Argosy All-Story Weekly — "Sea Marauders" — page 104: what you’re looking at

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

D26 strain his mind, giving him the rest everybody agrees Dick needs. Anne protests that it would be busi- ness suicide for the promising young architect, Mr. Richard Melton, to hire himself out as a secretary; every one will think he is broke and has lost his nerve. “But the best promise Anne can coax out of Dick is that he will assume the name of “ Arthur Vane” while he is working at Colonel Brage’s. Anne also has a hunch that there is something about the whole matter of the job which is not open and above- board. Both Bill and Dick seem to be telling the truth when they~say they know of no underhanded implication that this Westchester County secre- tarial demand could carry with it. Anne is sitting at home early that evening telling herself she ought to be ashamed for being unnecessarily sus- picious when Dick calls her up from Grand Central Station, right before train time. He talks to her so long over the tele- phone that he has to run for the train. And just before he starts he yells into the phone, as a parting phrase, “ She’s going away without me!’ That naturally does not improve Anne’s line of thought at all. In fact, it makes her think of a masterly gold- digger named Gwen, whom Dick once told Anne about having made the ac- quaintance of during his comparative- ly innocuous past. Meanwhile Dick’s train is speeding through the night. When he gets to the estate, he finds it gloomy; and Colonel Bragg, who had a reputation in New York for being genial, he dis- covers is as fierce as a grizzly bear and as forbidding as a dreadnaught. When he discovers, in addition, that he was not hired as Colonel Bragg’s secretary, but as social secretary for his wife, he determines to resign just as soon as he can talk to Mrs, Bragg. But he is astonished into speechless- ness when he sees the lady; she is his old gold-digging girl, Gwen. hab Po, an in aft ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. A series of ructions follow, in which the colonel and his wife, and the butler and the second man all codperate in keeping poor Dick from leaving. Mrs. Bragg threatens him, and the servants blackmail him; but the colo- nel himself caps the climax for the un- fortunate young architect when he orders him to send a night-letter tele- gram to Mr. Richard Melton to come and lunch with him to-morrow in order to sign a contract and receive payment for the plans of the addition to the fac- tory of the Combined Products Com- pany, of which the colonel reveals that he has secretly bought the controlling interest. This makes Richard frantic to flee the multimillionaire’s mansion, and in the black of the night he starts in to make his way from his room through a series of mishaps which bring him to the front entry hall. By the time Dick reaches that point, most of the people in the great house have been awakened, and lights flashed on upstairs. As he flattens himself against the wall of the lower hallway, he hears Colonel Brageg’s voice bellow from above, sees a thin line of fire from the upper banister, and hears the tremendous crash of a pistol shot. It hits a point about two inches | above Dick’s head. CHAPTER XIII. WARNED! ‘ FLIGHT may be a mere flight— until the shooting begins. After that it is likely to become a thrill- ing flight. We come to a more thrill- ing part of Richard’s early morning tour of the Bragg mansion. As a piece of reasoning machinery, his brain had quite ceased to function. A level-headed man must have thrown up his hands and bawled his surrender at the top of his lungs, that Colonel Bragg need no longer misunderstand the situation and shoot again. COmicbooks.com a ge ae a Poon ee poor? ~~ = eee = pa ptr = Gh ee eee Bip oO nme AO ge FA LO oe a en OS fol oe i a Sl en SO SI LER SON aD OL Seo EI A OER OU bs Oe ST a IE I mh