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Show THE STORY At a public dance Martin Forbes, a newspaper man, cuts In on Rhoda White's dance with Mai Lew-Is, whom Martin Instinctively In-stinctively dislikes. He overhears over-hears a conversation between Lewis and a woman, which ho realizes concerns Rhoda. He recalls re-calls a "blind ad" Inquiring the whereabouts of "Rhoda McFar-land" McFar-land" and senses a newspaper stry. He believes that Is Rho-da'g Rho-da'g real name. She refuses to deny or admit it. However, It recalls her childhood In California. Cali-fornia. Her mother dead, she had been happy until misfortune befell her father. Professor Mc-Farland. Mc-Farland. Associated with the blow Is her uncle, William Royce. They move to Chicago, where her father Is engaged In mysterious work. Rhoda takes up stenography. CHAPTER II Continued The only qualms of panic she ever felt when going about alone on her (mail excursions to the shops, the library, a near-by movie theater, took the form of a belief that she had seen him or that he was following her. If he was the source of the money they lived on, then It meant that he knew where they lived and that he .wai, for some reason she couldn't fathom, biding his time. But she was, as a matter of fact, too healthy and happy, even too well occupied, to think about him much. ' Really she'd never lacked friends. But her father's often repeated instruction in-struction not to tell who they were or whert they came from, to answer no personal questions at all, brought It about that most of her friendships were with members of the staff of the hotel, rather than with residents. - There was one exception among the guests: a middle-aged pretty woman who always wore black a widow, Ithoda supposed. She didn't ask many questions because she was deaf, so deaf that you had to shout to make her hear. She was going to a school where you learned lip-reading so that you could tell what people said by looking at them without hearing their Tolces at all. The school was downtown down-town In one of the big buildings of the loop, and Mrs. George, whose deafness deaf-ness had come upon her suddenly, hated to venture down Into that confusion con-fusion alone. Her need was a godsend to Rhoda, who volunteered to go with her every morning. She went Into the class with Mrs. George, and having nothing else to do, she sat and watched and learned lip-reading lip-reading herself. It took Mrs. George three months to learn, but In half that time Rhoda was Infallible at it. It made life more amusing. She liked to ride In the elevated and watch people talis down at the end of the car. And when she and her father had dinner In the restaurant, his long preoccupied silences did not leave her restless. She would be sampling conversations con-versations from all over the room. It was a real bereavement when Mrs. George left the hotel and went to New York to live. Hut the best friendship of those four hotul years didn't boj.in until after Mrs. George had gone It was with Miss Bacon, whose rather Incredible first name was Florahel, the public stenographer. Rhoda had been saying good morning to her and sometimes topping beside her desk for a word y or two, for months. But In her lone liness after Mrs. George had gone, she formed the habit of making longer visits when she saw Miss Bacon wasn't busy. Miss Bacon was not, Rhoda per-- celved, as old as she had thought ; her being rather stout and her wearing - spectacles made her look so. But she had a Jolly young voice and a nice smile. She didn't ask any prying questions. ques-tions. She talked quite a good deal In a nice friendly way, about her own nlTnlrs. I'rohahly she was rather lonely lone-ly herself. Not that she hadn't any relations, but that they didn't do her any good. Her father, it seemed, had had several wives who had died one after another, and the children didn't like one another very well, and quarreled. quar-reled. Florabel had boon the youngest and she'd had a horrible time until she'd managed to learn a trade that made her independent. Independence wns I'lorabel's sacred word. Everybody, she said, even a girl who was almost sure to get married, mar-ried, ought to have a trade. Then If anything unexpected happened, she'd got something to tie to. "Of course, not If she's rich," she added. "I'm not rich." Ithoda said. "At lsast I don't think we are. Father expects ex-pects to be pretty soon. I wish I could learn stenography. I suppose It's awfully hard." "It's spelling that is most important," im-portant," Florabel told her. "Can you Bpell?" "Oh, I think so." Rhoda said. "Spoiling "Spoil-ing Isn't hard, Is It?" "It was for mo, Flonibol told her. But Khoda, as It turned out. was one of those lucky people who simply can't misspell a word that they've ever V seen In print. "I could teach you myself," Florabel volunteered. "I'd like to, first rate. I haven't much to do, hardly ever. In tha middle of the morning or in the middle of the afternoon." There never was a more enthusias- tic pupil, and Florabel seemed as excited ex-cited about It as she was herself. She worked over the preliminary exercises vmtll her hand cramped and then until It came uncramped again. She was determined, at every lesson, to sur- By Beery KiteheK Wefcster Copyright by The BobbsMerrUI Co. WNU Service prise Florabel by how much more she knew and she never failed. By the end of two month's she could write a clean page if she didn't try to go too fast, and she was taking slow dictation that Florabel read not from prepared exercises but out of the newspaper or anywhere. Then one day a client appeared at the desk In the middle of the lesson. Rhoda caught up her notebook and fled, but not very far; only to the nearest sofa. When the man had finished fin-ished dictating his letters and gone away she went back to Florabel. "Let me see if I can't write them from my notes," she pleaded. "He talked loud enough for me to hear him, all right, and I know I've got everything." Florabel had been rather shocked and she made Rhoda promise not to do it again, but she did let her transcribe tran-scribe her notes on the typewriter and there were only a few small mistakes. What they did after that with clients they knew, was to ask permission for Rhoda to sit beside the desk and take the dictation for practice. They were mostly awfully nice about It. People were like that, in the main, according to Rhoda's experience kindly, glad to help one out of a difficulty diffi-culty If it didn't mean taking much trouble and sometimes when it did. The thing she couldn't understand was why they had been so cruel to her father. He never could have meant, whatever It was he'd done, to hurt anybody In the world. Yet as she remembered with better understanding some of the things that had happened in the last weeks before they left home to come east, the whole town must have turned upon him as if he'd been a leper. They'd broken him, somehow. She couldn't believe, any more, that the happy time he'd used to talk about the long holiday when they'd roam the world doing whatever they pleased would ever come. But the scheme that was to make it possible obsessed him more and more. He almost al-most never talked to her now; he didn't even want her to read to him. And he couldn't be very well, either. His face had a queer blue color sometimes some-times that frightened her. He insisted it was nothing, and when she found out, accidentally, that he'd been to see the doctor who lived in the hotel he told her It was for a touch of Indigestion. Indi-gestion. Florahel was urging her now to go out and find herself a regular Job. She was better fitted for it than most of the graduates of the schools, and as good as she'd ever get until she'd had some actual business experience. experi-ence. Rhoda wanted to do It. but she felt she couldn't without telling her father about the plan before putting It in execution. So she put Florabel off, saying she would go looking for a job some time, but that she didn't see that there was any hurry. At the end of one of these conversations conversa-tions she saw something In her friend's face that made her ask, with a catch In her breath, "Is there any special hurry that you know about?" Florahel visibly hesitated over her answer. "I sort of hated to tell you," she said. "Why, I'm not going to be here very much longer. You see, I'm going to marry Mr. Gage. You know. And of course that means I'm going to Denver to live. And oh. Lamb, I'd like to see you settled before I go!" Ithoda bated to remember the little scene that followed. She'd said, in her hurt bewilderment, some pretty mean tilings, nbout Independence and so on, and she'd made Florahel cry. They'd made It up. though, wit'.m the hour. She helped Florabel slp and she went to the wedding ant saw the couple off on the train. She liked Mr. Gage, herself. He was fat. like Florahel, and jolly.. He looked rather solemn, though, when he said good-by to her. He gave her his card with his address on It and told her to keep It carefully. If anything ever happened to her, he said, and she found she wanted any help, she was to write or telegraph. She refrained from asking him what he thought might happen. Of course she really knew. When, about a fortnight later, an hour after she and her father had finished their late dinner, the blow fell she hadn't been surprised at all. She bad had the doctor there within ten minutes, but she'd known then that it was too late for his remedies to do any real good. The one tiling that it was unendurable unendur-able to remember and impossible to forget was I ho way her father had pleaded with the doctor for one more day. lie frantically believed that enough of tl.e drug they were putting into Ids veins would give him the little handful of hours that was all he needed. They did give him more stuff out of the hypodermic syringe, but this time It was morphine and under it he relaxed, re-laxed, so that for a while he talked to her. comfortably but confusedly, lie thought it was just after her mother moth-er died, when stie five years old. Hut a little later after the nurse had come he roused, as from a sleep, stared at Khoda In a frightened way and tried to speak to her, waving the nurse away as he did so. The only iutclllgible words she had been able to hear, when he lapsed into unconsciousness, uncon-sciousness, were "papers" an '"your Uncle Wlltlara." The doctor had been giving some Instructions In-structions to the nurse. Rhoda Intercepted Inter-cepted him on his way to the door. "Will he wake up again?" she asked him. He looked at her steadily a moment before he answered. "No, my dear child, he won't. This Is the end." And then, surprisingly, his eyes filled up with tears. "You're only a little girl !" he said, as if It were a discovery. "Won't you let me get some woman here in the hotel to take you in until your friends can come and get you? And won't you let me telegraph now, for them?" She told him, afraid her voice was betraying her sudden panic, that she would telegraph and that she'd rather go and lie down by herself in her own room. The words must have sounded all right, since he assented, though a little dubiously. Even with the door shut she could hear her father's terrible breathing. She wanted to think, but she could not. She could only listen. It lasted a long time. When it stopped the cessation cessa-tion brought her bold upright in bed, unable to draw her own breath for a matter of seconds. It came at last with a sob of relief. She cried, rather peacefully until, after a while, she heard the nurse coming to tell her. She buried her face in the crook of her arm and lay perfectly still, and the nurse, believing her asleep, wrent away again, shutting the dcor after her. At that, quite suddenly, her mind went to work. What bad her father been trying to tell her, In that last flicker of his consciousness? But thinking about that, she decided at last, wouldn't do any good. The fragmentary frag-mentary words worked out to two opposite op-posite meanings. He might, of conrse, have been telling tell-ing her to go to Uncle William and that she'd find his address among his papers. But he might have meant that she was to look out for Uncle William Wil-liam and not let him get possession of the papers! And since her uncle was almost as much an ogre to her as he had been four years ago, It was the latter Interpretation that she adopted. What the doctor had said was the tiling that frightened her worst. "You're only a little girl !" That, of course, was nonsense. She was sixteen and lots of people thought she was older than that. She could pass for eighteen, well enough. He'd said that only because he was sorry for her. But sixteen was still a child according to law. You weren't of age until you were eighteen or was It twenty-one? And if Uncle William knew where she was and learned of her father's death, he'd come and get her, and she wouldn't be able to get away from him. Well then, the only safe thing for her to do was to disappear dis-appear before he had time to find out what had happened. Looking back now on those days, after the passage, of two years so packed with life that they seemed longer than the four that had preceded pre-ceded them, she wondered that she, a mere child of sixteen, had been able to follow out that resolution so steadily stead-ily that no one had tried to put an obstacle in her path. Except for a telegram, purporting to come from Florabel In Denver, which she had slipped out early that morning and' dispatched to herself, she had nothing to show anyone as an Indication that she had a friend in the world and the telegram wasn't much good since if you looked at it closely you saw that it hadn't come from Denver at all. She couldn't have done it, of course, if she had not had plenty of money, and, likely enough, not then If the hotel people hadn't been accustomed to her paying the bills. She paid everybody in cash, that morning, and when this was done she had a little over three hundred dollars left, fifteen twenty-dollar bills and a few small ones. The papers her father had tried to tell her something about had always been kept In a big leather hat trunk that must have been her mother's. She opened it and looked in with the idea of seeing whether her uncle's address ad-dress was there, but as the trunk was nearly full she decided against going through it. She didn't much want "to, anyway. She took it, as it was, along with her own small trunk in a taxi to a convenient railway station. It hadn't mattered much which stalion except that It had to be one that had a train that went to Denver. The next day she look her suitcase with her to the funeral and went from the cold little chapel straight back to the station. She spent that night at the Y. W. C. A., where nothing happened hap-pened except that hy inadvertence she picked her new name. She'd hail one all chosen, but when they gave her the Ml mm l - The Four of Them Should Keep House In It. register card to sign she'd begun writing writ-ing her old one, Rhoda Whitehouse McFarland. Half-way through she'd seen what she was doing and stopped. Well, Rhoda White made a good enough name, and she was glad that she hadn't discarded Rhoda. She'd have felt lonely, deprived of that. The very next day she found a Job and met Babe Jennings. The job was at the News, where Florabel had told her they took girls without experience In the stenographic department and trained them, themselves. If you were good you had a chance to be promoted to be private stenographer or even secretary to one of the executives. The only technical untruth Rhoda told the employment manager was that her name was Rhoda White. Her acquaintance with Babe had progressed slowly at ' first, and it wasn't until she'd been working for the paper six months that the older girl approached her with a proposal that they live together. Babe was excited ex-cited about an ad she'd taken, of a studio for rent cheap ; unbelievably cheap, seventy-five dollars a month. It was really a whole apartment; two bedrooms and a kitchenette, beside the studio Itself. Her scheme was that they get two other girls and that the four of them should keep house In it, getting? that is, their own breakfasts and suppers. The other two girls were dancers, members of the corps du ballet of the opera. They taught her to dance the other girls had a phonograph and It became be-came a passion with her. She'd dance with anybody, who could dance well, in a perfect oblivion of delight. She liked her Job and wasn't long getting promoted to be special stenographer stenog-rapher to one of the younger men on the executive staff. The only imperfection imper-fection in her whole scheme of life was the little tremor of fear she felt, every now and then, that it was too good to last. There was no real threat, was there, In Martin Forbes' imaginary discoveries? discov-eries? She didn't know any one named Lewis nor anyone who could be spoken of as "C. J." The only person who could be advertising for her was her uncle. For all she knew he might have been doing it for years; off and on ever since she'd disappeared N'on of the girls knew her story, and they wouldn't give her away If they did. (The two dancers were away just now on tour with the opera, so she and Babe had the whole studio to themselves.) them-selves.) She wouldn't risk asking Babe any questions, though, about Martin. How well, she wondered, did Babe know him? The thing to do now was to go to bed, and to be sound asleep before she came home. But she was only half "undressed up in one of tiie little bedrooms that had been partitioned off the loft when she heard the click of Hebe's key in the studio door. She listened and felt her shin prlngle as she thought she recognized recog-nized the voice of the rr.n who was urging Babe to let him come In for a smoke. Babe was firm abcut it and sent him away. Rhoda put on her bathrobe and slippers and came slithering down into the studio. 'Who was that who brought you home?" she asked. . "You ought to know, dear:," Babe told her. "He's your friend, not mine. When lie found out I lived with you I couldn't push him off. He brought me home in his runabout, but it was John Alden stuff I was doing all the time, and I knew It." "Was It Max Lewis?" Rnda asked. "None other, darling," said Bab. "I had forgotten you had two of them on, tonight." There was a silence for a moment after that. When Babe spoke again It was In a different manner. "He asked me one queer thing about you, Red. He asked if your real name wasn't Rhoda McFarland." CHAPTER m Flat Burglary . Martin Forbes told himself firmly as he went to bed that night that he'd had his lesson. Rhoda had treated him not as a friend but as a reporter trying to run down a story. It must be a pretty good story if she was so afraid he'd get it All right, by golly, he'd be a reporter, and the first thing tomorrow morning he'd go after that story and nail it down. That maneuver he'd been so proud of at the time getting rid of Babe Jennings and Max Lewis by Introducing Intro-ducing them to each other appeared now as likely to have been a downright down-right idiotic blunder. Babe and Rhoda might inhabit very different spiritual worlds, but wasn't it likely that if Babe knew her well enough to call her Red and get away with It, she'd also know the crude material facts about her where she lived, where she worked, and so on which were all that Max Lewis was interested In? And wouldn't Bnbe spill anything she knew to anybody who was Interested in finding it out? Why the devil hadn't he thought of that last night? Well, it was probably too late to repair re-pair the error now. He'd got to get hold of Babe, though, at the earliest possible moment. The more he thought about the possibilities of his blunder the worse they seemed. Next morning he dressed, bolted his breakfast and was waiting at the foot of the elevated stairs a good quarter of an hour before Babe could be expected ex-pected to appear. By the time he'd finished his second cigarette he felt as if'he'd been standing stand-ing there for hours, as if everybody that came along wondered what he was doing there. And then, so surprisingly sur-prisingly that he had to blink and shake his head to make sure that his Imagination wasn't deceiving him, he saw not Babe, but Rhoda herself coming com-ing down the stairs. What would she do when she saw him? Toss her head and walk scornfully by without speaking speak-ing at all? Or pause to make some other blighting aspersion on his good faith In having tried to help her. She didn't do either of those things. Her face lighted up at the sight of him, and when she came within rcacli she held out her hand. "This is an awfully nice way for the day to begin," site said. "I'm sorry I called you a reporter last night." "I am one," he told her. "Oh, I know you are, but you weren't being one last night. I don't know why I said that. I suppose because I have red hair." "This is turning out a much bettel day than I thought it could," he ob served. "I wish I'd known last night that this was going to happen. How did It happen? Do you often corns down these stairs about this timel Have yon got a job near here?" "The door's about fifty feet away." she told him. "I've worked for the News for two years." "Look here." he demanded, when he'd digested this fact, "did you know who I was all along last night, I mean?" "I thought it mitht be yon. I wasn't sure, though, till B:,be called yon Marty." "Honest ?" "llone.-t.'' She answered him quite simply, noi seeming surprised at his pressing sc minute a point. He didn't quite know himself why It was so important, but it was. "Well," he said, "we've got a lot of lost time to make up for. If I'il agree not to talk about anything you don't want to talk about, will you have dinner din-ner with me tonight?" "Yes." she said, "but I'll tell you what Id rather do if you'd Jut as leave. I'd nitlior you crime to supper at the studio. (Jive me a pfnril and a piece of your newspaper, and I'll write down the address." He'd have asked her what sort of studio It was If she hadn't glanced up as she handed hack his paper 8nd pencil and exclaimed, "Thera c-?oief Babe I It must be getting late." (TO fcg LUNTIMSD.J |
