Argosy All-Story Weekly, August 9, 1924 — page 94: what you’re looking at

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

~ 7 44 Se Ne _ By JACK BECHDOLT isn’t it? There are folks you work right alongside for years and never know any more about them than the kind of neckties they wear or how often they have their hair retouched. Then there are oth- ers, maybe, you never talk to at all—just faces you see in a crowd some place—that you feel like you know all about as if you were first cousins or something. Usually with me it happens quick, like getting hit by a taxi, and yet I had more or less known Dick Cryder a year before we got acquainted at all—and then, blooie, we were in love. Dick Cryder worked at Bowman & Co.’s, like I did, and I saw him every day—a big, brown haired, quiet fellow. We said how- dy-do to each other all that time, and all I ever knew about him was that he was considered an awfully flat tire. He was so darn serious nobody seemed to take to him. He worked earlier and [= funny how you get to know people, later and longer and harder than anybody in the office, and he never kidded the girls or took time out to smoke a cigarette in the hall and gossip like the other men did. He was just a kind of human sphinx, and no- body was interested enough to try to guess his riddle. Then we had the annual costume ball for Bowman employees. I went with Carlyle Manning, a new fellow in the office that was considered quite the snake’s elbows. Man- ning was a wow, with Valentino hair and trick sideburns and coal black eyes and a figure like a West Point cadet’s. All the girls were crazy about him, and it wasn’t just because I was the old man’s personal stenographer and got five dollars a week more than the others that I won out against the field, if I do say so. When I was dancing with Manning I saw this Dick Cryder watching us. He was dressed up like a court jester, and his black, red and white silk suit was hung all over 244 COM A LONOOLK nn