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Show Faith Always Faith j By GERTRUDE MAY MORRISON J (Associated Newspapers WNU Service.) with that stocking, after all the rest he'd gone through." "All the rest?" Her words were very faint. She found herself weeping weep-ing and she had promised not to cry not there in jail. Ben had raised her hands to his lips but beyond the anguished "Oh, Stell." he had not spoken. His mouth worked strangely. "If he died, Miss, before he found you, then I was to tell you." "Tell me what, Ben?" she said softly. "It is only that I was looking for you, Stell, and, as God is my Judge, I didn't take the stocking. It got hung on my coat somehow. I was peering close at every woman behind be-hind the counters, not knowing how much you might be changed. God, Stell, how I've wanted you," he burst out, between choking tears. For Stell, standing there, with his big hand helplessly clutching hers, was transformed by the age-old love for the child. "Ben," she said eagerly, "then you weren't tired of me?" "Tired? God, Stell, you know it was heaven, at home, with you tired? God!" and covering his face he sobbed. "Tell her, man," interrupted the keeper. "Visiting hours are over at seven." Then, without waiting further, he plunged on, "You never knew why Ben went to get the express man and left you there with the trunk? You never knew all these years what happened there at the dock?" "There at the dock?" The woman found herself repeating strangely. "Yes never knowin' how he was knocked down taken aboard that rotten ship " Her hands tightened on the iron bars no longer grim, but' mystic pathways to stars. Behind them, Ben and he belonged. The guard turned away. "All these years," he muttered, "trustin' him . . . and never knew what happened. Gee! Takes a woman, wom-an, don't it, to have faith." HEY arrested a man as I I came in," said Marge, ad- dressing a rather oldish-looking oldish-looking woman, who was munching on a homemade sandwich. sand-wich. Marge had just come into the employees' em-ployees' lounging room of the big department store where they both worked in lamps on the sixth floor. "Good looking guy, too. I'll say," she went on. "Ben, they called him." The older woman went suddenly white. "Ben" what memories stirred at the name. The hand holding hold-ing the sandwich trembled visibly. "What did the man look like?" she asked, trying to steady herself. "Big brown eyes and red hair, with a curl over his forehead like a little boy's." Then it was true her Ben arrested. arrest-ed. "My God, Stell, what's the matter? mat-ter? I thought you was going to pass out on me," said Marge slipping slip-ping an arm around her. "You pick good places to faint." "I'm all right," said Stell, bracing brac-ing herself. "Guess I must have been eating too fast, and then somehow some-how it upsets me to hear of men joing to jail." "That man you're spending your life grievin' over isn't in jail, is he? Gosh, you're a simp, Stell." "I don't know where he is definitely," defi-nitely," added the other. "But I know he'd play an honest game." "If that's what you call it to walk off and leave a woman," returned Marge loftily. "Better take my advice, ad-vice, forget him and step out with Big Jim. He likes you and would marry you, if you played your cards right. The boy's got a future," she added. "He'll be head of the lamp department some day." The older woman did not reply. Instead she took another bite from her sandwich before inquiring, "What was the man arrested for?" "Don't know exactly," said Marge. "Just saw him being loaded into the patrol wagon as I came in. You should have seen the dick! It's the first guy he's nabbed in I don't i ...i 1 u t;nu pink." Later that day Stell heard thexgirl in the credit cage say, "He told the cops his name was Good, and that he was looking for his wife who worked here. One of the cops laughed and said, 'Good, nothing! You're bad clean through!' The dick said he had followed him from one department to another on every floor of the store. And he was making the rounds the second time before they caught him with the goods not anything much, just one silk stocking. stock-ing. What's a guy going to do with one stocking, I ask you? Unless he's got a one-legged girl?" But Stell had heard enough. Ben had come back. Her Ben. He had been here in the store, wandering from department to department looking for her too timid to ask and then they'd picked him upj Surely, Sure-ly, there was some mistake. Whatever What-ever else Ben was, he was not a thief. But they had arrested him. Now at least she knew where he was. Four years before he had left her. Left her sitting on their packed trunk, hatted and gloved, while he went to look for a drayman. They were going to Iowa together their first trip home since their marriage twelve years before. "I'll chase down the street," he told her, "and get Connelly to come for the trunk. I'll only be gone a minute." But he had never come back. Not until the wee hours of the morning, not until she had waited, and waited, wait-ed, and waited, did she remove her hat and coat and unpack. The next day she went to work at the department store. And she had never heard of or from Ben until today. But she had kept on waiting, wait-ing, never going out anywhere, never nev-er looking at another man, just waiting wait-ing for Ben, and working, often dreaming of her happiness with Ben. And now he was back. At 6:30 she was at the police station, sta-tion, and the guard was leading her down the grim cement passageway. What if he had grown tired of her, sick of the devotion she gave him? Perhaps he had been too kind to tell he had always been afraid to hurt her. Had he taken this easy way out? It was all so unlike the youth she had married. Such a queer snarl. The guard looked at the woman with curious, friendly eyes. "So you've come just as he said you would," he commented. Then he called cheerily into the semi-darkness. "She's here just like you said." And she was conscious con-scious of standing before an old young man in a coarse prison jacket, jack-et, ill-looking, with great suffering in his hungry eyes. "Ben, oh, Ben!" she cried as she thrust both hands through the bars at once. All her love for him coursed through her and with it a mystic sense of happiness, an exalted, perfect per-fect moment such as she had not known in four bitter years. Nothing mattered except getting him back, holding him close, feeding feed-ing him, bringing him to life again "He's had a rotten break," the keeper was saying, "getting caug:it |