Hearts of Three | Page 3

the jolly devils who,
Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.
Here's to ships that we have taken!
They have seen which men were best.
We have lifted maids and cargo,
And the sharks have had the rest.
CHORUS:

Roaring wind and deep blue water!
We're the jolly devils who,
Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.
--George Sterling

HEARTS OF THREE
CHAPTER I
EVENTS happened very rapidly with Francis Morgan that late spring
morning. If ever a man leaped across time into the raw, red drama and
tragedy of the primitive and the medieval melodrama of sentiment and
passion of the New World Latin, Francis Morgan was destined to be
that man, and Destiny was very immediate upon him.
Yet he was lazily unaware that aught in the world was stirring, and was
scarcely astir himself. A late night at bridge had necessitated a late
rising. A late breakfast of fruit and cereal had occurred along the route
to the library the austerely elegant room from which his father, toward
the last, had directed vast and manifold affairs.
"Parker," he said to the valet who had been his father's before him, "did
you ever notice any signs of fat on E.H.M. in his last days?"
"'Oh, no, sir," was the answer, uttered with all the due humility of the
trained servant, but accompanied by an involuntarily measuring glance
that scanned the young man's splendid proportions. "Your father, sir,
never lost his leanness. His figure was always the same,
broad-shouldered, deep in the chest, big-boned, but lean, always lean,
sir, in the middle. When he was laid out, sir, and bathed, his body
would have shamed most of the young men about town. He always
took good care of himself ; it was those exercises in bed, sir. Half an

hour every morning. Nothing prevented. He called it religion."
"Yes, he was a fine figure of a man," the young man responded idly,
glancing to the stock-ticker and the several telephones his father had
installed.
"He was that," Parker agreed eagerly. "He was lean and aristocratic in
spite of his shoulders and bone and chest. And you've inherited it, sir,
only on more generous lines."
Young Francis Morgan, inheritor of many millions as well as brawn,
lolled back luxuriously in a huge leather chair, stretched his legs after
the manner of a full-vigored menagerie lion that is over-spilling with
vigor, and glanced at a headline of the morning paper which informed
him of a fresh slide in the Culebra Cut at Panama.
"If I didn't know we Morgans didn't run that way," he yawned, "I'd be
fat already from this existence... Eh, Parker?"
The elderly valet, who Had neglected prompt reply, startled at the
abrupt interrogative interruption of the pause.
"Oh, yes, sir," he said hastily. "I mean, no, sir. You are in the pink of
condition."
"Not on your life," the young man assured him. "I may not be getting
fat, but I am certainly growing soft... Eh, Parker?"
"Yes, sir. No, sir; no, I mean no, sir. You're just the same as when you
came home from college three years ago."
"And took up loafing as a vocation," Francis laughed. "Parker!"
Parker was alert attention. His master debated with himself
ponderously, as if the problem were of profound importance, rubbing
the while the bristly thatch of the small toothbrush moustache he had
recently begun to sport on his upper lip.
"Parker, I'm going fishing."

"Yes, sir!"
"I ordered some rods sent up. Please joint them and let me give them
the once over. The idea drifts through my mind that two weeks in the
woods is what I need. If I don't, I'll surely^ start laying on flesh and
disgrace the whole family tree. You remember Sir Henry? the old
original Sir Henry, the buccaneer old swashbuckler?" "Yes, sir; I've
read of him, sir."
Parker had paused in the doorway until such time as the ebbing of his
young master's volubility would permit him to depart on the errand.
"Nothing to be proud of, the old pirate."
"Oh, no, sir," Parker protested. "He was Governor of Jamaica. He died
respected."
"It was a mercy he didn't die hanged," Francis laughed. "As it was, he's
the only disgrace in the family that he founded. But what I was going to
say is that I've looked him up very carefully. He kept his figure and he
died lean in the middle, thank God. It's a good inheritance he passed
down. We Morgans never found his treasure; but beyond rubies is the
lean-in-the-middle legacy he bequeathed us. It's what is called a fixed
character in the breed that's what the profs taught me in the biology
course."
Parker faded out of the room