Mrs. Chadwick gazed bewilderingly at the flaming headline and at the pen and ink sketches illustrating the story which followed—sketches picturing with comic effect little scenes like that which transpired at her own breakfast table the morning before.
“I don’t understand,” she said weakly.
“Read the first few paragraphs and you will,” chuckled her husband.
His wife obediently read the introduction to the long story which Crandall had written.
On a certain Spring night a score of years ago a certain Baltimorean gazed up at the star spangled heavens on the desolate shores of a little inlet of Chesapeake Bay twenty long miles from a railroad and fifteen from any human habitation and swore by all the nine gods that sometime, somehow, some place he would get even collectively and appropriately with two dozen of his fellow club members who had just played him what he considered the scurviest trick known to mortal man. He had been kidnapped on his wedding night and dumped without ceremony on the loneliest spot in this corner of the world—all by way of a joke.
This same man sat yesterday in the living room of his country home with a perpetual grin on his face and a heartful of joy. He knew that every living man of that party of jokesters was suffering something approximating the torments he suffered on that night of nights and that he had stirred up more trouble in a score of households than a half a hundred genuine vampires might have succeeded in doing.
Opportunity chose the disguise of a theatrical press agent when she finally knocked after all these years—which statement leads naturally to an account of the real inside of the story of the projected millionaires’ chorus girl joy ride party which amused and startled this city yesterday.
Chapter Seventeen
The advance sale of seats for the engagement of the Frolics opened that morning. Jimmy Martin stood chatting with Manager George Seymour in the lobby of the Lyric Theatre and watching the long queue of prospective ticket purchasers which stretched out to the sidewalk and curved up the street for nearly half a block. Jimmy couldn’t resist gloating just a little bit. He had adopted a more or less casual, “I told you so” attitude the day before when the first story appeared, but this morning he just naturally expanded.