LITMIR.BIZ

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collapsing into a porch chair. “Don’t you know that I have a weak heart? Do your Christmas shopping early — do it in April! Oh, Lord, can you beat it?” he demanded of the others. “Can you beat it?”

      “I think it was mighty nice of Eva to remember me at all,” said Guy, thawing perceptibly.

      “What is it?” asked Custer. “I’ll bet you got him a pipe.”

      “However in the world did you guess?” demanded Eva.

      Custer rocked from side to side in his chair, laughing. “What are you laughing at? Idiot!” cried the girl. “How did you guess I got him a pipe?”

      “Because he never smokes anything but cigarettes.”

      “You’re horrid!”

      He pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her. “Dear little one!” he cried. Taking her head between his hands, he shook it. “Hear ‘em rattle!”

      “But I love a pipe,” stated Guy emphatically. “The trouble is, I never had a really nice one before.”

      “There!” exclaimed the girl triumphantly. “And you know Sherlock Holmes always smoked a pipe.”

      Her brother knitted his brows.

      “I don’t quite connect,” he announced.

      “Well, if you need a diagram, isn’t Guy an author?” she demanded.

      “Not so that anyone could notice it — yet,” demurred Evans.

      “Well, you’re going to be!” said the girl proudly.

      “The light is commencing to dawn,” announced her brother. “Sherlock Holmes, the famous author who wrote Conan Doyle!”

      A blank expression overspread the girl’s face to be presently expunged by a slow smile.

      “You are perfectly horrid!” she cried. “I’m going in to dapper up a bit for dinner — don’t wait.”

      She danced through the living room and out into the patio toward her own rooms.

      “Rattle, rattle, little brain; rattle, rattle round again,” her brother called after her. “Can you beat her?” he added to the others.

      “She can’t even be approximated,” laughed the colonel. “In all the world there is only one of her.”

      “And she’s ours, bless her!” said the brother. The colonel was glancing over the headlines of an afternoon paper that Eva had brought from the city.

      “What’s new?” asked Custer.

      “Same old rot,” replied his father. “Murders, divorces, kidnappers, bootleggers, and they haven’t even the originality to make them interesting by evolving new methods. Oh, hold on — this isn’t so bad!”

      “‘200,000 dollars’s worth of stolen whisky landed on coast,’” he read. “‘Prohibition enforcement agents, together with special agents from the Treasury Department, are working on a unique theory that may reveal the whereabouts of the fortune in bonded whisky stolen from a government warehouse in New York a year ago. All that was known until recently was that the whisky was removed from the warehouse in trucks in broad daylight, compassing one of the boldest robberies ever committed in New York. Now, from a source which they refuse to divulge, the government sleuths have received information which leads them to believe that the liquid loot was loaded aboard a sailing vessel and, after a long trip around the Horn, is lying somewhere off the coast of Southern California. That it is being lightered ashore in launches and transported to some hiding place in the mountains is one theory upon which the government is working. The whisky is eleven years old, was bottled in bond three years ago, just before the Eighteenth Amendment became a harrowing reality. It will go hard with the traffickers in this particular parcel of wet goods if they are apprehended since the theft was directly from a government bonded warehouse, and all government officials concerned in the search are anxious to make an example of the guilty parties.’”

      “Eleven years old!” sighed the colonel. “It makes my mouth water! I’ve been subsisting on homemade grape wine for over a year. Think of it — a Pennington! Why, my ancestors must be writhing in their Virginia graves!”

      “On the contrary, they’re probably laughing in their sleeves. They died before July 1, 1919,” interposed Custer. “Eleven years old — eight years in the wood,” he mused aloud, shooting a quick glance in the direction of Guy Evans who suddenly became deeply interested in a novel lying on a table beside his chair — notwithstanding the fact that he had read it six months before and hadn’t liked it. “And it will go hard with the traffickers, too,” continued young Pennington. “Well, I should hope it would. They’ll probably hang ‘em, the vile miscreants!”

      Guy had risen and walked to the doorway opening upon the patio.

      “I wonder what is keeping Eva,” he remarked.

      “Getting hungry?” asked Mrs. Pennington. “Well, I guess we all are. Suppose we don’t wait any longer? Eva won’t mind.”

      “If I wait much longer,” observed the colonel, “someone will have to carry me into the dining room.”

      As they crossed the library toward the dining room, the two young men walked behind their elders.

      “Is your appetite still good?” inquired Custer.

      “Shut up!” retorted Evans. “You give me a pain.”

      They had finished their soup before Eva joined them, and, after the men were reseated, they took up the conversation where it had been interrupted. As usual, if not always brilliant, it was at least diversified, for it included many subjects from grand opera to the budding of English walnuts on the native wild stock and from the latest novel to the most practical method of earmarking pigs. Paintings, poems, plays, pictures, people, horses, and home brew — each came in for a share of the discussion, argument, and raillery that ran round the table.

      During a brief moment when she was not engaged in conversation, Guy seized the opportunity to whisper to Eva who sat next to him.

      “Who was that bird you met in L.A.?” he asked.

      “Which one?”

      “Which one! How many did you meet?”

      “Oodles of them.”

      “I mean the one you were ranting about.”

      “Which one was I ranting about? I don’t remember.”

      “You’re enough to drive anybody to drink, Eva Pennington!” cried the young man disgustedly.

      “Radiant man!” she cooed. “What’s the dapper little idea in that talented brain — jealous?”

      “I want to know who he is,” demanded Guy.

      “Who who is?”

      “You know perfectly well who I mean — the poor fish you were raving about before dinner. You said you danced with him. Who is he? That’s what I want to know.”

      “I don’t like the way you talk to me; but, if you must know, he was the most dazzling thing you ever saw. He —”

      “I never saw him, and I don’t want to, and I don’t care how dazzling he is. I only want to know his name.”

      “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? His name’s Wilson Crumb.” Her tone was as of one who says: “Behold Alexander the Great!”

      “Wilson Crumb! Who’s he?”

      “Do you mean to sit there and tell me that you don’t know who Wilson Crumb is, Guy Evans?” she demanded.

      “Never heard of him,” he insisted.

      “Never heard of Wilson Crumb, the famous actor-director? Such ignorance!”

      “Did

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