The Argosy, Vol. 82, No. 3 — page 75: what you’re looking at

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

WC od »5 is WEDDING HOPES. HEN old Morrison made his god- Vf daughter a wedding present of a coel two thousand dollars he un- consciously supplied a certain little un- dressed deity with the ammunition for an- other job in a fashion to put him beyond the limits of even the most benevolent neu- trality. You ‘see, the aforesaid god-daughter was marrying Mr. Ashworth King, who had served Mr. Morrison faithfully for ten years in the capacity of buyer at a salary of twenty-five per. You see, also—or you shall see—that the best man at the wedding was Mr. Arthur Bannock, who had man- aged Mr. Morrison’s factory faithfully for eleven years at a salary of twenty-eight dol- lars. Mr. Ashworth King didn’t mind a bit giving such of the wedding guests as might not know better the impression that he was a very valuable man. He saw to it that the check lay in plain sight on the table of dis- played gifts. To Bannock, who knew nothing of the god-daughter relationship, King even whis- pered that he wasn’t yet too sure he hadn’t earned that gift above his salary once or twice over—though it was sure the swell thing for the old man to do even at that. Which set Arthur Bannock to figuring. If Morrison did thus much for a ten-year employee worth twenty-five a week, it stood 5 A 2 See George Mariano eek to reason the old man would do no less for an eleven-year employee worth twenty- eight. Oid Morrison rather clinched the matter when he crossed Bannock’s path as Arthur was leaving the exhibition-room, slapped his manager on the back and jovially re- marked: “This is what you ought to do, Ban- nock!” ‘“T don’t know but you’re right,” Ban- nock responded, the figures working hard in his brain. For six of the eleven last years Bannock had been wishing he might get married. For all of those six years Miss Eleanor Jan- greaves had been patiently waiting until he might get married. But how could he sup- port Eleanor on twenty-eight per week in anything remotely resembling the comforts in which she was living? A two thousand dollar start would cer- tainly make a difference. Two thousand might not last a man a lifetime; but it could help a lot. Put it, for instance, into the five thousand dollar house on which he and Eleanor had been gazing longingly for the past eight months. The owners wanted forty-five dollars a month rent for that house. If he paid down on it the five hundred he had saved up. he would have to keep on paying forty- five a month to a building loan association for years and years, not to mention taxes and other things that make property-owning miserable. 449 COPMICLOOKS (C@)