The Argosy, Vol. 84 No. 1 — page 73: what you’re looking at

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

THE GILDED TRAP, There couldn’t be a doubt that it suited Ellen. Sweet, patient, contented, and able to manage with little, just the sort of girl to be happy. with a brood of chickens now and a brood of children later on—she said she didn’t care if he never got any more than he was at present making, and she probably never would. She belonged to just the kind of quiet, monotonous rustic life that she had planned. But did he? Was that the sort of thing he had hoped for when he worked his way through business college? Did he fit into her plan? Ellen was all right. He loved Ellen. But he did wish she had a little more ginger, a little ambition to move about and have nice friends and live in a nice place like— No, such a home as Wheelock’s was not for him. No, he didn’t wish that Ellen were a bit like Wheelock’s daughter, who had flashed out of the house and back again the time Wheelock sent him up with a hundred dollars in bills because he had forgotten to draw them the night before. And yet— He had finished the sealing. He trudged glumly across to the head book- keeper’s «desk: again. Automatically, for he had this envelope-stamping job to do frequently, his hand went around to the back of it where the key was always hung which opened the stamp drawer in the safe. ; “ Darn!” he grumbled. Mercer’s desk was heavy. It was like Mercer to drop the key and leave him to find it. He pulled the big thing out a few inches from the wall, straightened himself with a little grunt, bent down— “Darn! Damn!” It was not merely protest against the extra effort of pulling the desk farther out, of messing about in the dust behind it. It was rebellion against his whole scheme of life, against the humdrum of which he had so much that the least added straw must break his temper or his spirit. It was an outburst of hate against 63 working through one day solely in order to be alive to work the next. “Oh, the devil!” Evans spoke the words slowly and with force enough to give them the violence of much worse profanity. The key was not under the desk. A glance showed that it was not on top. Another glance at the safe showed that it was not in the keyhole of the drawer. “Damn Mercer!” he cried in an aban- don of helpless rage very close to the verge of hysteria. This was a specimen of the head book- keeper’s shiftlessness and incompetence. There was just one reason for Mercer’s position; it was the big account of Mr. Josiah Wilbridge, who has sent the fellow down from Wendover Falls. Mer- cer was Wilbridge’s nephew. But what was Bruce going to do? The stamps were in that drawer. While the safe in which such trifling valuables were kept was something of a relic, there was little likelihood of cracking the lock with any tool at hand. Evans counted the change in his pocket. That was easy. There was just thirteen cents. Up at the boarding-house he had fifty cents more, having paid his board and a dole of the funeral bill sufficient to leave him bare car-fare for the week. There wasn’t enough altogether to stamp Wheelock’s mail, not to consider the statements. He looked hurriedly in some more like- ly places in which the key might have been laid. He looked in some less likely ones. He muttered another minor oath, in itself a symbol of his inward rebellion against that life of his which was usually too monotonous even to rise to an interest worth swearing at. “Let the mail go to blazes!” he snapped like a man who can stand no more. He shoved the letters into a heap, banged shut the outer door of the safe, and twisted its handle with a vicious jerk. For a moment in the outer vestibule he paused with the thought that Herman, CEOPMICGLOOOKS) (C@)