Argosy, Vol. 112, No. 2 — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

CROSSES OF STEEL. the fuses to set Cotopaxi and Chimborazo and Antisana all blowing their tops off at once! He sat down rather weakly. For a while he sat still, dazed with the immensity of his sudden happiness. At length he picked up Chixon’s letter again. He read it over— not because anything Chixon could ever write again could add to his mirth, but because he must do something. Not even the passages that spoke of Norma seemed interesting. He had taken from them the one great fact. But— He paused suddenly. What about her father? He had not really noticed that at all in his hurried hunt to make sure that it was of Norma that Chixon wrote. And would she feel that she could provide for her father from his funds? Just what had he cabled? Another thought seized him as he tried to recall. He got out paper and pencil. He wrote the words he had dictated to the Guayaquil operator. Once more he leaped to his phone, and this time never grew patient with the long wait for connections. “This is Grout,” he cried. send those cables of mine yet?” “« Si, senor—yes, sir,’’ came the response. “Oh!” It sounded like something drop- ping. His eyes fell to the memory copy he had made of the message he had sent. Change the address, and leave out “ marry me,” the message was exactly the same as the New Orleans telegram by which he had ordered Drake to leave the New York office and join him. Before him rose the picture of Norma Ballard sitting, shrinking to the farthest corner of the divan in her father’s library, her hands before her face, white with fright at his sudden and impetuously fierce declaration of his love. Since that was the last time he had seen her, she must have loved him then as much as now. Then he had thrust her from him by his manner. Then he had made her afraid. And now he had sent her an order to get expense money and come to her wedding “ Did you immediately! It seemed as if he could hear his telephone receiver rasping: ** Gorilla!” But his new hope could not stay long crushed. It survived futile efforts to think up another cablegram which could undo the faults of the first without also weaken- ing its purpose. Gorilla! Well, even that cablegram hadn’t been worse than his first attempt to propose to her. She had kept his picture for seven years since that. never wait another seven years without see- ing more of him than his picture! He knew now that she cared. If that cablegram didn’t produce the desired effect, he’d get it in the end. He had got about everything else he tried for. In the last analysis it looked as if the real reason why he had not got the one thing he wanted more than all the rest was because he had been about twice as badly scared as he had ever scared her. Fears were not the sort of thing to hold him back long—now that he knew they © were fears. ooo CHAPTER IV. VICTORY’S PRICE, {zt might safely be asserted that no more unpropitious moment in history could have been chosen for their purpose than that at which two native structural iron- workers presented themselves at the outer door of Grout’s office shack. It was three o’clock of the afternoon following the sending of his night cablegram to Norma Ballard. To young Vincent Fahey, in the tiny vestibule in the corner, they an- nounced themselves as respectively the sec- retary and general delegate of the Union General de Alarifes de Hierro de Ecuador. For men of such office, three o’clock was a rather considerate choice. Duncan Grout arranged his working day with a view to the climate and the habits of his men, beginning at earliest dawn and ending at twilight, but leaving the hot four hours of midday free for lunch and siesta. In com- ing at three, the men were not sacrificing working hours. Moreover, rough as they were, their man- ner might have been a lesson in politeness to Vincent Fahey, though he himself was a s ee af 185 She would Eomicbooks.co