“
Busy, Mr. Carshaw?” inquired some one when an impatient young man got in touch with Mulberry Street after an exasperating delay.
“Not too busy to try and defeat the scoundrels who are plotting against a defenseless girl,” he cried.
“Well, come down-town. We’ll expect you in half an hour.”
“But, Mr. Clancy asked me—”
“Better come,” said the voice, and Carshaw, though fuming, bowed to authority.
It is good for the idle rich that they should be brought occasionally into sharp contact with life’s realities. During his twenty-seven years Rex Carshaw had hardly ever known what it meant to have a purpose balked. Luckily for him, he was of good stock and had been well reared.
The instinct of sport, fostered by triumphs at Harvard, had developed an innate quality of self-reliance and given him a physical hardihood which revelled in conquest over difficulties. Each winter, instead of lounging in flannels at the Poinciana, he was out with guides and dogs in the Northwest after moose and caribou.
He preferred polo to tennis. He would rather pass a fortnight in oilskins with the rough and ready fisher-folk of the Maine coast than don the white ducks and smart caps of his wealthy yachting friends. In a word, society and riches had not spoiled him. But he did like to have his own way, and the suspicion that he might be thwarted in his desire to help Winifred Bartlett cut him now like a sword. So he chafed against the seeming slowness of the Subway, and fuel was added to the fire when he was kept waiting five minutes on arriving at police headquarters.
He found Clancy closeted with a big man who had just lighted a fat cigar, and this fact in itself betokened official callousness as to Winifred’s fate. Hot words leaped from his lips.