It Referred to Nothing Calculated to Disturb Domesticity, but It Came Near Wrecking a Happy Home.
When the senior partner of a young two-handed firm of patent attorneys reached the firm's office in West Broadway on Monday morning last his eye caught sight of a telegram addressed to his junior partner on the latter's desk. As the junior partner was in Washington and wasn't due back in New York until 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, the senior partner opened the telegram. It was a night message from St. Louis, and it read as follows:
"Hammer Jim Conway. Punch him your limit. Don't let anything scare you out. He's easy. Bub."
The senior partner scratched his head over this.
"Conway—Jim Conway," he muttered to himself. "Now, who the dickens can Jim Conway be, I'd like to know? We've got no client named Jim Conway, and we're not fighting any infringement case in which a Mr. Conway is the defendant. Darned funny telegram, this is."
The senior partner turned the message upside down and every which way, but the longer he looked at it from various points of view the more puzzled he became.
"Mighty belligerent sort of an affair, too," he mused. "Now, what has this Jim Conway done to my partner that he needs to be punched for it? And who's this Bub? Bub! That's a deuce of an undignified name for a man to put on paper. Great Scott! I wonder if my junior partner has gone in for prize fighting at that Jersey athletic club he belongs to? Perhaps he's been matched to box some fellow member named Jim Conway, and this Bub chap down at St. Louis is wiring him encouragement. Nope, that can't be right, either. My junior partner has been taking on fat at an alarming rate lately, so that he can't be training for a boxing contest."
He took a few turns up and down the office, holding the telegram out at arm's length.
"I hope the boy don't get into a serious mix-up with this Jim Conway fellow, whoever he is," he muttered nervously. "I don't believe the lad has done anything that he'd be ashamed to have me know about, and yet it's blamed queer that he should be getting telegraphic despatches from people by the name of Bub, urging him to employ physical force for the subjugation of a chap with such a Boweryesque sort of name as Jim Conway. The question is, what's the boy done to Conway, or Conway to him, that it should be necessary for one or both of them to resort to fisticuffs? Now, if the boy were to get mixed up in a brawl with this Conway there'd be the deuce to pay. It 'ud get into the papers, and it might have a serious effect upon our tidy and growing practice. I wish that junior partner of mine were a bit more level-headed. He's too clever and industrious and promising to have anything whatsoever to do with folks who travel under such names as Conway and Bub, and I'm going to give him a mild little personally conducted talking to when he gets back from Washington this afternoon. Why, I wouldn't have him get into a street fight, or a fight anywhere else for that matter, for big money—not only for the sake of the firm, but for his own sake. He's pretty handy with his maulies, and all that, but this fighting business is not the thing for gentlemen, not by a long shot. I just wish I could find out who this Conway duffer is, anyhow."
The young woman who manipulates the typewriter for the firm came in just then.