LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      The ushers were getting ready for the dinner. They were housed in the home of Paul Redfern, one of their number, whose family were traveling abroad, and who was keeping bachelor’s hall with a couple of servants to keep things in order. There was plenty of space and they were having a grand time scattered through three or four palatial rooms, shouting conversation back and forth. They were all friends, three of them having gone to the same college, and the rest had been more or less intimate friends childhood. For the bridegroom from afar had left the matter of ushers to his bride as the simplest way of solving the problem, since all of his friends were on the west coast.

      “Say, fellas, you’d better begin to rustle yourselves into battle array pretty quick! We ought to be starting in half an hour,” called Paul, who as host had suddenly become aware of the time.

      “You don’t say! Is it that late?” said Reeves Leighton, starting up from a sleepy hollow chair into which he had dropped when he came in. “What unearthly hour is this dinner anyway? Man, do you know what time it is?”

      “Sure I know,” said Paul, “and the dinner’s at six thirty. That’s not an unearthly hour. We have rehearsal in the church at eight, and they particularly asked us to be on time, because rehearsals always take forever and a day, and Mrs. Hollis said she wanted Sydney to get to sleep early so she would be all right for tomorrow. Syd hasn’t been very well lately, and her mother’s worried about her.”

      “Yes, I guess she’s been going a pretty fast pace the last month or two,” said Steve Grant. “I see her everywhere I go. It beats me why when a girl gets engaged everybody in the neighborhood has to begin to torment her with parties and things. Say, we’re going to miss that gal a lot when she goes away.”

      “Yes, Steve, you ought to have thought of that before. Why ever did you let a strange bridegroom from afar capture her?”

      “I did my best,” said Steve jauntily with a handsome grin. “I couldn’t help it, could I, if she preferred the stranger from afar to my manly beauty?”

      “Sure you could have helped it, Stevie,” teased Paul Redfern. “You never fail to get what you want, do you? The trouble was you were indolent. You should have begun sooner, and made hay while the sun shone! If we hadn’t counted on you to keep Syd in this part of the country some of the rest of us might have got going in time to save her!”

      “Well, at that I hear she’s doing rather well for herself,” said Curlin Grant with a comical grin. “A million dollars is not to be sneezed at, and everybody knows you can’t scare up one of those from any of us poor country guys.”

      Then the doorbell was heard in the distance, and they all came to attention.

      “That’s bound to be Link!” said Paul. “He’s always right on the dot for time. Lincoln Silverthorn is a hound for doing everything on the dotted line. But that means, fellas, that we’ve got to hustle!”

      “But where’s Luther Waite?” they called out as they scattered in search of their various garments.

      “Oh, have you forgotten? ‘Luther Waite, he’s always late’?” yelled out Steve as he made a dash for the room that had been assigned him. “He’ll turn up after we’re seated at the table. That’s Lute.”

      “Or maybe as we’re marching up the aisle,” added Curlin under his breath.

      Lincoln Silverthorn came upstairs gloved, overcoated, his hat in his hand to see how near ready they were. He stood in the hall where he could get a fairly good view of each of the four rooms where the young men were hurrying into their garments.

      “Hello, Link! Early as usual I see!”

      “Late as usual, I see,” said Link grinning.

      “Say, Link, seen anything of Lute Waite?”

      “Ho! You wouldn’t expect those two to meet up with each other, not beforehand, anyway!” called out Curlin comically.

      “No,” said Link. “I haven’t seen him. In fact I wasn’t looking for him. It wouldn’t occur to me to expect him so soon.”

      But while they were laughing at that the doorbell rang again and Luther Waite came pounding up the stairs, his hat in his hand, his hair awry, and a look of distress on his face.

      “Hi, there, Lute, you aren’t ill or anything are you, appearing on the scene so early?” called Steve wickedly, leaning over the stair railing.

      “No, I’m not yet,” said Luther panting as he hurried up, “but I don’t know but I’m gonna be! Say, Link, you ought ta know, who are the girls in this show? Do you know them all?”

      Link smiled at his serious face.

      “Why, yes, I guess I can name them all. There’s Frannie Ferrin, Lou McHale—you know her, Lutie. Then there’s Carey Carewe, Patricia Nicholson, and Betty Patterson and Sue Richards—those I don’t know so well—and my sister Rae!”

      A look of relief passed over your Waite’s face.

      “Is that all? Are you sure?” he asked anxiously.

      “Isn’t that enough?” groaned Reeves Leighton. “Just think of all those girls, and we don’t know which one we get yet,” said Reeves.

      “Calm yourself, brother,” said Paul. “They’re all a pretty decent lot if you ask me. I should think one might manage a little thing like walking down the aisle with any one of them. It isn’t as if it was to last for a lifetime. What’s eating you, Waite? You look all worried and jittery.”

      Waite dropped down on the top step of the stairs and leaned back against the stair railing.

      “Well, you see, I’ve had a shock!” he said with a heavy sigh of relief. “I was waiting for my bus to come along, and the bus came from the other direction, and who should I sight but that goofy cousin of Sydney Hollis’, that girl they call ‘Min’ something, and I thought if she was going to be one of the wedding party I was going to beat it! They’d be sure to put her with me. I am always a sucker for the leftovers that nobody else wants, but this would be the third time in the last year or so that I’ve served in that capacity, and I’m not up to it again. I just can’t take it! You know it’s not merely a matter of walking down the aisle with her, Paul my friend, it’s the matter of a whole evening more or less, generally more. She’s the kind that freezes onto you fast in the course of the amble down the aisle, and boy! I defy you to get away from her again while the ceremony lasts! And even after, she has ways of hinting that she wants you to take her places the next day and the next week and so on. The first time I met her it took me a week to make her forget me so she couldn’t reach me by telephone. And the next time it was all winter I hadta keep dodging her.”

      Luther Waite had a mop of deep mahogany curls, and gray eyes that had a hint of brown in them. He was rugged, with a lean face and build and a peppering of freckles across the bridge of a nice nose.

      “But look

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