Argosy All-Story Weekly, November 13, 1920 — page 76: what you’re looking at

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

hy A Breckenridge | Ellis PRECEDING CHAPTERS BRIEFLY RETOLD “—D° you,see that?” Jim Blearstead shoved a newspaper story of how John Lyle Warring was still expecting the return of his son who had been kidnaped some twenty years ago, under the eyes of Harve Cleek, a local pugilist, who came into Blearstead’s eating-house at closing time. Blearstead had abducted the child, but reported the nurse-maid, who had been his pal, had drowned the boy. With Cleek’s help, Blearstead now proposed to palm off his young nephew, John Walters, for the long lost son. The young man who had been induced by the pair to assist in a robbery against his will, insisted he was going straight and declined to take part in the deception. But the entrance of the police cut short his protestations. The law was looking for the burglar who had entered the Troost Avenue house of Alice Klade. —_ Blearstead hid his nephew under a pile of soiled linen while the police searched the premises. Next day Cleek hauled him away in a laundry-basket and hid him in a tenement, where he left - clothes and instructions from his uncle. Tacky Hode would row him up-river, and then he was to exchange his identity for that of John Lyle Warring, kidnaped son of the millionaire. Hode’s daughter Bettie and John were friends. On an old pencil-addressed envelope which he found in his hiding-place, and which envelope had been stamped “New York, March 4,” without the year, John wrote Bettie a note which might serve later on to establish an alibi. Two days later he rang the bell of the Warring house. His credentials demanded, the young man opened his package with the “identification tags’ and then Lucia threw her arms about him and exclaimed: “ My brother!” Mr. Glaxton, a Denver lawyer and a cousin of Mr. Warring, was also a member of the millionaire’s household and his principal advisor. business. At the moment he was out of town on When John saw how much his supposed father had been benefited by the imposition, he had little compunction over his deception. He promised himself he would “handle” the Denver lawyer, who had usurped Mr. Warring’s will as well as his authority. Virgie sent John to see Brother Harry Tredmill and he returned resolved to see that Eugene Ware, Lucia’s fiancé, as well as Glaxton fell in line. That much he could do for “his sister and father.” But the news of the mysterious presence of two detectives in Lagville who had called at the Warring house looking for one John Walters, wanted for robbery in Kansas City, gave him considerable anxiety. The women had _ successfully dismissed the detectives, but John’s troubles were not at an end: Alice Klade, whose house John had entered on Troost Avenue, was Lucia’s dearest friend and she was coming for a visit. Some evenings later he was sitting with Lucia in the moonlight trying to dissuade her from her marriage with Eugene Ware. CHAPTER XV. THE BROKEN ENGAGEMENT. FEW days later, after intense hours A cost to his problem, John sought the Ware Dry-Goods Emporium and invited the proprietor to a corner behind a high rampart of shoe-boxes where confi- dences were possible. Lucia, when she learned of Bettie, was equally insistent. Kugene Ware was six or seven years his senior, a good-looking, dry man, immensely absorbed in business, without curiosity. He had visited John and been visited by him and it was not in nature for him to catch sight of the other without feeling the bur- den of the hours thus dragged through the dust of labored small-talk. could not sustain his end of any conversa- This story began in the Argosy-Allstory Weekly for October 30. ' 354 Eugene comicbook