When eating away from home, special

care should be taken to maintain a

wise diet. Tou can have your morning

Cream of Wheat anywhere—it is

served in all hotels, restaurants and dining cars

Try this 3 mornings for a better day’s work

Tomorrow morning start the simple breakfast habit— with Cream of Wheat. Thousands of men find in its energy a new efficiency for the morning job.

Try it for just 3 mornings and see the difference. New energy, new keenness, new endurance! Here are 3 model breakfast menus suggested by noted nutrition authorities:

First morning

Oranges Cream or WHeat Sugar — Milk Buttered Toast Coffee or Cocoa

Second morning

Not one man in ten thousan

feeds himself properly”

Cream or Wueat with Dates Milk Omelet or Bacon Toast — Butter Coffee or Cocoa

says Samuel G. Blythe

you worked with your hands outdoors.

Every man at fifty is a problem. In his " F y ) P Third morning

entertaining book, “Keeping Fit at Fifty”, Samuel G. Blythe, well known writer, tells what he did in his own case and gives some sound advice to other men.

When Mr. Blythe reached his fiftieth birthday, he took an inventory of himself and other men his age. And he deduced these two general facts:

“The most important function of a man’s life is the way he feeds himself. But more important still, “Not one man in ten thou- sand feeds himself properly!”

An “overstoked furnace”, he calls the average man of sedentary habits. Too much food, too rich, heavy food—this is why he starts slowing down!

If you work at a desk you cannot handle the same kind or the same amount of food as if

The time to start eating right is with the first meal of the day. You do not need a big, heavy breakfast. It only puts an undue burden upon digestion.

Your first and greatest morning need is energy. Energy to get you started on the day's run.

This is just what Cream of Wheat sup- plies. It is one of the very finest energy foods because it is exceptionally rich in carbohydrates or energy units.

Cream of Wheat not only supplies energy but it saves energy because it uses so little in digestive work. It is in such simple form it is digested quickly, with a mini- mum of work.

With a Cream of Wheat breakfast you get all you need and just what you need— vital energy! And you get it without burdening digestion as heavier foods do.

2 ~

Cream or Wueat with Baked Apple

Milk Buttered Toast Bacon Coffee or Cocoa

nd for Free Sample and Book of 50 Recipes

We have a sample box of Cream of Wheat for this breakfast test, which we will send you free. We will also send our recipe book which gives 50 delightful ways to serve this famous energy food not only as a morning cereal but in desserts, meat, vegetable and cheese dishes for luncheon and supper. Fill out the coupon and mail today; get started on this help to “keeping fit’’.

Cream of Wheat Company Dept. 110, Minneapolis, Minnesota

oO Please send me, free, your recipe booklet, "50 Ways of Serving Cream of Wheat.”

(DD Pease send me a free sample box of Cream of Wheat.

Cyeam Wheat

Cream of Wheat Company, Minneapolis, Minnesota Name

In Canada, made by Cream of Wheat Company, Winnipeg

@ 1925, C.at W. Co

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

+ Men are wearing a new type h

extremely smart—a unique feature gives them 3 to 4 times ordinary wear

We are now offering the new feature — Ex Toe —in a [ smart new line of plain colors. In f New York and other large cities these have met with instant popularity. The Holeproof low prices remain unchanged.

All the reinforcement is hidden at the toe. The part the world sees is superlatively sheer and webby.

HOLEPROOF HOSIERY COMPANY, MILWAUKEE. WISCONSIN

PEER ATR

A new way of knitting has solved the problem of socks that wear out at the toe. Rich, webby

silks afford exclusive smartness and trim fit. Look like Fifth Avenue. Wear like Main Street

T LAST every man can afford to wear smart Pian A new way has been found to in- crease their wear 3 to 4 times.

You pay only the price of ordinary kinds, but you get sheer, lustrous silks. All are faultlessly correct. All fit around the ankles with extraor- dinary trimness.

And you may have your choice of eleven new colors that haye become immensely popular in the cities that dictate styles.

No extra cost. Stillyseventy-five cents and a dollar for the silks.

No wonder there are millions wearing them today. Where else can equal value be obtained?

You have seen smart socks. You have seen long wearing socks. But never have you seen such a combination before. They follow a dis-

covery made by men who know the science of fine knitting. They are the result of an entirely different principle.

The new way of knitting The new feature, Ex Toe, is more than ordinary

reinforcing. All other hose are reinforced, yet nine out of ten wear out the toe first.

Ex Toe is a new and entirely different way of knitting. That’s why it’s an achievement.

The extra protection at the toe is hidden. Not several thicknesses, but specially woven thread of extraordinary strength. No bunching. No dis- comfort. Extfa wear is gained by scientific means.

See these rich silks today. Choose from the smart new colors. If you prefer other materials you will find them at still lower prices. Be sure to ask for Ex Toe. If you can’t get them at your store write direct.

ffoleproof |x Toe Hasiery

HOLEPROOF HOSIERY COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED, LONDON, ONTARIC

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST October 17,1925

. : P s 2 INTRA A ha RRR A gg My gm

_ ue me . } 4 ‘ yy

College men will wear a double This is the new dinner jacket that is breasted suit this fall 7 two or three being worn by college men; full trou- buttens wide shoulders, easy drape sers; wide shoulders, soft, easy drape

nd ba ba be nd eed ee be

THESE SUITS HAVE THE COLLEGE MAN'S OK FOR FALL

They're just the way the style leaders in the universities want them; fabrics are right; details are right; colors are right; prices are right | * oh?

In the center is the new 2-button single breasted coat

HART SCHAFFNER & MARX

C. BH. Ludi

iem Boyd, Ad

Published Weekly

The Curtis I Publishing Company

Cyrus H. K. Curtis, President rm Vice-President and oe

P. S. Collins, Genere! Business Ma: Wolter D. Fuller, Secretary vi

Independence Savas Phalcdsinnte

London: 6, Henrietta Street Covent Garden, W.C.

THE SATURDA

EVENING POST

Founded A°D' 1728 Sy Benj. Franklin

Copyright, 1925. by The Curtis Publishing Compeny in the United States and Great Britsin Title Registered in U. S. Patent Office and in Foreign Countries

George Horace Lorimer EDITOR

Frederick S. Bigelow, A.W. Neoli. Thomes B.Costain, Wesley W. Stout, . Y. Riddell, Thomas L. Masson,

Associote

En oe 14, 1879, Polat ge ns roel is Me. 4 ag og

Sata Mit Co eh co

Entered Surpad-Chae lease Matter at the Post-Ofice Depertment, Ottews, Gonads

Volume 198

Sc. THE COPY

PHILADELPHIA, PA., OCTOBER 17, 1925

$2.00 THE YEAR

Number {6

EWT DUNNACK, returning to Fra- ternity after a ten years’ absence, traveled by boat from Boston to East Harbor; and this in spite of the

fact that he was extremely subject to seasickness and dreaded the possible dis- comfort of the voyage. His reason for choosing the steamer was that it was somewhat cheaper than the train, and he saved a fur- ther sum by sleeping in an upper bunk in the men’s cabin instead of paying fora stateroom. Not that Newt was in financial straits; but it was his old habit to live frugally, and needless ex- penditure of money was al- ways painful to him.

The trip from Boston was made, as it happened, over a placid sea; and the decks of the steamer heaved hardly more than the floor of a hotel room. The only mishap in connection with the voyage occurred at Rockland in the morning, where Newt chanced to drop a ten-cent piece in such a way that it rolled across the deck and fell into the waters of the har- bor, quite beyond recovery. The incident caused him a good deal of chagrin, for he hated losing money; he re- minded himself that dimes were consistently unlucky for him. So long as he had one in his pocket, matters consistently went amiss; either he lost the coin itself or some more burdensome mischance befell him. He was inclined to be super- stitious, and if he had been less stubborn he might have taken pains to avoid this persistent ill luck; but Newt was willing to risk the misfortune if he could have the dime.

As the steamer glided north along the beautiful and rugged coast line above Rockland, he forgot his mishap in anticipation of his approaching return to the home of his youth. The familiar contours of the Camden hills held his eye; and he knew that beyond them a dozen miles or so lay Fraternity. An occasional

letter from his mother, or from Sam, had told him of the process of decay and disintegration which had, since his departure, taken scores of families away from the town. He thought grimly that there was probably not much left but a crossroads. must still be a good property, and the old Mudie iouse and farm were worth something. Now that his father was dead, he had every reason to expect that it would be profitable for him to come home and take a look at things: He had waited till after his father’s funeral, thus avoiding the fair probability that he might have been called upon for a

TILLVUSTRATEDO ar w. H#. D.

Newt Greeted Her With a Smile and a Cheerful Word. “‘Glad to Make Your Acquaintance. Mea Lot About You Ever since This Morning”

But the Mudie mill

By Ben Ames Williams

KOERNER

the porter who offered to carry his bag. steep hill into the center of town.

eee

Sam's Bean Telling

“As if a bag was going to jump off the boat and swim ashore,” “You'd think them folks was made of money.”

Then the gangplank came aboard, and he gave up his ticket and went ashore, repulsing With this in his hand he set out to walk up the He was a chubby, round man, carrying, in spite of his abstemious habits at the table, a fair load of flesh; his face was small, and it was beginning to pucker, as the face of a jockey, forever training to keep down his weight,

MAN OF PLOTS

share of the expenses of that ceremony, Sam Dunnack had never done anything for him, Newt reflected; he was under no obligation to do anything for his father, not even bury him.

He found even Fast Harbor much changed. There were more summer folk about than there had been ten years before. Their cottages fringed the shore for two or three miles below East Harbor, and here and there someone came out to wave at the boat as she went by, greet- ing arriving guests who waved back again from the upper decks. At one par- ticularly vociferous wel- come from a colony of a score or so of cottages two miles below the town, the steamer responded by blow- ing three blasts on ber whistle, and bells on the cottage verandas returned the salute. Newt thought critically that it took coai to brew the steam thus wasted; that a part of the fare he had paid went to pay for that coal. But there was nothing he could do about it, and it was, after all, a matter of smail ac- count.

Then the boat whis- tled again, a long hoarse blast, to announce to the stevedores and wharf hands her arrival; and Newt thought this whistle, on a calm cool summer morning when they had been in sight from the wharf for ten minutes past, was totally unnecessary.

“All right to blow in a fog,”’ he told himself. ‘‘ Safe thing to do, then. But no sense in blowing away all that steam when they can see her without.”

Before the process of making a landing was wel! begun he went below and got his bag. Instead of leaving it in the check room, where a ten-cent fee was expected, he had bestowed it under a seat in the upper saloon, On the lower deck, waiting to disembark, he watched with a critical eye the number of other passen- gers who were redeeming checked bags and parcels. he thought scornfully.

THE SATURDAY

sometimes puckers. Thus he looked curiously like a person who has just sucked a tump of alum; as though he suffered from a faint, easily bearable but griping pain, His small eyes peered out from a nest of tiny wrinkles. This walk up the hill made him pant a little and he went more slowly, thinking that some of the passing automobiles might offer him a lift, but none did so.

“That's state of Maine for you,” he told himself harshly. “Won't even give a man o ride when they’re going his way.”

He found East Harbor changed, in some ways almost be- yond his recognition. In stores where he remembered el- derly men, young fellows now greeted his entrancg; young men who had heen boys when he went away, who had suc- ceeded to the ownership of the establishments through a long apprenticesip of work and saving. Here and there he met people he had known; but they returned his greet- ings doubtfully, and even when he had told them who he was they evinced no particular delight at seeing him. He tried to discover something about the affairs of his father, but few even knew Dunnack was dead, and those who did know seemed not particularly interested.

He was in no hurry to get out to Fraternity, There was a furtive instinct in the man which made him desire to make his entrance rather toward the end of the day, when dusk was falling, when his coming would not be so gener- ally remarked, There was no particular reason why he should be secret, but Newt had a curious liking for making a mystery of simpie things. He meant to walk in upon his mother at suppertime.

Toward mid-afternoon he began to investigate possible means of transportation. The drivers of public automo- biles in East Harbor had, he presently decided, an agree- ment among themselves as to the price they would charge for going ten miles into the country, He found an irri- tating unanimity in their answers to his inquiries, and an exasperating disinclination to bargain with him.

He exploded at last to one of them: “‘Ain’t there a driver in town that’s reasonable?”

“Maybe you can dicker with Uncle Jasper,” the other replied, And to Newt's question, he explained: ‘You'll probabiy see him in Post Office Square about this time o’day.”

Newt found in Uncle Jasper an oldster with a long tobacco-stained beard, sitting in a sagging two-seated car- riage behind a decrenit horse. Newt would have preferred to travel by automobile; but he was willing to sacrifice speed to economy, so he approached the old man. Uncle Jasper proved to be decidedly hard of hearing, so that their negotiations were carried on, by Newt in a shout, by the other in the patiently hushed tones of the deaf. Newt asked how much the other would charge to drive him to Fraternity; and the old man shook his head and said he guessed he did not want to go so far that night.

“Old hoss don’t git over the ground way he used to,” he explained apologetically. “Wouldn't git me back’ here.till way dark.”” He added as an afterthought, his tone faintly querulous: “ Will Bissell’s truck went out just:a little spell ago, You could have got you a ride with Andy Wattles.”

Newt said in exasperated undertone, “ Fine time to tell a man that!”

The old man leaned toward him and asked, “What say?”

Newt raised his voice. “I said we ought to be able to get together,” he urged. “‘You’re in the business. You haven’t any right to refuse to take a passenger. How much would you charge, anyway?”’

“T dunno as I want to go,” the other repeated. “But I ain’t had a fare today,” he added in a dispirited tone, and after a moment said tenta- tively, “Two dollars and ahalf.”

“TI don’t want to buy your outfit!’’ Newt shouted.

And Uncle Jasper asked uncertainly, “Eh?”

“Be reasonable, old man,”’ Newt urged. “Be reason- able.”

“Well, I want to be fair with a man,” the other pro- tested unhappily. ‘“ Whatever do you reckon’s right?”

“Dollar and a half,” Newt suggested. “And I'll see you get some supper before you start back. Cup of coffee, any- way.”

The old man clucked to his horse and the animal roused from its doze, ‘Won't hardly pay for my line,” he said whimsically. “But'l ain't had a fare all day,” he repeated. “You might as well get in,”

So Newt got in, stowing his bag under the rear seat, hifn- self taking “py, the driver; ‘and the ancient horse wearily plodded up the steep hill by, the post office, striking along the Fraternity road. From the top of the hill Newt saw the road unrolling across the fairly level high ground before him. Behind, the blue waters of the bay were far outspread, ending in the paler blue of the Castine shore. It

was late afternoon and the sun streamed in their faces

gloriously, while a little easterly wind from behind them came like a cooling touch across their cheeks. The dust of a passing automobile clouded around their heads, for a little kept pace with their slow progress, and then, as though im- patient, drifted ahead and left them plodding along behind.

VEN though he had thus secured transportation at a low rate, Newt was irked by the thought that with a little luck he might have begged a ride of Andy Wattles, on Bissell’s big truck. For a while he sat in silence, weighing this small mischance, feeling behind it some suggestion of an intangible malignity in nature which he at times thought

pursued him. Little things like that were forever happen-..

ing to him; inconsiderable incidents, which nevertheless cost him money or disturbed his well-laid plans. Newt was a man full of plans and projects; he had forever some fur- tive enterprise afoot; his thoughts were habitually busy with schemes and stratagems. The fact that few of them eame to fruition did not ordinarily disturb him; but he had

at times, like another man, his hours of fretting at fate..

This was one of those hours. The quiet of the late after-

noon and the silence of the ancient driver of this vehicle in |

EVENING POST

October 17,1925

As He Turned Toward the House the Mili Caught

Hise Bye Once More; and Again He Had That

Curious Impression of a Conscious and Whimsicaily

Matignant Intelligence Looking Out at Him From the Blank Windows

mood. His eyes fixed themselves upon the road in front of him and he submitted his body with slack muscles to the irregular and jolting progress of the weak-springed carriage.

Now and then something along the road caught his attention and held it for a space; and thus, some two or three miles from East Harbor, his eye

was attracted by a patch of what had been wooded land, cut off some years before, and now surrendering to the springing young birch and poplar, while pine and hemlock seedlings were appearing under the cover of these ephemeral growths. The sight of this cut-over land wakened a gleam of something like satisfaction in Newt’s eye. It brought back vividly to his memory the occasion of his leaving home. His father’s mother had owned that land. The old woman was now, he thought with satisfaction, dead a round half dozen years..But she had owned this.land, part of her small inheritance, until Newt, then just. turned twenty-one, heard in Hast Harbor one day that the Eas‘ Harbor Water Company wanted to buy it to protect a portion of the watershed.

The knowledge had:presented to Newt an opportunity which he was quick to seize. He had by small thriftinesses saved a sum of a few hundred dollars; had saved, in fact, almost every dollar that had ever come into his possession; and he went to his grandmother and said he was willing to take the land off her hands. This without the knowledge of her son, his father. Newt told her the land was of little value. The old woman had wearied of paying taxes on it, and she had a good opinion of Newt, who had taken care to cultivate her. She sold the land to him for six hundred dollars.

When Newt’s father heard of this transaction he ex- ploded into mild anger, insisting that the land was worth more, But Mrs. Dunnack, who had been ’Tilda Mudie— and the Mudies were notorious for thrift, even in a frugal countryside—said approvingly that the transaction showed that Newt was going to be a shrewd business man, and Newt’s father permitted himself to be silenced. But when later the water company sought to buy the land, and Newt asked a price of a thousand dollars, the elder Dunnack was irritated; and when at the condemnation proceedings, Newt testified that the land was worth more than a thou- sand, his father went into one of his rare hours of towering wrath. The fact that the appraisers agreed with Newt, so that the young man made a four-hundred-dollar profit on the transaction, fed this anger; and the incident resulted in an altercation between father and son, as a result of which the elder Dunnack resorted, for the better expression of his exasperation, to physicai violence. Overruling his

which he rode combined to produce in him a contemplative. wife, he banished. Newt; and Newt went away from home

not uncontentedly. He had prospered in Fraternity; he saw no reason why he should not prosper equally in more fruitful surroundings. The fact that the rupture with his father proved permanent did not disturb his peace of mind. Newt was a Mudie, he was fond of saying that he knew the value of money, while Dunnack was notoriously a Dun- nack and careless in matters financial. There had never been any sympathy between the two.

Newt heard at irregular intervals from his mother, and now and then he had a letter from his brother Sam. The fact that these letters from his mother had become ir- regular had not disturbed him; so long as the elder Dunnack lived the young man saw no profit to himself in reéntering the family circle. But now that Dunnack was dead, there was the mill, a good property; and there was the farm, worth something; and there was beyond any doubt a fair amount of money put thriftily away. So he had come home. Contempiation of these events from the past comforted Newt this evening; his mood became more expansive, and when about half the ride to Fraternity was done he roused himself from his abstraction and directed his attention to the oldster at his side. The old man, his beard wagging with the listless movement of his rumi- nating jaws, drove in silence, leaning forward in his seat, now and then clucking weakly to the strolling horse, as though he had lapsed into a hypnotic state and were un- conscious of his passing surroundings.

Newt looked at him more attentively, and said at last, remembering to raise his voice, “I been away for about ten years. Don’t seem to rec’lect you around East Harbor.”

The old man nodded. ‘I moved to the city f’om Har- mony "bout six years ago, when the old woman died. Figured I could make a little driving folks around, and I don’t need a pile.”

‘Live there alone, do you?” Newt asked.

The other shook his head. ‘Put up with my daughter,” he explained. “‘She married Tom Dower, works down to the coal wharf.”

“Looks to me you're old enough to take it easy,’”’ Newt

suggested. The other displayed an aggressive independence, straightening for a moment in his seat. “I pay board

regular,” he declared. ‘“‘Allus did say I wouldn’t be a burden to nobody.” “*T used to live out here in Fraternity,”” Newt explained. “I’m Newt Dunnack. Guess you’ve heard the name.” “Knew a man by that name, back in Harmony,” the oldster replied indifferently. ‘‘Or else it was Hummock.

He related to you?”

“Dunnack,” Newt repeated good-naturedly. ‘Not Hummock.” ;

“T don’t hear as good as I used to,”” Uncle Jasper con- fessed. “‘ Don’t know anybody of that name though.”

“*Mudie’s mill, out above the village,”” Newt explained. “My grandfather built that. Old Abel Mudie.”

“‘Never knowed him myself,” the driver confessed. “But my brother did. I’ve heard him tell how Abel Mudie was so close he grudged a cow her dry time.”

Newt chuckled. ‘Guess he was a good business man all right,” he agreed without malice. “‘He died before I was born. Yes, sir, he was the biggest man around here in his day. I take after him, my ma always said.”

“Didn’t know him myself,’”’ the old man assented; “‘ but I’ve heard tell of him.”

“Got a brother lives out here,” Newt continued. “But he’s a farmer. Won't ever get anywhere. Sam Dunnack.”

“Oh?” The other looked at him curiously. “Gh, Sam Dunnack. I didn’t get the name before. I know Sam. See him drive his apples to town last fall.”

“Where'd he get him any apples?”” Newt demanded jealously.

“He’s got an orchard, over this side the village,”” Uncle Jasper explained. “‘ Doing pretty good with it, they say.”

Newt considered this. He remembered that his father had had a young orchard, one of which he expected great things. No doubt Sam now handled that property. “Doing well with it, is he?”

“Everybody with an orchard had a good year last year,” the old man replied, and launched into an explanation. While he talked, Newt remained silent, busy with his own thoughts. He had not taken this orchard into account in his consideration of possible profits from his homecoming. If the orchard were indeed a valuable property he was glad he had returned.

‘Cider appies was a dollar ten,”’ the old man concluded. “Delivered at the cars. Yes, I guess Sam done pretty good with his orchard last fall.”

“Be a thin year this year then,’’ Newt suggested, find- ing some satisfaction in the thought. Hard times were, he knew, the wise man’s opportunity, and he was quite con- scious of his own business wisdom.

They were within two or three miles of the village and he knew the orchard would presently be visible, upon a southward cant of land to the right of the road. By and by he pointed it out and asked, ‘‘That Sam’s, ain’t it?”

“Dunno,” the old man said.

“T don’t know this country, to speak of. It might be.”

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 5

He relapsed into passive silence, hunching forward over his reins, while the cautious ald horse inched its way down the long hill; and Newt became absorbed in his own thoughts once more. The drive had been long, the sun was low, the hills ahead of them were putting on their purple garments against the night, and this deep and regal color clothed them with a fine beauty and dignity as they stood in silhouette against the splendid background of the coloring sky.

A little way beyond the orchard his eye was drawn by a farmhouse which stood by thé road. As they passed the place a girl was at the iron pump in the yard, drawing water, her body swaying gracefully as she manipulated the long iron handle, one arm reaching down to steady the bucket which depended from the spout. She looked up at their passing, and Newt, who had an eye that way, touched his hat in the embracing friendliness of country people and warmed to her answering nod. When they were past the place he asked the old man who she was; but the ancient of days professed ignorance, wagging his stained old beard.

“Told you I didn’t know the folks out this way,"’ he reminded Newt in mild impatience. ‘I don’t figure to comé this far, but business ain’t been so good.”

They crossed the bridge over the brook that flowed out of Maple Meadow, and climbed the last hill; and frorm its crest Newt saw the clustering white houses of the village, and the white church spire rising above the trees, and in silhouette against the western light the high, bare rear end of the structure which housed Will Bissell’s store. This was Fraternity, and he had come home.

As they passed through the village the usual little group of men watched them from the steps of the stere, but they seemed not to recognize Newt, and he made no sign to them. He pointed out to Uncle Jasper the turning that ied to the old Mudie place, half a mile or so beyond the village; and his eyes began to cast ahead along the dusty road for sight of the remembered scenes of his boyhood

“*Be past dark ‘fore I git back to town," the old man said complainingly; and Newt knew the other was thinking of the promised supper, so he made no reply.

UDIE’S mill is on the river, half a mile or so beyond

the village. Above it on a little rising ground, sepa-

rated from the road by the mill yard, littered with bits of (Continued on Page 138)

The Ancient Horse Wearily Plodded Up the Steep Hill by the Post Office, Striking Along the Fraternity Road

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

October 17,1925

RIDING THE CIRCLE ON HANG- ING WOMAN: —By MaryRobertsRinehart

There was oneof

my chaps the

otherday, those beloved shabby old chaps of dingy gray leather, with scallops of nail heads down the wings and a large stee! R at the lower eorner, which I wear only for pho- tographs and long horseback jour- neys. And & new ‘dude’ man at the corral asked me if I got them through a mail- order house!

When I toid him that they came from the man in Sheridan whose business it is to make them, he seemed extremely surprised. But it came to me then, almost as a blow, that a good many poopie believe that the cowboy now exists only in fic- tion and the ro-

| WAS wearing

those horrified si- lences, then people ran. But he lay still for a long time, and when they finally carried him off we knew that he had a badly broken leg, and would never ride a bucking horse again. He was conscious, when they put him in acar to take him to Sheridan, and he waved an in- domitable good-by as he left. But whenever I get a letter from some- body protesting against the cruelty to the horse in this riding, I think about Bruce. And about Jack, too, only that is much, much worse.

And I wonder if these people know anything about these outlaw horses who will not be

Pnoro®

deos; that the mail-order cow- boy, a term jocu- lar!y originated by the cowboy himself to refer to the dan- dies of his profession, has been taken seriously by the East; that it is convinced that all the old cow country now raises is either wheat or dudes, that the beef animals of the coun- try are collected for the packing houses by ones and twos from the milk herds of smal! farmers, and that the former cattle ranges are ali now cut up into suburban lots, neatly fenced in and smelling strongly of cabbages after a rain.

The Same Old Cowboy Life

UT, aa it happens, the cowboy is still with us. Discour-

aged he may be, but not extinct. Still on circle he wakens to the call of “ Roll out” at 3:30, sits up in his tarp bed, puts on his hat and is dressed; still as nighthawk he drives the bed wagon all day and atands guard all night over the “cavvy”; stilias night guard he circles the beef herds through the hours of darkness, singing to the cat- tle to guiet them; and still he drives his nervous anuffy animals incredible miles to therailroad and points them to the pens only to have, as of yore, the switch engine eome along, whistie, and stampede them wildly to the four corners of the earth,

True, his herds are emailer today. The old days of bunches of 25,000 cattle and upward are prac- tically over. But save in this one particular, his life and his methods are un- changed. On the range he makes and implicitly obeys his own laws; his appar- ently loose and haphazard organization on the round- up is actually compact and fitted together like the pieces of a scroll-saw puz- sle; from the folding of the blankets in his round-up bed to the place for the

oe GHT BY CHARLES J. BELOEN, PITONFORK, WYOMING

The Ways of the Weet are Still the Same.

nighthawk’s saddle, he follows certain arbitrary rules based on experience and custom, and thus eliminates fric- tion. He is, as always, his own doctor, surgeon, blacksmith, cook, carpenter, hunter, wrangler, packer, herder and me- chanic. He works in season eighteen hours a day and often twenty. And he has about as much time to think how pic- turesque he is as a one-armed man with the hives.

About two weeks ago, Domo’s nephews rode over from Birney to ask me to go with them “on circle.” It was during some riding, and just about that time Bruce’s horse came out of the bucking chute with a roar, ‘‘ broke in two” as they say out here, leaped, whirled, reared and finally fell. When he got up again there was Bruce stretched out on the ground and not moving.

Where the Whiteface Reigns Supreme. Driving Hereford Beef Cattie Inte the High Mountains

Par From the Ener

of ch

On the Few Remaining Big Ranches of the More Remote Range Country the Methods of Handling Cattie are Much the Same as They Were Twenty Years Ago

broken, and re- main poteatial killers to the end. And I wonder, too, if they think this sort of riding is all show stuff. If they do, let them ride the circle with me; let them see wicked old Alizan standing quiet, apparently watching the cattle, and then watch him, as I did, suddenly and without warning rear up straight in the air and fall over backward! How Irving escaped that attempt at mur- der, I donot know; for an attempt at murder it clearly was.

Bluebeard’s Return to the Wild

ND let them watch Burton and his buckskin; warily approaching it, finally a foot in the stirrup and easing himself into the saddle, and then, as regularly as he is mounted, use every trick in its little buckskin brain; bucking, rearing, stamping, squealing and bolting. It takes about ten acres of ground for Burton to mount that buckskin, and he can have it for all of me. It bucked into a mud- hole once and I hoped it would stick there and die, but it only threw up its head and knocked one of Bur- ton’s nice front teeth back against the roof of hismouth and came out unharmed. Let them, to come right back home, watch my own Bluebeard the day they put a packsaddle on him. I was standing by when I saw this child of my heart rush out of the corral, kick, buck, roar and finally bolt to parts unknown. The thought that some fine day he might mistake me for a packsaddle was too much for me, and I am now rid- ing a tall bay named Prince. Aside from the fact that I should have a stepladder to mount him, he seems safe enough. But who can tell? Some day a wasp may sting him, or something may touch his right ear—he is mighty peculiar about his right ear—and then “one

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

toot and I’ll be oot”’ as the sexton said in church to the old lady with the ear trumpet.

But, as I was saying, the Bones boys had asked me to ride the circle with them.

Not that their name is Bones at all. They have a perfectly good Southern name, but they began work- ing with cattle outfits when they were so small that they had to chin themselves onto their horses, and some wag christened them Big and Little Bones. So the Bones brothers they remain today, and their ranch over on Hanging Woman Creek is the Bones Brothers’ Ranch.

It is four years now since they first came over here from Hanging Woman. The cattle business was at its worst then, and so one eve- ning they saddled up and started forthisranch. They rode eighty-five miles that

the way. So for fear the horse would slip and throw him and get away, Dad tied a rope to the horn of his saddle and then around his waist. He was taking no chances that night.

Yes, it is better now. There are doctors at Sheri- dan, only sixty-five miles away, and a fair-to-middling road, and the mail comes three times a week by stage to Birney, three miles from the ranch. Only don't be fooled by Birney; it has three or four houses, a store, a school and a church, but there is nobody to serve the church; its wheezy little old parlor organ has iong been silent, its pulpit empty. The straggling street is just a dusty road, down which herds of cattle come to drink long thirsty draughts in the Tongue River.

s The Birney Store

night, each leading an extra horse, and the next morning they arrived at the corral.

A junior Rinehart was on duty there, his first day as corral dog at a salary of thirty-five dollars a month, a horse and saddle and his keep, and he rose from his bench and greeted them with his best Harvard manner.

“* May I take your horses?” he said politely.

Only Sixty. Five Miles From the Rails

OTHING of the sort, they say, had ever happened to them before. In a sort of daze they got down—they were perhaps eighteen and twenty then—but they recov- ered enough to state that they could unsaddle their own animals and that they had come to work. And work they did and ride too, until, a

PHOTO. COPYRIGHT BY CHARLES J. BELOEN, PITCHFORK, WYOMING

Tails to the Storm. Bringing Cattle in to Feed During a Bad Blizzard on the Range

and where the winter temperature sometimes falls to fifty below zero. Back, in a word, to the old life and the old game, only now with a handful of dudes in the summer to tide over slim years, and with the railroad only sixty-five miles away at Sheridan, instead of its former hundred to Miles City.

Yes, the nearest town used to be Miles City. And when Domo’s husband was kicked by a horse and fatally hurt, Dad-—the boys’ father—rode that hundred miles in one night to Miles City for a doctor. And got one, too, al- though it was no use after all. The road was “slick” that night, as they say out here, and there wasn’t a house along

OU see, Birney is reaily the store, kept by the boys’ Aunt Mamie and Uncle Taylor. It has everything, has that store, even to an ancient and unused soda fountain at the rear. Usually there is an Indian pony hitched outside and a buck inside with long braids, buying. They can have credit, too, if they are good Indians, up to ten dollers, But:

“If they get to owing more than that,’’ says Uncle Taylor, “they go somewhere else.”’

But where they are to go in this empty country is beyond my comprehension.

The store is a sort of social center in Birney. On mai! days in summer, Aunt Mamie makes a big freezer of ice cream, and all sorts of people with soft Southern voices drop in and sit about and

year or so ago, with the hope that cattle would come into their own again, they went back to Hanging Woman Creek, to Percy and Daisy Bell, his little Southern wife, to Uncle Taylor and Aunt Mamie, and to the herd of cattle in the foothills under Peker Jim Butte.

Back to Southern Montana, where the open range is still the cow range, where some of the long-horned survivors of the old Texas and Mexican herds still roam the hills, where the Indians still slip out from the reservation at night and raid the cattle,

PHOTOS. COPYRIGHT BY CHARLES J. BELDEN, PITCHFORK, WYOMING

chat. Odd, how many Southerners one finds in this part of the world. Aunt Mamie and Uncle Taylor came out thirty-eight years ago, bringing with them the old silver which had been buried in a pond all through the Civil War and was to be buried over and over again against Indian raids. And the great early herds driven up from Texas and New Mexico brought with them Southern cowboys who have lost nothing in the trans- planting. Direct children of the South, hot- tempered, soft-spoken and gallant, they still use the Texas drawl or the comprehensive (Continued on Page 66)

Ready for the Day's Work. An Early Morning Round:Up on the Rolling Ranges of the West During Calf: Branding Time.

Above —Mrs. Rinehart Wearing the Chaps Which Did Not Come From a Mail-Order House

8 THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

GOLIATH

ILLUSTRATE DO

October 17,1925

By F. BRITTEN AUSTIN

ANTOWN oTTo FISCHER

HE electric desk lamp tarew into

relief the virile in- tellectual model- ing of the admiral’s head as he bent over the outepread chart, his gray eye brows contracted into an accentua- tion of their tufted bushinesa, his thin lips compressed into a line. He straightened him- self, glanced at his chief of staff, who sat tapping a pen- cil point on a block of signal forma, spoke in a tone of grim unemotional satisfaction:

“ We're going to make it very neatly, I think.”

‘Just ebout dawn, sir.” The chief of staff's blue eyes smiled at him. “And we'll have him nicely silhou- etted against the eastern horizon. A very pretty bit of work.”

The admiral turned to take from his flag com- mander a signal that had just come by pneumatic tube from the decoding roora. It was an- othet of the long succession of wire- leas messages re- ceived every few minutes from an- other fleet a hun- dred and fifty miles away—a

leet of battie cruisers, cruisers and destroyers that had, just at thickening dusk, lifted the entire enemy battie fleet above the horizon. It had turned and fied for its life in the interchange of the first salvos, waa racing now towards them in a spasmodic illumination of weving searchlight beams and spitting gunfire ag it beat off incessant torpedo attacks. And the enemy fitet ‘was racing after thern, likewise blazing into sheaves and corus- cations of fierce light as it also was harried by black. de- stroyera foaming up out of the night in rear-guard action.

Here in this quiet chart room where the half dozen officers of the admiral’s staff sat or stood in deferential silence, and the only sound was the whir of an electric fam and the occasional slash of a heavier sea than usual against the ship. vibrating with the energy of her forced drive through the night, that distant drama transiated it- self into clusters of tiny flags grouped upon the outspread chart. For three hours a tense excitement, professionally restrained to & minimum of word and gesture, had gripped every one of those officers. There had been intricate com- putations of speeds and courses and ocean currents, a suc- ceagion of curtly definite orders sent to be ciphered into the eryptic symbols of the war code and transmitted by short- range wireless. Those orders were now completed, and those who had collabcrated in them glanced at one another with an anticipatory thrill of magnificent event.

They had reason to believe that the presence in these seas of their squadron of four immensely powerful, battle- ships, together with its attendant aircraft carrier, scouting light cruisers and destroyers, was utterly unsuspected by the enemy. Their réle was one of strategic surprise, pre- pared with the extreme of skill and secrecy. Their long- range wireless was silent, answering not at all the incessant communications from the battle-cruiser fleet, retiring on a prearranged courses. Even the short-distance wireless be- tween their own units had been employed with the utmost brevity, would not again be used. And presently—less than tiree hours ahead of them—just as the eastern sky

Like a Great Plight ef Sea Birds, They Grew Larger, R

The chief of staff glanced up at the admiral.

“Yes, it is cer- tainly odd, don’t you think, sir?” he supplemented. ‘‘Aircraft were supposed to be his long suit. His car- riers must be somewhere — the whole five of them.”

The admiral as- sured himself of the even burning of his cigar and shrugged his shoulders disdain- fully as he sat down on the edge of the desk. His intellectual effort at an end, he was not disinclined for the condescension of light conversa- tion.

“They don’t worry me,’’ he said. “If his car- riers are not with him, they won’t dare to come out after we've dis- posed of his bat- tleships. And if they are with him, the whole five of them won't pre- vent my sending his battleships to the bottom. I don’t say a battle- ship at anchor can’t be sunk by abomb attack, but it’s altogether a different matter to bomb success- fully a squadron

led Th ‘

detached itself in its first low irradiation from the heaving black sea, the enemy ships following the battle cruisers would appear like dark dots upon its horizon band of chrysolite green while they themselves, coming up. from the southwestward, would ‘still be hidden. in:the murk ‘of night. ‘They would effect. not merely a strategical, but ‘also a tactical surprise. The enemy, h sly: to their combined strength, would be an

indorsed the chief's succinct summary of the situation, looked with almost affectionate admiration at the man who had achieved it.

The admiral cogitated for a moment over the message in his hand, then passed it without comment to his chief of staff. The information it contained was already dis- counted. Every conceivable eventuality had been pro- vided for; they could proceed according to schedule. The admiral lit himself a cigar in the satisfaction of it, smiled sardonically at his chief of staff over the first long puffs of blue-gray smoke.

“We oughtn’t to hear any more about played-out battle- ships after this,” he said. ‘This’ll silence the cranks once for all. - Couldn’t have been better arranged. All our bat- tle cruisers can do is to run away from an enemy force that includes two battleships. We come up with four battle- ships and blot 'em off the map, and by this time tomorrow every enemy ship that isn’t at the bottom will be skedad- dling for their nearest fortified port. It’s as neat as a staff demonstration.”

“Quite, sir,” agreed the pleasant-faced chief of staff, with the proper appreciation of the wisdom of one’s hier- archical superior. “There’s nothing can beat the battle- ship—except, as you say, a superior ferce of battleships.”

“T can’t help wondering what’s happened to the enemy’s aircraft, sir,” put in the flag commander deferentially. “From what the battle cruisers say, it looks decidedly as if his carriers weren't with him.”

ae in @ Succession of Squadrons, One Behind the Other

Aly eee ‘ways turn bit of work—the admiral’s staff unanimously.but silently .

of battleships ma- neuvering at high speed in action, particularly when they have such a powerful anti-aircraft armament as ours. I hope they try it. It’d be another lit- tle object lesson to the newspaper know-alls. After we have sunk their battleships and battle cruisers, we sink their carriérs-—and the poor birds won’t have a nest to fly to.” He smiled with grim. pleasantness. ‘That's about the size of‘it, isn’t it? These cheap-and-easy methods al- tt cheap and nasty for the people who try ’em, and if they'll only give us a chance we'll make the people at home realize it.”

Another message cylinder fell with a plop into the wire cage under the pneumatic tube. The flag commander re- trieved it, took out the message form, glanced at it, handed it to the admiral.

“More intercepted enemy wireless, sir,’’ he remarked. “Can’t make head or tail of it. Pity we haven’t got their code.”

The admiral tossed that undecipherable message on his desk, shrugged his shoulders.

“Tt couldn’t tell us anything that matters,” he said. “We've got him whatever he does.” He stood up from the desk. “I’m going to turn in for a short spell. What’s the time?”

“Nought-twenty, sir,’ “Sunrise is 3:47.”

“Call me at 2:30. Wireless silence till further orders.”

The admiral went to the door of the chart room. As he opened it to the black night outside, the lights within were automatically extinguished. They jumped into brilliance again as the door closed behind him.

The chief of staff rose also,‘turned with his pleasant smile to the flag commander. 4

“‘Let’s get a breath of fresh: air while things are quiet. It’s like a Turkish bath in hefe.”’

The two officers went to the door, plunged the ch .rt room once more into a sudden blot-out of all illumination, emerged into a blast of damp warm wind that smote them

replied the flag commander.

THE

from a darkness which seemed physically dense in its com- plete opacity. They stood for a moment bracing them- selves instinctively to the wallowing lift and fall of the ship, orienting themselves to near obstructions of solid stee] known to be there only from long experience, groped forward past just-escaped collision with a shadowy figure standing immobile by a searchlight whose inward-burning intensity of brilliance was completely occluded. Only as they reached the rail of the signal platform whereon they stood did their eyes obtain relief from this baffling sight- lessness.

Down below them, and three hundred feet ahead, the bows of the ship became faintly visible in recurrent smoth- ers of dimly white foam that was bluishly phosphorescent as it rushed along the deck, lifting sharply in the interval before it dipped to another crash and temporary sub- mergence. Against that glimmering turmoil of briefly trapped cascading water, the four great sixteen-inch guns, protruding their immense tubes in pairs from the forward A and B turrets, one behind and above the other, were every now and then just discernibly silhouetted, and in the surrounding blackness the incessant flickering leap of white-frothing waves rebuffed in tumult from the ship’s flanks hinted at the massive widening of her bulk.

Above and behind them, the immense pyramidal mast structure towered invisibly into a sky devoid of stars. The ship seemed inclosed within velvet-black curtains, alone upon the ocean. But the unshuttering of a lamp trained to the specific quarter from that signal bridge would instantly have elicited, precisely where expected, an answering spark from the three consort battleships away to port, or, more distant, from the advance screen of light cruisers and destroyers similarly threshing in showers of spray through the rayless night.

The two officers stared into that obscurity without the interchange of a word. Fresh from that eager-brained plotting of battle, this quiet normality of nocturnal prog- ress was queerly incongruous to them, evoked an inde- finable feeling of awe. Save for the thud and slash of the sea, the quick whipping of a signal halyard, the eerie harp- like note of steel stays thrumming in the wind, the silence was absolute. Yet unconcerned though they of the ad-

miral’s staff were with the internal working of this individ- ual ship, they knew well enough that action stations had

long ago been sounded. One clash on the gongs and in an instant the ship would be vomiting flame and thunder. The contrast of that concealed colossal potentiality of ear- splitting, luridly flaring violence with this dark silence was strangely impressive to the imagination. The flag com- mander found himself caught by an involuntary visualiza- tion of it, spoke to break the spell. He prided himself on being utterly unromantic.

“It'll be hard luck if we miss ’em, sir,’’ he said.

“We shan’t miss em. Listen!’’ :

From far, far away came a muttering as of distant thun- der. Both men strained their eyes into the blank darkness to the northward. Not a flicker was visible. But the sound was unmistakable. The battle-cruiser fleet was still in action; therefore, the enemy fleet was still following it, ignorantly pressing forward on that prearranged course which would lead him to destruction. Probably the enemy admiral, cautious before the haphazards of a night action, was not trying to do more than maintain contact, confident of annihilating his weaker adversary at the dawn. In the meantime, both sides were utilizing the darkness for re- ciprocal torpedo attacks that might luckily eliminate some of the bigger ships before the final trial of strength. The wireless messages from the battle cruisers had stated the fact with curt explicitness. That distant muttering con- tinued, broadened into a spasmodic tiny roll on a louder wave of sound.

“‘In less than half an hour we ought to see their flashes clearly,” remarked the chief of staff.

There was again a silence between them as both men listened. The flag commander broke it, under the im- pulse of a suddenly oceurring idea.

“I wonder if that enemy wireless was making a ren- dezvous with his aircraft carriers for the morning, sir. He'd naturally concentrate everything he’s got for a knock-out blow at the battle ertisers. If for any reason he’d sent them into his southern base and ordered ’em out again at dusk last night, they’d just about cut across us from the northwestward at dawn.”

“Quite likely,”’ agreed the chief of staff. ‘I hope they do. We'll settle the whole thing in one go. The admiral’s absolutely right. A modern well-protected battleship is a Goliath that has nothing to fear from any puny little Davids, whether they fly or dive —-—”

SATURDAY EVENING POST 9

“ Look, sir!"’ interrupted-the flag commander. “ Wasn't that a flash? Yes, there’s another!”

Far, far away, low down at the indistinguishabie junc- tion of black sky and equally black sea, there was a faint brief flicker.

At that moment, in a chart room totally distinct from that sacred to the admiral and his staff, the captain com- manding the ship terminated a technical conference with his chief subordinates, the engineer captain, the com- mander, who was the executive officer of the ship, the navigating officer, the gunnery officer, the torpedo officer, and that officer responsible for all means of communication who was succinctly known as Flags. Between them, they represented every function of this mighty organism of stee! that was rushing through the night, an organism, the arti- ficial product of unnumbered and unknown scientists and craftsmen, that had acquired an immense Frankenstein- like personality of its own, but a personality they served with an almost mystically sublimated affection, sinking, with an ardent-loyalty, their separate individualities in her transcendently greater being.

Divorced here from all remote domesticities, the ship was the one all-dominating regent of their lives, a super- human entity to whom they were enthusiastically dedicated, body and soul. Grouped in that chart room, those sub- ordinate officers, diversely characterized of visage from the gray-headed, taciturn engineer captain to the ingenuously boyish-looking gunnery officer, were alike in their deeply exultant identification with her. They were alike proud in her pride of colossal latent might, potent to annihilate even beyond the horizon, of magnificent immunity from the perils deadly to lesser craft, all but invulnerable as she was in her external armor of ponderously thick steel, her intri- cate subdivision within. Even the quiet-faced, efficient-~ eyed captain, for whose single volition to direct all her infinite complexity of mechanism was brought to a focus point, betrayed a note of pride in his voice as he spoke his final word.

“That'll do then, gentlemen. You understand your or- ders. And I know nothing can beat the ship in fair fight.”

The group of officers saluted, turned to disperse, emerged from the chart house in a sudden blackness of the interior

(Continued on Page 151)

Suddenty, Without Warning, Independent of Their Volition, There Was a Stunning Crash, a Violent Shock, The Gune Had Fired

SATURDAY EVENING POST October 17, 1925

By Kenneth L.Roberts

DIcKErY

THE

MY STUPID DOGS

ILLUSTRATED ROBERT L.

my dogs have been subject to it. As far as I know, none of them ever succeeded in catching a squirrel orachipmunk; but whenever one of these creatures chippered or chattered or whistled, or otherwise expressed himself within hearing distance of my dogs, they would invariably hasten to the spot where they imagined the chippering or chattering or whistling had originated, and snuffle around hopefully for an hour or two atatime. They would do this day after day and month after month and year after year, without seeming to realize that their chances of capturing the objects of their chase were considerably slimmer than those of a gorilla to become the governor of Tennessee.

The Chipmunk Chasers

NE of my dogs developed such eagerness to

get out and hunt noncatchable chipmunks that he would break windows and leap through copper screening whenever he heard one give tongue.

For a long time I thought that this peculiar trait indicated that my dogs were weak in the head; but eventually I discovered that a friend of mine owned an unusually intelligent dog named Ranger who was able to get boxes of cigarettes that his master had left on the seat of his automobile, and make him- self generally as useful as many of the present-day servants who coarsely demand—and receive— twelve and fifteen dollars a week, and that the dog Ranger, when not engaged in running errands for his master, would press his nose ardently against a pile of lumber or a bit of wainscoting behind which he suspected a mouse of lurking, and stubbornly remain there for hours at a time.

My friend assured me that no mouse had ever emerged from behind the lumber or the wainscoting during the vigils of the dog Ranger, and that Ranger, so far as he knew, had never been given cause to think that a mouse

_.would ever emerge; but that his chief joy in life appeared to lie in this umrewarded and apparently hopeless en- deavor.

It then occurred to me that a great many men who are seemingly intelligent and useful members of society are

With a Few Deft Strokes of His Right Hind Leg, Stosh a Little Brandy Into the Traveler's Mouth

And before I forget it, I would like to remark that the days are about over when Rover can break into print by seizing Genevieve by her long golden tresses or by a con- veniently loose bit of her bathing suit and dragging her ashore. Confront Rover with a drowning lady wearing bobbed hair and a one-piece bathing suit, and the chances are ten to one that the problem would give him hydropho- bia. But it would probably have bothered even such men-

Kolar

HE dogs of literature, starting with those mentioned Ts the cuneiform tablets of ancient Egypt and pro- greasing to the sophisticated canines of McGuffey’s Fifth Reader and even more pretentious modern publica-

tions, have apparently possessed intellecta that made them seem like a blend of Marcus Aurelius, Sherlock Holmes and the old cclored family retainer that steadfastly refused to leave Miss Jinny and Marse Tom after Marse Tom had lost his shirt, to say nothing of Miss Jinny's step-ins, bet- ting on hoss races

For quick and accurate thinking, ability to be in the right place at the right time, and general industry and savoir-feire, these dogs are infinitely superior to the aver- age prominent European or American politician. There are the dogs of the monks of St. Bernard, for example. They were wont, as is widely known, to go out on stormy nights with little kegs of brandy attached to their collars and hunt for unfortunate travelers who had bogged down in the snow.

If a traveler, when discovered, was too chilled to go for- war under his own steam, the dogs of the monks of St. Bernard would pant heavily and warmly against his face, chest and limbs until he was able to sit up and apply his lips to the bunghole of the brandy keg.

If he was so far gone that he could not respond to this canine heating aystem, then every good and intelligent St. Bernard dog could be relied on—unless the tales of their prowess have been misinterpreted and misunderstood—to scratch out the bung of the brandy keg with a few deft strokes of hie right hind leg, slosh a little brandy into the traveler’s mouth, and reslosh at intervals until a faint flutter of the traveler's eyelids or a violent hiccup showed the astute animal that his patient would soon be able to attend to his own drinking.

The Dogs of Literature

ITERATURE is full of Rovers, Neros, Tigers and Snaps that have accomplished the romantic and the impos- sible; that have saved little golden-haired Genevieve from drowning by dragging her ashore by her luxuriant back hair; that have sprung at the throat of the vile miscreant who was planning to rob the beloved master of his moss- agate cuff links; that have carried information concerning injured friends or passers-by by loud whimperings or by casting backward locks; that have bounded off to their mistresses with messages tied to their collars, stating that Jim is lying up on the mountain with a bullet through his suspenders; that have been carried 2600 miles by train and automobile, and then found their way home through a heavy fog in seventy-two hours; that have awakened all the occupants of a burning building and at the same time called the fire department by barking like a fire alarm.

tal giants as Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander the Great if they had been equipped with four paws, instead of with two hands and two feet; so that Rover's inability to meet the situation should not count against him.

At any rate, the dogs of literature never fall down in a pinch. When Jeremy Daingerfield, the handsome young attorney, lies wounded by a moonshiner on Little Big- Nose Creek, his faithful collie Gyp is not perplexed by the situation. He doesn’t sit stupidly in front of him and look at him anxiously, with his head cocked first on one side and then on the other side, while Jeremy clearly enunciates, “‘Go down to the drug store and get me a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia.”” Immediately on receipt of Jeremy’s in- structions, the faithful collie emits an intelligent bark, sets off at once for the drug store and comes back either with the ammonia or with the druggist.

That is one of the things that make me so discon- tented with my dogs. I am passionately addicted to dogs, and have had several! of them during the past quar- ter century; but I am,mor- ally certain that if I had fallen down and broken a leg while far from the haunts of men, and had urged any one of my dogs, in clear urgent tones, to go home and bring help, he would either have stared at me with a highly intelligent look and done nothing at all, or dashed madly from tree to tree in the belief that I wished him to locate a red squirrel or a chipmunk and frighten it into hysterics.

This business of ceaselessly chasing defenseless little an- imals like squirrels, mice and chipmunks is apparently a vice that never enmeshes the superintelligent dogs of liter- ature in its toils; but all of

addicted to spending hour after hour and day after day and week ufter week on the golf links in a vain attempt to lower their golf scores from 95 to 85. None of them has

At That Moment Twenty-Eight Other Dogs Popped Out From

ever done it, and most of them will never do it; but still they continue, figuratively speaking, to chase chipmunks and keep their noses pressed against the lumber pile.

The fact that man does certain things, however, is no sign that dogs should be encouraged to do the same things. A dog, for example, that lapped up three or four drinks of homemade gin and then in- dulged in a lot of loud and important—but slightly addled—conversation dealing with his ability to get the better of all the dogs of his acquaintance, would probably be shot with tremendous enthusiasm by his infuriated master. For that reason I shall never feel ashamed of my hopeless effort te break 90; but I shall always resent the stupidity of my dogs in not remaining quietly by the fire when they hear a chipmunk burst into song, instead of attempting to tear down the side of the house and make a mag- nificent but wholly unproductive gesture of pursuit for the ten thousandth time.

Barking in Several Languages

T HAS been my observation that the dogs of literature succeed in acquiring a complete knowledge of the spoken word at a comparatively tender age. Some of them are even abie to master two or three languages in a short time.

A distinguished American novelist, for example, once wrote a book about an intelligent Irish terrier that became highly proficient in the English language, and then picked up such a commodious smattering of South Sea Island talk that he was able to communicate his ideas to a blind South

THE SATURDAY -EVENING

Behind Houses and Trees and Hedges and Simultaneously Fell on Him

Sea Island chief by an intri- cate combination of snuf- fles, grumbles and growls.

My dogs, I regret to say, have never be- come expert in their own or any other lan- guage, and I have always been able to speak with perfect freedom in their presence, except on a very few subjects. One of my dogs—the one that displayed such zeal in the pursuit of chipmunks—was a candy ad- dict; and the word “candy” could not be pronounced in his presence without causing him to display a distressing activity in his search for the confections which he—usu- ally erroneously—thought were concealed somewhere in the vicinity.

Another dog—the present recipient of my favors—has a thorough knowledge of the meaning of the words “something to eat,”” and shows his recognition of them by

laying his ears well back and racing feverishly around the room in such a way as to disarrange every rug in a highly annoying manner.

His understanding of the words “lie down,” “sit up,” “get into the automobile,” “go home” and a few other phrases, however, can never be depended on. Sometimes he understands them and behaves accordingly; but at other times one can see that though he has heard them and recognizes them as words, he cannot for the life of him locate their meaning.

There are, of course, methods of jogging the memory of my dog. If, for example, he is pon- dering deeply and heavily over the meaning of

the words “lie down,” and is looking wistfully and sheepishly at me as though to say, “You know, there’s something familiar about those words, and I suppose I ought to know what they mean, but I just can’t remem- ber,” I find that his memory is jolted into sudden activity if I make a slight motion as though a brisk slap were about to be administered to his short ribs. At the very beginning of the gesture his mind clears as if by magic, and he hastily lies down.

He is not one of the dogs, however, that understand every word you say and can do every- thing but talk. A great many of my friends and ac- quaintances. claim to have dogs that understand every word yousay. One

a dissolute-looking terrier of Scotch- Levantine or Scotch-Eskimo or Scotch-African an- cestry. This dog is said to be unusu- ally intelligent, and conversations of a strictly private na- ture have to be spelled out in his presence. Yet I have noticed that when his owner is absent

of my friends has —

Instantly the Air is Shattered by a Wild Scream of Anguith

this peculiar-looking terrier is greatly given to protracted spells of barking; and during the spells the neighbors walk right up to the porch on which he is tied and look directly into his wild-looking, unkempt face, and venom- ously hiss or ejaculate, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Although his owner continues to claim that this dog understands every word that you say, he never seems able to understand the words “shut up!”’ The neighbors can— and frequently do—shut off his bark by throwing a pailful of water on him, but they cannot quiet him in the least by the most violent admonitions to shut up.

A Prodigy at Three Months

ONSEQUENTLY I have become somewhat skeptical

concerning the mental powers of the many dogs that theoretically understand every word you say; but I am siso free to admit that by comparison with the master minds of dogdom with which the pages of the world’s best litera- ture are plentifully speckled, all my dogs, including the present incumbent, have been almost as slow on the up- take as those prominent American society leaders who thrill Palm Beach social circles each winter by throwing large and expensive dinners for the small, adenoidish dogs that prevail in the more rarefied portions of American society.

This has been a source of great- disappointment te me, especially in the case of the present incumbent, who is a wire-haired fox terrier with a set of beautiful whiskers faintly reminiscent of those that adorn the face of a recent and very distinguished Secretary of State.

My first meeting with this dog, which took place in the city of Munich, led me to believe that he would probably be at least as intelligent as the dogs that achieve distinc- tion by acting as walking barkeepers for foolish travelers in the Swiss Alps. He had reached the advanced age of three months at the time of our meeting, and was lying on a small, round stomach, with his whiskers bristling ferociously, barking furiously and recklessly at a moth. His then mistress, disturbed by his barking, came out on a balcony, looked at him sternly, and hurled the single German expletive “Pfui!” in his general direction. The dog immediately ceased his barking, rolled over on his back and fell asleep. Fascinated at the thought that a three- months-old dog had been able to absorb the inner meaning of the mystic German word “ Pfui!’ I at once negotiated for. him with ‘his master.

His master explained that he didn’t wish to sell hirn, as he had a fine head and particularly fine ears and fine spots all over him and beautiful whiskers—in short, a wunder- schin, or wonder-beautiful, dog—and that he wished to retain him for breeding purposes. If, however, he could get a very large price for him, his determination might collapse.

It further developed that his grandfather had been a French messenger dog that had been stunned by shell fire and picked up by a top sergeant in a Bavarian regiment early in the war. The Bavarian sergeant named the dog J'ai Trouvé, sent him back to Munich and had won more than eighty first prizes with him when I was introduced to his grandson.

(Continued on Page 101)

THE

Goodness G

In That Lovely Hush, She Said in a Loud Definite Voice,

T WOULD never in the world

[ie happened if Brother and I had even dreamed that New

England could turn out like that. Like Agnes, [ mean, But with all this conversation about lovely faded gentlewomen and Puri- taniam and elm trees and repressed desires and Browning aovieties and the refining influence of beautiful old ma- hogany and Sandwich glass, how in the world could we?

If it hadn't been for Great-Uncle William's legacy we would have gone on forever expecting gentleness and a low voice and a retiring disposition if we had wanted to, al- though we didn’t without it, or wouldn't have. I mean we didn't think of it even then until we heard that she shared a third of the same estate. Then Brother had one of his wonderful flashes of creative imagination. I mean it came to him, just like that. Ultramoderns as we are, we had al- ready decided that the time had come for us to sell the New York shop and plan to marry money, for the sake of each of our careers. We could get along without any money, but some money wasn’t enough. With this we could almost manage a season in Florida.

And Brother's thought was that Cousin Agnes was ex- actly what we wanted for background. Besides, she could pay a third of the expenses. We both felt that background was so important. I mean we are both so subtle and so sensitive to our environment, our creative temperaments are so finely atrung that the least thing affects us. Of course neither of us could dream of running the establish- ment or directing servants or any sort of drudgery. It would be a simply wonderful privilege for Cousin Agnes to do that. It would take her away from that depressing teaching and give her the joy of helping our careers as well as the stimulus of the contact with Brother, It would simply make her life over. And if she had been what we felt we had every right to expect she was, it would have. That is the terribly unsettling thing about it. Because now it seems to me that as far as I am concerned, I mean

PERV S TRA TE O

SATURDAY EVENING

By Marjory Stoneman Douglas

GEaR,R GE

as far as I can think clearly about it yet, considering the confusing things that have happened to me and the ex- traordinary person Cousin Agnes turned out to be—well, what I mean to say is, it seems to be just the other way around.

But, of course, I never dreamed of that then. When her letter came, with its neat handwriting, accepting our invi- tation, everything seemed quite as it should be. We were too busy disposing of the shop to think about Agnes. In one way it was a sacrifice to give it up. It was so adorable, with its three stone steps leading down to the vermilion door and the low orange ceiling and the bright blue and canary and scarlet of the painted brass boxes and the cigarette holders and the Jugo-Slav posters, with the Bur- mese brasses gleaming in the shadows and the fire in our studio behind with a wisp of incense going and some won- derful modernist poet or musician helping me make tea

Of course, as Brother always insists, being ultramodern people, we are absolutely adaptable. We can keep a shop in Greenwich Village and express ourselves in painted lamp shades and tissue-paper dancing dolls with charm and distinction, if we have to, or we can be the most complete aristocrats. Really, I think aristocracy is like that. I mean, Brother feels we have the right to demand the best of everything if we can get it. That is why, when we re- ceived our legacy money, he saw at once that it was our op- portunity. The feeling we had about it was that it was positively our duty to give to wealth the advantage of our exquisite taste and sense of aristocracy. As Brother said, for us to marry and form some simple uncultivated rich people to the tone and smartness of our sophistication, while allowing them to help with our careers, would be a great benefit to soeiety.

POST

October 17,1925

racious, Agnes

©.

“‘“:

fe &

“Can Anybody Here Mitk a Cow?"

Because really, Brother is marvel- ously sophisticated, and, of course, so am I. I think sophistication is simply wonderful. Brother is ab- solutely never shocked at anything, and at the same time he is terribly fastidious. Women rave about his pale skin and his silky Van Dyke beard and his grace and his pale hands and his eyes, the color of milky jade. They rave about the way he has sacrificed himself for his art. I mean, he is really a sculptor, but he insists that he will not degrade his art by working in anything but marble, and, of course, we have never been able to afford marble yet. But everyone says his tissue-paper dancing dolls are too amusing.

Brother always reminds people of Lorenzo de Medici, an aristocrat to his finger tips. You could just see him being fabulously wealthy in some Florentine rose garden, and patronizing scholars and artists, and collecting bronzes and being cold to beautiful women. Brother always insists that if he has the soul of a de Medici, I am like one of those intellectual Renaissance girls, esthetic and wistful and aloof, and very, very stimulating. I mean, I’m slight and the color of warm ivory, and several painters have told me that my mouth is redly, innocently sensuous, and my eyes are a blue green with long black lashes and, of course, I’m intensely high-strung. Everyone says I’m awfully psychic. I feel things so terribly.

I have a wonderful feeling for design and I have done a number of sonnets without the ordinary sonnet restric- tions, which the editor of the Literary Era would like to print if his readers were advanced enough, and I have a marvelous feeling for interior decoration. Sometimes just doing a lamp shade I am gripped with the most tremendous sensations. My genius is really the sort of thing which wealth could best bring out. Well, anyway, that is all why we felt we must take the step we did.

The very first moment I saw Agnes I had a feeling. I am like that. I can always tell, just by looking at a person.

wRoiGqgaf#gt

aaa"

THE

Brother and I were just having our tea by the firelight in the studio, with everything packed, when someone came through the shop, tramped across the floor, stooped under the studio doorway and straightened up to look at us out of the smoke in the ceiling. She was the tallest thing I ever saw in my life, much taller than Brother, and yet thinner. Heavens, she was thin! Her shoulders seemed unneces- sarily square. She hed on a brown tweed suit and a plain collar and tie, and a felt hat with a cock’s feather in it, and she had bright black eyes and a pointed nose. When she pointed her nose down at me and snapped her eyes, I found myself staring at her with my mouth open, quivering like a hypnotized rabbit. As soon as she took her eyes from me to look at my brother, I thought she was only a tourist from Boston come to look at the Village.

But then she looked back at me and said in a blunt con- tralto, “Is this Vivian Page? How-de-do, Vivian. I’m your Cousin Agnes. And who is this?”

Well, if brother and I hadn't been marvelously adapt- able the shock would have shown. But Brother was in- stantly suave and graceful with her so that presently she was taking her tea quietly and he was explaining every- thing to her. She pushed her hat to the back of her head and had her tea and stared into the fire. When she pushed off her hat completely her hair was black, pulled back from her forehead and done in a bun in the back, with one white lock running straight back in it. There was something about her that made me forget my first feeling, and that she was expected to be gentle and little and white-haired. Brother rippled on brilliantly, as he does when he is pleased with his audience, simply scintillating with sophisticated wit. I saw her watching him with eyes that fairly glittered and I began to feel that after all she couldn’t be better for our purpose. The Back Bay of Boston was simply written all over her. You just knew she always had seats at Sym- phony and wore flat-heeled shoes and masticated her food, and probably had on black wool jersey tights at that very moment. And yet if—when she was sitting there quietly drinking her tea—if I had only guessed! If I had dreamed! But then, it’s too late now anyway—and then she was toc

quiet. Ewen when things began to happen on the train it wasn’t anything you could exactly put your finger on.

I was awfully car-sick, as I always am. Quite like a child. Unless someone reads out loud to me and waits on me constantly I almost die. I could scream. I’m like that. So high-strung. And, of course, Brother can’t be expected to do anything, because unless he simply withdraws him- self from contact with everyone, the common uncouth people one has to meet on trains drive him simply frantic. He is so fastidious and sensitive. So that you would have thought that Agnes had enough to do without the curious thing she did do. Really, I think I would have spoken to her about making us conspicuous if I had not been so ill.

There was an old lady in our Pullman who had two dogs in the baggage car, and it seemed to me that every moment the train stopped anywhere Agnes was exercising those dogs up and down the platform. The first time Brother saw her he groaned and shut his eyes and I looked out, and there was Agnes, as tall as a bean pole, with an insignificant white poodle and a terrible little black-and-tan thing simply winding themselves around her ankles. It was the most undignified performance. It wasn’t at all as if the old lady had been interesting or distinguished or the dogs pic- turesque. Running around her like that, darting here and there among the baggage and tripping people up, they simply made Agnes look grotesque. I told Agnes when she came in that I couldn’t imagine why she did it. She said she liked animals, which seemed a curious reason. I mean, of course, one likes animals. I think sometimes animals are so interesting and psychic. But one doesn’t have to go hunting up poodle dogs in baggage cars. I hear the bag- gage people are quite nice to dogs nowadays.

Besides, I wanted Agnes to read to me. She read very well. I suppose being a school-teacher regulated the voice. I had her read to me Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, which is so wonderfully sophisticated, until I happened to think it might shock her, and after all, one has to cultivate one’s background. She was very quiet about it and only said that Petronius had done it better, but, of course, I knew she was shocked. I mean, really, you know, she

SATURDAY EVENING POST 13

should have been. So I asked her to read something she liked. And can you imagine it? She insisted on reading Horace in the original Latin. Of course I’ve heard of Horace, but imagine! Brother said she was just trying to impress us and he told her immediately that he didn’t un- derstand a word of it and that Latin is very old-fashioned anyway. But, really, after she had read a while I began to like the sound of it. It put me so nicely to sleep.

It was her quietness, really, which kept us unsuspecting. She never interrupted Brother when he felt like taiking. She just sat and looked out the window with her big white hands foided or read Latin books to herself. Brother was quite irritated by it, because he said it made us conspicuous and because he said a thing loses its effect if you do it too much. But then and while we were getting settled in the house she was perfectly docile, busy and helpful and effi- cient. She could really do a lot of work and took directions from Brother very well. I mean, in a way, she was atill be- ing quite what we had expected she would be.

Even after we were settled in the house and getting to know just the sort of people Brother and I cared to know, I did not notice anything about her cut of the way except that she had rather curious tastes in friends. Brother and I had decided from the first to know just the worthwhile type of people with money. What would be the use of knowing anyone else? So many people of the adventurer type come to places like Miami that one cannot be too careful. There were all sorts of people we liked in New York even, whom we decided to exclude in Florida. Peo- ple would not have understood them. Brother said wisely that the thing we must insist upon was that all our new friends must be smart and rich and t}ioroughly established. Of course I did not dream of emphasizing that point with Agnes. I never gave it a thought when she went off and made friends with the Latin teacher at the local high school, because I didn’t really think it mattered who Agnes’ friends were. But when she began to meet a number of the townspeople and actually did committee work with the io- cal humane society, Brother told her quite emphatically

(Continued on Page 201)

There Was a Dead Quiet, Then a Man's Voice Cried Suddenty Over the Heads of the Crowd, ‘Take That Gun Away From Her"

14 THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

THE FIRES OF

By Wythe Williams

T THIS moment of writing, the Moslem leader

October 17,1925

ISLAM

the Sabbath afternoon murder of the Aus- trian archduke rather than the appearance

of the mountain tribe of North Morocco, known as the Riff, whose complete name is Sidi Mohammed Abd el Krim ei Khat- tab, is struggling val- iantly with an army comparatively insigni- ficant in numbers, to bring the day nearer to hand when Islam will dominate North- ern Africa. Two mar- shals of France, more than twenty of her major generals, and nearly two hundred thousand picked troops have been en- gaged ‘actively in sub- jugating him if pos- sible, or pacifying him at almost any cost. With such superior forces against him,and taking into account his many victories over the armies of Spain, this “bandit,” as he is cailed in France, can scarcely be considered a mere in- cident in contempora- neous history, for he has been writing some important chapters ef it. The Riffian leader, his father and his brother have all three the same name. To distinguish them, the brother, who acts as general of the army, is called Si Mohammed. The chieftain is just plain Abd-el- Krim.

In Europe both Germany and Russia watch for their chance of political and military renaissance. Italy is feeund and elamorous; both France and England em- barrassed, wary and uneasy; Spain almost completely beneath consideration.

In Africa Abd-el-Krim has publicly proclaimed that one Mosler is equal to three Christians and that one Riffilan is equal to any ten Algerian, Tunisian or Sene- gaiese soldiers that France has mustered against him.

The Rainy Season Coming

HE rainy season will soon begin, which will make

active warfare impossible in North Africa. Before then undoubtedly the French official communiques will announce either a smashing military achievement or some sort of truce. Time now for the French means everything, in the realization of either eventuality. But time to the Arab means nothing. If it is the will of Allah, Abd-el-Krim will accept either defeat or truce, and wait for tomorrow or day after tomorrow. With impassible visage, masking an enigmatic soul, the salient characteristic of the Mosiem is patience. He knows far better than the European how to wait. So the French officers in Morocco, who do not bother much about official communiques, realize that, for this year at least, time may avail them little; that what- ever their successes in the next few weeks, the great Moroccan problem, instead of being solved, will have been simply adjourned.

The Riff country, a bleak mountain range fringing the Mediterranean from Tetuan to Melilla, has never been conquered. The Rifflans—now called Berbers, to distin- guish them from the Arabs of purer blood—are descend- ants of an ancient tribe known as the Ruafi. According to some hiutorians, the Ruefi first came to North Africa from the borders of Russia. They were then a white race and have turned brown through centuries under hot African auns. Then they are supposed to have been Christians. Islam is six centuries younger than Christienity. During the backeliding era of the Dark Ages, many Christian tribes in North Africa warred intermittently with idol worshipers, unti! the prophet Mohammed united them under his own star. But whatever the Riff may have been, or wherever from, their occupation, after raising sufficient to live-on frugally, has always been war. The Phoenicians tried to conquer them. They failed. The Romans tried

Cotenet Chartes J vy © ding the American

Air Squadren in Morecee, With Commandant Happe,

the French Ace. Above—Native Troops of the French

Army in Ouergha Vatiey, Meroeceeo, Where They Have Been Fighting

with the same lack of success. In the Moorish conquest of Spain the Ruafi performed a leading and an ardent rdle. The French army when this was written was not fighting in the real Riff country. It was merely getting back its own, that part of the French zone of the Protectorate that was conquered by'the Riff last spring. The French commander has been peering through his powerful field glasses at the distant peaks, and communing with himself, “It is perhaps easy for the great military power of France to drive’ this bandit from our fertile plain. But when the eagle retires to his crag—what then?”

The Moroccan question harassed Europe long before the World War. Coupled with the hardy annual “‘ War Clouds” that hovered over the Balkans, the “‘New Crisis in Mo- roeco” was a headline in the world’s press. The Algeciras Conference squelched temporarily German plans for Afri- ean colonial expansion, but it only just so happened that

of the German gun- boat Panther off the French Moroccan port, Agadir, actually caused the struggle to begin. Indeed, the Agadir incident was a far more logical reason than the Balkan assas- sination as an excuse for the war drums to roll.

Today, although the German danger has diminished, the Mo- roccan question con- tinues to present all the necessary ele- ments for an inter- national imbroglio. The balance of Euro- pean power has shifted, but Morocco remains a danger to European peace, al- most as great as in the years preceding 1914.

Spain’s Loss

PAIN’S history in Morocco is that of utter failure. It ends now, practically, with her disastrous war against the Riff. The Spanish death roll alone, in the African cam- paigns of the past few years, has been over 60,000. She has lost immense stores, and has paid millions of pese- tas into the coffers of Abd-el-Krim, all of which has enabled him to carry on with little buying and no bor- rowing. Before the French were attacked, and toward the end of her own campaigns, Spain bought her way out of her African forts and blockhouses in order to retire to the seaboard of her zone without further slaughter. The usual price in the preliminary negotiations was 50,000 pesetas per blockhouse. But when the Spanish soldiers got ready to march out with their arms another Riff emissary would often appear to demand another 50,000 pesetas. Otherwise they would march out without arms. This dealing, however necessary, was described in the Spanish press as “clever pclitical maneuvers.”’ But it reduced Spain to a state where she would have completely evacuated Africa, leaving be- hind the remaining munitions and stores, had she been permitted so to do by other European powers, and but for the remnants of dignity to which she still proudly, and often foolishly, clings.

Eye witnesses report that Spanish officers, when their blockhouses were attacked, often declaimed grandly that “soldiers of Spain must fight standing,” even though they could then be mowed down mercilessly by Riffian fire. A British official on a visit to Tangier once tried tactfully to explain to a Spanish official the British frontier methods in Australia and India. The Spaniard replied that the British were a race of shop- keepers and such methods were only to be expected, but that the noble descendants of the grandees of Spain— purest aristocracy on earth—had military traditions to maintain. The Britisher, still smiling, remarked dryly that he could only judge the methods by the results. To

this the Spaniard replied, ‘‘Oh, my dear sir, what can results matter so long as the dignity of Spain is preserved?” General Primo de Rivera, Marquis of Estrella and head of the Spanish Directory, while not a great man—not a Mussolini in any way—probably has more common sense than the majority of his compatriots, and is a better gen- eral than the others of his army. But his authority is in delicate balance. Spain was neutral during the World War. It was often such a curious neutrality that once British guns at Gibraltar dropped shells into the city of Algeciras as a hint that German submarines must leave. Nevertheless, neutrality was beneficial and Spain waxed comparatively rich. The African campaigns bled her riches both in men and money. To the applause of the public and in face of pig-headed army opposition, Primo de Rivera was able to get Spain as far otit of Africa as she is—that is, to the narrow edges of her former territory. But to get

SATURDAY EVENING POST

out entirely; to abandon officially the Spanish Protectorate in Merocco, might mean that both the Directory and the King would fall. So for her ’ own, as well as for outside reasons, Spain, now bolstered up by amilitary convention with France, hangs on.

The key, however, to the Moroccan situation lies in the Strait of Gibral- tar, which likewise continues to be the gateway between the Western and Eastern seas, in peace as well as in war. The Rock of Gibraltar, held by Great Britain for centuries, is no longer the impregnable fortress of past days. It is now vulnerable both from the sea and the air. It comprises only two square miles. There is no room for an air base of its own, and to refortify the rock with guns to equalize the long range of a modern battle fleet is regarded as practically impossible. Directly across the Strait is another rock, called Ceuta. The lessons of the World War teach that this rock is a far stronger natural position than Gibraltar. It has a large hinter- land that would permit better plac- ing of modern guns as wel! as providing an aviation center. But Ceuta, to both British annoyance and content, belongs to Spain.

Tangier, the International Port

N TANGIER—facing the Atlantic side of the Strait, and,

largely through British insistence, rendered international, and thus neutral and hopelessly second-rate—you hear all sides of the matter, the pros and cons attaching to each and every difficulty. Tangier is the shouting rather than the whispering gallery for all that pertains to Morocco. A city governed by many laws, the result is that almost no laws are rigidly observed. Tangier has two British judges, two Spanish judges, two French judges, a Belgian chief of police, an American Minister who sits quite outside the internationalization game, but who under our old treaty with the Sultan of Morocco protects Americans and their interests. In Tangier one thinks, says and does about as one pleases. Cafés and gambling rooms are open all night. Riff agents sit openly at sidewalk tables, sipping ab- sinth—still the popular drink of North Africa. British officers, across from ‘‘ Gib,” smile a bit superciliously at the aspirations of the French to give their army a “‘little exercise in Morocco.”” Idle British mining experts are waiting the moment the war is over, to dash into the Riff, to prospect iron and copper and other rumored potenti- alities of the promised land. Solemn Spanish officers en route from Al- geciras to the

A Mountain Battery in Action

Arab guides, haggling noisily with leather and rug venders from Marrakesh and Fez. The Café Central on the single wide street, now called the Place d’Ajdir, because there comes Haddou el Rifi, gigantic, good-looking personal representative of Abd-el-Krim, to sip steaming coffee and to meditate upon his next message to Prim» de Rivera, or perhaps to the French. There also, daily from ten o'clock until noon, comes Walter Harris, famous correspondent of the London Times, sage of Morocco, who has lived there forty years, speaks Arabic fluently, was once a prisoner of the famous bandit chief, Raisuli. Harris lives in a palace on the near-by hill, is gracious, entertaining, erudite on all subjects, knows everyone, including Abd-el-Krim, and ardently promotes the British hopes for peace. All in all, a fat and merry company, forever interesting, set in a medley of European and Oriental color, beside a sparkling blue sea.

In Tangier, the British admit their aspirations and their woes. Gibraltar they would now give back to Spain. In talk, it is often as good as done, so complacent is the British manner of rearranging theearth. Itis suggested, as an after- thought, that, of course, that always-campaigning-against- something-or-other newspaper, the London Daily Mail, might arouse the nation to protest against this romantic bit of Britain changing hands. Naturally, Spain would be glad to have it back, not as a fortress—of course not— but to have her territory again intact. The docks might

interfere commercially with those at Cadiz, but no matter. Ceuta in exchange would be the bargain. Arises the specter of the Algeciras ; Conference, when Britain agreed . not to thwart France in Morocco, then openly checkmating Germany and Italy. The latter now again dreams of Mediterranean power and African empire. France would pro- test certainiy at Ceuta changing hands, and her Latin sister, for once, would be in political agreement. But if Spain should clear out of Africa in case she is not pushed out? She might evacuate Ceuta, which in her hands remains unfoerti- fied and unmenacing. Who geta it then? Better, perhaps, let Spain keep it so long as possible, with the Riff as a second buffer state against France. Peace at almost any cost is the best thing. Or even the Riff on the coast, if peace fails. Any- thing, anybody, rather than France. Gibraltar may be something of a myth nowadays, but it atill re- mains a stronger fortress than any- thing else about. Gibraltar would be neutralized within six months, once France got to the Strait. England is a nation organized for trade and peace. France is a nation organ- ized for war. Her engineers, at Ceuta, would probably create one of the military marvels of all time.

The French Stand on the Riff

HY the recent French agreement with Spain? is the

English question. Why do marshals of France troubie tc call at Algeciras and Tetuan, rather than await Spanish grandees traveling to the torrid ovens of Rabat and Fez? Do they expect real military cojperation from the beaten Spanish army? What is it all about? Is it a bluff on the part of France, this sudden warm friendship, to enter even- tually the Spanish zone with troops, to be forced for “‘ strate- gic reasons”’ in her operations against the Riff to reach the sea?

The French argument comes not from Tangier—the French delve but little into that field of fertile imagin- ings; their argument comes from their battle front, also from Paris, and is even more complicated.

First, if the Spanish army will fight, France asks nothing better than that it do so. Thus the Riff wil! be hemmed in on many sides, and France will not stand guard alone. On the other hand, now having an active military convention with Spain, France admits that in their mutual interests she really ought to enter the Riff country, which is

entirely in the Spanish zone,

front. Spanish sol- diers on leave, loafing in port cafés, and rub- bing shoulders with their ene- mies, the Riffians, who go back through the lines— only twenty miles distant—that night, to resume their work of pot- shotting Span- iards. Arabs spill- ing from every- where. Beggars, cripples, blind — blind from small- pox and from the savage cruelty of the ex-sultan. Holy men — those determined faith- ful who have made the long trail to Mecca, sitting outside the mosques. The muezzins, with slow, musical voices proclaiming the oneness of Al- lah. Fluttering lady tourists, swaying on mules, up and down nar-

France does not mention either Ceuta or the Medi- terranean. In mat- ters so delicate, France prefers to wait. Certainly the French have no desire to quar- rel with England over Gibraltar or anything else—no more desire than has England <o quarrel with France. In the role of Britain's ally, and Spain's, and earnest de- fenders of civili- zation, the French might like to take over Ceuta on any legitimate excuse.

What concerns - France far more is to preserve. her work of thirteen years in Morocco, upon which de- pends the preser- vation of her entire colonial posses- sions in North Af- rica. If Morocco goes, then Aige- ria—a real colony,

(Continued on

row streets, with English - speaking

The American Air Squadron in Moreece

Page 213)

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

irty Work in the Argonne

YS aa wil” ~~

Ne Bent Over and Started te Write on the Shett

By William Hazlett Upson

TLLVUSTTRATEO ar

tion near the town of Septsarges. And early that morn-

ing me and Henry, who was privates in the battery, woke up and found that a heavy rain had started during the right. Our pup tent was gently but steadily leaking and soaking us to the skin;

We sat up, which was possible because our pup tent was pitched over a hole we had dug in the ground for pro- tection from shell fragments. We put on our raincoats, which was not any too, good but kept some of the water out, and we looked out through the flaps of the tent. The rain was coming down straight and steady out of a dull cloudy sky. All around was the soggy tents of the can- noneers. And in front of us were the four guns of the battery—- 155 howitzers— pointed north, and covered over with paulins which glistened in the wet. In front of the guns was the Septsarges-Dannevoux road, fuil of ruts and shell holes, and the ruts and shell holes full of rain water. Across the road was an old German cemetery, and beyond that, the wooded hills of the Bois de Septsarges, held by our infantry front lines, And a mile or so farther on was the German Army, sitting tight in a bunch of dugouts and trenches which was called the Kriemhilde Stellung, part of the Hindenburg Line

For two days--ever since we had brought the battery into position—we had been sending over shell and the Germans had been sending back shell. Some of them had hit pretty close-—one right in front of the second gun-—but nobedy had got hurt. The night before, we had fired until one o'clock; and the last thing me and Henry had heard as we went to sleep was the whistle of German 77’s going by overhead, and the crash as they burst in the woods behind us.

And this morning, besides the pattering of the rain, we could hear the noise of a pretty brisk barrage that the Germans were laying down Off to our right.

Henry said we better wait till the rain let up a bit before we chased along to the kitchen for breakfast. So we looked ever to the next tent, and there was Snipe Hennessey and

I: WAS the end of September. The battery was in posi-

ALBIN HENNING

his brother, Porky, looking out at the rain. They was flapping their elbows up and down and <caying “Quack, quack!” as loud as they could, and pretending they was ducks and having the time of their lives. Then we seen Porky whispering to Snipe, and Snipe picked up a big hunk of mud and threw it over at us. It hit Henry in the neck and splashed on me, and if anybody exéépt Snipe or Porky had thrown it, we would have gone over and walked on their face. But they ‘was sucha likable pair—especially Porky—that we had to laugh in spite of ourselves.

Porky was just a kid, only eighteen years old, rather short and stocky built, blue eyes, black hair and a real smile. He was about the gentlest, nicest guy in the whole battery. Not one of these softies that are nice because they are scared to be anything else; Porky was gentle and nice because he wanted to be, because he was a good-natured Irishman and because he liked everybody in the battery and everybody in the battery liked him.

Snipe was tall and thin, and when he was drunk he was the funniest Irishman I ever seen. Young Porky thought the world of him; the two of them was always together, and always up to some foolishness.

We seen Porky laughing and whispering to his brother Snipe, and Snipe grinned and picked up another hunk of mud. And then the German barrage that had been falling away off to our right shifted over, and with a long howi and a bang! bang! bang! three shells came down right in the battery position. Then three more, and after them still others in a burst of rapid fire that lasted five minutes, churning up the ground, throwing tons of mud around and filling the air with black smoke and buzzing fragments.

Me and Henry flattened out in the bottom of our hole. Two fragments zipped through the tent cloth, and one big clod of dirt came sailing in the open tent flap and hit my leg.

The noise quit as suddenly as it had begun and left that funny ringing and clanging noise that always comes inside a feller’s head when his eardrums have been pretty near busted by noise. And through this dizzy ringing I heard far off a little voice calling, ‘First aid! First aid!’

October 17, 1925

I grabbed ahold of Henry and we listened. And again we heard it, “First aid!’’ It sounded like Porky.

We stumbled out through the thin smoke that was hang- ing around, and we walked around a big fresh shell hole in the sod and went in the direction of the voice. Porky’s pup tent was half torn to pieces, and inside was Snipe, lying very still, and the back of his blouse all torn and red and smeary where.a big shell fragment had got him. Porky was opening his first-aid package and calling for help.

I ran to the battalion aid station, which was in a little dugout at the edge of the woods, and the battalion doctor came right over with two orderlies and a stretcher. By this time Lieutenant Baird and a lot of the cannoneers had gathered around. Henry and Porky were trying to tie up the wound in Snipe’s back. The doctor knelt down, turned Snipe over and took a look at him.

“‘No use,” he said. “‘He never knew what hit him.” Then he listened to his heart and felt of his wrist and one thing and another to make sure, and said again, “‘ No use. Killed instantly.”

None of us knew just what to do, but the doctor was quite brisk and businesslike.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. here?”

“TI don’t know,” said Lieutenant Baird.

“You'd better,”’ said the doctor. ‘‘ Now that he’s dead, the ambulance men won’t touch him. If you don’t bury him, he'll just lie around till the grave-digging details get here. That may be a week or two.”’

I looked at Porky to see what he thought about it and he was just standing there, sort of dazed, not saying a word.

“ All right,” Lieutenant Baird spoke up. ‘‘ How many of you men will volunteer to dig the grave?”

Me and Henry and Porky and three others stepped out, and the lieutenant said that would be enough. The doctor teok off one of Snipe’s identification tags and made some notes in a little book he had, and then we wrapped Snipe

“Bury him

up in a blanket and laid him on the stretcher and covered him with one of the gun paulins. It was raining slow and steady and dismal.

We got picks and shovels from the limber. We marked off a place six feet by two feet in the field beside the gun position. And we cut the sod in little squares, whieh we took out and piled carefully so we could put them back later.

Underneath, the clay was wet and cold and pretty hard. There was room for only one man to work at a time. One of us would loosen the clay with a pick, then he would step aside and another of us would shovel. That meant that while one man was working, the five others would be just standing around in the chilly rain. The waiting was worse than the working.

After my first turn at digging I stood next to Henry, but neither of us seemed to have much to say. I looked at Porky and he still seemed to be sort of dazed. There was a clattering noise over in the woods; breakfast was being ladled out.

“Say,” I said, “I had forgotten all about breakfast. Come on, Porky, let’s get some.”

“‘Breakfast?’’ said Porky, looking at me sort of stupid.

“Yes,” I said. “‘Come on. We can take turns eating, and the digging can go on.”

“I don’t want any breakfast,” said Porky, and he turned away.

I went over to the kitchen, and Henry followed along, but we didn’t eat much. When we got back, the others went over, all except Porky, who wouldn’t leave.

When the hole was about a foot deep, we came to very dense hard clay that took lots of work with the pick. Nobody talked much. Porky said nothing at all. He took his turn at digging, and in between times stood around with his hands in his pockets and a vacant look on his face.

Digging a grave is a long hard job. A person who has never tried it can have no idea of the amount of labor and the length of time it takes to make a hole six feet long by two feet wide by six feet deep.

While some of the other fellers were working, Henry came and stood beside me and said, “Somehow this re- minds me of back home in America once a long time ago when I was a kid. I had a little dog called Snappy. He was a little black dog with white feet, and I used to think he was the finest mutt in the world. I used to brush him off every day with a little brush.”

“Sometimes,”’ I said, ‘‘a feller will get awful fond of a dog.”

“Yes,”’ said Henry, ‘and one day Snappy got run over by a milk wagon. I dug a grave for him out in the back yard, and it was a long, long job. I was such a little kid that it was harder for me to dig that small grave than it is for us to dig this large one. And I still remember how I cried about that pup. I cried all the time I was digging the grave, and half the night afterwards—couldn’t go to sleep. But when I had finally cried myself out, I felt better.”

We both looked at Porky.

“Porky feels pretty bad,” I said. ‘He thought his brother was just about the only man on earth.”

“If he could only ery a little,”’ said Henry, “it would maybe be better for him.”

But Porky didn’t cry. When it was his turn to work, he would shovel like mad, and in between times he would stand around silently. And gradually his face began to take on a hard, mean look.

The grave kept going down—two feet—three feet. The rain slackened to a misty drizzle, but the clouds were as low and dark as ever. The ground around the grave had been tramped into a mess of soft sticky mud. All the time we could hear the rumbling and booming of distant shell fire, and once in a while a screech and a bang as a shell came down closer. But nothing hit near enough to bother us. From time to time big trucks would go roaring along the road, and occasionally little groups of walking wounded would pass by on their way to the rear.

Several men from the battery came lounging over to see how we were getting along. There was a young boob from Iowa that we called Sloppy. He watched us dig for a while and then went over where Snipe was laid out on the

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 17

stretcher. He lifted the corner of the paulin that covered Snipe arid looked underneath. Porky dropped his shovel.

“You get away from there!” he yelled. “Don't you dare touch your dirty hands to my brother!" And he let loose a string of profanity like nothing we had ever heard out of Porky before. He was just crazy mad.

Sloppy backed off and got away as fast as he could, and Porky gradually calmed down and went back to digging.

Then all of a sudden he said, “I’m sorry I bawled out Sloppy like I did. He didn’t mean no harm. I guess I don’t just know what I’m doing.”

He went over to the guns, looking for Sloppy, and I heard afterward that he gave him a whole pack Of cigarettes and apologized to him. Then he came back and started to dig again.

At four feet we struck several big roots and it took a lot of chopping to get through them. The first sergeant came by, stopped and watched Porky wielding the ax fast and furious on a root.

“Here, Porky,” he called to him, ‘come out of there and get some rest. You got enough to worry you without kili- ing yourself working that way.” Porky flared up again.

“You go to hell,” he said, “and leave me be! Can't I help bury my own brother?”

The first sergeant looked surprised. Nobody had ever tried such back talk on him before and got by with it. But this seemed like a special case. :

“All right,” he said, kind of quiet. “If you want to work, go ahead.”” And Porky kept on working and never even answered him.

At five feet we struck a big rock. We had intended to go six feet, but the rock was too big for us, so we let it go at five.

Lieutenant Baird arrived, and behind him a little putty- faced man that turned out to be the chaplain. The chap- lain was busy and bustling.

“‘How about the personal effects of the deceased?” he asked. “‘Any valuables in his pockets?”

Porky gave him a mean look.

(Continued on Page 117)

Jo the Chaptain Reached in His Pocket and Brought Out a Book and Read Out of It

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

WN YOUR OWN

By Frank Parker Stockbridge

HE housing problem for the city

October 17,1925

FLAT

as freely as he pleases. He can finish the interior of the rooms in any

dweller presents the aspects of a genuine dilemma, in that neither of the two apparent solutions is com- pletely satisfac tory in all cases The choice be- tween paying rent for an apartment and owning a heme has been complicated, since the end of the war, by the rise in rents on the one hand anid the increase in land values and taxes on the other. About five years ago city folk all over the United States began to discover, however, that the dilemma had a third horn

This is the cobp- erative apartment house. Though its most ardent ad- vocatesa do not contend that own- ership of a codp- erative apartment offers the final and perfect solution of the housing prob-

way that strikes hisfancy. Thereis no landlord to veto his desire to drive nails into the plas- ter, for it is his own plaster.

Of equal impor- tance, however, to the buyer of a co- operative apart- ment is the measure of control it gives him over his neighbors in the same building. He chooses his company, with the reasonable assur- ance that nobody whose manners differ materially from those of his own family is go- ing to live in such close proximity to him as to cause an- noyance by reason of a different code of social ethics.

I have before me a dozen advertise- ments of codpera- tive apartments for sale in as many sections of New York. Each con- tains some such

iem in every in- ev stance, the spread

of the movement

has at least converted the dilemma intoatrilemma; and the experience of those who have seized upon this third horn, so far, seems to indicate that for certain classes of people it provides as satisfactory a refuge as either of the other two.

Buying a Slice of Air

HE vogue of the cotperative apartment has spread

literally frora coast to coast. The National Association of Real Estate Boards last year found it necessary to estab- lish a co}perative section in response to a nation-wide demand from its members for information and

wORRWOOD @ UNDERWOOD. PHOTO. FROM sannson HEIGHTS COOPERATIVE APA@TMENTS “The Towers,"' the Coéperatively Owned Garden Apartments in a New York Suburb

its tentative stage in Philadelphia. In San Francisco the coéperative apartment house has become decidedly pop- ular. Broadly, the movement has taken root wherever the supply of desirable home sites is limited.

What the buyer of a codperative apartment purchases is, in the last analysis, a slice of air, situated a given number of feet above the street level and a specific distance from the building line, inclosed and equipped for habitation. He owns this slice of air absolutely. He can partition it off into as many or as few rooms as may suit his tastes and needs, tear down those partitions, shift them about,

line as, ‘Social

and business ref- erences required,”’ or ‘A list of owners who have already bought will be furnished on request.”” The prospective buyer can decide for himself whether he wants to associate with the sort of persons who have already bought in; they, in turn, can determine whether, after looking up his references, they want him to live in the next apartment or above or below them.

And the references are no mere matter of form. They are followed up and run down, at least in the more expen- sive coéperative developments, until every fact which has a bearing on the desirability of the applicant as a neighbor has been revealed. The efforts of obviously unqualified families to buy into some of the more

comparative statistics relating to the financing, building, sale and operation of such properties.

“‘Codperative apartment building organizations are springing up all over the country,” said Albert W. Swayne, of Chicago, chairman of that section, at the real-estate dealers’ national convention. “Curiously, the movement seems to have started independently in each of a dozen cities, but almost identical methods have been worked out in each of these centers. It is as if the whole country had suddenly realized that the codperative apartment house offers ne solution to the problem of how to build up the percentage of home owners in our larger cities, which is gradually being reduced by the replacement of individual homes by apartment buildings and business blocks.”

It is not alone a large-city development, how- ever. While New York, naturally, had more codperative apartment houses than any other com- munity, Champaign, [inois, with fewer than 20,000 popuiation, is housing a larger percentage of its. people in the six such buildings that have been erected there in the past three years. In Chicago more than 206 apartment houses are codperatively owned by their occupants. In St. Paul a million- dollar codperative house was recently promoted. There are codperative apartment houses in Detroit and in Fligt. Michigen, in Atlanta, Norfolk, Yonkers and St. Louis. In Long Beach, California, they call them Own-Your-Owns and have built more than twenty of them, three costing more than $1,000,000 each. Atlantic City built one last year. in Washington, D. C., there are more than twenty. In Baltimore three experiments have opened the door for further development of the codperative apartment idea, which is also in

PHOTO

BY BROWN BROS. One of the Many New York Coéperative Apartment Houses

exclusive apartment houses are sometimes humor- ous, often almost pathetic.

Hand-Picked Neighbors

NTO one house of exclusive standards a very

rich business man decided he would like to buy. There was but one unsold apartment left when he approached the agent. The price was $80,- 000. He was told that he could not have it. Think- ing that it was a matter of price, he raised his offer to $130,000. The agent was obdurate. Six of the rich man’s business acquaintances or associates were among the earlier purchasers of slices of air in this particular building. For reasons satisfactory to themselves, none of them had ever had any social relations with him. He went to each in turn, asking them to use their influence to get him ad- mitted. Each took refuge behind the fact that the agent was the sole arbiter, and it fell to the lot of the unfortunate real-estate operator to explain to an infuriated multimillionaire that his wife’s public manners were such that her presence in the house would depreciate the value of the property!

This man and his family would not have been happy in the enforced neighborliness of a codper- ative apartment where the rest of the group have a standard of manners and an outlook on life differing materially from his own, nor would the others. Butso widespread is the eodperative apart- ment movement, in New York and elsewhere, that it is possible for almost any family to find a codp- erative apartment within its means and with the assurance of congenial neighbors. If not found ready to hand, it isa perfectly simple procedure, and

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

PHOTO. BY BROWN BROTHERS, h. ¥. C

one which has been adopted scores of times in Manhattan alone, for the seeker to find enough like-minded as- sociates to buy an apartment house or have one built for their own use. Any intelli- gent real-estate dealer can show how that is done.

Permanency

EFINITE social values then are part of what the purchaser of a codéperative apart- ment buys, and these social values have a def- inite and readily trans- mutable cash value. And for tangible evi- dence of his ownership, the purchaser of a slice of air gets a certificate of stock in a corpora- tion and a lease running from that corporation to himself. The corporation has no property or assets . other than the apart- ;

of the particular block of stock issued to the origi- nal lessee. Ownership of the stock, however, does not per se carry the right to demand a lease, should the original owner sell the stock. The new owner must pass the same scrutiny as did the original buyer, and if he does not qualify he may provide a tenant who does, or the corporation will find one for him. The original buyer binds himself by contract not to transfer his lease or sublet his apartment with- out the consent of the corporation, both as to the act and the individuals. And he further binds himself to pay, in monthly installments for the term of his lease, whatever his share may be of the total cost of main- taining and operating the house. That share is pro- portioned to the whole just as his stockholdings are.

The codperative apartment owner’s annual charge for maintenance and operation therefore—his rent— bears a definite percentage relation to his stock investment. Many codperative buildings operate at a cost of from 8 to 10 per cent. Few run above 12 per cent. The range is between these percentages whether the individual investment is as low as $2000 or as high as $150,000, which are the extremes between which one can buy a codperative apartment in New York City. The variation depends somewhat upon the standards of management required by the

be torn down to make way for an apartment house, prob- ably codperative. The Vanderbilts have sold two or three of their Fifth Avenue mansions, and their kin and kind are buying codperative apartments, where they ean retain all that makes a Fifth Avenue address desirable at a tithe of the expense of keeping up a town house.

An Apartment on the Avenue

MAN of quite moderate means, however, as such things go in New York, can own asilice of air on Fifth Avenue. Twenty-four thousand dollars will buy a space big encugh to be properly termed a home in one apartment house, which, by the way, was completely sold out, from the plans, months before it was completed. That is not the highest price, nor the lowest. The twelve-room-and- five-baths apartments sold for from $34,000 to $75,000. Ten-room spaces with four baths brought from $24,000 to $50,000, and the nine-room apartments with three baths, from $20,000 to $45,000. Since the fifth floor is more de- sirable than the second, I have chosen as an illustration of a $24,000 codperative apartment a nine-room suite on the fifth floor, whence the tenant-owner can look out upon the lakes and trees of Central Park’s square mile, rather thai. a ten-room apartment lower down at the same figure, but closer to the street noises and gasoline fumes. For his $24,000 the purchaser got, first, 240

ment building. It was formed, usually, for the sole purpose of owning the building and often is limited in its charter to the own- ership and operation of that particular piece of property. If not so limited, it should be, in the view of many students of the subject, if for no other reason than to curb possible speculation with corporate funds when a surplus shall have been accumulated. In Illinois, where the legislature re- cently amended the ancient statute forbidding any corpo- ration to own real estate beyond its own business buildings, the law enforces the strict limitation just indicated.

The individual tenant-owner’s shares are proportioned to the total share capital of the corporation in precisely the relation which the rental value of his apartment bears to the total rental value of the building. This computation is readily made by experts. His lease runs to himself, his heirs or assigns, for a term which, in New York, is usually ninety-nine years, with the provision for an indefinite number of renewals for the same term. In Washington, the life of the corporation being limited to fifty years, a shorter lease is necessary, but ways have been found to insure perpetuity. In California, Illinois and elsewhere the term of the lease is often stated as ‘“‘forever,” and some- times as “until the end of the world.”

Lease and stock are loosely tied together. The particu- lar slice of air of which the lease gives possession cannot be rented to anybody except for the benefit of the owner

Three Cotéperative Apartment Houses Located in New York City

tenant-owners and somewhat upon the percentage to be set aside annually out of the tenant-owners’ payments for the amortization of the first mortgage, and the size and interest rate of that mortgage. For the capital stock seldom if ever represents the total value of the land and building; merely the corpora- tion’s equity, which may be anywhere from 40 to 60 per cent of the whole.

The amortization of the mortgage is one of the guaranties of the tenant-owner that his investment is not going to depreciate. Another is the interesting fact, discovered simultaneously in several cities, that a codperative apartment house desirably located results in an increase in the tand value, not alone of the ground on which the building itself stands, but of the adjacent property. The fact of the building’s existence makes the neighborhood at once desirable to everyone whe would like to live on the same street or in the same locality with families of the social grade to which its tenant-owners conform.

The man of moderate means hasn’t the proverbial Chinaman’s chance of owning a house on Fifth Ave- nue. Vincent Astor sold his not long ago, announc- ing that he could no longer afford to maintain it, with

the increase in land values and rising taxes. It is to

PROTEC

shares of stock, out of a total of 14,770, in a corporation which owns a corner lot, facing about 150 feet on Fifth Avenue and running back about 100 feet, improved with a four- teen-story fireproof building. The land cost, roughiy, about seventy-five dollars a square foot, The erec- tion of this codperative house and two or three others near by, how- ever, has already in- creased the land value, although the house is not finished as this is written. The building ecst about seventy-five cents a cubie foot. Many good fireproof houses are built in New York today for as low as sixty-five cents. This one is of distinctly high quality, calculated for a life of 100 years or more. Its field cost was in the neighborhood of (Continued en Page 54)

>} WE: WE WA - 5

D. BY BROWN BROTHERS, W. ¥. «

20 THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

October 17,1925

THE OLD FIGHTER’S CHILDREN

OON of a clear autumn day glowed ' N above the street, but the lamps of the theater made evening as our throng poured in and quietly found chairs. It wasa most good- humored ‘crowd,

TLELVUSTRATED ar

By Henry Milner Rideout

SOULEWN

HENRY J.

all Chinamen, peace-loving scons of Han or of T’ ong, their wives, their friends and their children,who over hung the b-leony like a row of imp- ish dolls or cher- ubs goggling down upon solemnity.

“ Fira’ tam, you look-see.”” Yi Tao bent across three or four intervening laps to murmur. “Pirs’ tam, they playing Can You Fight? Wolly nice, I t'ink se, you likee,”’

Reyond the foot- lighte gleamed a rack of weapons, their steel bur- nished like silver, their heads or hafta gay with tassels Battie-ax, pike, sword, spear, par- tisan, curved bill that had the inner edge of ite hook sharpened keener than a spoke- shave, all stood mated in paira right and left, ready for use. Two Chinamen in loose black garments made their bow and fell to work slight, sinewy, quick as a pair of leopards They be- gan gent.y enough The Drunkard and his Full Glass to show the nine-and- forty ways of fall- ing, the Monkey on @ Pole frolick- ing through the marvelea which underlie quarterataff play, the Man with the Heart who holds it shaped invisibly between his finger tips and by graceful undulation of body and limb performs each guard for each vital organ-—these pantomimes, and more, Jau Kai Ming and his pupil enacted all in the way of theory, with deliberate ease.

Then, swift and furious, came practice. They boxed with hands and feet-—a lightning interchange of eightfold blows that never came home, while bone and muscle, fist and shoe meeting, smacked like hardwood. They wrestled, one throwing another headlong, high off the floor, only to have the other in going down trip him, upset him with a foot lock tighter than tongs, magically neat, so that both fell, somersaulted and rose in a bounce together. Choosing weapons from the rack, they fought on—swords against bare hands, two knives against bare hands, a long partisan to a kind of triple flail, a ten-foot lance to the deadly shining chain that can fly supple as a snake or rigid as a bar. There was no pretense or trickery, no hitting to one side, or mere acrobatics, or combat of the stage. Nothing but the unearthly skill of master and man prevented blood- shed again and again by a hairbreadth, while for ninety minutes, gone like five, this pair of agile black demons con- tended in a whirl of flashing steel.

When for the last time they toweled their heads, nodded and smiled good afternoon, a great sigh rose from all who had watched

“How you likee? Pooty nice, mos’ olo kine.” Yi-Tao beamed with joy, hospitality and vicarious pride. “ You sed, Gi Sdi, hart to do, begin welly yong, lartchee study long tam. Yeah, I tink so, you likee him.”

Nothing But the Unearthly Skill of Master and Man Prevented Bloodshed Again and Again by a Hairbreadth

No man, having viewed sucha wonder; could fail to praise. Argument, indeed, began, as we shuffled out through an alley, whether one mode of fighting ought rather to be called Lion Behind Gold Mountain than Two Tigers Come to Szechuen. This fine point—fine, because every mode bore a name of classic tradition—was com- fortably waived by an old gentleman who turned his benevolent face to remark that in English it all nowadays would mean the same thing. As for that other conflict, named Three Sworn Brethren, after the celebrated Red Face, Black Face and White Face, the emperor's uncle, whose long arms reached below his knees, why, there you had history to guide you, seventeen hundred years or more.

“Yeah, shu,” agreed Tao. “ Pooty olo.”

By night in the kitchen therefore his talk ran upon this ancient art of fighting, and modern masters. Does not he who taught Jau Kai Ming still live, an honorable gentle- man about seventy-five years of age, active as a youth? Did not he, this grand old champion, Lao Chun Nam, not so long ago slay Iron Head, a ferocious brawler who had no right ever to have learned the mystery? It is well known. The surly Iron Head picked a quarrel, ran at Mr. Lao to deal him that butt over the heart which had never failed to kill—and was met by a quiet reply swifter than the snap of athumb. He.flew twenty feet backward, stone dead.

“He’s neck blokem,”’ said Tao...‘ He’s blains bus’ out.

Diasee way, so! One-two-th’ee, kick!. Callem Tigu Wash

Face.”

The trick is not imparted to children, fools or persons of bad character. For reasons general, nothing personal, it will be enough here to say that Tiger Wash Face is

executed in three counts, three nearly simul- taneous motions of knee, hands and foot. The brotherhood of the Shansi Heung Ma used it, but only when they were in dire need.

“Who? ”

“Shansi Heung Ma. You neffer hear *hout?”’ cried Tao, in surprise. “Ho! I tole you. Onetam,norf part, one olo man he welly good fight- ing —— No, I fo’- get. Stoly begin diffun, mo far back firs’, nodda way. One man farmu he all tam wuk outsi’ de field, nen one day he woss diggee hola, he catch one piecee waze ——’”’

The farmer had been digging with a wooden hoe, which could not harm anything it struck. Metal rang hollow, earth cracked away in shards like pattern mold from cast- ing, and down the hole poured sun- light on a black pot belly. The farmer wiped his eyes. After a breathing, he took the dark lump out carefully, to scrub in the nearest water. It then showed not black but smooth black-green, a jar of encrusted bronze with two ear-shaped han- dies and two col- ored zones of cloisonné where the enamel, faint blue, white, sum- mer leaf, iron red, was pitted hereand there as if worm- eaten through mystical design.

‘*Old.’’ The farmer hid it be- neath his coat on the ground and went back to digging. “A wine jar of ceremony. Perhaps our great-great-grandfather, when we had substance, poured libation to our family in the temple. Who knows? Not I. Only the man who buried it.”

Before bedtime he showed the jar to a few neighbors in the village, elderly cousins whom he could trust.

“It is of high value,”’ they decided. “‘ You are lucky, Siu Ching. But who will buy it? We are all poor hereabouts. Of course, there is Wong Tai Kwong.”

“Then,” said the farmer, “‘to him I will go.”

The oldest cousin wagged his gray head in doubt.

“I would not if it were mine.”

Early next morning, however, Siu Ching wrapped his jar in a mat and trudged off across country to the rich man’s, a great house of which the old-rose tiles glimmered under branches in a walled garden. Mr. Wong welcomed him with sleek habitual courtesy. A powerful creature, active in body, broad, sly and genial in face, Wong Tai Kwong just then sat taking his ease, enjoying the coolness of a room, or hall, where shadow fell pleasantly among rare things. Wainscot and beam sheathing were of sandalwood.

“You found this, did you?” ~A hard light woke in the merchant’s eyes, but swiftly died. Placing the jar on his table, he viewed it with apathy.- “ Where?”

“In my own field, sir.” of

“How much are you asking?”

The farmer summoned all his courage.

“Three hundred dollars.”

Mr. Wong smiled, not because the jar might sell for ten times as much, but because he had another plan.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 21

“Half that, perhaps, would be nearer.”’ He yawned. “T rather like it. Leave the thing here while I make up my mind, won’t you, and come back tomorrow?”

This began well, thought the farmer, who returned to his digging and moiled away like a new man. Here perhaps came the start, the rebirth of the family fortune. Hope kept him awake half that night and roused him cheerfully next day to complete the bargain.

“Remember, take no browbeating!’’ cried his wife, a game little woman who had struggled with him through better and worse. ‘‘ You are too gentle, too good. Stand by your price, don’t weaken; for it may mean that our son will become a scholar and a famous man.”

They parted happily, scolding and laughing and nodding. The day seemed of good omen, bright in their lives. An hour later Siu Ching, warm with walking, entered the great country house and made his bow.

“Ah, well,”’ sighed Mr. Wong, after exchange of for- mality, ‘“‘what can I do for you?”

The table near him stood empty. Otherwise no more change appeared in the long room than if he had sat there unmoved since yesterday.

“About the jar, sir. You wish to buy?”

Wong Tai Kwong frowned as at a puzzle.

“What jar? You have brought something for sale?’’

It was the farmer’s turn to look puzzled.

“‘My old wine jar of sacrifice, which I hope has found favor with one, sir, who knows the value of good work.” Siu paused. This rich man, he considered, must have a short memory. ‘According to your kind wish, I left it here on the table. Overnight, at your leisure ——”’

Wong shook his massive head gravely.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said he. nothing here.”

The farmer grew rigid, opened his mouth, remained for a moment dumb, then cried aloud, “Why, here on this table! Yesterday morn- ing! I saw it! You saw

“You left

In and round this village we are a large old family, but how poor! He is rich, the power of wealth surrounds him like a fort. What can we do? Hush! If the twigs are brittle, a thousand of them together do not make a log. Oh, peace, woman! It is a great danger to talk so of Wong Tai Kwong!”

At last, worn out, she surrendered.

“You are all alike. Men have no spirit. farther? Why go on?”

Two months afterward the widow lay dying. Her son, their only child, a brown work-hardened youth, took care of her, though she refused all care. What they said to- gether at the end is not known; but Siu Leong Yook, who had always been as meek and boyish as his father, came out from that room with a stern face and his mother’s look in his eyes.

“Uncle,” said he, “I am going to kill him.”

The eldest cousin groaned.

Here came all this perilous chatter of words again, to be silenced.

“Young child, we can do nothing for you.”

“Of course not. I do for myself.”

“Hear words of reason,” begged his uncle. “Can the duck’s egg break the stone pillar? You are fifteen years old. He’s a grown man, with a houseful more at his back to help him. A devil, yes, who has murdered two. Will you give him a third to eat up? Why, what know you about fighting? To fight against odds and: win—or, no, even to come out alive—a man must practice the art for years, learn, perfect himself, train his body. Who in our village can teach you, where we are all men of. peace? My grandfather knew a master of the art, who had to begin younger than you, by running and leaping in great iron shoes, month after month, till he could jump like a fly, jump from the ground to the roof and land without moving a tile.”

Why drag

it!”

“Lower your voice,” commanded the master of the house. “‘Have you been smoking opium? What you may have seen on my table your own half-wits may know. Look about you. This room is glutted with curios. If you left one, you will have a receipt or a witness?”’

Mild though his wife called him, the poor Ching was neither fool nor cow- ard. He looked right through a genial smiling mask, saw baseness hid- den within, and attacked.

“You—you dishonor- able person! Give me my wine jar or my three hun- dred dollars! Where is it? You—you~—give it back!”

The merchant turned his head with a lazy air and called aloud. Half a dozen men came run- ning in.

‘*Remove this brawler,”’ said Wong Tai Kwong. “‘ He grows noisy and threatens. I believe he came to rob my col- lection.”

It is true the farmer was being noisy, but not for long. The menserv- ants fell upon him, threw him out-of-doors, and there in sunlight fell upon him again with hand, foot and bamboo. He crawled home on all-fours about nightfall to his bed, where, after a week of clutching broken pieces of life together with tor- ment, he let them go in a breath and died.

His wife went round like a mad woman. She drove the clan to their wits’ end before they could quiet her.

“True, we are many,” argued the chief cousin, whenever she would hear him. “Yes, yes, I know.

————

A Young Girl in Apricot Colter Swayed and Spun, Flinging Overhead Twe Swords That Revolved

as Diasily But ae True as Wheels

The orphan heard him out, bowed gravely and turned away.

“Good! Our cousin Lai is a blacksmith.”

Outside the village, beyond the dreary dun fielis, past the grave mounds, above terraces of aged rock work that climbed like an infinitely serpentine stairway, rose the barren hilis. A road or ledge of rubble disappeared high among them. Elsewhere along their crest nothing, not even a ruinous temple, marked any place whither for any reason man should go. Yet farmers who worked under the morning star, who followed the end of daylight home, began to see more than once by the early dusk or the late a small human figure move against a background, far aloft, of crag, ridge or bowlder. It might be a fox, they reported, that had clawed up an old skull, and so, balancing a dead man’s head upon his own while preying northerly toward the Seven Stars, taken this form of mankind.

“A portent,”’ said the neighborhood, ‘“‘of change and uneasiness.”’

Meantime Wong the merchant lived well, drove hard bargains and flourished like a willow tree by a brook. Only one thing annoyed him, which was that of late his trading in furs had come to a stand. Over the hills, over the moun- tains, and beyond even to the borders of wild Russia, he went or had men go yearly to tre“ic with the barbarians. This part of his many affairs had brought in profit. Now it brought none, for thieves had sprung up, a tribe of bandits lurking in the higher wilderness, who stopped carts, mur- deréd carters and looted the silver going or the furs coming down. So long as they despoiled his rivals it was fair and well.

“But last time they carried off my silver,” complained Wong. ‘‘Mine! These earth-born evil ones, they grow continually worse.”

“Your foot wil] stamp them back into the ground,"’ de- clared a sycophant. ‘‘ Yet why endanger your precious per-

. son? Why not hire fight- ing men?”

“I have hired dozens. They are no good.”

“* How if you applied to the Shansi Heung Ma? There is a great master of the art, Chin Fong by name, a champion.”

At the moment, Wong Tai Kwong belittled this wisdom; but afterward, slyly adopting it as a por- tion of his own, acted, and sent a message to the fighter. In those days not long ago, before Western firearms corrupted the country, Shansi Heung Ma, or Shang Ma—the brotherhood of the horse guards, the guild of the pony tax that made a road safe anywhere for merchandise—waa a name to conjure with, Ill-doers, mountain thieves, out- laws, highwaymen all feared it. Mr. Wong, therefore expecting a brawny ruffian whiskered like the tiger, almost thought himself cheated when one day there called at his house an elderly gentleman with perfect manner, sedate garb and a clever, candid, youthiu! face. Except for good humor and for bodily movement rippling free as liquid, tougher than silk, the champion was quite commonplace.

“You are Chin Fong? The best, I believe, in your profession?”

Smiling politely, Chin Fong shook his head.

“T am of the mystery But no, sir, there are three better now, with eight, nine, eleven perhaps com- ing on as good.”

“Your modesty is charming.”

“Not at all, sir. A matter of fact. We keep our score, and know when a brother is passing his prime or learning still.” (Continued on Page i74)

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

WIND-BLOWN

Richard Ballantine received his brother’s letter. Re- turning leisurely northward along the coast of Europe in his schooner-yacht Wanderer, after a winter spent cruis- ing about the Mediterranean, he had put into the Spanish watering place for mail, and had found Charles’ letter, with iia extraordinary news, awaiting him.

He was at first amused, then tremendously

curious. And becauee nothing was more im- pertant to him than the satis- faction of his own wonder about life, he decided at once to give up his plane for the summer and gohome, The intervening ocean was only a detail in his thought. He had sailed too often into the blue haze that hovers over the horizon to believe, as !andsmen believe, in its solemnity.

Having reached kis decision, 4 he delayed only long enough to make a certain purchase—he wasn’t long ashore, because he knew just what he wanted and where to go for it—and to send a eable home. Within a few hours after bis arrival in port the wealthy young rover was again at sea.

Some two weeks later, on a gultry June afternoon, the Wan- derer dropped anchor off Great Cove, Long Island. Standing on the after deck cf the yacht, which lay motionless in the leaden waters of the Sound, ,

Richard could see, beyond a

discreet guard of oaks, the vast

blue-gray roof of Ballanton, the

house in one of whose rooms he

had been born; in another of

which his father, the chief of all the Ballantines and the greatest banker of his day, had died. Richard remembered that death; remembered the financial tremors that had accompanied it. and thinking at the same time of Charles, suddenly laughed aloud. Good Lord, it was incredible— that Charles, the reigning heir, high priest of the religion cf family pride and present head of the Ballantine banking dynasty, should be going to indulge in a romance, All romance. from the point of view of the Ballantine saga, was incredible. It was altogether too human.

Turning to his sailing master and close friend, who stood near him at the schooner’s rail, Richard said, ‘‘ My brother Charles is going to be married, Captain Mosby. I believe I haven't told you.”

“No, sir.”

*Tt’s by way of being a family secret, | understand. But I count you as one of the family.”

“Thank vou, Mr. Ballantine.”

“You know hew to keep a secret, which is more than I can say for some members of the family proper. Aunt Alexandra, for instance.”” Again Richard laughed, then fell to musing. Captain Mosby waited, Finally the young man said, “It seema that Charles is going to marry a dancing girl.”

“A dancing girl,”’ repeated the other in a tone that offered no comment on the information.

“So it seems. I daresay my mother will be upset. What?’

“T only coughed, sir. But if you want my opinion, I'm sure Mrs, Ballantine will manage the situation, whatever it is,” :

“Yes, you're right about that. My mother isn’t to be downed, but-—it’s extraordinary that Charles should be going to do such a thing.”’ Richard’s blue eyes gleamed with a humorous light. “Though as a matter of fact it’s not Charles I'm thinking of.”

“*Naturaily not so much as your mother, sir.”

“No. Nor even of my mother, [’'m thinking of the girl.”

“The dancing girl?”

““M-m-—yes; I can’t imagine her in Ballanton. That tomb—to hold a dancing girl! She'll die of it, Captain Mosby.”

“I doubt that, sir. once she geta her bearings. chance to better herself -

“But is she bettering herself? That's what I’m curious to know.”

So here, then, in a sentence, was the reason for their sud- den flight homeward across the Atlantic. Captain Mosby made note of his employer's curiosity and proceeded, with

[: WAS in San Sebastian, toward the end of May, that

She'll probably do very well in it, It’s not every girl has such a

He Had Reached the Bad of the Pergoia When He Saw Standing in the Garden Beyond, Beside a Bush of Yetiow Flowering Forsythia, @ Girl ina White Dress Without a Hat on Her Head

a privilege based on many other intimate conversations, to argue his point.

“T should say she was doing a handsome thing for her- self. A girl without a penny to her name, no doubt, to marry your brother Charles!"

“You think her a scheming hussy?”

“That’s putting words in my mouth, sir. Words I'd never say even if I thought them.”

“Well, she may be a scheming hussy for all I know. I’m not necessarily hostile on that account. Living is schem- ing. But she must be clever to have turned Charles’ head. Or else she understands witchcraft, Captain Mosby.”

“That's hardly possible, sir, in this latitude.”

“No, of course not. But she must be—unusual. unusual young woman.”

**You’ll find out about her soon enough now,’’ muttered the captain.

“Yes. I suppose she'll be visiting at Great Cove over the week-end. We're arriving on a Friday. That means something unpleasant, doesn’t it?’’

“It means trouble,”’ answered the sailor dryly.

But Richard scarcely heard. He had fallen to musing again. Charles, he thought, would be too infatuated with the girl—her name was Regina Duval—to see clearly the incongruity of her presence in the Ballantine saga. Yet that incongruity existed; it was apparent to him even in prospect. It was what gave spice to the whole affair.

A sharp roll of thunder in the west roused him to the realization that a storm was making.

“Tf you're going ashore, sir” suggested the sailing master.

“Yes. At once.”

Somehow he remembered the time a swallow had got into the house. It was just before a storm, the servants

ITLLUSTRATED

October 17,1925

By DANA BURNET

BY R. mM. crossr

were hurrying to close the win- dows, when suddenly the bird had flown in. He could see so clearly the frenzied bird shape tossed by the wind into the strange dark room.

“The launch is alongside, Mr. Ballantine.”

“I’m ready,” said Richard, rousing himself, and added as he moved toward the gangway, “‘I’ll sleep on board tonight. Send the launch in for me at ten o’clock.”

Captain Mosby answered me- chanically. He was aware, as he watched the figure of his employer descending the yacht’s ladder, of a certain emotion—a profound ap- proval tinged with apprehension. Richard's strong, well-conditioned body, his blond head that had al- ways a curious infantile glamour, his keen, hard youthfulness excited in the older man an affection al- most paternal.

“T’d like it better if we were heading out to sea,”’ he muttered, staring at the motor boat’s smooth wake. He had an unreasonable but persistent fear that Richard some day would be drawn back into the life that went on ashore there, under the wide, somber roof of Ballanton. That, to his notion, would be a kind of defeat, a sin against Nature. Richard, alone of his tribe, had the gift of perfect freedom. Let him guard it, then, reflected the captain, as he would guard his honor.

Landing at the Ballantine pier, the young man climbed the stone

steps, unexpectedly familiar, that led up the bank. These steps brought him to a vine- darkened pergola through which a gravel path wandered toward incidental gardens, and beyond these the great house rose brown and monstrous in its setting of oaks. As Richard started along the path a crash of thunder announced the approach of the storm that had been threatening. He hur- ried, and had reached the end of the pergola when he saw standing in the garden be- yond, beside a-bush of yellow flowering for- sythia, a girl in a white dress without a hat on her head.

She was looking directly at him; she must have seen him coming up the path, yet his first thought was that he had startled her. She seemed, in spite of her apparent poise, subtly alarmed, frightened. It was a puzzling impression. Because there was no sign of fear in the intelligent dark eyes looking steadily into his. It was rather an alertness, a readiness for flight, such as one sees in the eyes of birds and animals—quick creatures whose instinct is for wildness, for continual escape.

The wind blew against the bush, making the yellow blossoms flutter. She too, opposing her slender body to the gust, seemed to be urged to movement, to abandoned flutterings. Her figure was molded and revealed as though by the force that had created her—a force contemptuous of draperies as it was resentful of her stillness.

“You're the sailor brother.”’

He nodded and went toward her, holding out his hand. “No need to ask who you are.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, of course—you’re Regina ——

“Yes, I’m Regina.”

“You're going to marry my brother Charles.”

“Yes, but’’—her voice was curiously blurred by the wind—‘“you mustn't say it like that. So casually! It’s a tremendous thing, you know.”

“Tremendous, is it?’”’

“Oh, yes, I——"" Several words—a whole phrase—lost in the gust; then her voice, light and brittle as a bell heard at a distance: “I can’t get over the feeling—can’t believe I’m not dreaming. I came out here to try to realize—to pinch myself! Then I saw the yacht, and watched it. Fas- cinating! I guessed it was you. They’d told me you were coming. I wanted to see you.”

“My wanting to see you,” shouted back Richard, as a bolt of lightning crackled, ‘‘has driven me across the Atlantic.”

”

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

“Really? You've come all that way just to see what strange creature ——”’

“Yes! And I’ve brought you a present. In my trunk aboard the schooner. Better get back into the house now,” he added with a glance into the west. “Be pouring rain in a minute ——”’

“Were you prepared to dislike me?” she asked, making a little movement toward him.

“No. Not at all! I thought possibly you understood witchcraft. To have enchanted Charles, you know.”

“Oh! How funny! But—you'll be disappointed.”

“T don’t think so. What is it about first impres- sions? All this has been most satisfying.”

“You were satisfying,” she said, ‘coming up the path with that thundercloud over your shoulder. Charles said you were a Viking.”

“Then Charles has changed. He never used to say things like ——”’

“No. You're right. It was I who said it,”’ she confessed, and laughed suddenly till she was breathless. ‘‘Oh, how funny!”

“Here comes the deluge,” he called out. “‘Run!”

“Lord!” she said and, turning, ran fast along the garden path, and he after her. As they reached the flagstone terrace that made an entrance to the house, the rain fell suddenly in torrents. He caught her hand and dragged her up the steps, and so they came bursting into the high, dim hall of Ballanton, and almost into the arms of its dowager mistress who, with Aunt Alexandra a little behind her— as always—stood erect and implacable in the open door- way.

“Mother!” said her younger son, panting. ‘‘ Hello—I’ve arrived.”

“Well, Richard. I must say this is characteristic of you. Oh! You’re wet. And Regina’s drenched to the skin. You must change at once, my dear—I told you it was foolish to go out ——”

“Yes, Mrs. Ballantine.”

‘‘We met in the garden,” said Richard, “informally.”

“T should think so,”” commented Mrs. Ballantine, whose voice, however modulated, had always a fine edge to it.

“It was foolish,” said Regina suddenly, and went with a quick step up the broad, faintly shining stairs.

“Aunt Alex, darling!” cried Richard, kissing that soft lady; but what he thought was, “ Regina’s terrified of my mother.”

Aunt Alexandra said, “You look younger than ever, Richard, I declare—and to think you’ve come all the way across that ocean—and not even a hat on your head! And in a rain storm! And running—with Regina! Don’t you think she’s beautiful? Imagine meeting her in the garden! And are you well, my dear boy? And ——”

“‘ Alexandra!”’ said her sister, and Aunt Alex lapsed at once into obedient silence.

“Where’s Charles?” asked Richard. “‘Isn’t he here?”

“No. He telephoned to say he’d not be out till late this afternoon. He’s working very hard these days,’ an- nounced Mrs. Ballantine with a certain severity.

“Then there’s time for us to have a talk,” said Richard. “I want to know a lot ——”

**You’ll have to change your clothes, my dear boy. You're dripping.”

“Oh, not as bad as that.

I'll change later. I sup- pose I’ve some dinner things upstairs ———’”’

“Your room is just as you left it.”

“Come on then,” he said. “Let’s gossip.”

‘*Gossip!’’ exclaimed his mother, but it was she who led the way into the family living room off the hall. ‘‘There are some things you must know, and I suppose the sooner the better. Are you com- ing, Alexandra?”

“TI thought I'd run up and see whether that child didn’t want some camphor to rub on her chest,”’ mur- mured Aunt Alex timidly.

‘*‘Nonsense. One doesn’t rub one’s chest in June.”

“No, Edith,” the other.

But she went upstairs all thesame. Her timidity cloaked an amazing stub- bornness, as Richard well knew. He laughed as he followed his mother into the vast, high-paneled liv- ing room.

agreed

“You’ re all just the same,”’ he said, “‘in spite of Charles’ romance.’

““Romance!”’ repeated his mother, and sat down in the chair that always had been her throne. She was a tall, lean woman, sharp featured, with indomitable blue eyes— Richard had her eyes—and gray hair smartly waved and drawn into a high knot at the back of her head.

“Romance!” she said, and then, “I think this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to face.”

“Tell me all about it. When and where did he meet her?” asked Richard.

“Last winter. Ata charity bazaar. He was chairman of the committee... I’ve always told him to avoid those chairmanships. They're demoralizing—but Charles is so public spirited. Well! She was to dance—and did dance, quite charmingly, I must say: I was there and saw her. She danced in a sort of costume ———”’

“Ah!” said Richard, ‘In a sort of costume.”

“Yes. She'd been sent by the theater where she was— appearing ——”

“How appearing? Not in the chorus, dear mother!”

“No, thank Heaven! They won't have that to say about her, though of course they'll say it just the same. She had a leading part, I understand. A sort of special dancing part ——

“Has she left the theater?”

“Oh, yes! I insisted on that, as soon as Charles told me he’d decided to marry her. And so far we've managed to keep it a secret. You understand, Richard, it’s to be strictly a family secret for the present.”

“So Charles mentioned in his letter. ticularly?”

“The reason’s apparent enough, even to— Regina. Charles is very busy just now. Trying to arrange an international loan, you know. It’s a tremendously im- portant and delicate business. You wouldn't understand— but there are several large banking groups—the Park, Loman group, for instance—that must be brought around. Unfortunately the newspapers have got hold if it, and there’s been a good deal of publicity. Some Western sena- tors have been talking in Washington and altogether it’s a great burden on Charles. So naturally he doesn’t want to have to face, at this time, the additional publicity that’s bound to come with the announcement of his engagement.”

“‘He’s afraid it'll hurt him with the gang,” said Richard.

“The gang!"

“Well, the group then.

His banker friends.”

“So it would,” agreed Mrs. Ballantine readily. “They’re all highly re- spected and respectable men,” she added with spirit. ‘‘ The first citizens of the country. I’m sure I don’t know why you should refer to them as the gang.”

But why, par-

“Oh,” said Richard, smiling, “it was only a manner of speaking. I don’t mean to belittle them, indeed I don’t. But of course Regina would be a long way beyond their comprehension. That is, as Charles’ wife.”

His mother looked at him; and suddenly she exclaimed. “T don’t understand it. I'simply don’t understand it! if it had been you, with your undisciplined ways :——~

“Undisciplined!" said Richard, stung by the word. “Is that fair? Just because I don’t choose to stay ashore and sacrifice to the family idols —-—”’

‘*What a heathen notion! Oh, but we shan’t quarrel, my dear boy. Not when you've just got home. By the way, had you a nice voyage? And what decided you to give up your summer cruise?”

“Another heathen notion,” answered Richard with a grin. ‘“‘I wanted to see whether it was possible for a dan- cing girl to breathe the air of Ballanton.”

“Ah, precisely,”’ remarked his mother. ‘Precisely what I meant about you. You're impulsive beyond words. Once you get an-idea into your head, you must act. You never stop to deliberate ——”’

Richard thought ‘I'm in for a lecture!"" and was search- ing for some means of escape when a manservant came into the room and announced that Mr. Charles had telephoned to say he would not be home for dinner. A matter of busi- ness, it seemed, was detaining him in town.

“Ah!” said Mrs. Ballantine, and clicked her tongue. Turning to Richard she said “The loan!" and then fell silent, as though this portentous statement explained everything.

Richard took advantage of his opportunity.

““Must go up and dress,” he muttered, and excusing himself went quickly out of the room. All his life, he re- membered, he had- been moved to flee from his mother’s presence. It was a queer thing, and rather painful. He felt suddenly depressed as he climbed the stairs.

In the upper hall he met Aunt Alexandra coming out of the guest room, which was in the same wing as his own. That sentimental lady was in one of her ecstatic moods.

“Oh, but she’s beautiful, that Regina! You should see her, Richard. No, no, of course I don’t mean— though as far as that goes, it seems almost a sin to hide anything so lovely. Sovery lovely! Likeastatue— —quite perfect! Such a sweet young body—and such legs ——

“Alexandra!” said Richard, mimicking his mother.

(Continued on Page 89)

“Reginal How Do You— Happen to be— Here?"

STARRING STUPE

is tough enough for a lad that’s expected, among a

gross of other cushy chores, to split seven lower berths sixteen ways and to keep high-grass rookies from trying to sleep in Mrs. Pullman’s clothes hammocks; so you can eas- ily imagine the grand and glorious grief of toting a bevy of bat swingers across the big drink.

If Old Man Cook had started his tours with the bunch I had in tow, including Stupe Gilligan, he’d have gone down in the histories, not as the inventor of international rubbernecking, but as the bird that hatched the slogan, Stay Home, Young Man, and Grow Up With the Mort- gages. To look et Stupe was to think pleasantly of may- hem; to hear him talk was to make merry over man- slaughter. Even without Gilligan the junket wouldn’t have been a bed of roses; with him it was a cradle of thorns parked out in a rainstorm.

At that, though, I guess Bull Grogan thought he was doing the sweet and pretty by me when he hung that world trip around my neck with the side dish of Gilligan tripe.

Jim,” remarks the manager of the Sox to me after we'd staggered through the regular league schedule, “ be- tween scouting and sitting in for me part of the season, you've been hustling high and hefty this summer and I got a reward for you.”

“Curse these constant raises!'’ I kids. gave me ,

“Sey no more,” cuts in Bull. ‘‘ You're saved, but what I'm going to hand you makes a boost in salary look like a zero without any playmates from one to nine. You're going around the world free, grateful and for nothing.”

“On and with who?” I inquires.

“You're taking « ball team with you,” explains Grogan, “and you play in Honolulu, Sydney, Shanghai, end so forth.”

“The whole Blue Sox layout going along?" I asks.

“No,” returns the chief. “It’s going to be called the Blue Sox tour on account of our crowd framing the hike and putting up the piasters, but we're getting some jour- neymen from other teams in the league. You're the manager.”

“How'd you happen to scratch yourself?"" I demands suspiciously.

“I'm not well enough,” comes back Bull; “and, besides, I took that gang to England a couple of years ago.”

“The first excuse,” saye I, “passes mustard, but the second sounds kind of hollow and tinny when you throw it on the counter. What was the matter with the tour that you don’t want to make it again?”

“Nothing,” yelps Grogan. “Can't I slip you a gift hearse without having you look for the sterling mark on the handies? I figured you'd get a rest, see the world and also carry & measage of good will ——”

A whosit?"’ | interrupts. “A message of whiches?”

“The boss,” returns Bull, “like you maybe knows, is a bug on this hands-across-the-sea hurrah and the rest of the

Pi IST piloting a ball team on an overnight rattler jump

“Will ncbody

“Trey Don't Mardty Give You a Thing te Bat on Thies Raft,"* He Kicks

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

you-scratch-me-and-I'll-seratch-you stuff that’s expected to make a tramp out of war and peace a habit instead of a holiday. He’s got the idea that sending ball teams to other countries is a grand move toward making the lion and the lamb lie down together.”

“They do now,” I wheezes, “‘ but the lion’s the only one that gets up. Don’t we play any baseball?”

“Sure,” returns Grogan. ‘‘That’s all you dodo. They’ve got some good nines in a few of those foreign places, espe- cially Japan, and where they haven’t any you can use your tossers in an exhibition game. You haven't any objections to leaving behind a good impression of America on the side, have you?”

“No,” I returns, “but I can picture the cuddly notion of the U.S. A. a crowd of banzais are going to get watching Fathead McCoogan or Spikes Miller heaving a bat at the ump or telling him that his mother’s a lop-eyed crook.”

“In the first place,”’ says Bull, “ Miller and McCoogan aren't going along. We've picked a decent bunch and———”’

“Who's in the line-up?” I cuts in. Grogan rattles off a list of names, about twenty of 'em, including six of the Sox.

“And,” he finishes in a kind of mumble, “Gilligan, of the Lizards.”

““Stupe Gilligan?” I gasps.

“Yes,” returns the chief, shamefaced. “I know he’s stuffed with excelsior between the ears, but he got to the boss some way and hooked himself to the kite.”

“Well,” I snaps, “you'd better drop him if you want me to fiy it. I’m willing to be re- sponsible for the table manners of a backward anteater, or even sleep in the scuppers with a brace of dogs featuring rabies, but I draw the line on Stupe. The trip’s all wet if he goes. That puncture’d be telling the captain how to run the ship and the McAdoo how to rule Japan five minutes after he got a squint at 'em.”’

I speaks with feeling and experience about Gilligan. That calliope-mouthed minus was with the Blue Sox one season when I was pinch-hitting for Grogan, and how I suf- fered! Before the summer was over I was being mistaken for my grandfather and get- ting circulars from every sanitarium in the country.

Gilligan's front name was Joe, but at least eighty- seven people had independently christened him Stupid, a good part of them just from looking at his picture. There was nothing he knew anything about, but there wasn’t a subject from the birthrate of triplets in Hohokus, New Jersey, to the output of

left-handed widgets in Siloam Springs, Ar- kansas, that he couldn’t put up an argument

over. He was just as good on one side of

a debate as the other, not having the usual handi- cap of knowing something even distantly related by marriage to the discussion.

On account of the fact that his mind never wandered, having no place to go, Stupe was a pretty fair hitter, and that’s why he weighted down the Sox pay roll until I took Bull by the horns and put it to him cold that he’d either have to trade Gilligan or lose my trade. Grogan’s judgment was good and he picked me. Sluggers are common, but scouts are born, not made—can you imagine a guy making himself one of those things?

“Chief,”’ says I after a spell of glum silence, “ you’d better get another nurse

. to take your tots touring.”

“Come on,” urges Grogan, “smile for mamma and show your little toof- ums. The rest of the gang that’s going along’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Fair,” I admits.

“Well,’’ goes on Bull,‘ you can stand for one quince among two dozen eat- ing apples, can’t you? It'll be a trip you'll remember, Jim.”

“I got a hunch it will,” says I. “I’m looking back on it even before I start.”

“Just think,” continues Grogan. “You'll see the beautiful bathing gals

October 17,1925

By Sam Hellman

ILLUSTRATED ar Towr SARG

on the beach at Waikiki in their zero-piece bathing suits, you'll ride in those Japanese gin rickeys with a snappy geisha gimme, you'll -——”’

“Tell it to the Marines!’ I barks. list.”

‘I’m too old to en-

ILLIGAN doesn’t join the party till we gets to San Francisco, so there were five or six days of the world tour that I can’t blame for my white hair and stoop shoul- ders. But we’re no sooner through the Golden Gate than Stupe begins stirring his stuff and spilling it all over me. “You got to change that room of mine,” says he to me. ‘*What’s the matter?” I inquires, sarcastic. ‘“‘ The rivet- ing machine on the building next door keeping you awake?”’ “Building?” puzzles Gilligan. “Yes,” I tells him, short. “‘ The annex they’re putting on the Bon Ton Store at Sapulpa, Oklahoma.” “I don’t know nothing about that,” says Stupe, “but Harris’ room is bigger than mine and Gilroy's is right on the main floor.”’

He ® Se

24 + so » Sol,

““Why shouldn’t they be?’’ I snaps.

“Didn’t I bat .267 against Harris’ .259 last season?” howls Gilligan. “‘ Didn't I outfield Gilroy by .086?”

“You maybe did,’”’ I returns, ‘‘ but we didn’t lay out the flops on this scow according to the box-score returns. It was done alphabetical.”

“But G is ahead of H, isn’t it?’’ demands Stupe.

“How much,” I growls, reaching for my pocket, “are you willing to bet on that?”’

“Nothing,” says Gilligan after some of his substitute for thought, “It’s a long time since I left school and ——

“Thirty-one years is a longish stretch,” I agrees.

“What are you talking about?” scowls Stupe. not thirty yet.”

“T know,” says I, “but did you happen to notice how much closer you were to the starboard scuppers than Harris or Gilroy?”

“No,” admits Gilligan. “‘Is that supposed to bea treat?”

“A treat!” I gasps. ‘‘It’s the ox’s spats when it comes to accommodations. I don’t mind slipping you the info that I had to pay extra to land 'em for you. They wanted to give that stateroom to the King of Australia’s master of the hunt, but when I told ’em who I wanted it for, well, you should have seen the purser turn pale.

*** Master of the hunt, eh?’ says I. ‘The baby I’m talk- ing for is master of the bunt.’”’

“*T’ll say I am,” protests Stupe.

“T understand,” I goes on, “that the royal family is still trying to pull that cabin out from under you. It’s sure fierce the way they’ll fight to get near the starboard scup-

“lm

rs. “What's so good about them?” inquires Gilligan.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

“You'll see for yourself,” I whispers, “when you get down to where it’s hot and the scuppers get filled up with bilge water. Harris’d trade you in a minute if you’d rather have his quarters.”’

“Not me he won’t trade!” yelps Stupe. “I wouldn’t have that dog pen of his on a bet; nor Gilroy’s, I’d like to see those bozos try to get me away from those scuppers!”’

On account of Gilligan’s conversation or the up-she- goes-down-she-goes motion of the boat, I suddenly gets a dizzy feeling in the tummy and wabbles away from Stupe.

“Going to eat?” asks the super-simp.

“On the contrary,” I says, feeble, and makes a wild grab for the dan- cing rail.

Gilligan Lashes Out With His Gioved Mitt and Catches the Jap Flush on the Chin

“Sick?” inquires Gilligan, following me.

“No,” I mumbles. “ There’s a fish hereabouts that I used to know and I promised to look him up the next time I was around this way.”

“Tf the captain knew how to run this tug,” says Stupe, “it wouldn’t rock like this. I’ll go up in the balcony and give him a talking to.”

For the next three or four days I’m a horse de combat, sticking closer to my bunk than fleas to a pup, excepting eight or ten times a day when the subject of food comes up.

“‘Can’t you do anything for me?” I asks the ship’s doc, who drifts in for a look.

“Not a thing,” smiles he. “It’s got to take its course.”

“Got any arsenic?’’ I moans.

“What do you want arsenic for?”’ grins the sawbones.

“Well,” I tells him, cunning and subtle, “the bugs are raising heck with my rosebushes and I want to fix up a spray for them.”

“I see,” remarks the pill promoter, “that you still have your sense of humor.”

“And that’s slipping too,” I growls as Stupe walks into the cabin.

During all the time I’m off my feed—and what an‘

off !—Gilligan comes to me with complaints and whines. The flathead’s not a bit under the weather—his brains not having enough power to notify his stomach that it’s on the ocean—and he can’t understand my lack of interest in his merry mélange about menus. The first night I’m on the fritz he drops in with a howl about the meals.

“They don’t hardly give you a thing to eat on this raft,” he kicks. “All I got for dinner was a steak, a platter of potatoes and some other vegetables and a half a pie. How’s a growing lad going to live on that canary fodder?”

“You'd be surprised,” I chokes, “‘on how little a bimbo can get by. How much you think I’m eating?”

“You missed dinner, didn’t you?” comes back Gilligan.

“Missed nothing!” I shouts. “I didn’t even aim at it. Listen, vacuum, if you mention vittles to me again, or drift in here with a toothpick, your mother’ll faint the next time:she takes a look at you.”

*“My mother’s dead,”’ says Stupe.

“Your family has all the luck,” I groans, and turns to the wall.

I draws a lot of chatty visits from Gilligan and I finds out from Dave Hartnett, my particular side kicker in the

party, that I’m the bearded goat on account of the

other players’ refusing to cotton to that weevil. “The boys,” the pitcher tells me, “are all off of

him with the exception of Hank Tracy, and Hank

hasn’t been quite all present and accounted for since he was beaned by Hopper’s fast one last year. How’d you happen to include Stupe in this tour, anyways?”

“IT didn’t include him,” I snaps. “He was included on me by the boss; but now that he is with us, don’t treat him like he was a leper with the smallpox trying to crash a health-week meeting of the Ku Ku Klan. He's human and ”

“If you were feeling better,”’ interrupts Dave, “I could put up a brisk argument with you on that statement, Ever hear of evolution?”’

“It wouldn’t do any good,” says I. ‘The doc tells me that this seasickness is got to run its course.”

“Evolution,” explains Hartnett, who once had a college skin a sheep for him, “is the idea that man ascended from some lower form of life. Your friend Gilligan missed the elevator, that’s all. I wouldn’t care anything about him excepting that he’s queering us with all the passengers on the ship. After a talk with him they shy off the rest of us, figuring that we’re all a lot of loud speakers attached to vacuum cleaners. Your friend Gilligan -——”’

“You pull that friend-Gilligan line again,” I splutters, “and I'll get well just on purpose to drape your lamps with black-and-blue awnings. I didn’t think you’d kick a man when he was down and can’t keep anything else in the same positior.”’

“Cheer up,’”’ says Dave. ‘We'll be in Honolulu in the morning.”

“Hear that, stomach!” I exclaims. ‘‘ We hit terra cotta tomorrow.” And I feels so good over the notion that I

climbs out of the bunk and goes on deck with Hartnett. Stupe’s the first one of our crowd to pipe me.

“Me and Hank Tracy been having an argument,” says he, “and we agreed to put it up to you.”

“The first mate's perfectly right,” I decides, curt.

“The first mate!” gurgles Gilligan. ‘He wasn't in on it. What ——”

“He’s got the authority,” I cuts in sharp, “to make the cabin boy stop whistling on Sunday morning, hasn't he?"’ With which I takes Dave by the arm and walks away.

“T thought,” grins Hartnett, ‘you wanted us to treat Stupe like a human being?”

“I'm not sure enough of these sea dogs of mine yet,”’ I returns, ‘to listen to any Gilligansia. Can you imagine the heft of an argument between him and Tracy? Must of been about whether the ocean was wetter yesterday or tomorrow.”

“Probably wasn’t an argument at all,”’ suggests Dave. “The chances are it was merely an exchange of a lack of ideas.”

Just about this time a jane I'd shared a rail with on the first day out comes up to us.

“We're giving an entertainment this evening,” says she, ‘‘for the benefit of the Sailors’ Home. Is there any- body in your party that can do anything—sing or dance or play? How about yourself?”

“Lady,” I answers, ‘‘there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for the Sailors’ Home, because, sister, there’s nobody more hipped on home than the waif of the sea you see before you now; but I can’t dance on an empty stomach--eyen my own.”

“Can you do anything?” she asks Hartnett.

“I play a fair game of stud,” replies Dave modestly; “but there is a fellow in our crowd who can make Paviowa look like a truck caught in a bog, McCormack sound like a fishwife with laryngitis, and Paderewski ——-”

“Who's that?” the talent scout cuts in on him eagerly. “J. Stupe Gilligan,” answers the pitcher, and calls him over. “Our greatest need,’’ says the old gal, “is for an accompanist. Will you oblige?” she asks Stupe. “Sure,”’ he comes back prompt. “I didn’t know you played the piano,” I remarks. “I never have,” says Gilligan, “but I’ve seen a lot a guys doing it.” ui E MUST have hit Honolulu the wrong season of the year. Instead of brown chicksstrumming on ukes and doing a St. Vitus in grass undies, the only women I saw down by the beach were either dumping coal into ships’ bunkers, selling Rahway, New Jersey, curios to folks from Rahway, New Jersey, or toeing out clams in the shallows. The scenery is pretty snappy, but just misses by an eyelash being snappy enough to make up for seven days of muffed meais and the society of Stupe.

“Where's that volcano they were telling us about?” he inquires.

“There,” says I, pointing.

“I don’t see it doing any volcano-ing,” complains Gilligan.

“This is Monday,” explains Hartnett. ‘ Did you ever hear of an earthquake or a cyclone or any other upheavals of Nature on a Monday?”

“Don’t they ever happen on Mondays?” asks Stupe, serious.

“Never,” Dave assures him, solemn. “Why do you think the women folks picked Monday for wash day? You don’t imagine they would have if there was a chance of the clothes all getting spotted up with lava or pulled off the line by a hurricane, do you?”

“I never thought of that,” says Gilligan.

We have only one game scheduled in Hawaii, a set-to with a team from the army post. Figuring on giving the soldiers a chance to make a good showing, I sends our weakest lineup against them. That spots Stupe on second base.

Gilligan never was such a much as an infielder, but this day he was an untamed sieve. Balls hit in his direction went zinging through hislunch hooks, just stop- ping long enough to thumb their noses at him, and

(Continued on Page 115)

I Sees Gilligan, and What a Fine Messe of Raw Meat He Turns Out to Bei

WOOF-WOOF!

ITH one nota- ble exception, I regard per-

sons who play golf asa

tribe of harmless luna-

ties, who, if there was

no such game as golf,

would probably waste ™ their Saturdays and Sundays playing at tennia, that being the only game which for sublime futility surpasses golf.

The exception is Miss Roberta Bensonby Symonds, formerly of Bosten end now of Westchester County—the firet stone house after you turn up the road leading to the Fenwold Country Club, which, it searcely need be added here, is a golf course and a clubhouse for golf unfortunates, with the usua! brick fireplace containing a section of tree and pictures of English gentlemen playing the game in the year 1531, ail of them apparently at the point of apoplexy.

Since three years ago last Christmas afternoon I have had a profound admiration for Roberta Symonds and have often told her so, in spite of the fact that she shoots a smart eighty-five over the Fenwold course and would rather talk about jiggers and mashies than H. G. Wells and the new trio that seems to be coming to the fore in England.

A man talking golf is admittedly a pest, but a woman talking golf is an anachronism that approaches the point of complete absurdity. On the other hand, Roberta is almost as pretty as the girl pictures in the silk-hosiery advertisements, and generally wears an orange sweater with blue tassels. They insist at Fenwold that she out- ranks all the other ladies and will probably win the West- cheater Cup for 1926

The greens committee said that her form is absolutely perfect, which seemed to astonish the members, though I could have told them as much at any time. I would ad- mire Roberta even if her form was not perfect, because, leaving her golf aside, she has a good mind, and in time ean be directed into normal and useful occupations.

Personally I do not play games, having long held the fixed notion that games are rubbish, and that when a man is not oceupied in gainful or worthy endeavor he should sit down in s comfortable plush chair and not worry the body God gave him inte premature dissolution. I went into the book business seven years ago because it is a quiet busi- ness, and | prefer quiet.

Consequently I do not fit into the scheme of life in Westchester County, where I now reside, surrounded by golf courses; encompassed, as you might say, by thou- sands of old golf courses and hundreds of new ones, an noyed constantly by millions of golfers with bowlegs and atrocious taste in raiment, and by hundreds of millions of dirty-faced caddies who have no respect for an American citizen unless he wears baggy pants and drives a sedan.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

9 By FRANK CONDON

ms * ‘

7 Bxamined a Twisted Rod at the Front End of the Roadster and Found We Couid Proceed

It has been calculated that we have one caddie in West- chester County for every fish egg in Russia, and a fish egg will not annoy a person unless attacked.

Automobiles tearing furiously toward golf links run me down at intervals, and knickered maniacs wave their nib- licks at me and demand to know what I mean by stopping traffic, my own car being such a small roadster that it could not possibly interfere with traffic. It is painted a dull green and looks so much like the surrounding scenery that ordinary sane people never notice it.

Wherever you turn, frenzied-mgn are to be séen hurry ing forward to their stymies. There is a fixed glare in the eye of the habitual golfer that should, be, ealled to the attention of the authorities, ahdoif' Ll’ were President Coo- lidge I should certainly worry-overthe futureof the United States. Two hundred new golf courses, Were started within the past year, and it affects my ‘business, because golf players do not purchase books, unless it’ happens to be How to Keep Your Head Down, by Niblick, or How Not to Look Up, by Driver.

To be sure, living in Westchester has a good side, because it was there I met Roberta, wearing her orange sweater, and asked her to marry me, indicating that my Booke Shoppe was doing nicely and would do better. We talked it over in consid- erable detail.

“Will you?” I inquired, meaning marry me.

“No, Leander,” she replied, smiling in her usual pleasant way.

“ Why? ”

“Because you're so small and helpless,”’ she said.

The physical fact was and remains true; but Roberta laughed during our talk, and my theory is that if a girl smiles when she formally declares she will not marry you, the thing to do is to hang about and badger her with questions: I did so, until it began to seem useless.

“Of course,” I said sharply on another occasion,

“if you're getting your husbands in by the hun- dredweight, that’s another matter.”

“You should never marry, Leander,” she replied.

“T never'will,” I said, and I meant it.

Roberta is probably the only genuinely pretty woman that ever played golf in Westchester County.

ILLUSTRATED

« but_never does any real toil.

October 17,1925

Br mM. LZ. BLUMENTHAL

pm ”

pwerese fk cc”

+. ;

Pri a F _) } r & b+ ,

There may be lady golfers in Florida or California who smite the eye hap- pily; but out our way the female divot diggers are invariably stern and rockbound.

I am forced to except Roberta Symonds, because even when she is clad in her golfing armor, she remains a delight- ful spectacle, a ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy world, and the male members of Fenwold go to all sorts of silly lengths to win her casual attention.

The two golfing males who have been fluttering about her most diligently for the past year are John Stevenson and Lloyd Jarvis Tripp, both members of Fenwold and likewise of the great American leisure class that has offices The Stevensons make ele- vators for apartment buildings, and Lloyd Tripp’s hard- working father owns a factory in Newark, New Jersey, with branches in five cities. Both parents are now striving desperately to pass the ten- million mark, or maybe it’s

> but neither son is striving at anything, except to

Kéep in the early eighties, with a seventy-six now and

then. The demands upon their time are so infinitesimal that they can and do devote themselves exclusively to

& Caretese Workman Had Left a Lawn Roller

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 27

playing golf and winning the hand of Roberta Symonds; and despite the fact that I once was in the race myself, or thought I was, they come to me with confidences and seek encouragement. Each man has won Roberta twice within the last twelvemonth, but not quite to the point of a church wedding with flowers and a news-reel man on the steps.

“Are you going to marry John?” I asked Roberta early this spring, sitting upon the lower porch of her house and feeling a trifle depressed.

“I don’t know,” she said. ‘‘One can never tell about the future.”

“How about Lloyd?”

“‘He’s a jolly dear,’ she answered, “and he shoots a mashie shot as well as Bobby Jones. Lloyd is a. boy with a wonderful future and there are people who believe he may some day win the state amateur championship.”

“That’s lovely,” I said. “ What’s it got to do with your marrying him?”

“You are talking about marriage,”’ she laughed; “I’m not. If you’re going into town, you can take me if you promise not to drive into a vegetable truck.”

This was a slight reference to my ability with a motor car, which is nothing to boast about. I drive a car rather badly, but I do not worry over it any more than I would worry over inability to swallow swords.

Time proved to me that a beautiful golfing girl will never find much to interest her in a book salesman. She never shared my delight in cross-word puzzles, and eventually I left off asking Roberta to participate in my future and found considerable solace in the autobiographies of famous men who lived and died bachelors.

Now and then, but without sentimental eruptions, I had tea with her on the veranda of the Fenwold clubhouse, and occasionally I walked a few holes with her when she played and found it rather pleasant to observe the businesslike dexterity with which she struck the ball.

Spring wore on intosummer. Roberta Symonds won a tournament, one large useless cup and two thimble-size cuplets, and John Stevenson wandered into my front yard one evening to smoke a cigar in my rocker and discourse upon the illusory phantasmagoria popularly known as life.

“Lloyd Tripp makes me sick,” he remarked, after a few practice swings.

I admitted that I had at times likewise noticed a vague illness in myself, due largely to Mr. Tripp’s continued existence.

“His father has a factory in Tokio,” John said moodily. “Tf it isn’t Tokio, it’s Yokohama, or else Nagasaki. Lloyd is utterly no good on earth to any human being, and he cer- tainly ought to go over to Japan and settle down.”

“Of course,” I admitted. “Or anywhere else east of Suez.”

“‘He’s a handsome brute, isn’t he?”

I agreed that Lloyd was handsomer than most men.

“That's why he ought to sail for Japan and get himself into some serious business.”’

“s

“‘And grow up with the earthquakes,” I said heartily. “Why is it you have suddenly taken this hatred of him?”

‘Because as long as he continues to dawdle about here Roberta Symonds will not marry me—that’s why.”

“And if he goes to Japan to make rugs, she will?” I asked.

“Certainly,” said John. “ We've talked it over. I know how she feels toward me. It’s that pest of a Lloyd. . Roberta’s a lovely soul, isn’t she?”’

“She has nice eyes,’”’ I admitted. bang into a brassy shot. Marvelous!”

“So,” John continued, reverting to his cheerless tone, “T’m going to play him for it.”

“For what?”

“To see whether he goes to Japan—I think it’s Tokio— or whether I banish myself to London. We've got a plant in London.”

“Not England?” I asked, brightening up.

“Certainly.”

“It’s an excellent idea,”’ I said. ‘‘ Roberta tells me you and Lloyd are evenly matched. It’s a marvelous notion. I suppose if it turns out a tie, you both go.”

“Tt can’t be a tie. However, you wouldn’t know that. I hit a longer ball off the tee, but Lioyd’s iron game is steadier. If I’m going right I'll trim him; but it’s a cer- tainty that his pitch shots are surer than mine.”

*Then,” I said, with sudden enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which I had never previously felt for any part of the silly game, “Lloyd ought to give you two woofs.”

John had been querulously flicking the tip of his shoe with his stick and staring off into the woodland opposite my house. He now turned and faced me directly.

“Two what?” he asked.

“Woofs,” I repeated. He looked dazed and stopped flicking. ‘Is it possible,” I continued, “that you do not recognize a woof when a woof is mentioned? The woof story is a locker-room yarn first told in Scotland in the year 1645 by a man named Jock to another man named Sandy. It is one of the oldest tales in the lore of golf.”

John shook his head.

“You should be up on the literature of your pastime,” I said. “Why play a game unless you know about it?”

“All right,” he said impatiently.

“He gives me two woofs. What are they?”

“You then have, if Lloyd will agree to give them, two vocal explosions indiscriminately called woofs, wows, boos, haws, hos, and so forth. You merely step close to Lloyd at any time during the affray and shout ‘Woof!’ as loudly as you can. Naturally, it upsets him, he misses whatever shot he is trying to make and you gain an advantage. If he agrees you take the first woof on the first tee, as he drives off.”

‘And how she can

“ And the second one?” John asked, looking a bit inter- ested.

“You never take that one,” I replied. ‘The psychology of the stratagem is to refrain from using it. Your opponent is constantly expecting it. As the game continues he falls an easy prey to various nervous disorders and his self- control is shattered, making it simple for you to defeat him. . And you never heard of a woof! A fine gelfer you are!”

“Tt sounds interesting,” said John. “‘I wonder if Licyd has heard about it.”

“Probably not. You have to be in the book business to know about golf.”

He left my house in a much brighter mood and seemed to be chuckling as he passed down the walk. Three days later I escorted Roberta to Fenwold, where she had a match with a well-known woman star from Santa Barbara. Her own car being broken down, she telephoned over to see if I would drive her out to the club, which I was glad to do. On the way she was rather silent, except for a few words when I happened to touch a stone wali with the right fender.

“T hear you’re going to marry John Stevenson,” I said, as we passed Idlewild Cemetery, uttering the remark merely to make conversation.

“Ycudidn’t hear anything of thesort,” rejoined Roberte, “unless John himself volunteered, in which case it would be opinion rather than news.”

“Then you're not going to marry him?"

“Perhaps I am. He is one of the most amiable men I know, and he surely would make a dependable husband. There—there you are. . Leave it to you.”

The last few words had to do with a slight ditch into which one of the wheels strayed, jerking us about without damage. You could scarcely call it a ditch, and I ran into it simply because I was paying close attention to what the giri

(Continued on Page 183)

Directly Between Me and the Clubhouse, and What With Overhearing Roberta Speak and Trying to Turn My Head Quickly, I Naturatly Fett Over the Rolter

COUSIN JANE

ANE always dated her J growing old from a day when she had been working in that garden. It was 80 long afterward that the work had been shorn of ali ingratiating disguise; the early childish pretense that she was playing a game in which she could brilliantly surpass Marcy Tedmon or make herself believe that the growing things were her children to be tended and made fat, and entertained the while with tales of the good time they would have in the great warm cellar so soon to house them from winter. On this day she could hardly have recalied Seth Hacker's first warm ap- provals after Sareh’s tru- ancy, his stout reiterations that this garden had be- come a different garden since the night that trifling town-looker eplit the wind. Long years since, Seth had quit muttering about the truant, Jane on this day straightened a moment to rest from her stooping pos- ture above an onion bed of promise, her mind placidly awere of nothing but that the ache in her back would quickty go,

Beyond that, she was eonscious only of silence and warmth, an immense soothing peace that brooded al} about her, pat- terned lightly by aimless bird notes from the or- chard, the languid, heavy drone of u hovering bumble- bee and the scent of blos- some, of turned earth, of green staiks lately watered that the sun already stewed-—scents that seemed to loaf toward her, unhurried and uninsistent. She floated restfully on this.

Then from no cause outside, where nothing changed, she was caught in a startled wonder, as if the firm floor of the garden bed had become a quicksand. She stiff- ened under the shock, flexing all her body against a menace of something there close, but unseen.

“Why—why!" she breathed; a weak, dismayed admis- sion of this fear that so absurdly flooded her.

The sound of her own voice steadied her, lifted her outside herself, safe once more, it seemed. There she was, standing securely in a garden all too familiar, among prosaic known things. She stooped to piuck a reassuring weed from the bed, shook the earth from its roots and dropped it on a pile of its fellows, already withered; reached for another, to prove to herself that nothing had happened.

Put something had, and again she voiced her weak little “Why—why!” of acknowledgment. Pulling more weeds didn't wipe the thing out.

Yet to her bigher sense, there was nothing to frighten. There couldn't be, Nothing had changed, from the staunch earth to the birds above it in the orchard and the great sleepy drone of the bee that circled her. The barn slept in the sun as always, giving cff its smell of scorched wood; and further on she could see the kitchen entrance, with its screen door held back by a metal pail, because Chong wouldn't be bothered to open and shut it. Climbing a trellis beyond this was the bush of white roses, ‘ Blossom- ing ita foot head off,”’ as Seth Hacker each spring remarked. She was still startled, but now she was more abashed than afraid, as if she were being observed by hidden eyes, in- scrutable eyes that perhaps didn’t threaten, but were yet disconcerting

Casually, she pulled several weeds as a testimony that things were the aame, then walked from the spot where she had suffered this curious agitation. But the thing dogged her