Wild Wings | Page 3

considerable collection by
now and one in which he took great joy in lonely hours in his dingy
little lodging room, or in odd moments as he went his way at his task as
a reporter for a great New York daily. The perspicuous reader will not
need to be told that the young man was in love with Tony
Holiday--desperately in love.
Desperately was the word. Slight as Max Hempel's hope may have
been that Laura LaRue's daughter was to prove the ingénue he sought,
infinitely slighter was Dick Carson's hope of ever making Tony his
wife. How could it be otherwise? Tony Holiday was as far above him
in his own eyes as the top of Mount Tom was high above the onion
beds of the valley. The very name he used was his only because she had
given it to him. Dick Nobody he had been. Richard Carson he had
become through grace of Tony.
Like his companion the young man went back into the past, though not
so far a journey. As vividly as if it were but yesterday he remembered
the misery of flesh and spirit which had been his as he stowed himself
away in the hay loft in the Holiday's barn, that long ago summer dawn,
too sick to take another step and caring little whether he lived or died,
conscious vaguely, however, that death would be infinitely preferable
to going back to the life of the circus and the man Jim's coarse brutality
from which he had made his escape at last.

And then he had opened his eyes, hours later, and there had been
Tony--and there had been chiefly Tony ever since, for him.
If ever he amounted to anything, and he meant to amount to something,
it would be all due to Tony and her Uncle Phil. The two of them had
saved him in more ways than one, had faith in him when he wasn't
much but a scarecrow, ignorant, profane, unmoral, miserable, a "gutter
brat" as some one had once called him, a phrase he had never forgotten.
It had seemed to brand him, set him apart from people like the Holidays
forever. But Tony and Doctor Phil had shown him a different way of
looking at it, proved to him that nothing could really disgrace him but
himself. They had given him his chance and he had taken it. Please
God he would make himself yet into something they could be proud of,
and it would all be their doing. He would never forget that, whatever
happened.
A half hour later the train puffed and wheezed into the station at
Northampton. Dick Carson and Max Hempel, still close together,
descended into the swarming, chattering crowd which was delightfully
if confusingly congested with pretty girls, more pretty girls and still
more pretty girls. But Dick was not confused. Even before the train had
come to a full stop he had caught sight of Tony. He had a single track
mind so far as girls were concerned. From the moment his eyes
discovered Tony Holiday the rest simply did not exist for him. It is to
be doubted whether he knew they were there at all, in spite of their
manifest ubiquity and equally manifest pulchritude.
Tony saw him, too, as he loomed up, taller than the others, bearing
resistlessly down upon her. She waved a gay greeting and smiled her
welcome to him through the throng. Max Hempel, close behind, caught
the message, too, and recognized the face of the girl who smiled as the
original of the newspaper cut he had just been studying so assiduously.
Deliberately he dogged the young man's heels. He wanted to get a
close-up view of Laura LaRue's daughter. She was much prettier than
the picture. Even from a distance he had made that out, as she stood
there among the crowd, vivacious, vivid, clad all in white except for the
loose coral-hued sweater which set off her warm brunette beauty and

the slim but charmingly rounded curves of her supple young body. Yes,
she was like Laura, like her and yet different, with a quality which he
fancied belonged to herself and none other.
Almost jealously Hempel watched the meeting between the girl and the
youth who up to now had been negligible enough, but suddenly
emerged into significance as the possible young galoot already
mentally warned off the premises by the stage manager.
"Dick! O Dick! I'm so glad to see you," cried the girl, holding out both
hands to the new arrival. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining.
She looked quite as glad as she proclaimed.
As for the young man who had set down his suitcase and taken
possession of both the proffered hands, there wasn't the slightest doubt