Wild Wings: A Romance of Youth

by Margaret Piper Chalmers

"As a personal friend and not as the president of the college I am sending on the enclosed which may or may not be of importance. A young girl, Madeline Taylor by name, of Florence, Massachusetts, who has until recently been employed in Berry's flower shop, was found dead this morning with the gas jet fully turned on, the inference being clearly suicide. A short time ago a servant from the lodging house where the dead girl resided came to me with a letter addressed to your nephew. It seems Miss Taylor had given the girl the letter to mail the previous evening and had indeed made a considerable point of its being mailed. Nevertheless the girl had forgotten to do so and the next day was too frightened to do it fearing the thing might have some connection with the suicide. She meant to give it to Ted in person but finding him out decided at the last moment to deliver it to me instead. I am sending the letter to you, as I received it, unopened, and have not and shall not mention the incident to any one else. I should prefer and am sure that you will also wish that your nephew's name shall not be associated in any way with the dead girl's. Frankly I don't believe the thing contains any dynamite whatever but I would rather you handled the thing instead of myself.

"Believe me, my dear Holiday, I am heartily sick, and sorry over the whole matter of Ted's expulsion. If we had not had his own word for it I should not have believed him guilty. Even now I have a feeling that there was more behind the thing than we got, something perhaps more to his credit than he was willing to tell."

Philip Holiday picked up the enclosed letter addressed to Ted and looked at it as dubiously as if indeed it might have contained dynamite. The scrawling handwriting was painfully familiar. And the mention of Florence as the dead girl's home was disagreeably corroborating evidence. What indeed was behind it all?

Steeling his will he tore open the sealed envelope. Save for a folded slip of paper it was quite empty. The folded slip was a check for three hundred dollars made payable to Madeline Taylor and signed with Ted Holiday's name.

Here was dynamite and to spare for Doctor Holiday. Beside the uneasy questions this development conjured the catastrophe of the boy's expulsion took second place. And yet he forced himself not to judge until he had heard Ted's own story. What was love for if it could not find faith in time of need?

He said nothing to any one, even his wife, of the president's letter and that disconcerting check which evidently represented the results of the boy's law breaking. All day he looked for a letter from Ted himself and hoped against hope that he would appear in person. His anxiety grew as he heard nothing. What had become of the boy? Where had he betaken himself with his shame and trouble? How grave was his trouble? It was a bad day for Philip Holiday and a worse night.

But the morning brought a letter from his nephew, mailed ominously enough from a railway post office in northern Vermont. The doctor tore it open with hands that trembled a little. One thing at least he was certain of. However bad the story the lad had to tell it would be the truth. He could count on that.

"Dear Uncle Phil—" it ran. "By the time you get this I shall be over the border and enlisted, I hope, with the Canadians. I am horribly sorry to knife you like this and go off without saying good-by and leaving such a mess behind but truly it is the best thing I could do for the rest of you as well as myself.

"They will write you from college and tell you I am fired—for gambling. But they won't tell you the whole story because they don't know it. I couldn't tell them. It concerned somebody else besides myself. But you have a right to know everything and I am going to tell it to you and there won't be anything shaved off or tacked on to save my face either. It will be straight stuff on my honor as a Holiday which means as much to me as it does to you and Larry whether you believe it or not."

Then followed a straightforward account of events from the first ill-judged pick-up on the train and the all but fatal joy ride to the equally ill-judged kisses in Cousin Emma's garden.