Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 199: what you’re looking at

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

ihe-lrap out of only that many and maybe more. He had the nerve to give me fifty-two cases and four bits for my end and I went and split that with Walcott because I felt sorry for him, and then I might need him some time later and it won’t hurt to find him feeling right toward us. Well, friend Holy, this is just to say that Dinky Burgess nor no one else can get away with that kind of stuff while I got my health, and so I want you to help at that end with a little hot stuff and kid these rubes down here along until they are ready to fall. There’s a mess of plutes in this burg and hereabouts that made it out of oil, but I guess they ain’t any smarter for all that, hey? You get your Uncle Dudley, don’t you? Now, friend Holy, what we want is to get up a ruction that’ll stir up the natives and make them think there is war on between Marty McGuire and me and that we got to have blood before we will be satisfied. We can work the old game on these pikers because they ain’t on to it no more than a rabbit. Leave it to me to fix McGuire so that there won’t be no holler from him. I'll slip him a few iron men like we done before and then if we can keep it dark except for this neck of the tall grass everything will be dead easy. But you'll have to wise up Micky and get him in shape and then sneak down here after we got the papers talking about it. We'll pull off a little rough stuff in the hotel here and then spread it that nothing goes but a finish fight, and the law is against that, so they will have to take it to the woods somewheres and we can make it secret enough so that all the papers won’t be talking about it and some wise guy blow in with the dope that some one is running a ringer for Marty McGuire, because Marty will be somewhere else all the time. You get me, don’t your You better get: some cards and letter-heads printed for A. B. Crabbe like we done before, if you haven’t none of them old ones left. Tomorrow I will send you the clippings from the paper here and what to write to them and then you better be ready to bring Micky down and pull off the rough stuff here. Thanking you as ever and so no more from Yours truly, : ABE BERNSTEIN. There was a young lady clerk who dis- pensed cigars and papers in the hotel lobby during the day, and went home, with true Southern regard for propriety, before the night fell, a stray bellboy or porter then taking her place. Her name, as Mr. Bern- stein had already discovered, was Carola Messenger, and she boasted distinguished ancestry which had been reduced by the issue of the Lost Cause. She also possessed an attraction which appealed to plebeian and aristocrat alike and ensured her counter being a popular corner of the lobby. In spite of her voca- tion she was so obviously a gentlewoman that even the most dense traveling sales- man refrained from becoming unduly famil- lar with her, though she was affable and agreeable with all of them. 197 Abraham Bernstein knew well, from having kept his eyes open, that Dinky Burgess, in spite of his antecedents and character, regarded Miss Carola with affec- tionate hope and determination. Being ex- ceptionally shrewd, he realized from the first that the girl was not likely to fall a victim to the vulgar wiles of a professional pugilist, and as her beauty won his admira- tion, the welter-weight, spurred also by his feud with Burgess, set his wits to work in her direction also. Since yesterday his half artistic, half sentimental regard for her had been fanned by his resentment into quite a different feeling in which she entered as a personality hardly at all. She became merely another cog in his schemes to pay off the debt he owed to the man who had cheated him out of his earnings. He was vindictive enough to have married the girl if he had been able just to foil Burgess’s evident desire for her. His letter had been sent, and in the morn- ing he hastened to the lobby cigar-stand to see how the other threads of his plot were stitching. Miss Carola looked up from the paper he sought and answered his elaborate and ultra respectful salute with a bright smile and a little nod of the head. There was even more interest than usual in her regard. A famous pugilist was a rarity that excused considerable curiosity, even on the part of a lady, and the events that followed the recent combat in which he had engaged sufficed to strengthen that interest almost to absorption. Carola had to admit that Bernstein, or Kelly, as she thought his name to be, was very far different from her imagined heroes of the prize ring. He was no brutalized thug nor anything like it. On the contrary, he had seemed to be a rather dapper, bright- faced and handsome young man of slightly under average size, with a beautiful lithe build and extremely bright eyes. If there were crudities in his manner her own experience with the ways of the world was so limited that she could hardly detect them. He was always extremely polite and deferential to herself, and that, to a South- ern girl, goes far to mark the gentleman. His physical perfection was apparent to the casual glance, and a woman is attracted to a man by bodily comeliness even as the man is to the woman. Wherefore Miss Carola was fain to entertain a secret titillation—a slight shiver of romantic exhilaration— CoMmichoooks CO