Only at the threat of her raised crop did he drop the grasped bridle rein.

LONESOME TOWN

BY

ETHEL and JAMES DORRANCE

AUTHORS OF

“Glory Rides the Range,” “Get Your Man,” etc.

FRONTISPIECE BY

G. W. GAGE

NEW YORK

THE MACAULAY COMPANY

Copyright, 1922, by

THE MACAULAY COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

To

FATHER KNICKERBOCKER

WHO HAS WILLED TO HIS HEIRS FOREVER

THE GREAT HERITAGE OF CENTRAL PARK

CONTENTS

LONESOME TOWN

CHAPTER I—SOME PLACE LIKE HOME

The trail spilled into a pool of shadows at the bottom of the gorge. As if doubtful of following it, the lone rider in chaps and a flannel shirt drew up for a “breathing.” This was gratefully advantaged by his mount. Evidently they had come at speed, whatever the distance, for the reins were lathered and foam flecked the bit corners.

The man removed his white sombrero and mopped his brow with a purple bandanna. The fingers with which he combed back his moist thatch nicely matched the hair in color—sunburn brown. His head bulged slightly at the back, but was balanced on a neck and shoulders splendidly proportioned. His rather plain face was not covered with stubble or mustache—cheek bones high, jaw sloping in at an angle, nose straight, lips thin by contrast with their width.

While he rests in his saddle, every pore of him exuding healthfully to the midsummer heat of an unusual spring, meet “Why-Not” Pape, of Hellroaring Valley, Montana. But don’t expect to understand—not at first hand grasp—how one christened Peter Stansbury Pape some thirty-odd years before, had come by his interrogatory sobriquet. No more could you have seen in his expression excuse for the pace to which he had put his horse. His eyes—the best of his features—looked pleased and told of peace with the world; gray, with dark lashes and irises, they scanned the granite wall rising sheer from the trail-side. Sighting a bull snake that peered down at him from its crevasse, both of them smiled and one amiably winked.

You must have been something of a psychoanalyst—able to go below the surface of day-time and sleep-time dreams—to have realized the unreliability in this case of surface indications. Only by such super-sight could you have seen that Why-Not Pape merely appeared to be peaceful and pleased. As a matter of fact, his head and his heart were heavy with disappointment. But then, a subject so deep and personal shouldn’t be broached at this first formal introduction.

Meet also, if you please, Polkadot Pape, a cross-bred cow-pony who soon could quip the interest of any horse-worthy he-man and who, by virtue of his weird and wicked style of beauty, could command the admiration of the fair. Had you stood on the trail before him and made the slightest friendly overture, he would have bent a foreleg—the right one—and offered you a hoof-shake without so much as a nudge from the rider who most times was his master-mind. Contrary to the suggestion of his given name, his coat was not dotted; rather, was splotched with three colors—sorrel and black on a background of white. The extra splotch took him out of the pinto class and made him a horse apart. And always he gaited himself with the distinctive style of the bold, black spot beneath his left eye. This late afternoon, however, despite the toss of his head and swish of his long white tail, his manner, like his man’s, was superficial—the mere reflex from a habit of keeping up appearances. Circumstances over which he had no control darkened around him like a swarm of horse-flies.

Below a shadow pool lured. Beyond, the thin trail beckoned. Pape glanced upward. A white circle upon a dying elm—one of a group that struggled for their lives up over the rocks forming the east side of the gorge—caught his eye. Above he saw a second white circle upon a half-withered red birch; still higher, a third upon a bald cypress. Aware that no elm, birch, or cypress, alive or half alive or dead, reproduced perfect white circles on its trunk, he decided that these had been painted there with a purpose by the hand of man.

His desire to follow a trail so oddly blazed was indulged as quickly as born. The caress of one knee against saddle leather and the lightest lift of rein notified his tricolored steed. Polkadot sprang from the beaten path into an upward scramble over the rocks. The going would have advised the least astute of mountain goats to watch its step. But Dot was sure-footed from long practice over the boundary barriers of Hellroaring Valley.

When the white blaze faded out—when the trees ceased to be circle-marked—neither man nor mount would have considered a stop. From appearances, no one ahorse had left that gorge before by that route; probably no one would again. On and up they moved, enticed by the mystery of what might or might not be lurking at the top.

Across a flat bristling with rhododendrons and so small as to be accounted scarce more than a ledge, trotted the cow-pony; insinuated his way through a fringe of Forsythia brush just beginning to yellow; dug his shoe-prongs into the earth of a steep, but easier slope. Pape, looking back, could see through the tree tips a mountainous range of turreted peaks and flat-topped buttes, terminating on the north in a massive green copper dome. The height gained, he was interested by the discovery of an unroofed blockhouse of rough stone that literally perched upon a precipitous granite hump. Was it a relic of Indian war-path days? Had the flintlocks of pioneers spit defiance through the oblong loopholes inserted at intervals in its walls? He wondered.

“You wouldn’t be homesick at all, Dot, if your imagination had the speed of your hoofs,” he leaned down to adjure his horse, after a habit formed on many a lonelier trail. “Can’t you just hear those old-fashioned pop-guns popping? No? Well, at least you can hear the dogwood yapping? Look around you, horse-alive! Don’t this scene remind you of home? Of course you’ve got to concentrate on things near at hand. But trust me, that’s the secret of living to-day—concentration. Look far afield and you’ll lose the illusion, just as you bark your shins when you mix gaits.”

A shrill trill startled both; centered Pape’s attention on the brush that edged the mesa to his right. But the quail he suspected was too expert in the art of camouflage to betray its presence except by a repetition of his call, closer and more imperative than the first.

“That bird-benedict must be sized like a sage hen to toot all that. Maybe he’s a Mormon and obliged to get noisy to assemble his wives.”

This sanguinary illusion, along with varied others which had preceded it, was dissipated a moment after its inception and rather rudely. The trill sounded next from their immediate rear. Both horse and rider turned, to see pounding toward them a man uniformed in blue, between his lips a nickel-bright whistle, in his right hand a short, but official-looking club. Of the pair of Westerners who awaited the approach, one at least remembered that he was two-thousand-odd miles away from the Hellroaring home range of his over-worked imagination; appreciated that he was in for a set-to with a “sparrow cop” of America’s most metropolitan police.

Gasping from the effort of hoisting his considerable avoirdupois up the height and sputtering with offended dignity, the officer stamped to a stand alongside and glared fearsomely.

“What you mean, leaving the bridle path? Say, I’m asking you!”

“Horse bolted.” Pape parried with a half-truth—Dot had sort of bolted up the rocks.

The official eye fixed derisively on the angora chaps; lifted to the blue flannel shirt; stopped at the stiff-brimmed white Stetson. “One of them film heroes, eh?”

“Film? Not me. You’ll be asking my pardon, brother, when you know who——”

The officer interrupted with increasing belligerence: “Trying to play wild and woolly and never been acrost the Hudson River, like as not! You take an out-and-outer’s advice. Put away them Bill Hart clothes and ride a rocking-chair until you learn to bridle a hoss. I’ve a good mind to run you in. Why didn’t you mind my whistle?”

“Honest, Mr. Policeman, I thought you were a quail. You sounded just like——”

“A quail—me? I’ll learn you to kid a member of the Force. You climb down offen that horse, now, and come along with me over to the Arsenal.”

“Why Arsenal? Do you think I’m a big gun or a keg of powder?”

“The Arsenal’s the 33d Precinct Station House. Fresh bird yourself!”

The officer’s look told Pape even louder than his words that the time for persiflage had passed, unless he really wished a police court interval. He had indulged his humor too far in likening this overgrown, formidable “sparrow” to the most succulent tidbit of the fowl species. He brought into play the smooth smile that had oiled troubled waters of his past.

“No offense meant, I assure you. It happens that my hoss and I are from exceeding far across the river you mention—Montana. We’ve found your big town lonesome as a sheep range. Fact, we only feel comfortable when we’re sloping around in this park. Parts of it are so like Hellroaring that——”

“I can pinch you again for cussin’, young feller!”

“You can’t pinch a citizen for merely mentioning the geographical name of his home valley, which same you can find on any map. As I was about to say, there are spots in this stone-fenced ranch that make us think of God’s country. Just now, when we saw a trail blazed with white circles, we plumb forgot where we were and bolted.”

The guardian of law and order continued to look the part of an indignant butt of banter.

“A blazed trail in Central Park, New York?” he scoffed. “You’ll show me or you’ll come along to the station!”

“Why not a blazed trail—why not anything in Central Park?”

Peter Pape put the question with that grin, half ironic and wholly serious, with which he had faced other such posers in his past. To him, the West come East, this park was the heart of the town—Gotham’s great, green heart. By its moods it controlled the pulse of rich and poor alike; showed to all, sans price or prejudice, that beauty which is the love of nature made visible; inspired the most uncouth and unlearned with the responses of the cultured and the erudite.

The human heart was capable of any emotion, from small to great. Any deed, then, might be done within the people’s park.

CHAPTER II—A TIP FROM THE TOP

Peter Pape swung from the saddle and, pulling the reins over Polkadot’s head, led the law’s “strong arm” down the heights over the way he had ascended on horseback. A glance into the hectic visage beside him offered the assurance that, while not yet under arrest, he soon would be if he failed to find those circle-marked trees.

“The town that owns this park, now, should be the last to blame us for mistaking our locale,” he took occasion to argue amongst their downward stumbles. “It’s like a regular frontier wilderness—almost. There’s nothing much around to break the solitude except people—only about six or seven million of them per day. And there’s nothing to break the silence except——Listen to that never-ending drone! Don’t it sound for all the world like the wind playing through pines?”

“Sounds more like motors to me—Fords and automobiles a-playing over macadam,” grumbled the guard.

But Why-Not Pape was not easily to be diverted from his dream. “And yon green dome to the north of the range—” he lifted eyes and a hand—“just couldn’t look more like the copper stain on a butte within binocular range of my Hellroaring ranch house.”

“Lay off of that irreverence. You can’t cuss at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—not in my presence, you can’t!”

The topmost of the trail-blazing trees Pape offered as Exhibit “A” for the defense. The line of them, when sighted from below, looked to be leading, he declared.

An off-duty grin humanized the official countenance. “White paint spots tell the tree gang to saw down dying trunks and haul the logs to the saw-mill over in North Meadow. If you was to follow all of them as bridle signs you’d get yourself and that gingham nag of yourn sentenced for life. This once I’m going to try to believe you’re as green as you look. C’mon down to the path.”

Their wait at the equestrian trail was not long. A traffic policeman, mounted on a well-groomed bay, loped toward them, evidently on his way back to stables from a tour of duty that, from his magnificent appearance, easily might have included several flirtations and at least one runaway rescue. At a signal from his fellow afoot, he drew rein.

“You’ll be doing me a favor, Medonis Moore, if you’ll shoo this bird outen the park,” wheezed he of the whistle. “I got a date ‘sevening and Night Court’s not me rondy-voo.”

“What’s he gone and done, O’Shay?”

“Called me a quail for one thing, which shows you at the start that he’s kind of off. I’m right many queer things, like my lady friend tells me, but never that—not a quail.”

“Nor a quailer from duty, eh Pudge?”

Ignoring the jibe, the weighty one went into detail. “He rode his horse up to the top of the bluff. Says he’s from somewheres far West. Framed up a foolish excuse about believing in signs like religion. Says them white spots on the doomed trees was no lost language to him, but a message from the dead that led him wrong. Get me—or him? Howsomever, I’m willing to leave him go this time on account his being good-natured.”

“Account of that date, don’t you mean?”

The sparrow chaser drew up with dignity. “Which or whether, will you do me the favor, Medonis, of shooing him out?”

The colloquy had advanced of its own spirit, without interruption or plea from Why-Not Pape. Polkadot had improved the interim by nose-rubbing an acquaintance with the “’Donis” mount. Here at last was one of his kind of whom he could approve. Even though the police horse showed to be too much groomed—was overly “dressy,” as Why-Not often said of human passers-by—his tail was not docked and he wore a saddle very near “regular,” certainly not one of those pads of leather on which most of the park riders posted up and down like monkeys on so many sticks.

“Come along, bo,” decided the magnificent director of traffic. “I’m weak, but maybe I can keep you on the crooked and narrow far as the must-you-go gate.”

With a friendly farewell to the “sparrow” who had a “date,” Pape rode off with his new, enforced escort, Polkadot and the officer’s bay fell into step.

“Paint that horse yourself?” inquired “’Donis” Moore, with a grin.

This brought a laugh from Pape. “No, my friend; he was foaled as is, so far as his colors go. He’s just mixed a bit like me, and feels kind of lonesome in your cold New York.”

“New York cold?”

“You see, Dot and I came expecting the kind of time-of-our-lives we’d heard about. And we haven’t had it—not yet.”

The handsome officer, who presumedly had been nicknamed after Adonis by the Force, nodded understandingly. “Ain’t the trouble with your expectations, now? Would you be likely to hear of those times-of-lives, if they was the regular thing?”

“But we’re not looking for the regular thing. And why not expect? Don’t you get what you go after? You, for instance—I should think you’d expect the limit that kind Fate could give. If I looked like you——”

There was a sincerity of admiration in Pape’s lanky shrug and lapsing sigh such as “’Donis” Moore evidently wasn’t fortified to resist. He turned his dark eyes and fine-cut profile to a more detailed study of his by-proxy charge.

Pape pursued the advantage. “Sound looking critter you’re forking, officer. What you call him?”

“Hylan is his name—Traffic ‘B.’”

“That’s a new horse alias to me. Dot here does a polka when persuaded right. If Highland, now, does a fling, we might join them in a ‘brother’ act and put them on the stage.”

“You’ll be trespassing the dignity of our sacred mayor, as well as the people’s park, if you ain’t careful,” warned ’Donis Moore. “H-y-l-a-n is what I said was his name and he don’t own up to flings like you mean any more than our chief executive.”

The Westerner looked interested. “Named your nag after your boss, eh? Not an untactful idea at all. Hope hoss Hylan explains to Polkadot what fine company he’s in. First real acquaintance my poor brute’s met up with since I rode him out of the home corral and into a baggage car which I couldn’t hocus-pocus him into thinking was the latest in stables. I reckon it was too portable. He’ll be glad to know that he is starting at the top in equine circles—with His Honor the Mayor’s namesake.”

“You talk kind of discouraged, bo. Just what’s gone wrong?”

“Nothing’s gone wrong. You see, nothing’s started.”

“Then why don’t you start something?”

Pape’s attention looked much more arrested than his person. “Start something?”

“Sure. Something, say, along the partic’aler line of your ambitions.”

“The ambitions that have kept me on the move over the four States of my past range wouldn’t lead me into any nice place in this burg of rules and regulations, I fear. Even out in God’s country they had to make allowance for a lot I did. Here, seems like there’s an Indian sign hung on me. Not a soul knows or cares who or what I am.”

Evidently interested, the police rider checked his mount’s manger-bound trot to a walk, for they were nearing their division of ways.

“Would you be satisfied, now, with folks knowing who and what you really are?” he asked impressively, throwing his weight on the right stirrup, as he leaned toward his charge. “Who and what do you want to be?”

“Who doesn’t matter so much. What I want to be is gay—to get as much out of playing as I do out of working when I’m home.”

’Donis Moore looked him over critically. “You want to be a gay bird and you ride around looking like the last shad in the Hudson!” Obviously pleased with his rôle of mentor, Donis’ dark, handsome face lighted with his argument. “You see, bo, the people are right busy in this burg. They can’t stop to chum with strangers. You got to get in step with them—insist on chumming with them as you swing along. First you got to look like what you want to be. Appertainin’ to which, I’d get me some civilized togs if I was you—that is, if you happen to have any spare change in them corduroys.”

“Change?” enquired Pape. “I let them keep the change. I could buy quite a chunk of this town—a whole cold shoulder of it—without straining my finances. I mean that and at present prices. What I haven’t got is friends—not one among all these millions upon millions of effete folks. I’m wondering if the run of the cards wouldn’t have been some different B. P.”

“B. P.? How come? I ain’t no Greek studjent any more than I’m a descendant of Anna Eva Fay.”

“Before Prohibition,” Why-Not accommodated. “But then, I wouldn’t want the sort of friends whose innards I had to win any more than I’d want those I could win with my outards. Clothes don’t make the man—or so the poets say.”

“That dope’s blank verse, young fellow. Leastwise, the opposite holds in N’Yawk. The wrong clothes unmake him.” The cop dandy straightened, with an illustrative, downward glance over his own brass-buttoned magnificence. “I’m giving it to you right, bo. Unless you’re a celeb, and have earned a sort of special license to dress contrary to form, you’d best flatter the people you wanta trot with by harnessing out as near like ’em as possible. You been wearing that broad-brim on Broadway? You have, eh? Don’t you see that they just naturally take you for a steerer—likely think you’re wanting to sell ’em stock in some gilt mine? Not meaning to hurt your feelings, I’ll say that the piebald you’re riding is the only O. K. thing about you. Happens to be a fawncy of our au fait cits. to ride broncs this spring. Seeing you’re so careless about your cash, you’d best throw some into the talons of a tailor and a hatter and a near-silk-shirt grafter. Then, after you’ve got yourself looking something like the gay guy you say you wanta be, begin to act like him. Do something, if you get me, to make ’em notice you.”

They parted at the “Remember the Maine” monument, the official mentor’s argument duly paid for in thanks, and a “good-luck” hope exchanged.

What could he do to make New York notice him?

Peter Pape pondered the question as Polkadot dodged through Columbus Circle’s whirligig of traffic—a feat which took all the skill acquired in cutting out steers from range round-ups. The disinterested source of the invited advice recommended its substance. Before he had walked his mount a block down The Way he had decided to follow it. Its first half—the acquirement of the outer habiliments of sophistication—easily could be acted upon through the free coinage of gold. The second half——

How make the big town wish to be friends with him?

To himself he admitted the reason back of his confidence to the friendly Medonis of the Mounted. The very seriousness of his score-squaring mission to the “cold” burg, made him ambitious to be taken for that “gay guy” who must be haberdashed into his part—a Western gold-fish come East to flap his fins in the Big Puddle. He mustn’t forget that he now was a wealthy man, with no obligations except one voluntary vow and that to himself; that he still was young enough to feel as gay as any costume could make him look; that so far in life he had proved strong enough to do whatever he had decided to do.

So what—what?

The dusk of even this daylight-saving hour was thickening. Pape urged his mount into the rack of Times Cañon. There, toward the convergence of each street, clumps of vehicles spun forward, only to stop and lose all they had gained at the command of traffic signals. Variously bound surface cars clattered through; clanged with self-importance; puffed with passengers. Pedestrians darted this way, often, to turn and dart back that, in what seemed a limb-regardless passion to get home in the fewest possible seconds. Like flour upon the other ingredients in some great mixing bowl, Evening was sifted over all, then stirred into a conglomerate, working mass—dough to be baked by dinner time.

The sensation rather than sight of an overhead flash caused the splotched horse to throw back his head with a snort and the rider to hang his gaze on high. Unexpectedly, as happen most miracles, a blaze lit the ungeometrical square and searched the lowering clouds—millions of watts bottled in bulbs—a fan-fare of nitrogen dyed red, yellow, blue, green and diamond-white—incalculable volts of power wired into legible array.

The gray eyes of the Westerner upheld, fascinated, to this sight of Broadway’s electric display, to him the marvel of the marvels of to-day. Always was his pulse stirred by it and his imagination set apace. As, when a child, he had pored over the lurid illustrations of his fairy-book, so now nightly he pored over this real-life picture. For him it lit a bridle path into byways of the unknown—into the highway of the impossible.

A moment before a problem had darkened his brow. Now the darkness was displaced by light. Over the suggested answer to the unanswerable he exulted. What was difficulty of any sort except illusion? His Fatness the Quail—that is to say, the park sparrow cop—to-day had accused him of believing too devoutly in signs. Yet what were signs for if not to point the way?

His chuckles evoked the curiosity of Polkadot. Back toward him waggled one white-tipped, enquiring ear. Willingly, as at all such requests of his quadruped pal, he leaned to oblige.

“Why not?” He laughed aloud. “I ask you that, old hoss—why not?”

CHAPTER III—THE SKY SIGN

Peter Pape sighed a chestful of relief. They pulled on like ordinary pants. But of course that was what they were expected to do. Weren’t they direct from the work room of the most expensive tailor he could locate in Gotham? Even so, he had inserted his silk-socked toes into their twin tunnels with some foreboding. They were different, these long, straight leg-sheaths of his first full-dress suit.

There. The secret is out. Our East-exiled Westerner had followed advice. Praying that news of his lapse never would wing back to Hellroaring, he had submitted himself to measurements for a claw-hammer, known chiefly by rumor on the range as a “swallow-tail.” The result had been delivered late that afternoon, one week since the signs of Broadway had directed him aright. The suit had seemed in full possession of the dressing room of his hotel suite when he had returned from his usual park-path sprint on Polkadot, an event to-day distinguished by the whipcord riding breeches of approved balloon cut which had displaced his goat-skin chaps. Somehow it helped to fill an apartment which hitherto had felt rather empty; with its air of sophistication suggested the next move in the rôle for which it was the costume de luxe.

The trousers conquered in combat, Pape essayed to don the stiff-bosomed shirt which, according to the diagram pinned on the wall picturing a conventional gentleman ready for an evening out, must encase his chest. His chief conclusion, after several preparatory moments, was that the hiring of a valet was not adequate cause for a lynching with the first handy rope. No. There were arguments pro valet which should stay the hand of any one who ever had essayed to enter the costume de luxe of said conventional gentleman. What those patent plungers of his real pearl studs couldn’t and didn’t do! With the contrariness of as many mavericks, they preferred to puncture new holes in the immaculate linen, rather than enter the eyelets of the shirt-maker’s provision.

But we won’t go into the matter. Other writers have done it so often and so soulfully. The one best thing that may be remarked about such trials of the spirit is that they have an end as well as a beginning. At last and without totally wrecking the work of the launderer, Why-Not Pape’s famed will to win won. The shirt was harnessed; hooked-up; coupled.

Now came the test of tests for his patience and persistence—for his tongue and other such equipment of the genus human for the exercise of self-control. This was not trial by fire, although the flames of suppression singed him, but by choking. Again he thought tolerantly of valets; might have asked even the loan of m’lady’s maid had he been acquainted personally with any of his fair neighbors.

“They’d ought to sell block and tackle with every box of ’em,” he assured the ripe-tomato-colored cartoon of himself published in the dresser mirror.

Smoothing out certain of his facial distortions, lest they become muscularly rooted, to the ruin of his none too comely visage, he retrieved a wandering son-of-a-button from beneath the radiator and returned to the fray with a fresh strip of four-ply. When thrice he had threatened out loud to tie on a bandanna and let it go at that, by some slip or trick of his fingers he accomplished the impossible. His neck protruded proudly from his first stiff collar since the Sunday dress-ups of Lord Fauntleroy days—before the mother and father of faint but fond memory had gone, literally and figuratively “West,” leaving their orphan to work the world “on his own.”

Around the collar the chart entitled, “Proper Dress for Gents at All Hours,” dictated that he tie a narrow, white silk tie. Anticipating difficulties here, he had ordered a dozen. And he needed most of them; tried out one knot after another of his extensive repertoire; at last, by throwing a modified diamond hitch, accomplished an effect which gratified him, although probably no dress-tie had been treated quite that way before.

His chortle of relief that he was at ordeal’s end proved to be premature. Peering coldly and pointedly at him from across the room, their twin rows of pop-eyes perpendicularly placed, stood his patent leathers. Clear through his arches he already had felt their maliciousness and, as the worst of his trials, had left them to the last. All too late he recalled the fact that brand new buttoned shoes only meet across insteps and ankles by suasion of a hook, even as range boots yield most readily to jacks. Prolific as had been the growth of his toilet articles since a week ago, that small instrument of torture was not yet a fruit thereof. Further delay ensued before response to the order which he telephoned the desk for “one shoe-hooker—quick.”

Peter Stansbury Pape had emerged from the West of his upgrowing and self-making with two projects in view—one grave, one much less so. The grave, when its time came, would involve a set-to in the street called Wall with a certain earnest little group of shearers who, seeming to take him for a woolly lamb, almost had lifted his fleece. Animated by a habit of keeping his accounts in life square, steady in his stand as the mountain peaks that surrounded his home ranch, his courage fortified against fear because he recognized it at first sight and refused to yield to it, he was biding the right time to betake himself “down-town” for the round-up reckoning. But of all that, more anon.

His “less so” was to learn life as it is lived along Gay Way, although he had made no promise to himself to become a part thereof. A sincere wish to explore the greatest Main Street on any map, whose denizens so far had shown themselves elusive as outlaw broncs to a set-down puncher, had moved him to acceptance of the suggestion of ’Donis Moore.

While awaiting the pleasure—or the pain—of the shoe-hook, he considered the indifference of his reception at the Astor, a hotel selected for its location “in the heart of things.” In the heart of things—in the thick of the fight—in the teeth of the wind—right there was where Pape liked best to be. But the room-clerk had seemed unimpressed by his demand for the most luxurious one-man apartment on their floor plan. The cashier had eyed coldly the “herd” of New York drafts which he had offered for “corralling” in the treasury of the house. Clerks, elevator boys, even the dry-bar tenders had parried his questions and comments with that indifferent civility which had made this world, said to be the Real, seem false as compared with his hale and hearty Out-West.

The reply to his first inquiry, anent hotel stable accommodations for the intimate equine friend who, as a matter of course, had accompanied him on an American Express Company ticket, had been more of a shock to him than the height of Mt. Woolworth, first seen while ferrying the Hudson. Mr. Astor’s palace, he was told, had a garage of one-hundred-car capacity, but no stable at all, not even stall space for one painted pony. There were more rooms in the “one-man” suite than he knew how to utilize in his rather deficient home life, but the idea of attempting to smuggle Polkadot to the seventh landing, as suggested by the boast of a more modern hostelry that it elevated automobiles to any floor, was abandoned as likely to get them both put out. He had tramped many side-street trails before he had found, near the river, the stable of a contractor who still favored horses. Only this day had he learned of a riding academy near the southern fringe of Central Park where the beast might be boarded in style better suited to his importance in one estimation at least.

It is a pleasure to state that money really didn’t matter with Pape; in any calculable probability, never would. That constitutional demand of his—why not, why not?—had drilled into certain subterranean lakes beneath the range on which his unsuspecting cattle had grazed for years; had drilled until fonts of oleose gold had up-flowed. For months past his oil royalties literally had swamped the county-seat bank. He had been forced to divert the tide to Chicago and retain an attorney to figure his income tax. Upon him—in the now, instead of the hazy, hoped-for future—was the vacation time toward which he had toiled physically through the days of the past and through the nights had self-trained his mind with equal vigor.

The time had come. But the place—well, so far, America’s Bagdad had offered nothing approaching his expectations. Perhaps the fault had been in his surface unfitness for the censorious gaze of the Bagdadians. Perhaps clothes had unmade his outer man to folks too hurried to learn his inner. However, thanks to the official Sage of Traffic Squad “B,” he now had remedied superficial defects.

In truth, any one fairly disposed who saw his descent of the Astor’s front steps, would have conceded that. Despite the vicissitudes of preparation, the result was good. A tall, strong-built, free-swinging young man came to a halt at curb’s edge, a young man immaculately arrayed, from silky top of hat to tips of glistening boots. His attention, however, was not upon the impression which he might or might not be making. Having done his best by himself, he was not interested in casual applause. There was a strained eagerness in his eyes as, leaning outward, he peered up The Way.

The night was cloudy, so that the overhead darkness of eight-thirty was not discounted by any far-off moon or wan-winking stars. The sky looked like a black velvet counter for the display of man-made jewelry—Edison diamonds in vast array—those great, vulgar “cluster pieces” of Stage Street.

And high above all others—largest, most brilliant, most vulgar, perhaps—was a trinket transformed from some few bubbles of oil, the latest acquisition of one Westerner.

There it was—there it was! Pape chortled aloud from the thrill of first sight of it. Cryptic and steady it blazed, overtopping a quick-change series of electric messages regarding the merits of divers brands of underwear, chewing gum, pneumatic tires, corsets, automobiles, hosiery, movies and such. His heart swelled from pride, his pulse quickened and his mind lit as he viewed it. The while, his lips moved to the words emblazoned within its frame of lurid, vari-colored roses.

WELCOME

TO OUR CITY

WHY-NOT PAPE

While yet he stood at the curb a limousine, doubtless theater-bound, was halted in the traffic crush before him. He saw a bobbed, dark head, bound by a pearl filet with an emerald drop, protrude; saw a pointing, bejeweled finger; heard clearly the drawled comment:

“More likely, some new food for the fat, dar-rling. Remind me to tell mother. She gained whole ounces on that last chaff she choked down. The poor dear is losing her pep—starving worse than any Chinese baby that ever——”

The heavy car was crawling on toward its next stop. But Pape was spared any regrets in nearer diversion as he drifted along with the tide of pavement passers. In slowing to keep off the heels of a couple ahead, he eaves-dropped a woman’s demand of her escort:

“Now what, do you imagine, is Why-Not Pape? I do detest mysteries, although I suppose they’re the only way to get the public nowadays. Personally, I haven’t any use for women that won’t tell their ages, have you? I never read serial stories and simply can’t stand those suppressed men that some girls rave about. The reason you make a hit with me, Jimmie, is because you’re so frank, so natural, so sort of puppy-like. Oh, don’t bother getting sore! You know by this time that I——”

What was Why-Not Pape, indeed? Soon as the analytical lady strayed from the vital subject to that of her ingenuous companion, the author of the latest Broadway riddle passed on, a breaker on the edge of the down-sweeping tide of theater-goers, actor folk out of work and inevitable window shoppers. Of the several he overheard querying the new sign, none guessed—as none do in most real-life mysteries—that they were jostling elbows with the quite palpable solution. His upward stare attracted a direct remark from a pavement companion.

“You’ll read the answer in the newspapers soon. Nobody nor nothing is going to burn real money for long in that make-you-guess display.”

Pape was startled. Would the press take him up—possibly in time pique the public interest to such extent that he might need to blaze forth, within his rose-border, answers to the questions he had raised? If so, the coveted recognition might be considered won.

But he did not need to tell New York what or who he was, to congratulate himself. None would have excuse hereafter to regard lightly an introduction to Why-Not Pape. Even though inadvertently, already the city was welcoming him.

His one regret anent the bought-and-paid-for greeting was that it did not include the worthy Polkadot. He had considered a design of a light-pricked figure of himself mounted, the horse done in natural colors, only abandoning it when informed that black was not effective in Edison bulbs. At that, the bronc shied at a glare and down in his horse heart would not have liked such presentment had he seen and understood.

And the simpler conceit seemed to be attracting a sufficiency of attention. As well it might—well it might! So Peter Pape assured himself, beaming back and up at it. The Mayor’s Committee for the Entertainment of Distinguished Strangers couldn’t have done better by him. And any prima donna must have been pleased with that floral frame.

CHAPTER IV—DOUBLE FOCUS

A man of action does not loiter all evening returning his own howdy-doo to himself—not in his first evening outfit. At Forty-second Street Pape cast a last look at the sign in which he felt by now devout belief, doubtless one of the most costly and colorful ever flaunted before New York. Certainly it was self-advertisement raised to the Nth power and worthy any one’s consideration. Yet the obligation to escort his new suit somewhere was on him.

Where? To one of the cinematograph houses inviting from every compass point? Unthinkable. To the dance hall up the street, decorated in artificial cherry blossoms, where partners to suit the individual taste might be rented by the hour? Not in these clothes of class. To one of the “girl” shows? He had seen sufficient of them to realize more interest in sisters in the prevailing demi-habille of the street. To some romantic play? The heroes of such, sure to be admirable in looks and conduct, always got him in a discouraged state of mind about himself.

In his quandary Pape had approached a dignified, sizable building of yellow brick and now stopped before a plain-framed poster which named the pile as the Metropolitan Opera House, within which Geraldine Farrar was singing Zaza that night—that moment probably. Grand opera! He was impressed by the conviction that he and his new suit had been led blindly by Fate, who never before in his experience had shown more horse, or common, sense.

He made for the box office. The hour was late, or so he was informed by the man at the window. The curtains had been drawn aside many minutes before; were about to close again. The fashionable subscribers were seated. Wasn’t he able to see that even the S. R. O. sign was up outside?

Standing room was not what Pape wanted—not with those patent pincers on his feet. Matter of fact, he wouldn’t have considered a stand-up view of anything. Before paying for the best orchestra seat they had—didn’t matter about the price—he’d like to know who was Zaza, just as folks outside were asking what was Why-Not.

The look of the man at the window accused him of being mildly insane. “Zaza’s Zaza” he observed, as he turned to his accounts.

“Naturally,” Pape replied. “But why not’s not always why. What I want to ask you is——”

“Leslie Carter play of same name set to music—not jazz—by French composer. House is packed to the roof to-night, as I’ve been trying to tell you from the start.”

Before Pape could offer other insistence he felt himself displaced before the window by a personage disguised in ornate livery.

“Mrs. Blackstone can’t attend. Sudden death,” said the personage. “She’d be obliged if you could sell these tickets and credit her account.”

“It is not Mrs. Blackstone herself who died?” was the official’s cold query.

“Indeed, no. She knows it’s late, sir, but she’d be obliged if you——”

“I’ll oblige her if the money changer won’t,” Pape interrupted. “I’ll take a ticket.”

The autocrat of the box office, however, shook his head. “Mrs. B’s box is grand tier. Can’t be split. Six chairs.”

From what so far had seemed a mere human huddle within one of the entrance doors, an eager figure hurried, just behind an eager voice.

“We are five person. How much dollar for five seats of thees box?”

At the little, oldish foreigner in large, newish ready-mades, Fate’s unhandyman looked; then on past the emotionful face to following emotionful faces. The human huddle had disintegrated from a mass of despair into animated units which now moved toward the box office as toward a magnet. Sounds of as many magpies filled the dignified silence—two French women and three men venting recitatives of hope that yet they might hear the Leoncavallo masterpiece. But them, too, the ticket man discouraged, doubtless the more emphatically because of their attire, which was poor, if proud.

“Too much for your party, I’m sure. One-hundred-fifty.”

“But not for my party,” Pape interposed. “I’ll take the whole half dozen.”

The sole so-far thing to impress the assistant treasurer was the roll from which the emergency cash customer began to strip off bank notes. The recitative of hope soughed into a chorus of disappointment as the moneyed young man clutched his half dozen tickets and started for the inner door. Scarcely could he restrain himself from out-loud laughter as he halted and turned to command:

“Get a hurry on, party! At one-and-fifty there’d ought to be better parlez vous places inside.”

Perhaps his inclusive gesture was more comprehensive to them than his words; at any rate, his grin was eloquent.

To his sublet box by way of the grand staircase Peter Stanbury Pape, grand opera patron, strode at the usher’s heels; into it, himself ushered his agitated, magpie covey of true music-lovers. Well to one side he slumped into the chair assigned to him by common consent and found an inconspicuous rest for the more tortured of his feet.

Leaning forward, he undertook to get his bearings; concentrated on the dim and distant stage set, where a lady chiefly dressed in an anklet and feathered hat—presumedly Zaza of the title role from the way she was conducting herself—seemed to be under great stress of emotion set to song. Before he could focus his glasses—one of the pairs for all hands round which he had been persuaded to rent at the foot of the stair-case—the orchestra took control and the red velvet curtains came together between the intimate affairs of the great French actress and those of the many—of the great American audience.

After curtain calls had been duly accorded and recognized and there no longer existed any reason for the half-light cloak of a doubtful song-story, the vast auditorium was set ablaze. And with the illumination uprose a buzz of sound like nothing that Pape ever had heard—more like the swarming of all the bees in Montana within an acre of area than anything he could imagine.

Full attention he gave to the entre-acte of this, his first adventure in Orphean halls. Regretting the trusty binoculars idling on his hotel bureau, he screwed into focus the rented glasses; swept the waving head-tops of the orchestra field below; lifted to the horse-shoe of the subscribers and then to the grand tier boxes with their content of women whom he assumed to be of society, amazingly made up, daringly gowned, lavishly bedecked with jewels, ostrich feathers and aigrettes. A sprinkling of men, black-togged on the order of himself, made them the more wondrous dazzling. A moving, background pageant of visitors paid them court.

After a polite, if rather futile, attempt to mix his English, as spoken for utility in Montana, with the highly punctuated, mostly superfluous French of his overly grateful “party,” Pape left them to their own devices. These seemed largely to take the form of dislocating their necks in an effort to recognize possible acquaintances in the sea of faces which the gallery was spilling down from the roof. Remembering his advice to Polkadot over the value of concentration on the near-by, he centered his attention upon those labeled in his mind as the “hundred-and-fifty simoleon” class. His thoughts moved along briskly with his inspection.

Women, women, women. Who would have imagined in that he-man life he had lived on ranches West that the fair were so large a complement of humanity or that so many of them indeed were fair? Had he lost or gained by not realizing their importance? Suppose his ambition had been to furbelow one such as these, could he have given himself to the lure of making good on his own—faithfully have followed Fate’s finger to rainbow’s end?

However that might be, now that he was freed from slavery to the jealous jade by the finding of that automatically refilling pot of liquid gold, might he not think of the gentler companionship which he had lacked? The chief thing wrong with to-night, for instance, was the selection by chance of the women in his box. They did not speak his language—never could. Had there been a vacant chair for him to offer some self-selected lady, which one from the dazzling display before him would she be?

Perhaps the most ridiculous rule of civilized society—so he mused—was that limiting self-selectiveness. In the acquirement of everything else in life—stock, land, clothes, food—a person went thoroughly through the supply before choosing. Only in the matter of friends must he depend upon accident or the caprice of other friends. How much more satisfactory and straightforward it would be to search among the faces of strangers for one with personal appeal, then to go to its owner and say: “You look like my idea of a friend. How do I look to you?”

And, if advisable in casual cases, such procedure should help especially in a man’s search for his mate. Take himself, now, and the emptiness of his life. His bankers had told him he could afford whatever he wanted. Suppose he wanted a woman, what sort of woman should he want?

Beauty? Must she be beautiful? From the quickening of his pulse as he bent to peer into fair face after fair face with the added interest of this idea, he realized that he enjoyed and feared beauty at least as greatly as the most of men.

Class? In a flashed thought of his mother, a Stansbury of the Stansburys of Virginia, he decided on that. Class she must have.

And kind she must be—tested kind to the core. Tall, healthy, strong, of course. Graceful if possible. Gracious, but not too much so. Frank and at the same time reserved. Educated up to full appreciation of, but not superiority to himself. Half boy and at least one-and-a-half girl.

That would be plenty to start on, even for the most deliberate and calculating of choosers, which he felt himself dispositionally as well as financially fitted to be. From what he knew of the difficult sex in the rough, he should need time and study to decide accurately just how real were appearances in a finished feminine, trained from infancy, so he had heard, to cover all inner and outer deficiencies. Plenty of time and a steady nerve—that was all he should need to learn her nature, as he had learned the tempers of the most refractory of horses. By the time he was satisfied as to these mentally outlined points, others doubtless would have suggested themselves.

Pape was pleased with his theories, the first dressed-up ones he had evolved on the subject. If all men would go into this vital matter of self-selectiveness, there would be fewer prosperous lawyers, he congratulated himself. Better have a care before marriage than a flock of them—of another sort—after. Firstly, a choice made from personal preference, then the most direct course toward acquaintanceship, a deliberate inspection, a steady eye, a cool nerve——

Suddenly Pape stiffened, body and mind. His gaze fixed on a face within a box on his own level, some ten or so away, just where they began to curve toward the stage. The face was young—childlike in animation and outline. Its cheeks were oval and flushed, its lips red-limned and laughing, its eyes a flashing black. And black was the mass of curls that haloed it—cut short—bobbed.

A brilliant enough, impish enough, barbaric enough little head it was to catch and hold the attention of any strange young man. But that which particularly interested Pape was the filet that bound it—a filet of pearls with an emerald drop.

She wasn’t noticing him—she who had thought of him but once and then only as some new sort of anti-fat foodstuff. But another of her party, through lorgnetted opera lenses, was. Pape, focusing his rented pair for close range, returned this other person’s regard. The moment seemed long and different from other moments during which, round glass eye into round glass eye, they two looked.

At its end Pape rose and left his hundred-and-fifty-simoleon box. His exit was retarded, but not once actually halted, by the conversational overtures—somewhat less comprehensible than before—of his unknown guests. He moved as if under outside control, hypnotic, magnetic, dynamic.

True, he did have a doubtful thought or two on his progress through the foyer. She might not get his advanced idea of to-night instantaneously and might be too conventional to act on it, when explained. She might not give him the benefit of every doubt, which he was more than ready to give her, at first glance. There might be an embarrassing moment—particularly so for him. She might be married and taking her husband seriously. Speaking literally, he just might be thrown out.

But all such thought he counter-argued. What was the use of conviction without courage? Husbands were likely to be met in a one-woman world; were inconvenient, but not necessarily to be feared. And if she doubted him—— But she had the best eyes into which he ever had looked, with field glasses or without. Why shouldn’t she see all that he was at first glance? As for possible embarrassment, wasn’t he dressed according to chart and as good as the next man? This was, beyond doubt, his one best opportunity for the test of his theory of self-selection. Why not seize it?

CHAPTER V—ONLY THE BRAVE

Reaching the box which, according to his count of doors, should contain her, Peter Pape tried the door; opened it; stepped into and across the small cloak-room; looked through the brocaded hangings of the outer box. There she sat, just behind the bobbed youngster, an example of how different one black-haired girl can look from another. Her eyes, of the blue of tropic seas—calm, deep, mysterious—opened to his in surprise. He felt the other eyes in the box upon him, five pairs in all. But he looked only into hers—into the eyes that had summoned him.

Quick at detail, he appreciated at a glance more than the general effect of her. Her gown was of silver lace, a moonlight shimmer that lent a paling sheen to her shoulders and arms. She wore no ornaments, except a cluster of purplish forget-me-nots. As if one could forget anything about her! Forget those long, strong lines of her, not too thin nor yet too sturdy—those untinted cheeks of an oval blending gently into a chin that was neither hard nor weak—those parted, definitely dented lips, their healthful red indubitable—that black, soft, femininely long hair, simply parted and done in a knot on her neck?

More than at the greater distance, she looked the sort he liked. Did she like the looks of him? He could not voice the question direct, as in his calculations, with eight ears beside her own to hear. But he concentrated on the silent demand that she try to do so as he crossed to her with hand outstretched.

“I am so glad,” said he, “to see you again.”

Her hand relaxed in his clasp. She rose to her feet; drew up to the full height of her well-poised slenderness. Her expression was neither welcoming nor forbidding; rather was the puzzled, half-ashamed and wholly honest look of a child who can’t remember.

“Didn’t you ask me to come?”

He bent to her with the low-spoken question; met her eyes as seriously as through the lenses a moment since; waited breathlessly for the test of just how fearless and frank was she. With hope he saw a faint flush spread forward from her ears and tinge delightfully her pallor. Already he had felt the agitation of it in her finger-tips. Relief came with her first words.

“Yes, I know I did,” she said.

She knew. Yes, she knew. And she had the courage to say so. She not only looked—she was the sort he liked.

Whether from suggestion of his hand or her own volition, she stepped with him to the back of the box. He did not give her time to deny him, even to himself alone. With inspired assurance he urged:

“I have crossed a continent to meet you. Don’t let your friends see that you failed to recognize me at first. It takes only a moment to know me. Give me that moment.”

“Am I not giving it?” She looked still puzzled, still flushed, still brave. But she withdrew her hand and with it something of her confidence.

Would she deny him, after all, once she understood? She mustn’t be allowed to.

“Give me the moment toward which I’ve lived my life,” he said. “You won’t regret it. Look at me. Recognize me. Trust me.”

During the grave glance which she slanted slightly upward to his six-feet-flat, she obeyed; studied him; seemed to reach some decision regarding him, just what he had to surmise.

“The surprise of meeting you—here—at the opera——” she began hesitantly. “Seeing so many people, I think, confuses me. Somehow, personalities and places get all scrambled in my memory. Do forgive me—but you are from——”

“Montana, of course,” he prompted her.

“Oh!” She considered. Then: “I’ve been to the Yellowstone. It was there—that we met? I begin—to remember that——”

“That I’m a personal friend of Horace Albright, the superintendent,” he supplied, quick to seize the opportunity she had made to speak a true, good word for himself. “Every one of the Spread-Eagle Ranger force, from Jim McBride down, calls me by my first name, so you see that I am no tusk-hunter. You can’t have forgotten the snap of the air on those early-morning Y-stone rides or the colors of the border peaks in the afternoon sun or——”

“Or the spray of Old Faithful, the painted colors of the cañon, the whole life of the wild. Never. Never,” she contributed. “I was fascinated with the breadth and freedom of your West. Out there I felt like Alice in Wonderland, with everything possible.”

His eyes reproached her. “Everything is possible everywhere, even in your narrow, circumscribed East. I am glad that you remember the worth-while things. Perhaps, if you try——”

“Jane dar-rling, do you want to sit brazenly in front or modestly in back for the second act? That first was enough to put the Mona Lisa out of countenance. But I’ve heard that a little child saves the second.”

The interruption came from the bobbed-haired girl, who, from her repeated glances their way, evidently thought their aside somewhat protracted.

So “Jane” was the favorite, old-fashioned name she glorified! Pape was further thrilled by the touch of her hand on his arm.

“Do forgive me and help me out,” she said low and hurriedly. “Some hypnotist must have given me mental suggestion that I was to forget names. I am constantly embarrassed by lapses like this. Quick—I’ll have to introduce you.”

“Peter Pape.” Gladly he supplied the lack.

With considerable poise she announced him as “a friend from the Yellowstone,” who had happened in unexpectedly and been reviving memories of that most delightful summer she had spent in the West. If she accented ever so slightly the “revived memories” or flashed him a confused look with the pronouncement of his name, none but he noticed. And he did not care. Whether deceived by his high-handed play or playing a higher hand herself, she hadn’t thrown him out. Now she wouldn’t—couldn’t. He was her “friend” from the Yellowstone—near enough home, at that, since Hellroaring Valley was right next door. She was committed to his commitment. His theory was proving beyond anything he could have hoped, had he wasted time on hope after evolving it.

In turn she named Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Allen, a middle-aged couple who supplied ample dignity and chaperonage for the younger element of the box party; Mr. Mills Harford, a genial, sophisticated and well-built young man, who would have been called handsome by one with a taste for auburn hair, brown eyes and close-cropped mustaches; Miss Sturgis, her little cousin—she of the bobbed hair, filet of pearls and affectionate address.

Even in her grown-up, down-cut evening gown of Nile-green, the girl didn’t look more than fifteen—couldn’t have exceeded nineteen without violating all laws of appearances. Despite her excessive use of make-up—blued-over eyelids, plucked brows, darkened lashes, thick-pasted lips and high-colored cheeks—Cousin “Irene” was quite beautiful. And her manner proved as assertively brilliant as her looks.

“Mr. —— Pape?” she demanded thinkingly. “Have I met you before or heard of you——”

His hand on his heart, he bowed toward her. “Why-Not Pape.”

She stared at him much as she had at the sign.

“You don’t claim to be—— Don’t tell me that you are—— Then you’re not a breakfast-food?”

“Nothing so enlivening. Not even anti-fat,” he apologized in broad-smiling return.

“Oh—oh!” she gasped. “You couldn’t have overheard what I said in the car coming down?”

“From the curb, Miss Sturgis.”

“And you recognized me here in the box and that’s why—Dar-rling—” the endearment was drawled with a brief glance toward her relative—“isn’t that just too utterly romantic?”

“I hope, Irene, not too utterly.”

Jane’s quiet reply started a smile wreathing around the little circle, evidently of amusement over the child-vamp’s personal assumption of all honors.

Samuel Allen interposed in a tone of butter-melting benignity: “Any friend of Miss Lauderdale is more than welcome to our city so far as I am concerned.”

“Rawther! And welcome—thrice welcome to our midst,” the madcap again interpolated, seizing one of his large, brown hands in both her white, bejeweled, small ones.

“Dee-lighted!” Pape breathed, returning the extra shake.

Indeed, he felt delighted. She was Miss Jane Lauderdale, the reserved, long-haired relative of this short-haired enthusiast. And she wore no engagement ring—not any ring on any finger. He could only hope that she had no “understanding” with the good-looking chap ranged beside her. If so, she’d have to be made to mis-understand. She was more flustered over his acceptance of the unconscious invitation of that long, strange, magnified look than she had at first appeared. That showed in the tight clutch of her fingers on her feather fan. And she was taller than he had calculated—just enough shorter than he for ideal dancing. One thing about her he needed to decide, but couldn’t. Did she or did she not know that she didn’t know him?

But he must pay attention. Irene, continuing to baby-vamp him, waved him into the chair beside that into which she had sunk. Although of necessity she had dropped his hand she released neither his interest nor his eyes.

“You must be just a terribly important person to be flashed all over Broadway in that rosy wreath. I don’t blame your friends, though, for feeling a bit extravagant over you. We were talking about the sign before you came in—were guessing what kingdom you belong to, animal, vegetable or mineral. Millsy Harford here held out that you were more likely some manufactured product than anti-fat. Isn’t it all quite too funny for anything?”

“My folks used to say, from the rate of speed at which I grew up—” Pape applied to his ready store of persiflage—“that I was more like a vegetable than a boy. I always thought I was animal, judging by my appetite, you know. But my life’s been kind of lived with minerals. Maybe I’m all three.”

“How interesting.” Mrs. Allen, a lady faded to medium in coloring, age and manner, turned from an over-rail inspection of some social notable among the horseshoe’s elect to survey him through her lorgnette. “Just why, if I am not too personal, are you called ‘Why-Not?’”

“My nickname about the headwaters of our greatest river, madam.”

From her look of vague perplexity Pape turned his glance around the group until it halted for a study of Jane Lauderdale’s face—again Irish pale, tropic-eyed, illegible. He chose his further words with care.

“Guess I was the first to ask myself that question after the boys hung the sobri. on me and nailed it there,” he said, addressing himself to none in particular. “I made the interesting discovery that there wasn’t any answer, although there are limitless answers to almost every seemingly unanswerable question. You see, when I find myself up against the impossible, I just ask myself why not and buck it. I’ve found the impossible a boogey-boo.”

“You call yourself, then, a possible person?”

He was not to be discountenanced by Jane’s quiet insertion.

“Everything worth while that I’ve got in the past I owe to that belief,” he maintained. “It happens that I want some few extras in my near future. That’s how I’ll get ’em, from realizing that nothing—absolutely nothing—is impossible.”

Considerable of a speech this was for him. Yet he could see that he had made something of an impression by its delivery. One moment he marveled at his own assurance; the next wanted to know any good and substantial reason why he shouldn’t feel assured. He had made himself, to be sure. But probably he had done the job better than any one else could have done it for him. At least he had been thorough. And his efforts had paid in cash, if that counted.

A stir in the house—rather, a settling into silence—presaged the parting of the curtains on Act II. Mills Harford who, as had developed, was the host of the evening, began to rearrange the chairs to the better advantage of the fair of his party. The interloper felt the obligation at least of offering to depart. Irene it was who saved him. With a pout of the most piquantly bowed pair of lips upon which female ever had used unnecessary stick, she dared him to wish to watch the second act with her as much as she wished him to.

Pape could not keep down the thrill she gave him—she and the situation. To think that he, so lately the wearer of an Indian sign, should be begged to stay in such a circle! Only for a moment did he affect reluctance. During it, he glanced across at the box that was his by right of rental, with its content of brightly attired “true-lovers” blooming above the rail; smiled into the challenge of the precocious child’s black eyes; sank into the chair just behind her.

“Your friends over there look better able to do without you than I feel,” Irene ventured, with an over-shoulder sigh. “I don’t know who in the world they are, but——”

“No more do I, Miss Sturgis.”

“You don’t? You mean——”

“Righto. Just met up with ’em in the lobby. They hadn’t any seats and I had more than I could use without exerting myself.”

“How nice! Then they have only half as much right to you as I have. You see, I, as well as Miss Lauderdale, have met you before.”

“Down Broadway, you mean, and although you didn’t know it?”

She nodded back at him tenderly. “And although separated by circumstances—I in the car and you on the curb. From my cousin’s descriptions, I adore rangers. Don’t I, dar-rling?”

“No one could doubt that, eh, Jane?” Harford made answer for Miss Lauderdale, whom he had relieved of her fan with as much solicitude as though each ostrich feather weighed a pound.

“I do really. Why not?” Low and luringly Irene laughed. “You must look awfully picturesque in your uniform of forest green, your cavalry hat and laced boots.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m a cowman, not a ranger,” Pape thought advisable to state in a tone calculated to reach the ears of her responsible for his presence in their midst. “But most of the park service members are my friends. I live on the edge of the playground and know them right well.”

The young girl refused to have her enthusiasm quashed. “Well, that’s just as good. You have their spirit without being tied to the stake of routine, as it were. I detest routine, don’t you? Or do you? On second thought, you’re much better off. Don’t you think he is, dar-rling?”

In the dimming of the auditorium lights, she leaned closer to him; seemed to transfer the fulsomely drawled term of endearment from her relative to him; added in a cross between murmur and whisper:

“Isn’t dar-rling a difficult word—hard to say seriously? Fancy caring that much for any one—I mean any one of one’s own sex. Of course, I hope really to love a man that much some day. That is, I do unless I go in for a career. Careers do keep one from getting fat, though. As I am constantly telling my mother——”

“S-sh!”

Pape was relieved by Mrs. Allen’s silencing sibilant.

CHAPTER VI—JUST AU REVOIR

The great audience caught its breath and hopefully returned attention to the affairs of the French actress who so had shocked and fascinated them at the first act’s end. Stripped almost to the waist, the daring and tuneful Zaza had left them. More conventionally, not to say comfortably clad, she reappeared.

Pape, as deficient in French as in appreciation of opera arias, applied himself hopefully at first to getting the gist of the piece, but soon concluded that he must be clear “off trail in his lingo.”

Out in Montana, the most meteoric stage luminary never would think of singing a perfectly good wife and mother into handing over husband and father merely because his eyes had gone sort of blinky star-gazing at her. No. Such a translation didn’t sound reasonable at all; was quite too raw for the range. Better give his ears to the music and buy a Hoyle-translated libretto to-morrow.

Settling back in his chair, Pape allowed his gaze and mind to concentrate, after a habit acquired of late in Central Park, upon the nearby. She had an expressive profile, the young woman whom he had self-selected. If facial traits had real connection with character, that protruding chin, although curved too youthfully to do justice to its joints, suggested that she would not retreat unless punished beyond her strength. If young Irene only would take one good look at her cousin’s chin she must give up in any contest between them.

But then, Irene’s mental eye was on herself. To her, evidently, all other women were more or less becoming backgrounds.

That she should be so near him, Jane; that he actually should get—oh, it wasn’t imagination—the fragrance of her hair; yet that he should be so far away! ... She’d be annoyed and he must not do it, but he felt tempted to train his hired glasses on her, as she had trained hers on him only a few minutes since. He’d have liked again to draw her eyes close to his through their lensed aid and study out the answer to that teasing question—did she or did she not know that she didn’t know him?

One thing was clear in the semi-gloom. Her neck and shoulders and back looked more like marble than he’d have supposed live flesh could look. And her lines were lovely—not too padded over to conceal the shoulder blades, yet smooth. Above the narrow part of the V of silver lace, a small, dark dot emphasized her whiteness. Was it a freckle or a mole?

Another than himself seemed interested to know. The handsome Mr. Harford was leaning forward, elbows on knees and chin cupped in hand, his eyes closed, his lips almost touching the beauty spot. Had he given up to the welling wail of Zaza’s attempt to out-sing conventions or was his attention, too, on that tantalizing mark?

Whether or no, Pape felt at the moment that he must prevent the imminent contact if he did not live to do anything else in life. He, too, leaned forward. But his eyes did not close. They remained wide open, accurately gauging the distance between a pair of sacrilegious mustached lips and——

Tragedy was temporarily averted or, as it turned out, supplanted. An usher appeared between the curtains; in subdued tones asked for Miss Lauderdale; held up a square, white envelope.

Jane arose and passed into the cloak room. Mills Harford followed her. Pape in turn, followed him. Observing the girl closely as she tore open the envelope and read the enclosure, he saw alarm on her face; saw the sudden tension of her figure; saw her lips lengthen into a thin line.

“Chauffeur brought it. He is waiting down stairs for an answer,” the usher advised her.

“Tell him,” she said, “that I’ll come at once.”

The usher bowed and vanished.

“Anything wrong, Jane?” Harford asked.

“I can’t stay for the last act. Aunt Helene has been—has sent for me.”

As if fearful lest he should insist upon knowing the contents of her note, she crumpled it in one hand; with the other reached for a brocaded cape that hung on one side of the mirrored rack; allowed him to anticipate her and lay it about her shoulders.

“I’ll go with you,” said he.

“No.” She paused in her start toward the corridor and glanced into his face uncertainly. “Tamo is waiting with the car. You must see the opera out. The Farrar probably has thrills and thrills saved for the finale.”

“Not for me—without you. Of course I’ll go with you, dear.”

The ardor of the handsome chap’s last pronouncement seemed to decide her.

“Of course you won’t.” She shook his hand from her shoulder as if offended. “You are giving this party. You owe it to the Allens to stay. Explain to Irene and the rest that I——”

“At least let me put you into the car.”

“No.” Positively, she snapped this time. “I don’t need you. I don’t want you, to be frank. You’re coming up to the house to supper, all of you. Perhaps then I’ll explain.”

“You’ll explain on the way up—now.”

Harford looked to have made up his mind; looked angry. He took her elbow rather forcefully and started with her into the corridor.

On the sill she stopped and faced him defiantly. “I won’t explain until and unless I wish to. You can’t use that tone with me, Mills, successful as you may have found it with others. Mr. Pape is going to put me into the car.”

And lo, the Westerner found himself by her side, his hand at her elbow. He had felt electrified by her summons. Although not once had she glanced toward where he stood just outside the curtains, uncertain whether to advance or retreat, she apparently had been keen to his presence and had felt his readiness to serve.

Their last glance at Harford showed his face auburn as his hair. They hurried down the grand stairway, passed the regal doorman and queried the resplendent starter. His signal brought the Sturgis limousine, parked on Broadway in consideration of the emergency call. The driver, a Japanese, was alone on the seat in front.

Jane had not volunteered one word on the way down, and Pape was mindful to profit by the recent demonstration of her resentment of inquiries. Now, however, he began to fear that she had forgotten his existence entirely. A nod from her kept the chauffeur from scrambling out. She let herself into the car and tried the inside catch of the door as if to make sure that she was well shut in—alone.

But Pape’s habit of initiative overruled his caution. He had fractured too many rules of convention to-night to be intimidated at this vital moment. With the same sweep of the hand he demanded a moment more of the driver and pulled open the door.

“Of course I’m going along, Jane dear,” said he.

She gasped from shock of his impudence; a long moment stared at him; then, with a flash of the same temper she had shown Mills, returned him value received.

“Of course you’re not, Peter dar-rling.”

“Why not?”

Stubbornly he placed his shiny, large, hurting right foot on the running-board.

“Because you’re not a possible person. You’re quite impossible.” And with the waspish exclamation she leaned out, took him by the coat lapels and literally pushed him out of her way. “I know that I don’t know you at all. Did you think you had deceived me for one instant? I am not in the habit of scraping acquaintance with strangers, even at grand opera.”

“But—but——” he began stammered protest.

“It was partly my fault to-night. I did stare at you,” she continued hurriedly. “You looked so different from the regular run of men in black and white. Maybe my curiosity did invite you and you showed nerve that I learned to like out West by accepting. I couldn’t be such a poor sport as to turn you down before the rest. But it’s time now for the good-by we didn’t say in the Yellowstone.” She turned to the speaking tube. “Ready, Tamo. And don’t mind the speed limit getting home.”

From the decision of her voice, the man from Montana knew that she meant what she said. Never had he found it necessary to force his presence upon a woman. He stepped aside, heard the door pulled to with a slam; watched the heavy machine roll away. Its purr did not soothe him.