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Show INSTALLMENT NINE The Story So Far Laura Maguire, wife of Mike Ma-gulre, Ma-gulre, happy-go-lucky editor and mayor of the town. Is mother to four children: chil-dren: Tom. whose real estate job Is profitless during the depression and who Is married to Mary Etta, secretary to big shot; Alec, unable to get a Job, who takes up with a flashy divorcee much older than he; Shirley, engaged to Jaird Newsum, who also is out of a Job since his father gave up his manufacturing manu-facturing plant to stop losses, and whose marriage Is delayed; Kathleen, whom a stranger, Ritchie Graham, also a news paper man, is interested In. Ma New-sum New-sum wants Jaird to marry Connie Mays, the banker's daughter. On a bet. Alec takes out Lou Knight, the town drunk's daughter. Tom and Mary Etta had Just been guests at a Tavern party of Mary Etta's employer. Harvey Cobb Leigh. "You laugh that off," snapped Tom. "It doesn't seem funny to me." He reached up to the shelf over the bed alcove and dragged down a battered bat-tered suitcase. "What are you going to do?" demanded de-manded Mary Etta. "What do you think?" he retorted, opening that drawer in the dresser which was dedicated to his use. Mary Etta stood very still for a minute. "Calling it a day and quits?" she asked at last. Tom was stuffing shirts Into the suitcase. "I'm a failure. As a provider pro-vider and as a husband. But I'm not going to be kept by a woman, even my wife." Mary Etta caught her breath. "I warned you when I married you that I'd not let any man swallow my personality." "I know. And probably you're right. But I happen to have a personality per-sonality too. As well as a little pride of my own. You might possibly possi-bly pay my bills and retain some shreds of respect for me. But I couldn't let you and feel like anything any-thing except my wife's lap dog. These past six months have proved that, don't you think? Between us we've killed our love. All it needs now is a decent burial. And I fancy 1 CHAPTER XII Continued Tom knew she wanted him to pay for his supper by hunting up his host and being very appreciative of the spectacle to which he had been invited solely for his wife's sake. But Tom had had all he could stomach stom-ach at one sitting. So he stood stiffly stiff-ly by until Mary Etta was free to leave and said nothing complimentary complimen-tary to anybody. "Did you ever see anything like the way Harvey manages that three ring circus?" murmured Mary Etta on the way to the car. Tom grunted. "Sulking again?" she inquired crisply, turning the key in the ignition ig-nition with a snap. "If you must know," said Tom, "I'm fed up to the gills with Harvey Leigh and everything about him. Do you realize we have him for breakfast, break-fast, dinner and a bedtime story?" "You just can't bear success in somebody else. Can you?" She glanced at him curiously. "You have even hated me lately, haven't you?" Tom went while. "Do you realize we've scarcely spoken a civil word to each other in six months?" "Yes," said Mary Etta in her cool, unemotional way. "I realize all that." "Where are we drifting. Mary Etta?" Et-ta?" asked Tom in a stifled voice. "I wouldn't know." Her flippancy flecked him on the raw. He stared unseeingly straight before him and thought of their brief tempestuous courtship. They hadn't known each other very well. Tom was barely twenty-one, Mary Etta a few months younger. He hadn't intended in-tended to think of marriage for years. But somehow after he met Mary Etta he could think of nothing else. He had not been sure she liked him at all. Being Mary Etta she had been more antagonistic than encouraging. en-couraging. The day Tom asked her out of a sudden mad impulse to elope with him over the week-end, he had half expected her to bounce an ink bottle off his head. Not until un-til they came out of the County Courthouse, the license firmly clutched in his perspiring hand, had he believed in her surrender. But then Mary Etta never had exactly ex-actly surrendered. On their brief honeymoon before each of them returned to their respective re-spective desks, she had never even in his arms quite let herself go. She did love. Or rather she had. He was convinced of that. Or she would never have married him. Mary Etta had played fair. She did not believe be-lieve in maudlin sentiment. But she asked no more than she was willing to give. She proved a curiously exciting wife. Tom admitted that. There had been moments when he could have wrung her neck. Interspersed with the delirium of loving her so wildly it frightened him. But he was never indifferent to her. "I had another letter from old Colonel Shoup today," he said later while Mary Etta was cold creaming her face. "He dies hard, doesn't he?" she observed. "I should think he'd tire of wasting postage." "Listen, Mary Etta," said Tom thickly. "I know you hate small towns. But we can't go on like this. I grant you Colonel Shoup's proposition proposi-tion sounds like piffle on the surface. sur-face. Fifty dollars a month and commissions, if any. But he's got the best real estate business in Covington. Cov-ington. And he's offering to let me buy into a partnership on the installment in-stallment plan. It's exactly what I've always wanted. And" his voice quivered "a couple can live on fifty dollars a month in Covington. I know a four-room house not far from Mother's that can be rented for twenty, and whole families nowadays nowa-days eat on a dollar a day." "You mean if the wife does all the cooking and the washing and the ironing." said Mary Etta scornfully. scorn-fully. "Are you seriously proposing that I give up my hundred and seventy-five a month and move to a town I hate where I'll have to work like a slave, just so you'll have the pleasure of saying you pay all our expenses?" "Yes," said Tom, his mouth a hard ugly gash. "To save your face." went on Mary Etta, "I'm to let go of everything every-thing I've won from life and turn into the kind of female drudge my mother was. Bending over a hot cook stove. Squeezing pennies. Saving Sav-ing on haircuts. Wearing house aprons. Cutting up Sunday's roast for Thursday's hash. Boiling cabbage cab-bage till I want to scream. We couldn't even keep a car." "No," said Tom, "we couldn't But we might afford a baby some day." Mary Etta went very white. "Just because your mother thinks a wife should sacrifice herself to her man and go on and on sacrificing " "We'll leave my mother out oi this." "It's funny you married me, when she'i your ideal." hung her white linen hat on its accustomed ac-customed nail and marched over to the littered table consecrated to her use. The last issue of the Clarion lay there neatly arranged by Tommy Tom-my for her consideration. Kathleen did not need to turn to the editorial page to know what was afoot. Nevertheless, Nev-ertheless, her brown eyes smoldering, smolder-ing, she read every word. Mike had done it again. The very paper crackled with the remarks he had to make about unscrupulous un-scrupulous financiers in general and Banker Eugene Mays of Covington's leading bank in particular. Kathleen Kath-leen had to admit that her father, when he decided to set off fireworks, did a thoroughly good job. No wonder won-der Eugene Mays had paid the Clarion's Clar-ion's editor an early morning calL Kathleen shivered a little. The banker bank-er was a very imposing figure in local lo-cal concerns. Naturally he resented having sarcasm of the most virulent nature directed at his policies. In the private office somebody guffawed. guf-fawed. It was Mike of course, laughing laugh-ing in his caller's infuriated face. A faint grin traveled over the harassed har-assed faces of the group outside. It was so exactly like Mike to treat Mr. Eugene Mays' important anger to a cold douche of derision. But Kathleen did not grin. It might be very audacious and gallant of her father to tweak the lion's tail and then snigger about it. His daughter, however, was thinking of the number num-ber of people in Covington who owed Eugene Mays money and who jumped through hoops at his signal. The door of the inner office came open with a sharp crack, and everybody every-body in the main office became suddenly sud-denly tremendously occupied with his own tasks. Mr. Mays, however, did not condescend a glance to his audience. He stood on the threshold, facing the other way and brandished a fleshy fist in the general direction direc-tion of Michael Maguire's gamin-esque gamin-esque grin. "Keep on printing these infamous attacks on me and my institution, Maguire," he said, "and by God, I'll break you." Mike grinned. "I've been broke before, Mays. By better men than you. But I've never yet been scared out of telling the truth if it needed to be told." Kathleen was aware that Ritchie Graham had come in by the street door and was listening to the encounter en-counter with every manifestation of pleasure. Of course it gave him a thrill to see Mike risk financial annihilation an-nihilation for a principle. But Kathleen Kath-leen thought of Laura who was already al-ready stretching dollars till they groaned, and Kathleen did not feel thrilled as she would have a year ago at her father's debonair disregard disre-gard of consequences, he felt a little lit-tle sick. "If it's war you want," said Eugene Eu-gene Mays in a suddenly colder and more ominous voice, "say so. But you had better take into consideration considera-tion the fact that I have influence in this town. I can cut your advertising advertis-ing accounts to a quarter of what they are. Likewise your circulation. Maybe you don't realize that." "That's your ultimatum. Now suppose you listen to mine," Mike said with a thrust like the glitter of a rapier. "You have ten thousand thou-sand depositors in your bank. And a couple of hundred stockholders who leave everything to you. You are the bank. And it's a hell of a responsibility. Because this whole community would be sunk if you got your tail in a crack. Now as bankers bank-ers go, you're not so rank. But you could be sweeter. That western deal you are dickering with smells to heaven. So do one or two other juicy pies you've tried to stick your finger into recently. The people ought to know that sort of thing is dangerous to their interests. And they're going to know every time you try to pull a fast one. My advice to you, Mays, is to pull in your horns and leave high financing to the rest of the pirates. But if you don't, then you'll have to put up with whatever what-ever I care to say about you and your wildcat business ventures. And believe me, I'll say plenty!" Unfortunately the peroration of Mike's philippic was somewhat spoiled by the failure of Banker Mays to remain for its grandiloquent conclusion. Ritchie's gray eyes sparkled in his sunburned face. "I'm pretty good at the sling shot if you need any help," he said. "He doesn't," interrupted Kathleen Kath-leen with tartness. "Mike never missed a bull's-eye in his life if he had something to shoot at that was practically certain to explode and gum up the works." Mike cocked a quizzical eyebrow at his daughter. "Yes," she said in a voice sharper than she realized, "if Eugene Mays wants to, he can move us all into the poorhouse. And." she gave her father a hostile glance, "you'd think it was a circus and laugh. But then I've begun to wonder if you'll ever be quite adult. Or maybe I've got growing pains. Anyway the prospect pros-pect doesn't amuse me." (TO BE COTlMED) "What are you going to do?" demanded Mary Etta. you won't be long about that after I'm gone. Good-by, Mary Etta." She turned quickly away without speaking. Tom stared at her for a moment. And then very gently he opened and closed the door behind be-hind him. It was exactly as if he had slammed the lid of a coffin on a fragment of his heart. CHAPTER Xin Kathleen Maguire was late getting get-ting down to the office the following morning. Of course it did not make a lot of difference when Kathleen reached her desk. Officially she was the Clarion's society editor. But she suspected that Mike would not blink an eye if she failed to show up at all. For years he had been everything every-thing from janitor to political economist econo-mist on the paper if the emergency arose. And he was still capable of writing every word in any edition without missing a stride. Nevertheless Neverthe-less Kathleen took her job as seriously seri-ously as he allowed her to. In many ways the staff, due to Mike's penchant for broken-down humanity, was as decrepit as the purely mechanical end of the business. busi-ness. Mike had an unique manner of selecting employees. He was always al-ways hiring some derelict because he was down on his luck. At present pres-ent there were old Miller, an excellent excel-lent typesetter when he was sober, Roger Whyte who could write like an angel if he wasn't having nervous nerv-ous shakes, and Tommy South, office of-fice boy, an orphan Mike had plucked off by the scruff of his neck out of the Court for Juvenile Delinquents. De-linquents. The moment she entered the big cluttered room which was the Clarion's Clari-on's main office, Kathleen knew there was tension in the air. Roger Whyte's frail hands trembled on his typewriter keys. Tommy South's freckles stood out more prominently on a pale and perspiring countenance. counte-nance. Old Ducky Miller had dropped a tray of type and just stood staring at the jumbled pi. The door to Mike's private office was closed, an unusual occurrence. Kathleen recognized the symptoms symp-toms even before her sharp ears identified the roar on the other side of the flimsy partition. Grimly she |