She laughed and called herself a silly fool. She ripped off the backboard of the copper frame and extracted the poem. She found a photograph of her mother and cut it to fit. The frame restored, she picked up the mapping with the slip of news-print pasted thereon. She started to tear it. She did tear it once across. She had started another tear when she stopped. She smoothed the torn pieces out. She found an envelope that would hold them and tucked it away in a bottom drawer.
“Oh, why did I go?” she cried, as she turned once again to her work. “I shot my Bird of Paradise!”
She fell to thinking,—dry-throated, hard-eyed. So Gordon Ruggles wanted to marry her, did he? The rotter!
Romance! What was Romance?
CHAPTER II
GROPING TERRIBLY
I
Into the town lock-up came Caleb Gridley. And Caleb Gridley was one mad man.
It was four-thirty of a gray afternoon in March. The local police force tilted back in its chair with its feet on its desk and perused the day’s issue of the Telegraph with the official corncob of the department exquisitely odoriferous and the atmosphere of headquarters suggesting gas masks, cheese knives and quickly lowered windows.
“So this is how you earn taxpayers’ money!” snarled the tanner. “Where’s young Forge?”