Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 44: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

42 Adventure immediately. Says most urgent. Send me wire to show him saying you will come. He smiled at the last sentence. “Phil will understand,” he thought. “It really means that I don’t care whether -he comes or not so long as I have the telegram to show to Uncle Stephen and keep him quiet.” He gave the message to John, and the car disappeared: up the beach. Then, hoping that he might get a chance to speak a few words to Nellie Blaydon, he strolled over toward the inlet, peering through the gath- ering darkness at the white hull of the yacht as she lay on the shore, the beams of her lights gleaming through the windows of her cabin-trunk. From her after deck, the sound of voices came to him in indistinct murmurs—the rumble of the voice of Stephen Blaydon and the querulous tones of the portly Mrs. Herriot. He listened a few minutes to hear Nellie Blaydon speak, but only the two - voices came to him and the light from the girl’s stateroom convinced him that she was not with the others. He turned and went back to his tent. He felt weary and mentally fatigued, and he realized the uselessness of trying to probe . further into the mystery until he had new facts upon which to base fresh lines of reasoning. As he passed the aeroplane tent, he glanced in and saw Carl Loder stretched out sound asleep upon his cot. But sleep was slow in coming to Ward that night. Try as he would, he could not banish from his mind the disquieting im- pression that he ought to remember Stephen Blaydon, that he ought to be able to say definitely what it was about the man that he had known somewhere before. He finally closed his eyes to restless dreaming of attacks by bearded pirates, of blood-dripping cutlasses and bandana caps, and all the boyhood paraphernalia of the dime novel. And over it all leered the triumphant face of Stephen Blaydon, while Phil Conway and Dick Greiner wrung their hands in helpless pity in the dim back- ground.. ), IT WAS late in the morning when “Xe he awoke. He roused himself as he smelled the coffee from Carl’s fire. Listlessly he bathed and dressed himself and joined the mechanician. Loder greeted him with a beaming smile. “Good afternoon,” said Carl with pointed sarcasm. “You got up almost in time for dinner, didn’t you?” “Ts it so late?” Ward asked. body must have overslept. heard a sound.” “Everybody else has been up for hours,” Loder contradicted. ‘Mr. Stephen Blay- don got me up before sunrise. Say, Chief, that man sure is some sport.” The cobwebs suddenly fled from Ward’s brain. He became alert on the instant. “Ves?” he asked with assumed disin- terestedness. “What has he done to make you think that?” Carl reached into the pocket of his over- alls and drew out a five-dollar bill. “For breakfast,’”’ he said. ‘Some sport, that.” “Five dollars for breakfast?” Ward queried in surprise. ‘‘Why should he pay so much!” “Well, maybe it wasn’t only for break- fast. He came to the tent and woke me up to ask if there was any good fishing around here. I told him we hadn’t tried it, and he said it looked like it might be good down the cove near the inlet. ““*T see you’ve fixed up Caprice’s métor tender,’ he said, and I said that I’d put it in good shape in case we wanted to use it. “Then he pulled out his wallet—oh, gee; Chief! You’d ought to see that wallet! Full of ’em, it was—yellow boys and green ones, and all nice and new.’ “ *T’ll make you a business proposition,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a lot to think about to- day, and I can always think better when I’m fishing. I'll give you five dollars to get that tender down, fill her tank, get me some breakfast and start me off. Is it a go?” ““*Kiss your five good-by,’ I says—and here it is. It was his tender anyway. It isn’t ours, is it?”’ | “No,” Ward agreed. “He has a right to do as he pleases with it. And if he wants to spend the day fishing, that is his business. Now get me my breakfast or I will take that five away from you.” Carl kissed the bill and tucked it back in | his pocket. “Over my dead body, you will,” he said, and set to work with the frying-pan. Ward watched him in silence. He began to see the possible meaning of this early- morning fishing-trip of Blaydon’s. The tender from Caprice was a sturdy little “Every- I haven’t GEomicbooks