Judge — January 28, 1922 — page 3: what you’re looking at

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

O©cBs20178 Janvany 28, 1922 The Romantic Adventure of John Peters OTHING ever happened to John Peters before. He had lived his thirty-five or forty years like the Thane of Cawdor, “a prosper- ous gentleman.” A little law by day, a little golf in the afternoon, a little wife at night, and a little baby very late at night. He enlisted during the war in the flying corps, and was put in an office keeping books. He always took the first train before the wreck or the one that was four hours late on account of the wreck. When a man had to be shot he carefully headed out of John Peters’ neighborhood, and the drivers of all the automobiles that were to be wrecked, producing bloody and exciting spectacles, kept their eye on John Peters and slowed down until he had passed. If a lady was about to alienate anybody's affections, she took a look at Mrs. Peters and decided to begin her operations in the next block, or the next town, or the next week. The holdup men, the burglars, even the short-change artists, avoided “It wuz the glaciers that cut them hills and hollers, dang 'm, they done more damage By Witiiam ALLEN WHITE John Peters. Not that he was poor pickings, not that he was a fierce and dangerous man, for he was neither. The auro around his head was a dull, dead drab, and you could see that romance would never flirt with him. So when the man in the hallway on Forty-fifth Street beckoned libidin- ously to John Peters one gray winter evening and said: “Hist, buddy!” Peters’ heart beat quickly and his languishing spirit freshened up with hope. He thought he might be mur- dered or something, and get his name in the papers. He ducked into the hallway with all the ardor of an eager soul taking a header into the crime wave. The man in the hallway pulled out of the floor another man—a tall man— and the two produced from thin air, possibly from under their overcoats, possibly from up their sleeves, pos- sibly from the gray twilight itself, an ungainly pasteboard box—a long, low rakish-looking box, clearly packed with adventure “Would you buy a fur cheap, buddy?” “What kind of a fur?" This from John Peters. “A Siberian mink,” said the short man. “A genuine black Siberian mink. Most Siberian minks is white.” So this is romance, thought John Peters to himself. At the office he had heard weird tales of men who had bought from stevedores aigrettes, fine silks, costly plumes, rare loot from the farther Indies, which the steve- dores had secured by casually and festively dropping interesting-looking cases on the wharf and inadvertently gathering in their contents. Here was a Siberian mink A Siberian mink is a romantic crea- ture, not perhaps as bizarre for a parlor ornament as the yawning hippo- potamus cf the circus poster, nor as frightful for the baby’s plaything as the pterodactyl—but, thought Peters, semething rare and racy. Also this Siar} Hasp . a eo ‘en what whiskey ever did—but what did Congress care?” 1 comicbooks.com