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Show I .-;---..Q.. .... . I j Cupid and the Q Gossip I By H. IRVING KING -- . . --0- - CucyriKht.) MYSTERY tiiis a fascination for all normal people male or female. Some of the males of the species pretend pre-tend not to be "intrigued" by mystery but such people are promising candidates candi-dates for the An;iani,s club. Anyway, Gilbert Mai in was mystery. lie hud arrived in I'orestdale, a town of j about live thousand inhabitants put I up at the best and only real hotel of I the town; had stayed there for three I weeks and had spoken to the hotel j clerk only when he registered, the I waiters only when he ordered tits meals, and to the other guests of the i hotel not at all. All the luggage he j had brought with him was a suitcase ; and a small trunk a steamer trunk apparently. i II is case was discussed in full as- sembly in the hotel lobby. Sam Jur- gerson. the town gossip, decided that i the stranger was a crook. Sam was always of a suspicious nature. Once he had met the minister of J the First Baptist church making his rheumatic way home alone at eleven T o'clock at night, having just come .from seeing one of his parishioners who had become obsessed with the idea tiiat he was about to die and would like to see the minister before he did so. Sam saw the minister hobbling home and asked him: "Elder, what are you doing out here so late at night?" and the minister replied: "Gathering them in, gathering them in," and passed on. Sam was not much of a sleuth by nature, .simply a gossip, but under the stress of circumstances a man can become almost anything a bum or a hero capture a machine gun nest single handed or ask the casual passerby pass-erby for "beef and mustard." There are limitless possibilities to the "pressure "pres-sure of circumstances." . Gilbert kept pretty close to the hotel, ho-tel, going out twice a day for constitutional consti-tutional walks, but walking nowhere In particular and speaking to no one as Sam, who always trailed hiin on these health exercises, found out. No letters came for him and he sent none. It was springtime and the wealthy people of the town who had flown away for the winter months were beginning be-ginning to fly back again and open the big houses on the hill. This was Sam's harvest time, for he had for years acted as a general handy man about the estate of Col. Mathew Oak ley. The colonel regarded Sam as a character and used to like to hear him reel off the town gossip. While : affecting a stern and uncompromising manner, the colonel was, in reality, a rather weak man and secretly fond of gossip himself. Like all weak men, he 'was obstinate and called his obstinacy ' firmness. ' The colonel's only child, his daughter daugh-ter Eleanor, was something like her : father in this respect she was obsti-; obsti-; Bate. Just order her to do something and she wouldn't do it. Otherwise she was as near perfect as they make I 'em. And wher it came to looks she was a dream. "Well, Sam, what's the news?'' asked the colonel when his faithful bench-: bench-: man showed up at the Elms the name of the colonel's place. "Oh, nothing very alarming," re-j re-j plied Sara, "except that there's a fellow fel-low stopping down at the hotel who is a mystery. Nobody knows what he's here for. v My idea is that he's the head of a smuggling gang. There was a schooner caught down the hay last week with two hundred mysterious myste-rious packages on board, and if this Gilbert Martin ain't" "What!" cried the colonel, "Gilbert Martin? Eleanor, do you hear that?" "I hear," replied Eleanor. "Suppose you dismiss Sam now and we wilier wili-er confer." "Father," said Eleanor when Sam had disappeared, "what does this mean? Did you arrange for Gilbert Martin to be here when we returned?" "No, I didn't." snapped the colonel. "If he's here he's here on bis own hook. When we were in Rome ibis winter I ordered yon to marry Gilbert Gil-bert and you refused. That ended it as far as I was concerned. You never do anything I tell you to, anyway." Eleanor was meditative. "Well," she said at length, "Gilbert seemed to be so sure that I would say yes and then you went and actually ordered me to marry him. And I won't be bossed about." And here, greatly to the trepidation of the colonel, she began to cry. For Eleanor was a woman and human after all. The colonel fidgeted. "What was the last thing you said to him?" he asked. "I said that when 1 wanted to see him again I would let him know," replied re-plied Eleanor drying her tears. "Well." said the colonel, "yon see he has got here before us and placed himself richt handy in case you should want to see him again. Sam," he cried, going to a window which opened on the lawn where Sam was working at cleaning up. "Come here; Miss Eleanor Elea-nor wants to speak to you." Sam came in, wondering. "Sam," said Eleanor wilh great dignity, dig-nity, "you can tell Mr. Martin that Colonel and Miss Oakley will expect him to tea this afternoon." "What, the smuggler!" cried Sam. "Get out, you scoundrel, and deliver your message," roared the colone.. The wedding took place in Jinn- .1 course. |