The Argosy, Vol. 81, No. 4 — page 164: what you’re looking at

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

730 panted. ‘Don’t neglect on any account to deliver that message I gave you last night for that little girl up on Madison Avenue. Everybody else must think that Tom Brad- ley is food for the fishes; but I want her to know the truth. You’ve got the name and address O. K., eh? Miss Muriel Stock- ton, 129 Madison Avenue? All right, then. So long.” And off he dashed, just in time to catch the railing of the last car and swing him- self aboard as his train pulled out of the station. The skipper stood gazing after him a. trifle dazedly. His sensations were some- what akin to those of a man abruptly re- leased from a flywheel of high velocity on which he has been dizzily swinging around -and around for several hours. It would take him some little time to get his bear- ings again, and recover his lost equilibrium. Slowly he made his way with his rolling sea gait up the street to the local offices of his line, and then paused, aghast, at the sight of a bulletin which was pasted in the window. “Gee!” his startled thoughts took shape as he read it. “I suppose I had better wire this to that young fellow right away. He ought to know about it.” Then he.shook his head. “No,” he recalled; “he told me not to bother him with any outside matters, no matter how important, and I am going to obey orders. Anyhow,” he added with a salving of his conscience, “my wiring or not wiring won’t cut any figure. He’s bound to see the thing in the newspapers, and he can decide for himself whether or not he wants to come back.” The bulletin which so perturbed the cap- tain was a brief'telegram from New York, announcing that Captain Harry Bradley had been found dead in his private office with a bullet through his heart. CHAPTER XIII, A BOOB FROM BROADWAY. 1? was a fair assumption of the old skip- per’s that Tom would learn of his cou- sin’s demise through the press dispatches of the day; but it proved to be mistaken. In the Middle West toward which the junior partner of the enterprise was speed- ing, the death of Captain Harry Bradley THE ARGOSY. was of less sensational moment than in either New York or Norfolk, and the Cin- cinnati paper which was the first one Tom took an opportunity to look at contained but a brief mention of the occurrence, a scant paragraph or two which the Easterner in his unfamiliarity with the make-up of the sheet completely overlooked. It was the same thing, too, with the St. Louis papers, when he came to glance over them, only more so. A big municipal scan- dal happened to have broken loose in the Mound City which so filled up the avail- able space that any reference to this purely extraneous tragedy was crowded out alto- gether. \ And after that, of course, owing both to the lapse of time and distance, the chances of seeing anything relating to the affair be- came steadily less and less. Probably, if Mr. Thomas G. Bradley had been traveling under his own name and style, some of the acquaintances he made on railroad trains or around the hotels and restaurants would have said something to give him a hint of what had happened, but with “Mr. S. Fenton,” no one, not even those who knew about it, thought of rais- ing the subject. Accordingly, he went his way in utter ignorance of the decease of the man whose vindictive pursuit of him had been chiefly responsible for all his troubles—in utter ignorance, too, of the position in which that decease had placed the little country girl from Dutchess County. As to the experiences which he encoun- tered on that long Western journey, the various difficulties in which he became in. volved, and the ingenious ways in which he extricated himself from them, a book could be written; but as none of these proved of any lasting consequence, they may perhaps be left to the imagination. He himself regarded the trip as practi- cally without incident, rather monotonously uneventful in fact; but then it must be re- membered that as a connoisseur of thrills he had practically graduated into the pro- fessional class. A schoolgirl and the stunt- artist of a moving picture company have different ideas as to what constitutes real excitement. Dropping off at St. Louis with the idea of interviewing the British inspection offi- cers between trains, and geting a few details in regard to the contract he had so jauntily started out to fill, he discovered Go 0)(0\6) AMG S (E@)