The Argosy, Vol. 83 No. 1 — page 167: what you’re looking at

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

HIS MAD MOVE ON THE MOVIES. mind?—let me have a word with Mr. Dar- ton first?” Westling put in breathlessly. “Tf he means to sail on this boat—but I’m not going to let you sail!” “You may have nothing to say about it!” Jimmy corrected. “And again, I may have much to say about it,” the big man insisted, with as- tonishing suavity. ‘“‘Just be calm for a moment, Mr. Darton. Please! Is it true, as I have been informed, that you have abandoned your—er—American Commit- tee?” “Tt is—quite true,” the founder con- fessed. “Ts it true that—er—a certain rich man was and is behind the move?” Jimmy Darton crossed his fingers and braced himself. “Ym not coming back here for years; I may as well tell the truth,” said he. “There never was anybody behind it ex- cept myself, Mr. Westling.”’ “Well, by gad! I thought as much! Yes, and I said so! I knew it from the very beginning and—have you really abandoned it for good?” “T really have.” Westling laid a hand on his arm and searched Jimmy Darton’s amazed counte- nance. “Tell me one thing more, young man,” he said tensely. “Was it all—all your own idea?” Jimmy Darton nodded without great en- thusiasm. It chanced that just then he was thinking of the tidy little home that could have been built with the cold cash his American Committee had wasted. Stockwall Westling, on the other hand, heaved a vast sigh of obvious pleasure. “You're not going to sail on this boat, Mr. Darton,” said he, rather cryptically. “Because I’ve spent nearly two million dollars trying to find a man with a really original mind and I haven’t found him yet. You're going to lie low for a few days, until I can calm the storm you’ve raised—and I have influence enough in the business to do that, as you probably know. 157 “TY will promise you that the whole affair shall be hushed, and that nobody shall lose his position because he was carried away by your idea. You may rely on that, Mr. Darton, because we settled as much in conference before a hint came that you had quit. But as for yourself, you’re coming with us!” Westling concluded, im- placably. ‘‘We’ll give you twelve thou- sand for the first year, and more as you’re worth it, and a small royalty on the stuff you turn out. But you’re coming, for that idea was originality itself!” It might have been expected that Jimmy Darton would have been quite over- whelmed; that he would have staggered back and mouthed incoherently—or per- haps that he would have embraced Mr. Westling. Instead, drawing the dumfounded Sibyl closer to him, he merely transfixed Sibyl’s father with an inquiring, triumphant, chal- lenging eye. “Well?” Jimmy Darton asked pointedly. The wicked, vanquished father, . who may not have been so very wicked, after all, but whose only daughter’s eye was even then accusing him for the too elabo- rate aid of his partner, mopped his brow | for the last time, and resignedly replaced his hat. “T never dreamed of making a thousand a month at your age, no—if that’s what you mean, Jimmy,” he said, rather weak- ly. “Don’t elope.’’= So it happened late that evening that a certain purser out on the heaving Atlantic wondered just what had happened to the man who engaged A4 on the promenade deck and never came to claim it. He had no means of knowing that the very man, registered as “Joseph Perrine, Toledo, Ohio,” for safety sake, was sitting even then in the spacious bedroom on the tenth floor Broadway corner of a vast New York hotel, smoking a superb cigar, gazing at the ceiling, dreaming, while Thomas Morely huddled down in an armchair, supped black coffee and nibbled at a sand- wich he was really too tired to eat. CORMMICLOOOK (C@