid him hundreds of dollars.
But he told us that the stars told him we could
find you here."

"What's the old lady want this cherry-buster
to do?"

"That's a family secret," said Annie. "And
now you've asked enough questions. Come on
home, you big fool."

THE FIFTH WHEEL 65

They had moved but a little way up the street
when Thomas stopped.

"Got any dough with you, Annie?" he asked.

Annie looked at him sharply.

"Oh, I know what that look means," said
Thomas. "You're wrong. Not another drop.
But there's a guy that was standing next to me
in the bed line over there that's in a bad shape.
He's the right kind, and he's got wives or kids
or something, and he's on the sick list. No
booze. If you could dig up half a dollar for
him so he could get a decent bed I'd like it."

Annie's fingers began to wiggle in her purse.

"Sure, I've got money," said she. "Lots of
it. Twelve dollars." And then she added,
with woman's ineradicable suspicion of vicarious
benevolence: "Bring him here and let me see
him first."

Thomas went on his mission. The wan Bed
Liner came readily enough. As the two drew
near, Annie looked up from her purse and
screamed:

"Mr. Walter Oh— Mr. Walter!"

"Is that you, Annie?" said the young man
weakly.

"Oh, Mr. Walter! — and the Missis hunting
high and low for you!"

"Does mother want to see me?" he asked,
with a flush coming out on his pale cheek.

"She's been hunting for you high and low.
Sure, she wants to see you. She wants you to
come home. She's tried police and morgues and
lawyers and advertising and detectives and
rewards and everything. And then she took

66 STRICTLY BUSINESS

up clearvoyants. You'll go right home, won't
you, Mr. Walter?"

"Gladly, if she wants me," said the young
man. "Three years is a long time. I suppose
I'll have to walk up, though, unless the street
cars are giving free rides. I used to walk and
beat that old plug team of bays we used to drive
to the carriage. Have they got them yet?"

"They have," said Thomas, feelingly. "And
they'll have 'em ten years from IIOWT. The life
of the royal elephantibus truckhorseibus is one
hundred and forty-nine years. I'm the coach
man. Just got my reappointment five minutes
ago. Let's all ride up in a surface car — that
is — er — if Annie will pay the fares."

On the Broadway car Annie handed each one
of the prodigals a nickel to pay the conductor.

"Seems to me you are mighty reckless the
way you throw large sums of money around,"
said Thomas, sarcastically.

"In that purse," said Annie, decidedly, "is
exactly $11.85. I shall take every cent of it
to-morrow and give it to Professor Cherubusco,
the greatest man in the world."

"Well," said Thomas, "I guess he must be a
pretty fly guy to pipe off things the way he does.
I'm glad his spooks told him where you could
find me. If you'll give me his address, some
day I'll go up there, myself, and shake his
hand."

Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his
seat, and thoughtfully felt an abrasion or two
on his knees and elbows.

"Say, Annie," said he, confidentially, "maybe

THE FIFTH WHEEL 67

it's one of the last dreams of the booze, but I've
a kind of a recollection of riding in an auto
mobile with a swell guy that took me to a house
full of eagles and arc lights. He fed me on
biscuits and hot air, and then kicked me down
the front steps. If it was the d t'sy why am I

5 j>

so sore:

"Shut up, you fool," said Annie.

"If I could find that funny guy's house,"
said Thomas, in conclusion, "I'd go up there
some day and punch his nose for him."

VI

THE POET AND THE PEASANT

THE other day a poet friend of mine, who has
lived in close communion with nature all his
life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor.

It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine
breath of the fields, the song of birds, and the
pleasant chatter of trickling streams.

When the poet called again to see about it,
with hopes of a beefsteak dinner in his heart,
it was handed back to him with the comment:

"Too artificial."

Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess
County chianti, and swallowed indignation with
slippery forkfuls.

And there we dug a pit for the editor. With
us was Conant, a well-arrived writer of fiction —
a man who had trod on asphalt all his life, and
who had never looked upon bucolic scenes ex
cept with sensations of disgust from the windows
of express trains.

Conant wrote a poem and called it "The Doe
and the Brook." It was a fine specimen of the
kind of work you would expect from a poet who
had strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the
florist's windows, and whose sole ornithological
discussion had been carried on with a waiter.

68

THE POET AND THE PEASANT 69

Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to the
same editor.

But this has very little to do with the story.

Just as the editor was reading the first line of
the poem, on the next morning, a being stumbled
off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped slowly
up Forty-second Street.

The invader was a young man with light blue
eyes, a hanging lip, and hair the exact color of
the little orphan's (afterward discovered to be
the earl's daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney's
plays. His trousers were corduroy, his coat
short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his
back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys.
You looked expectantly, though in vain, at his
straw hat for ear holes, its shape inaugurating
the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a
former equine possessor. In his hand was a
valise — description of it is an impossible task;
a Boston man would not have carried his lunch
and law books to his office in it. And above one
ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay — the rustic's
letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last
clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering
to shame the gold-brick men.

Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed
him by. They saw the raw stranger stand in
the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall build
ings. At this they ceased to smile, and even
to look at him. It had been done so often. A
few glanced at the antique valise to see what
Coney "attraction" or brand of chewing gum
he might be thus dinning into his memory. But
for the most part he was ignored. Even the

70 STRICTLY BUSINESS

newsboys looked bored when he scampered like
a circus clown out of the way of cabs and street
cars.

At Eighth Avenue stood " Bunco Harry," with
his dyed mustache and shiny, good-natured
eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be
pained at the sight of an actor overdoing his
part. He edged up to the countryman, who
had stopped to open his mouth at a jewelry
store window, and shook his head.

"Too thick, pal," he said, critically — "too
thick by a couple of inches. I don't know what
your lay is; but you've got the properties on too
thick. That hay, now — why, they don't even
allow that on Proctor's circuit any'more."

"I don't understand you, mister," said the
green one. "I'm not lookin' for any circus.
I've just run down from Ulster County to look
at the town, bein' that the hayin's over with.
Gosh! but it's a whopper. I thought Pough-
keepsie was some pumpkins; but this here town
is five times as big."

"Oh, well," said "Eurico Harry," raising his
eyebrows, "I didn't mean to butt in. You
don't have to tell. I thought you ought to
tone down a little, so I tried to put you wise.
Wish you success at your graft, whatever it is.
Come and have a drink, anyhow."

"I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager
beer," acknowledged the other.

They went to a cafe frequented by men with
smooth faces and shifty eyes, and sat at their
drinks.

"I'm glad I come across you, mister," said

THE POET AND THE PEASANT 71

Haylocks. "How'd you like to play a game or
two of seven-up? I've got the keerds."

He fished them out of Noah's valise — a rare,
inimitable deck, greasy with bacon suppers and
grimy with, the soil of cornfields.

"Bunco Harry" laughed loud and briefly.

"Not for me, sport," he said, firmly. "I
don't go against that make-up of yours for a
cent. But I still say you've overdone it. The
Reubs haven't dressed like that since '79. I
doubt if you could work Brooklyn for a key-
winding watch with that layout."

"Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the
money," boasted Haylocks. He drew forth a
tightly rolled mass of bills as large as a teacup,
and laid it on the table.

"Got that for my share of grandmother's
farm," he announced. "There's $950 in that
roll. Thought I'd come to the city and look
around for a likely business to go into."

"Bunco Harry" took up the roll of money
and looked at it with almost respect in his
smiling eyes.

"I've seen worse," he said, critically. "But
you'll never do it in them clothes. You want
to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a
straw hat with a colored band, and talk a good
deal about Pittsburg and freight differentials,
and drink sherry for breakfast in order to work
oft phony stuff" like that."

"What's his line?" asked two or three shifty-
eyed men of "Bunco Harry" after Haylocks
had gathered up his impugned money and de
parted.

72 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"The queer, I guess," said Harry. "Or else
he's one of Jerome's men. Or some guy with a
new graft. He's too much hayseed. Maybe
that his — I wonder now — oh, no, it couldn't have
been real money."

Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably
assailed him again, for he dived into a dark
groggery on a side street and bought beer.
Several sinister fellows hung upon one end of
the bar. At first sight of him their eyes bright
ened; but when his insistent and exaggerated
rusticity became apparent their expressions
changed to wary suspicion.

Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.

"Keep that a while for me, mister," he said,
chewing at the end of a virulent claybank cigar.

"I'll be back after I knock around a spell.
And keep your eye on it, for there's $950 inside
of it, though maybe you wouldn't think so to
look at me."

Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a
band piece, and Haylocks was off for it, his coat-
tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back.

"Divvy, Mike," said the men hanging upon
the bar, winking openly at one another.

"Honest, now," said the bartender, kicking
the valise to one side. "You don't think I'd
fall to that, do you ? Anybody can see he ain't
no jay. One of McAdoo-'s come-on squad, I
guess. He's a shine if he made himself up.
There ain't no parts of the country now where
they dress like that since they run rural free
delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he's
got nine-fifty in that valise it's a ninety-eight

THE POET AND THE PEASANT 73

cent Waterbury that's stopped at ten minutes
to ten."

When Haylocks had exhausted the resources
of Mr. Edison to amuse he returned for his
valise. And then down Broadway he galli
vanted, culling the sights with his eager blue
eyes. But still and evermore Broadway re
jected him with curt glances and sardonic
smiles. He was the oldest of the "gags" that
the city must endure. He was so flagrantly
impossible, so ultra rustic, so exaggerated be
yond the most freakish products of the barn
yards, the hayfield, and the vaudeville stage, that
he excited only weariness and suspicion. And
the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so
fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamor
ously rural that even a shell-game man would
have put up his peas and folded his table at the
sight of it.

Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone
steps and once more exhumed his roll of yellow
backs from the valise. The outer one, a twenty,
he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.

"Son," said he, "run somewhere and get this
changed for me. I'm mighty nigh out of
chicken feed. I guess you'll get a nickel if
you'll hurry up."

A hurt look appeared through the dirt on
the newsy's face.

"Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer
funny bill changed yerself. Dey ain't no farm
clothes yer got on. G'wan wit yer stage
money."

On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a

74 STRICTLY BUSINESS

gambling-house. He saw Haylocks, and his ex
pression suddenly grew cold and virtuous.

"Mister," said the rural one. "I've heard
of places in this here town where a fellow could
have a good game of old sledge or peg a card
at keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come
down from old Ulster to see the sights. Know
where a fellow could get action on about $9
or $10? I'm goin' to have some sport, and then
maybe I'll buy out a business of some kind."

The steerer looked pained, and investigated a
white speck on his left forefinger nail.

"Cheese it, old man," he murmured, re
proachfully. "The Central Office must be
bughouse to send you out looking like such a
gillie. You couldn't get within two blocks of a
sidewalk crap game in them Tony Pastor props.
The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has
got you beat a crosstown block in the way of
Elizabethan scenery and mechanical accessories.
Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of
no gilded halls wrhere one may bet a patrol
wagon on the ace."

Rebuffed again by the great city that is so
swift to detect artificialities, Haylocks sat upon
the curb and presented his thoughts to hold a
conference.

"It's my clothes," said he; "durned if it ain't.
They think I'm a hayseed and won't have
nothin' to do with me. Nobody never made
fun of this hat in Ulster County. I guess if
you want folks to notice you in New York
you must dress up like they do."

So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars

THE POET AND THE PEASANT 75

where men spake through their noses and
rubbed their hands and ran the tape line
ecstatically over the bulge in his inside pocket
where reposed a red nubbin of corn with an
even number of rows. And messengers bearing
parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on
Broadway within the lights of Long Acre.

At 9 o'clock in the evening one descended to
the sidewalk whom Ulster County would have
foresworn. Bright tan were his shoes; his hat
the latest block. His light gray trousers were
deeply creased; a gay blue silk handkerchief
flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant
English walking coat. His collar might have
graced a laundry window; his blond hair was
trimmed close; the wisp of hay was gone.

For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the
leisurely air of a boulevardier concocting in his
mind the route for his evening pleasures. And
then he turned down the gay, bright street with
the easy and graceful tread of a millionaire.

But in the instant that he had paused the
wisest and keenest eyes in the city had en
veloped him in their field of vision. A stout
man with gray eyes picked two of his friends
with a lift of his eyebrows from the row of
loungers in front of the hotel.

"The juiciest jay I've seen in six months,"
said the man with gray eyes. "Come along."

It was half-past eleven when a man galloped
into the West Forty-seventh Street Police
Station with the story of his wrongs.

"Nine hundred and fifty dollars," he gasped,
"all my share of grandmother's farm."

76 STRICTLY BUSINESS

The desk sergeant wrung from him the name
Jabez Bulltongue, of Locust Valley farm, Ulster
County, and then began to take descriptions
of the strong-arm gentlemen.

When Conant went to see the editor about
the fate of his poem, he was received over the
head of the office boy into the inner office that
is decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and
J. G. Brown.

"When I read the first line of 'The Doe and
the Brook/" said the editor, "I knew it to be
the wTork of one whose life has been heart to
heart with Nature. The finished art of the
line did not blind me to that fact. To use a
somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a
wild, free child of the woods and fields were to
don the garb of fashion and walk down Broad
way. Beneath the apparel the man would
show."

"Thanks," said Conant. "I suppos-e the
check will be round on Thursday, as usual."

The morals of this story have somehow gotten
mixed. You can take your choice of "Stay on
the Farm" or "Don't Write Poetry."

VII
THE ROBE OF PEACE

MYSTERIES follow one another so closely in
a great city that the reading public and the
friends of Johnny Bellchambers have ceased to
marvel at his sudden and unexplained dis
appearance nearly a year ago. This particular
mystery has now been cleared up, but the
solution is so strange and incredible to the
mind of the average man that only a select few
who were in close touch with Bellchambers will
give it full credence.

Johnny Bellchambers, as is well known, be
longed to the intrinsically inner circle of the
elite. Without any of the ostentation of the
fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice
by eccentric display of wealth and show he still
was au fait in everything that gave deserved
lustre to his high position in the ranks of society.

Especially did he shine in the matter of dress.
In this he was the despair of imitators. Always
correct, exquisitely groomed, and possessed of
an unlimited wardrobe, he was conceded to be
the best-dressed man in New York, and, there
fore, in America. There was not a tailor in
Gotham who would not have deemed it a
precious boon to have beer> granted the privilege

77

78 STRICTLY BUSINESS

of making Bellchambers' clothes without a cent
of pay. As he wore them, they would have
been a priceless advertisement. Trousers were
his especial passion. Here nothing but per
fection would he notice. He would have worn
a patch as quickly as he would have overlooked
a wrinkle. He kept a man in his apartments
always busy pressing his ample supply. His
friends said that three hours was the limit of
time that he would wear these garments without
exchanging.

Bellchambers disappeared very suddenly.
For three days his absence brought no alarm to
his friends, and then they began to operate the
usual methods of inquiry. All of them failed.
He had left absolutely no trace behind. Then
the search for a motive was instituted, but none
was found. He had no enemies, he had no
debts, there was no woman. There were
several thousand dollars in his bank to his
credit. He had never showed any tendency
toward mental eccentricity; in fact, he was of a
particularly calm and well-balanced tempera
ment. Every means of tracing the vanished
man was made use of, but without avail. It
was one of those cases — more numerous in late
years — where men seem to have gone out like
the flame of a candle, leaving not even a trail
of smoke as a witness.

In May, Tom Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam,
two of Bellchambers' old friends, went for a
little run on the other side. While pottering
around in Italy and Switzerland, they happened,
one day, to hear of a monastery in the Swiss

THE ROBE OF PEACE 79

Alps that promised something outside of the
ordinary tourist-beguiling attractions. The
monastery was almost inaccessible to the
average sight-seer, being on an extremely rugged
and precipitous spur of the mountains. The
attractions it possessed but did not advertise
were, first, an exclusive and divine cordial made
by the monks that was said to far surpass
benedictine and chartreuse. Next a huge
brass bell so purely and accurately cast that it
had not ceased sounding since it was first rung
three hundred years ago. Finally, it was as
serted that no Englishman had ever set foot
within its walls. Eyres and Gilliam decided
that these three reports called for investigation.

It took them two days with the aid of two
guides to reach the monastery of St. Gondrau.
It stood upon a frozen, wind-swept crag with
the snow piled about it in treacherous, drifting
masses. They were hospitably received by the
brothers whose duty it was to entertain the
infrequent guest. They drank of the precious
cordial, finding it rarely potent and reviving.
They listened to the great, ever-echoing bell
and learned that they were pioneer travelers,
in those gray stone walls, over the Englishman
whose restless feet have trodden nearly every
corner of the earth.

At three o'clock on the afternoon they
arrived, the two young Gothamites stood with
good Brother Cristofer in the great, cold hall
way of the monastery to watch the monks
march past on their way to the refectory. They
came slowly, pacing by twos, with their heads

8o STRICTLY BUSINESS

bowed, treading noiselessly with sandaled feet
upon the rough stone flags. As the procession
slowly filed past, Eyres suddenly gripped
Gilliam by the arm. "Look," he whispered,
eagerly, " at the one just opposite you now — the
one on this side, with his hand at his waist — if
that isn't Johnny Bellchambers then I never saw
him!''

Gilliam saw and recognized the lost glass of
fashion.

"What the deuce," said he, wonderingly,
"is old Bell doing here ? Tommy, it surely can't
be he! Never heard of Bell having a turn for
the religious. Fact is, I've heard him say
things when a four-in-hand didn't seem to tie
up just right that would bring him up for court-
martial before any church."

"It's Bell, without a doubt," said Eyres,
firmly, "or I'm pretty badly in need of an
oculist. But think of Johnny Bellchambers,
the Royal High Chancellor of swell togs and
the Mahatma of pink teas, up here in cold
storage doing penance in a snuff-colored bath
robe ! I can't get it straight in my mind. Let's
ask the jolly old boy that's doing the honors."

Brother Cristofer was appealed to for infor
mation. By that time the monks had passed
into the refectory. He could not tell to which
one they referred. Bellchambers? Ah, the
brothers of St. Gondrau abandoned their
worldly names when they took the vows. Did
the gentlemen wish to speak with one of the
brothers? If they would come to the refectory
and indicate the one they wished to see, the

THE ROBE OF PEACE 81

reverend abbot in authority would, doubtless,
permit it.

Eyres and Gilliam went into the dining hall
and pointed out to Brother Cristofer the man
they had seen. Yes, it was Johnny Bell-
chambers. They saw his face plainly now, as
he sat among the dingy brothers, never looking
up, eating broth from a coarse, brown bowl.

Permission to speak to one of the brothers
was granted to the two travelers by the abbot,
and they waited in a reception room for him to
come. When he did come, treading softly in
his sandals, both Eyres and Gilliam looked at
him in perplexity and astonishment. It was
Johnny Bellchambers, but he had a different
look. Upon his smooth-shaven face was an
expression of ineffable peace, of rapturous
attainment, of perfect and complete happiness.
His form was proudly erect, his eyes shone with
a serene and gracious light. He was as neat
and well-groomed as in the old New York days,
but how differently was he clad! Now he
seemed clothed in but a single garment — a long
robe of rough brown cloth, gathered by a cord
at the waist, and falling in straight, loose folds
nearly to his feet. He shook hands *with his
visitors with his old ease and grace of manner.
If there was any embarrassment in that meeting
it was not manifested by Johnny Bellchambers.
The room had no seats; they stood to converse.

"Glad to see you, old man," said Eyres, some
what awkwardly. "Wasn't expecting to find
you up here. Not a bad idea, though, after all.
Society's an awful sham. Must be a relief to

82 STRICTLY BUSINESS

shake the giddy whirl and retire to — er — con
templation and — er— prayer and hymns, and
those things."

"Oh, cut that, Tommy," said Bellchambers,
cheerfully. "Don't be afraid that I'll pass
around the plate. I go through these thing-um-
bobs with the rest of these old boys because
they are the rules. I'm Brother Ambrose here,
you know. I'm given just ten minutes to talk
to you fellows. That's rather a new design in
waistcoats you have on, isn't it, Gilliam? Are
they wearing those things on Broadway now?"

"It's the same old Johnny," said Gilliam,
joyfully. "What the devil — I mean why-
Oil, confound it! what did you do it for, old
man?"

"Peel the bathrobe," pleaded Eyres, almost
tearfully, "and go back with us. The old
crowd'll go wild to see you. This isn't in your
line, Bell. I know half a dozen girls that wore
the willow on the quiet when you shook us in
that unaccountable way. Hand in your resig
nation, or get a dispensation, or whatever you
have to do to get a release from this ice factory.
You'll get catarrh here, Johnny — and— My
God! you haven't any socks on!"

Bellchambers looked down at his sandaled
feet and smiled.

"You fellows don't understand," he said,
soothingly. "It's nice of you to want me to go
back, but the old life \vill never know me again.
I have reached here the goal of all my am
bitions. I am entirely happy and contented.
Here I shall remain for the remainder of my

THE ROBE OF PEACE 83

days. You see this robe that I wear?" Bell-
chambers caressingly touched the straight-
hanging garment: "At last I have found some
thing that will not bag at the knees. I have
attained—

At that moment the deep boom of the great
brass bell reverberated through the monastery.
It must have been a summons to immediate
devotions, for Brother Ambrose bowed his
head, turned and left the chamber without
another word. A slight wave of his hand as he
passed through the stone doorway seemed to
say a farewell to his old friends. They left the
monastery without seeing himf again.

And this is the story that Tommy Eyres and
Lancelot Gilliam brought back with them from
their latest European tour.

VIII
THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT

THE other day I ran across my old friend
Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a conscientious
grafter of the highest type. His headquarters
is the Western Hemisphere, and his line of busi
ness is anything from speculating in town lots
on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden
toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure
from nutmegs ground to a pulp.

Now and then when Pogue has made a good
haul he comes to New York for a rest. He says
the jug of wine and loaf of bread and Thou in
the wilderness business is about as much rest
and pleasure to him as sliding down the bumps
at Coney would be to President Taft. "Give
me," says Pogue, "a big city for my vacation.
Especially New York. I'm not much fond of
New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only
place on the globe where I don't find any."

While in the metropolis Pogue can always be
found at one of two places. One is a little
second-hand bookshop on Fourth Avenue, where
he reads books about his hobbies, Mahometan-
ism and taxidermy. I found him at the other —
his hall bedroom in Eighteenth Street — where he
sat in his stocking feet trying to pluck "The

84

THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT 85

Banks of the Wabash" out of a small zither.
Four years he has practised this tune without
arriving near enough to cast the longest trout
line to the water's edge. On the dresser lay a
blued-steel Colt's forty-five and a tight roll of
tens and twenties large enough around to belong
to the spring rattlesnake-story class. A chamber
maid with a room-cleaning air fluttered near by
in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized
by the stocking feet, aghast at the Colt's, yet
powerless, with her metropolitan instincts, to
remove herself beyond the magic influence of
the yellow-hued roll.

I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue
talked. No one could be franker or more can
did in his conversation. Beside his expression
the cry of Henry James for lacteal nourishment
at the age of one month would have seemed like
a Chaldean cryptogram. He told me stories
of his profession with pride, for he considered it
an art. And I was curious enough to ask him
whether he had known any women who followed
it.

"Ladies?" said Pogue, with Western chivalry.
"Well, not to any great extent. They don't
amount to much in special lines of graft,
because they're all so busy in general lines.
WThat? Why, they have to. Who's got the
money in the world ? The men. Did you ever
know a man to give a woman a dollar without
any consideration? A man will shell out his
dust to another man free and easy and gratis.
But if he drops a penny in one of the machines
run by the Madam Eve's Daughters' Amalga-

86 STRICTLY BUSINESS

mated Association and the pineapple chewing
gum don't fall out when he pulls the lever you
can hear him kick to the superintendent four
blocks away. Man is the hardest proposition
a woman has to go up against. He's a low-
grade one, and she has to work overtime to
make him pay. Two times out of five she's
salted. She can't put in crushers and costly
machinery. He'd notice 'em and be onto the
game. They have to pan out what they get,
and it hurts their tender hands. Some of 'em
are natural sluice troughs and can carry out
$1,000 to the ton. The dry-eyed ones have to
depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy,
the kangaroo walk, cowhide whips, ability to
cook, sentimental juries, conversational powers,
silk underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous
letters, violet sachet powders, witnesses, re
volvers, pneumatic forms, carbolic acid, moon
light, cold cream and the evening newspapers."

"You are outrageous, Ferg," I said. "Surely
there is none of this * graft/ as you call it, in a
perfect and harmonious matrimonial union!"

"Well," said Pogue, "nothing that would
justify you every time in calling up Police
Headquarters and ordering out the reserves and
a vaudeville manager on a dead run. But it's
this way: Suppose you're a Fifth Avenue
millionaire, soaring high, on the right side of
copper and cappers.

"You come home at night and bring a
$9,000,000 diamond brooch to the lady who's
staked you for a claim. You hand it over.
She says, 'Oh, George!' and looks to see if it's

THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT 87

backed. She comes up and kisses you. You've
waited for it. You get it. All right. It's
graft.

"But I'm telling you about Artemisia Blye.
She was from Kansas and she suggested corn
in all of its phases. Her hair was as yellow as
the silk; her form was as tall and graceful as a
stalk in the low grounds during a wet summer;
her eyes were as big and startling as bunions,
and green was her favorite color.

"On my last trip into the cool recesses of
your sequestered city I met a human named
Vaucross. He was worth — that is, he had a
million. He told me he was in business on the
street. 'A sidewalk merchant?' says I, sar
castic. 'Exactly,' says he. 'Senior partner
of a paving concern.'

"I kind of took to him. For this reason, I
met him on Broadway one night when I was out
of heart, luck, tobacco, and place. He was all
silk hat, diamonds, and front. He was all front.
If you had gone behind him you would have only
looked yourself in the face. I looked like a
cross between Count Tolstoy and a June
lobster. I was out of luck. I had — but let
me lay my eyes on that dealer again.

"Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few
minutes and then he took me to a high-toned
restaurant to eat dinner. There was music,
and then some Beethoven, and Bordelaise
sauce, and cussing in French and frangipani,
and some hauteur and cigarettes. When I am
flush I know them places.

"I declare, I must have looked as bad as a

88 STRICTLY BUSINESS

magazine artist sitting there without any money
and my hair all rumpled like I was booked to
read a chapter from 'Elsie's School Days' at a
Brooklyn Bohemian smoker. But Vaucross
treated me like a bear hunter's guide. He
wasn't afraid of hurting the waiter's feelings.
'"Mr. Pogue,' he explains to me, 'I am using
you.'

"Go on,' says I; 'I hope you don't wake up.'
"And then he tells me, you know, the kind of
man he was. He was a New Yorker. His
W7hole ambition was to be noticed. He wanted
to be conspicuous. He wanted people to point
him out and bow to him, and tell others who he
was. He said it had been the desire of his life
always. He didn't have but a million, so he
couldn't attract attention by spending money.
He said he tried to get into public notice one
time by planting a little public square on the
east side with garlic for free use of the poor;
but Carnegie heard of it, and covered it over at
once with a library in the Gaelic language.
Three times he had jumped in the way of auto
mobiles; but the only result was five broken ribs
and a notice in the papers that an unknown
man, five feet ten, with four amalgam-filled
teeth, supposed to be the last of the famous
Red Leary gang, had been run over.

"Ever try the reporters?' I asked him.

"Last month,' says Mr. Vaucross, 'my ex
penditure for lunches to reporters was $124.80.'

"Get anything out of that?' I asks.

"'That reminds me,' says he; 'add $8.50 for
pepsin. Yes, I got indigestion.'

THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT 89

"How am I supposed to push along your
scramble for prominence?' I inquires. 'Con
trast?'

"Something of that sort to-night,' says
Vaucross. 'It grieves me; but I am forced to
resort to eccentricity.' And here he drops his
napkin in his soup and rises up and bows to a
gent who is devastating a potato under a palm
across the room.

"'The Police Commissioner,' says my
climber, gratified. "'Friend,' says I, in a
hurry, 'have ambitions but don't kick a rung
out of your ladder. When you use me as a
stepping stone to salute the police you spoil my
appetite on the grounds that I may be degraded
and incriminated. Be thoughtful.'

"At the Quaker City squab en casserole the
idea about Artemisia Blye comes to me.

"Suppose I can manage to get you in the
papers,' says I — 'a column or two every day in
all of 'em and your picture in most of 'em for a
week. How much would it be worth to you?'
'Ten thousand dollars,' says Vaucross, warm
in a minute. 'But no murder,' says he; 'and
I won't wear pink pants at a cotillon.'

"I wouldn't ask you to,' says I. 'This is
honorable, stylish, and unefFeminate. Tell the
waiter to bring a demi tasse and some other
beans, and I will disclose to you the opus
moderandi.'

"We closed the deal an hour later in the
rococo rouge et noise room. I telegraphed that
night to Miss Artemisia in Salina. She took a
couple of photographs and an autograph letter

90 STRICTLY BUSINESS

to an elder in the Fourth Presbyterian Church
in the morning, and got some transportation
and $80. She stopped in Topeka long enough
to trade a flashlight interior and a valentine to
the vice-president of a trust company for a
mileage book and a package of five-dollar notes
with $250 scrawled on the band.

"The fifth evening after she got my wire she
was waiting, all decolletee and dressed up, for
me and Vaucross to take her to dinner in one
of these New York feminine apartment houses
where a man can't get in unless he plays bezique
and smokes depilatory powder cigarettes.

"She's a stunner,' says Vaucross when he
saw her. * They '11 give her a two-column cut
sure.'

"This was the scheme the three of us con
cocted. It was business straight through.
Vaucross was to rush Miss Blye with all the
style and display and emotion he could for a
month. Of course, that amounted to nothing
as far as his ambitions were concerned. The
sight of a man in a white tie and patent leather
pumps pouring greenbacks through the large
end of a cornucopia to purchase nutriment and
heartsease for tall, willowy blondes in New York
is as common a sight as blue turtles in delirium
tremens. But he was to write her love letters —
the worst kind of love letters, such as your wife
publishes after }TOU are dead — every day. At
the end of the month he was to drop her, and
she would bring suit for $100,000 for breach of
promise.

"Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she

THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT 91

won the suit that was all; and if she lost she was
to get it anyhow. There was a signed contract
to that effect.

"Sometimes they had me out with 'em, but
not often. I couldn't keep up to their style.
She used to pull out his notes and criticize them
like bills of lading.

"'Say, you!' she'd say. 'What do you call
this — Letter to a Hardware Merchant from His
Nephew on Learning that His Aunt Has
Nettlerash? You Eastern duffers know as
much about writing love letters as a Kansas
grasshopper does about tugboats. "My dear
Miss Blye!" — wouldn't that put pink icing and
a little red sugar bird on your bridal cake ? How
long do you expect to hold an audience in a
court-room with that kind of stuff? You want
to get down to business, and call me "Tweed-
lums Babe" and "Honeysuckle," and sign
yourself "Mamma's Own Big Bad Puggy
Wuggy Boy" if you want any limelight to
concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs. Get
sappy.'

"After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the
indelible tabasco. His notes read like some
thing or other in the original. I could see a jury
sitting up, and women tearing one another's
hats to hear 'em read. And I could see piling
up for Mr. Vaucross as much notoriousness as
Archbishop Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge
or cheese-on-salad ever enjoyed. He seemed
mighty pleased at the prospects.

"They agreed on a night; and I stood on
Fifth Avenue outside a solemn restaurant and

92 STRICTLY BUSINESS

watched 'em. A process-server walked in and
handed Vaucross the papers at his table. Every
body looked at 'em; and he looked as proud as
Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five-
cent cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good
as ours.

"About two hours later somebody knocked
at my door. There stood Vaucross and Miss
Artemisia, and she was clinging — yes, sir,
clinging — to his arm. And they tells me they'd
been out and got married. And they articulated
some trivial cadences about love and such. And
they laid down a bundle on the table and said
'Good-night' and left.

"And that's why I say," concluded Ferguson
Pogue, "that a woman is too busy occupied
with her natural vocation and instinct of graft
such as is given her for self-preservation and
amusement to make any great success in
special lines."

"What was in the bundle that they left?" I
asked, with my usual curiosity.

"Why," said Ferguson, "there was a scalper's
railroad ticket as far as Kansas City and two
pairs of Mr. Vaucross's old pants."

IX

THE CALL OF THE TAME

WHEN the inauguration was accomplished —
the proceedings were made smooth by the
presence of the Rough Riders — it is well known
that a herd of those competent and loyal ex-
warriors paid a visit to the big city. The news
paper reporters dug out of their trunks the old
broad-brimmed hats and leather belts that they
wear to North Beach fish fries, and mixed with
the visitors. No damage was done beyond the
employment of the wonderful plural "tender-
feet" in each of the scribe's stories. The West
erners mildly contemplated the skyscrapers as
high as the third story, yawned at Broadway,
hunched down in the big chairs in hotel cor
ridors, and altogether looked as bored and
dejected as a member of Ye Ancient and
Honorable Artillery separated during a sham
battle from his valet.

Out of this sightseeing delegation of good
King Teddy's Gentlemen of the Royal Bear-
hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye, of Pin
Feather, Ariz.

The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue's rush
hour swept him away from the company of his
pardners true. The dust from a thousand

93

94 STRICTLY BUSINESS

rustling skirts filled his eyes. The mighty roar
of trains rushing across the sky deafened him.
The lightning-flash of twice ten hundred beam
ing eyes confused his vision. {

The storm was so sudden and tremendous
that Greenbrier's first impulse was to lie down
and grab a root. And then he remembered that
the disturbance was human, and not elemental;
and he backed out of it with a grin into a door
way.

The reporters had written that but for the
wide-brimmed hats the West was not visible
upon these gauchos of the North. Heaven
sharpen their eyes! The suit of black diagonal,
wrinkled in impossible places; the bright blue
four-in-hand, factory tied; the low, turned-
down collar, pattern of the days of Seymour
and Blair, white glazed as the letters on the
window of the open-day-and-night-except-Sun-
day restaurants; the out-curve at the knees from
the straddle grip; the peculiar spread of the
half-closed right thumb and fingers from the
stiff hold upon the circling lasso; the deeply
absorbed weather tan that the hottest sun of
Cape May can never equal; the seldom-winking
blue eyes that unconsciously divided the rushing
crowds into fours, as though they were being
counted out of a corral; the segregated loneli
ness and solemnity of expression, as of an
emperor or of one whose horizons have not
intruded upon him nearer than a day's ride —
these brands of the West were set upon Green-
brier Nye. Oh, yes; he wore a broad-brimmed
hat, gentle reader — just like those the Madison

THE CALL OF THE TAME 95

Square Post Office mail carriers wear when they
go up to Bronx Park on Sunday afternoons.

Suddenly Greenbrier Nye jumped into the
drifting herd of metropolitan cattle, seized upon
a man, dragged him out of the stream and gave
him a buffet upon his collar-bone that sent him
reeling against a wall.

The victim recovered his hat, with the angry
look of a New Yorker who has suffered an out
rage and intends to write to the Trib. about it.
But he looked at his assailant, and knew that
the blow was in consideration of love and
affection after the manner of the West, which
greets its friends with contumely and uproar
and pounding fists, and receives its enemies in
decorum and order, such as the judicious placing
of the welcoming bullet demands.

"God in the mountains!" cried Greenbrier,
holding fast to the foreleg of his cull. "Can
this be Longhorn Merritt?"

The other man was — oh, look on Broadway
any day for the pattern — business man — latest
rolled-brim derby — good barber, business, di
gestion, and tailor.

"Greenbrier Nye!" he exclaimed, grasping
the hand that had smitten him. "My dear
fellow! So glad to see you! How did you
come to — oh, to be sure — the inaugural cere
monies — I remember you joined the Rough
Riders. You must come and have luncheon
with me, of course."

Greenbrier pinned him sadly but firmly to
the wall with a hand the size, shape, and color of
a McClellan saddle.

96 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"Longy," he said, in a melancholy voice that
disturbed traffic, ''what have they been doing
to you? You act just like a citizen. They
done made you into an inmate of the city
directory. You never made no such Johnny
Branch execration of yourself as that out on the
Gila. 'Come and have lunching with me!'
You never defined grub by any such terms of
reproach in them days."

"I've been living in New York seven years,"
said Merritt. "It's been eight since we punched
cows together in Old Man Garcia's outfit. Well,
let's go to a cafe, anyhow. It sounds good to
hear it called 'grub' again."

They picked their way through the crowd
to a hotel, and drifted, as by a natural law, to
the bar.

"Speak up," invited Greenbrier.

"A dry Martini," said Merritt.

"Oh, Lord!" cried Greenbrier; "and yet me
and you once saw the same pink Gila monsters
crawling up the walls of the same hotel in
Canon Diablo! A dry — but let that pass.
Whiskey straight — and they're on you."

Merritt smiled, and paid.

They lunched in a small extension of the din
ing room that connected with the cafe. Merritt
dexterously diverted his friend's choice, that
hovered over ham and eggs, to a puree of celery,
a salmon cutlet, a partridge pie, and a desirable
salad.

"On the day," said Greenbrier, grieved and
thunderous, "when I can't hold but one drink
before eating when I meet a friend I ain't seen

THE CALL OF THE TAME 97

in eight years at a 2 by 4 table in a thirty-cent
town at i o'clock on the third day of the week,
I want nine broncos to kick me forty times over
a 64<>acre section of land. Get them statistics ? '

"Right, old man," laughed Merritt. "Waiter,
bring an absinthe frappe and — what's yours,
Greenbrier?"

"Whiskey straight," mourned Nye. "Out
of the neck of a bottle you used to take it,
Longy — straight out of the neck of a bottle
on a galloping pony — Arizona redeye, not this
ab — oh, what's the use? They're on you."

Merritt slipped the wine card under his glass.

"All right. I suppose you think I'm spoiled
by the city. I'm as good a Westerner as you
are, Greenbrier; but, somehow, I can't make
up my mind to go back out there. New York
is comfortable — comfortable. I make a good
living, and I live it. No more wet blankets
and riding herd in snowstorms, and bacon and
cold coffee, and blowouts once in six months for
me. I reckon I'll hang out here in the future.
We'll take in the theatre to-night, Greenbrier,
and after that we'll dine at—

"I'll tell you what you are, Merritt," said
Greenbrier, laying one elbow in his salad and
the other in his butter. "You are a concen
trated, effete, unconditional, short-sleeved,
gotch-eared Miss Sally Walker. God made
you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle
and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore
you have suffered His handiwork to elapse by
removing yourself to New York and putting
on little shoes tied with strings, and making

98 STRICTLY BUSINESS

faces when you talk. I've seen 3-011 rope and
tie a steer in 49^. If you was to see one now
you'd write to the Police Commissioner about
it. And these flapdoodle drinks that you
inoculate your system with — these little essences
of cowslip with acorns in 'em, and paregoric
flip — they ain't anyways in assent with the
cordiality of manhood. I hate to see you this
way."

"Well, Greenbrier," said Merritt, with
apology in his tone, "in a way you are right.
Sometimes I do feel like I was being raised on
the bottle. But, I tell you, New York is
comfortable — comfortable. There's something
about it — the sights and the crowds, and the
way it changes every day, and the very air of
it that seems to tie a one-mile-long stake
rope around a man's neck, with the other end
fastened somewhere about Thirty-fourth Street.
I don't know what it is."

"God knows," said Greenbrier, sadly, "and I
know. The East has gobbled you up. You
was venison, and now you're veal. You put
me in mind of a japonica in a window. You've
been signed, sealed, and diskivered. Requiescat
in hoc signo. You make me thirsty."

"A green chartreuse here," said Merritt to
the waiter.

"Whiskey straight," sighed Greenbrier, "and
they're on you, you renegade of the round-ups."

"Guilty, with an application for mercy," said
Merritt. "You don't know how it is, Green-
brier. It's so comfortable here that—

"Please loan me your smelling salts," pleaded

THE CALL OF THE TAME 99

Greenbrier. "If I hadn't seen you once bluff
three bluffers from Mazatzal City with an
empty gun in Phoenix

Greenbrier's voice died away in pure grief.

"Cigars!" he called harshly to the waiter, to
hide his emotion.

"A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine," said
Merritt.

"They're on you," chanted Greenbrier, strug
gling to conceal his contempt.

At seven they dined in the Where-to-Dine-
Well column.

That evening a galaxy had assembled there.
Bright shone the lights o'er fair women and

br Let it go, anyhow- — brave men. The

orchestra played charmingly. Hardly had a
tip from a diner been placed in its hands by a
waiter when it would burst forth into soniferous-
ness. The more beer you contributed to it the
more Meyerbeer it gave you. Which is reci
procity.

Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner.
Greenbrier was his old friend, and he liked him.
He persuaded him to drink a cocktail.

"I take the horehound tea," said Greenbrier,
"for old times' sake. But I'd prefer whiskey
straight. They're on you."

" Right!" said Merritt. "Now, run your eye
down that bill of fare and see if it seems to hitch
on any of the items."

"Lay me on my lava bed!" said Greenbrier,
with bulging eyes. "All these specimens of
nutriment in the grub wagon! What's this?
Horse with the heaves? I pass. But look

ioo STRICTLY BUSINESS

along! Here's truck for twenty round-ups all
spelled out in different sections. Wait till I
see."

The viands ordered, Merritt turned to the
wine list.

"This Medoc isn't bad," he suggested.

" You're the doc," said Greenbrier. "I'd
rather have whiskey straight. It's on you."

Greenbrier looked around the room. The
waiter brought things and took dishes away.
He was observing. He saw a New York restau
rant crowd enjoying itself.

"How was the range when you left the Gila?"
asked Merritt.

"Fine," said Greenbrier. "You see that lady
in the red speckled silk at that table? Well,
she could warm over her beans at my campfire.
Yes, the range was good. She looks as nice as a
white mustang I see once on Black River."

When the coffee came, Greenbrier put one
foot on the seat of the chair next to him.

"You said it was a comfortable town, Longy,"
he said, meditatively. "Yes, it's a comfortable
town. It's different from the plains in a blue
norther. What did you call that mess in the
crock with the handle, Longy? Oh, yes, squabs
in a cash roll. They're worth the roll. That
white mustang had just such a way of turning
his head and shaking his mane — look at her,
Longy. If I thought I could sell out my ranch
at a fair price, I believe I'd

"Gyar — song!" he suddenly cried, in a voice
that paralyzed every knife and fork in the
restaurant.

THE CALL OF THE TAME 101

The waiter dived toward the table.

"Two more of them cocktail drinks," ordered
Greenbrier.

Merritt looked at him and smiled signifi
cantly.

"They're on me," said Greenbrier, blowing a
puff of smoke to the ceiling.

X
THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY

THE poet Longfellow — or was it Confucius,
the inventor of wisdom ? — remarked :

"Life is real, life is earnest;
And things are not what they seem."

As mathematics are — or is: thanks, old
subscriber! — the only just rule by which ques
tions of life can be measured, let us, by all
means, adjust our theme to the straight edge
and the balanced column of the great goddess
Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures — unassail
able sums in addition — shall be set over
against whatever opposing element there may
be.

A mathematician, after scanning the above
two lines of poetry, would say: "Ahem! young
gentlemen, if we assume that X plus — that is,
that life is real — then things (all of which life
includes) are real. Anything that is real is
what it seems. Then if we consider the
proposition that * things are not what they
seem,' why ;

But this is heresy, ?nd not poesy. We woo
the sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY 103

you into the presence of the elusive, seductive,
pursued, satisfying, mysterious X.

Not long before the beginning of this century,
Septimus Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, in
vented an idea. He originated the discovery
that bread is made from flour and not from
wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour crop
was short, and that the Stock Exchange was
having no perceptible effect on the growing
wheat, Mr. Kinsolving cornered the flour
market.

The result was that when you or my landlady
(before the war she never had to turn her hand to
anything; Southerners accommodated) bought
a five-cent loaf of bread you laid down an addi
tional two cents, which went to Mr. Kinsolving
as a testimonial to his perspicacity.

A second result was that Mr. Kinsolving quit
the game with $2,000,000 prof — er — rake-ofF.

Air. Kinsolving's son Dan was at college when
the mathematical experiment in breadstuff's was
made. Dan came home during vacation, and
found the old gentleman in a red dressing-
gown reading "Little Dorrit" on the porch of
his estimable red brick mansion in Washington
Square. He had retired from business with
enough extra two-cent pieces from bread buyers
to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around
the earth and lap as far as the public debt of
Paraguay.

Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried
over to Greenwich Village to see his old high-
school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always ad
mired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-

io4 STRICTLY BUSINESS

haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious,
altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of
oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and
was learning watch-making in his father's
jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial, easy-
tempered and tolerant alike of kings and rag
pickers. The two foregathered joyously, being
opposites. And then Dan went back to college,
and Kenwitz to his mainsprings — and to his
private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.

Four years later Dan came back to Washing
ton Square with the accumulations of B. A. and
two years of Europe thick upon him. He took
a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving's elaborate
tombstone in Greenwood, and a tedious ex
cursion through typewritten documents with
the family lawyer; and then, feeling himself
a lonely and hopeless millionaire, hurried down
to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.

Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from
his eye, routed out his parent from a dingy rear
room, and abandoned the interior of watches
for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat
on a bench in Washington Square. Dan had
not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a
dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin.
Kenwitz was more serious, more intense, more
learned, philosophical, and socialistic.

"I know about it now," said Dan, finally. "I
pumped it out of the eminent legal lights that
turned over to me poor old dad's collection of
bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000,
Ken. And I am told that he squeezed it out
of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY 105

bread at the little bakeries around the corner.
You've studied economics, Ken, and you know
all about monopolies, and the masses, and
octopuses, and the rights of laboring people. I
never thought about those things before. Foot
ball and trying to be white to my fellow-man
were about the extent of my college curriculum.

"But since I came back and found out how
Dad made his money I've been thinking. I'd
like awfully well to pay back those chaps who
had to give up too much money for bread. I
know it would buck the line of my income for a
good many yards; but I'd like to make it square
with 'em. Is there any way it can be done, old
Ways and Means?"

Kenwitz's big black eyes glowed fierily. His
thin, intellectual face took on almost a sardonic
cast. He caught Dan's arm with the grip of a
friend and a judge.

"You can't do it!" he said, emphatically.
"One of the chief punishments of you men of
ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent
you find that you have lost the power to make
reparation or restitution. I admire your good
intentions, Dan, but you can't do anything.
Those people were robbed of their precious
pennies. It's too late to remedy the evil. You
can't pay them back."

"Of course," said Dan, lighting his pipe,
"we couldn't hunt up every one of the duffers
and hand 'em back the right change. There's
an awful lot of 'em buying bread all the time.
Funny taste they have — I never cared for bread
especially, except for a toasted cracker wTith

io6 STRICTLY BUSINESS

the Roquefort. But we might find a few of 'em
and chuck some of Dad's cash back where it
came from. I'd feel better if I could. It
seems tough for people to be held up for a soggy
thing like bread. One wouldn't mind standing
a rise in broiled lobsters or deviled crabs. Get
to work and think, Ken. I want to pay back
all of that money I can."

"There are plenty of charities," said Ken-
writz, mechanically.

"Easy enough," said Dan, in a cloud of
smoke. "I suppose I could give the city a
park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital.
But I don't want Paul to get away with the
proceeds of the gold brick we sold Peter. It's
the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken."

The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.

"Do you know how much money it would
take to pay back the losses of consumers during
that corner in flour?" he asked.

"I do not," said Dan, stoutly. "My lawyer
tells me that I have two millions."

"If you had a hundred millions," said Ken
witz, vehemently, "you couldn't repair a
thousandth part of the damage that has been
done. You cannot conceive of the accumu
lated evils produced by misapplied wealth.
Each penny that was wrung from the lean
purses of the poor reacted a thousandfold to
their harm. You do not understand. You
do not see how hopeless is your desire to make
restitution. Not in a single instance can it be
done."

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY 107

"Back up, philosopher!" said Dan. "The
penny has no sorrow that the dollar cannot
heal."

"Not in one instance," repeated Kenwitz.
"I will give you one, and let us see. Thomas
Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick
Street. He sold bread to the poorest people.
When the price of flour went up he had to raise
the price of bread. His customers were too
poor to pay it, Boyne's business failed, and he
lost his $1,000 capital — all he had in the world."

Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a
mighty blow \vith his fist.

"I accept the instance," he cried. "Take
me to Boyne. I will repay his thousand dollars
and buy him a new bakery."

"Write your check," said Kenwitz, without
moving, "and then begin to write checks in
payment of the train of consequences. Draw
the next one for $50,000. Boyne went insane
after his failure and set fire to the building from
which he was about to be evicted. The loss
amounted to that much. Boyne died in an
asylum."

"Stick to the instance," said Dan. "I
haven't noticed any insurance companies on
my charity list."

"Draw your next check for $100,000," went
on Kenwitz. "Boyne's son fell into bad ways
after the bakery closed, and was accused of
murder. He was acquitted last week after a
three-years' legal battle, and the state draws
upon taxpayers for that much expense."

io8 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"Back to the bakery!" exclaimed Dan, im
patiently. "The Government doesn't need to
stand in the bread line."

"The last item of the instance is — come and
I will show you," said Kenwitz, rising.

The socialistic watchmaker was happy. He
was a millionaire-baiter by nature and a pessi
mist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in
one breath that money was but evil and cor
ruption, and that your brand-new watch needed
cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.

He conducted Kinsolving southward out of
the square and into ragged, poverty-haunted
Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a
squalid brick tenement he led the penitent
offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a
door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.

In that almost bare room a young woman sat
sewing at a machine. She nodded to Kenwitz
as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream
of sunlight through the dingy window burnished
her heavy hair to the color of an ancient Tus
can's shield. She flashed a rippling smile at
Kenwitz and a look of somewhat flustered
inquiry.

Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and
pathetic beauty in heart-throbbing silence.
Thus they came into the presence of the last
item of the Instance.

"How many this week, Miss Mary?" asked
the watchmaker. A mountain of coarse gray
shirts lay upon the floor.

"Nearly thirty dozen," said the young woman,
cheerfully. "I've made almost £4. I'm im-

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY 109

proving, Mr. Kenwitz. I hardly know what to
do with so much money." Her eyes turned,
brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A little
pink spot came out on her round, pale cheek.

Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.

"Miss Boyne," he said, "let me present Mr.
-Kinsolving, the son of the man who put bread
up five years ago. He thinks he would like to
do something to aid those who were incon
venienced by that act."

The smile left the young woman's face. She
rose and pointed her forefinger toward the door.
This time she looked Kinsolving straight in the
eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.

The twTo men went down into Varick Street.
Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism and rancor
and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface,
gibed at the moneyed side of his friend in an
acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared to be
listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and
shook hands with him warmly.

"I'm obliged to you, Ken, old man" he said,
vaguely— -"a thousand times obliged."

"Mein Gott! you are crazy!" cried the watch
maker, dropping his spectacles for the first time
in years.

Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a
large bakery on lower Broadway with a pair of
gold-rimmed eye-glasses that he had mended
for the proprietor.

A lady was giving an order to a clerk as
Kenwitz passed her.

" These loaves are ten cents," said the clerk.

"I always get them at eight cents uptown,"

no STRICTLY BUSINESS

said the lady. "You need not fill the order.
I will drive by there on my way home."

The voice was familiar. The watchmaker
paused.

"Mr. Kenwitz!" cried the lady, heartily.
"How do you do?"

Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic
and economic comprehension on her wonderful
fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.

"Why, Miss Boyne!" he began.

"Mrs. Kinsolving," she corrected. "Dan
and I were married a month ago."

XI

THE THING'S THE PLAY

BEING acquainted with a newspaper reporter
who had a couple of free passes, I got to see the
performance a few nights ago at one of the
popular vaudeville houses.

One of the numbers was a violin solo by a
striking-looking man not much past forty,
but with very gray thick hair. Not being
afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system
of noises drift past my ears while I regarded
the man.

"There was a story about that chap a month
or two ago," said the reporter. "They gave
me the assignment. It was to run a column
and was to be on the extremely light and joking
order. The old man seems to like the funny
touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I'm
working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went
down to the house and got all the details; but
I certainly fell down on that job. I went back
and turned in a comic write-up of an east side
funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't seem
to get hold of it with my funny hooks, some
how. Maybe you could make a one-act tragedy
out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the
details."

After the performance my friend, the re-
iii

ii2 STRICTLY BUSINESS

porter, recited to me the facts over the Wiirz-
burger.

"I see no reason," said I, when he had con
cluded, "why that shouldn't make a rattling
good funny story. Those three people couldn't
have acted in a more absurd and preposterous
manner if they had been real actors in a real
theatre. I'm really afraid that all the stage
is a world, anyhow, and all the players merely
men and woman. 'The thing's the play,' is
the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare."

:'Try it," said the reporter.

"I will," said I; and I did, to show him how
he could have made a humorous column of it
for his paper.

There stands a house near Abingdon Square.
On the ground floor there has been for twenty-
five years a little store where toys and notions
and stationery are sold.

One night twenty years ago there was a wed
ding in the rooms above the store. The Widow
Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter
Helen was married to Frank Barry. John
Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen,
and her picture had been printed in a morning
paper next to the headlines of a "Wholesale
Female Murderess" story from Butte, Mont.
But after your eye and intelligence had re
jected the connection, you seized your magnify
ing glass and read beneath the portrait her
description as one of a series of Prominent
Beauties and Belles ®f the lowrer west side.

Frank Barry and John Delaney were "promi
nent" young beaux of the same side, and

THE THING'S THE PLAY 113

bosom friends, whom you expected to turn
upon each other every time the curtain went up.
One who pays his money for orchestra seats and
fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea
that has turned up in the story yet. Both had
made a great race for Helen's hand. When
Frank won, John shook his hand and congratu
lated him — honestly, he did.

After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put
on her hat. She was getting married in a
traveling dress. She and Frank were going to
Old Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the
usual horde of gibbering cave-dwellers were
waiting with their hands full of old Congress
gaiters and paper bags of hominy.

Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and
into her room jumps the mad and infatuated
John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon
his forehead, and made violent and reprehensive
love to his lost one, entreating her to flee or fly
with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any
old place where there are Italian skies and doles
jar nienie.

It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see
Helen repulse him. With blazing and scornful
eyes she fairly withered him by demanding
whatever he meant by speaking to respectable
people that way.

In a few moments she had him going. The
manliness that had possessed him departed.
He bowed low, and said something about
"irresistible impulse" and "forever carry in his
heart the memory of" — and she suggested that
he catch the first fire-escape going down.

ii4 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"I will away," said John Delaney, "to the
furthermost parts of the earth. I cannot re
main near you and know that you are another's.
I will to Africa, and there amid other scenes
strive to for

"For goodness sake, get out," said Helen.
"Somebody might come in."

He knelt upon one knee, and she extended
him one white hand that he might give it a
farewell kiss.

Girls, was this choice boon of the great little
god Cupid ever vouchsafed you — to have the
fellow you want hard and fast, and have the one
you don't want come with a damp curl on his
forehead and kneel to you and babble of Africa
and love which, in spite of everything, shall for
ever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To
know your power, and to feel the sweet security
of your own happy state; to send the unlucky
one, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while
you congratulate yourself as he presses his last
kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails are
well manicured — say, girls, it's galluptious —
don't ever let it get by you.

And then, of course — how did you guess r — the
door opened and in stalked the bridegroom,
jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.

The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen's
hand, and out of the window and down the fire-
escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.

A little slow music, if you please — faint
violin, just a breath in the clarinet and a touch
of the 'cello. Imagine the scene. Frank,
white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to

THE THING'S THE PLAY 115

death bursting from him. Helen, rushing and
clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches
her wrists and tears them from his shoulders —
once, twice, thrice he sways her this way and
that — the stage manager will show you how —
and throws her from him to the floor a huddled,
crushed, moaning thing. Never, he cries, will
he look upon her face again, and rushes from
the house through the staring groups of as
tonished guests.

And, now, because it is the Thing instead of
the Play, the audience must stroll out into the
real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow
gray, rich, poor, happy, or sad during the inter
mission of twenty years which must precede the
rising of the curtain again.

Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house.
At thirty-eight she could have bested many an
eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points
and general results. Only a few people re
membered her wedding comedy, but she made
of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender
or moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.

One day a middle-aged, money-making lawyer
who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked
her across the counter to marry him.

"I'm really much obliged to you," said Helen,
cheerfully, " but I married another man twenty
years ago. He was more a goose than a man,
but I think I love him yet. I have never seen him
since about half an hour after the ceremony.
Was it copying ink that you wanted or just
writing fluid?"
: The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-

n6 STRICTLY BUSINESS

time grace and left a respectful kiss on the back
of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes,
however romantic, may be overdone. Here she
was at thirty-eight, beautiful and admired;
and all that she seemed to have got from her
lovers were reproaches and adieus. Worse still,
in the last one she had lost a customer, too.

Business languished, and she hung out a
Room to Let card. Two large rooms on the
third floor were prepared for desirable tenants.
Roomers came, and went regretfully, for the
house of Mrs. Barry was the abode of neatness,
comfort, and taste.

One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and
engaged the front room above. The discord
and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a
friend had sent him to this oasis in the desert of
noise.

Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his
dark eyebrows, his short, pointed, foreign,
brown beard, his distinguished head of gray
hair, and his artist's temperament — revealed
in his light, gay, and sympathetic manner — was
a welcome tenant in the old house near Abing-
don Square.

Helen lived on the floor above the store.
The architecture of it was singular and quaint.
The hall was large and almost square. Up one
side of it and then across the end of it ascended
an open stairway to the floor above. This
hall space she had furnished as a sitting room
and office combined. There she kept her desk
and wrote her business letters; and there she sat
of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light

THE THING'S THE PLAY 117

and sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmos
phere so agreeable that he spent much time
there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders
of Paris, where he had studied with a particu
larly notorious and noisy fiddler.

Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melan
choly man in the early 40*8, with a brown,
mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunt
ing eyes. He, too, found the society of Helen
a desirable thing. With the eyes of Romeo
and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales
of distant climes and wooed her by respectful
innuendo.

From the first Helen felt a marvelous and
compelling thrill in the presence of this man.
His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the
days of her youth's romance. This feeling
grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her to an
instinctive belief that he had been a factor
in that romance. And then with a woman's
reasoning (oh, yes, they do, sometimes) she
leaped over common syllogisms and theory, and
logic, and was sure that her husband had come
back to her. For she saw in his eyes love, which
no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of
regret and remorse, which aroused pity which
is perilously near to love requited, which is the
sine qua non in the house that Jack built.

But she made no sign. A husband who
steps around the corner for twenty years and
then drops in again should not expect to find
his slippers laid out too conveniently near nor a
match ready lighted for his cigar. There must
be expiation, explanation, and possibly exe-

ii8 STRICTLY BUSINESS

cration. A little purgatory, and then, maybe,
if he were properly humble, he might be trusted
with a harp and crown. And so she made no
sign that she knew or suspected.

And my friend, the reporter, could see noth
ing funny in this! Sent out on an assignment
to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing
story of — but I will not knock a brother — let us
go on wTith the story.

One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's
hall-office-reception-room and told his love
with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured
artist. His words were a bright flame of the
divine fire that glows in the heart of a man
who is a dreamer and a doer combined.

" But before you give me an answrer," he went
on, before she could accuse him of suddenness,
"I must tell you that 'Ramonti' is the only
name I have to offer you. My manager gave
me that. I do not know who I am or where I
came from. My first recollection is of opening
my eyes in a hospital. I was a young man, and
I had been there for weeks. My life before that
is a blank to me. They told me that I was
found lying in the street with a wound on my
head and was brought there in an ambulance.
They thought I must have fallen and struck my
head upon the stones. There was nothing to
show who I was. I have never been able to re
member. After I was discharged from the
hospital, I took up the violin. I have had suc
cess. Mrs. Barry — I do not know your name
except that — I love you; the first time I saw
you I realized that you were the one woman in

THE THING'S THE PLAY 119

the world for me — and" — oh, a lot of stuff like
that.

Helen felt young again. First a wave of
pride and a sweet little thrill of vanity went all
over her; and then she looked Ramonti in the
eyes, and a tremendous throb went through her
heart. She hadn't expected that throb. It
took her by surprise. The musician had be
come a big factor in her life, and she hadn't been
aware of it.

"Mr. Ramonti," she said sorrowfully (this
was not on the stage, remember; it was in the
old home near Abingdon Square), "I'm awfully
sorry, but I'm a married woman."

And then she told him the sad story of her
life, as a heroine must do, sooner or later, either
to a theatrical manager or to a reporter.

Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and
kissed it, and went up to his room.

Helen sat down and looked mournfully at
her hand. Well she might. Three suitors had
kissed it, mounted their red roan steeds and
ridden away. I

In an hour entered the mysterious stranger
with the haunting eyes. Helen was in the
willow rocker, knitting a useless thing in cotton
wool. He ricocheted from the stairs and
stopped for a chat. Sitting across the table
from her, he also poured out his narrative of
love. And then he said: "Helen, do you not
remember me? I think I have seen it in your
eyes. Can you forgive the past and remember
the love that has lasted for twenty years? I
wronged you deeply — I was afraid to come back

120 STRICTLY BUSINESS

to you — but my love overpowered my reason.
Can you, will you, forgive me?"

Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger
held one of her hands in a strong and trembling
clasp.

There she stood, and I pity the stage that it
has not acquired a scene like that and her
emotions to portray.

For she stood with a divided heart. The
fresh, unforgettable, virginal love for her bride
groom was hers; the treasured, sacred, honored
memory of her first choice filled half her soul.
She leaned to that pure feeling. Honor and
faith and sweet, abiding romance bound her to
it. But the other half of her heart and soul
was filled with something else — a later, fuller,
nearer influence. And so the old fought against
the new.

And while she hesitated, from the room above
came the soft, racking, petitionary music of a
violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the
noblest. The daws may peck upon one's sleeve
without injury, but whoever wears his heart
upon his tympanum gets it not far from the
neck.

The music and the musician called her, and at
her side honor and the old love held her back.

"Forgive me," he pleaded.

"Twenty years is a long time to remain away
from the one you say you love," she declared,
with a purgatorial touch.

"How could I tell?" he begged. "I will
conceal nothing from you. That night when he
left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy.

THE THING'S THE PLAY 121

On a dark street I struck him down. He did
not rise. I examined him. His head had
struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him.
I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near
by and saw an ambulance take him away.
Although you married him, Helen —

" Who Are You? " cried the woman, with wide-
open eyes, snatching her hand away.

"Don't you remember me, Helen — the one
who has always loved you the best? I am John
Delaney. If you can forgive

But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurry
ing, flying up the stairs toward the music and
him who had forgotten, but who had known her
for his in each of his two existences, and as she
climbed up she sobbed, cried, and sang: "Frank!
Frank! Frank!"

Three mortals thus juggling with years as
though they were billiard balls, and my friend,
the reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it!

XII
A RAMBLE IN APHASIA

MY WIFE and I parted on that morning in
precisely our usual manner. She left her second
cup of tea to follow me to the front door. There
she plucked from my lapel the invisible strand
of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim
ownership) and bade me take care of my cold.
I had no cold. Next came her kiss of parting
— the level kiss of domesticity flavored with
Young Hyson. There was no fear of the ex
temporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite
custom. With the deft touch of long mal
practice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf
pin; and then, as I closed the door, I heard her
morning slippers pattering back to her cooling
tea.

When I set out I had no thought or premo
nition of what was to occur. The attack came
suddenly.

For many weeks I had been toiling, almost
night and day, at a famous railroad law case
that I won triumphantly but a few days
previously. In fact, I had been digging away
at the law almost without cessation for many
years. Once or twice good Doctor Volney, my
friend and physician, had warned me.

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA 123

"If you don't slacken up, Bellford," he said,
"you'll go suddenly to pieces. Either your
nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me,
does a week pass in which you do not read in the
papers of a case of aphasia — of some man lost,
wandering nameless, with his past and his
identity blotted out — and all from that little
brain clot made by overwork or worry?"

"I always thought," said I, "that the clot in
those instances was really to be found on the
brains of the newspaper reporters."

Doctor Volney shook his head.

"The disease exists," he said. "You need a
change or a rest. Court-room, office, and home
— there is the only route you travel. For
recreation you — read law books. Better take
warning in time."

"On Thursday nights," I said, defensively,
"my wife and I play cribbage. On Sundays
she reads to me the weekly letter from her
mother. That law books are not a recreation
remains yet to be established."

That morning as I walked I was thinking of
Doctor Volney's words. I was feeling as well
as I usually did — possibly in better spirits than
usual.

I woke with stiff and cramped muscles from
having slept long on the incommodious seat of a
day coach. I leaned my head against the seat
and tried to think. After a long time I said
to myself: "I must have a name of some sort."
I searched my pockets. Not a card; not a
letter; not a paper or monogram could I find.

124 STRICTLY BUSINESS

But I found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000
in bills of large denomination. "I must be
some one, of course," I repeated to myself, and
began again to consider.

The car was well crowded with men, among
whom, I told myself, there must have been some
common interest, for they intermingled freely,
and seemed in the best good humor and spirits.
One of them — a stout, spectacled gentleman
enveloped in a decided odor of cinnamon and
aloes — took the vacant half of my seat with a
friendly nod, and unfolded a newspaper. In
the intervals between his periods of reading, we
conversed, as travelers will, on current affairs.
I found myself able to sustain the conversation
on such subjects with credit, at least to my
memory. By and by my companion said:

"You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of
men the West sends in this time. I'm glad they
held the convention in New York; I've never
been East before. My name's R. P. Bolder —
Bolder & Son, of Hickory Grove, Missouri."

Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency,
as men will when put to it. Now must I hold a
christening, and be at once babe, parson, and
parent. My senses came to the rescue of my
slower brain. The insistent odor of drugs from
my companion supplied one idea; a glance at his
newspaper, where my eye met a conspicuous
advertisement, assisted me further.

"My name," said I, glibly, "is Edward
Pinkhammer. I am a druggist, and my home is
in Cornopolis, Kansas."

"I knew you were a druggist," said my fellow

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA 125

traveler, affably. "I saw the callous spot on
your right forefinger where the handle of the
pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to
our National Convention."

"Are all these men druggists?" I asked,
wonderingly.

"They are. This car came through from the
West. And they're your old-time druggists,
too — none of your patent tablet-and-granule
pharmashootists that use slot machines instead
of a prescription desk. We percolate our own
paregoric and roll our own pills, and we ain't
above handling a few garden seeds in the spring,
and carrying a side line of confectionery and
shoes. I tell you, Hampinker, I've got an idea
to spring on this convention — new ideas is
what they want. Now, you know the shelf
bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt Ant.
et Pot. Tart, and Sod. et Pot. Tart. — one's
poison, you know, and the other's harmless.
It's easy to mistake one label for the other.
Where do druggists mostly keep 'em? Why,
as far apart as possible, on different shelves.
That's wrong. I say keep 'em side by side, so
when you want one you can always compare it
with the other and avoid mistakes. Do you
catch the idea?"

"It seems to me a very good one," I said.

"All right! When I spring it on the con
vention you back it up. We'll make some of
these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-
cream professors that think they're the only
lozenges in the market look like hypodermic
tablets."

126 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"If I can be of any aid," I said, warming,
"the two bottles of — er

"Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tar-
trate of soda and potash."

"Shall henceforth sit side by side," I con
cluded, firmly.

"Now, there's another thing," said Mr.
Bolder. "For an excipient in manipulating a
pill mass which do you prefer — the magnesia
carbonate or the pulverized glycerrhiza radix?"

"The — er — magnesia," I said. It was easier
to say than the other word.

Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully
through his spectacles.

"Give me the glycerrhiza," said he. "Mag
nesia cakes."

"Here's another one of these fake aphasia
cases," he said, presently, handing me his
newspaper, and laying his finger upon an article.
"I don't believe in 'em. I put nine out of ten
of 'em down as frauds. A man gets sick of his
business and his folks and wants to have a good
time. He skips out somewhere, and when they
find him he pretends to have lost his memory —
don't know his own name, and won't even
recognize the strawberry mark on his wife's left
shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why can't they
stay at home and forget?"

I took the paper and read, after the pungent
headlines, the following:

DENVER, June 12. — Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent
lawyer, is mysteriously missing from his home since three
days ago, and all efforts to locate him have been in vain.
Mr. Bellford is a well-known citizen of the highest stand-

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA 127

ing, and has enjoyed a large and lucrative law practice.
He is married and owns a fine home and the most extensive
private library in the State. On the day of his disappear
ance, he drew quite a large sum of money from his bank.
No one can be found who saw him after he left the bank.
Mr. Bellford was a man of singularly quiet and domestic
tastes, and seemed to find his happiness in his home and
profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange dis
appearance, it may be found in the fact that for some
months he has been deeply absorbed in an important law
case in connection with the Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Com
pany. It is feared that overwork may have affected his
mind. Every effort is being made to discover the where
abouts of the missing man.

"It seems to me you are not altogether un-
cynical, Mr. Bolder," I said, after I had read
the despatch. "This has the sound, to me, of a
genuine case. Why should this man, prosper
ous, happily married, and respected, choose
suddenly to abandon everything? I know
that these lapses of memory do occur, and that
men do find themselves adrift without a name, a
history, or a home."

"Oh, gammon and jalap!" said Mr. Bolder.
"It's larks they're after. There's too much
education nowadays. Men know about aphasia,
and they use it for an excuse. The women are
wise, too. When it's all over they look you in
the eye, as scientific as you please, and say: 'He
hypnotized me."

Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid me
with his comments and philosophy.

We arrived in New York about ten at night.
I rode in a cab to a hotel, and I wrote my name
"Edward Pinkhammer" in the register. As

128 STRICTLY BUSINESS

I did so I felt pervade me a splendid, wild, in
toxicating buoyancy — a sense of unlimited
freedom, of newly attained possibilities. I was
just born into the world. The old fetters —
whatever they had been — were stricken from
my hands and feet. The future lay before me a
clear road such as an infant enters, and I could
set out upon it equipped with a man's learning
and experience.

I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five
seconds too long. I had no baggage.

"The Druggists' Convention," I said. "My
trunk has somehow failed to arrive." I drew
out a roll of money.

"Ah!" said he, showing an auriferous tooth,
"we have quite a number of the Western dele
gates stopping here." He struck a bell for the
boy.

I endeavored to give color to my role.

"There is an important movement on foot
among us Westerners," I said, "in regard to a
recommendation to the convention that the
bottles containing the tartrate of antimony and
potash, and the tartrate of sodium and potash be
kept in a contiguous position on the shelf."

"Gentleman to three-fourteen," said the
clerk, hastily. I was whisked away to my
room.

The next day I bought a trunk and clothing,
and began to live the life of Edward Pink-
hammer. I did not tax my brain with en
deavors to solve problems of the past.

It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the
great island city held up to my lips. I drank of

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA 129

it gratefully. The keys of Manhattan belong
to him who is able to bear them. You must be
either the city's guest or its victim.

The following few days were as gold and
silver. Edward Pinkhammmer, yet counting
back to his birth by hours only, knew the rare
joy of having come upon so diverting a world
full-fledged and unrestrained. I sat entranced
on the magic carpets provided in theatres and
roof-gardens, that transported one into strange
and delightful lands full of frolicsome music,
pretty girls, and grotesque, drolly extravagant
parodies upon human kind. I went here and
there at my own dear will, bound by no limits
of space, time, or comportment. I dined in
weird cabarets, at weirder tables d'hote to the
sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts
of mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again,
where the night life quivers in the electric glare
like a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery
of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom
they adorn, and the men who make all three
possible are met for good cheer and the spec
tacular effect. And among all these scenes that
I have mentioned I learned one thing that I
never knew before. And that is that the key to
liberty is not in the hands of License, but Con
vention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at
which you must pay, or you may not enter the
land of Freedom. In all the glitter, the seem
ing disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw
this law, unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail.
Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey these
unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of

i3o STRICTLY BUSINESS

the free. If you decline to be bound by them,
you put on shackles.

Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would
seek the stately, softly murmuring palm rooms,
redolent with high-born life and delicate re
straint, in which to dine. Again I would go
down to the waterways in steamers packed with
vociferous, bedecked, unchecked love-making
clerks and shop-girls to their crude pleasures
on the island shores. And there was always
Broadway — glistening, opulent, wily, varying,
desirable Broadway — growing upon one like an
opium habit.

One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout
man with a big nose and a black mustache
blocked my way in the corridor. When I would
have passed around him, he greeted me with
offensive familiarity.

"Hallo, Bellford!" he cried, loudly. "What
the deuce are you doing in New York? Didn't
know anything could drag you away from that
old book den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is
this a little business run alone, eh?"

"You have made a mistake, sir," I said,
coldly, releasing my hand from his grasp. "My
name is Pinkhammer. You will excuse me."

The man dropped to one side, apparently
astonished. As I walked to the clerk's desk I
heard him call to a bell boy and say something
about telegraph blanks.

"You will give me my bill," I said to the
clerk, "and have my baggage brought down in
half an hour. I do not care to remain where I
am annoyed by confidence men."

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA 131

I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a
sedate, old-fashioned one on lower Fifth Avenue.

There was a restaurant a little way off Broad
way where one could be served almost al fresco
in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet and
luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal
place in which to take luncheon or refreshment.
One afternoon I was there picking my way to a
table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve
caught.

"Mr. Bellford!" exclaimed an amazingly
sweet voice.

I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone —
a lady of about thirty, with exceedingly hand
some eyes, who looked at me as though I had
been her very dear friend.

"You were about to pass me," she said,
accusingly. "Don't tell me you did not know
me. Why should we not shake hands — at least
once in fifteen years?"

I shook hands with her at once. I took a
chair opposite her at the table. I summoned
with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The
lady was philandering with an orange ice. I
ordered a creme de menthe. Her hair was
reddish bronze. You could not look at it,
because you could not look away from her eyes.
But you were conscious of it as you are conscious
of sunset while you look into the profundities of
a wood at twilight.

"Are you sure you know me?" I asked.

"No," she said, smiling, "I was never sure of
that."

"What would you think," I said, a little

132 STRICTLY BUSINESS

anxiously, "if I were to tell you that my name is
Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, Kan
sas?"

"What would I think?" she repeated, with a
merry glance. "Why, that you had not brought
Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of course.
I do wish you had. I would have liked to see
Marian." Her voice lowered slightly — "You
haven't changed much, Elwyn."

I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and
my face more closely.

"Yes, you have," she amended, and there was
a soft, exultant note in her latest tones; "I see
it now. You haven't forgotten. You haven't
forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told
you you never could."

I poked my straw anxiously in the creme de
menthe.

"I'm sure I beg your pardon," I said, a little
uneasy at her gaze. "But that is just the
trouble. I have forgotten. I've forgotten
everything."

She flouted my denial. She laughed de-
liciously at something she seemed to see in my
face.

"I've heard of you at times," she went on.
"You're quite a big lawyer out West — Denver,
isn't it, or Los Angeles? Marian must be very
proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I
married six months after you did. You may
have seen it in the papers. The flowers alone
cost two thousand dollais."

She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen
years is a long time.

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA 133

"Would it be too late," I asked, somewhat
timorously, "to offer you congratulations?"

"Not if you dare do it," she answered, with
such fine intrepidity that I was silent, and began to
crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb nail.

"Tell me one thing," she said, leaning toward
me rather eagerly — "a thing I have wanted to
know for many years — just from a woman's
curiosity, of course — have you ever dared since
that night to touch, smell, or look at white roses
—at white roses wet with rain and dew?"

I took a sip of creme de menthe.

"It would be useless, I suppose," I said, with
a sigh, "for me to repeat that I have no recol
lection at all about these things. My memory
is completely at fault. I need not say how much
I regret it."

The lady rested her arms upon the table,
and again her eyes disdained my words and
went traveling by their own route direct to
my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange
quality in the sound — it was a laugh of happi
ness — yes, and of content — and of misery. I
tried to look away from her.

"You lie, Elwyn Bellford," she breathed,
blissfully. "Oh, I know you lie!"

I gazed dully into the ferns.

"My name is Edward Pinkhammer," I said.
"I came with the delegates to the Druggists'
National Convention. There is a movement
on foot for arranging a new position for the
bottles of tartrate of antimony and tartrate of
potash, in which, very likely, you would take
little interest."

134 STRICTLY BUSINESS

j

A shining landau stopped before the entrance.
The lady rose. I took her hand, and bowed.

"I am deeply sorry," I said to her, "that I
cannot remember. I could explain, but fear
you would not understand. You will not con
cede Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all
conceive of the — the roses and other things."

"Good-bye, Mr. Bellford," she said, with her
happy, sorrowful smile, as she stepped into her
carriage.

I attended the theatre that night. When I
returned to my hotel, a quiet man in dark
clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his
ringer nails with a silk handkerchief, appeared,
magically, at my side.

"Mr. Pinkhammer," he said, casually, giving
the bulk of his attention to his forefinger, "may
I request you to step aside with me for a little
conversation ? There is a room here."

"Certainly," I answered.

He conducted me into a small, private parlor.
A lady and a gentleman were there. The lady,
I surmised, would have been unusually good-
looking had her features not been clouded by an
expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was
of a style of figure and possessed coloring and
features that were agreeable to my fancy. She
was in a traveling dress; she fixed upon me an
earnest look of extreme anxiety, and pressed
an unsteady hand to her bosom. I think she
would have started forward, but the gentleman
arrested her movement with an authoritative
motion of his hand. He then came, himself,
to meet me. He was a man of forty, a little

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA 135

gray about the temples, and with a strong,
thoughtful face.

"Bellford, old man," he said, cordially, "I'm
glad to see you again. Of course we know
everything is all right. I warned you, you
know, that you were overdoing it. Now, you'll
go back with us, and be yourself again in no
time."

I smiled ironically.

"I have been 'Bellforded' so often," I said,
"that it has lost its edge. Still, in the end, it
may grow wearisome. Would you be willing
at all to entertain the hypothesis that my name
is Edward Pinkhammer, and that I never saw
you before in my life?"

Before the man could reply a wailing cry
came from the woman. She sprang past his
detaining arm. "Elwyn!" she sobbed, and
cast herself upon me, and clung tight. " Elwyn,"
she cried again, "don't break my heart. I
am your wife — call my name once — just once.
I could see you dead rather than this way."

I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.

"Madame," I said, severely, "pardon me if
I suggest that you accept a resemblance too
precipitately. It is a pity," I went on, with an
amused laugh, as the thought occurred to me,
"that this Bellford and I could not be kept side
by side upon the same shelf like tartrates of
sodium and antimony for purposes of identifi
cation. In order to understand this allusion,"
I concluded airily, "it may be necessary for you
to keep an eye on the proceedings of the Drug
gists' National Convention."

136 STRICTLY BUSINESS

The lady turned to her companion, and
grasped his arm.

"What is it, Doctor Volney ? Oh, what is it ?"
she moaned.

He led her to the door.

"Go to your room for a while," I heard him
say. "I will remain and talk with him. His
mind ? No, I think not — only a portion of the
brain. Yes, I am sure he will recover. Go to
your room and leave me with him."

The lady disappeared. The man in dark
clothes also went outside, still manicuring him
self in a thoughtful way. I think he waited
in the hall.

"I would like to talk with you a while, Mr.
Pinkhammer, if I may," said the gentleman who
remained.

"Very well, if you care to," I replied, "and
will excuse me if I take it comfortably; I am
rather tired." I stretched myself upon a couch
by a window and lit a cigar. He drew a chair
near by.

"Let us speak to the point," he said, sooth
ingly. "Your name is not Pinkhammer."

"I know that as well as you do," I said, coolly.
"But a man must have a name of some sort. I
can assure you that I do not extravagantly
admire the name of Pinkhammer. But when
one christens one's self suddenly, the fine names
do not seem to suggest themselves. But, sup
pose it had been Scheringhausen or Scroggins!
I think I did very well with Pinkhammer."

"Your name," said the other man, seriously,
"is Elwyn C. Bellford. You are one of the

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA 137

first lawyers in Denver. You are suffering
from an attack of aphasia, which has caused you
to forget your identity. The cause of it was
over-application to your profession, and perhaps
a life too bare of natural recreation and pleasures.
The lady who has just left the room is your
wife."

"She is what I would call a fine-looking
woman," I said, after a judicial pause. "I
particularly admire the shade of brown in her
hair."

"She is a wife to be proud of. Since your
disappearance, nearly two weeks ago, she has
scarcely closed her eyes. We learned that you
were in New York through a telegram sent by
Isidore Newman, a traveling man from Denver.
He said that he had met you in a hotel here, and
that you did not recognize him."

"I think I remember the occasion," I said.
"The fellow called me 'Bellford,' if I am not
mistaken. But don't you think it about time,
now, for you to introduce yourself?"

"I am Robert Volney — Doctor Volney. I
have been your close friend for twenty years,
and your physician for fifteen. I came with
Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon as we got
the telegram. Try, Elwyn, old man — try to
remember!"

"What's the use to try?" I asked, with a
little frown. "You say you are a physician.
Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his
memory does it return slowly, or suddenly?"

"Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; some
times as suddenly as it went."

i38 STRICTLY BUSINESS

"Will you undertake the treatment of my
case, Doctor Volney?" I asked.

"Old friend," said he, "I'll do everything in
my power, and will have done everything that
science can do to cure you."

"Very well," said I. "Then you will con
sider that I am your patient. Everything is in
confidence now — professional confidence."

"Of course," said Doctor Volney

I got up from the couch. Some one had set
a vase of white roses on the centre table — a
cluster of white roses, freshly sprinkled and
fragrant. I threw them far out of the window,
and then I laid myself upon the couch again.

"It will be best, Bobby," I said, "to have
this cure happen suddenly. I'm rather tired
of it all, anyway. You may go now and bring
Marian in. But, oh, Doc," I said, with a sigh,
as I kicked him on the shin — "good old Doc —
it was glorious!"

THE END OF VOL. I