Show 1 Adventurers Adventurers' Club 1 O Hands Up By FLOYD GIBBONS IBBONS Famous Headline Hunter WELL ELL sir you boys and girls s seem em to have had adventures with about everything thing there is but heres here's a bird with a new one He is Morton Greenbaum of New York city and he had an adventure with the English language Of course that wasn't all of the adventure There was a adark adark adark dark sinister looking man in it it-a it a man that frightened Mort al almost almost almost al- al most to death But the English language certainly played a big part and to my mind it deserves most of the credit for the affair Mort came to this country from Hungary In the fall of 1921 and made his home at first with a sister In Cleveland Ohio His sister conducted a grocery business there and she ehe and Mort lived In rooms upstairs over the store He stayed with his sister while he was learning English Mort worked hard over his English for lie ire realized that the sooner he had It learned the sooner he could get a Job and take his place In the community Every evening he went to night classes at the Central High school and In between times s he brushed up on his class work by reading the newspapers Mort Believes up Stick-up Guys Were Real Peril And from those papers papers' papers Mort got a mighty funny conception of or what these United States were like The war post-war crime wave was on and the papers were full of or st stories rles about hold Mort didn't stop to think that those crime Items were gathered from all over oer the country and from all over the the environs environs of ot Cleveland He thought of them In terms of the tho small towns In Hungary which he knew And the tho result was was that he began thinking of America as a place where law and order had broken down completely com com- where where bandits ran wild all over town town something something like our own conception of the banditry In China He felt that almost any minute he might run across a stick up man And the thought wasn't very comforting Then one day In October It happened Mort had been plugging along on his English and had learned a n bunch of or words that he recognized recognized recognized when he saw them on paper But when people pronounced them or when he tried to say them himself that well well that was a different matter Pronunciation was the thing that was bothering him most when one day as he be was watching the store while his sister had gone upstairs for a n few minutes a man came walking walling In This Looked Like an to Honest-to-Goodness Hold He came In silently and that frightened Mort right at the start He was a huge colored man and he stood In front of or Mort with his right t The Colored Mans Man's Right Hand Was Hidden In His Pocket h hand hidden in his pocket The pocket bulged says Mort and something something something some some- thing In tn It gave out a metallic sound The map looked straight at me and in a depressed but energetic tone hissed one word Hands Hands up Mort knew that word all too well He had seen It ItIn ItIn itin In the newspapers too many times not to know what It meant Strangely enough he says I 1 didn't seem to be afraid to die True my legs gave way and I could hardly rise from the stool I Iwas Iwas was sitting on but the prospect of my own death was not so disturbing as the thought that my only sister a 1 mother of five little children might come down any minute Accordingly with all nIl the self-control self I could command I began retreating along the counter toward the stairs so that if my sister appeared I might give her a sign to apprise her of the danger Black Man Has a Track Single-Track Mind At the thA same time Mort felt that he lIe ought to say something to keep leep that birds bird's mind off orr such ideas as shooting Mort But the only thing he be could think of at was a n feeble Wh at The big colored man seemed to be losing patience I he growled this time louder and more Insistently than titan before I 1 had nearly reached the stairs cays says Mort when the man seemed to lose his patience entirely He brought his hand from his pocket without pocket without a 1 gun In It to be sure sure and and gesticulating savagely In a certain direction above my head bellowed from the of his depths lungs And at that same moment Mort heard his sister coming down the stairs The thing he most had happened His brain reeled and his knees began giving way under him but he pulled himself together and whispered to his sister in Hungarian Honey man Honey man says I This up Hold-up Has an Extremely Happy Ending But the dread warning didn't seem to make any impression on Morts Mort's sister She kept right on coming down those stairs This time Mort lost all sense of caution Honey Boney he almost shouted Dont you hear bear I 1 And Morts Mort's sister looked at Mort as If to say Well what are you yelling about What she did say was All uAIl right Give him one of those red cans on the second shelf Puzzled bewildered Mort turned In the direction she was pointing And on the sides of those little red cans says Mort my alien allen eyes spelled out the tho legend hand band soap I I had bad tripped up on nothing more than the niceties of of the dangerous pronunciation syllables up and op And the metallic sounding thing In the colored mans man's pocket was only the Jingle of a few pennies with which he ho paid for his l purchase t o Service |