Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 201: what you’re looking at

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

The Trap gess had taken full advantage of the hint that had been given him and had seen to it that no insult his imagination could manufacture should escape publicity. Abe, reading the delicate morsel, grinned with appreciation of Dinky’s efforts coupled with those of the sporting writer of the paper. Then he set to work once more at his composition, which was again addressed to the same party. FRIEND HOLy: Well, old man, here is the dope that I have going down here in this burg and you can see for yourself it is pretty hot stuff. Burgess has went and fell for the game just as I thought he would, and it’s up to you and Micky to do the rest. Just you have the stuff I am sending you copied and send it down to this here sporting ed. and I will do the rest. Micky and you will have to drift down here in a few days and by that time I will have it all set for the big killing. Just to wise you up I will say that Micky wants to be even more red-headed than me and he has got to stage a phony rough-house with me down here at the hotel or somewheres where everybody will hear about it. We will make it look like this thing is for blood and that they will have to pull it off in the tall grass and make it a finish fight. Then when every one has their money down I guess it won’t be so hard to put over the double cross on these Johnny Wiseheimers, hey? Maybe this Burgess guy won’t be so ready to bilk the next pug he runs across, I guess. Ain’t that the truth, now? pretty soon. Well, so long until As ever, your friend, A. BERNSTEIN. When this was completed he set to work on another document, which, when finished, he tucked, together with the clipping from the paper, into the envelope in which the letter was mailed. Then, with the con- sclousness of good work well done, he strolled out into the streets to look about him. In due time a letter was handed to him from the clerk’s counter. It was from his friend, John, or “Holy”? Simpson. FRIEND ABEY: T seen in the paper that you put Walcott away the other day. Also contents of letter noted and much regret that Micky ain’t in shape to help put it over on that stiff, Burgess. You see he gets an offer from the movies to stage McGuire’s fight with Caton in each state and there’s a pot of dough in it for us. You know they can’t ship the films nowhere no more and so they gets Micky to do McGuire in all the states so they can put the films out in each one of them. It’ll mean something like seventy-five and expenses for each film, and there’ll be forty-five of them. So you see where he gets off on that. Can’t you hold up this graft until we can get back? You see how we’re fixed, Abe, don’t you? Yours, J. SIMPSON. 199 Abe, when he had digested this, uttered something like an oath and jumped to the telegraph-desk. He scratched off a hasty message and told the operator to rushit. In the course of events it reached Mr. Simpson, in the following form: Drop movie stuff. It will wait. This game means big money. As Mr. Simpson owed all his well-being to Abe, who could put an end to it whenever he chose to withdraw his patronage, he heeded this message and gave up the plans he had made. Asa result there appeared, a day or two later, a letter in the office of the Telegram upon which the sporting-editor seized with avidity. The next edition of the paper fairly screamed with the headlines: “KELLY’s Derr Gets Marty’s Goat!” Whoever was responsible for the matter that followed must be handed the palm for forceful invective and cutting insult. The editor published, expurgating only the un- printable, a letter purporting to come from no other than the great Marty McGuire himself, enclosed in a more formal one from A. B. Crabbe which, every sporting man knew, was the name of the famous pugilist’s manager. McGuire’s epistle was a seething diatribe in which Young Kelly was described more forcefully than politely in terms so uncom- plimentary as were calculated to take the curl out of his hair. It was more than hinted that Kelly’s claim to be welter-weight champion was based on nothing more sub- stantial than his innate cowardice; that Mc- Guire well knew that said Kelly could easily make the light-weight limit, but that he had deserted that class for the higher one because he would be safer in the latter, as it contained only second-rate pugilists; that, even so, there were plenty of welters who could make him jump out of any ring if they could only first coax him into it, but that none of these had yet succeeded in doing so, the Hebrew being too wary; that he never had whipped any one that any one else had ever heard of, and that he never would unless he caught some cripple un- awares; that Kelly was a thief, besides being a coward; that he never had knocked Mc- Guire down, but that McGuire had skipped and had afterward run himself nearly to death trying to catch Kelly during the CoMmicboooks CO