“Esmeralda! My darling! I am here!”
With the stately grace of a real “blue-blooded” aristocrat, the royal maiden turned majestically, and froze the heart within him with a frigid glare—such as only those with four centuries of unmixed “Mayflower” blood in their veins, can hope to aspire to.
“Your presence is sufficiently perceptible,” she said in measured tones, “to preclude any necessity for such boisterous conduct. In the future, when we are abroad together, it will please me greatly if you bring your manners along with you, instead of leaving them at home. Also, I would remind you that you have been fifteen whole minutes in answering my ‘call’.”
And then Nature claimed its own, and, womanlike, Esmeralda fell fainting into her lover’s arms, murmuring as she lost consciousness: “Algy! My darling! My savior!”
For a brief moment Algernon pressed the inanimate form of his sweetheart to his manly breast, and showered a storm of passionate kisses upon a wisp of her hair as it floated in the breeze against his nose—and then he bethought him of that poised tiger on the ledge above!
Quickly he pulled his “Electric Automatic,” aimed carefully at the beast’s heart, and pressed the button. A black spot showed on the spot he had aimed at, and the air became filled with the pungent odor of burned hair—but the brute above remained in an apparently statuesque unconsciousness of the assault!
Nonplussed and dumfounded, Algernon pulled out his collapsible opera glasses, adjusted them, and studied the perplexing phenomenon closely. Then at last a ray of light penetrated his brain as the memory of a forgotten incident recurred to him, and he mentally connected this incident with the enigma above. Realizing the simple truth at last, he burst into uproarious laughter and yelled at the top of his voice in unrestrained glee—until the dormant echoes of the “Great Silent North” awakened from their age-old slumbers, and an avalanche of snow was loosened from its mooring on the opposite mountain-side.
Algernon had remembered that, some six months before, a Royal Bengal tiger had escaped from “Barnum and Bailey’s” circus, while it was showing at Des Moines, Iowa; and that the efforts to recapture it, had only resulted in driving it into the northern wilderness. This, then, was that tiger! Happening in the neighborhood and naturally in a famished condition, a scent of Esmeralda had reached it and had aroused its savage instincts. But, as it stole out onto the ledge for the final, fatal spring, being unused to northern temperatures, the 60° below zero gale had frozen it dead in its tracks!
And then, just as all his troubles and worries seemed to have vanished, the “whir” of an airplane engine turned his eyes upwards; and, directly overhead, he saw a “Purity League” biplane circling for a landing.
With frantic energy he shook the unconscious form that reposed in his arms, and shouted into her ear at the top of his voice: