The Argosy, April 1916 — page 183: what you’re looking at

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

ag SSR ae feat SUPPOSE anybody else would have | picked the wallet up. I would have done so myself—on any other day. It happened, however, that I was acquainted with the date. And for that reason, when I saw that black-leather bill-fold lying in plain ‘view in the hall on the eighteenth floor of the Mammoth Building I smiled—a superior sort of smile. “No, you don’t!” I said to myself. don’t bite on any old gag like that!” The person or persons to whom I mental- ly addressed my remarks, I imagined to be watching me through the keyhole or the crack of a partially-opened transom in some one of the neighboring offices. They’d placed the pocketbook there to see who’d pick it up. Whoever did so would find, the moment after, that he was the victim of a practical joke. A voice would come floating out of the keyhole or over the transom, to proclaim the finder’s folly in tones of mockery: ‘April fool!” ‘The day was the first of April. It was the open season for the playing of all sorts of pranks upon the unwary—or the absent- minded, as concerned the date. But I meant to show the Merry Andrew who had placed that pocketbook there that I was not one of that kind. OT Robert ogee ANOCCPOUS O. SS Perhaps I was not the first who had seen the wallet even though it was only half past eight in the morning. Others might have come along before me and picked it up, to hear the jeers of the indi- vidual who had planted it; and, being re- cruited into the joke, had dropped it there again to let the next passer-by be fooled in turn as they had been. But they weren’t going to catch me. I was too wise—oh, much too wise—to be taken in by that be-whiskered japery which, next to the brick under the hat, is the most popular with those amateur joke- smiths whose busy day falls immediately after the thirty-first of March. So, as I walked by the bill-fold, which had a fat look—from its stuffing of news- paper, probably—I allowed my toe to come in contact with it and sent it spinning across the tiled floor of the hall, giving not so much as another glance at it as I passed indifferently on to the door of my office. I had come down early that morning, as I had been doing for the past week, because the little mail-order business I had started six months before was beginning to look up. . As a matter of fact, I had been rushed to death during the preceding six days. The firm of manufacturers who supplied me with the small and useful articles that I was to re-sell to canvassers at a profit of thirty 173 COmiclbooks (C@