Adventure Magazine Cover, February 3, 1921 — page 120: what you’re looking at

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

114 a crush, too. The house and grounds were overrun with people. Harrison Webster was bowing‘this way and that to persons he had never seen before, whose names he had never heard. In the matter of friends, his wife ran to quantity and liked mobs. He was a mild, uncomplaining, prema- turely middle-aged man, and was very much talked about behind his back. His wife, it was said, could do anything with him. Before her marriage she had been a semi- impoverished man-hunter. Pretty, sly, bold and desperate, she played the°game and won a quiet, decent, rich man. Mrs. Harry was black-eyed, raven-haired, slim, unscrupulous, and loved excitement. She was carelessly cynical and audaciously deceptive. “Why,” she demanded, “shouldn’t Harry believe me? I’m a good liar.” Guinnell drifted gaily through the crowd, answering greetings and jests. He was well known. Always amiable and never silly, willing to enter into any game or sport, play- ing well but seldom winning, he seemed an ideal manikin for a hostess to “have around. Webster met him with the eager grasp of a stranger who has chanced on one person that he knows, then as Guinnell left him the ‘ middle-aged host resumed the shy half-grin of a man trying to pretend that he feels at home in his own house. “Poor devil,” said Guinnell. decent to be happy. ‘ People were babbling and milling about under the lights and through shadows. The orchestra played a tom-tom variation and on the low open-air stage a girl hopped and wriggled through a dance supposed to resemble that with which African cannibals prepared their dinners. Mrs. Harry liked bizarre stunts. The girl wore a black mask with frightful negroid features; and she had on barbaric anklets that rattled, a girdle of plaited grass and carried a spear. Guinnell was at first uninterested, then he pushed and edged in more closely, staring hard. ““He’s too That girl’s hair was red, blazingly, cop- ~ perishly red. He asked night and left who she was. one knew. He edged to the outskirts of the crowd and began looking for Mrs. Harry, whom no one had seen for some time. A broad-breasted heavy old woman, No Adventure waddling along the path, answered his in-; quiry with: “Know where she is? Wherever Trev- elyan Ford is, of course!’ : The woman laughed hoarsely at her own jest and went on, puffing from the tightness of her dress. Trevelyan Ford was of a good family, but the family had long been tired of him. He was over thirty-five, agreeable, irresponsi- ble, dissipated, and always more or less in debt. It was whispered that he had lately forged his brother’s name, and the weary brother out of a family feeling had given him the choice of restoring the money or of going $ to prison. The orchestra stopped jazzing. Peaple clapped languidly. Guinnell glanced back. The girl was bowing, but she did not un: mask. She stepped quickly from the stage, threw a cloak over her and started for the house. He guessed that through being in the house to prepare for the entertainment she had got a chance at the necklace and taken it. She had known where to seg it; and she had been cool enotigh to sign ‘Mrs. Harrison Webster’s name. Brokers are familiar with the way that women cry “Thief!” to cover the disap- pearance of something they have pawned, and he said to himself that this girl had cleverly intended that some such suspicion might be fastened on Mrs. Webster when the theft was announced. He thought— “With a “inl like that a fellow could steal the earth and get away with it.” Guinnell was standing in the shadow of a wisteria arbor when a hand was thrust un- der his arm and patted him with careless affection as Mrs. Harry said: “Poutin’ or prowlin’? Here all by your- self—shameful! Is my party so dull?” There were lanterns overhead, but they were not burning, and Guinnell thought he heard the stealthy retreat of heavy footsteps out of the shadows from which Mrs. Harry had come. She wore a tight-fitting dress of black net, glittering with colored scales; and the ser- pentine effect was increased by the sleek- ness-of-her hair topped with a black aigret and the narrowed, up-turned eyebrows. Black tulle was wound about her throat. She looked wilfully devilish, capable of any - sinister thing. GOmIiGcbooks (C@