THE MOTORMANIACS

BY LLOYD OSBOURNE


CONTENTS:
    THE MOTORMANIACS
    THE GREAT BUBBLE SYNDICATE
    COAL OIL JOHNNY
    JONES



THE MOTORMANIACS



                        THE MOTORMANIACS


"It's jolly to get you off by yourself," I said as we wandered
away from the rest of the party.

"Then you are not afraid of an engaged girl," she observed
"Everybody else seems to be."

"I am made of sterner stuff," I said.  "Besides, I am dying to
know all about it."

"All about what?"

"What you found to like in Gerard Malcolm, and what Gerard
Malcolm found to like in you, and what he said and what you said
and what the Englishman said, and how it all happened generally."

"What you want to know would fill a book."

"You speak as if you mean it to be a sealed one."

"I don't see exactly what claim you have to be a reader."

"Well, I was the first person to love you," I said.  "Surely that
ought to count for something.  It didn't last long, I know, but
it was a wild business while it did.  When I discovered you were
just out for scalps--"

"And when I discovered you were the most conceited, monopolizing,
jealous, troublesome and exacting man that ever lived, and that I
was expected to play kitten while you did demon child--"

"Oh, of course, it was a mistake," I said quickly.  "The illusion
couldn't be kept up on either side.  We only, really got chummy
after we called it off."

"The trouble was that we were both scalpers, and when we decided
to let each other alone--in that way, I mean--we built up a
pleasant professional acquaintance on the ashes of the dead
fires."

"Can't you make it a little warmer than acquaintance?" I
protested.

"It was a real fellow feeling--whatever you choose to call
it," she conceded.  "You wanted to talk about yourself, and I
wanted to talk about myself, and without any self-flattery I
think I can say we found each other very responsive."

"I've rather a memory that you got the best of the bargain."

"There were hours and hours when I couldn't get a word in
edgewise."

"And there were whole days and days--" I began.

"Now, don't let's work up a fuss," she said sweetly.  "We won't
have so many more talks together, and anyway it isn't
professional etiquette for us to fight."

"Who wants to fight?" I said.  "I never was that kind of Indian."

"Then let's begin where we left off."

"It used to be all Harry Clayton then," I remarked.

"Was it as long ago as that?" she asked.  "Oh, dear, how time
passes!"

"He joined the great majority, I heard."

"Oh, yes, he's married," she said.  "He wasn't any good at all.
What can you do with a person who has scalps to burn?"

"That kind of thing discourages an Indian," I remarked.

"It robs the thing of all its zip, but I suppose there's a Harry
Clayton kind of girl, Loo."

"The woods are full of them."

"I am almost glad I've decided to bury the tomahawk."

"And leave me the last of the noble race?"

"You'll have to whoop alone."

"I'll often think of you in your log cabin with the white man,"
I said.  "On winter nights I'll flatten my nose against the
window-pane and have a little peek in; next day you'll
recognize my footsteps in the snow."

"I'd be sure to know them by their size."

"I'm going to take ten dollars off your wedding present for that"

"It was one of our rules we could say anything we liked."

"It was a life of savage freedom.  It takes one a little time to
get into it again."

"You used to say things, too."

"I can't remember saying anything as horrid as that."

"Well, you couldn't, you know," she said, and put out the tip of
a little slipper.

"I thought all the while it was to be Captain Cartwright--that
Englishman with the eyeglass."

"I thought so, too."

"I read of the engagement in the papers, and I can not recollect
that it was ever contradicted or anything."

"Oh, it wasn't," she said.  "Ax least, not till later--lots
later."

"I suppose I ought to hurriedly talk about something else," I
remarked.

"You needn't feel like that at all," she returned.  "The captain
and I are very good friends--only be doesn't play in my yard any
more."

"I can't remember Gerard Malcolm very well," I went on.  "Wasn't
he rather tall and thin, with a big nose and a hidden-away sister
who was supposed to be an invalid?"

"That's one way of describing him."

"I'd rather like to hear yours."

"Oh, I'm quite silly about him."

"That must have happened later," I said.  "It certainly didn't
show at the time."

"Everything must have a beginning, you know."

"That's what I want to get at,--what made you get a transfer from
the captain?"

"It all happened through an automobile," she said.

"Oh, an automobile!" I exclaimed.

"It was an awfully up-to-date affair altogether!"

"I suppose it ran away and he caught it by the bridle at the risk
of his life?"

"No, he didn't stop it," she said.  "He made it go."

"It isn't everybody can do that with an automobile."

"You ought to have seen the poor captain turn the crank!" she
exclaimed, with a little laugh of recollection.

"So the captain was there, too?" I said.  "He never struck me as
the kind of man that could make anything go, exactly."

"Oh, he didn't," she said.

"I am surprised that he even tried."

"But Gerard is a perfectly beautiful mechanic.  You ought to see
how respectful they are to him at the garage--especially, when
there's a French car in trouble."

"They are respectful to me, too."

"That's only because you're rich," she returned.

"I own a French car and drive it myself," I said, "and--but I see
there's no use of my saying anything."

"It's genius with Gerard," she said.  "It makes one solemn to
think how much he knows about gas engines."

"So that's how he did it!" I observed.  "Different men have
different ways to charm, I suppose.  I don't remember that looks
were his long suit."

"If you were a woman, that would be called catty."

"Oh, I don't want to detract from him," I said.  "He used to dance
with wall-flowers and they said he was an angel to his sister."

"It was that sister who was the real trouble," she said
meditatively.

"What had she to do with it?" I asked.

"Oh, just being there--being his sister--being an invalid, yon
know."

"No, I don't know, at all."

"The trouble is, I'm telling you the end of the story first."

"Let's start at the very beginning."

"In real life beginnings and middles and ends of things are all
so jumbled up."

"When I went away," I said, "everybody thought it was Harry
Clayton, with the Englishman as a strong second, and there wasn't
any Malcolm about it."

"Do yon remember the flurry in Great Westerns?" she asked.

"That's surely the beginning of something else," I remarked,

"No, it's the beginning of this."

I've a faint memory they jumped up to something tremendous,
didn't they?"

"It was the biggest thing of its kind ever seen on Wall Street."

"Wall Street!" I exclaimed.  "The voice is Jess Hardy's, but--"

"Well, you can't buy a Manton car without a little trouble."

"Or twenty-five hundred dollars in a certified check."

"It's nearer three thousand, with acetylene lamps, top, baskets,
extra tires, French tooter, freight, insurance, extra tools and a
leather coat."

"You've got the thing down fine," I said.  "You speak like a
folder."

"Well, I didn't have any three thousand dollars," she continued,
undisturbed; "all I had was an allowance of a hundred a month, a
grand piano, a horse (you remember my, blood mare, Gee-whizz?) a
lot of posters, and a father."

"He seems to me the biggest asset of the lot," I observed.

"I thought so, too, till I tried him," she said.  "He had the
automobile fever, too--only the negative kind--wanted to shoot
them with a gun."

"Surely it's dangerous enough already, without adding that."

"For a time I didn't know what to do," she went on.  "I thought
I'd have to try the stage, or write one of those Marie
Bashkirtseff books that shock people into buying them by
thousands--and whenever I saw a Manton on the road my eyes would
almost pop out of my head.  Then, when I was almost desperate,
Mr. Collenquest came on a visit to papa."

"I see now why you said Wall Street," I remarked.

"Mr. Collenquest is an old friend of papa's," she continued.
"They were at the same college, and both belonged to what they
call 'the wonderful old class of seventy-nine,' and there's
nothing in the world papa wouldn't do for Mr. Collenquest or Mr.
Collenquest for papa.  I had never seen him before and had rather
a wild idea of him from the caricatures in the paper--you know
the kind--with dollar-signs all over his clothes and one of his
feet on the neck of Honest Toil.  Well, he wasn't like that a
bit--in fact, he was more like a bishop than anything else and
the only thing he ever put his foot on was a chair when he and
papa would sit up half the night talking about the wonderful old
class of seventy-nine.  Papa is rather a quiet man ordinarily,
but that week it seemed as though he'd never stop laughing; and
I'd wake up at one o'clock in the morning and hear them still at
it.  Of course, they had long serious talks, too, and Mr.
Collenquest was never so like a bishop as when the conversation
turned on stocks and Wall Street.  When he boomed out things like
'the increasing tendency of associated capital in this country,'
or 'the admitted financial emancipation of the Middle West,'--you
felt somehow you were a better girl for having listened to him.
What he seemed to like best--besides sitting up all night till
papa was a wreck--was to take walks.  He was as bad about horses
as papa was about automobiles--and of course papa had to go, too
--and naturally I tagged after them both--and so we walked and
walked and walked.

"Well, one day they were talking about investments, and stocks,
and how cheap money was, and how hard it was to know what to do
with it, and I was picking wild-flowers and wondering whether I'd
have my Manton red, or green with gilt stripes, when I heard
something that brought me up like an explosion in the muffler.

"'I know you are pretty well fixed, Fred,' said Mr. Collenquest,
'but I never knew a man yet who couldn't do with forty or fifty
thousand more.'

"'I don't care to get it that way, Bill,' said my father.

"'I tell you Great Western is going to reach six hundred and
fifty,' said Mr. Collenquest.

"I picked daisies fast, but if there ever was a girl all ears,
it was I.

"'I am giving you a bit of inside information that's worth
millions of dollars,' said Mr. Collenquest in that solemn
tone that always gave me the better-girl feeling.

"'My dear old chap,' said papa, 'I don't want you to believe I am
not grateful for this sort of proof of your friendship; and you
mustn't think, because I have strong convictions, that I arrogate
any superior, virtue to myself.  Every man must be a law to
himself.  I have never speculated and I never will.'

"Mr. Collenquest heaved a regular bishop's sigh, and stopped and
put one foot on a log as though it was a toiler.

"'This isn't speculation, Fred,' he said.  'This is a fact,
because I happen to be rigging the market myself.'

"'I don't care to do it,' said my, father, as firmly as before.

"'If it's just being a little short of ready money,' said Mr.
Collenquest, 'well--my purse is yours, you know--from one figure
to six.'

"My father only shook his head.

"'I said fifty thousand,' said Mr. Collenquest, 'but there is
nothing to prevent your adding another naught to it.

"'It's speculating,' said my father.

"'Well, I'm sorry,' said Mr Collenquest.  'I'm getting pretty far
into the forties now, Fred, and I don't think the world holds
anything dearer to me than a few old friends like yourself.'  He
put out his hand as he spoke, and papa took it.  It was awfully
affecting.  I looked as girly-girly as I could, lest they should
catch me listening, and picked daisies harder than ever.

"'Of course, this is sacredly confidential,' said Mr.
Collenquest, 'but I know you'll let it go no farther, Fred.'

"'My word on that,' said my father in his grand, gentleman-of
-the-old-school way.

"Then they started to walk again, and though I felt a little
sneak right down to my shoes, I listened and listened for
anything more.  But they wandered off into the Pressed Steel Car
Company, till it got so tiresome I ached all over.

"That night I didn't do anything, because I wanted to think it
ever; but the next morning I went to papa and asked him
point-blank if I might sell Gee-whizz if I wanted go.  He looked
very grave, and talked a lot about what a good horse Gee-whizz
was, and how hard I'd find it to replace her.  But it was one of
papa's rules that there shouldn't be any strings to his presents
to me--that's the comfort of having a thoroughbred for your
father, you know--and ever since I was a little child he had
always told me what was mine was mine to do just what I liked
with.  He's the whitest father a girl ever had.  But he spoke to
me beautifully in a sort of man-to-man way, and was perfectly
splendid in not asking any questions.  If he hadn't been such a
bubble-hater, I'd have thrown my arms round his neck and told him
everything.  So I let it go at promising him the refusal of the
mare in case I decided to sell her.

"Then I kited after Mr. Collenquest, whom I found in a hammock,
reading a basketful of telegrams.

"'Oh, don't get up,' I said (because he was always a most
punctilious old fellow).  'The fact is, I just wanted to have a
little business talk with you.'

"'Oh, a business talk,' he said, in a be-nice-to-the-child tone.

"'Yes,' I said, 'I thought I might perhaps take a little flyer in
Great Westerns.'

"You ought to have seen him leap out of that hammock.  I quaked
all over, like Honest Labor in the pictures.

"He smothered an awful bad swear and turned as pale as a white
Panhard.

"'Little girl,' he said, 'you've been listening to things you had
no right to hear.'

"'I didn't mean to listen,' I said.  'Really and truly, Mr.
Collenquest, I didn't--'

"'You were forty feet away picking wildflowers,' he said.

"'You didn't realize how badly I wanted a Manton,' I said.

"'A Manton!' he cried out.  'What in heaven's name is a Manton?'

"It's awful to think how little some people know!  I'm sure he
thought it was something to wear.

"I explained to him what a Manton is.

"'And so you must have a Manton,' he said.

"'Did you ever want anything so bad that it kept you awake at
night?' I asked him.

"He looked at me a long time without saying a word.  He was one
of the kings of Wall Street and I was only a five-foot-three
girl, and I felt such a little cad when I saw his hands were
trembling.

"'Jess,' he said, 'if you chose to do it you could half ruin me.
You could shake some of the biggest houses in New York; you
could drive the Forty-fourth National Bank into the hands of a
receiver.  You could start a financial earthquake.'

"And he looked at me again a long time.

"'The point is,' he began once more, 'are you strong enough to keep
such a secret?  Have you the character to do it--the grit--the
determination?'

"'Just watch me!' I said.

"I thought it was a good sign that he smiled.

"'Just keep this to yourself for one month,' he said, 'and I'll
send you the biggest, the reddest, the most dangerous, noisy,
horse-frightening, man-destroying, high-stepping, high-smelling
--what do you call it--Manton?--in the whole United States.'

"'Oh, Mr. Collenquest, I couldn't do that,' I said.

"Then he got frightened all over again.

"'Why not?' he demanded.  'Why not?

"'I wouldn't put a price on my secrecy,' I said.  'That wasn't
what I meant at all, only I thought you might be good-natured
enough to let me in on the deal--with a margin on Gee-whizz, you
know.'

"'I suppose I am getting old,' he said, 'and getting stupid--but
would you mind explaining to me what you want in words of
one syllable?'

"'You wanted to put papa on a good thing,' I said.  'He wouldn't
have it, so I thought you might pass it along to me,

"'You seem to have passed it along to yourself,' he remarked, a
bit ironically.

"'It's a very small matter to you,' I pleaded, 'but it's a whole
Manton to me.'

"'And the shock nearly killed father,' he said, mopping his
bishop forehead.

"'I can make papa give me four hundred and fifty dollars for
Gee-whizz,' I said; 'and the question is, is that enough?'

"'Enough for what?' he asked.

"'For a Manton, of course,' I said.

"'Would you mind putting it in figures instead of gasoline?' he
said, laughing as though he had made an awfully good joke.  I
laughed, too--just to humor him.

"'Well,' I said, 'with acetylene lamps, top, baskets, extra
tires, French tooter, freight, insurance, spare tools and a
leather coat--say three thousand.'

"'I can double that for you,' he said.

"'I don't want one cent more,' I said.  That was just my chance
to shine--and I shined.

"He made a note of it in his pocketbook.

"'That's settled,' he said.

"'Not till I've said one thing more,' I remarked, 'and that is, I
shan't be horrid if the thing goes the wrong way.  My dressmaker
once put a hundred dollars in an oil company, and the oil company
man was surer than you--and yet it went pop.  I can easily tease
my mare back from papa.'

"He lay back again in the hammock and laughed, and laughed, and
laughed.

"'Oh, Jess Hardy,' he said, 'you'll be the death of me!'--and he
laughed as though it was at one of his own jokes.

"'I'd hate to make a vacancy in the wonderful old class of
seventy-nine,' I said.

"'Now, I want to say something, too,' he said, getting serious
again.  'If you have a pet minister who can't afford a holiday,
or you want to help that dressmaker pay off her mortgage, or give
a boost to a poor family who have had diphtheria--don't you think
to help them by tipping off Great Western Preferred.  That sort
of charity may sound cheap, but it's likely to cost me hundreds
of thousands.  Let me know, and I'll send them checks.'

"'Don't you worry about me,' I said.

"'I am told you are engaged to an Englishman,' he said; 'an
Embassy man at Washington.  You aren't making any kind of
mental reservation in his case, are you?'

"'He's the last person I tell anything to,' I said.  'That is,
--anything important, you know.'

"'Then, Miss Jess Hardy,' he said, with his eyes twinkling as
though he were giving an Apostolic benediction at a Vanderbilt
wedding, 'if you'll bring me your four-fifty we'll close the
deal.'

"'Perhaps it would be as well to leave papa out of this,' I
hinted.  'I mean about telling him anything, you know'

"'Oh, distinctly,' he said.  'Fred's a bit old-fashioned and we
must respect his prejudices.  Wait till you get him on the
cowcatcher of your Manton, anti then break it to him gently.'

"'And, Mr. Collenquest,' I said, 'if you should really think it
awfully low and horrid of me to do this--I won't do it.'

"'My dear little girl,' he returned, 'get that out of your head
right here.  I hope your car will prove everything you want it to
be, and the same with your Englishman, and I'm only too grateful
that it wasn't a steam yacht you had set your heart on, or a
palace on the Hudson.'

"There isn't much more to be said about this part of the afair.
Papa paid me four-fifty for Gee-whizz, and I handed the check to
Mr. Collenquest, and Mr. Collenquest went away, and then the
market began to turn bullish (isn't that the word?) and Great
Western went up with a whoop, and it got whoopier and whoppier;
and whenever anybody was certain it had reached the top-notch it
would take another kick skyward, and it went on jumping and
jumping till finally there came a letter from Mr. Collenquest
with a check for three thousand five hundred dollars, saying I
must have forgotten about buying Gee-whizz back again, and that
he had taken the liberty of exceeding my instructions about
selling till my shares had touched that figure.  Then one
morning, as we were at breakfast, a great big splendid Manton
car--my car--came whisking up the drive and stopped in front of
the house, and the expert--they had thrown him in for a week for
nothing--him and an odometer and an ammeter, and a new kind
of French spark-plug they wanted me to try--and a gasoline tester
--the Mantons are such nice people to deal with in all those little
ways--and the expert sent in word: would Miss Hardy come out and
see her new car?  And, of course, Miss Hardy, went out, and Mr.
Hardy went out, and my, aunt went out, and the five guests that
were staying with us went out, and the servants went out--and you
never saw such a mix-up in all your life, nor such excitement and
hurrah-boys generally.  For papa was ordering it off the place,
and I was explaining about Great Western Preferred, and my aunt
was trying to make us listen about a friend who had been burned
to death with a gasoline stove, and the guests were taking my
part and fighting for the first ride, and the expert was showing
off the double vertical cylinders, and explaining splash
lubrication to the butler, whom he must have mistaken for papa,
and--

"When it had settled down a bit and the battle-smoke drifted away
and showed who had won--which was me, naturally--and I had
promised aunt to be, oh, so careful, and papa that I'd cross my
heart never to go into stocks again, and rides, of course, to the
guests, and everything to everybody--then they all went back to
breakfast while I had mine brought out on the veranda--mine and
the expert's--and I guess I talked four speeds ahead while he ate
his on the low gear--for he had come ninety miles and wasn't much
of a talker at any time--and I just sat there and gloated over my
Manton.

"We had a perfectly delirious week together--the expert and I
--for the Manton turned out perfectly splendid and everything they
said it was, except for the rear tires blowing up three times,
and a short circuit in the coil owing to a faulty condenser; and
though it was all I could do to hold it down on the low speeds,
you ought to have seen me on the forty-mile clip--till they said
I'd have to go to prison for the next offense without the option
of a fine.  The expert was one of the nicest men you ever saw,
and we used to take off cylinder heads, and adjust cams, and
spend hours knocking everything to pieces and putting them
together again so that I might be prepared for getting on without
him.  He said he hated to think of that time, and what do you
suppose he did?  I was lying under the machine at the time,
studying the differential, while he was jacking up an axle.
Proposed, positively.  I dropped a nut and a cotter pin out of my
mouth, I was so astonished.  We talked it over for about five
minutes through one of the artillery, wheels, and I must say he
took it beautifully.  I wanted to be nice to him, because he had
been so patient in explaining things, and never got tired of
being asked the same question fifty times.  He wiped his eyes
with some cotton waste and told me that even if years were to
pass and oceans and continents divide us, I had only to say
'come' and he'd come--that is, if I ever got into real trouble
with the Manton.

"When it came to saying good-by to him I let him take my cap as a
keepsake and accepted a dynamo igniter that he guaranteed not
to burn out the wires (though that's exactly what it did a week
afterward) and it was all too sad for anything.  The governor,
you know, that was attached to the igniter, got stuck somehow,
and of course the current just sizzled up the plug.  Then, when
I had been running the machine for about a week and doing
splendidly with it, Captain Cartwright turned up from Washington.
I suppose I wasn't so pleased as I ought to have been to see him,
for though we were engaged and all that, there were wheels within
wheels and--you know how silly girls are and what fool things
they do, and Gerard Malcolm and the captain, to make matters
worse, talked a whole streak about good form, and how in England
they always walked their automobites, and how hateful anything
like speeding (and going to jail) was to a real English lady, and
'Oh, my dear, would the Queen do it?'  Can't you hear him?  It
goaded me into saying awful things back, and when I took him out
for his first spin, as grumpy as only an Englishman can be after
you've insulted him from his hat to his boots, I just opened the
throttle, threw in the high clutch, and let her go.  There were
some things I liked about the captain, and the best was that he
didn't scare easy.  He just folded his arms and never wiggled an
eyelash while I took some of the grades like the Empire State
Express.

"I knew he was boiling inside, in spite of his calm, British,
new-washed look, for I hadn't let him kiss me or anything, and
nobody, however brave he is, welcomes the idea of being squashed
under a ton of old iron.  You see I was in a perfectly vicious
humor, thinking what an awful mistake I had made, and what a
little fool I had been, and how if it had only been Gerard
Malcolm--and while my hands were clenched on the steering-wheel
I could see the mark of his horrid ring' sticking through my
gauntlets, and I wouldn't have cared two straws if I had blown up
a tire just then, and driven head-foremost through a stone wall.

"I had given him about eighteen miles of this sort of thing when
the right-hand cylinder began to miss a little.  Then, after a
while, the left started to skip, too.  I stopped under a tree to
look for the trouble and pulled up the bonnet.  The spark-plugs
were badly carbonized, and when I had seen to them and had put
the captain on the crank, we could only get explosions at
intervals.  There was good compression; everything was
lubricating nicely; no heating or sticking anywhere--but the
engine had lain down on us.  The captain was so angry he wouldn't
speak a word to me, and mumbled red-hot things to himself under
his breath.  Guess how I felt.  But he was too much of a
gentleman not to crank--and so he cranked and cranked and still
nothing happened.  I chased a whole row of things one after
another--battery, buzzer, oil or gasoline in the cylinders,
defective insulation, commutator, water in the carburettor,
choked feed-pipe,--and all it did was to cough in a dreary,
tow-me-home-to-mother sort of way,

"If the captain had known anything about engines and could have
made it start, I expect I would have married him and lived happy
ever afterward.  It was just his Heaven-sent chance to win out
and show he was the right man for the place.  But he didn't know
enough to run a phonograph and began to talk about getting towed
home, and how if he ever bought a machine it would be electric.
If I had been out of patience with him before, imagine what I
felt then!  He said he knew all the time I was driving too fast
and hurting something, and thought he had proved it by the
cylinders being hot--as though they aren't always hot.  It was
awful how stupid he was and helpless and disagreeable.  He
couldn't even crank properly and the engine back-fired on him and
hurt his hand.  Finally I got so desperate that I sat down and
cried, while he nursed his hand and said we ought to desert the
machine and go home, and that papa would be anxious if we didn't
turn up to lunch.  I knew all the time he was talking about his
lunch.  You don't know what an Englishman is if he isn't fed
regularly, and it was now after one and we were eighteen miles
from High Court.

"But I wasn't the girl to give up the ship.  As long as there
weren't any fractures or things stuck together I knew the expert
could have made it go--and if the expert, why not I?  If the
captain hadn't flurried me with all the silly things he said, I
believe I would have ferreted out the trouble all right.  But I
was so cross and tired and disgusted that my brain was stalled as
well as the Manton, and so I gave up for a little while and
wouldn't even answer the captain when he spoke to me.

"Oh, yes, we were pigs, both of us, he in his way and I in mine;
and the sun went down and down, and it didn't make me feel any
better to think that I was smudged all over with grease, and that
my hands and nails were something awful--while if ever there was
a galley-slave at the oar, it was the Honorable John Vincent
Cartwright cranking.

"We went on in this way till nearly four o'clock, when what
should we hear coming along the road but a buggy, and who should
be in that buggy but Gerard Malcolm with an actressy-looking
girl!  I wasn't over-pleased at the girl part of it, but it did
my heart good to see Gerard.  He drew up alongside the Manton and
leaped out of the buggy, so splendid and handsome and cool and
masterful, with a glisten in his eye which said: 'Bring on your
gas-engine!'--that I loved him harder than ever, and could have
almost torn the captain's ring off my finger.  He didn't waste
any time saying how-do-you-do, but just asked this and that and
dived in.  Then he pegged away for about five minutes, wiped his
hands, took his bat that the captain had been holding, and said:
'Gears!'

"'It'll take me about two hours to break them loose,' he said,
'and so if Miss Stanton wouldn't mind trading escorts, and if the
captain would take the buggy, I think Miss Hardy and I had better
stay by the machine.'

"Miss Stanton didn't look nearly so pleased as the captain; but
when Gerard said again he positively couldn't manage it under two
hours, and I snubbed her when she proposed towing, and when the
captain brightened up and made a good impression--he was so
excited, poor fellow, at the chance of getting away--that it all
came right, and they drove off cheerfully together.  When they
had quite disappeared, Gerard threw down the wrench he had in his
hand, and said we'd now have that talk he had been trying to get
with me for the past month.

"'We'll do the gears first, thank you,' I said.

"'Gears!' he exclaimed, 'there's nothing the matter with the
gears.  I thought you were chauffeur enough for that'

"'But you said--' I began.

"I can make this car move in five minutes,' he said, climbing
into the tonneau and motioning with his hand for me to take the
other seat.

"Of course I obeyed him.  I didn't want to, but somehow when
Gerard wants a thing I always do it.  They say every woman finds
her master, and though I hate to admit it even to myself, I
suppose Gerard is mine.  But I hid it all I could and I dare say
I was pretty successful.  It care all the easier because Gerard
himself was kind of embarrassed, and he colored up and stammered
while I sat in the tonneau, waiting for him to begin.

"'I thought you said you were going to talk,' I said.

"'Jess,' he said, 'my sister is going to get married.'

"Now, this was news, indeed.  She was lots old older than Gerard
--forty years old, if a day--and a chronic invalid.  I don't know
exactly what was the matter with her, but she had a bad
complexion, and used to stick pretty tight is the house, and was
always absorbed in church work.  She had snappy black eyes, and
Gerard couldn't call his soul his own.  They kept house together,
you know, and had been orphans ever since they were little.

"'Oh, married!' I said, pretending to be little interested.

"'It's Mr. Simpson, the curate,' he said.

"It seemed rude to be too surprised, so I just rattled off some
of the usual congratulations.  Gerard didn't say a word.  He
simply looked and looked, and there was something beautiful to me
in his shame and backwardness and hesitation.

"'It's very unexpected,' he blurted out at last.  'I thought I
was going to take care of her always.  It is going to make a
great difference in my life.'

"'I know how you always devoted yourself to her,' I said.

"'I had made up my mind never to marry,' he went on.  'How could
I marry?--for it would have been like turning her out of doors.
She was too ill and helpless and despondent to live by herself,
and had I brought a third person into the family it would have
been misery all round.'

"Still I said nothing.

"'Jess,' he said suddenly, 'don't you understand?  Can't you
understand?'

"In fact, I did understand very well.  It explained a heap of
things--why he had always acted so strangely--sometimes so
devoted to me, sometimes so distant; crazy to hold my hand one
day and avoiding me the next.  It was no wonder he had made me
utterly desperate and piqued me into accepting the captain.  Then
he said: 'Jess, Jess!' like that; and 'for God's sake, was it too
late?'

"I couldn't trust myself to speak and I could feel my lips
trembling.  I didn't sob or anything, but the tears just rolled
down my cheeks.  Wasn't it a dead giveaway?  It's awful to care
for a man as much as that.  I thought it was splendid of him that
he didn't try to kiss me.  He simply took my hand and pulled off
the captain's ring and said I had to give it back to him at once.
Then I broke down altogether and began to cry like a baby, while
Gerard got out and emptied the kerosene from the oil lamps into
the exhaust valves.  You see, pieces of scale from the inside of
the cylinders had wedged against the exhaust-valve seats so that
they wouldn't close tight, but leaked and leaked.  Gerard said
that new Mantons always feed too rich a mixture at first and that
he knew what was the matter the moment he stuck his fingers in.

"We went home on the second speed so that Gerard could steer with
one hand.

"Oh, the captain?  He acted kind of miserable at first, and was
awfully sarcastic about being a gentleman and not a gas-engineer.
But I said the modern idea was to be both.  He got himself
transferred home and I really think it was the making of him--for
what do you think happened last week?  He won the nonstop London
to Glasgow race on an eighteen horsepower Renault.  I felt quite
proud of him.

"He has asked Gerard and me and the Manton to spend a month with
him in England when we go abroad.  He said I'd probably be
pleased to hear that he had made a lovely garage out of his
ancestral Norman chapel.  But I suppose that was just his English
humor, you know.  Anyway, we are the best of friends, and if I
ever see him again I'll give him a double toot on my French
horn."

"And what became of the curate and Gerard's sister?"

"Oh, they married and went into steam."




                   THE GREAT BUBBLE SYNDICATE


I suppose it was a fool arrangement, but anyway we did it; and
Harry Prentiss, who is learning how to be a corporation lawyer
and has specialized on contracts, spent a whole week making it
what he called iron-clad.  When it was typewritten it covered
nine pages, and was so excessively iron-clad that nobody could
understand it but Harry.  He said it undoubtedly covered the
ground, however, and would be worth all the trouble it cost him
in the friction it would save afterward.  You'd hardly know Harry
as the same boy that played Yale full-back, he's grown so cynical
and suspicious, and he's got that lawyer way of looking at you
now, as though you were a liar and he was just about to pounce on
you with the truth.  I thought he might have brought Nelly and
himself into the agreement under one head, considering he was
engaged to her and they were only waiting to save a thousand
dollars in order to get married; but he couldn't see it in that
way at all, and spoke about people changing their minds, and how
in law you must be prepared for everything (especially if it were
disagreeable and unexpected) and put supposistious cases till
Nelly broke down and cried.

They had got five hundred toward the thousand when they were both
taken with automobile fever--and taken bad; and then they decided
that, though marriage was all right, they were still young, and
the bubble had the first call.  Harry had been secretly taking
the Horseless Age for three months, and as for Nelly--anybody
with a four-cylinder tonneau could have torn her from her happy
home.  Not that she didn't love Harry tremendously.  She was
crazy about him--but crazier for a bubble.  It's an infatuation
like any other, only worse, and I guess I was no better than
Nelly myself, for I used to ride regularly with Lewis Wentz and
you know what Lewis Wentz is.  And he only had a wheezy old steam
carriage anyway, and sometimes blue flames would leap up all
around you till you felt like a Christian martyr, and his boiler
was always burning out when he'd try to hold my hand instead of
watching the gage.  You paid in every kind of way for riding with
Lewis Wentz, and people talked about you besides--but I always
went just the same.  Oh, I know I ought to be ashamed to admit
it, and I said to myself every time should be the last; yet he
only had to double-toot at the front door for me to drop
everything and run.  This naturally made him awfully forward and
troublesome, not to speak of complicating me with pa, who didn't
approve of him the least bit, and who used to regale me with
little talks beginning: "I would rather see you lying dead in
your coffin," and winding up with, "Now, won't you promise your
poor old dad?" till I was all broken up.  But, as I said before,
Lewis Wentz had only to toot for me to forget my old dad and the
coffin and everything.

With only five hundred dollars to go on, Harry and Nelly, of
course, had to look about for more capital; and that was why they
chose me to go in with them.  I didn't have any capital except a
rich father, but I suppose they thought that was the same thing.
People are so apt to--though I never found it the same thing at
all.  Then, too, Nelly and I were bosom friends, and they
naturally wanted to give me the first chance.  Their original
plan had been to have the bubble held in four equal shares,
taking in Morty Truslow as the fourth.  I think there was a
little scheme in that, too, for Morty and I hadn't spoken for
three months, and it was all off between us.  There was a time
when I thought there was only one thing in the world, and that
was Morty Truslow--but that was over for good, with nothing left
of it but a great big ache.  I can never be grateful enough to
Mrs. Gettridge for putting me on to it, for, however much a girl
cares for a man, her pride won't let her--and she was Josie's
aunt, you know, and if anybody was on the inside track, she
was--and I cut him dead and sent back his letters unopened,
though he wrote and wrote--and it was awfully hard, you know,
because I just had to grit my teeth together to keep from loving
him to death.  Nelly said I was just too proud and silly for
anything, and pa looked as depressed as though there was another
slump in Preferred Steel, and mama said he was such a catch that
the first designing girl would snap him up, and Harry said you
wouldn't know Morty now, he was so changed and different.

So that was how it was when Nelly and Harry started the Great
Bubble Syndicate and wanted to take Morty and me into it as
quarter share-holders each.  But I wouldn't have joined in a
heavenly chariot on those terms, and so we talked and talked till
finally Morty was eliminated and we settled on a two-third and
one-third basis.  The next point was to choose the car, for it
had to be a cheap car and we wanted to get the very best for our
money.  Harry said the Model E Fearless runabout at seven hundred
and fifty was the bulliest little car on the market; and that the
Fearless agent was so good and kind and looked so much like Henry
Ward Beecher that you felt uplifted just to be with him; and that
you knew instinctively that his car was sure to be the best car.

A picture of the Fearless settled the matter, for it was a real
little beauty--long in the chassis and very low, with wood
artillery wheels and guards and lamps thrown in for nothing.
Harry said it had more power than it knew what to do with and was
a bird on the hills, and that he had a friend who had a friend
who owned one and swore by it.  Afterward we met him and towed
him nine miles, and what swearing he did was all the other way;
however, I mustn't get ahead of the story, or anticipate, as they
say in novels.

Getting two hundred and fifty dollars from pa was the next step,
and of all my automobiling experiences it was certainly the
worst.  He couldn't see it at all, though I caught him after
dinner and sat on the arm of his chair and rubbed my cheek
against his like the sunny-haired daughter on the stage.

He ought to have reciprocated by doing angel parent, but he
talked horse-sense instead; how he couldn't afford to buy me a
whole car, and how in his experience divided ownership always
ended in the people hating one another ever afterward, and how
dangerous automobiling was anyway, and how much nicer it would be
to have a beautiful little horse.

Then I gave him the iron-clad agreement.  He put on his
spectacles and read it, asking me not to breathe on his neck, as
it tickled him.  (How different real life is from the stage!)
And he began to giggle at the second page; at the third he could
hardly go on; and finally, when mama came in and asked what was
the matter, he couldn't speak at all, but got up and stamped
about the room till you thought he was going to have a fit.  Then
he sat down again and wiped his eyes and asked as a favor whether
he mightn't have a copy for himself.  I said I might possibly
manage it if he would come down with the two hundred and fifty.

Then he got kind of serious again; asked if I didn't know any
cheaper way of getting killed; said I might have appendicitis for
the same money and be fashionable.  When pa is in the right humor
he can tease awfully, and that agreement had set him off worse
than I had ever remembered.  But I stuck to my bubble and wasn't
to be guyed out of the idea, and finally he lit a cigar and
started, in to bargain.

Pa is the worst old skinflint in Connecticut, and never even gave
me a bag of peanut candy without getting a double equivalent.
First of all, I had to give up Lewis Wentz entirely; I wasn't to
speak to him, or bow or bubble or dance or anything.  I put up a
good fight for Lewis Wentz--not that I cared two straws for him,
now that I was going to have an automobile of my own, but just to
head pa off from grasping for more.  I didn't want to be eaten
out of house and home, you know, and I guess I am too much pa's
daughter to surrender more than I could help.

It was well I did so, for on top of that I had to promise never
to ride in any car except my own, and then he branched off into
my giving up coffee for breakfast, going to bed at ten, only one
dance a week, wearing flannel in winter, minding my mother more,
and Heaven only knows what all.  But I said that Lewis Wentz
alone was worth two hundred and fifty, and that I'd draw on the
other things when I needed money for repairs.  Then pa suddenly
had a new notion and said he wanted to be in the thing, too;
would take a quarter interest of his own; that we'd change the
syndicate to fourths instead of thirds.

I was almost too thunderstruck to speak.  Think of hearing pa
saying he wished to buy in!  It was like an evangelist wanting to
take shares in the devil.  I could only say "Pa!" like that, and
gasp.

"I know I'm pretty old to change," he said.  "But a fellow must
keep up with the procession, you know.  And I always liked the
way they smell."

His eyes were dancing and I saw he meant mischief; but, after
all, the bubble was assured now, and that was the great thing.
It wasn't till up to that moment that I felt really safe.

"I read here in the agreement," he went on, "that the automobile
is taken in rotation by every member of the syndicate; and that
when it's my day it's my day, and nobody can say a word or use it
themselves, even if I don't care to."

"That's how we'll save any possibility of friction," I returned.
"For instance, to-day it is absolutely my car; to-morrow it's
yours; day after to-morrow it is Harry's; the day after that it's
Nelly's--and if anything breaks on your day it's up to you to pay
for it."

"Oh, I'm not going to break anything," said pa with the satisfied
look of a person who doesn't know anything about it.

"Don't you be too sure about that," I said.  "I've been around
enough with Lewis Wentz to know better."

"Well, you see," said pa, "that depends on how much you use your
automobile.  If you never take it out at all you eliminate most
of the bothers connected with it."

"Never take it out at all?" I cried.

"On my day it stays in the barn," he said.

I began to see now what he was smiling at.  Wasn't it awful of
him?  He simply meant to tie it up for a quarter of the time.

"Now, Virgie," he said, "you mustn't think that I am not
stretching a point to promise you what I have.  It's too blamed
dangerous and you're all the little girl I have.  Well, if you
must do it, I am going to cut the risk by twenty-five per cent
and my automobile days will be blanks."

I flared up at this.  It's awful when your father wants to do
something you're ashamed of.  It was such a dog-in-the-manger
idea, too, and so unsportsmanlike.  But nothing could shake pa,
though I tried and tried, and said things that ought to have
pierced a rhinoceros.  But pa ran for governor once, and his
skin's thicker.  I felt almost sorry we hadn't taken in Morty
Truslow instead--not really, you know, but just for the moment.

"How can I tell Hairy and Nelly you're such a pig?" I said, half
crying.

"I'm not a pig," said pa, "though now I'm the next thing to it
--an automobilist.  And, anyway, it's a straight business
proposition.  Take it or leave it."

"Pa," I said, "if you'll stay out of it altogether, I'll take it
back about coffee for breakfast and not minding mama more."

"It's too late," he returned.  "I've got the automobile fever now
myself.  For two cents I'd buy out Harry and Nelly and keep the
red bug in the family."

Certainly pa has the most ingenious mind of anybody I know.  He
ought to have been in the Spanish Inquisition just to think up
new torments.  I don't wonder they like him so well on the Stock
Exchange: he probably initiates new members and makes them ride
goats.  Anyway, nothing could change him about the automobile,
and I closed the deal quick, lest he might carry out his other
plan and absorb seventy-five per cent of the syndicate's stock.


The Fearless was even prettier than its picture, and there wasn't
a runabout in town in the same class with it.  Then our lessons
began, which we took separately, because there was only room on
the seat for two, and nobody wanted the other members of the
syndicate to see him running into the curb or trying to climb
trees.  The agent turned out less like Henry Ward Beecher than
Harry had thought, and it was sickening how he lost interest in
us after he got his money.  But he threw in a tooter for nothing
and a socket-wrench, and in some ways lived up to the
resemblance.  He would not take me out himself, but gave me in
charge of a weird little boy we called the Gasoline Child.  The
Gasoline Child was about thirteen, and was so full of tools that
he rattled when he walked, and I guess his head rattled, too--he
knew so much about gas engines.  He was the greasiest, messiest,
grittiest and oiliest little boy that ever defied soap; and Harry
always declared he was an automobile variety of coddling-moth or
Colorado beetle or june-bug, who would wind up by spinning a
cotton-waste cocoon in the center of the machinery and hatch out
a million more like himself.  Perhaps he was too busy to start
his happy home, for I never saw him at the garage but his little
legs were sticking out of a bonnet, and you could hear him
hammering inside and telling somebody to "Turn it over, will
you?" or "Now, try it that way, Bill."

But with all the heaps he knew, the Gasoline Child was a good
deal like the man who got rich by never spending anything.  His
knowledge was imbedded in him like gold in quartz; you could see
it there all right, but couldn't take it out.  He tried so hard
to be helpful, too; would plunge his little paw into the greasy
darkness below the seat and say:

"That's a nut you ought to remember now it works on the babbitt
of the counter-shaft"--or something of the kind--"and you must
see to it regular."  Or, "Watch your valves, Miss, and be keerful
they don't gum on you."  Or, "Them commutators are often the seat
of trouble, for oftentimes they wear down and don't break the
spark right."  When I'd grow dizzy with these explanations he
would reassure me by saying that "I'd soon fall into it, like he
did."  But I didn't fall into it nearly so well as I could have
wished.  On the contrary, the more I learned the more intricate
the whole thing seemed to grow, and I looked forward to taking
the car out alone by myself with the sensations of a prisoner
about to be guillotined.  Not that I had lost heart in
automobilism.  The elation of those rides was delicious.  The
little car ran with a lightness that was almost like flying; it
was as buoyant, swift and smooth as a glorified sledge; one awoke
with joy to the fact that the world contained a new and
irresistible pleasure.

The Gasoline Child soon taught me to run it for myself.  With him
by my side I was as brave as a lion, and I took the corners and
shaved eternity in a way to make him gasp.  He said he had never
been really scared in an automobile before, and he used to look
at me with a ready-to-jump expression, as though I were a baby
playing with a gun.  You see, I had graduated on Lewis Wentz's
steamer and a twenty-mile clip didn't feaze me any, though there
were times when I'd forget which things to pull, and this always
seemed to rattle his little nerves.  It was strange, however, what
a coward I was when I first went out by myself.  There was no
devil left in me at all, and I was certainly the crawly-crawliest
bubbler you ever saw, and I teetered at street-car crossings till
everybody went mad.  It might have been worse than it was,
though, for the only real trouble I had was chipping the tail
off a milk wagon and ramming a silly horse on Eighth Avenue.
When his friends helped him up (he had been standing still at the
time, and I had forgotten the low gear always started with a
jump) they said his front legs were barked flve dollars' worth.
I wouldn't have minded if he had got the five dollars,
poor thing, for after ramming him once I became confused at the
notoriety I attracted, and, instead of reversing, I threw in the
highspeed clutch and rammed him some more.  Oh, yes, he had some
right to have a kick coming, though all he did was to look at me
reproachfully and then lie down.  He was an Italian vegetable
horse, and from the way his friends vociferated they must have
thought a lot of him.

Of course, Harry and Nelly were taking their lessons, too, and
getting into their individual scrapes in the intervals of my
getting into mine.  Pa was the only stock-holder who never came
to time, though he used to walk round to the garage on his day to
make sure the bubble was at home.  He was awfully mean about his
rights and explained the syndicate principle to Mr. Hoover, the
head of the establishment, and tipped right and left, so that
there shouldn't be any doubt about the blanks being blanks.  I
tried to bluff Mr. Hoover once and take out the car on pa's day,
but I bumped into a regular stone wall.  Pa had given everybody
there a typewritten schedule with his days marked in red ink, and
the whole thing had become the joke of the garage, till even the
wipers grinned when the foreman would call out: "Syndicate car
there, for Miss Lockwood."

In fact, that car seemed to make everybody mean who was in the
least way connected with it.  I was a perfect pig myself, and
Harry and Nelly were positively worse.  It was one of our rules
that the rider of the day should be answerable for any troubles
or breakages that occurred when be (or she) was running the car.
Naturally, there had to be some understanding of this kind, for
personality counts a lot in automobiling, and often the chauffeur
is more to blame than the machine.  But it was awful what fibs it
tempted us into, and how we were always "passing the buck," as
they say in poker.  Nelly got so treacherous that once she told
me she didn't care to use the wagon that day, and would I like
to? She had chewed up the bearings in a front wheel and if I
hadn't suspected her generosity and taken a good look beforehand
it would have cost me six dollars!

I guess I wasn't any better myself, and quite a coolness sprang
up all around.

The repair bills came to a good deal of money, and the eighteen
dollars a month we paid at the garage was the least of the total.
The Henry Ward Beecher agent had told Harry it cost a cent a mile
to run a Fearless, but if he had said a dollar-eighty he would
have been nearer the mark.  Mr. Hoover said cheerfully he knew
only one person who had got automobiling down to bed-rock, and
that was pa!  But for the rest of the syndicate it was their
life's blood.  It began to dawn on Harry and Nelly that they
could never get married at all, as long as they stayed in the
combine.  It had cost them all the money they had saved to come
in, and now it was taking every cent they had to stay in.  Nelly
used to cry about it, though I never noticed that it made any
difference in her taking out the car, which she did regularly,
and didn't let me ride with her unless I paid a dollar each time
in advance.  She said she didn't know any other way of saving
money.

Altogether, you wouldn't have known us for the same three people,
we had all grown so horrid and changed and mercenary.  Nelly was
hankering to get married, while I was crazy to put in a radiator
with a forced water circulation (ours was a silly old kind that
boiled on you), and Harry wobbled one way and the other as though
he couldn't make up his mind--sometimes agreeing with her, and
sometimes frantic for a radiator.  It looked as though the
Fearless was going to make it a lifetime engagement, and Harry,
said ruefully that their marriage was not only, made in Heaven,
but would probably take place there.  I should have felt sorrier
for them if they hadn't been so horrid to me about it.  From the
way they talked, you'd think I had started the syndicate idea
myself and had lured them into it against their own better
judgment.  They were nasty about pa, too, and said he was acting
dishonorably with his blank days, and that as a new machine
always had to be broken in and notoriously cost more for repairs
the first year than ever afterward, he was meanly benefiting
himself at our expense.  Harry called it pa's "unearned
increment" and seemed to think it was an outrage.

They struck a whole row of troubles about this time,
too--stripping a gear, losing a front wheel on the main street
and winding up by fracturing the whole transmission into finders.
Nelly would hardly speak to me on the street, and the Gasoline
Child told me they would be cheaply out of it at eighty dollars.
Pa was the only person who didn't share the general depression.
In fact, he never seemed to be so happy as when the car was
stripped in the shop and sure to stay there.  He used to go
around there occasionally and tell them they needn't hurry--and
they didn't!

The new transmission was of a better model than the old one, and
I foresaw I might have trouble about it with the syndicate.  It
would be just like Harry to talk about "unearned increment" and
rope me in to pay part.  But I still owed on my leather coat and
wasn't in the humor to hand out a cent.  What is the good of
iron-clad agreements, anyway, if people don't live up to them
--and as for the transmission, I was quite satisfied with the old
one till they broke it.  So when Nelly came around one night, all
smiles and friendliness, I suspected trouble and didn't kiss her
very hard back.  But she was in too high spirits to notice
anything, and hugged me and hugged me till I inwardly relented
ten dollars' worth on the transmission--for Nelly and I had been
good chums before we went into the syndicate, and there was a
time when we would have shared our last chocolate cream.

"Virgie, you can't guess!" she exclaimed, her eyes dancing.

"The makers will do the right thing and won't charge for it?"

This brought her back again to earth at once.

"It--it isn't the transmission at all," she said.  "I am going to
get married next month!"

"I thought they insisted that Harry had to save a thousand
dollars first."

"He's got it!  He's got it!" she cried delightedly.

I was nearly as happy as she was, for it had looked terribly
hopeless up till then, what with all the money they had put into
the syndicate and the way the bubble was gobbling us up.

"Oh, Nelly, I am so glad," I said.  "I'll put in that forced
water circulation at once, and I'll make your and Harry's share
of it a wedding present!"

"Oh, I'm out of the syndicate," she said.  "I guess we'd prefer
something for the flat."

"Out of the syndicate?" I cried.

"Yes," she returned brazenly.  "Sold out!"

It took me a moment to pull myself together.  I felt premonitions
running all over me.  I didn't feel so enthusiastic about their
marriage as I had at first thought I was.

"Oh, Virgie, darling, you won't hate me?" she asked.

"Not till I hear more about it," I said.

She thought to make it up by squeezing my hands.  But it wasn't
squeezing that I wanted, it was facts.  I drew away a bit and
waited for them.

"Losing that front wheel was bad enough," she said, "especially
as I went over the dashboard in my dotted muslin and Harry has
limped ever since; but when the transmission broke it seemed as
though it was both our hearts.  Harry said we had come to a place
where we had to choose between owning an automobile or getting
married.  It was perfectly plain we couldn't do both.  $e said he
didn't want to influence me either way, but that there was no
good drifting on and on, deceiving ourselves and thinking it
would all come out right.  Of course, when he put it to me like
that the bubble wasn't in it--and so we towed home for the last
time and Harry, went around to close out our interest in the
syndicate."

She paused here and looked at me, quite frightened.

"Around where, exactly?" I demanded.

"Well," she went on, "your father was always dropping hints that
he would buy us out at the price we paid, and so Harry went to
his office and tried to make a deal.  But your father said it
wasn't reasonable to expect him to pay for the new transmission,
too--and as Harry didn't want to, and couldn't, the whole thing
hung fire till Harry ran into Morty Truslow on the street.  Morty
offered him a thousand dollars right off for his half-interest,"
continued Nelly; "you know how free-handed be is, and rich, and
Harry just jumped at it and walked off with the check."

"But you only paid half of seven hundred and fifty dollars in the
first place!" I exclaimed.

"Well, you see," said Nelly, "that car has gone up since.  It's
'appreciated,' as Harry calls it.  And just think what a fortune
it has stood us in for repairs!"

"It's the most horrid, mean, treacherous thing one person ever
did to another!" I cried; "you know I wouldn't speak to Morty
Truslow if be had the only monkey-wrench in the world and I was
carbonized on a country road.  I think you have acted detestably,
and so has he, and I consider it downright caddish for him to buy
a half-interest in anything I am connected with"

"Oh, Virgie, you don't know how bad be feels!" said Nelly.  "He
told me be had just been breaking his heart, and that you
wouldn't answer his letters or anything, and if you would only
let him talk for fifteen minutes he'd explain everything and
you'd take him back."

"I won't take him back," I said.

"He wears a little flower you gave him next his heart," continued
Nelly, "and when he speaks about you it is with tears in his
eyes, and if you weren't made of flint and rock candy you'd feel
so sorry for him you couldn't sleep!"

"What did be offer you to say all this, Nelly?" I demanded.

"Only a pearl horseshoe," she returned, quite unabashed.  "Said I
might choose it for myself at Helbe's if I could persuade you to
give him a fifteen minutes' talk"

"I am sorry about the pearl horseshoe," I said ironically, "but
you might as well give up the idea right now.  And if he talked
forty times fifteen minutes it wouldn't make the least difference
in the world.  He thinks he's so handsome and so well off and
that so many girls are crazy about him that he only, has to
whistle for you to come!"

"If it wasn't for Harry I would," she said; "that is, if he
whistled loud enough and there wasn't too much of a crowd
thinking he meant them!  Oh, Virgie, it's just like Faversham to
hear him talk, and I can't think how anybody could be such a
little fool as to say no!"

"If you call that being a little fool I guess I am," I said,
"though for a year he was the one man in my life, and if it
hadn't been for Mrs. Gettridge--well, it's all off, now, and it's
going to stay off,--and his owning half the bubble won't make the
least difference in the world!"

"But you'll come to my wedding and be one of the bridesmaids?"
she pleaded.  "And you won't blame me too much for getting out of
the syndicate as I did?  I knew it wasn't right and I felt
awfully about it--but then, Harry and I couldn't have managed
otherwise, and it takes years and years to save a thousand
dollars!" she looked so sweet and pitiful and contrite as she
said this that I forgave her everything and hugged her till she
choked.  It seemed a shame to spoil her happiness with
reproaches, and I couldn't but think how I'd have felt myself if
it had been Mor--  Not that I cared a row of pins for him now,
and would have despised myself if I did--but everybody has
moments of looking back--and girls are such fools anyway.  And,
of course, deep down somewhere I was pleased that he still cared.


I felt quite twittery when I first went to the garage after that,
for I thought Morty might pop out at me from somewhere, and
though I wasn't afraid to meet him and would have cut him if I
had, it would inevitably be embarrassing and upsetting.  But he
had the good taste to stay away on my days, and I never saw as
much as a pin-feather of him.  But he was awfully artful, even if
he didn't let himself be seen, and the things he did to the car
went straighter to my heart than any words he could have spoken.
He put in a radiator, a new battery with a switch, three twisted
cowhide baskets, two fifty-dollar acetylene lamps, an odometer, a
spark gap, a little clock on the dashboard, and changed the
tooter for a splendid French horn.  My repair bills, too, stopped
as though by magic, and the bubble ran so well I guess people
must have sat up nights with it!  The engine would start at the
half-turn of the crank; the clutches were adjusted to a hair; she
speeded up to twenty now on the open throttle, which she had
never done before except in the advertisement; she was the
showiest, smartest, fastest little car in town, and when she
miraculously went into red leather, edged with gold stampings,
people used to fall over one another on the street.  I believe
those two months were the happiest months of my life.  It was
automobile Heaven, and if it hadn't been for pa's blanks and
Morty's half-interest I should have been deliriously happy every
day instead of every fourth.

I can't think how it happened, but finally I got confused and
lost count.  I had been away at my grandmother's for a week and
somehow that threw me out.  But it was a Thursday afternoon, I
remember, and a beautiful autumn day, and I walked along to the
garage with that delicious feeling of anticipation--that tingle
of happiness to come--that made my heart bound with love of the
little red wagon.  (The horse, for all his prancing and social
position, never roused a sensation like that and never will.)  I
dodged a big touring-car coming out, and then went in on the
floor to order my car.  I was just telling Bert to get it out
when I turned around, and there was Morty sitting in it not four
feet away from me.  He had his cap on and his leather coat, and I
saw at once that I had made a terrible mistake.  Before I could
even think what to do he saw my predicament and leaped out,
insisting that I--should take his place.  I murmured something
about being sorry and tried to move away, but he caught my arm
and wouldn't let go.  He was so eager and excited and made such a
scene that I allowed myself to be bundled into the car rather
than attract everybody's attention--for there was a Packard and a
waterless Knox looking on.  Bert started up the engine and I was
just engaging the low-gear clutch, when Morty gave me such a look
that I stopped dead.  It seemed too horribly mean to rob him of
his afternoon--besides, when you've been awfully in love with a
man--and his face--

"Mr. Truslow," I said, speaking loud, so as not to be drowned by
the engine, "if you promise on your honor not to speak a single
word to me--you can come, too!"  I had to say it twice before he
understood, and then, didn't he bound in!  I suppose it was an
awfully reckless thing to do, for whatever they say about absence
making the heart grow fonder, sitting close is lots more
dangerous, and I began to feel all my pride and determination
oozing out of my shoes.  It came over me in waves that I loved
him better than ever, and I stole little sidewise peeps at him
--and every peep seemed to make it worse.  He belonged to a
splendid type--I had to admit that, even if I didn't forgive him
--big, clear-eyed, ruddy and broad-shouldered--and there was
something tremendously compelling and manly about him that seemed
to sweep me off my feet.  This only made me hate him more, for I
didn't see how I could ever love anybody else, and it's dreary
for a girl to have only a single man in her life and not even be
on speaking terms with that one!  It leaves her with no outlook
or anything, and one might as well be dead right off.  But you
can't be long miserable in a bubble, even if you try--that is, if
it is running nicely, developing full power and you have a fat,
rich spark--and though I looked as cold and distant as I could,
secretly I think I never was so happy in my life.

Morty behaved properly for quite a while--much longer, in fact,
than I could have believed possible.  Then he brought out a
pencil and began to write things on the beck of an envelope.  I
never moved an eyelash and didn't seem to understand at all till
he handed me what he had written.  I promptly tore it up and
threw it away.  But he found another envelope and did it again,
this time holding to it tight and moving it before my eyes.  I
nearly ditched the car, for I was running with an open throttle
and the grade was in our favor.  Then he bent over and kissed my
cloth sleeve.  I pulled up short and gave him his choice of
either getting out or comporting himself like a civilized being.
He indicated that he would try to do the latter, though be looked
awfully savage and folded his arms, and moved as far away from me
as the seat would allow.  I didn't care, besides he was safer
like that than when he was nice--and so I just looked cross, too,
and speeded up.

I laid out about a twenty-five mile spin, cut cutting Deering
Avenue midway, and branching off where the Italians are working
at the new trolley, toward Menlo, Hatcherly and the road through
the woods.  We turned at the Trocadero, climbed the long hill,
and took the river-drive home.  You know how steep it is, the
river miles below and nothing but the sheerest wall on the other
side.  But there is no finer road in Europe, and it's straight
enough to see everything ahead, so you are free to coast as fast
as you please.  I let her out at the top, for knew my breaks had
been taken up, and there were cotter pins in every bolt of the
steering gear; and, as I said before, there was always plenty of
room to pull up in if you happened to meet a team.  Well, off we
went with a rush that made our ears sing, the little car humming
like a top.

When we were more than two-thirds down and going like the wind I
saw a nurse-girl near the bottom pushing a baby in a baby
carriage and coming uphill, with two lithe tots in red dresses
walking on either side of her.  They saw us the same moment we
saw them and lined up against the side--fiery sensibly, as I
thought--and it was all so plain and right that I held on without
a thought of danger.  When I was about ten yards from them and
allowing them an ample four feet to the good--I mean from the
steep side, where they stuck in a row like barnaeles--what did
the little idiots do but rush across the road like a covey of
partridges, while the nurse-girl stayed where she was with the
baby!  If ever a person's blood ran cold it was mine.  There was
no time, no room, no anything--and the bubble going at forty
miles an hour!  It seemed like a choice between their lives or
our own.  But, thank God, I was game, and I just screamed out the
one word "jump!" to Morty and turned the machine over the edge.
I must have jumped, too, though I have no recollection of it, for
when I came to myself my head was lying on Morty's knee and on
looking about I saw we were still on the road.  The machine?  Oh,
it was two hundred feet below, smashed to smithereens, and if we
both hadn't lit out like lightning--

I wasn't a bit hurt, only bruised and giddy, and Morty was
throwing the baby's milk in my face to revive me, while the baby
looked on and roared with displeasure at its being wasted.  Morty
wasn't hurt, either, and if there were ever two people well out
of a bad scrape it was he and I.  He had been so frightened about
me he was crying; and I guess his tears were like the recording
angel's, because they seemed to blot out all the old quarrel
between us.  At least, when we got up and began to limp home
it seemed to me I didn't mind anything so long as he was close
to me.  He was shameless enough to kiss me right before the
nurse-girl, who was demanding our names and addresses and our
blood--and all I did was to kiss back.  I didn't have any fight left,
and for once he had everything his own way.  Of course, it didn't
last long--it wouldn't have been good for him if it had--but even
in six minutes I managed to lose the results of six months'
coldness.  Yet I was glad it was gone; glad just to be alive; and
we'd look at each other and laugh like children.  You don't
realize what a good old place the world is until you've taken a
chance on leaving it and weighed against death itself; all our
little jealousies and misunderstandings seemed too trivial to
count.  It seemed enough that I loved him and that he loved me
and that neither of us had broken anything--bones, I mean.  It
was sad, though, to think the poor little bubble was a goner and
that we'd never hear its honest little pant again.

"If we had lived up to the comic papers, Morty," I said, "we
would have spiflicated a red child, given a merry toot and
disappeared in a cloud of dust!"

"I'm almost sorry we didn't," said Morty, who was dreadfully pale
and always hated walking.  "We'll know better next time."

"There'll be no next time for that bubble," I said sadly.
"It's sparked its last spark and will never choo-choo again!

"I mean our next car, of course," said Morty (it was awfully
sweet to hear him say "our." And it took the sting out of losing
the little bubble, especially now that we're going to have
another).

"Yesterday Forbes Mason offered me his new four-cylinder
Lafayette for twenty-eight hundred dollars," said Morty; "it's
only been run five hundred miles, and I told him I'd think about
it."

"It's suspiciously cheap," I said.  "Sure he hasn't cut the
cylinders?"

"Well, you see, he broke his arm cranking.  It backfired on him,
and his wife is such a little fool that he had to promise to give
up automobiling."

"They are splendid cars, with a record of fifty miles on the
track, unstripped and out of stock!"

"And you shall have half-interest in it, Virgie!"

"I never could pay fourteen hundred dollars, Morty, and I don't
want any more of pa's blanks.  It's too exasperating."

"Oh, I meant for nothing!"

"Then it's a present--and there's always a string to your
presents."

"Isn't there to everybody's?"

"Besides, it's an air-cooled motor," I said, not wanting to
appear too eager.  "Don't they always overheat in time and stick
the pistons?"

"Not the Lafayette!"

"Don't tempt me," I said.  "You know I couldn't take it on any
terms."

"Forced feed lubrication and direct drive on the fourth speed," he
continued, like a stage villain offering diamonds to the heroine.

"What kind of a string?"

"Oh, Virgie, it was all a lie about Josie Felton."

"I had it straight from Mrs. Gettridge and she's Josie's aunt and
she ought to know, I guess."

"Mrs. Gettridge is a social assassinator belongs to a regular
Mafia of mischief-makers and old cats--you know you used to care
once."

"Oh, I did, Morty, I did.  It nearly broke my heart, and I just
wanted to throw myself away--become a trained nurse or go in for
settlement work!"

"Couldn't it ever be as it used to be?"

"I should want all the bushings of phosphor bronze."

"They are that already--and it's patent-lock nutted throughout,
and the engine is that new kind that interlocks.  I'll draw it
for you when I get home . . . and we'll be married at the same
time as Harry and Nelly."

"And one of those French brass gasoline tanks that set flat
against the dash-board and hold a two-gallon extra supply."

"You shall have it!"

"But she said she had actually, seen the letter!"

"It was all a lie, every word of it," he broke out.  "We'll go
straight to her now if you like and have it out, and then you'll
see whom to believe!  There never was any letter or anything,
except that she made up her mind I was to have her niece whether
I wanted to or not.  I told you that fifty million times in the
letters you wouldn't read and sent back unopened.  And it wasn't
the kind of message I could give anybody else to take to you.  I
had to think of the girl, of course, and I know she liked me."

"French tires, of course?"

"Every blessed thing just the way you want it.  The only thing I
can't see my way to change is the chauffeur, a poor devil named
Truslow, who's really an awful decent kind of fellow when you get
to know him!"

"Oh, dear," I said, "I never dreamed the Great Bubble Syndicate
was going to end like this!"

"End?" cried Morty, putting his arm around my waist as though he
now had a right to.  "It's only the reorganization of a splendid
old concern, and for fourteen hundred kisses I am going to let
you in on the ground floor!"




                        COAL OIL JOHNNY


It was eleven o'clock in the forenoon, and on the veranda of Mrs.
Hemingway's house three young girls were gathered in
conversation.  Below them a garden ran to the water's edge and
gave access to a wooden pier projecting some thirty or forty feet
beyond.  Here, in a mimic harbor formed by a sharp turn of the
shore and a line of piles on which the pier was supported, rode
the Hemingway fleet at its moorings: a big half-decked catboat, a
gasoline launch, an Indian canoe and two trim gigs.  Here, too,
under the kindly lee of a small boat-house, the Hemingway crew
lay stretched in slumber, his head pillowed on an ancient jib,
and his still-smoking pipe fallen from his unconscious lips.  A
Hemingway puppy was stalking some Hemingway tomtits, in the
bland, leisurely, inoffensive manner of one whose intentions were
not serious; and the picture was completed by a Hemingway cat,
with a blue ribbon round its neck, which was purring to itself in
a serenity that a stray page of a Sunday supplement never yet
afforded man.

The wide, shady veranda was articulate of summer and girls and
gaiety, and of all that pleasant, prosperous American homeliness
that we see so much of in life and hear so little about in
fiction.  Hammocks, rocking-chairs and rugs were scattered about
in a comfortable, haphazard fashion; a tea-table here was stacked
high with novels and magazines; a card-table there bore a violin,
a couple of tennis racquets, a silver-handled crop and a box of
papa's second-best cigars.  (The really-truly best were under the
basketwork sofa.)  There was also a sewing-machine, a music-stand,
a couple of dogs asleep on the floor, a family Bible full of pressed
wild flowers, a twenty-two-bore rifle, and the messy remains of a
Latin exercise that the son of the house had recently been engaged
upon before being called away to play Indian.

Dolly Hemingway, a handsome, fair-haired, imperious-looking girl,
was lolling in a hammock, directing the deliberations of Sattie
Felton, aged seventeen, who was sitting on the floor holding a
dog's head in her lap, and of Grace Sinclair, aged twenty, who
was in possession of a stool and a box of chocolate creams.  A
very important matter was being discussed, and that was why
everybody was talking at once, and how it came about that a young
man passed unnoticed through the cool darkened rooms of the house
and appeared without warning before the little group--a tall,
bulky young man, with an air of diffidence on his honest,
sunburned face, and a general awkwardness of movement that seemed
to betray a certain doubt as to his welcome.  He stammered out
something like "Good morning," and then stood there, hat in hand,
waiting for the massacre to begin.

"Mr. Bassity!" exclaimed Dolly Hemingway, straightening up in the
hammock, and staring at him with cold gray eyes.  The bulky young
man halted, tried to find some reassurance in the no less
chilling faces of Sattie Felton and Grace Sinclair, and then
said, "How do you do!" in a voice of extreme dejection.

"It is the custom here," said Dolly in cutting accents, "for a
gentleman, when he calls upon a lady, to announce himself first
at the door--"

"And be told she's out," said Mr. Bassity, timidly defiant.
"Call next day, and out, too!  Call next week and still out!"

"When you make a closer study of the social system," began Miss
Hemingway "our social system, which seems in vogue everywhere
except the place you came from--you will discover that such
little subterfuges save painful interviews."

"Oh, now, girls, don't be hard on me," said Mr. Bassity, sitting
down uninvited and speaking with the most disarming contrition.
"We all used to be such good friends once, and now, for the life
of me, I don't know, what's the matter.  I valued your friendship
tremendously--valued it more than I can tell, and now I am losing
it without even knowing why.  It cuts a fellow; it's humiliating;
it is crool, that's what it is, awful crool, and I'll tell you
the straight-out truth that I've cried over it!"

He looked quite capable of crying over it again, and his honest,
manly face bore mute witness to his words.  Though addressing
himself to Miss Hemingway, his eyes were more often fixed on
Grace Sinclair, and it was plain that it was her good opinion he
valued most.  But she was as merciless as Dolly, and showed not
the least sign of relenting.

"We have decided that we do not care for the further pleasure
of your acquaintance," said Miss Hemingway.  "It's a disagreeable
thing to have to say--but it's the truth!  We liked you at first
because there was something breezy and Western about you; then
you got breezier and Westerner til it was more than the traffic
could stand."

"Now see here," broke out Mr. Bassity in pleading accents, "have
I ever done anything caddish or ungentlemanly--intentionally, I
mean--anything that could possibly justify my being dropped like
this--that could--"

"Perhaps not intentionally," Interrupted Miss Hemingway, "though
it's no good your coming around here to say you didn't know any
better.  You ought to have known better, that's all."

"Known what?" bleated Mr. Bassity.  "In Heaven's name, tell me
what?"

"Oh, it isn't one thing--it's a thousand," said Dolly.  "It's--it's
--general social ineptitude!"

Mr. Bassity looked more depressed than ever.  He didn't know what
the word meant, and it seemed to cover a terrifying accusation.
He was seen silently making a note of it for a future reference
to a dictionary.

"I'm just a rough, uncouth fellow," said he at last.  "I know
that well enough without three young ladies' telling me so: An
oil man--a successful oil man--hasn't much chance to cultivate
the social graces.  If he can keep on the right side of common
honesty he has done more than most.  I guess even our best people
out there would give you a shock--and I don't pretend I even ran
with them!"

"That's the most redeeming thing you've said yet," remarked Grace.

"Oh, they wouldn't have me," remarked Coal Oil Johnny with fatal
truthfulness.

"All you need is toning down," said Miss Hemingway, with a
suspicion of kindness in her voice.  "You're too exuberant,
that's all.  You're always rushing in where angels fear to tread,
till it has grown on you like a habit.  When other people stop
you're just beginning!"

"Couldn't you give me another chance?" he asked, still with his
eyes pathetically on Grace Sinclair's face.  "Just one more
chance to try and hit it off better next time?  Now, just sit up,
every one of you, and tell me frankly what I've done to offend
you--stamp all over me--bite my head off--and then let's begin
again with a clean slate, and see if I can't buck up"

"I'll leave it to the general vote," said Miss Hemingway.  "You
certainly have a very winning nature in some ways--and who
knows?--you might possibly do better after this awful warning.
Only you mustn't come round here next time demanding
explanations.  The next time will be positive and final.  Yes,"
she went on, "I propose that Mr. Bassity be given a good talking
to, and then have his name put on the probation list."

"Poor Mr. Bassity!" said Sattie Felton.  "I second the motion for
reinstating him temporarily!"

Grace Sinclair was not so quick in giving her decision.  In her
girlish heart she enjoyed the big man's discomfiture, and was
mischievous enough to prolong his suspense.  She knew that to him
her opinion was the most important of all, and this gave her an
added pleasure in withholding her verdict.  All three looked at
her as she bent her pretty brown head and seemed to weigh the
question.  She was a Southerner, and her French-Spanish blood
betrayed itself in her grace, her slender hands and feet, and the
type of her dark and unusual beauty.  She was more a woman than
either Dolly or Sattie, and the fact that Mr. Bassity was
desperately in love with her fanned within her breast a wilful
desire to torment him.

"Let me think!" she said.

"'Pon my soul!--" began that unfortunate young man, boisterously
attempting to sway her judgment.

"Hush!" exclaimed Sattie Felton.

"She's thinking," said Miss Hemingway severely.

Mr. Bassity noisily subsided.

"I don't know whether it's worth while to forgive him," said
Grace at last.  "He's so incorrigible--so wild and woolly--that
if you're nice to him he's like one of those dogs that want to
jump all over you!"

"Oh, Miss Sinclair, please, please--!" cried Coal Oil Johnny.

"Well, I won't hang the jury," continued Grace; "only it must be
clearly understood that we have the privilege of making a few
remarks"

Mr. Bassity made a pantomime of baring his breast.

"Strike!" he said.

"You first," said Dolly to Grace.

"Last Tuesday I was playing golf at the links," began that young
lady vindictively.  "Mr. Bassity volunteered to call for me at
four and take me home in his French automobile.  I knew we were
going too fast and said so twice, but he only answered, 'Oh,
bother!' or something equally polite and gracious.  Then as we
raced into Franklin Street we found a rope across it and sixteen
policemen waiting to arrest us!  Pleasant, wasn't it?--with a
million people looking on; and my picture next day in the paper.
I was so mortified I could have cried, and I can't think of it
even now without burning all over"

"Perhaps the prisoner might care to offer some explanation?"
suggested Miss Hemingway.

"Well, really, it was most unfortunate," admitted Coal Oil
Johnny.  "The fact is, the low gear is chewed up on that car, and
I've always been forced to run it on the intermediate--and the
most you can throttle down the intermediate to is eighteen miles
an hour!"

"The legal speed being eight, I believe," Icily interjected Miss
Sinclair.

"I don't know what the silly law is," continued Mr. Bassity, "but
the only way to obey it would be to get out and push the car.
Couldn't ask a lady to do that, could I?"

"You could have thrown in your intermediate and then thrown it
out again, and run on momentum," said Miss Sinclair.  "That's
automobile A B C!"

"Oh, but my dear girl," protested Coal Oil Johnny, "the clutches
on that car are something fierce, and half the time the
intermediate won't mesh.  When you're lucky enough to get it in,
of course you keep it in."

"Yes, and get arrested," said Miss Sinclair, "and give your
passenger some disagreeable notoriety, not to speak of shaking up
her happy home and getting her allowance stopped for a month."

Mr. Bassity looked acutely miserable.  To have brought penury to
his lady-love struck him to the heart.

"I'm the most wretched fellow alive," he said.  "If ever there
was a child of misfortune, it's me.  I can only throw myself on
the mercy of the court and grovel--yes, grovel
--if you'll show me a place to grovel and teach me how!"

"Have you anything else against the prisoner?" Inquired Miss
Hemingway of Grace.

"About sixty-five other complaints," assented that young lady.
"But I'll let it go at this, which was the worst of all"

"Miss Sattie Felton, what have you against the unhappy wretch who
stands trembling at the bar of justice?" asked the self-appointed
president of the court.

"Last Sunday I was at the Country Club with papa," said Miss
Felton.  "The prisoner engaged in an altercation with my male
parent on the subject of religion, said parent being a man of
strong views and short temper.  Said parent, however, being a man
of the world as well, tried to evade an argument and escape, but
was penned up in a corner for ten purple minutes.  Said afterward
that he had never been so affronted in all his life; explodes
even now at the recollection; calls the prisoner a word that
begins with a B, contains a double O and ends with R!"

At this staggering blow poor Coal Oil Johnny covered his face
with his hands and groaned.

"It's all true," he said, "only I was kind of goaded into it.  It
began by my saying that if religious people would only be
Christians, too, the world would be a better place to live in!"

"The court is now going to get in its own little knife," said
Miss Hemingway.  "The court, in a moment of generous weakness,
verging on imbecility, invited, or, rather, caused to be invited,
the prisoner to dinner.  Prisoner, through the absence of one
lady from the party, was placed next to a distinguished young
sociologist.  Of course, in his usual headlong and unrestrained
manner, the prisoner had to teach the distinguished young
sociologist a thing or two he didn't know about sociology.
Roared at him!  Yes, ladies of the jury, positively roared at
him, and beat on the table, extra, with his fist!"

"But he was such an ass!" said the prisoner.

"No reason at all why you should roar at him," said the court,
"and disturb everybody and make them feel uncomfortable."

"An awful ass!" persisted the prisoner.

"The world is full of them," said the court "If you were to roar
at every one you meet you'd never have time for anything else.
Life would degenerate into one long roar.  Everybody knows that
Professor Titcombe is a ninny and an idiot, but the decencies of
intercourse require you to say, 'How nice!' or 'How interesting!'
to his remarks.

"But he had never even been in Colorado," vociferated Coal Oil
Johnny.  "It was all lies and hearsay and gas.  But I have, and I
know all about it, and if you want proof I have a scar on my head
where a dago shot me at Telluride!"

"Prisoner's motion to show scar overruled," said the court.

"Isn't it about time to let me off?" pleaded Mr. Bassity.
"Surely I've listened like a lamb to everything you've said to
me?  I've been slapped on one cheek and then on the other, and if
I haven't always come up smiling it isn't that I haven't tried.
It stings a fellow to hear such things to his face; it hurts a
fellow more than I think you know; for I may not be up to the
general standard of your friends, but I guess my feelings are
just as sensitive, and my regard and respect for all three of you
is not a whit behind theirs.  I dare say this has amused you very
much, and I don't grudge for a minute the fun you've had out of
it--but suppose we call it off now and be friends again, and--and
--talk about something else!"  He looked earnestly from one to
another.

There was something so naive and affecting in Bassity's plea for
mercy that for a moment his three persecutors looked almost
ashamed of themselves.  Grace Sinclair's eyes filled with tears,
and she rose and went over to him and patted his hand.

"Cheer up," she said, smiling.  "We've reinstated you now, and
like you better than we ever did before."

"And oo'll be mamma's little darling and will never be naughty
again?" added Miss Hemingway.

"Poor old Johnny!" said Miss Felton sympathetically; "that's the
trouble about being a rough diamond and being polished while you
wait--makes you sorry you ever came, doesn't it?"

"Now you can smoke a cigar, Mr. Bassity," said Dolly, "and
improve your mind listening to us talk!"

"So long as I'm not the subject of it," observed Coal Oil Johnny
ruefully.

"Oh, we can't bother about you for always," said Miss Hemingway.
"You've had your little turn and must now give way to something
mere important!"

"Delighted!" said Mr. Bassity.

"And don't look as though your own cigars were better than
papa's," added Dolly.

"But they are," he retorted.

"Will nothing ever prevent your speaking the truth?" cried Miss
Sinclair.  "There ought to be tracts about the young man who
always spoke the truth--and his awful end!"

"Do you want me to listen intelligently or unintelligently?" Mr.
Bassity asked Dolly.

"Oh, any old way," she said.  "We don't mind particularly which."

"But you might tell me what the next topic's about," he said.  "It
might improve my mind more, you know, to have some glimmering of
what's going on.  Possibly--I say it with all diffidence--possibly I
might be able to contribute some valuable suggestions."

At this there arose such a chorus of incredulity that even the
dogs jumped up and barked.

"It'll be a long time before you'll ever pay your social way,"
said Miss Hemingway cruelly.  "In the meanwhile you're a social
pauper, living on crusts, and the most becoming thing you can do
is to sit very silent and grateful and self-effacing."

"Yep," said Coal Oil Johnny, pretending to gulp down a manly
emotion.  "Yep, kind lady, and God bless your purty face, and if
a lifetime of humble devotion and--"

"We all three have to do something for the St. John's Home for
Incurable Children," Interrupted Dolly, "and the question is,
what?"

"Simplest thing out," said Mr. Bassity, feeling for his
pocketbook.

"That's just what we're not going to do," continued Dolly.  "It's
horrid to go around dunning people for subscriptions, and being
ten dollars nice to them for three dollars and fifty cents cash.
We're all pledged to earn some money--really, truly earn it--and
every one of us is going to get out and hustle, and, of course,
we want to arrange it so that none of us three will overlap.  My
own idea is dog-thinning!"

"Dog-what?" ejaculated Coal Oil Johnny.

"Most people's dogs are too fat," explained Miss Hemingway.  "Most
owners are so slack and good-natured that, though they know they
are their own dogs' worst enemies, they weakly go on pampering
them in spite of their better judgment.  I am going to reduce
dogs for ten dollars a dog--not brutally, like a vet, who kicks
them into a cellar and leaves them there--but giving up my whole
time to it for a month.  Plain living, lots of exercise,
sympathy, tact, and all the comforts of home!  I've already got
the promise of four, and there's a Russian Poodle, besides, and a
dachshund, who are trying to make up their minds."

"I wish I could have thought of anything so original," cried
Sattie Felton mournfully.  "It seems so commonplace just to work
in papa's office for two weeks, doesn't it?"

"'Specially the way you'll work!" exclaimed Grace Sinclair.

"I am going to help Miss Drayton in the filing department," said
Sattie.  "Put a letter from an F man into an F drawer, and from a
G man into a G drawer, and from an H man into an H drawer, and
from an I man into an I drawer--"

"Oh, stop!" cried Dolly Hemingway, warningly.

"And from a J man into a J drawer," continued Sattie drearily,
"and from a K man into--"

The hurried passing of the chocolate creams in her direction
brought about a welcome silence.

"What's your plan, Miss Sinclair?" Inquired Mr. Bassity.

"Oh, Grace has a snap," said Sattie in thick, chocolate-cream
accents.

"My Despardoux car!" exclaimed Grace.  "It holds five, you know,
and I'm going every day to the I.B.&Q. depot and take passengers.
Hang out a little card: Beautiful Stackport, Two Hours' Ride for
One Dollar; Children Half-Price!"

"No chauffeur?" asked Coal Oil Johnny.

"Of course not.  In that case it would be the money he earned
--not mine!"

"I don't think I'd do that," said Coal Oil Johnny.

"It matters so little what you think!" said Grace.

"But all alone?" objected Bassity.

"I told you it holds five," said Miss Sinclair.

"I shall make it a point to go every trip," said Coal Oil Johnny.

"Indeed you shan't," protested Grace.  "The basis of the whole idea
is that no friends are allowed.  It's to be genuine money-making
without favoritism or the personal element, and I think it's
splendidly original and American."

Coal Oil Johnny looked at her and slowly shook his head.

"Don't do it," he said seriously.  "Please don't do it."

"But I please will, thank you," she returned; "and I'm going to
make more money out of it than anybody."

"What does your father say?" he asked,

"Offered me a hundred dollars not to!"

"Then I suppose it wouldn't be any good offering two hundred."

"Not in the least--nor two thousand!"

Coal Oil Johnny sighed, and puffed away at his cigar.

"See here," he said at last, "why wouldn't it be a bright idea to
give me lessons--at so much a lesson--on how to behave, and that
kind of thing!"

Sattie Felton clapped her hands together excitedly.

"I take him, I take him!" she cried.  "I spoke first, girls, and
it beats filing all hollow."  In her eagerness she jumped up and
ran to Coal Oil Johnny, as though to hold him tight and prevent
his being snatched away from her by the others.  Poor Bassity had
hoped to fall into other hands, and his face showed his
disappointment.

"I hoped--" he stammered.  "I thought perhaps--"

"No, Sattie spoke first," said Miss Hemingway, detecting
incipient rebellion, "and, anyway, she deserves to have you, for
her plan wasn't any good and was hardly better than getting a
present of the money from her father!"

"What can I charge him?" exclaimed Sattie.  "What are lessons
worth, Dolly--good long ones?"

"Five dollars each, or fifty for a course of twelve," replied that
reliable authority.  "Diploma, elegantly tinted for framing, one
dollar!"

"It isn't too much, is it?" asked Sattie anxiously of Mr.
Bassity.  "I don't want to rob you, you know, and even half would
be more than I could get by filing."

"Oh, it's cheap," said Coal Oil Johnny, attempting to seem
cheerful.  "I never expected to become a social favorite for
anything under a hundred.  Only I wish you wouldn't try your
way," he added aside to Miss Sinclair.  "I mean it in all
earnestness.  If I had a sister--"

"You'd keep her in a red morocco case, and only show her in peeps
to people of guaranteed respectability," said Grace, continuing
his sentence for him.  "That's always the way with imaginary
sisters.  But the real ones like to jump in and help the old
world along!"

"Oh, but do take a chauffeur," he pleaded.

Miss Sinclair gave him a mocking smile.

"Would you mind my running my own little show in my own little
way?" she observed sweetly.

He blew out a large smoke-ring and did not reply.  His honest,
sunburned face assumed a far-away expression.  Coal Oil Johnny
was thinking!

In the line of cabs and omnibuses that stood outside the I.B.&Q.
depot was a Despardoux car, dazzling the eye with brass, and
reflecting the passing throng in the deep, ruby,
red of its highly polished surface.  Its only occupant was Miss
Grace Sinclair, suffocating in a leather coat, and with her shy,
pretty face well concealed behind an automobile mask.  At the
side of the car, neatly pinned to one of the long rawhide
baskets, was the following invitation to the public:


                   BEAUTIFUL STACKPORT
                  TWO HOURS' RIDE FOR $1
                   CHILDREN 1/2 PRICE


But the public who had possibly already seen beautiful Stackport
for themselves, or who, maybe, were withheld by the lack of the
necessary dollar--the public, jostling past in an intermittent
stream, and coy as always in the investment of its cash,
disregarded the allurements of the Despardoux, and scarcely
deigned even to look its way.  A few of its members, however, of
a chatty and mechanical turn, were willing to volunteer a vast
deal of random conversation with less than no encouragement; but
the man with the dollar, the man who desired to see beautiful
Stackport, the man who thirsted for a two hours' ride--children
half-price--was yet to come.

Grace Sinclair had waited an hour.  Her first eager expectancy
had given way to a heartbreaking consciousness of failure.  She
felt herself humiliated, less for herself than for her
Despardoux.  She had thrown down her pearls, and the swine (true
to tradition) were treating them in the time-honored manner.  At
last, when hope was nearly dead within her breast, it was
suddenly revived by the appearance of a rustic gentleman, who,
stopping as though he had received a galvanic shock, opened his
mouth as he slowly spelled out the notice on the basket.  It was
plain he was from the country, for his reddish whiskers were
untrimmed, his hair long and straggling, his clothes of an
extraordinary and antique design; and, moreover, under his arm he
carried a coal-oil box, slatted across the front, which contained
a live rooster.  It was a pity that so sturdy a representative of
the agricultural classes should have worn spectacles, and blue
ones at that,
and he had a troubled, peering, blind look that caused Grace a
momentary pang.  But he seemed a jolly, hearty fellow in spite of
his infirmity, and coming up to her he gave her a broad and
confidential smile.

"About this burd," he began, in a rich, friendly drawl, indicating
the rooster.  "Be there any trouble about the burd coming, too?"

"Not a particle," said Miss Sinclair.

"Hey?" said the stranger.  "Hey?"

"Glad to have it," said Miss Sinclair, trying to suit her English
to the intelligence of the plain people.

"But no monkey business?" said the gentleman from the country.
"No half-price rung on me later?  No extry for live stock?"

"One dollar, and no charge for rooster," said Grace in her most
matter-of-fact tones.

From a capacious and inner pocket the stranger produced a
venerable wallet, and from the venerable wallet a dollar bill.

"A lot of money for just whizzing through the air," he remarked
genially, handing it to her.  "I could fall off my barn for
nothing, and as like as not be less hurt than when you've got
through with me!"

"I'll get you back all right," said Miss Sinclair.

The stranger showed symptoms of wanting to climb into the tonneau
by way of the mud-guard; and his enthusiasm was unbounded when he
was directed to the door.

"Gosh!" he exclaimed, seating himself luxuriously on the
cushions.  "Gosh! but they've got these things down fine!  I
never read the Poultry Gazette of a Saturday night without saying
to myself, what next?  Every day some new way of being killed, or
some old way improved!  My! but this is the dandiest of all!"

"There isn't the least danger if people are careful," said Grace,
gazing out of the corner of her eye at three very loud and
offensively jocular young men, their straw hats tilted at the
back of their heads, who had also been arrested by the notice on
the basket.  They were flashily dressed, with race-tout written
all over them, and their keen, impudent, tallowy faces filled her
with sudden misgiving.

"Let's try the old hell-wagon," said one.

"If people are only careful," repeated Grace forlornly.

"I dug four automobeelists out of a ditch once," observed the
rural gentleman.  "One had his leg broke, and the others were
scratched something awful--but perhaps they weren't careful!"

"Say, we want to see beautiful Stackport," said one of the touts,
clambering into the front seat beside Grace.

"Get out of that and give your place to a handsomer man," cried
another, trying to pull him out by the legs.

The scuffle ended in the triumph of number one, who turned to
Grace and addressed her in a hoarse, ironical voice.

"Never you mind them," he said.  "They're only a pair of cheap
skates who've won out a little on the track, and are blowing it
in."

"Cock-a-doodle-doo!" exclaimed another, poking his fingers
through the bars at the rooster.

"Wind her up, young chafer!" exclaimed the third.

"The fare is one dollar in advance," said Grace Sinclair, whose
heart was sinking within her.

Then there ensued a humorous altercation in which they tried to
beat her down to seventy-five cents.  But Grace, remaining firm,
finally received her three dollars, though they made it a point
of honor to pay her in the smallest change they could muster.
One fun-maker turned in three post-cards and a two-cent stamp;
while another convulsed the company on the curb, now five deep
and swelling rapidly, by volunteering to give his necktie in lieu
of a quarter.  It was no small relief to Grace when at last they
rode out of the depot amid the cheers of the multitude, and took
their swift way down Fairfield Avenue.  But the three young
rowdies, far from subsiding, egged one another on to fresh
enormities.  They would whoop at every passing automobile, shout
audible remarks about the personal appearance of its occupants,
tell an old gentleman, cautiously picking his way across the
street, to skin out or they'd take his leg off!  It was a wild
and mortifying progress, and as the streets gradually gave way to
country roads, and Grace anticipated that the worst was over, the
three young men discovered a new means of making themselves
objectionable.  They insisted on stopping at every roadhouse,
tooting loudly for the bartender to come out and serve them, and
tossing off, in the course of a dozen miles, an uncountable
number of glasses of beer.

Had it not been for the presence of the farmer, seated placidly
in the tonneau of the car with the rooster on his lap, Grace
would have been terrified at her predicament.  But his large,
friendly bulk, his heavy shoulders, his big hands and honest face
were immensely comforting to her.  He resisted all the
importunities of the others to drink with them, refusing with the
greatest good-nature, and maintaining throughout a certain
aloofness and detachment.  They called him Judge Hayseed, and
guyed him mercilessly; but his deep, hearty laugh never showed
the least sign of resentment, even when imaginary misadventures,
of the blow-out-the-gas order, were fathered on him.

In the midst of an unceasing and vociferous hilarity, as they
were bowling along at twelve miles an hour, which Grace would
have made twenty if the engine hadn't worked so queerly, she felt
the sharp dig of a finger against her back, and one of the young
men cried out: "Say, young chafer, you've plunked a tire!"

She stopped the car and got out, and there, sure enough, one of
the rear tires presented itself to her view in a state of
melancholy collapse.  It had picked up a horseshoe together with
the three jagged nails adhering to it, and was patently,
hopelessly, irretrievably punctured.  Grace had seen a hundred
repairs made on the road, but up to now she had never put her
hands to the task herself.  She brimmed over with the most
correct theory, but had invariably relegated the practice to a
skilful young man.  As she dejectedly scanned the faces of her
passengers, and met nothing in return but blank and dispirited
stares, she manfully got out her little jack and started in on
her own account.  But she had hardly raised the wheel free from
the ground, and was in the act of unscrewing the valve, when the
wrench was suddenly taken out of her hand by Judge Hayseed, who
asked in a very businesslike manner if there was an inner tube in
the kit.

"I took notice of a feller doing this on my farm once," he
drawled, "and it's kind of stuck in my head ever since."  It had
certainly stuck remarkably well, for the farmer attacked the shoe
with the precision of a veteran.  Loosening the lugs, and using
the two strippers against each other with adroitness and
strength, he quickly reached the point where he could easily draw
out the inner tube.

When the tire was pumped up, and Grace was again about to take
her place at the steering-wheel, the farmer sprang a fresh
surprise.

"Hold on a minute," he said.  "What's been making you miss so
horribly on the off cylinder?"

"Oh, the whole engine has been acting like the dickens," she
returned distressfully.  "It hasn't been developing half its
power.  It's in one of its mean humors to-day, and behaving like
a pig."

"Couldn't you take off that front thing and let's see what's the
trouble?" said the countryman, jumping back into his drawl.

And then, wrench in hand, he made a prolonged examination of the
machinery.  Then he turned over the engine and listened; then he
turned over the engine again and listened some more.  Then he
crawled in under the wagon, reappearing with a lick of grease
over one eye.

"It gets me," he said.  "I ran a little oil out of the crank-case
on general principles, and chased up the magnets--but
everything's tip-top as far as I can see!"

"Suppose you crank up and let's try again," said the girl.

But the car went worse than ever.  Instead of missing
occasionally the engine began to run now in gasps.  Just when
Grace waited for it to die altogether it would give another cough
and take another spurt ahead, progressing the car in a series of
agonizing little rushes, every one promising to be the last.  To
add to Grace's discomfiture there was a fairly steep hill looming
in front of them, and she foresaw their being stalled at the
bottom.  They made another stop.  A pair of new spark-plugs was
put in, but, instead of improving, the gasping got gaspier than
ever.  Still another stop, to replace the high tension wires.

But no improvement was effected.  A weird, whizzling sound added
itself to the other noises.  Every gasp brought them nearer the
hill, where, at the foot, the engine gave one awful hiccough and
died dead.

"We might manage to crawl home the way we came," said Grace, at
her wits' end.

"No, there's only one thing to do," said the farmer decisively,
"and that's to start all over again and ferret out the trouble."

He got out again.  So did Grace.  So did the three touts.  So did
the rooster.  It was a depressing moment.

Grace took off her long coat, laid it on one side of the road,
and deposited her cap, mask and gauntlets.  It would take time to
put the car to rights, and she didn't wish to be hampered.  Her
dark, glowing, girlish face came as a revelation to the three
sports.  She had been hidden behind so much glass and leather
that the transformation was startling.  The horsy gentlemen
uttered murmurs of surprise and gratification.  One of them
sidled up to her with a leer.

"We've had a bum ride in your bum wagon," he said, "and now you've
stuck us down here nine miles from the nearest beer!  You've a
lot to answer for, you have."

"I shall certainly return your money," returned Grace coldly.  "I
can't do more than that, can I?"

"Oh, yes, you can, you wicked little chafer," he said, giving a
wink over his shoulder to his companions.  "What's the matter
with a kiss?"  And with that he passed his arm around her waist.

What happened next happened quicker than it takes to write it.
The farmer's right hand descended on the young man's collar, and
his left executed a succession of slaps on the young man's
countenance, which, for vigor and swiftness, could not have been
done better by machinery.  Then he trailed him to one side of the
road, still shaking him in an iron grasp, and kicked him into the
ditch.

"Help!" roared the young man repeatedly in the course of these
proceedings.  "Help!"

This brought to the rescue his two friends, who, for the last
instant, had been too spellbound to move.  The farmer squared his
fists and received the newcomers on his knuckles.  He was a clean
hitter, and from the way he pirouetted and skipped you would have
said he could dance, too.  The three young sports, considerably
the worse for wear, fled pell-mell for the barbed-wire fence that
bordered the road, and went over it in the twinkling of an eye.
 Only a few bits of what they would probably have called "nobby
pants," speckled here and there on the barbs, betrayed to later
wayfarers this new instance of man's inhumanity to man.

"Do you know, we have never looked at the contact-box," said the
farmer, returning to the car quite calmly to take up the
interrupted thread of his conversation.

The tears were streaming down Grace's face, and her voice was
scarcely controllable.

"It's a b-brush s-s-system," she said, "and it has always worked
b-b-beautifully, and I never could have f-f-forgiven myself if
they had h-h-hurt you!"

The farmer did not hear more than half the sentence.  He was on
his knees peering down into the works.  Suddenly he raised his
head with an expression of triumph.

Bing!  A stone struck one of the kerosene lamps with a vicious
crash.

Bing!  Another just missed the countryman's rumpled hair.

Bing!  A mud-guard shook with a loud and tinny reverberation.

The enemy, lined up in the neighboring field, and yelling
shrilly, were opening up a rear-guard action with artillery.

"The contact-box is upside down," cried the farmer.  "I can't see
how it ever worked at all.  Yank me out a screw-driver quick!"

The contact-box was on the exposed side.  The farmer tried to
hunch himself into the least compass possible, but his broad back
and powerful frame interfered with his efforts to make a human
hedgehog of himself.  He was hit twice, once by a grazing shot
that brought out blood on his cheek, the other a stinger on the
hand.

"Scratch up a few rocks," he called to Grace, doggedly continuing
his work, and keeping a careful eye on the screws he was taking
out.

She got a dozen or so, and passed them over to him in a piece of
chamois leather taken from the tool kit.  He caught it up and ran
for the fence, the enemy retiring precipitately out of range.
But if he made no bull's-eyes he had a pleasant sense, for a
moment or two, of dominating the situation.  Then he returned
hurriedly to the car.

"I wonder if you and I couldn't push her around," he said to
Grace.  "They'll be back again in a minute, and then it will be
altogether too sunny on this side."  The pair of them laid on to
the spokes of the driving-wheels, and with a yeo-heave-yeo
managed to head the Despardoux in the direction of its native
Stackport.  Then the farmer settled to work again, Grace scurried
about searching for ammunition, and the three young touts rained
shower on shower of stones.  If ever delicate adjustments were
made under difficulties, it was on that Despardoux on that
fateful occasion.  The only alleviation of an otherwise
intolerable situation was the magnificent behavior of the
contact-box, which now, right side up and readjusted, showed
every symptom of meaning to do its duty.

It was anxiously put to the test, and, on the engine being
started, the farmer and Grace were rewarded by the chippetty,
chippetty, chippetty, chippetty of perfect sparking and
combustion.

The farmer rolled back the enemy, recovered Grace's coat and his
own rooster, seated himself at the wheel, gave the girl a hand
in, threw in his clutches and speeded up.

"Slow down!" cried Grace.  "Slow down, please.  I want to leave
their horrid money on the road."

"Not on your life," said the farmer.  "That three dollars belongs
to the St. John's Home for Incurable Children!"

"You oughtn't to know anything about the St. John's Home," said
Grace.

"Oh, I forgot--I don't," he retorted brazenly.  "Only that three
dollars is going to stay on board this car.  If anybody ever
earned three dollars by the sweat of their brow I guess it was
you and me!"

Grace put her hands up to his head and deliberately drew off his
hat, drew off his red wig, drew off his red whiskers, and tossed
them all back into the tonneau.

"Are you sorry I came?" said Coal Oil Johnny.

"There are some emotions that can not be put into words," she
answered.  "I won't try to say anything.  I can't.  But if I
should ever seem unkind, or distant, or forgetful, or anything
but the joy of your whole future existence--just you say
contact-box, and I'll melt!"




                             JONES




                               I


I could have taken "No" like a man, and would have gone away
decently and never bothered her again.  I told her so straight
out in the first angry flush of my rejection--but this string
business, with everything left hanging in the air, so to speak,
made a fellow feel like thirty cents.

"It simply means that I'm engaged and you are not," I said.

"It's nothing of the kind," she returned tearfully.  "You're as
free as free, Ezra.  You can go away this moment, and never
write, or anything!"

Her lips trembled as she said this, and I confess it gave me a
kind of savage pleasure to feel that it was still in my power to
hurt her.

It may sound unkind, but still you must admit that the whole
situation was exasperating.  Here was five-foot-five of
exquisite, blooming, twenty-year-old American girlhood sending
away the man she confessed to care for, because, forsooth, she
would not marry before her elder sister!  I always thought it was
beautiful of Freddy (she was named Frederica, you know) to be
always so sweet and tender and grateful about Eleanor; but
sometimes gratitude can be carried altogether too far, even if
you are an orphan, and were brought up by hand.  Eleanor was
thirty-four if a day--a nice enough woman, of course, and college
bred, and cultivated, and clever--but her long suit wasn't good
looks.  She was tall and bony; worshiped genius and all that; and
played the violin.

"No," repeated Freddy, "I shall never, never marry before Eleanor.
It would mortify her--I know it would--and make her feel that she
herself had failed.  She's awfully frank about those things,
Ezra--surprisingly frank.  I don't see why being an old maid is
always supposed to be so funny, do you? It's touching and tragic
in a woman who'd like to marry and who isn't asked!"

"But Eleanor must have had heaps of offers," I said, "surely--"

"Just one."

"Well, one's something," I remarked cheerfully.  "Why didn't she
take him then?"

"She told me only last night that she was sorry she hadn't!"

Here, at any rate, was something to chew on.  I saw a gleam of
hope.  Why shouldn't Eleanor marry the only one--and make us all
happy!

"That was three years ago," said Freddy.

"I have loved you for four," I retorted.  I was cross with
disappointment.  To be dashed to the ground, you know, just as I
was beginning--"Tell me some more about him," I went on.  I'm a
plain business man and hang on to an idea like a bulldog; once I
get my teeth in they stay in, for all you may drag at me and
wallop me with an umbrella--metaphorically speaking, of course.

"Tell me his name, where he lives, and all."

"We were coming back from Colorado, and there was some mistake
about our tickets.  They sold our Pullman drawing-room twice
over--to Doctor Jones and his mother, and also to ourselves.  You
never saw such a fight--and that led to our making friends, and
his proposing to Eleanor!"

"Then why in Heaven's name didn't she" (it was on the tip of my
tongue to say "jump at him ") "take him?"

"She said she couldn't marry a man who was her intellectual
inferior."

"And was he?"

"Oh, he was a perfect idiot--but nice, and all that, and
tremendously in love with her.  Pity, wasn't it?"

"The obvious thing to do is to chase him up instantly.  Where did
you say he lived?"

"His mother told me he was going to New York to practise
medicine."

"But didn't you ever hear from him again?  I mean, was that the
end of it all?"

"Yes?"

"Then you don't even know if he has married since?"

"No,"

"Nor died?"

"No."

"Nor anything at all?"

"No."

"What was his first name?"

"Wait a moment . . . let me think yes, it was Harry."

"Just Harry Jones, then, New York City?"

Freddy laughed forlornly.

"But he must have had antecedents," I cried out.  "There are two
ways of doing this Sherlock Holmes business--backward and
forward, you know.  Let's take Doctor Jones backward.  As they
say in post-office forms--what was his place of origin?"

"New York City."

"He begins there and ends there, does he, then?"

"Yes."

"But how sure are you that Eleanor would marry him if I did
manage to find him and bring him back?"

"I'm not sure at all."

"No, but Freddy, listen--it's important.  You told me yourself
that she--I want the very identical words she used."

Freddy reflected.

"She said she was almost sorry she hadn't accepted that silly
doctor!"

"That doesn't seem much, does it?" I remarked gloomily.

"Oh, from Eleanor it does, Ezra.  She said it quite seriously.
She always hides her feelings under a veil of sarcastic humor,
you know."

"You're certainly a very difficult family to marry," I said.

"Being an orphan--" she began.

"Well, I'm going to find that Jones if I--"

"Ezra, dear boy, you're crazy.  How could you think for a moment
that--"

"I'm off, little girl.  Good-by!"

"Wait a second, Ezra!"

She rose and went into the next room, reappearing with something
in her hand.  She was crying and smiling both at once.  I took
the little case she gave me--it was like one of those things that
pen-knives are put in and looked at her for an explanation.

"It's the h-h-hindleg of a j-j-jack-rabbit," she said, "shot by a
g-g-grave at the f-f-full of the moon.  It's supposed to be l-l-lucky.
It was given to me by a naval officer who got drowned.  It's the
only way I can h-h-help you!"

And thus equipped I started bravely for New York.




II


In the directory I found eleven pages of Joneses; three hundred
and eighty-four Henry Joneses; and (excluding seventeen dentists)
eighty-seven Doctor Henry Joneses.  I asked one of the typists in
the office to copy out the list, and prepared to wade in.  We
were on the eve of a labor war, and it was exceedingly difficult
for me to get away.  As the managing partner of Hodge & Westoby,
boxers (not punching boxers, nor China boxers, but just plain
American box-making boxers), I had to bear the brunt of the whole
affair, and had about as much spare time as you could heap on a
ten-cent piece.  I had to be firm, conciliatory, defiant and
tactful all at once, and every hour I took off for Jonesing
threatened to blow the business sky-high.  It was a tight place
and no mistake, and it was simply jackrabbit hindleg luck that
pulled me through!

My first Jones was a hoary old rascal above a drug store.  He was
a hard man to get away from, and made such a fuss about my
wasting his time with idle questions that I flung him a dollar
and departed.  He followed me down to my cab and insisted on
sticking in a giant bottle of his Dog-Root Tonic.  I dropped it
overboard a few blocks farther on, and thought that was the end
of it till the whole street began to yell at me, and a policeman
grabbed my horse, while a street arab darted up breathless with
the Dog-Root Tonic.  I presented it to him, together with a
quarter, the policeman darkly regarding me as an incipient
madman.

The second Jones was a man of about thirty, a nice, gentlemanly
fellow, in a fine offce.  I have usually been an off-hand man in
business, accustomed to quick decisions and very little beating
about the bush.  But I confess I was rather nonplussed with the
second Jones.  How the devil was I to begin?  His waiting-room
was full of people, and I hardly felt entitled to sit down and
gas about one thing and the other till the chance offered of
leading up to the Van Coorts.  So I said I had some queer,
shooting sensations in the chest.  In five minutes he had me
half-stripped and was pounding my midriff in.  And the questions
that man asked!  He began with my grandparents, roamed through my
childhood and youth, dissected my early manhood, and finally came
down to coffee and what I ate for breakfast.

Then it was my turn.

I asked him, as a starter, whether he had ever been in Colorado?

No, he hadn't.

After forty-five minutes of being hammered, and stethoscoped, and
punched, and holding my breath till I was purple, and hopping on
one leg, he said I was a very obscure case of something with nine
syllables!

"At least, I won't be positive with one examination," he said;
"but kindly come tomorrow at nine, when I shall be more at
leisure to go into the matter thoroughly."

I paid him ten dollars and went sorrowfully away.

The third Jones was too old to be my man; so was the fourth; the
fifth had gone away the month before, leaving no address; the
sixth, however, was younger and more promising.  I thought this
time I'd choose something easier than pains in the chest.  I
changed them to my left hand.  I was going to keep my clothes on,
anyhow.  But it wasn't any use.  Off they came.  After a decent
interval of thumping and grandfathers, and what I had for
breakfast, I managed to get in my question:

"Ever in Colorado, Doctor?"

"Oh, dear me, no!"

Another ten dollars, and nothing accomplished

The seventh Jones was again too old; the eighth was a pale
hobbledehoy; the ninth was a loathsome quack; the tenth had died
that morning; the eleventh was busy; the twelfth was a veterinary
surgeon; the thirteenth was an intern living at home with his
widowed sister.  Colorado?  No, the widowed sister was positive
he had never been there.  The fourteenth was a handsome fellow of
about thirty-five.  He looked poor and threadbare, and I had a
glimpse of a shabby bed behind a screen.  Patients obviously did
not often come his way, and his joy at seeing me was pitiful.  I
had meant to try a bluff and get in my Colorado question this
time free of charge; but I hadn't the heart to do it.  Slight
pains in the head seemed a safe complaint.

After a few questions he said he would have to make a thorough
physical examination.

"No clothes off!" I protested.

"It's essential," he said, and went on with something about the
radio-activity of the brain, and the vasomotor centers.  The word
motor made me feel like a sick automobile.  I begged to keep my
clothes on; I insisted; I promised to come tomorrow; but it
wasn't any good, and in a few minutes he was hitting me harder
than either of the two before.  Maybe I was more tender!  He
electrocuted me extra from a switchboard, ran red-hot needles
into my legs, and finally, after banging me around the room, said
I was the strongest and wellest man who had ever entered his
office.

"There's a lot of make-believe in medicine," he said; "but I'm
one of those poor devils who can't help telling a patient the
truth.  There's nothing whatever the matter with you, Mr.
Westoby, except that your skin has a slightly abrased look, and I
seem to notice an abnormal sensitiveness to touch"

"Were you ever in Colorado, Doctor?" I asked while he was good
enough to help me into my shirt.

"Oh, yes, I know Colorado well!"

My heart beat high.

"Some friends of mine were out there three years ago," I said.
"Wouldn't it be strange if by any chance the Van Coorts--"

"Oh, I left Denver when I was fifteen."

Five dollars!

The fifteenth Jones was a doctor of divinity; the sixteenth was a
tapeworm specialist; the seventeenth was too old, the eighteenth
was too old, the nineteenth was too old--a trio of disappointing
patriarchs.  The twentieth painted out black eyes; the twenty-first
was a Russian who could scarcely speak any English.  He said he
had changed his name from Karaforvochristophervitch to
something more suited to American pronunciation.  He seemed to
think that Jones gave him a better chance.  I sincerely hope it
did.  He told me that all the rest of the Jones family was in
Siberia, but that he was going to bomb them out!  The twenty-second
was a negro.  The twenty-third--!  He was a tall, youngish man,
narrow-shouldered, rather commonplace-looking, with beautiful
 blue eyes, and a timid, winning, deprecatory manner.  I told him
I was suffering from insomnia.  After raking over my grandfathers
again and bringing the family history down by stages to the very
moment I was shown into his office he said he should have to
ask me to undergo a thorough physical--!  But I was tired of being
slapped and punched and breathed on and prodded, and was
bold enough to refuse point-blank.  I'd rather have the insomnia!
We worked up quite a fuss about it, for there was something
tenacious in the fellow, for all his mild, kind, gentle ways; and
I had all I could do to get off by pleading press of business.
But I wasn't to escape scot-free.  Medical science had to get
even somehow.  He compromised by stinging my eye out with
belladonna.  Have you ever had belladonna squirted in your eye?
Well, don't!

He was sitting at the table, writing out some cabalistic wiggles
that stood for bromide of potassium, when I remarked casually
that it was strange how well I could always sleep in Colorado.

He laid down the pen with a sigh.

"A wonderful state--Colorado," I observed.

"To me it's the land of memories," he said.  "Sad, beautiful,
irrevocable memories--try tea for breakfast--do you read
Browning?  Then you will remember that line: 'Oh, if I--'  And I
insist on your giving up that cocktail before dinner."

"Some very dear friends of mine were once in Colorado," I said.
"Morristown people--the Van Coorts."

"The Van Coorts!"

Doctor Jones sprang from his chair, his thin, handsome face
flushing with excitement.

"Do you mean to say that you know Eleanor Van Coort?" he gasped.

"All my life."

He dropped back into the chair again and mumbled something about
cigars.  I was only to have blank a day.  In his perturbation I
believe he limited me to a daily box.  He was trying--and trying
very badly--to conceal the emotions I had conjured up.

"They were talking about you only yesterday," I went on.  "That
is, if it was you!  A Pullman drawing-room-"

"And a mistake about the tickets," he broke out.  "Yes, yes, it's
they all right.  Talking about me, did you say?  Did Eleanor--I
mean, did Miss Van Coort--express--?"

"She was wondering how she could find you," I said.  "You see,
they're busy getting up a house-party and she was running over
her men.  'If I only knew where that dear Doctor Jones was,' she
said, and then asked me, if by any possible chance--"

His fine blue eyes were glistening with all sorts of tender
thoughts.  It was really touching.  And I was in love myself, you
know.

"So she has remained unmarried!" he exclaimed softly.
"Unmarried--after all these years!"

"She's a very popular girl," I said.  "She's had dozens of men at
her feet--but an unfortunate attachment, something that seems to
go back to about three years ago, has apparently determined her
to stay out of the game!"

Doctor Jones dropped his head on his hands and murmured something
that sounded like "Eleanor, Eleanor!"  Then he looked up with one
of the most radiant smiles I ever saw on a man's face.  "I hope
I'm not presuming on a very short acquaintance," he said, "but
the fact is--why should I not tell you?--Miss Van Coort was the
woman in my life!"

I explained to him that Freddy was the woman in mine.

Then you ought to have seen us fraternize!

In twenty minutes I had him almost convinced that Eleanor had
loved him all these years.  But he worried a lot about a Mr. Wise
who had been on the same train, and a certain Colonel Hadow who
had also paid Eleanor attention.  Jones was a great fellow for
wanting to be sure.  I pooh-poohed them out of the way and gave
him the open track.  Then, indeed, the clouds rolled away.  He
beamed with joy.  In his rich gush of friendship he recurred to
the subject of my insomnia with a new-born enthusiasm.  He
subdivided all my symptoms.  He dived again into my physical
being.  He consulted German authorities.  I squirmed and lied and
resisted all I could, but he said he owed me an eternal debt that
could only be liquidated by an absolute cure.  He wanted to tie
me up and shoot me with an X-ray.  He ordered me to wear white
socks.  He had a long, terrifying look at a drop of my blood.  He
jerked hairs out of my head to sample my nerve force.  He said I
was a baffling subject, but that he meant to make me well if it
took the last shot in the scientific locker.  And he wound up at
last by refusing point-blank to be paid a cent!

I waltzed away on air to write an account of the whole affair to
Freddy, and dictate a plan of operations.  I was justified in
feeling proud of myself.  Most men would have tamely submitted to
their fate instead of chasing up all the Joneses of Jonesville!
Freddy sent me an early answer--a gay, happy, overflowing little
note--telling me to try and engage Doctor Jones for a three-day
house-party at Morristown.  I was to telegraph when he could
come, and was promised an official invitation from Mrs.
Matthewman.  (She was the aunt, you know, that they lived with
--one of those old porcelain ladies with a lace cap and a rent-roll.)
However, I could not do anything for two days, for we had
reached a crisis in the labor troubles, and matters were
approaching the breaking point.  We were threatened with one of
those "sympathetic" strikes that drive business men crazy.  There
was no question at issue between ourselves and our employees; but
the thing ramified off somewhere to the sugar vacuum-boiler
riveters' union.  Finally the S.Y.B.R.U. came to a settlement
with their bosses, and peace was permitted to descend on Hodge &
Westoby's.

I took immediate advantage of it to descend myself on Doctor
Jones.  He received me with open arms and an insomniacal
outburst.  He had been reading up; he had been seeing
distinguished confreres; he had been mastering the subject to the
last dot, and was panting to begin.  I hated to dampen such
friendship and ardor by telling him that I had completely
recovered.  Under the circumstances it seemed brutal--but I did
it.  The poor fellow tried to argue with me, but I insisted that
I now slept like a top.  It sounded horribly ungrateful.  Here I
was spurning the treasures of his mind, and almost insulting him
with my disgusting good health.  I swerved off to the house-party;
Eleanor's delight, and so on; Mrs.  Matthewman's pending
invitation; the hope that he might have an early date free--

He listened to it all in silence, walking restlessly about the
office, his blue eyes shining with a strange light.  He took
up a bronze paper-weight and gazed at it with an intensity of
self-absorption.

"I can't go," he said.

"Oh, but you have to," I exclaimed.

"Mr. Westoby," he resumed, "I was foolish enough to back a
friend's credit at a store here.  He has skipped to Minnesota,
and I am left with three hundred and four dollars and
seventy-five cents to pay.  To take a three days' holiday would
be a serious matter to me at any time, but at this moment it is
impossible."

I gave him a good long look.  He didn't strike me as a borrowing
kind of man.  I should probably insult him by volunteering.  Was
there ever anything so unfortunate?

"I can't go," he repeated with a little choke.

"You may never have another opportunity," I said.  "Eleanor is
doing a thing I should never have expected from one of her proud
and reserved nature.  The advances of such a woman--"

He interrupted me with a groan.

"If it wasn't for my mother I'd throw everything to the winds and
fly to her," he burst out.  "But I have a mother--a sainted
mother, Mr. Westoby--her welfare must always be my first
consideration!"

"Is there no chance of anything turning up?" I said.  "An
appendicitis case--an outbreak of measles?  I thought there was a
lot of scarlatina just now."

He shook his head dejectedly.

"Doctor," I began again, "I am pretty well fixed myself.  I'm
blessed with an income that runs to five figures.  If all goes
the way it should we shall be brothers-in-law in six months.  We
are almost relations.  Give me the privilege of taking over this
small obligation--"

I never saw a man so overcome.  My proposal seemed to tear the
poor devil to pieces.  When he spoke his voice was trembling.

"You don't know what it means to me to refuse," he said.  "My
self-respect my--my . . . "  And then he positively began to
weep!

"You said three hundred and four dollars and seventy-five cents,
I believe?"

He waved it from him with a long, lean hand.

"I can not do it," he said; "and, for God's sake, don't ask me
to!"

I argued with him for twenty minutes; I laid the question before
him in a million lights; I racked him with a picture of Eleanor,
so deeply hurt, so mortified, that in her recklessness and
despair she would probably throw herself away on the first man
that offered!  This was his chance, I told him; the one chance of
his life; he was letting a piece of idiotic pride wreck the
probable happiness of years.  He agreed with me with moans and
weeps.  He had the candor of a child and the torrential sentiment
of a German musician.  Three hundred and four dollars and
seventy-five cents stood between him and eternal bliss, and yet
he waved my pocketbook from him!  And all the while I saw myself
losing Freddy.

I went away with his "No, no, no!" still ringing in my ears.

At the club I found a note from Freddy.  She pressed me to lose
no time.  Mrs. Matthewman was talking of going to Europe, and of
course she and Eleanor would have to accompany her.  Eleanor, she
said, had ordered two new gowns and had brightened up
wonderfully.  "Only yesterday she told me she wished that silly
doctor would hurry up and come--and that, you know, from Eleanor
is almost a declaration!"

Some of my best friends happened to be in the club.  It occurred
to me that poor Nevill was diabetic, and that Charley Crossman
had been boring everybody about his gout.  I buttonholed them
both, and laid my unfortunate predicament before them.  I said
I'd pay all the expenses.  In fact, the more they could make it
cost the better I'd be pleased.

"What," roared Nevill, "put myself in the hands of a young fool
so that he may fill his empty pockets with your money!  Where do
I come in?  Good heavens, Westoby, you're crazy!  Think what
would happen to me if it came to Doctor Saltworthy's ears?  He'd
never have anything more to do with me!"

Charley Crossman was equally rebellious and unreasonable.

"I guess you've never had the gout," he said grimly.

"But Charley, old man," I pleaded, "all that you'd have to do
would be to let him talk to you.  I don't ask you to suffer for
it.  Just pay--that's all--pay my money!"

"I'm awfully easily talked into things," said Charley.  (There
was never such a mule on the Produce Exchange.)  "He'd be saying,
'Take this'--and I'm the kind of blankety-blank fool that would
take it!"

Then I did a mean thing.  I reminded Crossman of having backed
some bills of his--big bills, too--at a time when it was touch
and go whether he'd manage to keep his head above water.

"Westoby," he replied, "don't think that time has lessened my
sense of that obligation.  I'd cut off my right hand to do you a
good turn.  But for heaven's sake, don't ask me to monkey with my
gout!"

The best I could get out of him was the promise of an anemic
servant-girl.  Nevill generously threw in a groom with varicose
veins.  Small contributions, but thankfully received.

"Now, what you do," said Nevill, "is to go round right off and
interview Bishop Jordan.  He has sick people to burn!"

But I said Jones would get on to it if I deluged him with the
misery of the slums.

"That's just where the bishop comes in," said Nevill.  "There
isn't a man more in touch with the saddest kind of poverty in New
York--the decent, clean, shrinking poverty that hides away from
all the deadhead coffee and doughnuts.  If I was in your fix I'd
fall over myself to reach Jordan!"

"Yes, you try Jordan," said Charley, who, I'm sure, had never
heard of him before.

"Then it's me for Jordan," said I.

I went down stairs and told one of the bell-boys to look up the
address in the telephone-book.  It seemed to me he looked pale,
that boy.

"Aren't you well, Dan?" I said.

"I don't know what's the matter with me, sir.  I guess it must be
the night work."

I gave him a five-dollar bill and made him write down 1892 Eighth
Avenue on a piece of paper.

"You go and see Doctor Jones first thing," I said.  "And don't
mention my name, nor spend the money on Her Mad Marriage."

I jumped into a hansom with a pleasant sense that I was beginning
to make the fur fly.

"That's a horrible cold of yours, Cabby," I said as we stopped at
the bishop's door and I handed him up a dollar bill.  "That's
just the kind of a cold that makes graveyards hum!"

"I can't shake it off, sir," he said despondently.  "Try what I
can, and it's never no use!"

"There's one doctor in the world who can cure anything," I said;
"Doctor Henry Jones, 1892 Eighth Avenue.  I was worse than you
two weeks ago, and now look at me!  Take this five dollars, and
for heaven's sake, man, put yourself in his hands quick."

Bishop Jordan was a fine type of modern clergyman.  He was
broad-shouldered mentally as well as physically, and he brought
to philanthropic work the thoroughness, care, enthusiasm and
capacity that would have earned him a fortune in business.

"Bishop," I said, "I've come to see if I can't make a trade with
you!"

He raised his grizzled eyebrows and gave me a very searching
look.

"A trade," he repeated in a holding-back kind of tone, as though
wondering what the trap was.

"Here's a check for one thousand dollars drawn to your order," I
went on.  "And here's the address of Doctor Henry Jones, 1892
Eighth Avenue.  I want this money to reach him via your sick
people, and that without my name being known or at all
suspected."

"May I not ask the meaning of so peculiar a request?"

"He's hard up," I said, "and I want to help him.  It occurred to
me that I might make you--er--a confederate in my little game,
you know."

His eyes twinkled as he slowly folded up my check and put it in
his pocket.

"I don't want any economy about it, Bishop," I went on.  "I don't
want you to make the best use of it, or anything of that kind.  I
want to slap it into Doctor Jones' till, and slap it in quick"

"Would you consider two weeks--?"

"Oh, one, please!"

"It is understood, of course, that this young man is a duly
qualified and capable physician, and that in the event of my
finding it otherwise I shall be at liberty to direct your check
to other uses?"

"Oh, I can answer for his being all right, Bishop.  He's
thoroughly up-to-date, you know; does the X-ray act; and keeps
the pace of modern science."

"You say you can answer for him," said the bishop genially.
"Might I inquire who you are."

"I'm named Westoby--Ezra Westoby--managing partner of Hodge &
Westoby, boxers."

"I like boxers," said the bishop in the tone of a benediction,
rising to dismiss me.  "I like one thousand dollar checks, too.
When you have any more to spare just give them a fair wind in
this direction!"

I went out feeling that the Episcopal Church had risen fifty per
cent in my esteem.  Bishops like that would make a success of any
denomination.  I like to see a fellow who's on to his job.

I gave Jones a week to grapple with the new developments, and
then happened along.  The anteroom was full, and there was a
queue down the street like a line of music-loving citizens
waiting to hear Patti.  Nice, decent-looking people, with money
in their hands.  (I always like to see a cash business, don't
you?) I guess it took me an hour to crowd my way up stairs, and
even then I had to buy a man out of the line.

Jones was carrying off the boom more quietly than I cared about.
He wore a curt, snappy air.  I don't know why, but I felt
misgivings as I shook hands with him.

Of course I commented on the rush.

"The Lord only knows what's happened to my practice," he said.
"The blamed thing has gone up like a rocket.  It seems to me
there must be a great wave of sickness passing over New York just
now."

"Everybody's complaining," I said.

This reminded him of my insomnia till I cut him short.

"What's the matter with our going down to the Van Coorts' from
Saturday to Tuesday," I said.  "They haven't given up the hope of
seeing you there, Doctor, and the thing's still open."

Then I waited for him to jump with joy.

He didn't jump a bit.  He shook his head.  He distinctly said
"No."

"I told you it was the money side of it that bothered me," he
explained.  "So it was at the time, for, of course, I couldn't
foresee that my practice was going to fill the street and call
for policemen to keep order.  But, my dear Westoby, after giving
the subject a great deal of consideration I have come to the
conclusion that it would be too painful for me to revive those
--those--unhappy emotions I was just beginning to recover from!"

"I thought you loved her!" I exclaimed.

"That's why I've determined not to go," he said.  "I have outlived
one refusal.  How do I know I have the strength, the
determination, the hardihood to undergo the agonies of another?"

It seemed a feeble remark to say that faint heart never won fair
lady.  I growled it out more like a swear than anything else.  I
was disgusted with the chump.

"She's the star above me," he said; "and I am crushed by my own
presumption.  Is there any such fool as the man that breaks his
heart twice for the impossible?"

"But it isn't impossible," I cried.

"Hasn't she--as far as a woman can--hasn't she called you back to
her?  What more do you expect her to do?  A woman's delicacy
forbids her screaming for a man!  I think Eleanor has already
gone a tremendous way in just hinting--"

"You may be right," he said pathetically; "but then you may also
be wrong.  The risk is too terrible for me to run.  It will
comfort me all my life to think that perhaps; she does love me in
secret!"

"Do you mean to say you're going to give it all up?" I roared.

"You needn't get so warm about it," he returned.  "After all, I
have some justification in thinking she doesn't care."

"What on earth do you suppose she invited you for, then?"

"Well, it would be different," he said, "if I had a note from her
--a flower--some little tender reminder of those dear old dead
days in the Pullman!"

"She's saving up all that for Morristown," I said.

For the first time in our acquaintance Doctor Jones looked at me
with suspicion.  His blue eyes clouded.  He was growing a little
restive under my handling.

"You seem to make the matter a very personal one," he observed.

"Well, I love Freddy," I explained.  "It naturally brings your
own case very close to me.  And then I am so positive that you
love Eleanor and that Eleanor loves you.  Put yourself in my
place, Doctor!  Do you mean that you'd do nothing to bring two
such noble hearts together?"

He seized my hand and wrung it effusively.  He really did love
Eleanor, you know.  The only fault with him was his being so
darned humble about it.  He was eaten up with a sense of his own
inferiority.  And yet I could see he was just tingling to go to
Morristown.  Of course, I crowded him all I could, but the best I
could accomplish was his promise to "think it over."  I hated to
leave him wabbling, but patients were scuffling at the door and
fighting on the stairs.

The next thing I did was to get Freddy on the long-distance
'phone.

"Freddy," I said, after explaining the situation, "you must get
Eleanor to telegraph to him direct!"

"What's the good of asking what she won't do?" bubbled the sweet
little voice.

"Can't you persuade her?"

"I know she won't do it!"

"Then you must forge it," I said desperately.  "It needn't be
anything red-hot, you know.  But something tender and sincere:
'Shall be awfully disappointed if you don't come,' or, 'There was
a time when you would not have failed me!"'

"It's impossible."

"Then he won't budge a single inch!" I replied.

"Ezra?"

"Darling!"

"Suppose I just signed the telegram Van Coon?"

"The very thing!"

"If he misunderstood it--I mean if he thought it really came from
Eleanor--there couldn't be any fuss about it afterward, could
there?"

"And, of course, you'll send the official invitation from Mrs.
Matthewman besides?"

"For Saturday?"

"Yes, Saturday!"

"And you'll come?"

"Just watch me!"

"Ezra, are you happy?"

"That depends on Jones."

"Oh, isn't it exciting?"

"I have the ring in my pocket--"

"But touch wood, won't you?"

"Freddy?"

"Yes--"

"What's the matter with getting some for-get-me-nots and mailing
them to Jones in an envelope?"

"All right, I'll attend to it.  Eighteen ninety-two Eighth
Avenue, isn't it?"

"Be sure it is forget-me-nots, you know.  Don't mix up the
language of flowers, and send him one that says: 'I'm off with a
handsomer man,' or,' You needn't come round any more!'"

"Oh, Ezra, Eleanor is really getting quite worked up!"

"So am I!"

"Wouldn't it be perfectly splendid if--Switch off quick, here's
aunt coming!"

"Mayn't I even say I love you?"

"I daren't say it back, Ezra--she's calling."

"But do you?"

"Yes, unfortunately--"

"Why unfortun--?"

Buzz-buzz-swizzleum-bux-bux!--Aunt had cut us off.  However,
short as my little talk with Freddy had been, it brightened my
whole day.

Late the same afternoon, I went back to Doctor Jones.  I was
prepared to find him uplifted, but I hadn't counted on his being
maudlin.  The fellow was drunk, positively drunk--with happiness.
His tongue ran on like a mill-stream.  I had to sit down and have
the whole Pullman-car episode inflicted on me a second time.  I
was shown the receipt-slip.  I was shown the telegram from Eleanor.
I was shown with a whoop the forget-me-nots!  Then he was going on
Saturday?  I asked.  He said he guessed it would take an earthquake
to keep him away, and a pretty big earthquake, too! . . .  Oh, it
was a great moment, and all the greater because I was tremendously
worked up, too.  I saw Freddy floating before me, my sweet, girlish,
darling Freddy, holding out her arms while Jones gassed and gassed
and gassed.

I left him taking phenacetin for his headache.




III


The house-party had grown a little larger than was originally
intended.  On Saturday night we sat down twelve to dinner.
Doctor Jones and I shared a room together, and I must say
whatever misgivings I might have had about him wore away very
quickly on closer acquaintance.  In the first place he looked
well in evening dress, carrying himself with a sort of shy, kind
air that became him immensely.  At table he developed the
greatest of conversational gifts--that of the appreciative and
intelligent listener.  I heard one of the guests asking Eleanor
who was that charming young man.  Freddy and I hugged each other
(I mean metaphorically, of course) and gloried in his success.
In the presence of an admirer (such is the mystery of women)
Eleanor instantly got fifteen points better looking, and you
wouldn't have known her for the same girl.  Freddy thought it was
the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar gown she wore, but I could see
it was deeper than that.  She was thawing in the sunshine of
love, and I'll do Doctor Jones the justice to say that he didn't
hide his affection under a bushel.  It was generous enough for
everybody to bask in, and in his pell-mell ardor he took us all
to his bosom.  The women loved him for it, and entered into a
tacit conspiracy to gain him the right-of-way to wherever Eleanor
was to be found.  In fact, he followed her about like a dog, and
she could scarcely move without stepping on him.

Sunday was even better.  One of the housemaids drank some wood
alcohol by mistake for vichy water, and the resulting uproar
redounded to Jones' coolness, skill and despatch.  He dominated
the situation and--well, I won't describe it, this not being a
medical work, and the reader probably being a good guesser.  Mrs.
Matthewman remarked significantly that it must be nice to be the
wife of a medical man--one would always have the safe feeling of
a doctor at hand in case anything happened at night!  Eleanor
said it was a beautiful profession that had for its object the
alleviation of human pain.  Freddy.  jealously tried to get in a
good word for boxers, but nobody would listen to her except me.
It was all Jones, Jones, Jones, and the triumphs of modern
medicine.  Altogether he sailed through that whole day with
flying colors, first with the housemaid, and then afterward at
church, where he was the only one that knew what Sunday after
Epiphany it was.  He made it plainer than ever that he was a
model young man and a pattern.  Mrs.  Matthewman compared him to
her departed husband, and talked about old-fashioned courtesy and
the splendid men of her youth.  Everybody fell over everybody
else to praise him.  It was a regular Jones boom.  People began
to write down his address, and ask him if he'd be free Thursday,
or what about Friday, and started to book seats in advance.

That evening, as I was washing my hands before dinner and
cheerfully whistling Hiawatha, I became conscious that Jones was
lolling back on a sofa at the dark end of the room.  What
particularly arrested my attention was a groan--a hollow,
reverberatory groan--preceded by a pack of heartrending sighs.
It worried me--when everything seemed to be going so well.  He
had every right to be whistling Hiawatha, too.

"What's the matter, Jones?" said I.

He keeled over on the sofa, and groaned louder than ever.

"It isn't possible--that she's refused you?" I exclaimed.  He
muttered something about his mother.

"Well, what about your mother?" I said.

"Westoby," he returned, "I guess I was the worst kind of fool ever
to put my foot into this house."

That was nice news, wasn't it? Just as I was settling in my head
to buy that Seventy-second Street place, and alter the basement
into a garage!

"You see, old man, my mother would never consent to my marrying
Eleanor.  I'm in the position of having to choose between her and
the woman I love.  And I owe so much to my mother, Westoby.  She
stinted herself for years to get me through college; she hardly
had enough to eat; she . . . "  Then he groaned a lot more.

"I can't think that your mother--a--mother like yours, Jones--would
consent to stand between you and your lifelong happiness.  It's
morbid--that's what I call it--morbid, just to dream of such a thing."

"There's Bertha," he quavered.

"Great Scott, and who's Bertha?"

"The girl my mother chose for me two years ago--Bertha McNutt,
you know.  She'd really prefer me not to marry at all, but if I
must--it's Bertha, Westoby--Bertha or nothing!"

"It's too late to say that now, old fellow"

"It's not too late for me to go home this very night."

"Well, Jones," I broke out, "I can't think you'd do such a
caddish thing as that.  Think it over for a minute.  You come
down here; you sweep that unfortunate girl off her feet; you make
love to her with the fury of a stage villain; you force her to
betray her very evident partiality for you--and then you have the
effrontery to say: 'Good-by.  I'm off.'"

"My mother--" he began.

"You simply can not act so dishonorably, Jones."

He sat silent for a little while.

"My mother--" he started in again finally.

"Surely your mother loves you?" I demanded.

"That's the terrible part of it, Westoby, she--"

"Pooh!"

"She stinted herself to get me through col--"

"Then why did you ever come here?"

"That's just the question I'm asking myself now."

"I don't see that you have any right to assume all that about
your mother, anyway.  Eleanor Van Coort is a woman of a
thousand--unimpeachable social position--a little fortune of her
own--accomplished, handsome, charming, sought after--why, if
you managed to win such a girl as that your mother would walk
on air."

"No, she wouldn't.  Bertha--"

"You're a pretty cheap lover," I said.  "I don't set up to be a
little tin hero, but I'd go through fire and water for my girl.
Good heavens, love is love, and all the mothers--"

He let out a few more groans.

"Then, see here, Jones," I went on, "you owe some courtesy to our
hostesses.  If you went away to-night it would be an insult.
Whatever you decide to do later, you've simply got to stay here
till Tuesday morning!"

"Must I?" he said, in the tone of a person who is ordered not to
leave the sinking ship.

"A gentleman has to," I said.

He quavered out a sort of acquiescence, and then asked me for the
loan of a white tie.  I should have loved to give him a bowstring
instead, with somebody who knew how to operate it.  He was a
fluff, that fellow--a tarnation fluff!




IV


It was a pretty glum evening all round.  Most of them thought
that Jones had got the chilly mitt.  Eleanor looked pale and
undecided, not knowing what to make of Jones' death's-head face.
She was resentful and pitying in turns, and I saw all the
material lying around for a first-class conflagration.
Freddy was a bit down on me, too, saying that a smoother method
would have ironed out Jones, and that I had been headlong and
silly.  She cried over it, and wouldn't kiss me in the dark; and
I was goaded into saying--Well, the course of true love ran in
bumps that night.  There was only one redeeming circumstance, and
that was my managing to keep Jones and Eleanor apart.  I mean
that I insisted on being number three till at last poor Eleanor
said she had a headache, and forlornly went up to bed.

Jones was still asleep when I got up the next morning at six and
dressed myself quietly so as not to awake him.  It was now
Monday, and you can see for yourself there was no time to spare.
I gave the butler a dollar, and ordered him to say that
unexpected business had called me away without warning, but that
I should be back by luncheon.  I rather overdid the earliness of
it all.  At least, I hove off 1892 Eighth Avenue at eight-fifteen
A. M.  I loitered about; looked at pawnshop windows; gave a
careful examination to a forty-eight-dollars-ninety-eight-cent
complete outfit for a four-room flat; had a chat with a
policeman; assisted at a runaway; advanced a nickel to a colored
gentleman in distress; had my shoes shined by another; helped a
child catch an escaped parrot--and still it wasn't nine!
Idleness is a grinding occupation, especially on Eighth Avenue in
the morning.

Mrs. Jones was a thin, straight-backed, brisk old lady, with a
keen tongue, and a Yankee faculty for coming to the point.  I
besought her indulgence, and laid the whole Eleanor matter before
her--at least, as much of it as seemed wise.  I appeared in the
role of her son's warmest admirer and best friend.

"Surely you won't let Harry ruin his life from a mistaken sense
of his duty to you?"

"Duty, fiddlesticks!" said she.  "He's going to marry Bertha
McNutt!"

"But he doesn't want to marry Bertha McNutt!"

"Then he needn't marry anybody."

She seemed to think this a triumphant answer.  Indeed, in some
ways I must confess it was.  But still I persevered.

"It puts me out to have him shilly-shallying around like this,"
she said.  "I'll give him a good talking to when he gets back.
This other arrangement has been understood between Mrs. McNutt
and myself for years."

She was an irritating person.  I found it not a little difficult
to keep my temper with her.  It's easier to fight dragons than to
temporize with them and appeal to their better nature.  I
appealed and appealed.  She watched me with the same air of
interested detachment that one gives to a squirrel revolving in a
cage.  I could feel that she was flattered; her sense of power
was agreeably tickled; my earnestness and despair enhanced the
zest of her reiterated refusals.  I was a very nice young man,
but her son was going to marry Bertha McNutt or marry nobody!

Then I tried to draw a lurid picture of his revolt from her
apron-strings.

"Oh, Harry's a good boy," she said.  "You can't make me believe
that two days has altered his whole character.  I'll answer for
his doing what I want."

I felt a precisely similar conviction, and my heart sank into my
shoes.

At this moment there was a tap at the door, and another old lady
bounced in.  She was stout, jolly-looking and effusive.  The
greetings between the pair were warm, and they were evidently old
friends.  But underneath the new-comer's gush and noise I was
dimly conscious of a sort of gay hostility.  She was exultant and
frightened, both at once, and her eyes were sparkling.

"Well, what do you think?" she cried out, explosively.

Mrs. Jones' lips tightened.  There was a mean streak in that old
woman.  I could see she was feeling for her little hatchet, and
was getting out her little gun.

"Bertha!" exploded the old lady.  "Bertha--"

(Mysterious mental processes at once informed me that this was
none other than Bertha's mother.)

Mrs.  Jones was coolly taking aim.  I was reminded of that old
military dictum: "Don't shoot till you see the whites of their
eyes!"

"Bertha," vociferated the old lady fiercely--"Bertha has been
secretly married to Mr. Stuffenhammer for the last three months!"

Another series of kinematographic mental processes informed me
that Mr. Stuffenhammer was an immense catch.

"Twenty thousand dollars a year, and her own carriage," continued
Mrs. McNutt gloatingly.  "You could have knocked me down with a
feather.  Bertha is such a considerate child; she insisted on
marrying secretly so that she could tone it down by degrees to
poor Harry; though there was no engagement or anything like that,
she could not help feeling of course that she owed it to the dear
boy to gradually"

Mrs. Jones never turned a hair or moved a muscle.

"You needn't pity Harry," she said.  "I've just got the good news
that he's engaged to one of the sweetest and richest girls in
Morristown."

I jumped for my hat and ran.




V


You never saw anybody so electrified as Jones.  For a good minute
he couldn't even speak.  It was like bringing a horseback
reprieve to the hero on the stage.  He repeated "Stuffenhammer,
Stuffenhammer,"  In tones that Henry Irving might have envied,
while I gently undid the noose around his neck.  I led him under
a tree and told him to buck up.  He did so--slowly and surely--and
then began to ask me agitated questions about proposing.  He
deferred to me as though I had spent my whole life Bluebearding
through the social system.  He wanted to be coached how to do it,
you know.  I told him to rip out the words--any old words--and
then kiss her.

"Don't let there be any embarrassing pause," I said.  "A girl
hates pauses."

"It seems a great liberty," he returned.  "It doesn't strike me
as r-r-respectful."

"You try it," I said.  "It's the only way."

"I'll be glad when it's over," he remarked dreamily.

"Whatever you do, keep clear of set speeches;" I went on.  "Blurt
it out, no matter how badly--but with all the fire and ginger in
you."

He gazed at me like a dead calf.

"Here goes," he said, and started on a trembling walk toward the
house.

I don't know whether he was afraid, or didn't get the chance, or
what it was; but at any rate the afternoon wore on without the
least sign of his coming to time.  I kept tab on him as well as I
could--checkers with Miss Drayton--half an hour writing letters
--a long talk with the major--and finally his getting lost
altogether in the shrubbery with an old lady.  Freddy said the
suspense was killing her, and was terribly despondent and
miserable.  I couldn't interest her in the Seventy-second Street
house at all.  She asked what was the good of working and
worrying, and figuring and making lists--when in all probability
it would be another girl that would live there.  She had an
awfully mean opinion of my constancy, and was intolerably
philosophical and Oh-I-wouldn't-blame-you-the-least-little--bit
-if-you-did-go-off-and-marry-somebody-else!  She took a pathetic
pleasure in loving me, losing me, and then weeping over the dear
dead memory.  She said nobody ever got what they wanted, anyway;
and might she come, when she was old and ugly and faded and
weary, to take care of my children and be a sort of dear old
aunty in the Seventy-second Street house.  I said certainly not,
and we had a fight right away.

As we were dressing for dinner that night I took Jones to task,
and tried to stiffen him up.  I guess I must have mismanaged it
somehow, for he said he'd thank me to keep my paws out of his
affairs, and then went into the bath-room, where he shaved and
growled for ten whole minutes.  I itched to throw a bootjack at
him, but compromised on doing a little growling myself.
Afterward we got into our clothes in silence, and as he went out
first he slammed the door.

It was a disheartening evening.  We played progressive euchre for
a silly prize, and we all got shuffled up wrong and had to stay
so.  Then the major did amateur conjuring till we nearly died.  I
was thankful to sneak out-of-doors and smoke a cigar under the
starlight.  I walked up and down, consigning Jones to--well,
where I thought he belonged.  I thought of the time I had wasted
over the fellow--the good money--the hopes--I was savage with
disappointment, and when I heard Freddy softly calling me from
the veranda I zigzagged away through the trees toward the lodge
gate.  There are moments when a man is better left alone.
Besides, I was in one of those self-tormenting humors when it is
a positive pleasure to pile on the agony.  When you're eighty-eight
per cent miserable it's hell not to reach par.  I was sore all over,
and I wanted the balm--the consolation--to be found in the company
of those cold old stars, who have looked down in their time on such
countless generations of human asses.  It gave me a wonderful
sense of fellowship with the past and future.

I was reflecting on what an infinitesimal speck I was in the
general scheme of things, when I heard the footfall of another
human speck, stumbling through the dark and carrying a dress-suit
case.  It was Jones himself, outward bound, and doing five knots
an hour.  I was after him in a second, doing six.

"Jones!" I cried.

He never even turned round.

I grabbed him by the arm.  He wasn't going to walk away from me
like that.

"Where are you going?" I demanded.

"Home!"

"But say, stop; you can't do that.  It's too darned rude.  We
don't break up till tomorrow."

"I'm breaking up now," he said.

"Bu--"

"Let go my arm--!"

Oh, but, my dear chap--"I began.

"Don't you dear chap me!"

We strode on in silence.  Even his back looked sullen, and his
face under the gaslights.

"Westoby," he broke out suddenly, "if there's one thing I'm
sensitive about it is my name.  Slap me in the face, turn the
hose on me, rip the coat off my back--and you'd be astounded by
my mildness.  But when it comes to my name I--I'm a tiger!"

"A tiger," I repeated encouragingly.

"It all went swimmingly," he continued in a tone of angry
confidence.  "For five seconds I was the happiest man in the
United States.  I--I did everything you said, you know, and I was
dumfounded at my own success.  S-s-she loves me, Westoby."

I gazed inquiringly at the dress-suit case.

"We don't belong to any common Joneses.  We're Connecticut
Joneses.  In fact, we're the only Joneses--and the name is as
dear to me, as sacred, as I suppose that of Westoby is, perhaps,
to you.  And yet--and yet do you know what she actually said to
me?  Said to me, holding my hand, and, and that the only thing
she didn't like about me was my name."

I contrived to get out, "Good heavens!" with the proper
astonishment.

"I told her that Van Coort didn't strike me as being anything
very extra."

"Wouldn't it have been wiser to--?"

"Oh, for myself, I'd do anything in the world for her.  But a
fellow has to show a little decent pride.  A fellow owes
something to his family, doesn't he?  As a man I love the ground
she walks on; as a Jones--well, if she feels like that about it--I
told her she had better wait for a De Montmorency."

"But she didn't say she wouldn't marry you, did she?"

"N-o-o-o!"

"She didn't ask you to change your name, did she?"

"N-o-o-o!"

"And do you mean to say that just for one unfortunate remark--a
remark that any one might have made in the agitation of the
moment--you're deliberately turning your back on her, and her
broken heart!"

"Oh, she's red-hot, too, you know, over what I said about the Van
Coorts."

"She couldn't have realized that you belonged to the Connecticut
Joneses.  I didn't know it!"

"Well, it's all off now," he said.

It was a mile to the depot.  For Jones it was a mile of
reproaches, scoldings, lectures and insults.  For myself I shall
ever remember it as the mile of my life.  I pleaded,
argued, extenuated and explained.  My lifelong happiness--Freddy
--the Seventy-second Street house--were walking away
from me in the dark while I jerked unavailingly at Jones' coat-tails.
The whole outfit disappeared into a car, leaving me on the
platform with the ashes of my hopes.  Of all obstinate, mulish,
pig headed, copper-riveted--

I was lucky enough to find Eleanor crying softly to herself in a
corner of the veranda.  The sight of her tears revived my
fainting courage.  I thought of Bruce and the spider, and waded
in.

"Eleanor," I said, "I've just been seeing poor Jones off."

She sobbed out something to the effect that she didn't care.

"No, you can't care very much," I said, "or you wouldn't send a
man like that--a splendid fellow--a member of one of the oldest
and proudest families of Connecticut to his death."

"Death?"

"Well, he's off for Japan to-morrow.  They're getting through
fifty doctors a week out there at the front.  They're shot down
faster than they can set them up."

I was unprepared for the effect of this on Eleanor.  For two
cents she would have fainted then and there.  It's awful to hear
a woman moan, and clench her teeth, and pant for breath.

"Oh, Eleanor, can't you do anything?"

"I am helpless, Ezra.  My pride--my woman's pride"

"Oh, how can you let such trifles stand between you?  Think of
him out there, in his tattered Japanese uniform--so far from
home, so lonely, so heartbroken--standing undaunted in that rain
of steel, while--"

"Oh, Ezra, stop!  I can't bear it!  I can't bear it!"

"Is the love of three years to be thrown aside like an old glove,
just because--"

Her face was so wild and strained that the lies froze upon my
tongue.

"Oh, Ezra, I could follow him barefooted through the snow if only
he--"

"He's leaving Grand Central to-morrow at ten forty-five," I said.

She fumbled at her neck, and almost tore away the diamond locket
that reposed there.

"Take him this," she whispered hoarsely.  "Take it to him at
once, and say I sent it.  Say that I beg him to return--that my
pride crumbles at the thought of his going away so far into
danger."

I put the locket carefully into my pocket.

"And, Eleanor, try and don't rub him the wrong way about his
name.  Is it worth while?  There have to be Joneses, you know."

"Tell him," she burst out, "tell him--oh, I never meant to wound
him--truly, I didn't . . . a name that's good enough for him is
good enough for me!"

The next morning at nine I pulled up my Porcher-Mufflin car
before Jones' door.  He was sitting at his table reading a book,
and he made no motion to rise as I came in.  He gave me a pale,
expressionless stare instead, such as an ancient Christian might
have worn when the call-boy told him the lions were ready in the
Colosseum.  Resignation, obstinacy and defiance--all nicely
blended under a turn-the-other-cheek exterior.  He looked
woebegone, and his thin, handsome face betrayed a sleepless night
and a breakfastless morning.  I could feel that my presence was
the last straw to this unfortunate medical camel.

I threw in a genial remark about the weather, and took a seat.

Jones hunched himself together, and squirmed a sad little squirm.

"Mr. Westoby," he said, "I once made use of a very strong
expression in regard to you.  I said, if you remember, that I'd
be obliged if you'd keep your paws--"

"Don't apologize," I interrupted.  "I forgot it long ago."

"You've taken me up wrong," he continued drearily.  "I should like
you to consider the remark repeated now.  Yes, sir, repeated."

"Oh, bosh!" I exclaimed.

"You have a very tough epidermis," he went on.  "Quite the
toughest epidermis I have met with in my whole professional
career.  A paper adequately treating your epidermis would make a
sensation before any medical society."

Somehow I couldn't feel properly insulted.  The whole business
struck me as irresistibly comical.  I lay back in my chair--my
uninvited chair--and roared with laughter.

I couldn't forbear asking him what treatment he'd recommend.

He pointed to the door, and said laconically: "Fresh air."

I retorted by laying the diamond locket before him.

"My dear fellow," I said, as he gazed at it transfixed, "don't
let us go on like a pair of fools.  Eleanor charged me to give
you this, and beg you to return."

I don't believe he heard me at all.  That flashing trinket was
far more eloquent than any words of mine.  He laid his head in
his hands beside it, and his whole body trembled with emotion.
He trembled and trembled, till finally I got tired of waiting.  I
poked him in the back, and reminded him that my car was waiting
down stairs.  He rose with a strange, bewildered air, and
submitted like a child to be led into the street.  He had the
locket clenched in his hand, and every now and then he would
glance at it as though unable to believe his eyes.  I shut him
into the tonneau, and took a seat beside my chauffeur.

"Let her out, James," I said.

James let her out with a vengeance.  There was a sunny-haired
housemaid at the Van Coorts' . . . and it was a crack, new
four-cylinder car with a direct drive on the top speed.  Off we
went like the wind, jouncing poor Jones around the tonneau like a
pea in a pill-box.  But he didn't care.  Was he not seraphically
whizzing through space, obeying the diamond telegram of love?  In
the general whizzle and bang of the whole performance he even
ventured to raise his voice in song, and I could overhear him
behind me, adding a lyrical finish to the hum of the machinery.
It was a walloping run, and we only throttled down on the
outskirts of Morristown.  You see I had to coach him about that
Japanese war business, or else there might be trouble!  So I
leaned over the back seat and gently broke it to him I thought I
had managed it rather well.  I felt sure he could understand, I
said, the absolute need of a little--embellishing and--

"Let me out," he said.

I feverishly went on explaining.

"If you don't let me out I'll climb out," he said, and began to
make as good as his word over the tonneau.

Of course, there was nothing for it but to stop the car.

Jones deliberately descended and headed for New York.

I ran after him, while the chauffeur turned the car round and
slowly followed us both.  It was a queer procession.  First
Jones, then I, then the car.

Finally I overtook him.

"Jones," I panted.  "Jones."

He muttered something about Ananias, and speeded up.

"But it was an awfully tight place," I pleaded.  "Something had
to be done; you must make allowances; it was the first thing that
came into my head--and you must admit that it worked, Jones.
Didn't she send you the locket?  Didn't she--?"

"What a prancing, show-of, matinee fool you've made me look!" he
burst out.  "I have an old mother to support.  I have an
increasing practice.  I have already attracted some little
attention in my chosen field--eye, ear and throat.  A nice figure
I'd cut, traipsing around battle-fields in a kimono, and looking
for a kindly bullet to lay me low.  If I were ever tempted by
such a thing--which God forbid--wouldn't I prefer to spread
bacilli on buttered toast?"

"I never thought of that," I said humbly.

"I have known retail liars," he went on.  "But I guess you are the
only wholesaler in the business.  When other people are content
with ones and twos you get them out in grosses, packed for
export!"

He went on slamming me like this for miles.  Anybody else would
have given him up as hopeless.  I don't want to praise myself,
but if I have one good quality it's staying power.  I pleaded and
argued, and expostulated and explained, with the determination of
a man whose back is to the wall.  I wasn't going to lose Freddy
so long as there was breath in my body.  However, it wasn't the
least good in the world.  Jones was as impervious as sole-leather,
and as unshaken as a marble pillar.

Then I played my last card.

I told him the truth!  Not the whole truth, of course, but within
ten per cent of it.  About Freddy, you know, and how she was
determined not to marry before her elder sister, and how
Eleanor's only preference seemed to be for him, and how with such
a slender clue to work on I had engineered everything up to this
point.

"If I have seemed to you intolerably prying and officious," I
said, "well, at any rate, Jones, there's my excuse.  It rests
with you to give me Freddy or take her from me.  Turn back, and
you'll make me the happiest man alive; go forward, and--and--"

I watched him out of the corner of my eye.

His tread lost some of its elasticity.  He was short-circuiting
inside.  Positively he began to look sort of sympathetic and
human.

"Westoby," he said at last, in a voice almost of awe, "when they
get up another world's fair you must have a building to yourself.
You're colossal, that's what you are!"

"I'm only in love," I said.

"Well, that's the love that moves mountains," he said.  "If
anybody had told me that I should . . . "  He stopped
irresolutely on the word.

"Oh, to think I have to stand for all that rot!" he bleated.

I was too wise to say a word.  I simply motioned James to switch
the car around and back up.  I shooed Jones into the tonneau and
turned the knob on him.  He snuggled back in the cushions, and
smiled--yes, smiled--with a beautiful, blue-eyed, faraway,
indulgent expression that warmed me like spring sunshine.  Not
that I felt absolutely safe even yet--of course I couldn't--but
still--

We ran into Freddy and Eleanor at the lodge gates.  I had already
telephoned the former to expect us, so as to have everything fall
out naturally when the time came.  We stopped the car, and
descended--Jones and I--and he walked straight off with Eleanor,
while I side-stepped with Freddy.

She and I were almost too excited to talk.

It was now or never, you know, and there was an awfully solemn
look about both their backs that was either reassuring or
alarming--we couldn't decide quite which.  Freddy and I simply
held our breath and waited.

Finally, after an age, Jones and Eleanor turned, still close in
talk, still solemn and enigmatical, and drew toward us very
slowly and deliberately.  When they bad got quite close, and the
tension was at the breaking point, Eleanor suddenly made a little
rush, and, with a loud sob, threw her arms round Freddy's neck.

Jones fidgeted nervously about, and seemed to quail under my
questioning eyes.  It was impossible to tell whether things had
gone right or not.  I waited for him to speak . . .  I saw words
forming themselves hesitatingly on his lips . . . he bent toward
me quite confidentially.

"Say, old man," he whispered, "is there any place around here
where a fellow can buy an engagement ring?"