Adventure, November 1915 — page 200: what you’re looking at

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

wr r: \ . f 198 “T-want to ask Mr. Norton——” the bleat shivered, and stopped wheezingly. She’d frightened him almost as badly as the freshet. “Well, you can’t ask fins. But you know what Mr. Norton would——” “Norton is a daredevil,” he broke in harshly. Evidently the freshet fright went deepest home. “But those suits, Mr. MacKinnon? It means bankruptcy, dishonor, the end of - everything.” The young woman lowered her tones to their deepest note. “Tt ain’t a matter of suits,” blubbered the voice. “It’s a matter of human lives, and: “Of your life, Mr. MacKinnon, I take it.” Just then the door behind blew open with a sudden acceleration of the tempest, and the cry from within the chamber pierced her through and through—— “Tf I had one man I could trust—just one!” Then for the first time she realized that there was one who could not fail her hus- band in this, his sharpest need. “Wait,” she shouted, and the masculin- ity of her voice startled her with its per- emptoriness. “I am coming down. Wait —do you hear?” A moment she hesitated, the receiver still at her ear, while a bored hello girl sug- gested through it, ‘““Did you get them?” “Not yet,” she laughed back almost gaily, “but I will.” SHE hung up the receiver, still smiling mischievously. Emma Norton’s face was not unlike that of a baby, with wide eyes of violet blue, bobbing bronze curls on either side of her softly-tinted cheeks, but the set of her jaw, when one noticed it, was almost tragically granitic. Yet so far nobody had noticed it. She gathered cloak, rubbers, umbrella, whisked back to the phone to order her brother to rush promptly to the mill; then, stealing across the hall where the nurse lay asleep, she groped for the nurse’s leather visiting-case, carried it .to the light and selected something that shone brightly. When the case was back in its place she left the room, to tiptoe back in a minute and arouse the nurse. The woman came yawning, protesting that she still had an allotted hour of sleep and the patient was quiet. - Adventure “Tf you'll watch straight until tomorrow noon, Pll give you a hundred dollars,” | whispered the girl. “Ts it a go?” The woman grinned sleepily. “Say, you’re the wonder of the lot,” she yawned. ‘“Surest thing you know, I will.” Emma Norton smiled to herself again when she detected the melodramatic step with which she was stealing, ten minutes later, into the high mill door. Something new within her was moving her in her-réle. She crawled, foot by foot, down the hallway and slid like an apparition in upon the assistant, cringing over his desk. His wizened face, with its Punchlike nose and chin, its frizzle of toneless hair—it had been carrotty, and now was nondescript with insprinkled white—turned a shade . more pallid as he glanced up and found her there. He squirmed before her. Moved by some dramatic absurdity the girl chuck- led aloud. “This is no laughing matter, marm!’’ he commented pompously. “Vm not laughing at the catastrophe,” she cried, “but at you; you’re welshing already. Why, the fight hasn’t begun. I’m here to start it, though.” He arose solemnly from his chair, a dried- up pretense at a superior sex, an automaton of a creature, a penhandle for recording orders and for executing them rigidly; use- less in an emergency, yet lifted above all femininity by the fact of his trousers—at least so he saw things. “I’m the boss here, since Mr. Norton does his own supering, and I'll be interfered with by no woman living,” he tried to blaze her down with his red-rimmed eyes. “But Mr. Norton would not give up,” she cooed. “Norton’s a daredevil, and I’ve told ye so. I guess he’s got a wife to suit; but the good Lord has put the lives of these men and women in my hands and [’ll —— “Have a care,’ she answered. He sneered: “This ain’t no place for footlight work. You get back home—you hear me?” She only laughed in an inane way. The fellow before her slumped irritably back into his desk, leaning to press a button. The instant his head was turned an amazing change came over her. A sickly-sweet odor reeked through the room. “What are you at?” he shrilled, and tried to get his legs from beneath his desk. Gomichbooks com