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PETER B. KYNE

It was six o’clock p.m. of an afternoon in midsummer, and Mr. Tobias Hand still sat in the little office allocated to him by Worden, Garr, Ltd.—in order that, freed from the turmoil of the general office, he might write the bright, snappy, human-interest advertising copy for which he was paid twenty-five thousand dollars per annum, and which, for the past six months, he was aware he had not been earning. There existed no valid reason why Tobias Hand should have come to the office at all on Saturday, for he was sufficiently valuable to Worden, Garr, Ltd., to be accorded privileges he had arrogated to himself every summer until about a year after his marriage to Laurel Runyan. He had a nice little workshop at home, and could have written his copy there—in fact, his employers cared not where he wrote it, provided he delivered it and they found it acceptable; but the office had become his haven of refuge following his discovery that he could not concentrate at home—that his thoughts resolutely refused to congeal. In a moment of bitterness he had told himself once that this condition was no more than he deserved for marrying a woman who had been named after a tree.

Mr. Hand was now facing his daily Gethsemane. He had to go home—and he didn’t remotely care to. Time had been when his heart was wont to give a little flop, like a newly hooked fish, as he slipped his key into the latch of his apartment; but for a year past, on the contrary, he had been aware, on such occasions, of what is aptly described as a “gone” feeling in the stomach. However, it was now six o’clock, and a charwoman had just opened his door and bent upon him an unfriendly glance that said quite plainly: “Take your feet down off that window-ledge, quit mooning and go home so I can get my work done.” So he sighed, slipped on his coat, lit his pipe, and was walking down the corridor when a door opened and Simeon Worden came out.

“Hello, Toby,” he greeted Hand kindly. “What’s the big rush that has kept you here so late on Saturday afternoon?”

Toby Hand stared at him rather stupidly a moment and replied: “Trying to do some ground and lofty thinking, Mr. Worden.”

“I hope,” said Worden, without moving from the doorway, “that your mental gymnastics had something to do with Rajah cigarettes.”

Toby shook his head.

“Magnolia shaving-cream, then,” Worden pursued hopefully.

Again Toby Hand shook his head.

“Come in,” Worden commanded. “I want to have a talk with you.”

“I’ll spare us both that, Mr. Worden,” Toby answered hastily. “I have decided to resign.”

“Come in anyway, Toby. At least you can sit down while you tell me why. I’ll have to be seated. Your announcement makes me weak.” And Worden took his star copy-writer by the arm and led him back into his office.

In a closet in one corner of his office, Mr. Worden had a small refrigerator. From it he now took a bottle of whisky, two tall glasses, a pint of soda and some ice. He poured Toby and himself a drink, explaining the while that it was first-drink time anyhow, that the day had been frightfully hot, and that undoubtedly they both needed sustenance in the impending crisis. After the first sip Simeon Worden said:

“More money, Toby? Garr and I have been discussing you and decided to raise your ante five thousand, provided you snapped yourself together and turned out the old-time copy and evolved the old clever advertising campaigns. So, if you’ve been dissatisfied and sulking on the job, jump out of it, boy. You win.”

“You should know that isn’t so, Mr. Worden.”

“We really didn’t think so. But we’ve been mystified. Such things do happen, you know.”

“I am not, nor have I, for a long time, been earning my present salary. I’ve decided, therefore, that the only decent thing I can do is resign. One loathes being a sponge.”

“Motion denied. You’ll take a three months’ vacation instead—on full salary—and return with some bright ideas that will be worth the expenditure. Tomorrow you start packing; on Monday the firm will present you with two round-trip tickets to wherever you care to go and a reasonable sum for expenses; and on Tuesday you high-tail it out of this hell of humidity to some cooler spot. You’ve gone stale. A rest and a complete change will cure you, says old Doc Worden.”

But Toby Hand only shook his head at this and said: “Thank you, Mr. Worden. You’re wonderfully kind, but your prescription will not work.”

“Son,” the older man pleaded, “come clean with me. Are you unhappy?”

“Yes sir.”

“Ah, I perceive. You’ve got so you can’t concentrate on your work, and when night comes you’re afraid to go home, eh?”

“Exactly, sir. I hate to admit it, but you’re entitled to the truth.”

“Then I’ll have to resign from your case, my boy. You’ll have to work that cure out yourself. Is the situation hopeless?”

“I’m quite certain it is.”

“Well, as the darky remarked, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to run when you’s afraid.’ Why not have a capital operation?”

“There have never been any divorces in our family; and one would shock my mother immeasurably.”

“I see. Old school. ‘What, therefore, God hath joined together let not man put asunder.’ What does your wife think about this?”

“I haven’t discussed it with her.”

“You might be surprised!” Simeon Worden was a bit of a worldling.

“Perhaps. However, I do not blame her. It was my mistake. I shouldn’t have married her until I knew, absolutely, that we each had wearing qualities.”

“Can you continue to live with her?”

“Yes—at a price.”

“Social, professional and financial bankruptcy,” old Worden mused aloud. “Can you live without her?”

“Certainly.”

“Sometimes young married folk get so close to the woods they can’t see the trees. I’m afraid I can’t do anything for you except give you some free advice you will not, in all probability, heed—”

The telephone rang, and Worden answered it. “For you, Toby,” he said, and handed him the receiver.

“Hand, speaking.” He sat there listening for a minute and then said: “I’ll be up immediately.” He turned to Simeon Worden. “My mother’s companion has just informed me that Mother has had a very bad heart attack, and the doctor doesn’t expect her to survive the night.”

“I’m sorry, Toby, terribly sorry. Run along. We’ll discuss your troubles at another time. And I suppose you’re right about resigning. You used to be a whiz-bang when you could concentrate on your job, but now you’re a dud. Some day you’ll be a whiz-bang again, and when that day arrives, we’ll have your old job waiting for you at more money. I’ll mail you a check for three months’ salary on Monday. Don’t give it to your wife. Don’t give her any part of it.” He was silent a moment, and then blurted out bluntly: “I have never liked her.” He stood up and put his arm around Toby Hand paternally. “Sorry for you, boy. Buck up. You labor under the disadvantage of being a gentleman of the old school, with the added disadvantage of a touch of the infantilism of the new school. Pity and chivalry are the two clubs with which so many modern wives beat their husbands’ brains out. Hope your mother’s physician is a pessimist. Good-by. Run along, run along—and good luck to you!”

So Toby Hand ran along—for two reasons. He wanted to get to his mother’s bedside, and he did not wish to weep in the presence of old Simeon Worden, whose masculine kindness and understanding had touched him very deeply. “I’ll phone your wife and tell her you will not be home to dinner—and why,” Simeon shouted down the hall after him.

Toby Hand’s mother passed away that night—drifting from sleep into death. When the undertaker had removed her body to his establishment, Toby went home, so depressed that he was not aware of the additional depression incident to his arrival. Laurel was not in the apartment; nor had she telephoned to his mother’s house that night; so Toby surmised that Simeon Worden had not been able to communicate with her.

It occurred to him, as he undressed, that Laurel would not look in upon him when she returned, but would go directly to her own room. The thought brought him a modicum of satisfaction, for tonight, of all nights, he preferred not meeting her; for she would profess, at the news of his mother’s death, a concern or a grief he knew she would not remotely feel. He knew she resented his mother—not that the dead woman had been an obtrusive mother-in-law, but because Toby had supported her far too expensively to meet with Laurel’s approbation. Five thousand dollars a year he had been wont to spend on his mother’s support; and Laurel had frequently protested that three thousand was ample for such an old lady; that a part-time maid should be substituted for the dignified middle-aged companion-housekeeper Toby had insisted on providing. He had thought this rather piggish of Laurel, even in the days when he was greatly in love with her; and after she had harped on the matter for several months, he had told her things in a firm and (so Laurel alleged) brutal manner.

Well, he reflected sadly as his head sought the pillow, at least one bone of contention between them had been removed. He supposed Laurel would have some brave plans for spending that five thousand dollars a year of excess income. He wondered what she would say when he told her he had resigned his position. She would want to know why, of course; and when he told her truthfully why he had resigned, she would be very angry and weep, and accuse him of a low attempt to make her responsible for his futility and failure.

He had wept when his mother passed away, for she had been a good and loving mother to him, and he had for her all of a good son’s affection and appreciation. Well, he was not a weakling; he would not weep again until the earth closed over her. He was not a selfish man, but it did occur to him that in dying his mother had performed a last labor of love. She had made it possible for him to free himself from Laurel. After the funeral he would have a plain talk with Laurel and ask her if she wished to divorce him. He had about twenty thousand dollars in good bonds, all that was left of the sixty thousand dollars he had saved when he married her. He would give Laurel half those bonds, and she could have the apartment; he would pay her five thousand a year alimony. After the divorce he would go away for three months; when he had himself in hand again, he would come back to his old position with Worden, Garr, Ltd. He knew the spark of his genius had not gone out. It was merely burning low—required more oxygen.

Thoughts raced through Toby Hand’s head with something of the speed with which a pet squirrel treads the play-wheel in its cage, and so it was dawn before he fell asleep. At eight o’clock he was awakened by a gentle shaking and discovered Laurel standing beside his bed.

He rubbed his eyes and looked up at her, and saw that she was dressed for the street; the thought occurred to him that she presented a very striking and decorative note in the room.

She was twenty-six years old but did not look it. She was five feet six inches tall and possessed an exquisitely graceful figure; some people (including Toby) thought she was regal-looking. She had thick hair of such a pronounced Titian hue that women who did not like her said it was the result of henna; but this was not true. And her glorious hair had a natural wave. She had large brown eyes which would have been lovely had they not lacked the sparkle of intelligence; one admired them at first for the fine black brows and the long curving black lashes; then, provided one had a discriminating taste, one decided Laurel’s eyes were slightly bovine. She possessed a saucy pug nose and its concomitant, a saucy mouth with an adorable short upper lip that revealed, when she smiled (which she had not done in Toby’s presence for a long time) flashes of perfect white teeth. She knew how to dress, and she dressed expensively—in short, she was the sort of woman men turn to gaze after on the street.

For an instant the ancient loyalty conquered, and Toby Hand felt a sudden yearning surge of adoration for this wife of his—adoration mixed with sadness, for he knew his love-life with Laurel was ended—had been ended, in fact, for a year, although neither had admitted it to the other.

The glance she bent upon Toby now had no warmth in it; yet it was not noticeably cool. Impersonal, perhaps. She knew he was going to demand an explanation of her absence when he returned the night before; and with the finesse of her sex—a finesse that will always be exasperating to the male because he can never successfully combat it—she had resolved on an attack as the best possible defense. She knew the value of the initiative. She said in faintly aggrieved tones:

“You didn’t come home to dinner, and you didn’t telephone. I waited for you until six o’clock, and then I accepted an invitation out to dinner. I couldn’t get you on the telephone.”

“Of course. The private-exchange operator left at one o’clock. Before leaving, she plugs in lines to the members of the firm only. I was in my office until six. Mr. Worden and I had a conference then, and when I left, he promised to telephone you I would not be home to dinner and why. I’m glad you didn’t wait for me.” In the silence that followed this speech, he looked at Laurel again. “You look charming,” he told her. “I do not think I have seen that dress before, have I?”

“No, you haven’t. And I think it’s just too mean of you, Toby, to leave me sitting here at home waiting for some word from you.”

“And you waited for me until six o’clock?”

“Yes.”

“I telephoned you at four and again at four-thirty and again at five-thirty. When I phoned at four, the cook answered. She went to summon you, but returned with the information that you had gone out at three-thirty, that your maid confirmed this, that certainly you were not in the apartment.”

“I was here all the afternoon until six. I can’t imagine—”

“Don’t try, my dear. At five o’clock I left my office and went downstairs to get some pipe tobacco. I was just in time to see you go rolling by in a cab with Jim Daingerfield. So I returned to my office, sat down and did a lot of solid thinking—about you and Jim Daingerfield and me.”

Laurel turned pale. She had sought to place him on the defensive, to inculcate in him a feeling that he had, justly enough, earned her displeasure—and she had failed. She had fibbed to him, and he had caught her at it. She was suddenly enraged at herself; her rage induced her to do a thing she had planned for months but had lacked, hitherto, the courage to do.

She sat down and lighted a cigarette.

“Well, Toby,” she drawled coolly, ignoring his charge, “did you come to any decision in the matter?”

“A partial decision. Jim Daingerfield is the obstacle to a definite decision, Laurel. Give up that man’s friendship, Laurel, and let’s you and I start from scratch again with this married life of ours. To date it has been a failure—and I am a man who dislikes to admit failure. I seem unable to please you, to keep you happy. I know I cannot give you all the things you want and which would conduce to your happiness if you had them; but somehow, Laurel, I’m not sorry about that. I give you more than I can afford; I give you enough to make a woman not born to wealth reasonably happy. But I’m always displeasing you, and it does seem to me that in the majority of our distressing quarrels there is no really solid basis for your displeasure. The thought occurred to me yesterday that your discontent arises from the fact that you are my wife. Tell me, Laurel, isn’t that true?”

“For once in your dreamy life,” she said cruelly, “you have been doing some very cogent reasoning. The fact of the matter is, Toby, I do not love you any more. I’m tired of living a lie with you.”

“That, of course, cannot be helped. Such things happen. But you can help telling lies. However, I’m not going to scold you. I’m not going to try to enumerate the points of your character upon which I have impaled myself. You would deny it all fiercely, and presently, when I had knocked down all your defenses and cornered you, you would drown the discussion in a flood of tears; if I persisted, you’d have hysterics; and I discovered quite a while ago that tears and hysterics win, although they do not convince. I observe you are dressed for the street, so I suppose you’re going somewhere and came in to bid me good-by.”

“I’m going down to Montauk Point to join the Hetheringtons on their yacht, for a week’s cruise.”

“Jim Daingerfield will be there, of course. He got the Hetherington cat to invite you—or perhaps you did. Well, business is business, and I suppose she wants to help Hetherington out with Daingerfield. Daingerfield is in the big quick money, and little brokers like Hetherington, with their fifty-foot motor cruisers they cannot afford, must cultivate the men with money.”

“Toby,” said Laurel soberly, “don’t you think you are unnecessarily nasty?”

“No, just tired and disillusioned, and still sufficiently in love with you to protest at the manner in which you cheapen yourself. I realize, of course, that you prove attractive to Jim Daingerfield for the same reason you proved attractive to me; but I have difficulty understanding why he should prove attractive to you. He’s fifteen years your senior; he’s fat, pudgy, vulgar, ignorant, homely and a decided parvenu. He’s a business sharpshooter; he’s been mixed up in a couple of shady deals; he was indicted once for using the mails to defraud but managed to beat the case, thanks to a dumb-bell of an assistant United States attorney. Laurel, you aren’t really interested in Daingerfield, are you?”

She had to silence him, for there was no evading him now. “I love him,” she said, and waited to permit that statement to sink in. “I want you to be decent about this, Toby. I want you to let me go to Reno and get a divorce from you. It can be done quietly and without scandal if you permit the suit to be won by default.”

“If you had fallen in love with some man who was normally decent, my consideration for your happiness would prompt me to agree to your request, Laurel. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let Jim Daingerfield have you. You’re not a gift; but you do not deserve such an affliction as that fellow. If I agreed to your proposal, you could marry him in sixty days. But I will not. You’ve known him three months. Six months from now you’ll loathe him. So I’m going to give you that six months to know him better; if after that you still insist, why, you can have Jim Daingerfield. I’ll have done my duty by you, and if then you contract another unsuccessful marriage, you can always blame it on Daingerfield.”

“Toby, you’re a pig.”

He smiled at her without rancor. “I have denied you so very little since marriage that now, when I deny you a divorce under six months, I’m a pig. What legal ground have you for divorcing me?”

“I don’t love you.”

“Not legal grounds, and not the right answer if it were. You love Jim Daingerfield. That’s what you tell yourself; it may be that it is what you have told Daingerfield, or hinted to him broadly. But I do not believe your statement. There’s only one person in the world you love—”

“And it’s not you,” she interrupted.

“Of course not. It’s you! And what a long time it has taken me to discover it! And despite that, I’m still chump enough to feel hurt at the prospect of losing you. But—no matter. I’ll get over it. A wife who doesn’t love her husband is no use to her husband. If I had as much money as Jim Daingerfield, you wouldn’t call me a pig, and under no circumstances would you declare you no longer loved me. Love isn’t essential to married happiness with women of your nature; but money and social position are.”

Laurel stood up. “I shall not remain here to be insulted,” she declared with freezing dignity.

For the first time in months Toby laughed. Really, she was a most ridiculous woman; her hollow histrionics tickled his sense of humor; for the moment he forgot his mother had just died. Then it struck him as very strange that he should laugh at Laurel, feel derision for her. He had never done that before. He was suddenly serious.

“By Jasper, Laurel, that laugh woke me up,” he said. “No man can love a woman after he has discovered she is ridiculous to such an extent he can laugh at her. I’ve decided I do not love you, either. A moment ago, when I intimated that I did, I was merely deluding myself. Yielding to an old habit. I was merely in love with love. Please wait a moment, you unhappy, misunderstood girl.”

“I shall not!” she almost screamed.

“Oh, yes, you will. You’ll stand right there and listen to me and like it. I’ve just decided to be the head of this house—king for a day. Hark to the royal ukase. I’m not going to divorce you, and I’m not going to permit you to divorce me. Now, how is that for piggish conduct?”

She sat down in the nearest chair.

“Very porcine, Toby.”

“Six months is all too brief a period in which to get acquainted with a slicker like Jim Daingerfield,” he decided then. “A year would be better. We’ll discuss divorce a year from now. If you’ve been a good girl, I’ll give you a divorce. If you’ve been a bad girl, I’ll not. Indeed, I’m not so certain I want a divorce; if I had one, I might make a fool of myself over some other fool woman. And I’ve been such a nice kind husband that it hurts my ego to have you toss me away for a clown like Daingerfield. However, I’ll not annoy you with my unwelcome presence. I’m going away for a long vacation, and in all probability we shall not meet again. You’ve got me in such a mental haze I can no longer function on my job; so yesterday, out of a sense of decency, I resigned my position. I’ll care for you amply while I’m away—five thousand a year, the same as I gave Mother. And remember, Laurel, I am not deserting you—merely going away to get myself in hand. If you start divorce proceedings while I’m away, my attorney will learn of it immediately. Don’t try serving the summons by publication, alleging that it is necessary because you do not know where a summons may reach me by registered mail. You can always reach me in care of my attorney, and you will be legally and officially informed of the fact. Do not disregard that notice. If you do, I’ll have the divorce canceled by reason of fraud. Good-by, my dear. Good luck to you, and I hope you have a very pleasant outing on Hetherington’s yacht, and that Jim Daingerfield proves a more attractive cavalier than I esteem him. You can run along now.”

She could not begin to understand him in his new rôle of rebel. He had silenced her so effectively she could only find relief in action. So she picked up a traveling-clock and hurled it at him. He caught it deftly.

“I could kill you!” she screamed.

He got out of bed and sidled toward her; she retreated; and when he got between her and the door, she retreated into his bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. Toby Hand smiled. That she could, for a moment, believe he would strike her, was just one more evidence of her sluggish intelligence.

He went out into the hall and found a bag and a suitcase there. He opened the suitcase, emptied it, and found that which, by some unusually devilish premonition, he had expected to find there. A yachting costume! He knew it had cost eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents, because the bill for it had reached him the day before. He locked his bedroom door, got paper and pencil and wrote:

He then carefully repacked the suitcase, laid the note on top and closed the suitcase again. The yachting costume he hid in his study.

When he reentered his bedroom, Laurel was peering out of a crack of the bathroom door at him. “Don’t you dare strike me,” she admonished.

He roared with laughter, leaped back into bed and pulled the covers over his head; he heard Laurel dash out of the room, and shouted after her: “Hurrah for my side!”

He spent the day making arrangements for his mother’s funeral, writing a letter of instructions to his attorney, drawing checks and paying bills, writing letters to every store where Laurel had an account, withdrawing her credit and absolving himself of responsibility should any additional credit be extended her. These letters he would send by registered mail, with a return registry-receipt requested. He got his trunks and bags up out of the basement storeroom, and packed his clothes and such articles as were distinctly his own. He called in the cook and the maid, and dismissed both with a month’s salary. He looked at his lease, discovered it would expire on the first of the month, and sent a check for the rental and notified the landlord that the lease would not be renewed. He wrote the telephone company to disconnect the telephone on the first of the month, summoned the janitor and instructed him to disconnect the gas and electric-light meter on the same day, and to deliver his trunks to the expressman who would call on the morrow. Then he left his home forever, without regret—and wishing he were a longshoreman, capable of breaking the dishes and smashing the furniture.

He was no longer in love with his wife, no longer in love with love, no longer assailed by regrets, fears, perturbations, no longer on the dodge from his wife’s displeasure. And he was deeply grateful that there were no children to complicate matters; he smiled cynically as he recalled that his insistent demand for children, and Laurel’s equally insistent refusal to bear them, had been the first rift within the lute that by and by had made their music mute. Damned selfish, lazy baggage! If she hadn’t been as healthy as a horse——

A worn, sad, middle-aged woman stood on the corner, playing a guitar and singing in a shrill plaintive voice, “Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?”

“Did you have a boy?” Toby asked.

“I did,” she replied. “If I had him now, I wouldn’t be doing this. He was killed with the Marines in France.”

He dropped a hundred-dollar note into her palm. Here was a woman who had done her duty. She commenced to weep. “He was a grand boy, Mother,” said Toby Hand. “I’m sorry.”

He felt in love with the world just then. . . .

Following the funeral of Toby’s mother, he dropped around to say good-by to his friends in the office of Worden, Garr, Ltd. Simeon Worden had him in for a final conference.

“Well, Toby,” he began, “I suppose you have plans now.”

Toby informed him of those plans. “Silly of me to get so temperamental and moody I can’t do my work,” he explained, “but I’m quite certain time will cure that. I’ll be back in here one of these days, ready to hit the ball again.”

“We’ll miss you, boy—so much that we’ll welcome you back. Here’s a check for three months’ salary.”

Toby declined it, gratefully and firmly, and Simeon Worden did not insist. He said: “Where are you going, you prideful young devil? We must keep in touch with you.”

“Going to Alaska,” Toby replied. “Three Saints Bay, Alaska.”

“What’s doing at Three Saints Bay?”

“A salmon cannery that belongs to my wife’s uncle. He lives in San Francisco. On the only occasion we met, he took quite a shine to me. He goes to Three Saints Bay every summer in his motor yacht, and twice he’s invited me to go there with him on my vacation. Until now I’ve never had a vacation of sufficient duration to enable me to accept his invitation, although I would have been delighted to. He has comfortable private quarters not far from the cannery, and he tells me I can get grand fishing and hunting at no great distance. He goes north each year in early May, so I presume he’s up there now. I’ll go up on one of the regular passenger steamers to Sitka and wire him from there. He’ll send his boat down for me. I’ll stay until the middle of September and come home with him and his wife. That trip will kill three months of my exile. I’ll knock around California another three months, and by the New Year all the cobwebs should be out of my brain and I’ll come back to work.”

When Laurel Hand left Toby following that last memorable interview, she had sufficient time, while descending in the elevator, to erase from her attractive features the fury with which she had parted from her husband. Like all women of her type Laurel possessed a certain hard practicality for use in crises; she felt a few faint qualms of guilt, for she could not convince herself that he had done aught but play the game fairly with her, according to his masculine lights; but this guilty feeling served merely to increase her resentment of him.

Ah, well, of what manner of use was a husband after one had lost control of him? Laurel was glad the break had come while she was still young and beautiful and in full possession of the art of charming men.

She glanced in the mirror of the elevator as it reached the street floor, gave her nose a final daub, and was assured that she had never looked so well. At the curb Jim Daingerfield was waiting for her at the wheel of an imported roadster. He wore white flannels and a straw hat and had a look of coolness which his rubicund face denied. He was about forty years old, a big man, and much too stout. One saw readily that he lived well—too well, in fact—and he had about him a look of careless efficiency and worldliness.

“Hello, sugar,” he greeted her, and as Laurel settled beside him, he said: “What delayed you?”

“Toby got fussy.”

“Very fussy?”

“Quite. He objected to you.”

Mr. Daingerfield considered this, as he eased in his gears and started down the avenue. The situation, he decided, might hold potentialities of danger; so he was silent, preferring not to indicate an alert interest. Laurel appraised him with a sidewise glance, then continued:

“Toby and I have just agreed to disagree. It is probable I shall not see him again. He is leaving town for an indefinite vacation. He’s resigned his position—God knows why, for it’s a very decent one as positions go. When he returns, I may divorce him if we still feel that way about it.”

“And he’ll depart peaceably, Laurel?”

“Oh, yes. Toby’s not the sort to be undignified.”

“What’s the matter with you two?” Daingerfield queried. “Your husband appears to be rather a nice chap.”

“He’s too nice. Have you ever met the sort of nice people who can be so sweetly stubborn and domineering you ache to throw clocks at them? Well, that’s Toby. He’s very superior, and he knows it. . . . Ah, well, our marriage was a mistake. I can’t see that either of us is very much to blame. We’ve simply got on each other’s nerves. No mutual understanding; the more we try to understand each other, the more confused we become. It’s really very sad.” And Laurel sighed audibly, gasped a little and put her handkerchief to her eyes. Without having a very vital reason for it, she really wanted to weep a little, and the present offered as good an opportunity as any. And her tears might impress Jim Daingerfield.

They did. He laid one soft plump hand on hers and squeezed it. “Now, baby,” he urged, “when love lies dead, wise people never come to its bier and weep. You’ll feel better soon. It’s all for the best. When two people discover their marriage is not productive of happiness, the sensible thing to do is part.”

She squeezed his hand in appreciation of this platitude. She had not yet discovered (or rather she had not permitted herself to discover) that Jim Daingerfield was customarily banal and platitudinous. Just now she wanted comforting, and Daingerfield was there to supply it.

“Oh, Jimmy,” she breathed, “you’re such a comfort to me! You’re such an understanding man.”

Since this coincided precisely with Mr. Daingerfield’s estimate of himself, he was flattered. The protective instinct was aroused in him. He was certain now that Toby Hand had been abusing Laurel much more than she cared to admit, and he yearned to protect her from any more of that.

“You and I have been mighty good friends, Laurel,” he began. “From the first we’ve been buddies. I was fond of you from the start, and now I’m crazy about you. When Toby returns—or before that, if you can work it—what say if you and I get married? I think I can take care of you right. A girl like you should have a sympathetic man to look after her—somebody that can appreciate her and give her the sort of life a beautiful thing like you deserves and requires. How about it, baby?”

“Oh, Jimmy,” she said softly, “you’re wonderful. I can’t believe you truly love me. Do you?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die!” he assured her fervently and jocularly.

“You make me very happy.” Laurel’s hand twined around his pudgy fingers.

“Darling,” he murmured, “if we could only have a total eclipse of the sun now, so I could lean over and kiss you right here in the middle of Park Avenue! Jerusalem cats! I’m happy, too.” And the bulky idiot looked it. For the moment, captivated by Laurel’s beauty and distress, he was genuinely sincere.

Daingerfield’s ego had been titillated now. He grew confidential about himself, his business, his financial resources, his brave plans for the future, the sum (indefinite, but Laurel presumed it would be very ample) he planned to settle upon her on their wedding day. He had an office downtown, where he managed his various interests; Laurel gathered that he was a market-manipulator and operator of no mean proportions. A well-known firm of naval architects were even now designing for him a two-hundred-and-twenty-five foot Diesel-powered yacht. . . . Too bad it wouldn’t be completed in time for them to use it on their honeymoon. Well, no matter. Their married life would be one continuous honeymoon.

Before they were halfway to Montauk Point, where the modest little gasoline cruiser of the Hetheringtons awaited them, Laurel’s memories of the tragic-eyed Toby had grown very dim. Mentally she trod the tips of amethyst clouds. Time—time—only twelve short months, but oh, how long they would seem to her!

It was a perfect week, despite her anger at the note she found in her suitcase. Laurel exerted herself to be fascinating, to be a good comrade, a good fellow, which was the sort of woman she knew, instinctively, Jim Daingerfield desired.

Meanwhile, she gave her situation some serious thought; if Daingerfield died or tired of her before the divorce, there would be no sense in getting rid of Toby. Perhaps Toby could be convinced of his stupidity in insisting on a period of probation. . . . No harm trying. She would sue for separate maintenance; under that arrangement Toby would have to pay her at least ten thousand a year.

They were driving back from Montauk Point when this idea occurred to Laurel. Simultaneously it occurred to Jim Daingerfield, and he mentioned it. “Why don’t you sue Toby for separate maintenance, darling?” he suggested. “Ask for half his salary, and you might get it.”

“You forget he has resigned his position.”

“He’ll have to go to work again before long, won’t he? But never mind that. If you win your suit, he’ll have to dig the money up somehow. He’ll figure that a great imposition on him; he’ll regard you as a perennial nuisance—and immediately he’ll suggest that you divorce him instead. I’ve never heard of a husband who took kindly to separate maintenance.”

He might have added that he had never heard of a man suing for separate maintenance, that this legal adventure is specifically the prerogative of women who wish, after a fashion, to have their cake and eat it.

“Grand,” Laurel agreed. “I’ll do that.”

“My lawyer will attend to it for you,” he promised.

He dropped her in front of the apartment-house where she and Toby lived, and drove down to his office. Scarcely had he got there when Laurel telephoned him. Between sobs she told him of the situation that confronted her upon her return: No maid, no cook, no lights, no gas, and the landlord demanding the immediate surrender of the apartment; a registered letter from Toby’s attorney, enclosing a check for her allowance, and notifying her that her credit had been stopped everywhere, and that, in the event of her desire to communicate with her husband, she was to address Toby in his care—whereupon he would forward her letter to Toby promptly.

“I’m desperate,” she wailed. “Jim, dear, what shall I do? I have only five hundred dollars in the world.”

As a man of vast emprise Daingerfield was equal to the situation. “Put your furniture in storage and go to a hotel—one within the limits of your means. I’ve just had a cablegram calling me to London, and I’m leaving tonight. Important. I’ll be back in two or three weeks, and then we’ll see what can be done. Sorry I have to run away like this.”

If Toby Hand had been no bigger than Tom Thumb, he was, nevertheless, a husband; and the bravest of men are afraid of husbands, for husbands are charged with potential danger. They name other men as co-respondents and sue them for alienation of affection; in their resentment, scandal means less than nothing to them; and Daingerfield had no stomach for that sort of thing—wherefore he had decided instantly to put the Atlantic ocean between him and possible complications. When men cleared out of their homes and clamped down on their wives, as Toby Hand had done, it was time for the other man to hunt a cyclone-cellar.

Laurel pleaded with him not to desert her in her extremity, but since Jim Daingerfield was not married to her, he knew he could afford to deny her request—and he did. Within the hour he had secured a passage; he dined with Laurel that night, and she saw him off at the pier.

Upon returning to her apartment, she found a thousand dollars in her handbag.

The next week it occurred to Laurel that Toby must still be in the city. Surely he would not resign the service of Worden, Garr, Ltd., without according his employers the customary thirty days’ notice. So she telephoned Simeon Worden.

“Laurel Hand speaking, Mr. Worden,” she announced sweetly. “Where is Toby?”

This was the first definite information Simeon Worden had received that Toby Hand had commenced the process of getting rid of the millstone around his neck, and he rejoiced accordingly. He was a very wise, disillusioned old man, and a very good judge of human nature.

“I’m damned if I know,” he said brutally. “Who should know where he is, if you do not?”

Laurel hung up, hating herself for her lack of finesse, loathing old Worden because he had so adroitly made her aware of it. While she was wondering what to do next, she received a telegram from Mark Canfield, Toby’s attorney, requesting her to call at his office immediately. She was there within the hour.

“Read that,” he ordered, and handed her a telegram:

Of course Laurel wept copiously; for while she did not love Toby Hand and never really had, she could not actively dislike him—dead; and she had lived with him three years. Also the sudden sense of relief from worry, the realization of freedom, of her good luck, helped to move her profoundly. When Laurel at length ceased weeping and murmured desolately, “What shall I do?” Canfield replied:

“Nothing. If Toby’s body should be recovered, which is not probable, his estate will give it burial. Toby left a will with me just before he started west. He had an estate of approximately twenty thousand dollars and no debts, and the entire estate he left to you.”

“Poor dear Toby! He was always so kind and thoughtful.”

“He also had a life-insurance policy in the principal sum of one hundred thousand dollars. You are the beneficiary.”

“But—but,” she stammered, “hasn’t he provided for his mother?”

Mark Canfield stared at her coldly. “So you haven’t yet discovered that Toby’s mother passed away and was buried the day before he left New York?”

Laurel’s amazement was genuine. “He didn’t tell me.”

“I imagine he might have, if you hadn’t left his home in such a hurry to join Jim Daingerfield,” Canfield almost roared at her. “You damned hypocrite—you and your crocodile tears! Sit down! Don’t pull any dramatics in my office. Toby was my friend as well as my client; we’d been ensigns together on the same ship during the war; so he was also my brother. He had no secrets from me, so it affords me real pleasure to inform you that while you can start counting your chickens now, it will be quite a while before they are hatched. Apparently, nobody saw Toby drown; hence, until his body shall be recovered, it cannot be proved, legally, that he is dead. The court may be morally certain Toby is dead, but his estate may not be probated until the court is legally convinced that he is dead, and a missing man is not legally dead until he has not been heard of for seven years. And life-insurance companies are entitled to proof of death. They never pay until there is reasonable certainty the policy-holder is not alive. Simeon Worden is Toby’s executor, and I am the attorney for his estate. Toby’s instructions to me were to pay you four hundred and sixteen dollars and sixty cents on the last day of each and every month until his return; but now that he is presumably dead, those instructions are null and void, and you will have to petition the court to grant you an allowance. I think the court will do that, but will not be so liberal as Toby.”

“How do you know nobody saw him drown?” Laurel demanded.

“Because I have had a telephone conversation with the general manager of the Northwestern Steamship Company in Seattle. He has received a detailed report by wireless from the captain, who was picked up with the passengers and crew by another steamer of the fleet southbound, some fifteen hours after the disaster, which occurred at midnight on a very dark night. All hands were presumed to have been in the lifeboats until the check-up aboard the rescuing vessel. There were some boats still on the Yukon Princess when she foundered, but it is not probable that Toby and the missing woman could have launched one of these, although it is possible he may have shoved a light pontoon life-raft overboard and drifted away on that. It is summer in Alaska now, and a sturdy chap like Toby might survive a few days, even without food or water, and be picked up later. It is my duty to inform you of all this, but it is my pleasure to leave you in a state of uncertainty. You gave Toby a dirty deal.”

Plainly there was no profit in remaining longer, so Laurel left with what dignity she could muster, and radioed Jim Daingerfield to return as quickly as possible, because Toby was dead. When Daingerfield received that message, he was pleased. He told himself it was just one more evidence of the Daingerfield luck. He always got the breaks. In order to make good on his bluff anent his pseudo-important conference in London, he cabled Laurel he had completed his business, and was returning on the next boat leaving Southampton.

Laurel met him upon his arrival at Hoboken, and as they crossed to New York in his limousine and drove uptown, she told him all that she had been able to discover about Toby’s death.

“And has his body been recovered?” Daingerfield asked.

“No.”

“Well, then, even if he managed to leave the ship on a raft, it’s almost certain he perished of exposure, or else he would have been picked up. There are any number of local freight and passenger steamers, fishing boats and yachts from Seattle and British Columbia ports in those waters during the summer. If he’d been picked up, you would of course have heard from him by now. He was lost three weeks ago. Poor devil!” he added as an afterthought.

Suddenly he grinned broadly at her. “Why, you’re in mourning, darling! It’s mighty becoming, but—why the devil do you do it? You’re not grieving, are you?”

She could have struck him. She had no particular objection to being secretly unconventional, but she was a slave to convention nevertheless. “Nobody knows that Toby and I had parted—that eventually I was to have sued him for a divorce. Why should they know it now?” she answered sharply.

“Woman’s reasoning!” he said. “Well, darling, how soon can we be married?”

She reflected that she was always doing things wrong, always too impetuous. She should have schemed to have Daingerfield remain abroad three months, and she hadn’t. Now his first move had been to toss her upon the horns of a dilemma. “Darling,” she replied rapturously, “my real desire is to have you drive to the City Hall now and procure the license. But one must consider one’s friends. For all Toby’s friends and mine know, he and I lived an ideally happy married life. To marry you so soon after his death would be what the world calls indecent haste. Why, Jimmy dear, you can’t fail to understand!”

“Oh, I suppose so,” he growled. “Damn the fetish of convention! It’s always interfering with human happiness. How long do you purpose making me wait?”

“Would three months be too long, Jim dear?”

“It would—but it’s better than a year, as Toby planned. Very well. I’ll compose my soul in patience. In what sort of financial shape did Toby leave you?”

She told him of the complex situation in which Toby’s death had involved her, that she had petitioned to have Toby’s will filed for probate and for an allowance, that the court had granted her a temporary allowance of two hundred and fifty dollars a month, so she would have to live at a very cheap hotel.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Jim Daingerfield ordered. “I’ll attend to the bills. Going to be my job in three months anyhow, so why not now?”

She squeezed his pudgy hand; then, reflecting that here was an opportune moment to simulate emotion and weep, she did so. Her tears had upon Mr. Daingerfield exactly the effect she anticipated.

Although normally gregarious, Toby had refrained from mixing with any of the eighty-odd passengers aboard the Yukon Princess. It was too early in the summer for the influx to Alaska of the customary run of summer trippers; most of the passengers were Alaskans returning to their homes. They appeared to know each other, but whether they did or not, they were cheerful and neighborly, apparently on the broad general principle that as Alaskans they had much in common. There was but one other passenger who, like Toby, kept to herself, and this was a girl in her early twenties, an attractive but not particularly beautiful young person whose raiment proclaimed her one who had, doubtless, saved her pennies for this trip. She had favored Toby with two or three impersonal glances in which, had he been in the mood for female companionship or shipboard flirtation, he might have detected more than a vague interest.

At dinner the night before reaching Sitka he observed, for no particular reason, that the retiring young lady he had observed three times daily for three days at the table next his was not present. A choppy cross-sea was running, and the ship was pitching and rolling simultaneously, for the wind was on her port quarter. Toby guessed, without being at all interested, that the young woman was seasick. In fact, the dining-hall was only semi-populated, and when he went on deck after dinner, it seemed that the entire force of room stewards were scurrying along the corridors answering bells. He saw the retiring young lady stretched out in her deck-chair, looking pea-green and miserable. He looked at her with a faint mixture of interest and concern which she, recognizing, repaid with a pallid smile and a shake of her head.

It was cold, and it seemed to Toby that the girl was dressed far too lightly to be out on deck; she wore a medium-weight camel’s-hair coat, but still she shivered a little. “I think you ought to go to your stateroom,” he said to her abruptly.

“I do not wish to go to my stateroom. It’s stuffy—and there’s a fat woman in there, and she’s most dreadfully ill. I was quite all right and proud of my sea legs until I went in to nurse her; then I promptly joined the awful chorus in sympathy.”

“Power of suggestion,” he ventured. “Have you a steamer rug?”

She shook her head. “I’m not an experienced traveler.”

Without further ado he went to his stateroom, got his own warm woolen steamer rug, brought it back and tucked it around her. Then from his hip pocket he produced a flask, unscrewed a cup top, filled this little cup and handed it to the girl. “It’s good old French brandy,” he urged, “and I proffer it purely as a medicine. You’re chilled—and it may warm your interior and quiet it.”

“Thank you, Sir Launfal. You’re mighty kind.” The girl took the little cup and disposed of its contents in three gulps. She licked her pale lips and waggled her tongue in her cheeks after the manner of one who deems himself a connoisseur of liquor. “That’s not hard to take, is it?”

“Nor hard to get rid of, for that matter,” he replied humorously, when but a moment later, the girl got out of her deck-chair and lurched to the rail. Her handkerchief had already performed yeoman service, so Toby took a clean folded handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to her. She nodded her thanks and he moved off up the deck, walked until he had smoked a couple of pipes and retired to his own stateroom. He did not undress, but stretched himself out on his berth and commenced reading.

About midnight he was ready to go to sleep; so he rose, and before undressing reached for the thermos-bottle in its rack to get himself a drink of water. The ship was rolling and pitching, so he had to spread his legs and balance himself while pouring the drink. He was drinking when a terrific impact checked the vessel’s progress so suddenly that he was unbalanced and hurtled forward, striking his head against the teak bottle-rack.

When Toby recovered consciousness—a condition at which he was, perhaps, five minutes in arriving, he was in the dark; also he was lying on the stateroom floor. He lay quiescent, wondering what had happened; then slowly there returned to him the memory of that grinding crash and shock; suddenly he seemed to pop up out of his lethargy and was aware that this was due to ice-water dashed in his face and on top of his aching head.

“Hold everything,” he cried weakly. “Who’s drowning me?”

“I am,” a girl’s voice answered. “The ship’s sinking. The water’s up in the engine-room; it’s flooded the dynamos, and the lights have just gone out. I didn’t see you when the passengers gathered on the side they launched the boats from, so I came around to your stateroom. I found you lying on the floor with a cut in your head—and then the lights went out. I—I didn’t want to go without you.”

“That,” said Toby Hand, “is what I call real sporting. Give me a lift, and I’ll be able to stand up.”

She got him on his feet, and he stood a moment leaning against her. “Hurry,” she pleaded. “The last boat will soon be leaving.”

He managed to strike a match and find his hat and overcoat. “Guess there’ll be room for my suitcase and bag,” he mumbled, and stooped to pick them up. As he did so the girl poured the remainder of the contents of the thermos-bottle on his head. The effect of the ice-water this time was electrical. “Lead on,” he said, and stumbled out on to the deck. He was a trifle dizzy, and his head ached, but he could think clearly now:

“This is the windward side,” he cried. “They’ll be launching the boats from the lee side. Hurry.”

They hurried around the forward end of the house. Off to leeward they could hear the sound of shouting, but the deck was as dark and deserted as had been the weather deck. “The captain and mates had flashlight torches,” the girl panted. “Oh, they can’t have gone and left us! Wait here.”

She was gone into the darkness. He clung to a stanchion awaiting her return. Once or twice he thought he heard her screaming, but the sound came to him very faintly and confused above the piping of the wind and the crash of the seas over the forecastle head and down on the well-deck.

She came back to him, groping in the darkness; and when she found him she clung to him. “They’re all gone,” she announced bravely. “What are we going to do about it?”

“Well, they’ll not come back,” he answered. “I suppose Sparks kept sending his S. O. S. until the juice went off. The wind will drive the boats to leeward—”

“The captain’s boat had a motor in it,” she interrupted. “I heard him tell the mates he’d pick the other boats up and tow them.”

“We must have hit a rock and stopped. The bow of the ship is up on it now, because the deck slants toward the stern. She’s filling fast, of course, but she may hang on longer than the captain thought. When she’s full, she’ll slide back off the rock that holds her and sink by the stern.”

“There were six boats on each side of the ship,” she interrupted, “and I saw the crew swing out every boat on this side; but only five boats were used. The last one toward the stern is still there. Come.”

He found himself dragged down the deck; they located the boat swung out clear of the davits, and as Toby stood on the edge of the deck, leaned out and pushed it to make certain it was swinging clear, the lip of a wave washed over his feet and he heard it splash spitefully against the bottom of the boat.

The sound of stateroom doors banging gave him an idea. He visited four staterooms, groped in the dark and tore the blankets from the berths, came back to the boat-falls, where the girl waited, tossed the blankets into the boat and helped the girl into it. He opened his suitcase, delved into it, found his sheathed hunting-knife, closed the suitcase and tossed that into the boat. Then he carefully cast off from the chock the rope that led through the stern boat-falls, but leaving one half-turn on the chock, and permitted the boat to drop by the stern very slowly. He did not think it had more than four or five feet to drop, and he was not mistaken. The lip of the wave washing in on deck and beating against the keel of the out-swung boat had told him that the Yukon Princess was almost awash and would sink in a few minutes.

As the stern of the lifeboat touched the water, Toby cast off the half-turn on the chock and leaped to the boat-falls in the bow; down them he slid until his feet touched the nose of the boat; then he dropped inboard on his hands and knees. In the darkness he found the hook of the block in the bronze lifting-ring; a surge of the sea eased it in the ring for an instant, and he cast it off. The boat bumped alongside the ship smartly, but not with sufficient force to crush it. Toby made his way aft, fending the boat off the side of the ship with his hands, cast loose the boat-falls from the stern lifting-ring and seized an oar, which he pushed against the side of the sinking vessel, thrusting the lifeboat away, as they drifted down the side of the vessel and out under her submerged stern. Once free of the vessel, Toby found the thole-pins hanging to their gaskets, set them up, shipped his oars and pulled furiously away into the night; when he judged he was safe from the down-suck of the sinking steamer, he put the boat’s head to the sea and gazed off into the darkness for the boats that had preceded him. There was no sign of them.

Toby shipped his oars, scrambled forward again and opened the door to the lazaret under the tiny deck in the stern. As he suspected might be the case, he found a small sea-anchor here, knotted securely to a coil of one-inch Manila rope; he tested the knot, hurled the sea-anchor overboard and paid out about sixty feet of rope, then made the end fast to the forward lifting-ring. As the boat drifted to leeward, the rope paid out, and presently the sea-anchor took hold and they rode bow on to the sea. They had shipped a little spray, but the bottom of the boat was far from awash, so Toby collected his blankets, made a bed for the girl up forward and went amidships to find her.

“Young lady, ahoy!” he shouted.

“Ahoy yourself,” came the cheery response. “What have you to report, Skipper?”

“We’re sitting on top of the world and in no danger. At daylight I’ll step the mast, bend the sprit-sail on her, ship the rudder and start sailing somewhere.”

“Any food or water aboard, Skipper?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. If not—bad news will keep.”

“Your head is cut, and your face is bloody. Wash it in sea-water. That’s an unbeatable disinfectant. What’s your name?”

“Tobias Hand. My friends call me Toby.”

“Good old Toby! And my name is Stephanie Howard. My friends call me Steve.”

“Good old Steve! You’re not frightened?”

“Not with you.”

“Thank you. I’m not exactly a land-lubber. Did a hitch in the navy during the war. Crawl forward and lie down. You’ll find a nest of blankets there. I’ll have to take the deck. Some other craft might run us down, so I’ll act as lookout. Good night, Steve.”

“Good night, Toby.”

When Stephanie Howard so readily obeyed Toby Hand’s suggestion (it was really a command) that she go forward, lie down in the blankets and endeavor to get some sleep, Toby was quite filled with admiration of her. He told himself Steve possessed that rarest of feminine virtues—physical courage. He was delighted in the knowledge that she had refrained from dramatizing herself in the face of their perhaps tragic situation. He could not help picturing his wife’s reaction to the same situation. Laurel, of course, would not have bothered to risk her life to make certain her husband was in a lifeboat. She would have been first to enter the first boat. If, like Steve, she had discovered herself alone on a sinking ship with him, she would have gone quite hysterical with fear and demanded of him an instantaneous and happy solution of their predicament. Upon receiving it, she would have been suspicious of it; her ego would have indicated to her that in this emergency her judgment was superior to his, and she would have argued the matter in a subconscious effort to demonstrate his incompetence! Once aboard a boat and free of the ship, as Toby and Steve now were, she would have been as pitiable as she could be, because consumed with pity for herself.

Unlike Steve, she would not have lain quietly down and thought things over. She would have declared she could not rest, and that it was silly of him to expect it; she would have blamed him for everything, declaring it was a mistake to have boarded the ship in the first place and an inexcusable error on his part not to have kept his feet when the vessel struck. She would not have been concerned about his injured head, and most certainly she would not have advised him to bathe it in sea-water because sea-water is one of the very best disinfectants, for her knowledge of matters not related to her personal comfort was nebulous; the only disinfectants she knew anything about were those she had seen advertised.

The cold salt water stung the wound in his head, but stopped the bleeding; presently, too, the ache gave way to a mere feeling of soreness, and he commenced to consider their situation. About the only conclusion he could arrive at was that he should stand watch all night and have Steve relieve him in the morning, unless land should be sighted at daylight—which he very much doubted, for the wind had hauled into the northeast, and unless there was a current setting them in toward the mainland, this wind, if continued, would drive them off-shore. It was a long time since he had looked at a map of Alaska, but he remembered vaguely that there was a chain of islands along the coast, the waters between these islands and the mainland forming what is known as the Inside Passage.

He was appalled to discover that he was quite thirsty. He remembered he had been about to take a long drink of water when the Yukon Princess had struck; later Steve had poured that water over his head! He shuddered at such wanton waste.

Throughout the night Steve lay as quiet as a hibernating animal; when it was daylight, he saw she was watching him. As their glances met, she smiled encouragingly, rose out of the blankets and came amidships. She opened his suitcase, abstracted a handkerchief, dipped it overside and scrubbed his blood-bespattered face; then without asking permission grasped his head, drew it down to the level of her vision and examined the wound.

“An inch long and cut to the bone. And hasn’t our Toby the grandest goose-egg on top of his head!” She stood up, steadying herself with a hand on his shoulder, and gazed around the horizon, but made no comment on what she saw, which was nothing but horizon. Instead she said cheerfully: “The sun rises in the east. The mainland is to the east or thereabouts, so all we have to do is hoist the sail and depart in that direction.”

“Unfortunately,” said Toby, “we have neither sail nor mast. If we should survive this voyage, I shall complain to the United States Supervising Inspector of Hulls and Boilers regarding this lack. Lifeboats are supposed to be equipped at all times with mast, boom, sail, a breaker of water and a case of sea-biscuit. We have a water-breaker but no water; and the case of sea-biscuit is nonexistent. I am very sorry to be the skipper of a boat that cannot even provide its passenger with bread and water.”

“How would you like to have an orange, Toby?”

“That query comes under the head of cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Yes? Well, I have six large ones in my bag. There was a basket of fruit and nuts and chocolate in my stateroom—evidently a parting gift to the seasick lady who shared the stateroom with me. When we were told to take to the boats, I tossed away some clothing I didn’t need and filled the space with the contents of that basket. My father used to say that if you provide your own grub, the beasts of the field will provide a hole in the ground to shelter you. Toby, are you a drinking man?”

“No, I’m quite temperate—a cocktail before dinner, and a glass of wine, an occasional highball when I need a pick-up. Wish I had one now. The manager of the Seattle office of the firm I used to work for gave me two quarts of fine old brandy before the steamer left the dock.”

“The practice of thrusting upon departing friends gifts they do not need should never be discouraged, Toby. I knew you had some brandy, because you gave me a small drink to unsettle my stomach. So while the lights still shone and you were lying on the floor but commencing to wiggle, I looked around your stateroom for some of your brandy. In one of your bags I found your flask and a full quart. I thrust both in my pocket—then the lights went out, and I decided your drink could wait.”

“I wish you hadn’t made me wait all night,” he reproved her mildly.

“I wanted to offer it to you, but decided we might have greater need for it later. Well, now, to breakfast. A wee nippy, half an orange and two walnuts each. What ho, Toby, m’lad?”

“Steve, you’re the shadow of a rock in a weary land. I really am quite thirsty. Are you?”

She nodded, handed him his flask and commenced peeling an orange, first presenting him with four walnuts and directing him to crack them. To his horror, the contents of two of them were shriveled.

“Our hard luck, Toby,” Steve told him gravely. “Eat the sound one and be grateful; then we’ll get out our toothbrushes and brush our teeth, like nice little boys and girls should. Salt water is really a good dentifrice.”

“You know things, don’t you, Steve? Have a drink first.”

She tilted the flask and waved it at him. “Mud in your eye, old-timer,” she toasted him, and swallowed a mouthful. “Where I come from,” she added, “it is considered an affront to good liquor and a sign of frailty to take a chaser. So I do not miss water—yet! Wow, wow, wow! That warms Stevie’s empty interior. Look, Toby. Comes the dawn.”

“All hell to pay, and no pitch hot,” he growled. “However, being shipmates with a thoughtful, generous, unselfish and cheerful young lady takes a great deal of the curse off this rough life we’re living.”

“I think you’re very wonderful, Toby.”

“We’ll parlay that bet, Steve. Have you, by any chance, such a worthless appendage as a husband to grieve over you when you’re gone?”

“Thank heaven, no! How are you fixed for a loved one to bemoan your passing?”

“I have a wife.”

“I knew it! All the very nicest men have. I do not like her.”

“You needn’t. My demise will smooth her rough path very materially.”

“Life insurance and money in bank, I suppose.”

He nodded.

“She’ll feel dreadfully, of course.”

“No, but she’ll wear mourning nevertheless, under the impression that it’s what’s expected of her.” He knew he should not have said that, but he had a sudden mad impulse to confide in Steve—probably because she was the last person he would have an opportunity to confide in.

“I see, Toby. You’re one of those men whose wife does not understand him.”

“There’s no answer to that statement. Any answer would be wrong. The fact is, I’m a very difficult person to understand.”

“I imagine that’s because you never take the trouble to furnish a blue-print of yourself. Gentlemen, I have observed, disdain to make explanations—that is, intelligent gentlemen. They make the mistake of assuming an equal intelligence on the part of the wives of their bosoms.” She was silent a moment, then resumed: “ ‘The shallows murmur, but the deeps are dumb.’ Here’s your hemisphere of orange; and if it’s a sour orange, I’ll scream.”

He burst out laughing. She was a great comfort to him, and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t tell her so; that she eased his worry over her. “I shall never forget how brave you are,” he added.

“I suppose you expected me to make your hard task harder by breaking down and crying, Toby.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Hum! Fooled you, didn’t I? Well, I’ll tell you how-come I’m not a cry-baby. I had a brother two years older than I. His name was Stephen, and he died. My father wanted another son, and he was so sure I was going to be a boy that he named me Steve in advance of my début. He was a stubborn man who disliked having to change his plans, so he compromised on Stephanie to get Steve, and raised me man-fashion. I suppose you thought I was a Russian.”

“I didn’t think anything about you, except that in the throes of approaching mal de mer you looked wretched and not particularly beautiful, and I didn’t think you were dressed warmly enough. Now that you’re not seasick, it appears that, despite a hard night, you’re a most presentable young woman. Not beautiful, not pretty, not handsome, but good-looking—thank God!”

“I see you married a beautiful woman, Toby.”

“I did—damn it.”

“You needn’t swear about it. You’re not an Adonis yourself—thank God!” she added. “However, you’re a pretty reliable sort. What do you do to start the nimble cartwheel of commerce rolling your way?”

“I’m an advertising copy-writer when I work at it.”

“Are you a top-notcher or just an ad-writer?”

“I belong to the new school, and I used to be fairly good. I write human-interest ads—illustrate with a little fiction story just why anybody, not a dub, should buy the goods I try to sell. About two days hence, when your face has been burned bricky red and your lips are cracked and bleeding, you’ll provide a grand inspiration for a cosmetic or a sunburn-cure. What means do you employ to keep the wolf away from the door?”

“My father owns a little granite and concrete bank in a cow-town in Nevada. He has fifty thousand dollars capital, ten thousand reserve and six hundred thousand in deposits. I’m his cashier, bookkeeper and stenographer, and help him pass on loans. While the country had been wallowing in prosperity, we reduced all our loans to the safety point; consequently business got so dull I decided to take a vacation, and now I shudder to think what will happen to Pa’s bank. It’s very hard for him to say no as if he meant it.”

“What’s your university?”

“University of Nevada. We sage-brush folk always patronize home industry. What’s yours?”

“Haven’t any. Started taking them on the chin when I was fourteen.”

“No social graces, eh?”

“Not a dog-gone grace. Like you, I was on my vacation. Let’s have another walnut and enjoy our vacation together.”

“I suppose,” she replied thoughtfully, “we might just as well be flat broke as the way we are. If you have a sweater in your suitcase, I can use it. I’m not dressed for a life on the ocean wave.”

He got her the sweater. She got him another walnut. He cracked it. The meat was withered. He cracked one for her. The meat in that was withered also. “The man who sold those nuts was a swindler,” he raged.

“They’re going-away walnuts, my dear man. Sound walnuts are kept for the stay-at-home trade.”

The sun was now visible just over the eastern horizon, and the northeast breeze had freshened. “Even if I had a sail, we couldn’t sail into the wind with this boat. It has no keel,” he complained. “And I can’t pull for the mainland with the oars. We’d go forward two feet and drift back twenty-five inches. Steve, old messmate, I’m going to have some sleep. Here’s my watch, all wound and ticking merrily. Please awaken me at noon, and meanwhile keep an eye out for a vessel of sorts. Thanks for your bounty. I think we’re both pagans, or we would have said grace before and after that gorgeous breakfast.”

“Not too late for grace after meals, Toby,” and she recited:

A lump rose in Toby Hand’s throat—a lump that swelled and swelled. To keep Steve from observing his emotion, he placed his arm around her, drew her toward him and patted her cold cheek. “You’ll do, Steve,” he murmured tremulously. “If I don’t get you safely back home, there’s going to be a tremendous falling off in your dad’s deposits. I know now what keeps his funny little bank out of the red ink.”

“Haven’t got a cigarette, have you, Toby?”

He handed her his case and a box of matches, went forward and lay down. He watched her for a few minutes, sitting very erect on the midships thwart, thoughtfully blowing smoke-rings and watching half a dozen gulls sailing overhead. It occurred to him that the presence of gulls argued proximity to land, and with this comforting thought he stretched out, drew a blanket over him and fell asleep.

Back in New York, Laurel Hand was having a very pleasant time receiving the condolences of her friends. She laid the flattering unction to her soul that these were mutual friends of hers and Toby’s, but as a matter of fact they were not. They were Toby’s friends. Her own friends numbered less than half a dozen—with the exception of Jim Daingerfield all were women and even the most stupid of them held private reservations regarding Laurel, for no woman can deceive another woman very long as to her true character. Laurel’s friends called on her or telephoned, but Toby’s friend’s sent telegrams, which Laurel very carefully retained and counted. To the few women friends who called, she read all these telegrams, as evidence of the tremendous loss she had sustained.

She had a pleasant suite at an apartment-hotel, and Jim Daingerfield kept her supplied with flowers, cigarettes, candy and his society, in addition to paying her rent. Usually they dined at an excellent but obscure speakie; occasionally she and Daingerfield motored down to one of the numerous country clubs of which he was a member, and where, on week-day nights, they were practically secure from the inquiring gaze of those who knew him. The Hetheringtons were very nice to her, and their motor cruiser offered her a haven of coolness throughout the summer, as well as opportunity for week-ends in Jim Daingerfield’s society. In return Daingerfield invited Laurel and the Hetheringtons for Friday-to-Monday sojourns at Pinecrest and White Sulphur Springs. Laurel was so happy she had extreme difficulty in concealing the fact, in presenting to the world a melancholy and subdued mien, for Daingerfield was opening up to her a world which Toby’s salary had denied her, even if Toby had had the time or the inclination to escort her to such spas or live up to every dollar he earned. She reflected now that that had been rather shabby of him. However, she spoke of him very frequently, apparently rejoicing in a recital of his many virtues, his steadiness and sobriety, his thoughtfulness and boyish ingenuousness. She played the game well.

Meanwhile Daingerfield’s attorney had been instructed to take over the matter of offering Toby’s will for probate, but when Laurel notified Mark Canfield to that effect, that young man coldly informed her that he was the attorney for Toby’s estate, so nominated in Toby’s will, and that he intended to exercise the function for which he had been appointed, and charge for it! Simeon Worden heard about it and called her up and scolded her—brutally, she told Daingerfield. Canfield filed the will for probate, and as luck would have it, the surrogate to whose court it had been assigned promptly went on his vacation, although he did have the decency to grant her an allowance of two hundred and fifty dollars a month.

Daingerfield’s lawyer, however, handled the matter of the life insurance. The company was very decent about it; one of their officers stated that while they agreed with Mrs. Hand that her husband had perished, still, there was a remote chance he might have escaped; hence they suggested that, in such circumstances, it was their policy to withhold payments for at least three months, merely to be on the safe side. At the end of that time they would pay. In fact, they would pay sooner, should Toby’s body be recovered and identified. Laurel raged at this enforced delay in settlement, and instructed her attorney to threaten suit, which the latter did—only to be invited to proceed and ascertain something of the delay which the law actually allowed in such circumstances. Thereupon, to Laurel, he counseled patience.

Three months to the day of the sinking of the Yukon Princess, Laurel and Daingerfield were married. Laurel pleaded for a honeymoon on the Riviera, but the stockmarket was soaring, and Daingerfield was too busy making money to heed her request. So she tried on him something that had, during the first two years of her life with Toby Hand, never failed to be productive of results. She wept!

Daingerfield compromised on a diamond-and-sapphire bracelet as wide as a dog-collar. Laurel accepted the bauble with shrill little cries of ecstasy, but in about a week she commenced pecking at him again, because she knew from experience that if one pecked long enough, one got from a man what one desired, in return for peace. She did not gain her point, but she did accumulate an imported runabout and a very great deal of jewelry, plus a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year penthouse, done in the so-called modernistic style and formerly owned by a gentleman who had the temerity to short a bull market.

The first month she was married to Jim Daingerfield she made a disturbing discovery—several of them, in fact. He had a quick temper and would sulk, and since Laurel was inclined to sulk also, the thirty-first day of their wedded life Mr. Daingerfield informed her brutally that he was disgusted with her whining, her unreasonableness and selfish lack of consideration of his business interests. He bade her get the idea fixed solidly in her head that they were not going abroad until he had cleaned up in the market, and if she mentioned the subject again, she never would see Europe on his money. He told her to shut up and cease her damnable whimpering; to try to be a woman, not a cry-baby.

Laurel had not experienced this sort of treatment hitherto. Hence her pride—i. e., her enormous ego—was outraged, and she refused to speak to Daingerfield for three days. He, poor wretch, was willing to capitulate the second day, and Laurel knew it, but she had her method of discipline, and knew that precipitate forgiveness was fatal. On the second day he bought her a karakul coat, which she sent back, claiming it made her look dumpy. This so enraged Daingerfield that he told her bluntly to go to hell, but the following day he apologized, was forgiven, and celebrated his return to good standing by purchasing for her a ten-thousand-dollar square-cut emerald ring. But—she was no nearer the Riviera. . . .

A vigorous shaking awakened Toby Hand. He came slowly awake and found Steve bending over him.

“Quick, Toby,” she urged, “there’s a squall coming! I think it’s going to rain. It’s quite dark.”

“What time is it, Steve?”

“Four o’clock.”

“But I told you to awaken me at noon.”

“Why should I? I wasn’t sleepy, and if you’re going to stand watch all night, you should sleep all day. Can we catch some rain, Toby?”

He sat up and considered this, then peered over the gunwale of the boat. Half a mile away a black squall was bearing down on them. The sea in that direction was already a smother of foam. He looked to the rope on his sea-anchor, found it had not chafed, due to the handkerchief he had wound around it for seizing at the point where it touched the bow of the boat, glanced at Steve and nodded. His tongue was very dry and very thick.

She followed him amidships and watched him remove the bung from the water-breaker. Then he opened his suitcase and got out a new slicker he had purchased in Seattle, thrust one sleeve down the bung of the water-breaker and indicated that she should hold one side of the garment while he held the other.

“If it rains hard for fifteen minutes, we’ll catch enough rain in the body of this slicker to fill our water-breaker. Tip it so the sleeve will act as a funnel.”

“Will that squall sink us, Toby?”

“No, we’ll head into it, and these whaleboat type of lifeboats can ride out anything short of a hurricane, if hove on to a sea-anchor.”

He rolled their blankets and coats up into a compact heap and spread his old canvas shooting-jacket over them, then piled their baggage on top just as the squall struck them. Steve bent her back to the furious blast but Toby took the rain in his face and howled with delight. He opened his mouth and let the big welcome drops drive into it; he licked his lips and put his foot on the slicker, close to the bung, to keep the sleeve from being swept out of the orifice. The rain deluged them for about fifteen minutes; then the squall swept on into the southwest and the castaways stood staring at a full water-breaker. Toby gathered the slicker into a pocket and Steve knelt and drank from the water imprisoned there. Then she held it and he drank to repletion.

“How delightful rain-water is when mixed with linseed oil from a new slicker,” she remarked ironically. “Toby, I’m soaked—and cold as the heart of a French Minister of Finance.”

He handed her his flask. “Drink hearty, shipmate.”

He gazed at the sky. “Rain’s over and the blankets are dry. You’ve got to change into dry clothing. Have you got any?”

“Very few. My coat’s dry, thanks to you. With dry stockings and knickers and my coat I’ll make out by rolling up in a blanket.”

“Fine. Go forward and shuck ’em. I’ll sit on the rear thwart and look the other way. You’ll find a woolen shirt in my suitcase. Use it for a towel.”

He went aft and lighted a cigarette and in about ten minutes she joined him. Her hair had been blown undone during the squall and her hairpins scattered; he saw that she had been permitting her hair to grow out following a period of bobbing, and it hung now in a thick damp chestnut cluster just below the nape of her white neck. She was peeling an orange which she divided with him, but he declined to take it, nor would he accept two little pieces of chocolate she proffered. “You eat it,” he urged. “I can fast a couple of weeks if necessary. I’m not hungry now.”

“You’re a dear liar. Well, go forward and change your clothes.”

He got into his hunting-clothes, then spread the wet clothing of both on the bottom of the boat to dry, after which they sat down in the stern side by side and drew a blanket around them.

“I think we ought to sing a song of the sea,” Steve suggested, “but having been raised out on the Nevada desert I do not know any.”

So he sang for her, in a not particularly bad voice, an ancient ballad of the sea, entitled “Rolling Home.” Like all songs of the sort the music has been written in a minor key and was a sweet but very simple melody. Steve knew it after the first singing and he devoted five minutes to teaching her the words; then they sang it together with considerable enthusiasm.

“Now let’s blue it,” Steve suggested, and showed him how. So they “blued” it and Toby sang “Rango Was a Sailor,” and “Blow the Man Down” and half a dozen other old forgotten lays of the days of iron men and wooden ships. And the long Alaskan twilight came down and in the north they saw the flickers of the aurora borealis; they talked poetry and pestilence, war, peace, finance, books, men, women, and events. Toby insisted Steve should wear his overcoat. When he made up her bed for the night and she turned in with a sleepy, “Good night, Toby, old Stick-in-the-Mud,” he forgot for the first time in three years, that he was married to Laurel. . . .

He was wolfishly hungry. All night long he suffered hunger pains and the following day he felt heavy-headed, dull and nauseated to such an extent that it was only by the exercise of will that he forced himself to stand watch that night. Steve’s high spirits had departed to a considerable extent also; Toby suspected she had hunger pains and felt almost as badly as he did, but if so she did not mention it. There was no more singing, no more animated conversation. On the fourth day both felt very much better; they were no longer distressed because of lack of food and had a feeling of lightsomeness and general well-being. That night the fog came down as thick as mush and since there existed now no excuse for standing watch all night, Steve suggested to Toby that they dispense with formality—that he lie down beside her and sleep. So he did, and to his surprise she put her head on his shoulder and wept softly for a long time, finally falling asleep there, with one cold little hand in his.

Toby lay there without moving for a long time, for he did not wish to disturb her. He looked up at the stars and took an inventory of his life, and a great bitterness came over him in the thought that Fate had dealt him a hand from the bottom of the deck when he married Laurel without knowing that, once in a blue moon, one encounters women like Steve Howard. Steve had told him she was twenty-three years old; her nature was direct, unspoiled, simple; he could well believe she had been man-raised, for her character was that of a very gallant gentleman.

His thoughts kept adverting to her courage, to her merry, whimsical method of clothing an ordinary sentence with extraordinary charm. Her features were formed with sufficient regularity to preclude homeliness or even commonness, but her beauty lay in her sparkling hazel eyes, with their long black lashes; in her vivid personality. Her eyes turned up just a very little at the outside corners, faintly Oriental, and he knew she had never had her eyebrows plucked. Her voice was low, just a bit husky and he had not been in the least surprised, when she sang, to discover her voice was a contralto. Her face was always merry and in moments of thoughtfulness she had a wistful, brooding look as if she gazed beyond a veil and saw things not visible to other eyes. In point of height she was about five feet five inches, and Toby guessed she might weigh a hundred and twenty-five pounds. A woman’s body, soft, with many a curve and no angles. Her clothing bespoke the small-town girl of limited means, yet it was in good taste. She had good teeth and a compelling smile; she was widely read, hence well educated, and Toby gathered that the spirit of adventure was in her, that her soul beat against her drab environment as the wings of a bird beat against its cage. Hers, he thought, was a well-developed case of wanderlust; if she got out of this adventure alive he hoped she would be cured of it, but—he did not think so.

He liked her breath, coming faintly against his bearded cheek, liked the odor of her well-kept hair. He thought she must be a very healthy girl and one who had herself extraordinarily well in hand, for she slept peacefully, undisturbed by the fears he knew must be reposing in her unconscious mind and which, in the case of a more high-strung girl, would have reacted in the form of terrifying dreams or incoherent mutterings.

Presently, just as his arm began to grow numb with the weight of her body, she turned over, sighed and said audibly:

“Toby’s such a dear.” She mouthed another sentence or two, then added coherently: “He’s unhappy, poor thing. And I think it’s because his wife’s a dumb-bell. He had to run away . . . to run away . . . to get himself set firmly on his feet. Poor Toby.” She mumbled some more, sighed deeply and was quiet again. Later, from time to time, she exhaled great gasping sighs that were almost moans.

“Well, we have two oranges and one piece of chocolate left for Steve and a keg of water for both of us. We can fight it out for two weeks,” Toby decided. “I have fishing tackle in my suitcase, and tomorrow I’ll try to catch a fish. The natives of Polynesia eat raw fish and we can do the same. It’s only the idea that’s repellent. I’ll cut the fish into thin strips.”

He awakened at dawn with Steve in his arms, and he hadn’t the slightest idea how she had got there. However, since his arms held her close he realized he must have had considerable to do with it. He was wondering how he could withdraw without awakening her to embarrassment, when she spoke.

“Toby, you’re a very unconventional married man. Don’t you think so?”

“I am,” he confessed miserably, “but I didn’t intend to be. My action was quite a subconscious one. I hadn’t the least thought of becoming so familiar on such short acquaintance, or, in fact, on an acquaintance of far greater duration.”

“I like modest men. You’re as shy as a little boy.”

He started to withdraw his protecting arm, but she would not have that, so he desisted. “Purely the instinct of protection, I think,” he defended. “I dreamed last night the boat had capsized and we were both in the drink. I was diving for you—I wanted so desperately to get you before you sank away from me forever.”

“You sweet thing!”

“Steve,” he protested, “I believe you like my familiarity.”

“You quaint creature! I adore it. And I’m not a forward, uppity, flirtatious girl, either. It seems to me quite natural. Once I’d have been a coy young thing, inexpressibly shocked—no, I wouldn’t either. I’d merely have been an ordinary faking human being and pretended I was.”

“Steve, my job is to protect you,—to save you if I can,—and I assure you I haven’t the slightest intention of exhibiting a vulgar and unwarranted familiarity because of your helplessness.”

“My dear Toby,” said Steve, “forgive me if I suggest very forcibly that you are talking through your hat. Ours is not a brief acquaintance. We have known each other since you were a tadpole and I was a fish in the Paleozoic slime. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you and I are living at a perfectly remarkable speed that increases in ratio to the brief span of life before us?”

“Have it your own way, Steve. A man in my position cannot afford to admit anything—and remain a gentleman.”

Steve had her own way of answering that. She reached up and ran her hand over his face with its four-day growth of whiskers. “Why, you old billygoat!”

“I must look like the devil.”

“You do, but I don’t mind. Oh, my whole body aches from lying on such a hard bed. Up, Tobias, my good man, and we’ll wash the sleep out of our eyes and have a look around.”

She scrambled to her feet and peered out over the bows of the boat. “Land, ho—in the most approved sailor fashion,” she cried. “We’re driving onto a beach. Up, Toby, we’re almost into the breakers,” and she started hauling in the sea anchor.

Toby leaped up, saw a high towering wall of black granite some two hundred yards ahead and tailed on to the sea-anchor with a will. The moment it came inboard they shipped the oars, whisked the boat around and lay to, staring at the land.

“It will not do,” Steve decided. “Waves pounding at the base of a cliff. We’ll have to find a bathing-beach if we are to make a successful landing. Are you equal to a long and hard pull, Toby?”

“I am not. I feel structurally weak amidships. But my head is clear and I’m equal to doing some ground and lofty thinking. We’ll sail around. We have a nice twenty-mile breeze—”

“I know,” Steve cried happily. “Your slicker!” And she brought it forth from where it had been doing duty as her pillow. She held it and assisted Toby to thrust an oar blade through one sleeve, across the breast of the slicker and down the other sleeve. Then Toby cut two of the thole-pin gaskets and tied that sleeve to the oar blade, after cutting notches in it with his pocket-knife to hold the cord securely. He then thrust the oar, handle down, through the hole in the forward thwart where a mast is ordinarily stepped in a lifeboat. From the end of the rope attached to the sea anchor he cut off a short length, unbraided it, thrust another oar upward and tied the upper skirt of the slicker securely to the top of this oar; the lower corner of the skirt he tied farther down the oar, stepped this second oar between the slats in the bottom of the boat and permitted it to lean outward against the gunwale. “Now, hold it so it won’t flap overboard,” he commanded Steve, and ran aft with the tiller, which he shipped. Despite the sparse area of the slicker, it filled and the boat moved easily off before the wind at a pace that Toby estimated to be about three miles per hour. Steve was delighted. She drew the supporting oar inboard from the gunwale to give the slicker added drawing power and the speed increased perceptibly as they moved down the coast.

“Isn’t this fun?” she cried. “This is my first adventure yachting, and just think, Toby, of all the horrible exertion it saves you. Oh, if we only had a real sail how we’d scoot along.”

With the sight of land all of Toby’s apprehensions had vanished. He was as happy as a schoolboy. “Some day, Steve, we’ll have a nice little thirty-foot sloop and I’ll show you what sailing is like,” he exulted.

“Where do you get that ‘we’ stuff?” she demanded.

“There you go, ripping the silver lining out of my cloud of contentment. Haven’t you any imagination?”

Her rippling laugh taunted him; she smiled back at him, her hazel eyes alight with delight, her chestnut hair floating behind her in the breeze. “Toby, the minute we get ashore we’ll eat the last of the oranges and the chocolate. We’ll have a real celebration. Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may find there isn’t even a jack-rabbit on that island.”

“There must be something living on it. I have a rifle in my suitcase and plenty of ammunition. I have fishing tackle—”

“Oh, Toby, you’re simply gorgeous. What a grand camping trip we’re going to have. We’ll broil our fish and meat on the end of a forked stick.”

“But we’ll not have any salt.”

“Salt is not necessary. We’ll learn to do without it. Toby, that’s a lovely island. There’s good feed on it. Why, I know a cattleman who would weep with joy at the sight of that grass. And it’s such a big island! Why, the coast-line stretches farther than I can see, Toby, aren’t we having the most wonderful adventures?”

He grunted a contradiction. “Be your age, Stevie.”

“I’ll not. I’ve lived in a cow-country town all my life, and if you refuse to be enthusiastic I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Do anything but weep,” he pleaded. “That’s something I can’t stand.”

“You poor old thing! I admit I had a weak spell last night but I’m ashamed of that. It wasn’t at all sporting of me. Please forget it now, Toby.”

“Steve, you’re adorable.”

She permitted the oar to lean over against the gunwale, came aft, climbing over the thwarts and thrust her blistered face close to his. “Kiss me,” she commanded. “I’m so happy I could scream. I don’t care whether you’re married or single.—Anyhow, what’s a little kiss on such an occasion as this between shipmates?”

“It’s a whole lot more than you seem to think,” he replied soberly—but he kissed her. “What would your old man think? He’d probably shoot me if he knew.”

“Tish, tush and a couple of tooshes! I’m not in love with you, you bewhiskered booby! I’m only a little bit crazy about you. You’re such a comfortable creature. Just think how awful it would be if we were in a boat with the other passengers! Why, you’d be as solemn as a burro. Not a peep out of you to indicate what a human being you are. Another little kiss, Mr. Robinson Crusoe, if you please.”

“No!” he answered sharply.

“A slave to convention, eh? Oh, Toby, you’re just a baby—a nice, big, comfortable baby. And I adore you for it.”

“Go for’d and tend that sail.”

“Kill-joy,” she retorted. “Old King Kill-joy the Thirteenth. You’re such an old precious and I love to tease you. But I’ll obey. You’re the midshipmite and the captain tight and the crew of the Nancy Lee, but you needn’t roar at me.”

“That,” he informed her, “is the prescriptive right of a married man.”

She dropped him a curtsy, hurried forward and was as silent as the Sphinx for an hour. Then Toby raised a yell. “Long sloping beach in sight, Steve! Just around that point. But I think I’ll wait for the slack of the tide before attempting to beach this boat. These long rollers are crashing up the beach pretty briskly.”

“Oh, take a chance,” she urged. “The wind may change and what with that and the ebb tide we may be sucked out to sea again. Who cares for a drenching after all? Fly at it, old settler, fly at it.”

So they rounded the point and flew at it. But the wind failed them just off the line of breakers, so Toby ran forward, unshipped the oar mast and shipped a pair of oars. “When we hit the beach I’ll go overboard,” he informed her, “and run her up high and dry.”

As they came bounding in, he unshipped his oars and went overside up to his neck, grasped the gunwale and gave the boat a hard shove. A breaking wave struck it under the stern and lifted it forward, carrying him with it; then his feet touched the beach again and he gave another mighty shove, clung to the gunwale and rode the boat in. It touched the sand; then another wave lifted it, swung it broadside on to the beach and swept it over Toby. He went down backward and the skag swept against his right leg; the boat swung broadside to the beach and well up on the shingle.

The next thing Toby knew Steve, up to her armpits in the surf, had him by the collar and was dragging him ashore as the wash of another wave struck the boat and drove it so far up the beach that the suck of the receding surf was powerless to drag it back.

“What’s the matter with you, Toby?” the girl cried sharply. “Can’t you stand up?”

The face he lifted to her was drawn with agony. “No, I can’t, Steve. My leg’s broken.” He sagged down and on both hands and his left knee crawled, like a stricken animal, up out of the wash of the surf and lay face down on the sunswept shingle.

Steve stood a moment, gazing down on him. “My error,” she admitted. “I suppose we should have waited for the slack water.” Then she went down to the boat, removed their baggage and the blankets, carried them far up the beach and set them in the lee of a low coastal bank, after which she returned to Toby. She had opened his suitcase and possessed herself of his big hunting-knife; up beyond high-water mark she had found an empty orange-box, thrown overboard from some passing coaster; this she managed to tear apart and whittle the thin sides into splints of an appropriate length. From the boat she removed a blanket and cut part of it into strips, after which she returned to Toby and sat down beside him.

“I don’t know a thing about setting a broken leg, Toby,” she announced softly, “but never let it be said I didn’t try. Where does it hurt?”

“Right leg, between the knee and the ankle. I can’t wiggle my toes, so I know the tibia or the fibula, or both, are fractured.”

Gently she rolled up the leg of his trousers to the knee and examined the leg. “Yes, it’s fractured, Toby. It wriggles midway between the knee and the ankle.”

She fastened one end of the sea-anchor cable to the bow of the stranded boat and the other end to Toby’s ankle. “Now crawfish up the beach and take up the slack of the rope,” she counseled. “When I give the word you stretch yourself and pull hard against the rope while I press. That might snap the broken bone back into place, and while you hold it there I’ll do a job of backwoods surgery and put splints on it to keep it in place.”

He did as she told him, and Steve had the satisfaction of seeing the fracture set. She ran her facile fingers over the break to make certain, then wrapped around the leg strips torn from the blanket, placed the splints in position and bound them tightly to his leg with other strips. She did a neat, workmanlike job, got him up with much difficulty, standing erect on one leg, and then got in under his right shoulder. “Lean on me and hop,” she commanded, “and hold up your chin while you’re doing it.”

Together they made the agonizing journey to the clean dry sand under the lee of the low coastal bluff, and Steve spread the blankets and ordered him to lie on them. “Now,” she declared, “you shall have an orange and a man’s-size drink of brandy, and after that I’m going to take your rifle and scout this island for a camp site and something to eat. The day is young.”

He lay quietly on his back and watched her fit the takedown sporting rifle together and he knew by the way she went at the task that she was no novice. She removed one of the straps from his suitcase, and made a belt of it; after which she slipped the sheath of the hunting-knife over the strap and buckled it around her waist. She slipped a dozen cartridges in the pocket of his sweater, then knelt beside him a moment and laid her cheek against his.

“Poor Toby,” she murmured. “What rotten luck—and it’s all my fault. But don’t worry. I’ll take care of you, old boy. I’m going away now, but when I come back I’ll have meat—if it’s to be found on this island.”

When she left him he wept a little. He couldn’t help it. He felt like a man condemned—and moreover Steve was rather wonderful; he was wholly unaccustomed to her kind.

It had often occurred to Toby Hand, during his brief tour of married life with Laurel, that he had experienced more mixed emotions than any other man living, without breaking under them. Rage, regret, humiliation, melancholia, worry, were the specters that had walked with him nearly two years. Now, as he lay on the beach on that lonely island off the Alaskan coast, feeling acutely the pain of his broken leg, he experienced an emotion from which his optimistic and resilient nature had heretofore been free. Despair! He had always known that it lay in his power to free himself of Laurel and the distress that went with her, whenever he made up his mind to do so; but in his present predicament he was quite without hope of escape.

Along the ten miles of coast he had sailed, he had observed no signs of human habitation. No smoke of a camp-fire had risen to meet the dawn. Hungry, he thought of food. He had a feeling that the island lay too far out at sea to be the habitat of any of the game animals or fowl indigenous to the mainland. Such game as they must depend upon for sustenance would have to be very close to the coast—Stephanie Howard, shod only in the fragile high-heeled, short-vamp shoes of the period could not possibly walk more than a mile over rough ground; and when she became barefooted, they would have to depend on seabirds and fish. And if the distance to fresh water should prove prohibitive, that and the lack of any utensil to carry water in would present an insoluble problem.

He knew he would be helpless for two months at least. Fortunately the Alaskan summers are delightful, and an open-air camp on the beach would not be productive of hardship; but in the matter of food and water the lives of himself and Steve were wholly dependent upon her good health. And she must secure food for them at once, for two more days without it would weaken her to the point where she would lack the strength to seek it, even at a trifling distance from the beach—and that would mean slow starvation.

He shrank from that prospect, but even in his extremity the traditional protective instinct of his sex eradicated thought of self. His despair was centered in Steve, how she would stand up under it. But for the generous impulse which had actuated her to save him, she would not be facing this dreadful impasse with him; in all probability she would be now on the way back to her duties in her father’s bank. He wondered if, when the pinch came on in earnest, she would regret her action; he felt that if she evinced any indication of regret, he would want to die at once. When an hour passed and Steve had not returned, he commenced to worry about her. Another hour, and he was frantic. He pictured her with a broken leg, a sprained ankle, or overcome by weakness, unable to make her way back to him. Being a woman and not accustomed to firearms, she might have shot herself. He sat erect, staring up the beach in the direction in which she had departed. Her footprints were plainly visible in the sand. . . . He made up his mind he could wait no longer and on his hands and one knee, he commenced crawling along on that trail. He had proceeded about ten feet on his torturous journey when a bullet whined over him, struck the sand about thirty feet in front of him and kicked up a little geyser of sand.

He looked back. About three hundred yards down the beach Steve was standing. She waved to him, then stooped, swung something over her shoulder and came toward him. She had to rest very frequently and was about twenty minutes reaching him. Meanwhile he had crawled back to the blankets and was looking and feeling a trifle chagrined.

Steve dropped her burden and stood gazing down at him with frank disapproval. “It wouldn’t have done any good to shout at you,” she explained, “because the surf pounding on the beach would have drowned my voice. I thought it would have drowned the sound of a shot too—so I fired over your silly head to stop you. Crawling away on my trail, I suppose!”

He nodded and Steve smiled approvingly. “Well, you’re a good game partner,” she admitted. “I’ve shot a lamb.”

“A what?” he almost yelled.

“A lamb—a regular woolly lamb, a spring lamb—a Hampshire lamb, by his black face and Roman nose. He was with the ewe, and she has another lamb with her. Family party lost from a band of sheep that were grazed hereabouts sometime ago. He weighs about forty pounds, and is quite fat. I dressed him where I killed him, which lightened him some; but at that, I’ve been a frightfully long time getting him back to camp. I’m tuckered out.”

She opened the suitcase, got out the bottle of brandy and took a swallow of it, after he declined to join her in the libation, on the ground that this stimulant should be reserved for the family provider. He watched her spread the remains of his slicker on the sand, haul the carcass of the lamb onto it and commence skinning. He observed she did a neat, workmanlike job. “I’ve often watched my father skin a deer,” she explained. “In fact, I’ve skinned a few myself. Dad used to take me hunting with him on Saturday afternoons and Sundays.”

She removed her inadequate shoes and stockings, tucked up her skirt, carried the carcass down into the surf and washed it, then washed the slicker and laid the meat back on it again, covering it against a swarm of yellow wasps which appeared immediately. Then she gathered driftwood and made a fire; when the flames had reduced the fuel to a bed of live coals, she abstracted the steel ramrod from the butt of his rifle, screwed it together and skewered four chops on it, wrapped his handkerchief around one end for a handle and broiled the meat.

“It will be tough,” he warned. “The animal heat isn’t out of it yet.”

“You’re a tenderfoot, Toby. Freshly killed meat is tender; then it gets tough, and must be hung an appropriate period before it’s tender again.” She handed him a chop. “Eat that, Toby, without salt or pepper, but say a real grace before you do.” And with a full heart he said:

“We give thanks, O Lord, for this, Thy gift, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Bless us, God, and help us.”

“Amen,” Steve murmured—and sank her fine white teeth into a chop. She broiled six chops for each of them, took his hat, went to the boat, poured water from the water-breaker into the depression in the crown of the hat, drank and brought a drink back for him.

“I feel like a boa constrictor,” she announced. “After a full meal the boa is torpid and stretches out for a long sleep.” She stretched out on a blanket beside him, drew half of it over her and sank almost immediately into deep slumber. He had observed that she was disinclined to talk, which to him evidenced an exhaustion she would not admit. Presently he too slept, for his despair had vanished. If there were sheep on this island, there were also sheep-herders. He had a feeling that somehow, in the fullness of time, he and Steve would manage to wangle through.

When he awoke in the middle of the afternoon, Steve was gone, and he realized she would not be back for quite a while, for in her part of the blanket he found two objects—the half of the heels of her ridiculous shoes. She had cut them off with his hunting-knife in order to walk better—and farther. Just at sunset she returned and tossed down before him two small limbs, each about six feet long and with a crotch at the end. He saw that they had been freshly cut.

“Crutches for you, Toby,” she announced. “I’ll get you up on your one sound leg tomorrow morning, measure the distance from your armpits to the ground and cut these things to fit you. We’re going to move. It’ll be the devil’s own journey, but you’ve got to make it.”

“As if I’d go back on you,” he protested. “Where do we go from here?”

“To an abandoned sheep-camp about half a mile inland, my dear. I’ve found the cutest little house. One-room cabin made from small logs, with an open rock fireplace and two rough bunks. I found some large discarded coffee-tins I can cook in, and there’s a spring close by. No food, unfortunately, but I’m not worried about that. I saw a fox and half a dozen blue grouse and some bear sign. I drove that ewe and her remaining lamb up close to the house, shot them both, dressed them and locked them up in the house. Tomorrow I’ll start drying the meat and skins. It will not be long before I’ll have to organize a pair of shoes for myself in order to get around better.”

“Steve, you’re precious.”

“I’m glad you think so. I think myself I can make a hand in a pinch.”

“Any signs of the sheep-herders?”

“I saw none. The country is flat for five miles in every direction. It must be a month since they were in this vicinity. They follow the feed, you know, and all the sheep sign is old, and the little fir twigs on the bunks are quite stale and withered. I’ll cut new mattresses for us tomorrow and make you comfortable. Found a discarded flour-sack, and I’ll fill that with pine needles and make a pillow of sorts for you.”

“Miss Robinson Crusoe, you’re my little comfort.”

She smiled brightly upon him. “Coming up for air, aren’t you? Well, I’m not discouraged. Life isn’t going to be a bed of roses for a while, but it’s going to be a great deal more comfortable than it was for our prehistoric ancestors—and fortunately I come from a country with horizons.”

She gathered more driftwood and cooked another heavy meal of lamb chops. After supper she went down toward the stranded boat, and dug in the sand with her hands until she had a hole about five feet long, three feet deep and two feet wide. She then found a short drift-log to fit this hole, tied the boat’s painter securely to the middle of it, dropped it into the hole parallel with the beach, filled it in and stamped it down.

“I’ve fastened the boat with a dead man,” she announced. “Now a receding wave can’t suck our boat to sea.”

She groped around in the moonlight until she found a flat sandstone rock, upon which she whetted Toby’s hunting-knife, then proceeded to cut wool off the pelt of the lamb.

“Now what?” he demanded.

“We didn’t have any cotton batting to wrap your leg in before applying the splints,” she explained, “so I’m going to do the job over again and pad your leg with wool. I’m not a nurse, but I have common sense, I trust. When you and I got into that boat together, we threw convention overboard. I can and will do all things necessary to help you, and you must not try to help yourself. You’d be surprised at the number of sick-room supplies I’ll organize tomorrow.”

“We’ll have to exist entirely on meat, without salt,” he warned her.

“No, we’ll make stews in water diluted with sea water. Half a mile up the beach I found a sort of rocky basin beyond high-water mark. I’ll fill it with sea-water, and when that evaporates, we’ll have some salt. We can exist nicely and entirely on a meat diet, provided we eat plenty of fats. Without fats we’ll get scurvy.”

“How do you know all this important information?”

“Ever read Stefansson’s ‘The Friendly Arctic’?”

“Oh!”

She spent an hour gathering dry seaweed up beyond the high-water mark, and made a bed for both of them, spread the blankets, tucked him in and crept in alongside him. His hand sought hers, and he carried it to his lips. He was troubled in his soul as to what people would say of her if and when they should return to civilization, and Steve appeared to sense his thoughts; perhaps she was thinking similar thoughts, for she said:

“Never bother to explain, Toby. As somebody once remarked: ‘Your friends do not require explanations, and your enemies will not believe them.’ Good night, comrade.”

“We shall probably not find help until I can walk to meet it, Steve. I don’t know how long a broken leg requires to mend, but it must be all of two months—longer if I have a bad break. I wonder if people will believe I had a broken leg?”

But Steve did not answer. Her breath was coming and going in the deep sleep of the physically exhausted.

The sun was high when they awakened. Steve left him and walked around a bend up the beach. She returned, barefooted, carrying her shoes and stockings. “Had a bath,” she explained. “Och! The ocean is cold. Sleep fairly well?”

“Quite, considering the fact that my leg aches rather badly.”

She gave him a drink of water with some brandy in it, broiled the remaining ribs of the lamb and they breakfasted. Then she got him to his feet, leaning against the side of the sheer bluff and measured the crude crutches. “They’ll do as they are until we strike firm going,” she announced. “They’ll sink a few inches in the sand of the beach. After that I’ll cut them off.” And she notched the spot where they would have to be cut. Then she padded the crotch of each with a shirt, made a roll of their coats and the blankets, tied the ends together with a strip of rope cut from the boat painter, slipped into the roll soldier-fashion, picked up the rifle and signed to him to start. They walked close to the wash of the surf where the sand was firmer, because wet. It was a painful and sorry pilgrimage for Toby; but after following the beach half a mile, the bluff descended to a level with the beach and they turned inland. Here the girl cut the crutches to a better fit, and they rested an hour. By midafternoon they had reached the abandoned shack of the sheep-herders, and while Toby lay on one of the rude bunks, Steve returned to the beach and brought up her bag and his suitcase. Two legs of lamb, tied together, hung around her neck; exhausted though she was by now, she yet met him smilingly.

“We waste nothing,” she announced cheerfully, “except the pelt, and I had to abandon that. It was getting pretty high.”

She lay down on the bunk opposite him and relaxed for half an hour, then arose and skinned the carcasses of the ewe and lamb she had killed the night before. The pelts she tacked to the side of the house by using wooden pins for pegs. From the carcasses she carefully removed all the tallow and intestinal fat and stored this in large empty coffee tins. The dead branches under the fir trees furnished her with fuel; while her fire was burning in the rude stone fireplace, she filled the empty flour-bag with soft pine needles and tucked it in under Toby’s head. The bed of live coals snuggled between two flat rocks, and when she had broiled their supper, she sat on an empty canned-goods case before the fire and carefully tended the fats and tallow as they were tried out. She had to move the cans every minute in order that the excess heat on that portion of the bottoms overhanging the fire might not melt the solder. Toby, watching her nodding over this task, watching the tears roll down her cheeks as the smoke caused her eyes to smart, was filled with compassion for her; when from time to time, she glanced toward him, she saw his thoughts reflected in his eyes and smiled back at him reassuringly.

“Are you just a little bit sorry you missed the last boat in order to make certain that I got aboard?” he asked her finally.

“A true sport never knows a regret,” she answered. “Help me be a true sport by refraining from suspecting me of such base weakness.”

“You must come of superb stock, Steve.”

“Just plain folks. My grandmother walked across the plains with my grandfather in ’49. It has been said of such Argonauts that the cowards never started and the weaklings died on the road. My paternal grandmother would have known what to do in a pinch like this. I wonder how she’d cure those sheep-pelts without anything to cure them with. They’ve got to be made usable, Toby. My supply of clothing is mighty scant, and if we should be marooned here until cold weather, I’d find it hard to be cheerful. I’m not so proud I wouldn’t wear a sheepskin, woolly side in.”

“They smell abominably, Steve. However, we might try something. Tomorrow you might scrape all the fat off them very carefully, soak them in sea water for a week, dry them, rub ashes on them, smoke them and hang them in the sun.”

“My shoes are about gone, Toby.”

“Tomorrow we’ll make some sandals for you.”

“How?”

“I have a good cowhide suitcase. We’ll cut strips of leather wide enough to turn on each side of your foot and be laced on with thongs cut from the soft pliable leather straps around the suitcase. We can get along without luggage.”

“You are so resourceful, Toby.”

“This leg of mine will have to be kept stretched,” he continued. “Tomorrow you’ll have to tie a heavy rock to one end of a rope, tie the other end to my ankle and permit the rock to hang down over the end of this bunk. I’ll show you how to rig a tackle.”

“You’ll be driven crazy, Toby.”

“I’ll not. I’m crazy now. You’ve driven me insane.”

“I, Toby?”

“Yes. I am intellectually incapable of appreciating you at more than a trace of your true worth. Steve, you’re a very wonderful young woman.”

“I’m so glad you think so, Toby. I want you to think well of me. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t. You’re really quite worth while, my dear boy. I’ve met some pretty fine men, provided you overlooked their uncouthness and remembered their virtues, but you’re the first gentleman I’ve ever met. I think you’re a thoroughbred, Toby—white inside and out. . . . Pleased to have met you, old settler.”

“I’m not frightened or worried any more, Steve. In fact, for some incomprehensible reason I’m rather happy—and I shouldn’t be.”

“Why not? It’s fun to go native, even with a broken leg. You’re enjoying a radical change in your existence.” She stirred the bubbling tallow thoughtfully. “I do hope this doesn’t turn rancid,” she mused; “but rancid or sweet, we’ll eat it and like it.”

Suddenly she stood up, distressed. “Oh, Toby, will you ever forgive me? I haven’t washed your face since we landed.”

She dipped his handkerchief into a can of water she had brought from the adjacent spring, and washed him; face, neck, hands and ears. “I notice you have a safety razor in your kit,” she went on, “so tomorrow I’ll heat some water and shave you. Have you scissors?”

“No.”

“Then your hair must grow until you look like the late Buffalo Bill, but I’ll not stand for whiskers. You’re so very nice—and so very helpless, Toby, I might take a notion to fondle you—”

“Oh, you mustn’t do that, really,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to fall in love with you—yet.”

She shifted the can of fat on the fire, the while a small smile played around her mobile mouth, despite the pains she took to conceal it. “Very well, Toby, I’ll not insist,” she said presently. “After all, you’ve been very noble. You told me you were a married man, although,” she added reflectively, “I believe you’re married about as much as a coyote is married.”

“I don’t want to discuss that,” he hastened to intervene.

“It isn’t necessary, and I admire your delicacy in refraining from doing it. But you can’t fool me, Toby. You haven’t had a very good time lately; you’re unhappy and worried. I suppose the thought has occurred to you that if we’re marooned here six months, you may return home to find yourself a modern Enoch Arden.”

“That thought has occurred to me, Steve. How did you guess it?”

“You talked, last night, in your sleep, and I pieced the story together. What will you do if Laurel marries the unpleasant Daingerfield man while you’re here?”

“Oh, Lord,” he groaned out, “I did talk, didn’t I? Oh, well, if that happens, the marriage can be annulled.”

“Three cheers for our side. Then you’ll have her back on your hands again. Well, after a few months of Daingerfield she might have a much higher appreciation of you and conclude to stick.”

“She may do all the concluding she desires,” he cried sharply, “but it will not do her any good. When I pulled out, I did so for keeps. She asked for a divorce; and when I get back, she’ll have it whether she wants it or not.”

“The trouble with you, Mr. Hand, is that you have an old-fashioned conscience. The modern idea is to snatch a feather from the tail of the Bird of Happiness as the bird flies over you.”

“I can wait for my happiness.”

“I gathered you’re an expert at that. Well, as the prophet Isaiah wrote: ‘Blessed is he who hath endured temptation for righteousness’ sake, for he shall wear the crown of life.’ I shall not tempt you, Toby, my lad. Yet I should be clearly within my rights if I decided to. The first night out from Seattle, the chief mate picked on me. We indulged in considerable conversation on maritime subjects, and he explained to me the law of salvage. It seems that anybody who finds, at sea, a piece of flotsam and jetsam, or an abandoned ship, is entitled, under the law of salvage, to retain it.” She glanced over at him, and the look of amazement she encountered sent her into a gale of laughter.

“Don’t worry, Toby, don’t worry,” she hastened to assure him. “I’ll not insist on my maritime rights. We’ll be neighbors.”

“You’re in a frightful social jackpot because of me,” he mourned.

“Yes, Toby,” she replied lugubriously, “I’m afraid you’re going to be a victim of your exalted sense of honor before you’re a year older. You’ll simply have to marry me to make an honest woman of me. You can’t be cast away with a young woman for months—a gel that has borne an excellent reputation always—and then run out on her. I fear that my father might shoot you.”

“Will you please give all your attention to trying out that tallow and cease your annoying feminine habit of anticipating future events?”

“Certainly; but promise me first, Toby, you’ll not do me wrong.”

He did not answer. Instead he covered his face with his bent arm and commenced breathing heavily. In about five minutes she called softly:

“Toby?”

And at that he shouted: “I’m asleep!”

It did him good to hear her hearty laughter, to know that here was a woman with a priceless sense of humor. . . . The thought came to him that it must be very pleasant to have a wife who poked gentle fun at one. . . . Yes, he who had known the tyranny of tears could appreciate a wife like that. Such a wife wouldn’t even have to be good-looking. . . . In the midst of a tangled variety of very strange thoughts, fears and emotions he fell asleep. Steve sat tending her task until the tallow had been rendered; then she threw a couple of knots on the fire, wrapped herself in his overcoat and her own coat and crept into the berth opposite him. She lay for a few minutes watching his fine profile silhouetted against the flickering light from the fireplace. “Poor darling,” she whispered to herself, “he’s in a spot.”

Strangely, it did not occur to her that she was in one also!

Toby Hand was the unconscious possessor of the most priceless of assets. He had personality and charm. Withal he was as simple as a boy, and incapable of the slightest effort at self-dramatization. A conversation with Toby, even on a commonplace topic, never struck one as commonplace, because his quiet humor saved it from that. When he looked at one, he smiled with his eyes; without in the least having any cogent thought about it, he gave the impression of an alert interest in one, a quick sympathy with one’s desires.

Old Barney Runyan, Laurel’s paternal uncle, had developed a keen interest in Toby long before meeting him. It arose out of a letter Toby had written him upon the occasion of his becoming engaged to Laurel. He had written Runyan that since the latter was Laurel’s next of kin, and had for many years exhibited a paternal interest in her welfare, it seemed to Toby a duty to write him, tell him about himself and assure him jovially that, in the opinion of Tobias Hand, Runyan’s niece might go farther in search of a husband and fare worse. He told Runyan about himself and expressed the hope that his marriage to Laurel would prove pleasing to her uncle and aunt.

That old-fashioned courteous deference pleased Barney Runyan, who was old-fashioned himself, but none too courteous. He lived in San Francisco, and upon the occasion of his first visit to New York, he had telephoned Toby and asked him to dine with him. “And you needn’t bring Laurel with you,” he added. “Two men can’t get acquainted with a chattering woman buttin’ in on their talk.”

At that first meeting Bernard Runyan (or Barney, as he was more familiarly known to his friends and his wife) had fallen under the spell of Toby’s personality. Here was one young man old Barney was not suspicious of—not one of the la-de-da lads, university-spoiled, and with sights set for bigger game than he was able to carry home if, by some miracle, he bagged it. Old Barney had started the battle of life far back of scratch, and nobody had ever done anything for him; he had accumulated many millions of dollars and had fought for every dollar.

Toby discovered old Barney had, at fourteen, shipped as a cabin boy around Cape Horn; that at sixteen he had been an able seaman, a third mate at eighteen, second mate at nineteen, chief mate at twenty and master before he was twenty-two. He had always been thrifty and prudent in his investments, and had laid the foundation for his fortune skippering steamers, laden with contraband cargo, into Vladivostok, during the Russo-Japanese war. Tricky business, calling for courage and enterprise, and paying double the usual salary and a bonus. At forty he had left the sea and married a woman who possessed a trait not unusual in intelligent women—a flair for astute investment in real estate. Long before others had awakened to the opportunities for wealth in the Alaskan fisheries, Runyan had incorporated a canning company at Bristol Bay and was its controlling owner. In the years that followed, he had erected other canneries, serviced by a fleet of square-rigged ships. He had mining interests in Alaska and timber lands in Oregon and Washington, and a fifteen-story modern office building in San Francisco. He possessed a justifiable pride in his commercial achievements but was not stuck up about it.

On the occasion of that first meeting with Toby, Barney was somewhat troubled in his soul. He told Toby about it. The previous year the customary run of red salmon had not come to Three Saints Bay. Instead there had arrived a prodigious run of “dog” salmon—in food quality differing not at all from the red salmon save in the color of their flesh, which is white. Because red salmon predominated in Alaskan and Pacific Coast waters, and large packs of this variety have been made annually for half a century at points where the dog salmon never appeared, the trade has developed such a preference for red salmon that nobody has had the hardihood to can the white variety and undertake the task of popularizing it. Hence, when a dog salmon was hooked, it was immediately returned to the sea.

Having arrived at Three Saints Bay in the spring with his ships loaded with fishermen and supplies for the season, and discovering that his pack of red salmon was going to be so slight as to be negligible, Runyan, in a spirit of adventure common to the man, made up his mind to fill out his pack with dog salmon. He knew he would have difficulty selling it, and would in all probability make a loss that year, but not such a loss as would be entailed by depending upon the meager run of red salmon. He had his fishermen and cannery help on the ground, all contracted for a season of work, and he was one who kept his contracts. Moreover (he decided) the fact that nobody had ever packed or sold dog salmon did not constitute a reason why it should not be packed and sold.

Then while in New York, he had met Toby Hand, to whom, in the course of conversation, he explained his predicament.

“Any sound, wholesome article can be sold if properly advertised,” Toby had declared. “The trouble with you, Mr. Runyan, is that you are handicapped by tradition. You seek the sale of your product only in the recognized trade channels. You should seek new trade channels. I’ll make a survey of the market and discover what countries absorb the red salmon pack; then we’ll tackle the remainder of the world with your white salmon pack.”

In a month he reported that the best available market appeared to be south of Mason and Dixon’s line. The negro population, he thought, would absorb white salmon at a price; so would the poor whites. And he launched for Bernard Runyan an advertising campaign, the selling argument of which was embodied in one line: “This salmon is guaranteed not to turn red in the can. Your money back if it does.”

So Bernard Runyan had sold his white salmon pack and established a future market for such dog salmon as his fishermen brought in. And his admiration and affection for Toby Hand had been enormous.

“What a pity,” he told his wife, “that a brilliant young fellow like Hand should have been hornswoggled into marrying my niece!”

He had never liked his niece. Laurel was the only child of his only brother, a footless sort of man to whom Runyan paid twenty thousand dollars a year to do a job in his employ which could have been done by any ordinarily bright clerk. Some of the contempt with which the old dominant captain of industry viewed his brother’s futility had been visited upon Laurel when, in time, she developed her father’s qualities. Having no children of his own, old Bernard had endeavored to develop a paternal affection for his niece, but found that impossible. To the way of thinking of Runyan and his wife, Laurel was not lovable. Both saw through her little artifices, her pretenses of affection, her ill-concealed resentments when disappointed in anything. She had lived with her uncle and aunt for a few years after the death of her parents, but the intimacy had not been a happy one, and both Runyan and his wife had been relieved when she was sent off to a boarding-school, from which she seldom wrote them except for money—which old Bernard supplied in quantities more than sufficient for her needs, but which, in view of his millions, Laurel deemed niggardly.

She had been greatly shocked when, upon her being graduated from Vassar, her uncle had written suggesting that it would be best for her to endeavor thereafter to be self-supporting. He practically insisted that she secure some sort of employment and work at it, but added, kindly enough, that he would send her each month a check equal to her salary. Her present allowance would continue for six months, to enable her to seek and secure congenial employment; if at the end of that time she had not placed herself, the allowance would be discontinued.

“Not that I give a damn for money,” old Bernard had added, “but because you have gathered the illusion that I’m a human Christmas tree—probably because your father thought so too. You will have to prove yourself worth while, so you must dignify yourself with a job. It will tend to humanize you. Nobody should be permitted to entertain the idea that it is their main object in life to dwell in idleness and graft, waiting for a rich relative to die. So you get busy, my dear, and make good with your Uncle Bernard; otherwise, when Uncle Barney kicks the bucket, you’re going to be horribly disappointed in his will.”

How Laurel had loathed him for that blunt letter! Danger-signals meant nothing to her; she was incapable of reading them. Instead of following old Bernard’s advice, she had waited six months—and married Toby Hand.

Barney had roared with laughter when the wedding announcement reached him. “I knew she’d do it, Mother,” he declared. “She was born a grafter, and a grafter she’ll remain all her days. If this man she’s marrying has any character, he’ll divorce her within five years. I feel sorry for him. Fell in love with a beautiful face an’ figger. Laurel could always put her best foot forward to achieve an objective; but once she achieved it—oh, well, let Nature take its course.”

His sympathy for Toby Hand became all the keener after meeting Toby. Runyan, following the dog-salmon incident, yearned to steal Toby from the employ of Worden, Garr, Ltd., and give the young man double the salary in his own employ; but since that predicated the infliction of Laurel’s society upon him, and particularly upon the old wife of his bosom, whom he loved with a peculiar old-fashioned tenderness and whom, he knew, Laurel disliked, he decided to wait.

The first intimation he received that his prediction was about to come true reached him in a letter from Toby, addressed to him at his San Francisco office and forwarded to him at the Three Saints Bay cannery, where for many years he and his old wife had delighted in spending the summer. He found the contents of that letter singularly pleasing to him.

“Great news, Mother,” he announced to Mrs. Runyan. “Young Hand has left Laurel. He’s fed up—although he doesn’t go into details. He says she wants a divorce, which he will give her at a time agreeable to himself; meanwhile he is coming up here to visit us. He knows he’s welcome.”

“I’m sorry for him, Barney.”

“Sorry, my grandmother! Rejoice with the boy. Dear, kind, thoughtful, noble, self-sacrificing Laurel has asked him to divorce her. Well, Laurel’s ancestors were seafaring men, so she knows enough not to let go one rope until she has a firm hold on another. I’ll bet a cooky the new man is pretty rich. Hope so, because in that event Toby won’t be held up for a settlement or alimony through the years. Her extravagance probably busted the poor devil. Well, I’ll grab the boy now. He’s one young man I certainly want to have in my business. Grand idea. Holy sailor, what a grand idea! One Runyan ruins Toby, and another makes it up to him. Mother, let’s us too act dirty.”

Mother looked at him inquiringly. “A codicil to our respective wills,” he announced. “Laurel’s dumped Toby, so let us dump Laurel. Amputate her from the Runyan bank-roll and give her share to Toby. It’ll gravel hell out of her when we’re gone.”

He commenced to chuckle as he conjured up a vision of Laurel when the Runyan family fortune passed her by with a bequest of one dollar.

“You’re a wicked old devil, Barney Runyan,” Mother observed, “and I’ll not join with you in acting dirty. Laurel is not and never has been a lovable girl. She’s catty, and she always would lie, and she’s a selfish schemer; but she’s your next of kin, and you’ll have to provide for her future to the extent, at least, that no matter what happens to her, she never will become a public charge. Of course her husband is a dear—quite the antithesis of Laurel. How much do you think we ought to leave the boy?”

“That requires some thought, Mother. The young feller doesn’t know it, but he’s going on the Runyan pay roll if I can possibly persuade him to do so. We’ll make up our minds in a day or two, and when I send the yacht down to Juneau to meet Toby and bring him up, I’ll have the captain mail the codicils to my attorneys.”

His yacht reached Juneau the day before the Yukon Princess was due to arrive there; hence the master had the earliest news of the disaster to that vessel and of the loss of Toby Hand and Stephanie Howard. He carried the news back to the Runyans at Three Saints Bay.

Laurel was not very intelligent; she assimilated new ideas slowly, but she was cunning. Something told her Jim Daingerfield was not the gentleman Toby Hand had been, and that a wife, to him, was a piece of property, to be controlled by him. With such men there is such a thing as going too far. So she told Daingerfield she had been a bad, selfish, petulant girl and was so sorry for it; which caused him to beam with pleasure in the knowledge that he had taken the odd trick. Hence, when Laurel informed him very apologetically that her bank-account required rehabilitation, he roared with delight and deposited a hundred thousand to her credit.

Laurel had no thought of spending that money. Why should she? Her husband was making money so fast he derived a wild thrill from spending it; he would give her whatever she hinted she desired. All he required in return was that she should outdress other women, be kind and pleasant to him, decorate the head of his table. After all, his wants were few.

She discovered he did not have many friends of consequence. He had no social standing. As a huge market operator he was out of touch with the social and financial aristocracy of New York. His intimates were all men who had made “new” money, and their wives were plainly a little bewildered and overdid things. Laurel found herself in the midst of a spending competition; she loathed entertaining her husband’s commonplace friends and their equally commonplace wives; a certain daintiness caused her to revolt against the drinking orgies common in that set, the sycophantic head-waiters and English butlers who not so very long ago had been scullery lads, the blatant brags about town houses, country houses, yachts, airplanes, trips to Europe and expensive shops. False though she was herself, Laurel was not a half-bad hand at concealing her falseness, and she had an instinct for detecting it in others. And in nobody did she detect it more promptly and with greater certitude than in Jim Daingerfield. However, she did not worry greatly about this, for she had more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash and as much more in jewelry at retail prices; when she could stand him no longer, she could divorce him and get an excellent settlement.

More than once, during this period of strange and new experiences, she thought rather kindly of Toby, comparing him, to his signal advantage, with the parvenu society into which Daingerfield had introduced her. Toby, she reflected, had never appeared overdressed. With three suits of clothes, two pairs of flannel trousers, a pair of tan shoes, a pair of black shoes, a pair of dinner shoes and a pair of sport shoes, half a dozen ties and a dozen shirts, he was a much better dressed man than she was meeting nowadays. She thought of his poise, of his clear, thoughtful blue eyes that appraised one so mercilessly and yet so tolerantly, of his well-pitched voice, his freedom from slang, from cheap wise-cracking, from loud and annoying brag. Toby had never been a drinking man, either. He had been too smart for that, and, moreover it would have interfered with his work; yet, on the few occasions when she had seen him rather overdo it, he had held his liquor well. She wished now that Jim Daingerfield had some of the simplicity and naturalness which she had once thought dulness or taciturnity in Toby.

The thing Laurel found hardest to bear was the inane chatter of her set. Nobody had anything remotely worth while to say. Toby had not been like that. He never would associate with Tom, Dick and Harry merely because they had money or meant money to him. Laurel realized now that women had always liked him, for women have a habit of being fascinated by a man of definite character, a man who never flatters them outrageously or pursues them.

It seemed to Laurel that now she had men about her who were fat. Toby had always looked after his waist-line; had he lived, he would have been youthful-looking at fifty. He had been very fond of trout-fishing and had spent many an evening making his own flies. Once he had bought a hat right off the head of an old lady (probably the old lady from Dubuque) because it was twenty-five years old and adorned with the most gorgeous feathers for making trout-flies. Laurel knew that a luxurious swivel-chair on the deck of a sixty-foot fishing cruiser, with a highball at hand and a hired man to gaff the fish and affix the bait, as Jim Daingerfield’s set did in Florida, would never have appealed to Toby. Toby had never permitted her to keep a dog, because he loved dogs himself and had always maintained that an apartment was no place in which to keep one, that such dogs were overfed and underexercised and developed eczema, nerves and bad manners.

She and Daingerfield had a vulpine-faced butler yclept Hibbs. Laurel found herself considering one night at dinner that Toby would not have approved of Hibbs. She recalled that during the first year of their marriage they had had a very correct Japanese butler named Hashiguro, who served from the left as well-trained butlers should. Toby had developed a passion for trying to snatch a piece of bread from the tray while Hashiguro was at his right—an act of vandalism which the active little Jap had always avoided by lifting the tray or adroitly sidestepping. After each such futile effort Toby would say, “Hashi, I’ll get you yet”; whereupon Hashiguro would whistle through his teeth and murmur: “Yes sir, I don’ zink so.”

Since Toby’s death Laurel had discovered that the whistling insuck of breath on the part of a Japanese is a politeness, inferring literally: “The air about you is so sweet I suck it in, I smell it and I like it.” Hashiguro, she recalled, had never done that to her, and at Christmas he had given Toby a rod for catching striped bass—a rod made from ebony and inlaid with pearl shell in intricate patterns—a rod he had made himself. He had sent Laurel a cheap potted plant.

When she thought about Hashiguro and Toby, she laughed aloud, then dropped a tear. Daingerfield (they were dining at home, for a wonder, and alone) asked: “What’s the big idea?” And she had longed to throw a plate at him, because he had endeavored to intrude upon her emotional privacy.

All in all, it began to dawn on Laurel, after three months of living with Daingerfield, that she dwelt in a world of perpetual motion. She who formerly had rebelled because she had had too much time to herself, now rebelled because she had no time at all to herself. She had too many servants; she had no necessity to oversee her own house; she had a secretary to handle her numerous engagements, and a Swedish masseuse came every morning to knead her slim beautiful body and ward off a mounting neurasthenia.

Under his fat Daingerfield concealed an amazing activity and vitality. He was never happy unless he was going somewhere and seeing things. He liked people to see him at smart places—he was an inveterate first-nighter, from which it followed that Laurel saw more than her share of bad, dull, turgid and banal theatrical entertainment. . . . Whenever Daingerfield bought something, he told people what it cost him; as ignorant of art as is a pig of the binomial theorem, he bought treacly landscapes because they cost a great deal of money, and pretended to an intimate knowledge of artists, ancient and modern. He couldn’t sing the scale of C without flatting half the notes; yet in the opera season he managed to be seen with Laurel twice a week in the famous Horseshoe. He laughed heartily and loudly and with minor excuse; he strove gallantly at the task of being a good fellow and a good host; he overdressed and over-tipped and over-ate, and he called Laurel “Baby” in the presence of their guests, who thought that extraordinarily sweet of him. He had one redeeming quality which Laurel recognized and appreciated, however. Apparently he was kind and good-natured unless crossed. She had tried out her formula on him; she had crossed him and lost—and she had never tried it again.

Thinking this over one day, she decided that if Toby had only been a bit of a roughneck, their married life would not have gone on the rocks.

The surrogate to whom the probate of Toby’s will had been assigned took up the case three months after Toby’s reported death. The estate owed no debts, so it was speedily closed; and four months after Toby had been reported dead, his attorney handed her a check for some cash, and some bonds that were all that remained of Toby’s long years of thrift. The estate amounted to about eighteen thousand dollars.

The stockmarket crash came on October twenty-ninth. When Daingerfield came home that night, he was strangely quiet; but inasmuch as Laurel did not mention the topic which was then on fifty million tongues, he opined, correctly, that she had not read the afternoon papers. So he cheered up, and in the course of their conversation remarked:

“Baby, I’m going to put you in the market and make you a barrel of money.”

“Oh, dar-ling!”

“Easiest thing I do, old girl. The bull market is about over. We’ve reached our Farthest North—and now we’re headed for our Farthest South. I got out in time—saw the cyclone coming. We had a very bad break today, and it will be worse tomorrow. If you’ll give me a check for all the money you can spare, I’ll sell a lot of standard stocks short for you, on margin, and you can follow the market down and clean up a million—all for yourself.”

“Is that what you’re going to do, Jim?”

“It’s what I’ve already done. If I don’t clean up forty or fifty millions on this break, you beat it out to Reno and divorce me, baby, on the ground that nobody expects a woman to live with a feeble-minded man.”

“Is it safe?”

“As a church. I didn’t suggest this to you while the market was soaring. I wanted to wait. There’s an old saying, baby, that whatever goes up, must come down. Men are naturally optimistic. When stocks are high, men think they’re going higher; but when prices crack, men stubbornly believe they will react and go back to the old price levels. This country is due for a shaking up, for an accounting, for a financial readjustment—and the person who hocks the family silver to go short will, in a few weeks, be able to buy all the tea in China. I advise you to climb aboard the chariot with me and take a free ride. I know stocks that are due to drop fifty points—and a hundred thousand invested in a short selling will return five million dollars.”

“I have two hundred and thirteen thousand dollars, Jim, and my bonds from Toby’s estate.”

“Let me have a check for it all, and within a week the bankers will be fighting for your business. Give me the bonds and I’ll sell them for you.”

The following morning she gave him the check and her bonds. Faults Jim Daingerfield had in profusion, but Laurel believed him to be a financial wizard. Quickly she decided to make four or five million, and leave him! No woman with several million dollars could stand him indefinitely. She would give him back every dollar he had ever spent on her and beg him to let her go. Why, she asked herself, should she stick to him until she was middle-aged and had lost her charm? . . . She excused herself for these traitorous thoughts by assuring herself their marriage had all been a hideous mistake. Toby had been right about Jim. Yes, for once in his life, Toby had demonstrated himself to be a prophet. Poor Toby!

The day succeeding the one on which they moved from the beach to the sheep-herders’ abandoned cabin, was a busy one for Stephanie Howard. Under Toby’s direction she rigged, with strips cut from a blanket, an ingenious contraption one end of which was fastened to Toby’s ankle and the other weighted with a rock and hung over the foot of the bunk, the result being a constant pull on his broken leg to prevent the fracture from buckling. As Toby explained, he didn’t want to discover, after he was able to walk again, that one of his legs was shorter than it really ought to be. Then Steve removed the first rude splint and both examined the fracture with considerable interest. Toby decided it was a neat little fracture and should knit readily, so Steve padded his leg with raw wool, re-applied the splints and did a much more workmanlike job of rough surgery. This finished, she cut armfuls of short fir twigs and made new soft mattresses for both of them. Thereafter she made a rack of slight stripped fir twigs and set it up on four rocks in a clear space where the sun could shine upon it, after which she cut all the meat on hand into strips and laid them on the rack, to be dried in the sun. Until near sunset she stood over this meat with a twig, keeping away the yellow-jackets and flies that appeared instantly for the feast; then she gathered the meat up in Toby’s slicker and stored it in the cabin for the night. For supper she made a stew into which she dropped almost a cupful of tallow; they ate the meat with their fingers and drank the liquid part, toasting confusion to the specter of scurvy.

Supper over, she heated a gallon can of water and in the flickering faint light cast by the fire, undressed Toby for the first time and washed his body with a wet bandanna handkerchief she had found in his suitcase, slipped the coat of his pajamas on him, tucked him up in his blanket with his overcoat on top and said: “Now lie flat on your back. No tossing or turning for Toby Hand.” She thrust a cigarette into his mouth and lighted it with a dry twig thrust into the fire. “We must conserve our matches,” she admonished.

She lighted a cigarette for herself, stretched out on her own bunk and puffed contentedly. When she had rested an hour she rose again and with Toby’s knife commenced to scrape away the scraps of flesh and fat that adhered to the pelts of the late ewe and her lamb. “I’ll peg these out in the sun on the ground tomorrow,” she informed Toby, “and then at intervals throughout the day I’ll sprinkle them with salt water. In the resultant evaporation some salt crystals are bound to remain and the sun will melt the fat I can’t scrape off and that grease will catch the salt says good old Steve, the tanner.”

“How many cigarettes have we left?” he demanded sharply.

“Two cartons in your plunder and eight packs in mine, but you have a pipe and a two-pound can of tobacco.”

“How long will it take that cursed mutton to dry?”

“About three days.”

“So you must fight flies and wasps two days longer?”

She nodded.

“I’d rather jump in the ocean,” he growled bitterly.

“It will make an excellent light travel-ration if and when we leave here and start exploring this island for aid. We may have to travel far, and game may not be always available,” she reminded him.

“I feel like a grease-ball,” he complained. “That stew was pretty hard to take. I’d sell my soul for a cup of coffee.”

She went to her bag and groped in it; presently Toby was astounded to hear her playing, on a cheap harmonica, “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls.” “Now, how’s that for entertainment?” she demanded when she had finished.

“It’s marvelous—and I’m rebuked for my impatience. The idea of a girl being able to play a fool harmonica so that it sounds like real music!”

“I played over the radio for a month once with the Frontier Orchestra. They gave me two hundred dollars for doing it, and that’s a lot of money.” She ran a few scales and played, “Then You’ll Remember Me.”

Toby sang it; he had a very good barbershop baritone.

“Can you croon?” Steve demanded.

“No,” he answered sharply, “of course not.”

“I’m glad; if I thought you’d croon I’d stab you to the heart.”

He shouted with laughter. “Oh, Stevie, I’ll never again hear my wife sing, ‘Wabash Moon.’ She has a really good contralto but her idea of a great melody is, ‘When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.’ You wouldn’t be so low as to sing that to me in my helpless condition, would you, Steve? Songs about the moon set my reason tottering on its throne—and I’m not so fond of songs about rivers, either.”

She tossed the harmonica back in her bag, crossed to his bunk, stooped and kissed him. “Good night, Toby. I must be up very early to scout around for some wild berries for your breakfast. You’re just a spoiled city lad and I see I have to humor you.”

“That,” he replied with a certain note of bitterness, “will be an experience.”

Down on the bluff above the shore Steve found a great patch of wild strawberries; she picked a gallon of them. Also she brought up from the beach the water-breaker from the lifeboat and it was filled with sea-water. She forced Toby to drink about four ounces of it for the good of his internal economy and then served him strawberries and two lamb chops.

During the succeeding days the meat dried satisfactorily, and she reported a noticeable coating of salt crystals on the sheep-pelts. She kept a can of salt water boiling continuously on the hearth and eventually collected about a tablespoonful of salt, which made her greasy stews much more palatable. Grouse were plentiful, also snowshoe rabbits, now wearing their summer coat of light brown. About two miles from their cabin she one day came across a sizable stream, waded into it and flipped a salmon out on the bank. Bear sign was plentiful, so she continued up the stream and killed a large brown bruin she found trying to paw a salmon out of a hole. She skinned him partially, where he lay, removed about twenty pounds of fat and some loin-steaks, and carried them home in her tucked-up dress.

Toby was horrified at the tale of the bear-killing. “The big brown fellows up here are Kadiak bears,” he warned her, “and killing one of them is a man’s job. For heaven’s sake, leave them alone. If you wound them they charge you, and if they reach you that will be about all.”

“But we must have fat,” she protested. “I had to take the risk, but I was careful. I maneuvered so I could break his back; then another shot through the head finished him. I’m a pretty good shot, Toby.”

“But I’ve never eaten bear meat. I know it will sicken me.”

“You’ll eat it, my brave lad,” said Steve firmly, “and like it. I found a big still pool in a bend in the creek. The sun had warmed it and I had a fine bath while a mother bear and two cubs watched me from the hillside.” She gazed ruefully at her soiled dress, and at his soiled clothing hung on wooden pegs on the wall. “I’m going back there tomorrow and do a heavy day’s washing.”

“You’re not!”

“Who’s running this show, Toby Hand?”

“Steve, please— If anything should happen to you I’d die.”

“Of course you would—of starvation.”

“I don’t mean that sort of death.”

“Oh, heart-trouble, eh?”

“Naturally I would,” he almost shouted. In his helplessness and worry his inhibitions were all down now. “Damn it, Steve, if you cared for me at all you wouldn’t frighten me so!”

“Oh,” she answered demurely, “am I supposed to think a great deal of you, Toby?”

“Of course you are,” he rasped unreasonably. “Don’t I think a great deal of you?”

“How should I know? Anyhow, if you do, Toby, it’s quite reprehensible. You mustn’t forget you’re a married man.”

“You might help me forget it. If you think I glean any pleasure from remembering it——”

“Whoa, Dobbin! You’re speaking out of your turn, but I can understand this sudden rebellious mood. I suppose you’ve never slept flat on your back before. You should be grateful we haven’t got mosquitoes to contend with. Go to sleep now, and if you need me during the night, call me.”

There was nothing to break the monotony of the days that ensued—days of toil for Steve and of anxiety, impatience and despair for Toby, who lacked the mental tonic of having something to do. Steve’s chief concern was the husbanding of ammunition. She would not waste any on grouse, but made a figure-four trap and baited it with berries. Despite Toby’s protests she visited the stream to do her washing and to kill a bear when needed. She saw no more sheep and came to the conclusion that those she had killed had been lost from a band that had been removed from the island. Berries lasted until well into September and in the natural basin she had discovered down on the beach she had, by natural evaporation, collected quite a quantity of salt. Three bearskins she had dragged home and pegged out in the sun to dry, which they did, curing quickly but stiffly in that cool dry atmosphere. They made excellent beds, protecting her and Toby from the chill the mattresses of fir twigs failed to keep out. The stock of jerked meat accumulated against a winter’s need.

Both Steve and Toby remained in good health and free from digestive disturbances due to the preponderant meat diet. By mincing the meat and salting it liberally they were enabled to eat quantities of it raw, thus reducing the intestinal danger from an almost exclusive diet of cooked meat. Toby’s fractured tibia had commenced to knit by first intention and at the end of six weeks he ventured to stand upon it and move about a little on his crude crutches. At the end of nine weeks he had thrown away his crutches and was walking a little. Due to the location of the fracture he was enabled to walk about freely while still retaining the splints as a measure of precaution. Steve had kept track of the passing days by carving a notch in a log in the wall. . . .

The Alaskan salmon fleet bearing the season’s pack comes home in September. About the middle of September Bernard Runyan and his wife boarded their yacht and started home.

It was not until the first of October that Runyan’s general manager commenced to worry over the non-arrival of the party. It was Runyan’s custom to leave his yacht at Seattle and continue the journey to San Francisco by train, but usually he telegraphed his general manager as soon as he reached Seattle. When another week passed without news of the yacht, the general manager quietly sent out an alarm to all steamers plying in Alaska waters, as well as to the coast guard. On the thirteenth a lifeboat bearing on its stern the words M. Y. Klickitat was picked up by a Canadian coast guard cutter. M. Y. Klickitat was the name of Bernard Runyan’s yacht, and when by November first the craft was still missing, all hope that she would ever turn up finally perished.

Jim Daingerfield was the avenue through which news of the tragedy reached Laurel. He had read a story about it in the Wall Street Journal and it constituted the first cheering news he had had in a long time. Laurel had told him of her multi-millionaire uncle and Daingerfield knew she was his next of kin. Undoubtedly, therefore, he thought, the old man’s will would provide handsomely for Laurel, although Daingerfield was aware that the Runyans did not regard Laurel as sympatico, as the Spanish phrase it. He had wondered more than once why she had been so undiplomatic as to neglect the old pair; even if they bored her and annoyed her; even if they had not been lovable, a realization of the side on which her bread was buttered should have indicated to Laurel a course of conduct calculated to win their affection. Daingerfield was an adherent of the ancient principle that one can catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar.

The news did not disturb Laurel unduly. She said: “Oh, dear, how perfectly dreadful,” asked a few questions, sighed and said: “I wonder how much Uncle Bernard left me.”

“I suppose he’s left you a competency,” Daingerfield suggested, “but it seems to me, if you had played your cards right, you’d be the heir to the bulk of the Runyan fortune. You must learn to be more diplomatic, Laurel. Very often I have to be nice to people I’d like to kick, but for business reasons I refrain from following the bent of my natural desire. However,” he added sadly, “anybody who expects diplomacy from a woman is the king of optimists.”

Laurel telegraphed at once to the manager of Runyan’s cannery business in San Francisco, asking for particulars of the death of the Runyans and, of course, furnishing her address. In about a week she received a letter from her uncle’s attorneys, advising that they had no details of the death of her uncle and aunt. However, since they were morally certain both had perished, their wills had been opened, whereupon a curious situation had developed. Bernard Runyan and his wife had made reciprocal wills several years previous; with the exception of a specific bequest of one hundred thousand dollars to Laurel which was contained in her uncle’s will, the residue of his estate was bequeathed to his wife and his wife, after making a specific bequest of one hundred thousand dollars to Laurel, had bequeathed the residue of her estate to her husband. On the 15th of July previous, however, both decedents had made holographic codicils to their wills. Bernard Runyan’s codicil revoked the specific bequest of one hundred thousand dollars to Laurel and substituted one dollar; to one Tobias Hand he had, in that codicil, bequeathed one hundred thousand dollars, with the further stipulation that this bequest should be net, i. e. that his estate should pay the federal and state inheritance taxes on the bequest. The codicil to Mrs. Runyan’s will provided also a net bequest of one hundred thousand dollars to Tobias Hand, but did not withdraw the specific bequest of one hundred thousand dollars to Laurel in her original testament.

The attorneys went on to state that since Tobias Hand had been Laurel’s husband and they were informed that he had been lost in the wreck of the S. S. Yukon Princess the preceding July, the bequest was not a part of the latter’s estate; that the inability to prove whether Runyan or his wife had died first presented a legal problem, but that in any event, if and when that legal problem should be solved, Laurel would receive the hundred thousand dollars from her aunt’s estate. In the interim, however, neither estate could be probated.

If somebody had struck Laurel and Jim Daingerfield on their respective heads with a club they could not have been more shocked, angered and chagrined. Laurel had hysterics when Daingerfield roared at her:

“Didn’t I tell you what a fool you were for failing to cultivate old Runyan and his wife, Laurel? My God! Just to feed a silly feminine grouch against that old couple you’ve tossed away millions.”

“I’ll sue to have Uncle Bernard’s will set aside,” Laurel raved. “I’m his next of kin. I guess I have some rights.”

“I guess you haven’t any that the old man did not acknowledge. He left you one hundred thousand dollars in his will; then he changed his mind and revoked that clause and left you one dollar instead. You can’t sue on that. You can’t allege he intended to remember you in his will and forgot to; you can’t allege that undue influence was made upon him to cut you off with a dollar bill.”

“It was undue influence,” she protested. “It was that odious Toby Hand who influenced him—probably wrote Uncle Bernard a lot of lies about me. You’ll notice he is bequeathed a hundred thousand under each will. Doesn’t that prove his treachery?”

“Oh, come, come. Don’t be dirty, Laurel. Hand is dead and it ill becomes you to blacken his memory. I have a suspicion he did as well by you as his means would permit; I’ve heard he was a mighty decent sort and I don’t believe he influenced your uncle. I don’t think that would ever have occurred to him and I don’t think he could have succeeded even if he had tried. Any man smart enough to roll up several millions of dollars generally knows his own way about and generally he hates a bootlicker and a liar. If Toby had tried to get you in bad with your uncle, Runyan would not have liked it and he would not have mentioned Toby in his will. The person that smeared that old man with undue influence was his niece.”

“That’s a lie. I didn’t, and the proof of that is that Aunt Margaret remembered me in her will.”

“Women are softer than men, sometimes, and I’ve noticed that the best of them have a passion for doing things their husbands don’t want them to do. Your aunt merely felt sorry for you because you are a woman. Your uncle didn’t like you and he didn’t feel sorry for you.”

“I’ll not be scolded,” Laurel almost screamed.

“You ought to be spanked.”

He ignored her furious reply, went to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. With the half empty glass in hand he stood there, cogitating. “The old crook!” he ground out presently. “A man who would do a trick like that would steal sheep.” He sighed deeply. “Well, that dream’s faded.”

He appeared so distressed Laurel couldn’t help noticing it, despite her tremendous sympathy for herself. Instantly she was suspicious.

“Are we liable to miss it?” she demanded.

He saw he had been tactless and hastened adroitly to cover up. “Of course not. Don’t be a bigger fool than you have been. It merely makes me wild to think of those people handing you an insult fresh from their watery graves.”

“I tell you Toby wrote Uncle Barney.”

“Well, he might at that, but probably only to tell him that he was leaving you because the marriage had turned out to be a failure.”

“How you men defend each other! Toby wrote him that I was going to divorce him because of you and because you were very rich. So Uncle Runyan, who didn’t believe in divorces, said to himself: ‘Very well, if she’s going to marry a millionaire, why should she have any of my money?’ Besides, he was terribly fond of Toby. Toby performed an advertising miracle for him once and made him a lot of money, or at least saved him a great loss.”

Daingerfield had an irresistible impulse to hurt her. “Another proof that this boy Toby was quite a lad.”

“I loathe you,” Laurel screamed.

“Go ahead. Who cares?”

Daingerfield poured himself a stiff peg of brandy neat. “I’ve had a devil of a hard day,” he admitted. “I’m going to bed. This market’s driving me cuckoo—and then to have you get a poke like this from the ones you naturally would think loved you, makes me feel murderous.”

“How much money have you made for me in the market, Jim?” she shot at him suddenly.

“I don’t know exactly, darling. I’ll look it up for you in the morning and telephone you the exact figures,” he evaded. “You don’t want to sell out now, do you?”

“Perhaps. If I should, approximately how much would I be worth?”

“Perhaps two million dollars.”

“That’s enough for me, Jim. Close out all the trades you made with my money tomorrow. I want to play safe.”

“How like a woman!” He tried to smile but it was more of a leer. “O.K., Laurel. Good night.”

But she barred his way. “Jim,” she charged, “are you lying to me?”

“What makes you think that?” he countered.

“Answer my question, Jim. Are you in trouble and trying to keep the news from me?”

He was very pale as he answered: “I’ll not lie to you, Laurel. I rode the market down to what I thought was the very bottom. Then I cleaned up and bought in again. Spread myself on thirty per cent margin for the entire roll, anticipating a sharp upward trend. But the market hits new lows daily and while I’ve jumped in too soon and bought a little on margin, those deals haven’t proved profitable. I’m afraid to buy—and yet, if I bought and rode the market up as I rode it down I’d soon be in the multi-millionaire class. The situation is very harassing.”

“Is my money safe, Jim?”

“Absolutely. What stocks I have bought since selling out have been with my own money. I’m playing safe with yours, darling.”

She was relieved, and favored him with a caress. “Thank God,” she murmured, “I’m independent of Uncle Barney and his millions. I wonder why they made reciprocal wills.”

“Who knows why old fools do anything? However, California has an unusual community-property law. A wife has an inviolable, definite vested interest in fifty per cent of her husband’s wealth, provided it has been accumulated during the married life of the couple, so I suppose each felt that in the event of death the other should have all the swag. Now they’re both dead, nobody knows which preceded which across the Styx—and the estates will be tied up until the court can decide whether Runyan inherited his wife’s half of their community property or whether she inherited his half. Fortunately, as you say, you need not worry about it. To show you what a sport I am I’ll give you Uncle Barney’s lone dollar now!” And he handed her a dollar bill.

“I wouldn’t buy any more stocks now, Jim,” she advised. “Wait until everything really has struck bottom and remained there a while. The upward trend will be slow and there’ll be plenty of time to take advantage of it. Perhaps you’d better give me a check for my winnings tomorrow.”

“Why not buy Liberty Bonds?” he suggested. “There’s one security that isn’t off. Why not have the money earn you three and a quarter per cent, free of income taxes? I’ll give my broker an order in the morning. He’ll be some time picking them up, so let’s start him at once.”

“How much income will that net me, sweet?” she cooed.

He considered. “About sixty thousand a year.”

“I’ll take the bonds,” she decided.

He put an arm around her. “Good girl,” he murmured; “good old pal! I tell you it’s great for a man, when he comes home all worn out just thinking about this crazy market and worrying over world conditions, to have a beautiful, sensible wife to turn to.”

He helped himself to another stiff drink and waddled off to bed. Laurel realized, by his breath when he kissed her, that he had been drinking all day, and her disgust toward him, which had been mounting for weeks, now reached a new high. She sat before the living-room fire meditating on her future course and had come to a definite conclusion to leave him as soon as he had completed the purchase of the Liberty Bonds for her, when the telephone tinkled. Laurel reached for it.

“Hello; is this Mrs. Hand?” A man was speaking.

“The former Mrs. Hand. Mrs. Daingerfield now,” she replied.

“Mrs. Hand still,” the voice assured her. “This is Toby’s attorney, Mark Canfield, speaking. Your husband is alive.”

“How do you know?”

“I have just received a telegram from him, dated today from Juneau, Alaska. It reads:

“Oh, God!” Laurel commenced to sob. “Mark, what shall I do?”

“You might send me a check for a thousand dollars tonight, so I’ll get it in the morning and wire it to Toby. I haven’t charge of his funds since his estate was probated and distributed to you.”

In an emergency, Laurel could think quickly. “Mark,” she pleaded desperately, “don’t give this story out to the newspapers. I haven’t any money. Jim invested it in the market for me, but I’ll get the money—all of Toby’s estate—back tomorrow, and hand it over to you. Meanwhile, you send him the thousand until I can get the money back to you.”

“I hope you can do that, Laurel. Very well, I’ll wire him the funds tomorrow. Now, how about a little free legal advice from your husband’s attorney?”

“What is to be done? Tell me,” she pleaded.

“Well, clean up with Daingerfield financially and then we’ll have the court annul the marriage. After that you can run out to Reno and in six weeks get a divorce from Toby. Then you can marry Daingerfield again.”

“But I don’t want to do that!” she wailed. “I want Toby back. Oh, Mark, I’ve made such a mistake—and to think Toby is safe, after all!”

“Well, of course, whatever you and Toby do now is the business of you and Toby, but I imagine you’re going to be out of the picture as soon as he returns. My personal opinion is that he wouldn’t have you back on a bet and that the sporting thing for you to do is to divorce him immediately. But, get your money—or rather, Toby’s money—out of the market at once and while you’re at it, get that life-insurance money out also. Life-insurance companies always insist on having their money back, when they discover they have paid it out on a live person. If you should lose that hundred thousand and be unable to repay the company, Toby would of course be saddled with the debt. Good night.”

One thought beat in Laurel’s brain: “I must get my money from Jim before he finds out. I must, I must!”

For no reason at all, save her feminine intuition, she knew she was going to have trouble doing that!

On October first Steve decided Toby’s leg was in such condition that he might venture with her on a tour of the island in search of aid. Lacking an ax with which to cut fuel for winter, and lacking fresh bear meat, due to the hibernation of these animals, Steve knew they dared not attempt to winter in the abandoned cabin. Despite her care the tin cans she had used for cooking utensils could not be used longer. Toby had made her a passable pair of sandals from the cowhide suitcase and she was wearing a pair of his heavy woolen socks. While Toby had managed to shave daily until his supply of shaving-cream was used up, he was now bearded, and his hair hung on his shoulders.

“Well, Toby, old-timer,” she asserted, “today is moving day for us. If we remain in this cabin and attempt to winter here something tells me we will not be here to enjoy the spring. It’s ‘Hobson’s choice’ with us, my dear, so roll our jerked meat up in your slicker and make a pack of it. The few clothes and personal possessions we have must be rolled up in the blankets. I’ll carry my share and the rifle and what’s left of our ammunition. We have half a box of matches, thanks to our thrift in never permitting our fire to go out. We’ll sleep out between two camp-fires and manage to survive until the snow flies, I imagine. Let’s get going.”

They were on their way within the hour, following the coast in a southeasterly direction. They kept to the highest land in order to have a wide view of the terrain, but although they marched all day no sign of human habitation was to be seen. The following day timber forced them to come down to the shore-line and follow that. The level going favored Toby’s weak leg and they managed about ten miles per day for the next three days. On the fifth day they rounded a long black promontory almost large enough to be called a cape, and in the cove at its western base they saw a boat lying bottom-up just beyond the wash of the surf. From a point close by, but invisible under the bluff, a thin column of smoke rose straight into the sky.

Toby and Steve stared at it for about ten seconds, then at each other.

“Company?” Steve murmured.

“I doubt if that company will be any help,” Toby replied. He struck off toward the smoke column. At the edge of the bluff they looked down and saw that the smoke came from a smoldering white drift-log close up to the bluff; between it and the bluff a man lay face downward in the sand. With some difficulty Toby and Steve made their way down to him. At the sound of their approach, at Steve’s cheerful hail, he did not move, so Toby knelt beside him and shook him. A faint sigh, half a moan, came from the stranger, and Toby rolled him over on his back. The man opened lack-luster eyes and whispered: “Water!”

The island was well watered and, while Toby and Steve had thus far in their wanderings managed to find a spring or a creek at which to camp, they carried with them, in Toby’s flask and the empty whisky-bottle, water to sustain them on the intervals between watering-places.

Steve pressed the bottle to the castaway’s lips, ran a hand over his brow, and felt of his pulse. “He’s burning up with fever, Toby,” she announced. “See how brief and labored his breathing is. Looks like pneumonia to me.”

Toby opened the man’s shirt and laid his ear to the cold breast. “He’s wheezy inside, Steve. Sailor—if we may judge by his uniform, which is still pretty damp. He was probably wet for a long time before the boat pitched in on this beach. . . . Build up the fire, Steve, while I undress him and roll him up in our blankets. Nothing we can do for him except keep him warm and dry.”

Steve gathered dry driftwood and the fire was soon blazing brightly. Then she took the rifle and walked down the beach to the boat. It was a twenty-foot mahogany dory; across the stern in gold letters Steve read: “M. Y. Klickitat, San Francisco.” From under the gunwale a piece of blue cloth appeared, half buried in the wet sand. Steve scooped the sand away and discovered a human leg under the cloth. So she knew that the boat, rolled over as it struck the beach, had pinned a man beneath it. Insofar as she could observe, however, the craft had sustained no damage.

Her gruesome discovery did not disturb her. She and Toby were living too close to death these days to have this evidence of it distract her from her main purpose of that day, which was to secure fresh meat for supper—for already she was beginning to feel the effects of four days of jerked meat exclusively; the demand for fresh meat and a plethora of animal fats must not be denied. And she must find water.

She plodded up the beach for half a mile and came upon a stream that wandered down through a scrub-timbered cañon and emptied into the cove. Dead salmon she came across very frequently—female salmon which had spawned and died. That meant there would be bears along the stream. Fortunately it was too early for the bears to hibernate.

A few hundred yards up the stream she saw a yearling bear standing on a sandbar. She fired, wounding him, and instantly he charged. The girl stood her ground and hit him twice more, rolling him over each time. But each time he got up and came lumbering weakly toward her, until a bullet through his throat finally stopped him. She half-skinned him, with great difficulty hacked a three-rib fat roast from the carcass, tore loose the fine white firm lard around the bear’s kidneys and returned wearily to Toby.

“This chap’s going to die,” he whispered to her. “I’ve thawed him out and he is now conscious but I doubt if he will remain long in that condition. I’m going to question him and I want you to help me remember what he tells us.”

Together they knelt beside the dying man, and in brief, labored, gasping sentences, he told his story. He was mate of the motor yacht Klickitat en route from Three Saints Bay to Seattle. Four hours out they had had an explosion aboard, due, no doubt, to an accumulation of gasoline in the bilges. The stern was blown off and the owner and his wife, who were seated aft, were blown into the sea. The watertight bulkheads kept the forward two-thirds of the burning craft afloat long enough to permit the mate and two seamen to get the lifeboat overside, and they picked up the owner who was clinging to a piece of wreckage. His wife they did not find. The owner was terribly burned and died in about two hours and one of the seamen died from burns the following morning. The lifeboat contained neither water nor provisions and the wind blew them off-shore about fifty miles; then a half-gale, with rain, blew them back again. They were weak and half-frozen and when their boat struck the beach it did so broadside on and rolled over. The mate was thrown clear but the seaman was pinned under the boat and the mate’s strength wasn’t equal to righting it and freeing the man. So he had crawled up under the lee of the bluff; fortunately he had a patent cigar-lighter so he had been enabled to make a fire from driftwood. He thought he had been there three days.

Toby permitted him to rest and catch his breath before asking him his name, the name of the dead man and the name of the owner of the yacht, but he seemed not to hear the questions and sank into coma.

“Well, he’s Swedish and he was mate of the yacht Klickitat,” Steve said calmly, “so even if he should die, his identity will, in time, be established. So will that of the owner. The dead man may identify himself.”

Toby glanced at the piece of bear meat the girl had brought. “If we could get a dash of hot broth into this poor fellow,” he suggested, “it might help him considerably. But we have nothing in which to prepare it.”

“In that boat,” Steve suggested, “there should be some sort of tin can for bailing purposes. Let’s roll the boat over and see what luck we have. We’ve got to get that man out, anyhow, and bury him.”

“That’s a sound idea, Steve.” After considerable effort they managed to get the boat over on its keel. Beside the dead man lay a galvanized iron bucket. Steve picked it up. “I’ll go for water,” she suggested, “while you dispose of this poor fellow,” and departed for the stream.

Toby dragged the dead man up to the edge of the bluff and searched the body. He found a pearl-handled pocket knife, a few dollars in silver, a sodden black memorandum book, a meerschaum pipe beautifully colored, a pigskin tobacco pouch full of wet tobacco and a fountain pen with a broad gold band on it, upon which were engraved the initials R. F. O. In the breast pocket of the dead man’s blue woolen reefer coat was a letter addressed to Rudolph F. Olsen, Three Saints Bay, Kadiak Island, Alaska.

In the memorandum book Toby wrote with the fountain pen a minute description of the dead man; then he scooped a shallow grave in the sand with his hands, buried the dead sailor and piled loose wash-boulders in a cairn over the mound. By the time this was done Steve had returned with the bucket of water.

“Any further news from our patient, Toby?”

“No, he is still unconscious.”

They made a crude fireplace of two flat stones, raked some fire in between them, set the bucket of water on to heat and commenced cutting up the bear meat and fat. When the stew was finished Toby poured a quantity of the rich, hot broth into their bottle and approached their patient with the idea of forcing some of it between his blue lips, only to discover that the man was dying. Already the death rattle was in his throat; while Steve and Toby were eating he passed away. Toby removed his personal effects and he and Steve buried him beside his companion, after which they turned in together in the warmth reflected against the face of the bluff by their camp-fire.

In the morning they searched the beach and found two oars. In the bottom of the boat they found a mast lashed alongside the gunwale and in the bottom of the boat a small boom and a sprit-sail.

“Steve,” Toby announced, “we’re going to take to the sea again. We can’t be more than a hundred miles from All Saints Bay, because the Klickitat blew up about four hours out from that port and she was headed south or southeast for Seattle. Therefore, to find All Saints Bay we should circle west and then north or northwest around this island. The wind’s in our favor and the tide will be full by noon. We’ll fill this little water-breaker, cook up another full bucket of bear stew and wangle this boat down to the sea. It’s light. We can crawfish it down.”

The tide was at the turn of the ebb, however, before they were ready to leave. Toby shoved it off into the wash of the surf; then Steve stood up to her armpits in the stern and held it while Toby scrambled in and shipped his oars. “Now!” he cried, as a wave lifted them—and Steve shoved, leaped forward and slid into the boat on her face just as Toby’s oars took a bite and the boat shot forward. The succeeding wave flung them high in the air and drenched them with spray, but they rode it clear and were beyond the breaking waves and into the rollers in safety. Toby pulled off-shore half a mile, then shipped his oars and ran up the sprit-sail, having shipped the mast and boom before launching the boat. The little sail filled, the boat eased over gently and they were off, following the coast, while Steve cast off her wet rags, donned a pair of Toby’s hunting-trousers and his sweater, and wrapped herself in a couple of blankets.

“Now you may look around, Toby,” she called to him presently. She was smoking one of the last of their precious cigarettes and she handed him his pipe, loaded and lighted. Toby shipped an oar through the notch in the stern to steer with and sat down beside her, his right hand clutching the oar, his left the sprit-sail sheet. A twenty-five-mile breeze was blowing about two points aft their beam and the little boat scuttled along merrily at about eight or nine miles an hour. By dark they appeared to be on the west coast of the island and about opposite the point where they had first landed, but their last view of that inhospitable shore-line gave no hint of human habitation or harbor.

Suddenly Steve shouted. “Toby—a light! Off yonder toward the northwest!”

He looked in the direction she indicated. Very faintly, high above the dark horizon, a pin-prick of light glowed steadily.

“That,” Toby decided, “must be a light on top of a hill; there must be land in that direction, though I did not see any before sunset. I wonder if that light marks the entrance to All Saints Bay.”

He pointed his craft toward it. All night long, with a failing wind, but guided by that distant beacon, he held to his course. At dawn a rugged coast-line loomed before them about ten miles distant; presently, as if a gate in the coast-line had opened to give her egress, a big black barkentine hove into view, with every stitch of her canvas drawing. The wind had hauled into the northwest and was freshening rapidly, and Toby could not point his flat-bottomed craft into the eye of the wind. Down the sound the barkentine rolled with a bone in her teeth, gathering speed, and following the coast-line. She passed about four miles from them. Toby and Steve stood up and waved blankets until their arms ached, but their signals attracted no attention, although Toby altered his course to the southwest, since in that direction only could he make any progress with the northwest wind now blowing.

“Nobody looks back,” Steve said tremulously. “They must all be looking forward—to home.”

“She must be one of the salmon fleet going home with the summer pack, Steve. Well, we know where she came from. I can’t point up to that bay she came out of, but I can point down to the coast ten or twelve miles below us. Hope I find a smooth firm beach on which to land. We’re making a devil of a lot of leeway.”

Under the shelter of the coast the wind gradually died. But they had located a bight with a white sand beach, so Toby lowered his sail, shipped his oars and pulled for it. As they came in on the crest of a four-foot wave and grounded, Steve, painter in hand, leaped ashore over the bow; when the succeeding wave lifted the boat she ran up the beach with it.

“Now come ashore, Toby, without indecent haste, and try not to break another leg,” she called.

Together they hauled the boat up above the wash of the surf; then they removed their poor effects, not omitting the bucket of cold greasy bear-meat stew. Immediately they made a fire and heated the uninviting mess, and while they were dipping into it with their fingers—as Steve often remarked, like a pair of apes—the tide, which was flooding, crept up on their stranded boat and an unusually big wave floated it at the very moment the backwash of the wave started. The boat slipped seaward; when Steve and Toby saw it, it was in the breakers. And the tide must have commenced to ebb about that time, for the little craft drifted steadily out. Before they finished eating their breakfast it was a quarter of a mile to sea.

“Let it go,” Toby suggested confidently. “One long march—two at the most—and we’ll be back in civilization again. Let’s pack our dunnage and head up the beach.”

Just before dark Toby and Steve came to a headland where the coast-line bent sharp-angled to the left. They could look across the entrance to a similar headland and a turn of the coast-line on the farther side. Looking up the bay they saw hills, with a growth of scrubby timber, and on one of these hills a forty-foot tower on which a beacon-light was glimmering. At the base of the hills and snuggled down on the beach they made out one large white building, with a smokestack rising from it and a cluster of small buildings around it. A wharf jutted out into the bay, and on the very end of it was a tiny house from which a light gleamed.

“It will be inky dark before we can travel the distance around the south side of this bay,” Toby decided. “And there doesn’t seem to be any beach. We’ll have to camp here until morning and then follow the high ridge around.”

“Do I have to eat some more of that vile stew?” Steve demanded vehemently.

“Not unless you wish to.”

“Do you?”

“You bet I do. I’m famished.”

“Carry on,” Steve ordered. So they climbed the hill into the timber, and camped for the night between two fires. They were up at dawn and Steve looked at the bucket which still contained more than sufficient cold stew for their breakfast. Suddenly she said: “No, I’ll be damned if I’ll touch it. To hell with this hellish mess—forever!” And she picked the bucket up and hurled it down the hillside. All the bravery and cheerfulness she had exhibited since that never-to-be-forgotten night when the Yukon Princess was wrecked, had fled now. She was filled with rage and disgust, now that there appeared no further necessity for the old cheerfulness and courage. She stood a moment watching the bucket careening down the hill; then she turned to Toby and cried sharply:

“Well, why are you standing there like a dummy? Don’t you realize we only have to hike three or four miles to coffee and buttered toast and canned peaches and ham and eggs, sunny-side up?”

“I never suspected you had a temper,” he reproached her. Steve commenced to laugh, but with a slight note of hysteria in it.

“Toby Hand,” she shot out at him then, “you’re a gentleman. You’re a Saint Anthony, a Sir Galahad, a sport and a thoroughbred, but what do you think I think of you?”

“I’d be interested to find out.”

“Very well, I’ll tell you. I love you and I don’t care three hoots in a hollow whether you like that assertion or not. You’re a grand person and I declare for a show-down here and now. Do you love me?”

“By all the saints and Three Saints Bay, I do. I adore you. You’re the finest, bravest, sportiest, funniest, hardiest, most gallant, thinnest, gauntest, homeliest, scraggiest, unwashed dilapidated ragamuffin of a woman the sun ever shone on.”

“You’re no Adonis yourself, my boy. Come out from behind that lion’s mane and that wilderness of whiskers and kiss me.” She ran to him. “Oh, my very dear one, I can’t stand this deception any longer! You’re my man. I’ve earned you, and I crave to see the photograph of the woman that’s going to try to take you away from me. You don’t love Laurel any more, do you?”

“No, darling.”

“Do you hate her?”

“No. Hate is a sign of inferiority.”

“She’s just a toothache to you, is that it, Toby?”

He eyed her gravely. “By Judas, you’re the eternal feminine, after all! Why the delay in kissing me?”

“I want to know,” she half wailed—and he drew her to him savagely and pressed kisses upon her lips and upon her pale face.

“I’ll never, never let you go, Stevie darling,” Toby asserted. “You’re my woman, and if I can’t have you with bell and book I’ll have you anyway. Nothing in this world matters except the happiness that robs nobody else.”

She clung to him a long time, trembling, then suddenly abandoned him, to commence shaking out the blankets.

“Leave them where they are,” he commanded. “They’re too filthy for any civilized person to sleep on.” He picked up his rifle. “Seven cartridges left. How good God has been to us! Forward, Stevie! March!”

Two hours later they came down the ridge to the beach where the cannery stood. It was apparent at a glance that it had been shut down for the season, so they walked out to the end of the wharf and rapped at the door of the little hut there. There was no reply and the door was padlocked. Toby expertly shot the padlock to pieces, got the muzzle of his rifle into the edge of the door and pried it open. They found themselves in a neat little kitchen in which the aroma of a recently cooked breakfast still lingered. In a room in the rear were two bunks with disheveled gray blankets on them.

“Well, we’re home, Toby,” said Steve, and leaped for the coffee-pot. While she was rinsing it and filling it with cold water from a tap at the tiny sink, Toby found the coffee and set about making a fire in the stove. Steve stood, swaying slightly, before a shelf on which canned goods were stacked. “Apricots or peaches, Toby?”

“Both,” he answered, and opened the cupboard. “Bacon, but no eggs. What a shame! But here’s a loaf of sour-dough bread and some big red onions.”

“We’ll fry ’em in the bacon grease. Oh, Toby, Toby, what a glorious thing an onion is, after our long diet of meat and fat! I could die with joy! Oh, darling, do you think that fire will ever burn?”

When they had breakfasted—and what a breakfast!—they found cigarettes and pipe tobacco, and sat on a bench in front of the little shanty, smoking in rapturous peace and listening to the tide swishing among the wharf piling.

About midday two men came walking down the dock from the deserted cannery. At sight of Steve and Toby they halted, then apparently reassured that they were not the victims of an optical delusion, approached.

“Hello,” one greeted them. “Who you fallers ban?”

Toby introduced himself and Steve and gave the men the desired information. Each Swede looked at the other, each murmured audibly: “Vell, Ay be damned. Ve got coompany de whole vinter!”

“We burgled your house and helped ourselves to breakfast,” Steve piped up brazenly.

Both men nodded grave approval of a course so eminently sensible. “Ay ban Pedar Johannsen,” the first speaker introduced himself, “an’ my partner ban Ole Gunderson. Ve ban one Svede and a half. Ole’s fader, hay ban Norvegian. Ve ban de caretakers here for the vinter.”

“And Ay tank,” Ole Gunderson spoke up, “ve ban got to take care of you and de lady. Pedar, dey ban look like hell!”

“We’ve been through it,” Toby assured him, “over on that island across the strait or sound or whatever it is. The place is apparently uninhabited.”

Ole shook his head. “Sitkalidak Island,” he vouchsafed. “Dey ban few people an’ some Indians on de west side at Newman Bay. A faller had some sheep dere vonce, but de bears raise’ hell with de sheep an’ he give up de business.”

“Are you the only white men here?”

“Right now, yas. Up de coast dere are some trappers an’ Indians.”

“Have you any communication with the outside world?”

“In de summertime ve haf radio, but de operator ban go home in de barkentine Gloriana yesterday.”

“Have you any boat that could take us over to the mainland?”

“Ve got a boat that can make it in gude wedder, but no crew. Me an’ Ole ban de caretakers, so ve can’t leave. And Ay tank you skal wait and get fat before you go.”

“Dot,” Ole Gunderson agreed heartily, “is de business.” He cast upon his partner a very meaning glance, which was returned with interest. Said Pedar Johannsen eagerly: “Ban you two play coontract bridge?”

Both wanderers nodded, and Ole Gunderson threw his hat in the air and whooped like a wild Indian. Pedar Johannsen loaded his pipe. “Vat brand o’ coontract you ban play?” he queried. “Coolbertson, Vork, Vanderbilt or Yacoby?”

“We play a standardized game of our own,” Steve hastened to reply. “We use the best points in all four systems, but we prefer our own.”

“Ve got a nice liddle electric-light plant here,” Pedar went on, “and this summer de ol’ man brought us up a big radio for company in de vinter time, an’ ve got onto coontract over de radio. But a radio iss not a good partner, an’ me an’ Ole ban sorry ve are not tvins. All de vinter ve ban play cribbage an’ rummy an’ casino, until half de time ve ban not talking each to de udder. Now, by golly, we skal haf a fine vinter.”

“But we can’t stay here all winter,” Steve almost wailed.

“Vy not?” Ole wanted to know. “Aint you ban dead since last Yune or Yuly?”

“But we don’t want to wait here till resurrection morn.”

“Now, Miss Lady,” Pedar pleaded, “ve be mighty good to you all de vinter, an’ not a nickel skal it cost you. Ve put you up in de ol’ man’s bungalow, an’ dere you haf to cook with compressed gas in de cylinders de old man brings up from San Francisco. You haf de house heated with gas; you haf nice big fireplaces, an’ nice beds an’ good grub. And de yentleman skal shoot maybe some bears before dey hole up, some volves, some ptarmigan, some volverine, some foxes, an’ take home de skins for a souvenir of Kadiak Island. Ve got planty of food in de coompany commissary, an’ from de coompany store me an’ Ole will outfit you with clothes. Of course ve aint lady’s clothes got, but ve haf britches an’ shirts an’ boots to fit de Filipinos dey ban vork here in de summertime, an’ you ban as big as a Filipino. Ve got planty decks o’ cards, an’ a barrel o’ yackass brandy ve make from raisins ve buy from de coompany.”

“Anudder liddle drink,” Ole suggested, “vouldn’t do us any good. Pedar, you are a hell of a faller to have visits from ladies, aint you?”

Pedar, thoroughly humbled, led them into the cabin and produced four glasses and a bottle. “Velcome to Kadiak Island!” he toasted the guests, and downed a wineglass full of the fiery nepenthe at one long gulp.

“I imagine this hooch will give me a battle,” Steve suggested suspiciously; “but far be it from old man Howard’s daughter to cast a cloud over the party. Pedar, Ole—mud in your eyes! Pleased to meet you. Toby started for Alaska to enjoy some hunting and fishing, and I intend to see that he gets it. We have been dead so long we can stay dead a little longer.”

“Drink hearty,” Ole urged, and Steve took a mouthful. Toby noticed she held it for about a minute, evidently savoring it, then swallowed it bravely and took another sip. So he bowed to the two Swedes, drank some himself, and almost strangled.

“Isn’t that some gargle?” Steve wanted to know. “It carries authority.”

“Ve ban give you a kvart,” Ole suggested hospitably.

“Accepted with thanks,” Steve replied. “Well, if we’re marooned, we’re marooned, so let’s be cheerful and popularize marooning, Toby. I want a rest. I want to stay in bed a month—when I’m not playing coontract with our hosts,” she added hastily, as she noticed their faces fall. “I’ll teach you boys in jig time how to estimate the value of your hands.”

Pedar looked at Ole. “By Yiminy, she iss all right,” he declared. “Ve ban in luck dey didn’t coom yesterday an’ go home in de Gloriana.” He took from a shelf a quart milk-bottle with a beautiful little model of a full-rigged ship built inside it and placed it in Steve’s hands. “A present from Pedar Johannsen,” he said. “If, ven I ban a young faller, I had met a girl like you, I vould now ban vearin’ a long-tailed coat and a gold vatch. Ban you goin’ to marry Toby?”

“Oh, no,” Steve assured him. “Toby is already married. We’re just friends—two people who happened to be shipwrecked together and found ourselves dependent on each other.”

Ole shook his shaggy blond head as if here were a situation he found very mysterious indeed. “Und, Ole,” said Pedar, “de poor nut iss crazy to go home to his vife! Ole, dot is vat I call a left-handed coompliment. After dot I skal have to have some more yackass brandy.”

“Pipe down, you two comedians,” Toby commanded. He was embarrassed. “What we want is not more yackass brandy, but a hot bath and some clean new clothing. As you see, we are both in rags. And Miss Howard wants to go to bed. She’s exhausted.”

“Ole,” Pedar commanded, “take a monkey-wranch und go up to de ol’ man’s house und turn on de gas, light de pilot-light under the kvick heater, turn on de electricity, get in vood und make a fire in de fireplace. I vill take dese lost people to de store und de commissary und start dem living once more yet.”

From the rear of the cabin, where it was parked, he brought forth a wheelbarrow. Instantly Steve climbed into it, and Pedar Johannsen, roaring with delight, trundled her up to the commissary, where they selected a stock of staple groceries and canned goods, ham, bacon and lard. Then Pedar led them to the company store, which he called the slop-chest, and after informing them that they knew as much about the stock as he did, he pointed out the bungalow they were to occupy and proceeded up to it, shoving the loaded wheelbarrow before him.

When Steve and Toby reached the house with their selections of clothing, Pedar was drawing their baths, after which he and Ole, with unexpected delicacy, retired to their cabin on the wharf—first, however, assigning Steve to “de ol’ lady’s room” and Toby to “de ol’ man’s.”

With almost childish curiosity Steve and Toby wandered through the house. It was very comfortably furnished; beside every bed and in front of the fireplace was a Kadiak bear skin, and on the electrical piano Toby found a framed photograph that caused him to call out in excitement. It was the photograph of Bernard Runyan!

“Steve,” he declared, “despite all our wandering, I have arrived at my destination at last! We are at Three Saints Bay, and there is the photograph of my would-be host, Barney Runyan, my wife’s uncle.”

“I do not like your wife, so I can’t cheer for your wife’s relatives,” Steve declared, and turned the photograph face down. “This is our party, my boy. However,” she added, “your report makes me feel quite at home. I wonder if old Barney has a booze locker. If so, let’s find it and burgle it. A burned child dreads the fire—and I’m finished with yackass brandy for life. Why, Toby, what makes you look so serious?”

“I’m wondering, Steve, if that yacht that blew up may not have been Barney Runyan’s, and those men we buried part of his crew. I never did know the name of his yacht. It was only out four hours from some port hereabouts. Stevie, I’m afraid the poor old folks have gone west.”

“I hope not, Toby.” And that was her sole comment. After all, there was nothing else to say. She went to her room; and presently Toby, his heart heavy with premonition, went to his. For an hour he luxuriated in soap and hot water; in the bathroom locker he found razor-blades and a tube of shaving cream, and shaved; he dressed and went out into the living-room, where he found Steve seated before the fire drying her hair. She was arrayed in a blue sweater, khaki trousers held up by a belt, and coarse shoes two sizes too large for her, but made wearable by the use of very heavy, blue woolen socks.

“I found a manicure set and scissors and a can of face-cream and some face-powder,” she exulted. “And the bed’s gorgeous. As soon as I’ve done my nails and cut your hair, I’m going to make a high dive into that bed and sleep twenty-four hours without stopping. As for you, Toby, my lad, you look like a fictional he-man hero of the North Woods.”

“There was a scale in my bathroom. I’ve lost thirty pounds, Steve.”

“And I’ve lost twenty-two pounds, Toby. Pedar and Ole are right. We had better remain here a month and get fat again.”

He knelt beside her, and she laid her head wearily on his shoulder. “Oh, Toby, I’m so tired. I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself, while we were fighting it out together, but now that we’re safe, I feel as if I’m going to go to pieces.”

“That jolt of home-brew has made you lethargic, Steve.”

“I had to take it, Toby. I needed it.”

“You seemed to like it,” he accused gently. “I noticed you held it in your mouth about a minute and savored it.”

“I have a toothache, Toby dear. I’ve had it for two months—and that sudden death paralyzed the pain.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Toby was displeased.

“You had troubles of your own, my dear. Why should I whimper and add to them?”

He put his arm around her and silently held her close to him. Brave, gallant Steve! He could have wept for her, so touched was he by her sacrifice and pain, endured for two months not only in secret but without any diminution of her customary cheerfulness. “You’re precious,” he said presently. “What a sport you are!”

“Oh, well, you were quite a sport yourself. I used to look at you that first awful six weeks, when you lay on your back with that rock dragging at your throbbing leg—itchy, perspiring, hungry, tortured, depressed—and you didn’t complain, never looked on the dark side of things all through those long, lonely, despairing days. And I knew that you knew Laurel was glad you were gone, that she had probably married the Daingerfield idiot, probably come into possession of your estate—and tied you up financially and socially in the sort of situation any honest man would loathe. Poor old Toby! Toby, I’m going to cry. I don’t want to be weak, but I—I’ve gone my limit.”

He put his arms around her; she was trembling, not so much from emotion as from weakness long concealed, long borne in silence. There are in this world persons who possess what is known as stamina—that high courage of the will that provides a reserve of strength long after the body has, ordinarily, reached the breaking-point. With such persons the breaking-point is reached only after the necessity for further drafts on stamina has been reached. And it was thus with Steve now. She leaned her head against his breast, and sobbed and laughed intermittently. And Toby did not seek to comfort her. He knew this outburst would act as a relief to her pent-up feelings. Mentally, he prescribed for her a complete rest—at least two weeks in bed, while, with good nourishing food, she regained her old strength and weight.

“It’s the toothache,” she explained wearily, when at length she had herself in hand again. “A lower wisdom tooth—and they’re never sound. Soft, pulpy things we don’t want and can’t use. If Ole has a pair of pliers, you might pull it out. And Toby! Get Ole or Pedar to cut your hair. I’m not up to it. I’m going to bed and stay there.”

She did. In the morning Toby brought her breakfast in on a bed-tray. “Fried eggs and ham—why, where did you get those eggs?” Steve demanded.

“Ole found a couple of water-jars filled with them. Preserved, you know. They’re good.”

“And canned grapefruit, a glass of grapefruit juice, toasted soda crackers, jam and coffee. Did you cook this breakfast, Toby?”

He nodded.

“I’ve never had breakfast in bed that I can remember. I’ve never been sick enough for that. What’s the news?”

“Well, that was Barney Runyan’s yacht that blew up. I’ve confirmed that from Ole and Pedar. In fact, the man Johannsen who died on the beach was Pedar’s brother. I made a rude panoramic sketch of the vicinity from memory, and told Pedar the body could be found in the bight on this side of that long black cape. He seems to know the coast-line rather well, and this morning he and Ole took a launch and went over there to bring both bodies back. Poor Pedar is quite distressed, and I doubt if he will be up to coontract until you are. Just now we are the caretakers. We are at Three Saints Bay, and this is Barney Runyan’s cannery.”

“So finally you reached the place you started for last June. How remarkable! Toby, you’ll find Mrs. Runyan’s bed-jacket hanging in that closet. Please give it to me and then fix my pillows, and I’ll sit up and eat.”

He had to help her sit up, for she was woefully weak, although she ate nearly all the breakfast. She appraised him sharply. “How do you feel, Toby?”

“Surprisingly well,” he assured her. “Just desperately tired; but a few days in bed, between periods of cooking, and I’ll be fit again.”

“It’s the weakness due to the reaction. We’ve merely let ourselves go. A tablespoonful of yackass brandy now, Toby, to silence this growling tooth—and I’ll be off to sleep again. Poor Pedar! When he comes back, we must be very kind to him.”

Late in the afternoon of the next day Ole and Pedar returned with their dead. Toby helped them carry the bodies up on the dock and place them in an outhouse adjacent to the cannery. That night Ole and Pedar made coffins; the following morning they dug the graves, and in the late afternoon the funeral took place in the little company cemetery. Steve insisted on attending it; Toby, from the Book of Common Prayer he had found in the Runyan house, read the burial service, which pleased Pedar very much; and Steve in her sweet but undistinguished little contralto sang, “Lead, Kindly Light” and “One Sweetly Solemn Thought.” And when the graves had been filled in, she took poor Pedar’s arm and led him up to the house, while Toby followed with Ole. And there the old stamina appeared again. She cooked dinner for them, warmed their heavy hearts with her womanly sympathy and cheerfulness. Presently she asked:

“Pedar, what has become of Amos ’n’ Andy?”

“Dot faller,” said Pedar disgustedly, “ban gone back to Madame Kveen. Vat do you know about dot Andy? Ban I as big a fool as him, I ban cut my throat.”

“What does Amos think about that?”

“He iss nearly crazy. Dot Amos, he has common sense got, but nobody can do nodding wid a fool.”

“Dot taxi-cab business dem two fallers ban in looks like a bust-up,” Ole volunteered. “How could Amos stand dot fool Andy I don’t know. He iss a hell of a pardner.”

“Do you and Pedar ever quarrel?”

Ole shook his head. “Ve aint ban play coontract yet,” he reminded her.

“Then,” Steve promised him, “we’ll have a grand fight tomorrow night.”

Both Steve and Toby came back to normal rapidly, gaining from a pound to a pound and a half daily. For the following week Steve spent her days in bed, but arose to prepare dinner for her men, and remained up until ten o’clock while she and Toby taught Ole and Pedar contract bridge. Like all of their race, Pedar and Ole derived tremendous enjoyment from cards; Barney Runyan’s expensive radio reached stations unknown to the more humble set of the two Swedes, and the mechanical piano delighted them. And Steve’s cooking added to their dull and prosaic lives a touch that had long been missing.

By day, while Steve lay taking the rest-cure, Toby wandered in the surrounding country, finding such trout-fishing as he had never believed possible. He shot three Kadiak bears before November first; thereafter all the bear appeared to have hibernated. He bowled over foxes and wolves, and shot ducks and ptarmigan and grouse; he enjoyed his delayed vacation tremendously. But one annoyance persisted, and that was the problem of getting over to the mainland. There was a twenty-eight-foot launch available; and this craft, Toby knew, could negotiate the passage in good weather; but he lacked a crew to bring the launch back again, and neither he, Ole nor Pedar knew enough about a gasoline-engine to risk attempting the passage without an expert in such matters. Moreover the Swedes, faithful to their employment as caretakers, dared not leave to accompany them. It began to look as if he and Steve would have to remain on the island until the cannery workers should return in the spring; then one day an eighty-foot Coast Guard cutter came poking into Three Saints Bay. She was running low on fuel, and her commander desired to purchase some gasoline from the Runyan cannery. When Toby explained the predicament in which he and Steve were, and asked for transportation to the mainland, the request was readily granted.

Pedar and Ole were quite bowed down with disappointment, and pleaded with them to reconsider their desire to leave, but both castaways were obdurate. The commander of the Coast Guard cutter placed his stateroom at the disposal of Steve, and they cleared away for Juneau.

Albeit, by reason of his profession, Toby Hand might reasonably have been presumed to entertain considerable reverence for publicity, he loathed it insofar as it might apply to him personally, and he had an additional reason for loathing it when he considered the unenviable position in which Fate had placed Steve. She must be protected at any cost; every effort must be spent toward keeping their amazing story from the press. Consequently, upon first meeting the commander of the Coast Guard cutter he had told the latter his story in detail and had received earnest assurance that his confidence would not be misplaced, that his plea for protection for Steve’s reputation would be respected.

An accounting of their joint assets revealed that they totaled close to eight hundred dollars. Acting upon the skipper’s advice they remained in their quarters after the cutter had docked in Juneau, while the skipper went up town, bearing a list of purchases to be made for Steve and in accordance with sizes, colors and quality covered by a list she had given him. For a man he succeeded admirably, and presently Steve, arrayed in neat, if not too well-fitting feminine attire once more, left the cutter, walked up town and registered at a certain hotel. A little later Toby followed and registered at another hotel. Thereafter he outfitted himself with some cheap clothing and sent a telegram to Mark Canfield, requesting the latter to transfer a thousand dollars to him by telegraph, and stating the name of the hotel at which he was stopping.

Steve’s first act was to seek a dentist and have her aching wisdom tooth extracted. Thereafter she and Toby met and did some more shopping. Steve almost fought with him for the privilege of sending her father a telegram, but he sternly forbade it, explaining the necessity for his action, and at length, reluctantly, she yielded to his desires.

“It isn’t necessary, Toby,” she protested, “to strive to make an honest woman of me. It would never occur to my father to think that I had emerged from this adventure a ruined lady.”

“It would most certainly occur to the neighbors,” he assured her.

“Have you sent a telegram to your wife, Toby?”

“No. My lawyer will telephone her if and when he thinks she ought to be apprised of my return to the land of the living.”

Steve stood still in the street and stared at him. “Is it as bad as all that, Toby?”

“It is. In fact, Steve, I’m going to stop over in Reno and sue her for divorce, before returning to New York.”

“Toby, that’s not like you. Isn’t it the code of the American gentleman to permit the wife to get the divorce?”

“Steve, I never knew real happiness until I met you. I shall not risk the chance that my wife will divorce me, and I shall no longer risk the loss of happiness.”

“And aren’t you going to offer her an opportunity for a reconciliation?”

“No!” fiercely. “I left only when I discovered it was the great desire of her life to get rid of me. I can imagine her giving three cheers when she heard I had been lost on the Yukon Princess; I’d bet my great toe she has married again.”

“Poor old Enoch Arden! And what are you going to do when you find yourself free again?”

“I have thought that when that happy day arrived and I could afford it, I’d appear in your father’s little red brick bank and present to him a sight draft for his daughter. And if he didn’t pay the draft I’d protest it—and run away with you.”

“That,” said Steve, “would be extremely tactful. I couldn’t think of engaging myself to a married man. There’s something inexpressibly vulgar about that, out where I come from. Moreover, you’re too decent to suggest it.”

“Well, at any rate, I can hint at it. And if it’s vulgar of me to declare I love you with all my heart and soul, then I’m the prize vulgarian of the universe. One cannot help loving when love comes—and I haven’t tried to keep from loving you. Just merely from showing it.”

“Of course, booby, you would make a crack like that—right on the main street of Juneau, where I can’t do a thing about it. However,” she added and looked up at him with shining eyes, “as we say in Nevada, ‘the bet goes as it lies.’ Flotsam and jetsam is something one picks up at sea, and if one picks it up it belongs to one, doesn’t it?”

“Provided it has been abandoned, Stevie.”

She drew him into a narrow alley between two stores. Nobody was in sight. “I’m an abandoned woman, Toby. Kiss me—quickly. Oh, darling, I’ve waited six months for this!”

He kissed her half a dozen times. “It’s been hard playing the rôle of a St. Anthony,” he admitted.

“I’m glad you did. I was always afraid you would abandon your rôle—and that I’d help. Love with respect—so much better—oh, Toby, I’m such a fool! Here I am, weeping—in an Alaskan alleyway—making a spectacle of myself!” With a quick flirt of her head she flipped away the tears and squared her shoulders. “Anyhow, who cares? Nobody knows us, Toby!”

Three days later they boarded a steamer for Seattle, where they took train for San Francisco. After seeing Steve to her hotel Toby called at the office of the Alaskan Fisheries, Ltd., and asked to see the general manager.

“My name is Hand,” he announced, “and I have called to give you certain information relative to the death of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Runyan in Alaskan waters last October.”

“Ah,” the manager murmured. “We have assumed here that Mr. Runyan, his wife and the crew of his yacht were all dead, but up to date we have been unable to prove it.”

“Well, I can prove it. Hearsay evidence which I got from a survivor of the crew before he died. He told the story to me in the presence of a witness, and I have here a few articles with which to identify the witness.”

“Start at the beginning and tell me the story,” the manager urged. And Toby complied. An hour later Toby and Steve were in the office of Runyan’s attorneys, repeating the story.

When the tale was told, the chief counsel for Bernard Runyan asked: “Have you seen Mr. Runyan’s will, or heard anything about it?”

“Of course not,” Toby answered. “I have had no opportunity to do so, and the only persons I have discussed the tragedy with were the two caretakers at Three Saints Bay. Neither they nor I knew anything about a will then, for we were completely isolated from the world. As a matter of fact, any information regarding Mr. Runyan’s last will and testament would be news to me, although not interesting news. One assumes that such men as Bernard Runyan never die intestate.”

“You will be interested. Mr. and Mrs. Runyan left reciprocal wills—that is, in the event of the death of one, the other inherited the estate of the decedent. Under the community property laws of the State of California Mrs. Runyan had an absolute, inviolable and vested right in fifty per cent of the community property and all of the property had been acquired since their marriage. Mr. Runyan had no relatives for whom he cared to provide—”

“He had one—a niece—my wife.”

“Good God! Are you Tobias Hand?”

“I am, although I am supposed to be dead,” and for the first time Toby told the tale of the escape of Steve and himself from the wreck of the Yukon Princess.

“Well,” said the lawyer, “evidently your wife was not popular with Mr. Runyan, because his will provides a bequest of one dollar for her. Mrs. Runyan, however, was more tender-hearted. Her will provides in a codicil a specific bequest of one hundred thousand dollars for your wife. Because of the existence of reciprocal wills and our inability to decide who died first—Mr. Runyan or his wife—the probate of both wills would have been delayed indefinitely. In fact, it might have constituted quite a knotty legal problem, which, thanks to your testimony and that of Miss Howard, can now be ironed out. We will now be enabled to prove, to the satisfaction of the probate court, that Mrs. Runyan died first—hence her estate goes to the estate of her husband; that is, with the exception of one hundred thousand dollars to your wife and a hundred thousand to you.”

“I’m glad of that,” Toby answered simply, as, indeed, he was.

“Mr. Runyan,” the lawyer resumed, “appears to have thought a great deal of you. His will provides a bequest of one hundred thousand dollars for you, with the additional proviso that his estate is to pay the state and federal estate tax on the bequest. He wanted you to have the hundred thousand dollars clear.”

Toby had nothing to say to that. He was incapable of utterance. But he looked shyly across at Steve and smiled. And Steve broke the embarrassing silence:

“Life,” she said, “has assumed for Mr. Hand, in the last few seconds, a much more roseate hue.”

“The wills will be filed for probate tomorrow morning,” the lawyer continued, “and I shall endeavor to induce the court to set an early date for the proving of them. You are anxious to get home, of course, Mr. Hand—and you, too, Miss Howard—and I shall impress that upon the judge and ask for early action.”

The interview over, Toby and Steve walked back to their hotel. “The publicity cat will soon be out of the bag,” Toby mourned, “and I wouldn’t have had it escape for a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Well, we had to come here and tell them what we knew, Toby. For my part I’m glad we did. You’ll be free of financial worries for the remainder of your life if you conserve that legacy—and publicity is only a three-day wonder. I think it’s time I telephoned my father and broke the news to him.”

A half-hour later she came into his suite, ran into his arms and clung there, sobbing. He held her, saying nothing, because he knew something tragic had happened and that, in her own good time, Steve would tell him what it was.

“I—I telephoned to my father’s bank,” Steve said presently, “and the—a deputy bank commissioner—answered. The little bank’s gone bust—frozen loans on ranches and cattle—and my father’s dead. Been dead two months—and there’s no reason—now—why I should—go home. I—don’t have to face my friends—so don’t worry about me—any more.”

“But there must be an estate to look after, Steve.”

She shook her head tragically. “No estate. Father turned over everything he had to the bank—and there is no estate.”

He felt a thrill of joy at that announcement. Steve was his responsibility now. . . . He sat down, drew her over on his lap and held her wet face against his, to draw what comfort she could from that contact. Everything, everybody he had ever known seemed far away and only Steve mattered. To him the death of her father was unimportant, save that it was causing Steve grief, but he knew that time heals all grief and that Steve’s courage would soon reassert itself. He forgot that Laurel had ever existed. It had been a tremendous day in the existence of both of them—a day that marked a turning in the long lane of both their lives.

Presently Steve lay quietly in his arms and he drew a little table, whereon the telephone stood, toward him, took down the receiver and called Mark Canfield in New York. He had Canfield on the wire in less than a minute.

“Hello, Mark, this is Toby,” he announced. “I’m calling up from San Francisco to tell you the good news. Laurel’s uncle and aunt—perhaps you’ve heard of them—the Runyans—are dead and each has left me a hundred thousand dollars. Mrs. Runyan has left Laurel a hundred thousand. I wish you’d telephone her the good news as soon as you can.”

To his amazement Mark Canfield commenced to chuckle. “What are you chuckling about, idiot?” Toby demanded.

“A little joke on Laurel, my boy. I’ll not bother to telephone her. In fact, I cannot. She’s en route to Reno to divorce you for desertion and I’ve agreed with her that you shall bear the expense of the action. I’ve set a limit of two thousand dollars.”

“Cheap at double the price. Mark, did she marry Daingerfield?”

“Of course.”

“The unfortunate devil. Have I any money?”

“Oh, yes. Your estate was probated and Laurel got it, but I made her give it back as soon as I knew you were alive. Want some money?”

“Of course I do. Send me five thousand. By the way, did Laurel collect my life insurance?”

“Collected it and lost it in the market.”

“Oh, Lord,” Toby almost moaned. “Now I’ll have to make that good. A hundred thousand! Well, they’ll have to wait until I collect my Runyan inheritance.”

“Don’t be an ass, my boy. I’m going to tip the insurance people off to Laurel’s inheritance and some time tomorrow the executors of Mrs. Runyan’s last will and testament will be served with a writ of attachment enjoining them from paying her the legacy. That’s the joke I was laughing at. In all my life I have never heard of a woman so unfortunate as your recent affliction. She tries and tries—and she never wins.”

“Mark, you’re the shadow of a rock in a weary land. After all, why should I assume responsibility for her private debts, when she can afford to pay them from her private resources? And I do not have to go to Reno and sue her.”

“No, you lucky devil, she’s going to sue you.”

“Fine. I’ll be starting home in six weeks.”

“Simeon Worden says to hurry. You’ve never been off his payroll and he’s crying for you like monkeys cry for peanuts.”

“Give him my best and tell him that while I had nothing better to do I schemed out half a dozen perfectly corking advertising campaigns for the firm’s biggest accounts. And, Mark, some more news.”

“I anticipate it. You’re going to marry that Howard girl the day after Laurel turns you loose.”

“I am. How did you guess it?”

“Because,” the shrewd Canfield shot back at him, “there’s joy in your voice for the first time in three years. Well, kiss Laurel’s successor for the old family solicitor. I’ll send the money in the morning.”

Toby hung up, leaned over and kissed Steve. “For my lawyer and best friend, Steve. He seems to have managed my affairs, during my absence, better than I could have managed them myself. We’ll be married in six weeks. Now, buck up and try not to think about your father. He passed out of this life at a period when life was getting very hard to live—and hereafter you’re going to have a full-time job keeping me up on my toes. We’re not going back to New York until we can go back together and in the meantime I’m going to hire a typewriter and get to work on some high-class advertising copy. Clear off to your own suite, darling. I’m going to call old Simeon Worden up for orders and a lot of facts I can work up into fiction and sell as advertising.”

He lifted her to her feet and stood looking at her. “As soon as we can buy some new clothes, sweetheart,” he promised her, “we’ll give our hand-me-downs to the poor. No mourning, Steve. That’s a relic of barbarism. I want to see you in a fluffy green evening dress, with green slippers and in order that you may buy them, tomorrow I’m going to start your allowance with a thousand dollars.”

“It’s horribly unconventional, Toby, but I don’t see how we can help it if you will insist on marrying a pauper. However,” she added, with a dash of her old-time jollity shining through her grief, “you practically proposed to me before you knew you were heir to two hundred thousand dollars, so I can prove I’m not going to marry you for your money!”

Steve was one of those blessed mortals who never sip sorrow with a long spoon. From the moment she left Toby she exhibited no more signs of grief and possibly this was not a difficult thing for her to accomplish, in view of the fact that her happiness with Toby was so great. During the ten days that intervened before the judge of the probate sat to prove the Runyan wills, she was busy shopping; she accompanied Toby to a tailor’s shop and helped him select the goods for several suits of clothes; she helped him select patterns for his shirts, purchased handkerchiefs and neckwear for him. Toby was busy writing in his rooms all day but each night they dined together in one of the half dozen old restaurants for which San Francisco is famous. They went to picture shows together; on Sundays they hired a Drive-Yourself automobile and had a basket luncheon in the country. And the smiles, the old cheerful spirit of badinage, came back to Steve and they knew such happiness as is known only to those whom happiness has for long passed by.

Following their testimony in the Runyan will matter there was no publicity, the judge having been thoughtful enough to hold the session behind closed doors; thereafter the probate of the will proceeded as a matter of no public interest. From the attorneys for the estate Steve ascertained, presently, that Laurel had made an assignment of her inheritance under Mrs. Runyan’s will to the life-insurance company and the days were passing swiftly—so swiftly, in fact, that to his surprise Toby received one morning a telegram from Mark Canfield conveying the information that Laurel had been given a decree of divorce in Reno the day previous.

He handed the telegram to Steve. “Let’s get married today,” he suggested.

“Impossible, Toby. In California one first files a notice of intention to marry; then, three days later, if they are still resolved to go through with it, they can be married. I suggest that you and I fly to Reno, Nevada, tomorrow morning and, after being married there, board the train for New York.”

“Right, as usual, Steve.”

It was hours after Mark Canfield had telephoned Laurel the amazing tidings of Toby Hand’s return from the dead, before she dragged herself wearily to bed. As a usual thing, where her interests were concerned, Laurel was able to think fast and clearly, but her very soul was numb now. She could not even weep—she to whom tears came so readily when they suited her purpose. She was so frightened that she trembled pitiably; she found it difficult to undress. In a dull vague way she realized that all her ambitious plans had suddenly developed weak spots; vague fears and apprehensions for the future overwhelmed her, and she lacked the ability to analyze them and lay plans for a counter-attack against Fate.

She slipped into her pajamas—which had cost Jim Daingerfield a hundred and fifty dollars; and just before she turned out her bedside lamp, she stood and gazed down at him. He lay on his face, breathing stertorously, as drunken men do; his alcoholic breath befouled the room. How fat and ugly and misshapen he was, with his puffy red face and the great roll of fat on the back of his neck that reminded Laurel sometimes of a spare tire on a car! In his haste to get to sleep, he had dispensed with his night-clothing; she beheld his bare back and arms, hirsute as a bear and besprinkled with large black moles, and she could not help comparing him with the athletic Toby, whose skin was as fair and smooth and white as a woman’s—Toby, whom she had never seen intoxicated, for all that he was not a total abstainer. With each exhalation Jim Daingerfield was making a little whistling sound through his pursed lips, punctuated every half-minute with a grampus-like snort. He reminded Laurel of a tapir she had once seen in the Bronx Zoo.

She leaned over him and shook him fiercely. “Wake up,” she cried, “and roll over on your side.”

He opened his eyes and stared at her stupidly, then heaved himself up on the edge of the bed, reached for the water-bottle on the stand close at hand, and drank from the bottle until it was empty. Laurel could not resist the impulse to quarrel with him; his grossness had infuriated her.

“You’re positively disgusting,” she flung out at him.

He heaved himself wearily back into bed and closed his eyes. “Will you kindly go to hell?” he begged, without animus. She raved at him for about a minute, then suddenly ceased. He was sound asleep again; so, deprived of the surcease which would have come of battle, Laurel turned out the light, crept into her bed and wept at last. And in the midst of her tears, she too fell asleep, having guarded against a sleepless night of horror by taking a heavy dose of veronal. Indeed, in a mild way she was a veronal addict.

She was still sleeping soundly when Daingerfield awoke; nor did the sound of his shower or the stropping of his razor in the adjoining bathroom disturb her. When dressed, he tiptoed out of the room, had his breakfast and took a cab down to his office.

At nine o’clock Laurel’s maid came in, awakened her and drew her bath. Simultaneously a Swedish woman appeared and massaged Laurel for half an hour and gave her an alcohol rub. After her bath, she had breakfast in her room; and after breakfast the doors of her mind unlocked, and she gave herself up to consideration of her predicament.

She had married Jim Daingerfield, but she was not his wife. She had no dower rights in his estate; their marriage must be annulled, and annulments carry no alimony. She wondered if Daingerfield would remember how she had scolded him the night before. Perhaps not. He had been quite drunk. She hoped he wouldn’t remember, for she had to be cautious now. She must so play her cards that after her divorce from Toby, Daingerfield would be eager to remarry her. Once that bridge was crossed, she would proceed to make Daingerfield’s life so unhappy he would be glad to get rid of her, and for the riddance he would settle handsomely.

Laurel had always known she had not, remotely, loved Daingerfield; now she knew she hated him. But she must carry on. A woman had to think of herself and her future. Of course, provided her fortune was safe, provided Daingerfield could get her out of the market with even half the profit he had promised her, she would never consent to remarry him. On the other hand, if it transpired that the ruinous market had shattered their joint fortunes, he would still be something to cling to until she could make other arrangements, for Daingerfield was the sort of man who always makes money. He had the courage to take risks, the power to crash through to his objectives.

Then, for a little while, her amazing ego indicated that she might patch things up with Toby, provided she could restore to him the estate she had placed in jeopardy. She was certain he still loved her, because he had loved her so dearly in the beginning. And he had always been tolerant and forgiving, always yielding for the sake of peace. She knew he loathed defeat, that he had a curious old-fashioned abhorrence of divorce, an echo of his early religious training, even though he had developed into something of a pagan. She might assure him that his long absence, the shock of his reported death, had shown her how dearly she loved him, after all, and had given her a keen realization of the extent to which she had failed to make him happy; that for the future—

She abandoned that thought. After all, she had some knowledge of Toby’s character. He had high pride, and he was very astute. He would refuse to be cozened; he would regard her as tarnished goods, a secondhand wife. How often had she heard him say: “If a man does me in the eye once, that’s his fault. If he does it twice, that’s my fault.” Presumably that philosophy applied to women also. In all probability Toby had not had a very good time during his absence, and the peace and comfort of a home would look good to him; but he had tasted liberty, and to a henpecked and unloved man, the first taste of liberty is like unto the first drop of human blood to a tiger. . . . Still, if Toby made the slightest advance toward a reconciliation, she would encourage him.

For the first time she felt a tiny wave of pity, of tenderness, for him. He was coming home penniless, unless she could get back into Mark Canfield’s hands the net amount of his estate. But if she couldn’t do that, neither could she repay the life-insurance company. And neither could Toby. So the life-insurance company would sue them both; it would, of course, secure a judgment against them, and all his life Toby would have to be harassed by that judgment. He would be had up before a judge on an order of examination to pry into his assets; he would have to tell the judge how much money he made and the judge would consider and order him to pay a certain amount monthly to the life-insurance company until the total sum of one hundred thousand dollars should be repaid. Or they would attach his salary, and he would be forced into bankruptcy, in order that he might have a fighting chance for economic survival. Poor Toby! Laurel was sufficiently magnanimous to admit to herself that he did not deserve a moment’s hard luck; she was astute enough to realize that he would never forgive her for having brought this disaster upon him.

At ten o’clock she telephoned Jim Daingerfield: “Good morning, darling. How are you feeling? Not so good, I dare say. You bad boy!”

He grunted something unintelligible.

“Did you sleep well, Jim dear?”

“Of course I did. Had to get jingled, though, to make the grade.”

“Poor darling, you’re worried, aren’t you?”

“This market,” he replied, cheered a little by her bogus sympathy, “would worry the Bank of England.”

“Jim, dear!”

“Well, what is it now?”

“I’ve been thinking about the market and the bonds, and I’m afraid. I want you to close out all the trades you’ve made for my account, and bring me home the money.”

“You don’t want to take a heavy loss, do you?”

“Yes, I do. It’s all a paper profit anyhow; and how can I make a loss when I haven’t really fingered the gain? I want to play safe, and if you can get me back my original investment, I’ll not scold you a bit.”

“Well, you needn’t threaten me with your displeasure. You gave me enough hell last night, and I don’t want any more of it, understand?”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I was worried and nervous.”

“That’s no excuse for acting like a demon. You try that stuff again, my lady, and I’ll lay you across my knee and paddle you.”

“Please dear, let’s not quarrel! You’ll close out my trades and bring me home the check tonight, won’t you, Jim?”

“Deals of any magnitude aren’t closed in a day. What’s sold today is paid for tomorrow.”

“But couldn’t you let me have your check today, and tomorrow I can repay you.”

“I haven’t that much ready money in the bank. What’s your great hurry?”

“Just a woman’s notion, sweetheart.”

“Woman’s notion, huh! The trouble with you, Laurel, is that you’re not only infernally notional, but if you don’t have your own way, you sulk and refuse to play. I’m busy. Get off the line. Somebody may be calling me while you sit there gabbing over a lot of damned nonsense.” And he hung up.

Almost instantly his bell rang again. His broker was on the wire. “Daingerfield,” he announced, “all those trades we’re carrying for you are pretty shaky. They’re off three points since the market opened—that is, an average of three. Some of them have dropped five. We must have more margin to keep those trades sweet.”

“How soon do you have to have it?”

“Within half an hour. They’ll probably rally a little before eleven-thirty and then go off again just before the close of the morning session. Get over here with that margin. We aren’t taking any chances these days, and you can’t blame us.”

“But I can’t give it to you on such short notice,” Daingerfield pleaded. “Man, have a heart!”

“No heart for any stock-gambler, my friend. You started on a shoestring, and you were lucky. You rode the market up. Then you started to ride it down, and again you made a killing. Now you’re riding it up again—and it’s sliding out from under you. Short notice be damned! If you have cash and negotiable securities to cover ten points more margin, why can’t you hustle right over with it?”

“I haven’t sufficient ready cash to cover, and I can’t get hold of the securities today. That’s final.”

“I’m afraid, Daingerfield, that you have reached the end of your string and are just fighting for time. I tried to telephone you yesterday, but your secretary said you were out of town. You have no right to go out of town, without notifying your office where you can be reached by telephone or telegram—not when you’re up to your eyes in this crazy market. You know so much better than to do that, that I believed you were merely dodging me, hoping the market would rally before I called you. Now, once more: do we get the margin in half an hour?”

“No,” Daingerfield replied firmly. “I cannot do the impossible. Damn it, man, I’ve done millions of dollars’ worth of business with your house—”

“We earned our brokerage, Daingerfield. This is not an eleemosynary institution. We’re going to sell you out immediately.”

“For God’s sake, man, don’t do that. I’ve already margined that stuff sixty points—”

“If you hang on to it, you’ll margin it sixty more. Good-by.”

Daingerfield laid his aching head on his arms, his arms on his desk, and quivered. Beside him the tape chattered, grinding out the latest quotations from the New York Stock Exchange, but he had lost interest in it now; he feared to look at it, feared to read on it the proof of his undoing. At one o’clock he went to luncheon at a speak-easy and returned at three, more than a little drunk, to find on his desk a statement of his and Laurel’s account with his brokers. He perused them dully and discovered he owed his broker a trifle over eight thousand dollars, and that Laurel owed them a trifle over two thousand. Attached to the statements was a letter requesting a check to cover the deficiency.

“To hell with them!” he muttered. “Serves them right for selling me out. The closing price on all of my stocks was an average of four points higher than when they sold me out. Pikers! All the dough I got left now I need for the Daingerfield family.”

His bank would be open until four, so he drew a check to his own favor for all the cash he had on deposit—something over five thousand dollars—and went over to the bank to cash it. The teller handed the check back to him.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but I can’t cash this for you. Your account was attached about fifteen minutes ago by Clow, Patrick & Evans.”

Clow, Patrick & Evans were his brokers. “Pretty fast work,” he mumbled. “Got to hand it to those boys. They’re on the job and taking no chances.”

He went downstairs to the safe-deposit department, got out his safe-deposit box and carried it into one of the booths where, in more prosperous days, he had been wont to retire to clip his coupons. From the box he took a very fat heavy Manila envelope, and from it counted out fifteen ten-thousand-dollar bills. Assured that they were all there, he replaced them in the envelope and thrust the envelope into the inside breast pocket of his coat. The feel of his little fortune, the knowledge that he possessed it, buoyed up his spirits and gave him sufficient courage to go home and face Laurel.

In many ways Jim Daingerfield was a very shrewd and far-seeing man. At the height of his prosperity he remembered one day that he had come up from nothing, and that to nothing he might return. He had, therefore, set aside this hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold certificates as a guarantee against the ultimate disaster. He could have paid his broker the margin demanded that morning, but a still small voice had whispered to him not to. He had been some weeks making up his mind that he had jumped into a bull market again while the bears were still busy. He had thought the price of sound securities had gone its farthest south—and he had been mistaken. The price hadn’t even started for the south, and this morning he had definitely come to that conclusion, decided that every dollar with which he sought to protect his trades hereafter would be lost irrevocably. Better, he decided, to take it on the chin now than later. He had invested all of his huge winnings and Laurel’s money in the purchase of a line of stocks at the market, and on twenty-five-per-cent margin. The market had steadily dropped, and every dollar he had in the world, with the exception of this hundred and fifty thousand dollars he called his “road stake,” and all of his sound securities, had been fed into the brokers’ office to keep those trades sweet. When he was through, he knew he was through, and wisely decided to go no further. The first shock incident to the realization of his huge losses, when he discovered he could not induce his brokers to carry him further, had been a severe one, but it had now passed. Jim Daingerfield was calm and confident again.

On his way home, he concocted a story to tell Laurel.

She was waiting for him, and met him with an affectionate kiss. His belligerent attitude when she phoned him that morning had warned her to be careful—and she was. Not once, either before dinner or after it, did she bring up the subject of business; seemingly she had effaced it from her thoughts. And Daingerfield was correspondingly grateful. At last he said in a matter-of-fact tone:

“Oh, by the way, sweetheart, I did something today you may scold me for!”

“I’ve made up my mind that nothing you do, darling, can ever cause me to scold you again. I’m sure that whatever you did is right.”

“I agree with you, Laurel. Well, I closed out your trades and took a loss of about two thousand dollars for you. I felt so badly when I realized I’d lost all your money, because I jumped in and bought when I thought the market had struck bottom, when as a matter of fact it had only started for the bottom, that I decided it was up to me to pull you out again and get your principal back at least. So tomorrow I’m going to margin a smear of stocks and sell them short for you. When they’ve dropped twenty or thirty points, as I verily believe they will, the old sock will be well filled again.”

She could have stabbed him. So the murder was out—he had lost all of her money, and now he was striving to exculpate himself by promising to win it back! Striving for self-control, she asked casually: “I suppose you’ve been cleaned out, too, you poor dear!”

Her bogus sympathy caught him off guard. “All but my road-stake,” he answered, grinning. “They sold us out today. I hung on as long as I could, and then decided it would be ruinous to hang on any longer.”

The blow had fallen! The news of Toby’s return from the grave would, doubtless, be in the morning papers. She knew such news-stories are difficult to bottle up, and that Toby would have no reason to hide his identity; he would want to let his little world know he was alive and well. She decided to tell Jim Daingerfield.

“Jim, I suppose you’ve been wondering why I was so anxious about my money this morning. Well, I’ll tell you: Toby is alive!”

He could only stare at her. She continued: “Mark Canfield called me up and told me. He’s Toby’s attorney. All he knows is that Toby wired him from Juneau, Alaska, for a thousand dollars in order to come home. He didn’t give any details. I—I wanted to send him the thousand, but I—I—suppose Mark Canfield—will have sent it—by now.”

She commenced to weep violently, for she had to attract his sympathy. After all, he still had money, and by hook or crook, she must get some of it away from him.

He was silent several minutes, digesting this information. “That means,” he said finally, “that you and I aren’t married. Our marriage will have to be annulled. Well, that can be arranged very readily.”

She nodded. “I’ll get a divorce from Toby, of course, and then we can be married again.”

He did not reply to this suggestion, so she knew he was considering it carefully. “We’re in a dreadful jam,” she wailed. “Toby’s estate, and that insurance money—all lost in the market.”

“Well, that’s Toby’s hard luck, my dear. If you can’t pay it back, why, you can’t!”

“Not, of course, until you’ve won it back in the market. You will do that for me, won’t you, Jim?”

He sighed heavily. “I’ll see what can be done in the morning, Laurel. God, this news makes me ill. Don’t talk about it any more. I’ve got to think.”

“You poor dear!” she murmured, and watched him lumber off to bed.

In the morning he said: “Look here, Laurel, there’s no use mincing words. If I stick around this town, I’ll be forced into bankruptcy. I’ve got to go to some other city—Chicago, say—and operate from there.” He handed her two one-thousand-dollar bills. “Here’s a thousand for you, for present emergencies, and a thousand to send to Toby. Get downtown right away to Canfield’s office and hand it to him. Take a receipt. I’ll see the life-insurance people and try to adjust their claim. If they’re wise, they’ll accept fifty cents on the dollar in preference to a judgment they can’t collect. And of course, you and I have got to quit living together immediately. You’ve got your reputation to think of. So I’ll pack my duds and get out this morning.”

By ten o’clock he was packed and gone, ostensibly to Chicago. At parting he kissed her good-by with great tenderness and bade her not to worry about things.

Mark Canfield realized, of course, that the news of Toby’s survival had struck Laurel and Jim Daingerfield with something of the impact of a meteor landing in a swamp. He suspected, also, that the chief beneficiary of the accompanying grief would be Laurel, so he made up his mind to handle her very gently and tactfully when she appeared at his office to keep her ten o’clock appointment. As Toby’s attorney and best friend it was necessary to secure from her as much information, beneficial to Toby, as possible. Her statement that she did not possess a thousand dollars to give him to send Toby—that she was in the market—disturbed him greatly. “It would be like the fool to lose everything, as hundreds of thousands of other people have done, and then Toby would come home so broke he’d creak when he walked.”

When she entered his office he took her hand in most friendly fashion and led her to a chair. She was very pale—in order to impress him with evidences of her suffering she had purposely refrained from using rouge—and the dark circles under her eyes indicated copious weeping and a night of little sleep.

“Well, Laurel,” he began sympathetically, “this is a very embarrassing situation, not only for you, but for all concerned. Very embarrassing, indeed.”

“Oh Mark, it’s terrible. I suppose we’ll be in the tabloids now.”

“What of that? There’s nothing so dead as yesterday’s newspaper.”

“Have you any further news, Mark?”

“No. One cannot telephone to Alaska, and after studying Toby’s telegram it seemed to me to be a bit guarded—as if, purposely, he had refrained from particulars. He refers to his little pal but mentions no name, so I infer the little pal must be a Miss Stephanie Howard who was also reported lost when the Yukon Princess went down. I have a suspicion Toby and the girl managed to get away from the ship and that the vessel stayed above water longer than the captain anticipated. I suppose they were blown off-shore to some one of those islands along the Alaskan Peninsula and have had no means of communicating with the outer world.”

“Are you sure the wire came from Toby and not some smart impostor?”

“Quite. I know Toby’s style of expression. It’s unmistakable.”

“Have you telegraphed him regarding his affairs here—about my marriage?”

“Certainly not. Time enough to start trouble and worry for him when he gets here.”

“Of course, poor dear! He must have had a perfectly horrible time of it all these months.”

“Well, now, my dear,” Canfield began, “it is unfortunate that we have some distressing financial matters to discuss. Did you bring me a thousand dollars?”

She laid the money on his desk and he wrote a receipt for her, as payment on account of the return of Toby’s estate. “I suppose you can, in a few days,” he suggested, “bring me in the remainder of Toby’s estate. I will, of course, waive my fee as attorney for the estate and we can secure a refund on the state and federal estate taxes. The present is a perfectly frightful time for a man to find himself penniless and without employment, and all through no fault of his own. Of course, knowing Toby as we both do, we know he will understand and forgive—”

“Do you think he’ll ask me back, Mark?”

“It would be like him to do so,” Canfield answered drily. “He was always quite mad about you and was rather depressed when he left you. He didn’t want to do that, I think, but it seemed he had no other alternative.”

“Oh, Mark, I’ve been such a fool.”

Canfield nodded very solemnly an affirmative to this. “I imagine you have often regretted the mad impulse, born of infatuation, which caused you to marry Daingerfield. Haven’t you lived to discover how much more comfortable life was with Toby than with Daingerfield?”

She sighed deeply. “I’m glad that life is at an end, Mark. If Toby will only take me back he’ll never again have cause to complain of me. Mark, you will speak a good word for me, will you not?”

“No, I shall not. But I shall not, on the contrary, speak a bad word for you. I shall be strictly neutral. I can, however, suggest a way in which you might aid your own cause materially. Of course, to begin with, you will never see Jim Daingerfield again, unless by accident.”

Her disbelief was apparent. “Why?”

“Because he’s broke. Yesterday his brokers sold out all his trades. They had been anticipating the necessity for doing this and, as I am their attorney, they had instructed me to have a complaint drawn in anticipation of suit for such sum as he might owe them when the smoke cleared away. An hour after they had sold him out I had filed the suit and secured a writ of attachment on his bank account. There wasn’t enough in it to cover his deficit. Where is Daingerfield now?”

“He left me this morning, of course. He said he was going to Chicago.”

“Did he say where you could reach him?”

“No.”

“Did he ask you to secure a divorce in Reno so you and he could be married again?”

“No.”

“Did he leave you sufficient funds to finance a divorce if you considered securing one?”

“No. He left me two thousand dollars—and he knew I had to send half of that to Toby.”

“Laurel, what have you done with Toby’s estate and the life-insurance money?”

“I invested it in the market.”

“In your own name?”

“Yes, I think so. Jim handled the matter for me with his brokers.”

“When you made the purchases of stock did you issue your own check direct to the brokers or to Daingerfield?”

“I issued the checks to the brokers. He said he’d buy for me.”

“Well, there is no account in your name on the books of my client, because I suspected there might be and made it my business to ask. If he made the purchases in his own name, that makes him an embezzler. Laurel, you’re broke, aren’t you?”

She nodded tearfully.

“And so is Toby, by reason of circumstances over which he had no control. Laurel, what are you going to do to make good to your husband?”

“What can I do?” she wailed.

“You have a lot of expensive jewelry which Daingerfield gave you, I daresay. He’s the sort that would spend it while he had it—the sort that likes to load his heart’s desire with the finest.”

“Only this ring, Mark,” and she showed him a three-carat diamond ring.

He knew she was lying, but he only said sadly: “He was cheaper than I thought. Who owns the furniture in your apartment?”

“He does, I suppose. He paid for it.”

“I thought so. It would appear, therefore, Laurel, that you are not in position to make any further restitution to poor Toby.”

Her answer to that was a burst of tears.

“How unfortunate,” Canfield murmured. “In the matter of a reconciliation with Toby it would help materially if you could make restitution. I had the thought that a sacrifice sale of your jewels would enable you to make good to Toby for the amount of his estate.”

“If I only could,” she sobbed.

He patted her shoulder. “Buck up, Laurel. No use weeping over spilled milk. I suppose you’ll remain at your apartment until the end of the month. Daingerfield doubtless paid the rental until that date.”

She nodded dolefully.

“Well, there’s nothing more to be done until Toby comes home. I’ll telephone you when he does and advise you of his reaction to the bad news.”

She saw that the interview was at an end and left him. He accompanied her to the door of his general office, then, as the door closed behind her, he turned to a man who was seated on his visitors’ bench. “Follow her,” he ordered, “and see where she goes and what she does.”

Ten minutes later he had the manager of a great national detective agency on the telephone, instructing him to send men to meet all trains entering Chicago the following morning, as well as all commercial passenger planes arriving that day at the Chicago Municipal Airport, and to trail Jim Daingerfield, an accurate description of whom he furnished.

“What a woman!” he murmured as he hung up. “She has a suspicion she’ll not see Jim Daingerfield again, so she’d like to make it up with Toby. I thought she might. But, until she is certain she has lost Daingerfield and gained Toby she is going to look after Number One! Well, she loses—both ways—the liar!”

In about two hours the man he had sent to shadow Laurel returned to make his report. “She went directly to her apartment, Mr. Canfield. I waited at the entrance and in about ten minutes she came downstairs again, got into her car and drove down to the Third National Bank. I followed her downstairs into the safe-deposit vault and saw her rent a box. So I rented one, too, just to account for my presence there, while my subject was inside placing something in the box. I trailed her back to her apartment again and then trailed her car to the garage where she keeps it. The car is a Hispano-Suiza town car and is registered in her name.”

Within the hour car, safe-deposit box and the furniture in the Daingerfield apartment had all been attached to protect any judgment that might be entered against Laurel in a suit filed against her by Canfield, as Toby’s attorney-in-fact, demanding the return of the latter’s estate. The moment the writ of attachment was served on her Laurel telephoned Canfield.

“Mark,” she shrilled, “what is the meaning of this outrage?”

“It means, my dear, that I’m too smart to be fooled by your lies. I suspected you had a small fortune in jewels given you by Daingerfield, so bright and early this morning I had a man from the district attorney’s office check up on you with the best jewelry firms in town. So I knew you had enough pearls, bracelets, rings, etc., to pay Toby, even if the lot had to be sold—as it will have to be—for a fifth of its purchase price. Disabuse your mind regarding Toby’s estate. I have it now. Only a matter of obtaining legal possession—and in the meantime you cannot dispose of it. I’ve grabbed your car, also. Ought to get three thousand for that at the sheriff’s sale.”

“I have dower rights,” she choked. “I’ll get some of it back.”

“Not a great deal, I fear. At any rate, you’ll have to go to Reno to fight for them and I have a feeling you can’t afford to lay out much cash for an attorney, travel and hotel expenses. Nor can I imagine any judge wasting a great deal of sympathy on you, particularly after he discovers what you’ve done to Toby in the matter of that life insurance.”

“I could kill you,” she raved.

“I haven’t the slightest doubt of that. Nevertheless, I gave you ample opportunity to do the decent thing by Toby. You wouldn’t, so now I’ll make you do it. Good-by.”

At five o’clock he received a telephone call from Newark, New Jersey. “Operative No. 67,” a voice informed him. “I trailed Mrs. Daingerfield to the United Airport here. She has boarded a plane for Chicago.”

“What a fast worker she is,” Canfield soliloquized, and immediately telephoned the detective agency at Chicago to pick her up at the municipal airport there.

When he got down to his office the following morning he found a telegram informing him that Mr. and Mrs. Daingerfield were both registered at the Lake Shore Hotel but occupying separate rooms. Daingerfield, it appeared, had arrived several hours earlier than Laurel and in the hotel safe had deposited a bulky envelope.

“His getaway money,” Canfield decided, and immediately filed a suit, on behalf of the brokerage firm, against Jim Daingerfield, in the Federal Court, secured a writ of attachment and had it telegraphed to the United States marshal in Chicago, wherein the latter was instructed to serve it on the owners of the hotel, thus prohibiting the withdrawal by Daingerfield of any property whatsoever he might have placed with the hotel management for safe-keeping in their safe, and particularly in lock-box No. 231.

Jim Daingerfield had arrived in Chicago at six-thirty p.m. by airplane. Upon arrival at his hotel he dined and then, in an effort to divert his mind from his troubles, went to a theater, returning at eleven. As he asked for the key to his room the clerk said:

“Mrs. Daingerfield arrived shortly after ten o’clock, sir, and is registered in 1047.”

“Thanks,” Daingerfield murmured aloud, but inwardly he cursed. He went at once to his room, packed and had his baggage sent downstairs. To the hotel porter he presented five dollars. “I’ll wire you where I want this baggage expressed,” he informed that functionary, and, carrying his suitcase, went to the cashier’s window, paid his bill and was about to withdraw his property from the hotel safe when somebody touched his arm.

He turned and found Laurel at his side. “Why, hello, darling,” he saluted her, with fake enthusiasm. “When did you get here?”

“About an hour ago. I see you’re leaving the hotel. Where are you going?”

“To Cincinnati,” he lied promptly.

“You can’t be in a desperate hurry, Jim. Suppose you stay until morning. I must have a conference with you. Something dreadful has happened.”

“I’ll retain my room,” Daingerfield told the cashier. “Just credit me with that payment I have made.” He picked up his suitcase. “Come up to my room, Laurel,” he invited her. He saw she was excited and something warned him that if she did not have her way with him she might create a scene in the lobby. And Daingerfield loathed scenes.

In his room he removed his coat and vest, lighted a cigar and sat down. “Well, let me have the bad news, Laurel,” he commanded.

She let him have it. “After giving Canfield a thousand to wire to Toby, and after paying off the servants with two weeks wages extra in lieu of notice, paying the household bills and buying my ticket to Chicago, I have a hundred and thirty dollars left,” she explained. “I was desperate, and, of course after that horrible Mark Canfield had the furniture attached I couldn’t continue to live in the house. I dared not risk running up bills I couldn’t pay.”

“Why, didn’t you know I would have sent you money?”

“I didn’t. At least, I couldn’t be sure of it. So I came on here to get it. Jim, you’re not broke. You’re too smart to risk everything, and I know you had a cash reserve in your safe-deposit box. You’ve got to take care of me.”

His small eyes half closed in a stare that was faintly ophidian. “Why do I have to?” he demanded. “I’m willing to be a good fellow while I can afford it, but—you’re not my wife.”

“But—but—aren’t we going to be married again after I have divorced Toby? You must realize that a divorce costs something.”

“I hadn’t figured on that, Laurel. In fact, I had about come to the conclusion before Toby bobbed up alive, that I’d made a mistake in marrying you. We—we aren’t suited to each other,” he added lamely.

“Well, that’s that,” Laurel was so surprisingly philosophical he suspected she had anticipated this action of his. But her calm worried him. “Of course,” she resumed, “Toby will recover his estate from the sale of the jewels you gave me, the car and the furniture, and if there is anything left over that, the life-insurance people will attach it.”

“That life-insurance thing is, of course, regrettable, Laurel, but it can’t be helped now. You’ll be sued, of course, but all the life-insurance people will get is a judgment upon which they cannot levy. Toby will be sued also, I daresay, and they’ll have a non-collectible judgment against him for their pains. Of course, you and Toby each have a bequest of one hundred thousand dollars under the Runyan wills, but since those wills are reciprocal and it is probable the court will never be able to decide whether Runyan or his wife died first—”

His voice trailed off. He had reached a conversational dead end.

“If that question is ever decided—” she began, but he interrupted.

“Come to think of it, your aunt made a specific bequest to you, Laurel, and, except for a hundred thousand to Toby, the residue of her estate was willed to her husband. By Judas, you can’t be kept out of that hundred thousand.”

“Oh, yes, I can,” she retorted. “Mark Canfield will see to it that the life-insurance people get wind of that bequest and, of course, they’ll attach it to satisfy their judgment against me.”

“They might attach Toby’s bequest, also—if he should find himself in line for it, under those crazy wills. He might have to pay half the judgment in that event. Let us hope so.”

“And in the interim, Jim, are you going to permit me to starve? After all, I wouldn’t be in this trouble if you hadn’t urged me to go into the market and lose everything. Have you no pity, Jim?”

Selfish and ruthless as he was, her pleading touched him. “Laurel, I haven’t very much—a trifle over ten thousand. I dug into my safety-first money trying to protect your trades, and I’ve simply got to keep enough for a new start. On the other hand, you’re in a jackpot due to my bad judgment and, of course, I’ll have to protect you to a certain extent. My dear, you’ll have to find yourself a job, because—”

“Yes, I understand, Jim. I wouldn’t be a drag on you for all the money in the world. Perhaps I can secure employment in poor Uncle Barney’s company, but first I have to divorce Toby.”

“Maybe,” Daingerfield suggested hopefully, “he’ll spare you that expense by divorcing you.”

“I must not be branded, Jim. How much can you give me?”

He pondered heavily. “It’ll be hard on me, darling, but I’ll do it. I’ll give you five thousand dollars in the morning.”

She came over to him and kissed him lovingly, then sat in his lap and commenced to weep softly. He knew she was trying to win him back, so, since he considered he had driven an excellent bargain, he comforted her and petted her. And, because Laurel feared he would escape from her that night if given the opportunity, she sent up to her room for her bag and announced that she intended to spend this last night with him. He could have struck her for this, but reflected that it would be unwise. Why prejudice an amicable settlement—an excellent bargain—by a too nice attention to the eternal verities? He knew, from one experience, that Laurel, when aroused, had the temper of a tigress; without any conscious cerebration on his part he knew now she had never loved him; that she was the sort who could never, by any possibility, love anybody, that she was monumentally selfish, secretive and cunning. He was a little bit afraid of her . . . what if she took a notion to dispute his statement as to his remaining wealth and demand a larger gift—and received it—under pain of being shot if he refused? Nor had he expected to escape from her so easily, although he was not so unintelligent as to fail to realize that her failure to continue to plead with him to remarry her, after she had divorced Toby, was the direct result of the loss of his fortune, for which she had married him in the first place!

He sighed and surrendered himself to the inevitable . . . he would get rid of her in the morning. His temperament was such that when he was mentally disturbed he had an impulse to settle the disturbance with liquor. He had a couple of quarts of whisky in his suitcase, so he sent down for ice and soda and mixed a highball for each of them. Laurel had never cared for liquor, but tonight she elected to join him in a convivial glass; while she sipped one highball he consumed four . . . he was talking thickly as he retired and she knew he would sleep soundly.

When he had been snoring for an hour she slipped noiselessly out of bed, felt in his clothes for his bill-fold, carried it into the bathroom, closed the door, switched on the light and counted his money. The bill-fold contained almost six thousand dollars and a numbered tag with one edge perforated. She knew what that was—knew that Daingerfield had deposited something for safe-keeping in the hotel safe; that it was contained in a numbered envelope and that this numbered slip with the perforated edge and bearing the same number as the envelope had been torn off the flap of that envelope and handed the depositor as the latter’s means of identification, together with the key to the lock-box.

In the bathroom she dressed, as for the street, and went downstairs. She knew another cashier came on duty at midnight, which would render her task easier. She handed in the numbered tag and the key and the cashier looked wearily in his deposit register. “Name?” he queried.

“Daingerfield—J.,” she murmured—and yawned prettily. The cashier glanced at the numbered tag, consulted his register, saw that number and name given him by Laurel tallied with his register and forthwith unlocked the box and handed her its contents. She carried the thick Manila envelope to the deserted writing-room. It contained a smaller envelope, unsealed, and packed with bills. She counted them. One hundred and forty-three thousand dollars! She extracted ten bills of denomination of ten thousand dollars each and slipped them in her handbag, then padded out the pilfered envelope with strips of writing paper torn to the same size as the bills. She carried the envelope back to the cashier.

“Please lock this up again for me,” she said, and the cashier tucked the white envelope into another large Manila envelope, tore off the tag, locked the envelope in the same box and made a new entry in his deposit register.

Laurel returned noiselessly to Daingerfield’s room, where she returned the key and the numbered tag. In the hall she saw two men seated on a divan, smoking. They looked at her critically.

When she awakened at nine o’clock Daingerfield was still sleeping, so she dressed and ordered breakfast for them both. “Hello,” he said, after the waiter had left the room, “dressed already?”

“I’m flying back to New York, Jim, on the ten-thirty ship. Could you give me the five thousand dollars now?”

“Hand me my bill-fold,” he requested. He counted out five thousand dollars and, very soberly, she kissed him. She breakfasted with relish and packed her bag. “Well, good-by, Jim old dear,” she said and held out her hand. “Good luck always.”

“Good-by, Laurel. All the best of it.” She bent and kissed him and, bag in hand, left the room. In the hall she passed two men seated on the divan and they were the same two men she had seen shortly after midnight. While she was paying her bill she noticed one of them standing beside her.

As she turned away from the cashier’s window she heard him ask the cashier to change a one hundred dollar bill for him; when she walked casually to the door he did not follow, which greatly relieved her, for she had begun to be very suspicious of him. She took a taxi to the airport and boarded the ten-thirty airplane for New York, arriving at the airport in Newark at four-fifty. She took a taxi to her apartment in New York.

“Telegram for you, Mrs. Daingerfield,” her maid announced.

It was from Jim Daingerfield and ran as follows:

Laurel went to her room, threw herself on her bed and laughed heartily. So the crook did not know she had helped herself to the hundred thousand he had lost for her in the stock market! He had lied to her. He had told her he had but ten thousand dollars left—and all the time he had had a hundred and fifty thousand! And now his safe-deposit box had been attached! Therefore, until the suit Mark Canfield had filed against him should be tried and the contents of the box be turned over to his brokers by order of the court—(Laurel had no intention of releasing the attachment by paying the claim as Daingerfield had requested)—Daingerfield would not know he had been despoiled! Of course, through the night cashier and the latter’s register he could prove eventually that she had had access to his box, but—what could he do about it? If he bothered her she’d swear out a warrant charging him with embezzlement. The hotel, having no knowledge of the contents of his envelope, would disclaim responsibility and the night cashier, who would have handled hundreds of safe-deposit tags before being asked to testify in the case of Jim Daingerfield, in all probability would be unable to recall who had handed him Daingerfield’s numbered tag and key!

“The lying crook,” Laurel said savagely. “Well, he owed it to me and I out-smarted him. Now let him do his worst.”

The telephone rang and she answered. Mark Canfield was on the line. “Laurel,” he announced, “I have a matter of grave importance to discuss with you. Something has happened since you were in my office—something of considerable interest to you. May I run up and call upon you right away?”

“I’d rather see Satan himself, but if it is important, come up,” she snapped back.

He arrived within the half-hour.

“Well?” Laurel greeted him coldly.

“I’ve come for the money.”

“What money?”

“The money you stole out of Jim Daingerfield’s safe-deposit box in the Lake Shore Hotel in Chicago at twelve-thirteen this morning.”

Laurel sat down so abruptly Canfield thought, for a moment, she would faint. “I—I don’t know w-wh-what you’re talking—about,” she managed to reply.

“Oh, yes, you do, Laurel. Your every movement has been noted since you visited me at my office the day before yesterday. Detectives picked Jim Daingerfield up at the Chicago Municipal Airport and trailed him to his hotel. You must have known he would probably put up there, so you registered there also. And oh, naughty, naughty, you spent the night there with Mr. Daingerfield—and I can prove you knew you shouldn’t—that he was not your legal husband. Grand ammunition for Toby when he sues you for divorce. He can get one in ten minutes on that evidence—and right here in New York!”

As usual, when cornered, Laurel took refuge in tears. Canfield waited patiently until no more tears were forthcoming; then resumed.

“Daingerfield has had me on the telephone. He said he’d pay the amount of my clients’ claim against him, plus the expense they have been put to, and that he had the necessary funds in the hotel safe. So it was arranged that the box should be opened in the presence of the United States marshal, who thereupon collected the amount of my client’s claim and released the attachment. And then, what a howl went up from Daingerfield! It seems he found his getaway money just one hundred thousand dollars less than when he cachéd it in the hotel safe, and he couldn’t understand why the envelope had been padded out with letter paper torn to the size of the bills. Ten ten-thousand dollar bills were missing.

“You took them, Laurel. A private detective saw you. You have them now. Jim Daingerfield has retained me as his attorney and has telegraphed me instructions to see you, secure the return of his hundred thousand dollars and give you a receipt for same. Here is his telegram, authorizing me to act for him. If you surrender the money he will not prosecute. If you refuse to surrender it I have a detective sergeant downstairs and he is armed with a search warrant. If we find ten ten-thousand dollar bills in this apartment you will have a difficult time proving how they came into your possession. Daingerfield, the fox, has a record of their numbers!”

“He owed me that hundred thousand dollars. He took my money and gambled it in Wall Street in his own name.”

“Oh, no, he didn’t. I have since discovered that all his trades with my clients were paid with his own checks, so I asked him about it and it seems your account was carried in your name in another brokerage house. You were sold out but you only owe your brokers about two thousand dollars—two thousand three dollars and ten cents, to be exact. Suppose you hand me the money to be paid over to them. Daingerfield says he gave you five thousand dollars this morning.”

“I took that hundred thousand dollars to make good with the life-insurance company,” Laurel wailed.

“That isn’t Jim Daingerfield’s responsibility. You gave him the life-insurance money to buy a line of stocks for you and he did exactly that. Not only that, but the soft fool put up more than fifty thousand dollars of his own money subsequently trying to protect the trade when the market started slipping from under him. Finally he gave you two thousand dollars the day he left you and you pried an additional five thousand out of him in Chicago. I do not like the fellow. I think he’s a sharpshooter and a vulgarian, but I must say he has his decent moments.”

Laurel rose with difficulty, lurched into her bedroom and Canfield followed her. From her handbag she took one hundred and two thousand and three dollars and ten cents, and the lawyer sat down, at her boudoir desk and wrote her two receipts.

“Tomorrow,” he suggested, “you will buy a ticket to Reno, establish a residence of six weeks and then sue Toby for divorce on the ground of desertion. I will have an attorney in Reno represent him and accept service of the summons and complaint. And you are to waive alimony or a property settlement.”

“You win,” she answered dully.

“I’m greedy—where Toby is concerned. I desire another victory. Tomorrow I shall dismiss the suit I have entered against you, as Toby’s attorney-in-fact, and that will automatically release the attachments against your car and the jewels in your safe-deposit box. In return for this and my promise not to have Toby sue you, in New York, on the ground of adultery committed in Chicago, you will transfer title to your car and your jewels to me and I will sell them at the best possible figure, deduct from the total selling price the amount of his estate and hand over any sums that may be in excess of this to you. The government and the state will, of course, return the estate tax and I will return to Toby the fee I was paid as executor and attorney for the estate that wasn’t quite an estate. Will you do that, Laurel?”

She nodded. “I cannot afford to be disgraced.”

And the next day she did it. “Poor fool,” Mark Canfield soliloquized, as, the transaction closed, Laurel departed from his office. “You lived with that good man three years and yet it hasn’t occurred to you that for all the money in the world he would not smear the woman who once had borne his name!”

The following afternoon Jim Daingerfield called upon him. “Well, Canfield,” he greeted the lawyer, “what luck?”

“I have made some progress, Daingerfield.” He drew a cardboard box from his safe and emptied upon his desk the jewels Laurel had turned over to him. “You recognize these, of course, and you know what you paid for them. How would you like to buy them back—cheap? One of these days you may wish to make a good fellow of yourself to some other woman.”

Daingerfield flushed painfully. “What do you want for them?”

“You know what they cost you. Laurel owes Toby Hand, for the net amount of his estate turned over to her, eighteen thousand four hundred and eighty-two dollars and three cents. She has given me these jewels to sell, in an effort to reimburse Toby. She didn’t want to, of course, but I managed to persuade her it would be the decent thing to do.”

They looked at each other, coldly, searchingly. “You got my hundred thousand back, Canfield?”

Mark Canfield nodded.

“And your fee for that?”

“It’s worth ten per cent of the recovery, is it not?”

“Pretty high, Canfield.”

“Buy these jewels back at my price and I’ll waive the fee. Otherwise I’ll collect the fee and sell the jewels elsewhere.”

“I can sue Laurel for the return of these baubles.”

“And run into so much publicity you’ll never get over it. You’d be the laughing stock of your friends.”

Daingerfield sighed. “So I have to buy this junk twice, do I?”

“Not at all. I’m not attempting to coerce you. And I’m offering you a bargain. This junk, as you call it, cost you well over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. In normal times you can sell it and make considerable money over its second cost. However, if the offer is not acceptable I will give you ninety thousand dollars and take your receipt.”

Daingerfield sighed. “You’re a funny chap, Canfield. You’re putting the screws on Laurel and me, yet you ain’t interested in squeezing a profit out of the deal for yourself. You’ve had a grand opportunity to play the shyster—and you haven’t. You know I can’t stand the publicity and you know Laurel’s word would be as good as mine when it came to proving just how much money I had in that hotel safe. A crooked lawyer would have seen to it that a large portion of my roll, if not all, stuck to his fingers.”

“I am solely interested in my client’s welfare, Daingerfield. I have met men whose morals were worse than yours, although you’re far from a lily in the dell—and Laurel is pretty bad. You have some heart but she has none. So I take my remuneration in soaking you both.”

“I’ve been a first-class fool, and I deserve it. I swallowed a lot of guff from Laurel about Toby, but I reckon he must be a pretty decent sort, after all. At any rate, I’ll buy back these evidences of my insanity, pawn them and see if, with the proceeds and the other money I have left I can’t make another stake selling short. I think the market has only started on the toboggan and that I can yet get a free ride.”

“I agree with you, Daingerfield.” Then Toby wrote out a form of receipt, which Daingerfield signed and which Canfield’s secretary witnessed, after which he handed the money over to Daingerfield, less the agreed purchase price of the jewels, and the latter took his departure.

Canfield called up Simeon Worden of Worden, Garr, Ltd., with whom he had a slight acquaintance.

“How is the advertising business, Mr. Worden?” he queried.

“Still on top, but I know it can’t last if this depression holds up or gets worse. We’ve had to let about fifty employees go.”

“How would you like to hire an old employee? He used to be one of your best men and I imagine he would be just as good as ever—in fact more so, now that he has had time to free himself of his inhibitions to good advertising technique.”

“What’s his name?”

“Toby Hand. He’s en route home. It seems the report of his death was grossly exaggerated. He’s been helping inhabit a hitherto uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska.”

“No kiddin’?” Simeon Worden sometimes gave indubitable evidence that he was a New Yorker.

“No kiddin’, Mr. Worden.”

“He never quit his job,” yelled Worden. “He’s never been off the payroll. Give me his address and I’ll wire him.”

“No publicity,” Canfield warned. “He’ll report for duty when he gets here.”

Mark Canfield hung up and sat for a long time, considering every aspect of the Hand case. Finally he called up Laurel again.

“Toby is safe as far as his estate is concerned, Laurel. I sold your jewels back to Jim Daingerfield, but there was nothing left over for you. I couldn’t afford to haggle and the notion to sell them back to him only popped into my head when he popped into my office. At that I think I made a wonderful sale. Since the depression has struck us everybody in the world has been trying to raise cash by selling jewels at an enormous discount, and the pawnbrokers will not loan money on them any more. And now that Toby is safe again financially, I’ve begun to feel a little bit sorry for you.”

“Remarkable,” she sneered.

“I’m going to make Toby stand for the expense of the divorce. Two thousand dollars, Laurel, not another nickel, so govern yourself accordingly. Toby’s attorney will hand you a check for it when the clerk of the court hands you your decree of divorce. Is it a bargain?”

“It is. Thank you, Mark. I’m leaving for Reno tonight.”

“Good-by and good luck and in the future, my dear, do try to throttle that enormous ego of yours. You’re not a quarter so smart as you think you are.”

He put the receiver back on the hook and sat staring at it, smiling a little. “Well, I’ve been a good little boy scout,” he decided. “I’ve done my good deed for today. I think I’ll shoot me about eighteen holes of golf and try to forget the only criminal case I’ve ever been indecent enough to accept. I feel a little bit unethical—oh, by Jove, I forget something!”

He called Laurel again. “More good news, Laurel. I have that Hispano-Suiza car on my hands. Want to sell it?”

“Of course. I can’t afford its upkeep.”

“I’ll give you four thousand dollars for it. The title is already in my name.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I’ll send you a check by messenger at once.”

At the garage where it was in storage he picked up a chauffeur and rode majestically out to the golf links in it!

Toby and Steve were to fly to Reno the following morning to be married, and on their last night in San Francisco Steve declared for a party. “It’ll be the last time I’ll dine with you and dance with you as a single young woman,” she warned. “I want you to be nice to me just once more, because I know that after marriage I’ll probably have to use a derrick to lift you out of your own home. I just know, Toby, that you’re the sort that will settle down.”

“Well,” he replied gravely, “if you have any suspicions at all of me—if you entertain the vaguest thought that married life with me will be dull and prosaic, permit me to remind you that you still have time to withdraw.”

“I have the opportunity, too, Smarty. Old Henry Casey, who runs about twenty thousand head of cattle over in Humboldt county, has heard that I’m alive and has written me an offer of marriage. It seems the banking commissioner told him I had telephoned and gave him my address. Then he met your wife in a gambling house in Reno and she told him the story of her life, so old Henry put two and two together very promptly, after the fashion of sage-brush gents who have lots of time to think things over, and decided that you and I had spent six months together on an uninhabited island. I really believe the old dear wants me to realize that if nobody else will have me after that devastating experience, he will, b’gosh.”

“Your friend Henry Casey is a very wise man. He knows a good thing when he sees it. By the way, I had a letter from Laurel recently forwarded me through my New York attorney. She wanted to make it up with me and try all over again.”

“Pathetic stuff, eh?” Steve suggested tartly.

“Very. She pleaded guilty to being the cause of all of my unhappiness and stated that she had come to the conclusion that my unhappiness had rebounded on her. She said she’d never know another happy day as long as she lived; that she was practically penniless but nevertheless her sense of sportsmanship—her newly awakened sense of fair play—had indicated that she would be unworthy of me if she asked for alimony; that I had given her everything she had asked for while I could afford it.”

“And all she wanted now was true love, eh, you booby?”

He nodded gravely. “As a brief on appeal her letter was a classic. She begged me, in the event that I could find it in my heart to forgive her, to telegraph her at Reno and she would dismiss her divorce complaint and join me at once.”

The little waggish smile played around the corners of Steve’s adorable mouth. “The ego of a pretty woman—and a selfish woman—is enormous, Toby. They will never believe they have lost their power over a man, once it merely seems they have lost it. I judge she had definitely arrived at the conclusion that Daingerfield would not remarry her, after she had divorced you.”

“That was my thought.”

“Were you tempted—even remotely?” After all, Steve was a woman.

“I was tempted to send her some money, but on the advice of Mark Canfield I decided to wait six months. Within six months she will be flat broke or married again—to a man with money. Of course, Stevie, I’d never see Laurel in real distress while I had the power to alleviate it.”

They were in Toby’s suite at the time. Steve walked straight to him, took him in her arms and kissed him. “Most women would not like to hear you say that, after they were engaged to be married to you, but I’m glad you said it—glad you feel that way. It reassures me—if I required reassurance—that you’re a man with an exalted sense of responsibility and a head and heart so soft I shall always be able to manage you. You do not hold grudges.”

To demonstrate to Steve that his head wasn’t quite as soft as his heart he said: “Of course I realized Laurel knows I am heir to two hundred thousand dollars.”

Steve laughed heartily. “You’re keeping something from me, old-timer. What other promise did the poor thing make you?”

“She said she’d have a baby if I remarried her.”

Steve did not laugh at that. To her there was a note of tragedy in it. Here (she thought) was a situation that required no explanation.

“So you wanted a baby, poor dear.”

“All the babies I could support.”

“Well, do not lose hope. That’s an order I’ll do my best to fill for you, Toby. I shall always feel in comfortable circumstances with one Toby but with a half dozen carbon copies around the house I shall feel sinfully rich. I’ve stuck you for a new dinner dress. Thirty-nine fifty, reduced from seventy-five. How do you like it?”

It was a shimmery green dress and Steve wore green pumps. The flush of health had crept back into her pale cheeks, assisted possibly by a little rouge; she had just come from the hair-dresser’s and Toby thought she looked very wonderful, indeed. Not so beautiful as Laurel—not by a considerable stretch—but ah, so comforting, so restful, such a vibrant, intelligent repository of faith and helpfulness. He took a solitaire diamond ring from his vest pocket and slipped it on her finger.

“An old-fashioned setting,” she murmured.

“Yes, it belonged to my mother. And tomorrow I shall put her plain old gold wedding ring on the same finger, my dear.”

Steve kissed the ring. “And now,” she said chokingly, “we’ll go downstairs to dine and dance, but before I do—”

Her arms went around his neck and she drew his cheek down to hers. “I’ve never had any treasures before, Toby—and how I adore those I have now—even if somebody else once possessed them. I’ll—I’ll try so hard to be a sensible wife—I’ll try so hard not to be a possessive wife, nor an extravagant one. I’ll try always to be grown up—never to be a spoiled baby—never to regard you as a piece of property to be exploited as I see fit. I’ve got a real job, partner. I’ve got to make you happy and keep you happy—to make up for the lost years. I—I, oh, damn it, Toby, now I must powder my nose again!”

“I think it might not be amiss if I powdered mine,” he said.

He stood, watching her as she erased the tear stains, but he did not see her in the green dress and green pumps, with her hair softly waved and tucked in around her lovely nape. He saw her again as the thin, tired, pale-faced, ragged castaway, but still possessed of her courage and her blessed sense of humor, and he felt that he could get down on his knees and kiss the hem of her garment for that.

He knew Steve wasn’t difficult to look at, but he knew, also, that she would never be termed beautiful. And he was hopelessly, eternally in love with her, not because of her physical charm but wholly because of her mental charm. Steve would wear. Fair weather or foul, she could be depended upon; always her chestnut head would be unbowed, if bloody. She had character. Her peppery little temper proved that, but her sense of humor would lead her into the fields of philosophy, and she could never hold grudges, never develop into a shrew, never derive pleasure from observing or inflicting suffering on one she loved, and to whom she owed a brimming measure of allegiance.

Toby could not forego a bitter little smile as it occurred to him how carefully and thoroughly he was analyzing Steve’s character. Ah, if he had only had that much common sense when he met Laurel! Verily, man born of woman is one tremendous jackass.

Down in the dining-room, the orchestra commenced to play while Steve and Toby were still at their soup. Steve dropped her spoon and stood up, and they floated away to the strains of the Blue Danube. Steve’s cheek lay close to his shoulder, and the perfume of her hair intoxicated him. She was an exquisite dancer; and Toby was—well, a bit lumpy; so she took him in charge, so that they did not collide with other couples. “I’m still taking care of you,” she teased him. “Ever since I’ve known you, almost, you’ve been such a helpless monkey! But I suppose, after you get your nice job back and that two hundred thousand dollars from the Runyan estate, you’ll hire a man to look after you.”

He did not hear her. There was a far-away look in his eyes, and she saw that he was building castles in Spain. Well, she thought, who wouldn’t—with two hundred thousand dollars in sight? She fairly itched to know what he was thinking about, but had the good sense not to intrude on his dreams. And presently she was rewarded for her patience.

“I think,” he said, “I should prefer a little house in the country, about forty-five minutes from Broadway. I have a nice car in a garage in New York, and when the spring days come, we’ll leap into it and go house-hunting.”

Steve smiled her acquiescence. And when Toby said, “Our soup will be getting cold,” she led him back to the table. Lips faintly parted, eyes radiant, every fiber of her body tingling with the joy of existence, she represented to Toby Hand a modern Cinderella. He looked carefully around the great dining-room to see if his precious Steve were receiving from others the meed of interest and attention he deemed she merited, and was prouder than a Thanksgiving turkey-gobbler to notice that all the women were watching her. And while he was jealously searching out those who seemed indifferent to Steve’s charms, he received a very great shock.

Coming across the dining-room, preceded by an obsequious head waiter, was Jim Daingerfield, convoyed by a statuesque platinum blonde! Simultaneously Daingerfield’s glance met Toby’s. He half-halted, then came forward with outstretched hand.

“My dear fellow,” he greeted Toby heartily, “I read in the papers that you’d put over a Resurrection Morn stunt, but I never anticipated the pleasure of meeting you here.”

Toby ignored the pudgy hand. “So you immediately put the space of a continent between you and Laurel, eh?”

“I flew—figuratively and literally. Embarrassing as the devil! No hard feelings, I trust.”

Toby laughed outright, and Daingerfield flushed angrily.

“You may have her back now,” he said.

“I don’t think I want her, Hand. Fate has given me the breaks—no heartbreak, no lawsuit, no alimony, no settlement,” he answered brutally. “I know when I’m well off—sometimes.”

“Serves her right. I always told her you were a bit of a human hog. I’m sure she knows it now.”

Daingerfield accepted the insult. He was that kind. Steve stared casually at Daingerfield’s broad back, as he rejoined his blonde companion.

“Who’s your friend, Toby? Some beer-truck driver you knew in pre-Prohibition days?”

“A man I have met very casually. His name is Jim Daingerfield.”

“That?”

“Precisely.”

“Well,” said Steve, “I know somebody who cannot possibly be lonely!”

“Two of ’em, my dear, two of ’em. The Lord moves in wondrous ways His wonders to perform.”

Steve laughed happily and attacked her chicken à la Marengo. . . .

To Toby the flight to Reno next morning seemed not unlike what he imagined must be the flight of a soul, released from a sad world and bound for a newer and happier life beyond the skies. As the plane roared up over the snow-crested Sierra Nevadas and he caught his first glimpse of Reno nestling in the verdancy of Truckee Meadows, Steve leaned across the aisle and touched him on the arm. “There’s my country,” she shouted. “Home again, away again—and I’ll never come back any more.”

They found a rent car at the flying field, entered it and drove straight to the court-house. As they walked down the corridor to the entrance of the marriage license bureau, a door opened and a man and a woman emerged. Toby’s heart gave a great leap—not of emotion but surprise and embarrassment, for the woman was Laurel. Seemingly they recognized each other at the same instant. Each paused. Steve paused, too, and glanced from Toby to this strange—and beautiful woman.

Laurel was very much composed. “Why, hello, Toby,” she cried, and came toward him with outstretched hand. “It’s so nice to see you again, after all you’ve been through. You do look so well.”

“Thank you, Laurel. I feel, possibly, better than I look. I had no idea I would meet you here. You seem to be emerging from the chambers of the District Judge.”

“Anything,” Laurel replied gaily, “may happen in Reno—and usually does.” She half turned and appraised Steve interestedly, then faced Toby again. “Toby, permit me to present my husband, Mr. Leonard Kent. Leonard, dear, this is Mr. Hand, from whom the kind judge delivered me yesterday.”

Toby bowed composedly and Mr. Leonard Kent blushed. “I wish you and Mr. Kent all the joy in life, Laurel,” said Toby. “Good-by and good luck to you both.” He lifted his hat and hurried away after Steve who was proceeding down the corridor. At the door of the License Bureau he turned. Laurel was gazing after him and in her glance he thought he noted a glint of suppressed ferocity. Well, he had not answered her letter . . . he flattered himself he had gotten through with the ordeal of meeting her rather neatly, and he was thoroughly pleased with himself in the realization that it had affected him no more than a surprise meeting with any other woman he had known rather intimately in his other incarnation.

Then Steve turned, but she did not look at Laurel. Instead she smiled up at Toby, as if enjoying a secret jest; then she took him gently by the elbow and drew him through the open door. She closed it carefully.

“I rather think you came off best in that encounter, Toby. And now I understand everything. She’s lovely—to look at—and she’s quite the fastest worker I know of. Well, needs must when the devil drives. Do you know who Mr. Leonard Kent is?”

“No.”

“You do not read the papers very thoroughly. He is an English motion picture star and he has been up here securing a divorce. I have never known a man as handsome as Mr. Kent to have any brains, although I daresay a picture star as prominent as he must have some money. . . . She flattered the poor man, of course . . . and he was lonely. This is his fourth adventure into matrimony, so I imagine he has to be king or he won’t play. And with a new wife hell-bent on being queen I sense additional business for the Reno law mill.”

“Poor Laurel,” he answered. “She can’t win a bet, although I have never known a woman who could play a poor hand half so well as she. . . . Well, there’s friend Cupid looking through the window at us and smiling in a most neighborly fashion. Let’s get going.”

“One moment, Toby.” Steve possessed herself of his right wrist and felt his pulse, glancing the meanwhile at the second hand of a clock on the wall. “Seventy-eight, full and strong,” she murmured. “I had thought your pulse would have jumped to a hundred and fifty. It seems safe, therefore, to proceed with the business in hand.”

When they gave their names to the marriage license clerk the latter picked two telegrams off his desk and handed them to Toby. “Evidently,” he said, “some friends of yours must have expected you were due here, so they sent these telegrams in my care.”

The first telegram Toby opened was from Mark Canfield and ran:

The second was from Simeon Worden.

He handed both telegrams to Steve for her perusal and supplied the marriage license clerk with the necessary information. “That,” said the latter, as he passed the document across the counter to Toby, “will cost you two dollars. Pretty cheap for happiness—if you get it.”

“Happiness, Mr. Cupid,” Steve reminded him, “is like gold. It’s where you find it and provided you have sufficient intelligence to recognize it when you see it.”

“About half an hour ago, Miss Howard, I issued a license to a Mr. Leonard Kent and your predecessor. Consequently, I have no hesitancy in stating that, as a result of my observations, Mr. Hand is a singularly intelligent man.”

After the immemorial custom of his kind, he proffered a handshake and felicitations to both. “Shall I direct you to a preacher or to the District Judge?”

“If you have a Rabbi handy he’ll do.”

“Marriage,” said Steve, “is, or ought to be a holy institution. While we have no particular religious affiliation, still I think we’ll use a preacher of sorts.”

Cupid wrote an address on a piece of scratch paper and handed it to Steve. Half an hour later they were married and late that night they boarded the Overland Limited for New York. They were seated in their drawing-room with the door open when a porter with two suit-cases passed, followed by a man and a woman.

“Oh, Lord,” Toby gasped. “Laurel and her husband are on the same train with us.”

“And that, my beamish boy,” said Steve, “is the last time that name will be uttered in my presence. I’m not a jealous woman and I hope I’m not a cat—but there are limits and you’ve just reached the last of them.”

He closed the door, sat down beside her and drew her head over on his shoulder, for whenever Steve exhibited a flash of temper he found her more than usually lovable.

“Oh, very well, I’ll forgive you,” she said presently. “After all one cannot be hard on a husband who has just presented a nobody with what practically amounts to a sight draft for two hundred thousand dollars. That much money always makes me emotional. My banking experience gives me a keen realization of what can be done with it.”

She was striving bravely to be jocular, but at the last words commenced to telescope. Practically all women weep on their wedding day, but prideful little Steve had saved hers for a time when she could be comforted without being looked at.

“Darling,” she sniffled, “I’m only a cow-country girl, but I—I love you, truly. Toby, I adore you. All my life I’m going to be so g-g-good to you—and I—I’m happy be-cause I—I didn’t poach on—you know’s preserve. You were—on the loose—when I found you and I—I didn’t mind jumping a claim that had been—abandoned. And now I suppose—I’ll always have to be doing—assessment-work to—keep my title c-c-clear. Oh, Toby, how sweet life is! And I’ve never been to New York. I’ve never—seen—an armadillo dilling in his armor.”

“I think there’s one,” said Toby Hand, “up in the Bronx Zoo.”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

[The end of Two Make a World by Peter B. Kyne]