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Show ill HALLE ERMINE DIVES f fffll ILLUSTRATIONS 6 LAUREN STOUT J Jg FCT1 r 1 ijlr , CHAPTER I. The Crash. "Failed!" ejaculated John Valiant blankly, and the hat he held dropped to the claret-colored rug like a huge white splotch of sudden fright. "The Corporation failed ! " The young man was the glass of fashion, from the silken ribbon on the spotless Panama to his pearl-gray gaiters, gait-ers, and well favored a lithe stalwart figure, with wide-set hazel eyes and strong brown hair waving back from a candid forehead. Never had his innocuous and butter-fly existence known a surprise more startling. He had swung into the room with all the nonchalant habits, hab-its, the ingrained certitude of the man born with achievement ready-made in his hands. And a single curt statement state-ment like the ruthless blades of a pair of shears had snipped across the one splendid scarlet thread in the woof that constituted life as he knew it. He had knotted his lavender scarf that morning a vice-president of the Valiant Corporation one of the greatest great-est and most successful of modern-day modern-day organizations; he sat now in the fading afternoon trying to realize that the huge fabric, without warning, had toppled to its fall. How solid and changeless it had always seemed that great business fabric woven by the father he could so dimly remember! His own invested fortune had been derived from the great corporation the elder Valiant had founded and controlled until his death. With almost unprecedented earnings, it had stood as a very Gibraltar Gib-raltar of finance, a type and sign of brilliant organization. Now, on the heels of ,a trust's dissolution which would be a nine-days' wonder, the vast structure had crumbled up like a cardboard card-board The rains had descended and the floods had come, and it had fallen! The man at the desk had wheeled In his revolving chair and was looking at the trim athletic back blotting the daylight, with a smile that was little short of a covert sneer. He was one of the local managers of the corporation corpora-tion whose ruin was to be that day's sensation, a colorless man who had acquired ac-quired middle age with his first long trousers and had been dedicated to the commercial treadmill before he had bought a safety-razor. He despised all loiterers along the primroBe paths, and John Valiant was but a decorative figurehead. fig-urehead. Valiant started as the other spoke at his elbow. He had come to the window win-dow and was looking down at the pavement. "How quickly some news Bpreads!" For the first time the young man noted that the street below was filling with a desultory crowd. He distin- guished a knot of Italian laborers talking talk-ing with excited gesticulations a. ' V "It's Very Good Living Abroad. There's a Boat Leaving Tomorrow." smudged plasterer, tools In hand, clerks, some hatless and with thin alpaca coats all peering at the voiceless voice-less front of the great building, and all, be imagined, with a thriving fear in their faces. As he watched, a woman, wom-an, coarsely dressed, ran across the street, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes. "The notice has gone up on the door," said tile manager. "I sent word to the police. Crowds are ugly sometimes." some-times." Valiant drew a sudden sharp breath. The corporation down in the mire, with crowds at its doors ready to clamor for money entrusted to it, the aggregate savings of widow and or-phai or-phai . the piteous hoarded sums earned by labor over which pinched sickly faces had burned the midnight oil! The older man had turned back to the desk to draw a narrow typewritten typewrit-ten slip, of paper from a pigeonhole. "Here," he said, "is a list of the bonds of the subsidiary companies recorded in your name. These are all, of course, engulfed in the larger failure. I You have, however, your private fortune. for-tune. If you take my advice, by the way," he added significantly, "you'll make sure of keeping that." "What do you mean?" John Valiant Va-liant faced him quickly. The other laughed shortly. " 'A word to the wise. " he quoted. "It's- very good living abroad. There's a boat leaving tomorrow." A dull red sprang into the younger face. "You mean " "Look at that crowd down there you can hear them now. There'll be a legislative' investigation, of course. And the devil'll get the hindmost." He struck the desk-top with his hand. "Have you ever seen the bills for this furniture? Do you know what that rug under your feet cost? Twelve thousand it's an old Persian. What do you suppose the papers will do to I that? Do you think such things will seem amusing to that rabble down there?" His hand swept toward the window. "It's been going on for too many years, I tell you! And now some one'll pay the piper. The lightning light-ning won't strike me I'm not tall enough. You're a vice-president." "Do you imagine that I knew these things that I have been a. party to what you seem to believe has been a deliberate wrecking?" Valiant towered tow-ered over him, his breath coming fast, his hands clenched hard. "You?" The manager laughed again an unpleasant laugh that scraped the other's quivering nerves like hot sandpaper. "Oh, lord no! How should you? You've been too busy playing polo and winning bridge prizes. How many board meetings have you attended at-tended this year? Your vote Is prox-ied prox-ied as regular as clockwork. But you're supposed to know. The people down there in the street won't ask questions about patent-leather pumps and ponies; they'll want to hear about such things as rotten irrigation loans in the Stony-River Valley to market an alkali desert that is the personal property of the president of this corporation." cor-poration." Valiant turned a blank white fape. "Sedgwick?" "Yes. You know his principle: 'It's all right to be honest, if you're not too damn henest.' He owns the Stony-River Stony-River Valley bag and baggage. It was a big gamble and he lost." Valiant was staring at the 'Other with a strange look. Emotions to which in all his self-indulgent life he had been a stranger were running through his mind, and outre passions had him by the throat. Fool and doubly blind! A poor pawn, a catspaw raking the chestnuts for unscrupulous men whose ignominy he was now called on, perforce, per-force, to share! In his pitiful egotism he had consented to be a figurehead, and he had been made a tool. A red rage surged over him. No one had ever seen on John Valiant's face Buch a look as grew on it now. He turned and without a word opened the door. The older man took a step toward him he had a sense of dangerous electric forces in the air but the door closed sharply in his face. He smiled grimly. "Not crooked," he Said to himself ; ''merely callow. A well-meaning, manicured young fop wholly surrounded by men who knew what they wanted!" He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his chair. Valiant plunged down in the elevator eleva-tor to the street. He pushed past the guarded door, and threading the crowd, made toward the curb, where his bulldog, with a bark of delight, leaped upon the seat of a burnished car, rumbling and vibrating with pent-up pent-up power. There were those in the sullen anxious crowd who knew whose was that throbbing metal miracle, the chauffeur spick and span from shining cap-visor to polished brown puttees, and recognized the white face that went past, pelted it with muttered sneers. But he scarcely saw or heard them, as be stepped into the seat, took the wheel from the chauffeur's hand and threw on the gear. He drove mechanically past a hundred hun-dred familiar things and places, but he saw nothing, till the massive marble fronts of the upper park side ceased their mad dance as the car halted before be-fore a tall iron-grilled doorway with wide glistening steps, between windows win-dows strangely shuttered and dark. He sprang out and touched the bell. The heavy oak parted slowly; the confidential con-fidential secretary of the man he had come to face stood in the gloomly doorway. "1 want to see Mr. Sedgwick." "You can't Bee him, Mr. Valiant" "But I will!" Sharp passion leaped Into the young voice. "He must speak to me." The man in the doorway shook his head. "He won't speak to anybody any more," he said. "Mr. Sedgwick shot himself two hours ago." CHAPTER II. . Vanity Valiant. "The witness is excused." In the ripple that stirred across the court room at the examiner's abrupt conclusion, John Valiant, who had withstood that pitiless hail of questions, ques-tions, rose, bowed to hJm and slowly crossed the cleared space to his counsel. coun-sel. The chairman lookod severely-over severely-over his eye-glasses, with his gavel lifted, and a statuesque girl, in the rear of the room, laid her delicately gloved hand on a companion's and smiled slowly without withdrawing her gaze, and with the faintest tint of color col-or in her face. Katharine Fargo neither smiled nor flushed readily. Her smile was an Index In-dex of her whole personality, languid, symmetrical, exquisitely perfect. The little group with whom she sat looked somewhat out of place in that mixed assemblage. Smartly groomed and palpably members of a set to whom John Valiant was a familiar, they had had only friendly nods and smiles for the young man at whom so many there had gazed with jaundiced eyes. To the general public which read its daily newspaper perhaps none of the gilded set was better known than "Vanity Valiant" The new Panhard he drove was the smartest car on the avenue, and the collar on the white bulldog that pranced or dozed on its leather seat Bported a diamond buckle. To the spacewriters of the social columns, col-umns, he had been a perennial inspiration. inspira-tion. - The patterns of his waistcoats, and the splendors of his latest bachelors' bache-lors' dinner at Sherry's with such He Had Suddenly Remembered That It Was His Twenty-fifth Birthday. items the public had been kept sufficiently suffi-ciently familiar. To it, he stood a perfect per-fect symbol of the eider ease and insolent in-solent display of inherited wealth. And the great majority of those who had found place in that roomy chamber cham-ber to listen to the ugly tale of squandered squan-dered millions, looked to him with a resentment that was sharpened by his apparent nonchalance. Long before the closing session it had been clear that, as far as indictments indict-ments were concerned, the investigation investiga-tion would be barren of result. Of individual criminality, flight and suicide sui-cide had been confession, but more sweeping charges could not be brought home. The gilded fool had not brought himself into the embarrassing purview of the law. The jostling crowd flocked out into the square, among them a fresh-faced girl on the arm of a graybearded man in black frock coat" and picturesque broad-brimmed felt hat. She turned her eyes to his. "Sp that," she said, "is John Valiant! I'd almost rather have missed Niagara Falls. I must write Shirley Dandridge about it. I'm so sorry I lost that picture of him that I cut out of the paper." "1 reckon he's not such a bad lot," said her uncle. He hailed a cab. "Grand Central Station," he directed, with a glance at his watch, "and be quick about it. We've just time to make our train." Some hours later, In an inner office of a downtown sky-scraper, the newly-appointed newly-appointed receiver of the Valiant Corporation, Cor-poration, a heavy, thick-set man with narrow eyes, sat beside a table on which lay a Bmall black satchel with a padlock on its handle, whose contents con-tents several bundles of crisp papers he had been turning over in his heavy hands with a look of incredulous incredu-lous amazement. A eheet containing a mass of figures and memoranda lay among them. The shock was still on his face when a knock came at the door, and a man entered. The newcomer was gray-haired, gray-haired, slightly stooped and lean-jowled, lean-jowled, with a humorous expression on his lips. He glanced in surprise at the littered table. "Fargo," said the man at the desk, "do you notice anything queer about me?" His friend grinned. "No, Buck," he said Judicially, "unless it's that necktie. neck-tie. It would stop a Dutch clock." "H ang the haberdashery! Read this from young Valiant." He passed over a letter. Fargo read. He looked up. "Securities "Securi-ties aggregating three millions!" he said in a hushed voice. "Why, unless I've been misinformed, that represents practically all his private fortune." The other nodded. "Turned over to the corporation with his resignation as a vice-president, and without a blessed string tied to 'em! What do vou think of that?" "Think! It's the most absurdly idiotic thing I ever met. Two weeks ago, before the investigation but now, when it's perfectly certain' they can bring nothing home to him " He paused. "Of course I suppose It'll save the corporation, eh? But it may be ten years before its securities pay dividends. And this is real money. Where the devil does he come in meanwhile?" The receiver pursed his lips. "I knew his father," he said. "He had the same crazy quixotic streak." He gathered the scattered docu-1 docu-1 ments and locked them carefully with the satchel in a safe. "Spectacular young ass!" he said explosively. "I should say so!" agreed Fargo. "Do 3rou know I used to be afraid my Katharine had a leaning toward him. But thank God, she's a sensible girl!" Dusk had fallen that evening when John Valiant's Panhard turned into a cross-street and circled into the yawning yawn-ing mouth of his garage. A little later, the bulldog at his heels, he ascended the steps of his club, where he lodged he had disposed dis-posed of his bachelor apartments a fortnight ago. The cavernous seats of the lounge were all occupied, but he did not pause as he strode through the hall. He took the little pile of letters the boy handed him at the desk and went slowly up the stairway. He wandered into the deserted library libra-ry and sat down, tossing the letters on the magazine-littered table. He had suddenly remembered that it was his twenty-fifth birthday. In the reaction from the long strain he felt physically spent. He thought of what he had done that afternoon with a sense of satisfaction. A reversal re-versal of public judgment, in his own case, had not entered his head. He knew his world its comfortable faculty facul-ty of forgetting, and the multitude of sins that wealth may cover. To preserve pre-serve at whatever personal cost the one ' noble monument his father's genius had reared, and to right the wrong that would cast its gloomy shadow on his name that had been his only thought. What he had done would have been done no matter what the outcome of the investigation. But now, he told himself, no one could say the act had been wrung from him. That, he fancied, would have been his father's way. He smiled a slow smile of reminiscence reminis-cence for there had come to him at that moment the dearest of all those memories a play of his childhood. He saw himself seated on a low stool, watching a funny old clock with a moon-face, whose smiling lips curved up like military mustachios, and wishing wish-ing the lazy long hands would hurry. He saw himself stealing down a long corridor to the door of a big room strewn with books and papers, that through some baleful and mysterious spell could not be made to open at all hours. When the hands pointed right, however, there was the "Open Sesame" his own Becret knock, two fierce twin raps, witlTone little lonesome lone-some one afterward and this was unfailing. un-failing. Safe inside, he saw himself standing og a big, polar-bQar-skin, the dooj 'tight-locked ffgalnst all cprvers, an expectant baby figure with hlj little lit-tle hand clasped in his father's.' The white rug was the magic entranee to the Never-Never Country, known only to those two. He could hear his own shrill treble: "Wishing-House, Wlshing-House, where are you?" Then the deeper voice (quite unrecognizable unrec-ognizable as his father's) answering: "Here I am, SasteT; here I am!" An3 Instantly the roojn vanished" and they were In the JTever-Wever Land, and before them reared the biggest big-gest house in the world, with a row of white pillars across its front a mile high. John Valiant felt an odd beating of the heart and a tightening of the throat, for he saw a scene that never faded from his memory. It was the one hushed and horrible night, when dread things had been happening that he could not understand, when a bie man with gold eye-glasses, who smelled of some curious sickish-sweet perfume, came and took him by the hand and led him into a room where his father lay in bed, very gray and quiet. The white hand on the coverlet had beckoned to him and he had gone close up to the bed, standing very straight, his heart beating fast and hard. "John!" the word had been almost a whisper, very tense and anxious, very distinct. "John, you're a little boy, and father is going away." "To to Wishing-House?" The gray lips had smiled then, ever so little, and sadly. "No, John." , "Take me with you. father! Take me with you!" His voice had trembled then, and he had had to gulp hard. "Listen, John, for what I am saying say-ing is very important. You don't know what I mean now, but sometime some-time you will." The whisper had grown strained and frayed, but it was still distinct. "I can't go to the Never-Never Never-Never Land. But you may sometime. If you if you do, and if you find Wishing-House, remember that the men who lived in it before be-fore you and me were gentlemen. gen-tlemen. Whatever else they were, they were always that. Be like them, John. will you?" "Yes, father." The old gentleman with the eyeglasses eye-glasses had come forward then, hastily. hasti-ly. "Good-night, father " He had wanted to kiss him, but a strange cool hush had settled on the room and his father seemed all at once to have fallen asleep. And he had gone out, so carefully, on tiptoe, wondering, and suddenly afraid. CHAPTER 111. ' The Turn of the Page. a John Valiant stirred and laughed, a little self-consciously, for there had been drops on his face. Presently he took a check-book from his pocket and began to figure on the stub, looking up with a wry smile. "To come down to brass tacks," he muttered, mut-tered, "when I've settled everything (thank heaven, I don't owe my tailor!) there will be a little matter of twenty-eight twenty-eight hundred odd dollars, a passe motor mo-tor and my clothes between , me and the bread-line!" Everything else he had disposed ol everything but the four-footed comrade com-rade there at his feet. "But I'd not sell you, old chap," he said, softly; "not a single lick of your friendly pink tongue; not for a beastly hundred hun-dred thousand!" He withdrew his caressing hand and looked again at the check-stub. Twenty-eight hundred! He laughed bleakly. Whyt he had spent more than that a month ago on a ball at Sherry's! This morning he had been rich; tonight be was poor! j What could he do? He could not remember a time when he had not had 1 8,11 that he wanted. He had never borrowed bor-rowed from a friend or been dunned by an importunate tradesman. And ne had never tried to earn a dollar Tn his life as to current methods oj making mak-ing a living, Vie was as Ignorant as X ' -.Plteblo Indian. f He Itose grimly and dragged his chair facing the window. The night was balmy and he looked down across the darker Bea of reefs, barred like a gigantic checker-board by the shining lines of streets, to where the flashing electric Blgns of the theater district laid their wide swath of colored radiance. ra-diance. The manifold calls of the street and the buzz of trolleys made a dull tonal background, subdued and far away. ,TO BE CONTlNDKll) |