Argosy All-Story Weekly, August 9, 1924 — page 77: what you’re looking at

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

STANDING ROOM ONLY. He gulped with embarrassment. ‘* David.” “Well, David, I have a favor to ask—” “‘ Whatever it is, Ill do it.”” MacKechnie said that with entirely uncharacteristic as- surance. ‘‘T want you to sell your theater.” MacKechnie was stricken dumb. Her next question was shot forth with the crispness of a businesslike demand: ‘‘ How much did Mayer offer you?” “¢ Sixty-five thousand.” ‘‘ And how about the other one?” “You mean Kaplan? He said he’d pay me around fifty.” Eva considered for 4 moment. ‘That sounds like a couple of exhibitors. They always talk loud, except when they’re offering money. Your theater is worth sev- enty-five thousand—at least—and we can certainly jack one of them up to that fig- ure.” MacKechnie was now utterly bewildered. “ B-but I don’t want to sell,” he stam- mered. “Why not?”—officiously. “ Well, it’s the only business I know. I can’t do anything else.” She surveyed him with a gaze of sharp appraisal. ‘You think you can’t do anything else? Nonsense! With your brains and seventy- five thousand there’s nothing we couldn’t Coma MacKechnie jumped a figurative mile. oe We eo” “Yes, we. this.” ‘But what are you going to do?” ‘T’m going with you—wherever you go.” MacKechnie stared blankly into the mid- dle distance—with eyes that saw nothing. His reasoning power curled up limply and expired with a barely audible gasp. “Tm going with you,” Eva Ray contin- ued calmly, deliberately. ‘I’ve saved up a lot of money from the wages of sin in Hollywood. That will be lumped with what you get for your theater—and it ‘ll be enough to give us a start wherever we want it.” Then her tone changed to one of swift, staccato command. ‘ Now you put in a call to what’s-hisename—that exhibitor in You can’t count me out of St. Louis—and while you’re waiting for that to go through, send for Mayer and tell him to come straight up here. Between the two, we'll get this thing settled.” Meekly, unprotestingly, MacKechnie went to the telephone. As he waited for attention from the long distance operator, his first impression of Eva Ray returned to smote him directly between the eyes— “ Beautiful, but dumb! Dumb!” V : THe next day Sol Mosher rode sadly back to Topeka—in company with another go-getter from the Art-Plus Exchange. ‘What a week!” Sol observed fervently. “ What a week! Another one like that, and I’d leave the picture business myself and go back into cloaks and suits. Phew!” The anonymous friend was duly sympa- thetic. “She went nuts—that’s what she did— just plain cuckoo,” Sol rambled on. “ Just imagine, she’s handed a swell contract from Charlie Gates, and she passes it up—passes it up cold. And what for? Why, for a big Scotch stiff like Dave MacKechnie. And he’s so shot with luck that he goes out and sells his little tin horn theater for eighty- five thousand fish. Eighty-five thousand —think of it—and this time last week he couldn’t have given it away to charity.” Sol Mosher watched the flat scenery whirl past the car window for a few minutes and then delivered himself of his final pro- nouncement. “When she made that speech about getting married last night I like to have dropped dead. What she’d said before was bad enough, God knows, but when she topped everything with that, I was killed outright. That swamped me. And Dave MacKechnie cops eighty-five thousand smackers for his theater. You can’t trust those Scotchmen around the corner.” Fortunately his words were not spoken into the aperture of a broadcasting instru- ment, and consequently did not reach the ears of Mr. and Mrs. David MacKechnie, who were traveling as rapidly as possible in the opposite direction. But even if they had, what then? Conn O 227 DOOK CO