Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 13: what you’re looking at

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

» WHERE without committing mayhem, for he started back toward his place at the table. The screens in our offices are so arranged that it is practically impossible to get out from behind one of them without knocking it flat to the floor. This one was set at just the regulation angle; and the presi- dent hit it with his shoulder and it began to tilt; and he snarled quite viciously at the screen and yanked it back with a good deal more force than seemed necessary. He gave it such a violent yank, in fact, that he himself bumped squarely into the wall close by. He snarled again as his other shoulder hit something. Two or three seconds I watched him pawing at the mirror, which had been dislodged, and trying to catch it and then the thing escaped his fingers al- together and went down on the floor with a crash that sounded as if half the plate glass in the building had caved in! Down at Mr. Berford’s feet there were, at a rough guess, about five hundred little pieces of broken mirror! Some of my ancestors must have been ig- norant and superstitious people; it’s all nonsense, of course, but to save my soul I can’t see a thing like that happen without having a little cold chill, even if it is only for an instant. Mr. Berford had some other kind of ancestors, I imagine. He just looked at the wreckage and growled and kicked most of it back behind the screen, there- after resuming his trip toward the table. Within a yard of it, he stopped short and stared blank astonishment. Upon my word of honor, to the very last one of them, those five old gentlemen, ail nearing seventy, all substantial, hard-head- ed business men, were sitting there with their mouths open and their eyes fairly popping! _“ That’s—unfortunate! That’s very un- fortunate!” Macpherson breathed. Jones tittered, more than anything else like a scared little boy. “Seven years bad luck!” he said. “ Seven what?” Mr. Berford rasped. ‘ That’s what they say, Thomas!” _ © Absurd—yes,” Mr. Moreland put in. “ But my younger brother, many years ago, broke his mirror and—’’ WAS I? “And had seven years bad luck?” Ber- ford laughed. “He wasn’t spared to suffer them, Tom. He met a woman that very night who drove him to drink within the year and to the grave within another!” Moreland said, and shook his head. Something about this and the sigh that went with it helped restore Craven’s bal- ance at least; he pulled down the corner of his mouth, sneered undisguisedly at Mr. Moreland and seemed to feel better. Mr. Berford’s teeth came together with an angry click and he was about to speak when Ben- nett interrupted with: ‘“ Ridiculous, of course. Yes, yes, we’re bound to admit it’s ridiculous. But I do call - to mind one little incident in this connec- tion which made a lasting impression on me. It must have been about 1888—yes, it was in the early spring of 1888, just after the big blizzard, that a cousin of mine—a young chap, you understand, without a grain of superstition in his whole makeup, chanced to—er—were you waiting to say something, Thomas?” “Tf you don’t object?” “ Not a particle. Go on.” . “ Then may I ask of you gentlemen in so many words,” the president rapped out, ‘“‘ if there is really one among you who seriously believes that bad luck follows the breaking of a mirror?” They stirred uneasily, but nobody spoke until: - “Well, there’s a lot of things in this life, Thomas, that we may not believe, in the ordinary sense of the word,” Macpherson began, heavily and unsmilingly. ‘‘ And at the same time the evidence may be so over- whelming that there is something that— that—well, perhaps there’s not, after all. Perhaps there’s not.” ‘Most emphatically, there is mot!” Mr. Berford snapped contemptuously. ‘ And there is no such thing as ‘bad luck’ or ‘good luck’ or any other kind of ‘luck’! What comes to a man in the way of ‘ bad luck’ he brings upon himself, absolutely without any exception whatsoever!”’ “Always, Tom?” Macpherson sighed dubiously. “ Invariably!” barked. the president and 169