Miss Dividends: A Novel

by Archibald Clavering Gunter

Turning his back to the incline, in order to get a better light upon his novel, Ralph sits chuckling over the queer conceits of the gifted Frenchman—the red eyes all the while coming nearer to him.

As Travenion laughs again, a heavy step sounds behind him, and the great red eyes are at his shoulder, looking over the volume with him, and he springs up with a shriek, for Kruger's voice is in his ears crying, "Doomed by the Church!"

Then this Mormon fanatic is upon him, seizing his arms, and bruising his more tender flesh, chuckling: "What's champagne muscle to grass-fed muscle, you dainty cur of New York!"

And though Travenion fights as men only fight who are fighting for their lives, he pinions him and makes him helpless, and dashes him brutally down.

Looking at him, the old club man, who was once a Mormon bishop, tries his last diplomacy. He gasps between white lips and chattering teeth: "This—to a man who has been your chum—your companion—who is your brother in the Church."

"Who was my brother in the Church!" cries Lot. "But we'll discuss the affair a leetle. With ye're permission, I'll liquor."

Knocking the head off a bottle of Clicquot, he quaffs it greedily; the one Ralph was drinking from having been thrown down in the struggle.

Throwing the bottle away; as it crashes to the other end of the level, he remarks with a hideous leer: "Now we'll come to biz once more!"

But Ralph answers him nothing.

Then Lot laughs: "You walked into yer own trap. You thought I'd gone to Salt Lake, but I reckoned from yer break-out of last night that yer Utah Central stock, which the Mormon Church needs and will have, was here in yer possession, an' made up my mind to locate it. I knew it wa'n't in yer safe, 'cause I'd seen that open too often lately. I reckoned it was right in this mine, and I'd been hunting over this place all night without success. But in the mornin' I heard a noise on the trail, and I seed ye and yer darter comin' up, an' I knowed what yer'd come for! An' when yer come down in the mine, I come down a leetle ahead of yer, and spied on yer from that drift, an' seed yer give that stock to Ermie to take away. But I'll 'tend to her afterwards."