MONOTONY

MONOTONYLove, does my love with weary burden fallDaily upon thy too accustomed earWith words so oft repeated that the dear,Sweet tones of early joy begin to pall?What gift of loving may I give to callAgain to your deep eyes of brown the tearOf welling, full delight and love, the clear,Rose-petaled blush that holds my heart in thrall?Not all the homage of the bees that wingLaden with honey through the clover daysWearies the tiny queen with heavy tune!Not all the rapture of the birds that flingLove melodies adrift through leafy waysBurdens the mothers on their nests in June!Philip Gerry.

Love, does my love with weary burden fallDaily upon thy too accustomed earWith words so oft repeated that the dear,Sweet tones of early joy begin to pall?What gift of loving may I give to callAgain to your deep eyes of brown the tearOf welling, full delight and love, the clear,Rose-petaled blush that holds my heart in thrall?Not all the homage of the bees that wingLaden with honey through the clover daysWearies the tiny queen with heavy tune!Not all the rapture of the birds that flingLove melodies adrift through leafy waysBurdens the mothers on their nests in June!

Love, does my love with weary burden fall

Daily upon thy too accustomed ear

With words so oft repeated that the dear,

Sweet tones of early joy begin to pall?

What gift of loving may I give to call

Again to your deep eyes of brown the tear

Of welling, full delight and love, the clear,

Rose-petaled blush that holds my heart in thrall?

Not all the homage of the bees that wingLaden with honey through the clover daysWearies the tiny queen with heavy tune!Not all the rapture of the birds that flingLove melodies adrift through leafy waysBurdens the mothers on their nests in June!

Not all the homage of the bees that wing

Laden with honey through the clover days

Wearies the tiny queen with heavy tune!

Not all the rapture of the birds that fling

Love melodies adrift through leafy ways

Burdens the mothers on their nests in June!

Philip Gerry.

“PLUG” IVORY AND “PLUG” AVERYBy Holman F. DayIItwas the queerest turnout that ever invaded Smyrna Corner.Even the frogs of Smyrna swamp at the edge of the village gulped back their pipings, climbed the bank for a nearer view, and goggled in astonished silence as it passed, groaning, in the soft and early dusk.’Twas a sort of van—almost a little house on wheels, with an elbow of stove funnel sticking out of one side. An old chaise top was fastened by strings and wire over a seat in front. Dust and mud covered everything with striated coatings, mask eloquent of wanderings over many soils. A cadaverous horse, knee-sprung and wheezy, dragged the van at the gait of a caterpillar.Under the chaise top was hunched an old man, gaunt but huge of frame, his knees almost to his chin. Long, white hair fluffed over his bent shoulders, and little puffs of white whiskers stood out from his tanned cheeks. A fuzzy beaver hat barely covered the bald spot on his head. The reins were looped around his neck. Between his hands, huge as hams, moaned and sucked and suffled and droned a much-patched accordion. The instrument lamented like a tortured animal as he pulled it out and squatted it together. To its accompaniment, the old man sang over and over some words that he had fitted to the tune of “Old Dog Tray,”“Plug” Ivory Buck sat outside the door of his “emporium” in Smyrna Corner, his chair tipped back comfortably, ankle roosting across his knee, his fuzzy stovepipe hat on the back of his head.The end of his cigar, red in the May dusk, was cocked up close to his left eye with the arrogant tilt that signified the general temperament of “Plug” Ivory. For almost fifty years a circus man, he felt a bland and yet contemptuous superiority to those who had passed their lives in Smyrna Corner. However, when his father had died at the ripe age of ninety-three—died in the harness, even while gingerly and thriftily knuckling along a weight into the eighth notch of the bar of the scoop scales—Ivory had come back as sole heir to store, stock and stand, a seventy-two-year-old black sheep bringing a most amazing tail behind him—no less than a band chariot, a half dozen animal cages, a tent loaded on a great cart, and various impedimenta of “Buck’s Leviathan Circus and Menagerie.”He trundled the array through the village’s single street, stored the gilded glories in the big barn on the old home place, with the euphemism of circus terminology changed the sign “A. Buck, General Store,” to “I. Buck, Commercial Emporium,” and there he had lived five years, keeping “bachelor’s hall” in the big house adjoining the store.Sometimes he dropped vague hints that he might start on the road again, displaying as much assurance of long years ahead as though he were twenty-one. It was a general saying in Smyrna Corner that a Buck didn’t think he was getting old until after he had turned ninety. The townspeople accepted Ivory as a sort of a wild goose of passage,called him “Plug” on account of his never varying style of headgear, and deferred to him because he had fifty thousand dollars tucked away in the savings bank at the shire.The May dusk became tawny in the west, and he gazed out into it discontentedly.“I wish them blamenation tadpoles shed their voices along with their tails,” he grumbled, with an ear to the frogs in the marsh. “They ain’t quite so bad when they get big enough to trill, but that everlasting yipping makes me lonesome. I’m a good mind to toss up this tenpenny nail and salt codfish business and get back to the sawdust once more.”There was a stir in a cage above his head, a parrot waddled down the bars, stood on his beak and yawped hoarsely:“Crack ’em down, gents! The old army game!”“If it wasn’t for you, Elkanah, I swear I should die of listening to nothing but frogs tuning up and swallows twittering and old fools swapping guff,” he went on, sourly, and then he suddenly cocked his ear, for a new note sounded faintly from the marsh.“I never knew a bullfrog to get his bass as early as this,” he mused, and as he listened and peered, the old horse’s head came slowly bobbing around the alders at the bend of the road. Above the wailing of the distant accordion he caught a few words as the cart wabbled up the rise on its dished wheels:Old horse Joe is ever faithful,O-o-o, o-o-o—ever true.We’ve been—o-o-o—wide world over,O-o-o, o-o-o, toodle-oodle—through.Then a medley of dronings, and finally these words were lustily trolled with the confidence of one who safely reaches the last line:A bet-tur friend than old horse Joe.“Whoa, there! Whup!” screamed the parrot, swinging by one foot.“Ain’t you kind of working a friend to the limit and a little plus?” inquired Buck, sarcastically. The old horse had stopped before the emporium, legs spraddled, head down and sending the dust up in little puffs as he breathed.“Joachim loves music,” replied the stranger, mildly. “He’ll travel all day if I’ll only play and sing to him.”“Love of music will be the death of friend Joachim, then,” commented Buck.“Is there a hostelry near by?” asked the other, lifting his old hat politely. With satirical courtesy Buck lifted his—and at that psychological moment the only plug hats in the whole town of Smyrna saluted each other.“There’s a hossery down the road a ways, and a mannery, too, all run by old Sam Fyles.”“Crack ’em down, gents,” rasped the parrot. “Twenty can play as well as one.”The man under the chaise top pricked up his ears and cast a significant look at the plug hat on the platform. Plug hat on the platform seemed to recognize some affinity in plug hat on the van, and there was an acceleration of mutual interest when the parrot croaked his sentence again.Buck tipped forward with a clatter of his chair legs and trudged down to the roadside. He walked around the outfit with an inquisitive sniffing of his nose and a crinkling of eyebrows, and at last set himself before the man of the chaise top, his knuckles on his hips.“Who be I?” he demanded.The stranger surveyed him for some time, huggling his head down in cowering fashion, so it seemed in the dusk.“You,” he huskily ventured, “are Buck’s Leviathan Circus and Menagerie; Ivory Buck, Proprietor.”“And you,” declared Buck, “are Brick Avery, inventor of the dancing turkey and captor of the celebrated infant anaconda—side-show graft with me for eight years.”He put up his hand, and the stranger took it for a solemn shake, flinching at the same time.“How long since?” pursued Buck.“Thirty years for certain.”“Yes, all of that. Let’s see! If I remember right, you threw up your side-show privilege with me pretty sudden, didn’t you?” His teeth were set hard into his cigar.The man on the van scratched a trembling forefinger through a cheek tuft.“I don’t exactly recollect how the—the change came about,” he faltered.“Well,Ido! You ducked out across country the night of the punkin freshet, when I was mud bound and the elephant was afraid of the bridges. You and your dancin’ turkey and infant anaconda and a cage of monkeys that wasn’t yours and—Her!” He shouted the word. “What become of Her, Brick Avery?”He seized a spoke of the forewheel and shook the old vehicle angrily. The spoke came away in his hand.“Never mind it,” quavered the man. “We’re all coming to pieces, me and the whole caboodle. Don’t hit me with it, though!”He was eying the spoke in Buck’s clutch.“What did you steal her for, Brick Avery?”“There isn’t anything sure about her going away with me,” the other protested.Buck yanked away another spoke in his vehemence.“Don’t you lie to me,” he bawled. “There wasn’t telegraphs and telephones and railroads handy in them days, so that I could stop you or catch you, but I didn’t need any telegraphs to tell me she had gone away with handsome Mounseer Hercules, of the curly hair.” He snorted the sobriquet with bitter spite. “A girl I’d took off’n the streets and made the champion lady rider of—and was going to marry, and thought more of, damn yeh, than I did of all the rest of the world! What did ye do with her?”“Well, she wanted to go along, and so I took her aboard. She seemed to want to get away from your show, near as I could find out.” The giant hugged his knees together and blinked appealingly.“It must be a bang-up living you’re giving her,” sneered Buck, running his eye over the equipage. In his passion he forgot the lapse of the years and the possibility of changes.“Seems as if you hadn’t heard the latest news,” broke in Avery, his face suddenly clearing of the puckers of apprehension. “She never stuck to me no time. She didn’t intend to. She just made believe that she was going to marry me so that I would take her along. She run away with the sixteen hundred dollars I had saved up and Signor Dellabunko—or something like that—who was waiting for her on the road, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of ’em since, nor I don’t want to, and I’ve still got the letter that she left me, so that I can prove what I say. She was going to do the same thing to you, she said in it, but she had made up her mind that she couldn’t work you so easy. It’s all in that letter! Kind of a kick-you-and-run letter!”In his agitation Buck broke another spoke from the crumbling wheel. The parrot cracked his beak against the cage’s bars and yawled:“It’s the old army game, gents!”“Hadn’t you just as soon tear pickets off’n the fence there, or something like that?” wistfully queried Avery. “This is all I’ve got left, and I haven’t any money, and I haven’t had very much courage to do anything since she took that sixteen hundred dollars away from me.” He scruffed his raspy palms on his upcocked knees. “I didn’t really want to run away with her, Ivory, but she bossed me into it. I never was no hand to stand up for my rights. Any one, almost, could talk me ’round. I wish she’d stuck to you and let me alone.” His big hands trembled on his knees, and his weak face, with its flabby chaps, had the wistful look one sees on a foxhound’s visage. “When did you give up the road?” he asked.“Haven’t given it up!” The tone was curt and the scowl deepened. “I’ve stored my wagons and the round-top and the seats, but I’m liable to buy an elephant and a lemon and start out again ’most any time.”The eyes of the old men softened with a glint of appreciation as they looked at each other.“I don’t suppose you have to,” suggested Avery, with a glance at the store.“Fifty thousand in the bank and the stand of buildings here,” replied Buck, with the careless ease of the “well-fixed.” “How do you get your three squares nowadays?”“Lecture on Lost Arts and Free Love and cure stuttering in one secret lesson, pay in advance,” Avery replied, listlessly. “But there ain’t the three squares in it. I wish I’d been as sharp as you are, and never let a woman whiffle me into a scrape.”“Nobody ever come it over me,” declared Buck, pride slowly replacing his ire, but he added, gloomily; “excepting her, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it, and I’ve never seen another woman worth looking at—not for me, even if she did come it over me.”“But she didn’t come it over you,” insisted Avery. “I’m the one she come it over, and look at me!” He made a despairing gesture that embraced all his pathetic appanage. “You are the one that’s come out ‘unrivaled, stupendous and triumphant,’ as your full sheeters used to say. If I was any help in steering her away I’m humbly glad of it, for I always liked you, Ivory.”This gradual shifting to the ground of the benefactor, even of the servile sort, was not entirely placating, as Ivory Buck’s corrugated brow still hinted, but the constant iteration of admiration for his marvelous shrewdness and good fortune was having its effect. The old grudge and sorrow that had gnawed at his heart during so many years suddenly shooed away. The pain was assuaged. It was like opodeldoc stuffed into an aching tooth. He felt as though he would like to listen to a lot more of that comforting talk.“Avery,” he cried, with a heartiness that surprised even himself, “you’re a poor old devil that’s been abused, and you seem to be all in.” He surveyed the wheezing horse and kicked another spoke from the yawning wheel.“Crack ’em down, crack ’em down, gents!” squalled the parrot.“If it wasn’t for Elkanah, there, to holler that to me, with an occasional ‘Hey, Rube!’ I couldn’t stay in this Godforsaken place fifteen minutes. There’s no one here that can talk about anything except ensilage and new-milk cows. Now what say? Store your old traps along o’ mine, squat down and take it comfortable. I reckon that you and me can find a few things to talk about that really amount to something!”“I should hate to feel I was a burden on you, Ivory,” stammered Avery, gasping at the amazing generosity of this invitation. “If there’s any stutterers around here I might earn a little something on the side, perhaps.”“Me with fifty thousand in the bank and letting a guest of mine graft for a living? Not by a blame sight!” snorted Buck. “You just climb out and shut up and help me unharness old Pollyponeezus here.”Ten minutes afterward they had the canvas off the chariots and were inspecting them by lantern light, chattering old reminiscences and seeming almost to hear the “roomp-roomp” of the elephant and the snap of the ringmaster’s whip.To the astonishment of Smyrna Corner, two plug hats, around which wreaths of cigar smoke were cozily curling, blossomed on the platform of the emporium next morning, instead of one. The old men had thirty years of mutual confidences to impart, and set busily at it, the parrot waddling the monotonous round of his cage overhead and rasping:“Crack ’em down, gents! The old army game!”In two weeks “Plug” Ivory and “Plug” Avery were as much fixtures in the Smyrna scenery as the town pump. Occasionally of an evening the wail of the snuffling accordion wavered out over the village. Buck, his head thrown back and his eyes closed, seemed to get consoling echoes of the past even from this lugubrious assault on Melody, and loungers hovered at a respectful distance. No one dared to ask questions, and in this respect the old men differed from the town pump as features in the scenery.Before a month had passed the two had so thoroughly renewed their youththat they were discussing the expense of fitting out a “hit-the-grit” circus, and were writing to the big shows for prices on superannuated or “shopworn” animals.It was voted that the dancing turkey and infant anaconda grafts were no longer feasible. Once on a time the crowds would watch a turkey hopping about on a hot tin to the rig-a-jig of a fiddle and would come out satisfied that they had received their money’s worth. A man could even exhibit an angleworm in a bottle and call it the infant anaconda, and escape being lynched. Brick Avery sadly testified to the passing of those glorious days.However, it was decided that a cage of white leghorn fowls, colored with aniline dyes, could be shown even in these barren times as “Royal South American Witherlicks”; that Joachim could be converted into a passable zebra, and “Plug” Avery still had in his van the celluloid lemon peel as well as the glass cube that created the illusion of ice in the pink lemonade. The village painter was set at work on the new gilding of the chariots in the big barn.“Even if we don’t really get away,” explained Buck, “it’s a good idea to keep the property from running down.”But the appearance of the new gilt inflamed their showmen’s hearts. An irresistible hankering to get a nearer sniff of the sawdust, to mix with the old crowd, induced Buck to send a card to a sporting paper, advertising for correspondence from bareback riders, tumblers, specialty people and privilege speculators, who wanted to join a “one-ring, chase-the-fairs road show—no first-raters.” He emphasized the fact that all personal interviews would be arranged later in New York City.“We don’t want anyone tracking down here,” he confided to Avery. “That would call the bluff. But we can get some letters that maybe will perk us up a little.”The letters came in bundles—letters long, short, earnest and witty—whiffs from the good old world of the dressing tent. And they were read and discussed on the emporium’s platform, and some were answered in non-committal style so as to draw out further correspondence, and all in all it was voted by both “Plugs” that a small amount of money invested in advertising certainly did produce its full worth of entertainment.But in the midst of these innocent attempts to alleviateennuisomething else came along beside letters. It was a woman—a slim, wiry, alert woman. She clambered down from the stage one day, advanced trippingly to the platform and courtesied low before the two plug hats, her long, draggly plume bobbing against her rouged cheek. The two plug hats arose and were doffed. Then the three faced each other.“You don’t hold your ages as well as I do, boys,” she commented, after her sharp scrutiny.“It’s the old army game, gents!” screamed the parrot, excited by this new arrival, gay with her colors and her ribbons.“It’s Her!” gasped Plug Avery.“It’s Signory Rosy-elly!” choked Plug Avery.She came up and sat down between them on one of the platform chairs.“It was the longest time before I could place those names,” she chattered. “‘Buck & Avery, Consolidated Aggregation,’ says I to myself. ‘Buck & Avery,’ I says. And, thinks I, them two old codgers must have gone to Kingdom Come, for I’m—let’s see—I’m twenty, or something like that, years younger than either of you, as I remember.” She poked each one jovially with her parasol.“‘Buck & Avery,’ says I,” she went on, cheerfully oblivious of their grimness. “‘It’s their boys,’ I says, and so I came right along, for I need the job, and I couldn’t explain the romantic part in a letter. I was thinking I’d surely be taken on when I told Buck and Avery’s sons the romance. But I don’t have to tellyou, boys.”She jocosely poked them again.“‘A little old!’ you say?”—they hadn’t said anything, by the way, but stood there with gaping, toothless mouths. “Not a bit of it for a jay-towncircuit. Of course, it isn’t a Forepaugh job for me now or else I wouldn’t be down here talking to Buck & Avery. But I’m still good for it all—rings, banners, hurdles, rump-cling gallop and the blazing hoop for the wind-up. You know what I can do, boys. Remember old times. Give me an engagement for old-times’ sake.” She flashed at them the arch looks of a faded coquette.Buck, the poignancy of his ancient regret having been modified by his long course of consolation from the lips of Avery, was the first to recover. This faded woman, trying to stay time’s ravages by her rouge, displaced the beauteous image he had cherished so long in his memory.“Ain’t you ashamed to face us two?” he demanded. “You that run away and broke your promise to me! You that ruined me!” He patted his breast dramatically and shot a thumb out at Avery.“My sakes!” she cried. “You ain’t so unprofessional as to remember all that silliness against me, are you? I was only a girl, and you couldn’t expect me to love you—either of you. I’m a poor widow now,” she sighed, “and I need work. And here you have been laying up grudges against me—the two of you—all these years! What would your wives have said?”“We never got married,” replied the two, in mournful duet.But she wasn’t in a consoling mood. “You’re lucky!” she snapped. “I married a cheap, worthless renegade, who stole my money and ran away. He fell off a trapeze and broke his neck, and I was glad of it.”The look that passed between Plug Ivory and Plug Avery carried all the pith of the quotation: “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”“So am I,” grunted Buck, surlily. “No, I’m sorry he didn’t live to torment you. No, the only thing I’m really sorry about is that ’twas Brick Avery’s money he got away with.”Avery sighed.“But I want to say to you, Signory Rosy-elly,” continued Buck, with a burst of pride quite excusable, tipping his hat to one side and hooking his thumb into the armhole of his vest, “it wasn’t my money you got, and it never will be my money you’ll get. You just made the mistake of your life when you run away from me.”“He’s got fifty thousand dollars in the bank,” hoarsely whispered Avery, vicariously sharing in this pride of prosperity—the prosperity beyond her reach.“Uh-huh! Correct!” corroborated Buck, surveying her in increasing triumph. This moment was really worth waiting through the years for, he reflected.“Twenty can play as well as one,” croaked the parrot, his beady eye pressed between the bars of his cage.The signora glanced up at this new speaker, eyed Elkanah with a sage look that he returned, and then, after a moment’s reflection, said:“Thanks for the suggestion, old chap. That is to say, three can play as well as two, when there’s fifty thousand in the bank. Buck, you know I’m always outspoken and straight to the point. No underhanded bluff for me. I’m going to sue you for ten thousand.”“Crack ’em down, gents!” remarked Elkanah, grimly.Buck cast a malevolent look at the bird, and then, his cigar tip-tilted and the corner of his mouth sarcastically askew, suggested with an air as though the idea were the limit of satiric impossibility:“I want to know! Breach of promise, I per-sume!”“Good aim! You’ve rung the bell,” rejoined the lady, coolly.The unconscionable impudence of the bare suggestion fetched a gasp from both men. Plug Ivory’s assumption of dignity crumbled immediately. The years rolled back. He felt one of those old-time fits of rage come bristling up the back of his head, the fury of old when he had tried to wither that giddy creature in his spasms of jealousy. But now, as in the past, her calm assurance put him out of countenance and his wild anathemas died away in sputterings.“I know all that, Ivory Buck,” she said, icily. “But how are you going to prove I was married? Where are you going to hunt for witnesses? Professional people are like wild geese—roosting on air and moulting their names like feathers. What proof of anything are you going to find after all these thirty years? While I—I’ve got your letters, every one—all your promises. Observe how I take my cue! Jury a-listening! I’ve been hunting the world over for you. You hid here. Here I find you—this poor, deserted woman, whose life has been wrecked by your faithlessness, finds you. Me, with a crape veil, a sniff in my nose, a crushed-creature face make-up, a tremolo in my voice and a smart lawyer such as I know about! What can you two old fools say to a country jury to block my bluff? Why, you can save money by handing me your bank book!”In his fury Buck grabbed her chair and tipped it forward violently in order to dump her off his sacred platform. She fled out into space with a flutter of skirts, landed lightly as a cat and pirouetted on one toe, crooking her arms in the professional pose that appeals for applause.“This is the first time Signora Rosyelli, champion bareback rider, ever tried to ride a mule,” she chirped, “but you see she can do it and make her graceful dismount to the music of the band.”Several villagers across the road were gaping at the scene. She inquired the way to the tavern, one of them took her valise, and she went down the road, tossing a kiss from her finger tips toward the two plug hats. Plug hats watched her out of sight and then turned toward each other with simultaneous jerk.“Don’t that beat tophet and repeat?” they inquired, in exact unison.“What are you going to do?” asked Plug Avery.“Fight her! Fight her clear to the high, consolidated supreme court aggregation of the United States, or whatever they call it!” roared Plug Ivory.“Nobody has ever beat her yet, except Dellybunko, and we ain’t in his class,” sighed Avery, despondently.“You don’t think, do you, that I’m going to lap my thumb and finger and peel her off ten thousand dollars?”“Why don’t you and she get married and we’ll all live here, happy, hereafter?” wistfully suggested Avery. “If it was in a book it would end off like that—sure pop.”“This ain’t no book,” replied Buck, elbows on his knees, eyes moodily on the dusty planks.“So you’re bound to go to court?”“Low court—high court—clear to the ridgepole—clear to the cupoly, and then I’ll shin the weather vane with the star spangled banner of justice between my teeth.”“I heard a breach of promise trial once,” related Avery, half closing his eyes in reminiscence, “and it was the funniest thing I ever listened to. ‘Twas twenty years ago, and I’ll bet that the people down there laugh yet when they see that fellow walk along the street. Them letters he wrote was certainly the squashiest—why, every one of them seemed to woggle like a tumbler of jelly—sweet and sloppy, as you might say! It being so long ago, when you was having your spell, I don’t suppose you remember just what you wrote to her, do you?”Avery still gazed at the same knothole, but a hot flush was crawling up from under his collar. He took off his plug hat and scuffed his wrist across his steaming forehead.“I remember that he called her ‘Ittikins, Pittikins, Popsy-sweet.’ Thought I’d die laughing at that trial! Did you sling in any names like that, Ivory? You being so prominent now and settled down and having money in the bank, them kind of names, if you wrote mushy like that, will certainly tickle folks something tremendous.”A student in physiognomy might have read that memory was playing havoc with Buck’s resolution. Avery was knitting his brows in deep reflection, knuckling his forehead.“Seems as if,” he went on, slowly,“she told me you called her something like ‘Sweety-tweety,’ or ‘Tweeny-weeny Girlikins’—something like that. How them newspapers do like to string out things—funny kind of things, when a man is prominent and well known, and has got money in the bank! Folks can’t help laughing—they just naturally can’t, Ive! You’ll be setting there in court, looking ugly as a gibcat and her lawyer reading them things out. Them cussed lawyers have a sassy way of——”Buck got up, kicked his chair off onto the ground, and in choler uncontrollable, clacked his fists under Avery’s nose and barked:“Twit me another word—just one other word—and I’ll drive that old nose of yourn clear up into the roof of your head!”Then he locked his store door and stumped away across the field to the big barn, where the remains of Buck’s Leviathan Circus reposed in isolated state.No one knows by just what course of agonized reasoning he arrived at his final decision, but at dusk he came back to the store. With the dumb placidity of some ruminant, Avery was sitting in his same place on the platform of the emporium.“Brick,” said Ivory, humbly, “I’ve been thinking back and remembering what I wrote to her—and it’s all of it pretty clear in my mind, ’cause I never wrote love letters to anyone else. And I can’t face it. I couldn’t sit in court and hear it. I couldn’t sit here on this platform in my own home place and face the people afterward. I couldn’t start on the road with a circus and have the face to stand before the big tent after it and bark like I used to. They’d grin me out of business. I’d be backed into the stall. No, I can’t do it. Go down and see what she’ll compromise on.”Avery came back after two hours and loomed in the dusk before the platform. He fixed his eyes on the plug hat that was still lowered in the attitude of despondency.“I wrassled with her, Ivory, just the same as if I was handling my own money, and I beat her down to sixty-six hundred. She won’t take a cent less.”“I’ll tell you what that sounds like to me,” snarled Buck, after a moment of meditation. “It sounds as if she was going to get five thousand and you was looking after your little old sixteen hundred.”A couple of tears squeezed out and down over Avery’s flabby cheeks.“This ain’t the first time you’ve misjudged me, when I’ve been doing you a favor,” said he. “And it’s all on account of the same mis’able woman that I’m misjudged—and we was living so happy here, me and you. I wish she was in——” His voice broke.“I ain’t responsible for what I’m saying, Avery,” pleaded Buck, contritely. “You know what things have happened to stir me up the last few hours—yes, all my life, for that matter. I ain’t been comfortable in mind for thirty years till you come here and cheered me up and showed me what’s what. I appreciate it and I’ll prove that to you before we’re done. We’ll get along together all right after this. All is, you must see me through.”Then the two plug hats bent together in earnest conference.The next morning Avery, armed with an order on the savings bank at the shire for six thousand six hundred dollars, and with Buck’s bank book in his inside pocket, drove up to the door of Fyles’ tavern in Buck’s best carriage, and Signora Rosyelli flipped lightly up beside the peace commissioner.He was to pay over the money on the neutral ground at the shire, receive the letters, put her aboard a train and then come back triumphantly into that interruptedotium cum dignitateof Smyrna Corner.For two days a solitary and bereaved plug hat on the emporium’s platform turned its fuzzy gloss toward the bend in the road at the clump of alders. But the sleek black nose of Buck’s “reader” did not appear.On the third day the bank book arrived by mail, its account minus six thousand six hundred dollars, and between its leaves a letter. It was anapologetic letter, and yet it was flavored with a note of complaint. Brick Avery stated that after thinking it all over he felt that, having been misjudged cruelly twice, it might happen again, and being old, he could not endure griefs of that kind. He had supported the first two, but being naturally tender-hearted and easily influenced, the third might be fatal. Moreover, the conscience of Signora Rosyelli had troubled her, so he believed, ever since the affair of the one thousand six hundred dollars. So he had decided that he would quiet her remorse by marrying her and taking entire charge of her improved finances. In fact, so certain was he that she would waste the money—being a woman fickle and vain—that he had insisted on the marriage, and she, realizing her dependence on his aid in cashing in, assented, and now he assured her that as her husband he was entitled to full control of their affairs—all of which, so the letter delicately hinted, was serving as retribution and bringing her into a proper frame of mind to realize her past enormities. The writer hoped that his own personal self-sacrifice in thus becoming the instrument of flagellation would be appreciated by one whom he esteemed highly.They would be known at the fairs as Moseer and Madame Bottotte, and would do the genteel and compact gift-sale graft from the buggy—having the necessary capital now—and would accept the buggy and horse as a wedding present, knowing that an old friend with forty-three thousand four hundred dollars still left in the bank would not begrudge this small gift to a couple just starting out in life, and with deep regard for him and all inquiring friends, they were, etc.In the more crucial moments of his life Buck had frequently refrained from anathema as a method of relief. Some situations were made vulgar and matter-of-fact by sulphurous ejaculation. It dulled the edge of rancor brutally, as a rock dulls a razor.Now he merely turned the paper over, took out a stubby lead pencil, licked it and began to write on the blank side, flattening the paper on his bank book.FOR SALE—1 Band Wagon, 1 Swan Chariot, 3 Lion Cages.He paused here in his laborious scrawl and, despite his resolution of silence, muttered:“It’s going to be a clean sale. I don’t never in all my life want to hear of a circus, see a circus, talk circus, see a circus man——”“Crack ’em down, gents!” squalled the parrot. It was the first time for many hours that he had heard his master’s voice, and the sound cheered him. He hooked his beak around a wire and rattled away jovially. He seemed to be relieved by the absence of the other plug hat that had been absorbing so much of the familiar, beloved and original plug hat’s attention.Ivory looked up at Elkanah vindictively and then resumed his soliloquy.“No, sir, never! Half of circusing is a skin game all through—and I’ve done my share of the skinning. But to be skinned twice—me, I. Buck, proprietor—and the last time the worst, but——”“Twenty can play it as well as one!” the parrot yelled, cocking his eye over the edge of the cage.It was an evil scowl that flashed up from under the plug hat, but Elkanah in his new joy was oblivious.“Me a man that’s been all through it from A to Z—my affections trod on, all confidence in females destroyed and nothing ahead of me all the rest of my life! No, sir, I never want to hear of a circus again. Bit by the mouths I fed—and they thumbing their noses at me. That trick——”“It’s the old army game!” squealed the parrot, in nerve-racking rasp.Ivory Buck arose, yanked the bottom off the cage, caught the squawking bird, wrung his neck, tossed him into the middle of the road, and then, sucking his bleeding finger, went on writing the copy for his advertisement.

“PLUG” IVORY AND “PLUG” AVERYBy Holman F. Day

By Holman F. Day

Itwas the queerest turnout that ever invaded Smyrna Corner.

Even the frogs of Smyrna swamp at the edge of the village gulped back their pipings, climbed the bank for a nearer view, and goggled in astonished silence as it passed, groaning, in the soft and early dusk.

’Twas a sort of van—almost a little house on wheels, with an elbow of stove funnel sticking out of one side. An old chaise top was fastened by strings and wire over a seat in front. Dust and mud covered everything with striated coatings, mask eloquent of wanderings over many soils. A cadaverous horse, knee-sprung and wheezy, dragged the van at the gait of a caterpillar.

Under the chaise top was hunched an old man, gaunt but huge of frame, his knees almost to his chin. Long, white hair fluffed over his bent shoulders, and little puffs of white whiskers stood out from his tanned cheeks. A fuzzy beaver hat barely covered the bald spot on his head. The reins were looped around his neck. Between his hands, huge as hams, moaned and sucked and suffled and droned a much-patched accordion. The instrument lamented like a tortured animal as he pulled it out and squatted it together. To its accompaniment, the old man sang over and over some words that he had fitted to the tune of “Old Dog Tray,”

“Plug” Ivory Buck sat outside the door of his “emporium” in Smyrna Corner, his chair tipped back comfortably, ankle roosting across his knee, his fuzzy stovepipe hat on the back of his head.

The end of his cigar, red in the May dusk, was cocked up close to his left eye with the arrogant tilt that signified the general temperament of “Plug” Ivory. For almost fifty years a circus man, he felt a bland and yet contemptuous superiority to those who had passed their lives in Smyrna Corner. However, when his father had died at the ripe age of ninety-three—died in the harness, even while gingerly and thriftily knuckling along a weight into the eighth notch of the bar of the scoop scales—Ivory had come back as sole heir to store, stock and stand, a seventy-two-year-old black sheep bringing a most amazing tail behind him—no less than a band chariot, a half dozen animal cages, a tent loaded on a great cart, and various impedimenta of “Buck’s Leviathan Circus and Menagerie.”

He trundled the array through the village’s single street, stored the gilded glories in the big barn on the old home place, with the euphemism of circus terminology changed the sign “A. Buck, General Store,” to “I. Buck, Commercial Emporium,” and there he had lived five years, keeping “bachelor’s hall” in the big house adjoining the store.

Sometimes he dropped vague hints that he might start on the road again, displaying as much assurance of long years ahead as though he were twenty-one. It was a general saying in Smyrna Corner that a Buck didn’t think he was getting old until after he had turned ninety. The townspeople accepted Ivory as a sort of a wild goose of passage,called him “Plug” on account of his never varying style of headgear, and deferred to him because he had fifty thousand dollars tucked away in the savings bank at the shire.

The May dusk became tawny in the west, and he gazed out into it discontentedly.

“I wish them blamenation tadpoles shed their voices along with their tails,” he grumbled, with an ear to the frogs in the marsh. “They ain’t quite so bad when they get big enough to trill, but that everlasting yipping makes me lonesome. I’m a good mind to toss up this tenpenny nail and salt codfish business and get back to the sawdust once more.”

There was a stir in a cage above his head, a parrot waddled down the bars, stood on his beak and yawped hoarsely:

“Crack ’em down, gents! The old army game!”

“If it wasn’t for you, Elkanah, I swear I should die of listening to nothing but frogs tuning up and swallows twittering and old fools swapping guff,” he went on, sourly, and then he suddenly cocked his ear, for a new note sounded faintly from the marsh.

“I never knew a bullfrog to get his bass as early as this,” he mused, and as he listened and peered, the old horse’s head came slowly bobbing around the alders at the bend of the road. Above the wailing of the distant accordion he caught a few words as the cart wabbled up the rise on its dished wheels:

Old horse Joe is ever faithful,O-o-o, o-o-o—ever true.We’ve been—o-o-o—wide world over,O-o-o, o-o-o, toodle-oodle—through.

Old horse Joe is ever faithful,

O-o-o, o-o-o—ever true.

We’ve been—o-o-o—wide world over,

O-o-o, o-o-o, toodle-oodle—through.

Then a medley of dronings, and finally these words were lustily trolled with the confidence of one who safely reaches the last line:

A bet-tur friend than old horse Joe.

“Whoa, there! Whup!” screamed the parrot, swinging by one foot.

“Ain’t you kind of working a friend to the limit and a little plus?” inquired Buck, sarcastically. The old horse had stopped before the emporium, legs spraddled, head down and sending the dust up in little puffs as he breathed.

“Joachim loves music,” replied the stranger, mildly. “He’ll travel all day if I’ll only play and sing to him.”

“Love of music will be the death of friend Joachim, then,” commented Buck.

“Is there a hostelry near by?” asked the other, lifting his old hat politely. With satirical courtesy Buck lifted his—and at that psychological moment the only plug hats in the whole town of Smyrna saluted each other.

“There’s a hossery down the road a ways, and a mannery, too, all run by old Sam Fyles.”

“Crack ’em down, gents,” rasped the parrot. “Twenty can play as well as one.”

The man under the chaise top pricked up his ears and cast a significant look at the plug hat on the platform. Plug hat on the platform seemed to recognize some affinity in plug hat on the van, and there was an acceleration of mutual interest when the parrot croaked his sentence again.

Buck tipped forward with a clatter of his chair legs and trudged down to the roadside. He walked around the outfit with an inquisitive sniffing of his nose and a crinkling of eyebrows, and at last set himself before the man of the chaise top, his knuckles on his hips.

“Who be I?” he demanded.

The stranger surveyed him for some time, huggling his head down in cowering fashion, so it seemed in the dusk.

“You,” he huskily ventured, “are Buck’s Leviathan Circus and Menagerie; Ivory Buck, Proprietor.”

“And you,” declared Buck, “are Brick Avery, inventor of the dancing turkey and captor of the celebrated infant anaconda—side-show graft with me for eight years.”

He put up his hand, and the stranger took it for a solemn shake, flinching at the same time.

“How long since?” pursued Buck.

“Thirty years for certain.”

“Yes, all of that. Let’s see! If I remember right, you threw up your side-show privilege with me pretty sudden, didn’t you?” His teeth were set hard into his cigar.

The man on the van scratched a trembling forefinger through a cheek tuft.

“I don’t exactly recollect how the—the change came about,” he faltered.

“Well,Ido! You ducked out across country the night of the punkin freshet, when I was mud bound and the elephant was afraid of the bridges. You and your dancin’ turkey and infant anaconda and a cage of monkeys that wasn’t yours and—Her!” He shouted the word. “What become of Her, Brick Avery?”

He seized a spoke of the forewheel and shook the old vehicle angrily. The spoke came away in his hand.

“Never mind it,” quavered the man. “We’re all coming to pieces, me and the whole caboodle. Don’t hit me with it, though!”

He was eying the spoke in Buck’s clutch.

“What did you steal her for, Brick Avery?”

“There isn’t anything sure about her going away with me,” the other protested.

Buck yanked away another spoke in his vehemence.

“Don’t you lie to me,” he bawled. “There wasn’t telegraphs and telephones and railroads handy in them days, so that I could stop you or catch you, but I didn’t need any telegraphs to tell me she had gone away with handsome Mounseer Hercules, of the curly hair.” He snorted the sobriquet with bitter spite. “A girl I’d took off’n the streets and made the champion lady rider of—and was going to marry, and thought more of, damn yeh, than I did of all the rest of the world! What did ye do with her?”

“Well, she wanted to go along, and so I took her aboard. She seemed to want to get away from your show, near as I could find out.” The giant hugged his knees together and blinked appealingly.

“It must be a bang-up living you’re giving her,” sneered Buck, running his eye over the equipage. In his passion he forgot the lapse of the years and the possibility of changes.

“Seems as if you hadn’t heard the latest news,” broke in Avery, his face suddenly clearing of the puckers of apprehension. “She never stuck to me no time. She didn’t intend to. She just made believe that she was going to marry me so that I would take her along. She run away with the sixteen hundred dollars I had saved up and Signor Dellabunko—or something like that—who was waiting for her on the road, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of ’em since, nor I don’t want to, and I’ve still got the letter that she left me, so that I can prove what I say. She was going to do the same thing to you, she said in it, but she had made up her mind that she couldn’t work you so easy. It’s all in that letter! Kind of a kick-you-and-run letter!”

In his agitation Buck broke another spoke from the crumbling wheel. The parrot cracked his beak against the cage’s bars and yawled:

“It’s the old army game, gents!”

“Hadn’t you just as soon tear pickets off’n the fence there, or something like that?” wistfully queried Avery. “This is all I’ve got left, and I haven’t any money, and I haven’t had very much courage to do anything since she took that sixteen hundred dollars away from me.” He scruffed his raspy palms on his upcocked knees. “I didn’t really want to run away with her, Ivory, but she bossed me into it. I never was no hand to stand up for my rights. Any one, almost, could talk me ’round. I wish she’d stuck to you and let me alone.” His big hands trembled on his knees, and his weak face, with its flabby chaps, had the wistful look one sees on a foxhound’s visage. “When did you give up the road?” he asked.

“Haven’t given it up!” The tone was curt and the scowl deepened. “I’ve stored my wagons and the round-top and the seats, but I’m liable to buy an elephant and a lemon and start out again ’most any time.”

The eyes of the old men softened with a glint of appreciation as they looked at each other.

“I don’t suppose you have to,” suggested Avery, with a glance at the store.

“Fifty thousand in the bank and the stand of buildings here,” replied Buck, with the careless ease of the “well-fixed.” “How do you get your three squares nowadays?”

“Lecture on Lost Arts and Free Love and cure stuttering in one secret lesson, pay in advance,” Avery replied, listlessly. “But there ain’t the three squares in it. I wish I’d been as sharp as you are, and never let a woman whiffle me into a scrape.”

“Nobody ever come it over me,” declared Buck, pride slowly replacing his ire, but he added, gloomily; “excepting her, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it, and I’ve never seen another woman worth looking at—not for me, even if she did come it over me.”

“But she didn’t come it over you,” insisted Avery. “I’m the one she come it over, and look at me!” He made a despairing gesture that embraced all his pathetic appanage. “You are the one that’s come out ‘unrivaled, stupendous and triumphant,’ as your full sheeters used to say. If I was any help in steering her away I’m humbly glad of it, for I always liked you, Ivory.”

This gradual shifting to the ground of the benefactor, even of the servile sort, was not entirely placating, as Ivory Buck’s corrugated brow still hinted, but the constant iteration of admiration for his marvelous shrewdness and good fortune was having its effect. The old grudge and sorrow that had gnawed at his heart during so many years suddenly shooed away. The pain was assuaged. It was like opodeldoc stuffed into an aching tooth. He felt as though he would like to listen to a lot more of that comforting talk.

“Avery,” he cried, with a heartiness that surprised even himself, “you’re a poor old devil that’s been abused, and you seem to be all in.” He surveyed the wheezing horse and kicked another spoke from the yawning wheel.

“Crack ’em down, crack ’em down, gents!” squalled the parrot.

“If it wasn’t for Elkanah, there, to holler that to me, with an occasional ‘Hey, Rube!’ I couldn’t stay in this Godforsaken place fifteen minutes. There’s no one here that can talk about anything except ensilage and new-milk cows. Now what say? Store your old traps along o’ mine, squat down and take it comfortable. I reckon that you and me can find a few things to talk about that really amount to something!”

“I should hate to feel I was a burden on you, Ivory,” stammered Avery, gasping at the amazing generosity of this invitation. “If there’s any stutterers around here I might earn a little something on the side, perhaps.”

“Me with fifty thousand in the bank and letting a guest of mine graft for a living? Not by a blame sight!” snorted Buck. “You just climb out and shut up and help me unharness old Pollyponeezus here.”

Ten minutes afterward they had the canvas off the chariots and were inspecting them by lantern light, chattering old reminiscences and seeming almost to hear the “roomp-roomp” of the elephant and the snap of the ringmaster’s whip.

To the astonishment of Smyrna Corner, two plug hats, around which wreaths of cigar smoke were cozily curling, blossomed on the platform of the emporium next morning, instead of one. The old men had thirty years of mutual confidences to impart, and set busily at it, the parrot waddling the monotonous round of his cage overhead and rasping:

“Crack ’em down, gents! The old army game!”

In two weeks “Plug” Ivory and “Plug” Avery were as much fixtures in the Smyrna scenery as the town pump. Occasionally of an evening the wail of the snuffling accordion wavered out over the village. Buck, his head thrown back and his eyes closed, seemed to get consoling echoes of the past even from this lugubrious assault on Melody, and loungers hovered at a respectful distance. No one dared to ask questions, and in this respect the old men differed from the town pump as features in the scenery.

Before a month had passed the two had so thoroughly renewed their youththat they were discussing the expense of fitting out a “hit-the-grit” circus, and were writing to the big shows for prices on superannuated or “shopworn” animals.

It was voted that the dancing turkey and infant anaconda grafts were no longer feasible. Once on a time the crowds would watch a turkey hopping about on a hot tin to the rig-a-jig of a fiddle and would come out satisfied that they had received their money’s worth. A man could even exhibit an angleworm in a bottle and call it the infant anaconda, and escape being lynched. Brick Avery sadly testified to the passing of those glorious days.

However, it was decided that a cage of white leghorn fowls, colored with aniline dyes, could be shown even in these barren times as “Royal South American Witherlicks”; that Joachim could be converted into a passable zebra, and “Plug” Avery still had in his van the celluloid lemon peel as well as the glass cube that created the illusion of ice in the pink lemonade. The village painter was set at work on the new gilding of the chariots in the big barn.

“Even if we don’t really get away,” explained Buck, “it’s a good idea to keep the property from running down.”

But the appearance of the new gilt inflamed their showmen’s hearts. An irresistible hankering to get a nearer sniff of the sawdust, to mix with the old crowd, induced Buck to send a card to a sporting paper, advertising for correspondence from bareback riders, tumblers, specialty people and privilege speculators, who wanted to join a “one-ring, chase-the-fairs road show—no first-raters.” He emphasized the fact that all personal interviews would be arranged later in New York City.

“We don’t want anyone tracking down here,” he confided to Avery. “That would call the bluff. But we can get some letters that maybe will perk us up a little.”

The letters came in bundles—letters long, short, earnest and witty—whiffs from the good old world of the dressing tent. And they were read and discussed on the emporium’s platform, and some were answered in non-committal style so as to draw out further correspondence, and all in all it was voted by both “Plugs” that a small amount of money invested in advertising certainly did produce its full worth of entertainment.

But in the midst of these innocent attempts to alleviateennuisomething else came along beside letters. It was a woman—a slim, wiry, alert woman. She clambered down from the stage one day, advanced trippingly to the platform and courtesied low before the two plug hats, her long, draggly plume bobbing against her rouged cheek. The two plug hats arose and were doffed. Then the three faced each other.

“You don’t hold your ages as well as I do, boys,” she commented, after her sharp scrutiny.

“It’s the old army game, gents!” screamed the parrot, excited by this new arrival, gay with her colors and her ribbons.

“It’s Her!” gasped Plug Avery.

“It’s Signory Rosy-elly!” choked Plug Avery.

She came up and sat down between them on one of the platform chairs.

“It was the longest time before I could place those names,” she chattered. “‘Buck & Avery, Consolidated Aggregation,’ says I to myself. ‘Buck & Avery,’ I says. And, thinks I, them two old codgers must have gone to Kingdom Come, for I’m—let’s see—I’m twenty, or something like that, years younger than either of you, as I remember.” She poked each one jovially with her parasol.

“‘Buck & Avery,’ says I,” she went on, cheerfully oblivious of their grimness. “‘It’s their boys,’ I says, and so I came right along, for I need the job, and I couldn’t explain the romantic part in a letter. I was thinking I’d surely be taken on when I told Buck and Avery’s sons the romance. But I don’t have to tellyou, boys.”

She jocosely poked them again.

“‘A little old!’ you say?”—they hadn’t said anything, by the way, but stood there with gaping, toothless mouths. “Not a bit of it for a jay-towncircuit. Of course, it isn’t a Forepaugh job for me now or else I wouldn’t be down here talking to Buck & Avery. But I’m still good for it all—rings, banners, hurdles, rump-cling gallop and the blazing hoop for the wind-up. You know what I can do, boys. Remember old times. Give me an engagement for old-times’ sake.” She flashed at them the arch looks of a faded coquette.

Buck, the poignancy of his ancient regret having been modified by his long course of consolation from the lips of Avery, was the first to recover. This faded woman, trying to stay time’s ravages by her rouge, displaced the beauteous image he had cherished so long in his memory.

“Ain’t you ashamed to face us two?” he demanded. “You that run away and broke your promise to me! You that ruined me!” He patted his breast dramatically and shot a thumb out at Avery.

“My sakes!” she cried. “You ain’t so unprofessional as to remember all that silliness against me, are you? I was only a girl, and you couldn’t expect me to love you—either of you. I’m a poor widow now,” she sighed, “and I need work. And here you have been laying up grudges against me—the two of you—all these years! What would your wives have said?”

“We never got married,” replied the two, in mournful duet.

But she wasn’t in a consoling mood. “You’re lucky!” she snapped. “I married a cheap, worthless renegade, who stole my money and ran away. He fell off a trapeze and broke his neck, and I was glad of it.”

The look that passed between Plug Ivory and Plug Avery carried all the pith of the quotation: “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”

“So am I,” grunted Buck, surlily. “No, I’m sorry he didn’t live to torment you. No, the only thing I’m really sorry about is that ’twas Brick Avery’s money he got away with.”

Avery sighed.

“But I want to say to you, Signory Rosy-elly,” continued Buck, with a burst of pride quite excusable, tipping his hat to one side and hooking his thumb into the armhole of his vest, “it wasn’t my money you got, and it never will be my money you’ll get. You just made the mistake of your life when you run away from me.”

“He’s got fifty thousand dollars in the bank,” hoarsely whispered Avery, vicariously sharing in this pride of prosperity—the prosperity beyond her reach.

“Uh-huh! Correct!” corroborated Buck, surveying her in increasing triumph. This moment was really worth waiting through the years for, he reflected.

“Twenty can play as well as one,” croaked the parrot, his beady eye pressed between the bars of his cage.

The signora glanced up at this new speaker, eyed Elkanah with a sage look that he returned, and then, after a moment’s reflection, said:

“Thanks for the suggestion, old chap. That is to say, three can play as well as two, when there’s fifty thousand in the bank. Buck, you know I’m always outspoken and straight to the point. No underhanded bluff for me. I’m going to sue you for ten thousand.”

“Crack ’em down, gents!” remarked Elkanah, grimly.

Buck cast a malevolent look at the bird, and then, his cigar tip-tilted and the corner of his mouth sarcastically askew, suggested with an air as though the idea were the limit of satiric impossibility:

“I want to know! Breach of promise, I per-sume!”

“Good aim! You’ve rung the bell,” rejoined the lady, coolly.

The unconscionable impudence of the bare suggestion fetched a gasp from both men. Plug Ivory’s assumption of dignity crumbled immediately. The years rolled back. He felt one of those old-time fits of rage come bristling up the back of his head, the fury of old when he had tried to wither that giddy creature in his spasms of jealousy. But now, as in the past, her calm assurance put him out of countenance and his wild anathemas died away in sputterings.

“I know all that, Ivory Buck,” she said, icily. “But how are you going to prove I was married? Where are you going to hunt for witnesses? Professional people are like wild geese—roosting on air and moulting their names like feathers. What proof of anything are you going to find after all these thirty years? While I—I’ve got your letters, every one—all your promises. Observe how I take my cue! Jury a-listening! I’ve been hunting the world over for you. You hid here. Here I find you—this poor, deserted woman, whose life has been wrecked by your faithlessness, finds you. Me, with a crape veil, a sniff in my nose, a crushed-creature face make-up, a tremolo in my voice and a smart lawyer such as I know about! What can you two old fools say to a country jury to block my bluff? Why, you can save money by handing me your bank book!”

In his fury Buck grabbed her chair and tipped it forward violently in order to dump her off his sacred platform. She fled out into space with a flutter of skirts, landed lightly as a cat and pirouetted on one toe, crooking her arms in the professional pose that appeals for applause.

“This is the first time Signora Rosyelli, champion bareback rider, ever tried to ride a mule,” she chirped, “but you see she can do it and make her graceful dismount to the music of the band.”

Several villagers across the road were gaping at the scene. She inquired the way to the tavern, one of them took her valise, and she went down the road, tossing a kiss from her finger tips toward the two plug hats. Plug hats watched her out of sight and then turned toward each other with simultaneous jerk.

“Don’t that beat tophet and repeat?” they inquired, in exact unison.

“What are you going to do?” asked Plug Avery.

“Fight her! Fight her clear to the high, consolidated supreme court aggregation of the United States, or whatever they call it!” roared Plug Ivory.

“Nobody has ever beat her yet, except Dellybunko, and we ain’t in his class,” sighed Avery, despondently.

“You don’t think, do you, that I’m going to lap my thumb and finger and peel her off ten thousand dollars?”

“Why don’t you and she get married and we’ll all live here, happy, hereafter?” wistfully suggested Avery. “If it was in a book it would end off like that—sure pop.”

“This ain’t no book,” replied Buck, elbows on his knees, eyes moodily on the dusty planks.

“So you’re bound to go to court?”

“Low court—high court—clear to the ridgepole—clear to the cupoly, and then I’ll shin the weather vane with the star spangled banner of justice between my teeth.”

“I heard a breach of promise trial once,” related Avery, half closing his eyes in reminiscence, “and it was the funniest thing I ever listened to. ‘Twas twenty years ago, and I’ll bet that the people down there laugh yet when they see that fellow walk along the street. Them letters he wrote was certainly the squashiest—why, every one of them seemed to woggle like a tumbler of jelly—sweet and sloppy, as you might say! It being so long ago, when you was having your spell, I don’t suppose you remember just what you wrote to her, do you?”

Avery still gazed at the same knothole, but a hot flush was crawling up from under his collar. He took off his plug hat and scuffed his wrist across his steaming forehead.

“I remember that he called her ‘Ittikins, Pittikins, Popsy-sweet.’ Thought I’d die laughing at that trial! Did you sling in any names like that, Ivory? You being so prominent now and settled down and having money in the bank, them kind of names, if you wrote mushy like that, will certainly tickle folks something tremendous.”

A student in physiognomy might have read that memory was playing havoc with Buck’s resolution. Avery was knitting his brows in deep reflection, knuckling his forehead.

“Seems as if,” he went on, slowly,“she told me you called her something like ‘Sweety-tweety,’ or ‘Tweeny-weeny Girlikins’—something like that. How them newspapers do like to string out things—funny kind of things, when a man is prominent and well known, and has got money in the bank! Folks can’t help laughing—they just naturally can’t, Ive! You’ll be setting there in court, looking ugly as a gibcat and her lawyer reading them things out. Them cussed lawyers have a sassy way of——”

Buck got up, kicked his chair off onto the ground, and in choler uncontrollable, clacked his fists under Avery’s nose and barked:

“Twit me another word—just one other word—and I’ll drive that old nose of yourn clear up into the roof of your head!”

Then he locked his store door and stumped away across the field to the big barn, where the remains of Buck’s Leviathan Circus reposed in isolated state.

No one knows by just what course of agonized reasoning he arrived at his final decision, but at dusk he came back to the store. With the dumb placidity of some ruminant, Avery was sitting in his same place on the platform of the emporium.

“Brick,” said Ivory, humbly, “I’ve been thinking back and remembering what I wrote to her—and it’s all of it pretty clear in my mind, ’cause I never wrote love letters to anyone else. And I can’t face it. I couldn’t sit in court and hear it. I couldn’t sit here on this platform in my own home place and face the people afterward. I couldn’t start on the road with a circus and have the face to stand before the big tent after it and bark like I used to. They’d grin me out of business. I’d be backed into the stall. No, I can’t do it. Go down and see what she’ll compromise on.”

Avery came back after two hours and loomed in the dusk before the platform. He fixed his eyes on the plug hat that was still lowered in the attitude of despondency.

“I wrassled with her, Ivory, just the same as if I was handling my own money, and I beat her down to sixty-six hundred. She won’t take a cent less.”

“I’ll tell you what that sounds like to me,” snarled Buck, after a moment of meditation. “It sounds as if she was going to get five thousand and you was looking after your little old sixteen hundred.”

A couple of tears squeezed out and down over Avery’s flabby cheeks.

“This ain’t the first time you’ve misjudged me, when I’ve been doing you a favor,” said he. “And it’s all on account of the same mis’able woman that I’m misjudged—and we was living so happy here, me and you. I wish she was in——” His voice broke.

“I ain’t responsible for what I’m saying, Avery,” pleaded Buck, contritely. “You know what things have happened to stir me up the last few hours—yes, all my life, for that matter. I ain’t been comfortable in mind for thirty years till you come here and cheered me up and showed me what’s what. I appreciate it and I’ll prove that to you before we’re done. We’ll get along together all right after this. All is, you must see me through.”

Then the two plug hats bent together in earnest conference.

The next morning Avery, armed with an order on the savings bank at the shire for six thousand six hundred dollars, and with Buck’s bank book in his inside pocket, drove up to the door of Fyles’ tavern in Buck’s best carriage, and Signora Rosyelli flipped lightly up beside the peace commissioner.

He was to pay over the money on the neutral ground at the shire, receive the letters, put her aboard a train and then come back triumphantly into that interruptedotium cum dignitateof Smyrna Corner.

For two days a solitary and bereaved plug hat on the emporium’s platform turned its fuzzy gloss toward the bend in the road at the clump of alders. But the sleek black nose of Buck’s “reader” did not appear.

On the third day the bank book arrived by mail, its account minus six thousand six hundred dollars, and between its leaves a letter. It was anapologetic letter, and yet it was flavored with a note of complaint. Brick Avery stated that after thinking it all over he felt that, having been misjudged cruelly twice, it might happen again, and being old, he could not endure griefs of that kind. He had supported the first two, but being naturally tender-hearted and easily influenced, the third might be fatal. Moreover, the conscience of Signora Rosyelli had troubled her, so he believed, ever since the affair of the one thousand six hundred dollars. So he had decided that he would quiet her remorse by marrying her and taking entire charge of her improved finances. In fact, so certain was he that she would waste the money—being a woman fickle and vain—that he had insisted on the marriage, and she, realizing her dependence on his aid in cashing in, assented, and now he assured her that as her husband he was entitled to full control of their affairs—all of which, so the letter delicately hinted, was serving as retribution and bringing her into a proper frame of mind to realize her past enormities. The writer hoped that his own personal self-sacrifice in thus becoming the instrument of flagellation would be appreciated by one whom he esteemed highly.

They would be known at the fairs as Moseer and Madame Bottotte, and would do the genteel and compact gift-sale graft from the buggy—having the necessary capital now—and would accept the buggy and horse as a wedding present, knowing that an old friend with forty-three thousand four hundred dollars still left in the bank would not begrudge this small gift to a couple just starting out in life, and with deep regard for him and all inquiring friends, they were, etc.

In the more crucial moments of his life Buck had frequently refrained from anathema as a method of relief. Some situations were made vulgar and matter-of-fact by sulphurous ejaculation. It dulled the edge of rancor brutally, as a rock dulls a razor.

Now he merely turned the paper over, took out a stubby lead pencil, licked it and began to write on the blank side, flattening the paper on his bank book.

FOR SALE—1 Band Wagon, 1 Swan Chariot, 3 Lion Cages.

He paused here in his laborious scrawl and, despite his resolution of silence, muttered:

“It’s going to be a clean sale. I don’t never in all my life want to hear of a circus, see a circus, talk circus, see a circus man——”

“Crack ’em down, gents!” squalled the parrot. It was the first time for many hours that he had heard his master’s voice, and the sound cheered him. He hooked his beak around a wire and rattled away jovially. He seemed to be relieved by the absence of the other plug hat that had been absorbing so much of the familiar, beloved and original plug hat’s attention.

Ivory looked up at Elkanah vindictively and then resumed his soliloquy.

“No, sir, never! Half of circusing is a skin game all through—and I’ve done my share of the skinning. But to be skinned twice—me, I. Buck, proprietor—and the last time the worst, but——”

“Twenty can play it as well as one!” the parrot yelled, cocking his eye over the edge of the cage.

It was an evil scowl that flashed up from under the plug hat, but Elkanah in his new joy was oblivious.

“Me a man that’s been all through it from A to Z—my affections trod on, all confidence in females destroyed and nothing ahead of me all the rest of my life! No, sir, I never want to hear of a circus again. Bit by the mouths I fed—and they thumbing their noses at me. That trick——”

“It’s the old army game!” squealed the parrot, in nerve-racking rasp.

Ivory Buck arose, yanked the bottom off the cage, caught the squawking bird, wrung his neck, tossed him into the middle of the road, and then, sucking his bleeding finger, went on writing the copy for his advertisement.

SUPPER WITH NATICABy Robert E. MacAlarneyIItisn’t at all pleasant to burn one’s fingers, but it’s worth while burning them now and then, if you have to be scorched to be near a particularly attractive fire; at least I’ve found it that way. All of which leads me to Natica Drayton—Melsford that was.I think I’m the only one of the crew she dragged at her heels who hasn’t forgot about things and gone off after other game; some of them have been lashed to the burning stake of pretty uncomfortable domesticity, too. As for me—well, I’ve simply gone on caring, and I think I shall always go on.Does she know it? Of course she knows it; always has known it, ever since that first summer at Sacandaga. Not that I’ve been ass enough to say anything after the first time. I’m only an ordinary sort of chap when it comes to intuition, but somehow I’ve never plucked up the cheek to do any talking about my own miserable self; not since she let me down as gently as she could, while I paddled her back from Birch Point to the canoe house, with Elephant Mountain ragged-backed in the moon-haze. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it was she said. There was the drip of water from the paddle as I lifted it, stroke after stroke; the tiny hiss of smother at the prow, and twisted through it all, like a gathering string, Natica Melsford’s voice, letting me down easy—as easily as she could.After I had made fast, I remember feeling that somehow the moonlight had turned things extremely cold; and I reached for my sweater that lay in the stern. I also laughed a great deal too much around the logs at the bungalow fire, and then drank a deal more than too much at the clubhouse before turning in. Maybe it was cowardly to sneak back to town a couple of days later, “on business,” of course—a shabby excuse for a chap that doesn’t dabble in business more than I do. But I honestly needed to go to get back my equilibrium. I got it, though, and I’ve kept it pretty continuously. And this much is enough for that. Natica Melsford is the only interesting bit about this story, and let’s get back to her.That winter she married Jack Drayton. The afternoon we rehearsed for the wedding I looked at her, before we pranced down the aisle and endured the endless silly giggles of the bridesmaids, and the usher louts who would fall out of step, and grew more peevish by the minute. I looked her over then, and I said to myself: “You feeble paranoiac, imagine that girl tying up withyou.” Well, I couldn’t very well imagine it, although I tried. But I was extremely noisy, and I heard two or three of the bridesmaids, to say nothing of the maid of honor and the bridegroom’s mamma, tapping their gentle hammers, at my expense, at the breakfast. It was a year afterward that I began to fag regularly for the Drayton establishment.Jack Drayton, by rights, ought to have been poisoned. He’d be the first to acknowledge it now. Perhaps if he’d married a girl who insisted on having things out the moment they began, the things wouldn’t have happened. ButNatica Melsford wasn’t that sort. She was the kind that simply looked scorn into and clear through you, when she thought you were acting low down. This, with a man strung like Jack was, simply put the fat into the fire. It would have been different with me. I’d—well—I’d have made an abject crawl, to be sure. You see, her knowing this was the thing that must have always queered me with her. A woman prefers a man she can get furious at and who’ll stick it out a bit, to one who caves in at the first sign of a frown. But Jack carried things too far.No, he didn’t mind my frequenting the house. He liked me and I liked him. But, all the same, I knew he didn’t regard me as a foeman worthy of his steel. And, although the knowledge made me raw now and then, when he’s come in with his easy, careless way, still I swallowed the mean feeling because it gave me a chance to see her. And don’t imagine I went around hunting for trouble. It was at the club one night—I’d just come from the Draytons, and Jack hadn’t been home to dinner—that I heard Rawlins Richardson and Horace Trevano chattering about Maisie Hartopp. The “Jo-Jo” song had made the biggest kind of a hit that winter at the Gaiety, and the hit had been made by the Hartopp singing it to a stage box which the Johnnies scrambled to bid in nightly.It seemed like small game for Jack Drayton to be trailing along with the ruck—the ruck meaning Tony Criswold and the rest of that just-out-of-college crew—but I didn’t need signed affidavits, after five minutes of club chatter, to know that he was pretty well tied to an avenue window at Cherry’s after the show. The Ruinart, too, that kept spouting from the bucket beside it, was a pet vintage of the Hartopp.There was a lot of that silly chuckle, and I recalled reading somewhere that there was a husband belonging to the Hartopp, a medium good welterweight, who picked up a living flooring easy marks for private clubs at Paterson, N. J., and the like, and occasionally serving as a punching bag for the good uns before a championship mill. What the devil was there to do? I couldn’t answer the riddle.It sounds like old women’s chatter, the meddlesome way I scribble this down. It would take a real thing in the line of literature to paint me right, anyway, I fancy. When a third party keeps mixing in with husband and wife, he deserves all the slanging that’s coming to him; which same is my last squeal for mercy.A month went by—two of them. Natica Drayton wasn’t the strain that needs spectacles to see through things. Then, too, I guessed the loving friend sympathy racket was being worked by some of the bridge whist aggregation which met up with her every fortnight. She laughed more than she ought to have done. This was a bad sign with her. Once or twice, when the three of us dined together, and she was almost noisy over the benedictine, I could have choked Jack Drayton, for he didn’t see. It’s not a pretty thing for an outsider to sità trois, and see things in a wife’s manner that the husband doesn’t or won’t see; and worse than that, to know that the wife knows you see it and that he doesn’t. Speak to Jack? I wouldn’t have done it for worlds. As I said, I’m willing to burn my fingers and even cuddle the hurt; but I don’t meddle with giant firecrackers except on the Fourth of July, and that didn’t come until afterward.I was to take her to the opera one night—Drayton had the habit of dropping in for an act or two and then disappearing—but on her own doorstep she tossed off her carriage wrap and sent Martin back to the stables.“Let’s talk, instead,” she said, and she made me coffee in the library, with one of those French pots that gurgle conveniently when you don’t exactly know what to say. That pot did a heap of gurgling before we began to talk. When she spoke, what she said almost took me off my chair.“Percy, have you seen the show at the Gaiety?” she asked.I had seen it more than once, and I said so.“They tell me there’s a song there——” she went on.“There are a lot of songs,” said I.“There’s one in particular.”There wasn’t any use in fencing, so I answered: “You mean the ‘Jo-Jo’ song. It’s a silly little ditty, and it’s sung by——”“A girl named Hartopp—Maisie Hartopp.” She was speaking as if she were trying to remember where she’d heard the name.Of course, me for the clumsy speech. “She’s a winner,” I cut in.She got up at that, and walked over to the fireplace. “She seems to be,” she said, picking at a bit of bronze, a wedding present, I think. Then she came over to where I was sitting and put a hand on my shoulder. I’d have got to my feet if I hadn’t been afraid to face her. “Percy——” she began, and I felt the fingers on my shoulder quiver. I don’t think the Apaches handed out anything much worse in the torture line than the quiver of a woman’s ringers upon your shoulder, when you know that those fingers aren’t quivering on your account. Maybe that occurred to her, for a second later she took her hand away. “You once said something foolish to me, Percy,” she said.I nodded my head, my eyes upon an edge of the Royal Bokhara. “It was in a canoe, wasn’t it?” I replied. “There was a moon, of course, and the paddle blades went drip, drip.”“You meant what you said then, didn’t you?”My gaze was wavering from the rug by now. Little wonder, was it? “I meant it all right,” I got out after a while. “Do you want to hear me say my little speech over again?” Was it possible that, after all, Natica Drayton had really decided to toss Jack over, and take on a fag, warranted kind and gentle, able to be driven by any lady? But I forgot that foolish notion pretty nearly right off.“There is a husband,” she went on, as if taking account of stock.“There always is,” I rejoined. “Some of ’em are good and the others are bad.” I chuckled despite me, as I put in my mean little hack.“I mean the Hartopp’s husband,” she explained.“There is,” I said. “‘Boiler-plate’ Hartopp. His given name is James, and he prize-fights fair to middling.” All this wasn’t quite good billiards, but we’d begun wrong that night, and we might as well keep it up, thought I.Natica Drayton was tapping her foot upon the fender. “H’m,” she mused. “Some of those horrid names sound interesting.” Then she turned to me abruptly. “I think, perhaps, you ought to go now,” she suggested.“I think so, too,” I agreed, rising very hastily, and taking my leave.“Have you Friday evening disengaged?” She flung this after me before I had got to the hall.“Yes,” said I, all unthinking.“Then we’ll do it Friday,” she said.“We’ll do what?” I asked, coming back to her. For once I felt rebellious, and showed it, whereat she smiled.“Supper after the theater at Cherry’s.”“Oh, well, I don’t mind that,” I volunteered.“With ‘Boiler-plate’ Hartopp,” she added.The searchlight dawned upon me. It swung around the room once or twice, and that was enough. I knew in the flood of sudden illumination that the girl had planned this thing in advance, with the daring of despair—and a wife’s despair, a very young wife’s despair, is a more desperate thing than the anger of any other woman. Natica had planned it all in advance; had figured it, and the chances of it. And in the balance she had confidently thrown the asset of my assisting her.The right sort of a man, I suppose, would have become enraged because of her taking things for granted. But I—I had been chained to her chariot too long a time to experience the mild sensation of resentment.Natica wished to face her husband in a crowded restaurant after the play. More than that, she wished to face him in company with a man not of her sort,even as he—Drayton—was escorting a woman whose lane of living did not rightly cross his. The coincidence of Natica’s means-to-an-end being the Hartopp’s husband, was simply a gift of fate; an opportunity of administering poetic justice, which could not be denied. Had the Hartopp not possessed a convenient husband, Natica would have arranged for another companion. But even she had not dared to plan hercoupalone, with her chosen instrument of wifely retaliation. Through it all, she had confidently counted on me, a discreet background, a pliant puppet.She could not know what Drayton might do, after they had eyed one another from different tables. She did not much care. But she would at least have the painful joy of the Brahmin woman’s hope, who trusts by some fresh incantation to secure a blessing, formerly vouchsafed her by the gods, but which now old-time petitions fail to renew. It seemed cold-blooded, the entire arrangement, and yet I knew it was not. She was far braver than I could have been, even to win her caring. But I understood.I must have been rough as I took her hand. “Look here,” I said. “It’s a desperate game, Natica. You wouldn’t have dared to say that to any other man than me. You’ve got used to seeing me fag for you. And I’m going to do it this time, too. But if you weaken, by Heaven, you’ll deserve to lose for good. It’s crazy, it’s the act of a pair of paretics, but I’m going to see it through.”She was crying when I left her. “Percy, my dear,” she said; then she began to laugh—that after dinner benedictine laugh of hers. “If there weren’t Jack, that speech of yours just now might make me want to kiss you.”On the sidewalk I tried to figure out if there had been knockout drops in the coffee Natica had brewed for me. In any one of the forty-eight hours ensuing, I might have rung up the Draytons’ on the telephone, and told her that I had come to my senses. But I didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, I hunted up a newspaper chap I knew, and he put me next to “Boiler-plate” Hartopp at the Metropole.The bruiser wasn’t as bad sort as I had fancied him. He was an Englishman all right—a cut below middle class; you could tell that by the way he clipped his initial h’s off and on. I tried the ice at first—it’s always best when you don’t know the exact thickness of your frozen water. The way I tried it was to toss a flower or two at Maisie Hartopp and her “Jo-Jo” song.He rose sure enough, and it didn’t take me a quarter hour to see that the pug was really bowled out by the parcel of stage skirts who wore his name on the Gaiety bills. This made it a warmer game than it might have been otherwise, but I was in for it now, and I made the date.No, I didn’t mention Natica. Even a broken-to-harness shawl carrier has a shred of cautious decency about him. But I gabbled lightly about a certain feminine party who was keen on exemplars of the genuine thing in the line of the manly art. Whereupon “Boilerplate” acquired a pouter-pigeon chest, which fairly bulged over the bar railing, and gave me his word of honor he’d be waiting at Forty-fourth Street about eleven on Friday. He intimated, ere I left, that he’d bring his festive accouterments with him. And he did.We were a bit late—Natica and I. It must have been a quarter past the hour when we drove up to Cherry’s. I felt reasonably certain that if Jack Drayton were guarding a champagne bucket by the corner table that night, he was located then. In the offing, miserably self-conscious, a crush hat on the back of his really fine head, and two or three small locomotive headlights glinting from his broad expanse of evening shirt, was “Boiler-plate” Hartopp. The flunkeys were regarding him curiously, and once a waiter-captain came out and gave him what seemed to be an unsatisfactory report.I think the man was just about to take the count from sheer nerves, when he made me out in the doorway. Natica winked—actually winked at me—ashe floundered over his share of the introduction. Looking at her, and faintly divining her mood that night, I felt sorry for Jack, for “Boiler-plate” and for myself. I left them for a moment and went in to see about my table. Two minutes later I emerged, to face Drayton and the Hartopp unloading from an electric hansom. The under-toned remark of one of the footman came to me: “A bit behind schedule time to-night, eh, Charley?”There wasn’t anything to do then, for they were fair inside. “Boiler-plate” was finishing some elephantine pleasantry to Natica, when he saw what I saw. A foolish grin rippled across his wide face. “Hullo!” he said to the Hartopp, who looked properly peevish, and then waspish, as she let her glance travel to Natica, who stood perfectly poised and, I fancied, a trifle expectant. Drayton eyed them together and in particular. The color streaked his forehead and faded out. Then he saw me, and, although he never may have murder in his eyes again, it was there at that choice moment. We weren’t at all spectacular, you mustn’t think that. It was all very quick, and there were a lot of people coming and going.She was in instant command of the situation. Why shouldn’t she have been, having created it? And unexpectedly, suddenly as she had encountered her quarry, equally suddenly she shifted her position, without the time to take me into her confidence.“Don’t bother about our table, Percy,” she said. “Now that we’ve met friends, it will be jollier to dineen famille. It will be ever so much nicer than eating in a stuffy restaurant, and the butler won’t have gone to bed yet. Run out and get us a theater wagon.”I went out to the carriage man in a trance. The gods, of a deed, were fighting furiously on Natica’s side—for she could not have foreseen this vantage, readily as she swung her attack by its aid. Exquisite torture, truly, to flaunt a husband’s folly in his own face, over his own mahogany, with the source of that folly looking on. Drayton’s bounden civility to his wife, and to the other woman, must make him present himself as a target. He knew it, his wife knew it; as yet the other woman but dimly suspected it—not being over subtle—and it smote me in the face continuously. The puppet always feels the most cut up at times like these. In a way, it is because his vanity is being seared. Mine fairly crackled.So we rattled off up the avenue. The only comfortable ones among us were Natica and Hartopp. He seemed to think the occurrence a pleasant bit of chance, and he wasn’t in the least jealous, not he. I suppose the wife had him schooled to her stage ways of doing things.Once he turned to Jack with a chuckle and said: “This is a jossy bit of luck, ain’t it, each of us out with the other man’s better?”Natica laughed shamelessly. “You’ve such a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, Mr. Hartopp,” she said. And when “Boiler-plate” tried to deny the insinuation, his wife nudged him on the arm and whispered: “Shut up, Jim.”There isn’t any use in stringing out the amateur theatricals the five of us indulged in that night. The Drayton servants were too well chosen to show any surprise at being told to put on a champagne supper at midnight, and then go to bed before it was served. We sat at that mahogany table until the candelabra were guttering, and each of us had toyed more than he ought to have done with his glass. Natica acted as if she were entertaining in earnest, and for the time being I actually think she felt that she was. She got the Hartopp to sing her “Jo-Jo” song, and the Hartopp actually did it as if she enjoyed it. Afterward Natica induced “Boiler-plate” to tell about the time he mixed it up with Fitzsimmons for ten rounds.“It was a lucky punch that put me out,” he kept repeating, almost pathetically. “You know Fitz’s lucky punch.”I might have seen what was in the wind if I hadn’t been thick-headed, what with the champagne and the rattles. “Boiler-plate” once started on the ring, it was an easy transition.“You’ve boxing gloves, haven’t you, Jack?” asked Natica. “Get them for Mr. Hartopp. Let’s see him demonstrate Mr. Fitzsimmons’ lucky punch.”Drayton turned without a word, and made as if to go upstairs. At the door he turned. “Come on, Hartopp,” he said. “I’ll lend you a rowing jersey.”“You clear a place in the drawing room, Percy,” said Natica, briskly. “Be sure that the shades are drawn. It would be awful to be raided by the police.” And I obediently piled the gilt parlor furniture in corners.The Hartopp fluttered anxiously around Natica the while. She was a woman, and she was beginning to half understand. “Please,” she said, touching Natica’s arm. “Jim’s been drinking, and he’s very rough when he’s been drinking. We’ve all been foolish, but only foolish, remember. Jim and I sail for London next week. Just let us slip away now, and forget all about it.”Natica laughed. Her eyes were on the door. “Remember, we’ve only been foolish,” repeated the Hartopp. “Only foolish, that’s all.” She went to Natica and shook her arm roughly; there were feet upon the stairs. “You silly,” she snapped. “You ought to be glad you’re married to a gentleman. He’s different from all the others. I can tell you that, and I know. And I tell you that Jim’s been drinking. Jack will——”Natica’s pose stiffened, but she did not look around. “Yes,Jackwill what?” she said, coldly.The Hartopp flushed. “He’ll be hurt,” she finished, weakly. Then, as the two from upstairs entered, she whispered: “He’ll be hurt worse than you are now.”The “Boiler-plate” looked very foolish in an old Yale rowing shirt, with the “Y” stretched taut across his ponderous chest. He had a pair of arms like a blacksmith. Jack Drayton had taken off his coat and was in his shirt sleeves. He never looked at Natica, nor at the Hartopp; but he tossed me a stopwatch and told me to keep time.“We’ll box five rounds, Percy,” he said.Natica clapped her hands. “What fun!” she cried. “Jack, you’re boxing against my champion.”The “Boiler-plate,” who had been regarding the work at hand with much gravity, again allowed his countenance to be relaxed by the old, foolish grin. “Oh, I say,” he interposed. “That’s all right, but so long as Maisie is in the room I’m fighting for her—she’s my wife, you know.”The Hartopp went to Natica with a softened gleam in her eyes; “I saw a telephone in the hall,” she said. “I’m going out to call a cab.” I heard her at the lever as they began to spar.I don’t believe I could get a job at timekeeping in a real mill. My rounds must have been wonderfully and fearfully made. For I forgot all about the stop-watch now and then, while I learned the truth of the Hartopp’s caution that “Boiler-plate” grew rough after he’d been drinking a bit.I knew that Jack had been a pretty fair boxer at the university, but, after I had called time for the first round, the thing was to all intents and purposes a genuine fight, and he was all in several times over. The “Boiler-plate’s” fists made a noise like a woodchopper. Natica stood watching it with a queer, queer smile. But I saw—and I saw it with a sinking at the heart, for I realized that I’d cherished the guilty hope that things were not really going to be straightened out—that with every mark of the “Boiler-plate’s” glove, her husband was coming back into his own.She half sprang toward them when Jack went down with a crash, after I had got them started on the last go. Drayton arose warily, the blood spurting from a nasty cut over the eye, where the heel of the other’s glove had scraped. The “Boiler-plate” lumbered dangerously near just then, and Natica, despite her, uttered a cry of warning.I saw Jack turn away from the mountain in the Yale rowing shirt, and his eyes met Natica’s squarely for the first time since Cherry’s. Something he read in them made him laugh. This was only for the fraction of a second, however, for a glove, with thenth power behind it, lifted him a clearthree feet into a stack of gilt chairs near his own corner.He didn’t move, and the “Boilerplate” stared at him stupidly.“Say,youmade him look at you,” he said to Natica. “I didn’t mean to land on him blind.”But she did not heed him. She was among the gilt chairs, with Jack Drayton’s head upon her lap. The wheels of a cab stopped outside, and the Hartopp was seizing her dazed lord and master. She had his coat and bediamonded linen in her hands, and she clutched the “Boiler-plate” firmly, leading him to the door.“Say, Maisie, wait a minute,” he protested. “I’ve got the swell’s college shirt on, and I didn’t mean to land on him blind.”I opened the door, for she signaled with her eyes. “Come on, Jim, there’s a dear,” she said. Between us we cajoled him into the coupe. As I shut the door, she leaned to me and whispered: “Tell her for me she’s a cat—a cruel cat.”I handed the driver a bill. “You’ve a very bad memory, cabby, haven’t you?” I asked.“Extremely bad, sir,” said he, touching his hat.“But, Maisie, I’ve got the swell’s college shirt on,” I heard “Boiler-plate” insist. Then the wheels moved.The Draytons were both upon their feet when I stole back into the hall. I needed my hat and coat, or I shouldn’t have set foot within the house again that night. Jack, a bit staggery and holding to the back of a chair, mopped the cut on his temple with a handkerchief, his wife’s handkerchief, in his free hand. Natica, a smear of red on the front of her frock, stood beside him, with a strangely happy expression in her face and pose. A great many things had been pushed over the precipice which leads to forgetfulness, in the time I had been out on the sidewalk busy with the cabby.“Good-night, Percy,” Jack called out.“Good-night,” said I, going to him to take his hand, for he was too wobbly to have met me halfway.“It’s been a nightmare,” said he. “We’ll wake up to-morrow morning and know that we’ve only been asleep.”“Yes,” I agreed, but looking at the puffiness in his face, I thought this was coming it a bit strong.“Good-night, Percy,” said Natica. And gently as she spoke the words, it came to me with a sudden rush of conviction that I had ceased fagging for the Drayton establishment for good—now.“It was coming to me,” said Jack. I was fiddling on the threshold uncertainly.“Hush, you foolish boy,” whispered Natica, touching the cut on his forehead, just once, with a very tender finger.“Yes, it was coming to you,” said I. I was glad that they perceived the conviction in my speech.And that is how I had my last supper with Natica.

SUPPER WITH NATICABy Robert E. MacAlarney

By Robert E. MacAlarney

Itisn’t at all pleasant to burn one’s fingers, but it’s worth while burning them now and then, if you have to be scorched to be near a particularly attractive fire; at least I’ve found it that way. All of which leads me to Natica Drayton—Melsford that was.

I think I’m the only one of the crew she dragged at her heels who hasn’t forgot about things and gone off after other game; some of them have been lashed to the burning stake of pretty uncomfortable domesticity, too. As for me—well, I’ve simply gone on caring, and I think I shall always go on.

Does she know it? Of course she knows it; always has known it, ever since that first summer at Sacandaga. Not that I’ve been ass enough to say anything after the first time. I’m only an ordinary sort of chap when it comes to intuition, but somehow I’ve never plucked up the cheek to do any talking about my own miserable self; not since she let me down as gently as she could, while I paddled her back from Birch Point to the canoe house, with Elephant Mountain ragged-backed in the moon-haze. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it was she said. There was the drip of water from the paddle as I lifted it, stroke after stroke; the tiny hiss of smother at the prow, and twisted through it all, like a gathering string, Natica Melsford’s voice, letting me down easy—as easily as she could.

After I had made fast, I remember feeling that somehow the moonlight had turned things extremely cold; and I reached for my sweater that lay in the stern. I also laughed a great deal too much around the logs at the bungalow fire, and then drank a deal more than too much at the clubhouse before turning in. Maybe it was cowardly to sneak back to town a couple of days later, “on business,” of course—a shabby excuse for a chap that doesn’t dabble in business more than I do. But I honestly needed to go to get back my equilibrium. I got it, though, and I’ve kept it pretty continuously. And this much is enough for that. Natica Melsford is the only interesting bit about this story, and let’s get back to her.

That winter she married Jack Drayton. The afternoon we rehearsed for the wedding I looked at her, before we pranced down the aisle and endured the endless silly giggles of the bridesmaids, and the usher louts who would fall out of step, and grew more peevish by the minute. I looked her over then, and I said to myself: “You feeble paranoiac, imagine that girl tying up withyou.” Well, I couldn’t very well imagine it, although I tried. But I was extremely noisy, and I heard two or three of the bridesmaids, to say nothing of the maid of honor and the bridegroom’s mamma, tapping their gentle hammers, at my expense, at the breakfast. It was a year afterward that I began to fag regularly for the Drayton establishment.

Jack Drayton, by rights, ought to have been poisoned. He’d be the first to acknowledge it now. Perhaps if he’d married a girl who insisted on having things out the moment they began, the things wouldn’t have happened. ButNatica Melsford wasn’t that sort. She was the kind that simply looked scorn into and clear through you, when she thought you were acting low down. This, with a man strung like Jack was, simply put the fat into the fire. It would have been different with me. I’d—well—I’d have made an abject crawl, to be sure. You see, her knowing this was the thing that must have always queered me with her. A woman prefers a man she can get furious at and who’ll stick it out a bit, to one who caves in at the first sign of a frown. But Jack carried things too far.

No, he didn’t mind my frequenting the house. He liked me and I liked him. But, all the same, I knew he didn’t regard me as a foeman worthy of his steel. And, although the knowledge made me raw now and then, when he’s come in with his easy, careless way, still I swallowed the mean feeling because it gave me a chance to see her. And don’t imagine I went around hunting for trouble. It was at the club one night—I’d just come from the Draytons, and Jack hadn’t been home to dinner—that I heard Rawlins Richardson and Horace Trevano chattering about Maisie Hartopp. The “Jo-Jo” song had made the biggest kind of a hit that winter at the Gaiety, and the hit had been made by the Hartopp singing it to a stage box which the Johnnies scrambled to bid in nightly.

It seemed like small game for Jack Drayton to be trailing along with the ruck—the ruck meaning Tony Criswold and the rest of that just-out-of-college crew—but I didn’t need signed affidavits, after five minutes of club chatter, to know that he was pretty well tied to an avenue window at Cherry’s after the show. The Ruinart, too, that kept spouting from the bucket beside it, was a pet vintage of the Hartopp.

There was a lot of that silly chuckle, and I recalled reading somewhere that there was a husband belonging to the Hartopp, a medium good welterweight, who picked up a living flooring easy marks for private clubs at Paterson, N. J., and the like, and occasionally serving as a punching bag for the good uns before a championship mill. What the devil was there to do? I couldn’t answer the riddle.

It sounds like old women’s chatter, the meddlesome way I scribble this down. It would take a real thing in the line of literature to paint me right, anyway, I fancy. When a third party keeps mixing in with husband and wife, he deserves all the slanging that’s coming to him; which same is my last squeal for mercy.

A month went by—two of them. Natica Drayton wasn’t the strain that needs spectacles to see through things. Then, too, I guessed the loving friend sympathy racket was being worked by some of the bridge whist aggregation which met up with her every fortnight. She laughed more than she ought to have done. This was a bad sign with her. Once or twice, when the three of us dined together, and she was almost noisy over the benedictine, I could have choked Jack Drayton, for he didn’t see. It’s not a pretty thing for an outsider to sità trois, and see things in a wife’s manner that the husband doesn’t or won’t see; and worse than that, to know that the wife knows you see it and that he doesn’t. Speak to Jack? I wouldn’t have done it for worlds. As I said, I’m willing to burn my fingers and even cuddle the hurt; but I don’t meddle with giant firecrackers except on the Fourth of July, and that didn’t come until afterward.

I was to take her to the opera one night—Drayton had the habit of dropping in for an act or two and then disappearing—but on her own doorstep she tossed off her carriage wrap and sent Martin back to the stables.

“Let’s talk, instead,” she said, and she made me coffee in the library, with one of those French pots that gurgle conveniently when you don’t exactly know what to say. That pot did a heap of gurgling before we began to talk. When she spoke, what she said almost took me off my chair.

“Percy, have you seen the show at the Gaiety?” she asked.

I had seen it more than once, and I said so.

“They tell me there’s a song there——” she went on.

“There are a lot of songs,” said I.

“There’s one in particular.”

There wasn’t any use in fencing, so I answered: “You mean the ‘Jo-Jo’ song. It’s a silly little ditty, and it’s sung by——”

“A girl named Hartopp—Maisie Hartopp.” She was speaking as if she were trying to remember where she’d heard the name.

Of course, me for the clumsy speech. “She’s a winner,” I cut in.

She got up at that, and walked over to the fireplace. “She seems to be,” she said, picking at a bit of bronze, a wedding present, I think. Then she came over to where I was sitting and put a hand on my shoulder. I’d have got to my feet if I hadn’t been afraid to face her. “Percy——” she began, and I felt the fingers on my shoulder quiver. I don’t think the Apaches handed out anything much worse in the torture line than the quiver of a woman’s ringers upon your shoulder, when you know that those fingers aren’t quivering on your account. Maybe that occurred to her, for a second later she took her hand away. “You once said something foolish to me, Percy,” she said.

I nodded my head, my eyes upon an edge of the Royal Bokhara. “It was in a canoe, wasn’t it?” I replied. “There was a moon, of course, and the paddle blades went drip, drip.”

“You meant what you said then, didn’t you?”

My gaze was wavering from the rug by now. Little wonder, was it? “I meant it all right,” I got out after a while. “Do you want to hear me say my little speech over again?” Was it possible that, after all, Natica Drayton had really decided to toss Jack over, and take on a fag, warranted kind and gentle, able to be driven by any lady? But I forgot that foolish notion pretty nearly right off.

“There is a husband,” she went on, as if taking account of stock.

“There always is,” I rejoined. “Some of ’em are good and the others are bad.” I chuckled despite me, as I put in my mean little hack.

“I mean the Hartopp’s husband,” she explained.

“There is,” I said. “‘Boiler-plate’ Hartopp. His given name is James, and he prize-fights fair to middling.” All this wasn’t quite good billiards, but we’d begun wrong that night, and we might as well keep it up, thought I.

Natica Drayton was tapping her foot upon the fender. “H’m,” she mused. “Some of those horrid names sound interesting.” Then she turned to me abruptly. “I think, perhaps, you ought to go now,” she suggested.

“I think so, too,” I agreed, rising very hastily, and taking my leave.

“Have you Friday evening disengaged?” She flung this after me before I had got to the hall.

“Yes,” said I, all unthinking.

“Then we’ll do it Friday,” she said.

“We’ll do what?” I asked, coming back to her. For once I felt rebellious, and showed it, whereat she smiled.

“Supper after the theater at Cherry’s.”

“Oh, well, I don’t mind that,” I volunteered.

“With ‘Boiler-plate’ Hartopp,” she added.

The searchlight dawned upon me. It swung around the room once or twice, and that was enough. I knew in the flood of sudden illumination that the girl had planned this thing in advance, with the daring of despair—and a wife’s despair, a very young wife’s despair, is a more desperate thing than the anger of any other woman. Natica had planned it all in advance; had figured it, and the chances of it. And in the balance she had confidently thrown the asset of my assisting her.

The right sort of a man, I suppose, would have become enraged because of her taking things for granted. But I—I had been chained to her chariot too long a time to experience the mild sensation of resentment.

Natica wished to face her husband in a crowded restaurant after the play. More than that, she wished to face him in company with a man not of her sort,even as he—Drayton—was escorting a woman whose lane of living did not rightly cross his. The coincidence of Natica’s means-to-an-end being the Hartopp’s husband, was simply a gift of fate; an opportunity of administering poetic justice, which could not be denied. Had the Hartopp not possessed a convenient husband, Natica would have arranged for another companion. But even she had not dared to plan hercoupalone, with her chosen instrument of wifely retaliation. Through it all, she had confidently counted on me, a discreet background, a pliant puppet.

She could not know what Drayton might do, after they had eyed one another from different tables. She did not much care. But she would at least have the painful joy of the Brahmin woman’s hope, who trusts by some fresh incantation to secure a blessing, formerly vouchsafed her by the gods, but which now old-time petitions fail to renew. It seemed cold-blooded, the entire arrangement, and yet I knew it was not. She was far braver than I could have been, even to win her caring. But I understood.

I must have been rough as I took her hand. “Look here,” I said. “It’s a desperate game, Natica. You wouldn’t have dared to say that to any other man than me. You’ve got used to seeing me fag for you. And I’m going to do it this time, too. But if you weaken, by Heaven, you’ll deserve to lose for good. It’s crazy, it’s the act of a pair of paretics, but I’m going to see it through.”

She was crying when I left her. “Percy, my dear,” she said; then she began to laugh—that after dinner benedictine laugh of hers. “If there weren’t Jack, that speech of yours just now might make me want to kiss you.”

On the sidewalk I tried to figure out if there had been knockout drops in the coffee Natica had brewed for me. In any one of the forty-eight hours ensuing, I might have rung up the Draytons’ on the telephone, and told her that I had come to my senses. But I didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, I hunted up a newspaper chap I knew, and he put me next to “Boiler-plate” Hartopp at the Metropole.

The bruiser wasn’t as bad sort as I had fancied him. He was an Englishman all right—a cut below middle class; you could tell that by the way he clipped his initial h’s off and on. I tried the ice at first—it’s always best when you don’t know the exact thickness of your frozen water. The way I tried it was to toss a flower or two at Maisie Hartopp and her “Jo-Jo” song.

He rose sure enough, and it didn’t take me a quarter hour to see that the pug was really bowled out by the parcel of stage skirts who wore his name on the Gaiety bills. This made it a warmer game than it might have been otherwise, but I was in for it now, and I made the date.

No, I didn’t mention Natica. Even a broken-to-harness shawl carrier has a shred of cautious decency about him. But I gabbled lightly about a certain feminine party who was keen on exemplars of the genuine thing in the line of the manly art. Whereupon “Boilerplate” acquired a pouter-pigeon chest, which fairly bulged over the bar railing, and gave me his word of honor he’d be waiting at Forty-fourth Street about eleven on Friday. He intimated, ere I left, that he’d bring his festive accouterments with him. And he did.

We were a bit late—Natica and I. It must have been a quarter past the hour when we drove up to Cherry’s. I felt reasonably certain that if Jack Drayton were guarding a champagne bucket by the corner table that night, he was located then. In the offing, miserably self-conscious, a crush hat on the back of his really fine head, and two or three small locomotive headlights glinting from his broad expanse of evening shirt, was “Boiler-plate” Hartopp. The flunkeys were regarding him curiously, and once a waiter-captain came out and gave him what seemed to be an unsatisfactory report.

I think the man was just about to take the count from sheer nerves, when he made me out in the doorway. Natica winked—actually winked at me—ashe floundered over his share of the introduction. Looking at her, and faintly divining her mood that night, I felt sorry for Jack, for “Boiler-plate” and for myself. I left them for a moment and went in to see about my table. Two minutes later I emerged, to face Drayton and the Hartopp unloading from an electric hansom. The under-toned remark of one of the footman came to me: “A bit behind schedule time to-night, eh, Charley?”

There wasn’t anything to do then, for they were fair inside. “Boiler-plate” was finishing some elephantine pleasantry to Natica, when he saw what I saw. A foolish grin rippled across his wide face. “Hullo!” he said to the Hartopp, who looked properly peevish, and then waspish, as she let her glance travel to Natica, who stood perfectly poised and, I fancied, a trifle expectant. Drayton eyed them together and in particular. The color streaked his forehead and faded out. Then he saw me, and, although he never may have murder in his eyes again, it was there at that choice moment. We weren’t at all spectacular, you mustn’t think that. It was all very quick, and there were a lot of people coming and going.

She was in instant command of the situation. Why shouldn’t she have been, having created it? And unexpectedly, suddenly as she had encountered her quarry, equally suddenly she shifted her position, without the time to take me into her confidence.

“Don’t bother about our table, Percy,” she said. “Now that we’ve met friends, it will be jollier to dineen famille. It will be ever so much nicer than eating in a stuffy restaurant, and the butler won’t have gone to bed yet. Run out and get us a theater wagon.”

I went out to the carriage man in a trance. The gods, of a deed, were fighting furiously on Natica’s side—for she could not have foreseen this vantage, readily as she swung her attack by its aid. Exquisite torture, truly, to flaunt a husband’s folly in his own face, over his own mahogany, with the source of that folly looking on. Drayton’s bounden civility to his wife, and to the other woman, must make him present himself as a target. He knew it, his wife knew it; as yet the other woman but dimly suspected it—not being over subtle—and it smote me in the face continuously. The puppet always feels the most cut up at times like these. In a way, it is because his vanity is being seared. Mine fairly crackled.

So we rattled off up the avenue. The only comfortable ones among us were Natica and Hartopp. He seemed to think the occurrence a pleasant bit of chance, and he wasn’t in the least jealous, not he. I suppose the wife had him schooled to her stage ways of doing things.

Once he turned to Jack with a chuckle and said: “This is a jossy bit of luck, ain’t it, each of us out with the other man’s better?”

Natica laughed shamelessly. “You’ve such a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, Mr. Hartopp,” she said. And when “Boiler-plate” tried to deny the insinuation, his wife nudged him on the arm and whispered: “Shut up, Jim.”

There isn’t any use in stringing out the amateur theatricals the five of us indulged in that night. The Drayton servants were too well chosen to show any surprise at being told to put on a champagne supper at midnight, and then go to bed before it was served. We sat at that mahogany table until the candelabra were guttering, and each of us had toyed more than he ought to have done with his glass. Natica acted as if she were entertaining in earnest, and for the time being I actually think she felt that she was. She got the Hartopp to sing her “Jo-Jo” song, and the Hartopp actually did it as if she enjoyed it. Afterward Natica induced “Boiler-plate” to tell about the time he mixed it up with Fitzsimmons for ten rounds.

“It was a lucky punch that put me out,” he kept repeating, almost pathetically. “You know Fitz’s lucky punch.”

I might have seen what was in the wind if I hadn’t been thick-headed, what with the champagne and the rattles. “Boiler-plate” once started on the ring, it was an easy transition.

“You’ve boxing gloves, haven’t you, Jack?” asked Natica. “Get them for Mr. Hartopp. Let’s see him demonstrate Mr. Fitzsimmons’ lucky punch.”

Drayton turned without a word, and made as if to go upstairs. At the door he turned. “Come on, Hartopp,” he said. “I’ll lend you a rowing jersey.”

“You clear a place in the drawing room, Percy,” said Natica, briskly. “Be sure that the shades are drawn. It would be awful to be raided by the police.” And I obediently piled the gilt parlor furniture in corners.

The Hartopp fluttered anxiously around Natica the while. She was a woman, and she was beginning to half understand. “Please,” she said, touching Natica’s arm. “Jim’s been drinking, and he’s very rough when he’s been drinking. We’ve all been foolish, but only foolish, remember. Jim and I sail for London next week. Just let us slip away now, and forget all about it.”

Natica laughed. Her eyes were on the door. “Remember, we’ve only been foolish,” repeated the Hartopp. “Only foolish, that’s all.” She went to Natica and shook her arm roughly; there were feet upon the stairs. “You silly,” she snapped. “You ought to be glad you’re married to a gentleman. He’s different from all the others. I can tell you that, and I know. And I tell you that Jim’s been drinking. Jack will——”

Natica’s pose stiffened, but she did not look around. “Yes,Jackwill what?” she said, coldly.

The Hartopp flushed. “He’ll be hurt,” she finished, weakly. Then, as the two from upstairs entered, she whispered: “He’ll be hurt worse than you are now.”

The “Boiler-plate” looked very foolish in an old Yale rowing shirt, with the “Y” stretched taut across his ponderous chest. He had a pair of arms like a blacksmith. Jack Drayton had taken off his coat and was in his shirt sleeves. He never looked at Natica, nor at the Hartopp; but he tossed me a stopwatch and told me to keep time.

“We’ll box five rounds, Percy,” he said.

Natica clapped her hands. “What fun!” she cried. “Jack, you’re boxing against my champion.”

The “Boiler-plate,” who had been regarding the work at hand with much gravity, again allowed his countenance to be relaxed by the old, foolish grin. “Oh, I say,” he interposed. “That’s all right, but so long as Maisie is in the room I’m fighting for her—she’s my wife, you know.”

The Hartopp went to Natica with a softened gleam in her eyes; “I saw a telephone in the hall,” she said. “I’m going out to call a cab.” I heard her at the lever as they began to spar.

I don’t believe I could get a job at timekeeping in a real mill. My rounds must have been wonderfully and fearfully made. For I forgot all about the stop-watch now and then, while I learned the truth of the Hartopp’s caution that “Boiler-plate” grew rough after he’d been drinking a bit.

I knew that Jack had been a pretty fair boxer at the university, but, after I had called time for the first round, the thing was to all intents and purposes a genuine fight, and he was all in several times over. The “Boiler-plate’s” fists made a noise like a woodchopper. Natica stood watching it with a queer, queer smile. But I saw—and I saw it with a sinking at the heart, for I realized that I’d cherished the guilty hope that things were not really going to be straightened out—that with every mark of the “Boiler-plate’s” glove, her husband was coming back into his own.

She half sprang toward them when Jack went down with a crash, after I had got them started on the last go. Drayton arose warily, the blood spurting from a nasty cut over the eye, where the heel of the other’s glove had scraped. The “Boiler-plate” lumbered dangerously near just then, and Natica, despite her, uttered a cry of warning.

I saw Jack turn away from the mountain in the Yale rowing shirt, and his eyes met Natica’s squarely for the first time since Cherry’s. Something he read in them made him laugh. This was only for the fraction of a second, however, for a glove, with thenth power behind it, lifted him a clearthree feet into a stack of gilt chairs near his own corner.

He didn’t move, and the “Boilerplate” stared at him stupidly.

“Say,youmade him look at you,” he said to Natica. “I didn’t mean to land on him blind.”

But she did not heed him. She was among the gilt chairs, with Jack Drayton’s head upon her lap. The wheels of a cab stopped outside, and the Hartopp was seizing her dazed lord and master. She had his coat and bediamonded linen in her hands, and she clutched the “Boiler-plate” firmly, leading him to the door.

“Say, Maisie, wait a minute,” he protested. “I’ve got the swell’s college shirt on, and I didn’t mean to land on him blind.”

I opened the door, for she signaled with her eyes. “Come on, Jim, there’s a dear,” she said. Between us we cajoled him into the coupe. As I shut the door, she leaned to me and whispered: “Tell her for me she’s a cat—a cruel cat.”

I handed the driver a bill. “You’ve a very bad memory, cabby, haven’t you?” I asked.

“Extremely bad, sir,” said he, touching his hat.

“But, Maisie, I’ve got the swell’s college shirt on,” I heard “Boiler-plate” insist. Then the wheels moved.

The Draytons were both upon their feet when I stole back into the hall. I needed my hat and coat, or I shouldn’t have set foot within the house again that night. Jack, a bit staggery and holding to the back of a chair, mopped the cut on his temple with a handkerchief, his wife’s handkerchief, in his free hand. Natica, a smear of red on the front of her frock, stood beside him, with a strangely happy expression in her face and pose. A great many things had been pushed over the precipice which leads to forgetfulness, in the time I had been out on the sidewalk busy with the cabby.

“Good-night, Percy,” Jack called out.

“Good-night,” said I, going to him to take his hand, for he was too wobbly to have met me halfway.

“It’s been a nightmare,” said he. “We’ll wake up to-morrow morning and know that we’ve only been asleep.”

“Yes,” I agreed, but looking at the puffiness in his face, I thought this was coming it a bit strong.

“Good-night, Percy,” said Natica. And gently as she spoke the words, it came to me with a sudden rush of conviction that I had ceased fagging for the Drayton establishment for good—now.

“It was coming to me,” said Jack. I was fiddling on the threshold uncertainly.

“Hush, you foolish boy,” whispered Natica, touching the cut on his forehead, just once, with a very tender finger.

“Yes, it was coming to you,” said I. I was glad that they perceived the conviction in my speech.

And that is how I had my last supper with Natica.

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