“But why, why, Father?”
“I guess he thought we were bootleggers, because Wally, for a joke, kind of helped it along, and——”
“But what was in the package, father?”
“Well, that was a joke on us,” said George Todd, and she could hear his appreciative chuckle over the wire. “You see, there was two dozen bottles of hair tonic in that darned package.”
Alyse hung up the telephone with a disapproving face.
“You might know that if anything happened to Father it would be something ridiculous,” she sighed.
DERRICK’S RETURN
By GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
From Cosmopolitan
DERRICK dreamed that Indians had captured him and had laid him face down in their camp fire and were slowly burning his head off. As a matter of fact a surgeon was working out a difficult problem in the back of Derrick’s throat, and for a little while, toward the end of the operation, anesthesia had not been complete.
The operation was a success. Something that ought not to have been in Derrick’s throat was now out of it, and an incorrect arrangement of this and that had been corrected. The only trouble was a slight, ever so slight bleeding which could not be stopped. The measures taken to stop it were worse than the dream about the Indians, and, still worse, they didn’t stop it. The thin trickle of blood kept on trickling until the reservoirs from which it came were empty, and then the doctors—there were a good many of them now—told the woman who sobbed and carried on that her husband’s sufferings were all over. They told her that Derrick was dead.
But Derrick wouldn’t have admitted that. Even the bleeding and the pain of which he seemed to have died were now but vague and negligible memories. The great thing was to get out of that body which had already begun to decay, and making use of a new and perfectly delightful power of locomotion, to get as far away from it as possible. He caught up with sounds and passed them. And he discovered presently that he could move a little more quickly than light. In a crumb of time some unerring intuition told him that he had come to the Place to which some other unerring intuition had directed him.