The Boy Scout | Page 4

from the hands of the
barkeeper a glass crashed to the floor.
The young man regarded the barkeeper with puzzled eyes.
"He doesn't answer," he exclaimed. "He must have hung up."
"He must have fainted!" said the barkeeper.
The white-haired one pushed a bill across the counter. "To pay for
breakage," he said, and disappeared down Pelham Parkway.

Throughout the day, with the bill, for evidence, pasted against the
mirror, the barkeeper told and retold the wondrous tale.
"He stood just where you're standing now," he related, "blowing in
million-dollar bills like you'd blow suds off a beer. If I'd knowed it was
him, I'd have hit him once, and hid him in the cellar for the reward.
Who'd I think he was? I thought he was a wire-tapper, working a con
game!"
Mr. Carroll had not "hung up," but when in the Bronx the beer-glass
crashed, in Wall Street the receiver had slipped from the hand of the
man who held it, and the man himself had fallen forward. His desk hit
him in the face and woke him--woke him to the wonderful fact that he
still lived; that at forty he had been born again; that before him
stretched many more years in which, as the young man with the white
hair had pointed out, he still could make good.
The afternoon was far advanced when the staff of Carroll and Hastings
were allowed to depart, and, even late as was the hour, two of them
were asked to remain. Into the most private of the private offices
Carroll invited Gaskell, the head clerk; in the main office Hastings had
asked young Thorne, the bond clerk, to be seated.
Until the senior partner has finished with Gaskell young Thorne must
remain seated.
"Gaskell," said Mr. Carroll, "if we had listened to you, if we'd run this
place as it was when father was alive, this never would have happened.
It hasn't happened, but we've had our lesson. And after this we're going
slow and going straight. And we don't need you to tell us how to do that.
We want you to go away--on a month's vacation. When I thought we
were going under I planned to send the children on a sea-voyage with
the governess--so they wouldn't see the newspapers. But now that I can
look them in the eye again, I need them, I can't let them go. So, if you'd
like to take your wife on an ocean trip to Nova Scotia and Quebec, here
are the cabins I reserved for the kids. They call it the Royal
Suite--whatever that is--and the trip lasts a month. The boat sails
to-morrow morning. Don't sleep too late or you may miss her."

* * * * *
The head clerk was secreting the tickets in the inside pocket of his
waistcoat. His fingers trembled, and when he laughed his voice
trembled.
"Miss the boat!" the head clerk exclaimed. "If she gets away from
Millie and me she's got to start now. We'll go on board to-night!"
A half-hour later Millie was on her knees packing a trunk, and her
husband was telephoning to the drug-store for a sponge bag and a cure
for seasickness.
Owing to the joy in her heart and to the fact that she was on her knees,
Millie was alternately weeping into the trunk-tray and offering up
incoherent prayers of thanksgiving. Suddenly she sank back upon the
floor.
"John!" she cried, "doesn't it seem sinful to sail away in a 'royal suite'
and leave this beautiful flat empty?"
Over the telephone John was having trouble with the drug clerk.
"No!" he explained, "I'm not seasick now. The medicine I want is to be
taken later. I know I'm speaking from the Pavonia; but the Pavonia isn't
a ship; it's an apartment-house."
He turned to Millie. "We can't be in two places at the same time," he
suggested.
"But, think," insisted Millie, "of all the poor people stifling to-night in
this heat, trying to sleep on the roofs and fire-escapes; and our flat so
cool and big and pretty--and no one in it."
John nodded his head proudly.
"I know it's big," he said, "but it isn't big enough to hold all the people
who are sleeping to-night on the roofs and in the parks."

"I was thinking of your brother--and Grace," said Millie. "They've been
married only two weeks now, and they're in a stuffy hall bedroom and
eating with all the other boarders. Think what our flat would mean to
them; to be by themselves, with eight rooms and their own kitchen and
bath, and our new refrigerator and the gramophone! It would be
Heaven! It would be a real honeymoon!"
Abandoning the drug clerk, John lifted Millie in his arms and kissed
her, for