Indiscretions of Archie

It wasn’t Archie’s fault really. Its true he went to America and
fell in love with Lucille, the daughter of a millionaire hotel proprietor and
if he did marry her—well, what else was there to do?

From his point of view, the whole thing was a thoroughly good egg; but Mr.
Brewster, his father-in-law, thought differently, Archie had neither money nor
occupation, which was distasteful in the eyes of the industrious Mr. Brewster;
but the real bar was the fact that he had once adversely criticised one of his
hotels.

Archie does his best to heal the breach; but, being something of an ass, genus
priceless, he finds it almost beyond his powers to placate “the
man-eating fish” whom Providence has given him as a father-in-law

P. G. Wodehouse

AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE WARRIOR,” “A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS,”
“UNEASY MONEY,” ETC.

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT,1921, BY GEORGE H, DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY

(COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEDICATION

TO

B. W. KING-HALL

My dear Buddy,—

We have been friends for eighteen years. A considerable proportion of my books
were written under your hospitable roof. And yet I have never dedicated one to
you. What will be the verdict of Posterity on this? The fact is, I have become
rather superstitious about dedications. No sooner do you label a book with the
legend—

TO MY

BEST FRIEND

X

than X cuts you in Piccadilly, or you bring a lawsuit against him. There is a
fatality about it. However, I can’t imagine anyone quarrelling with you,
and I am getting more attractive all the time, so let’s take a chance.

Yours ever,

P. G. WODEHOUSE.

CHAPTER I.

DISTRESSING SCENE

“I say, laddie!” said Archie.

“Sir?” replied the desk-clerk alertly. All the employes of the
Hotel Cosmopolis were alert. It was one of the things on which Mr. Daniel
Brewster, the proprietor, insisted. And as he was always wandering about the
lobby of the hotel keeping a personal eye on affairs, it was never safe to
relax.

“I want to see the manager.”

“Is there anything I could do, sir?”

Archie looked at him doubtfully.

“Well, as a matter of fact, my dear old desk-clerk,” he said,
“I want to kick up a fearful row, and it hardly seems fair to lug you
into it. Why you, I mean to say? The blighter whose head I want on a charger is
the bally manager.”

At this point a massive, grey-haired man, who had been standing close by,
gazing on the lobby with an air of restrained severity, as if daring it to
start anything, joined in the conversation.

“I am the manager,” he said.

His eye was cold and hostile. Others, it seemed to say, might like Archie
Moffam, but not he. Daniel Brewster was bristling for combat. What he had
overheard had shocked him to the core of his being. The Hotel Cosmopolis was
his own private, personal property, and the thing dearest to him in the world,
after his daughter Lucille. He prided himself on the fact that his hotel was
not like other New York hotels, which were run by impersonal companies and
shareholders and boards of directors, and consequently lacked the paternal
touch which made the Cosmopolis what it was. At other hotels things went wrong,
and clients complained. At the Cosmopolis things never went wrong, because he
was on the spot to see that they didn’t, and as a result clients never
complained. Yet here was this long, thin, string-bean of an Englishman actually
registering annoyance and dissatisfaction before his very eyes.

“What is your complaint?” he enquired frigidly.

Archie attached himself to the top button of Mr. Brewster’s coat, and was
immediately dislodged by an irritable jerk of the other’s substantial
body.

“Listen, old thing! I came over to this country to nose about in search
of a job, because there doesn’t seem what you might call a general demand
for my services in England. Directly I was demobbed, the family started talking
about the Land of Opportunity and shot me on to a liner. The idea was that I
might get hold of something in America—”

He got hold of Mr. Brewster’s coat-button, and was again shaken off.

“Between ourselves, I’ve never done anything much in England, and I
fancy the family were getting a bit fed. At any rate, they sent me over
here—”

Mr. Brewster disentangled himself for the third time.

“I would prefer to postpone the story of your life,” he said
coldly, “and be informed what is your specific complaint against the
Hotel Cosmopolis.”

“Of course, yes. The jolly old hotel. I’m coming to that. Well, it
was like this. A chappie on the boat told me that this was the best place to
stop at in New York—”

“He was quite right,” said Mr. Brewster.

“Was he, by Jove! Well, all I can say, then, is that the other New York
hotels must be pretty mouldy, if this is the best of the lot! I took a room
here last night,” said Archie quivering with self-pity, “and there
was a beastly tap outside somewhere which went drip-drip-drip all night and
kept me awake.”

Mr. Brewster’s annoyance deepened. He felt that a chink had been found in
his armour. Not even the most paternal hotel-proprietor can keep an eye on
every tap in his establishment.

“Drip-drip-drip!” repeated Archie firmly. “And I put my boots
outside the door when I went to bed, and this morning they hadn’t been
touched. I give you my solemn word! Not touched.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Brewster. “My employés are
honest.”

“But I wanted them cleaned, dash it!”

“There is a shoe-shining parlour in the basement. At the Cosmopolis shoes
left outside bedroom doors are not cleaned.”

“Then I think the Cosmopolis is a bally rotten hotel!”

Mr. Brewster’s compact frame quivered. The unforgivable insult had been
offered. Question the legitimacy of Mr. Brewster’s parentage, knock Mr.
Brewster down and walk on his face with spiked shoes, and you did not
irremediably close all avenues to a peaceful settlement. But make a remark like
that about his hotel, and war was definitely declared.

“In that case,” he said, stiffening, “I must ask you to give
up your room.”

“I’m going to give it up! I wouldn’t stay in the bally place
another minute.”

Mr. Brewster walked away, and Archie charged round to the cashier’s desk
to get his bill. It had been his intention in any case, though for dramatic
purposes he concealed it from his adversary, to leave the hotel that morning.
One of the letters of introduction which he had brought over from England had
resulted in an invitation from a Mrs. van Tuyl to her house-party at Miami, and
he had decided to go there at once.

“Well,” mused Archie, on his way to the station, “one
thing’s certain. I’ll never set foot in that bally place
again!”

But nothing in this world is certain.

CHAPTER II.

A SHOCK FOR MR. BREWSTER

Mr. Daniel Brewster sat in his luxurious suite at the Cosmopolis, smoking one
of his admirable cigars and chatting with his old friend, Professor Binstead. A
stranger who had only encountered Mr. Brewster in the lobby of the hotel would
have been surprised at the appearance of his sitting-room, for it had none of
the rugged simplicity which was the keynote of its owner’s personal
appearance. Daniel Brewster was a man with a hobby. He was what Parker, his
valet, termed a connoozer. His educated taste in Art was one of the things
which went to make the Cosmopolis different from and superior to other New York
hotels. He had personally selected the tapestries in the dining-room and the
various paintings throughout the building. And in his private capacity he was
an enthusiastic collector of things which Professor Binstead, whose tastes lay
in the same direction, would have stolen without a twinge of conscience if he
could have got the chance.

The professor, a small man of middle age who wore tortoiseshell-rimmed
spectacles, flitted covetously about the room, inspecting its treasures with a
glistening eye. In a corner, Parker, a grave, lean individual, bent over the
chafing-dish, in which he was preparing for his employer and his guest their
simple lunch.

“Brewster,” said Professor Binstead, pausing at the mantelpiece.

Mr. Brewster looked up amiably. He was in placid mood to-day. Two weeks and
more had passed since the meeting with Archie recorded in the previous chapter,
and he had been able to dismiss that disturbing affair from his mind. Since
then, everything had gone splendidly with Daniel Brewster, for he had just
accomplished his ambition of the moment by completing the negotiations for the
purchase of a site further down-town, on which he proposed to erect a new
hotel. He liked building hotels. He had the Cosmopolis, his first-born, a
summer hotel in the mountains, purchased in the previous year, and he was
toying with the idea of running over to England and putting up another in
London, That, however, would have to wait. Meanwhile, he would concentrate on
this new one down-town. It had kept him busy and worried, arranging for
securing the site; but his troubles were over now.

“Yes?” he said.

Professor Binstead had picked up a small china figure of delicate workmanship.
It represented a warrior of pre-khaki days advancing with a spear upon some
adversary who, judging from the contented expression on the warrior’s
face, was smaller than himself.

“Where did you get this?”

“That? Mawson, my agent, found it in a little shop on the east
side.”

“Where’s the other? There ought to be another. These things go in
pairs. They’re valueless alone.”

Mr. Brewster’s brow clouded.

“I know that,” he said shortly. “Mawson’s looking for
the other one everywhere. If you happen across it, I give you carte
blanche to buy it for me.”

“It must be somewhere.”

“Yes. If you find it, don’t worry about the expense. I’ll
settle up, no matter what it is.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” said Professor Binstead. “It
may cost you a lot of money. I suppose you know that.”

“I told you I don’t care what it costs.”

“It’s nice to be a millionaire,” sighed Professor Binstead.

“Luncheon is served, sir,” said Parker.

He had stationed himself in a statutesque pose behind Mr. Brewster’s
chair, when there was a knock at the door. He went to the door, and returned
with a telegram.

“Telegram for you, sir.”

Mr. Brewster nodded carelessly. The contents of the chafing-dish had justified
the advance advertising of their odour, and he was too busy to be interrupted.

“Put it down. And you needn’t wait, Parker.”

“Very good, sir.”

The valet withdrew, and Mr. Brewster resumed his lunch.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” asked Professor Binstead, to
whom a telegram was a telegram.

“It can wait. I get them all day long. I expect it’s from Lucille,
saying what train she’s making.”

“She returns to-day?”

“Yes, Been at Miami.” Mr. Brewster, having dwelt at adequate length
on the contents of the chafing-dish, adjusted his glasses and took up the
envelope. “I shall be glad—Great Godfrey!”

He sat staring at the telegram, his mouth open. His friend eyed him
solicitously.

“No bad news, I hope?”

Mr. Brewster gurgled in a strangled way.

“Bad news? Bad—? Here, read it for yourself.”

Professor Binstead, one of the three most inquisitive men in New York, took the
slip of paper with gratitude.

“‘Returning New York to-day with darling Archie,’” he
read. “‘Lots of love from us both. Lucille.’” He gaped
at his host. “Who is Archie?” he enquired.

“Who is Archie?” echoed Mr. Brewster helplessly. “Who
is—? That’s just what I would like to know.”

“‘Darling Archie,’” murmured the professor, musing over
the telegram. “‘Returning to-day with darling Archie.’
Strange!”

Mr. Brewster continued to stare before him. When you send your only daughter on
a visit to Miami minus any entanglements and she mentions in a telegram that
she has acquired a darling Archie, you are naturally startled. He rose from the
table with a bound. It had occurred to him that by neglecting a careful study
of his mail during the past week, as was his bad habit when busy, he had lost
an opportunity of keeping abreast with current happenings. He recollected now
that a letter had arrived from Lucille some time ago, and that he had put it
away unopened till he should have leisure to read it. Lucille was a dear girl,
he had felt, but her letters when on a vacation seldom contained anything that
couldn’t wait a few days for a reading. He sprang for his desk, rummaged
among his papers, and found what he was seeking.

It was a long letter, and there was silence in the room for some moments while
he mastered its contents. Then he turned to the professor, breathing heavily.

“Good heavens!”

“Yes?” said Professor Binstead eagerly. “Yes?”

“Good Lord!”

“Well?”

“Good gracious!”

“What is it?” demanded the professor in an agony.

Mr. Brewster sat down again with a thud.

“She’s married!”

“Married!”

“Married! To an Englishman!”

“Bless my soul!”

“She says,” proceeded Mr. Brewster, referring to the letter again,
“that they were both so much in love that they simply had to slip off and
get married, and she hopes I won’t be cross. Cross!” gasped Mr.
Brewster, gazing wildly at his friend.

“Very disturbing!”

“Disturbing! You bet it’s disturbing! I don’t know anything
about the fellow. Never heard of him in my life. She says he wanted a quiet
wedding because he thought a fellow looked such a chump getting married! And I
must love him, because he’s all set to love me very much!”

“Extraordinary!”

Mr. Brewster put the letter down.

“An Englishman!”

“I have met some very agreeable Englishmen,” said Professor
Binstead.

“I don’t like Englishmen,” growled Mr. Brewster.
“Parker’s an Englishman.”

“Your valet?”

“Yes. I believe he wears my shirts on the sly,’” said Mr.
Brewster broodingly, “If I catch him—! What would you do about
this, Binstead?”

“Do?” The professor considered the point judicially. “Well,
really, Brewster, I do not see that there is anything you can do. You must
simply wait and meet the man. Perhaps he will turn out an admirable
son-in-law.”

“H’m!” Mr. Brewster declined to take an optimistic view.
“But an Englishman, Binstead!” he said with pathos.
“Why,” he went on, memory suddenly stirring, “there was an
Englishman at this hotel only a week or two ago who went about knocking it in a
way that would have amazed you! Said it was a rotten place! My
hotel!”

Professor Binstead clicked his tongue sympathetically. He understood his
friend’s warmth.

CHAPTER III.

MR. BREWSTER DELIVERS SENTENCE

At about the same moment that Professor Binstead was clicking his tongue in Mr.
Brewster’s sitting-room, Archie Moffam sat contemplating his bride in a
drawing-room on the express from Miami. He was thinking that this was too good
to be true. His brain had been in something of a whirl these last few days, but
this was one thought that never failed to emerge clearly from the welter.

Mrs. Archie Moffam, nee Lucille Brewster, was small and slender. She had a
little animated face, set in a cloud of dark hair. She was so altogether
perfect that Archie had frequently found himself compelled to take the
marriage-certificate out of his inside pocket and study it furtively, to make
himself realise that this miracle of good fortune had actually happened to him.

“Honestly, old bean—I mean, dear old thing,—I mean,
darling,” said Archie, “I can’t believe it!”

“What?”

“What I mean is, I can’t understand why you should have married a
blighter like me.”

Lucille’s eyes opened. She squeezed his hand.

“Why, you’re the most wonderful thing in the world,
precious!—Surely you know that?”

“Absolutely escaped my notice. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! You wonder-child! Nobody could see you without
loving you!”

Archie heaved an ecstatic sigh. Then a thought crossed his mind. It was a
thought which frequently came to mar his bliss.

“I say, I wonder if your father will think that!”

“Of course he will!”

“We rather sprung this, as it were, on the old lad,” said Archie
dubiously. “What sort of a man is your father?”

“Father’s a darling, too.”

“Rummy thing he should own that hotel,” said Archie. “I had a
frightful row with a blighter of a manager there just before I left for Miami.
Your father ought to sack that chap. He was a blot on the landscape!”

It had been settled by Lucille during the journey that Archie should be broken
gently to his father-in-law. That is to say, instead of bounding blithely into
Mr. Brewster’s presence hand in hand, the happy pair should separate for
half an hour or so, Archie hanging around in the offing while Lucille saw her
father and told him the whole story, or those chapters of it which she had
omitted from her letter for want of space. Then, having impressed Mr. Brewster
sufficiently with his luck in having acquired Archie for a son-in-law, she
would lead him to where his bit of good fortune awaited him.

The programme worked out admirably in its earlier stages. When the two emerged
from Mr. Brewster’s room to meet Archie, Mr. Brewster’s general
idea was that fortune had smiled upon him in an almost unbelievable fashion and
had presented him with a son-in-law who combined in almost equal parts the more
admirable characteristics of Apollo, Sir Galahad, and Marcus Aurelius. True, he
had gathered in the course of the conversation that dear Archie had no
occupation and no private means; but Mr. Brewster felt that a great-souled man
like Archie didn’t need them. You can’t have everything, and
Archie, according to Lucille’s account, was practically a hundred per
cent man in soul, looks, manners, amiability, and breeding. These are the
things that count. Mr. Brewster proceeded to the lobby in a glow of optimism
and geniality.

Consequently, when he perceived Archie, he got a bit of a shock.

“Hullo—ullo—ullo!” said Archie, advancing happily.

“Archie, darling, this is father,” said Lucille.

“Good Lord!” said Archie.

There was one of those silences. Mr. Brewster looked at Archie. Archie gazed at
Mr. Brewster. Lucille, perceiving without understanding why that the big
introduction scene had stubbed its toe on some unlooked-for obstacle, waited
anxiously for enlightenment. Meanwhile, Archie continued to inspect Mr.
Brewster, and Mr. Brewster continued to drink in Archie.

After an awkward pause of about three and a quarter minutes, Mr. Brewster
swallowed once or twice, and finally spoke.

“Lu!”

“Yes, father?”

“Is this true?”

Lucille’s grey eyes clouded over with perplexity and apprehension.

“True?”

“Have you really inflicted this—this on me for a
son-in-law?” Mr. Brewster swallowed a few more times, Archie the while
watching with a frozen fascination the rapid shimmying of his new
relative’s Adam’s-apple. “Go away! I want to have a few words
alone with this—This—wassyourdamname?” he demanded, in
an overwrought manner, addressing Archie for the first time.

“I told you, father. It’s Moom.”

“Moom?”

“It’s spelt M-o-f-f-a-m, but pronounced Moom.”

“To rhyme,” said Archie, helpfully, “with
Bluffinghame.”

“Lu,” said Mr. Brewster, “run away! I want to speak
to-to-to—”

“You called me this before,” said Archie.

“You aren’t angry, father, dear?” said Lucilla.

“Oh no! Oh no! I’m tickled to death!”

When his daughter had withdrawn, Mr. Brewster drew a long breath.

“Now then!” he said.

“Bit embarrassing, all this, what!” said Archie, chattily. “I
mean to say, having met before in less happy circs. and what not. Rum
coincidence and so forth! How would it be to bury the jolly old
hatchet—start a new life—forgive and forget—learn to love
each other—and all that sort of rot? I’m game if you are. How do we
go? Is it a bet?”

Mr. Brewster remained entirely unsoftened by this manly appeal to his better
feelings.

“What the devil do you mean by marrying my daughter?”

Archie reflected.

“Well, it sort of happened, don’t you know! You know how these
things are! Young yourself once, and all that. I was most frightfully in
love, and Lu seemed to think it wouldn’t be a bad scheme, and one thing
led to another, and—well, there you are, don’t you know!”

“And I suppose you think you’ve done pretty well for
yourself?”

“Oh, absolutely! As far as I’m concerned, everything’s
topping! I’ve never felt so braced in my life!”

“Yes!” said Mr. Brewster, with bitterness, “I suppose, from
your view-point, everything is ‘topping.’ You haven’t
a cent to your name, and you’ve managed to fool a rich man’s
daughter into marrying you. I suppose you looked me up in Bradstreet before
committing yourself?”

This aspect of the matter had not struck Archie until this moment.

“I say!” he observed, with dismay. “I never looked at it like
that before! I can see that, from your point of view, this must look like a bit
of a wash-out!”

“How do you propose to support Lucille, anyway?”

Archie ran a finger round the inside of his collar. He felt embarrassed, His
father-in-law was opening up all kinds of new lines of thought.

“Well, there, old bean,” he admitted, frankly, “you rather
have me!” He turned the matter over for a moment. “I had a sort of
idea of, as it were, working, if you know what I mean.”

“Working at what?”

“Now, there again you stump me somewhat! The general scheme was that I
should kind of look round, you know, and nose about and buzz to and fro till
something turned up. That was, broadly speaking, the notion!”

“And how did you suppose my daughter was to live while you were doing all
this?”

“Well, I think,” said Archie, “I think we rather
expected you to rally round a bit for the nonce!”

“I see! You expected to live on me?”

“Well, you put it a bit crudely, but—as far as I had mapped
anything out—that WAS what you might call the general scheme of
procedure. You don’t think much of it, what? Yes? No?”

Mr. Brewster exploded.

“No! I do not think much of it! Good God! You go out of my
hotel—my hotel—calling it all the names you could think
of—roasting it to beat the band—”

“Trifle hasty!” murmured Archie, apologetically. “Spoke
without thinking. Dashed tap had gone drip-drip-drip all
night—kept me awake—hadn’t had breakfast—bygones be
bygones—!”

“Don’t interrupt! I say, you go out of my hotel, knocking it as no
one has ever knocked it since it was built, and you sneak straight off and
marry my daughter without my knowledge.”

“Did think of wiring for blessing. Slipped the old bean, somehow. You
know how one forgets things!”

“And now you come back and calmly expect me to fling my arms round you
and kiss you, and support you for the rest of your life!”

“Only while I’m nosing about and buzzing to and fro.”

“Well, I suppose I’ve got to support you. There seems no way out of
it. I’ll tell you exactly what I propose to do. You think my hotel is a
pretty poor hotel, eh? Well, you’ll have plenty of opportunity of
judging, because you’re coming to live here. I’ll let you have a
suite and I’ll let you have your meals, but outside of that—nothing
doing! Nothing doing! Do you understand what I mean?”

“Absolutely! You mean, ‘Napoo!’”

“You can sign bills for a reasonable amount in my restaurant, and the
hotel will look after your laundry. But not a cent do you get out of me. And,
if you want your shoes shined, you can pay for it yourself in the basement. If
you leave them outside your door, I’ll instruct the floor-waiter to throw
them down the air-shaft. Do you understand? Good! Now, is there anything more
you want to ask?”

Archie smiled a propitiatory smile.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I was going to ask if you would stagger along
and have a bite with us in the grill-room?”

“I will not!”

“I’ll sign the bill,” said Archie, ingratiatingly. “You
don’t think much of it? Oh, right-o!”

CHAPTER IV.

WORK WANTED

It seemed to Archie, as he surveyed his position at the end of the first month
of his married life, that all was for the best in the best of all possible
worlds. In their attitude towards America, visiting Englishmen almost
invariably incline to extremes, either detesting all that therein is or else
becoming enthusiasts on the subject of the country, its climate, and its
institutions. Archie belonged to the second class. He liked America and got on
splendidly with Americans from the start. He was a friendly soul, a mixer; and
in New York, that city of mixers, he found himself at home. The atmosphere of
good-fellowship and the open-hearted hospitality of everybody he met appealed
to him. There were moments when it seemed to him as though New York had simply
been waiting for him to arrive before giving the word to let the revels
commence.

Nothing, of course, in this world is perfect; and, rosy as were the glasses
through which Archie looked on his new surroundings, he had to admit that there
was one flaw, one fly in the ointment, one individual caterpillar in the salad.
Mr. Daniel Brewster, his father-in-law, remained consistently unfriendly.
Indeed, his manner towards his new relative became daily more and more a manner
which would have caused gossip on the plantation if Simon Legree had exhibited
it in his relations with Uncle Tom. And this in spite of the fact that Archie,
as early as the third morning of his stay, had gone to him and in the most
frank and manly way, had withdrawn his criticism of the Hotel Cosmopolis,
giving it as his considered opinion that the Hotel Cosmopolis on closer
inspection appeared to be a good egg, one of the best and brightest, and a bit
of all right.

“A credit to you, old thing,” said Archie cordially.

“Don’t call me old thing!” growled Mr. Brewster.

“Right-o, old companion!” said Archie amiably.

Archie, a true philosopher, bore this hostility with fortitude, but it worried
Lucille.

“I do wish father understood you better,” was her wistful comment
when Archie had related the conversation.

“Well, you know,” said Archie, “I’m open for being
understood any time he cares to take a stab at it.”

“You must try and make him fond of you.”

“But how? I smile winsomely at him and what not, but he doesn’t
respond.”

“Well, we shall have to think of something. I want him to realise what an
angel you are. You are an angel, you know.”

“No, really?”

“Of course you are.”

“It’s a rummy thing,” said Archie, pursuing a train of
thought which was constantly with him, “the more I see of you, the more I
wonder how you can have a father like—I mean to say, what I mean to say
is, I wish I had known your mother; she must have been frightfully
attractive.”

“What would really please him, I know,” said Lucille, “would
be if you got some work to do. He loves people who work.”

“Yes?” said Archie doubtfully. “Well, you know, I heard him
interviewing that chappie behind the desk this morning, who works like the
dickens from early morn to dewy eve, on the subject of a mistake in his
figures; and, if he loved him, he dissembled it all right. Of course, I admit
that so far I haven’t been one of the toilers, but the dashed difficult
thing is to know how to start. I’m nosing round, but the openings for a
bright young man seem so scarce.”

“Well, keep on trying. I feel sure that, if you could only find something
to do, it doesn’t matter what, father would be quite different.”

It was possibly the dazzling prospect of making Mr. Brewster quite different
that stimulated Archie. He was strongly of the opinion that any change in his
father-in-law must inevitably be for the better. A chance meeting with James B.
Wheeler, the artist, at the Pen-and-Ink Club seemed to open the way.

To a visitor to New York who has the ability to make himself liked it almost
appears as though the leading industry in that city was the issuing of
two-weeks’ invitation-cards to clubs. Archie since his arrival had been
showered with these pleasant evidences of his popularity; and he was now an
honorary member of so many clubs of various kinds that he had not time to go to
them all. There were the fashionable clubs along Fifth Avenue to which his
friend Reggie van Tuyl, son of his Florida hostess, had introduced him. There
were the businessmen’s clubs of which he was made free by more solid
citizens. And, best of all, there were the Lambs’, the Players’,
the Friars’, the Coffee-House, the Pen-and-Ink,—and the other
resorts of the artist, the author, the actor, and the Bohemian. It was in these
that Archie spent most of his time, and it was here that he made the
acquaintance of J. B. Wheeler, the popular illustrator.

To Mr. Wheeler, over a friendly lunch, Archie had been confiding some of his
ambitions to qualify as the hero of one of the
Get-on-or-get-out-young-man-step-lively-books.

“You want a job?” said Mr. Wheeler.

“I want a job,” said Archie.

Mr. Wheeler consumed eight fried potatoes in quick succession. He was an able
trencherman.

“I always looked on you as one of our leading lilies of the field,”
he said. “Why this anxiety to toil and spin?”

“Well, my wife, you know, seems to think it might put me one-up with the
jolly old dad if I did something.”

“And you’re not particular what you do, so long as it has the outer
aspect of work?”

“Anything in the world, laddie, anything in the world.”

“Then come and pose for a picture I’m doing,” said J. B.
Wheeler. “It’s for a magazine cover. You’re just the model I
want, and I’ll pay you at the usual rates. Is it a go?”

“Pose?”

“You’ve only got to stand still and look like a chunk of wood. You
can do that, surely?”

“I can do that,” said Archie.

“Then come along down to my studio to-morrow.”

“Right-o!” said Archie.

CHAPTER V.

STRANGE EXPERIENCES OF AN ARTIST’S MODEL

“I say, old thing!”

Archie spoke plaintively. Already he was looking back ruefully to the time when
he had supposed that an artist’s model had a soft job. In the first five
minutes muscles which he had not been aware that he possessed had started to
ache like neglected teeth. His respect for the toughness and durability of
artists’ models was now solid. How they acquired the stamina to go
through this sort of thing all day and then bound off to Bohemian revels at
night was more than he could understand.

“Don’t wobble, confound you!” snorted Mr. Wheeler.

“Yes, but, my dear old artist,” said Archie, “what you
don’t seem to grasp—what you appear not to realise—is that
I’m getting a crick in the back.”

“You weakling! You miserable, invertebrate worm. Move an inch and
I’ll murder you, and come and dance on your grave every Wednesday and
Saturday. I’m just getting it.”

“It’s in the spine that it seems to catch me principally.”

“Be a man, you faint-hearted string-bean!” urged J. B. Wheeler.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why, a girl who was posing for me
last week stood for a solid hour on one leg, holding a tennis racket over her
head and smiling brightly withal.”

“The female of the species is more india-rubbery than the male,”
argued Archie.

“Well, I’ll be through in a few minutes. Don’t weaken. Think
how proud you’ll be when you see yourself on all the bookstalls.”

Archie sighed, and braced himself to the task once more. He wished he had never
taken on this binge. In addition to his physical discomfort, he was feeling a
most awful chump. The cover on which Mr. Wheeler was engaged was for the August
number of the magazine, and it had been necessary for Archie to drape his
reluctant form in a two-piece bathing suit of a vivid lemon colour; for he was
supposed to be representing one of those jolly dogs belonging to the best
families who dive off floats at exclusive seashore resorts. J. B. Wheeler, a
stickler for accuracy, had wanted him to remove his socks and shoes; but there
Archie had stood firm. He was willing to make an ass of himself, but not a
silly ass.

“All right,” said J. B. Wheeler, laying down his brush. “That
will do for to-day. Though, speaking without prejudice and with no wish to be
offensive, if I had had a model who wasn’t a weak-kneed, jelly-backboned
son of Belial, I could have got the darned thing finished without having to
have another sitting.”

“I wonder why you chappies call this sort of thing
‘sitting,’” said Archie, pensively, as he conducted tentative
experiments in osteopathy on his aching back. “I say, old thing, I could
do with a restorative, if you have one handy. But, of course, you
haven’t, I suppose,” he added, resignedly. Abstemious as a rule,
there were moments when Archie found the Eighteenth Amendment somewhat trying.

J. B. Wheeler shook his head.

“You’re a little previous,” he said. “But come round in
another day or so, and I may be able to do something for you.” He moved
with a certain conspirator-like caution to a corner of the room, and, lifting
to one side a pile of canvases, revealed a stout barrel, which he regarded with
a fatherly and benignant eye. “I don’t mind telling you that, in
the fullness of time, I believe this is going to spread a good deal of
sweetness and light.”

“Oh, ah,” said Archie, interested. “Home-brew, what?”

“Made with these hands. I added a few more raisins yesterday, to speed
things up a bit. There is much virtue in your raisin. And, talking of speeding
things up, for goodness’ sake try to be a bit more punctual to-morrow. We
lost an hour of good daylight to-day.”

“I like that! I was here on the absolute minute. I had to hang about on
the landing waiting for you.”

“Well, well, that doesn’t matter,” said J. B. Wheeler,
impatiently, for the artist soul is always annoyed by petty details. “The
point is that we were an hour late in getting to work. Mind you’re here
to-morrow at eleven sharp.”

It was, therefore, with a feeling of guilt and trepidation that Archie mounted
the stairs on the following morning; for in spite of his good resolutions he
was half an hour behind time. He was relieved to find that his friend had also
lagged by the wayside. The door of the studio was ajar, and he went in, to
discover the place occupied by a lady of mature years, who was scrubbing the
floor with a mop. He went into the bedroom and donned his bathing suit. When he
emerged, ten minutes later, the charwoman had gone, but J. B. Wheeler was still
absent. Rather glad of the respite, he sat down to kill time by reading the
morning paper, whose sporting page alone he had managed to master at the
breakfast table.

There was not a great deal in the paper to interest him. The usual bond-robbery
had taken place on the previous day, and the police were reported hot on the
trail of the Master-Mind who was alleged to be at the back of these financial
operations. A messenger named Henry Babcock had been arrested and was expected
to become confidential. To one who, like Archie, had never owned a bond, the
story made little appeal. He turned with more interest to a cheery half-column
on the activities of a gentleman in Minnesota who, with what seemed to Archie,
as he thought of Mr. Daniel Brewster, a good deal of resource and public
spirit, had recently beaned his father-in-law with the family meat-axe. It was
only after he had read this through twice in a spirit of gentle approval that
it occurred to him that J. B. Wheeler was uncommonly late at the tryst. He
looked at his watch, and found that he had been in the studio three-quarters of
an hour.

Archie became restless. Long-suffering old bean though he was, he considered
this a bit thick. He got up and went out on to the landing, to see if there
were any signs of the blighter. There were none. He began to understand now
what had happened. For some reason or other the bally artist was not coming to
the studio at all that day. Probably he had called up the hotel and left a
message to this effect, and Archie had just missed it. Another man might have
waited to make certain that his message had reached its destination, but not
woollen-headed Wheeler, the most casual individual in New York.

Thoroughly aggrieved, Archie turned back to the studio to dress and go away.

His progress was stayed by a solid, forbidding slab of oak. Somehow or other,
since he had left the room, the door had managed to get itself shut.

“Oh, dash it!” said Archie.

The mildness of the expletive was proof that the full horror of the situation
had not immediately come home to him. His mind in the first few moments was
occupied with the problem of how the door had got that way. He could not
remember shutting it. Probably he had done it unconsciously. As a child, he had
been taught by sedulous elders that the little gentleman always closed doors
behind him, and presumably his subconscious self was still under the influence.
And then, suddenly, he realised that this infernal, officious ass of a
subconscious self had deposited him right in the gumbo. Behind that closed
door, unattainable as youthful ambition, lay his gent’s heather-mixture
with the green twill, and here he was, out in the world, alone, in a
lemon-coloured bathing suit.

In all crises of human affairs there are two broad courses open to a man. He
can stay where he is or he can go elsewhere. Archie, leaning on the banisters,
examined these alternatives narrowly. If he stayed where he was he would have
to spend the night on this dashed landing. If he legged it, in this kit, he
would be gathered up by the constabulary before he had gone a hundred yards. He
was no pessimist, but he was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that he was
up against it.

It was while he was musing with a certain tenseness on these things that the
sound of footsteps came to him from below. But almost in the first instant the
hope that this might be J. B. Wheeler, the curse of the human race, died away.
Whoever was coming up the stairs was running, and J. B. Wheeler never ran
upstairs. He was not one of your lean, haggard, spiritual-looking geniuses. He
made a large income with his brush and pencil, and spent most of it in creature
comforts. This couldn’t be J. B. Wheeler.

It was not. It was a tall, thin man whom he had never seen before. He appeared
to be in a considerable hurry. He let himself into the studio on the floor
below, and vanished without even waiting to shut the door.

He had come and disappeared in almost record time, but, brief though his
passing had been, it had been long enough to bring consolation to Archie. A
sudden bright light had been vouchsafed to Archie, and he now saw an admirably
ripe and fruity scheme for ending his troubles. What could be simpler than to
toddle down one flight of stairs and in an easy and debonair manner ask the
chappie’s permission to use his telephone? And what could be simpler,
once he was at the ’phone, than to get in touch with somebody at the
Cosmopolis who would send down a few trousers and what not in a kit bag. It was
a priceless solution, thought Archie, as he made his way downstairs. Not even
embarrassing, he meant to say. This chappie, living in a place like this,
wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the spectacle of a fellow trickling about the
place in a bathing suit. They would have a good laugh about the whole thing.

“I say, I hate to bother you—dare say you’re busy and all
that sort of thing—but would you mind if I popped in for half a second
and used your ’phone?”

That was the speech, the extremely gentlemanly and well-phrased speech which
Archie had prepared to deliver the moment the man appeared. The reason he did
not deliver it was that the man did not appear. He knocked, but nothing
stirred.

“I say!”

Archie now perceived that the door was ajar, and that on an envelope attached
with a tack to one of the panels was the name “Elmer M. Moon” He
pushed the door a little farther open and tried again.

“Oh, Mr. Moon! Mr. Moon!” He waited a moment. “Oh, Mr. Moon!
Mr. Moon! Are you there, Mr. Moon?”

He blushed hotly. To his sensitive ear the words had sounded exactly like the
opening line of the refrain of a vaudeville song-hit. He decided to waste no
further speech on a man with such an unfortunate surname until he could see him
face to face and get a chance of lowering his voice a bit. Absolutely absurd to
stand outside a chappie’s door singing song-hits in a lemon-coloured
bathing suit. He pushed the door open and walked in; and his subconscious self,
always the gentleman, closed it gently behind him.

“Up!” said a low, sinister, harsh, unfriendly, and unpleasant
voice.

“Eh?” said Archie, revolving sharply on his axis.

He found himself confronting the hurried gentleman who had run upstairs. This
sprinter had produced an automatic pistol, and was pointing it in a truculent
manner at his head. Archie stared at his host, and his host stared at him.

“Put your hands up,” he said.

“Oh, right-o! Absolutely!” said Archie. “But I mean to
say—”

The other was drinking him in with considerable astonishment. Archie’s
costume seemed to have made a powerful impression upon him.

“Who the devil are you?” he enquired.

“Me? Oh, my name’s—”

“Never mind your name. What are you doing here?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I popped in to ask if I might use your
’phone. You see—”

A certain relief seemed to temper the austerity of the other’s gaze. As a
visitor, Archie, though surprising, seemed to be better than he had expected.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” he said, meditatively.

“If you’d just let me toddle to the ’phone—”

“Likely!” said the man. He appeared to reach a decision.
“Here, go into that room.”

He indicated with a jerk of his head the open door of what was apparently a
bedroom at the farther end of the studio.

“I take it,” said Archie, chattily, “that all this may seem
to you not a little rummy.”

“Get on!”

“I was only saying—”

“Well, I haven’t time to listen. Get a move on!”

The bedroom was in a state of untidiness which eclipsed anything which Archie
had ever witnessed. The other appeared to be moving house. Bed, furniture, and
floor were covered with articles of clothing. A silk shirt wreathed itself
about Archie’s ankles as he stood gaping, and, as he moved farther into
the room, his path was paved with ties and collars.

“Sit down!” said Elmer M. Moon, abruptly.

“Right-o! Thanks,” said Archie, “I suppose you wouldn’t
like me to explain, and what not, what?”

“No!” said Mr. Moon. “I haven’t got your spare time.
Put your hands behind that chair.”

Archie did so, and found them immediately secured by what felt like a silk tie.
His assiduous host then proceeded to fasten his ankles in a like manner. This
done, he seemed to feel that he had done all that was required of him, and he
returned to the packing of a large suitcase which stood by the window.

“I say!” said Archie.

Mr. Moon, with the air of a man who has remembered something which he had
overlooked, shoved a sock in his guest’s mouth and resumed his packing.
He was what might be called an impressionist packer. His aim appeared to be
speed rather than neatness. He bundled his belongings in, closed the bag with
some difficulty, and, stepping to the window, opened it. Then he climbed out on
to the fire-escape, dragged the suit-case after him, and was gone.

Archie, left alone, addressed himself to the task of freeing his prisoned
limbs. The job proved much easier than he had expected. Mr. Moon, that hustler,
had wrought for the moment, not for all time. A practical man, he had been
content to keep his visitor shackled merely for such a period as would permit
him to make his escape unhindered. In less than ten minutes Archie, after a
good deal of snake-like writhing, was pleased to discover that the thingummy
attached to his wrists had loosened sufficiently to enable him to use his
hands. He untied himself and got up.

He now began to tell himself that out of evil cometh good. His encounter with
the elusive Mr. Moon had not been an agreeable one, but it had had this solid
advantage, that it had left him right in the middle of a great many clothes.
And Mr. Moon, whatever his moral defects, had the one excellent quality of
taking about the same size as himself. Archie, casting a covetous eye upon a
tweed suit which lay on the bed, was on the point of climbing into the trousers
when on the outer door of the studio there sounded a forceful knocking.

“Open up here!”

CHAPTER VI.

THE BOMB

Archie bounded silently out into the other room and stood listening tensely. He
was not a naturally querulous man, but he did feel at this point that Fate was
picking on him with a somewhat undue severity.

“In th’ name av th’ Law!”

There are times when the best of us lose our heads. At this juncture Archie
should undoubtedly have gone to the door, opened it, explained his presence in
a few well-chosen words, and generally have passed the whole thing off with
ready tact. But the thought of confronting a posse of police in his present
costume caused him to look earnestly about him for a hiding-place.

Up against the farther wall was a settee with a high, arching back, which might
have been put there for that special purpose. He inserted himself behind this,
just as a splintering crash announced that the Law, having gone through the
formality of knocking with its knuckles, was now getting busy with an axe. A
moment later the door had given way, and the room was full of trampling feet.
Archie wedged himself against the wall with the quiet concentration of a clam
nestling in its shell, and hoped for the best.

It seemed to him that his immediate future depended for better or for worse
entirely on the native intelligence of the Force. If they were the bright,
alert men he hoped they were, they would see all that junk in the bedroom and,
deducing from it that their quarry had stood not upon the order of his going
but had hopped it, would not waste time in searching a presumably empty
apartment. If, on the other hand, they were the obtuse, flat-footed persons who
occasionally find their way into the ranks of even the most enlightened
constabularies, they would undoubtedly shift the settee and drag him into a
publicity from which his modest soul shrank. He was enchanted, therefore, a few
moments later, to hear a gruff voice state that th’ mutt had beaten it
down th’ fire-escape. His opinion of the detective abilities of the New
York police force rose with a bound.

There followed a brief council of war, which, as it took place in the bedroom,
was inaudible to Archie except as a distant growling noise. He could
distinguish no words, but, as it was succeeded by a general trampling of large
boots in the direction of the door and then by silence, he gathered that the
pack, having drawn the studio and found it empty, had decided to return to
other and more profitable duties. He gave them a reasonable interval for
removing themselves, and then poked his head cautiously over the settee.

All was peace. The place was empty. No sound disturbed the stillness.

Archie emerged. For the first time in this morning of disturbing occurrences he
began to feel that God was in his heaven and all right with the world. At last
things were beginning to brighten up a bit, and life might be said to have
taken on some of the aspects of a good egg. He stretched himself, for it is
cramping work lying under settees, and, proceeding to the bedroom, picked up
the tweed trousers again.

Clothes had a fascination for Archie. Another man, in similar circumstances,
might have hurried over his toilet; but Archie, faced by a difficult choice of
ties, rather strung the thing out. He selected a specimen which did great
credit to the taste of Mr. Moon, evidently one of our snappiest dressers, found
that it did not harmonise with the deeper meaning of the tweed suit, removed
it, chose another, and was adjusting the bow and admiring the effect, when his
attention was diverted by a slight sound which was half a cough and half a
sniff; and, turning, found himself gazing into the clear blue eyes of a large
man in uniform, who had stepped into the room from the fire-escape. He was
swinging a substantial club in a negligent sort of way, and he looked at Archie
with a total absence of bonhomie.

“Ah!” he observed.

“Oh, there you are!” said Archie, subsiding weakly against
the chest of drawers. He gulped. “Of course, I can see you’re
thinking all this pretty tolerably weird and all that,” he proceeded, in
a propitiatory voice.

The policeman attempted no analysis of his emotions, He opened a mouth which a
moment before had looked incapable of being opened except with the assistance
of powerful machinery, and shouted a single word.

“Cassidy!”

A distant voice gave tongue in answer. It was like alligators roaring to their
mates across lonely swamps.

There was a rumble of footsteps in the region of the stairs, and presently
there entered an even larger guardian of the Law than the first exhibit. He,
too, swung a massive club, and, like his colleague, he gazed frostily at
Archie.

“God save Ireland!” he remarked.

The words appeared to be more in the nature of an expletive than a practical
comment on the situation. Having uttered them, he draped himself in the doorway
like a colossus, and chewed gum.

“Where ja get him?” he enquired, after a pause.

“Found him in here attimpting to disguise himself.”

“I told Cap. he was hiding somewheres, but he would have it that
he’d beat it down th’ escape,” said the gum-chewer, with the
sombre triumph of the underling whose sound advice has been overruled by those
above him. He shifted his wholesome (or, as some say, unwholesome) morsel to
the other side of his mouth, and for the first time addressed Archie directly.
“Ye’re pinched!” he observed.

Archie started violently. The bleak directness of the speech roused him with a
jerk from the dream-like state into which he had fallen. He had not anticipated
this. He had assumed that there would be a period of tedious explanations to be
gone through before he was at liberty to depart to the cosy little lunch for
which his interior had been sighing wistfully this long time past; but that he
should be arrested had been outside his calculations. Of course, he could put
everything right eventually; he could call witnesses to his character and the
purity of his intentions; but in the meantime the whole dashed business would
be in all the papers, embellished with all those unpleasant flippancies to
which your newspaper reporter is so prone to stoop when he sees half a chance.
He would feel a frightful chump. Chappies would rot him about it to the most
fearful extent. Old Brewster’s name would come into it, and he could not
disguise it from himself that his father-in-law, who liked his name in the
papers as little as possible, would be sorer than a sunburned neck.

“No, I say, you know! I mean, I mean to say!”

“Pinched!” repeated the rather larger policeman.

“And annything ye say,” added his slightly smaller colleague,
“will be used agenst ya ’t the trial.”

“And if ya try t’escape,” said the first speaker, twiddling
his club, “ya’ll getja block knocked off.”

And, having sketched out this admirably clear and neatly-constructed scenario,
the two relapsed into silence. Officer Cassidy restored his gum to circulation.
Officer Donahue frowned sternly at his boots.

“But, I say,” said Archie, “it’s all a mistake, you
know. Absolutely a frightful error, my dear old constables. I’m not the
lad you’re after at all. The chappie you want is a different sort of
fellow altogether. Another blighter entirely.”

New York policemen never laugh when on duty. There is probably something in the
regulations against it. But Officer Donahue permitted the left corner of his
mouth to twitch slightly, and a momentary muscular spasm disturbed the calm of
Officer Cassidy’s granite features, as a passing breeze ruffles the
surface of some bottomless lake.

“That’s what they all say!” observed Officer Donahue.

“It’s no use tryin’ that line of talk,” said Officer
Cassidy. “Babcock’s squealed.”

“Sure. Squealed ’s morning,” said Officer Donahue.

Archie’s memory stirred vaguely.

“Babcock?” he said. “Do you know, that name seems familiar to
me, somehow. I’m almost sure I’ve read it in the paper or
something.”

“Ah, cut it out!” said Officer Cassidy, disgustedly. The two
constables exchanged a glance of austere disapproval. This hypocrisy pained
them. “Read it in th’ paper or something!”

“By Jove! I remember now. He’s the chappie who was arrested in that
bond business. For goodness’ sake, my dear, merry old constables,”
said Archie, astounded, “you surely aren’t labouring under the
impression that I’m the Master-Mind they were talking about in the paper?
Why, what an absolutely priceless notion! I mean to say, I ask you, what!
Frankly, laddies, do I look like a Master-Mind?”

Officer Cassidy heaved a deep sigh, which rumbled up from his interior like the
first muttering of a cyclone.

“If I’d known,” he said, regretfully, “that this guy
was going to turn out a ruddy Englishman, I’d have taken a slap at him
with m’ stick and chanced it!”

Officer Donahue considered the point well taken.

“Ah!” he said, understandingly. He regarded Archie with an
unfriendly eye. “I know th’ sort well! Trampling on th’ face
av th’ poor!”

“Ya c’n trample on the poor man’s face,” said Officer
Cassidy, severely; “but don’t be surprised if one day he bites you
in the leg!”

“But, my dear old sir,” protested Archie, “I’ve never
trampled—”

“One of these days,” said Officer Donahue, moodily, “the
Shannon will flow in blood to the sea!”

“Absolutely! But—”

Officer Cassidy uttered a glad cry.

“Why couldn’t we hit him a lick,” he suggested, brightly,
“an’ tell th’ Cap. he resisted us in th’ exercise of
our jooty?”

An instant gleam of approval and enthusiasm came into Officer Donahue’s
eyes. Officer Donahue was not a man who got these luminous inspirations
himself, but that did not prevent him appreciating them in others and bestowing
commendation in the right quarter. There was nothing petty or grudging about
Officer Donahue.

“Ye’re the lad with the head, Tim!” he exclaimed admiringly.

“It just sorta came to me,” said Mr. Cassidy, modestly.

“It’s a great idea, Timmy!”

“Just happened to think of it,” said Mr. Cassidy, with a coy
gesture of self-effacement.

Archie had listened to the dialogue with growing uneasiness. Not for the first
time since he had made their acquaintance, he became vividly aware of the
exceptional physical gifts of these two men. The New York police force demands
from those who would join its ranks an extremely high standard of stature and
sinew, but it was obvious that jolly old Donahue and Cassidy must have passed
in first shot without any difficulty whatever.

“I say, you know,” he observed, apprehensively.

And then a sharp and commanding voice spoke from the outer room.

“Donahue! Cassidy! What the devil does this mean?”

Archie had a momentary impression that an angel had fluttered down to his
rescue. If this was the case, the angel had assumed an effective
disguise—that of a police captain. The new arrival was a far smaller man
than his subordinates—so much smaller that it did Archie good to look at
him. For a long time he had been wishing that it were possible to rest his eyes
with the spectacle of something of a slightly less out-size nature than his two
companions.

“Why have you left your posts?”

The effect of the interruption on the Messrs. Cassidy and Donahue was
pleasingly instantaneous. They seemed to shrink to almost normal proportions,
and their manner took on an attractive deference.

Officer Donahue saluted.

“If ye plaze, sorr—”

Officer Cassidy also saluted, simultaneously.

“’Twas like this, sorr—”

The captain froze Officer Cassidy with a glance and, leaving him congealed,
turned to Officer Donahue.

“Oi wuz standing on th’ fire-escape, sorr,” said Officer
Donahue, in a tone of obsequious respect which not only delighted, but
astounded Archie, who hadn’t known he could talk like that,
“accordin’ to instructions, when I heard a suspicious noise. I
crope in, sorr, and found this duck—found the accused, sorr—in
front of the mirror, examinin’ himself. I then called to Officer Cassidy
for assistance. We pinched—arrested um, sorr.”

The captain looked at Archie. It seemed to Archie that he looked at him coldly
and with contempt.

“Who is he?”

“The Master-Mind, sorr.”

“The what?”

“The accused, sorr. The man that’s wanted.”

“You may want him. I don’t,” said the captain. Archie, though
relieved, thought he might have put it more nicely. “This isn’t
Moon. It’s not a bit like him.”

“Absolutely not!” agreed Archie, cordially. “It’s all a
mistake, old companion, as I was trying to—”

“Cut it out!”

“Oh, right-o!”

“You’ve seen the photographs at the station. Do you mean to tell me
you see any resemblance?”

“If ye plaze, sorr,” said Officer Cassidy, coming to life.

“Well?”

“We thought he’d bin disguising himself, the way he wouldn’t
be recognised.”

“You’re a fool!” said the captain.

“Yes, sorr,” said Officer Cassidy, meekly.

“So are you, Donahue.”

“Yes, sorr.”

Archie’s respect for this chappie was going up all the time. He seemed to
be able to take years off the lives of these massive blighters with a word. It
was like the stories you read about lion-tamers. Archie did not despair of
seeing Officer Donahue and his old college chum Cassidy eventually jumping
through hoops.

“Who are you?” demanded the captain, turning to Archie.

“Well, my name is—”

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, it’s rather a longish story, you know. Don’t want to
bore you, and all that.”

“I’m here to listen. You can’t bore me.”

“Dashed nice of you to put it like that,” said Archie, gratefully.
“I mean to say, makes it easier and so forth. What I mean is, you know
how rotten you feel telling the deuce of a long yarn and wondering if the party
of the second part is wishing you would turn off the tap and go home. I
mean—”

“If,” said the captain, “you’re reciting something,
stop. If you’re trying to tell me what you’re doing here, make it
shorter and easier.”

Archie saw his point. Of course, time was money—the modern spirit of
hustle—all that sort of thing.

“Well, it was this bathing suit, you know,” he said.

“What bathing suit?”

“Mine, don’t you know. A lemon-coloured contrivance. Rather bright
and so forth, but in its proper place not altogether a bad egg. Well, the whole
thing started, you know, with my standing on a bally pedestal sort of
arrangement in a diving attitude—for the cover, you know. I don’t
know if you have ever done anything of that kind yourself, but it gives you a
most fearful crick in the spine. However, that’s rather beside the point,
I suppose—don’t know why I mentioned it. Well, this morning he was
dashed late, so I went out—”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

Archie looked at him, surprised.

“Aren’t I making it clear?”

“No.”

“Well, you understand about the bathing suit, don’t you? The jolly
old bathing suit, you’ve grasped that, what?”

“No.”

“Oh, I say,” said Archie. “That’s rather a nuisance. I
mean to say, the bathing suit’s what you might call the good old pivot of
the whole dashed affair, you see. Well, you understand about the cover, what?
You’re pretty clear on the subject of the cover?”

“What cover?”

“Why, for the magazine.”

“What magazine?”

“Now there you rather have me. One of these bright little periodicals,
you know, that you see popping to and fro on the bookstalls.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the
captain. He looked at Archie with an expression of distrust and hostility.
“And I’ll tell you straight out I don’t like the looks of
you. I believe you’re a pal of his.”

“No longer,” said Archie, firmly. “I mean to say, a chappie
who makes you stand on a bally pedestal sort of arrangement and get a crick in
the spine, and then doesn’t turn up and leaves you biffing all over the
countryside in a bathing suit—”

The reintroduction of the bathing suit motive seemed to have the worst effect
on the captain. He flushed darkly.

“Are you trying to josh me? I’ve a mind to soak you!”

“If ye plaze, sorr,” cried Officer Donahue and Officer Cassidy in
chorus. In the course of their professional career they did not often hear
their superior make many suggestions with which they saw eye to eye, but he had
certainly, in their opinion, spoken a mouthful now.

“No, honestly, my dear old thing, nothing was farther from my
thoughts—”

He would have spoken further, but at this moment the world came to an end. At
least, that was how it sounded. Somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood
something went off with a vast explosion, shattering the glass in the window,
peeling the plaster from the ceiling, and sending him staggering into the
inhospitable arms of Officer Donahue.

The three guardians of the Law stared at one another.

“If ye plaze, sorr,” said Officer Cassidy, saluting.

“Well?”

“May I spake, sorr?”

“Well?”

“Something’s exploded, sorr!”

The information, kindly meant though it was, seemed to annoy the captain.

“What the devil did you think I thought had happened?” he demanded,
with not a little irritation, “It was a bomb!”

Archie could have corrected this diagnosis, for already a faint but appealing
aroma of an alcoholic nature was creeping into the room through a hole in the
ceiling, and there had risen before his eyes the picture of J. B. Wheeler
affectionately regarding that barrel of his on the previous morning in the
studio upstairs. J. B. Wheeler had wanted quick results, and he had got them.
Archie had long since ceased to regard J. B. Wheeler as anything but a tumour
on the social system, but he was bound to admit that he had certainly done him
a good turn now. Already these honest men, diverted by the superior attraction
of this latest happening, appeared to have forgotten his existence.

“Sorr!” said Officer Donahue.

“Well?”

“It came from upstairs, sorr.”

“Of course it came from upstairs. Cassidy!”

“Sorr?”

“Get down into the street, call up the reserves, and stand at the front
entrance to keep the crowd back. We’ll have the whole city here in five
minutes.”

“Right, sorr.”

“Don’t let anyone in.”

“No, sorr.”

“Well, see that you don’t. Come along, Donahue, now. Look
slippy.”

“On the spot, sorr!” said Officer Donahue.

A moment later Archie had the studio to himself. Two minutes later he was
picking his way cautiously down the fire-escape after the manner of the recent
Mr. Moon. Archie had not seen much of Mr. Moon, but he had seen enough to know
that in certain crises his methods were sound and should be followed. Elmer
Moon was not a good man; his ethics were poor and his moral code shaky; but in
the matter of legging it away from a situation of peril and discomfort he had
no superior.

CHAPTER VII.

MR. ROSCOE SHERRIFF HAS AN IDEA

Archie inserted a fresh cigarette in his long holder and began to smoke a
little moodily. It was about a week after his disturbing adventures in J. B.
Wheeler’s studio, and life had ceased for the moment to be a thing of
careless enjoyment. Mr. Wheeler, mourning over his lost home-brew and refusing,
like Niobe, to be comforted, has suspended the sittings for the magazine cover,
thus robbing Archie of his life-work. Mr. Brewster had not been in genial mood
of late. And, in addition to all this, Lucille was away on a visit to a
school-friend. And when Lucille went away, she took with her the sunshine.
Archie was not surprised at her being popular and in demand among her friends,
but that did not help him to become reconciled to her absence.

He gazed rather wistfully across the table at his friend, Roscoe Sherriff, the
Press-agent, another of his Pen-and-Ink Club acquaintances. They had just
finished lunch, and during the meal Sherriff, who, like most men of action, was
fond of hearing the sound of his own voice and liked exercising it on the
subject of himself, had been telling Archie a few anecdotes about his
professional past. From these the latter had conceived a picture of Roscoe
Sherriff’s life as a prismatic thing of energy and adventure and
well-paid withal—just the sort of life, in fact, which he would have
enjoyed leading himself. He wished that he, too, like the Press-agent, could go
about the place “slipping things over” and “putting things
across.” Daniel Brewster, he felt, would have beamed upon a son-in-law
like Roscoe Sherriff.

“The more I see of America,” sighed Archie, “the more it
amazes me. All you birds seem to have been doing things from the cradle
upwards. I wish I could do things!”

“Well, why don’t you?”

Archie flicked the ash from his cigarette into the finger-bowl.

“Oh, I don’t know, you know,” he said, “Somehow, none
of our family ever have. I don’t know why it is, but whenever a Moffam
starts out to do things he infallibly makes a bloomer. There was a Moffam in
the Middle Ages who had a sudden spasm of energy and set out to make a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, dressed as a wandering friar. Rum ideas they had in
those days.”

“Did he get there?”

“Absolutely not! Just as he was leaving the front door his favourite
hound mistook him for a tramp—or a varlet, or a scurvy knave, or whatever
they used to call them at that time—and bit him in the fleshy part of the
leg.”

“Well, at least he started.”

“Enough to make a chappie start, what?”

Roscoe Sherriff sipped his coffee thoughtfully. He was an apostle of Energy,
and it seemed to him that he could make a convert of Archie and incidentally do
himself a bit of good. For several days he had been, looking for someone like
Archie to help him in a small matter which he had in mind.

“If you’re really keen on doing things,” he said,
“there’s something you can do for me right away.”

Archie beamed. Action was what his soul demanded.

“Anything, dear boy, anything! State your case!”

“Would you have any objection to putting up a snake for me?”

“Putting up a snake?”

“Just for a day or two.”

“But how do you mean, old soul? Put him up where?”

“Wherever you live. Where do you live? The Cosmopolis, isn’t it? Of
course! You married old Brewster’s daughter. I remember reading about
it.”

“But, I say, laddie, I don’t want to spoil your day and disappoint
you and so forth, but my jolly old father-in-law would never let me keep a
snake. Why, it’s as much as I can do to make him let me stop on in the
place.”

“He wouldn’t know.”

“There’s not much that goes on in the hotel that he doesn’t
know,” said Archie, doubtfully.

“He mustn’t know. The whole point of the thing is that it must be a
dead secret.”

Archie flicked some more ash into the finger-bowl.

“I don’t seem absolutely to have grasped the affair in all its
aspects, if you know what I mean,” he said. “I mean to say—in
the first place—why would it brighten your young existence if I
entertained this snake of yours?”

“It’s not mine. It belongs to Mme. Brudowska. You’ve heard of
her, of course?”

“Oh yes. She’s some sort of performing snake female in vaudeville
or something, isn’t she, or something of that species or order?”

“You’re near it, but not quite right. She is the leading exponent
of high-brow tragedy on any stage in the civilized world.”

“Absolutely! I remember now. My wife lugged me to see her perform one
night. It all comes back to me. She had me wedged in an orchestra-stall before
I knew what I was up against, and then it was too late. I remember reading in
some journal or other that she had a pet snake, given her by some Russian
prince or other, what?”

“That,” said Sherriff, “was the impression I intended to
convey when I sent the story to the papers. I’m her Press-agent. As a
matter of fact, I bought Peter-its name’s Peter-myself down on the East
Side. I always believe in animals for Press-agent stunts. I’ve nearly
always had good results. But with Her Nibs I’m handicapped. Shackled, so
to speak. You might almost say my genius is stifled. Or strangled, if you
prefer it.”

“Anything you say,” agreed Archie, courteously, “But how? Why
is your what-d’you-call-it what’s-its-named?”

“She keeps me on a leash. She won’t let me do anything with a kick
in it. If I’ve suggested one rip-snorting stunt, I’ve suggested
twenty, and every time she turns them down on the ground that that sort of
thing is beneath the dignity of an artist in her position. It doesn’t
give a fellow a chance. So now I’ve made up my mind to do her good by
stealth. I’m going to steal her snake.”

“Steal it? Pinch it, as it were?”

“Yes. Big story for the papers, you see. She’s grown very much
attached to Peter. He’s her mascot. I believe she’s practically
kidded herself into believing that Russian prince story. If I can sneak it away
and keep it away for a day or two, she’ll do the rest. She’ll make
such a fuss that the papers will be full of it.”

“I see.”

“Wow, any ordinary woman would work in with me. But not Her Nibs. She
would call it cheap and degrading and a lot of other things. It’s got to
be a genuine steal, and, if I’m caught at it, I lose my job. So
that’s where you come in.”

“But where am I to keep the jolly old reptile?”

“Oh, anywhere. Punch a few holes in a hat-box, and make it up a shakedown
inside. It’ll be company for you.”

“Something in that. My wife’s away just now and it’s a bit
lonely in the evenings.”

“You’ll never be lonely with Peter around. He’s a great
scout. Always merry and bright.”

“He doesn’t bite, I suppose, or sting or what-not?”

“He may what-not occasionally. It depends on the weather. But, outside of
that, he’s as harmless as a canary.”

“Dashed dangerous things, canaries,” said Archie, thoughtfully.
“They peck at you.”

“Don’t weaken!” pleaded the Press-agent

“Oh, all right. I’ll take him. By the way, touching the matter of
browsing and sluicing. What do I feed him on?”

“Oh, anything. Bread-and-milk or fruit or soft-boiled egg or dog-biscuit
or ants’-eggs. You know—anything you have yourself. Well, I’m
much obliged for your hospitality. I’ll do the same for you another time.
Now I must be getting along to see to the practical end of the thing. By the
way, Her Nibs lives at the Cosmopolis, too. Very convenient. Well, so long. See
you later.”

Archie, left alone, began for the first time to have serious doubts. He had
allowed himself to be swayed by Mr. Sherriff’s magnetic personality, but
now that the other had removed himself he began to wonder if he had been
entirely wise to lend his sympathy and co-operation to the scheme. He had never
had intimate dealings with a snake before, but he had kept silkworms as a
child, and there had been the deuce of a lot of fuss and unpleasantness over
them. Getting into the salad and what-not. Something seemed to tell him that he
was asking for trouble with a loud voice, but he had given his word and he
supposed he would have to go through with it.

He lit another cigarette and wandered out into Fifth Avenue. His usually smooth
brow was ruffled with care. Despite the eulogies which Sherriff had uttered
concerning Peter, he found his doubts increasing. Peter might, as the
Press-agent had stated, be a great scout, but was his little Garden of Eden on
the fifth floor of the Cosmopolis Hotel likely to be improved by the advent of
even the most amiable and winsome of serpents? However—

“Moffam! My dear fellow!”

The voice, speaking suddenly in his ear from behind, roused Archie from his
reflections. Indeed, it roused him so effectually that he jumped a clear inch
off the ground and bit his tongue. Revolving on his axis, he found himself
confronting a middle-aged man with a face like a horse. The man was dressed in
something of an old-world style. His clothes had an English cut. He had a
drooping grey moustache. He also wore a grey bowler hat flattened at the
crown—but who are we to judge him?

“Archie Moffam! I have been trying to find you all the morning.”

Archie had placed him now. He had not seen General Mannister for several
years—not, indeed, since the days when he used to meet him at the home of
young Lord Seacliff, his nephew. Archie had been at Eton and Oxford with
Seacliff, and had often visited him in the Long Vacation.

“Halloa, General! What ho, what ho! What on earth are you doing over
here?”

“Let’s get out of this crush, my boy.” General Mannister
steered Archie into a side-street, “That’s better.” He
cleared his throat once or twice, as if embarrassed. “I’ve brought
Seacliff over,” he said, finally.

“Dear old Squiffy here? Oh, I say! Great work!”

General Mannister did not seem to share his enthusiasm. He looked like a horse
with a secret sorrow. He coughed three times, like a horse who, in addition to
a secret sorrow, had contracted asthma.

“You will find Seacliff changed,” he said. “Let me see, how
long is it since you and he met?”

Archie reflected.

“I was demobbed just about a year ago. I saw him in Paris about a year
before that. The old egg got a bit of shrapnel in his foot or something,
didn’t he? Anyhow, I remember he was sent home.”

“His foot is perfectly well again now. But, unfortunately, the enforced
inaction led to disastrous results. You recollect, no doubt, that Seacliff
always had a—a tendency;—a—a weakness—it was a family
failing—”

“Mopping it up, do you mean? Shifting it? Looking on the jolly old stuff
when it was red and what not, what?”

“Exactly.”

Archie nodded.

“Dear old Squiffy was always rather a lad for the wassail-bowl. When I
met him in Paris, I remember, he was quite tolerably blotto.”

“Precisely. And the failing has, I regret to say, grown on him since he
returned from the war. My poor sister was extremely worried. In fact, to cut a
long story short, I induced him to accompany me to America. I am attached to
the British Legation in Washington now, you know.”

“Oh, really?”

“I wished Seacliff to come with me to Washington, but he insists on
remaining in New York. He stated specifically that the thought of living in
Washington gave him the—what was the expression he used?”

“The pip?”

“The pip. Precisely.”

“But what was the idea of bringing him to America?”

“This admirable Prohibition enactment has rendered America—to my
mind—the ideal place for a young man of his views.” The General
looked at his watch. “It is most fortunate that I happened to run into
you, my dear fellow. My train for Washington leaves in another hour, and I have
packing to do. I want to leave poor Seacliff in your charge while I am
gone.”

“Oh, I say! What!”

“You can look after him. I am credibly informed that even now there are
places in New York where a determined young man may obtain
the—er—stuff, and I should be infinitely obliged—and my poor
sister would be infinitely grateful—if you would keep an eye on
him.” He hailed a taxi-cab. “I am sending Seacliff round to the
Cosmopolis to-night. I am sure you will do everything you can. Good-bye, my
boy, good-bye.”

Archie continued his walk. This, he felt, was beginning to be a bit thick. He
smiled a bitter, mirthless smile as he recalled the fact that less than half an
hour had elapsed since he had expressed a regret that he did not belong to the
ranks of those who do things. Fate since then had certainly supplied him with
jobs with a lavish hand. By bed-time he would be an active accomplice to a
theft, valet and companion to a snake he had never met, and—as far as
could gather the scope of his duties—a combination of nursemaid and
private detective to dear old Squiffy.

It was past four o’clock when he returned to the Cosmopolis. Roscoe
Sherriff was pacing the lobby of the hotel nervously, carrying a small
hand-bag.

“Here you are at last! Good heavens, man, I’ve been waiting two
hours.”

“Sorry, old bean. I was musing a bit and lost track of the time.”

The Press-agent looked cautiously round. There was nobody within earshot.

“Here he is!” he said.

“Who?”

“Peter.”

“Where?” said Archie, staring blankly.

“In this bag. Did you expect to find him strolling arm-in-arm with me
round the lobby? Here you are! Take him!”

He was gone. And Archie, holding the bag, made his way to the lift. The bag
squirmed gently in his grip.

The only other occupant of the lift was a striking-looking woman of foreign
appearance, dressed in a way that made Archie feel that she must be somebody or
she couldn’t look like that. Her face, too, seemed vaguely familiar. She
entered the lift at the second floor where the tea-room is, and she had the
contented expression of one who had tea’d to her satisfaction. She got
off at the same floor as Archie, and walked swiftly, in a lithe, pantherish
way, round the bend in the corridor. Archie followed more slowly. When he
reached the door of his room, the passage was empty. He inserted the key in his
door, turned it, pushed the door open, and pocketed the key. He was about to
enter when the bag again squirmed gently in his grip.

From the days of Pandora, through the epoch of Bluebeard’s wife, down to
the present time, one of the chief failings of humanity has been the
disposition to open things that were better closed. It would have been simple
for Archie to have taken another step and put a door between himself and the
world, but there came to him the irresistible desire to peep into the bag
now—not three seconds later, but now. All the way up in the lift he had
been battling with the temptation, and now he succumbed.

The bag was one of those simple bags with a thingummy which you press. Archie
pressed it. And, as it opened, out popped the head of Peter. His eyes met
Archie’s. Over his head there seemed to be an invisible mark of
interrogation. His gaze was curious, but kindly. He appeared to be saying to
himself, “Have I found a friend?”

Serpents, or Snakes, says the Encyclopaedia, are reptiles of the saurian class
Ophidia, characterised by an elongated, cylindrical, limbless, scaly form, and
distinguished from lizards by the fact that the halves (rami) of the
lower jaw are not solidly united at the chin, but movably connected by an
elastic ligament. The vertebra are very numerous, gastrocentrous, and
procoelous. And, of course, when they put it like that, you can see at once
that a man might spend hours with combined entertainment and profit just
looking at a snake.

Archie would no doubt have done this; but long before he had time really to
inspect the halves (rami) of his new friend’s lower jaw and to
admire its elastic fittings, and long before the gastrocentrous and procoelous
character of the other’s vertebrae had made any real impression on him, a
piercing scream almost at his elbow—startled him out of his scientific
reverie. A door opposite had opened, and the woman of the elevator was standing
staring at him with an expression of horror and fury that went through, him
like a knife. It was the expression which, more than anything else, had made
Mme. Brudowska what she was professionally. Combined with a deep voice and a
sinuous walk, it enabled her to draw down a matter of a thousand dollars per
week.

Indeed, though the fact gave him little pleasure, Archie, as a matter of fact,
was at this moment getting about—including war-tax—two dollars and
seventy-five cents worth of the great emotional star for nothing. For, having
treated him gratis to the look of horror and fury, she now moved towards him
with the sinuous walk and spoke in the tone which she seldom permitted herself
to use before the curtain of act two, unless there was a whale of a situation
that called for it in act one.

“Thief!”

It was the way she said it.

Archie staggered backwards as though he had been hit between the eyes, fell
through the open door of his room, kicked it to with a flying foot, and
collapsed on the bed. Peter, the snake, who had fallen on the floor with a
squashy sound, looked surprised and pained for a moment; then, being a
philosopher at heart, cheered up and began hunting for flies under the bureau.

CHAPTER VIII.

A DISTURBED NIGHT FOR DEAR OLD SQUIFFY

Peril sharpens the intellect. Archie’s mind as a rule worked in rather a
languid and restful sort of way, but now it got going with a rush and a whir.
He glared round the room. He had never seen a room so devoid of satisfactory
cover. And then there came to him a scheme, a ruse. It offered a chance of
escape. It was, indeed, a bit of all right.

Peter, the snake, loafing contentedly about the carpet, found himself seized by
what the Encyclopaedia calls the “distensible gullet” and looked up
reproachfully. The next moment he was in his bag again; and Archie, bounding
silently into the bathroom, was tearing the cord off his dressing-gown.

There came a banging at the door. A voice spoke sternly. A masculine voice this
time.

“Say! Open this door!”

Archie rapidly attached the dressing-gown cord to the handle of the bag, leaped
to the window, opened it, tied the cord to a projecting piece of iron on the
sill, lowered Peter and the bag into the depths, and closed the window again.
The whole affair took but a few seconds. Generals have received the thanks of
their nations for displaying less resource on the field of battle.

He opened the door. Outside stood the bereaved woman, and beside her a
bullet-headed gentleman with a bowler hat on the back of his head, in whom
Archie recognised the hotel detective.

The hotel detective also recognised Archie, and the stern cast of his features
relaxed. He even smiled a rusty but propitiatory smile. He
imagined—erroneously—that Archie, being the son-in-law of the owner
of the hotel, had a pull with that gentleman; and he resolved to proceed warily
lest he jeopardise his job.

“Why, Mr. Moffam!” he said, apologetically. “I didn’t
know it was you I was disturbing.”

“Always glad to have a chat,” said Archie, cordially. “What
seems to be the trouble?”

“My snake!” cried the queen of tragedy. “Where is my
snake?”

Archie, looked at the detective. The detective looked at Archie.

“This lady,” said the detective, with a dry little cough,
“thinks her snake is in your room, Mr. Moffam.”

“Snake?”

“Snake’s what the lady said.”

“My snake! My Peter!” Mme. Brudowska’s voice shook with
emotion. “He is here—here in this room.”

Archie shook his head.

“No snakes here! Absolutely not! I remember noticing when I came
in.”

“The snake is here—here in this room. This man had it in a bag! I
saw him! He is a thief!”

“Easy, ma’am!” protested the detective. “Go easy! This
gentleman is the boss’s son-in-law.”

“I care not who he is! He has my snake! Here—here in this
room!”

“Mr. Moffam wouldn’t go round stealing snakes.”

“Rather not,” said Archie. “Never stole a snake in my life.
None of the Moffams have ever gone about stealing snakes. Regular family
tradition! Though I once had an uncle who kept gold-fish.”

“Here he is! Here! My Peter!”

Archie looked at the detective. The detective looked at Archie. “We must
humour her!” their glances said.

“Of course,” said Archie, “if you’d like to search the
room, what? What I mean to say is, this is Liberty Hall. Everybody welcome!
Bring the kiddies!”

“I will search the room!” said Mme. Brudowska.

The detective glanced apologetically at Archie.

“Don’t blame me for this, Mr. Moffam,” he urged.

“Rather not! Only too glad you’ve dropped in!”

He took up an easy attitude against the window, and watched the empress of the
emotional drama explore. Presently she desisted, baffled. For an instant she
paused, as though about to speak, then swept from the room. A moment later a
door banged across the passage.

“How do they get that way?” queried the detective, “Well,
g’bye, Mr. Moffam. Sorry to have butted in.”

The door closed. Archie waited a few moments, then went to the window and
hauled in the slack. Presently the bag appeared over the edge of the
window-sill.

“Good God!” said Archie.

In the rush and swirl of recent events he must have omitted to see that the
clasp that fastened the bag was properly closed; for the bag, as it jumped on
to the window-sill, gaped at him like a yawning face. And inside it there was
nothing.

Archie leaned as far out of the window as he could manage without committing
suicide. Far below him, the traffic took its usual course and the pedestrians
moved to and fro upon the pavements. There was no crowding, no excitement. Yet
only a few moments before a long green snake with three hundred ribs, a
distensible gullet, and gastrocentrous vertebras must have descended on that
street like the gentle rain from Heaven upon the place beneath. And nobody
seemed even interested. Not for the first time since he had arrived in America,
Archie marvelled at the cynical detachment of the New Yorker, who permits
himself to be surprised at nothing.

He shut the window and moved away with a heavy heart. He had not had the
pleasure of an extended acquaintanceship with Peter, but he had seen enough of
him to realise his sterling qualities. Somewhere beneath Peter’s three
hundred ribs there had lain a heart of gold, and Archie mourned for his loss.

Archie had a dinner and theatre engagement that night, and it was late when he
returned to the hotel. He found his father-in-law prowling restlessly about the
lobby. There seemed to be something on Mr. Brewster’s mind. He came up to
Archie with a brooding frown on his square face.

“Who’s this man Seacliff?” he demanded, without preamble.
“I hear he’s a friend of yours.”

“Oh, you’ve met him, what?” said Archie. “Had a nice
little chat together, yes? Talked of this and that, no!”

“We have not said a word to each other.”

“Really? Oh, well, dear old Squiffy is one of those strong, silent
fellers you know. You mustn’t mind if he’s a bit dumb. He never
says much, but it’s whispered round the clubs that he thinks a lot. It
was rumoured in the spring of nineteen-thirteen that Squiffy was on the point
of making a bright remark, but it never came to anything.”

Mr. Brewster struggled with his feelings.

“Who is he? You seem to know him.”

“Oh yes. Great pal of mine, Squiffy. We went through Eton, Oxford, and
the Bankruptcy Court together. And here’s a rummy coincidence. When they
examined me, I had no assets. And, when they examined Squiffy, he
had no assets! Rather extraordinary, what?”

Mr. Brewster seemed to be in no mood for discussing coincidences.

“I might have known he was a friend of yours!” he said, bitterly.
“Well, if you want to see him, you’ll have to do it outside my
hotel.”

“Why, I thought he was stopping here.”

“He is—to-night. To-morrow he can look for some other hotel to
break up.”

“Great Scot! Has dear old Squiffy been breaking the place up?”

Mr. Brewster snorted.

“I am informed that this precious friend of yours entered my grill-room
at eight o’clock. He must have been completely intoxicated, though the
head waiter tells me he noticed nothing at the time.”

Archie nodded approvingly.

“Dear old Squiffy was always like that. It’s a gift. However
woozled he might be, it was impossible to detect it with the naked eye.
I’ve seen the dear old chap many a time whiffled to the eyebrows, and
looking as sober as a bishop. Soberer! When did it begin to dawn on the lads in
the grill-room that the old egg had been pushing the boat out?”

“The head waiter,” said Mr. Brewster, with cold fury, “tells
me that he got a hint of the man’s condition when he suddenly got up from
his table and went the round of the room, pulling off all the table-cloths, and
breaking everything that was on them. He then threw a number of rolls at the
diners, and left. He seems to have gone straight to bed.”

“Dashed sensible of him, what? Sound, practical chap, Squiffy. But where
on earth did he get the—er—materials?”

“From his room. I made enquiries. He has six large cases in his
room.”

“Squiffy always was a chap of infinite resource! Well, I’m dashed
sorry this should have happened, don’t you know.”

“If it hadn’t been for you, the man would never have come
here.” Mr. Brewster brooded coldly. “I don’t know why it is,
but ever since you came to this hotel I’ve had nothing but
trouble.”

“Dashed sorry!” said Archie, sympathetically.

“Grrh!” said Mr. Brewster.

Archie made his way meditatively to the lift. The injustice of his
father-in-law’s attitude pained him. It was absolutely rotten and all
that to be blamed for everything that went wrong in the Hotel Cosmopolis.

While this conversation was in progress, Lord Seacliff was enjoying a
refreshing sleep in his room on the fourth floor. Two hours passed. The noise
of the traffic in the street below faded away. Only the rattle of an occasional
belated cab broke the silence. In the hotel all was still. Mr. Brewster had
gone to bed. Archie, in his room, smoked meditatively. Peace may have been said
to reign.

At half-past two Lord Seacliff awoke. His hours of slumber were always
irregular. He sat up in bed and switched the light on. He was a shock-headed
young man with a red face and a hot brown eye. He yawned and stretched himself.
His head was aching a little. The room seemed to him a trifle close. He got out
of bed and threw open the window. Then, returning to bed, he picked up a book
and began to read. He was conscious of feeling a little jumpy, and reading
generally sent him to sleep.

Much has been written on the subject of bed-books. The general consensus of
opinion is that a gentle, slow-moving story makes the best opiate. If this be
so, dear old Squiffy’s choice of literature had been rather injudicious.
His book was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the particular
story which he selected for perusal was the one entitled, “The Speckled
Band.” He was not a great reader, but, when he read, he liked something
with a bit of zip to it.

Squiffy became absorbed. He had read the story before, but a long time back,
and its complications were fresh to him. The tale, it may be remembered, deals
with the activities of an ingenious gentleman who kept a snake, and used to
loose it into people’s bedrooms as a preliminary to collecting on their
insurance. It gave Squiffy pleasant thrills, for he had always had a particular
horror of snakes. As a child, he had shrunk from visiting the serpent house at
the Zoo; and, later, when he had come to man’s estate and had put off
childish things, and settled down in real earnest to his self-appointed mission
of drinking up all the alcoholic fluid in England, the distaste for Ophidia had
lingered. To a dislike for real snakes had been added a maturer shrinking from
those which existed only in his imagination. He could still recall his emotions
on the occasion, scarcely three months before, when he had seen a long, green
serpent which a majority of his contemporaries had assured him wasn’t
there.

Squiffy read on:—

“Suddenly another sound became audible—a very gentle, soothing
sound, like that of a small jet of steam escaping continuously from a
kettle.”

Lord Seacliff looked up from his book with a start. Imagination was beginning
to play him tricks. He could have sworn that he had actually heard that
identical sound. It had seemed to come from the window. He listened again. No!
All was still. He returned to his book and went on reading.

“It was a singular sight that met our eyes. Beside the table, on a wooden
chair, sat Doctor Grimesby Rylott, clad in a long dressing-gown. His chin was
cocked upward and his eyes were fixed in a dreadful, rigid stare at the corner
of the ceiling. Round his brow he had a peculiar yellow band, with brownish
speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly round his head.”

    “I took a step forward. In an instant his strange head-gear began to
move, and there reared itself from among his hair the squat, diamond-shaped
head and puffed neck of a loathsome serpent...”

“Ugh!” said Squiffy.

He closed the book and put it down. His head was aching worse than ever. He
wished now that he had read something else. No fellow could read himself to
sleep with this sort of thing. People ought not to write this sort of thing.

His heart gave a bound. There it was again, that hissing sound. And this time
he was sure it came from the window.

He looked at the window, and remained staring, frozen. Over the sill, with a
graceful, leisurely movement, a green snake was crawling. As it crawled, it
raised its head and peered from side to side, like a shortsighted man looking
for his spectacles. It hesitated a moment on the edge of the sill, then
wriggled to the floor and began to cross the room. Squiffy stared on.

It would have pained Peter deeply, for he was a snake of great sensibility, if
he had known how much his entrance had disturbed the occupant of the room. He
himself had no feeling but gratitude for the man who had opened the window and
so enabled him to get in out of the rather nippy night air. Ever since the bag
had swung open and shot him out onto the sill of the window below
Archie’s, he had been waiting patiently for something of the kind to
happen. He was a snake who took things as they came, and was prepared to rough
it a bit if necessary; but for the last hour or two he had been hoping that
somebody would do something practical in the way of getting him in out of the
cold. When at home, he had an eiderdown quilt to sleep on, and the stone of the
window-sill was a little trying to a snake of regular habits. He crawled
thankfully across the floor under Squiffy’s bed. There was a pair of
trousers there, for his host had undressed when not in a frame of mind to fold
his clothes neatly and place them upon a chair. Peter looked the trousers over.
They were not an eiderdown quilt, but they would serve. He curled up in them
and went to sleep. He had had an exciting day, and was glad to turn in.

After about ten minutes, the tension of Squiffy’s attitude relaxed. His
heart, which had seemed to suspend its operations, began beating again. Reason
reasserted itself. He peeped cautiously under the bed. He could see nothing.

Squiffy was convinced. He told himself that he had never really believed in
Peter as a living thing. It stood to reason that there couldn’t really be
a snake in his room. The window looked out on emptiness. His room was several
stories above the ground. There was a stern, set expression on Squiffy’s
face as he climbed out of bed. It was the expression of a man who is turning
over a new leaf, starting a new life. He looked about the room for some
implement which would carry out the deed he had to do, and finally pulled out
one of the curtain-rods. Using this as a lever, he broke open the topmost of
the six cases which stood in the corner. The soft wood cracked and split.
Squiffy drew out a straw-covered bottle. For a moment he stood looking at it,
as a man might gaze at a friend on the point of death. Then, with a sudden
determination, he went into the bathroom. There was a crash of glass and a
gurgling sound.

Half an hour later the telephone in Archie’s room rang. “I say,
Archie, old top,” said the voice of Squiffy.

“Halloa, old bean! Is that you?”

“I say, could you pop down here for a second? I’m rather
upset.”

“Absolutely! Which room?”

“Four-forty-one.”

“I’ll be with you eftsoons or right speedily.”

“Thanks, old man.”

“What appears to be the difficulty?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I thought I saw a snake!”

“A snake!”

“I’ll tell you all about it when you come down.”

Archie found Lord Seacliff seated on his bed. An arresting aroma of mixed
drinks pervaded the atmosphere.

“I say! What?” said Archie, inhaling.

“That’s all right. I’ve been pouring my stock away. Just
finished the last bottle.”

“But why?”

“I told you. I thought I saw a snake!”

“Green?”

Squiffy shivered slightly.

“Frightfully green!”

Archie hesitated. He perceived that there are moments when silence is the best
policy. He had been worrying himself over the unfortunate case of his friend,
and now that Fate seemed to have provided a solution, it would be rash to
interfere merely to ease the old bean’s mind. If Squiffy was going to
reform because he thought he had seen an imaginary snake, better not to let him
know that the snake was a real one.

“Dashed serious!” he said.

“Bally dashed serious!” agreed Squiffy. “I’m going to
cut it out!”

“Great scheme!”

“You don’t think,” asked Squiffy, with a touch of
hopefulness, “that it could have been a real snake?”

“Never heard of the management supplying them.”

“I thought it went under the bed.”

“Well, take a look.”

Squiffy shuddered.

“Not me! I say, old top, you know, I simply can’t sleep in this
room now. I was wondering if you could give me a doss somewhere in
yours.”

“Rather! I’m in five-forty-one. Just above. Trot along up.
Here’s the key. I’ll tidy up a bit here, and join you in a
minute.”

Squiffy put on a dressing-gown and disappeared. Archie looked under the bed.
From the trousers the head of Peter popped up with its usual expression of
amiable enquiry. Archie nodded pleasantly, and sat down on the bed. The problem
of his little friend’s immediate future wanted thinking over.

He lit a cigarette and remained for a while in thought. Then he rose. An
admirable solution had presented itself. He picked Peter up and placed him in
the pocket of his dressing-gown. Then, leaving the room, he mounted the stairs
till he reached the seventh floor. Outside a room half-way down the corridor he
paused.

From within, through the open transom, came the rhythmical snoring of a good
man taking his rest after the labours of the day. Mr. Brewster was always a
heavy sleeper.

“There’s always a way,” thought Archie, philosophically,
“if a chappie only thinks of it.”

His father-in-law’s snoring took on a deeper note. Archie extracted Peter
from his pocket and dropped him gently through the transom.

CHAPTER IX.

A LETTER FROM PARKER

As the days went by and he settled down at the Hotel Cosmopolis, Archie,
looking about him and revising earlier judgments, was inclined to think that of
all his immediate circle he most admired Parker, the lean, grave valet of Mr.
Daniel Brewster. Here was a man who, living in the closest contact with one of
the most difficult persons in New York, contrived all the while to maintain an
unbowed head, and, as far as one could gather from appearances, a tolerably
cheerful disposition. A great man, judge him by what standard you pleased.
Anxious as he was to earn an honest living, Archie would not have changed
places with Parker for the salary of a movie-star.

It was Parker who first directed Archie’s attention to the hidden merits
of Pongo. Archie had drifted into his father-in-law’s suite one morning,
as he sometimes did in the effort to establish more amicable relations, and had
found it occupied only by the valet, who was dusting the furniture and
bric-a-brac with a feather broom rather in the style of a man-servant at the
rise of the curtain of an old-fashioned farce. After a courteous exchange of
greetings, Archie sat down and lit a cigarette. Parker went on dusting.

“The guv’nor,” said Parker, breaking the silence, “has
some nice little objay dar, sir.”

“Little what?”

“Objay dar, sir.”

Light dawned upon Archie.

“Of course, yes. French for junk. I see what you mean now. Dare say
you’re right, old friend. Don’t know much about these things
myself.”

Parker gave an appreciative flick at a vase on the mantelpiece.

“Very valuable, some of the guv’nor’s things.” He had
picked up the small china figure of the warrior with the spear, and was
grooming it with the ostentatious care of one brushing flies off a sleeping
Venus. He regarded this figure with a look of affectionate esteem which seemed
to Archie absolutely uncalled-for. Archie’s taste in Art was not
precious. To his untutored eye the thing was only one degree less foul than his
father-in-law’s Japanese prints, which he had always observed with silent
loathing. “This one, now,” continued Parker. “Worth a lot of
money. Oh, a lot of money.”

“What, Pongo?” said Archie incredulously.

“Sir?”

“I always call that rummy-looking what-not Pongo. Don’t know what
else you could call him, what!”

The valet seemed to disapprove of this levity. He shook his head and replaced
the figure on the mantelpiece.

“Worth a lot of money,” he repeated. “Not by itself,
no.”

“Oh, not by itself?”

“No, sir. Things like this come in pairs. Somewhere or other
there’s the companion-piece to this here, and if the guv’nor could
get hold of it, he’d have something worth having. Something that
connoozers would give a lot of money for. But one’s no good without the
other. You have to have both, if you understand my meaning, sir.”

“I see. Like filling a straight flush, what?”

“Precisely, sir.”

Archie gazed at Pongo again, with the dim hope of discovering virtues not
immediately apparent to the casual observer. But without success. Pongo left
him cold—even chilly. He would not have taken Pongo as a gift, to oblige
a dying friend.

“How much would the pair be worth?” he asked. “Ten
dollars?”

Parker smiled a gravely superior smile. “A leetle more than that, sir.
Several thousand dollars, more like it.”

“Do you mean to say,” said Archie, with honest amazement,
“that there are chumps going about loose—absolutely loose—who
would pay that for a weird little object like Pongo?”

“Undoubtedly, sir. These antique china figures are in great demand among
collectors.”

Archie looked at Pongo once more, and shook his head.

“Well, well, well! It takes all sorts to make a world, what!”

What might be called the revival of Pongo, the restoration of Pongo to the
ranks of the things that matter, took place several weeks later, when Archie
was making holiday at the house which his father-in-law had taken for the
summer at Brookport. The curtain of the second act may be said to rise on
Archie strolling back from the golf-links in the cool of an August evening.
From time to time he sang slightly, and wondered idly if Lucille would put the
finishing touch upon the all-rightness of everything by coming to meet him and
sharing his homeward walk.

She came in view at this moment, a trim little figure in a white skirt and a
pale blue sweater. She waved to Archie; and Archie, as always at the sight of
her, was conscious of that jumpy, fluttering sensation about the heart, which,
translated into words, would have formed the question, “What on earth
could have made a girl like that fall in love with a chump like me?” It
was a question which he was continually asking himself, and one which was
perpetually in the mind also of Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law. The matter of
Archie’s unworthiness to be the husband of Lucille was practically the
only one on which the two men saw eye to eye.

“Hallo—allo—allo!” said Archie. “Here we are,
what! I was just hoping you would drift over the horizon.”

Lucille kissed him.

“You’re a darling,” she said. “And you look like a
Greek god in that suit.”

“Glad you like it.” Archie squinted with some complacency down his
chest. “I always say it doesn’t matter what you pay for a suit, so
long as it’s right. I hope your jolly old father will feel that
way when he settles up for it.”

“Where is father? Why didn’t he come back with you?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, he didn’t seem any too keen on my
company. I left him in the locker-room chewing a cigar. Gave me the impression
of having something on his mind.”

“Oh, Archie! You didn’t beat him again?”

Archie looked uncomfortable. He gazed out to sea with something of
embarrassment.

“Well, as a matter of fact, old thing, to be absolutely frank, I, as it
were, did!”

“Not badly?”

“Well, yes! I rather fancy I put it across him with some vim and not a
little emphasis. To be perfectly accurate, I licked him by ten and
eight.”

“But you promised me you would let him beat you to-day. You know how
pleased it would have made him.”

“I know. But, light of my soul, have you any idea how dashed difficult it
is to get beaten by your festive parent at golf?”

“Oh, well!” Lucille sighed. “It can’t be helped, I
suppose.” She felt in the pocket of her sweater. “Oh, there’s
a letter for you. I’ve just been to fetch the mail. I don’t know
who it can be from. The handwriting looks like a vampire’s. Kind of
scrawly.”

Archie inspected the envelope. It provided no solution.

“That’s rummy! Who could be writing to me?”

“Open it and see.”

“Dashed bright scheme! I will, Herbert Parker. Who the deuce is Herbert
Parker?”

“Parker? Father’s valet’s name was Parker. The one he
dismissed when he found he was wearing his shirts.”

“Do you mean to say any reasonable chappie would willingly wear the sort
of shirts your father—? I mean to say, there must have been some
mistake.”

“Do read the letter. I expect he wants to use your influence with father
to have him taken back.”

“My influence? With your father? Well, I’m dashed.
Sanguine sort of Johnny, if he does. Well, here’s what he says. Of
course, I remember jolly old Parker now—great pal of mine.”

Dear Sir,—It is some time since the undersigned had the honour of
conversing with you, but I am respectfully trusting that you may recall me to
mind when I mention that until recently I served Mr. Brewster, your
father-in-law, in the capacity of valet. Owing to an unfortunate
misunderstanding, I was dismissed from that position and am now temporarily out
of a job. “How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the
morning!” (Isaiah xiv. 12.)

“You know,” said Archie, admiringly, “this bird is hot stuff!
I mean to say he writes dashed well.”

It is not, however, with my own affairs that I desire to trouble you, dear sir.
I have little doubt that all will be well with me and that I shall not fall
like a sparrow to the ground. “I have been young and now am old; yet have
I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (Psalms
xxxvii. 25). My object in writing to you is as follows. You may recall that I
had the pleasure of meeting you one morning in Mr. Brewster’s suite, when
we had an interesting talk on the subject of Mr. B.’s objets
d’art. You may recall being particularly interested in a small china
figure. To assist your memory, the figure to which I allude is the one which
you whimsically referred to as Pongo. I informed you, if you remember, that,
could the accompanying figure be secured, the pair would be extremely
valuable.

    I am glad to say, dear sir, that this has now transpired, and is on view at
Beale’s Art Galleries on West Forty-Fifth Street, where it will be sold
to-morrow at auction, the sale commencing at two-thirty sharp. If Mr. Brewster
cares to attend, he will, I fancy, have little trouble in securing it at a
reasonable price. I confess that I had thought of refraining from apprising my
late employer of this matter, but more Christian feelings have prevailed.
“If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so
doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head” (Romans xii. 20). Nor, I
must confess, am I altogether uninfluenced by the thought that my action in
this matter may conceivably lead to Mr. B. consenting to forget the past and to
reinstate me in my former position. However, I am confident that I can leave
this to his good feeling.

I remain, respectfully yours,

Herbert Parker.

Lucille clapped her hands.

“How splendid! Father will be pleased!”

“Yes. Friend Parker has certainly found a way to make the old dad fond of
him. Wish I could!”

“But you can, silly! He’ll be delighted when you show him that
letter.”

“Yes, with Parker. Old Herb. Parker’s is the neck he’ll fall
on—not mine.”

Lucille reflected.

“I wish—” she began. She stopped. Her eyes lit up. “Oh,
Archie, darling, I’ve got an idea!”

“Decant it.”

“Why don’t you slip up to New York to-morrow and buy the thing, and
give it to father as a surprise?”

Archie patted her hand kindly. He hated to spoil her girlish day-dreams.

“Yes,” he said. “But reflect, queen of my heart! I have at
the moment of going to press just two dollars fifty in specie, which I took off
your father this after-noon. We were playing twenty-five cents a hole. He
coughed it up without enthusiasm—in fact, with a nasty hacking
sound—but I’ve got it. But that’s all I have got.”

“That’s all right. You can pawn that ring and that bracelet of
mine.”

“Oh, I say, what! Pop the family jewels?”

“Only for a day or two. Of course, once you’ve got the thing,
father will pay us back. He would give you all the money we asked him for, if
he knew what it was for. But I want to surprise him. And if you were to go to
him and ask him for a thousand dollars without telling him what it was for, he
might refuse.”

“He might!” said Archie. “He might!”

“It all works out splendidly. To-morrow’s the Invitation Handicap,
and father’s been looking forward to it for weeks. He’d hate to
have to go up to town himself and not play in it. But you can slip up and slip
back without his knowing anything about it.”

Archie pondered.

“It sounds a ripe scheme. Yes, it has all the ear-marks of a somewhat
fruity wheeze! By Jove, it is a fruity wheeze! It’s an egg!”

“An egg?”

“Good egg, you know. Halloa, here’s a postscript. I didn’t
see it.”

P.S.—I should be glad if you would convey my most cordial respects to
Mrs. Moffam. Will you also inform her that I chanced to meet Mr. William this
morning on Broadway, just off the boat. He desired me to send his regards and
to say that he would be joining you at Brookport in the course of a day or so.
Mr. B. will be pleased to have him back. “A wise son maketh a glad
father” (Proverbs x. 1).

“Who’s Mr. William?” asked Archie.

“My brother Bill, of course. I’ve told you all about him.”

“Oh yes, of course. Your brother Bill. Rummy to think I’ve got a
brother-in-law I’ve never seen.”

“You see, we married so suddenly. When we married, Bill was in
Yale.”

“Good God! What for?”

“Not jail, silly. Yale. The university.”

“Oh, ah, yes.”

“Then he went over to Europe for a trip to broaden his mind. You must
look him up to-morrow when you get back to New York. He’s sure to be at
his club.”

“I’ll make a point of it. Well, vote of thanks to good old Parker!
This really does begin to look like the point in my career where I start to
have your forbidding old parent eating out of my hand.”

“Yes, it’s an egg, isn’t it!”

“Queen of my soul,” said Archie enthusiastically, “it’s
an omelette!”

The business negotiations in connection with the bracelet and the ring occupied
Archie on his arrival in New York to an extent which made it impossible for him
to call on Brother Bill before lunch. He decided to postpone the affecting
meeting of brothers-in-law to a more convenient season, and made his way to his
favourite table at the Cosmopolis grill-room for a bite of lunch preliminary to
the fatigues of the sale. He found Salvatore hovering about as usual, and
instructed him to come to the rescue with a minute steak.

Salvatore was the dark, sinister-looking waiter who attended, among other
tables, to the one at the far end of the grill-room at which Archie usually
sat. For several weeks Archie’s conversations with the other had dealt
exclusively with the bill of fare and its contents; but gradually he had found
himself becoming more personal. Even before the war and its democratising
influences, Archie had always lacked that reserve which characterises many
Britons; and since the war he had looked on nearly everyone he met as a
brother. Long since, through the medium of a series of friendly chats, he had
heard all about Salvatore’s home in Italy, the little newspaper and
tobacco shop which his mother owned down on Seventh Avenue, and a hundred other
personal details. Archie had an insatiable curiosity about his fellow-man.

“Well done,” said Archie.

“Sare?”

“The steak. Not too rare, you know.”

“Very good, sare.”

Archie looked at the waiter closely. His tone had been subdued and sad. Of
course, you don’t expect a waiter to beam all over his face and give
three rousing cheers simply because you have asked him to bring you a minute
steak, but still there was something about Salvatore’s manner that
disturbed Archie. The man appeared to have the pip. Whether he was merely
homesick and brooding on the lost delights of his sunny native land, or whether
his trouble was more definite, could only be ascertained by enquiry. So Archie
enquired.

“What’s the matter, laddie?” he said sympathetically.
“Something on your mind?”

“Sare?”

“I say, there seems to be something on your mind. What’s the
trouble?”

The waiter shrugged his shoulders, as if indicating an unwillingness to inflict
his grievances on one of the tipping classes.

“Come on!” persisted Archie encouragingly. “All pals here.
Barge along, old thing, and let’s have it.”

Salvatore, thus admonished, proceeded in a hurried undertone—with one eye
on the headwaiter—to lay bare his soul. What he said was not very
coherent, but Archie could make out enough of it to gather that it was a sad
story of excessive hours and insufficient pay. He mused awhile. The
waiter’s hard case touched him.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said at last. “When jolly old
Brewster comes back to town—he’s away just now—I’ll
take you along to him and we’ll beard the old boy in his den. I’ll
introduce you, and you get that extract from Italian opera off your chest which
you’ve just been singing to me, and you’ll find it’ll be all
right. He isn’t what you might call one of my greatest admirers, but
everybody says he’s a square sort of cove and he’ll see you
aren’t snootered. And now, laddie, touching the matter of that
steak.”

The waiter disappeared, greatly cheered, and Archie, turning, perceived that
his friend Reggie van Tuyl was entering the room. He waved to him to join his
table. He liked Reggie, and it also occurred to him that a man of the world
like the heir of the van Tuyls, who had been popping about New York for years,
might be able to give him some much-needed information on the procedure at an
auction sale, a matter on which he himself was profoundly ignorant.

CHAPTER X.

DOING FATHER A BIT OF GOOD

Reggie Van Tuyl approached the table languidly, and sank down into a chair. He
was a long youth with a rather subdued and deflated look, as though the burden
of the van Tuyl millions was more than his frail strength could support. Most
things tired him.

“I say, Reggie, old top,” said Archie, “you’re just the
lad I wanted to see. I require the assistance of a blighter of ripe intellect.
Tell me, laddie, do you know anything about sales?”

Reggie eyed him sleepily.

“Sales?”

“Auction sales.”

Reggie considered.

“Well, they’re sales, you know.” He checked a yawn.
“Auction sales, you understand.”

“Yes,” said Archie encouragingly. “Something—the name
or something—seemed to tell me that.”

“Fellows put things up for sale you know, and other fellows—other
fellows go in and—and buy ’em, if you follow me.”

“Yes, but what’s the procedure? I mean, what do I do? That’s
what I’m after. I’ve got to buy something at Beale’s this
afternoon. How do I set about it?”

“Well,” said Reggie, drowsily, “there are several ways of
bidding, you know. You can shout, or you can nod, or you can twiddle your
fingers—” The effort of concentration was too much for him. He
leaned back limply in his chair. “I’ll tell you what. I’ve
nothing to do this afternoon. I’ll come with you and show you.”

When he entered the Art Galleries a few minutes later, Archie was glad of the
moral support of even such a wobbly reed as Reggie van Tuyl. There is something
about an auction room which weighs heavily upon the novice. The hushed interior
was bathed in a dim, religious light; and the congregation, seated on small
wooden chairs, gazed in reverent silence at the pulpit, where a gentleman of
commanding presence and sparkling pince-nez was delivering a species of chant.
Behind a gold curtain at the end of the room mysterious forms flitted to and
fro. Archie, who had been expecting something on the lines of the New York
Stock Exchange, which he had once been privileged to visit when it was in a
more than usually feverish mood, found the atmosphere oppressively
ecclesiastical. He sat down and looked about him. The presiding priest went on
with his chant.

“Sixteen-sixteen-sixteen-sixteen-sixteen—worth three
hundred—sixteen-sixteen-sixteen-sixteen-sixteen—ought to bring five
hundred—sixteen-sixteen-seventeen-seventeen-eighteen-eighteen
nineteen-nineteen-nineteen.”

He stopped and eyed the worshippers with a glittering and reproachful eye. They
had, it seemed, disappointed him. His lips curled, and he waved a hand towards
a grimly uncomfortable-looking chair with insecure legs and a good deal of gold
paint about it. “Gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen! You are not here to
waste my time; I am not here to waste yours. Am I seriously offered nineteen
dollars for this eighteenth-century chair, acknowledged to be the finest piece
sold in New York for months and months? Am I—twenty? I thank you.
Twenty-twenty-twenty-twenty. Your opportunity! Priceless. Very few
extant. Twenty-five-five-five-five-thirty-thirty. Just what you are looking
for. The only one in the City of New York. Thirty-five-five-five-five.
Forty-forty-forty-forty-forty. Look at those legs! Back it into the light,
Willie. Let the light fall on those legs!”

Willie, a sort of acolyte, manœuvred the chair as directed. Reggie van Tuyl,
who had been yawning in a hopeless sort of way, showed his first flicker of
interest.

“Willie,” he observed, eyeing that youth more with pity than
reproach, “has a face like Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy, don’t you think
so?”

Archie nodded briefly. Precisely the same criticism had occurred to him.

“Forty-five-five-five-five-five,” chanted the high-priest.
“Once forty-five. Twice forty-five. Third and last call, forty-five. Sold
at forty-five. Gentleman in the fifth row.”

Archie looked up and down the row with a keen eye. He was anxious to see who
had been chump enough to give forty-five dollars for such a frightful object.
He became aware of the dog-faced Willie leaning towards him.

“Name, please?” said the canine one.

“Eh, what?” said Archie. “Oh, my name’s Moffam,
don’t you know.” The eyes of the multitude made him feel a little
nervous “Er—glad to meet you and all that sort of rot.”

“Ten dollars deposit, please,” said Willie.

“I don’t absolutely follow you, old bean. What is the big thought
at the back of all this?”

“Ten dollars deposit on the chair.”

“What chair?”

“You bid forty-five dollars for the chair.”

“Me?”

“You nodded,” said Willie, accusingly. “If,” he went
on, reasoning closely, “you didn’t want to bid, why did you
nod?”

Archie was embarrassed. He could, of course, have pointed out that he had
merely nodded in adhesion to the statement that the other had a face like Jo-Jo
the dog-faced boy; but something seemed to tell him that a purist might
consider the excuse deficient in tact. He hesitated a moment, then handed over
a ten-dollar bill, the price of Willie’s feelings. Willie withdrew like a
tiger slinking from the body of its victim.

“I say, old thing,” said Archie to Reggie, “this is a bit
thick, you know. No purse will stand this drain.”

Reggie considered the matter. His face seemed drawn under the mental strain.

“Don’t nod again,” he advised. “If you aren’t
careful, you get into the habit of it. When you want to bid, just twiddle your
fingers. Yes, that’s the thing. Twiddle!”

He sighed drowsily. The atmosphere of the auction room was close; you
weren’t allowed to smoke; and altogether he was beginning to regret that
he had come. The service continued. Objects of varying unattractiveness came
and went, eulogised by the officiating priest, but coldly received by the
congregation. Relations between the former and the latter were growing more and
more distant. The congregation seemed to suspect the priest of having an
ulterior motive in his eulogies, and the priest seemed to suspect the
congregation of a frivolous desire to waste his time. He had begun to speculate
openly as to why they were there at all. Once, when a particularly repellent
statuette of a nude female with an unwholesome green skin had been offered at
two dollars and had found no bidders—the congregation appearing silently
grateful for his statement that it was the only specimen of its kind on the
continent—he had specifically accused them of having come into the
auction room merely with the purpose of sitting down and taking the weight off
their feet.

“If your thing—your whatever-it-is, doesn’t come up soon,
Archie,” said Reggie, fighting off with an effort the mists of sleep,
“I rather think I shall be toddling along. What was it you came to
get?”

“It’s rather difficult to describe. It’s a rummy-looking sort
of what-not, made of china or something. I call it Pongo. At least, this one
isn’t Pongo, don’t you know—it’s his little brother,
but presumably equally foul in every respect. It’s all rather
complicated, I know, but—hallo!” He pointed excitedly. “By
Jove! We’re off! There it is! Look! Willie’s unleashing it
now!”

Willie, who had disappeared through the gold curtain, had now returned, and was
placing on a pedestal a small china figure of delicate workmanship. It was the
figure of a warrior in a suit of armour advancing with raised spear upon an
adversary. A thrill permeated Archie’s frame. Parker had not been
mistaken. This was undoubtedly the companion-figure to the redoubtable Pongo.
The two were identical. Even from where he sat Archie could detect on the
features of the figure on the pedestal the same expression of insufferable
complacency which had alienated his sympathies from the original Pongo.

The high-priest, undaunted by previous rebuffs, regarded the figure with a
gloating enthusiasm wholly unshared by the congregation, who were plainly
looking upon Pongo’s little brother as just another of those things.

“This,” he said, with a shake in his voice, “is something
very special. China figure, said to date back to the Ming Dynasty. Unique.
Nothing like it on either side of the Atlantic. If I were selling this at
Christie’s in London, where people,” he said, nastily, “have
an educated appreciation of the beautiful, the rare, and the exquisite, I
should start the bidding at a thousand dollars. This afternoon’s
experience has taught me that that might possibly be too high.” His
pince-nez sparkled militantly, as he gazed upon the stolid throng. “Will
anyone offer me a dollar for this unique figure?”

“Leap at it, old top,” said Reggie van Tuyl. “Twiddle, dear
boy, twiddle! A dollar’s reasonable.”

Archie twiddled.

“One dollar I am offered,” said the high-priest, bitterly.
“One gentleman here is not afraid to take a chance. One gentleman here
knows a good thing when he sees one.” He abandoned the gently sarcastic
manner for one of crisp and direct reproach. “Come, come, gentlemen, we
are not here to waste time. Will anyone offer me one hundred dollars for this
superb piece of—” He broke off, and seemed for a moment almost
unnerved. He stared at someone in one of the seats in front of Archie.
“Thank you,” he said, with a sort of gulp. “One hundred
dollars I am offered! One hundred—one hundred—one
hundred—”

Archie was startled. This sudden, tremendous jump, this wholly unforeseen boom
in Pongos, if one might so describe it, was more than a little disturbing. He
could not see who his rival was, but it was evident that at least one among
those present did not intend to allow Pongo’s brother to slip by without
a fight. He looked helplessly at Reggie for counsel, but Reggie had now
definitely given up the struggle. Exhausted nature had done its utmost, and now
he was leaning back with closed eyes, breathing softly through his nose. Thrown
on his own resources, Archie could think of no better course than to twiddle
his fingers again. He did so, and the high-priest’s chant took on a note
of positive exuberance.

“Two hundred I am offered. Much better! Turn the pedestal round, Willie,
and let them look at it. Slowly! Slowly! You aren’t spinning a
roulette-wheel. Two hundred. Two-two-two-two-two.” He became suddenly
lyrical. “Two-two-two—There was a young lady named Lou, who was
catching a train at two-two. Said the porter, ‘Don’t worry or hurry
or scurry. It’s a minute or two to two-two!’
Two-two-two-two-two!”

Archie’s concern increased. He seemed to be twiddling at this voluble man
across seas of misunderstanding. Nothing is harder to interpret to a nicety
than a twiddle, and Archie’s idea of the language of twiddles and the
high-priest’s idea did not coincide by a mile. The high-priest appeared
to consider that, when Archie twiddled, it was his intention to bid in
hundreds, whereas in fact Archie had meant to signify that he raised the
previous bid by just one dollar. Archie felt that, if given time, he could make
this clear to the high-priest, but the latter gave him no time. He had got his
audience, so to speak, on the run, and he proposed to hustle them before they
could rally.

“Two hundred—two hundred—two—three—thank you,
sir—three-three-three-four-four-five-five-six-six-seven-seven-seven—”

Archie sat limply in his wooden chair. He was conscious of a feeling which he
had only experienced twice in his life—once when he had taken his first
lesson in driving a motor and had trodden on the accelerator instead of the
brake; the second time more recently, when he had made his first down-trip on
an express lift. He had now precisely the same sensation of being run away with
by an uncontrollable machine, and of having left most of his internal organs at
some little distance from the rest of his body. Emerging from this welter of
emotion, stood out the one clear fact that, be the opposition bidding what it
might, he must nevertheless secure the prize. Lucille had sent him to New York
expressly to do so. She had sacrificed her jewellery for the cause. She relied
on him. The enterprise had become for Archie something almost sacred. He felt
dimly like a knight of old hot on the track of the Holy Grail.

He twiddled again. The ring and the bracelet had fetched nearly twelve hundred
dollars. Up to that figure his hat was in the ring.

“Eight hundred I am offered. Eight hundred.
Eight-eight-eight-eight—”

A voice spoke from somewhere at the back of the room. A quiet, cold, nasty,
determined voice.

“Nine!”

Archie rose from his seat and spun round. This mean attack from the rear stung
his fighting spirit. As he rose, a young man sitting immediately in front of
him rose too and stared likewise. He was a square-built resolute-looking young
man, who reminded Archie vaguely of somebody he had seen before. But Archie was
too busy trying to locate the man at the back to pay much attention to him. He
detected him at last, owing to the fact that the eyes of everybody in that part
of the room were fixed upon him. He was a small man of middle age, with
tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. He might have been a professor or something
of the kind. Whatever he was, he was obviously a man to be reckoned with. He
had a rich sort of look, and his demeanour was the demeanour of a man who is
prepared to fight it out on these lines if it takes all the summer.

“Nine hundred I am offered. Nine-nine-nine-nine—”

Archie glared defiantly at the spectacled man.

“A thousand!” he cried.

The irruption of high finance into the placid course of the afternoon’s
proceedings had stirred the congregation out of its lethargy. There were
excited murmurs. Necks were craned, feet shuffled. As for the high-priest, his
cheerfulness was now more than restored, and his faith in his fellow-man had
soared from the depths to a very lofty altitude. He beamed with approval.
Despite the warmth of his praise he would have been quite satisfied to see
Pongo’s little brother go at twenty dollars, and the reflection that the
bidding had already reached one thousand and that his commission was twenty per
cent, had engendered a mood of sunny happiness.

“One thousand is bid!” he carolled. “Now, gentlemen, I
don’t want to hurry you over this. You are all connoisseurs here, and you
don’t want to see a priceless china figure of the Ming Dynasty get away
from you at a sacrifice price. Perhaps you can’t all see the figure where
it is. Willie, take it round and show it to ’em. We’ll take a
little intermission while you look carefully at this wonderful figure. Get a
move on, Willie! Pick up your feet!”

Archie, sitting dazedly, was aware that Reggie van Tuyl had finished his beauty
sleep and was addressing the young man in the seat in front.

“Why, hallo,” said Reggie. “I didn’t know you were
back. You remember me, don’t you? Reggie van Tuyl. I know your sister
very well. Archie, old man, I want you to meet my friend, Bill Brewster. Why,
dash it!” He chuckled sleepily. “I was forgetting. Of course!
He’s your—”

“How are you?” said the young man. “Talking of my
sister,” he said to Reggie, “I suppose you haven’t met her
husband by any chance? I suppose you know she married some awful chump?”

“Me,” said Archie.

“How’s that?”

“I married your sister. My name’s Moffam.”

The young man seemed a trifle taken aback.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Not at all,” said Archie.

“I was only going by what my father said in his letters,” he
explained, in extenuation.

Archie nodded.

“I’m afraid your jolly old father doesn’t appreciate me. But
I’m hoping for the best. If I can rope in that rummy-looking little china
thing that Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy is showing the customers, he will be all
over me. I mean to say, you know, he’s got another like it, and, if he
can get a full house, as it were, I’m given to understand he’ll be
bucked, cheered, and even braced.”

The young man stared.

“Are you the fellow who’s been bidding against me?”

“Eh, what? Were you bidding against me?”

“I wanted to buy the thing for my father. I’ve a special reason for
wanting to get in right with him just now. Are you buying it for him,
too?”

“Absolutely. As a surprise. It was Lucille’s idea. His valet, a
chappie named Parker, tipped us off that the thing was to be sold.”

“Parker? Great Scot! It was Parker who tipped me off. I met him on
Broadway, and he told me about it.”

“Rummy he never mentioned it in his letter to me. Why, dash it, we could
have got the thing for about two dollars if we had pooled our bids.”

“Well, we’d better pool them now, and extinguish that pill at the
back there. I can’t go above eleven hundred. That’s all I’ve
got.”

“I can’t go above eleven hundred myself.”

“There’s just one thing. I wish you’d let me be the one to
hand the thing over to Father. I’ve a special reason for wanting to make
a hit with him.”

“Absolutely!” said Archie, magnanimously. “It’s all the
same to me. I only wanted to get him generally braced, as it were, if you know
what I mean.”

“That’s awfully good of you.”

“Not a bit, laddie, no, no, and far from it. Only too glad.”

Willie had returned from his rambles among the connoisseurs, and Pongo’s
brother was back on his pedestal. The high-priest cleared his throat and
resumed his discourse.

“Now that you have all seen this superb figure we will—I was
offered one thousand—one thousand-one-one-one-one—eleven hundred.
Thank you, sir. Eleven hundred I am offered.”

The high-priest was now exuberant. You could see him doing figures in his head.

“You do the bidding,” said Brother Bill.

“Right-o!” said Archie.

He waved a defiant hand.

“Thirteen,” said the man at the back.

“Fourteen, dash it!”

“Fifteen!”

“Sixteen!”

“Seventeen!”

“Eighteen!”

“Nineteen!”

“Two thousand!”

The high-priest did everything but sing. He radiated good will and bonhomie.

“Two thousand I am offered. Is there any advance on two thousand? Come,
gentlemen, I don’t want to give this superb figure away. Twenty-one
hundred. Twenty-one-one-one-one. This is more the sort of thing I have been
accustomed to. When I was at Sotheby’s Rooms in London, this kind of
bidding was a common-place. Twenty-two-two-two-two-two. One hardly noticed it.
Three-three-three. Twenty-three-three-three. Twenty-three hundred dollars I am
offered.”

He gazed expectantly at Archie, as a man gazes at some favourite dog whom he
calls upon to perform a trick. But Archie had reached the end of his tether.
The hand that had twiddled so often and so bravely lay inert beside his
trouser-leg, twitching feebly. Archie was through.

“Twenty-three hundred,” said the high-priest, ingratiatingly.

Archie made no movement. There was a tense pause. The high-priest gave a little
sigh, like one waking from a beautiful dream.

“Twenty-three hundred,” he said. “Once twenty-three. Twice
twenty-three. Third, last, and final call, twenty-three. Sold at twenty-three
hundred. I congratulate you, sir, on a genuine bargain!”

Reggie van Tuyl had dozed off again. Archie tapped his brother-in-law on the
shoulder.

“May as well be popping, what?”

They threaded their way sadly together through the crowd, and made for the
street. They passed into Fifth Avenue without breaking the silence.

“Bally nuisance,” said Archie, at last.

“Rotten!”

“Wonder who that chappie was?”

“Some collector, probably.”

“Well, it can’t be helped,” said Archie.

Brother Bill attached himself to Archie’s arm, and became communicative.

“I didn’t want to mention it in front of van Tuyl,” he said,
“because he’s such a talking-machine, and it would have been all
over New York before dinner-time. But you’re one of the family, and you
can keep a secret.”

“Absolutely! Silent tomb and what not.”

“The reason I wanted that darned thing was because I’ve just got
engaged to a girl over in England, and I thought that, if I could hand my
father that china figure-thing with one hand and break the news with the other,
it might help a bit. She’s the most wonderful girl!”

“I’ll bet she is,” said Archie, cordially.

“The trouble is she’s in the chorus of one of the revues over
there, and Father is apt to kick. So I thought—oh, well, it’s no
good worrying now. Come along where it’s quiet, and I’ll tell you
all about her.”

“That’ll be jolly,” said Archie.

CHAPTER XI.

SALVATORE CHOOSES THE WRONG MOMENT

Archie reclaimed the family jewellery from its temporary home next morning;
and, having done so, sauntered back to the Cosmopolis. He was surprised, on
entering the lobby, to meet his father-in-law. More surprising still, Mr.
Brewster was manifestly in a mood of extraordinary geniality. Archie could
hardly believe his eyes when the other waved cheerily to him—nor his ears
a moment later when Mr. Brewster, addressing him as “my boy,” asked
him how he was and mentioned that the day was a warm one.

Obviously this jovial frame of mind must be taken advantage of; and
Archie’s first thought was of the downtrodden Salvatore, to the tale of
whose wrongs he had listened so sympathetically on the previous day. Now was
plainly the moment for the waiter to submit his grievance, before some ebb-tide
caused the milk of human kindness to flow out of Daniel Brewster. With a swift
“Cheerio!” in his father-in-law’s direction, Archie bounded
into the grill-room. Salvatore, the hour for luncheon being imminent but not
yet having arrived, was standing against the far wall in an attitude of
thought.

“Laddie!” cried Archie.

“Sare?”

“A most extraordinary thing has happened. Good old Brewster has suddenly
popped up through a trap and is out in the lobby now. And what’s still
more weird, he’s apparently bucked.”

“Sare?”

“Braced, you know. In the pink. Pleased about something. If you go to him
now with that yarn of yours, you can’t fail. He’ll kiss you on both
cheeks and give you his bank-roll and collar-stud. Charge along and ask the
head-waiter if you can have ten minutes off.”

Salvatore vanished in search of the potentate named, and Archie returned to the
lobby to bask in the unwonted sunshine.

“Well, well, well, what!” he said. “I thought you were at
Brookport.”

“I came up this morning to meet a friend of mine,” replied Mr.
Brewster genially. “Professor Binstead.”

“Don’t think I know him.”

“Very interesting man,” said Mr. Brewster, still with the same
uncanny amiability. “He’s a dabbler in a good many
things—science, phrenology, antiques. I asked him to bid for me at a sale
yesterday. There was a little china figure—”

Archie’s jaw fell.

“China figure?” he stammered feebly.

“Yes. The companion to one you may have noticed on my mantelpiece
upstairs. I have been trying to get the pair of them for years. I should never
have heard of this one if it had not been for that valet of mine, Parker. Very
good of him to let me know of it, considering I had fired him. Ah, here is
Binstead.”—He moved to greet the small, middle-aged man with the
tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles who was bustling across the
lobby.—“Well, Binstead, so you got it?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose the price wasn’t particularly stiff?”

“Twenty-three hundred.”

“Twenty-three hundred!” Mr. Brewster seemed to reel in his tracks.
“Twenty-three hundred!”

“You gave me carte blanche.”

“Yes, but twenty-three hundred!”

“I could have got it for a few dollars, but unfortunately I was a little
late, and, when I arrived, some young fool had bid it up to a thousand, and he
stuck to me till I finally shook him off at twenty-three hundred. Why, this is
the very man! Is he a friend of yours?”

Archie coughed.

“More a relation than a friend, what? Son-in-law, don’t you
know!”

Mr. Brewster’s amiability had vanished.

“What damned foolery have you been up to now?” he demanded.
“Can’t I move a step without stubbing my toe on you? Why the devil
did you bid?”

“We thought it would be rather a fruity scheme. We talked it over and
came to the conclusion that it was an egg. Wanted to get hold of the rummy
little object, don’t you know, and surprise you.”

“Who’s we?”

“Lucille and I.”

“But how did you hear of it at all?”

“Parker, the valet-chappie, you know, wrote me a letter about it.”

“Parker! Didn’t he tell you that he had told me the figure was to
be sold?”

“Absolutely not!” A sudden suspicion came to Archie. He was
normally a guileless young man, but even to him the extreme fishiness of the
part played by Herbert Parker had become apparent. “I say, you know, it
looks to me as if friend Parker had been having us all on a bit, what? I mean
to say it was jolly old Herb, who tipped your son off—Bill, you
know—to go and bid for the thing.”

“Bill! Was Bill there?”

“Absolutely in person! We were bidding against each other like the
dickens till we managed to get together and get acquainted. And then this
bird—this gentleman—sailed in and started to slip it across
us.”

Professor Binstead chuckled—the care-free chuckle of a man who sees all
those around him smitten in the pocket, while he himself remains untouched.

“A very ingenious rogue, this Parker of yours, Brewster. His method seems
to have been simple but masterly. I have no doubt that either he or a
confederate obtained the figure and placed it with the auctioneer, and then he
ensured a good price for it by getting us all to bid against each other. Very
ingenious!”

Mr. Brewster struggled with his feelings. Then he seemed to overcome them and
to force himself to look on the bright side.

“Well, anyway,” he said. “I’ve got the pair of figures,
and that’s what I wanted. Is that it in that parcel?”

“This is it. I wouldn’t trust an express company to deliver it.
Suppose we go up to your room and see how the two look side by side.”

They crossed the lobby to the lift.-The cloud was still on Mr. Brewster’s
brow as they stepped out and made their way to his suite. Like most men who
have risen from poverty to wealth by their own exertions, Mr. Brewster objected
to parting with his money unnecessarily, and it was plain that that
twenty-three hundred dollars still rankled.

Mr. Brewster unlocked the door and crossed the room. Then, suddenly, he halted,
stared, and stared again. He sprang to the bell and pressed it, then stood
gurgling wordlessly.

“Anything wrong, old bean?” queried Archie, solicitously.

“Wrong! Wrong! It’s gone!”

“Gone?”

“The figure!”

The floor-waiter had manifested himself silently in answer to the bell, and was
standing in the doorway.

“Simmons!” Mr. Brewster turned to him wildly. “Has anyone
been in this suite since I went away?”

“No, sir.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody except your valet, sir—Parker. He said he had come to fetch
some things away. I supposed he had come from you, sir, with
instructions.”

“Get out!”

Professor Binstead had unwrapped his parcel, and had placed the Pongo on the
table. There was a weighty silence. Archie picked up the little china figure
and balanced it on the palm of his hand. It was a small thing, he reflected
philosophically, but it had made quite a stir in the world.

Mr. Brewster fermented for a while without speaking.

“So,” he said, at last, in a voice trembling with self-pity,
“I have been to all this trouble—”

“And expense,” put in Professor Binstead, gently.

“Merely to buy back something which had been stolen from me! And, owing
to your damned officiousness,” he cried, turning on Archie, “I have
had to pay twenty-three hundred dollars for it! I don’t know why they
make such a fuss about Job. Job never had anything like you around!”

“Of course,” argued Archie, “he had one or two boils.”

“Boils! What are boils?”

“Dashed sorry,” murmured Archie. “Acted for the best. Meant
well. And all that sort of rot!”

Professor Binstead’s mind seemed occupied to the exclusion of all other
aspects of the affair, with the ingenuity of the absent Parker.

“A cunning scheme!” he said. “A very cunning scheme! This man
Parker must have a brain of no low order. I should like to feel his
bumps!”

“I should like to give him some!” said the stricken Mr. Brewster.
He breathed a deep breath. “Oh, well,” he said, “situated as
I am, with a crook valet and an imbecile son-in-law, I suppose I ought to be
thankful that I’ve still got my own property, even if I have had to pay
twenty-three hundred dollars for the privilege of keeping it.” He rounded
on Archie, who was in a reverie. The thought of the unfortunate Bill had just
crossed Archie’s mind. It would be many moons, many weary moons, before
Mr. Brewster would be in a suitable mood to listen sympathetically to the story
of love’s young dream. “Give me that figure!”

Archie continued to toy absently with Pongo. He was wondering now how best to
break this sad occurrence to Lucille. It would be a disappointment for the poor
girl.

“Give me that figure!”

Archie started violently. There was an instant in which Pongo seemed to hang
suspended, like Mohammed’s coffin, between heaven and earth, then the
force of gravity asserted itself. Pongo fell with a sharp crack and
disintegrated. And as it did so there was a knock at the door, and in walked a
dark, furtive person, who to the inflamed vision of Mr. Daniel Brewster looked
like something connected with the executive staff of the Black Hand. With all
time at his disposal, the unfortunate Salvatore had selected this moment for
stating his case.

“Get out!” bellowed Mr. Brewster. “I didn’t ring for a
waiter.”

Archie, his mind reeling beneath the catastrophe, recovered himself
sufficiently to do the honours. It was at his instigation that Salvatore was
there, and, greatly as he wished that he could have seen fit to choose a more
auspicious moment for his business chat, he felt compelled to do his best to
see him through.

“Oh, I say, half a second,” he said. “You don’t quite
understand. As a matter of fact, this chappie is by way of being downtrodden
and oppressed and what not, and I suggested that he should get hold of you and
speak a few well-chosen words. Of course, if you’d rather—some
other time—”

But Mr. Brewster was not permitted to postpone the interview. Before he could
get his breath, Salvatore had begun to talk. He was a strong, ambidextrous
talker, whom it was hard to interrupt; and it was not for some moments that Mr.
Brewster succeeded in getting a word in. When he did, he spoke to the point.
Though not a linguist, he had been able to follow the discourse closely enough
to realise that the waiter was dissatisfied with conditions in his hotel; and
Mr. Brewster, as has been indicated, had a short way with people who criticised
the Cosmopolis.

“You’re fired!” said Mr. Brewster.

“Oh, I say!” protested Archie.

Salvatore muttered what sounded like a passage from Dante.

“Fired!” repeated Mr. Brewster resolutely. “And I wish to
heaven,” he added, eyeing his son-in-law malignantly, “I could fire
you!”

“Well,” said Professor Binstead cheerfully, breaking the grim
silence which followed this outburst, “if you will give me your cheque,
Brewster, I think I will be going. Two thousand three hundred dollars. Make it
open, if you will, and then I can run round the corner and cash it before
lunch. That will be capital!”

CHAPTER XII.

BRIGHT EYES—AND A FLY

The Hermitage (unrivalled scenery, superb cuisine, Daniel Brewster, proprietor)
was a picturesque summer hotel in the green heart of the mountains, built by
Archie’s father-in-law shortly after he assumed control of the
Cosmopolis. Mr. Brewster himself seldom went there, preferring to concentrate
his attention on his New York establishment; and Archie and Lucille,
breakfasting in the airy dining-room some ten days after the incidents recorded
in the last chapter, had consequently to be content with two out of the three
advertised attractions of the place. Through the window at their side quite a
slab of the unrivalled scenery was visible; some of the superb cuisine was
already on the table; and the fact that the eye searched in vain for Daniel
Brewster, proprietor, filled Archie, at any rate, with no sense of aching loss.
He bore it with equanimity and even with positive enthusiasm. In Archie’s
opinion, practically all a place needed to make it an earthly Paradise was for
Mr. Daniel Brewster to be about forty-seven miles away from it.

It was at Lucille’s suggestion that they had come to the Hermitage. Never
a human sunbeam, Mr. Brewster had shown such a bleak front to the world, and
particularly to his son-in-law, in the days following the Pongo incident, that
Lucille had thought that he and Archie would for a time at least be better
apart—a view with which her husband cordially agreed. He had enjoyed his
stay at the Hermitage, and now he regarded the eternal hills with the
comfortable affection of a healthy man who is breakfasting well.

“It’s going to be another perfectly topping day,” he
observed, eyeing the shimmering landscape, from which the morning mists were
swiftly shredding away like faint puffs of smoke. “Just the day you ought
to have been here.”

“Yes, it’s too bad I’ve got to go. New York will be like an
oven.”

“Put it off.”

“I can’t, I’m afraid. I’ve a fitting.”

Archie argued no further. He was a married man of old enough standing to know
the importance of fittings.

“Besides,” said Lucille, “I want to see father.” Archie
repressed an exclamation of astonishment. “I’ll be back to-morrow
evening. You will be perfectly happy.”

“Queen of my soul, you know I can’t be happy with you away. You
know—”

“Yes?” murmured Lucille, appreciatively. She never tired of hearing
Archie say this sort of thing.

Archie’s voice had trailed off. He was looking across the room.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed. “What an awfully pretty
woman!”

“Where?”

“Over there. Just coming in, I say, what wonderful eyes! I don’t
think I ever saw such eyes. Did you notice her eyes? Sort of flashing! Awfully
pretty woman!”

Warm though the morning was, a suspicion of chill descended upon the
breakfast-table. A certain coldness seemed to come into Lucille’s face.
She could not always share Archie’s fresh young enthusiasms.

“Do you think so?”

“Wonderful figure, too!”

“Yes?”

“Well, what I mean to say, fair to medium,” said Archie, recovering
a certain amount of that intelligence which raises man above the level of the
beasts of the field. “Not the sort of type I admire myself, of
course.”

“You know her, don’t you?”

“Absolutely not and far from it,” said Archie, hastily.
“Never met her in my life.”

“You’ve seen her on the stage. Her name’s Vera Silverton. We
saw her in—”

“Of course, yes. So we did. I say, I wonder what she’s doing here?
She ought to be in New York, rehearsing. I remember meeting
what’s-his-name—you know—chappie who writes plays and what
not—George Benham—I remember meeting George Benham, and he told me
she was rehearsing in a piece of his called—I forget the name, but I know
it was called something or other. Well, why isn’t she?”

“She probably lost her temper and broke her contract and came away.
She’s always doing that sort of thing. She’s known for it. She must
be a horrid woman.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to talk about her. She used to be married to someone,
and she divorced him. And then she was married to someone else, and he divorced
her. And I’m certain her hair wasn’t that colour two years ago, and
I don’t think a woman ought to make up like that, and her dress is all
wrong for the country, and those pearls can’t be genuine, and I hate the
way she rolls her eyes about, and pink doesn’t suit her a bit. I think
she’s an awful woman, and I wish you wouldn’t keep on talking about
her.”

“Right-o!” said Archie, dutifully.

They finished breakfast, and Lucille went up to pack her bag. Archie strolled
out on to the terrace outside the hotel, where he smoked, communed with nature,
and thought of Lucille. He always thought of Lucille when he was alone,
especially when he chanced to find himself in poetic surroundings like those
provided by the unrivalled scenery encircling the Hotel Hermitage. The longer
he was married to her the more did the sacred institution seem to him a good
egg. Mr. Brewster might regard their marriage as one of the world’s most
unfortunate incidents, but to Archie it was, and always had been, a bit of all
right. The more he thought of it the more did he marvel that a girl like
Lucille should have been content to link her lot with that of a Class C
specimen like himself. His meditations were, in fact, precisely what a
happily-married man’s meditations ought to be.

He was roused from them by a species of exclamation or cry almost at his elbow,
and turned to find that the spectacular Miss Silverton was standing beside him.
Her dubious hair gleamed in the sunlight, and one of the criticised eyes was
screwed up. The other gazed at Archie with an expression of appeal.

“There’s something in my eye,” she said.

“No, really!”

“I wonder if you would mind? It would be so kind of you!”

Archie would have preferred to remove himself, but no man worthy of the name
can decline to come to the rescue of womanhood in distress. To twist the
lady’s upper lid back and peer into it and jab at it with the corner of
his handkerchief was the only course open to him. His conduct may be classed as
not merely blameless but definitely praiseworthy. King Arthur’s knights
used to do this sort of thing all the time, and look what people think of them.
Lucille, therefore, coming out of the hotel just as the operation was
concluded, ought not to have felt the annoyance she did. But, of course, there
is a certain superficial intimacy about the attitude of a man who is taking a
fly out of a woman’s eye which may excusably jar upon the sensibilities
of his wife. It is an attitude which suggests a sort of rapprochement or
camaraderie or, as Archie would have put it, what not.

“Thanks so much!” said Miss Silverton.

“Oh no, rather not,” said Archie.

“Such a nuisance getting things in your eye.”

“Absolutely!”

“I’m always doing it!”

“Rotten luck!”

“But I don’t often find anyone as clever as you to help me.”

Lucille felt called upon to break in on this feast of reason and flow of soul.

“Archie,” she said, “if you go and get your clubs now, I
shall just have time to walk round with you before my train goes.”

“Oh, ah!” said Archie, perceiving her for the first time.
“Oh, ah, yes, right-o, yes, yes, yes!”

On the way to the first tee it seemed to Archie that Lucille was distrait and
abstracted in her manner; and it occurred to him, not for the first time in his
life, what a poor support a clear conscience is in moments of crisis. Dash it
all, he didn’t see what else he could have done. Couldn’t leave the
poor female staggering about the place with squads of flies wedged in her
eyeball. Nevertheless—

“Rotten thing getting a fly in your eye,” he hazarded at length.
“Dashed awkward, I mean.”

“Or convenient.”

“Eh?”

“Well, it’s a very good way of dispensing with an
introduction.”

“Oh, I say! You don’t mean you think—”

“She’s a horrid woman!”

“Absolutely! Can’t think what people see in her.”

“Well, you seemed to enjoy fussing over her!”

“No, no! Nothing of the kind! She inspired me with absolute
what-d’you-call-it—the sort of thing chappies do get inspired with,
you know.”

“You were beaming all over your face.”

“I wasn’t. I was just screwing up my face because the sun was in my
eye.”

“All sorts of things seem to be in people’s eyes this
morning!”

Archie was saddened. That this sort of misunderstanding should have occurred on
such a topping day and at a moment when they were to be torn asunder for about
thirty-six hours made him feel—well, it gave him the pip. He had an idea
that there were words which would have straightened everything out, but he was
not an eloquent young man and could not find them. He felt aggrieved. Lucille,
he considered, ought to have known that he was immune as regarded females with
flashing eyes and experimentally-coloured hair. Why, dash it, he could have
extracted flies from the eyes of Cleopatra with one hand and Helen of Troy with
the other, simultaneously, without giving them a second thought. It was in
depressed mood that he played a listless nine holes; nor had life brightened
for him when he came back to the hotel two hours later, after seeing Lucille
off in the train to New York. Never till now had they had anything remotely
resembling a quarrel. Life, Archie felt, was a bit of a wash-out. He was
disturbed and jumpy, and the sight of Miss Silverton, talking to somebody on a
settee in the corner of the hotel lobby, sent him shooting off at right angles
and brought him up with a bump against the desk behind which the room-clerk
sat.

The room-clerk, always of a chatty disposition, was saying something to him,
but Archie did not listen. He nodded mechanically. It was something about his
room. He caught the word “satisfactory.”

“Oh, rather, quite!” said Archie.

A fussy devil, the room-clerk! He knew perfectly well that Archie found his
room satisfactory. These chappies gassed on like this so as to try to make you
feel that the management took a personal interest in you. It was part of their
job. Archie beamed absently and went in to lunch. Lucille’s empty seat
stared at him mournfully, increasing his sense of desolation.

He was half-way through his lunch, when the chair opposite ceased to be vacant.
Archie, transferring his gaze from the scenery outside the window, perceived
that his friend, George Benham, the playwright, had materialised from nowhere
and was now in his midst.

“Hallo!” he said.

George Benham was a grave young man whose spectacles gave him the look of a
mournful owl. He seemed to have something on his mind besides the artistically
straggling mop of black hair which swept down over his brow. He sighed wearily,
and ordered fish-pie.

“I thought I saw you come through the lobby just now,” he said.

“Oh, was that you on the settee, talking to Miss Silverton?”

“She was talking to me,” said the playwright, moodily.

“What are you doing here?” asked Archie. He could have wished Mr.
Benham elsewhere, for he intruded on his gloom, but, the chappie being amongst
those present, it was only civil to talk to him. “I thought you were in
New York, watching the rehearsals of your jolly old drama.”

“The rehearsals are hung up. And it looks as though there wasn’t
going to be any drama. Good Lord!” cried George Benham, with honest
warmth, “with opportunities opening out before one on every
side—with life extending prizes to one with both hands—when you see
coal-heavers making fifty dollars a week and the fellows who clean out the
sewers going happy and singing about their work—why does a man
deliberately choose a job like writing plays? Job was the only man that ever
lived who was really qualified to write a play, and he would have found it
pretty tough going if his leading woman had been anyone like Vera
Silverton!”

Archie—and it was this fact, no doubt, which accounted for his possession
of such a large and varied circle of friends—was always able to shelve
his own troubles in order to listen to other people’s hard-luck stories.

“Tell me all, laddie,” he said. “Release the film! Has she
walked out on you?”

“Left us flat! How did you hear about it? Oh, she told you, of
course?”

Archie hastened to try to dispel the idea that he was on any such terms of
intimacy with Miss Silverton.

“No, no! My wife said she thought it must be something of that nature or
order when we saw her come in to breakfast. I mean to say,” said Archie,
reasoning closely, “woman can’t come into breakfast here and be
rehearsing in New York at the same time. Why did she administer the raspberry,
old friend?”

Mr. Benham helped himself to fish-pie, and spoke dully through the steam.

“Well, what happened was this. Knowing her as intimately as you
do—”

“I don’t know her!”

“Well, anyway, it was like this. As you know, she has a dog—”

“I didn’t know she had a dog,” protested Archie. It seemed to
him that the world was in conspiracy to link him with this woman.

“Well, she has a dog. A beastly great whacking brute of a bulldog. And
she brings it to rehearsal.” Mr. Benham’s eyes filled with tears,
as in his emotion he swallowed a mouthful of fish-pie some eighty-three degrees
Fahrenheit hotter than it looked. In the intermission caused by this disaster
his agile mind skipped a few chapters of the story, and, when he was able to
speak again, he said, “So then there was a lot of trouble. Everything
broke loose!”

“Why?” Archie was puzzled. “Did the management object to her
bringing the dog to rehearsal?”

“A lot of good that would have done! She does what she likes in the
theatre.”

“Then why was there trouble?”

“You weren’t listening,” said Mr. Benham, reproachfully.
“I told you. This dog came snuffling up to where I was sitting—it
was quite dark in the body of the theatre, you know—and I got up to say
something about something that was happening on the stage, and somehow I must
have given it a push with my foot.”

“I see,” said Archie, beginning to get the run of the plot.
“You kicked her dog.”

“Pushed it. Accidentally. With my foot.”

“I understand. And when you brought off this kick—”

“Push,” said Mr. Benham, austerely.

“This kick or push. When you administered this kick or push—”

“It was more a sort of light shove.”

“Well, when you did whatever you did, the trouble started?”

Mr. Benham gave a slight shiver.

“She talked for a while, and then walked out, taking the dog with her.
You see, this wasn’t the first time it had happened.”

“Good Lord! Do you spend your whole time doing that sort of thing?”

“It wasn’t me the first time. It was the stage-manager. He
didn’t know whose dog it was, and it came waddling on to the stage, and
he gave it a sort of pat, a kind of flick—”

“A slosh?”

“Not a slosh,” corrected Mr. Benham, firmly. “You
might call it a tap—with the promptscript. Well, we had a lot of
difficulty smoothing her over that time. Still, we managed to do it, but she
said that if anything of the sort occurred again she would chuck up her
part.”

“She must be fond of the dog,” said Archie, for the first time
feeling a touch of goodwill and sympathy towards the lady.

“She’s crazy about it. That’s what made it so awkward when I
happened—quite inadvertently—to give it this sort of accidental
shove. Well, we spent the rest of the day trying to get her on the ’phone
at her apartment, and finally we heard that she had come here. So I took the
next train, and tried to persuade her to come back. She wouldn’t listen.
And that’s how matters stand.”

“Pretty rotten!” said Archie, sympathetically.

“You can bet it’s pretty rotten—for me. There’s nobody
else who can play the part. Like a chump, I wrote the thing specially for her.
It means the play won’t be produced at all, if she doesn’t do it.
So you’re my last hope!”

Archie, who was lighting a cigarette, nearly swallowed it.

“I am?”

“I thought you might persuade her. Point out to her what a lot hangs on
her coming back. Jolly her along, you know the sort of thing!”

“But, my dear old friend, I tell you I don’t know her!”

Mr. Benham’s eyes opened behind their zareba of glass.

“Well, she knows you. When you came through the lobby just now she
said that you were the only real human being she had ever met.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I did take a fly out of her eye.
But—”

“You did? Well, then, the whole thing’s simple. All you have to do
is to ask her how her eye is, and tell her she has the most beautiful eyes you
ever saw, and coo a bit.”

“But, my dear old son!” The frightful programme which his friend
had mapped out stunned Archie. “I simply can’t! Anything to oblige
and all that sort of thing, but when it comes to cooing, distinctly
Napoo!”

“Nonsense! It isn’t hard to coo.”

“You don’t understand, laddie. You’re not a married man. I
mean to say, whatever you say for or against marriage—personally
I’m all for it and consider it a ripe egg—the fact remains that it
practically makes a chappie a spent force as a cooer. I don’t want to
dish you in any way, old bean, but I must firmly and resolutely decline to
coo.”

Mr. Benham rose and looked at his watch.

“I’ll have to be moving,” he said. “I’ve got to
get back to New York and report. I’ll tell them that I haven’t been
able to do anything myself, but that I’ve left the matter in good hands.
I know you will do your best.”

“But, laddie!”

“Think,” said Mr. Benham, solemnly, “of all that depends on
it! The other actors! The small-part people thrown out of a job!
Myself—but no! Perhaps you had better touch very lightly or not at all on
my connection with the thing. Well, you know how to handle it. I feel I can
leave it to you. Pitch it strong! Good-bye, my dear old man, and a thousand
thanks. I’ll do the same for you another time.” He moved towards
the door, leaving Archie transfixed. Half-way there he turned and came back.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, “my lunch. Have it put on your
bill, will you? I haven’t time to stay and settle. Good-bye!
Good-bye!”

CHAPTER XIII.

RALLYING ROUND PERCY

It amazed Archie through the whole of a long afternoon to reflect how swiftly
and unexpectedly the blue and brilliant sky of life can cloud over and with
what abruptness a man who fancies that his feet are on solid ground can find
himself immersed in Fate’s gumbo. He recalled, with the bitterness with
which one does recall such things, that that morning he had risen from his bed
without a care in the world, his happiness unruffled even by the thought that
Lucille would be leaving him for a short space. He had sung in his bath. Yes,
he had chirruped like a bally linnet. And now—

Some men would have dismissed the unfortunate affairs of Mr. George Benham from
their mind as having nothing to do with themselves, but Archie had never been
made of this stern stuff. The fact that Mr. Benham, apart from being an
agreeable companion with whom he had lunched occasionally in New York, had no
claims upon him affected him little. He hated to see his fellowman in trouble.
On the other hand, what could he do? To seek Miss Silverton out and plead with
her—even if he did it without cooing—would undoubtedly establish an
intimacy between them which, instinct told him, might tinge her manner after
Lucille’s return with just that suggestion of Auld Lang Syne which makes
things so awkward.

His whole being shrank from extending to Miss Silverton that inch which the
female artistic temperament is so apt to turn into an ell; and when, just as he
was about to go in to dinner, he met her in the lobby and she smiled brightly
at him and informed him that her eye was now completely recovered, he shied
away like a startled mustang of the prairie, and, abandoning his intention of
worrying the table d’hote in the same room with the amiable creature,
tottered off to the smoking-room, where he did the best he could with
sandwiches and coffee.

Having got through the time as best he could till eleven o’clock, he went
up to bed.

The room to which he and Lucille had been assigned by the management was on the
second floor, pleasantly sunny by day and at night filled with cool and
heartening fragrance of the pines. Hitherto Archie had always enjoyed taking a
final smoke on the balcony overlooking the woods, but, to-night such was his
mental stress that he prepared to go to bed directly he had closed the door. He
turned to the cupboard to get his pyjamas.

His first thought, when even after a second scrutiny no pyjamas were visible,
was that this was merely another of those things which happen on days when life
goes wrong. He raked the cupboard for a third time with an annoyed eye. From
every hook hung various garments of Lucille’s, but no pyjamas. He was
breathing a soft malediction preparatory to embarking on a point-to-point hunt
for his missing property, when something in the cupboard caught his eye and
held him for a moment puzzled.

He could have sworn that Lucille did not possess a mauve négligé. Why,
she had told him a dozen times that mauve was a colour which she did not like.
He frowned perplexedly; and as he did so, from near the window came a soft
cough.

Archie spun round and subjected the room to as close a scrutiny as that which
he had bestowed upon the cupboard. Nothing was visible. The window opening on
to the balcony gaped wide. The balcony was manifestly empty.

“Urrf!”

This time there was no possibility of error. The cough had come from the
immediate neighbourhood of the window.

Archie was conscious of a pringly sensation about the roots of his
closely-cropped back-hair, as he moved cautiously across the room. The affair
was becoming uncanny; and, as he tip-toed towards the window, old ghost
stories, read in lighter moments before cheerful fires with plenty of light in
the room, flitted through his mind. He had the feeling—precisely as every
chappie in those stories had had—that he was not alone.

Nor was he. In a basket behind an arm-chair, curled up, with his massive chin
resting on the edge of the wicker-work, lay a fine bulldog.

“Urrf!” said the bulldog.

“Good God!” said Archie.

There was a lengthy pause in which the bulldog looked earnestly at Archie and
Archie looked earnestly at the bulldog.

Normally, Archie was a dog-lover. His hurry was never so great as to prevent
him stopping, when in the street, and introducing himself to any dog he met. In
a strange house, his first act was to assemble the canine population, roll it
on its back or backs, and punch it in the ribs. As a boy, his earliest ambition
had been to become a veterinary surgeon; and, though the years had cheated him
of his career, he knew all about dogs, their points, their manners, their
customs, and their treatment in sickness and in health. In short, he loved
dogs, and, had they met under happier conditions, he would undoubtedly have
been on excellent terms with this one within the space of a minute. But, as
things were, he abstained from fraternising and continued to goggle dumbly.

And then his eye, wandering aside, collided with the following objects: a
fluffy pink dressing-gown, hung over the back of a chair, an entirely strange
suit-case, and, on the bureau, a photograph in a silver frame of a stout
gentleman in evening-dress whom he had never seen before in his life.

Much has been written of the emotions of the wanderer who, returning to his
childhood home, finds it altered out of all recognition; but poets have
neglected the theme—far more poignant—of the man who goes up to his
room in an hotel and finds it full of somebody else’s dressing-gowns and
bulldogs.

Bulldogs! Archie’s heart jumped sideways and upwards with a wiggling
movement, turning two somersaults, and stopped beating. The hideous truth,
working its way slowly through the concrete, had at last penetrated to his
brain. He was not only in somebody else’s room, and a woman’s at
that. He was in the room belonging to Miss Vera Silverton.

He could not understand it. He would have been prepared to stake the last cent
he could borrow from his father-in-law on the fact that he had made no error in
the number over the door. Yet, nevertheless, such was the case, and, below par
though his faculties were at the moment, he was sufficiently alert to perceive
that it behoved him to withdraw.

He leaped to the door, and, as he did so, the handle began to turn.

The cloud which had settled on Archie’s mind lifted abruptly. For an
instant he was enabled to think about a hundred times more quickly than was his
leisurely wont. Good fortune had brought him to within easy reach of the
electric-light switch. He snapped it back, and was in darkness. Then, diving
silently and swiftly to the floor, he wriggled under the bed. The thud of his
head against what appeared to be some sort of joist or support, unless it had
been placed there by the maker as a practical joke, on the chance of this kind
of thing happening some day, coincided with the creak of the opening door. Then
the light was switched on again, and the bulldog in the corner gave a welcoming
woofle.

“And how is mamma’s precious angel?”

Rightly concluding that the remark had not been addressed to himself and that
no social obligation demanded that he reply, Archie pressed his cheek against
the boards and said nothing. The question was not repeated, but from the other
side of the room came the sound of a patted dog.

“Did he think his muzzer had fallen down dead and was never coming
up?”

The beautiful picture which these words conjured up filled Archie with that
yearning for the might-have-been which is always so painful. He was finding his
position physically as well as mentally distressing. It was cramped under the
bed, and the boards were harder than anything he had ever encountered. Also, it
appeared to be the practice of the housemaids at the Hotel Hermitage to use the
space below the beds as a depository for all the dust which they swept off the
carpet, and much of this was insinuating itself into his nose and mouth. The
two things which Archie would have liked most to do at that moment were first
to kill Miss Silverton—if possible, painfully—and then to spend the
remainder of his life sneezing.

After a prolonged period he heard a drawer open, and noted the fact as
promising. As the old married man, he presumed that it signified the putting
away of hair-pins. About now the dashed woman would be looking at herself in
the glass with her hair down. Then she would brush it. Then she would twiddle
it up into thingummies. Say, ten minutes for this. And after that she would go
to bed and turn out the light, and he would be able, after giving her a bit of
time to go to sleep, to creep out and leg it. Allowing at a conservative
estimate three-quarters of—

“Come out!”

Archie stiffened. For an instant a feeble hope came to him that this remark,
like the others, might be addressed to the dog.

“Come out from under that bed!” said a stern voice. “And mind
how you come! I’ve got a pistol!”

“Well, I mean to say, you know,” said Archie, in a propitiatory
voice, emerging from his lair like a tortoise and smiling as winningly as a man
can who has just bumped his head against the leg of a bed, “I suppose all
this seems fairly rummy, but—”

“For the love of Mike!” said Miss Silverton.

The point seemed to Archie well taken and the comment on the situation neatly
expressed.

“What are you doing in my room?”

“Well, if it comes to that, you know—shouldn’t have mentioned
it if you hadn’t brought the subject up in the course of general
chit-chat—what are you doing in mine?”

“Yours?”

“Well, apparently there’s been a bloomer of some species somewhere,
but this was the room I had last night,” said Archie.

“But the desk-clerk said that he had asked you if it would be quite
satisfactory to you giving it up to me, and you said yes. I come here every
summer, when I’m not working, and I always have this room.”

“By Jove! I remember now. The chappie did say something to me about the
room, but I was thinking of something else and it rather went over the top. So
that’s what he was talking about, was it?”

Miss Silverton was frowning. A moving-picture director, scanning her face,
would have perceived that she was registering disappointment.

“Nothing breaks right for me in this darned world,” she said,
regretfully. “When I caught sight of your leg sticking out from under the
bed, I did think that everything was all lined up for a real find and, at last,
I could close my eyes and see the thing in the papers. On the front page, with
photographs: ‘Plucky Actress Captures Burglar.’ Darn it!”

“Fearfully sorry, you know!”

“I just needed something like that. I’ve got a Press-agent, and I
will say for him that he eats well and sleeps well and has just enough
intelligence to cash his monthly cheque without forgetting what he went into
the bank for, but outside of that you can take it from me he’s not one of
the world’s workers! He’s about as much solid use to a girl with
aspirations as a pain in the lower ribs. It’s three weeks since he got me
into print at all, and then the brightest thing he could think up was that my
favourite breakfast-fruit was an apple. Well, I ask you!”

“Rotten!” said Archie.

“I did think that for once my guardian angel had gone back to work and
was doing something for me. ‘Stage Star and Midnight
Marauder,’” murmured Miss Silverton, wistfully.
“‘Footlight Favourite Foils Felon.’”

“Bit thick!” agreed Archie, sympathetically. “Well,
you’ll probably be wanting to get to bed and all that sort of rot, so I
may as well be popping, what! Cheerio!”

A sudden gleam came into Miss Silverton’s compelling eyes.

“Wait!”

“Eh?”

“Wait! I’ve got an idea!” The wistful sadness had gone from
her manner. She was bright and alert. “Sit down!”

“Sit down?”

“Sure. Sit down and take the chill off the arm-chair. I’ve thought
of something.”

Archie sat down as directed. At his elbow the bulldog eyed him gravely from the
basket.

“Do they know you in this hotel?”

“Know me? Well, I’ve been here about a week.”

“I mean, do they know who you are? Do they know you’re a good
citizen?”

“Well, if it comes to that, I suppose they don’t. But—”

“Fine!” said Miss Silverton, appreciatively. “Then it’s
all right. We can carry on!”

“Carry on!”

“Why, sure! All I want is to get the thing into the papers. It
doesn’t matter to me if it turns out later that there was a mistake and
that you weren’t a burglar trying for my jewels after all. It makes just
as good a story either way. I can’t think why that never struck me
before. Here have I been kicking because you weren’t a real burglar, when
it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans whether you are or not. All
I’ve got to do is to rush out and yell and rouse the hotel, and they come
in and pinch you, and I give the story to the papers, and everything’s
fine!”

Archie leaped from his chair.

“I say! What!”

“What’s on your mind?” enquired Miss Silverton,
considerately. “Don’t you think it’s a nifty scheme?”

“Nifty! My dear old soul! It’s frightful!”

“Can’t see what’s wrong with it,” grumbled Miss
Silverton. “After I’ve had someone get New York on the
long-distance ’phone and give the story to the papers you can explain,
and they’ll let you out. Surely to goodness you don’t object, as a
personal favour to me, to spending an hour or two in a cell? Why, probably they
haven’t got a prison at all out in these parts, and you’ll simply
be locked in a room. A child of ten could do it on his head,” said Miss
Silverton. “A child of six,” she emended.

“But, dash it—I mean—what I mean to say—I’m
married!”

“Yes?” said Miss Silverton, with the politeness of faint interest.
“I’ve been married myself. I wouldn’t say it’s
altogether a bad thing, mind you, for those that like it, but a little of it
goes a long way. My first husband,” she proceeded, reminiscently,
“was a travelling man. I gave him a two-weeks’ try-out, and then I
told him to go on travelling. My second husband—now, he
wasn’t a gentleman in any sense of the word. I remember
once—”

“You don’t grasp the point. The jolly old point! You fail to grasp
it. If this bally thing comes out, my wife will be most frightfully
sick!”

Miss Silverton regarded him with pained surprise.

“Do you mean to say you would let a little thing like that stand in the
way of my getting on the front page of all the papers—with
photographs? Where’s your chivalry?”

“Never mind my dashed chivalry!”

“Besides, what does it matter if she does get a little sore? She’ll
soon get over it. You can put that right. Buy her a box of candy. Not that
I’m strong for candy myself. What I always say is, it may taste good, but
look what it does to your hips! I give you my honest word that, when I gave up
eating candy, I lost eleven ounces the first week. My second husband—no,
I’m a liar, it was my third—my third husband said—Say,
what’s the big idea? Where are you going?”

“Out!” said Archie, firmly. “Bally out!”

A dangerous light flickered in Miss Silverton’s eyes.

“That’ll be all of that!” she said, raising the pistol.
“You stay right where you are, or I’ll fire!”

“Right-o!”

“I mean it!”

“My dear old soul,” said Archie, “in the recent
unpleasantness in France I had chappies popping off things like that at me all
day and every day for close on five years, and here I am, what! I mean to say,
if I’ve got to choose between staying here and being pinched in your room
by the local constabulary and having the dashed thing get into the papers and
all sorts of trouble happening, and my wife getting the wind up and—I
say, if I’ve got to choose—”

“Suck a lozenge and start again!” said Miss Silverton.

“Well, what I mean to say is, I’d much rather take a chance of
getting a bullet in the old bean than that. So loose it off and the best
o’ luck!”

Miss Silverton lowered the pistol, sank into a chair, and burst into tears.

“I think you’re the meanest man I ever met!” she sobbed.
“You know perfectly well the bang would send me into a fit!”

“In that case,” said Archie, relieved, “cheerio, good luck,
pip-pip, toodle-oo, and good-bye-ee! I’ll be shifting!”

“Yes, you will!” cried Miss Silverton, energetically, recovering
with amazing swiftness from her collapse. “Yes, you will, I by no means
suppose! You think, just because I’m no champion with a pistol, I’m
helpless. You wait! Percy!”

“My name is not Percy.”

“I never said it was. Percy! Percy, come to muzzer!”

There was a creaking rustle from behind the arm-chair. A heavy body flopped on
the carpet. Out into the room, heaving himself along as though sleep had
stiffened his joints, and breathing stertorously through his tilted nose, moved
the fine bulldog. Seen in the open, he looked even more formidable than he had
done in his basket.

“Guard him, Percy! Good dog, guard him! Oh, heavens! What’s the
matter with him?”

And with these words the emotional woman, uttering a wail of anguish, flung
herself on the floor beside the animal.

Percy was, indeed, in manifestly bad shape. He seemed quite unable to drag his
limbs across the room. There was a curious arch in his back, and, as his
mistress touched him, he cried out plaintively,

“Percy! Oh, what is the matter with him? His nose is
burning!”

Now was the time, with both sections of the enemy’s forces occupied, for
Archie to have departed softly from the room. But never, since the day when at
the age of eleven he had carried a large, damp, and muddy terrier with a sore
foot three miles and deposited him on the best sofa in his mother’s
drawing-room, had he been able to ignore the spectacle of a dog in trouble.

“He does look bad, what!”

“He’s dying! Oh, he’s dying! Is it distemper? He’s
never had distemper.”

Archie regarded the sufferer with the grave eye of the expert. He shook his
head.

“It’s not that,” he said. “Dogs with distemper make a
sort of snifting noise.”

“But he is making a snifting noise!”

“No, he’s making a snuffling noise. Great difference between
snuffling and snifting. Not the same thing at all. I mean to say, when they
snift they snift, and when they snuffle they—as it were—snuffle.
That’s how you can tell. If you ask me”—he passed his
hand over the dog’s back. Percy uttered another cry. “I know
what’s the matter with him.”

“A brute of a man kicked him at rehearsal. Do you think he’s
injured internally?”

“It’s rheumatism,” said Archie. “Jolly old rheumatism.
That’s all that’s the trouble.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely!”

“But what can I do?”

“Give him a good hot bath, and mind and dry him well. He’ll have a
good sleep then, and won’t have any pain. Then, first thing to-morrow,
you want to give him salicylate of soda.”

“I’ll never remember that.”—“I’ll write it
down for you. You ought to give him from ten to twenty grains three times a day
in an ounce of water. And rub him with any good embrocation.”

“And he won’t die?”

“Die! He’ll live to be as old as you are!-I mean to
say—”

“I could kiss you!” said Miss Silverton, emotionally.

Archie backed hastily.

“No, no, absolutely not! Nothing like that required, really!”

“You’re a darling!”

“Yes. I mean no. No, no, really!”

“I don’t know what to say. What can I say?”

“Good night,” said Archie.

“I wish there was something I could do! If you hadn’t been here, I
should have gone off my head!”

A great idea flashed across Archie’s brain.

“Do you really want to do something?”

“Anything!”

“Then I do wish, like a dear sweet soul, you would pop straight back to
New York to-morrow and go on with those rehearsals.”

Miss Silverton shook her head.

“I can’t do that!”

“Oh, right-o! But it isn’t much to ask, what!”

“Not much to ask! I’ll never forgive that man for kicking
Percy!”

“Now listen, dear old soul. You’ve got the story all wrong. As a
matter of fact, jolly old Benham told me himself that he has the greatest
esteem and respect for Percy, and wouldn’t have kicked him for the world.
And, you know it was more a sort of push than a kick. You might almost call it
a light shove. The fact is, it was beastly dark in the theatre, and he was
legging it sideways for some reason or other, no doubt with the best motives,
and unfortunately he happened to stub his toe on the poor old bean.”

“Then why didn’t he say so?”

“As far as I could make out, you didn’t give him a chance.”

Miss Silverton wavered.

“I always hate going back after I’ve walked out on a show,”
she said. “It seems so weak!”

“Not a bit of it! They’ll give three hearty cheers and think you a
topper. Besides, you’ve got to go to New York in any case. To take Percy
to a vet., you know, what!”

“Of course. How right you always are!” Miss Silverton hesitated
again. “Would you really be glad if I went back to the show?”

“I’d go singing about the hotel! Great pal of mine, Benham. A
thoroughly cheery old bean, and very cut up about the whole affair. Besides,
think of all the coves thrown out of work—the thingummabobs and the poor
what-d’you-call-’ems!”

“Very well.”

“You’ll do it?”

“Yes.”

“I say, you really are one of the best! Absolutely like mother made!
That’s fine! Well, I think I’ll be saying good night.”

“Good night. And thank you so much!”

“Oh, no, rather not!”

Archie moved to the door.

“Oh, by the way.”

“Yes?”

“If I were you, I think I should catch the very first train you can get
to New York. You see—er—you ought to take Percy to the vet. as soon
as ever you can.”

“You really do think of everything,” said Miss Silverton.

“Yes,” said Archie, meditatively.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE SAD CASE OF LOONEY BIDDLE

Archie was a simple soul, and, as is the case with most simple souls, gratitude
came easily to him. He appreciated kind treatment. And when, on the following
day, Lucille returned to the Hermitage, all smiles and affection, and made no
further reference to Beauty’s Eyes and the flies that got into them, he
was conscious of a keen desire to show some solid recognition of this
magnanimity. Few wives, he was aware, could have had the nobility and what not
to refrain from occasionally turning the conversation in the direction of the
above-mentioned topics. It had not needed this behaviour on her part to
convince him that Lucille was a topper and a corker and one of the very best,
for he had been cognisant of these facts since the first moment he had met her:
but what he did feel was that she deserved to be rewarded in no uncertain
manner. And it seemed a happy coincidence to him that her birthday should be
coming along in the next week or so. Surely, felt Archie, he could whack up
some sort of a not unjuicy gift for that occasion—something pretty ripe
that would make a substantial hit with the dear girl. Surely something would
come along to relieve his chronic impecuniosity for just sufficient length of
time to enable him to spread himself on this great occasion.

And, as if in direct answer to prayer, an almost forgotten aunt in England
suddenly, out of an absolutely blue sky, shot no less a sum than five hundred
dollars across the ocean. The present was so lavish and unexpected that Archie
had the awed feeling of one who participates in a miracle. He felt, like
Herbert Parker, that the righteous was not forsaken. It was the sort of thing
that restored a fellow’s faith in human nature. For nearly a week he went
about in a happy trance: and when, by thrift and enterprise—that is to
say, by betting Reggie van Tuyl that the New York Giants would win the opening
game of the series against the Pittsburg baseball team—he contrived to
double his capital, what it amounted to was simply that life had nothing more
to offer. He was actually in a position to go to a thousand dollars for
Lucille’s birthday present. He gathered in Mr. van Tuyl, of whose taste
in these matters he had a high opinion, and dragged him off to a
jeweller’s on Broadway.

The jeweller, a stout, comfortable man, leaned on the counter and fingered
lovingly the bracelet which he had lifted out of its nest of blue plush.
Archie, leaning on the other side of the counter, inspected the bracelet
searchingly, wishing that he knew more about these things; for he had rather a
sort of idea that the merchant was scheming to do him in the eyeball. In a
chair by his side, Reggie van Tuyl, half asleep as usual, yawned despondently.
He had permitted Archie to lug him into this shop; and he wanted to buy
something and go. Any form of sustained concentration fatigued Reggie.

“Now this,” said the jeweller, “I could do at eight hundred
and fifty dollars.”

“Grab it!” murmured Mr. van Tuyl.

The jeweller eyed him approvingly, a man after his own heart; but Archie looked
doubtful. It was all very well for Reggie to tell him to grab it in that
careless way. Reggie was a dashed millionaire, and no doubt bought bracelets by
the pound or the gross or what not; but he himself was in an entirely different
position.

“Eight hundred and fifty dollars!” he said, hesitating.

“Worth it,” mumbled Reggie van Tuyl.

“More than worth it,” amended the jeweller. “I can assure you
that it is better value than you could get anywhere on Fifth Avenue.”

“Yes?” said Archie. He took the bracelet and twiddled it
thoughtfully. “Well, my dear old jeweller, one can’t say fairer
than that, can one—or two, as the case may be!” He frowned.
“Oh, well, all right! But it’s rummy that women are so fearfully
keen on these little thingummies, isn’t it? I mean to say, can’t
see what they see in them. Stones, and all that. Still, there it is, of
course!”

“There,” said the jeweller, “as you say, it is, sir.”

“Yes, there it is!”

“Yes, there it is,” said the jeweller, “fortunately for
people in my line of business. Will you take it with you, sir?”

Archie reflected.

“No. No, not take it with me. The fact is, you know, my wife’s
coming back from the country to-night, and it’s her birthday to-morrow,
and the thing’s for her, and, if it was popping about the place to-night,
she might see it, and it would sort of spoil the surprise. I mean to say, she
doesn’t know I’m giving it her, and all that!”

“Besides,” said Reggie, achieving a certain animation now that the
tedious business interview was concluded, “going to the ball-game this
afternoon—might get pocket picked—yes, better have it sent.”

“Where shall I send it, sir?”

“Eh? Oh, shoot it along to Mrs. Archibald Moffam, at the Cosmopolis. Not
to-day, you know. Buzz it in first thing to-morrow.”

Having completed the satisfactory deal, the jeweller threw off the business
manner and became chatty.

“So you are going to the ball-game? It should be an interesting
contest.”

Reggie van Tuyl, now—by his own standards—completely awake, took
exception to this remark.

“Not a bit of it!” he said, decidedly. “No contest!
Can’t call it a contest! Walkover for the Pirates!”

Archie was stung to the quick. There is that about baseball which arouses
enthusiasm and the partisan spirit in the unlikeliest bosoms. It is almost
impossible for a man to live in America and not become gripped by the game; and
Archie had long been one of its warmest adherents. He was a whole-hearted
supporter of the Giants, and his only grievance against Reggie, in other
respects an estimable young man, was that the latter, whose money had been
inherited from steel-mills in that city, had an absurd regard for the Pirates
of Pittsburg.

“What absolute bally rot!” he exclaimed. “Look what the
Giants did to them yesterday!”

“Yesterday isn’t to-day,” said Reggie.

“No, it’ll be a jolly sight worse,” said Archie.
“Looney Biddle’ll be pitching for the Giants to-day.”

“That’s just what I mean. The Pirates have got him rattled. Look
what happened last time.”

Archie understood, and his generous nature chafed at the innuendo. Looney
Biddle—so-called by an affectionately admiring public as the result of
certain marked eccentricities—was beyond dispute the greatest left-handed
pitcher New York had possessed in the last decade. But there was one blot on
Mr. Biddle’s otherwise stainless scutcheon. Five weeks before, on the
occasion of the Giants’ invasion of Pittsburg, he had gone mysteriously
to pieces. Few native-born partisans, brought up to baseball from the cradle,
had been plunged into a profounder gloom on that occasion than Archie; but his
soul revolted at the thought that that sort of thing could ever happen again.

“I’m not saying,” continued Reggie, “that Biddle
isn’t a very fair pitcher, but it’s cruel to send him against the
Pirates, and somebody ought to stop it. His best friends should interfere. Once
a team gets a pitcher rattled, he’s never any good against them again. He
loses his nerve.”

The jeweller nodded approval of this sentiment.

“They never come back,” he said, sententiously.

The fighting blood of the Moffams was now thoroughly stirred. Archie eyed his
friend sternly. Reggie was a good chap—in many respects an extremely
sound egg—but he must not be allowed to talk rot of this description
about the greatest left-handed pitcher of the age.

“It seems to me, old companion,” he said, “that a small bet
is indicated at this juncture. How about it?”

“Don’t want to take your money.”

“You won’t have to! In the cool twilight of the merry old summer
evening I, friend of my youth and companion of my riper years, shall be
trousering yours.”

Reggie yawned. The day was very hot, and this argument was making him feel
sleepy again.

“Well, just as you like, of course. Double or quits on yesterday’s
bet, if that suits you.”

For a moment Archie hesitated. Firm as his faith was in Mr. Biddle’s
stout left arm, he had not intended to do the thing on quite this scale. That
thousand dollars of his was earmarked for Lucille’s birthday present, and
he doubted whether he ought to risk it. Then the thought that the honour of New
York was in his hands decided him. Besides, the risk was negligible. Betting on
Looney Biddle was like betting on the probable rise of the sun in the east. The
thing began to seem to Archie a rather unusually sound and conservative
investment. He remembered that the jeweller, until he drew him firmly but
kindly to earth and urged him to curb his exuberance and talk business on a
reasonable plane, had started brandishing bracelets that cost about two
thousand. There would be time to pop in at the shop this evening after the game
and change the one he had selected for one of those. Nothing was too good for
Lucille on her birthday.

“Right-o!” he said. “Make it so, old friend!”

Archie walked back to the Cosmopolis. No misgivings came to mar his perfect
contentment. He felt no qualms about separating Reggie from another thousand
dollars. Except for a little small change in the possession of the Messrs.
Rockefeller and Vincent Astor, Reggie had all the money in the world and could
afford to lose. He hummed a gay air as he entered the lobby and crossed to the
cigar-stand to buy a few cigarettes to see him through the afternoon.

The girl behind the cigar counter welcomed him with a bright smile. Archie was
popular with all the employés of the Cosmopolis.

“’S a great day, Mr. Moffam!”

“One of the brightest and best,” agreed Archie. “Could you
dig me out two, or possibly three, cigarettes of the usual description? I shall
want something to smoke at the ball-game.”

“You going to the ball-game?”

“Rather! Wouldn’t miss it for a fortune.”

“No?”

“Absolutely no! Not with jolly old Biddle pitching.”

The cigar-stand girl laughed amusedly.

“Is he pitching this afternoon? Say, that feller’s a nut?
D’you know him?”

“Know him? Well, I’ve seen him pitch and so forth.”

“I’ve got a girl friend who’s engaged to him!”

Archie looked at her with positive respect. It would have been more dramatic,
of course, if she had been engaged to the great man herself, but still the mere
fact that she had a girl friend in that astounding position gave her a sort of
halo.

“No, really!” he said. “I say, by Jove, really! Fancy
that!”

“Yes, she’s engaged to him all right. Been engaged close on a
coupla months now.”

“I say! That’s frightfully interesting! Fearfully interesting,
really!”

“It’s funny about that guy,” said the cigar-stand girl.
“He’s a nut! The fellow who said there’s plenty of room at
the top must have been thinking of Gus Biddle’s head! He’s crazy
about m’ girl friend, y’ know, and, whenever they have a fuss, it
seems like he sort of flies right off the handle.”

“Goes in off the deep end, eh?”

“Yes, sir! Loses what little sense he’s got. Why, the last
time him and m’ girl friend got to scrapping was when he was going on to
Pittsburg to play, about a month ago. He’d been out with her the day he
left for there, and he had a grouch or something, and he started making low,
sneaky cracks about her Uncle Sigsbee. Well, m’ girl friend’s got a
nice disposition, but she c’n get mad, and she just left him flat and
told him all was over. And he went off to Pittsburg, and, when he started in to
pitch the opening game, he just couldn’t keep his mind on his job, and
look what them assassins done to him! Five runs in the first innings! Yessir,
he’s a nut all right!”

Archie was deeply concerned. So this was the explanation of that mysterious
disaster, that weird tragedy which had puzzled the sporting press from coast to
coast.

“Good God! Is he often taken like that?”

“Oh, he’s all right when he hasn’t had a fuss with m’
girl friend,” said the cigar-stand girl, indifferently. Her interest in
baseball was tepid. Women are too often like this—mere butterflies, with
no concern for the deeper side of life.

“Yes, but I say! What I mean to say, you know! Are they pretty pally now?
The good old Dove of Peace flapping its little wings fairly briskly and all
that?”

“Oh, I guess everything’s nice and smooth just now. I seen m’
girl friend yesterday, and Gus was taking her to the movies last night, so I
guess everything’s nice and smooth.”

Archie breathed a sigh of relief.

“Took her to the movies, did he? Stout fellow!”

“I was at the funniest picture last week,” said the cigar-stand
girl. “Honest, it was a scream! It was like this—”

Archie listened politely; then went in to get a bite of lunch. His equanimity,
shaken by the discovery of the rift in the peerless one’s armour, was
restored. Good old Biddle had taken the girl to the movies last night. Probably
he had squeezed her hand a goodish bit in the dark. With what result? Why, the
fellow would be feeling like one of those chappies who used to joust for the
smiles of females in the Middle Ages. What he meant to say, presumably the girl
would be at the game this afternoon, whooping him on, and good old Biddle would
be so full of beans and buck that there would be no holding him.

Encouraged by these thoughts, Archie lunched with an untroubled mind. Luncheon
concluded, he proceeded to the lobby to buy back his hat and stick from the boy
brigand with whom he had left them. It was while he was conducting this
financial operation that he observed that at the cigar-stand, which adjoined
the coat-and-hat alcove, his friend behind the counter had become engaged in
conversation with another girl.

This was a determined looking young woman in a blue dress and a large hat of a
bold and flowery species. Archie happening to attract her attention, she gave
him a glance out of a pair of fine brown eyes, then, as if she did not think
much of him, turned to her companion and resumed their
conversation—which, being of an essentially private and intimate nature,
she conducted, after the manner of her kind, in a ringing soprano which
penetrated into every corner of the lobby. Archie, waiting while the brigand
reluctantly made change for a dollar bill, was privileged to hear every word.

“Right from the start I seen he was in a ugly mood. You know how
he gets, dearie! Chewing his upper lip and looking at you as if you were so
much dirt beneath his feet! How was I to know he’d lost fifteen
dollars fifty-five playing poker, and anyway, I don’t see where he gets a
licence to work off his grouches on me. And I told him so. I said to him,
‘Gus,’ I said, ‘if you can’t be bright and smiling and
cheerful when you take me out, why do you come round at all? Was I wrong or
right, dearie?”

The girl behind the counter heartily endorsed her conduct. “Once you let
a man think he could use you as a door-mat, where were you?”

“What happened then, honey?”

“Well, after that we went to the movies.”

Archie started convulsively. The change from his dollar-bill leaped in his
hand. Some of it sprang overboard and tinkled across the floor, with the
brigand in pursuit. A monstrous suspicion had begun to take root in his mind.

“Well, we got good seats, but—well, you know how it is, once things
start going wrong. You know that hat of mine, the one with the daisies and
cherries and the feather—I’d taken it off and given it him to hold
when we went in, and what do you think that fell’r’d done? Put it
on the floor and crammed it under the seat, just to save himself the trouble of
holding it on his lap! And, when I showed him I was upset, all he said was that
he was a pitcher and not a hatstand!”

Archie was paralysed. He paid no attention to the hat-check boy, who was trying
to induce him to accept treasure-trove to the amount of forty-five cents. His
whole being was concentrated on this frightful tragedy which had burst upon him
like a tidal wave. No possible room for doubt remained. “Gus” was
the only Gus in New York that mattered, and this resolute and injured female
before him was the Girl Friend, in whose slim hands rested the happiness of New
York’s baseball followers, the destiny of the unconscious Giants, and the
fate of his thousand dollars. A strangled croak proceeded from his parched
lips.

“Well, I didn’t say anything at the moment. It just shows how them
movies can work on a girl’s feelings. It was a Bryant Washburn film, and
somehow, whenever I see him on the screen, nothing else seems to matter. I just
get that goo-ey feeling, and couldn’t start a fight if you asked me to.
So we go off to have a soda, and I said to him, ‘That sure was a lovely
film, Gus!’ and would you believe me, he says straight out that he
didn’t think it was such a much, and he thought Bryant Washburn was a
pill! A pill!” The Girl Friend’s penetrating voice shook with
emotion.

“He never!” exclaimed the shocked cigar-stand girl.

“He did, if I die the next moment! I wasn’t more than half-way
through my vanilla and maple, but I got up without a word and left him. And I
ain’t seen a sight of him since. So there you are, dearie! Was I right or
wrong?”

The cigar-stand girl gave unqualified approval. What men like Gus Biddle needed
for the salvation of their souls was an occasional good jolt right where it
would do most good.

“I’m glad you think I acted right, dearie,” said the Girl
Friend. “I guess I’ve been too weak with Gus, and he’s took
advantage of it. I s’pose I’ll have to forgive him one of these old
days, but, believe me, it won’t be for a week.”

The cigar-stand girl was in favour of a fortnight.

“No,” said the Girl Friend, regretfully. “I don’t
believe I could hold out that long. But, if I speak to him inside a week,
well—! Well, I gotta be going. Goodbye, honey.”

The cigar-stand girl turned to attend to an impatient customer, and the Girl
Friend, walking with the firm and decisive steps which indicate character, made
for the swing-door leading to the street. And as she went, the paralysis which
had pipped Archie released its hold. Still ignoring the forty-five cents which
the boy continued to proffer, he leaped in her wake like a panther and came
upon her just as she was stepping into a car. The car was full, but not too
full for Archie. He dropped his five cents into the box and reached for a
vacant strap. He looked down upon the flowered hat. There she was. And there he
was. Archie rested his left ear against the forearm of a long, strongly-built
young man in a grey suit who had followed him into the car and was sharing his
strap, and pondered.

CHAPTER XV.

SUMMER STORMS

Of course, in a way, the thing was simple. The wheeze was, in a sense,
straightforward and uncomplicated. What he wanted to do was to point out to the
injured girl all that hung on her. He wished to touch her heart, to plead with
her, to desire her to restate her war-aims, and to persuade her—before
three o’clock when that stricken gentleman would be stepping into the
pitcher’s box to loose off the first ball against the Pittsburg
Pirates—to let bygones be bygones and forgive Augustus Biddle. But the
blighted problem was, how the deuce to find the opportunity to start. He
couldn’t yell at the girl in a crowded street-car; and, if he let go of
his strap and bent over her, somebody would step on his neck.

The Girl Friend, who for the first five minutes had remained entirely concealed
beneath her hat, now sought diversion by looking up and examining the faces of
the upper strata of passengers. Her eye caught Archie’s in a glance of
recognition, and he smiled feebly, endeavouring to register bonhomie and
good-will. He was surprised to see a startled expression come into her brown
eyes. Her face turned pink. At least, it was pink already, but it turned
pinker. The next moment, the car having stopped to pick up more passengers, she
jumped off and started to hurry across the street.

Archie was momentarily taken aback. When embarking on this business he had
never intended it to become a blend of otter-hunting and a moving-picture
chase. He followed her off the car with a sense that his grip on the affair was
slipping. Preoccupied with these thoughts, he did not perceive that the long
young man who had shared his strap had alighted too. His eyes were fixed on the
vanishing figure of the Girl Friend, who, having buzzed at a smart pace into
Sixth Avenue, was now legging it in the direction of the staircase leading to
one of the stations of the Elevated Railroad. Dashing up the stairs after her,
he shortly afterwards found himself suspended as before from a strap, gazing
upon the now familiar flowers on top of her hat. From another strap farther
down the carriage swayed the long young man in the grey suit.

The train rattled on. Once or twice, when it stopped, the girl seemed undecided
whether to leave or remain. She half rose, then sank back again. Finally she
walked resolutely out of the car, and Archie, following, found himself in a
part of New York strange to him. The inhabitants of this district appeared to
eke out a precarious existence, not by taking in one another’s washing,
but by selling one another second-hand clothes.

Archie glanced at his watch. He had lunched early, but so crowded with emotions
had been the period following lunch that he was surprised to find that the hour
was only just two. The discovery was a pleasant one. With a full hour before
the scheduled start of the game, much might be achieved. He hurried after the
girl, and came up with her just as she turned the corner into one of those
forlorn New York side-streets which are populated chiefly by children, cats,
desultory loafers, and empty meat-tins.

The girl stopped and turned. Archie smiled a winning smile.

“I say, my dear sweet creature!” he said. “I say, my dear old
thing, one moment!”

“Is that so?” said the Girl Friend.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Is that so?”

Archie began to feel certain tremors. Her eyes were gleaming, and her
determined mouth had become a perfectly straight line of scarlet. It was going
to be difficult to be chatty to this girl. She was going to be a hard audience.
Would mere words be able to touch her heart? The thought suggested itself that,
properly speaking, one would need to use a pick-axe.

“If you could spare me a couple of minutes of your valuable
time—”

“Say!” The lady drew herself up menacingly. “You tie a can to
yourself and disappear! Fade away, or I’ll call a cop!”

Archie was horrified at this misinterpretation of his motives. One or two
children, playing close at hand, and a loafer who was trying to keep the wall
from falling down, seemed pleased. Theirs was a colourless existence and to the
rare purple moments which had enlivened it in the past the calling of a cop had
been the unfailing preliminary. The loafer nudged a fellow-loafer, sunning
himself against the same wall. The children, abandoning the meat-tin round
which their game had centred, drew closer.

“My dear old soul!” said Archie. “You don’t
understand!”

“Don’t I! I know your sort, you trailing arbutus!”

“No, no! My dear old thing, believe me! I wouldn’t dream!”

“Are you going or aren’t you?”

Eleven more children joined the ring of spectators. The loafers stared
silently, like awakened crocodiles.

“But, I say, listen! I only wanted—”

At this point another voice spoke.

“Say!”

The word “Say!” more almost than any word in the American language,
is capable of a variety of shades of expression. It can be genial, it can be
jovial, it can be appealing. It can also be truculent. The “Say!”
which at this juncture smote upon Archie’s ear-drum with a suddenness
which made him leap in the air was truculent; and the two loafers and
twenty-seven children who now formed the audience were well satisfied with the
dramatic development of the performance. To their experienced ears the word had
the right ring.

Archie spun round. At his elbow stood a long, strongly-built young man in a
grey suit.

“Well!” said the young man, nastily. And he extended a large,
freckled face toward Archie’s. It seemed to the latter, as he backed
against the wall, that the young man’s neck must be composed of
india-rubber. It appeared to be growing longer every moment. His face, besides
being freckled, was a dull brick-red in colour; his lips curled back in an
unpleasant snarl, showing a gold tooth; and beside him, swaying in an ominous
sort of way, hung two clenched red hands about the size of two young legs of
mutton. Archie eyed him with a growing apprehension. There are moments in life
when, passing idly on our way, we see a strange face, look into strange eyes,
and with a sudden glow of human warmth say to ourselves, “We have found a
friend!” This was not one of those moments. The only person Archie had
ever seen in his life who looked less friendly was the sergeant-major who had
trained him in the early days of the war, before he had got his commission.

“I’ve had my eye on you!” said the young man.

He still had his eye on him. It was a hot, gimlet-like eye, and it pierced the
recesses of Archie’s soul. He backed a little farther against the wall.

Archie was frankly disturbed. He was no poltroon, and had proved the fact on
many occasions during the days when the entire German army seemed to be picking
on him personally, but he hated and shrank from anything in the nature of a
bally public scene.

“What,” enquired the young man, still bearing the burden of the
conversation, and shifting his left hand a little farther behind his back,
“do you mean by following this young lady?”

Archie was glad he had asked him. This was precisely what he wanted to explain.

“My dear old lad—” he began.

In spite of the fact that he had asked a question and presumably desired a
reply, the sound of Archie’s voice seemed to be more than the young man
could endure. It deprived him of the last vestige of restraint. With a rasping
snarl he brought his left fist round in a sweeping semicircle in the direction
of Archie’s head.

Archie was no novice in the art of self-defence. Since his early days at school
he had learned much from leather-faced professors of the science. He had been
watching this unpleasant young man’s eyes with close attention, and the
latter could not have indicated his scheme of action more clearly if he had
sent him a formal note. Archie saw the swing all the way. He stepped nimbly
aside, and the fist crashed against the wall. The young man fell back with a
yelp of anguish.

“Gus!” screamed the Girl Friend, bounding forward.

She flung her arms round the injured man, who was ruefully examining a hand
which, always of an out-size, was now swelling to still further dimensions.

“Gus, darling!”

A sudden chill gripped Archie. So engrossed had he been with his mission that
it had never occurred to him that the love-lorn pitcher might have taken it
into his head to follow the girl as well in the hope of putting in a word for
himself. Yet such apparently had been the case. Well, this had definitely torn
it. Two loving hearts were united again in complete reconciliation, but a fat
lot of good that was. It would be days before the misguided Looney Biddle would
be able to pitch with a hand like that. It looked like a ham already, and was
still swelling. Probably the wrist was sprained. For at least a week the
greatest left-handed pitcher of his time would be about as much use to the
Giants in any professional capacity as a cold in the head. And on that crippled
hand depended the fate of all the money Archie had in the world. He wished now
that he had not thwarted the fellow’s simple enthusiasm. To have had his
head knocked forcibly through a brick wall would not have been pleasant, but
the ultimate outcome would not have been as unpleasant as this. With a heavy
heart Archie prepared to withdraw, to be alone with his sorrow.

At this moment, however, the Girl Friend, releasing her wounded lover, made a
sudden dash for him, with the plainest intention of blotting him from the
earth.

“No, I say! Really!” said Archie, bounding backwards. “I mean
to say!”

In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion,
achieved the maximum of thickness. It was the extreme ragged, outside edge of
the limit. To brawl with a fellow-man in a public street had been bad, but to
be brawled with by a girl—the shot was not on the board. Absolutely not
on the board. There was only one thing to be done. It was dashed undignified,
no doubt, for a fellow to pick up the old waukeesis and leg it in the face of
the enemy, but there was no other course. Archie started to run; and, as he did
so, one of the loafers made the mistake of gripping him by the collar of his
coat.

“I got him!” observed the loafer.

There is a time for all things. This was essentially not the time for anyone of
the male sex to grip the collar of Archie’s coat. If a syndicate of
Dempsey, Carpentier, and one of the Zoo gorillas had endeavoured to stay his
progress at that moment, they would have had reason to consider it a rash move.
Archie wanted to be elsewhere, and the blood of generations of Moffams, many of
whom had swung a wicked axe in the free-for-all mix-ups of the Middle Ages,
boiled within him at any attempt to revise his plans. There was a good deal of
the loafer, but it was all soft. Releasing his hold when Archie’s heel
took him shrewdly on the shin, he received a nasty punch in what would have
been the middle of his waistcoat if he had worn one, uttered a gurgling bleat
like a wounded sheep, and collapsed against the wall. Archie, with a torn coat,
rounded the corner, and sprinted down Ninth Avenue.

The suddenness of the move gave him an initial advantage. He was halfway down
the first block before the vanguard of the pursuit poured out of the side
street. Continuing to travel well, he skimmed past a large dray which had
pulled up across the road, and moved on. The noise of those who pursued was
loud and clamorous in the rear, but the dray hid him momentarily from their
sight, and it was this fact which led Archie, the old campaigner, to take his
next step.

It was perfectly obvious—he was aware of this even in the novel
excitement of the chase—that a chappie couldn’t hoof it at
twenty-five miles an hour indefinitely along a main thoroughfare of a great
city without exciting remark. He must take cover. Cover! That was the wheeze.
He looked about him for cover.

“You want a nice suit?”

It takes a great deal to startle your commercial New Yorker. The small tailor,
standing in his doorway, seemed in no way surprised at the spectacle of Archie,
whom he had seen pass at a conventional walk some five minutes before,
returning like this at top speed. He assumed that Archie had suddenly
remembered that he wanted to buy something.

This was exactly what Archie had done. More than anything else in the world,
what he wanted to do now was to get into that shop and have a long talk about
gents’ clothing. Pulling himself up abruptly, he shot past the small
tailor into the dim interior. A confused aroma of cheap clothing greeted him.
Except for a small oasis behind a grubby counter, practically all the available
space was occupied by suits. Stiff suits, looking like the body when discovered
by the police, hung from hooks. Limp suits, with the appearance of having
swooned from exhaustion, lay about on chairs and boxes. The place was a cloth
morgue, a Sargasso Sea of serge.

Archie would not have had it otherwise. In these quiet groves of clothing a
regiment could have lain hid.

“Something nifty in tweeds?” enquired the business-like proprietor
of this haven, following him amiably into the shop, “Or, maybe, yes, a
nice serge? Say, mister, I got a sweet thing in blue serge that’ll fit
you like the paper on the wall!”

Archie wanted to talk about clothes, but not yet.

“I say, laddie,” he said, hurriedly. “Lend me your ear for
half a jiffy!” Outside the baying of the pack had become imminent.
“Stow me away for a moment in the undergrowth, and I’ll buy
anything you want.”

He withdrew into the jungle. The noise outside grew in volume. The pursuit had
been delayed for a priceless few instants by the arrival of another dray,
moving northwards, which had drawn level with the first dray and dexterously
bottled up the fairway. This obstacle had now been overcome, and the original
searchers, their ranks swelled by a few dozen more of the leisured classes,
were hot on the trail again.

“You done a murder?” enquired the voice of the proprietor, mildly
interested, filtering through a wall of cloth. “Well, boys will be
boys!” he said, philosophically. “See anything there that you like?
There some sweet things there!”

“I’m inspecting them narrowly,” replied Archie. “If you
don’t let those chappies find me, I shouldn’t be surprised if I
bought one.”

“One?” said the proprietor, with a touch of austerity.

“Two,” said Archie, quickly. “Or possibly three or
six.”

The proprietor’s cordiality returned.

“You can’t have too many nice suits,” he said, approvingly,
“not a young feller like you that wants to look nice. All the nice girls
like a young feller that dresses nice. When you go out of here in a suit I got
hanging up there at the back, the girls’ll be all over you like flies
round a honey-pot.”

“Would you mind,” said Archie, “would you mind, as a personal
favour to me, old companion, not mentioning that word
‘girls’?”

He broke off. A heavy foot had crossed the threshold of the shop.

“Say, uncle,” said a deep voice, one of those beastly voices that
only the most poisonous blighters have, “you seen a young feller run past
here?”

“Young feller?” The proprietor appeared to reflect. “Do you
mean a young feller in blue, with a Homburg hat?”

“That’s the duck! We lost him. Where did he go?”

“Him! Why, he come running past, quick as he could go. I wondered what he
was running for, a hot day like this. He went round the corner at the bottom of
the block.”

There was a silence.

“Well, I guess he’s got away,” said the voice, regretfully.

“The way he was travelling,” agreed the proprietor, “I
wouldn’t be surprised if he was in Europe by this. You want a nice
suit?”

The other, curtly expressing a wish that the proprietor would go to eternal
perdition and take his entire stock with him, stumped out.

“This,” said the proprietor, tranquilly, burrowing his way to where
Archie stood and exhibiting a saffron-coloured outrage, which appeared to be a
poor relation of the flannel family, “would put you back fifty dollars.
And cheap!”