Argosy, Vol. 112, No. 2 — page 100: what you’re looking at

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

I, T the completion of his law studies, and his admission to the bar of the Empire State, young Evan Todd had never put in concise words his formula of living. He had not mentally matured suffi- ciently to frame as a tenet that which he folluwed through instinct. However, the formula was this: “Lean until you can stand.” He graduated from Urbanus University, which had a curriculum of wide range. You could select an idealistic course—or a prac- tical one, and thereafter get along. Evan Todd had chosen to study law. He had been reared from childhood, and put through college, by a doting old aunt of Palmyrus. After commencement he wrote her of a plan he had formed. Old Aunt Letitia, a withered string-bean of a woman, read the letter with resigned dismay. She had supposed Evan would be qualified to return to Palmyrus, and hang out wa shin- gle, right after graduation. With the call from the son of her dead sister, however, she set. about plans to maintain him elsewhere for two more years. She hypnotized the hens into laying more eggs; she took in a few family washings; she ached with the extra work of caring for a pair of boarders. Meanwhile, Evan studied law in the office of Hannibal Hoyt, in the town of Bucepha- lus, within easy trolley distance of Urbanus 266 b Edward Walton ; and its fine einisiuiie library. However, he studied Hannibal more. The day after he was notified that he had been admitted to the bar he was cruelly shocked to receive a telegram from his aunt’s physician announcing her sudden death. “ Heart failure; worn out,” was the laconic reason given. Evan Todd remained a day longer in Bucephalus, to. accustom himself to his grief, gather his effects, and take leave of old Hannibal Hoyt, whose visage was vaguely remindful of a sea lion’s with white whiskers. ‘Then he returned to Palmyrus, where he had received his earlier education, in time to attend his aunt’s funeral as chief mourner. Coming back from the grave in the old cemetery where were twittering the first robins of spring, Evan, as his aunt’s only relative, sat in the parlor hearing the will read by Erasmus Hawkins, Palmyrus’s only lawyer. Old Hawkins’s voice cackied with the cracked timbre of nearly eighty years. A lance of May sunlight flashed through the window and searched out appointments of the late seventies. Also it accentuated the dull-green luster of Attorney Hawkins’s Sunday frock coat, that was once of rusty black. During the reading young Evan Todd’s large, pale-blue eyes protruded the more. Long, slender fingers clawed at the sparse tow hair that had been decorously plastered iS 5 ae ete) OmiGcnpDOoOoK ties = : ; bead