Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

56 ‘you stepped in just in time to save me. ' ‘There was no one there, of course, so they knew their whole gang had been rounded up and that they were due to disappear as quickly and quietly as possible.” He fidgetted nervously again, and then finally seemed to make up his mind. “Ward,” he said gently, “‘you’ve made Nellie and me think a lot of you by the way you’ve acted through this whole thing. Not only by what you've done for us, you ,know, but you’ve gone through it all with- ‘out asking questions.” “J promised Miss Nellie I wouldn’t,” Ward explained with a smile. “Humph! I don’t know another man in the world who could have kept such a prom- ise—even to Nellie. And she generally gets everything she wants. You must have been sorely tempted several times to de- mand explanations, for some of the things you found out.” “T’ll confess I was.” ‘‘Well, as things were, no one could have explained the whole thing to you. Nellie didn’t know much about it. She was only \ doing what I had instructed her to do, and even I got to the stage where I didn’t know where I stood. It all came out of a perfectly harmless joke. At least, no harm was meant at the time.” “A joke!’ Ward exclaimed. “It seems to me that it became mighty serious for a joke.” “Well, it was Stephen’s idea of fun. He’s always been scatter-brained and irresponsi- ble. .That’s why I took advantage ofour father’s instructions, and simply kept him on’a moderate allowance instead of giving him his share of the estate. I had the right to do that under father’s will. “This joke came out of the one time I tried to use Stephen in a really big business deal. I didn’t want him to take a part in the deal; he was simply to act as an entertain- ment committee. “As you know, I have some rather large interests in South America. A year or more ago I stumbled on a chance to double my holdings down there by combination with a big syndicate that was forming, and I ran down and made the preliminary arrange- ments with the understanding that, after other matters had been completed, the men in the syndicate would come to New York and complete the deal. “They sent a man up here to say that Adventure everything was all right, and that they would soon be on their way. This man told me quietly that they were taking this trip more or less as a picnic, and that they proposed to see all of the famous gaiety of New York while they were here. He sug- gested that it would be good business if I would arrange things so that they could paint the town red without having to waste time asking their way about.” Old Blaydon smiled grimly. “The humor of that,’’ he said, ‘‘lies in the fact that I have never touched a drop of liquor in my life, and that I abhor the al- leged ‘gaiety’ of Broadway as I abhor noth- ing else in this world. So much so that I doubt if I know the name and location of more than two white-light resorts in the whole city. “But, of course, I did not tell this to my friend from South America. I merely told him that I would see that they had all of the White Way they wanted, and then I sent for Stephen and told him to go ahead with any program that he thought would best suit-under the circumstances, and have everything charged to me regardless of the cost. That is where Mrs. Herriot stepped in.”’ Blaydon’s lips curled in a look of inex- pressible loathing, and Ward could see his fists clench on the arms of his wicker chair. “Stephen’s program,” he explained, ‘‘in- cluded many parties at her apartments, where she surrounded herself with the gay- est life of the city. I went to New York to see one of the South Americans about a tangle in the deal, and, on my arrival, found that he had gone, with the others, to one of Mrs. Herriot’s parties. It was most im- ' portant that I see him, and I could not wait until the following day, so I jumped into a taxi, drove to the Herriot apartment, and asked for Stephen. “‘The noise told me plainly that the party was in full swing, and that everybody had had too much to drink. When Stephen came out and saw me, he looked frightened to death, and he soon told me why. One of the visitors had tried to make love to Mrs. Herriot more ardently than Stephen fancied, and he, to prevent it, declared that she and I were engaged to be married. The South Americans had taken it seriously, and had toasted the supposedly approaching nuptials at every one of their _ parties. comichbook (()