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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75475 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND
+
+
+
+
+  THE “DO SOMETHING”
+  BOOKS
+
+  BY
+  HELEN BEECHER LONG
+
+    JANICE DAY
+    THE TESTING OF JANICE DAY
+    HOW JANICE DAY WON
+    THE MISSION OF JANICE DAY
+
+  12mo. Cloth. Illustrated
+  Price per volume, $1.25 net
+
+  GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
+  NEW YORK
+
+
+[Illustration: “I leave you, Miss Clayton, to keep things straight here!”
+
+                                                       (_See Page 138_)]
+
+
+
+
+  THE GIRL HE LEFT
+  BEHIND
+
+  BY
+  HELEN BEECHER LONG
+
+  Author of
+  The “Janice Day” Books
+
+  ILLUSTRATED BY
+  R. EMMETT OWEN
+
+  GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
+  NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
+  GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
+
+  _All rights reserved_
+
+  PRINTED IN U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                           PAGE
+
+      I “So Perfectly Capable”        11
+
+     II A Comparison                  22
+
+    III “Dogfennel”                   30
+
+     IV The Skinners                  41
+
+      V The Dream of a Star           53
+
+     VI Two Good-byes                 66
+
+    VII Leading Up to a Climax        77
+
+   VIII A Puzzling Situation          89
+
+     IX The Duty Devolves             98
+
+      X Love and Business            107
+
+     XI War Is Declared              121
+
+    XII The Image He Took Away       129
+
+   XIII The Awakening                140
+
+    XIV Benway’s Discovery           152
+
+     XV From “Over There”            164
+
+    XVI The Clouds Thicken           175
+
+   XVII A Rendezvous With Death      185
+
+  XVIII The Wrath of the Hun         198
+
+    XIX Uncertainties                205
+
+     XX So Far Away!                 216
+
+    XXI The Burden                   224
+
+   XXII The Fight                    231
+
+  XXIII Comparisons                  241
+
+   XXIV Opening the Way              248
+
+    XXV Compensation                 259
+
+   XXVI His Awakening                265
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  “I leave you, Miss Clayton, to keep things
+    straight here!” (_See Page 138_)               _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                           FACING
+                                                            PAGE
+  He did fire--futilely, perhaps--as the great
+    car circled clumsily above the spot (_See
+    Page 201_)                                                200
+
+  “I nominate her as assistant manager, to hold
+    the job till Frank Barton comes back!”
+    (_See Page 227_)                                          227
+
+  “You have been in my thoughts continually--the
+    girl I left behind” (_See Page 268_)                      268
+
+
+
+
+THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+“SO PERFECTLY CAPABLE”
+
+
+Ethel Clayton gathered the several letters with their accompanying
+checks in a neat sheaf and rose from her desk, which was placed nearest
+the door of the manager’s office. With the papers in her left hand she
+went to the door on which was stenciled “Mr. Barton” and opened it
+without waiting for a reply to her knock. She knew only Jim Mayberry
+was in the room with the manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+As she pushed the door inward she heard Frank Barton saying:
+
+“I am puzzled what answer to make them, Jim.”
+
+The manager was at his desk. Mayberry, leaning back in his chair,
+nodded understandingly and in agreement. The general manager was not
+in the habit of taking the superintendent of the factory into his
+confidence in particular instances and Mayberry was alive to that fact.
+He listened. Listening, and keeping one’s mouth shut, never hurt a man
+yet.
+
+The girl at the door of the office waited, too. Her business with the
+manager was important, if not imperative.
+
+“The Bogata people have been good customers of ours in the past,” went
+on Barton, reflectively. “But I have inside information that their
+credit is wabbly. It is strained, just as ours has been. If we tied up
+twenty to thirty thousand dollars in their particular line of goods,
+and then had the goods left on our hands, it might be fatal to the
+Hapwood-Diller Company, even now.
+
+“The expansion of mercantile values and the increase in profits have
+not struck our kind of production, as you very well know, Jim. Our
+stock is not listed among the ‘war brides.’ Rather it might better be
+termed a ‘war widow.’ The company has had a hard pull, Jim. We can’t
+afford to take many chances.”
+
+Again the superintendent sat tight and merely nodded. The declining
+sun delivered slanting rays in through the high windows of the general
+manager’s office. The two men--neither of whom had arrived at thirty
+years--sat with preternaturally grave faces, one ruminating upon the
+event that had unexpectedly arisen in the affairs of the concern they
+had both worked for since boyhood; the other possibly giving much more
+thought to his own personal matters.
+
+For Jim Mayberry, without being in the least neglectful of his duties
+as superintendent of the factory, was a person given much to the
+contemplation of what he called “the prime law of nature: Looking out
+for Number One.” He did, however, suggest:
+
+“Those Bogata people have been all right folks, Frank. The factory’s
+made money on their orders.”
+
+“That’s just it,” the manager returned briskly, but with a gesture that
+betrayed his indecision.
+
+He was a tall, black-haired, virile fellow, clean shaven, good color in
+his cheeks, and impeccably dressed. Mayberry, in contrast, had light
+hair which already he plastered across his crown to hide an incipient
+bald spot. He wore a small blond moustache and had numerous wrinkles
+about his eyes.
+
+“Just the same it is not safe, I firmly believe, to accept the order.
+But a brusk refusal might do the Hapwood-Diller Company untold harm at
+some future time. The Bogata concern may come back. Miracles do happen.”
+
+“Better accept the order then,” Mayberry put in. “We can postpone
+filling it. We don’t have to give a bond. If they really prove to be
+shaky, we can renege.”
+
+The girl, who had come in and softly closed the door, flashed the
+superintendent a glance that was all scorn for business ethics thus
+expressed. But Barton replied quite calmly:
+
+“Two objections to that, Jim. In the first place the Hapwood-Diller
+Company has always based its policy on honor. Secondly, it is unwise
+for us to tie up any money at all in beginning a job we do not intend
+to complete.”
+
+“Aw!” grunted the superintendent. His vocabulary--at this juncture at
+least--seemed not to be extensive.
+
+There had been a rising murmur in the street under the open windows for
+some minutes. Now the sudden crash of martial music broke upon their
+ears. Barton’s countenance became vivid with interest, and he swung
+himself erect and strode to the nearest window.
+
+“Here come the boys,” he said, pride vibrating in his voice. He was
+very military looking. Nothing but the “setting up exercise” could ever
+have made his shoulders so very square and his splendidly muscled torso
+taper to so narrow a waist.
+
+Mayberry rose and sauntered after him. “Mailsburg’s heroes,” he
+observed. “I suppose you’re wishing you were marching away with them,
+Frank.”
+
+The other said nothing, but his eyes glowed. The marching column swung
+around the corner following the band--a column in khaki, a color
+already becoming familiar on the streets although war was not many
+months old.
+
+Ethel had gone to the other window and was likewise looking out upon
+the quota of the National Guard, with packs and rifles, on their way to
+the railroad station. A little group of women, girls and children clung
+to the column and kept pace with it. The men spectators seemed rather
+ashamed to follow on, but stood, nevertheless, on the curb to watch the
+boys go by.
+
+“I expect they’ll have a hot old time down at that training camp,”
+drawled Mayberry.
+
+Barton did not seem to hear him. His hand came to salute as the colors
+went by.
+
+A volume of voices rose from below as the band music drifted into the
+distance.
+
+“And mebbe marching to their graves!”
+
+“It’s a shame that some that can least be spared have to go while them
+that would never be missed keep out of it.”
+
+“You’re right! Some of ’em’s got fathers an’ mothers, an’ wives!” cried
+a shrill voice, “while them that ain’t got a soul dependent on ’em----”
+
+“There’s one yonder,” was the quick rejoinder. “And had all the benefit
+of Guard training too!” And the speaker, a woman, directed the gaze of
+her companions to the office window.
+
+Mayberry chuckled. “They’ve pinned you to the wall, Frank,” he murmured
+in the ear of the white-faced manager.
+
+Ethel Clayton had turned suddenly from the window. “Have you time to
+sign these checks and letters before the outgoing mail, Mr. Barton?”
+she asked.
+
+He took the papers, but did not verbally reply for a moment. His
+countenance had become calm again, if still pale, when he had seated
+himself in his chair and turned in it so that the others could both
+observe him.
+
+“I will sign them at once, Miss Clayton,” Barton said quite composedly.
+“But first----”
+
+For a moment his gaze centered upon her. There was something wholly
+good to look at in the girl’s face and figure. Had she not dressed
+so practically for her work her personal attractions would have been
+further enhanced. Mayberry was watching her, too; and his gaze betrayed
+a certain eagerness, whereas the manager’s eyes merely revealed
+expectancy. Then he flicked a glance in Mayberry’s direction.
+
+“Perhaps Miss Clayton might give us a word of advice upon this matter,
+Jim?” he said questioningly, and with a quizzical little smile.
+
+The superintendent, a little startled, shifted his gaze from the girl’s
+face to the manager’s countenance. Ethel, perfectly composed, waited
+for the explanation of Barton’s observation.
+
+“Woman’s intuition forever!” the latter ejaculated.
+
+“What do you mean, Frank?” hastily demanded Jim Mayberry. “If you and I
+don’t know what to do----”
+
+Ethel flushed faintly, but looked questioningly at the manager. The
+implied doubt of her ability in Mayberry’s tone possibly piqued her.
+Frank Barton said in his good-natured, easy manner:
+
+“Oh, we know _what_ to do. But it’s the way the thing is done. You know
+about this new Bogata order, Miss Clayton?”
+
+“Of course, Mr. Barton.”
+
+“I do not see how we can accept it. The Bogata Company is not in good
+financial standing. But we must not offend them. The refusal must be
+one to which they cannot take exception. It is a big order, and they
+have sent it in without question, just as though they expected us to
+get to work on it with merely an acknowledgment of the favor.”
+
+“I see,” the girl said in her composed way.
+
+“You are so perfectly capable, Miss Clayton,” laughed the general
+manager. “See what you can do with the matter. Do you think we can keep
+within the lines of safety, and yet make no enemy of the Bogata people?”
+
+“I believe it can be done, Mr. Barton,” replied the girl.
+
+There was a decision in her manner of speaking that revealed Ethel
+Clayton as being quite what the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company had said she was--“capable.”
+
+“See what you can do with a letter, then,” Barton went on, producing
+the order sheets in question and handing them to her along with the
+letters and checks he had signed.
+
+She left the private office without further word. Jim Mayberry was
+frowning.
+
+“You’re trusting a good deal to that girl, Frank,” he growled.
+
+“I’ve never trusted anything to her yet that she hasn’t handled all
+right,” the manager replied easily. “If I manage to--to get away, Jim,
+you’ll find her a great help here.”
+
+“Uh-huh!” grunted the superintendent. “Maybe.”
+
+“You are insular,” laughed Frank Barton. “The women are forging to the
+front, man. Miss Clayton is far more capable than some of the heads of
+departments who have grown gray here.”
+
+“Maybe,” agreed the superintendent. “But I don’t want to see her out
+there in overalls, bossing my men around. Don’t forget that, Frank.”
+
+The superintendent arose and strolled out of the private office. In the
+larger desk room he halted and watched the “capable” girl at her desk
+nearest the manager’s door. Ethel was the “buffer” between much outside
+annoyance and the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+There were gold and red lights in her chestnut hair; the pallor of
+her countenance was not unhealthy; merely she was not enough in the
+open. But where the sun had kissed the bridge of her nose there was a
+sprinkle of tiny freckles. There were flecks of gold, too, in her brown
+eyes. Her mouth and chin were firm rather than soft, and the gaze of
+her eyes direct; nevertheless there was nothing unfeminine about her
+appearance.
+
+The severest critic could hold no brief against the charms of her
+figure. Her arms were beautifully rounded, her wrists tapering, her
+hands just the right size. She had a naturally small waist, and the
+lines of her hips showed that her limbs were slenderly yet strongly
+built. She was a tall girl.
+
+The superintendent caught her eye after a moment, she looking up
+thoughtfully from the papers before her.
+
+“You want to handle that business with gloves, Ethel,” he advised in
+a low voice. “Barton’s hardly himself to-day--the boys going away and
+all. He thinks that, with three years’ experience in bossing those
+sappies around the armory, he should jump right into this war. Get to
+be a general or something right off the handle,” and he chuckled.
+
+Again the girl’s face flushed softly and she dropped her gaze. She made
+him no reply at all, but Mayberry went on:
+
+“And that Fuller girl’s got him running around in circles, too. You can
+see he isn’t himself, or he would not balk at such an order as this
+from the Bogata people. Why, they’re all right folks. The factory’s
+made a lot of money out of their orders. And here----”
+
+“Did Mr. Barton ask you to discuss this matter with me, Mr. Mayberry?”
+asked the girl coldly and without looking up again. “If not, please
+remember that he has commissioned me to write a letter to them that
+will meet his approval. Don’t bother me now.”
+
+“Oh, pshaw, Ethel!” the man said, smiling down at her unctuously.
+“Don’t take every little thing so blame seriously. Frank Barton and I
+were kids together. I can’t fall down and worship him the way some of
+you do. Anyway, you’d better show him how to take a chance with these
+Bogata people--if you really want to _help_. I know they’re all right.”
+
+“Why don’t you tell that to Mr. Barton?” the girl asked rather tartly.
+
+“Oh, pshaw!” chuckled the superintendent. “Let it go till to-morrow.
+It’s almost closing time, anyway. Take a little spin in that car of
+mine before supper, will you?”
+
+“Thank you; no.”
+
+“Aw! don’t act so offishly, Ethel. You’ve never been to ride with me
+yet.”
+
+“I understand that other girls have--to their sorrow,” Miss Clayton
+responded in a tone that cut through even Jim Mayberry’s skin. He
+flushed dully and his lazy eyes began to glow.
+
+“Don’t believe everything you hear, Ethel,” he said. “I want to talk to
+you about that. Let me drive you home to-night and I’ll explain these
+stories that you have heard.”
+
+He strolled away as Little Skinner came across the room to ask a
+question. Could it be that Little Skinner had received a secret
+signal to break in upon the superintendent’s objectionable line of
+conversation? At least, her business with Ethel was brief.
+
+The latter’s attention immediately returned to the problem the manager
+had put up to her for solution. She was made proud whenever Frank
+Barton did anything like this, and of late it was not infrequent that
+he had shown his trust in her ability.
+
+Yet there was a sting in the way he had spoken, too. She knew well
+enough that the sting was unintentional on his part. Never had the
+general manager been other than scrupulously polite to her. She was
+always “Miss Clayton” to him, and he deferred to her in many ways and
+was as courteous in his busiest moments as he could have been meeting
+her at a social affair. That was Frank Barton’s way.
+
+But--
+
+She found that her gaze had wandered from the papers before her to
+the small mirror set into the rather ornate inkstand that stood upon
+her desk--a birthday present from her office mates not many months
+before. The girl reflected there was, Ethel Clayton very well knew,
+better looking than the average girl. Her even features were quietly
+beautiful. She perhaps lacked the verve and dash possessed by some
+girls. She had one particular girl in mind as she thought this.
+She lacked the tricks of the social trade too, that that same girl
+possessed.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and brought her attention back with a jerk
+to the matter in hand. But there was faint disgust in her tone as she
+murmured:
+
+“Yes, just as he says: ‘Miss Clayton is so perfectly capable.’ Pah!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A COMPARISON
+
+
+She read the letter from the Bogata Company and again glanced through
+the order. It was a large one. It called for certain supplies she knew
+the factory did not have on hand. She realized that the goods ordered
+were all of a special pattern and would be practically useless either
+to the Hapwood-Diller Company or to any other concern save the Bogata
+people if the latter should be unable to take the goods.
+
+Yet this letter assumed that the order would be accepted and the goods
+turned out without any hesitancy on the part of the manufacturers, and
+upon the usual terms. The Bogata Company ignored the possibility of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company having heard of its financial embarrassments.
+The letter and accompanying order were sent, Ethel was sure, in a
+spirit of bravado. To use a common phrase, the Bogata people were
+“trying to put something over.”
+
+If the scheme went through, all well and good. The Hapwood-Diller
+Company might be made the means of saving the Bogata people from actual
+and complete collapse. Ethel knew, however, that her employing concern
+was in no shape to assume such a burden. Yet if the firm ordering the
+goods finally pulled out of its quagmire of financial difficulty, its
+friendship rather than its enmity was to be desired.
+
+Her mind centered upon the matter, the logical circumstances connected
+with it marching in slow procession through her brain. She was
+acquainted with every important order now on the factory’s books.
+Even Jim Mayberry had no better grasp of the details of the factory’s
+affairs than Ethel Clayton.
+
+Suddenly she got up and went to a file cabinet wherein was listed the
+particulars of all orders as yet unfinished. She began to figure with
+pencil and pad upon the already promised output of the factory and its
+possible output when the force was driven at top speed.
+
+Her calculations led her to certain unmistakable conclusions. She went
+back to her desk, calmly wrote the letter, typed it, and took the
+letter and her figures in to Barton. He was about to close his desk for
+the day.
+
+“Do you think you have succeeded?” he asked, smiling and taking the
+typed sheet from her hand. But in a moment he glanced up quickly and
+with a slight frown. “What is this you say here, Miss Clayton? We
+cannot accept the order because of work already contracted for? Why,
+that----”
+
+“Is the plain truth, Mr. Barton!” she exclaimed, putting forward
+her array of figures. “The factory is now working maximum hours and
+with a full crew in all departments. I have heard you say yourself
+that either extra help or overtime cuts into the profits rather than
+increases them. To fulfill contracts we have accepted, if you took on
+this of the Bogata Company, we would have to run the machines longer
+hours and pay extra wages. The Bogata people offer no price for their
+work to cover such an increased cost. My letter embodies the actual
+truth without going into particulars; but my statements can be easily
+proved if they are inclined to be critical.”
+
+Barton’s face had been gradually lighting up, and it was with real
+admiration that he said at her conclusion:
+
+“Fine! I’ll sign that and you can put it in the mail in the morning.
+Has John gone to the post-office?”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Barton.”
+
+“The morning will do,” said the general manager, affixing his signature
+to the letter. “You certainly are a capable assistant.”
+
+She flushed at his words as she turned from his desk; and the color
+remained in her countenance for some time. But it was not a flush of
+pleasure. Indeed, the expression of her countenance was not at all
+happy as she closed her desk and left the main office a little later.
+
+At the street exit she hesitated; then she went back through the drying
+and cutting rooms and had John Murphy let her out of the side gate
+which would not be opened for an hour yet for the exit of the factory
+hands. She had caught a glimpse of Jim Mayberry sitting in his car out
+in front.
+
+She did not like the superintendent, and for more reasons than one. In
+the first place, he was one of those men who seem to have no respect at
+all for girls who worked. Ethel was not sure how well he was received
+by Mailsburg people whose first thoughts were of society. But Mayberry
+had a bad reputation among many respectable people. Careful mothers and
+fathers frowned on his attentions to their daughters.
+
+As she turned into Burnaby Street on her way home she saw Frank Barton
+ahead of her. His military stride was likewise taking him briskly
+homeward. The girl might have hastened her own steps and joined him;
+but she hesitated, for that was not like Ethel Clayton. Her association
+with the handsome general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing
+Company had been entirely on a business footing. The fact that they
+attended the same church had scarcely brought them together outside the
+offices of the concern.
+
+Barton was well liked by most Mailsburg people. Especially had he been
+commended for his work of the last two years--since he had been raised
+to the pinnacle of general manager of the biggest manufacturing concern
+in the town.
+
+Yet there are always carping critics in every place and in any event.
+As mark the criticism hurled at the young manager from the sidewalk
+that afternoon as the boys were marching from the National Guard Armory
+to the railway station.
+
+Ethel knew that the suggestion that Barton was a slacker must have hurt
+the general manager cruelly. She, perhaps as well as anybody else, knew
+why Frank Barton, trained in the Guard, and a military man from choice,
+was not marching away with this first quota at the call to arms.
+
+If many Mailsburg people looked at Barton in the way suggested by the
+careless criticism which had lately reached his ears, Ethel Clayton
+knew that the manager’s existence was going to be a hard one. She
+did not want to see him go to the war. Indeed, she was by no means
+inspired as yet with any degree of patriotism. The war was too remote
+and our reason for entering into it too theoretical. The blood of but
+few of our men had been shed, and those were, as a rule, such as were
+connected with the more spectacular portions of the service, nor had
+our women and children been butchered by the Hun.
+
+In her heart Ethel longed to say something to Frank Barton to ease the
+wound which he had suffered that afternoon. Should she overtake him and
+speak? And then, even while she hesitated, the humming of a smoothly
+running automobile sounded behind her.
+
+She turned to look, startled, fearing it was Jim Mayberry. But a girl
+was driving the car that swerved in toward the curb, stopping just
+beside the manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Barton!”
+
+The girl in the car was handsome, but with a high color and a shrill
+voice. She had a great deal of light hair, which was carefully dressed;
+she wore an expensive motor hat and veil; her cerise motor coat was of
+heavy silk. If the frame ever sets off the picture to advantage, then
+Helen Fuller was a work of art!
+
+“It’s just too, too lovely that I should catch you this way, Mr.
+Barton,” she cried, as Ethel approached nearer. “You can’t say you are
+busy and I am _sure_ it is not yet dinner time. I _must_ see you about
+our garden festival. You know, for the Red Cross. We _all_ must do our
+bit _these_ days. Do hop in and advise with poor me.”
+
+Ethel came within range of Barton’s vision. He gave her as usual one
+of his warm, kind smiles, lifting his hat. Helen Fuller stared at
+the passing girl, who plainly heard her scornful query: “One of your
+factory hands, Mr. Barton?”
+
+“One of our office force--and one of the most valuable on the pay roll
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company, Miss Fuller, I assure you.”
+
+But the cheerful reply did not take the barb out of the wound Helen
+Fuller’s question had made. A little farther along the street, however,
+Ethel shook herself and murmured:
+
+“What a perfect fool I am! It is ridiculous to mind anything that Helen
+Fuller says. She remembers very well going to school with me and that
+I was always at or near the head of the class and she at the foot.
+That was before Grandon Fuller had that stock in the company left him
+by Uncle Diller. Dear me! how the possession of money changes some
+people.” Then, and cheerfully, she exclaimed aloud: “Ah! here’s Benway.”
+
+A young man with a perfectly splendid head of brown curly hair,
+flawless complexion, level brows, fine, open gray eyes set well apart,
+a straight nose and lips not full enough to be sensuous but not too
+thin, the whole countenance softened by a cleft chin and humorous lines
+at the corners of his mouth--that was Benway Chase.
+
+He came swinging along the walk and seized Ethel companionably by her
+right arm, although that placed him upon the inner side of the path.
+She met his look with one of pleasure, and they went on together like
+the good comrades they were.
+
+People whom they knew and met greeted them with a matter-of-course air.
+To see Ethel Clayton and Ben Chase together was nothing astonishing for
+Mailsburg folk. They had been neighbors and chums since they were in
+rompers.
+
+Her brightness of countenance faded when her old chum left her at the
+gate of the Clayton cottage. She cast a commiserating glance after him
+as he went on, whistling. It was not until then that the withered,
+useless right arm of the young man became really noticeable.
+
+She called to her mother that she was home from work and went up to her
+room to freshen her dress for dinner. Benway slipped out of her mind as
+she did this--and most other things, save one. That was a comparison
+she had begun to make on Burnaby Street between herself and Helen
+Fuller.
+
+Was she jealous of the other girl? Why should she be? She was sure she
+would not care to change places with Miss Fuller, money and all, for
+any consideration. Yet--
+
+She saw Frank Barton getting into the Fuller car, which Helen drove
+so conspicuously about the streets of Mailsburg. Ethel Clayton could
+not do that! Ethel must work, and dress plainly six days in the week
+because of her position. Miss Fuller was always dressed as gaily
+as a bird of paradise. And one must confess that men’s eyes were
+attracted--sometimes blinded--by gay clothes. Frank Barton could not be
+blamed for being a man. No. She had no complaint to make against Frank
+Barton. He was always polite and kind and appreciative.
+
+“And he’d be all of that to a stray kitten that chanced to cross his
+path!” she ejaculated in sudden disgust. “Helen Fuller has something to
+offer him that I haven’t.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+“DOGFENNEL”
+
+
+Frank Barton stepped into the car beside Miss Fuller and was whirled
+away, a willing captive. To tell the truth, the general manager of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company had been so busy fitting himself for his present
+situation with the corporation, which he had now held two years, that
+he had found little play-time. Having been motherless since childhood,
+and always sisterless, he probably knew less about women than any
+normal man in Mailsburg who had arrived at the age of twenty-eight.
+
+No girl had before so plainly shown that she was interested in him--and
+Miss Fuller only recently. Her curiosity had first been piqued by
+hearing Grandon Fuller speak in strong approval of the manager. Barton
+had pulled the concern out of a slough of financial trouble that had
+threatened to ruin the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+The Fullers had not always been wealthy. At least, not the
+Grandon-Fuller branch. Not until Israel Diller died and left them the
+bulk of his holdings in the Hapwood-Diller Company were they any better
+off than their neighbors on the far end of Burnaby Street, where Ethel
+Clayton and her mother and the Chases still lived.
+
+With the money Mrs. Fuller--an ambitious woman--had set out to be the
+leader of Mailsburg’s society. To a certain degree she had succeeded.
+Helen was growing up to be a society devotee and with scarcely a
+sensible idea in her head. But she had beauty, and she made the most of
+that.
+
+It was the thing, too, to be alive with interest in some semi-public
+topic or other; and Helen was alive to the value of self-advertising.
+A week never went by that her name did not appear in the society news
+of the city or county papers. She had been out just as long as Frank
+Barton had been manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+She did not really care a fillip for Frank Barton--not at this
+time--nor for any other man. But she thoroughly enjoyed the reputation
+of having more men dangling after her than any other girl in Mailsburg.
+She even endured the society of that “tame cat,” Morrison Copley; for
+at least he counted!
+
+“Really, Mr. Barton,” Helen said, having got the manager beside her in
+the driving seat of the car. “Really, you show very little interest in
+your country’s welfare. Don’t you realize _yet_ we are _at war_?”
+
+Barton’s face was rather glum, but he tried to speak lightly. “I read
+something about it in the papers. I’ve been so extremely busy, Miss
+Fuller, I fear I should only know of it from hearsay if the Germans
+sailed up the creek and landed at old Hammerly’s dock.”
+
+“The boys of the National Guard marched away to-day!” she cried.
+
+“Yes. That does make it look serious,” he agreed in a graver strain.
+
+“Everybody should do his or her bit, Mr. Barton,” the girl said with an
+admonitory air. “I am _astonished_ at you. As I tell Morry Copley, if
+I were a man nothing should keep me out of uniform. I _do_ think those
+khaki colors are awfully _sweet_.”
+
+“I fear,” Barton said grimly, “that the fellows who put on khaki
+because it looks ‘sweet’ will not make particularly good soldiers.”
+
+“Morry Copley, for instance?” and she laughed at herself and at the
+non-present Copley. “Oh, well, you know what I mean. It really seems
+_too_ bad that so many of you men in this town are not a bit patriotic.”
+
+“You’ve got me wrong, Miss Fuller,” the manager said hastily and in
+considerable earnestness. “I do not think I lack patriotism. But one
+must fulfill one’s duty.”
+
+“Oh, business!” she exclaimed, scornfully.
+
+He was on the defensive. “Your father’s income from our company is what
+enables you to drive about in this car, Miss Fuller,” he said bluntly.
+
+“Now, _don’t_, for pity’s sake, talk _business_ to me. I really don’t
+understand a thing about it. I presume that girl who passed us just
+now--Clayton is her name?--may possess all the business acumen needed.
+I haven’t _her_ experience.”
+
+And Frank Barton, startled, wondered why Helen Fuller had taken the
+trouble to slur Ethel Clayton.
+
+The Fuller house, built on the exodus of the family from Burnaby
+Street, was just the dwelling one knowing Grandon Fuller and his wife
+would expect it to be. It was very large and very important looking,
+with a lot of gingerbread trimming about the eaves and veranda roof and
+the porte-cochère.
+
+A footman in a conspicuous livery stood at attention as Helen stopped
+her car under the covered way. With a silver whistle this flunky
+summoned a man from the garage to take the automobile. Barton followed
+his hostess to the other end of the veranda where quite a party--mostly
+the younger matrons and the girls of Mailsburg’s smart set--were
+gathered. Tea had been made and two other liveried servants were
+rolling service tables about from group to group.
+
+“Well, I have accomplished something,” Helen said, after an apology for
+not being at home when her guests arrived and dropping with assumed
+weariness into a comfortable chair. Immediately her maid put a knitting
+bag into her lap and her mistress seized the needles with avidity.
+“Every stitch counts, you know,” she went on. “I only wish I might knit
+while I drive my machine. But that is impossible. And I told father
+I’d drive the car myself and so let Charles, our chauffeur, enlist. We
+women must do our part. Let’s see, Marie; how many of these sweaters
+have I done for the soldiers?”
+
+“That is Mam’selle’s second this fortnight,” said the French maid,
+without losing her composure. That she did nine-tenths of the work,
+Helen merely rattling the needles while company was present, was not a
+matter for the world to know.
+
+“You all know Mr. Barton, I think,” Helen went on, placing the manager
+in a chair near her, as though he were a stray kitten she had picked
+up on the street and brought home as a curiosity. “I’ve managed to
+interest _him_ in our garden party. Really, he should be made to do
+a good deal for the Red Cross. He has not done a sin-gle sol-i-ta-ry
+thing as yet for the _cause_. I tell him he is a slacker of the first
+water.”
+
+Some who chanced to hear her smiled. Frank Barton’s ears fairly burned.
+It was no joke for him; yet he admitted that Miss Fuller did not
+understand--_would_ not understand, perhaps--why he was not in khaki.
+
+“Bah Jove!” drawled the high and somewhat effeminate voice of Morrison
+Copley, “Mr. Barton has plenty of company in this burg. I heard old
+Hammerly say he thought of offering a reward for the discovery of a
+single man within the conscription age here who joins from patriotic
+motives. He says patriotism died out in Mailsburg in the last
+generation.”
+
+“By the way, Morry,” asked a fellow with the bulging shoulders of
+a prizefighter together with a dissipated face, “how did _you_ get
+exempted?”
+
+“Dependent parent,” returned Copley. “You know, mothaw really couldn’t
+get on without me.”
+
+“That’s true enough,” sneered the other. “Madam Copley would be lost
+without her baby boy.”
+
+Morrison Copley did not, however, lack the keener weapons of retort.
+“That’s all right, Bradley. I understand you gave the exemption board
+the names of two dependent barkeepers.”
+
+The laugh that followed this sally enabled Frank Barton to recover his
+composure. These fellows boldly acknowledged their lack of patriotic
+feeling. He knew that his reasons for claiming exemption until the
+Hapwood-Diller Company was in good shape again were, at least,
+commendable.
+
+In a desultory way plans were made for the forthcoming garden party to
+raise funds for the local Red Cross chapter. Barton did not find that
+either his advice or his efforts were much needed. But he did get a
+chance to talk with Miss Fuller; and he was not a deep enough student
+of feminine nature to understand just how shallow she was.
+
+The Fullers were of the best socially there was in Mailsburg, despite
+the fact that their money had come to them comparatively late. Mrs.
+Fuller’s maiden name had been Diller, and the Dillers dated their
+aristocracy in the county back to pre-Revolution days. To Barton, whose
+antecedents had been quite unimportant, such connections in a social
+way seemed worthy.
+
+“Come again to see me, Mr. Barton, when I am alone,” Helen whispered,
+when he rose to follow the very first group with their knitting bags
+that made its departure. “One must give one’s self more or less to
+one’s guests when there is a crowd like this. I want you to take dinner
+with us soon--quite _en famille_. Will you?”
+
+Barton promised. Grandon Fuller had always been cordial with him, and
+he was glad to be _persona grata_ with the family. After all, it meant
+considerable to him to be taken up by the Fullers.
+
+He was the only person on this occasion to walk away from the house.
+The others rode in some kind of vehicle. But somebody got into step
+with Barton less than ten yards from the gateway.
+
+“What brings you into the swagger part of the town, Frank?” demanded
+a harsh voice. “You are not hatching something with Fuller to
+double-cross the rest of the Hapwood-Diller stockholders?”
+
+The young manager knew the character of the speaker too well to be
+offended. Macon Hammerly wore an apparent grouch to shield himself from
+the importunities of his fellowmen. He actually could not say “No” to
+any request or favor asked, unless he shouted it.
+
+He was a dry old fellow with stiff, badly brushed iron-gray hair and an
+aggressive chin-whisker. He was the last man in Mailsburg to wear “half
+leg” boots and had a local cobbler make them for him. He kept a feed
+and grain store down on the docks and possessed in all probability more
+cash in the bank than any other man in town. But he made no display of
+it.
+
+He was distantly related to the Fullers; and he made no display of
+that, although Helen called him “Uncle.” He bent a curious and somewhat
+disapproving eye upon Barton as he waited for his answer.
+
+“I was just calling there.”
+
+“Huh! On whom?”
+
+“Miss Fuller took me up into her car and brought me over. It seems
+there is to be a garden party for the Red Cross----”
+
+“Expected it must be something about a cross,” grumbled Macon Hammerly.
+“Red Cross or what not, it will be the double-cross for you if you
+don’t look out. You’ve nothing in common, Frank, with that dogfennel.”
+
+“With _what_?” asked Barton, chuckling. “That’s a new one!”
+
+“A new name for that inconsequential, useless crowd that circle about
+Grandon Fuller’s gal? Huh! D’you know any better name for them? There
+ain’t nothing more useless and picayune along the road than dogfennel.
+That whole bunch isn’t worth the powder to blow it to Halifax!”
+
+“‘Dogfennel’,” and Barton still chuckled. “I don’t know but you are
+rather hard on our common may-weed. But I grant you that some of those
+people I met back there are quite as futile as the name implies. But
+Miss Fuller herself! She is a remarkably pretty girl.”
+
+The old man in the linen duster and the broad-brimmed hat was quite as
+emphatic as Barton expected him to be. “So’s dogfennel pretty--if you
+like weeds. I don’t want to see you mixing in with that crowd, Frank.
+How’s business?”
+
+“Better. Had to turn down a big order to-day, but I think we were
+justified in doing so.”
+
+“Huh! Who says so? You and Jim Mayberry?” growled Hammerly, who kept in
+quite close touch with the factory affairs.
+
+“Not altogether,” Barton smilingly replied. “We took the advice of Miss
+Clayton.”
+
+“Huh! You _did_?” Hammerly listened quietly to the manager’s
+explanation, commenting in his usual tart way, but with open
+satisfaction: “You do show some sense once in a while, Frank. She’s
+got a head on her, that Ethel Clayton. And you are right, I’ll bet a
+cooky! The Bogata people are due to bust inside of three months. Mark
+my words.”
+
+The two men separated at a corner and Barton strode on to his boarding
+house and the dinner which he knew would be dished up cold to him now.
+Mrs. Trevor played no table favorites in her ménage. The manager of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company was not happy. His reflections were tinged with
+a hue of disgust at his own equivocal situation.
+
+He knew he had good and sufficient reason for not enlisting the minute
+of the declaration that a state of war with Germany existed. The same
+reason had kept him at home when many of his comrades in the Guard had
+gone to the Mexican Border.
+
+He had been spending his strength and thought to one end since being
+placed in charge of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company. The
+war had struck the concern hard, cutting off or doubling the price
+of supplies without broadening the market for manufactured wares or
+increasing the profit on them.
+
+Upon the dividends of the company many families in Mailsburg depended
+for their very daily bread. Had the dividends been reduced or even
+passed for several successive quarters, the Fullers would have got
+along all right; but there were stockholders whose livelihood depended
+utterly upon the factory running on full time and turning a profit on
+every dollar’s worth of product that left the shipping room. And Frank
+Barton seemed to be the only man to keep it so running.
+
+For the most part these needy folk were widows or orphans or old people
+past working age, who had received their stock from one or another
+of the original owners of the factory. These helpless people Barton
+had felt particularly his charge. To throw up his job and join the
+colors might ruin the small fry depending upon the success of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company’s affairs. Until of late he had scarcely found
+breathing space to think of anything save the business of the factory.
+
+But now! The boys marching away earlier in the day had stabbed Frank
+Barton to the quick. He was not a man who wore his heart on his sleeve.
+It was only those who knew him best who suspected the rankling wound
+he suffered when his course was unfavorably compared with that of the
+guardsmen whose brother-in-arms he had been.
+
+Even Helen Fuller had accused him of being a slacker, and had compared
+him with Morry Copley and that Bradley fellow. Barton’s gorge rose as
+he thought of this.
+
+“A slacker, eh?” he muttered to himself. “A slacker, am I?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SKINNERS
+
+
+Jim Mayberry was smoking his second cigarette when a girl came out of
+the main door of the factory offices. She was a slim, rather startled
+looking girl. Her flaxen hair was pulled back so tightly as to raise
+her eyebrows perceptibly; this opened very wide her eyes and seemed
+even to pull the point of her nose up a little and raise her upper lip
+to display two little rabbit teeth.
+
+“Hello, Skinner,” said the superintendent. “Isn’t Ethel ’most ready?”
+
+“Hello, Jim Mayberry,” responded the girl, who felt no obligation to
+show the superintendent any particular respect outside the factory.
+“Going to take me home in your flivver?”
+
+“Aren’t you afraid to ride with me?” asked the man with a slow smile.
+
+“Nope. You try to get funny with _me_ and I’ll scratch your eyes out.”
+
+“My!” drawled Mayberry, “aren’t you the catty thing?”
+
+“You’d think so,” rejoined the flat-chested girl with all the strutting
+boastfulness of a boy. “No feller’s ever going to kiss _me_ if I don’t
+want him to.”
+
+“I bet you!” agreed the superintendent with mock admiration. “But
+where’s Ethel?”
+
+“You aren’t waiting for her, are you, Jim?” the slim girl asked,
+giggling.
+
+“I thought I was.”
+
+“Then there’s another thought coming to you,” declared the delighted
+Skinner. “Ethel went long ago--out through the side gate. Guess she
+must have suspected you’d be waiting here.”
+
+Mayberry uttered a brief and impolite expletive. That did not trouble
+Mabel Skinner. She lived in a house full of rough men. Her mother was
+dead and an older sister kept house for the Skinners. The children of
+Sam Skinner had not been brought up according to the Puritan acceptance
+of the term. Like Topsy, they had “just growed.”
+
+“She wouldn’t ride in that flivver with you anyway,” Mabel Skinner
+added. “But I would.”
+
+“Jump in, then, Little Skinner,” the superintendent said, without
+further advertising his chagrin.
+
+“I hope my Sunday School teacher won’t see me,” the girl observed,
+getting in beside him quickly. “If she does she will know I am riding
+fast to perdition. And _do_ make your old rattle-bang go as fast as
+possible, Jim. I just love to scoot over the road. Gee, if I’d only
+been made a boy instead of a girl, I’d have been a jockey.”
+
+“Hear the girl!” chuckled Mayberry, who was really after all too
+good-natured to be spiteful to his guest. “You’ll be up in one of
+these flying machines yet.”
+
+“Oh, that would be grand! I’d go to France and join the flying corps.
+That girl from Texas that got over there with the first batch of Yankee
+soldiers--did you read about her? They got on to her and sent her back.
+That’s because she got married to one of the buddies. Catch _me_! I
+wouldn’t marry the best man alive.”
+
+“You won’t,” prophesied Jim Mayberry, still chuckling.
+
+“Smartie! Anyhow, I wouldn’t fall for any man I’ve ever seen yet. Not
+even Mr. Barton,” she added, as though there might be some doubt in her
+mind about the general manager.
+
+“Humph! who has fallen for him?” demanded the superintendent
+suspiciously.
+
+“Every girl in town but me,” declared Mabel Skinner promptly, but
+grinning impishly, “He’s an awfully nice man, is Mr. Barton.”
+
+“Yes. I’d fall for him myself if I were a girl, I guess,” Mayberry
+agreed.
+
+“Yes--you--would! Say, that’s my corner!”
+
+“I know. But I’m going to spin you around the reservoir and bring you
+home the other way.”
+
+“Oh, bully!” ejaculated the girl, fairly jumping in her seat. “I’m
+being run away with by a man. Never thought it would happen to me. I
+really wish you wasn’t so trifling, Jim Mayberry. I’d maybe sue you
+for breach of promise.”
+
+“Then I’m safe, am I?” he asked.
+
+“As far as I am concerned you are. I wouldn’t really marry you on a
+bet, Jim. Don’t you know that?”
+
+He was highly amused. Mabel Skinner’s tart tongue always delighted him.
+She lived in one of the poorer quarters of the town. When he finally
+brought the machine into her street it created a sensation. People
+left their supper tables to see Mabel Skinner brought home in the
+superintendent’s car.
+
+“What’s the matter, Mab? Broke a leg?” demanded one lout of a boy, with
+an impudent grin for Mayberry, and who was just slipping out of the
+Skinners’ gate. This was “Boots” Skinner, next younger of the clan than
+Mabel.
+
+“Both of ’em, or you wouldn’t catch me ruining my reputation riding
+home with Mr. Mayberry. Don’t tell anybody, Boots.”
+
+The superintendent of the Hapwood-Diller factory found that it was he
+who felt some confusion in bringing Mabel home. The latter took her
+time in getting out of the car.
+
+“I’m awfully much obliged to you, Mr. Mayberry,” she said, in a shrill
+and penetrating voice, so that the interested neighbors could all hear.
+“I don’t know what I should have done if you hadn’t brought me. Walked,
+I guess. Well! ‘Over the river!’”
+
+She popped into the house before he could get the starter into action
+under the fire of the neighbors’ chuckles. They all knew Mabel Skinner;
+and most of them had sized up Jim Mayberry for what he was, too.
+
+Mayberry drove down into Mailsburg’s business quarter and stopped
+before the Bellevue Hotel. He often took his dinner there and spent the
+evening, as well, in some upper room where there were shaded lights,
+much cigar smoke, the clink of glasses and the rattle of poker chips.
+
+The superintendent had been born and brought up in Mailsburg, as Frank
+Barton had been; but his family was now scattered. He and Barton had
+been the closest of chums at school. Mayberry owned quite as bright
+a mind as the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company; but he
+lacked the balance of his friend.
+
+Had it not been for the inspiration of Barton’s companionship and
+example Mayberry would never have obtained the eminence he had in the
+factory. In truth, his old chum had actually boosted Mayberry into
+the superintendent’s job after having been himself elected manager of
+the concern. Not that Mayberry was not well fitted for this position.
+But he lacked that quality of ambition to have gained it for himself
+without Frank Barton’s good offices. At that, he lacked the grace of
+gratitude.
+
+The Bellevue was the gathering place of the sporting men of the town.
+When Mayberry came out from dinner, Mr. Grandon Fuller occupied one of
+the easy chairs on the porch. Fuller’s taste for society was not like
+that of his wife and daughter. He was a big, pursy man with a shock of
+white hair and a ruddy countenance. He had a hail-fellow-well-met air
+for most occasions, and his jovial manner made him popular with most
+people. In local politics he had some prominence.
+
+“Hey, young man!” he called to Mayberry, “you’ve no engagement, have
+you? Smith is getting up a party for a little game. Will you join us?”
+
+“Not to-night, Colonel,” returned the superintendent, giving Fuller a
+handle to his name that always delighted the rich man. He had been on
+the governor’s staff once. “I am sorry. I have an appointment.”
+
+“Tut, tut! can’t you let the girls alone for one night, Son?” and
+Fuller’s laugh was unctuous.
+
+“’Pon my word it’s business.”
+
+“Thought nobody had to trouble their heads about business up at the
+factory except Barton?”
+
+“But Barton may not be there always,” laughed the superintendent,
+although the suggestion of the manager’s omnipotence did not please
+him. Everybody praised Frank Barton’s business acumen. Mayberry, being
+Barton’s close friend, knew just how weak the fellow really was! This
+was Mayberry’s thought; but he made no display of this feeling, saying:
+
+“It really is business, Colonel. I am sorry not to be able to join you
+and the other gentlemen. But we really all have to work up there at the
+factory. Barton may get the bulk of the credit. You know how it is when
+a fellow once gets into the limelight.”
+
+“Yes,” chuckled Fuller. “But they tell me a lime never gets into the
+limelight. Don’t tell me Frank Barton is to be counted among the citrus
+fruit.”
+
+“Never!” responded Mayberry. “But, then, there are others working for
+the Hapwood-Diller Company too who are not lemons. Good-night.”
+
+He went down the steps whistling cheerfully and Mr. Fuller looked
+quizzically after him.
+
+“Bright young fellow, just the same,” murmured the man. “Perhaps may be
+made more useful, even, than Barton. But I fear neither Helen nor the
+wife would stand for _him_ as a dinner guest; whereas, Barton----”
+
+These cryptic observations were unheard by Mayberry of course. And the
+frown on his brow belied his cheerful whistle and airy remarks to Mr.
+Fuller. He got into his car, started it, and drove away from the hotel
+with the secret feeling that he would enjoy running over a dog.
+
+He kept on through the old part of Mailsburg and down past the docks
+and over the Stone Bridge. The creek was a wide, oilily flowing
+stream--save in the time of the spring freshets. He took the Creek
+Road and rolled easily out of town and along past the farms and wooded
+strips which intervened between Mailsburg and Norville.
+
+He drove slowly and looked at the illuminated dial of the clock before
+him frequently. It was plain that he had a rendezvous here in the open.
+Some one has said: “If you have a secret to tell, select the middle
+of a ten-acre lot.” Mayberry’s appointment suggested secrecy, for he
+finally stopped near the bank of the creek with an open, sloping field
+on the other hand, and no cover but a rock beside the road.
+
+There was shadow enough about the rock, however, to protect the figure
+of a man on the landward side. But the scent of his tobacco permeated
+the air.
+
+“Hello, Blaisdell?” Jim Mayberry said quietly and questioningly, having
+brought his car to a stop just opposite this rock.
+
+“Welcome, dear boy,” was the prompt reply. The waiting man stretched
+his long limbs and came out of the shadow, still puffing his pipe, to
+rest a foot upon the step of the car. Mayberry lit a cigarette and
+pinched out the glowing end of the match before dropping it. “What’s
+the news?” asked Blaisdell.
+
+“Kind of bad--for you and me,” Mayberry admitted.
+
+“What do you mean? Doesn’t that order go through?”
+
+“It may not. I’m no intriguer, Blaisdell. I can keep you informed; but
+I am not up in diplomacy. Barton has heard some yarn about you fellows.
+He is for turning the order down--flat.”
+
+“Can’t you influence him? I thought you and he were thicker than the
+hair on a dog’s neck.”
+
+“We’ve always been chums,” drawled Mayberry. “That doesn’t give me any
+hold over Frank’s processes of reasoning. And he can talk me off my
+feet. I didn’t agree to do the impossible, Blaisdell. If the order goes
+through the best I can do is to rush it.”
+
+“Yet you expect to get your rake-off,” sneered the other.
+
+“That’s my legitimate graft. It’s for letting everything go through
+smoothly. You know, in my position, I can favor your company,
+Blaisdell.”
+
+“It doesn’t seem that you can--not if this order clogs the chute. I am
+frank to tell you, Jim, we’ve got to get those goods without question
+or we shall be in untold trouble.”
+
+“Ye-as,” drawled the superintendent, “so I inferred. That is what is
+bothering Barton. He seems to be wise to the state of your credit.”
+
+“He doesn’t _know_ it,” snapped the other. “He only suspects. Nobody
+knows it but Billings, Hempstead, me and--you.”
+
+“And I’m sitting tight and saying nothing. I want my rake-off on the
+order of course--By jinks, I _need_ it! Money is as scarce with me
+just now as gold filling in a hen’s teeth.”
+
+“Then do something to help us,” urged Blaisdell.
+
+“I’ll do all I can. If I were in charge--Oh, well! I _could_ do
+something in that case.”
+
+“Say! any chance of that happening?” demanded the other and with
+eagerness.
+
+“I--don’t--know. There may be. Frank has got the war fever. Fact! Any
+fellow that got exempted as easy as he did----”
+
+“By the way,” asked Blaisdell, “how did you get past the board?”
+
+“Conscientious objector,” replied Mayberry glibly. “Sure! My mother and
+father were Quakers and I often attended the Friends’ Meeting House,”
+and he laughed.
+
+“You are a liar, Jim,” said the other frankly. “The Quakers are putting
+their young men into the Red Cross and all such work. That claim
+don’t go. I believe it cost you money. Doc Flammer has bought a new
+runabout--and it’s a better car than you drive, Jim. I believe that
+foxy medico knows how to feather his nest.”
+
+“I really have a bad heart,” said the superintendent of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company seriously. “Quite a murmur. You can hear it
+sometimes without the stethoscope.”
+
+“But the doc never advised you to cut out the tobacco, did he?” drily
+queried Blaisdell, as Mayberry lit another cigarette at the coal of
+his first. “Now, see here, to get back to biz: You say Barton has the
+fever?”
+
+“He’s wanted to go all along. You should hear him talk! He makes me
+sick!” scoffed the superintendent. “If he should go I shall step into
+his shoes _pro tem_. He wants to go to the officers’ training camp
+at Lake Quehasset. _Then_ I might be able to help you fellows--and
+myself--Blaisdell.”
+
+“You think Barton will immediately turn down our order? Before he goes
+away--if he does go?”
+
+“I believe he has already.” Mayberry gave no particulars, but he spoke
+of the letter the manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company had ordered
+written that afternoon. It was not to his advantage to say anything
+about Ethel Clayton and the confidence Barton had in her good sense and
+ability.
+
+“Postpone the sending of that letter, Jim,” said Blaisdell hastily. “It
+has not left the office yet, has it?”
+
+“I do not believe so. It was too late for the last mail,” Mayberry
+agreed. But he was puzzled.
+
+“I’ll tell you what I mean,” Blaisdell said, leaning nearer to the
+superintendent. He laid a hand upon the latter’s shoulder. His lips
+were close to Mayberry’s ear. Nobody could have heard then what he
+said, not if they had been at Blaisdell’s elbow. And there was nobody
+so near. A few minutes later the superintendent turned his car and
+started back toward Mailsburg while Blaisdell strolled away in the
+opposite direction. Then it was that a cramped figure rolled out from
+the shadow on the creek side of the great rock.
+
+“Those two chumps purty near made me late setting my lines,” observed
+Boots Skinner under his breath. “The moon’ll be up in a few minutes and
+then mebbe I’d git nabbed.
+
+“Old Man Hammerly says that if I’m caught doing this ag’in he’ll give
+me all the laws allows--an’ then some. The old jackdaw! I bet he never
+gits the chance.
+
+“That’s the way. Ain’t no chance for a poor feller, jest as dad says.
+Such rich chaps as them two can plan to do all the devilment that they
+want, and nobody dast touch ’em. But me! I ain’t let to ketch a mess
+o’ fish in peace. Huh! Jest the same, me an’ dad will have a fish-fry
+for breakfast,” and he grinned in the darkness, carefully baiting his
+hooks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE DREAM OF A STAR
+
+
+Mrs. Clayton was a Diller. She often stated this fact with pride.
+
+“The Dillers, my dear, are among the very oldest and the very best
+families in the country; and when one has family as every sensible
+person recognizes, money is of secondary importance,” Ethel’s mother
+insisted over and over, in season and out.
+
+“All very well, dear,” agreed the girl cheerfully. “But money is more
+essential to our daily comfort than blue blood. I presume I am glad I
+have Diller blood in my veins. I am much gladder I have Diller brains
+in my head; for they enable me to earn twenty dollars a week--more than
+any other girl earns, I do believe, in Mailsburg.”
+
+Mrs. Clayton, with all her horror of things common, could not deny
+that Israel Diller had been the saviour of the family by his business
+ability. He went into trade and he made good in it. By grace of
+his doing so, and leaving her a few shares of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company--and Grandon Fuller’s wife a good many--both the Claytons and
+the Fullers were benefitted. Indeed, Mrs. Clayton and Ethel lived much
+more comfortably in the little cottage at the end of Burnaby Street
+by grace of the dividends from those shares than they had while Mr.
+Clayton was alive.
+
+“But I sometimes wonder,” Mrs. Clayton sighed, “how it came about
+that Mehitable Fuller and I should have been so unevenly treated by
+Great-uncle Israel. Mehitable never did a hand’s turn for old Mr.
+Diller in her life. While you can remember yourself, Ethel, although
+you were but a tiny girl, that the old gentleman was brought here that
+time he had typhoid and he was a care on my hands for six months.”
+
+“Oh, Mother!”
+
+“I’m not begrudging the care,” her mother hastened to say. “And of
+course his lawyer afterward brought me the money for his board--six
+dollars a week for twenty-seven weeks. And I signed a paper saying it
+was all I could expect. Still--Well! if he had been alone in his own
+home and had had to hire a trained nurse and all that he’d have paid
+out a lot more money than he did.”
+
+“Now, Mother, never mind all that,” Ethel urged.
+
+“No, I realize it doesn’t sound nice,” Mrs. Clayton agreed. “But it
+seems funny. When I see those Fullers driving around so haughtily, and
+read about Mehitable, that I went to school with, and that pug-nosed
+girl of hers----”
+
+“Mercy! don’t let anybody hear you speak of Helen Fuller’s nose in such
+terms,” laughed Ethel. “And Helen is pretty. You’ve got to acknowledge
+that.”
+
+“Her nose _is_ a pug,” declared Mrs. Clayton. “That’s got nothing to do
+with those stocks. Great-uncle Israel’s will was peculiar. So they all
+say. No administrator mentioned. And he died with Gran Fuller right in
+the house----”
+
+“Don’t!” begged Ethel. “You must not intimate any wrongdoing, when
+there can have been no wrongdoing.”
+
+“What do you know about it? And you but a chit of a girl at the time!”
+demanded Mrs. Clayton. “Anyway, Gran Fuller was there, and he found the
+will. Mr. Mestinger, the lawyer, was dead then.”
+
+“But the witnesses were alive if the lawyer wasn’t. Of course it was
+Mr. Diller’s honest will.”
+
+“And he gave all that lump of money to Mehitable who never scarcely
+spoke to him, and only a little, meaching few stocks of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company to me. Oh, well, small favors thankfully
+received. The money’s very welcome every quarter.”
+
+Of course, Ethel was the recipient of a fairly comfortable salary. But
+they could not have lived so nicely as they did upon her weekly stipend
+only. Moreover, it was but recently that the girl was able to earn the
+amount at present paid her.
+
+“And there was a time,” pursued Mrs. Clayton on this particular
+evening, “when I came near selling the shares for a song.” She and
+Ethel were sitting, after the dinner dishes were cleared up, on the
+sheltered porch. “Grandon Fuller made me an offer for my stock. That
+was just before Mr. Barton was made manager, and people said the
+company was going to fail.”
+
+“Mr. Barton has done wonders,” declared the girl with admiration.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” responded her mother deprecatingly. “I suppose
+business just chanced to change. But it’s lucky we held on to our
+stock.”
+
+“It was Mr. Barton who saved us and the rest of the small
+stockholders,” the girl said firmly.
+
+“Well, I suppose you must say so. I presume you feel some gratitude
+to him for raising your pay. You never would have got it without his
+say-so.”
+
+“I hope I earn it,” Ethel observed with some sharpness. “I believe I
+am worthy of my wages, just as Mr. Barton is worthy of the credit of
+having put the Hapwood-Diller Company on its feet.”
+
+“Still talking shop?” asked the cheerful voice of Benway Chase. He had
+come up the walk without the widow and her daughter hearing him till he
+spoke.
+
+“Oh, Ethel is singing the praises of that wonderful Mr. Barton, as
+usual,” her mother said.
+
+“I’ll join in,” Ben Chase chuckled, and he sat down on the step of the
+porch to fill and light his pipe. “We’ve got to hand it to Mr. Barton,
+Mrs. Clayton. He did another good deed to-day. Promised to take me into
+the offices.”
+
+“Oh, Ben!” exclaimed the girl in sheer delight. “Did you speak to him
+as I advised you?”
+
+“Certainly did. I got tired of waiting on the pleasure of those other
+people who had promised me a job. I have spent every cent we can
+afford getting a business course and just because I am left-handed the
+business men I have seen hem and haw over hiring me--or even giving me
+a chance to show them I am as quick as a fellow with two hands.”
+
+“Dear me, Bennie, don’t talk in that way,” murmured Mrs. Clayton.
+
+“Nobody wants a fellow with one hand--not really!” exclaimed the young
+man with vigor. “They won’t take me in the army--though a fellow could
+work a machine gun very well with one paw,” and he laughed without
+managing to get much mirth into the sound.
+
+“But your Mr. Barton is different,” he added, turning to Ethel. “I saw
+him to-day at lunch hour--while you were out, Ethel. He never said a
+word about my bum wing. By the way, did you know he was going away?”
+
+“Who’s going away?” asked Mrs. Clayton, scenting gossip.
+
+“Not Mr. Barton?” cried her daughter quickly.
+
+“Spoke as though he expected to be absent from the offices in the near
+future. Said you and that Jim Mayberry would break me in all right.
+What did he mean if it wasn’t that he expected to be absent?”
+
+The girl looked at him breathlessly and her face was actually pale.
+Mrs. Clayton drawled:
+
+“I suppose he must mean to take a vacation.”
+
+“That’s not it, is it?” Benway Chase asked Ethel, realizing that she
+was deeply moved.
+
+“It’s the war!” gasped the girl.
+
+“The war?” rejoined her mother. “What’s that to do with Mr. Barton?
+He’s exempt, isn’t he?”
+
+“He will enlist. I knew he would!” The girl’s hands were clasped in
+real agony and her voice showed imminent tears. “Oh, I knew he would!”
+
+“Not really?” exclaimed Benway, forgetting to keep his pipe alight.
+“Mr. Barton can’t be spared, can he?”
+
+“I suspected all along how he felt about it,” moaned the girl. “Ever
+since April when war was declared--even before.”
+
+“But, goodness! there are so many other men to go,” cried her mother.
+“And you were just saying that he was necessary to the well-being of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company, Ethel. Surely he will not desert us.”
+
+“The business is in very good shape again--thanks to him,” Ethel
+answered, trying to recover her composure. “I suppose he feels that
+now, at least, he can go to the officers’ training camp. And if we get
+along all right I just know he will go to France.”
+
+Benway whistled--low and thoughtfully. “He’s that kind of a chap, I
+guess,” he observed. “Goodness knows, this town is full of those who
+think differently. The boards had the hardest time getting their full
+quota for this first draft. There’s got to be a general awakening
+before the second call comes----”
+
+“But war is dreadful!” cried Mrs. Clayton.
+
+“It must be. But we haven’t come to a realization of it yet or we’d all
+be glad to try to help keep it in Europe, instead of letting it dribble
+over here after militarism has ruined the less prepared countries over
+there. This war is going to mean a good deal. The government is awfully
+particular about the men they take right now; but they won’t be so
+particular before it is all over.
+
+“Why!” cried the young fellow with a break in his voice that showed a
+deeper emotion, “even the Red Cross or the Y. M. C. A. won’t accept for
+service a fellow with a single solitary thing the matter with him!”
+
+Ethel, who had slipped down into a seat on the step beside him,
+suddenly patted his shoulder in a sisterly way. She knew that he had
+tried to serve his country under the banner of the Cross of Peace and
+had been refused because of his withered arm.
+
+“Heigho!” added Benway, shrugging his shoulders and swallowing his
+emotion, “that’s neither here nor there. Mr. Barton spoke as though he
+expected to leave soon, anyway. I expect Ethel, here, will pretty near
+be boss of those offices while he is gone. How about it, Ethel? Going
+to be a hard taskmaster to yours truly?”
+
+“I am afraid if Mr. Barton goes that my influence there will be curbed
+rather than increased,” the girl said with gravity.
+
+“No!”
+
+“Naturally Mr. Mayberry will be boss. Mr. Mayberry does not consider me
+as capable as does Mr. Barton.”
+
+“Jim Mayberry!” exclaimed Ben. “He’s dead in love with you, they say.”
+
+The girl’s head came up and she turned a haughty look upon her friend.
+
+“Do you consider that complimentary to me?” she demanded.
+
+“No. But complimentary to his good sense,” returned Benway. “I don’t
+know much about Mayberry; only that he hangs about the Bellevue too
+much.”
+
+“You’ve said it all,” Ethel declared, with less sternness. “I do not
+like Mr. Mayberry.”
+
+“All right. I shan’t like him, either, then,” said Benway cheerfully.
+“But, goodness, girl! you can’t blame men for falling in love with you.
+I wonder the whole town doesn’t tail along after you when you walk down
+the street.”
+
+She laughed at him then--and with him.
+
+“There is one thing about your compliments, Ben,” she said. “They may
+lack grace; but they are unmistakable. Ridiculous! There are hundreds
+of girls in Mailsburg better looking than I am.”
+
+“Now, did I say anything about looks?” he asked her wickedly. “It’s
+your sweet disposition that makes you so many friends.”
+
+“Like Jim Mayberry, I suppose?” she said in some disgust.
+
+They continued to wrangle in a friendly way. Mrs. Clayton, frankly
+yawning, bade them good-night. The moment her mother withdrew Ethel’s
+manner changed. She removed herself a little from Benway’s vicinity and
+her witticisms ceased.
+
+“I believe I shall retire early myself, Ben,” she said. “This has been
+a trying day. I--I shall be glad to have you in the offices with us.”
+
+“Shall you?” There was something in his tone that increased her
+seriousness.
+
+“If I can do anything there to help you, let me do it,” she said
+earnestly. “You know we have always been such chums, Ben.”
+
+“Haven’t we?” Again the disturbing accent. She started to rise. He
+caught her hand. “Wait,” he said. “Let me say a little something to
+you, Ethel.”
+
+“Ben! Ben! Had you better? You know----”
+
+“I know--everything you can tell me,” he interrupted bitterly. “I know
+I am only half a man. A fellow shy a wing hasn’t much chance in this
+world. I ought to know it after all my experience. Especially as the
+folks have no money to back me. But I have a whole brain----”
+
+“I’ve always told you that, Ben,” she hastened to say. “A perfectly
+good brain. I would not harp so much on that withered arm.”
+
+“No, perhaps you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t unless the old arm happened to
+be hitched to your shoulder, as it is to mine. No, it is easy enough to
+say to a cripple, ‘Forget it.’ Wait till you try it yourself! Though,
+Heaven forbid! I hope you will never suffer such a handicap, Ethel.”
+
+“Oh, Benway!”
+
+“Now, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, Ethel,” he returned, and
+patted her hand. “Fact is, I feel rather toppy to-night myself. I know
+that Mr. Barton is taking me on for just what he thinks is in me, and
+no more. He must think that a withered arm will not make me less useful
+around the offices of the Hapwood-Diller Company. Influence is not
+getting me this footing.
+
+“And he was kind enough to say,” went on the boy, “that he saw no
+reason why I should not rise there as he had risen. He told me how
+he began in one of the shops and worked up. Of course, I am not
+beginning just in that way; but he says that a practical knowledge
+of the mechanical end of the business is not absolutely necessary to
+advancement.
+
+“If I make good, Ethel--if I prove that the stuff is in me to get up in
+the business world, after all----”
+
+“Of all your friends I shall be the one who will be the most delighted,
+Ben,” she interrupted, rising now with finality. “Don’t forget that
+I have always said it was in you to make something of yourself.
+Even if your parents could not afford to send you to college, I
+know--absolutely know--you will make your mark.”
+
+“Well, yes,” he said, rather piqued that she had not let him finish.
+She stood above him now, looking down.
+
+“Good-night, Benway. I suppose you will come to the offices on Monday?”
+
+“Yes, I’ll see you then, Ethel, every day,” he said wistfully.
+
+“Good-night,” she repeated and went quickly within. Once inside
+the screen door she watched his shadowy figure down the path. “‘No
+influence’?” she murmured. “He does not suspect how I fairly had to beg
+Mr. Barton to give him a chance! Poor Benway! Poor, poor boy!”
+
+The girl went on to her bedroom. She stood a moment in the darkness.
+
+“Frank Barton going--leaving--” she gasped. “Oh, why can’t he see? Why
+can’t he see?” she added, moaning.
+
+Then she began her preparations for bed.
+
+Benway Chase crossed the road and entered the field that divided his
+own home from the end of Burnaby Street. This was a surburban locality.
+There was the fine smell of new-mown hay in his nostrils. Half way
+across the field he stumbled upon a cock of hay that had been thrown up
+for the night, and he fell upon it, rolling upon his back luxuriously
+and gazing back.
+
+There was a light in a certain window of the Clayton Cottage. He had
+watched it many a night, for he knew that it was the window of Ethel’s
+room. Above the rooftree hung a brilliant star. He had watched that,
+too, often and again. And when the light in Ethel’s room was snuffed
+out he fixed his eyes on the star and dreamed.
+
+It was only a boy’s dream at best. It was a foolish dream, perhaps. But
+Benway Chase often dreamed it.
+
+He was fully a year older than Ethel Clayton; but sometimes she made
+him feel very much younger than she. Dreamer by nature, he; and she one
+of those practical souls that chafe in the bodies of women. At least,
+they chafe where women’s growth is hampered. But Ethel was numbered
+of the emancipated. She was a business woman. Moreover, she was a
+successful business woman.
+
+As she had said, no girl in Mailsburg in all probability earned a
+larger wage than she did. She had a grasp upon the details of the
+business of the Hapwood-Diller Company that fitted her without
+question for a position as important as that of Jim Mayberry for
+instance. Indeed, she was better informed and more capable than even
+Frank Barton realized.
+
+The manager merely found her surprisingly helpful on occasion. He
+respected her; he admired her good business sense displayed at these
+times. Ethel Clayton did not wish to be admired by the manager for any
+such reason.
+
+Perhaps hers, too, was a dream of a star.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TWO GOOD-BYES
+
+
+After the porter, who dusted and removed the waste paper, Mabel Skinner
+was the first of the office force to arrive at the Hapwood-Diller
+Company the next morning.
+
+Her startled face was preternaturally grave on this occasion. Before
+she even removed her hat and the tight little jacket she wore, the girl
+went to the mail basket on Ethel Clayton’s desk, dumped the outgoing
+letters on its flat surface, and ran through them quickly, scrutinizing
+each address. She did this twice and then puzzlement, as well as
+gravity, showed in her sharp features. She stacked the letters slowly
+again in the basket, deep in thought.
+
+Then she went to the letter files. She found under the B heading a
+quantity of correspondence relating to the Bogata Company of Norville.
+But there was nothing of recent date. It seemed no letter had been
+written the day before by the Hapwood-Diller Company to the Bogata
+people.
+
+“Well,” the girl sighed, “I know Boots is an awful liar. But this time
+he fooled me. Guess I’ll keep my nose out of what don’t concern me. But
+that Boots!”
+
+And that evening she gave the recreant Boots a most decisive thrashing
+out behind the barn. For any older Skinner that could not trounce a
+younger Skinner, male or female, was not worthy of the clan.
+
+Mabel’s appearance at her desk when the rest of the office force
+arrived caused much comment.
+
+“Life is short and time is fleeting,” said Sydney, the bookkeeper. “We
+are warned of the Great Change to come. Little Skinner is here on time
+and at work.”
+
+“That happens three days before you die, Syd,” responded Mabel
+sepulchrally, and made no further explanation, not even to Ethel.
+
+Ethel went about her work with some feeling of depression. Barton had
+said nothing directly to her about going away. Indeed, he was not
+likely to take Ethel Clayton into his confidence in private matters.
+Yet she understood now, from several things he had been doing of late,
+that he had it in mind to absent himself from the offices.
+
+Jim Mayberry was in conference with the general manager on more than
+one occasion during the next few days. Ethel could only be thankful
+that the superintendent seemed to have too much on his mind to bother
+her. He did not even mention her refusal to ride with him in his car.
+But the girl thought more than once of the possibility of Mayberry’s
+becoming objectionable when Barton was gone and he, the superintendent,
+had charge of affairs.
+
+On Monday Benway Chase came into the offices. Ethel had paved the
+way for his reception by her associates, and Benway was made to feel
+welcome at once. Only Mayberry seemed surprised to see him.
+
+“Why, say!” drawled the superintendent, “what does Barton expect to
+make of _you_?”
+
+“I’m after your job, Mr. Mayberry,” responded Benway, smiling into the
+rather sneering face of the older man. “You don’t mind, do you?”
+
+“Not if you can cop it,” said the other. “But it takes a two-fisted
+man to handle some of the huskies we’ve got in the shops. Don’t forget
+that.”
+
+The intimation was brutal, but the boy with the withered arm only paled
+a little about the lips.
+
+“You know,” he said coolly, “we left-handed chaps have all the luck.
+Ask any ball fan.”
+
+Mayberry laughed shortly and passed on. Ethel was particularly kind to
+Benway for the rest of that day, and Mabel Skinner, who also had heard
+the superintendent, stuck out her tongue at his retreating figure.
+
+“He’s such a nasty thing!” she whispered to Ethel. “I wish his old
+flivver would try to climb a telegraph pole with him--or go into the
+ditch!”
+
+For Skinner was a strong partisan of Ethel’s. Her friends were
+Skinner’s friends and her enemies Skinner’s particular foes. Besides,
+the younger girl had at once taken a fancy to Benway Chase. In looks
+alone the young fellow had the advantage of any man Mabel Skinner had
+ever seen before--not barring the general manager, whom she worshipped
+as a kind of god.
+
+A smile from Benway Chase would turn almost any girl’s head. He had the
+darlingest curls! His complexion was finer and clearer than any girl’s
+Skinner knew. There were shades of brown and red in his cheeks that
+reminded her of a ripe russet apple.
+
+“My!” she whispered to herself, her china-blue eyes staring from her
+head more staringly than usual, “wouldn’t I just like to put my two
+hands into his hair and pull it--ever so gently? And his eyes are just
+as lovely as our setter-pup’s. Oh, my! And of course he’s set his heart
+on Ethel!”
+
+She was not jealous of Ethel. Skinner was much too modest to feel
+such an emotion for one whom she so much admired. She considered
+Benway Chase as far above her as the moon and stars. She thought them
+beautiful in much the same way as she admired Benway.
+
+In the middle of that week Ethel was called into the manager’s office
+at an unusual hour--not long before closing time. He usually dictated
+his letters in the morning. But she carried her notebook and pencil
+when she answered the summons.
+
+“No letters, Miss Clayton,” Barton said, smiling and wheeling sideways
+in his chair to face her. “Sit down. This is a business conference----”
+
+“Oh! Mr. Mayberry----”
+
+“I’ve talked to Jim,” said Barton quickly. “I’ve been hammering things
+into him this fortnight, off and on. He has finally got to the point
+where he admits he may be able to swing things here for a bit while I
+run away.”
+
+Ethel flashed him a glance that he could not help but note. He raised
+an admonishing hand.
+
+“Don’t think I am running away from duty, Miss Clayton. I believe we
+are in such shape now--the Hapwood-Diller Company, I mean--that the
+business will run smoothly under the guidance of Mr. Mayberry--and you.
+I am banking a good deal on you, Miss Clayton,” his kindly smile again
+lighting up his face.
+
+“On me, Mr. Barton?” she hesitated.
+
+“You are such a perfectly capable person, Miss Clayton,” he said. “I
+believe you have a better grasp on details here than almost anybody
+else. Of course, Mr. Mayberry and I ought to know fully as much
+as you do; but the other day you proved that we did not,” and he
+laughed. “That Bogata matter, you remember. We had overlooked the
+very point which we should have remembered. You did not overlook it.
+Therefore----You see?
+
+“That is exactly what I mean. Jim is all right. He has a grasp of the
+mechanical part of the business. But you must run the office end, more
+or less----”
+
+“But, Mr. Barton! you are not going to remain away for long, are you?”
+she interposed.
+
+“I cannot say, Miss Clayton,” he returned gravely. “We none of us know
+what this war may amount to. I only know that I can be of some help
+if the war continues; and with my experience in the Guard I should be
+preparing to give my country all the help in my power if I am called
+on. I am leaving for the training camp at Lake Quehasset this evening.”
+
+She could not suppress a murmur, and the pallor of her cheek was
+marked, but he noticed neither.
+
+“The exemption board allowed my claim of business need. But I am
+promised to the service if the business here can get along without me.
+The time has now come to try it,” and he laughed a little whimsically.
+“You know, a dead man is seldom missed, no matter how important his
+place in life seems to be. After a little somebody is found to fill his
+shoes. I fancy it will not be so hard, Miss Clayton, to fill mine.
+
+“I am depending on Mr. Mayberry and you, Miss Clayton, to keep the
+stockholders of the company satisfied that I can be spared. We have
+some months’ training in camp in any case. I have felt the call from
+‘over there’ for a long time. I own frankly,” he added, his voice
+vibrant with emotion, “that had I been free, I should not have waited
+for our Government to declare war before getting into the scrimmage.
+
+“But never mind that! I was held here. You know something of the
+circumstances we faced two years ago when I took hold. Now we seem to
+have got out of the mire. We’re standing on firm ground. With ordinary
+care everything should go smoothly with the Hapwood-Diller Company. Can
+I depend on you to do your part, Miss Clayton?”
+
+“Oh, yes, Mr. Barton! I will! I will!” cried the girl with clasped
+hands, but looking away from him.
+
+“Fine! Help Mr. Mayberry all you can. He’s rather brusk, perhaps, but
+he knows the business. Still----
+
+“I’ve one favor to ask of you, Miss Clayton. It is important, and it is
+particular. I want you to write to me.”
+
+She looked at him then. But there was nothing in his serious face to
+warrant the slight flush that came into her cheeks.
+
+“I’d like to have you write me about once a week. Consult nobody as to
+what you write, but just detail as briefly as you please matters as
+they occur--business matters and whatever you may think will give me a
+correct impression of the situation of affairs in the factory and the
+office.
+
+“I haven’t the least idea,” he added, once again smiling, “that things
+will not run along all right. But I shall be anxious--nervous, if you
+will. Mayberry will write, of course. But you will look on things with
+quite different eyes from the way he will look at them. In the first
+place, you are a woman and you have a different mental slant upon every
+occurrence from that of a man, it seems to me. I am sure anything you
+may have to report will be illuminating.”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Barton.”
+
+“Will you do it, Miss Clayton?”
+
+“Am I to understand I am to render a weekly report and keep the matter
+secret from everybody--even from Mr. Mayberry?”
+
+“I am exacting no spy-duty from you!” he said hastily. “That is not my
+meaning.”
+
+“I understand you perfectly, I think,” Ethel said gently. “You
+undoubtedly will be anxious.”
+
+“But I want the truth--the exact truth, Miss Clayton,” Barton went on.
+
+“Yes, I understand that too,” she replied.
+
+They arose at the same moment and Frank Barton put out his hand. “You
+will be of great help to me, I am sure, Miss Clayton,” he said, her
+hand lost for a moment in the embrace of his larger palm. “You have
+been of sure and practical assistance to me on many occasions. I know
+you will be of equal aid to Mayberry. Now, good-bye, Miss Clayton. I
+hope I shall not add much to your burdens.”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Barton! I am glad to do anything within reason. I feel that it
+is but a small thing I do compared with what you must face.”
+
+At that he flushed suddenly, and like a boy. “Oh that!” he murmured.
+“My duty has held me here. Now duty calls me elsewhere. Duty is our
+master, Miss Clayton. Good-bye.”
+
+“And--I hope you--will return to us safely,” she said, her eyes filling
+with tears.
+
+“Thank you, Miss Clayton. I hope to come back all right. I believe
+I shall,” he said cheerfully, and sat down immediately to sort some
+papers upon his desk. He did not look again in her direction as she
+went out of the private office.
+
+He heard the raucous note of an automobile horn a little later.
+He stacked the documents together and stuck them in their proper
+pigeonhole. He was leaving his desk open for Jim Mayberry to use if he
+wished.
+
+Stepping quickly to the window Barton saw the Fuller car stopping at
+the curb. Helen was driving, and was alone. He took down his hat and
+dust-coat and passed rapidly through the office. But at the outer door
+he stopped a moment and looked back. He faced the entire office force
+from that position.
+
+“Be good children till I return--all of you,” he said, laughing. “I
+am banking heavy on you, Sydney. Good-bye, all. I want to hear good
+reports of you while I am away.”
+
+Mayberry was to meet him later and go to the train with him. But Helen
+Fuller had come to take him for a spin and for a little talk on this,
+his last day in town. Somehow, he had not been invited to dinner as
+she suggested. Was it because Grandon Fuller after all considered the
+general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company of less importance to his
+schemes, now that he was going away?
+
+“Dear _me_, Mr. Barton,” sighed Helen, dexterously turning the car, “my
+conscience _condemns_ me.”
+
+“Why so?”
+
+“I fear something I may have said is sending you off like this--so
+_suddenly_--and to train for the army. Dear me! suppose you should be
+killed or wounded?”
+
+“Scarcely likely in the training camp,” he returned, happy in the
+concern the girl seemed to show.
+
+“Oh, but _afterward_! For I know you will go over there, Mr. Barton. I
+feel it! And if anything _I_ have said----”
+
+“I am sure,” he told her quietly, “that you have said nothing to me
+or to any of your gentlemen acquaintances regarding our duty in this
+trying time that was not perfectly justified, Miss Fuller.”
+
+“Oh, do you _think_ so?” she cried. “Do you _know_, Mr. Barton, I
+am greatly tempted to go to France _myself_. Some girls I know have
+already gone. You know, really, it puts one on the _qui vive_ to hear
+so much about it--and--and all that,” she added rather vaguely.
+
+He was so much in earnest himself, he felt so strongly the exaltation
+of his decision, that he did not notice the futility of her speech. And
+then Helen Fuller was strikingly, if a little flamboyantly, pretty. He
+nodded with pursed lips.
+
+“It’s a job we all have to decide for ourselves. I can imagine how you
+feel, Miss Fuller. As for myself, I’ve got to be in it!”
+
+“It’s too bad,” she drawled, “that you couldn’t influence Morry Copley
+to go with you.”
+
+“Well, Mr. Copley now will have to decide for himself, won’t he?”
+
+She laughed. “It seems he has allowed Mrs. Copley to decide for him,”
+she said.
+
+Somehow their conversation did not take that personal tinge which Helen
+desired. To tell the truth, a girl cannot give her escort just the
+right feeling of intimacy when both her eyes and her hands are engaged
+in guiding a motor-car. Helen finally dropped Barton at his lodgings in
+time for dinner, and their good-bye was much more casual than she had
+intended it should be.
+
+“But I shall go over to the camp to see you,” she promised, as she
+wheeled away from the curb. “Best of luck!”
+
+The man stood bareheaded till the girl had turned the corner. But that
+night when he closed his eyes, in his Pullman berth, it was the face of
+another girl, with brown eyes tear-filled, that rose to his vision and
+dissolved only when he sank to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+LEADING UP TO A CLIMAX
+
+
+For Ethel Clayton the days that immediately followed the departure
+of the manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company were merely busy days.
+Positively nothing happened. The particular work that came to her was
+not different from that which had been her portion for some months;
+only in her oversight of things in general (and that oversight
+secretive) was she differently engaged.
+
+She took her book and pencil into the private office each morning at
+the usual hour and took dictation from Jim Mayberry.
+
+Mayberry was not the clear-headed, forceful thinker that Barton was.
+But his letters were brief and to the point nevertheless; he was not a
+numbskull. Nor did he lack a grasp of business details quite necessary
+to the carrying on of the affairs of the big concern. He worked
+faithfully, seemed to neglect nothing; and though he did not admit it,
+Ethel felt sure he was thankful to her when she smoothed the crudeness
+of his English, or brought out more clearly the points he desired to
+make in his correspondence.
+
+To her satisfaction he did not at first show those amorous proclivities
+which had so annoyed her in the past. His thoughts seemed to be
+centered on the business of trying to fill both Barton’s and his own
+jobs. Or was it that Jim Mayberry had something on his mind other than
+the business affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company to trouble him?
+
+The office force, of course, buzzed at first because of the departure
+of Mr. Barton. But every individual was on his best behavior. They had
+all liked the general manager; and, perhaps, they had visions of his
+returning suddenly and taking them to task for sins of both omission
+and commission.
+
+Mayberry left the people in the outer office strictly and entirely
+alone; even Sydney came to Ethel at times for advice, or to report some
+slight matter which needed to be “put up to the boss.” It had been so
+before Barton went away, although the girl had not then remarked it.
+She was still “the buffer” between the small annoyances of the office
+and the man at the head of affairs.
+
+Grandon Fuller came in one day and had a somewhat extended conference
+with the manager _pro tem_. Ethel noted that the holder of so large
+a block of the company’s stock seemed to be very friendly with
+Mayberry, whereas when Mr. Macon Hammerly came in, as was his wont, he
+always timed his calls so as to miss Mayberry. The shrewd old grain
+dealer was frank to say that he did not like the present head of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+“Jim always looked to me like a well-fed fox,” grumbled Hammerly to
+Ethel. “I always wonder who’s pullet he’s just swallowed.”
+
+Although Mayberry did not greatly disturb Ethel’s quiet pool of
+existence, Benway Chase seemed to have been an agitating pebble flung
+into it. Her old friend took hold of his duties with all the energy
+and keenness of perception that she knew he would display, once he
+was given a chance. Sydney and the rest of the office force liked him
+immensely.
+
+On her own part, however, Ethel found him trying. He was promptly
+at her gate every morning to accompany her to work; and at night he
+escorted her home. It had been like that when they went to school
+together. But Ethel felt altogether different about it now. She did not
+like to be made conspicuous or to be appropriated in such a fashion.
+And when Benway undertook to go to lunch with her, she put her foot
+down firmly.
+
+Yet, she could not hurt his feelings. Because of his affliction she had
+been all her life striving to be particularly kind to Benway. From her
+earliest remembrance, when she had felt spasms of pity and sympathy for
+her little playmate and had impulsively run to him to pat his cheek
+and say, “Poor, poor Bennie!” to this very chance she had begged for
+him with the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company, Ethel Clayton had
+mothered the boy. Naturally and quite unconsciously he took advantage
+of her kindness.
+
+She shrank from having the rest of the office force suspect any
+tender relation between herself and the boy. “Boy” was of course the
+term in which she thought of him. And when he undertook to time his
+absence from the office so as to accompany her to the restaurant which
+she usually patronized, she had to put a stop to that. She quietly
+inaugurated a system of “taking turn about” for lunch hour which pretty
+well put it out of Benway’s power to leave at the same time she did.
+
+Likewise, she went farther away, to the Orleans Tea Room, instead of
+to the place at which it was the custom of most of the Hapwood-Diller
+office force to have their midday meal. The tea room was a more
+expensive place and was largely patronized by “up town” folk; and it
+was because of this change in her habits that Ethel chanced to learn,
+not two weeks after the manager’s departure for the training camp,
+something that she thought really did not concern her, but which
+interested her immensely, as it was connected with Frank Barton.
+
+She saw one noon a gaily, though beautifully, dressed and unmistakable
+figure entering the tea room ahead of her--that of Helen Fuller. Her
+escort was Morrison Copley--one of those men whose names made Ethel’s
+lips involuntarily curl. And yet, as far as Ethel Clayton knew, there
+was nothing bad about Morry Copley.
+
+She considered it a misfortune that the only empty table should be
+next the one occupied by those two from what Macon Hammerly called
+“the swagger part of town.” Miss Fuller looked the employee of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company over with a cold disdain which might have hurt
+cruelly a supersensitive soul. Ethel’s was too well balanced a nature
+to be disturbed by the ill breeding of the other girl.
+
+“You boys are going to be _terribly_ put to it for styles this fall,”
+Helen was drawling, her elbows on the table and her hands cupped to
+hold her pretty chin. Somebody had told her that the pose became her.
+“Everything offered for masculine wear will have a military cut.”
+
+“I don’t see why we’re to be put to it,” returned Morry, gazing at the
+girl before him with doglike devotion. “Belted things always did look
+well on me, you know, Nell. I’m slim waisted.”
+
+“Slim in every way, Morry,” the girl said laughing. “Morrison Copley,
+S. S. quite fits you. Slim slacker. My! _I’d_ be ashamed if _I_ were a
+man----”
+
+“Plenty of fellows are going. Those that like army life and--and all
+that,” complained Morry. “I don’t see why you should hound me, all
+the time, Nell. And mothaw really would make an awful row if I said I
+wanted to go.”
+
+“If you even _said_ so, Morry?” she scoffed.
+
+“Say, aren’t you satisfied?” demanded the young man with more energy
+than usual. “You say you made Frank Barton go to camp. How many scalps
+do you want to hang in your wigwam?”
+
+“Your scalp, as you call it, would look pretty good to me,” she
+laughed. “I want to send all the fellows I can. Bradley’s half
+promised. He was in the Guard for two years, but got out because he was
+too lazy to drill, I suppose,” Miss Fuller said.
+
+“Pooh, they’re only stalling,” grumbled Morry. “You know just about how
+far Brad will get at that training camp. And Barton’s only going for a
+show. They’ll never get to France, any of them.”
+
+“Why don’t _you_ try it, then? If there’s no danger, that should suit
+_you_, Morry!”
+
+“I tell you what!” exclaimed the young man indignantly and forgetting
+his drawl, “if I go into this thing I’ll go the whole figure, don’t
+forget that! If other fellows go to France I shall go. I won’t hunt me
+a soft job here where I can wear a uniform and never smell powder.”
+
+Helen Fuller looked at him and thoughtfully.
+
+“I wonder, Morry, if you really _would_,” she finally said.
+
+Ethel could not help hearing this. Indeed, the heedlessness with which
+the two conversed on their private affairs in public made it imperative
+that all within earshot should know what they were talking about.
+
+Slight as was Ethel’s interest in the two, and in their affairs, one
+point did not escape her. It could not fail to impress the girl’s mind
+and linger in her thoughts.
+
+Had Frank Barton gone to the training camp because of the bite of Helen
+Fuller’s tart tongue? Miss Fuller was taking much commendation for
+inspiring the manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company with patriotism.
+Was Barton’s brand of patriotism of that character? How much influence
+did the girl really have over him?
+
+These questions could not be stilled in Ethel’s mind. She reverted to
+them time and again. Helen’s claim that her influence drove her young
+men friends to patriotic service seemed to be believed by other people.
+Somebody told Ethel on Sunday at church that Charlie Bradley and young
+Copley had both gone to the officers’ camp.
+
+“Of course, it’s more of a lark than anything else for most of those
+who go,” said the person who told Ethel. “Fancy Morry Copley trying to
+give orders in that squeaky voice of his!”
+
+Ethel’s letters to Barton were strictly business, without being coldly
+formal. She allowed them to sound a note of cool friendliness in the
+beginning and at the close but nothing deeper. An expression of hope
+for his good health was as warm a phrase as entered into them. His
+polite, brief acknowledgments, addressed to her home, showed that
+he considered their correspondence nothing more than a business
+arrangement.
+
+She realized that she was by no means the only person in Mailsburg
+interested in the absent ones in camp and barracks. The town was
+beginning to wake up to the exigencies of the war. The ministers prayed
+for the boys on Sunday, and every social and charitable organization in
+Mailsburg began to talk of work for the soldiers at least, whether or
+not any of them really did much at first.
+
+At this time in her heart Ethel hated the idea of war so desperately
+that the many activities connected with the draft and the going away
+and the war itself seemed to her mind both futile and non-beneficial.
+If those young men really got as far as France, and into the trenches,
+they would be killed. They were merely “cannon fodder” in that case.
+And if they did not go--if the war ended, as some people said it would,
+before many of them got over there--then all this talk and planning was
+so much wasted breath and time and money.
+
+It was a fact that, at this particular time, Ethel Clayton had little
+interest save in her work and in the affairs of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company--particularly in Frank Barton’s absence from his post and how
+it might affect the concern for which they both worked.
+
+Just as she felt that there were plenty of other men to go to the war
+and that Barton might be spared, so she felt that there were already
+too many women, both foolish and wise, giving their time and thought
+to war work. The local papers began to be full of news of the various
+activities of the several organizations in this connection. In addition
+some of those desirous of notoriety were getting a heap of free
+advertising.
+
+“I declare!” said Mrs. Clayton, busily clicking her knitting needles,
+“the _Clarion_ toots a loud note almost every day for that girl of
+Mehitable Fuller’s. She’s first into one thing and then another--like a
+spoiled kitten. And all this folderol about the war seems to give her
+more of a chance than ever to show off.”
+
+“I wonder,” said Ethel, thoughtfully, “if we ought not to think more
+about it than we do, Mother? I sit here with my hands idle in the
+evening. I wonder if all this knitting I see going on hasn’t a basis of
+honest endeavor in it, after all?”
+
+“Pshaw!” said her mother.
+
+“I know it looks silly. Looks like a fad. One of the girls in the
+office brings her knitting bag. She’s at the switchboard and has more
+or less idle time. Instead of reading silly love stories as she used,
+she knits.”
+
+“What does she knit?”
+
+“Why, she says she hopes it will turn out to be a sweater when she gets
+it done; and if it is good enough she will give it to the Red Cross,”
+and Ethel laughed gently.
+
+“Humph!” mumbled Mrs. Clayton. “I wonder if she has a good pattern?”
+
+Thus grew the stirrings of general interest in Mailsburg in the war and
+in our preparations for entering it. Ethel realized amid her manifold
+office duties that the undercurrent of their life was becoming more
+strongly patriotic.
+
+It was learned that at least one Mailsburg boy was already at the
+front. It was true he had disappeared from town some years before, and
+under a cloud; but his mother had always known where he was.
+
+Now the _Clarion_ came out with a full page on Sunday, “Mailsburg’s
+First Boy in France.” Sergeant Willy O’Rourke of General Pershing’s
+forces had sent his mother several postal cards from “over there.” Here
+they were reproduced, with a tintype of the sergeant and a sympathetic
+wash-drawing of Mrs. O’Rourke--a little old woman living down by the
+docks who said to the reporter:
+
+“Shure an’ th’ O’Rourkes was all fighters. ’Tis no wonder Willy got
+over there first. Them Garmans’ll have their own troubles now.”
+
+And yet there was something in it that made the reader choke up. Macon
+Hammerly had his brusk comment to make:
+
+“It may be that Bill O’Rourke left town just ahead of the constable.
+I remember well the red-headed gossoon. He wasn’t a mite better than
+this Boots Skinner is now. But, by the holy poker! he’s a _man_.
+There’s nothing soft and sissified about Bill. If Bill dies for his
+country he’ll be doing something better than a whole lot of these
+trifling, dawdling fellows will ever arrive at.”
+
+If he dies for his country! That might be Frank Barton’s fate if he
+went “over there.” The thought more than once brought Ethel Clayton
+upright in bed at night. It sometimes wet her pillow with tears. Yet,
+if it was the truth that Helen Fuller’s influence had urged Barton
+away to the wars, Ethel was jealous of the other girl for it, and she
+realized the fact with shame.
+
+Affairs in the Hapwood-Diller Company offices continued much as usual
+for several weeks. The directors seemed to think Jim Mayberry a
+satisfactory substitute manager. Having the details of the business
+at her finger tips as she had, Ethel was quite sure that the
+superintendent was attending to his additional duties in an exemplary
+manner.
+
+Ethel checked up much of the work of the other members of the office
+staff, especially in the correspondence end of the business, and it was
+in looking over a schedule of stock to be ordered she made a discovery
+that puzzled her.
+
+Mayberry had now, of course, the ordering of supplies of all kinds;
+but there was little in the manufacturing line that Ethel Clayton did
+not know about. Here were certain grades of stock which she had no
+idea were called for by any order then on the factory’s books already
+contracted for.
+
+Had Mr. Barton been doing the ordering she would have felt quite free
+to hold up the schedule until she could speak to him about it. But she
+feared Mayberry might be touchy in any such matter. He was jealous
+of his rights, and she hesitated to give him a chance to say she was
+overstepping the borders of her field of employment.
+
+She went to the files and spent some time in checking off the grades of
+supplies called for by the orders the factory already had contracted
+for. And suddenly--it was quite a startling discovery--she came upon
+the schedule of the Bogata Company’s order which she had every reason
+to believe had been declined.
+
+She had a clear remembrance of the letter she had written, Mr. Barton’s
+approval of it, even the reason for the order being refused by the
+Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company. This reason was connected with
+the very purchase of these special supplies she had noted in the
+puzzling schedule in her hand.
+
+It could not be overlooked. There was something wrong in what she had
+discovered.
+
+Fearing she knew not what--a mistake on her own part, perhaps--she
+waited until she could find Mayberry disengaged. When she knew he was
+in the manager’s office and alone, Ethel ventured to knock upon the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A PUZZLING SITUATION
+
+
+Mayberry glanced up swiftly as she entered the office at his response.
+He was rolling a cigarette which he finished and lighted, vouchsafing
+her merely a casual nod. Very different treatment, this, from Frank
+Barton’s unfailing courtesy.
+
+“What’s on the docket, Ethel?” Mayberry asked, eyeing her through the
+smoke that circled from his lips. “Anything wrong?”
+
+“I am not at all sure that there is anything wrong, Mr. Mayberry,” she
+replied, ignoring the chair he twisted about for her to occupy, and
+standing at the end of the desk. “I have found something which puzzles
+me so much that I thought it best to have you ratify the order before
+it is sent.”
+
+“What order?”
+
+She placed before him the schedule for supplies which he had given to
+one of the other girls to copy. “These are the items that puzzle me,”
+she said, pointing to several which, in summing up, amounted to several
+thousand dollars.
+
+“Well?” he said, his gaze direct and not at all reassuring.
+
+But Ethel Clayton was not to be easily put down. “I was not aware,”
+she said quietly, “that any of our contracts now under way called for
+goods of that grade.”
+
+“Well?” he said again and in the same sneering tone.
+
+“So I investigated,” Ethel pursued, apparently unshaken, “and I found
+this.” She placed before him the papers relating to the Bogata order
+which she felt so sure Mr. Barton had refused to consider.
+
+“Huh? Why shouldn’t you find it?” Mayberry asked in apparent surprise.
+Yet he flushed slightly, too.
+
+“I have every reason to suppose that order refused. You know it, too.
+You remember that Mr. Barton asked me to write a letter to that end. I
+did so.”
+
+“I remember there was something said about it,” Mayberry reflected.
+“But I heard nothing more about it. Frank said nothing further to me.”
+
+“No. Because it was settled, Mr. Mayberry,” the girl said more
+confidently. “We cannot fill this order.”
+
+“Indeed? Are you sure about that?” he asked, eyeing her with perfect
+composure now.
+
+“Why shouldn’t I be sure?” she retorted.
+
+“Well--I don’t know,” he drawled. “If you wrote a letter refusing this
+order, Frank saw it, of course?”
+
+“He O.K.’d it,” she said.
+
+“And it was sent?”
+
+“So I presume.”
+
+“It looks to me as though Frank must have changed his mind,” the
+superintendent said with a sly little smile. “He said nothing more
+to me about it. He would, it seems to me, if the order was finally
+refused. Having once discussed the matter with me, seems to me he would
+have done that.”
+
+“But he thought you understood,” cried the girl, both puzzled and
+alarmed. “You know he said the Bogata Company’s credit was involved.
+It was not whether the order should be accepted or not that was under
+discussion, Mr. Mayberry. It was merely how the refusal should be
+couched--in what terms. Don’t you remember?”
+
+“I admit you seem to have a clearer remembrance of the circumstances
+than I,” said Mayberry. “But it looks to me as though Frank had changed
+his mind about it without referring to the matter again to either of
+us. He probably found out that his fears regarding the Bogata Company’s
+credit were unfounded. Otherwise how would I have found the order on
+file? We have got to get right to work on it, too. That is why I am
+ordering these particular supplies.”
+
+“But, Mr. Mayberry!” she gasped, “I am quite sure a mistake has been
+made. Mr. Barton never intended this order to be filled.”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“The letter I wrote----”
+
+“Pooh! I suppose Frank was trying you out--seeing what you could do in
+an emergency,” and the superintendent laughed. “He never sent your
+letter. The Bogata people are old customers. It would not do to offend
+them.”
+
+“That is just it, Mr. Mayberry,” she cried. “It was a serious matter. I
+feel sure--Why! I put the letter in the mail myself.”
+
+Mayberry sat up straighter in his chair and his gaze became more
+intent. He dropped the butt of his cigarette in the ash tray that was
+never on the desk when the general manager was there.
+
+“You mean to tell me,” he asked, “that you posted that letter after
+Barton signed it?”
+
+“No. It was after John made his last trip to the post-office. When Mr.
+Barton had signed the letter I sealed it in the envelope, affixed the
+stamp, and placed it in the letter basket on my desk with other late
+mail.”
+
+“Humph! Did those letters go out that evening?” Mayberry asked.
+
+“No. John always takes them when he goes to early post--before I arrive
+at my desk.”
+
+“Then Frank could have regained the letter without your knowing it.”
+
+“But, Mr. Mayberry! surely he would have said something.”
+
+“Are you sure? He was not in the habit of taking you--or even me--into
+his confidence in most matters, was he?” and Mayberry looked at the
+girl keenly. “Where’s the carbon copy of that letter?”
+
+“I’ll get it,” she said, turning swiftly to the door.
+
+“And I say, Ethel!” he said. “Bring the Bogata Company’s letter as
+well, will you?”
+
+She resented his familiar way of speaking; but never had she been able
+to break Jim Mayberry of calling her by her given name. And he had,
+after all, known her when she was still a child. She was gone some
+minutes from the private office--long enough for Mayberry to smoke
+a second cigarette. She appeared with the proper drawer of the file
+cabinet and her countenance had fallen. She had run hastily through the
+Bogata correspondence. Here was the letter which had accompanied the
+order from the Bogata Company. The copy of the answer she had written
+at Frank Barton’s behest, and which he had approved, was not to be
+found.
+
+“I do not understand it, Mr. Mayberry,” the girl declared in a worried
+tone.
+
+“Pshaw! easily enough understood,” the superintendent rejoined. “He
+probably conferred with somebody who knew the Bogata people are as safe
+as a stone church. So he withdrew the letter from your mail basket
+after you went home.”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Mayberry!”
+
+“Sure.” Mayberry laughed. “You’ve stirred up a mare’s nest. Don’t
+worry.”
+
+“But I can’t accept your assertion as at all plausible,” the girl
+said earnestly. “He surely would have spoken to me about it. The next
+day----”
+
+“His mind was full of army stuff. He did not know half the time what he
+was doing here for a week before he went.”
+
+Ethel knew that was not at all true. But she was not here to quarrel
+with the superintendent. However, she said:
+
+“I remember clearly that Mr. Barton did not remain here later than I
+did that evening, Mr. Mayberry. I saw him on the street after I left
+the factory by the side gate.”
+
+“Huh!” Mayberry’s cheeks suddenly burned again and his eyes glittered
+as he gazed loweringly upon her. “You seem to remember mighty well what
+happened. I remember that evening, too, come to think of it. I was
+waiting out in front for you in my car. You stood me up.”
+
+Scorn leaped suddenly into the girl’s eyes. “I do not understand you,
+Mr. Mayberry,” she said tartly.
+
+“Oh! you don’t, hey?”
+
+“We are not discussing personalities,” she said, dropping her gaze and
+ignoring his ugly look. “This is business. I fear there has been a
+serious mistake made.”
+
+“Nothing of the kind, that _I_ can see,” Mayberry rejoined. “Barton
+changed his mind. Why should you bother _your_ head about it further?”
+
+His sneer bit like acid in a fresh wound; but Ethel checked her temper.
+
+“I do not mean to interfere in the slightest with your work, Mr.
+Mayberry. Mr. Barton brought me into the affair himself. I feel that
+all is not right. Let us communicate with Mr. Barton before this order
+for stock is sent. It may save the Hapwood-Diller Company several
+thousand dollars.”
+
+“It won’t save us a cent.”
+
+“But--”
+
+“I’ve got it all figured out. You see, I’ve had this on my mind a long
+time.”
+
+“Yes, that may be true, still--”
+
+“It won’t save us a cent, Ethel,” the superintendent drawled again,
+having recovered his own temper. “This Bogata order’s got to be filled.
+It will do no good to delay the purchase of supplies. It’s Friday now.
+If we wrote to-night we could not expect an answer before Tuesday or
+Wednesday from Barton. And I can point out to you why even he cannot
+change matters now.”
+
+“Why?” she demanded sharply.
+
+He picked up the letter which had accompanied the schedule of the order
+from the Bogata Company of Norville. If he smiled Ethel did not see it,
+for she was eagerly scanning the paragraph to which Mayberry’s finger
+pointed:
+
+  “Prices and terms as agreed upon in our last two orders. If we hear
+  nothing to the contrary within ten days shall consider the order and
+  terms accepted and will look for delivery of first quota of goods
+  within ninety days.”
+
+“Actually,” drawled Mayberry, “this order was accepted by us more than
+a month ago. It was evident that Barton did not send the letter you
+wrote, and removed the copy of it from the file. The schedule came to
+me in the usual way. There is nothing more to be said about it, Ethel.
+I believe that Frank himself said something about The Hapwood-Diller
+Company never reneging on a job. It would be a bad precedent to do so
+when he is absent from his post.”
+
+He said it so that the girl actually winced. To think of Jim Mayberry
+pointing out to her the ethics of the matter!
+
+“The fact is,” he pursued, coolly, “I have got to get a hustle on to
+make the first delivery within the specified time. I have already
+arranged to increase the output of Shop Number Two in order to do this.
+We shall run four or five hours overtime five days a week, beginning
+Monday. We’re crowded with work as it is; and this Bogata order is a
+big one.”
+
+Ethel listened to him in silence. She realized that it was useless to
+say anything more. Her heart pounded in her ears, but her countenance
+remained pale. She felt the approach of disaster when she turned away
+from his desk with the letter file-drawer in her arms.
+
+“Don’t trouble your head about it, Ethel,” he called after her. “You
+take everything too blamed seriously--just as I told you before. It
+won’t get you anywhere----”
+
+But she had closed the door between them. Had she turned to answer she
+realized very clearly that she would have said something for which she
+might be sorry afterward.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE DUTY DEVOLVES
+
+
+Ethel Clayton felt the assurance of wrongdoing on the part of the
+superintendent of the Hapwood-Diller Company. Yet she could not tell
+why nor how.
+
+That the concern had been drawn into the Bogata affair by some trick
+was without question. Mayberry’s look and words alone would have proved
+that to her satisfaction.
+
+She had a clear and particular remembrance of the circumstances
+surrounding the receipt of the order from the Norville company,
+Barton’s decision to refuse to fill it, his reason for so doing, and
+all. The way in which she had shown the general manager how to refuse
+the order without giving offence could not easily be forgotten.
+
+Mr. Barton had said that the running of the factory on double time, or
+crowding the shops with extra workmen, meant a distinct loss of profit
+rather than a gain for the Hapwood-Diller Company. The factory was not
+arranged for such increase of output. More than one concern has been
+ruined by such false prosperity.
+
+Here Mayberry was planning to put into execution exactly the plan
+vetoed by the absent general manager’s good sense. Yet, knowing how the
+contracts for their product stood, Ethel believed that such increase in
+working hours would be necessary if the Bogata order was to be filled
+on time.
+
+There was a catch there. She felt it. She was convinced that the
+superintendent had more knowledge of the subject than he was willing to
+admit.
+
+It all puzzled the girl. Why should Jim Mayberry be so determined to
+balk Mr. Barton’s will? And in this particular instance?
+
+As far as she had been able to see the superintendent had done nothing
+in his conduct of the factory’s affairs which would have either
+displeased Barton or was contrary to the latter’s methods. Why was the
+superintendent so determined to favor the Bogata Company?
+
+She remembered clearly that the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company was positive of the irresponsibility of the Bogata people.
+There was no gainsaying that. She was positive he had not changed his
+mind, involving the destruction of the letter she had written and
+Barton had signed, the removal of the carbon copy from the files, and
+the filing of the schedule of the Bogata Company’s order.
+
+No! she would not believe Frank Barton had done all that and said
+nothing about it to either Mayberry or herself. Yet, if the manager
+had not done it, _who had_?
+
+Who would be benefited by such a favor to the Bogata people? It might
+be actually disastrous to the Hapwood-Diller Company--and that thought
+frightened Ethel.
+
+She did not know what to do. That is, what to do to halt the line of
+conduct Mayberry had plainly determined to follow. She figured up
+the schedule for factory stock again. Between four and five thousand
+dollars for special grade raw material, useless except to the Bogata
+people, was included in it.
+
+Knowing well how carefully Barton had watched the outlay for stock
+for months--how narrow the line was between profit and loss in every
+department indeed--Ethel quite realized that this single purchase would
+make a very bad showing upon the books of the Hapwood-Diller Company,
+unless the Bogata order was finished and was paid for.
+
+If that contract was filled and was not paid for, a ruinous deficit
+in supplies and labor cost would face the factory at the end of the
+fiscal year. And in addition the general manager had assured her he
+figured overtime work or an increase of help in the shops as positively
+detrimental.
+
+This order for stock and factory supplies was supposed to go out at
+once. It was nearly time for John Murphy to make his last trip for the
+day to the post-office. There was absolutely nothing to hold the order
+back, and Mayberry, she knew, would take offence if the matter was
+retarded.
+
+It was true that five days must be wasted if Mr. Barton was communicated
+with by mail. And that joker in the Bogata Company’s letter seemed to
+be a barrier to any attempt to get out of fulfilling the contract at
+this late day. Would it do any good to disturb Barton about the matter
+at all now?
+
+If she could only see him! If she could discuss the point with
+him--tell him of her suspicions and fears. At least, some of her
+suspicions. Ethel scarcely admitted to herself that she positively
+identified the person guilty of juggling the letters and the Bogata
+order sheets. Merely she felt certain that Frank Barton knew nothing
+about it.
+
+He should know. He must know before more harm was done.
+
+The order for supplies was before her. She reached across the desk for
+the envelope in which to enclose it and her stiff linen cuff caught in
+the filigree work of the inkstand the office staff had presented to her.
+
+It tottered. In another moment the catastrophe had occurred--a deluge
+of blue fluid rolled across the desk and the papers on it.
+
+Ethel sprang up to escape the drip from the top of the desk.
+
+“Man overboard!” ejaculated Benway Chase, starting for the lavatory for
+a towel with which to mop up the ink.
+
+Little Skinner held the blotted order sheets gingerly by their corners,
+to drip over Ethel’s wastebasket.
+
+“Gee!” she said, hoarsely, “all them papers!”
+
+“Those papers, Mabel,” admonished Ethel involuntarily.
+
+For Mabel Skinner was like an actor afflicted with stammering in his
+natural character; when once in his part and on the stage he never
+stutters. So Mabel, nimble of wit, who was studying stenography at
+a night school, hoping to work up to a better position with the
+Hapwood-Diller Company, could take the small amount of dictation that
+fell to her reasonably well and could transcribe it into fair English:
+but she usually talked like a street gamin.
+
+“They will have to be recopied, Mabel,” Ethel said quietly. “Josephine
+has her hands full; will you do it for me?”
+
+“Sure,” agreed Miss Skinner, shifting her gum. Then she cocked an
+apprehensive eye at the clock. “I--I got a date to-night, Miss Clayton;
+but I can go without supper----”
+
+“I don’t wish you to finish it to-night, Mabel. Let me have it
+completed sometime to-morrow forenoon.”
+
+“I’m on,” said the girl, and bore away the streaked and blotted papers
+to her machine.
+
+John was called in to clean up the muss, and after a while Ethel could
+resume her seat. Nothing of importance upon her desk had been spoiled
+by the ink but the supply order sheets, and fortunately Jim Mayberry
+did not come out of the private office until it was all over. It was
+Ethel’s business to see that the order was promptly sent. It was her
+fault that it was delayed.
+
+Never before in her business experience had Ethel Clayton deliberately
+done such a thing. She was acting upon her own initiative and in a way
+that scarcely measured up to her ethical standards. Yet how should she
+meet guile save with guile?
+
+On the way home that evening Benway was bewailing the fact that Mr.
+Barton was not in the office so that he could see how well he, Benway,
+was fitting into the routine of the office.
+
+“Even Mr. Mayberry admits I can do the work all right,” the boy said
+hopefully. “He said as much yesterday. But I don’t like the fellow,
+Ethel. I don’t like the way he looks at you.”
+
+“‘A cat may look at a king’, Bennie,” she said lightly.
+
+“But no dog like him should look at a queen, Ethel,” Benway Chase
+retorted with a smile and a little sigh. “They are all tarred with the
+same brush, Ethel. Every man that comes into the offices wants to hang
+over your desk and palaver.”
+
+“Hush, Ben! How you talk!” she exclaimed, a little flushed and annoyed.
+“I declare I’ll have you sent out into the shipping room to work if you
+watch me like that.”
+
+“Pooh!” he laughed. “Is the honey at fault because the bees buzz around
+it?”
+
+“How poetical!” she scoffed. Yet she was secretly displeased. She did
+not like to think that the men she met in business hours gave her more
+attention than matters relating to business called for. The one man
+whose admiration she would have been glad to secure had never, while he
+was with them, shown any particular interest in her.
+
+Ethel was too introspective for her own comfort.
+
+She wondered all the evening if the thought that was budding in her
+mind was germinated by her desire to see Frank Barton. Was it for
+business reasons that she determined on her course? Or did she have
+another and more personal desire to speak with the general manager of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company, face to face?
+
+However, she considered that the duty had devolved upon her to take
+a drastic course. The order for new stock for the factory could be
+delayed only forty-eight hours through the accident to the first draft
+of the schedule. Instead of its reaching its destination on Saturday,
+Ethel saw to it that it was not mailed until after noon on Saturday.
+Therefore it would not be received by the dealer to whom it was
+assigned until Monday. Meantime----
+
+She astonished her mother on Saturday evening by announcing that she
+proposed to go to Quehasset on the early train Sunday morning. By
+this time the railroad was running excursion trains to the officers’
+training camp on Saturdays and Sundays. Quehasset was becoming a
+popular week-end resort.
+
+“Not alone!” gasped Mrs. Clayton. “Never!”
+
+“I’d like to know why not?” her daughter asked, rather tartly. “I’ve
+been to Boston alone, and that’s farther.”
+
+“But it won’t look right--all those men, Ethel. You know some of them,
+too. There’s Mr. Barton!”
+
+“I expect to see him,” declared the girl composedly.
+
+“It--it doesn’t look right,” objected her mother more faintly.
+
+“I’d like to know why not? I should hope I was old enough to go about
+without a chaperon, or----”
+
+“Let Benway go with you,” urged Mrs. Clayton, hurriedly.
+
+But that was exactly what Ethel did not wish to do. Indeed, if
+possible, she should have liked to keep the knowledge of her trip to
+Quehasset from her mother. She hurried away early in the morning,
+before most of the folk at that end of Burnaby Street were astir, and
+boarded the train which stopped but a minute at the Mailsburg Station
+at eight o’clock.
+
+She noted, as she passed along the High Street to the station, that
+more than the usual number of automobiles were abroad and most of
+them headed for the Creek Road which was the first lap of the driving
+highway to the training camp.
+
+The Fuller car was one of these she saw. Helen was driving and her
+mother and father sat in the tonneau. Her cousins gave Ethel Clayton
+not the slightest notice, but she could not help being somewhat
+disturbed by the thought that they were likewise bound for the training
+camp and that they would see her there with Frank Barton. At any rate,
+she hoped to arrive at the army camp first.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+LOVE AND BUSINESS
+
+
+Frank Barton had been thinking but little of love and not much about
+business. His entire time from the bugle-blown:
+
+  “I can’t get ’em up!
+  I can’t get ’em up!
+  I can’t get ’em up in the mor-r-rning!”
+
+to tattoo at night was filled with thoughts military. In addition to
+the regular course in tactics, he was studying special branches, such
+as the science of gunfire, range finding, signaling, and the like, for
+he wished to be assigned to the Field Artillery branch of the service.
+
+His former experience in the Guard was of vast assistance to him,
+yet he found that even the brief campaign on the Mexican Border had
+greatly changed the drill and the training of both officers and men.
+New methods were being adopted all the time. He soon realized that a
+military formula based upon the experience gained by our War Department
+in the Civil War, and upon which basis the National Guard had been
+drilled in the past, was almost as old-fashioned as the rules for
+conducting a Field of Honor in the time of the Crusaders.
+
+The Great War has flung into the discard most established measures of
+warfare. Fancy, so many years after the tilting with spears, a fighting
+man wearing an iron pot on his head!
+
+Barton had little time for the social life of the camp nor interest in
+it. He was only interested in those men about him who were as sturdily
+in earnest as himself in learning and getting ahead. Some were getting
+into “this army thing,” as they called it, as a profession; some out
+of pure patriotism, even if they did not talk about it. In either case
+those who were not thoroughly in earnest did not last long.
+
+He was mildly surprised when Morry Copley and his friend Bradley
+arrived in camp--the former arrayed in a uniform cut by a fashionable
+tailor, Bradley slouching behind in his heavy way, and with a scowl.
+Why either of these fellows had come it was hard for Barton to
+understand.
+
+Reports from the factory encouraged Barton to believe that he might
+safely continue his training. Mayberry had driven over in his car once
+to see him and they had talked things over. Business seemed running
+on well-oiled gears. There had been nothing in Ethel Clayton’s brief
+letters to make him apprehensive. The factory and its affairs seemed
+far afield from him.
+
+The camp interests were so manifold that when even a short furlough
+was due him Barton did not go home to Mailsburg. Instead he went to
+New York to confer with certain high officers of the Department of
+the East who he felt sure would bear him in mind if chance arose for
+an early assignment to the Front. If business matters remained as
+they seemed to be, he was determined to get “over there” as soon as
+possible. Pershing’s hundred thousand were on the scene; the engineers
+had marched through London and had arrived in France; now it was the
+Rainbow Division that was talked of as being almost ready to sail, and
+Frank Barton was eager to be assigned to duty with them.
+
+“Rest your mind easy, Barton,” Grandon Fuller assured him the first
+time he came over to Camp Quehasset with his daughter. “We stockholders
+appreciate all that you have done; the Board is more than pleased with
+your work. But you have trained a good assistant in Mayberry. He’ll do
+very well.”
+
+“I believe he will,” Frank Barton said heartily. He would rather,
+however, have had a reassuring word from Macon Hammerly upon this
+point. But Hammerly neither wrote to him nor came near the camp.
+
+Helen was full of her own plans, although she did not forget to show
+some interest in Barton’s affairs. She had become an active member of
+the Red Cross forces. Being amply able to pay her own expenses, and
+with health and freedom, she had the more easily secured permission to
+join the very next quota of Red Cross workers sailing from “an Atlantic
+seaport”--that in about six weeks. Her mother was to go with her and
+establish herself in Paris.
+
+“Really,” Barton thought, “it is brave of Helen, and wonderfully
+unselfish as well.” That the girl made a display of everything she did
+was not seen by his blinded eyes.
+
+Barton was expecting the Fullers over again in their car on this
+Sunday, and had accordingly polished his accoutrements and made his
+quarters presentable. He shared these last with three other men; but
+they were all off for the day, and he himself was duty-free until taps.
+
+So he was not at all surprised when he heard the rustle of crisp skirts
+and a light tapping on his open door. Before he could reply to the
+summons he heard Morry Copley’s high voice advising:
+
+“He must be there, Miss--ah--Really, I’m suah he’s not gone out of the
+street this morning. I’ll look around for him if I may?”
+
+“Thank you,” said a very cool voice. Morry was evidently not being
+encouraged. And it was not Helen Fuller who spoke.
+
+“Miss Clayton!”
+
+Barton appeared with hand outstretched and a real welcome in his eyes.
+But Copley was not to be easily ignored.
+
+“I say, Barton,” he drawled, “I showed her over here from the camp
+entrance, knowing you were at home, don’t you know.”
+
+“Thanks, old fellow,” Barton said. “This is Miss Clayton’s first visit
+to the camp.”
+
+“Oh, I knew that,” Copley agreed, boldly eyeing the girl and showing
+no desire to relieve them of his presence. One of Barton’s Western
+brother-rookies would have accused the young exquisite of “horning in.”
+“I’m suah if I’d ever seen--er--the lady here before I should have
+remembered her.”
+
+Ethel was plainly ruffled; but Frank Barton burst into hearty laughter.
+He considered Morry quite harmless.
+
+“Miss Clayton, I am sure, will allow me to introduce you, Copley,” he
+said cordially, and then smiled at Ethel. “Mr. Copley comes from our
+town, Miss Clayton.”
+
+“Bah Jove! I saw you before in a tea room once,” Morry burst out. “Suah
+I did! I was with Miss Fuller, you know. I wonder I did not recognize
+you before. You weren’t dressed the same, you know.”
+
+“If it was on a working day I am sure she was not dressed the same,”
+Barton said, looking frankly his approval of Ethel’s Sunday appearance.
+
+And yet, as she stood bandying light conversation with the two men,
+Ethel Clayton was secretly hurt. Would Frank Barton have so casually
+introduced Helen Fuller, for instance, to any companion-in-arms who had
+forced himself upon them as Morry Copley had? The thought stung her
+pride.
+
+Really Copley seemed more than a little interested in her. He rattled
+on boldly, and there was not a chance for her to divert his attention
+that she might speak seriously and personally to the man she had come
+to see.
+
+The latter was unfeignedly glad to see her; but he seemed to consider
+her visit merely a social one. And that did not altogether please Ethel
+Clayton. She had come strictly on business. At least, so she had been
+assuring herself. Yet all Barton seemed to care about the factory and
+its affairs was expressed in a perfunctory:
+
+“Everything going on all right at the works, Miss Clayton? Though of
+course that is a superfluous question with such capable people as you
+and Mayberry on the job. I knew it would be that way.”
+
+“Really, Mr. Barton, you must not assume too much,” she hesitated,
+unable to approach clearly before Morry Copley the matter that so
+troubled her and that had brought her to Quehasset.
+
+“I say,” drawled the latter, “you don’t mean to say Miss Clayton is one
+of these really industrious people--like yourself, Barton? Is she, too,
+a prop and support of the Hapwood-Diller Company?”
+
+“She most certainly is!” smiled the general manager. “But I believe she
+brings me nothing but good news. How about it, Miss Clayton?”
+
+It was her chance--perhaps the best one she would have to get him away
+from this chattering, inconsequential Morry Copley. “I have one puzzle
+to consult you about, Mr. Barton,” she began, when, with a whir and
+clash of released gears, a big touring car whirled around the corner
+and halted almost directly before the shack.
+
+“Oh, Jimminy Christmas, see who’s here!” ejaculated Copley.
+
+“Miss Fuller! Welcome to our city!” joined in Barton, and hastily
+descended to the car.
+
+Morry Copley remained lounging beside Ethel, greeting the girl in the
+car with merely the semaphore sign of good comradeship. Helen was
+alone, having dropped her mother and father at the Staff Headquarters.
+As had been said, Grandon Fuller had once borne the title of “Colonel”
+and played the fact now for all it was worth.
+
+“Don’t let me keep you, Mr. Copley,” Ethel said significantly.
+
+“No chance!” drawled Morry. “Miss Fuller has no use for me when
+Barton’s around. They talk nothing but war and nursing. Gee! I hate to
+think of folks getting all mussed up so.”
+
+“Why, for pity’s sake, did you ever join this camp?” Ethel asked, in
+astonishment.
+
+“I rawther fancied myself in the uniform, don’t you know,” he declared,
+but with twinkling eyes. “I say!” he added, “they’re not going for a
+spin without us?”
+
+Ethel leaped to her feet and anger flashed from her eyes, although
+Morry did not see it. Miss Fuller was evidently trying to urge Barton
+to get into the car. She had punched her starter button and the car
+began to throb.
+
+But Barton turned back to the two on the plank porch of the shack. “Do
+come, Miss Clayton,” he urged. “I promised I would take luncheon with
+Miss Fuller to-day at the Mannerly Arms, and she has not much time. It
+will be quite all right, I am sure. If you have something to say to
+me----”
+
+“My errand is strictly business, Mr. Barton,” Ethel replied shortly.
+
+“I am sure Miss Fuller will wait----”
+
+“Oh, bring her along, _do_!” exclaimed Helen from the car and with
+impatience. “Come on, Morry. I know _you_ are dying to take her. You’ll
+excuse me for not getting out and begging you myself, Miss Clayton,”
+she added carelessly. “I suppose it is sometimes necessary to mix
+business with pleasure. If you really _have_ to consult Mr. Barton----”
+
+“I will not detain him long, Miss Fuller,” Ethel said, pale but firm.
+“I have neither time nor inclination to go to lunch with you--and Mr.
+Copley. She dismissed the latter with a curt nod, and he strolled down
+to the car, grumbling, while Barton, a little vexed, took his place
+beside the girl who he acknowledged was so capable an assistant in the
+factory office.
+
+“I am sorry to interfere in any way with your affairs, Mr. Barton,”
+Ethel hastened to say. “Had I not believed the occasion serious----”
+
+“Serious for me?” he asked quickly, eyeing her curiously.
+
+“Serious to the Hapwood-Diller Company,” she replied stiffly. “Of
+course I have a double interest in the welfare of the company. My
+mother’s income depends upon its profits.”
+
+“I know that your mother holds some of our stock,” he said patiently.
+
+“Therefore my particular interest may perhaps be excused.” Ethel could
+not help saying this, if it was a mite catty. She could not feel in any
+angelic mood at the moment. “In addition, Mr. Barton, you asked me to
+keep a watchful eye on things in the office.”
+
+“I did,” he said with gentleness.
+
+She flushed more deeply. It was plain that he was quite aware she had
+been hurt by Miss Fuller’s manner; and that but increased Ethel’s
+vexation. As though it really mattered what Helen Fuller did or said!
+
+He noted the flush and looked disturbed.
+
+“Are you not feeling well?” he asked kindly.
+
+“Oh, yes, I am perfectly well,” she returned quickly.
+
+“You look as if you might have a headache, or something like that.”
+
+“It wouldn’t matter if I did have,” she replied, not knowing what else
+to say.
+
+“Oh, yes, it would. I don’t want you to work if you are not well.”
+
+“Here is the situation,” and she rushed on to state the matter of the
+Bogata order with her usual brisk explicitness.
+
+Barton now gave close attention, and his changing expression betrayed
+the value he put upon her story. At its conclusion he demanded:
+
+“But what’s the matter with Jim? He must know that we all agreed those
+people were not to be trusted.”
+
+“He did not agree to that, it is evident,” Ethel said dryly. “In fact,
+his remembrance seems to be hazy regarding the whole matter. Seems to
+think you would have spoken to him about it again had you not intended
+to accept the order.”
+
+Barton made an impatient gesture. “That’s Jim all over. Stubborn as a
+mule!” he exclaimed. “And yet that very stubbornness makes him of value
+in many circumstances.”
+
+It was plain he had no real suspicion of Mayberry. And Ethel was
+determined not to put forward just at that time her own belief in the
+superintendent’s treachery.
+
+“And what have you done about the matter before coming to me?” Barton
+asked with a curiosity that Ethel thought she understood. He was not
+at all sure whether she had the initiative to balk this thing which she
+believed was all wrong.
+
+“Something wholly feminine, I fear,” she replied, and told him of the
+accident to the order addressed to the factory supply people.
+
+Barton laughed shortly. Evidently he was not displeased.
+
+“I can see you have a very good reason for not quarreling with
+Mayberry. Quite right. Things would by no means go so smoothly if you
+two could not work together. You retarded the order so that you could
+see me to-day?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And what do you expect me to do?”
+
+“If that Bogata order is not to be filled, you can telegraph the stock
+people to hold our order for correction.”
+
+“Right! You certainly have a grasp of the situation, as you always
+have, Miss Clayton,” he said promptly. “I will dictate that telegram.
+You can send it from the railroad station as you go back, if you will.”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Barton,” she responded, whipping out her book and pencil.
+
+He smiled covertly. She was all business now.
+
+“Your suspicions are quite correct,” Barton observed. “Somebody
+tampered with that letter and order. I did not see the letter or the
+carbon copy of it after signing the former. The Bogata people must
+have a friend in our offices. Have you any idea----”
+
+“No!” she exclaimed almost harshly.
+
+If Barton could not see Jim Mayberry’s hand in the affair surely it was
+not her place to tell him. He seemed to ignore utterly the possibility
+of the superintendent’s being the person guilty.
+
+“The Bogata people cannot hold us to any such terms,” Barton went on to
+say. “We did not accept the order. Business--especially as important a
+matter as this--is not so easily done. Their letter was a good deal of
+a bluff as it stood. I should have felt justified in throwing it and
+the schedule of their order into my wastebasket. Jim Mayberry is green
+yet. I’ll have you take word to him----”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Barton! if you do that you will make my position terribly
+difficult,” she cried.
+
+“True,” he admitted. “I suppose that is so. I will communicate with
+Hammerly. He knows all about the affairs of the Bogata people. We will
+let him break the news to Jim,” and he laughed a little.
+
+“You see, Miss Clayton, we must expect such mistakes as this to creep
+in when a fellow is like Jim. He has all the knowledge of the business
+that is necessary, I am sure. But he is likely to make mistakes--at
+first.”
+
+She looked at the manager in wonder. Was it possible that his old-time
+interest in Jim Mayberry, and the fact that they had been friends for
+so long, utterly blinded Barton to the superintendent’s faults?
+
+“You have a quicker mind than Jim,” went on Barton, easily, “and you
+haven’t his stubbornness. I really would not dare accept my lieutenancy
+and ask for active duty if Jim had not you at his elbow. I know you
+will not let him make any serious error.”
+
+“But, Mr. Barton!” she cried, under her breath, “you do not expect
+really to leave the country so quickly?”
+
+“Perhaps. I have offered my services. I have got my commission. Really,
+my work here has been somewhat like a review of former studies. And
+officers are needed----”
+
+“Not _over there_?” Ethel gasped.
+
+He did not chance to see her face as he replied quietly: “So we expect.
+We are not supposed to talk of it. Certain movements of the War
+Department are kept secret. But whatever happens to me I am confident
+you and Jim will conduct the affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company
+successfully. Why, this proves it! What he overlooks you will not miss.
+Now, will you take a letter to Mr. Hammerly?”
+
+She held her pencil poised in readiness and nodded. Surely at that
+moment she could not have uttered a word. He began to dictate, and
+the letter was couched in such terms as to show his belief that Jim
+Mayberry was perfectly innocent of all guile in the matter. However,
+when it was concluded, Barton said reflectively:
+
+“But there is a traitor in the offices, Miss Clayton. That we know it
+must put you and Mayberry both on guard. I depend on you particularly
+to watch for the guilty party.”
+
+“And suppose I find him?” she demanded quickly.
+
+“If you cannot reach me,” Barton gravely told her, “then--then go to
+Mr. Hammerly. Cross-grained as he is, he is perfectly honest. Besides,”
+he added, “next to Mr. Grandon Fuller, he owns more stock in the
+Hapwood-Diller Company than anybody else.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+WAR IS DECLARED
+
+
+“For pity’s sake, Mr. Barton, _do_ come away,” Helen Fuller cried at
+last. “We’ll _never_ have time for luncheon.”
+
+“Beg pardon. Business must be attended to before we can take our
+pleasure, always,” and Frank Barton laughed.
+
+But Ethel’s countenance was quite composed again. She did not even
+glance in Miss Fuller’s direction as she closed the notebook and put it
+and the pencil into her bag.
+
+“Good-day, Miss Clayton,” Barton said, taking her hand. “I will not
+thank you for coming to me on this business, for I know your deep
+interest in the company’s affairs. That was merely your duty. But to
+see you again has been a pleasure. Even should I be assigned to foreign
+duty suddenly, I shall hope to see all my Mailsburg friends at least
+once before I sail. I send my regards to everybody in the office.”
+
+It was like that. He did not consider her call a personal one. Yet
+that was not altogether Frank Barton’s fault, for Ethel had made it
+plain that she had come only on business. The young manager of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company was no more dense than any other man.
+
+Helen’s voice, with a tartness in it that could not be mistaken,
+reached them again:
+
+“_Do_ hurry, Mr. Barton! I presume if you were fighting in the trenches
+it would all have to stop while you gave your attention to some factory
+matter.”
+
+He laughed and ran down the steps to the car. The engine of the latter
+began to roar again.
+
+“Coming, Morry?” Helen asked, as the wheels began to revolve.
+
+“Two’s company, three’s a gang,” he drawled, waving his hand.
+“Farewell. I am going to show Miss Clayton around the camp.”
+
+This he insisted on doing. After the brusk departure of Barton in the
+car Ethel was too proud to show any chagrin. Besides, Morry Copley was
+evidently desirous of pleasing her. She noted that he had assumed quite
+a military carriage and concluded that his few weeks in camp had done
+him a world of good.
+
+“Won’t you let me call on you when I come back to Mailsburg on
+furlough, Miss Clayton?” he asked, when he had showed her everything of
+general interest in the camp.
+
+“Most certainly not!” Ethel exclaimed bluntly. “You know very well Mrs.
+Copley would be horrified if you visited a working girl, Mr. Copley.”
+
+“Aw, fiddle!” returned Morry in disgust, “I’m not half as much tied to
+her apron strings as you think.”
+
+“Perhaps you should be,” Ethel laughed. “What will she say if you
+really are ordered to France?”
+
+“Mothaw really thinks this is all play. She has no idea we’ll really
+go. At least, not such fellows as Bradley and me.”
+
+“And--will you?” Ethel wickedly observed.
+
+“If I get my commission I’ll be off before she knows it--poor dear
+lady,” he declared. “Don’t you people in Mailsburg fret. There are some
+men in this camp besides Frank Barton.”
+
+Ethel sent the telegram holding up the stock order as instructed by
+Barton, and when she arrived home late in the afternoon she transcribed
+her notes of the letter to Mr. Macon Hammerly and sent it to that
+gentleman by special messenger. The latter appeared in the offices of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company early on Monday morning. For once he seemed
+to wish to catch Jim Mayberry at his desk.
+
+“Let’s see,” scowled Macon Hammerly, eyeing the superintendent blackly,
+“have you managed to find a hat in town big enough for you, Jim?”
+
+“I have ’em made to order--and stretchable,” grinned the younger man,
+never at a loss for an answer when he met Hammerly, whom he just as
+cordially disliked as Hammerly disliked him. “What’s biting you now?”
+
+“A suspicion that you have a swelled head is eating on me,” frankly
+announced the old grain dealer, his bushy eyebrows meeting again. “I’ve
+come to give you a mite of advice.”
+
+“Thanks!” returned Mayberry, encouragingly. “I’ve been expecting this
+visit ever since Frank went away. It must have pained you to keep away
+so long.”
+
+“Not exactly,” returned Hammerly. “It’s only surprised me that I
+haven’t had to come around before. I told Barton I’d keep an eye on
+you.”
+
+“Thanks again,” growled Mayberry, and this time he did not look so
+pleasant. Hammerly was quite unmoved.
+
+“Here’s the trouble,” he said, quietly watching the superintendent.
+“Barton wrote me to look up the Bogata people again.”
+
+The hit was palpable. Mayberry jumped in his chair. He lifted his face
+to stare at the old man in open surprise.
+
+“Seems there’s an order kicking around the office here from them.
+Barton had his doubts about accepting it. Now there _is_ no doubt.
+You’re not to do a stroke of work on those goods.”
+
+“Who says so?” snapped Mayberry. “Who’s in charge here, I want to know,
+Mr. Hammerly?”
+
+“_You_ won’t be,” said the other softly, “if you don’t take well meant
+advice.”
+
+“Why! that order’s been accepted long ago. I’ve ordered some of the
+stock. I’ve planned to begin the work this week.”
+
+“Change your plans, Jim Mayberry. Change your plans,” said Hammerly
+in a more threatening voice. “You’re not in power here. Barton may
+come back any day and polish you off. And this Bogata business is
+settled--for all time. Don’t make a mistake.”
+
+“Why, we can’t----”
+
+“You’re right. You can’t fill the order. Pull in your horns. The Bogata
+Company are going to have a New Year’s present of a receivership.
+And I’m hanged if I’ll stand by and see them try to bolster up their
+rotten credit with the credit of the Hapwood-Diller Company. They don’t
+happen to owe this firm anything, Jim; but they owe everybody else in
+the world who would give ’em a cent’s worth of credit. You kill their
+order.”
+
+“I tell you it can’t be done,” muttered Mayberry.
+
+“If you don’t Barton will come here and do it himself. He’s already
+wired your supply people to hold that order you sent for correction.
+You’re not going to run this factory into debt one penny’s worth to aid
+the Bogata people.”
+
+Mayberry sprang up, his heavy face aflame. “If you were a younger man,
+Mr. Hammerly----”
+
+“Forget my age, Jim. I’ve never seen the day yet that I couldn’t handle
+a chap of your size and shape,” and he let his keen eye run over
+Mayberry’s obese figure. “You’re as stubborn as a mule. Perhaps that’s
+all the matter with you. But you’ve got your instructions. All you need
+to do is to follow them. Write to the Bogata people and tell them this
+factory can’t fill their order.”
+
+“I don’t see by what right----”
+
+“None at all. I’m butting in,” said Hammerly turning to the door. “But
+you’d better think it over.” He went out chuckling, and after a while
+Mayberry cooled down. He knew well enough Hammerly’s power on the
+board. He soon grew calm enough to study the thing out.
+
+Barton had called on Hammerly for advice again. How had Barton heard of
+the Bogata matter? Just one answer to that question. Ethel Clayton!
+
+Mayberry’s expression when he came to this conclusion boded ill for
+Ethel. He knew just how he stood personally with her. Not that he
+cared more for Ethel Clayton in the first place than he did for half a
+dozen other girls. Only it had piqued him that she should have been so
+disdainful of his advances.
+
+Now he had a real reason, he told himself, for considering Ethel in the
+light of an enemy. She had thwarted his intention of jamming the Bogata
+order through the factory before Barton became aware of what he was
+doing. The success of the scheme meant much in a financial way to the
+superintendent.
+
+Now he could not do it. It was true that he had got his orders from
+the old grain merchant. Hammerly would surely keep his eye on him
+hereafter--if he had not already been doing so.
+
+Mayberry knew he had a friend in Grandon Fuller. But he did not know
+yet just how much of a friend Mr. Fuller was. Nor why he was friendly
+with him! Mr. Fuller had not yet shown his hand.
+
+Fuller was the heaviest stockholder in the Hapwood-Diller Company and
+was, of course, on the board of directors. But it was doubtful if he
+could swing more votes than Macon Hammerly.
+
+Angry as he was, Mayberry felt that it would be the part of wisdom to
+keep from an open break with the grain dealer. Besides, Barton had not
+gone to France yet--if he ever did.
+
+A telegram came from the supply house:
+
+  “We hold your order as requested subject to correction.”
+
+Mayberry sent for Ethel.
+
+“What do you know about this, Ethel?” he demanded, glowering at her as
+she read the telegram.
+
+“Just as much as you do, Mr. Mayberry,” she declared, composedly enough.
+
+He thought that over a bit. Then he dictated a a letter to the
+Bogata Company bluntly refusing to fill their order and without
+even explaining or apologizing for the seeming delay in answering
+their letter. He had managed to do exactly what Barton had tried to
+avoid--giving the Bogata people offence. If the miracle happened, and
+the Bogata people “came back,” they would never feel friendly again
+toward the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+As for Mayberry and Ethel, war was declared between them. There could
+be no further doubt of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE IMAGE HE TOOK AWAY
+
+
+Although Frank Barton was still manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company,
+he had turned his salary back into the treasury of the concern ever
+since joining the training camp at Lake Quehasset.
+
+It was not long after the flurry regarding the Bogata Company
+order that a suggestion was made in the directors meeting of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company that Barton be removed and Mayberry be put in
+his place as manager. The suggestion came from Grandon Fuller. Macon
+Hammerly opposed it.
+
+“I am told that Barton will sail shortly with a contingent of our brave
+boys for the other side,” Mr. Fuller declared pompously. “I fancy he
+has merely neglected to resign in the stress of other business. Mr.
+Mayberry has shown his ability and capacity for management. I do not
+see why Brother Hammerly should object.”
+
+“Patriotic reasons,” said the opposing member of the board dryly. “I
+object to kicking a fellow out of his job because he is going off to
+fight his country’s battles. Let things rest as they are, Fuller.”
+
+“Do you mean all through the war?” demanded Mr. Fuller, with some heat.
+
+“Why not? Frank Barton pulled this company out of a slough of despond
+that pretty near swamped us. If he comes back alive I, for one, want to
+see him manager again.”
+
+“But what about Mr. Mayberry?”
+
+“How is _he_ hurt?” snorted the old grain merchant. “He’s sitting here,
+tight enough, while another man is fighting in his place. The least he
+can do is to hold Barton’s job for him.”
+
+That killed the suggestion for the time being. The matter leaked out of
+the board room, however, and Ethel Clayton heard of it. She wondered
+if, after all, the Fullers were such good friends of Frank Barton as
+they seemed to be.
+
+Likewise she began to wonder what would happen to her if Jim Mayberry
+ever got the full power over the office force that he had in the
+factory. He might then discharge her on some easily trumped-up pretext.
+The thought was not a pleasant one.
+
+Of late, on several occasions Mayberry had criticized her work,
+especially her management of the office staff. He aimed some shafts
+of his rough wit, too, at Benway Chase, although he could find no
+complaint to make in the new clerk’s work.
+
+For Benway really showed a remarkable aptitude for his position. He was
+always energetic. When a member of the shipping room force was away for
+a while, Benway took on the duties of checker in addition to his usual
+work, which latter he did not in the least neglect.
+
+When Mayberry noticed this he said:
+
+“So you are out to master the whole business, are you, Chase? Going to
+be the wheelhorse, driver and spotted dog under the hind axle.”
+
+“I told you, Mr. Mayberry, I was out for your job,” Benway said coolly.
+“Every little bit a fellow learns puts him so much farther ahead.”
+
+“Think so, do you?” sneered the superintendent.
+
+But Ethel knew Benway was getting a firm grasp on the details of the
+office work that made him exceedingly useful. He very quietly relieved
+her of some of the duties which had a way of falling upon her shoulders.
+
+Barton had been in the habit of depending on her bright mind and
+willingness to a great degree. Mayberry deliberately shirked much of
+the routine work as he could. And of course it all fell upon Ethel and
+made her burden the heavier to bear. Sometimes she was held at her post
+until long after the others were gone for the day.
+
+Benway Chase would have remained to help or to accompany her home on
+these occasions had she allowed him to, and she had fairly to drive
+Little Skinner home. The latter would have done all Ethel’s work for
+her had she been able.
+
+“Take it from me!” the slangy Mabel declared. “That Jim Mayberry lets
+you slave here while he’s playin’ poker down to the Bellevue or
+runnin’ about the country in that flivver of his. I wish’t Mr. Barton
+would come back. He wouldn’t see you abused. Miss Clayton--’deed he
+wouldn’t!”
+
+Ethel had not heard from Barton since her visit to the training camp,
+although she wrote to him briefly each week as she had promised.
+Nothing special had arisen in the daily affairs of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company to cause her sufficient worry to bring it to Barton’s notice.
+And with the little trials, of course, she had no intention of
+troubling him.
+
+Mailsburg’s first quota of drafted men marched past the factory one
+day to the railway station. The streets were lined with silent people
+for the most part. But the buildings were cheerful with bunting and
+flags. It was Ethel who insisted that the factory front be decorated in
+addition to the great silk flag which Barton had raised first with his
+own hands and which John raised each morning and took in at night.
+
+Mayberry grudgingly shut down the shops for an hour that the hands
+might cheer more than a hundred of the drafted men who had left the
+Hapwood-Diller Company to don the army khaki.
+
+Service flags began to appear all over the town after that. Mrs.
+Trevor, Barton’s former landlady, hung out one with a single star on
+it, and Ethel was told that the grim old woman kept Barton’s chair at
+the table for him and allowed nobody to sit in it.
+
+Almost every day something happened to remind Ethel that the war was
+coming closer and closer to her. Her mother was knitting for the Red
+Cross. She did not say much about this work save to mention with a
+sniff that she hoped she could turn out as good work as those snips of
+girls she saw knitting in the cars and on the park benches.
+
+“And I expect to see them take those awful looking knitting bags to
+church with them one of these days,” was likewise Mrs. Clayton’s tart
+comment.
+
+One day Ethel saw Morry Copley in town. It was while she was out
+to lunch and, without seeing her, he bustled past so importantly
+that she could not escape the thought that there must be something
+afoot--perhaps some assignment of troops or officers that affected
+Frank Barton as well. Morry wore the insignia of a second-lieutenant.
+
+She hurried back to the office with the expectation of seeing Barton.
+Surely he would not come to town without looking in upon them! But the
+afternoon dragged by without his appearance. She said nothing to her
+office mates regarding her expectations.
+
+Each time the door opened she started and looked up, expecting to see
+him--tall and handsome in his khaki--enter the office. It made her
+nervous. There were mistakes in her work that put her back so she had
+to remain after hours again. When Benway wanted to help her she snapped
+at him and sent that surprised young man home “with a flea in his ear.”
+
+Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Barton had been cooling his heels
+in the Fullers’ reception hall. He had sent up his card to Helen and
+the maid had come down to say that the young lady was very busy. Would
+Monsieur wait?
+
+Monsieur would--most assuredly he would! He had not seen or heard from
+Miss Fuller since the Sunday on which both she and Ethel Clayton had
+chanced to come to Camp Quehasset. And now, save for a conference with
+Mr. Hammerly, he had sacrificed most of his time in Mailsburg to speak
+confidentially to Grandon Fuller’s daughter.
+
+He waited her pleasure with such patience as he could master. He had
+come to think of Helen during most of his waking hours. At least if his
+military duties and studies were to the fore, the thought of Helen was
+ever present in the back of his mind.
+
+She was going to France he knew; but he might never see her over there.
+Just now he was feeling very keenly the fact that he was assigned
+to the Front and that he might, within a very short period, be in
+desperate danger of death.
+
+A precious hour and more he waited. Occasionally he saw a soft-footed
+serving man or a maid pass his lonely alcove. Nobody spoke to him.
+Finally the noise of a car under the porte-cochère awoke hollow echoes.
+Immediately the sound of voices came from above. Down the broad
+staircase tripped Helen.
+
+“Oh, mercy _me_, Mr. Barton! Are _you_ here? And waiting _all_ this
+time? That stupid maid! I was so busy with my dressmaker that I could
+not possibly come. And then--the maid never reminded me.”
+
+She might have delivered him a physical blow in the face and he would
+have felt or shown it no more keenly. She was gorgeous in frock and
+hat, and she smiled upon him in her old alluring way. But his spirit
+fell from its heights. A dressmaker had been of more importance! She
+had depended upon her maid to remind her that he was waiting to see her!
+
+“I hoped to see you for a few minutes, Miss Helen,” he said quietly. “I
+am going away.”
+
+“Of course! So am I!” she cried. “But I must be off now to the
+Northup’s dinner. The car is waiting. It’s too late for me to refuse,
+Mr. Barton. And there is a dance afterward that I positively _must_
+look in at. Dear _me_! I’ll really be _glad_ to be over there and at
+work in a hospital. This running around to dinners and dances and what
+Morry Copley calls ‘tea-fights’, is just killing me.
+
+“Can’t I see you in the morning, Frank?”
+
+He wanted to tell her that in the morning he would already be at sea.
+But that was forbidden.
+
+“I am afraid not. I have to go back on the eight-ten.”
+
+“Oh! Not so _soon_! Really?” There was much lacking in her tone--much
+of warmth that he had expected. “Well, best of luck! Hope to see you
+‘over there,’ you know. Bye-bye!”
+
+She ran out to the car, turning to wave her hand as she got in. And
+that after he had waited an hour! Had Macon Hammerly been right after
+all? He had said:
+
+“The Fullers only want you for what they can get out of you. Grandon
+Fuller was never known yet to do anything without a purpose behind
+it. Look how he hung about Israel Diller--was right on the spot when
+the old chap died. You don’t suppose Diller made Grandon Fuller rich
+because he _deserved_ riches, do you?”
+
+His wasted hour caused Barton to miss the office force at the factory;
+but he went that way to the station, hoping to see Mayberry at least.
+His mastery of the Hapwood-Diller Company’s affairs seemed a long way
+behind him now. Indeed when a man faces war the past grows small to
+him in any case. It is what is going to happen to him that completely
+obsesses his thought.
+
+Barton thrust his head in at the office door, having opened it softly.
+A single strong light was ablaze over Ethel Clayton’s desk. The
+remainder of the room was in shadow.
+
+The girl had evidently finished the task that had kept her so late, for
+her desk was cleared up and she sat back in her chair, dreaming. Her
+gaze was fixed on the door of the private office; but Frank Barton
+could not see her face until he spoke.
+
+“Nobody here but you, Miss Clayton? I am certainly glad to see you. All
+the rest gone?”
+
+She turned her face toward him slowly, appearing not to be startled at
+all by his coming. “They are all gone, Mr. Barton,” she said quietly,
+and reached up quickly to turn the shade of the electric lamp so that
+the light no longer fell on her face.
+
+“Mayberry gone, too?” he asked, coming in with his hand held out.
+
+“He is out of town, I believe,” Ethel told him, her voice unshaken,
+rising to meet him.
+
+“I am sorry I missed them all,” Barton said, grasping her hand for a
+moment warmly. “You will have to give them my regards and best wishes.”
+
+“Will you not stay over night?”
+
+“I fear that will be impossible. I am on my way to catch the eight-ten.”
+
+“You are not going away _now_? Not for _good_?”
+
+Barton laughed. “I hope to come back safely,” he said. “But this is
+good-bye for some time, Miss Clayton----”
+
+He caught her arm and steadied her as she swung against the desk. Her
+eyes closed and he saw suddenly that she was very pale.
+
+“Are you faint? You’re working too hard!” he cried. “Look here, Miss
+Clayton, you must take better care of yourself. I shouldn’t feel half
+so safe in going away if you were not right here on the job. You’ve
+got to be good to yourself.”
+
+“I--I was a little faint. It’s all right, Mr. Barton,” she murmured.
+“Nothing serious, I assure you. I’m not one of the fainting kind, as
+you know.”
+
+“No indeed!” he cried admiringly. “I bank on you and your very good
+sense, Miss Clayton. You are not like other girls. I did not know for
+a moment but that my announcement startled you. I should have been
+flattered!” and he laughed.
+
+She was silent. He could not see her face well, for she kept it turned
+from the lamp. Finally she said: “Naturally I am troubled that you
+should be going--so far away. Oh, this war is terrible, Mr. Barton!”
+
+“Yes. All wars have been terrible. The one that touches you nearest
+seems the most terrible. But after all, Miss Clayton, it doesn’t matter
+much how one dies as long as death is inevitable.”
+
+“That is fatalism! Perhaps it is the right soldier spirit,” she
+murmured. Then she turned to face him again and her countenance was
+quietly radiant. “But why should we who stop at home add to your
+burdens? We should send you away with a smile.”
+
+“I wonder!” he exclaimed. “I wonder if we fellows ought not to go away
+with a smile--to furnish those we leave behind with courage? Those we
+leave behind must do our work. War is waste, you know, when all is said
+and done. I leave you, Miss Clayton, to keep things straight here,”
+and he smiled warmly again as his hand once more sought hers. “Write
+to me,” and he told her how to address him through the War Department.
+“Good-bye!”
+
+He wheeled swiftly and marched to the door. His upright carriage and
+squared shoulders made his back look almost strange to her. She stood
+before the desk leaning against it, her hands clinging tightly to its
+edge. Her knuckles were perfectly white from the pressure of her hands
+upon the wood--that grasp which actually kept her from falling.
+
+But her face showed none of her terror and weakness. He turned at the
+door to smile and nod to her again. The image he took away in his mind
+was of her perfectly composed, smiling face. And again it was the
+memory of Ethel Clayton, not of Helen Fuller, that he carried away as
+the Girl He Left Behind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE AWAKENING
+
+
+Frank Barton had gone to the Front. He would be where there was battle,
+murder, and sudden death! War had become a horrid, living reality to
+Ethel Clayton.
+
+She heard that Morrison Copley had been in town to bid his mother
+good-bye and had gone away, too, bound for the transport. Likewise that
+Charlie Bradley, that hulking fellow who had been so notorious about
+town, supposedly had sailed at the same time Barton had gone to France.
+
+Ethel had occasion to pass the Fuller house within the week. It was
+shuttered and empty looking. The _Clarion_ had told, in a column and a
+half, of the last reception tendered Helen Fuller and her mother before
+their departure. Grandon Fuller was living at the Bellevue and seemed
+rather relieved than otherwise, so people said, that his wife and
+daughter had gone abroad.
+
+But Ethel did not scoff now--she had never done so openly--at the idea
+of flighty Helen Fuller settling down to Red Cross work. Secretly she
+wished that she, too, were on the way to France. Suppose Frank Barton
+should be wounded! Some woman would attend him in the hospital. It
+might even fall to Helen’s lot. Had Ethel gone to France it might be
+her fate to nurse Barton.
+
+She felt a sudden and bitter distaste for her work in the offices
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company. The drab business affairs of every
+day disgusted her. Although she neglected nothing, Ethel had no
+satisfaction in what she did.
+
+The war filled more and more space in the daily papers. But there was
+no news of the Rainbow Division, with which it was believed Barton and
+the other young officers from Mailsburg had sailed. Everything was so
+secretly done!
+
+There was the story that sifted back from France to the families of
+some of the soldiers of the unit from the West, who thought they were
+bound for New York by train, but who found themselves alighting in New
+Orleans and going aboard the troop ships there, to sail for southern
+France by the way of Gibraltar.
+
+The fact that the country was honeycombed by German and Austrian spies,
+and by those whom the enemy’s money could buy, was becoming slowly a
+settled conviction, even in Mailsburg. Those of German birth and name
+would in time be ostracised. It could not be helped. It was in the
+nature of things.
+
+The man who in war time calls himself too broad-minded to hate the
+enemy is often one who has not yet awakened to the seriousness of war.
+The enemy-alien in our midst should tremble for his personal safety.
+Otherwise he becomes a menace.
+
+Just off Burnaby Street was a little shop where, ever since Ethel was
+a child, had sat a little old German cobbling shoes. He was a marked
+character in this part of the town where the residents were mostly of
+the old, native American stock.
+
+Somebody has said that the trade of tailor breeds socialists and
+pessimists. So being a cobbler used to breed philosophers of a kindly
+sort. Gessler had been wont to hand out bits of homely and comfortable
+philosophy with his mended shoes.
+
+The war had changed his attitude toward life, it seemed. Until the
+United States had got into it he had talked eagerly with everybody who
+would listen.
+
+The Kaiser he hated, for he was a “Prussian, arrogant and brutal.”
+
+“My father used always to say that there would be war if that
+bloodhound came to the throne!” he frequently said. But he likewise was
+proud of his race. “The whole world is fighting them and can’t beat
+them already!” he cried.
+
+Now that his adopted country was arraigned against the fatherland,
+Gessler was very glum and silent. He did not have so much work as
+before; but he sat all day on his cobbler’s bench, his hammer in his
+hand, often staring out of the window with empty eyes.
+
+On her way to work one morning Ethel carried a pair of shoes to be
+mended. But when she reached the corner in sight of which the little
+German’s shop stood, she hesitated. How could she approach Gessler and
+speak to him with that pleasant familiarity that had been her custom.
+
+She could think of him only now as an enemy. Every German was an
+enemy! His countrymen in their terrible undersea craft might sink the
+transport upon which Frank Barton had sailed. The war had come home
+to Ethel Clayton! It was real to her at last, as it becomes real to
+everybody who has a personal stake in it.
+
+She took the shoes to another cobbler and went on her way to the office.
+
+These days Ethel was almost vexed with Benway Chase because he
+continued to be so enthusiastic about his work and interested in it. He
+never seemed to flag in his tasks; and he might really be, as he had
+laughingly said, fitting himself for Jim Mayberry’s position.
+
+He spent most of his noon hour talking with the foremen of the
+different shops. He learned much about the practical working of the
+factory system; yet he never neglected his own particular tasks.
+
+Mabel Skinner still considered Benway the most wonderful young man who
+had ever crossed her path; but she worshiped from afar. She did not
+dream of preening her poor plumage to attract his notice; yet when
+he smiled at her in good comradeship Little Skinner was secretly in
+ecstasies.
+
+“Gee!” she confided to Boots, her errant brother, on one occasion,
+“when Mr. Chase asked me did I like flowers, an’ give me some of them
+late asters from his mother’s garden, I almost swallowed my gum!”
+
+“Cracky!” scoffed Boots. “That poor fish? Why, he ain’t got but one
+good wing!”
+
+“An’ he can put over a spitter with that that _you_ can’t hit,
+Smartie,” retorted his sister vigorously. “And he’s a gentleman, Mr.
+Chase is!”
+
+“Cracky!” repeated Boots. “Seems to me, if I was a girl I’d fall for a
+feller that could gimme something besides a flower an’ a sweet smile.
+Like that Jim Mayberry. He’s got a flivver and could take you ridin’.”
+
+“He only took me once,” said Mabel complacently. “And I guess he must
+have give you a ride in his buzz-cart, too, that time, or you wouldn’t
+have give me that dream about Jim and Sam Blaisdell of Norville workin’
+in cahoots against Mr. Barton.”
+
+“Huh! That warn’t no dream,” grumbled Boots. “You think you’re allus
+so smart, Mab Skinner. I heard ’em talkin’ all right ’bout how to do
+Mr. Barton. And it had something to do with the Bogata works down to
+Norville, just as I told you.”
+
+“Well, that egg never hatched, then,” declared his dubious sister.
+
+They might have suspected the incubation of another egg had she known
+how often Jim Mayberry was in consultation with Mr. Grandon Fuller
+these days at the Bellevue, although Mabel Skinner of course knew
+little about the inside affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company. It might
+have aroused any person’s suspicions to mark the superintendent’s
+intimacy with the largest stockholder of the concern.
+
+Mr. Fuller had not again suggested the removal of Barton and the
+appointment of Mayberry as manager. Indeed, with the former already out
+of the country and in the Service, that change did not seem necessary
+to the carrying to conclusion of any schemes Mr. Fuller might have.
+
+Not that there was anything wrong showing on the surface of affairs.
+The factory seemed to be running quite as usual. But as the end of the
+business year approached Ethel could not fail to note that the reports
+on output were not so favorable as they had been earlier in the year.
+As, of course, it was not really within the compass of her work she
+could not discover why this should be.
+
+From the very day Mayberry had been balked in his endeavor to put
+the Bogata order through, the tide of fortune for the Hapwood-Diller
+Manufacturing Company seemed to have turned. The superintendent never
+spoke again about the Bogata Company to Ethel. The latter knew,
+however, that Hammerly’s prophecy regarding a receivership for that
+concern had come true--and that before the new year.
+
+In the matter of the shop reports the girl was puzzled and alarmed. It
+did not seem to be anybody’s fault; certainly Mayberry did not neglect
+his supervision of the factory, and most of the foremen were old and
+faithful employees.
+
+The report of the corporation compared unfavorably with the last
+report. A good deal of money was tied up in raw material. Contracts
+unfilled and bills not yet collectible were items that bulked big on
+the wrong side of the ledger.
+
+The board voted the usual dividend; but the surplus was much reduced
+thereby. And then, suddenly and like the bursting of a bomb, trouble
+came.
+
+The Hapwood-Diller Company stock was listed in the market; that is, it
+was traded in by the curb brokers both in State and Broad Streets. One
+morning Hammerly came raging into the offices, his _Financial Gazette_
+in his hand, his spectacles pushed up to the line of his grizzled hair,
+and his eyes fairly snapping.
+
+“What’s the meaning of this, I want to know?” he cried, shaking the
+financial sheet under Jim Mayberry’s nose as that young man appeared
+from the manager’s office. “Do you know anything about this?”
+
+“About what, Mr. Hammerly?”
+
+“This trading in Hapwood-Diller shares? It’s been going on for a
+week, I understand. Yesterday three hundred shares was sold for
+eighty-nine--eleven points off. Never heard of such a thing! Who’s
+selling?”
+
+“Why, bless your heart, Mr. Hammerly,” said the superintendent, “I
+don’t know. I own only fifty shares and I haven’t sold them, I can
+assure you.”
+
+“Some tarnal fool is dumping his shares on the market, and at a bad
+time. Right after such a poor showing as was made by our last report.
+If Frank Barton was on the job such a report would never have been
+made.”
+
+Mayberry flushed. “No man can make bricks without straw, Mr. Hammerly,”
+he said.
+
+“Huh?” snorted the grain dealer. “Who ever told you they made bricks of
+straw? That’s about all you know, Jim Mayberry. They make bricks with
+clay around these parts. You ain’t in Egypt. But that ain’t neither
+here nor there. This here selling of shares--and maybe these were only
+wash sales?” added the suspicious old man. “Here! let me see the stock
+book, Mayberry.”
+
+“Ask Ethel for that,” returned the superintendent sharply, and, turning
+on his heel, walked away.
+
+Mr. Hammerly looked after him with lowering brow. “Ha!” he muttered,
+“mighty independent of a sudden. Now, I wonder what that means?”
+
+But he was as pleasant as usual with Ethel. Macon Hammerly approved of
+her. He retired to a corner seat to study the list of names to whom
+stock, at the reorganization after Israel’s Diller’s death, had been
+issued. Most of the local owners of the shares had clung to all their
+original allotment, even through the depression at the beginning of
+the war before Frank Barton had been elevated to the management of the
+concern’s affairs.
+
+The Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company had always been a very close
+corporation. There were some Diller and Hapwood heirs in the West and
+South who had traded off their shares in the corporation; but nobody
+knew better than Mr. Macon Hammerly just where those shares lay. At
+least, up to this date he thought he knew where the bulk of them were.
+
+The next shock to the working force of the Company, as well as to the
+board, was the turning back of the entire order billed to the Kimberly
+Binding Company. The order amounted to twelve thousand dollars. The
+goods were not according to specifications.
+
+Jim Mayberry denied all responsibility for this error. The Kimberly
+order had been received and the contract signed by Barton. Mayberry
+showed that the shop sheets covering the contract had been followed
+exactly by the workmen. The duplicates of these papers in the office
+were the same as the working plans in every particular.
+
+But the Kimberly Company produced its copy of the specifications with
+two differences in it, one of dimension and the other of quality,
+changes which made the finished product absolutely useless to the
+Kimberly people. Or for anybody else, for that matter! The product
+could merely go into the scrap heap.
+
+There was a live tilt in the board meeting that day between Mr. Grandon
+Fuller and his followers, and Mr. Macon Hammerly. Ethel was in and out
+of the room to take dictation, and to furnish books and figures when
+required, so she heard much of the wrangle.
+
+Jim Mayberry sat sullenly in his place at the table and had only one
+declaration to repeat: It was not up to him! Mr. Fuller did most of the
+talking.
+
+Barton’s name was signed to the Kimberly schedule. He had O. K.’d it.
+Two bad errors had crept into the specifications and the now absent
+manager had overlooked them.
+
+“And he was _absent_, all right, before ever he left here,” Fuller
+scoffed. “Absent in his mind if not in body. And his absent-mindedness
+has cost us a pretty penny. I can see right now that this board will
+have to pass the next dividend.”
+
+The very next day a block of five thousand shares sold in Boston for
+eighty-seven and a half and two hundred in the New York market for
+eight-seven flat.
+
+One evening Ethel came home from work to be greeted by her mother in a
+flurried state of mind.
+
+“Good land, Ethel! What’s the matter with the Hapwood-Diller Company
+now? I feared how it would be if Frank Barton went away.”
+
+Ethel keenly remembered her mother’s expressed doubt of Mr. Barton’s
+having much to do with the prosperity of the concern. Now she asked
+Mrs. Clayton:
+
+“What do you think is the matter at the factory? I don’t know what you
+mean.”
+
+“Well, I want to know! And you working right there, too. Here this
+little lawyer comes around and offers me a ridiculous price for our
+shares----”
+
+“What lawyer?”
+
+“I don’t know him. He says he’s from New York. Here’s his card,” and
+she handed to Ethel a card on which was engraved “A. Schuster, Atty.”
+and an address in a Wall Street building.
+
+“Anyway, he seems to think he can buy our stock for sixty-five dollars.
+That’s all he’ll offer and he just laughed and laughed when I told him
+the shares of the Hapwood-Diller Company had never been worth less than
+a hundred dollars apiece since they were printed.”
+
+“What did he say to that?” asked her more than curious daughter.
+
+“He declared sixty-five was better than it would sell in the market
+in a month, unless the company was reorganized and put on a paying
+basis. I wonder what Grandon Fuller or Hammerly would say to that? And
+you ought to know the truth, Ethel,” added the worried woman. “Aren’t
+things going right in the office now that Frank Barton’s gone away?”
+
+“There is nothing to worry over,” her daughter said stoutly.
+
+“Well, that’s what I told that little lawyer,” Mrs. Clayton declared.
+“I said we’d just got our dividend check same’s usual, and he
+said--What do you suppose he said?”
+
+“I have no idea,” confessed Ethel.
+
+“That it would be the last one we’d get for many a long day. Can that
+be so, Ethel? I don’t know what we should do if our income from those
+shares your great-uncle Diller left us should be cut off.”
+
+“I shouldn’t worry, Mother,” Ethel said composedly.
+
+Yet this was only one of the many things she began to hear which
+suggested a coming catastrophe to the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+BENWAY’S DISCOVERY
+
+
+Benway Chase was to prepare a copy of the faulty specification sheet of
+the Kimberly Binding Company’s order, to be attached to the report on
+that unfortunate affair filed in the records of the board’s proceedings.
+
+Ethel had not discussed the unfortunate matter with Benway, or with
+anybody else. That Frank Barton could have allowed such an error--two
+such errors, indeed--to escape his notice was scarcely in accord with
+her belief in the general manager’s perspicacity. Her lips merely
+tightened when anybody mentioned the tragic happening within her
+hearing.
+
+For it was indeed tragic. Rumors that the factory output was falling
+behind and that the Hapwood-Diller Company was facing a situation
+similar to that which had threatened it when Frank Barton had first
+taken hold as manager, reached Ethel’s ears from all sides.
+
+Although she could not understand how this mistake in the Kimberly
+order could have happened, she accepted the claim of the ordering
+company as honestly made, and that without question. The Kimberly
+Company was not a second Bogata concern. They wanted the goods ordered
+and were amply able to pay for them. The mistakes in the specifications
+made much trouble for the purchasing corporation as well as for the
+Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+This schedule from the Kimberly Binding Company had been copied in
+duplicate in the Hapwood-Diller Company’s office, one copy with Frank
+Barton’s name upon it being returned to the ordering firm, the other
+filed where only properly accredited members of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company’s office force supposedly were able to get at it.
+
+The question as to how the two items on the schedule came to be
+different from those on the sheet sent back to the Kimberly Company
+bulked just as big in Ethel’s mind as the similar question regarding
+the Bogata Company’s order. She felt that the same treacherous hand was
+to be suspected.
+
+It was not Frank Barton’s fault. Of this she was confident. But she
+could not put an accusing finger on any person. That there was a
+traitor in the Hapwood-Diller office went without saying. This time
+Mr. Barton was too far away for her to discuss the point with him, and
+Hammerly gave her no opportunity of speaking her mind.
+
+Benway came with the copy he was making of the faulty schedule and
+placed it before her. He was transcribing the paper in his own very
+exact, upright handwriting. But he had made a mistake.
+
+“Do you think that will be noticed, Ethel?” he asked with a measure of
+suppressed excitement that she did not at first notice. “See where I
+made a bull--and used the acid to take the ink out?”
+
+“Why, yes, Benway; I see it--now that you call my attention to it. But
+really you have made the correction very neatly. I think it will be all
+right. The paper only shines a little on the surface where you erased
+the ink marks with the acid.”
+
+“That’s just it, Ethel,” he hissed, close to her ear. “The erasing
+fluid leaves the surface of this sort of paper glossy. Now look at
+this!”
+
+He plumped the document he was copying--the schedule in which the two
+errors had been found--under her eye.
+
+“Why, what is it?”
+
+“See anything wrong about those two mysterious lines?” he demanded, and
+now she marked his excitement.
+
+“Oh, Benway! That’s been all gone over. You can see there have been
+no changes made in this original paper. There is no more shine to the
+surface where those two errors stand than elsewhere. _That_ was taken
+up in board meeting. I heard them discuss it. And I studied it myself.
+No. There have surely been no erasures.”
+
+“Sure?”
+
+“You are very obstinate, Benway!” exclaimed Ethel impatiently.
+
+“But look,” he whispered. “Here!” He snapped on the electric light over
+her desk. “Look at those places on the slant--with the glare of the
+light on them. Don’t you see that the paper has been roughened under
+those two faulty lines--and nowhere else on the sheet? And see again!
+Under the electric light the surface of the paper seems bluer at those
+places than anywhere else. That is a good quality of paper, too.”
+
+“Is--isn’t it a chance discoloration?” murmured the girl.
+
+“Don’t you think that’s far-fetched?” demanded Benway. “Two blue
+blots--and just where those wrong items are written?”
+
+“Could they have been caused by drops of water?”
+
+“Huh! Drops of something!” growled Benway. “I own to that belief. But
+never water. Here! Use this reading glass. Don’t you see the raw fibre
+of the paper? The surface has been scratched just where those wrong
+items stand. Not by the sort of erasing fluid we use in this office;
+but by some means. What do you think?”
+
+Ethel passed the sensitive tips of her fingers lightly over the
+indicated spots on the sheet. It seemed to her that she could feel the
+slight roughness of the paper that Benway indicated so assuredly.
+
+“You go back and finish your job, Benway,” she told him finally. “Then
+bring me this original. Understand? Say nothing to anybody else about
+it.”
+
+“Sure!” he returned, his eyes snapping.
+
+“Then if you are asked about it,” she added quietly, “you may say that
+you gave me the paper and know nothing at all about it.”
+
+He looked at her with more seriousness.
+
+“Say, are you figuring on getting into trouble with----”
+
+Ethel held up her hand. “You are not supposed to figure on this at all.
+Just do as I say, Benway.”
+
+“Oh! All right, Ma’am,” he said with a mocking little smile and a
+twinkle in his eye.
+
+Even he did not wholly understand the seriousness of the discovery;
+but Ethel appreciated it fully. When he brought the original sheet of
+specifications back to her she hid it in her dress and at noon instead
+of going to lunch she caught a southbound car and rode to the Stone
+Bridge.
+
+On either side of the creek there were docks and warehouses; but Macon
+Hammerly’s general store and row of storehouses for feed and grain
+and such other things as he dealt in were beyond the bridge and some
+distance along what was called the Creek Road. The Creek Road debouched
+into the fanning country that adjoined Mailsburg somewhat abruptly, at
+the south end of the town.
+
+Really, Mr. Hammerly was a country merchant, always had been such, and
+always would be. He had come into possession of his father’s store when
+he was a young man, and it was said that his grandfather had first
+engaged in business--the trading of general merchandise for pelts and
+farm produce--on this very spot. However, the Macon Hammerly store and
+warehouses were well known over a large area.
+
+Being on the edge of the city the farming people were likely to trade
+with him largely. And yet he was not considered a “good fellow.” He was
+too sharp and severe in his business methods.
+
+To his docks the sluggishly moving canal-boats came bringing grain and
+feed and coal and other merchandise that he dealt in more largely. And
+he was a wholesale dealer in many articles that other merchants in
+Mailsburg sold at retail. For one thing, his was the largest seed house
+in the county.
+
+Ethel hurried over the arch of the Stone Bridge and down the narrow,
+bricked walk across from the head of the several docks and the doors
+of the warehouses upon them. This was an old, old part of the town;
+indeed, it had been known as Stone Bridge once; but Mailsburg had grown
+out to it and had all but enveloped it with new buildings and better
+streets. Only down the Creek Road the land still was checkered with
+open fields and patches of wood.
+
+Before the weather-beaten building in which was Macon Hammerly’s
+general store, was a wide, roofed porch. Several bewhittled armchairs,
+just “wabbly” enough to be comfortable, stood about upon the platform.
+Sometimes these were filled with Hammerly’s ancient cronies--cynics of
+a former generation who had been in this world so long that they seemed
+to believe they knew better how to run it than Omnipotence!
+
+Mr. Hammerly was alone at one end of the porch. This was egg-buying
+day, and as he dealt largely in eggs--shipping quantities to the larger
+cities--the old man usually looked after the buying while his clerks
+packed the boxes inside.
+
+Hammerly believed if a thing was worth doing at all it was worth doing
+well. Likewise he believed in that other old saw relative to a man’s
+doing anything himself if he wanted to be sure it was done right. He
+could not do everything of importance about his store and warehouses;
+but he could--and did--buy eggs.
+
+He watched the farmers and their wives cannily as they brought their
+baskets up to the platform. He handled many of the eggs himself. It was
+his inflexible rule to refuse all pullet eggs, and he had always in his
+pocket a wooden curtain-pole ring of a certain size. If an egg would
+slip through that, it was discarded.
+
+Ethel chanced to arrive at a moment when there was a let-up in the
+activities of egg buying. The grain dealer pushed up his spectacles
+with that familiar gesture of his and grinned at the girl.
+
+“You ain’t come away down here on no party call, Ethel?” he said
+questioningly. “You know I ain’t in the swagger set, and I don’t serve
+pink tea here.”
+
+“No, sir,” she said, smiling in spite of her serious mood. “I know you
+are a perfect barbarian.”
+
+The man chuckled, but said only:
+
+“Heard from Frank Barton yet?”
+
+“Oh, no, sir!”
+
+“I got you beat, then,” he said, with twinkling eye. “Not direct; but
+from Washington. Got a friend there and he’s kept me posted. The troop
+ship _Tecumseh_ got over safely--as they all did, in fact. Them German
+undersea boats seem to have been too far under the sea to catch ’em.
+Frank’s safe in France.”
+
+“Until he gets into the trenches,” said the girl bitterly.
+
+“Don’t you be like these other folks, Ethel. Grouchers, every one!
+Knocking the war, and looking on the black side of every cloud instead
+of on the silver. The good Lord knows I’m no optimist by nature;
+but these are the times when every one of us should stretch our
+cheerfulness to the breaking point.
+
+“Frank’s going to be all right. He’s going to do his duty, and he’s
+going through with it all and come back to us. That’s my belief, Ethel.”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Hammerly! I hope you are right.”
+
+“If things go as smooth here with us as they do over there with him,”
+he added, with twinkling eyes, “I reckon all will be well.”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Hammerly!” she exclaimed again, “things are not going smoothly
+here. At least, not with the Hapwood-Diller Company.”
+
+“So that’s what brings you down here? I ain’t so flattered as I was,
+Ethel,” he said good-naturedly. “Let’s hear your trouble.”
+
+“Oh, you mustn’t think I’m not glad to see you,” she said, hurriedly.
+
+“O’ course you’re glad,” he said, with something of a grin on his
+wrinkled face. He stroked his chin reflectively. “Great times these,
+an’ no mistake. If I was only younger----”
+
+“You’d get into the war, I suppose.”
+
+“Certain sure, I would. An’ you would, too, if you was a young man.”
+
+“Perhaps--I really don’t know--it’s all so horrible.”
+
+“So ’tis, an’ that German Kaiser has got a pile to answer for, believe
+me. But now to business. Tell me what’s wrong.”
+
+“I’m not sure that it’s really wrong. But it looks queer to me.”
+
+“I see. Got some papers, eh?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Let’s see ’em.”
+
+She displayed the specification sheet and explained hurriedly Benway’s
+discovery. The appearance of erasure in two places on the document
+seemed plainer to Ethel each time she looked at it.
+
+“I dunno,” drawled Hammerly, at first doubtful. But the longer he
+looked at the two bluish marks the more deeply he was impressed with
+the significance of them. “Can it be that we’ve got him at last?” he
+finally questioned vigorously.
+
+“_Him?_” repeated Ethel, curiously.
+
+“There’s a dirty traitor in this business, Ethel,” declared the grain
+dealer.
+
+“Who do you think it is? Jim Mayberry?” she asked outright.
+
+“He never did this,” declared Hammerly with emphasis. “He wouldn’t have
+brains enough. That’s scarcely seeable, that rubbing out. And see how
+close the handwriting has been copied.
+
+“I see. That is Josephine Durand’s work--the original writing of the
+sheet, I mean. We never use the typewriter on these specification
+papers, because of the uneven ruling. She wrote both this and the copy
+that went back to the Kimberly people with Mr. Barton’s name on it.”
+
+“I know,” growled Hammerly, still staring closely at the paper.
+
+“And Josephine is perfectly trustworthy, I am sure. Besides, it does
+not seem possible that Mr. Barton did not closely compare the two
+papers. Those figures were changed, I am sure, after Mr. Barton left.”
+
+“Not a doubt on it! Not a doubt on it!” agreed Hammerly. “I’ve seen
+something like this afore,” he added, more to himself than to the
+girl. “You let me keep this paper, Ethel. We’ll see. How’s your ma?”
+
+“Worried a good deal, Mr. Hammerly. That lawyer who came around to buy
+her shares in the Hapwood-Diller Company really scared mother.”
+
+“What lawyer?” snapped Macon Hammerly, instantly interested.
+
+Ethel told of the incident and gave Mr. Hammerly the name and address
+of the attorney, Mr. Schuster. “I believe he did secure a few shares
+from some of the small stockholders,” Ethel said. “You know Abel
+Rawlins had seven shares and Mrs. Henry Cutt a dozen. They sold, mother
+says, and she is worried for fear the company is going to smash and we
+may lose everything.”
+
+“How many’s she got, Ethel?” asked the old man, a heavy frown on his
+brow. And when Ethel told him, he added: “So? Israel Diller ought to’ve
+done better by her than that. She was just as close’t kin to the old
+man as Grandon Fuller’s wife.”
+
+“Oh, we won’t talk about that,” said Ethel, with a gesture of
+dismissal. “What is done, is done.”
+
+“Humph! Mebbe! If it stays done!” grunted Macon Hammerly. “But it’s
+been ten years and more now, ain’t it? Well! Howsomever, you let me
+keep this paper a spell and see if I can make anything out of it.
+I want to compare it with something I saw once--an’ had suspicions
+about.”
+
+He bought no more eggs personally that day--and probably some of pullet
+size slipped by. Instead, when Ethel left him, he walked up into the
+business section of High Street and there, near the court-house, went
+into the office of Alfred Gainor, who, as Mr. Mestinger’s chief clerk,
+had fallen heir to most of his clients and their business when the
+older attorney died.
+
+Mr. Mestinger had been the legal adviser of Israel Diller and had drawn
+the latter’s will.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+FROM “OVER THERE”
+
+
+Ethel Clayton went away from her interview with Macon Hammerly cheered
+upon one particular point at least. His outlook upon the chance for
+Frank Barton’s continued safety, even if he was in France, was helpful.
+And she knew the old grain merchant had Barton’s well-being at heart.
+
+Crabbed as he was with most people, Macon Hammerly had always betrayed
+his interest in the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing
+Company and his regard for him. He sometimes said, in his rough way,
+that he kept Frank’s welfare in mind because the young fellow did not
+know enough to look out for himself. Ethel knew, however, that Hammerly
+had not been speaking carelessly about the absent Barton.
+
+The latter was over the sea in safety, and the girl was devoutly
+thankful for it. Indeed she added that thanksgiving to her prayers
+before retiring. But she longed to hear personally from Barton. She
+had already written him three letters since she had last seen him, all
+addressed as he had told her; but they had brought no replies.
+
+As before, while he was in the training camp, her letters were mostly
+regarding office incidents which she knew he would be interested in.
+But she had said nothing about the threatened trouble and loss to the
+company through the mistake in the Kimberly Binding Company order.
+Let somebody else tell the absent soldier that misfortune. Ethel was
+determined to put nothing in her letters that was not cheerful.
+
+She learned very quickly, as thousands of other people were learning
+just at that time, how particularly hard it is to write cheerfully to
+the men at war. The very fact of sitting down to write to a soldier
+on active duty calls up before the mind a picture too terrible to be
+ignored.
+
+How do we know the letter will ever reach the one addressed? What peril
+may he not face before our written words reach France and be delivered
+to him?
+
+In Ethel Clayton’s case, too, the pang of jealousy was not lacking.
+She realized that her feeling for Frank Barton was not reciprocated.
+He had never given her the least cause to believe that he had other
+than the merest feeling of comradeship for her. Whereas it was plain
+that for Grandon Fuller’s daughter he experienced a much deeper regard.
+Nevertheless Ethel was jealous of Helen Fuller.
+
+Mrs. Clayton thought her daughter was working too hard, and that
+business worries depressed her. Benway Chase, too, noted her wan look
+and increasing pallor.
+
+“You’re overdoing it, Ethel,” he said one bleak evening when they were
+walking home together.
+
+“Overdoing _what_?” and her tone of voice admonished him that she did
+not welcome his interference. Yet he persevered:
+
+“You needn’t get mad. You shoulder too much responsibility--and for
+that oaf, Jim Mayberry. Let him do some of his own work.”
+
+She became gentler at once. Ben did not suspect why she so willingly
+took upon herself the extra tasks. It was for the absent Barton that
+she worked so hard, not for the manager _pro tem_. If he was spared to
+come back to Mailsburg and the Hapwood-Diller Company, Ethel was going
+to do all she could to hold his job for him!
+
+“Somebody must do these things, Benway,” she said quietly. “I am in a
+responsible position. From the very fact I am a woman, more is expected
+of me if I would hold up my end of the work and satisfy everybody. And
+if I do not look after the tags of work in the office, who will?”
+
+“‘Tags of work!’” quoted Benway with emphatic disgust. “If _that_ were
+only it! Oh, Ethel! I wish I could do it for you.”
+
+“Thanks, Benway.”
+
+“And you won’t even let me help,” he complained. “You don’t even talk
+to me about your troubles. Why Ethel! I seem even less your friend now
+that I am in the office with you than I used to be.”
+
+“Goodness, Benway!” she exclaimed with renewed impatience, “you can’t
+expect to take my personal troubles or my work on your shoulders.”
+
+“Why not?” he demanded tenderly. “You know it’s what I’d love to do.
+Oh, I wish I had a million and could take you out of all this! That’s
+what I wish, Ethel.”
+
+“Why, I don’t want to give up my work, Benway. Nor do I want to
+be rich. At least, I never have thought of being wealthy. And a
+million----”
+
+“Well, I’d get along with even less,” he admitted drolly. “All I really
+long for is a loaf, a jug of wine, a flivver, and thou.”
+
+“My dear boy,” she declared briskly, “you’ll get your first three
+wishes much easier than you will your fourth. Leave me out of the
+category, please.
+
+“I don’t want to go off in a flivver with any man and a loaf of bread
+and a wine jug. I am wedded to my work. I love it. It’s just as much
+my life as it is yours. I have never looked upon my work as a mere
+stop-gap between high school or college and the wedded state--as is so
+often the case with girls. _This is my job_, and I have no right to
+expect you, or anybody else, Benway, to ease it for me.”
+
+He looked at her aggrieved. “Is it always going to be so, Ethel?”
+
+“I expect it will be always so,” she returned with less vehemence.
+“I am not a marrying girl, Bennie. I wish you’d get that into your
+handsome head. Get interested in some other girl--do!”
+
+“Pshaw! Who told you you were not a marrying girl?” he demanded,
+chuckling. “Wait till the right knock comes on the door.”
+
+“I shan’t hear it. I shall be too busy.”
+
+He was more serious for a moment.
+
+“Perhaps there is danger of that. I’ve been knocking myself ever since
+I can remember, and I get mighty little response.”
+
+“Don’t waste your time, Bennie,” she said bruskly. “I tell you frankly:
+Marriage is the last thing I expect to accomplish.”
+
+“You’re wrong. It’s death that is the last thing for us all. But you
+can’t break down my hopes, Ethel. I shall continue to knock.”
+
+Somehow this insistence of Benway’s irritated Ethel more than usual.
+She was almost sorry she had ever urged Mr. Barton to take him into the
+offices, for the young fellow too plainly betrayed his interest in her.
+
+It was bad enough for Sydney and the others to note the fact that
+Benway was always ready to run her errands or otherwise be at her beck
+and call; but Jim Mayberry made his uncouth comments upon it too.
+
+“You have him trained like a little curly dog, haven’t you?” the
+superintendent sneered one day, when Benway had anticipated some need
+of Ethel’s. “He fetches and carries better than a retriever. Is he good
+for anything else?”
+
+“You had better ask Sydney if he does his work if you are afflicted
+with blindness yourself, Mr. Mayberry,” she said tartly.
+
+“Oh, I’m not too blind to see there are a good many things going dead
+wrong in this office,” Mayberry growled. “But I’m not having my way
+here. We are under petticoat rule, it seems.”
+
+Such hints as this had previously warned Ethel to keep still. Being
+unable to have his way with her, Jim Mayberry would be glad to find
+cause for bringing her before the Board of Directors for dismissal. She
+felt all the time that if he ever did have the backing of the Board
+members he would make quick changes in the office.
+
+She knew herself to be in an uncertain situation. Really, she would
+have done better for her future perhaps if she had looked about for
+another position. Her record with the Hapwood-Diller Company, if she
+left of her own volition, would obtain her work elsewhere.
+
+But she could not do this. Tacitly she had promised to remain “on the
+job.” Barton expected it of her. He had frankly said he felt secure
+in leaving the company and going away because she would be there. She
+was “the girl he left behind.” He depended upon her to keep things
+straight. And perhaps, more than Frank Barton suspected, it was Ethel
+who could hold his position for him until he returned from France.
+
+If he ever did return! This thought scarified her mind continually. It
+seemed just as though every German gun and every German bayonet were
+pointed straight at the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+How could he escape with his life?
+
+And then the letter came--the letter she had longed for. When John
+tumbled it out of his bag upon her desk with the others, Ethel could
+not suppress a little scream, for she saw it first of all. Little
+Skinner and Josephine heard her and came running.
+
+“What is it, Ethel?” demanded the latter.
+
+“It’s a mouse, I bet!” said Skinner. “Some o’ them boys been playing a
+joke on you, Miss Clayton?”
+
+“Why, is it only a letter?” queried the other stenographer. “How you
+startled me.”
+
+“It’s enough to startle anybody,” declared Ethel, making the best of a
+bad matter. “It’s from Mr. Barton.”
+
+At that announcement even Sydney left his desk to draw near. Ethel’s
+heart beat a warm alarm, but she could not get out of opening and
+reading the missive there and then. Of course he would say nothing in
+it that the office force could not safely hear. She knew it would be
+merely a kindly message for all. She wished--oh, how deeply!--that it
+might be of so intimate a nature that she could not read it aloud to
+them.
+
+He was within sound of the guns at the Front already. No locality was
+particularized, for that would have been censored, but if he could hear
+the heavy cannonade from his training camp it would not be long before
+his battalion would be marching into the trenches.
+
+No fear for the future was breathed through Barton’s chatty, friendly
+letter. He gave such a picture of the camp, and the boys in khaki,
+and the people about them, that even Sydney--his face working
+spasmodically--clenched his fist and muttered:
+
+“By heaven! how I wish I was over there with him.”
+
+Benway’s eyes shone, too; and Mabel Skinner expressed for the hundredth
+time the desire she had to be a boy.
+
+“Why, I tell Boots that if I was him I’d run away and swear I was
+nineteen and enlist.”
+
+“It’s tough on you, Skinner,” drawled Jim Mayberry, who chanced to
+be passing through and heard this outbreak. “Nothing but a pair of
+trousers between you and glory.”
+
+Little Skinner remembered that it was in office hours, so she made no
+retort. Otherwise Mayberry would never have got away with it, as she
+declared afterward.
+
+However, she was really trying to eschew rudeness, especially within
+the hearing of Benway Chase. Once or twice, as Ethel would not let him
+hang around for her after hours, Benway had walked along with Mabel.
+The girl had been delighted by these attentions. She began to dress
+more quietly and gradually the startled expression left her face, for
+she learned to arrange her hair more tastefully. Her improvement was
+marked enough for others besides Ethel to notice it.
+
+“By jove!” ejaculated Sydney, “our Skinner is coming into her own. She
+looks more like a girl should and less like a boy dressed up in girl’s
+togs.”
+
+It was only Ethel, however, who suspected why Mabel was changing both
+in manner and in appearance. That the girl worshiped Benway Chase
+from afar Ethel did not doubt; but at first she was not sure that she
+approved. Little Skinner came from such a very poor and “shiftless”
+family. Should Benway look on Mabel with favor, Ethel feared that his
+mother would be horror-stricken. Yet Ethel had told Benway she would be
+glad to see him interested in some other girl.
+
+If Barton’s letter did not cheer Ethel in large measure it linked her
+more closely to the war and its activities. Hard as she had to work in
+the offices, she found time to be active in the local Red Cross chapter
+to which she belonged.
+
+She insisted, too, in buying several of the second issue of Liberty
+Bonds, although Mrs. Clayton was not in favor of her so doing.
+
+“We have all the stocks and bonds and such things we can afford,” the
+troubled woman declared. “If the Hapwood-Diller stock is going downhill
+(and they tell me the Board will really pass the next dividend) we’ll
+have to dig right into our little bank account, or else live as poor as
+church mice.”
+
+“Oh, it’s not as bad as that, Mother,” the girl declared. “I have a
+steady income, you must remember--and that’s a good deal.”
+
+“Yes, but not as much as it ought to be. I declare, in these times,
+with prices of everything going up, wages should be about doubled.”
+
+“If we doubled on the wages, we’d have to close down.”
+
+“But you didn’t have to take more bonds.”
+
+“I thought it was our patriotic duty to do that.”
+
+“Let them do it that have more than we have, Ethel.”
+
+“I think everybody ought to do all he or she can.”
+
+“Well, maybe. But it’s hard on poor folks. And there’s another thing,”
+added Mrs. Clayton suddenly.
+
+“What is that?”
+
+“I never did see such times! I couldn’t get sugar at all to-day; though
+that trouble’s ’most over, they say. And if we didn’t have coal in our
+cellar we’d go without a fire, I guess. You’d better hang on to what
+money you’ve got, Ethel.”
+
+“I’d like to know who’s been talking to you again about the company
+being in difficulties!” her daughter said sharply. “It’s not so.”
+
+“They tell me the shares are selling as low as seventy-five in Boston.
+Flory Diller’s all of a twitter about selling. She wants to buy a piano
+player, anyway; and if she sells her shares the money will belong to
+her and never mind what John says, she’ll have that player.”
+
+“It is such foolish people as Flory that make all the trouble,”
+grumbled Ethel. “I wish you would not listen to them, Mother.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE CLOUDS THICKEN
+
+
+News of the first raid against American troops in the trenches appeared
+in the newspapers. There were but three deaths and a few captured and
+missing; but the fact that a part of the American contingent had been
+really in action could not fail to fire the imagination and swell
+patriotic hearts on this side of the ocean.
+
+But to Ethel, when she read, the three stark bodies laid to rest on
+November the fourth in a little French village far back of the lines
+loomed a more important thing than all else. To her troubled mind it
+was only pitiful--not great--that a French general should, standing at
+salute beside those graves, say: “In the name of France, I thank you.
+God receive your souls. Farewell!” Nor did it bring aught but tears to
+her eyes to read the translation of the inscription put at the foot of
+these graves:
+
+  “Here lie the first soldiers of the great Republic of the United
+  States who died on the soil of France for Justice and Liberty,
+  November 3, 1917.”
+
+No. She could not yet feel the exaltation of spirit that had seized
+Frank Barton and thousands of others in these early months of the war.
+She had begun to feel her duty toward it, but she deplored the fact of
+war and could not yet believe in the necessity for it.
+
+It was all a horrid nightmare. The shocking fact that men were being
+shot down, killed or maimed, still usurped all other thought regarding
+it in her mind. Even Frank Barton’s letter, in which he pictured the
+conditions in France and something of what he had already seen of the
+effect of the German invasion, inspired Ethel with nothing but fear for
+his safety.
+
+He should be back in Mailsburg and at his desk in the Hapwood-Diller
+Company offices. That is the way she saw it. And especially now, for
+Ethel felt that there was some underhand work going on that she could
+not fathom.
+
+Since taking the Kimberly Binding Company schedule to Mr. Hammerly she
+had heard nothing from the grain merchant. Nor had she seen him. But
+Mr. Grandon Fuller came to confer with Jim Mayberry one day, and when
+the latter sent out for Ethel to come into the private office the girl
+intuitively knew that immediate trouble was brewing.
+
+But she entered the room with perfect composure. Fuller, lounging in
+his chair, looked at her with heavily lidded eyes. He left the talking
+at first to Mayberry, and the latter was brusk indeed.
+
+“Where’s that specification sheet of the Kimberly order, Ethel?”
+
+“There is a copy of it attached to the report made for the Board, Mr.
+Mayberry,” she said quietly.
+
+“I want the original. I can’t find it on file,” snapped Mayberry.
+
+“I do not know where it is,” she told him quite promptly.
+
+“What! You don’t know whether it is in the office or not?”
+
+“It is not in the office at present. Where it is I do not know. But the
+copy is exact. Isn’t that sufficient?”
+
+“You know well enough it isn’t what I want,” said the superintendent
+roughly. “You are taking too much upon yourself, Ethel. You gave that
+paper to Hammerly.”
+
+“Why shouldn’t I?” she asked.
+
+“Let me tell you that he isn’t manager here----”
+
+“Nor are you, Mr. Mayberry. I prefer not to be spoken to in this
+manner. I saw no reason to refuse Mr. Hammerly permission to examine
+the paper. If Mr. Fuller had asked for it I should have considered it
+quite proper to hand it to him.”
+
+She knew well enough by the expression upon the stockholder’s
+countenance that she had hit the bull’s-eye. But Mayberry, red-faced
+and blustering, declared:
+
+“You usurp too much power here, Ethel. It has annoyed me before. I may
+not be manager in name; but if I can’t be boss of the works without a
+girl’s interference, I’ll throw up the job entirely.”
+
+“No! Don’t say that, Mayberry!” interposed Fuller significantly. “Wait
+until the Board meets again. We will see then.”
+
+“You get that paper--get it at once!” ordered Mayberry in his very
+ugliest tone. “And don’t let another private paper of this company go
+out of the office--do you hear?”
+
+“I am not deaf, Mr. Mayberry,” she said tartly. “You need not roar at
+me.”
+
+“Who are you working for, young woman?” Grandon Fuller asked, but in a
+moderate voice. “The Hapwood-Diller Company, or Macon Hammerly?”
+
+“_I_ am working for the company,” she said with significance.
+
+“You will not be for long,” growled Mayberry. “Get that schedule back
+from old Hammerly----”
+
+“You will have to ask him for it, Mr. Mayberry,” she said. “If that is
+all you called me in for, I have plenty to do outside,” and she walked
+out of the private office.
+
+Ethel was quite sure that she could make herself no more disliked
+than she was already by both the superintendent and the principal
+stockholder. But whatever came of the incident she proposed to keep
+her self-respect. She would not allow any one to bully her.
+
+It was open war now, however, between Jim Mayberry and herself. When
+Mr. Fuller had gone the angry superintendent strode out to her desk. He
+took no pains to smother his rage or his voice when he spoke to her.
+
+“You’ll learn mighty soon, Ethel, that Frank Barton has lost his
+influence in this concern--and there’ll be no come back, either. He’s
+gone for good, whether the fool dodges a bullet or a bit of shrapnel or
+not. He’s through here.
+
+“And so you will be, and that very soon, if you don’t take a different
+tone here. I may lack power to discharge you right now, but I shan’t
+lack that power long. Then we’ll have a house cleaning,” and he glared
+over the office as though he felt the enmity of Ethel’s desk-mates.
+
+“Going to clean up for fair, are you, Jim?” asked Sydney, who
+felt secure in his position, for he had been bookkeeper for the
+Hapwood-Diller Company when the present superintendent was merely a boy
+in one of the shops. “You’ll have your hands full if you intend to run
+both the offices and the shops, won’t you?”
+
+“I’ll show you as well as this blame girl----”
+
+Benway Chase slipped down from his stool and started toward the
+superintendent. Ethel stood up, her own hands clenched and her eyes
+aflame.
+
+“As long as I _am_ at work here, Mr. Mayberry, I refuse to be insulted
+and browbeaten by you. If you have any instructions for me, let me hear
+them. I don’t wish to hear anything else.”
+
+Mayberry stamped out of the room. Mabel Skinner gave three cheers under
+her breath.
+
+“Oh, Miss Clayton! Ain’t you lovely! I’d have slapped his face!” she
+added in approval.
+
+This brought a laugh, and the office quickly simmered down. But Ethel
+knew the matter was not ended. She could not help feeling worried about
+the future. If Jim Mayberry had his way she would soon be out of a
+situation.
+
+Then at home her mother was forever talking about the decreasing value
+of the Hapwood-Diller shares. She heard of other friends selling out
+their stock at low prices.
+
+She set her lips more firmly and refused to believe that disaster
+threatened the concern that Frank Barton had all but sweated blood to
+put on a paying basis. Yet there were signs enough that affairs were
+not as they should be. There were little breakdowns in the machinery
+that never happened before. One shop was closed for two days and the
+work fell behind thereby. The profit was sliced completely from one
+job, she knew, because of these handicaps.
+
+And she was helpless to avert these crippling accidents, nor could she
+point out who was at fault. Certainly there was no happening wherein
+she could honestly accuse Mayberry of guiltiness, no matter how much
+she may have believed him to be at the bottom of the trouble.
+
+He had a good and valid excuse to offer the Board of Directors when
+that body should investigate these petty affairs. Naturally he could
+not give his attention so closely to the workmen as before. The foremen
+ran their several departments more to suit themselves than when
+Mayberry did not have to do two men’s work. It began to be remarked by
+high and low alike that Jim Mayberry could not be expected to be both
+superintendent and manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company!
+
+And these whispers pointed to but one thing: The appointment of another
+superintendent and the establishment of Mayberry in Frank Barton’s
+place. The situation grew more and more difficult.
+
+The possible end of these things troubled Ethel daily and hourly. Not
+so much that she feared losing her own position. That would be sad, but
+not a catastrophe.
+
+Her main thought was for the future of the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+There was a conspiracy against the concern. Who fathered the traitorous
+design, and the object of it, she did not know. Jim Mayberry might
+be only a tool, for, with Macon Hammerly, Ethel considered the
+superintendent a weakling after all.
+
+She doubted and feared Grandon Fuller. Yet he was the largest
+stockholder in the concern--or his wife was, and he managed his wife’s
+affairs. Surely it could not be pleasing to him to see the shares of
+the company falling in the open market.
+
+These matters were really outside of Ethel Clayton’s province. Yet they
+would have been vitally troubling to Frank Barton were he at home and
+in charge of affairs. And Ethel felt herself to be on watch for him.
+
+If she might only confer with him! If she could tell him her suspicions
+and reveal to him her worry over the Hapwood-Diller Company! This
+longing obsessed her.
+
+Arriving at home one evening rather early she saw, before reaching the
+gate, a stranger leaving the premises. He was a small, black-haired man
+who walked briskly away from the Clayton cottage. Her mother met her at
+the door.
+
+“He’s been here again, Ethel!” she exclaimed tragically when her
+daughter ran up the steps.
+
+“Who has been here?”
+
+“That Schuster. The lawyer who wants to buy our shares of stock. But he
+won’t give us but sixty now. My dear! I am afraid something dreadful is
+going to happen.”
+
+“There’s something going to happen to him!” ejaculated the girl with
+emphasis. “Is that he yonder--that little runt?”
+
+“Yes. And he said--”
+
+But Ethel was down the steps and out of the gate without listening to
+further particulars. She saw the man turn the corner and walk quickly
+toward the car line. There was a path across the open fields past
+Benway Chase’s house that brought one more quickly to the car tracks.
+Ethel went this way.
+
+“It’s the only thing to do,” she told herself. “The only thing to do.”
+
+She was much disturbed in mind, and her course of action was by no
+means exactly clear to her, just yet. But she was doing some quick
+thinking.
+
+Ordinarily she would not have minded had she met Benway, but now she
+did not want to stop to talk, and so watched her chance to slip past
+the house unobserved.
+
+“Perhaps he’d try to help me, but I guess I don’t want his assistance,”
+she reasoned.
+
+She almost ran the distance. While yet some rods from the car line,
+she saw a car bowling along but a short block away. She waved her hand
+frantically.
+
+The motorman was not looking her way, and consequently did not see her.
+Then she called to him, and he braked up in a hurry.
+
+“Always willing to accommodate the ladies,” he remarked with a grin.
+
+She was already aboard the car, therefore, when the lawyer swung
+himself up on the step and entered. There were several passengers and
+he gave nobody more than a cursory glance. Therefore (and Ethel was
+glad of the fact) he did not know her or suspect her identity.
+
+There was a scheme afoot either to ruin the Hapwood-Diller Company,
+or, more probably, to “freeze out” the smaller stockholders. Of this
+the girl was confident. She believed A. Schuster was doing the secret
+work for the plotters, and it might be that, if she trailed him, she
+could learn just who it was who was at the bottom of this dastardly
+conspiracy.
+
+If Frank Barton were here, and possessed her knowledge of affairs and
+her suspicions, would he not do the same? She believed so, and she
+believed the situation called her to the task.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH
+
+
+At just this point in Ethel Clayton’s business troubles, when she
+wished so heartily that she could have the benefit of Barton’s advice,
+the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company was thinking very
+little indeed of such tame affairs as those relating to the factory in
+Mailsburg.
+
+Like those other thousands who have a rendezvous with death on the
+battleline, the intensive training and preparation for that event was
+filling his whole thought, as well as taking up all his time. The
+regiment to which Frank Barton was attached had plunged immediately
+into such grilling work as many of the men had never in their lives
+experienced.
+
+In the first place, Barton’s detachment was billeted in a little
+village which had before that day on which the American soldiery
+marched in, escaped all contact with the Yankees, or, indeed, any
+one outside its local confines. It was but a tiny collection of farm
+cottages and stables builded together far back in feudal times for
+protective reasons. Sanitation was an unknown word to the inhabitants.
+
+Barton’s captain was taken down with pleuropneumonia almost at his
+landing from the troop ship _Tecumseh_, and was in a hospital.
+Barton as ranking lieutenant was in charge of the company of nearly
+two hundred men. With the medical major he had the well-being, both
+mental and physical, of these men upon his hands. It was a situation of
+responsibility.
+
+His second in command appeared before him on the first morning,
+saluted, and said:
+
+“Lieutenant Barton, I have to report, sir, that this place--er--really,
+Lieutenant, _it stinks_.”
+
+“So my nose tells me, Lieutenant Copley. The doctor likewise agrees
+with us.”
+
+“Bah jove!” groaned Morrison Copley, who could not altogether cast his
+drawl on such sort notice. “What is to be done about it?”
+
+“Clean up!” announced Barton vigorously.
+
+And that was their first job. Precious piles of stable scrapings that
+had occupied the little courtyards before the farmers’ cots, or had
+been heaped in stable penthouses since time immemorial, were forked
+into carts and spread upon the fallow ground outside the village.
+
+It was a shock to the villagers, and at first they raised a great
+clamor, for custom was being vastly disturbed. But when they were made
+to see that the mules and horses of the American forces were adding
+daily to the fertilizer piles and that the Yankee boys in removing
+the manure to the fields were doing the farmers’ work, and that for
+nothing, objections died among the French population of the village, if
+not entirely among the soldiers themselves. But they made that village
+clean and kept it clean.
+
+Once Frank Barton burst out laughing and had to retreat to his
+quarters to recover. The thought had struck him suddenly that if Madam
+Copley--the haughty, somewhat snobbish Madam Copley--could see her son
+bossing a gang forking over steaming manure piles, she would probably
+swoon.
+
+It was rather startling, too, when one considered what a metamorphosis
+had come over Morry Copley. Even his voice had changed. Its shrillness
+had been modified and when he gave an order now it was with the snap of
+a whiplash in his tone.
+
+Morry was diplomatic, too. In the cleaning up of the village this
+ranked high, for he managed such French as he possessed most adroitly
+and made the peasants who first thought they were being robbed agree
+with him that it might be a good thing, once in a hundred years, to
+scrape the manure platforms--and even the cobbled village street--right
+down to the bone.
+
+From that first week of occupancy, when effectual sanitary measures
+were put into practice, right through the long season of trench
+training that followed, Barton and his detachment were never idle
+enough to suffer from homesickness.
+
+Although the training field and trenches for this American division
+were near enough to the battlefront for the big guns to be heard, they
+were well hidden, and were defended from the enemy aircraft by a
+special squadron of French flying machines and sentinel airplanes.
+
+The plan of the German military leaders to bring some great disaster
+upon the first American troops to arrive back of the battlelines, was
+not yet accomplished. That the attempt would be made again and again
+until the catastrophe was assured was well understood by the Americans
+as well as by the allied training officers working with the division.
+
+“The Boche will get you if you don’t watch out,” became a byword in
+the Yankee camps. Perhaps the frequent cry of “wolf! wolf!” made the
+Americans at last somewhat careless. Men who have always joked about
+the lack of intelligence of German saloon-keepers and delicatessen
+shopmen are not likely to be easily impressed by stories of Fritz’s
+super-powers under the sea, on the earth, or in the air.
+
+Working with his men all day and studying at night made up the round of
+Barton’s existence during these first weeks in France. It was not often
+he gave much attention to outside matters, or thought upon anything but
+military tactics.
+
+It was true there was a desire in the back of his mind at first to
+learn how Helen Fuller was and where she was stationed in France--if
+she really had come over. He wrote a friendly note to her addressed in
+care of the Red Cross headquarters in Paris, but received no reply.
+
+Then arrived Ethel’s first three letters, all in one mail. The
+picture in them of Mailsburg and the affairs of the Hapwood-Diller
+Manufacturing Company, pleased Barton greatly. He had not realized
+before how hungry he was for news.
+
+Jim Mayberry seemed to have forgotten him altogether. He was not so
+dense that he did not understand Mayberry’s character in a measure.
+Barton had never expected gratitude from the boyhood friend he had made
+superintendent of the factory. Ethel’s letters, however, hinted at none
+of the trouble Mayberry was making in Barton’s absence.
+
+They were just cheerful narratives of the daily happenings that she
+knew would interest the absent manager. He had already written one
+general missive addressed to her; but now he sat down and replied
+particularly to Ethel Clayton--a warm and friendly letter inspired by
+a feeling that he had not before realized he held for the girl whom he
+had always considered so “capable.”
+
+He remembered how she had looked at him from her desk on the evening
+of his final departure from Mailsburg. Actually he had never forgotten
+this picture of the girl he had left behind to watch over the affairs
+of the concern he had done so much for and which had meant so much to
+him. She seemed to mean a deal more in his thought, too, than merely a
+capable office assistant.
+
+And she was a pretty girl. That Sunday she had visited the camp
+at Lake Quehasset! There was no girl he knew who could look more
+attractive. Why had he never noticed it before that day? Hers was a
+less glowing, a less striking beauty than Helen Fuller’s, but it was a
+beauty that once noted never lost its attraction for the appreciative
+eye.
+
+The lonely man in camp or barracks is sure to contemplate the memory of
+his friends and acquaintances among womankind, and Barton’s mind dwelt
+as never before on the girls and women he knew in Mailsburg.
+
+“Why,” he thought, as he closed the long letter to Ethel, “I might have
+tried to make a friend of her. I wonder why I did not try? Miss Clayton
+is very much worth while.”
+
+The wound caused by Helen Fuller’s treatment of him at the last,
+was still raw. He felt that she had deliberately cultivated his
+acquaintance, had made him believe she had more than a passing interest
+in him, only to make the fall of his hopes seem the greater.
+
+He wondered if Helen had really had for him exactly the same feeling
+that she had for Morrison Copley or Charlie Bradley. Was she merely a
+coquette, playing with men as a fisherman plays a trout--and for the
+same reason? Was it merely for sport that she had exerted herself to
+charm him?
+
+Frank Barton felt all the hurt that a man of his kind does when he
+awakes to the fact that he has been made a fool of by a guileful
+woman. But he did not feel that pique which often turns a man from one
+woman to accept the salve of another’s sympathy. In thinking of Ethel
+Clayton and writing to her he had no such thought as this in mind.
+
+No. Instead he threw himself with all his strength into his work.
+He was acting ranking officer of his company, and he felt all the
+responsibility which that implies. He desired to have his boys show at
+inspection a higher degree of training than any other company in the
+regiment. He kept his brother officers, as well as the non-commissioned
+officers, up to the scratch by both example and precept.
+
+“Barton’s a shark for work,” they all said. “He just eats it up!”
+
+The notice of staff officers was drawn to his command and it brought
+Lieutenant Barton some special attentions. He was taken with a group of
+other advanced officers to the front line trenches and there learned
+much of the actual work of modern warfare--much that would help him
+when his brave boys “went in.”
+
+And then, back with his detachment once more, the men of which were
+“fit as a fiddle” and ready for any work, Frank Barton saw that day for
+which he had been preparing all these long weeks and months.
+
+It did not come just as he expected. He and his men were not moved
+to some sector of the front where they would slip into the places of
+wearied and mud-encrusted poilus at night. They did not go to the Hun
+in fact; the Hun came to them.
+
+The day began early indeed for Lieutenant Barton. He was up long before
+reveille, for there was a line of motor-lorries stalled in the mud
+just outside the village, that had been there half the night. Barton’s
+company was called on for help.
+
+For several days there had been a thaw and each night a thick and
+penetrating fog arose from the saturated earth, wiping out the stars
+completely and hanging a thick pall over the countryside.
+
+Under the oversight of the non-commissioned officers, the men began
+building miniature corduroy roads over the miry spots, and prying the
+lorries’ wheels out of the mud so that they could get a start, one by
+one, and go on through the village street.
+
+Barton strode along the line of stalled trucks and their trailers
+to the very last one in the procession. Beyond, the forelights of a
+smaller motor-car showed in the mist. In curiosity he drew near to this.
+
+“Any chance of getting by the jam, Lieutenant?” demanded an
+unmistakably American voice.
+
+“Not, now,” Barton responded, drawing nearer. “You will have to wait
+for those trucks to get through the town.”
+
+“And how long will that be?”
+
+“I cannot say. By the way, perhaps you had better let me see your
+passes. Save time. I happen to be in command here.”
+
+“Oh, sure! Here you are, Lieutenant.”
+
+The driver of the car stepped out, pulling several papers from an inner
+pocket as he did so. Barton flashed the spotlight of his torch on them.
+At the same moment a clear and well remembered voice spoke from the
+tonneau:
+
+“Why, it’s Frank Barton! How very odd!”
+
+“Miss Fuller! Helen!” ejaculated the officer in equal amazement.
+
+He turned his flashlight upon the occupants of the car. Two women in
+nurse’s cloaks and an elderly French citizen were Helen’s companions.
+She, too, was garbed as a Red Cross nurse.
+
+“Oh, we shall be all right now!” the American girl cried.
+
+She explained to her companions in French, but spoke so rapidly that
+Barton could not follow her observations. The chauffeur, a keen-faced
+American lad, evidently college-bred, chuckled and returned the papers
+to his pocket.
+
+“You see, Mr. Barton,” she said to the lieutenant, “we are going to
+the base hospital on ahead--these ladies and I. Monsieur Renau goes to
+the village there on business. I engaged Johnny Gear and his machine
+to take us around this way because the railroad accommodations for
+civilians, as you know, are dreadful. And here you find us stuck in the
+mud,” she concluded dramatically.
+
+“I fear you will be stuck in the mud more than once if you follow
+this lorry train,” Barton said. “It has right of way and will leave an
+almost impassable mire behind it.”
+
+“Now you’ve said something, Lieutenant,” agreed Johnny Gear.
+
+“But you can get us around it, of course, Frank,” said Helen
+confidently, and in the tone of an American girl to whom nothing is
+impossible if she has once made up her mind to get it.
+
+“Not by any near road, Miss Helen,” he responded.
+
+“Why! _there_ is a track,” the girl cried, for through a sudden rift in
+the fog she could see a few yards. “Doesn’t that go around this village
+you say is just ahead of us?”
+
+“It leads into our training encampment. Nobody is allowed there without
+special permit.”
+
+“Oh, now, _Frank_----”
+
+“But there is a road,” he hastened to add. “You must turn back. Half a
+mile back you will find a road that encircles the whole field, and on
+which you will not be challenged. I’ll go with you if you can back and
+turn your car.”
+
+“You bet I can,” agreed Gear. “Look out for the mud, Lieutenant.”
+
+“Come and sit beside me, Frank,” the American girl said, quickly
+opening the tonneau door on her side. “How are you--and the other
+Mailsburg heroes? I’ve just lots and _lots_ to tell you!”
+
+He slipped into the seat indicated and was introduced--after a
+fashion--to the French girls and to Monsieur Renau. Gear got his car
+turned about and they went lubbering on over the heavy road.
+
+It was daybreak now but still very dark, with the world completely
+smothered in fog. Almost by chance Barton discovered the entrance to
+the encircling track he had spoken of. It was a twenty-mile trip around
+the training field; but if he continued with them he was sure the party
+would make it all right.
+
+“And you _must_ see that we get through, Frank,” Helen Fuller urged.
+“Really, you know, we’ve _got_ to get to our destination to-day.”
+
+Barton smiled at her reassuringly. Her eyes were as bright as ever, her
+smile as alluring. He quite forgot how cavalierly she had treated him
+at their last meeting in Mailsburg.
+
+“Drive right ahead, Mr. Gear,” he told the chauffeur. “There is almost
+no heavy trucking over this road, and I think you will be able to get
+ahead of the lorry train.”
+
+Then he gave his attention to the girl beside him. She chattered in
+her usual magpie fashion; yet Barton loved to hear her. Naturally of a
+serious trend himself, Helen Fuller’s inconsequential talk had always
+amused him. And much that she told him now about her experience since
+coming to France was interesting.
+
+That she was quite as sure as ever that her interests and her
+activities were of more importance than anything else in the world,
+a listener could not fail to understand. When she asked him of his
+adventures she gave him no time for reply, but went on with her own
+story. Nobody in the world mattered so much as Helen Fuller. It began
+to irritate him after a while. It never had before.
+
+The car plowed on for some time; it was Barton himself who stopped it.
+
+“Wait!” he commanded. “What is that I hear? Shut off your engine, Mr.
+Gear.”
+
+Then they all heard it--the unmistakable roaring of a powerful motor.
+Moreover it was not on the road before or behind them. It was in the
+air.
+
+“An aeroplane!” cried Helen.
+
+“A very heavy aero--_hein_?” queried one of her fellow nurses.
+
+“And that’s right!” exclaimed the driver. “Foggy as it is I suppose
+there are plenty of flying men up yonder.”
+
+“I have never heard a machine just like that,” Barton said, in a
+puzzled tone. “I thought I had identified the sound of all these French
+machines--Great heavens!”
+
+A series of explosions interrupted his speech. Off to the left they
+were, in the direction of the village and the cantonments. Through the
+thick mist a flash or two was visible.
+
+“Shells!” yelled Gear.
+
+“An enemy plane dropping bombs!” ejaculated Barton. “Must have got past
+the French escadrille in this fog.”
+
+A nearer explosion followed and the roar of the aeroplane’s engine
+seemed almost over their heads.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE WRATH OF THE HUN
+
+
+“Oh! Oh!” cried Helen, clinging tightly to Barton’s arm. “Let us turn
+back!”
+
+“What good’ll that do!” growled Gear, who heard her.
+
+One of the French nurses crossed herself and murmured a prayer as
+Barton could see by her whispering lips. He could not fail to note how
+much better the French girls were taking it than Helen. She had quite
+lost her self-control and was fairly hysterical.
+
+He could not afford to show any trepidation himself, even if he felt
+it. He was in the uniform of an officer of the American forces and
+there were French eyes upon him. In any case he must not show the white
+feather, and it stabbed his pride that Helen, an American Red Cross
+nurse, should do so.
+
+An aerial bomb fell nearer and almost deafened them with its explosion.
+Barton sprang out of the motor-car and aided Helen to alight.
+
+“Into the ditch--everybody!” he shouted. “Lie down!”
+
+He saw Renau and Gear spring to the help of the other women, then in a
+moment Barton was rushing toward the muddy sluiceway with Helen Fuller.
+
+“Oh, _don’t_ drag me around so, Frank! I’m wet to my _knees_. Isn’t
+there some place--”
+
+The roaring of the powerful motor overhead drowned her further
+complaint. It was then that another shell fell.
+
+Had Barton not dragged the girl down with him--both falling flat into
+the bottom of the ditch--they must have suffered the fate of those
+who had not yet got away from the motor-car--the two nurses, Monsieur
+Renau, and poor smiling, reckless Johnny Gear, Johnny, who had run away
+from home to “see what the blooming war was like.”
+
+Overhead the aero engine moaned into the distance. Barton got to his
+knees and pulled the girl up beside him. It was light enough for them
+to see each other.
+
+“Oh! Oh! Take me away! I must go somewhere. Oh, Frank! I--I’m all
+_muddy_,” Helen, poor shallow, selfish Helen, wailed.
+
+“Oh!” gasped Barton, unheeding. “They’re dead--dead!”
+
+He stood up and tossed back the thick hair from his brow. He had not
+his cap. He found his army pistol gripped in his right hand. His left
+was holding up the girl whom he clutched by the shoulder as carelessly
+as he might have held a half-filled sack of flour.
+
+“You’re not _listening_!” cried Helen. “Don’t you _hear_? Take me
+somewhere--take me where it is _safe_.”
+
+He was listening, but not to her cries. That terrible thing in the air
+was coming back.
+
+The moan of the powerful engine was increasing again. A few guns
+in the distance began to pop. The Field Artillery was getting into
+action--_and he was not there_.
+
+What carnage might not have already been accomplished! This terrible
+thing in the air, swooping through the fog, might have brought havoc
+and disaster to the American forces.
+
+“Take me away! Take me away!” the girl cried over and over again,
+fairly clawing at his arm to attract his attention.
+
+“Where shall I take you? One place is as safe as another--until this
+raid is over.”
+
+It was growing lighter all the time. The fog was rapidly thinning.
+Suddenly Helen shrieked:
+
+“Where is our car?”
+
+There was nothing but a hole in the road where it had stood. Not a
+shred of it remained within their straining vision. Wiped out--like
+that!
+
+“Here it comes again!” shouted Barton.
+
+Through the dissipating mist the great sausage-like body of the German
+air-raider appeared. It was one of the newest and largest airships yet
+conceived and built. It drifted low--not two hundred yards from the
+earth.
+
+“Down on the ground!” commanded Barton. “If they spy us----”
+
+[Illustration: He did fire--futilely, perhaps--as the great car circled
+clumsily above the spot.
+                                                      (_See page 201_)]
+
+The huge flying car swooped lower. It seemed to be heading directly for
+the two Americans in the muddy road. The lieutenant flung the girl down
+again, but stood erect himself, his legs astride, his head back, eyes
+glaring through the shreds of fog at the airship. He had involuntarily
+assumed an attitude of defiance and his pistol was raised at firing
+angle.
+
+He did fire--futilely, perhaps--as the great car circled clumsily above
+the spot. He emptied the weapon at the flying foe.
+
+Suddenly--whether a chance bullet had hit some vital spot or not--a red
+flame leaped to life in the envelope of the huge bag. So low sailed the
+machine that Barton could see a man run along a narrow platform and
+shoot the spray of a chemical fire extinguisher up at the spreading
+flame.
+
+Only for a moment was this attempt continued. Then a second man
+appeared, and the usual high, staccato voice of a Prussian officer
+uttering a command sounded sharply through the rumble of the dying
+motor.
+
+The efforts of the man with the fire extinguisher ceased. Some
+catastrophe had overtaken the huge war machine. Her engine had lost its
+stroke. She was coming to earth--and that in enemy territory. The crew
+would destroy the ship as they always do in such instances.
+
+A wild cheer burst from Barton’s lips. Swiftly he reloaded his
+automatic pistol. The nose of the wabbly, creaking machine, so clumsy
+looking that Barton half wondered how it was ever lifted from the
+ground, plunged toward the earth.
+
+It passed directly over the road. The balloon envelope was afire in a
+dozen places. Barton could see the flash of an axe in the officer’s
+hands as he wrecked the mechanism of the still flying airship.
+
+There was a deafening crash when the car hit the ground. The American
+saw one man, turning over and over in the air, dashed forty feet at
+least by the force of the impact. Other figures climbed down from the
+crushed car on to which the balloon collapsed slowly, all afire.
+
+“Come on!” shouted the excited lieutenant, waving his weapon. “Now
+we’ve got ’em!”
+
+“Frank! Stop! Don’t you _dare_ leave me!” wailed Helen Fuller.
+
+“Wait for me here, Helen----”
+
+“I tell you I _won’t_!” cried the girl. She stamped her foot in rage.
+“You take me right away from here!”
+
+“But I must round those fellows up. We’ve got ’em--don’t you see? Wait
+here for me if you are afraid.”
+
+“I’ll _never_ forgive you, Frank Barton, if you leave me! And I _won’t_
+go over there! Those--those men will kill us. Oh, Frank! Come back!”
+
+He hesitated but a moment to answer her. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want
+me to be a quitter, Helen,” he declared, and leaped the ditch to get
+into the field upon which the wrecked German airship had fallen.
+
+With a scream she followed him. She ran faster than he, and caught
+his right arm again just as he was rounding the rear of the wreckage.
+Before them stood fourteen men in the gray olive of the German uniform.
+The man thrown when the ship came down never moved.
+
+Barton saw instantly that the crew of the airship--even the commander
+himself--were unarmed. Good reason for that. Deep in the enemy’s
+country, without a possible chance of escape through the lines, a
+peaceful demeanor and appearance spelled safety for them.
+
+Barton raised his pistol, Helen still clinging to his arm. The Germans,
+or, at least, those in the front of the group, raised their hands in
+token of surrender. Even the commander called out: “_Kamerad!_”
+
+“Frank Barton! Take me away! Save me!” shrieked the hysterical girl.
+
+She hung, a dead weight, upon his arm and pulled down the weapon. One
+of the men in the back of the group had been stooping down, his hands
+on the ground. Now he stood up, stepped clear of his companions, and
+swung his right hand back.
+
+With the accuracy of a baseball player he flung the sharp stone he had
+picked up. Barton tried to fire and dodge, but Helen’s interference
+made both attempts impossible. The stone struck him just above the
+right temple and glanced off, cutting such a gash that the blood poured
+down his face, blinding him.
+
+With a shout the Germans started for Barton and the girl. The
+lieutenant, feeling himself helpless, thrust his weapon into Helen’s
+hand.
+
+“Defend yourself!” he gasped, and then slipped slowly to the ground,
+crumpling in a senseless heap at her feet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+UNCERTAINTIES
+
+
+Had Ethel Clayton known how deep in wild adventure Barton was as she
+rode down town in the surface car watching the little lawyer, she would
+have been utterly disgruntled at the tameness of her quest.
+
+Yet it was with thought of Barton in her mind, as well as of her own
+personal interest and that of her mother’s, that the girl forged on.
+She believed that a conspiracy was on foot the intent of which was the
+ruining of the business structure Frank Barton had labored so hard to
+build and make secure. He had made the Hapwood-Diller Company a going
+concern. Somebody was now determined to make abortive all the general
+manger’s work and, as well, to ruin the smaller stockholders.
+
+Who that somebody was Ethel was not certain, although she had strong
+suspicions. She believed A. Schuster to be the link connecting her
+suspicions with the truth. She sat quietly in the car and did not even
+glance his way after her first hasty appreciation of the man when he
+had entered.
+
+In front of the Bellevue he left the car, but Ethel went on to the
+next crossing before alighting. She hurried back. Under the bunch of
+electric lights before the main door of the hotel she saw A. Schuster
+pass in.
+
+She had expected this. Both Mr. Grandon Fuller and Jim Mayberry she
+knew to be habitués of the hotel. There was a public dining-room at one
+side of the front door and the lobby and office were on the other, with
+the smoking-room and café back of the clerk’s desk.
+
+Ethel had already made up her mind what she would do in this emergency.
+She mounted the broad steps briskly and crossed the lobby toward the
+small ladies’ parlor behind the stairway. A glance to the right showed
+her the black-haired lawyer approaching the desk.
+
+In one chair lounged the pursy Mr. Fuller. He vouchsafed Schuster no
+more than a glance. But Jim Mayberry, coming from the smoking-room,
+hailed the lawyer affably:
+
+“Hi, old man! going to have supper with me? Come on upstairs while I
+get into my best bib and tucker for the evening.”
+
+He clapped Schuster heartily on the shoulder and led him away toward
+the little elevator that wheezed upward asthmatically the next moment.
+Neither had looked at Grandon Fuller nor he at them.
+
+This fact was sufficient to have made Ethel Clayton suspicious had
+she not been so before. Jim Mayberry was always so very polite
+and deferential to Mr. Fuller when the latter appeared at the
+factory offices. It seemed now as though the superintendent of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company had ignored the presence of the chief
+stockholder too obviously.
+
+Ethel passed hastily on to the parlor; but nothing of this had escaped
+her quick eye and understanding. In the parlor she found a girl in cap
+and apron whom she knew. It was Eliza Boling, who presided over the
+linen room of the hotel and acted as a sort of floor clerk on the third
+floor. Ethel had gone to school with the girl.
+
+“Oh, Ethel! come up to my desk so we can talk,” cried Miss Boling, when
+she caught sight of Miss Clayton. “I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”
+
+Ethel was nothing loath under the circumstances, and ran upstairs with
+her. The slowly moving elevator had scarcely more than deposited Jim
+Mayberry and the lawyer on the third floor. Ethel saw them approaching
+one of the doors.
+
+“Isn’t that Mr. Mayberry?” she asked her acquaintance.
+
+“Oh, I suppose it is,” replied the other girl without looking up.
+“Don’t let him speak to you. He’s so awfully fresh!”
+
+“Is that his room?” Ethel asked.
+
+“Number Eighty? Yes. And I wish it was on another floor.”
+
+Eliza Boling was a somewhat attractive girl, and Ethel could understand
+easily that the superintendent of the Hapwood-Diller Company would
+have made himself objectionable to her.
+
+The two girls talked of mutual friends and affairs of mutual interest
+for some time. Then the elevator door clanged again. Ethel looked
+quickly. The heavy figure of Mr. Grandon Fuller stepped out into the
+corridor. He did not glance toward the two girls.
+
+Mr. Fuller walked straight to the door of Number Eighty. He rapped once
+and then entered the room. It was plain his coming was expected.
+
+Ethel had seen enough to assure her that Fuller, Jim Mayberry, and the
+sly looking Schuster were engaged in something that they wished to keep
+secret from people in general.
+
+She believed she had traced the conspirators. The reason for the
+largest stockholder of the Hapwood-Diller Company seeking to wreck that
+concern was, however, beyond Ethel Clayton’s powers of divination.
+
+For that was exactly the threat of circumstances as the girl saw it.
+The forcing down of the price of Hapwood-Diller stock must in the end
+ruin the credit of the corporation. She went home vastly puzzled by the
+whole situation.
+
+Her mother was utterly unstrung.
+
+“Oh, Ethel, I feel terribly condemned!” she cried. “Where have you
+been? I wish you had come in earlier so as to hear that Mr. Schuster
+talk.”
+
+“I don’t want to hear him talk,” declared her daughter.
+
+“It seems to me, Ethel,” complained Mrs. Clayton, “that you are siding
+against me--against your own interests. I suppose you call that loyalty
+to your employer. But Frank Barton isn’t there at the offices any more.
+He never ought to have gone away. I am convinced of that now. The
+business is on its last legs. You know it is, but you won’t admit it.”
+
+“I know nothing of the kind, Mother!” cried Ethel with exasperation.
+“Why, you talk about the Hapwood-Diller Company as these pro-Germans do
+about the war! And just as unreasonably.”
+
+“What do you mean--calling your own mother a pro-German?” demanded Mrs.
+Clayton. “I guess I’m just as good a patriot as the next one--and I
+knit as many socks and sweaters, too!
+
+“But about our shares of stock--that’s different. Since you’ve been
+away Amy Hopper’s been in and she’s sold her shares--she had ten--and
+has bought a Ford car. At least, she’s got something for her money,
+while we are likely to lose everything.”
+
+Ethel was just completing her warmed-over supper, and under a steady
+dropping of her mother’s complaints, when the porch door banged open
+and Benway Chase rushed in.
+
+“Goodness, Bennie, how you scared me!” Mrs. Clayton ejaculated. “Sit
+down and have a piece of pie--do!”
+
+“No. But I’ll stand up and eat it--many thanks, Mrs. Clayton!”
+responded the young fellow, whipping the piece of pie off the plate
+she offered him and inserting it like a wedge into his mouth for the
+first bite. Somehow he managed to utter: “Fire at the factory, Ethel.
+Get on your hat and coat.”
+
+“No! Benway?” she gasped, starting up.
+
+“Surest thing you know! You can see the smoke from the street. I
+telephoned. It’s confined to Shop Four. The firemen are there. But
+let’s go down and see that nothing’s damaged around the offices.”
+
+She ran for her coat and hat and they sallied forth, Benway swallowing
+the last of the pie as they cleared the gate. “Gee! but your mother
+does make good pie crust, Ethel,” he said.
+
+His boyishness somehow troubled her more than it usually did just then.
+Perhaps because her own thoughts were so serious. He would make a good
+match for Mabel Skinner. He would never grow up enough for Ethel to
+consider him for a moment as a partner in life.
+
+The fire was under control when the two young people reached the
+factory. Nor had it done much damage. Moreover, it was well covered
+with insurance; but the delay in work under way would be considerable.
+
+“By jove!” said Benway, “the old H-D Company is up against it for fair.
+Everything is going wrong with it. You’d think the place was bewitched,
+wouldn’t you?”
+
+“Hush! Let us not talk about such things. John says it was faulty
+insulation. But how came there to be faulty insulation in that shop?
+Somebody is guilty of criminal carelessness. Oh, I wish Frank Barton
+were here!”
+
+This last wish she did not let Benway hear. And, indeed, what could
+Barton have done had he been on the spot? The Board of Directors met
+the next day and even Mr. Hammerly could find nobody to “jack up.”
+
+The grain dealer was in a fine rage, however. The meeting was as
+acrimonious a session as had ever been held since the reorganization
+of the corporation. Ethel was only called into the room once and then
+Hammerly did not speak to her. And after the meeting he pulled his hat
+down over his ears and stamped out of the offices without a word.
+
+She wondered what he had done with the paper she had given him--the
+specification sheet of the Kimberly Binding Company order. It seemed
+strange that he had never taken her into his confidence at all about
+that matter.
+
+It leaked out in some way, however, after this meeting, that the old
+grain merchant was beaten by Grandon Fuller and his friends and that
+Jim Mayberry was likely to be made manager in Barton’s place at the
+next quarterly meeting. She had noticed that the superintendent left
+the Board meeting with a smile. He had given Ethel a hard look, and
+she was well aware of what awaited her in the near future if Mayberry
+had his way.
+
+There was a streak of fair weather for her in a day or two, however.
+Another letter arrived from France, and this time it was not merely an
+impersonal narrative of the absent’s manager’s adventures in uniform.
+There was an intimate note to the missive that warmed Ethel’s heart
+to a glow. Yet she realized that not a phrase went beyond proper
+friendliness.
+
+She read it all to the others in the office, although it was not just
+the same as his first letter had been. She did not let the sheets go
+out of her own hands, however. There was a personal atmosphere to it
+which made her fold the letter finally and hide it in her blouse. This
+betrayed a softness that would have angered Ethel had anybody accused
+her of it.
+
+Other people heard about the letter, however, and she was stopped
+for several days upon the street by friends of Barton asking after
+him. Secretly she was proud that it was she whom he had selected as a
+correspondent among all those who knew and were interested in him here
+in Mailsburg.
+
+Then Mrs. Trevor came to the office to see her. The boarding-house
+mistress who had housed and fed Frank Barton so long was a rather grim
+woman in an old-fashioned Paisley shawl and arctics. Her hands were red
+and gnarled and her back was as curveless as a ramrod.
+
+When she strode into the Hapwood-Diller offices she was as stern as
+a grenadier. Her mere appearance quelled even Mabel Skinner. But when
+she came close to Ethel Clayton’s desk the girl saw that her eyelids
+were red-rimmed and that she had difficulty in keeping her lips from
+trembling.
+
+“Miss Clayton--you’re Miss Clayton, ain’t you?” she began. “Ethel
+Clayton?”
+
+“Yes,” agreed Ethel. “You are Mrs. Trevor?”
+
+The woman nodded. Then said: “What do you know about Frank Barton? I
+hear you got a letter from him?”
+
+“Yes, Mrs. Trevor.”
+
+“When was it writ?”
+
+Ethel told her, understanding too well to consider Mrs. Trevor at all
+impertinent. She told her most of what was in the letter, too, for it
+was burned into her memory too clearly for her to forget what Frank
+Barton had said.
+
+“Well,” said the woman, with a sigh, “I had to know. I expect I’m an
+old fool. But that boy was with me long, Miss Clayton.”
+
+“I think I understand,” the girl said gently.
+
+“You see, I got to dreaming of him. Night afore last I had a terrible
+dream. I saw him with his face all bloody, his empty hands in the
+air--sort of clutching like--and him falling down just like he was
+dead. And there was smoke and fire all about, just as though he was in
+battle. It’s worried me a lot.”
+
+“I should think it would, Mrs. Trevor,” Ethel said. “But you know,
+they say dreams go by contraries.”
+
+“So they say, but I don’t know as it is always true. I’ve had
+dreams----”
+
+“Oh, you mustn’t let dreams get on your nerves,” broke in Ethel hastily.
+
+“Well, the dear boy meant so much to me. You can’t imagine what a good
+boarder he was--no trouble at all--leas’wise not alongside o’ some of
+’em. Lordy! what a lot of trouble some of ’em do make, to be sure. But
+Frank Barton--he’s one boy out of a thousand, yes, he is;” and the old
+boarding-house mistress bobbed her head vigorously.
+
+“You mustn’t worry. It will be all right, I’m sure,” answered the girl,
+but rather weakly.
+
+“You feel sure, Miss Clayton?”
+
+“You must look on the bright side. It will be all right.”
+
+“Well, I hope so!” The woman then tramped out of the office. She was
+plainly relieved and comforted. But Ethel was not.
+
+Of course she did not believe in dreams. But what Mrs. Trevor had said
+remained in the girl’s mind--stuck to her memory like a burr. She was
+constantly seeing Frank Barton falling down, his face masked in blood.
+She almost accepted Mrs. Trevor’s vision as prophetic.
+
+Then came the day when the Mailsburg _Clarion_ printed an afternoon
+extra edition. Those in the office heard the boys shouting it under the
+windows and Benway Chase ran out to buy a paper. Across the sheet was
+the headline:
+
+  GERMAN AIR RAID ON AMERICAN CAMP!
+      METEOR DIVISION BOMBED!
+
+The Field Artillery with which Frank Barton served was a part of the
+so-styled Meteor Division.
+
+Ethel Clayton realized this while the paper was still across the room
+from her. She sat perfectly still at her desk, clutching the edge of it
+to keep down the cry that rose to her lips.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+SO FAR AWAY!
+
+
+Benway Chase was looking at her and Ethel realized that in the boy’s
+eyes there was an expression of pain and despair that gave almost a
+tragic cast to his countenance. He had suddenly become aware that his
+old-time friend, the girl he had always worshiped, was given to the
+very last fibre of her being to another.
+
+His lips moved stiffly as he came nearer to her desk.
+
+“Is it Mr. Barton’s division!” he questioned, brokenly. “Oh, Ethel!”
+
+“His Field Artillery is a part of the Meteor Division,” she said, and
+was surprised that her voice was unshaken.
+
+“And you--” He did not finish the speech. His gaze dropped. The others
+gathered around to read the startling news in the _Clarion_.
+
+Besides the headlines emblazoned across the page, there was not much
+to read. The War Department merely announced that it was reported--a
+report as yet unverified--that the Germans had raided the American
+camp. No casualties were announced. As previously declared, the
+Department would make all particulars public as soon as the undisputed
+facts were received from the officer commanding the division.
+
+Mayberry must have heard the buzz of conversation from the private
+office. He appeared, an ominous scowl on his brow.
+
+“What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Is this all you people have to
+do? I believe the Hapwood-Diller Company could get along just as well
+with half the office force we have.”
+
+“Let you and me enlist, Mayberry,” suggested Sydney. “They could get
+along without us, that’s sure.”
+
+Little Skinner giggled. The superintendent, who had some fear of
+Sydney, strode forward without replying to the bookkeeper and took the
+paper out of Josephine Durand’s hand. He held some papers in a sheaf
+in his left hand and when he caught sight of the headlines he put his
+papers on the desk the better to handle the smutted newspaper.
+
+Ethel had not risen. In flapping open the _Clarion_ Mayberry started a
+circulation of air that scattered his sheaf of papers. Ethel gathered
+them together and stacked them into a neat packet. But this time a
+different paper was on top of the pile. She saw that the top sheet was
+headed: “A. Schuster.”
+
+“What’s all this about?” Mayberry was saying. “Murder! Was Barton in
+it?”
+
+“His battalion is attached to that division, Mr. Mayberry,” Benway
+said.
+
+“Well, maybe he’s seen some real fighting, then,” the superintendent
+said cheerfully. “That’s what he went over there for, I suppose.”
+
+He dropped the _Clarion_ upon Ethel’s desk and picked up his papers.
+Seeing what lay on top he flashed the girl a sudden suspicious glance.
+But Ethel seemed oblivious of it.
+
+Indeed, it seemed as though all save the phlegmatic superintendent were
+too thoroughly disturbed to set their minds on office matters. Ethel
+betrayed less emotion than most of them, perhaps; but then it was her
+nature to hide her keener feelings.
+
+The few following days she found hard to live through. The strain upon
+her patience was great. The papers were filled with frothings and
+imaginations about the raid on the American camp. Then came the truth
+with the list of casualties.
+
+The list was small. One enlisted man killed, seven wounded and one
+missing. The huge German flying machine had been brought down, one
+of its crew losing his life, the other fourteen being captured by
+Second-Lieutenant Charles Bradley with a part of his company.
+
+With hungry eyes Ethel Clayton read the list of casualties. The last
+line yielded the news which she had feared all along:
+
+  “_Lieutenant F. Barton, Field Artillery, missing._”
+
+There was a full account in the papers of the raid and the bringing
+down of the German raider. But the single statement, that Frank Barton
+was missing, added a spice of mystery to the affair that created a good
+deal of excitement in Mailsburg.
+
+It could not be possible, if all the German raiders were captured or
+killed, that Frank Barton was himself captured and taken into the
+German lines. That seemed improbable. Yet the sinister report stood.
+
+What had happened to him? Would Ethel ever hear from him again? Was his
+fate to be one of those mysteries of war that are never satisfactorily
+explained? Of the three lurid headings of the casualty list, killed,
+wounded, missing, the last is always the most nerve-breaking.
+
+Just at this time, however, Ethel Clayton’s mind was scarified by other
+and serious troubles. She had decided that at last the evidence of
+conspiracy was sufficient to lay before Mr. Hammerly; and as the latter
+seemed to make no move the girl went to him.
+
+“The quarterly meeting is near. I understand that Mr. Mayberry is to be
+advanced to Mr. Barton’s position,” she said to the old grain dealer.
+“To me it looks like ruin for us all. My mother has some interest
+in it, Mr. Hammerly, so I am speaking for her, not for myself as an
+employee.”
+
+“Humph! No! You’d best keep out of it, Ethel,” said the old man. “Leave
+this to me. I’ve learned something about this Schuster, though I never
+saw him. If I need your evidence I’ll call on you in the board meeting.
+But I reckon I can link up A. Schuster with the proper parties without
+your verbal testimony.”
+
+Meanwhile Jim Mayberry made himself as unpleasant around the offices as
+he could. He felt, it seemed, that he would soon have all the force at
+his mercy, unless it were Sydney. He would scarcely dare discharge the
+bookkeeper, who had been so long with the corporation.
+
+“Mayberry hangs the sword of Damocles over our heads,” Benway growled
+one evening to Ethel. “I can feel the breath of it on the back of my
+neck, at least. I might as well be looking around for another job.”
+
+Ethel had no word of comfort for him. She did not see herself just how
+it was coming out. It seemed probable that Frank Barton would never
+come back now; so why should the stockholders keep his situation for
+him?
+
+The day for the quarterly board meeting arrived, and the board room
+buzzed like a hive of disturbed bees. Thoroughly in touch as she was
+with the reports from all departments, Ethel knew very well that the
+expected blow must fall.
+
+The usual dividend must be passed. The circumstances of the corporation
+would not allow anything else to be done. The last two quarterly
+reports showed a decline in profits, in production, and in value of
+plant, which fairly staggered most of the board members.
+
+“It stands to reason,” Grandon Fuller stated in his decided way, “that
+before he went away, Mr. Barton was covering up a good many things that
+he would better have given us notice of. We can excuse the enthusiasm
+and anxiety of the young, perhaps; he was very desirous of getting
+out of it all and putting on the army khaki. But now we have suffered
+enough--this corporation I mean--because of his mistakes. We must get
+back on a stable foundation. Somebody must get a firm grip upon the
+Hapwood-Diller Company.”
+
+“Suppose Brother Fuller tells us just wherein Frank Barton is to be
+blamed for our present situation?” suggested Macon Hammerly, with
+surprising gentleness for him. “We want facts, not allegations.”
+
+“You know very well how he bungled that Kimberly order.”
+
+“I have affidavits of a chemist and two handwriting experts here,”
+interposed Hammerly, shuffling the papers before him, “which state
+that two lines in the Kimberly Company’s schedule sheet were erased,
+and in the two interpolated lines an attempt made by somebody to copy
+the writing of the young woman who made the schedule. In other words
+a deliberate and successful attempt to change the substance of the
+Kimberly order was made after it passed out of Mr. Barton’s hands.”
+
+There was immediate uproar--denial by Fuller and angry talk by some
+of the other members of the board. Hammerly grimly displayed his
+affidavits and proved his case to the satisfaction of most of the board
+of directors.
+
+“The fact remains,” cried Grandon Fuller, “that our shares are selling
+in the open market as low as sixty. The news has got out that the
+business is tottering for want of a strong hand to manage it.”
+
+“We’ll take that up, too,” interposed Hammerly. “I have here a list of
+shares and whom they were bought from by a man named A. Schuster. These
+shares have been thrown on the market by various brokers at ridiculous
+prices. They were all bought up again by A. Schuster! And this same
+tricky legal light has been the representative of a certain member of
+this board in New York for the past three years.”
+
+This remarkable statement produced a profound sensation. For a brief
+instant there was intense silence as the members of the board looked at
+each other. Then--
+
+“What are you saying?”
+
+“That’s a grave accusation!”
+
+“Can you prove your words?”
+
+“It’s a crime to do what you’re hinting at, Hammerly.”
+
+“He can’t prove a thing!”
+
+“He don’t know what he’s talking about!”
+
+“Shut him up!”
+
+“He ought to be put out of the meeting!”
+
+“That’s the talk. He is going too far. This is a meeting of gentlemen.”
+
+Thus came the chorus of objections, not alone from Grandon Fuller. But
+Macon Hammerly’s scowl quelled the riot.
+
+“I know whereof I speak,” he said solemnly. “I have papers and
+witnesses to prove it. And I have reason to suppose, in addition, that
+Mr. Grandon Fuller has made some wash sales of his own shares of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company that in the first place bore down the price. Let
+him deny it if he dares!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE BURDEN
+
+
+The game of “freeze out” fathered by the heaviest stockholder in
+the Hapwood-Diller Company betrayed by Macon Hammerly’s confident
+statements was but an incident of that stormy meeting of the board. The
+latter was thoroughly reorganized before the end of the session. And
+that spelled utter defeat for Mr. Fuller’s plans.
+
+He held some of his friends on the board; but Hammerly was a shrewd
+politician. He voted more proxies than Fuller could assemble. The
+latter found himself ousted from the chairmanship; the grain merchant
+was voted into the vacant place by a satisfactory majority. The smoke
+of battle cleared away, leaving Grandon Fuller slumped down in his
+chair with a sour face and Jim Mayberry looking glum and at the same
+time half-frightened and half-dazed.
+
+“Send for Ethel Clayton,” ordered the new chairman. “We want
+stenographic notes of what goes on here. If any of our stockholders
+question what we do we must be able to spread before them an exact
+report of our actions. Under the old régime this was impossible. There
+was too much secret diplomacy here,” and he grinned.
+
+Ethel realized the tenseness of the situation when she came into the
+board room, book and pencil in hand. She was given a seat at Hammerly’s
+right hand.
+
+“Now,” said the grim looking grain dealer, “you have something to say,
+I presume, Jim?” and he looked at the superintendent.
+
+“I say what I said before, Mr. Hammerly,” grumbled Mayberry. “If I
+can’t have a free hand I can’t undertake to manage the concern, and
+that’s all there is to it.”
+
+“But you can continue as superintendent, I presume?” softly asked
+Hammerly. “That job isn’t too big for you, is it?”
+
+The younger man’s face flamed and he answered angrily: “I don’t know
+what you mean. Nobody ever complained of my work before.”
+
+“While Barton was on the job to overlook you--no,” admitted the old
+man, his sarcasm biting. “True. But things have been going badly in the
+various shops. That fire in Number Four the other day, for instance.”
+
+“By thunder!” exploded Mayberry, “you can’t blame me for that! I can’t
+be in a dozen places at once.”
+
+“There have been quite unnecessary breakdowns, and work has been
+retarded. How do you explain these things?” demanded Mr. Hammerly.
+
+“I--I----”
+
+“I don’t mean to say you are not a good man in your place, Jim,” said
+the grain merchant. “But Barton’s job is too big for you. I did not
+believe you could begin to fill his shoes at the start.”
+
+“Yet you agreed that Barton should go away?” questioned Grandon Fuller.
+
+“Yes. He wanted to go. For patriotic reasons I could not thwart his
+desire. And in addition I knew that if Jim here fell down--as he
+has--we would not be helpless.”
+
+“What do you mean by that?” asked Seville Baker, who owned a drug store
+and had several thousand dollars invested in the Hapwood-Diller Company
+stock.
+
+Jim Mayberry’s face was fiery again. Even Grandon Fuller sat up to
+stare at Hammerly. The others seemed as much amazed.
+
+The old grain dealer grinned for a moment rather sheepishly. Then a new
+expression came into his face, for he turned to look at the girl beside
+him. His gnarled right hand crept over her white and well shaped left.
+She glanced up from her book, startled.
+
+“I tell you what ’tis,” said Hammerly in his homely way; “if I was as
+blind as you other fellers are this board would be about as much good
+as an old women’s sewing bee! That’s what!
+
+“There’s been just one person that’s kept things going half smoothly
+in the Hapwood-Diller Company since Frank Barton cleared out to be a
+soldier. And that person had a good deal to do toward helping Frank
+when he was on the job.
+
+“Don’t you fellers know that Miss Clayton here was Frank’s right hand
+man? She knows all the ins and outs of things. It was her caught this
+poor fish, Jim Mayberry, selling us out to the Bogata Company. She’s
+been of much more importance lately, I can tell you. If we pull out of
+this hole we are in and pay a dividend again, it will be because of
+what she has done.”
+
+Grandon Fuller dragged himself to his feet. He had a power of
+repression scarcely second to Hammerly himself. But this was too much.
+
+“You old fool!” he shouted at the grain dealer. “You don’t mean to try
+to put a woman in charge of this business? It’s suicidal!”
+
+“I mean just that. I mean Miss Clayton’s able to fill the job, and Jim
+Mayberry ain’t. She’s a better man when it comes to business sense than
+any of us. I nominate her for the place of assistant manager, to hold
+the job till Frank Barton comes back to us--if the poor feller ever
+does come back.”
+
+“I won’t vote on such a fool proposition,” cried Fuller wrathfully,
+starting for the door.
+
+“Don’t bother to, Grandon,” drawled Hammerly. “You’d be beat if you
+did--and you know it. I’ve got more proxies than you have.”
+
+[Illustration: “I nominate her as assistant manager, to hold the job
+till Frank Barton comes back.”
+                                                    (_See page 227_)]
+
+The door of the board room banged. Ethel Clayton had turned to speak,
+but Hammerly was scowling at Jim Mayberry, who had risen as though
+to follow his fellow-conspirator. “Spit it out, Jim. Tell us what’s on
+your chest.”
+
+“I--I----You old fool!” exclaimed the superintendent, “do you think I
+am going to work here under a _girl_? To be set aside for her?”
+
+“No; I don’t guess you will,” responded Hammerly. “We’ll give you a
+chance to resign if that’s what you want. And I guess your resignation
+will be accepted pretty nigh unanimous.”
+
+“But Mr. Hammerly,” begged Seville Baker, feebly, “what will happen to
+the works? Mr. Mayberry has been superintendent so long----”
+
+“There’s a good foreman in every shop who has been on his job longer
+than Jim Mayberry has voted. They’ve only been hampered by Jim--that’s
+the truth of the matter.”
+
+“I will be through at the end of the month, gentlemen,” said Mayberry,
+recovering his dignity. “The high hand Mr. Hammerly takes in this
+matter----”
+
+“Shoo!” exclaimed the grain merchant with grim pleasantry. “You’ll get
+through right here and now. I for one wouldn’t trust you to go out into
+the shops again. You go to Sydney and draw your salary to the end of
+next month. You broke your contract when you accepted the assistant
+managership and extra salary. Your dear friend, Fuller, or his legal
+henchman, Schuster, didn’t point that out to you, did they? Sydney’s
+got the money all in an envelope for you. Scat!” and he waved both
+hands at the angry Mayberry.
+
+“Now,” the old man added, turning to his conferees, “maybe you fellows
+think I’ve taken a high hand in these proceedings; but to tell you
+honestly, we ought to have both Mayberry and Grandon Fuller arrested.
+Only it would have created a scandal that the Hapwood-Diller Company
+couldn’t afford at this time.”
+
+“We don’t want any scandal,” came from the corner of the room.
+
+“We’ve had enough trouble as it is,” came from the other side of the
+place.
+
+“Let us get right down to a working basis--and let it go at that.”
+
+“What we want to do is to pull up and make some money.”
+
+At this last remark, Macon Hammerly turned to the speaker and smiled
+grimly. Then he went on:
+
+“There ain’t no use in denying that we’re in a bad hole. We’ve run
+behind for two quarters, and our credit’s hurt by those stock sales.
+It’s going to be a heavy burden upon this girl’s shoulders--as it was
+upon Frank Barton’s--to pull us out. But she’ll do it! Won’t you,
+Ethel?” he demanded heartily.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Hammerly,” the girl murmured.
+
+“Louder! Tell them ‘Yes,’” cried the grain merchant.
+
+“I can only follow in Mr. Barton’s footsteps,” she stammered.
+
+“And good enough!” declared Mr. Baker.
+
+“If you can do half as well as Barton, Miss Clayton,” said another of
+the revivified board, “we shall have no complaint.”
+
+“We’ll be behind you, girl,” said Macon Hammerly. “Keep the wheels
+turning, speed up the output, and watch the outgoes as well as the
+incomes. That’s the secret of success in this business. And the Lord
+help you!” he added under his breath, but the excited girl herself did
+not hear his less jubilant tone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE FIGHT
+
+
+With a reunited board behind her and canny Macon Hammerly to advise
+with, it might seem at the rising of the curtain on Ethel Clayton’s
+régime as _de facto_ manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing
+Company that her course would be along pleasant paths.
+
+Instead she very soon found that she was walking over burning
+plowshares.
+
+That Grandon Fuller was beaten in his control of the board of directors
+did not make him amenable to the new policies of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company and the reign of a girl as manager of the business.
+
+He boldly stated that he considered the knell of the company had rung
+because of the situation in the offices. If a full-grown man like Jim
+Mayberry could not handle the business so as to make a profit, how
+could a girl be expected to do so?
+
+That Mr. Fuller’s intention was still to discourage the small
+stockholders so that he could buy up their holdings at a low price and
+finally control the corporation, could not be overlooked. Yet he was
+careful to do nothing now that would give Hammerly a legal hold on him.
+
+Mayberry was out of it, or so it seemed. He went to work for the
+Mailsburg Addition Real Estate Company, of which Mr. Fuller was known
+to be the backer. It was a good deal of a come-down for Jim Mayberry.
+
+On that wonderful day when Hammerly had carried his point and had given
+the welfare of the business into Ethel’s hands, the foremen of the
+shops had been called in before the board and the situation explained
+to them.
+
+They were not asked to express their opinion of Jim Mayberry’s
+oversight of the factory, nor to explain their own apparent
+shortcomings and the failure of their several shops to keep up to the
+standard of output established by Mr. Barton.
+
+Merely they were asked if they would be loyal to the corporation, and
+if they were willing to work in harmony with Ethel Clayton until such
+time as a general superintendent could be found to take Mayberry’s
+place. These questions brought enthusiastic and unanimous affirmative
+responses.
+
+But a willingness upon the part of all the hands was not all that was
+needed. When a manufacturing plant, either in its mechanical part or in
+its working force, has been allowed to deteriorate, it is uphill work
+to get it back on a firm foundation.
+
+Ethel felt that with the good teamwork of the office force which she
+could depend upon, her burden at that end would be light. In the
+factory administration lay her difficult problem.
+
+She depended on Benway Chase in no inconsiderable degree, as she knew
+he had gained a working knowledge of the factory affairs. Benway had
+continued to make himself acquainted with practical things and much
+shoplore. The foremen liked him, too, and would discuss things with the
+young fellow that they might have been chary of talking over with “the
+lady boss,” as they began to call her.
+
+There was not an ounce of business jealousy in Ethel Clayton’s makeup.
+She gave Benway all the encouragement possible, and after the first two
+weeks she reported to the board that she could not possibly carry on
+the work at all were it not for Benway, or somebody equally efficient
+and willing in his stead.
+
+Since the news of the air raid on the American camp in France, Benway
+had been even gentler and more considerate of Ethel than before; but
+there was, too, a certain aloofness in his manner which the girl quite
+understood.
+
+He had captured Ethel’s secret. His own love for her had given him an
+immediate key to her emotion when she first saw the headlines spread
+over the news sheet. Frank Barton’s peril had caused her to betray her
+feeling for him to the love-sharpened vision of Benway.
+
+Since that time no news save that he was still missing had come of
+Frank Barton. It was well Ethel’s mind was so filled with business
+matters and that her every waking hour was occupied by the affairs
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company. She had no opportunity of dwelling
+in thought upon that line in the casualty list that had not been
+explained: “_Lieut. F. Barton, Field Artillery, missing_.”
+
+When the clergyman prayed on Sunday for those who had gone “over there”
+to fight in their country’s cause, Ethel thought of but one person.
+It seemed to her as though the whole war--the fate of a worldwide
+democracy--was as nothing compared to the mystery of what had happened
+to Frank Barton.
+
+She was not alone in this desire to know the fate of the general
+manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company. Mrs. Trevor came more than once
+to discuss the mystery with her. She began to learn how many friends
+Frank Barton really had in Mailsburg. His cheerful, kindly spirit had
+won him a following of which any man might feel proud.
+
+Mr. Macon Hammerly had used his influence to make inquiry. But the War
+Department, like most large bodies, moves slowly. The questions from
+Lieutenant Barton’s friends were not the only fear-fraught queries that
+must be answered.
+
+Nobody in Mailsburg, it seemed, had heard from any of the town’s sons
+who had gone to France when Barton went. The boys drafted from the town
+were still in the training camps on this side of the water. As far as
+Ethel could learn no one had heard directly from Morrison Copley or
+Charles Bradley since that tragic happening.
+
+Ethel’s pillow was often wet at night because of Frank Barton’s fate;
+but by day the business difficulties that faced her held her mind in
+thrall. She began to appreciate more than ever before what Barton
+himself had gone through when he had first taken hold of the job of
+putting the Hapwood-Diller Company on a paying basis.
+
+And she had problems to solve that Barton had not been obliged to
+consider. In two years and a half circumstances had greatly changed.
+The labor situation was one of the hardest of Ethel’s enigmas.
+
+Besides the hundred or more men who had been drafted from the shops,
+and others who had enlisted, many of the best mechanics had gone away
+to work in munition plants where the wages were vastly higher than the
+Hapwood-Diller Company could afford to pay.
+
+This had brought into the shops a class of workmen who were not, to
+say the least, high grade. There was unrest among them, too. Having no
+feeling of loyalty for the corporation, these new workmen were really a
+menace to the peaceful conduct of the business.
+
+Little troubles rose almost daily, many of which could not be settled
+by the shop foremen. After all, the absence of a strong hand over the
+factory as a whole, began to be felt. And Ethel realized this lack
+quite as soon as anybody.
+
+With the old hands she would have had some personal influence. With the
+new workmen--many of them foreigners--she could do little.
+
+Jim Mayberry was a burly man, and not afraid to “bawl a man out” if
+occasion arose. If he threatened to knock a man down he looked as
+though he could do it. That may not be the most approved way of keeping
+a lot of unruly workmen in order; but it is often efficacious.
+
+Benway Chase could merely be Ethel’s errand boy. Benway felt his
+limitations keenly. “If I only had a good right arm!” he groaned more
+than once.
+
+“No use worrying about that, Bennie,” she said. “We must find some way
+to manage besides knocking their heads together. There are only a few
+who make trouble. Don’t you think we can get rid of them?”
+
+But labor was so scarce and the factory was so crowded with orders that
+she shrank from such a drastic course. She had an intuitive feeling,
+too, that the discharge of certain trouble-makers would bring other
+trouble-makers to the surface.
+
+More than once she was stopped in front of the office or on her way
+home by some worker grown bold by the changed condition of affairs.
+
+“What about more wages, Miss?” one burly man asked her, quite
+abruptly. “If wages don’t go up soon, I quit.”
+
+“Everything is so high, my wife says I’ve got to earn more,” was what
+a tall, thin workman told her right in front of her own home. And two
+days later both of these men demanded their time and left.
+
+“It sure is getting worse every day,” was the way Benway Chase put it.
+“I don’t see how it’s going to end.”
+
+“Maybe we’ll have to shut down,” Ethel answered.
+
+“Oh, you don’t mean that!”
+
+“No, I don’t. But there is no telling what will happen,” said the girl,
+soberly.
+
+She felt that poison was seeping into the working force from without.
+Nothing she could say or do would stop it. The foremen admitted that
+the tone of the shops had entirely changed. If they were able to get a
+fair day’s work turned out they were doing well. And many of the men
+did their stint grudgingly.
+
+The wages of all the hands had been advanced twice since Frank Barton
+had first taken hold of the corporation. Had business remained good and
+profits increased, it had been his intention, Ethel knew, to ask the
+board of directors for another advance at the end of the third year.
+
+But with affairs in the mess they were--a quarterly dividend passed and
+the output decreased--there would be no hope of following out this
+intention of the absent general manager.
+
+Many factories in neighboring towns had turned to war work of one kind
+or another. But the machinery of the Hapwood-Diller Company, built for
+special need, could not be used on any war work that Ethel had ever yet
+heard of.
+
+The factory of the defunct Bogata Company was being used for munition
+work. People from Mailsburg were flocking to Norville, attracted by the
+high wages. One by one the Hapwood-Diller Company’s best workmen left
+and went to work at the Norville plant.
+
+Ethel’s report to the board was sure to be a report of failure. She
+realized that she did not measure up to the demands of her position. To
+claim she was helpless would not absolve her from the fact she was a
+failure. That could not be cloaked.
+
+This was her job. She had accepted it. If she could not make good she
+should give it up. She began to feel that Ethel Clayton might be a good
+enough hack; but she lacked the ability necessary to carry her to the
+front in the business race. She was away back in the ruck.
+
+These were her feelings and meditations one evening when, after the
+others had gone, she still remained in the office, as she often did.
+
+Her work for the day was done. Hours of consideration, it seemed, would
+not aid her in making the figures on the credit side of the ledger add
+up to a larger sum than the figures on the debit side.
+
+She stood with her back to her desk, hands gripping its edge, her eyes
+emptily staring at the wall. Her mental vision was alert, not her
+physical.
+
+If Frank Barton could only return! If he would only walk in at that
+door--just to advise with her, to hearten her, to suggest to her
+agitated mind some scheme by which she might put life into this
+business.
+
+Would she ever see him again now that he had marched away? Her mind
+pictured the marching past of that host of high-hearted men and boys,
+bound for a foreign shore from which many necessarily would never
+return. And it seemed Frank Barton was one of the very first to be lost
+to the knowledge of his friends--lost to those who loved him!
+
+The outer door banged open heavily. She knew John Murphy had not yet
+gone home, and she looked up expecting to see his grizzled visage.
+
+Instead it was the sharp and eager features of Mabel Skinner. The
+younger girl came in like a whirlwind.
+
+“Oh, Ethel! Miss Clayton!” she gasped. “Guess!”
+
+“Guess what?”
+
+“Guess what I just heard down at Rhyncamp’s store! That Marble girl was
+there! You know--the Marbles who live right next to the Fuller house.”
+
+“I know. What of it?” asked Ethel, excited, though she did not know why
+she should be.
+
+“She’s chums with that Fuller girl. You know--Grandon Fuller’s daughter
+Helen. She went to France to join the Red Cross.”
+
+Ethel’s clasped hands showed her interest. She could not speak. Her
+eyes searched the vivid face of Little Skinner pleadingly.
+
+“The Marble girl’s just got a letter from Helen Fuller. I heard her
+tell Mr. Rhyncamp. Miss Fuller is nursing in a hospital over there
+somewhere. She says her very first patient was Mr. Barton. He ain’t
+dead, then, Miss Clayton! He ain’t dead! He’s only wounded! Oh, Miss
+Clayton!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+COMPARISONS
+
+
+Mabel Skinner’s news was true. The letter Miss Marble had received told
+the story from Helen Fuller’s standpoint. But let the heroics in it be
+the nine days’ wonder of Mailsburg. Here are the facts:
+
+Frank Barton came to his senses slowly and found himself upon a cot,
+one of a long line, in a ward of the base hospital at Lovin, as the
+place may be called, without the first idea of how he got there. His
+last memory was of facing the crew of the German air-raider with Helen
+Fuller clinging to his arm and making it impossible to defend her or
+himself or to deal effectively with the enemy before them.
+
+“Where--where am I?” he stammered. “What happened?”
+
+“Oh, Frank!” squealed a voice, and some one in correct nurse’s garb
+stood beside him. “You’re not going to die, are you? Isn’t that just
+_dear_!”
+
+“Oh, heavens!” groaned Lieutenant Barton, in something like despair.
+“_You_ here?”
+
+Were Frank Barton’s eyes at last seeing truly? It was, perhaps, the
+most impolite speech he had ever made. But he was very weak and still a
+little lightheaded.
+
+Had the quiet-faced French matron of the ward understood much English,
+she surely would have removed Miss Fuller from attendance on the
+lieutenant almost at once. As it was he had to listen to the girl’s
+fulsome praises and silly ejaculations.
+
+It was not until some time later that Barton learned just what had
+happened after he had been hit with the sharp stone and had handed his
+weapon to the distracted Helen.
+
+“Why, that Heinie used to pitch in one of the bush leagues,” Morrison
+Copley told Barton, when he came to see his lieutenant. “Lived ten
+years in America and then went back to fight for Kultur. Something’s
+going to happen to him, for the lieutenant in command of the airship
+declares all bets off. He had warned his men not to fight.”
+
+“I wonder what they had in their mind when they started for me. Going
+to kiss me, I suppose,” Barton suggested weakly.
+
+“Bah jove! that’s a good one,” said Morry. “I must tell that to Brad.
+Say, that lad got ‘mention’ in general orders for capturing the gang.
+But he walks right up to the colonel, and says: ‘Colonel, it wasn’t
+much to capture fourteen men that were not armed. How about Lieutenant
+Barton who tackled them single handed and perhaps helped bring the old
+Zep down anyway?’”
+
+“That’s all right,” commented Barton. “Good of Bradley. But, really, I
+did no more than another man would have done. Those poor people in the
+car that were blown to bits----”
+
+“And it was a car that followed on behind that one that picked you and
+Mam’zelle Hélène up,” grinned Morry, “and brought you cross country to
+Lovin. That’s how you were lost trace of. Guess the folks at home must
+think you evaporated into thin air, Lieutenant. But they’ll know the
+truth very soon now. I’ve written home about you.”
+
+But that was not entirely satisfactory to Frank Barton. He wanted to
+write himself. He had a strong and particular reason for writing, and
+to a particular girl.
+
+Aside from the wound in his head--a wound which would always leave a
+scar--his right arm was strapped tightly to his side. He had a fracture
+of the shoulder that made a cast necessary and would entail a long
+convalescence. Frank Barton’s active military career was halted before
+it was much more than begun.
+
+The delayed report of his wounds did not officially reach Mailsburg
+until after both Helen’s letter to Miss Marble and Morrison Copley’s
+“open letter” to the Mailsburg _Clarion_ were received. Barton was the
+first of the town’s boys reported under fire and the first to suffer
+injury in the war.
+
+A delayed letter from Ethel had reached Barton soon after he found
+himself established in the hospital ward with Helen Fuller hovering
+about him a good part of every day.
+
+“Business, I suppose, Frank?” she observed when she saw the name and
+address on the back of the envelope. “_Can’t_ those factory people let
+you alone, you poor dear boy, even when you are _wounded_ so?”
+
+Barton felt like speaking impolitely again. But he had command of
+himself now. Nevertheless Helen continued to rasp his nerves on more
+than one subject. Had he been blessed with another nurse he would
+have dictated an answer to Ethel’s letter. There was a tone to it--a
+wistfulness which the girl had been unable to hide--that deeply moved
+the wounded lieutenant.
+
+The missive was written before Ethel had been made assistant manager of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company; yet even then she felt the burden of her
+position and would have been glad of any bit of kindly advice he might
+have sent her. But for three weeks, at least, he must remain silent. He
+had never learned to write with his left hand like Benway Chase.
+
+He proved to be a patient _blessé_, and both the physicians and
+nurses praised him. That he had come to a French hospital was rather
+unfortunate, for Barton’s knowledge of French was slight. He had to
+make most of his desires known through Helen and therefore was at a
+disadvantage.
+
+She frankly encouraged the appearance of a closer association between
+them than was the case. A few months before Frank Barton would have
+been delighted at such intimacy with Helen Fuller. But he was quite
+aware now of her shortcomings.
+
+Even her association with the Red Cross was a play. It was a part of
+her unquenchable desire to show off all the time. Had Barton been
+really left to her small mercies he realized that it would have gone
+hard with him. She kept her interest in him as a patient only because
+of the romance of their adventure together at the time of the air raid.
+
+He could not forget how small and light a part she had played at that
+time. He hoped that no other American girl in France would prove
+herself so great a coward as Helen Fuller had on that momentous
+occasion.
+
+He began to feel a distaste for her glowing beauty--a beauty of
+coloring and feature and texture of skin and hair only, without
+character or intelligence looking out of the eyes or showing in the
+face.
+
+In the warmth of the first few days of their sojourn at the hospital
+even so modest a man as Frank Barton saw plainly that he was being
+given the opportunity to declare himself. Helen was waiting for him to
+respond to her advances.
+
+When he did not respond she began finally to be piqued, then angry. She
+had herself transferred to another ward. Her absence did not increase
+Barton’s temperature, the chart at the head of his cot remained normal.
+
+This rift between them was noted and remarked on by some of the other
+nurses. At last Helen took offence, had her mother telegraph her from
+Paris, and obtained a furlough and departed from Lovin without bidding
+Frank good-bye.
+
+He did not miss her, save in a relieved way. He had compared her with
+another girl--another of whom he had never thought before as other than
+a business associate--and found that Helen Fuller was dwarfed in the
+comparison.
+
+Thinking of Ethel as he lay in his hospital cot, he was amazed to
+discover how much that was really worth while he knew about her.
+Important things, too--individualities and phases of character that now
+revealed Ethel Clayton as a girl eminently worthy of consideration.
+
+The girl he had left behind was all that Helen Fuller proved not to
+be. He was confident that Ethel would not have shown the white feather
+as Helen had at the time of the German air raid. No girl who had so
+courageously taken up the additional burden of responsibility in the
+Hapwood-Diller Company offices could be a coward in any particular.
+
+The vision of Ethel Clayton grew in his mind. His thoughts centered
+about her. He began to wonder what her attitude would be toward him if
+he should go back home and see her again.
+
+It was not interest in the Hapwood-Diller Company that was drawing
+his heart to Mailsburg during these days. He did not give a fig for
+business. His heartstrings were attuned to a much tenderer emotion. He
+was gradually beginning to see things in their proper light.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+OPENING THE WAY
+
+
+Ethel heard of Barton in several ways during the next few weeks, but
+never by personal letter. She understood the reason for that, however,
+for Morrison Copley had quite freely explained the lieutenant’s wounds
+and his helpless condition in the _Clarion_.
+
+“Thank the good Lord ’tain’t his legs nor his eyes,” Mrs. Trevor said.
+“When a man can’t see to read and he can’t get about on his own pins he
+ain’t no use to himself, nor to nobody else.”
+
+Ethel did not fail to write to the wounded man, and that frequently.
+When these letters should reach Barton he would learn the particulars
+of the important changes in the Hapwood-Diller offices, and something,
+too, of Ethel’s troubles and perplexities.
+
+But she had no idea that it was something entirely different from
+office news that the hungry-hearted absentee wished for.
+
+The explanation of the mystery touching Frank Barton’s wounds and his
+confinement in the hospital relieved Ethel’s anxiety to a certain
+degree. But there was one thing that seriously pricked her thought at
+all times. Helen Fuller was with the wounded man!
+
+Miss Marble had made Helen’s letter broadly public. Other people in
+Mailsburg noted the fact that Helen’s first patient was the general
+manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company. It is the easiest thing in the
+world for gossip to put such a two and two together and make four.
+
+It was remarked that before Barton had gone to the officers’ training
+camp at Quehasset he had been seen much with Helen Fuller. His interest
+in her had been noted.
+
+Now the gossips declared their association on the other side could
+lead to but one conclusion. Somebody offered a bet in Ethel’s hearing,
+two to one, that there would be a wedding at the American Embassy in
+Paris just as soon as Lieutenant Barton was allowed to leave the base
+hospital at Lovin.
+
+However, relieved by her knowledge of Barton’s safety, Ethel Clayton
+tried to give all her attention to the task she had accepted when she
+was practically hoisted into Barton’s place.
+
+Hammerly and a few of the other directors cheered her; Grandon Fuller
+sneered and continued to acclaim openly that a girl at the head of the
+business spelled ruin for the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+
+“Don’t mind that grouch, Ethel,” Macon Hammerly said. “We’ve put a ring
+in his nose, and like any other hog he squeals over the operation. But
+such squealing never yet did any hurt.”
+
+“It gets on one’s nerves most awfully, just the same, Mr. Hammerly,”
+the girl said with a sigh.
+
+She had not, however, come to the old man with any empty complaint. The
+labor situation at the factory was in a critical condition. The spoiled
+work being turned back by the inspectors and foremen had increased
+twenty per cent. Still the malcontents complained of low wages.
+
+“To protect the corporation and to answer the low wage complaint,”
+Ethel told Hammerly, “I have certain drastic changes to suggest. I
+admit they are diametrically opposed to the system inaugurated by Mr.
+Barton; but Mr. Barton did not have the same difficulties to deal with
+that we have now.”
+
+“Ain’t it so?” agreed the old man. “In those times, Grandon Fuller was
+trying to rope Frank, just as he afterward noosed Mayberry. Go on,
+Ethel. You’ve got good sense, I know.”
+
+“Thank you. At least, I have the interests of the corporation at heart.
+If I fail as manager I lose more than your good opinion, Mr. Hammerly.”
+
+“By Henry! you ain’t goin’ to fail, girl,” cried the man.
+
+“But I am desperate. Desperate enough to change the entire system of
+the factory if the board of directors will back me. Look at this, Mr.
+Hammerly.”
+
+She displayed her carefully drawn up plans. The important change
+was the shifting from a flat payment of labor at so much per hour,
+graduated according to the skill of the workmen, to a piecework scale
+of wages which she had scheduled with the assistance of Benway Chase.
+
+“I believe it will answer the complaint of low pay. Our best men will
+be encouraged to remain with us instead of going to the munition
+factories. The dissatisfied workmen will be those less skilled and we
+can the more easily replace them if they leave,” Ethel explained.
+
+Macon Hammerly’s approval was instant, and with his backing Ethel’s
+scheme was sure to be agreed to by the board. But to put it into force
+without opposition was more than could be expected.
+
+The better class of workmen in the factory when consulted quietly
+before the posting of the notices, were eager to give the plan a trial.
+Many of them owned their own homes in Mailsburg and had hesitated
+to leave their employment at the Hapwood-Diller factory despite
+the temptation of higher wages elsewhere. The chance to increase
+voluntarily their incomes by speeding up found favor.
+
+There were incendiary fellows, however, ready instantly to decry the
+change. They could see no good in it. It was a trick on the part of the
+corporation to underpay the bulk of the laboring force employed in the
+factory.
+
+This cauldron of trouble continued to bubble and steam up to the
+very Saturday before the installation of the new system of payment.
+At closing time that afternoon it was already dark; but many of the
+workmen left the factory gate only to remain in the side street where
+they milled like cattle on the verge of a stampede. They talked in
+noisy groups. There was something on foot and whether or not they knew
+just what it was to be, both the satisfied workmen and the dissatisfied
+remained.
+
+An automobile with two sputtering gasoline torches in it appeared at
+last and drove slowly through the noisy crowd to the corner, where it
+stopped in view of both the door of the factory offices and of the
+workmen’s entrance gate. A burly figure in a greatcoat and goggles was
+behind the steering wheel of the car. In the tonneau was a little,
+black-haired, foreign looking man who stood on the seat to speak to the
+crowd that at once surged near.
+
+“That is Mr. Schuster!” Ethel Clayton ejaculated, looking from the
+office window that best overlooked the corner. She had remained after
+the bulk of the office force had gone; but Mabel Skinner was with her.
+
+“I don’t know who that one may be,” said the younger girl, “but it’s
+Jim Mayberry’s car and that’s Jim himself all camouflaged up with
+goggles and a long coat. Let’s go down there, Miss Clayton, and listen
+to what that crazy man’s saying. He waves his arms around like they
+was unhinged--just the same as his brain is.”
+
+The girls were about to leave the offices in John’s care when the
+street-corner forum convened. Ethel was worried.
+
+“Is the side gate locked, John?” she asked the porter.
+
+“I don’t s’pose it is yet, ma’am,” he replied.
+
+“Go out and bar it and warn the night watchmen to be on their guard.
+Nobody must be allowed to enter the gate to-night--not even a foreman
+if one should return. And be sure the main door is locked after us.”
+
+“Yes, ma’am,” grinned John. “And will you call out the military?”
+
+Ethel feared, however, that it might be no laughing matter. Mabel
+Skinner was eager to go to the corner and hear what the man had to say;
+Ethel accompanied her, fearing the sharp tongue of the younger girl
+would get her into trouble in the rough crowd.
+
+Schuster was Mr. Grandon Fuller’s personal representative, Ethel was
+sure. And Jim Mayberry’s presence made certain the identity of the
+influence which was seeking to stir up trouble for the Hapwood-Diller
+Company and its girl manager.
+
+Jim Mayberry caught sight of Ethel almost as soon as the two girls
+reached the corner. He turned and called Schuster’s attention to Ethel.
+The fox-featured little lawyer instantly seized the opportunity for
+making a point in his speech.
+
+“Here you are, men! You fellows under petticoat government! Here’s your
+lady boss come out to laugh at you. You big, brawny, husky fellows
+ought to be proud of yourselves--bossed by a girl! Tied to her apron
+strings!”
+
+He added something more vulgar that drew a laugh from a certain portion
+of the throng. Jim Mayberry turned and pushed up his dust goggles,
+leering into Ethel’s white and disgusted face. Mabel Skinner quite lost
+her self-control.
+
+“You’re in nice work now, ain’t you, Jim Mayberry?” she scoffed at the
+former superintendent of the factory. Then she screamed at the crowding
+men: “You big galoots! You goin’ to let that little fice up there
+insult a lady like Miss Clayton? And don’t you see who’s egging him
+on--and egging _you_ on to riot and trouble? He’s asking you to pull
+his chestnuts out of the fire. It’s Jim Mayberry--Mayberry, the man
+that’s sore because the board kicked him out as superintendent and put
+Miss Clayton into his place. Aw, say! You all know Jim Mayberry!”
+
+This raised a laugh which drowned out the lawyer’s vitriolic words.
+Mayberry reached for Little Skinner, his face inflamed and ugly.
+
+“You brat!” he growled. “I’ll teach you----”
+
+He did not finish the remark. As his clutching hand descended upon
+the girl’s shoulder a figure jumped upon the running board of the
+automobile on the other side.
+
+“Beating up a girl would be about your size, Jim Mayberry!” exclaimed
+Benway Chase, and with all the force of his good left arm he struck the
+former superintendent of the factory in the face.
+
+Mayberry uttered an oath and swung around. Benway met him with a second
+blow--this time landing on the nose. In a moment the victim’s face was
+covered with blood.
+
+“Go it, Bennie! Hit him again!” shrieked Mabel, jumping up and down in
+her excitement.
+
+Ethel was horrified; but Little Skinner became the primitive woman
+cheering on her particular hero.
+
+Mayberry got up from behind the steering wheel and cast himself blindly
+upon the striking Benway. The latter gave ground, leaping back off the
+car. Mayberry plunged after him. In a moment they had clinched and were
+down in the street, striking at each other, Benway silent but Mayberry
+swearing and threatening.
+
+It was at this moment that Macon Hammerly appeared with a policeman.
+The latter refused to observe the incipient riot around the two men on
+the ground, but stepped up and tapped Schuster on the arm.
+
+“Hey, you!” he said to the little lawyer, “where’s your permit?”
+
+“‘Permit?’”
+
+“Permit to speak on the street ’cordin’ to the city ord’nance made an’
+pervided. Ain’t got none?” went on the officer. “Come along with me,
+then,” and he jerked Schuster off the automobile seat as though he were
+a child and started at once down town with him.
+
+“I reckon,” Hammerly said to Ethel with a grin, “that Grandon forgot
+that small point. There almost always is some vital point, Ethel, that
+a villain overlooks.
+
+“Now, you come on with me, girl. There’s something I want you to be in
+on. I was coming up after you when I saw this gang here and sicked the
+policeman on to that little Schuster. Come on.”
+
+The whirl of events had quite taken Ethel’s mind off of Benway Chase
+and his fight with Mayberry. But Mabel Skinner had darted around the
+car, vitally determined to lend her hero aid if he needed it.
+
+Benway needed no help. Had it been so, there seemed to be quite a
+number in the crowd disposed to be his friends.
+
+“Let the young boss alone,” one said. “It ain’t beef that counts. The
+young boss has got the spirit to lick his weight in wildcats.”
+
+“Oh, Bennie! Oh, Bennie!” burst forth Mabel Skinner. “Don’t you let
+that big loafer hurt you!”
+
+“I won’t,” promised Benway, rising quite self-possessed and scarcely
+marred by the scrimmage. “He doesn’t want to fight.”
+
+This seemed quite true. At least, Jim Mayberry had very quickly got
+enough. He stood up painfully, climbed into his car awkwardly, and
+drove away, amid the jeers of the onlookers, without even an additional
+threat.
+
+The bubble of his reputation as a fighter was pricked. Some of
+the older workmen lingering near mentioned the fact that the
+ex-superintendent of the factory had been but a bag of wind after all.
+“The young boss,” as they had come to call Benway Chase, had “licked
+him with one hand.”
+
+The latter slipped out of the crowd as quickly as possible. Mabel
+Skinner was clinging to his good arm and it was not until they were
+a full dark block away from the scene of the disturbance that he
+discovered the girl was crying.
+
+“What’s the matter with you?” demanded Benway, utterly aghast at the
+idea of self-possessed Little Skinner giving way to tears. “Are you
+hurt?”
+
+“No--no, sir, Mr. Chase. I ain’t hurt.”
+
+“Then why are you crying?” he demanded, snuggling the girl closer to
+his side.
+
+“I--I was afraid you might be,” she confessed.
+
+“But, I’m not! That big chump never hurt me a mite!”
+
+“Then I--I guess I’m crying for joy,” sobbed Mabel. “If he’d hurt you,
+Mr. Chase, I guess I’d have _died_!”
+
+“Huh! Why the ‘Mr. Chase?’ Wasn’t I ‘Bennie’ a while back when you were
+rooting for me? Why, Mabel, I couldn’t have lost out with you yelling
+your head off that way on the side lines!”
+
+“Oh, Bennie!” she gasped.
+
+It was a very dark corner. When they strolled out into the next circle
+of lamp light, Benway’s arm was around the girl’s shoulders and she was
+looking up into his face with such an ecstatic expression on her own
+that had Boots Skinner seen it he certainly would have been held fast
+in his tracks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+COMPENSATION
+
+
+Macon Hammerly offered no explanation at all as he led Ethel in the
+direction of High Street, quite in the opposite way from her usual walk
+at this hour of the evening. But he was pleasantly chatty just the same.
+
+In spite of his gruffness and homely speech, if he liked the grain
+dealer could show a less prickly side to his character, and he always
+showed that glossed side to Ethel Clayton.
+
+“Don’t you make no mistake, girl,” he now observed. “Your plan is going
+to have a fair trial, and we’ll have no such riot scene staged again as
+that to-night. Maybe I ain’t got all the political influence Grandon
+Fuller blows about; but I’ve got him about sewed up in a bag and he
+ain’t going to trouble you--he nor his hirelings--much more.
+
+“He was trying to pull the wool over Barton’s eyes when Barton went
+away, I believe. I trusted to Frank’s natural horse sense to keep him
+out of any scrape with Grandon. But they do say he’s gone and fallen
+for that flibbertigibbet daughter of the Fullers. I expect those nurses
+have a great advantage over a man. Like enough every one of ’em’ll be
+married to some poor sinner before this war’s over,” and he grinned.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Hammerly!” Ethel gasped. “Maybe I’d better go as a nurse,” she
+added, smiling.
+
+“_You?_ Shucks! There ain’t no need for you to fish. The fellers will
+all be after you. I’m going to live ten years longer and dandle two or
+three of your babies on my knee. Come on! Here’s where we turn in.”
+
+He led her into the law office of Alfred Gainor. The attorney had a
+visitor who rose hastily to go when Hammerly, with Ethel behind him,
+entered the private office.
+
+“No, don’t run away, Grandon,” said the grain merchant in his very
+harshest tone. “I told Gainor to get you here for just this purpose.”
+
+“What do you mean, Hammerly?” growled the other. “I have nothing to say
+to you at present.”
+
+“No, I don’t expect you have. But I’ve got something to say to you, and
+you’d best listen.”
+
+“If you’ve come to me to plead for my favor on this girl’s behalf----”
+
+“Nothing of the kind! Nothing of the kind!” reiterated Hammerly. “There
+won’t be no pleading on our side, I assure you, Grandon. And Ethel’s
+here because she’s got a vital interest in what’s going to be done.”
+
+“I don’t understand you.”
+
+“You will,” observed Hammerly grimly.
+
+“What do you expect to interest me in, man?” demanded Grandon Fuller
+with a less ruffled demeanor.
+
+“I’m going to interest you in two or three things, Grandon,” said
+the old man composedly, while the lawyer looked on as though he
+quite understood. “I’m going to interest you first of all in the
+specification sheet of the Kimberly Binding Company order. And then I’m
+going to link that up with a much more important paper that you ain’t
+seen for ten years, but that’s been on file here all that time since it
+was probated and recorded. I mean Israel Diller’s will.”
+
+At this statement Grandon Fuller leaped to his feet and advanced upon
+the old grain merchant with inflamed countenance.
+
+“What do you mean, you hoary-headed old scoundrel?” he shouted. “Do you
+mean to tell me----”
+
+He halted, licked his thick lips, and his flabby pomposity began to
+shrink. Hammerly nodded.
+
+“That’s it. Give a calf rope enough and it’ll hang itself. I could sit
+here and bandy words with you long enough to make you give yourself
+clean away. For you ain’t a very brainy villain. Otherwise you wouldn’t
+have used a trick the second time that served you once--and that you
+had got away with, it seemed, without raising suspicion.”
+
+“I don’t understand you,” snarled Fuller. “What are you talking about
+anyway?”
+
+“I’m talking about forgery, Grandon--forgery and substitution. The
+chemists and handwriting experts are not alone able to swear to changes
+made on that Kimberly schedule; they will swear to changes made in the
+same way--and by the same hand--in Israel Diller’s will!
+
+“Sit down, Grandon! Don’t fall down,” advised Hammerly. “Mr. Mestinger,
+who drew Israel’s will, being dead, you substitute your wife’s name for
+that of Lorreta Clayton’s all through that instrument and made Niece
+Mehitable instead of Niece Lorreta, the principal legatee under the
+will.
+
+“I always had suspicions, but no proof. Not till Ethel, here, showed me
+that Kimberly company schedule and pointed out what that boy, Benway
+Chase, first saw in it.
+
+“You’re caught, Grandon! You’re caught just as hard and fast as I
+caught Boots Skinner the other night setting hooks in the creek
+against the law. I’m going to let Boots go this time, for he ain’t
+an all around bad boy. Boots’ testimony is all I needed to link up
+your principal henchman with your blackguarding of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company. Jim Mayberry’s a proved scoundrel as far back as that Bogata
+Company matter, and I’m going to run him out of town.
+
+“What I do with you, Grandon, depends entirely on how much restitution
+you are willing to make to the Widow Clayton and her daughter here.
+If we go to law about this it will cost a lot of money--and a lot of
+scandal. You’ve made a heap of money one way and another since you got
+those shares of the Hapwood-Diller Company that was meant for Mrs.
+Clayton. I’ll give you a chance.
+
+“You’ll give those shares your wife got from the Israel Diller estate
+to Mrs. Clayton, with dividends and accrued interest to date. You’ll
+sell all your other holdings of the corporation’s shares to me, _and at
+the low price which you’ve hammered them down to_!”
+
+“W--What! Never!” groaned Grandon Fuller.
+
+“That will automatically put you out of the Hapwood-Diller Company’s
+affairs,” went on Macon Hammerly, not heeding the interruption. “And
+I guess that will help some; eh, Ethel?” he continued, turning to the
+much interested girl.
+
+“Oh, is it true? Did he tamper with that will?” cried the girl.
+
+“He did.”
+
+“It’s false! I never----”
+
+“Don’t try to deny it, Grandon. It’s true.” The old grain merchant
+strode forward and towered sternly over the other man. “Come, what is
+it to be, a peaceful settlement or war?”
+
+“Gi--give me time to--to think.”
+
+“Time to play another trick, you mean. No, you’ve got to decide now, at
+once, right here.”
+
+“You--you are hard. I can explain----”
+
+“No explanation is necessary. I’ve got you just where I want you. Will
+you settle or not?”
+
+Grandon Fuller arose to his feet. He was panting hard.
+
+“I won’t do it!” he began and then he shrank back before the steady
+gaze of Hammerly and Ethel. “I--I--” He suddenly dropped into his
+seat, his face a stricken gray. “Well, have your own way,” he mumbled.
+“You’ve got me cornered.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+HIS AWAKENING
+
+
+One evening, some weeks later, Ethel found herself alone in the office.
+It was after working hours and the others had gone home. She had still
+to work late at times; but her plan of wage payment was already proving
+successful.
+
+There was a new spirit in the shops. Some of the old help were coming
+back for safety, and the possibility of an increased income with the
+Hapwood-Diller Company looked better to the married men, at least, than
+a bulky pay envelope and the danger of sudden death.
+
+In fact, for several weeks, since Grandon Fuller had been eliminated
+from the affairs of the corporation, Ethel had been able to prove her
+worth to the board of directors. The business was running smoothly. The
+girl had proved that sex was not an insuperable barrier in the conduct
+of such a complicated business as this of which she had charge.
+
+With the help of Benway Chase, who had been advanced to a minor
+governing position in the factory, Ethel was making good. She thought
+of this cheerfully on this evening as she turned to snap out the
+electric light above her desk, the last thing before going out.
+
+Her hand was stayed by the quiet opening of the office door. In the
+half-shadow of the entrance stood a tall figure, the face of which she
+could not see. Nor did she see but one hand when the visitor advanced
+into the room and closed the door. Was it a man with only one arm?
+
+Then she saw that the right arm was bandaged to his side by a black
+silk scarf. He was in uniform.
+
+“Mr. Barton!”
+
+“Ethel!”
+
+She was half way to him on flying feet when she realized what he had
+called her and how he had spoken. She halted.
+
+“Mr. Barton! How you startled me! How glad I am to see you!” she
+declared. “When did you arrive?”
+
+“Just now. You are the first person I have seen to speak to in
+Mailsburg,” he said, and strode forward to greet her.
+
+“Your poor arm!” she murmured when she took his offered left hand. Then
+she looked up and saw the grim scar on his brow. It gave an entirely
+different expression to his countenance. Indeed he seemed to be an
+entirely different man from the Frank Barton of old. He clung to her
+hand.
+
+“You--are you back for good? We have needed you so! Now I can give the
+Hapwood-Diller Company back into your hands,” she said.
+
+“I am afraid not yet,” Frank Barton replied gently. “I have only a
+short furlough--till my shoulder completely heals. I came across hoping
+to be of some small help in recruiting or in Red Cross work while I am
+debarred from more active service.”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Barton! you will not really go back again?” she cried, looking
+down at her hand still crushed within his own.
+
+“Unless the war ends very soon,” he laughed. “I know that you have
+been more than successful in my job. Mr. Hammerly wrote me all about
+Jim Mayberry and Grandon Fuller. I would not have believed it of Jim.
+You have had a hard fight here, Ethel; but you have overcome, you have
+succeeded.”
+
+She did not seek to draw away her hand, but still looked down, refusing
+to meet his gaze.
+
+“How did you leave the other Mailsburg boys? Mr. Copley, for instance?”
+
+“Fine!” he declared heartily.
+
+“And Miss Fuller?”
+
+“She and her mother returned on the _Lorraine_ with me. They were
+called home, it seems, by Mr. Fuller’s business troubles. They have
+lost money, they tell me, and will have to give up their big house on
+the Hill.”
+
+“But that makes no difference to _you_, of course, Mr. Barton?”
+
+“Not the least,” he returned composedly. “I am afraid I shall never
+become a favorite of Miss Fuller’s. I could not stand petting while I
+was in the hospital at Lovin, and it rather piqued my nurse.”
+
+Ethel looked up at him quickly. There was that in his eyes she had
+never seen before. It held her gaze captive.
+
+His single good hand released her hand. But gently he drew her toward
+him, his hand behind her shoulder. Her form yielded hesitatingly to his
+urging.
+
+“I cannot claim that patriotism brought me back for these few weeks
+that I may remain, Ethel,” he went on in a voice that suddenly became
+strangely husky. “I wanted to see you--face to face.”
+
+There was an awkward pause. She felt his hand on her shoulder tremble.
+
+“I can’t understand why it is that I never saw you in just the same
+light that I have since I’ve been away. But you have been in my
+thoughts continually--the girl I left behind!”
+
+“Oh, of course--the business--” she began flutteringly.
+
+“No, it wasn’t the business, Ethel. It was you!” he cried.
+
+“Me?” Her breast began to heave and her face glowed. He bent low that
+he might catch her eyes.
+
+[Illustration: “You have been in my thoughts continually--the girl I
+left behind.”
+                                                   (_See page 268_)]
+
+“Yes, you! I guess I was asleep, but I’m awake now. We were so close
+day after day--and I was so wrapped up in business--that I didn’t
+realize how much you really meant to me.”
+
+“Oh!” It was the faintest kind of an exclamation. She wanted to speak,
+but for once the “perfectly capable person” could not say a word. Her
+heart was pounding.
+
+“But it came to me all of a sudden, while I was in the hospital and
+while that very fluttery Helen Fuller was trying to wait on me. Then I
+realized what a big difference there was in girls--and I realized that
+you were the only girl in the world for me--the only one!”
+
+Again there was a silence. But now she raised her eyes to meet his and
+they were full of glorious tenderness. He clutched her close to him
+with his one good arm.
+
+“I love you--oh, how I love you!” he murmured. “How I love you!”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Bar----”
+
+“Ethel!”
+
+“Frank, then.”
+
+She spoke his name with such sweetness that it almost overpowered him.
+It was as if she had suddenly lifted the veil and was letting him look
+into her very soul. He still held her close. Now he suddenly kissed
+her, once, twice and again.
+
+“Thank God!” he said reverently. “Thank God!”
+
+In her soul she also thanked God for His goodness in bringing this
+man to her. But she could not speak. She could only cling tightly to
+him--and for a long while he felt her heart beating close to his own.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Trevor sat in a front seat in her shabby little hat and Paisley
+shawl and frankly cried outright during the ceremony.
+
+“But they’ll make a grand couple,” she sobbed. “A grand couple--both of
+’em so smart!”
+
+Macon Hammerly occupied a seat further back. He sat with an expression
+of grim pride on his face, as though he considered himself in some way
+the father of this little romance.
+
+“My young folks--both of ’em,” he whispered to a neighbor. “Sweetest
+gal in the world, barrin’ none--an’ a fine fellow, too, believe me!”
+
+Mrs. Clayton was there, of course, dressed in the best she had ever
+possessed. She felt like weeping, but she did not, for was she not a
+Diller, and had she not a family pride to maintain? Especially now,
+when their financial affairs were so greatly changed?
+
+“Not that I do not consider Mr. Barton a very fine man,” she confessed.
+“But I feel that Ethel might do so much better in a social way if she
+would only try. And really a soldier under orders has no right to
+marry--especially when he has to go away so soon. Worst of all, Ethel
+insists upon retaining her position as manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company. Well, now that we have such a large amount in the business
+perhaps that is as well. The shares are already at par again.”
+
+Benway Chase was there too and sat close beside Mabel Skinner--a new
+Mabel, full of ambition and who no longer chewed gum.
+
+“Some day we’ll do it too, Mabel,” he whispered.
+
+“Oh, you go on!” she answered, but looked immensely pleased
+nevertheless.
+
+The organ pealed forth and slowly the procession moved down the aisle
+of the church, the bride leaning lightly on the groom’s good arm. They
+came out into the sunshine of the late winter day and both Ethel in her
+veil and Barton in his khaki were glorified by it. The automobile that
+was to take them to the Clayton home was in readiness and they entered
+it.
+
+“Mine--mine at last!” he breathed, when they were safe from the eyes of
+the curious crowd.
+
+“It’s like a dream--it doesn’t seem real!” she murmured, with eyes that
+spoke volumes as she beamed on him.
+
+“Only a week before I have to go to the front again!” he groaned.
+
+“Let’s not think about that, Frank--let’s think only about how happy we
+are.”
+
+“Just as you say, Ethel.” He drew her closer, glanced hastily around
+to make sure they were not observed, and kissed her. “Wonderful, this
+getting married, isn’t it? Beats business all hollow!” And he smiled.
+
+She looked at him fondly, and suddenly a mischievous dimple showed in
+each cheek. “Well, I don’t know. If you have a perfectly capable person
+for an assis----”
+
+“Ethel! You’ve sprung that on me twice since we became engaged! Now as
+my wife you’ve got to cut it out.”
+
+“What? Cut out being capable? And yet remain manager while you are
+away?” And then, as she saw he was really hurt she added swiftly and
+tenderly: “Forgive me, Frank, that’s a dear! I’m so happy--so furiously
+happy--I don’t know what I am saying or doing!”
+
+He held her as close as he dared in such a public place. “Mine! mine!
+mine!” he murmured over and over again.
+
+Very softly she patted the free hand of the wounded arm. Then she
+suddenly pressed it to her lips and kissed it.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
+
+
+  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
+
+  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75475 ***
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+      The girl he left behind | Project Gutenberg
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+
+/* Illustration classes */
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+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75475 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter hide"><img src="images/coversmall.jpg" width="450" alt=""></div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1>THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND</h1>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="bbox">
+<p class="ph1">THE “DO SOMETHING”<br>
+BOOKS</p>
+
+<p class="center">BY<br>
+HELEN BEECHER LONG</p>
+
+<hr class="full">
+<p><span class="smcap">Janice Day</span><br>
+<span class="smcap">The Testing of Janice Day</span><br>
+<span class="smcap">How Janice Day Won</span><br>
+<span class="smcap">The Mission of Janice Day</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. Cloth. Illustrated<br>
+Price per volume, $1.25 net</p>
+
+<hr class="full">
+
+<p class="center">GEORGE SULLY &amp; COMPANY<br>
+<span class="smcap">New York</span></p>
+</div></div></div></div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_0"></span>
+<figure class="figcenter illowe28_125" id="i_004">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i_004.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="caption">“I leave you, Miss Clayton, to keep things
+straight here!”</p>
+<p class="right">(<i>See Page <a href="#Page_138">138</a></i>)</p>
+</figcaption>
+</figure>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_005.jpg" alt="title page"></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+<p><span class="xxlarge">THE GIRL HE LEFT<br>
+BEHIND</span></p>
+
+<p>BY<br>
+<span class="xlarge">HELEN BEECHER LONG</span><br>
+
+Author of<br>
+The “Janice Day” Books</p>
+
+<p>ILLUSTRATED BY<br>
+<span class="large">R. EMMETT OWEN</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="large">GEORGE SULLY &amp; COMPANY</span><br>
+NEW YORK</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1918, by</span><br>
+GEORGE SULLY &amp; COMPANY</p>
+
+<hr class="tiny">
+<p class="center"><i>All rights reserved</i><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+PRINTED IN U. S. A.</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[vii]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<table>
+
+
+<tr><td class="tdr"><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td class="tdr" colspan="2"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">I</td><td> “So Perfectly Capable”</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_11">      11</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">II</td><td> A Comparison</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_22">      22</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">III</td><td> “Dogfennel”</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_30">      30</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">IV</td><td> The Skinners</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_41">     41</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">V</td><td> The Dream of a Star</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_53">      53</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VI</td><td> Two Good-byes</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_66">      66</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VII</td><td> Leading Up to a Climax</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_77">      77</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VIII</td><td> A Puzzling Situation</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_89">      89</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">IX</td><td> The Duty Devolves</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_98">      98</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">X</td><td> Love and Business</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_107">      107</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XI</td><td> War Is Declared</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_121">      121</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XII</td><td> The Image He Took Away</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_129">     129</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIII</td><td> The Awakening</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_140">      140</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIV</td><td> Benway’s Discovery</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_152">      152</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XV</td><td> From “Over There”</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_164">      164</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[viii]</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVI</td><td> The Clouds Thicken</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_175">      175</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVII</td><td> A Rendezvous With Death</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_185">      185</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVIII</td><td> The Wrath of the Hun</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_198">      198</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIX</td><td> Uncertainties</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_205">      205</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XX</td><td> So Far Away!</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_216">      216</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXI</td><td> The Burden</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_224">      224</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXII</td><td> The Fight</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_231">      231</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXIII</td><td> Comparisons</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_241">      241</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXIV</td><td> Opening the Way</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_248">      248</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXV</td><td> Compensation</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_259">      259</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXVI</td><td> His Awakening</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_265">      265</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[ix]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<table>
+<tr><td class="tdl">“I leave you, Miss Clayton, to keep things
+straight here!” (<i>See Page <a href="#Page_138">138</a></i>)</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_0">               <i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&#160;</td><td class="tdr"><small>FACING<br>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdl">He did fire—futilely, perhaps—as the great
+car circled clumsily above the spot (<i>See
+Page <a href="#Page_201">201</a></i>)</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_200">                                 200</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdl">“I nominate her as assistant manager, to hold
+the job till Frank Barton comes back!”
+(<i>See Page <a href="#Page_227">227</a></i>)</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_227">                                227</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdl">“You have been in my thoughts continually—the
+girl I left behind” (<i>See Page <a href="#Page_268">268</a></i>)</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_268">                268</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_x">[x]</span></p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
+<p class="ph2">THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND</p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER I<br>
+
+<small>“SO PERFECTLY CAPABLE”</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ethel Clayton</span> gathered the several letters with
+their accompanying checks in a neat sheaf and rose
+from her desk, which was placed nearest the door of
+the manager’s office. With the papers in her left
+hand she went to the door on which was stenciled
+“Mr. Barton” and opened it without waiting for a
+reply to her knock. She knew only Jim Mayberry
+was in the room with the manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company.</p>
+
+<p>As she pushed the door inward she heard Frank
+Barton saying:</p>
+
+<p>“I am puzzled what answer to make them, Jim.”</p>
+
+<p>The manager was at his desk. Mayberry, leaning
+back in his chair, nodded understandingly and in
+agreement. The general manager was not in the
+habit of taking the superintendent of the factory into
+his confidence in particular instances and Mayberry
+was alive to that fact. He listened. Listening, and
+keeping one’s mouth shut, never hurt a man yet.</p>
+
+<p>The girl at the door of the office waited, too. Her
+business with the manager was important, if not imperative.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>“The Bogata people have been good customers of
+ours in the past,” went on Barton, reflectively. “But
+I have inside information that their credit is wabbly.
+It is strained, just as ours has been. If we tied up
+twenty to thirty thousand dollars in their particular
+line of goods, and then had the goods left on our
+hands, it might be fatal to the Hapwood-Diller Company,
+even now.</p>
+
+<p>“The expansion of mercantile values and the increase
+in profits have not struck our kind of production,
+as you very well know, Jim. Our stock is not
+listed among the ‘war brides.’ Rather it might better
+be termed a ‘war widow.’ The company has had a
+hard pull, Jim. We can’t afford to take many
+chances.”</p>
+
+<p>Again the superintendent sat tight and merely
+nodded. The declining sun delivered slanting rays in
+through the high windows of the general manager’s
+office. The two men—neither of whom had arrived
+at thirty years—sat with preternaturally grave faces,
+one ruminating upon the event that had unexpectedly
+arisen in the affairs of the concern they had both
+worked for since boyhood; the other possibly giving
+much more thought to his own personal matters.</p>
+
+<p>For Jim Mayberry, without being in the least
+neglectful of his duties as superintendent of the factory,
+was a person given much to the contemplation
+of what he called “the prime law of nature: Looking
+out for Number One.” He did, however, suggest:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>“Those Bogata people have been all right folks,
+Frank. The factory’s made money on their orders.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s just it,” the manager returned briskly, but
+with a gesture that betrayed his indecision.</p>
+
+<p>He was a tall, black-haired, virile fellow, clean
+shaven, good color in his cheeks, and impeccably
+dressed. Mayberry, in contrast, had light hair which
+already he plastered across his crown to hide an incipient
+bald spot. He wore a small blond moustache
+and had numerous wrinkles about his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Just the same it is not safe, I firmly believe, to
+accept the order. But a brusk refusal might do the
+Hapwood-Diller Company untold harm at some future
+time. The Bogata concern may come back. Miracles
+do happen.”</p>
+
+<p>“Better accept the order then,” Mayberry put in.
+“We can postpone filling it. We don’t have to give a
+bond. If they really prove to be shaky, we can renege.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl, who had come in and softly closed the door,
+flashed the superintendent a glance that was all scorn
+for business ethics thus expressed. But Barton replied
+quite calmly:</p>
+
+<p>“Two objections to that, Jim. In the first place
+the Hapwood-Diller Company has always based its
+policy on honor. Secondly, it is unwise for us to tie
+up any money at all in beginning a job we do not
+intend to complete.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>“Aw!” grunted the superintendent. His vocabulary—at
+this juncture at least—seemed not to be
+extensive.</p>
+
+<p>There had been a rising murmur in the street under
+the open windows for some minutes. Now the sudden
+crash of martial music broke upon their ears. Barton’s
+countenance became vivid with interest, and he
+swung himself erect and strode to the nearest window.</p>
+
+<p>“Here come the boys,” he said, pride vibrating in
+his voice. He was very military looking. Nothing
+but the “setting up exercise” could ever have made his
+shoulders so very square and his splendidly muscled
+torso taper to so narrow a waist.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry rose and sauntered after him. “Mailsburg’s
+heroes,” he observed. “I suppose you’re
+wishing you were marching away with them, Frank.”</p>
+
+<p>The other said nothing, but his eyes glowed. The
+marching column swung around the corner following
+the band—a column in khaki, a color already becoming
+familiar on the streets although war was not many
+months old.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel had gone to the other window and was likewise
+looking out upon the quota of the National
+Guard, with packs and rifles, on their way to the
+railroad station. A little group of women, girls and
+children clung to the column and kept pace with it.
+The men spectators seemed rather ashamed to follow
+on, but stood, nevertheless, on the curb to watch
+the boys go by.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>“I expect they’ll have a hot old time down at that
+training camp,” drawled Mayberry.</p>
+
+<p>Barton did not seem to hear him. His hand came
+to salute as the colors went by.</p>
+
+<p>A volume of voices rose from below as the band
+music drifted into the distance.</p>
+
+<p>“And mebbe marching to their graves!”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a shame that some that can least be spared
+have to go while them that would never be missed
+keep out of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re right! Some of ’em’s got fathers an’
+mothers, an’ wives!” cried a shrill voice, “while them
+that ain’t got a soul dependent on ’em——”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s one yonder,” was the quick rejoinder.
+“And had all the benefit of Guard training too!”
+And the speaker, a woman, directed the gaze of her
+companions to the office window.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry chuckled. “They’ve pinned you to the
+wall, Frank,” he murmured in the ear of the white-faced
+manager.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel Clayton had turned suddenly from the
+window. “Have you time to sign these checks and
+letters before the outgoing mail, Mr. Barton?” she
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>He took the papers, but did not verbally reply for a
+moment. His countenance had become calm again,
+if still pale, when he had seated himself in his chair
+and turned in it so that the others could both observe
+him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>“I will sign them at once, Miss Clayton,” Barton
+said quite composedly. “But first——”</p>
+
+<p>For a moment his gaze centered upon her. There
+was something wholly good to look at in the girl’s
+face and figure. Had she not dressed so practically
+for her work her personal attractions would have been
+further enhanced. Mayberry was watching her, too;
+and his gaze betrayed a certain eagerness, whereas the
+manager’s eyes merely revealed expectancy. Then he
+flicked a glance in Mayberry’s direction.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps Miss Clayton might give us a word of
+advice upon this matter, Jim?” he said questioningly,
+and with a quizzical little smile.</p>
+
+<p>The superintendent, a little startled, shifted his gaze
+from the girl’s face to the manager’s countenance.
+Ethel, perfectly composed, waited for the explanation
+of Barton’s observation.</p>
+
+<p>“Woman’s intuition forever!” the latter ejaculated.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean, Frank?” hastily demanded
+Jim Mayberry. “If you and I don’t know what to
+do——”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel flushed faintly, but looked questioningly at
+the manager. The implied doubt of her ability in
+Mayberry’s tone possibly piqued her. Frank Barton
+said in his good-natured, easy manner:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, we know <i>what</i> to do. But it’s the way the
+thing is done. You know about this new Bogata
+order, Miss Clayton?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, Mr. Barton.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>“I do not see how we can accept it. The Bogata
+Company is not in good financial standing. But we
+must not offend them. The refusal must be one to
+which they cannot take exception. It is a big order,
+and they have sent it in without question, just as
+though they expected us to get to work on it with
+merely an acknowledgment of the favor.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see,” the girl said in her composed way.</p>
+
+<p>“You are so perfectly capable, Miss Clayton,”
+laughed the general manager. “See what you can do
+with the matter. Do you think we can keep within
+the lines of safety, and yet make no enemy of the
+Bogata people?”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe it can be done, Mr. Barton,” replied the
+girl.</p>
+
+<p>There was a decision in her manner of speaking that
+revealed Ethel Clayton as being quite what the general
+manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company had said
+she was—“capable.”</p>
+
+<p>“See what you can do with a letter, then,” Barton
+went on, producing the order sheets in question and
+handing them to her along with the letters and checks
+he had signed.</p>
+
+<p>She left the private office without further word.
+Jim Mayberry was frowning.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re trusting a good deal to that girl, Frank,”
+he growled.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve never trusted anything to her yet that she
+hasn’t handled all right,” the manager replied easily.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
+“If I manage to—to get away, Jim, you’ll find her a
+great help here.”</p>
+
+<p>“Uh-huh!” grunted the superintendent. “Maybe.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are insular,” laughed Frank Barton. “The
+women are forging to the front, man. Miss Clayton
+is far more capable than some of the heads of departments
+who have grown gray here.”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe,” agreed the superintendent. “But I
+don’t want to see her out there in overalls, bossing my
+men around. Don’t forget that, Frank.”</p>
+
+<p>The superintendent arose and strolled out of the
+private office. In the larger desk room he halted and
+watched the “capable” girl at her desk nearest the
+manager’s door. Ethel was the “buffer” between
+much outside annoyance and the general manager of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company.</p>
+
+<p>There were gold and red lights in her chestnut hair;
+the pallor of her countenance was not unhealthy;
+merely she was not enough in the open. But where
+the sun had kissed the bridge of her nose there was a
+sprinkle of tiny freckles. There were flecks of gold,
+too, in her brown eyes. Her mouth and chin were
+firm rather than soft, and the gaze of her eyes direct;
+nevertheless there was nothing unfeminine about her
+appearance.</p>
+
+<p>The severest critic could hold no brief against the
+charms of her figure. Her arms were beautifully
+rounded, her wrists tapering, her hands just the right
+size. She had a naturally small waist, and the lines<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>
+of her hips showed that her limbs were slenderly yet
+strongly built. She was a tall girl.</p>
+
+<p>The superintendent caught her eye after a moment,
+she looking up thoughtfully from the papers before
+her.</p>
+
+<p>“You want to handle that business with gloves,
+Ethel,” he advised in a low voice. “Barton’s hardly
+himself to-day—the boys going away and all. He
+thinks that, with three years’ experience in bossing
+those sappies around the armory, he should jump right
+into this war. Get to be a general or something right
+off the handle,” and he chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>Again the girl’s face flushed softly and she dropped
+her gaze. She made him no reply at all, but Mayberry
+went on:</p>
+
+<p>“And that Fuller girl’s got him running around in
+circles, too. You can see he isn’t himself, or he would
+not balk at such an order as this from the Bogata
+people. Why, they’re all right folks. The factory’s
+made a lot of money out of their orders. And
+here——”</p>
+
+<p>“Did Mr. Barton ask you to discuss this matter
+with me, Mr. Mayberry?” asked the girl coldly and
+without looking up again. “If not, please remember
+that he has commissioned me to write a letter to them
+that will meet his approval. Don’t bother me now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, pshaw, Ethel!” the man said, smiling down at
+her unctuously. “Don’t take every little thing so
+blame seriously. Frank Barton and I were kids together.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>
+I can’t fall down and worship him the way
+some of you do. Anyway, you’d better show him how
+to take a chance with these Bogata people—if you
+really want to <i>help</i>. I know they’re all right.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why don’t you tell that to Mr. Barton?” the girl
+asked rather tartly.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, pshaw!” chuckled the superintendent. “Let
+it go till to-morrow. It’s almost closing time, anyway.
+Take a little spin in that car of mine before
+supper, will you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you; no.”</p>
+
+<p>“Aw! don’t act so offishly, Ethel. You’ve never
+been to ride with me yet.”</p>
+
+<p>“I understand that other girls have—to their sorrow,”
+Miss Clayton responded in a tone that cut
+through even Jim Mayberry’s skin. He flushed dully
+and his lazy eyes began to glow.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t believe everything you hear, Ethel,” he
+said. “I want to talk to you about that. Let me
+drive you home to-night and I’ll explain these stories
+that you have heard.”</p>
+
+<p>He strolled away as Little Skinner came across the
+room to ask a question. Could it be that Little Skinner
+had received a secret signal to break in upon the
+superintendent’s objectionable line of conversation?
+At least, her business with Ethel was brief.</p>
+
+<p>The latter’s attention immediately returned to the
+problem the manager had put up to her for solution.
+She was made proud whenever Frank Barton did anything<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>
+like this, and of late it was not infrequent that
+he had shown his trust in her ability.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there was a sting in the way he had spoken, too.
+She knew well enough that the sting was unintentional
+on his part. Never had the general manager
+been other than scrupulously polite to her. She was
+always “Miss Clayton” to him, and he deferred to her
+in many ways and was as courteous in his busiest
+moments as he could have been meeting her at a social
+affair. That was Frank Barton’s way.</p>
+
+<p>But—</p>
+
+<p>She found that her gaze had wandered from the
+papers before her to the small mirror set into the
+rather ornate inkstand that stood upon her desk—a
+birthday present from her office mates not many
+months before. The girl reflected there was, Ethel
+Clayton very well knew, better looking than the
+average girl. Her even features were quietly beautiful.
+She perhaps lacked the verve and dash possessed
+by some girls. She had one particular girl in mind
+as she thought this. She lacked the tricks of the social
+trade too, that that same girl possessed.</p>
+
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders and brought her attention
+back with a jerk to the matter in hand. But
+there was faint disgust in her tone as she murmured:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, just as he says: ‘Miss Clayton is so perfectly
+capable.’ Pah!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER II<br>
+
+<small>A COMPARISON</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">She</span> read the letter from the Bogata Company and
+again glanced through the order. It was a large one.
+It called for certain supplies she knew the factory
+did not have on hand. She realized that the goods
+ordered were all of a special pattern and would be
+practically useless either to the Hapwood-Diller Company
+or to any other concern save the Bogata people
+if the latter should be unable to take the goods.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this letter assumed that the order would be accepted
+and the goods turned out without any hesitancy
+on the part of the manufacturers, and upon the usual
+terms. The Bogata Company ignored the possibility
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company having heard of its
+financial embarrassments. The letter and accompanying
+order were sent, Ethel was sure, in a spirit of
+bravado. To use a common phrase, the Bogata
+people were “trying to put something over.”</p>
+
+<p>If the scheme went through, all well and good.
+The Hapwood-Diller Company might be made the
+means of saving the Bogata people from actual and
+complete collapse. Ethel knew, however, that her
+employing concern was in no shape to assume such a
+burden. Yet if the firm ordering the goods finally<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>
+pulled out of its quagmire of financial difficulty, its
+friendship rather than its enmity was to be desired.</p>
+
+<p>Her mind centered upon the matter, the logical
+circumstances connected with it marching in slow
+procession through her brain. She was acquainted
+with every important order now on the factory’s
+books. Even Jim Mayberry had no better grasp of
+the details of the factory’s affairs than Ethel Clayton.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she got up and went to a file cabinet
+wherein was listed the particulars of all orders as yet
+unfinished. She began to figure with pencil and pad
+upon the already promised output of the factory and
+its possible output when the force was driven at top
+speed.</p>
+
+<p>Her calculations led her to certain unmistakable
+conclusions. She went back to her desk, calmly
+wrote the letter, typed it, and took the letter and her
+figures in to Barton. He was about to close his desk
+for the day.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think you have succeeded?” he asked,
+smiling and taking the typed sheet from her hand.
+But in a moment he glanced up quickly and with a
+slight frown. “What is this you say here, Miss
+Clayton? We cannot accept the order because of
+work already contracted for? Why, that——”</p>
+
+<p>“Is the plain truth, Mr. Barton!” she exclaimed,
+putting forward her array of figures. “The factory
+is now working maximum hours and with a full crew
+in all departments. I have heard you say yourself<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
+that either extra help or overtime cuts into the profits
+rather than increases them. To fulfill contracts we
+have accepted, if you took on this of the Bogata Company,
+we would have to run the machines longer
+hours and pay extra wages. The Bogata people offer
+no price for their work to cover such an increased
+cost. My letter embodies the actual truth without
+going into particulars; but my statements can be
+easily proved if they are inclined to be critical.”</p>
+
+<p>Barton’s face had been gradually lighting up, and
+it was with real admiration that he said at her conclusion:</p>
+
+<p>“Fine! I’ll sign that and you can put it in the mail
+in the morning. Has John gone to the post-office?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Barton.”</p>
+
+<p>“The morning will do,” said the general manager,
+affixing his signature to the letter. “You certainly
+are a capable assistant.”</p>
+
+<p>She flushed at his words as she turned from his desk;
+and the color remained in her countenance for some
+time. But it was not a flush of pleasure. Indeed, the
+expression of her countenance was not at all happy
+as she closed her desk and left the main office a little
+later.</p>
+
+<p>At the street exit she hesitated; then she went back
+through the drying and cutting rooms and had John
+Murphy let her out of the side gate which would not
+be opened for an hour yet for the exit of the factory<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
+hands. She had caught a glimpse of Jim Mayberry
+sitting in his car out in front.</p>
+
+<p>She did not like the superintendent, and for more
+reasons than one. In the first place, he was one of
+those men who seem to have no respect at all for girls
+who worked. Ethel was not sure how well he was received
+by Mailsburg people whose first thoughts were
+of society. But Mayberry had a bad reputation
+among many respectable people. Careful mothers
+and fathers frowned on his attentions to their daughters.</p>
+
+<p>As she turned into Burnaby Street on her way
+home she saw Frank Barton ahead of her. His military
+stride was likewise taking him briskly homeward.
+The girl might have hastened her own steps and joined
+him; but she hesitated, for that was not like Ethel
+Clayton. Her association with the handsome general
+manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company
+had been entirely on a business footing. The
+fact that they attended the same church had scarcely
+brought them together outside the offices of the concern.</p>
+
+<p>Barton was well liked by most Mailsburg people.
+Especially had he been commended for his work of the
+last two years—since he had been raised to the pinnacle
+of general manager of the biggest manufacturing concern
+in the town.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there are always carping critics in every place
+and in any event. As mark the criticism hurled at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>
+the young manager from the sidewalk that afternoon
+as the boys were marching from the National Guard
+Armory to the railway station.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel knew that the suggestion that Barton was a
+slacker must have hurt the general manager cruelly.
+She, perhaps as well as anybody else, knew why Frank
+Barton, trained in the Guard, and a military man from
+choice, was not marching away with this first quota
+at the call to arms.</p>
+
+<p>If many Mailsburg people looked at Barton in the
+way suggested by the careless criticism which had
+lately reached his ears, Ethel Clayton knew that the
+manager’s existence was going to be a hard one. She
+did not want to see him go to the war. Indeed, she
+was by no means inspired as yet with any degree of
+patriotism. The war was too remote and our reason
+for entering into it too theoretical. The blood of but
+few of our men had been shed, and those were, as a rule,
+such as were connected with the more spectacular
+portions of the service, nor had our women and children
+been butchered by the Hun.</p>
+
+<p>In her heart Ethel longed to say something to Frank
+Barton to ease the wound which he had suffered that
+afternoon. Should she overtake him and speak?
+And then, even while she hesitated, the humming of a
+smoothly running automobile sounded behind her.</p>
+
+<p>She turned to look, startled, fearing it was Jim
+Mayberry. But a girl was driving the car that
+swerved in toward the curb, stopping just beside the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>
+manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Barton!”</p>
+
+<p>The girl in the car was handsome, but with a high
+color and a shrill voice. She had a great deal of light
+hair, which was carefully dressed; she wore an expensive
+motor hat and veil; her cerise motor coat was
+of heavy silk. If the frame ever sets off the picture to
+advantage, then Helen Fuller was a work of art!</p>
+
+<p>“It’s just too, too lovely that I should catch you this
+way, Mr. Barton,” she cried, as Ethel approached
+nearer. “You can’t say you are busy and I am <i>sure</i>
+it is not yet dinner time. I <i>must</i> see you about our
+garden festival. You know, for the Red Cross. We
+<i>all</i> must do our bit <i>these</i> days. Do hop in and advise
+with poor me.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel came within range of Barton’s vision. He
+gave her as usual one of his warm, kind smiles, lifting
+his hat. Helen Fuller stared at the passing girl, who
+plainly heard her scornful query: “One of your factory
+hands, Mr. Barton?”</p>
+
+<p>“One of our office force—and one of the most valuable
+on the pay roll of the Hapwood-Diller Company,
+Miss Fuller, I assure you.”</p>
+
+<p>But the cheerful reply did not take the barb out of
+the wound Helen Fuller’s question had made. A little
+farther along the street, however, Ethel shook herself
+and murmured:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>“What a perfect fool I am! It is ridiculous to mind
+anything that Helen Fuller says. She remembers
+very well going to school with me and that I was
+always at or near the head of the class and she at the
+foot. That was before Grandon Fuller had that stock
+in the company left him by Uncle Diller. Dear me!
+how the possession of money changes some people.”
+Then, and cheerfully, she exclaimed aloud: “Ah!
+here’s Benway.”</p>
+
+<p>A young man with a perfectly splendid head of
+brown curly hair, flawless complexion, level brows,
+fine, open gray eyes set well apart, a straight nose and
+lips not full enough to be sensuous but not too thin,
+the whole countenance softened by a cleft chin and
+humorous lines at the corners of his mouth—that was
+Benway Chase.</p>
+
+<p>He came swinging along the walk and seized Ethel
+companionably by her right arm, although that placed
+him upon the inner side of the path. She met his
+look with one of pleasure, and they went on together
+like the good comrades they were.</p>
+
+<p>People whom they knew and met greeted them with
+a matter-of-course air. To see Ethel Clayton and
+Ben Chase together was nothing astonishing for
+Mailsburg folk. They had been neighbors and chums
+since they were in rompers.</p>
+
+<p>Her brightness of countenance faded when her old
+chum left her at the gate of the Clayton cottage. She
+cast a commiserating glance after him as he went on,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>
+whistling. It was not until then that the withered,
+useless right arm of the young man became really
+noticeable.</p>
+
+<p>She called to her mother that she was home from
+work and went up to her room to freshen her dress for
+dinner. Benway slipped out of her mind as she did
+this—and most other things, save one. That was a
+comparison she had begun to make on Burnaby Street
+between herself and Helen Fuller.</p>
+
+<p>Was she jealous of the other girl? Why should she
+be? She was sure she would not care to change places
+with Miss Fuller, money and all, for any consideration.
+Yet—</p>
+
+<p>She saw Frank Barton getting into the Fuller car,
+which Helen drove so conspicuously about the streets
+of Mailsburg. Ethel Clayton could not do that!
+Ethel must work, and dress plainly six days in the
+week because of her position. Miss Fuller was always
+dressed as gaily as a bird of paradise. And one must
+confess that men’s eyes were attracted—sometimes
+blinded—by gay clothes. Frank Barton could not be
+blamed for being a man. No. She had no complaint
+to make against Frank Barton. He was always polite
+and kind and appreciative.</p>
+
+<p>“And he’d be all of that to a stray kitten that
+chanced to cross his path!” she ejaculated in sudden
+disgust. “Helen Fuller has something to offer him
+that I haven’t.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER III<br>
+
+<small>“DOGFENNEL”</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Frank Barton</span> stepped into the car beside Miss
+Fuller and was whirled away, a willing captive. To
+tell the truth, the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company had been so busy fitting himself for
+his present situation with the corporation, which he
+had now held two years, that he had found little play-time.
+Having been motherless since childhood, and
+always sisterless, he probably knew less about women
+than any normal man in Mailsburg who had arrived
+at the age of twenty-eight.</p>
+
+<p>No girl had before so plainly shown that she was
+interested in him—and Miss Fuller only recently.
+Her curiosity had first been piqued by hearing Grandon
+Fuller speak in strong approval of the manager.
+Barton had pulled the concern out of a slough of financial
+trouble that had threatened to ruin the Hapwood-Diller
+Company.</p>
+
+<p>The Fullers had not always been wealthy. At least,
+not the Grandon-Fuller branch. Not until Israel
+Diller died and left them the bulk of his holdings in the
+Hapwood-Diller Company were they any better off
+than their neighbors on the far end of Burnaby Street,
+where Ethel Clayton and her mother and the Chases
+still lived.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>With the money Mrs. Fuller—an ambitious woman—had
+set out to be the leader of Mailsburg’s society.
+To a certain degree she had succeeded. Helen was
+growing up to be a society devotee and with scarcely
+a sensible idea in her head. But she had beauty, and
+she made the most of that.</p>
+
+<p>It was the thing, too, to be alive with interest in
+some semi-public topic or other; and Helen was alive
+to the value of self-advertising. A week never
+went by that her name did not appear in the society
+news of the city or county papers. She had been out
+just as long as Frank Barton had been manager of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company.</p>
+
+<p>She did not really care a fillip for Frank Barton—not
+at this time—nor for any other man. But she
+thoroughly enjoyed the reputation of having more
+men dangling after her than any other girl in Mailsburg.
+She even endured the society of that “tame
+cat,” Morrison Copley; for at least he counted!</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mr. Barton,” Helen said, having got the
+manager beside her in the driving seat of the car.
+“Really, you show very little interest in your country’s
+welfare. Don’t you realize <i>yet</i> we are <i>at war</i>?”</p>
+
+<p>Barton’s face was rather glum, but he tried to
+speak lightly. “I read something about it in the
+papers. I’ve been so extremely busy, Miss Fuller,
+I fear I should only know of it from hearsay if the
+Germans sailed up the creek and landed at old
+Hammerly’s dock.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>“The boys of the National Guard marched away to-day!”
+she cried.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. That does make it look serious,” he agreed
+in a graver strain.</p>
+
+<p>“Everybody should do his or her bit, Mr. Barton,”
+the girl said with an admonitory air. “I am <i>astonished</i>
+at you. As I tell Morry Copley, if I were a man
+nothing should keep me out of uniform. I <i>do</i> think
+those khaki colors are awfully <i>sweet</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“I fear,” Barton said grimly, “that the fellows who
+put on khaki because it looks ‘sweet’ will not make
+particularly good soldiers.”</p>
+
+<p>“Morry Copley, for instance?” and she laughed at
+herself and at the non-present Copley. “Oh, well, you
+know what I mean. It really seems <i>too</i> bad that so
+many of you men in this town are not a bit patriotic.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve got me wrong, Miss Fuller,” the manager
+said hastily and in considerable earnestness. “I do
+not think I lack patriotism. But one must fulfill
+one’s duty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, business!” she exclaimed, scornfully.</p>
+
+<p>He was on the defensive. “Your father’s income
+from our company is what enables you to drive about
+in this car, Miss Fuller,” he said bluntly.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, <i>don’t</i>, for pity’s sake, talk <i>business</i> to me.
+I really don’t understand a thing about it. I presume
+that girl who passed us just now—Clayton is her name?—may
+possess all the business acumen needed. I
+haven’t <i>her</i> experience.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>And Frank Barton, startled, wondered why Helen
+Fuller had taken the trouble to slur Ethel Clayton.</p>
+
+<p>The Fuller house, built on the exodus of the family
+from Burnaby Street, was just the dwelling one knowing
+Grandon Fuller and his wife would expect it to
+be. It was very large and very important looking,
+with a lot of gingerbread trimming about the eaves
+and veranda roof and the porte-cochère.</p>
+
+<p>A footman in a conspicuous livery stood at attention
+as Helen stopped her car under the covered way.
+With a silver whistle this flunky summoned a man
+from the garage to take the automobile. Barton
+followed his hostess to the other end of the veranda
+where quite a party—mostly the younger matrons
+and the girls of Mailsburg’s smart set—were gathered.
+Tea had been made and two other liveried servants
+were rolling service tables about from group to group.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I have accomplished something,” Helen
+said, after an apology for not being at home when
+her guests arrived and dropping with assumed weariness
+into a comfortable chair. Immediately her
+maid put a knitting bag into her lap and her mistress
+seized the needles with avidity. “Every stitch counts,
+you know,” she went on. “I only wish I might knit
+while I drive my machine. But that is impossible.
+And I told father I’d drive the car myself and so let
+Charles, our chauffeur, enlist. We women must do
+our part. Let’s see, Marie; how many of these
+sweaters have I done for the soldiers?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>“That is Mam’selle’s second this fortnight,” said
+the French maid, without losing her composure.
+That she did nine-tenths of the work, Helen merely
+rattling the needles while company was present, was
+not a matter for the world to know.</p>
+
+<p>“You all know Mr. Barton, I think,” Helen went
+on, placing the manager in a chair near her, as though
+he were a stray kitten she had picked up on the street
+and brought home as a curiosity. “I’ve managed
+to interest <i>him</i> in our garden party. Really, he should
+be made to do a good deal for the Red Cross. He
+has not done a sin-gle sol-i-ta-ry thing as yet for the
+<i>cause</i>. I tell him he is a slacker of the first water.”</p>
+
+<p>Some who chanced to hear her smiled. Frank
+Barton’s ears fairly burned. It was no joke for him;
+yet he admitted that Miss Fuller did not understand—<i>would</i>
+not understand, perhaps—why he was not
+in khaki.</p>
+
+<p>“Bah Jove!” drawled the high and somewhat
+effeminate voice of Morrison Copley, “Mr. Barton
+has plenty of company in this burg. I heard old
+Hammerly say he thought of offering a reward for
+the discovery of a single man within the conscription
+age here who joins from patriotic motives. He says
+patriotism died out in Mailsburg in the last generation.”</p>
+
+<p>“By the way, Morry,” asked a fellow with the
+bulging shoulders of a prizefighter together with a
+dissipated face, “how did <i>you</i> get exempted?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>“Dependent parent,” returned Copley. “You
+know, mothaw really couldn’t get on without me.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s true enough,” sneered the other. “Madam
+Copley would be lost without her baby boy.”</p>
+
+<p>Morrison Copley did not, however, lack the keener
+weapons of retort. “That’s all right, Bradley. I
+understand you gave the exemption board the names
+of two dependent barkeepers.”</p>
+
+<p>The laugh that followed this sally enabled Frank
+Barton to recover his composure. These fellows
+boldly acknowledged their lack of patriotic feeling.
+He knew that his reasons for claiming exemption
+until the Hapwood-Diller Company was in good
+shape again were, at least, commendable.</p>
+
+<p>In a desultory way plans were made for the forthcoming
+garden party to raise funds for the local Red
+Cross chapter. Barton did not find that either his
+advice or his efforts were much needed. But he did
+get a chance to talk with Miss Fuller; and he was not
+a deep enough student of feminine nature to understand
+just how shallow she was.</p>
+
+<p>The Fullers were of the best socially there was in
+Mailsburg, despite the fact that their money had
+come to them comparatively late. Mrs. Fuller’s
+maiden name had been Diller, and the Dillers dated
+their aristocracy in the county back to pre-Revolution
+days. To Barton, whose antecedents had been quite
+unimportant, such connections in a social way seemed
+worthy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>“Come again to see me, Mr. Barton, when I am
+alone,” Helen whispered, when he rose to follow the
+very first group with their knitting bags that made
+its departure. “One must give one’s self more or
+less to one’s guests when there is a crowd like this.
+I want you to take dinner with us soon—quite <i>en
+famille</i>. Will you?”</p>
+
+<p>Barton promised. Grandon Fuller had always been
+cordial with him, and he was glad to be <i>persona grata</i>
+with the family. After all, it meant considerable to
+him to be taken up by the Fullers.</p>
+
+<p>He was the only person on this occasion to walk
+away from the house. The others rode in some kind
+of vehicle. But somebody got into step with Barton
+less than ten yards from the gateway.</p>
+
+<p>“What brings you into the swagger part of the
+town, Frank?” demanded a harsh voice. “You are
+not hatching something with Fuller to double-cross
+the rest of the Hapwood-Diller stockholders?”</p>
+
+<p>The young manager knew the character of the
+speaker too well to be offended. Macon Hammerly
+wore an apparent grouch to shield himself from the
+importunities of his fellowmen. He actually could
+not say “No” to any request or favor asked, unless
+he shouted it.</p>
+
+<p>He was a dry old fellow with stiff, badly brushed
+iron-gray hair and an aggressive chin-whisker. He
+was the last man in Mailsburg to wear “half leg”
+boots and had a local cobbler make them for him.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
+He kept a feed and grain store down on the docks
+and possessed in all probability more cash in the
+bank than any other man in town. But he made no
+display of it.</p>
+
+<p>He was distantly related to the Fullers; and he
+made no display of that, although Helen called him
+“Uncle.” He bent a curious and somewhat disapproving
+eye upon Barton as he waited for his
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>“I was just calling there.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh! On whom?”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Fuller took me up into her car and brought
+me over. It seems there is to be a garden party for
+the Red Cross——”</p>
+
+<p>“Expected it must be something about a cross,”
+grumbled Macon Hammerly. “Red Cross or what
+not, it will be the double-cross for you if you don’t
+look out. You’ve nothing in common, Frank, with
+that dogfennel.”</p>
+
+<p>“With <i>what</i>?” asked Barton, chuckling. “That’s a
+new one!”</p>
+
+<p>“A new name for that inconsequential, useless
+crowd that circle about Grandon Fuller’s gal? Huh!
+D’you know any better name for them? There
+ain’t nothing more useless and picayune along the
+road than dogfennel. That whole bunch isn’t worth
+the powder to blow it to Halifax!”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Dogfennel’,” and Barton still chuckled. “I don’t
+know but you are rather hard on our common may-weed.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>
+But I grant you that some of those people
+I met back there are quite as futile as the name implies.
+But Miss Fuller herself! She is a remarkably
+pretty girl.”</p>
+
+<p>The old man in the linen duster and the broad-brimmed
+hat was quite as emphatic as Barton expected
+him to be. “So’s dogfennel pretty—if you
+like weeds. I don’t want to see you mixing in with
+that crowd, Frank. How’s business?”</p>
+
+<p>“Better. Had to turn down a big order to-day, but
+I think we were justified in doing so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh! Who says so? You and Jim Mayberry?”
+growled Hammerly, who kept in quite close touch
+with the factory affairs.</p>
+
+<p>“Not altogether,” Barton smilingly replied. “We
+took the advice of Miss Clayton.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh! You <i>did</i>?” Hammerly listened quietly to the
+manager’s explanation, commenting in his usual tart
+way, but with open satisfaction: “You do show some
+sense once in a while, Frank. She’s got a head on
+her, that Ethel Clayton. And you are right, I’ll
+bet a cooky! The Bogata people are due to bust inside
+of three months. Mark my words.”</p>
+
+<p>The two men separated at a corner and Barton
+strode on to his boarding house and the dinner which
+he knew would be dished up cold to him now. Mrs.
+Trevor played no table favorites in her ménage.
+The manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>
+not happy. His reflections were tinged with a hue
+of disgust at his own equivocal situation.</p>
+
+<p>He knew he had good and sufficient reason for not
+enlisting the minute of the declaration that a state
+of war with Germany existed. The same reason had
+kept him at home when many of his comrades in the
+Guard had gone to the Mexican Border.</p>
+
+<p>He had been spending his strength and thought
+to one end since being placed in charge of the Hapwood-Diller
+Manufacturing Company. The war had
+struck the concern hard, cutting off or doubling the
+price of supplies without broadening the market for
+manufactured wares or increasing the profit on them.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the dividends of the company many families
+in Mailsburg depended for their very daily bread.
+Had the dividends been reduced or even passed for
+several successive quarters, the Fullers would have
+got along all right; but there were stockholders whose
+livelihood depended utterly upon the factory running
+on full time and turning a profit on every dollar’s
+worth of product that left the shipping room. And
+Frank Barton seemed to be the only man to keep it
+so running.</p>
+
+<p>For the most part these needy folk were widows or
+orphans or old people past working age, who had
+received their stock from one or another of the original
+owners of the factory. These helpless people Barton
+had felt particularly his charge. To throw up his
+job and join the colors might ruin the small fry depending<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
+upon the success of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company’s affairs. Until of late he had scarcely
+found breathing space to think of anything save the
+business of the factory.</p>
+
+<p>But now! The boys marching away earlier in the
+day had stabbed Frank Barton to the quick. He
+was not a man who wore his heart on his sleeve. It
+was only those who knew him best who suspected
+the rankling wound he suffered when his course was
+unfavorably compared with that of the guardsmen
+whose brother-in-arms he had been.</p>
+
+<p>Even Helen Fuller had accused him of being a
+slacker, and had compared him with Morry Copley
+and that Bradley fellow. Barton’s gorge rose as he
+thought of this.</p>
+
+<p>“A slacker, eh?” he muttered to himself. “A
+slacker, am I?”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER IV<br>
+
+<small>THE SKINNERS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Jim Mayberry</span> was smoking his second cigarette
+when a girl came out of the main door of the factory
+offices. She was a slim, rather startled looking girl.
+Her flaxen hair was pulled back so tightly as to raise
+her eyebrows perceptibly; this opened very wide her
+eyes and seemed even to pull the point of her nose
+up a little and raise her upper lip to display two little
+rabbit teeth.</p>
+
+<p>“Hello, Skinner,” said the superintendent. “Isn’t
+Ethel ’most ready?”</p>
+
+<p>“Hello, Jim Mayberry,” responded the girl, who
+felt no obligation to show the superintendent any
+particular respect outside the factory. “Going to
+take me home in your flivver?”</p>
+
+<p>“Aren’t you afraid to ride with me?” asked the
+man with a slow smile.</p>
+
+<p>“Nope. You try to get funny with <i>me</i> and I’ll
+scratch your eyes out.”</p>
+
+<p>“My!” drawled Mayberry, “aren’t you the catty
+thing?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’d think so,” rejoined the flat-chested girl
+with all the strutting boastfulness of a boy. “No
+feller’s ever going to kiss <i>me</i> if I don’t want him to.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>“I bet you!” agreed the superintendent with mock
+admiration. “But where’s Ethel?”</p>
+
+<p>“You aren’t waiting for her, are you, Jim?” the
+slim girl asked, giggling.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought I was.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then there’s another thought coming to you,”
+declared the delighted Skinner. “Ethel went long
+ago—out through the side gate. Guess she must
+have suspected you’d be waiting here.”</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry uttered a brief and impolite expletive.
+That did not trouble Mabel Skinner. She lived in
+a house full of rough men. Her mother was dead
+and an older sister kept house for the Skinners. The
+children of Sam Skinner had not been brought up
+according to the Puritan acceptance of the term.
+Like Topsy, they had “just growed.”</p>
+
+<p>“She wouldn’t ride in that flivver with you anyway,”
+Mabel Skinner added. “But I would.”</p>
+
+<p>“Jump in, then, Little Skinner,” the superintendent
+said, without further advertising his chagrin.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope my Sunday School teacher won’t see me,”
+the girl observed, getting in beside him quickly.
+“If she does she will know I am riding fast to perdition.
+And <i>do</i> make your old rattle-bang go as fast
+as possible, Jim. I just love to scoot over the road.
+Gee, if I’d only been made a boy instead of a girl,
+I’d have been a jockey.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hear the girl!” chuckled Mayberry, who was
+really after all too good-natured to be spiteful to his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>
+guest. “You’ll be up in one of these flying machines
+yet.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that would be grand! I’d go to France and
+join the flying corps. That girl from Texas that got
+over there with the first batch of Yankee soldiers—did
+you read about her? They got on to her and
+sent her back. That’s because she got married to
+one of the buddies. Catch <i>me</i>! I wouldn’t marry
+the best man alive.”</p>
+
+<p>“You won’t,” prophesied Jim Mayberry, still
+chuckling.</p>
+
+<p>“Smartie! Anyhow, I wouldn’t fall for any man
+I’ve ever seen yet. Not even Mr. Barton,” she added,
+as though there might be some doubt in her mind
+about the general manager.</p>
+
+<p>“Humph! who has fallen for him?” demanded the
+superintendent suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>“Every girl in town but me,” declared Mabel
+Skinner promptly, but grinning impishly, “He’s an
+awfully nice man, is Mr. Barton.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I’d fall for him myself if I were a girl, I
+guess,” Mayberry agreed.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes—you—would! Say, that’s my corner!”</p>
+
+<p>“I know. But I’m going to spin you around the
+reservoir and bring you home the other way.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, bully!” ejaculated the girl, fairly jumping in
+her seat. “I’m being run away with by a man.
+Never thought it would happen to me. I really<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
+wish you wasn’t so trifling, Jim Mayberry. I’d
+maybe sue you for breach of promise.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then I’m safe, am I?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“As far as I am concerned you are. I wouldn’t
+really marry you on a bet, Jim. Don’t you know
+that?”</p>
+
+<p>He was highly amused. Mabel Skinner’s tart
+tongue always delighted him. She lived in one of
+the poorer quarters of the town. When he finally
+brought the machine into her street it created a sensation.
+People left their supper tables to see Mabel
+Skinner brought home in the superintendent’s car.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter, Mab? Broke a leg?” demanded
+one lout of a boy, with an impudent grin for Mayberry,
+and who was just slipping out of the Skinners’
+gate. This was “Boots” Skinner, next younger of
+the clan than Mabel.</p>
+
+<p>“Both of ’em, or you wouldn’t catch me ruining
+my reputation riding home with Mr. Mayberry.
+Don’t tell anybody, Boots.”</p>
+
+<p>The superintendent of the Hapwood-Diller factory
+found that it was he who felt some confusion in bringing
+Mabel home. The latter took her time in getting
+out of the car.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m awfully much obliged to you, Mr. Mayberry,”
+she said, in a shrill and penetrating voice, so that the
+interested neighbors could all hear. “I don’t know
+what I should have done if you hadn’t brought me.
+Walked, I guess. Well! ‘Over the river!’”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>She popped into the house before he could get the
+starter into action under the fire of the neighbors’
+chuckles. They all knew Mabel Skinner; and most
+of them had sized up Jim Mayberry for what he was,
+too.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry drove down into Mailsburg’s business
+quarter and stopped before the Bellevue Hotel. He
+often took his dinner there and spent the evening, as
+well, in some upper room where there were shaded
+lights, much cigar smoke, the clink of glasses and the
+rattle of poker chips.</p>
+
+<p>The superintendent had been born and brought up
+in Mailsburg, as Frank Barton had been; but his
+family was now scattered. He and Barton had been
+the closest of chums at school. Mayberry owned
+quite as bright a mind as the general manager of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company; but he lacked the balance
+of his friend.</p>
+
+<p>Had it not been for the inspiration of Barton’s
+companionship and example Mayberry would never
+have obtained the eminence he had in the factory.
+In truth, his old chum had actually boosted Mayberry
+into the superintendent’s job after having been
+himself elected manager of the concern. Not that
+Mayberry was not well fitted for this position. But
+he lacked that quality of ambition to have gained
+it for himself without Frank Barton’s good offices.
+At that, he lacked the grace of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>The Bellevue was the gathering place of the sporting
+men of the town. When Mayberry came out
+from dinner, Mr. Grandon Fuller occupied one of the
+easy chairs on the porch. Fuller’s taste for society
+was not like that of his wife and daughter. He was
+a big, pursy man with a shock of white hair and a
+ruddy countenance. He had a hail-fellow-well-met
+air for most occasions, and his jovial manner made
+him popular with most people. In local politics he
+had some prominence.</p>
+
+<p>“Hey, young man!” he called to Mayberry, “you’ve
+no engagement, have you? Smith is getting up a
+party for a little game. Will you join us?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not to-night, Colonel,” returned the superintendent,
+giving Fuller a handle to his name that always
+delighted the rich man. He had been on the governor’s
+staff once. “I am sorry. I have an appointment.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tut, tut! can’t you let the girls alone for one night,
+Son?” and Fuller’s laugh was unctuous.</p>
+
+<p>“’Pon my word it’s business.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thought nobody had to trouble their heads about
+business up at the factory except Barton?”</p>
+
+<p>“But Barton may not be there always,” laughed
+the superintendent, although the suggestion of the
+manager’s omnipotence did not please him. Everybody
+praised Frank Barton’s business acumen. Mayberry,
+being Barton’s close friend, knew just how weak<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
+the fellow really was! This was Mayberry’s thought;
+but he made no display of this feeling, saying:</p>
+
+<p>“It really is business, Colonel. I am sorry not
+to be able to join you and the other gentlemen.
+But we really all have to work up there at the factory.
+Barton may get the bulk of the credit. You know
+how it is when a fellow once gets into the limelight.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” chuckled Fuller. “But they tell me a lime
+never gets into the limelight. Don’t tell me Frank
+Barton is to be counted among the citrus fruit.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never!” responded Mayberry. “But, then, there
+are others working for the Hapwood-Diller Company
+too who are not lemons. Good-night.”</p>
+
+<p>He went down the steps whistling cheerfully and
+Mr. Fuller looked quizzically after him.</p>
+
+<p>“Bright young fellow, just the same,” murmured
+the man. “Perhaps may be made more useful, even,
+than Barton. But I fear neither Helen nor the wife
+would stand for <i>him</i> as a dinner guest; whereas,
+Barton——”</p>
+
+<p>These cryptic observations were unheard by Mayberry
+of course. And the frown on his brow belied
+his cheerful whistle and airy remarks to Mr. Fuller.
+He got into his car, started it, and drove away from
+the hotel with the secret feeling that he would enjoy
+running over a dog.</p>
+
+<p>He kept on through the old part of Mailsburg and
+down past the docks and over the Stone Bridge. The
+creek was a wide, oilily flowing stream—save in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>
+time of the spring freshets. He took the Creek Road
+and rolled easily out of town and along past the farms
+and wooded strips which intervened between Mailsburg
+and Norville.</p>
+
+<p>He drove slowly and looked at the illuminated dial
+of the clock before him frequently. It was plain
+that he had a rendezvous here in the open. Some
+one has said: “If you have a secret to tell, select the
+middle of a ten-acre lot.” Mayberry’s appointment
+suggested secrecy, for he finally stopped near the
+bank of the creek with an open, sloping field on the
+other hand, and no cover but a rock beside the road.</p>
+
+<p>There was shadow enough about the rock, however,
+to protect the figure of a man on the landward
+side. But the scent of his tobacco permeated the air.</p>
+
+<p>“Hello, Blaisdell?” Jim Mayberry said quietly
+and questioningly, having brought his car to a stop
+just opposite this rock.</p>
+
+<p>“Welcome, dear boy,” was the prompt reply. The
+waiting man stretched his long limbs and came out
+of the shadow, still puffing his pipe, to rest a foot
+upon the step of the car. Mayberry lit a cigarette
+and pinched out the glowing end of the match before
+dropping it. “What’s the news?” asked Blaisdell.</p>
+
+<p>“Kind of bad—for you and me,” Mayberry admitted.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean? Doesn’t that order go
+through?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>“It may not. I’m no intriguer, Blaisdell. I can
+keep you informed; but I am not up in diplomacy.
+Barton has heard some yarn about you fellows. He
+is for turning the order down—flat.”</p>
+
+<p>“Can’t you influence him? I thought you and he
+were thicker than the hair on a dog’s neck.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ve always been chums,” drawled Mayberry.
+“That doesn’t give me any hold over Frank’s processes
+of reasoning. And he can talk me off my feet.
+I didn’t agree to do the impossible, Blaisdell. If the
+order goes through the best I can do is to rush it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yet you expect to get your rake-off,” sneered the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s my legitimate graft. It’s for letting
+everything go through smoothly. You know, in my
+position, I can favor your company, Blaisdell.”</p>
+
+<p>“It doesn’t seem that you can—not if this order
+clogs the chute. I am frank to tell you, Jim, we’ve
+got to get those goods without question or we shall
+be in untold trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ye-as,” drawled the superintendent, “so I inferred.
+That is what is bothering Barton. He seems to be
+wise to the state of your credit.”</p>
+
+<p>“He doesn’t <i>know</i> it,” snapped the other. “He
+only suspects. Nobody knows it but Billings, Hempstead,
+me and—you.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I’m sitting tight and saying nothing. I want
+my rake-off on the order of course—By jinks, I <i>need</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
+it! Money is as scarce with me just now as gold filling
+in a hen’s teeth.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then do something to help us,” urged Blaisdell.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll do all I can. If I were in charge—Oh, well!
+I <i>could</i> do something in that case.”</p>
+
+<p>“Say! any chance of that happening?” demanded
+the other and with eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>“I—don’t—know. There may be. Frank has got
+the war fever. Fact! Any fellow that got exempted
+as easy as he did——”</p>
+
+<p>“By the way,” asked Blaisdell, “how did you get
+past the board?”</p>
+
+<p>“Conscientious objector,” replied Mayberry glibly.
+“Sure! My mother and father were Quakers and I
+often attended the Friends’ Meeting House,” and he
+laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“You are a liar, Jim,” said the other frankly.
+“The Quakers are putting their young men into the
+Red Cross and all such work. That claim don’t go.
+I believe it cost you money. Doc Flammer has
+bought a new runabout—and it’s a better car than
+you drive, Jim. I believe that foxy medico knows
+how to feather his nest.”</p>
+
+<p>“I really have a bad heart,” said the superintendent
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company seriously. “Quite
+a murmur. You can hear it sometimes without the
+stethoscope.”</p>
+
+<p>“But the doc never advised you to cut out the
+tobacco, did he?” drily queried Blaisdell, as Mayberry<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>
+lit another cigarette at the coal of his first.
+“Now, see here, to get back to biz: You say Barton
+has the fever?”</p>
+
+<p>“He’s wanted to go all along. You should hear
+him talk! He makes me sick!” scoffed the superintendent.
+“If he should go I shall step into his shoes
+<i>pro tem</i>. He wants to go to the officers’ training camp
+at Lake Quehasset. <i>Then</i> I might be able to help
+you fellows—and myself—Blaisdell.”</p>
+
+<p>“You think Barton will immediately turn down
+our order? Before he goes away—if he does go?”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe he has already.” Mayberry gave no
+particulars, but he spoke of the letter the manager
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company had ordered written
+that afternoon. It was not to his advantage to say
+anything about Ethel Clayton and the confidence
+Barton had in her good sense and ability.</p>
+
+<p>“Postpone the sending of that letter, Jim,” said
+Blaisdell hastily. “It has not left the office yet,
+has it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not believe so. It was too late for the last
+mail,” Mayberry agreed. But he was puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll tell you what I mean,” Blaisdell said, leaning
+nearer to the superintendent. He laid a hand upon
+the latter’s shoulder. His lips were close to Mayberry’s
+ear. Nobody could have heard then what he
+said, not if they had been at Blaisdell’s elbow. And
+there was nobody so near. A few minutes later the
+superintendent turned his car and started back toward<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
+Mailsburg while Blaisdell strolled away in the opposite
+direction. Then it was that a cramped figure
+rolled out from the shadow on the creek side of the
+great rock.</p>
+
+<p>“Those two chumps purty near made me late
+setting my lines,” observed Boots Skinner under his
+breath. “The moon’ll be up in a few minutes and
+then mebbe I’d git nabbed.</p>
+
+<p>“Old Man Hammerly says that if I’m caught doing
+this ag’in he’ll give me all the laws allows—an’ then
+some. The old jackdaw! I bet he never gits the
+chance.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the way. Ain’t no chance for a poor feller,
+jest as dad says. Such rich chaps as them two can
+plan to do all the devilment that they want, and nobody
+dast touch ’em. But me! I ain’t let to ketch
+a mess o’ fish in peace. Huh! Jest the same, me an’
+dad will have a fish-fry for breakfast,” and he grinned
+in the darkness, carefully baiting his hooks.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER V<br>
+
+<small>THE DREAM OF A STAR</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Clayton</span> was a Diller. She often stated
+this fact with pride.</p>
+
+<p>“The Dillers, my dear, are among the very oldest
+and the very best families in the country; and when
+one has family as every sensible person recognizes,
+money is of secondary importance,” Ethel’s mother
+insisted over and over, in season and out.</p>
+
+<p>“All very well, dear,” agreed the girl cheerfully.
+“But money is more essential to our daily comfort
+than blue blood. I presume I am glad I have Diller
+blood in my veins. I am much gladder I have Diller
+brains in my head; for they enable me to earn twenty
+dollars a week—more than any other girl earns, I
+do believe, in Mailsburg.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Clayton, with all her horror of things common,
+could not deny that Israel Diller had been the saviour
+of the family by his business ability. He went into
+trade and he made good in it. By grace of his doing
+so, and leaving her a few shares of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company—and Grandon Fuller’s wife a good
+many—both the Claytons and the Fullers were benefitted.
+Indeed, Mrs. Clayton and Ethel lived much
+more comfortably in the little cottage at the end of
+Burnaby Street by grace of the dividends from those<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>
+shares than they had while Mr. Clayton was
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>“But I sometimes wonder,” Mrs. Clayton sighed,
+“how it came about that Mehitable Fuller and I
+should have been so unevenly treated by Great-uncle
+Israel. Mehitable never did a hand’s turn for old
+Mr. Diller in her life. While you can remember yourself,
+Ethel, although you were but a tiny girl, that the
+old gentleman was brought here that time he had
+typhoid and he was a care on my hands for six
+months.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mother!”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not begrudging the care,” her mother hastened
+to say. “And of course his lawyer afterward brought
+me the money for his board—six dollars a week for
+twenty-seven weeks. And I signed a paper saying
+it was all I could expect. Still—Well! if he had been
+alone in his own home and had had to hire a trained
+nurse and all that he’d have paid out a lot more money
+than he did.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, Mother, never mind all that,” Ethel urged.</p>
+
+<p>“No, I realize it doesn’t sound nice,” Mrs. Clayton
+agreed. “But it seems funny. When I see those
+Fullers driving around so haughtily, and read about
+Mehitable, that I went to school with, and that pug-nosed
+girl of hers——”</p>
+
+<p>“Mercy! don’t let anybody hear you speak of Helen
+Fuller’s nose in such terms,” laughed Ethel. “And
+Helen is pretty. You’ve got to acknowledge that.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>“Her nose <i>is</i> a pug,” declared Mrs. Clayton.
+“That’s got nothing to do with those stocks. Great-uncle
+Israel’s will was peculiar. So they all say. No
+administrator mentioned. And he died with Gran
+Fuller right in the house——”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t!” begged Ethel. “You must not intimate
+any wrongdoing, when there can have been no wrongdoing.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you know about it? And you but a
+chit of a girl at the time!” demanded Mrs. Clayton.
+“Anyway, Gran Fuller was there, and he found the
+will. Mr. Mestinger, the lawyer, was dead then.”</p>
+
+<p>“But the witnesses were alive if the lawyer wasn’t.
+Of course it was Mr. Diller’s honest will.”</p>
+
+<p>“And he gave all that lump of money to Mehitable
+who never scarcely spoke to him, and only a little,
+meaching few stocks of the Hapwood-Diller Company
+to me. Oh, well, small favors thankfully received.
+The money’s very welcome every quarter.”</p>
+
+<p>Of course, Ethel was the recipient of a fairly comfortable
+salary. But they could not have lived so
+nicely as they did upon her weekly stipend only.
+Moreover, it was but recently that the girl was able
+to earn the amount at present paid her.</p>
+
+<p>“And there was a time,” pursued Mrs. Clayton on
+this particular evening, “when I came near selling
+the shares for a song.” She and Ethel were sitting,
+after the dinner dishes were cleared up, on the sheltered
+porch. “Grandon Fuller made me an offer<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>
+for my stock. That was just before Mr. Barton was
+made manager, and people said the company was
+going to fail.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Barton has done wonders,” declared the girl
+with admiration.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’t know,” responded her mother deprecatingly.
+“I suppose business just chanced to
+change. But it’s lucky we held on to our stock.”</p>
+
+<p>“It was Mr. Barton who saved us and the rest of
+the small stockholders,” the girl said firmly.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I suppose you must say so. I presume you
+feel some gratitude to him for raising your pay. You
+never would have got it without his say-so.”</p>
+
+<p>“I hope I earn it,” Ethel observed with some sharpness.
+“I believe I am worthy of my wages, just as
+Mr. Barton is worthy of the credit of having put the
+Hapwood-Diller Company on its feet.”</p>
+
+<p>“Still talking shop?” asked the cheerful voice of
+Benway Chase. He had come up the walk without
+the widow and her daughter hearing him till he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Ethel is singing the praises of that wonderful
+Mr. Barton, as usual,” her mother said.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll join in,” Ben Chase chuckled, and he sat down
+on the step of the porch to fill and light his pipe.
+“We’ve got to hand it to Mr. Barton, Mrs. Clayton.
+He did another good deed to-day. Promised to take
+me into the offices.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Ben!” exclaimed the girl in sheer delight.
+“Did you speak to him as I advised you?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>“Certainly did. I got tired of waiting on the pleasure
+of those other people who had promised me a job.
+I have spent every cent we can afford getting a business
+course and just because I am left-handed the
+business men I have seen hem and haw over hiring
+me—or even giving me a chance to show them I am
+as quick as a fellow with two hands.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dear me, Bennie, don’t talk in that way,” murmured
+Mrs. Clayton.</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody wants a fellow with one hand—not
+really!” exclaimed the young man with vigor. “They
+won’t take me in the army—though a fellow could
+work a machine gun very well with one paw,” and
+he laughed without managing to get much mirth
+into the sound.</p>
+
+<p>“But your Mr. Barton is different,” he added,
+turning to Ethel. “I saw him to-day at lunch hour—while
+you were out, Ethel. He never said a word
+about my bum wing. By the way, did you know
+he was going away?”</p>
+
+<p>“Who’s going away?” asked Mrs. Clayton, scenting
+gossip.</p>
+
+<p>“Not Mr. Barton?” cried her daughter quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“Spoke as though he expected to be absent from
+the offices in the near future. Said you and that
+Jim Mayberry would break me in all right. What
+did he mean if it wasn’t that he expected to be absent?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>The girl looked at him breathlessly and her face
+was actually pale. Mrs. Clayton drawled:</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose he must mean to take a vacation.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s not it, is it?” Benway Chase asked Ethel,
+realizing that she was deeply moved.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s the war!” gasped the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“The war?” rejoined her mother. “What’s that
+to do with Mr. Barton? He’s exempt, isn’t he?”</p>
+
+<p>“He will enlist. I knew he would!” The girl’s
+hands were clasped in real agony and her voice showed
+imminent tears. “Oh, I knew he would!”</p>
+
+<p>“Not really?” exclaimed Benway, forgetting to
+keep his pipe alight. “Mr. Barton can’t be spared,
+can he?”</p>
+
+<p>“I suspected all along how he felt about it,” moaned
+the girl. “Ever since April when war was declared—even
+before.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, goodness! there are so many other men to
+go,” cried her mother. “And you were just saying
+that he was necessary to the well-being of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company, Ethel. Surely he will not
+desert us.”</p>
+
+<p>“The business is in very good shape again—thanks
+to him,” Ethel answered, trying to recover her composure.
+“I suppose he feels that now, at least, he
+can go to the officers’ training camp. And if we get
+along all right I just know he will go to France.”</p>
+
+<p>Benway whistled—low and thoughtfully. “He’s
+that kind of a chap, I guess,” he observed. “Goodness<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>
+knows, this town is full of those who think
+differently. The boards had the hardest time getting
+their full quota for this first draft. There’s
+got to be a general awakening before the second call
+comes——”</p>
+
+<p>“But war is dreadful!” cried Mrs. Clayton.</p>
+
+<p>“It must be. But we haven’t come to a realization
+of it yet or we’d all be glad to try to help keep it in
+Europe, instead of letting it dribble over here after
+militarism has ruined the less prepared countries
+over there. This war is going to mean a good deal.
+The government is awfully particular about the
+men they take right now; but they won’t be so particular
+before it is all over.</p>
+
+<p>“Why!” cried the young fellow with a break in his
+voice that showed a deeper emotion, “even the Red
+Cross or the Y. M. C. A. won’t accept for service a
+fellow with a single solitary thing the matter with
+him!”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel, who had slipped down into a seat on the
+step beside him, suddenly patted his shoulder in a
+sisterly way. She knew that he had tried to serve
+his country under the banner of the Cross of Peace
+and had been refused because of his withered arm.</p>
+
+<p>“Heigho!” added Benway, shrugging his shoulders
+and swallowing his emotion, “that’s neither here nor
+there. Mr. Barton spoke as though he expected to
+leave soon, anyway. I expect Ethel, here, will pretty
+near be boss of those offices while he is gone. How<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>
+about it, Ethel? Going to be a hard taskmaster to
+yours truly?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid if Mr. Barton goes that my influence
+there will be curbed rather than increased,” the girl
+said with gravity.</p>
+
+<p>“No!”</p>
+
+<p>“Naturally Mr. Mayberry will be boss. Mr. Mayberry
+does not consider me as capable as does Mr.
+Barton.”</p>
+
+<p>“Jim Mayberry!” exclaimed Ben. “He’s dead in
+love with you, they say.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl’s head came up and she turned a haughty
+look upon her friend.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you consider that complimentary to me?”
+she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>“No. But complimentary to his good sense,”
+returned Benway. “I don’t know much about Mayberry;
+only that he hangs about the Bellevue too
+much.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve said it all,” Ethel declared, with less
+sternness. “I do not like Mr. Mayberry.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right. I shan’t like him, either, then,” said
+Benway cheerfully. “But, goodness, girl! you can’t
+blame men for falling in love with you. I wonder
+the whole town doesn’t tail along after you when you
+walk down the street.”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed at him then—and with him.</p>
+
+<p>“There is one thing about your compliments,
+Ben,” she said. “They may lack grace; but they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>
+are unmistakable. Ridiculous! There are hundreds
+of girls in Mailsburg better looking than I am.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, did I say anything about looks?” he asked
+her wickedly. “It’s your sweet disposition that
+makes you so many friends.”</p>
+
+<p>“Like Jim Mayberry, I suppose?” she said in some
+disgust.</p>
+
+<p>They continued to wrangle in a friendly way. Mrs.
+Clayton, frankly yawning, bade them good-night.
+The moment her mother withdrew Ethel’s manner
+changed. She removed herself a little from Benway’s
+vicinity and her witticisms ceased.</p>
+
+<p>“I believe I shall retire early myself, Ben,” she
+said. “This has been a trying day. I—I shall be
+glad to have you in the offices with us.”</p>
+
+<p>“Shall you?” There was something in his tone that
+increased her seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>“If I can do anything there to help you, let me do
+it,” she said earnestly. “You know we have always
+been such chums, Ben.”</p>
+
+<p>“Haven’t we?” Again the disturbing accent. She
+started to rise. He caught her hand. “Wait,” he
+said. “Let me say a little something to you, Ethel.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ben! Ben! Had you better? You know——”</p>
+
+<p>“I know—everything you can tell me,” he interrupted
+bitterly. “I know I am only half a man. A
+fellow shy a wing hasn’t much chance in this world.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
+I ought to know it after all my experience. Especially
+as the folks have no money to back me. But
+I have a whole brain——”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve always told you that, Ben,” she hastened to
+say. “A perfectly good brain. I would not harp
+so much on that withered arm.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, perhaps you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t unless
+the old arm happened to be hitched to your shoulder,
+as it is to mine. No, it is easy enough to say to a
+cripple, ‘Forget it.’ Wait till you try it yourself!
+Though, Heaven forbid! I hope you will never suffer
+such a handicap, Ethel.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Benway!”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, Ethel,”
+he returned, and patted her hand. “Fact is, I feel
+rather toppy to-night myself. I know that Mr. Barton
+is taking me on for just what he thinks is in me,
+and no more. He must think that a withered arm
+will not make me less useful around the offices of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company. Influence is not getting
+me this footing.</p>
+
+<p>“And he was kind enough to say,” went on the boy,
+“that he saw no reason why I should not rise there
+as he had risen. He told me how he began in one
+of the shops and worked up. Of course, I am not
+beginning just in that way; but he says that a practical
+knowledge of the mechanical end of the business
+is not absolutely necessary to advancement.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>“If I make good, Ethel—if I prove that the stuff
+is in me to get up in the business world, after all——”</p>
+
+<p>“Of all your friends I shall be the one who will
+be the most delighted, Ben,” she interrupted, rising
+now with finality. “Don’t forget that I have always
+said it was in you to make something of yourself.
+Even if your parents could not afford to send you
+to college, I know—absolutely know—you will make
+your mark.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, yes,” he said, rather piqued that she had
+not let him finish. She stood above him now, looking
+down.</p>
+
+<p>“Good-night, Benway. I suppose you will come
+to the offices on Monday?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I’ll see you then, Ethel, every day,” he said
+wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Good-night,” she repeated and went quickly
+within. Once inside the screen door she watched his
+shadowy figure down the path. “‘No influence’?”
+she murmured. “He does not suspect how I fairly
+had to beg Mr. Barton to give him a chance! Poor
+Benway! Poor, poor boy!”</p>
+
+<p>The girl went on to her bedroom. She stood a
+moment in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>“Frank Barton going—leaving—” she gasped. “Oh,
+why can’t he see? Why can’t he see?” she added,
+moaning.</p>
+
+<p>Then she began her preparations for bed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>Benway Chase crossed the road and entered the
+field that divided his own home from the end of Burnaby
+Street. This was a surburban locality. There
+was the fine smell of new-mown hay in his nostrils.
+Half way across the field he stumbled upon a cock
+of hay that had been thrown up for the night, and
+he fell upon it, rolling upon his back luxuriously and
+gazing back.</p>
+
+<p>There was a light in a certain window of the Clayton
+Cottage. He had watched it many a night, for
+he knew that it was the window of Ethel’s room.
+Above the rooftree hung a brilliant star. He had
+watched that, too, often and again. And when the
+light in Ethel’s room was snuffed out he fixed his
+eyes on the star and dreamed.</p>
+
+<p>It was only a boy’s dream at best. It was a foolish
+dream, perhaps. But Benway Chase often
+dreamed it.</p>
+
+<p>He was fully a year older than Ethel Clayton;
+but sometimes she made him feel very much younger
+than she. Dreamer by nature, he; and she one of
+those practical souls that chafe in the bodies of
+women. At least, they chafe where women’s growth
+is hampered. But Ethel was numbered of the emancipated.
+She was a business woman. Moreover,
+she was a successful business woman.</p>
+
+<p>As she had said, no girl in Mailsburg in all probability
+earned a larger wage than she did. She had a
+grasp upon the details of the business of the Hapwood-Diller<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>
+Company that fitted her without question
+for a position as important as that of Jim Mayberry
+for instance. Indeed, she was better informed
+and more capable than even Frank Barton realized.</p>
+
+<p>The manager merely found her surprisingly helpful
+on occasion. He respected her; he admired her good
+business sense displayed at these times. Ethel Clayton
+did not wish to be admired by the manager for
+any such reason.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps hers, too, was a dream of a star.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER VI<br>
+
+<small>TWO GOOD-BYES</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">After</span> the porter, who dusted and removed the
+waste paper, Mabel Skinner was the first of the office
+force to arrive at the Hapwood-Diller Company the
+next morning.</p>
+
+<p>Her startled face was preternaturally grave on this
+occasion. Before she even removed her hat and the
+tight little jacket she wore, the girl went to the mail
+basket on Ethel Clayton’s desk, dumped the outgoing
+letters on its flat surface, and ran through them
+quickly, scrutinizing each address. She did this
+twice and then puzzlement, as well as gravity, showed
+in her sharp features. She stacked the letters slowly
+again in the basket, deep in thought.</p>
+
+<p>Then she went to the letter files. She found under
+the B heading a quantity of correspondence relating
+to the Bogata Company of Norville. But there was
+nothing of recent date. It seemed no letter had been
+written the day before by the Hapwood-Diller Company
+to the Bogata people.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” the girl sighed, “I know Boots is an awful
+liar. But this time he fooled me. Guess I’ll keep
+my nose out of what don’t concern me. But that
+Boots!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>And that evening she gave the recreant Boots a
+most decisive thrashing out behind the barn. For
+any older Skinner that could not trounce a younger
+Skinner, male or female, was not worthy of the clan.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel’s appearance at her desk when the rest of
+the office force arrived caused much comment.</p>
+
+<p>“Life is short and time is fleeting,” said Sydney,
+the bookkeeper. “We are warned of the Great
+Change to come. Little Skinner is here on time and
+at work.”</p>
+
+<p>“That happens three days before you die, Syd,”
+responded Mabel sepulchrally, and made no further
+explanation, not even to Ethel.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel went about her work with some feeling of
+depression. Barton had said nothing directly to her
+about going away. Indeed, he was not likely to take
+Ethel Clayton into his confidence in private matters.
+Yet she understood now, from several things he had
+been doing of late, that he had it in mind to absent
+himself from the offices.</p>
+
+<p>Jim Mayberry was in conference with the general
+manager on more than one occasion during the next
+few days. Ethel could only be thankful that the
+superintendent seemed to have too much on his
+mind to bother her. He did not even mention her
+refusal to ride with him in his car. But the girl
+thought more than once of the possibility of Mayberry’s
+becoming objectionable when Barton was
+gone and he, the superintendent, had charge of affairs.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>On Monday Benway Chase came into the offices.
+Ethel had paved the way for his reception by
+her associates, and Benway was made to feel
+welcome at once. Only Mayberry seemed surprised
+to see him.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, say!” drawled the superintendent, “what
+does Barton expect to make of <i>you</i>?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m after your job, Mr. Mayberry,” responded
+Benway, smiling into the rather sneering face of the
+older man. “You don’t mind, do you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not if you can cop it,” said the other. “But it
+takes a two-fisted man to handle some of the huskies
+we’ve got in the shops. Don’t forget that.”</p>
+
+<p>The intimation was brutal, but the boy with the
+withered arm only paled a little about the lips.</p>
+
+<p>“You know,” he said coolly, “we left-handed chaps
+have all the luck. Ask any ball fan.”</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry laughed shortly and passed on. Ethel
+was particularly kind to Benway for the rest of that
+day, and Mabel Skinner, who also had heard the
+superintendent, stuck out her tongue at his retreating
+figure.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s such a nasty thing!” she whispered to Ethel.
+“I wish his old flivver would try to climb a telegraph
+pole with him—or go into the ditch!”</p>
+
+<p>For Skinner was a strong partisan of Ethel’s.
+Her friends were Skinner’s friends and her enemies
+Skinner’s particular foes. Besides, the younger girl<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>
+had at once taken a fancy to Benway Chase. In
+looks alone the young fellow had the advantage of
+any man Mabel Skinner had ever seen before—not
+barring the general manager, whom she worshipped
+as a kind of god.</p>
+
+<p>A smile from Benway Chase would turn almost
+any girl’s head. He had the darlingest curls! His
+complexion was finer and clearer than any girl’s
+Skinner knew. There were shades of brown and
+red in his cheeks that reminded her of a ripe russet
+apple.</p>
+
+<p>“My!” she whispered to herself, her china-blue eyes
+staring from her head more staringly than usual,
+“wouldn’t I just like to put my two hands into
+his hair and pull it—ever so gently? And his eyes
+are just as lovely as our setter-pup’s. Oh, my!
+And of course he’s set his heart on Ethel!”</p>
+
+<p>She was not jealous of Ethel. Skinner was much
+too modest to feel such an emotion for one whom
+she so much admired. She considered Benway Chase
+as far above her as the moon and stars. She thought
+them beautiful in much the same way as she admired
+Benway.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle of that week Ethel was called into
+the manager’s office at an unusual hour—not long
+before closing time. He usually dictated his letters
+in the morning. But she carried her notebook and
+pencil when she answered the summons.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>“No letters, Miss Clayton,” Barton said, smiling
+and wheeling sideways in his chair to face her. “Sit
+down. This is a business conference——”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Mr. Mayberry——”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve talked to Jim,” said Barton quickly. “I’ve
+been hammering things into him this fortnight, off
+and on. He has finally got to the point where he
+admits he may be able to swing things here for a bit
+while I run away.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel flashed him a glance that he could not help
+but note. He raised an admonishing hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t think I am running away from duty, Miss
+Clayton. I believe we are in such shape now—the
+Hapwood-Diller Company, I mean—that the business
+will run smoothly under the guidance of Mr.
+Mayberry—and you. I am banking a good deal on
+you, Miss Clayton,” his kindly smile again lighting
+up his face.</p>
+
+<p>“On me, Mr. Barton?” she hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“You are such a perfectly capable person, Miss
+Clayton,” he said. “I believe you have a better
+grasp on details here than almost anybody else. Of
+course, Mr. Mayberry and I ought to know fully
+as much as you do; but the other day you proved
+that we did not,” and he laughed. “That Bogata
+matter, you remember. We had overlooked the
+very point which we should have remembered. You
+did not overlook it. Therefore——You see?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>“That is exactly what I mean. Jim is all right.
+He has a grasp of the mechanical part of the business.
+But you must run the office end, more or
+less——”</p>
+
+<p>“But, Mr. Barton! you are not going to remain
+away for long, are you?” she interposed.</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot say, Miss Clayton,” he returned gravely.
+“We none of us know what this war may amount to.
+I only know that I can be of some help if the war
+continues; and with my experience in the Guard I
+should be preparing to give my country all the help
+in my power if I am called on. I am leaving for the
+training camp at Lake Quehasset this evening.”</p>
+
+<p>She could not suppress a murmur, and the pallor
+of her cheek was marked, but he noticed neither.</p>
+
+<p>“The exemption board allowed my claim of business
+need. But I am promised to the service if the
+business here can get along without me. The time
+has now come to try it,” and he laughed a little
+whimsically. “You know, a dead man is seldom
+missed, no matter how important his place in life
+seems to be. After a little somebody is found to
+fill his shoes. I fancy it will not be so hard, Miss
+Clayton, to fill mine.</p>
+
+<p>“I am depending on Mr. Mayberry and you, Miss
+Clayton, to keep the stockholders of the company
+satisfied that I can be spared. We have some months’
+training in camp in any case. I have felt the call
+from ‘over there’ for a long time. I own frankly,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>
+he added, his voice vibrant with emotion, “that had
+I been free, I should not have waited for our Government
+to declare war before getting into the scrimmage.</p>
+
+<p>“But never mind that! I was held here. You
+know something of the circumstances we faced two
+years ago when I took hold. Now we seem to have
+got out of the mire. We’re standing on firm ground.
+With ordinary care everything should go smoothly
+with the Hapwood-Diller Company. Can I depend
+on you to do your part, Miss Clayton?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, Mr. Barton! I will! I will!” cried the girl
+with clasped hands, but looking away from him.</p>
+
+<p>“Fine! Help Mr. Mayberry all you can. He’s rather
+brusk, perhaps, but he knows the business. Still——</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve one favor to ask of you, Miss Clayton. It is
+important, and it is particular. I want you to write
+to me.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him then. But there was nothing
+in his serious face to warrant the slight flush that
+came into her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>“I’d like to have you write me about once a week.
+Consult nobody as to what you write, but just detail
+as briefly as you please matters as they occur—business
+matters and whatever you may think will give
+me a correct impression of the situation of affairs
+in the factory and the office.</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t the least idea,” he added, once again
+smiling, “that things will not run along all right.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>
+But I shall be anxious—nervous, if you will. Mayberry
+will write, of course. But you will look on
+things with quite different eyes from the way he will
+look at them. In the first place, you are a woman
+and you have a different mental slant upon every
+occurrence from that of a man, it seems to me. I
+am sure anything you may have to report will be
+illuminating.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Barton.”</p>
+
+<p>“Will you do it, Miss Clayton?”</p>
+
+<p>“Am I to understand I am to render a weekly report
+and keep the matter secret from everybody—even
+from Mr. Mayberry?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am exacting no spy-duty from you!” he said
+hastily. “That is not my meaning.”</p>
+
+<p>“I understand you perfectly, I think,” Ethel said
+gently. “You undoubtedly will be anxious.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I want the truth—the exact truth, Miss
+Clayton,” Barton went on.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I understand that too,” she replied.</p>
+
+<p>They arose at the same moment and Frank Barton
+put out his hand. “You will be of great help to me,
+I am sure, Miss Clayton,” he said, her hand lost for
+a moment in the embrace of his larger palm. “You
+have been of sure and practical assistance to me on
+many occasions. I know you will be of equal aid
+to Mayberry. Now, good-bye, Miss Clayton. I
+hope I shall not add much to your burdens.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>“Oh, Mr. Barton! I am glad to do anything within
+reason. I feel that it is but a small thing I do compared
+with what you must face.”</p>
+
+<p>At that he flushed suddenly, and like a boy. “Oh
+that!” he murmured. “My duty has held me here.
+Now duty calls me elsewhere. Duty is our master,
+Miss Clayton. Good-bye.”</p>
+
+<p>“And—I hope you—will return to us safely,” she
+said, her eyes filling with tears.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Miss Clayton. I hope to come back
+all right. I believe I shall,” he said cheerfully, and
+sat down immediately to sort some papers upon his
+desk. He did not look again in her direction as she
+went out of the private office.</p>
+
+<p>He heard the raucous note of an automobile horn
+a little later. He stacked the documents together
+and stuck them in their proper pigeonhole. He was
+leaving his desk open for Jim Mayberry to use if he
+wished.</p>
+
+<p>Stepping quickly to the window Barton saw the
+Fuller car stopping at the curb. Helen was driving,
+and was alone. He took down his hat and dust-coat
+and passed rapidly through the office. But at the
+outer door he stopped a moment and looked back.
+He faced the entire office force from that position.</p>
+
+<p>“Be good children till I return—all of you,” he
+said, laughing. “I am banking heavy on you, Sydney.
+Good-bye, all. I want to hear good reports
+of you while I am away.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>Mayberry was to meet him later and go to the train
+with him. But Helen Fuller had come to take him
+for a spin and for a little talk on this, his last day in
+town. Somehow, he had not been invited to dinner
+as she suggested. Was it because Grandon Fuller
+after all considered the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company of less importance to his
+schemes, now that he was going away?</p>
+
+<p>“Dear <i>me</i>, Mr. Barton,” sighed Helen, dexterously
+turning the car, “my conscience <i>condemns</i> me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why so?”</p>
+
+<p>“I fear something I may have said is sending you
+off like this—so <i>suddenly</i>—and to train for the army.
+Dear me! suppose you should be killed or wounded?”</p>
+
+<p>“Scarcely likely in the training camp,” he returned,
+happy in the concern the girl seemed to show.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, but <i>afterward</i>! For I know you will go over
+there, Mr. Barton. I feel it! And if anything <i>I</i>
+have said——”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure,” he told her quietly, “that you have
+said nothing to me or to any of your gentlemen
+acquaintances regarding our duty in this trying time
+that was not perfectly justified, Miss Fuller.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, do you <i>think</i> so?” she cried. “Do you <i>know</i>,
+Mr. Barton, I am greatly tempted to go to France
+<i>myself</i>. Some girls I know have already gone. You
+know, really, it puts one on the <i>qui vive</i> to hear so
+much about it—and—and all that,” she added rather
+vaguely.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>He was so much in earnest himself, he felt so
+strongly the exaltation of his decision, that he did
+not notice the futility of her speech. And then Helen
+Fuller was strikingly, if a little flamboyantly, pretty.
+He nodded with pursed lips.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a job we all have to decide for ourselves. I
+can imagine how you feel, Miss Fuller. As for myself,
+I’ve got to be in it!”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s too bad,” she drawled, “that you couldn’t
+influence Morry Copley to go with you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Mr. Copley now will have to decide for
+himself, won’t he?”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed. “It seems he has allowed Mrs. Copley
+to decide for him,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Somehow their conversation did not take that personal
+tinge which Helen desired. To tell the truth,
+a girl cannot give her escort just the right feeling of
+intimacy when both her eyes and her hands are engaged
+in guiding a motor-car. Helen finally dropped
+Barton at his lodgings in time for dinner, and their
+good-bye was much more casual than she had intended
+it should be.</p>
+
+<p>“But I shall go over to the camp to see you,” she
+promised, as she wheeled away from the curb. “Best
+of luck!”</p>
+
+<p>The man stood bareheaded till the girl had turned
+the corner. But that night when he closed his
+eyes, in his Pullman berth, it was the face of another
+girl, with brown eyes tear-filled, that rose to his
+vision and dissolved only when he sank to sleep.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER VII<br>
+
+<small>LEADING UP TO A CLIMAX</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">For</span> Ethel Clayton the days that immediately followed
+the departure of the manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company were merely busy days. Positively
+nothing happened. The particular work that came
+to her was not different from that which had been
+her portion for some months; only in her oversight
+of things in general (and that oversight secretive) was
+she differently engaged.</p>
+
+<p>She took her book and pencil into the private office
+each morning at the usual hour and took dictation
+from Jim Mayberry.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry was not the clear-headed, forceful
+thinker that Barton was. But his letters were brief
+and to the point nevertheless; he was not a numbskull.
+Nor did he lack a grasp of business details
+quite necessary to the carrying on of the affairs of
+the big concern. He worked faithfully, seemed to
+neglect nothing; and though he did not admit it,
+Ethel felt sure he was thankful to her when she
+smoothed the crudeness of his English, or brought
+out more clearly the points he desired to make in
+his correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>To her satisfaction he did not at first show those
+amorous proclivities which had so annoyed her in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>
+the past. His thoughts seemed to be centered on
+the business of trying to fill both Barton’s and his
+own jobs. Or was it that Jim Mayberry had something
+on his mind other than the business affairs of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company to trouble him?</p>
+
+<p>The office force, of course, buzzed at first because
+of the departure of Mr. Barton. But every individual
+was on his best behavior. They had all liked
+the general manager; and, perhaps, they had visions
+of his returning suddenly and taking them to task
+for sins of both omission and commission.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry left the people in the outer office strictly
+and entirely alone; even Sydney came to Ethel at
+times for advice, or to report some slight matter
+which needed to be “put up to the boss.” It had
+been so before Barton went away, although the girl
+had not then remarked it. She was still “the buffer”
+between the small annoyances of the office and the
+man at the head of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>Grandon Fuller came in one day and had a somewhat
+extended conference with the manager <i>pro tem</i>.
+Ethel noted that the holder of so large a block of the
+company’s stock seemed to be very friendly with
+Mayberry, whereas when Mr. Macon Hammerly
+came in, as was his wont, he always timed his calls
+so as to miss Mayberry. The shrewd old grain dealer
+was frank to say that he did not like the present head
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>“Jim always looked to me like a well-fed fox,”
+grumbled Hammerly to Ethel. “I always wonder
+who’s pullet he’s just swallowed.”</p>
+
+<p>Although Mayberry did not greatly disturb Ethel’s
+quiet pool of existence, Benway Chase seemed to have
+been an agitating pebble flung into it. Her old
+friend took hold of his duties with all the energy
+and keenness of perception that she knew he would
+display, once he was given a chance. Sydney and
+the rest of the office force liked him immensely.</p>
+
+<p>On her own part, however, Ethel found him trying.
+He was promptly at her gate every morning
+to accompany her to work; and at night he escorted
+her home. It had been like that when they went
+to school together. But Ethel felt altogether different
+about it now. She did not like to be made conspicuous
+or to be appropriated in such a fashion.
+And when Benway undertook to go to lunch with
+her, she put her foot down firmly.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, she could not hurt his feelings. Because of
+his affliction she had been all her life striving to be
+particularly kind to Benway. From her earliest
+remembrance, when she had felt spasms of pity and
+sympathy for her little playmate and had impulsively
+run to him to pat his cheek and say, “Poor, poor
+Bennie!” to this very chance she had begged for him
+with the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company,
+Ethel Clayton had mothered the boy. Naturally<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>
+and quite unconsciously he took advantage of her
+kindness.</p>
+
+<p>She shrank from having the rest of the office force
+suspect any tender relation between herself and the
+boy. “Boy” was of course the term in which she
+thought of him. And when he undertook to time his
+absence from the office so as to accompany her to the
+restaurant which she usually patronized, she had to
+put a stop to that. She quietly inaugurated a system
+of “taking turn about” for lunch hour which pretty
+well put it out of Benway’s power to leave at the
+same time she did.</p>
+
+<p>Likewise, she went farther away, to the Orleans
+Tea Room, instead of to the place at which it was
+the custom of most of the Hapwood-Diller office
+force to have their midday meal. The tea room was
+a more expensive place and was largely patronized by
+“up town” folk; and it was because of this change
+in her habits that Ethel chanced to learn, not two
+weeks after the manager’s departure for the training
+camp, something that she thought really did not
+concern her, but which interested her immensely,
+as it was connected with Frank Barton.</p>
+
+<p>She saw one noon a gaily, though beautifully,
+dressed and unmistakable figure entering the tea
+room ahead of her—that of Helen Fuller. Her escort
+was Morrison Copley—one of those men whose names
+made Ethel’s lips involuntarily curl. And yet, as far<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>
+as Ethel Clayton knew, there was nothing bad about
+Morry Copley.</p>
+
+<p>She considered it a misfortune that the only empty
+table should be next the one occupied by those two
+from what Macon Hammerly called “the swagger
+part of town.” Miss Fuller looked the employee
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company over with a cold
+disdain which might have hurt cruelly a supersensitive
+soul. Ethel’s was too well balanced a nature to be
+disturbed by the ill breeding of the other girl.</p>
+
+<p>“You boys are going to be <i>terribly</i> put to it for
+styles this fall,” Helen was drawling, her elbows on
+the table and her hands cupped to hold her pretty
+chin. Somebody had told her that the pose became
+her. “Everything offered for masculine wear will
+have a military cut.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see why we’re to be put to it,” returned
+Morry, gazing at the girl before him with doglike
+devotion. “Belted things always did look well on
+me, you know, Nell. I’m slim waisted.”</p>
+
+<p>“Slim in every way, Morry,” the girl said laughing.
+“Morrison Copley, S. S. quite fits you. Slim slacker.
+My! <i>I’d</i> be ashamed if <i>I</i> were a man——”</p>
+
+<p>“Plenty of fellows are going. Those that like
+army life and—and all that,” complained Morry.
+“I don’t see why you should hound me, all the time,
+Nell. And mothaw really would make an awful
+row if I said I wanted to go.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you even <i>said</i> so, Morry?” she scoffed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>“Say, aren’t you satisfied?” demanded the young
+man with more energy than usual. “You say you
+made Frank Barton go to camp. How many scalps
+do you want to hang in your wigwam?”</p>
+
+<p>“Your scalp, as you call it, would look pretty good
+to me,” she laughed. “I want to send all the fellows
+I can. Bradley’s half promised. He was in the
+Guard for two years, but got out because he was too
+lazy to drill, I suppose,” Miss Fuller said.</p>
+
+<p>“Pooh, they’re only stalling,” grumbled Morry.
+“You know just about how far Brad will get at that
+training camp. And Barton’s only going for a show.
+They’ll never get to France, any of them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why don’t <i>you</i> try it, then? If there’s no danger,
+that should suit <i>you</i>, Morry!”</p>
+
+<p>“I tell you what!” exclaimed the young man indignantly
+and forgetting his drawl, “if I go into this
+thing I’ll go the whole figure, don’t forget that! If
+other fellows go to France I shall go. I won’t hunt
+me a soft job here where I can wear a uniform and
+never smell powder.”</p>
+
+<p>Helen Fuller looked at him and thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder, Morry, if you really <i>would</i>,” she finally
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel could not help hearing this. Indeed, the
+heedlessness with which the two conversed on their
+private affairs in public made it imperative that all
+within earshot should know what they were talking
+about.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>Slight as was Ethel’s interest in the two, and in
+their affairs, one point did not escape her. It could
+not fail to impress the girl’s mind and linger in her
+thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>Had Frank Barton gone to the training camp because
+of the bite of Helen Fuller’s tart tongue? Miss
+Fuller was taking much commendation for inspiring
+the manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company with
+patriotism. Was Barton’s brand of patriotism of
+that character? How much influence did the girl
+really have over him?</p>
+
+<p>These questions could not be stilled in Ethel’s
+mind. She reverted to them time and again. Helen’s
+claim that her influence drove her young men friends
+to patriotic service seemed to be believed by other
+people. Somebody told Ethel on Sunday at church
+that Charlie Bradley and young Copley had both
+gone to the officers’ camp.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, it’s more of a lark than anything else
+for most of those who go,” said the person who told
+Ethel. “Fancy Morry Copley trying to give orders
+in that squeaky voice of his!”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel’s letters to Barton were strictly business,
+without being coldly formal. She allowed them to
+sound a note of cool friendliness in the beginning and
+at the close but nothing deeper. An expression of
+hope for his good health was as warm a phrase as
+entered into them. His polite, brief acknowledgments,
+addressed to her home, showed that he considered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>
+their correspondence nothing more than a
+business arrangement.</p>
+
+<p>She realized that she was by no means the only
+person in Mailsburg interested in the absent ones
+in camp and barracks. The town was beginning to
+wake up to the exigencies of the war. The ministers
+prayed for the boys on Sunday, and every social and
+charitable organization in Mailsburg began to talk
+of work for the soldiers at least, whether or not any
+of them really did much at first.</p>
+
+<p>At this time in her heart Ethel hated the idea of
+war so desperately that the many activities connected
+with the draft and the going away and the war itself
+seemed to her mind both futile and non-beneficial.
+If those young men really got as far as France, and
+into the trenches, they would be killed. They were
+merely “cannon fodder” in that case. And if they
+did not go—if the war ended, as some people said it
+would, before many of them got over there—then all
+this talk and planning was so much wasted breath
+and time and money.</p>
+
+<p>It was a fact that, at this particular time, Ethel
+Clayton had little interest save in her work and in
+the affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company—particularly
+in Frank Barton’s absence from his post
+and how it might affect the concern for which they
+both worked.</p>
+
+<p>Just as she felt that there were plenty of other men
+to go to the war and that Barton might be spared,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>
+so she felt that there were already too many women,
+both foolish and wise, giving their time and thought
+to war work. The local papers began to be full of
+news of the various activities of the several organizations
+in this connection. In addition some of those
+desirous of notoriety were getting a heap of free advertising.</p>
+
+<p>“I declare!” said Mrs. Clayton, busily clicking her
+knitting needles, “the <i>Clarion</i> toots a loud note almost
+every day for that girl of Mehitable Fuller’s.
+She’s first into one thing and then another—like a
+spoiled kitten. And all this folderol about the war
+seems to give her more of a chance than ever to show
+off.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder,” said Ethel, thoughtfully, “if we ought
+not to think more about it than we do, Mother? I
+sit here with my hands idle in the evening. I wonder
+if all this knitting I see going on hasn’t a basis of
+honest endeavor in it, after all?”</p>
+
+<p>“Pshaw!” said her mother.</p>
+
+<p>“I know it looks silly. Looks like a fad. One of
+the girls in the office brings her knitting bag. She’s
+at the switchboard and has more or less idle time.
+Instead of reading silly love stories as she used, she
+knits.”</p>
+
+<p>“What does she knit?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, she says she hopes it will turn out to be a
+sweater when she gets it done; and if it is good enough<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>
+she will give it to the Red Cross,” and Ethel laughed
+gently.</p>
+
+<p>“Humph!” mumbled Mrs. Clayton. “I wonder if
+she has a good pattern?”</p>
+
+<p>Thus grew the stirrings of general interest in Mailsburg
+in the war and in our preparations for entering
+it. Ethel realized amid her manifold office duties
+that the undercurrent of their life was becoming more
+strongly patriotic.</p>
+
+<p>It was learned that at least one Mailsburg boy was
+already at the front. It was true he had disappeared
+from town some years before, and under a cloud; but
+his mother had always known where he was.</p>
+
+<p>Now the <i>Clarion</i> came out with a full page on Sunday,
+“Mailsburg’s First Boy in France.” Sergeant
+Willy O’Rourke of General Pershing’s forces had sent
+his mother several postal cards from “over there.”
+Here they were reproduced, with a tintype of the
+sergeant and a sympathetic wash-drawing of Mrs.
+O’Rourke—a little old woman living down by the
+docks who said to the reporter:</p>
+
+<p>“Shure an’ th’ O’Rourkes was all fighters. ’Tis no
+wonder Willy got over there first. Them Garmans’ll
+have their own troubles now.”</p>
+
+<p>And yet there was something in it that made the
+reader choke up. Macon Hammerly had his brusk
+comment to make:</p>
+
+<p>“It may be that Bill O’Rourke left town just ahead
+of the constable. I remember well the red-headed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>
+gossoon. He wasn’t a mite better than this Boots
+Skinner is now. But, by the holy poker! he’s a <i>man</i>.
+There’s nothing soft and sissified about Bill. If
+Bill dies for his country he’ll be doing something better
+than a whole lot of these trifling, dawdling fellows
+will ever arrive at.”</p>
+
+<p>If he dies for his country! That might be Frank
+Barton’s fate if he went “over there.” The thought
+more than once brought Ethel Clayton upright in
+bed at night. It sometimes wet her pillow with tears.
+Yet, if it was the truth that Helen Fuller’s influence
+had urged Barton away to the wars, Ethel was jealous
+of the other girl for it, and she realized the fact with
+shame.</p>
+
+<p>Affairs in the Hapwood-Diller Company offices
+continued much as usual for several weeks. The
+directors seemed to think Jim Mayberry a satisfactory
+substitute manager. Having the details of the business
+at her finger tips as she had, Ethel was quite
+sure that the superintendent was attending to his
+additional duties in an exemplary manner.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel checked up much of the work of the other
+members of the office staff, especially in the correspondence
+end of the business, and it was in looking
+over a schedule of stock to be ordered she made a
+discovery that puzzled her.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry had now, of course, the ordering of supplies
+of all kinds; but there was little in the manufacturing
+line that Ethel Clayton did not know about.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>
+Here were certain grades of stock which she had no
+idea were called for by any order then on the factory’s
+books already contracted for.</p>
+
+<p>Had Mr. Barton been doing the ordering she would
+have felt quite free to hold up the schedule until she
+could speak to him about it. But she feared Mayberry
+might be touchy in any such matter. He was
+jealous of his rights, and she hesitated to give him a
+chance to say she was overstepping the borders of
+her field of employment.</p>
+
+<p>She went to the files and spent some time in checking
+off the grades of supplies called for by the orders
+the factory already had contracted for. And suddenly—it
+was quite a startling discovery—she came upon
+the schedule of the Bogata Company’s order which
+she had every reason to believe had been declined.</p>
+
+<p>She had a clear remembrance of the letter she had
+written, Mr. Barton’s approval of it, even the reason
+for the order being refused by the Hapwood-Diller
+Manufacturing Company. This reason was connected
+with the very purchase of these special supplies
+she had noted in the puzzling schedule in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>It could not be overlooked. There was something
+wrong in what she had discovered.</p>
+
+<p>Fearing she knew not what—a mistake on her own
+part, perhaps—she waited until she could find Mayberry
+disengaged. When she knew he was in the
+manager’s office and alone, Ethel ventured to knock
+upon the door.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER VIII<br>
+
+<small>A PUZZLING SITUATION</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mayberry</span> glanced up swiftly as she entered the
+office at his response. He was rolling a cigarette
+which he finished and lighted, vouchsafing her
+merely a casual nod. Very different treatment, this,
+from Frank Barton’s unfailing courtesy.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s on the docket, Ethel?” Mayberry asked,
+eyeing her through the smoke that circled from his
+lips. “Anything wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not at all sure that there is anything wrong,
+Mr. Mayberry,” she replied, ignoring the chair he
+twisted about for her to occupy, and standing at
+the end of the desk. “I have found something which
+puzzles me so much that I thought it best to have you
+ratify the order before it is sent.”</p>
+
+<p>“What order?”</p>
+
+<p>She placed before him the schedule for supplies
+which he had given to one of the other girls to copy.
+“These are the items that puzzle me,” she said, pointing
+to several which, in summing up, amounted to
+several thousand dollars.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” he said, his gaze direct and not at all reassuring.</p>
+
+<p>But Ethel Clayton was not to be easily put down.
+“I was not aware,” she said quietly, “that any of our<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>
+contracts now under way called for goods of that
+grade.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” he said again and in the same sneering
+tone.</p>
+
+<p>“So I investigated,” Ethel pursued, apparently
+unshaken, “and I found this.” She placed before
+him the papers relating to the Bogata order which
+she felt so sure Mr. Barton had refused to consider.</p>
+
+<p>“Huh? Why shouldn’t you find it?” Mayberry
+asked in apparent surprise. Yet he flushed slightly,
+too.</p>
+
+<p>“I have every reason to suppose that order refused.
+You know it, too. You remember that Mr. Barton
+asked me to write a letter to that end. I did so.”</p>
+
+<p>“I remember there was something said about it,”
+Mayberry reflected. “But I heard nothing more
+about it. Frank said nothing further to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“No. Because it was settled, Mr. Mayberry,” the
+girl said more confidently. “We cannot fill this
+order.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed? Are you sure about that?” he asked,
+eyeing her with perfect composure now.</p>
+
+<p>“Why shouldn’t I be sure?” she retorted.</p>
+
+<p>“Well—I don’t know,” he drawled. “If you wrote
+a letter refusing this order, Frank saw it, of course?”</p>
+
+<p>“He O.K.’d it,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“And it was sent?”</p>
+
+<p>“So I presume.”</p>
+
+<p>“It looks to me as though Frank must have changed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>
+his mind,” the superintendent said with a sly little
+smile. “He said nothing more to me about it. He
+would, it seems to me, if the order was finally refused.
+Having once discussed the matter with me, seems
+to me he would have done that.”</p>
+
+<p>“But he thought you understood,” cried the girl,
+both puzzled and alarmed. “You know he said the
+Bogata Company’s credit was involved. It was not
+whether the order should be accepted or not that
+was under discussion, Mr. Mayberry. It was merely
+how the refusal should be couched—in what terms.
+Don’t you remember?”</p>
+
+<p>“I admit you seem to have a clearer remembrance
+of the circumstances than I,” said Mayberry. “But
+it looks to me as though Frank had changed his mind
+about it without referring to the matter again to
+either of us. He probably found out that his fears
+regarding the Bogata Company’s credit were unfounded.
+Otherwise how would I have found the
+order on file? We have got to get right to work on
+it, too. That is why I am ordering these particular
+supplies.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, Mr. Mayberry!” she gasped, “I am quite
+sure a mistake has been made. Mr. Barton never
+intended this order to be filled.”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know?”</p>
+
+<p>“The letter I wrote——”</p>
+
+<p>“Pooh! I suppose Frank was trying you out—seeing
+what you could do in an emergency,” and the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>
+superintendent laughed. “He never sent your letter.
+The Bogata people are old customers. It would not
+do to offend them.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is just it, Mr. Mayberry,” she cried. “It
+was a serious matter. I feel sure—Why! I put the
+letter in the mail myself.”</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry sat up straighter in his chair and his
+gaze became more intent. He dropped the butt of
+his cigarette in the ash tray that was never on the
+desk when the general manager was there.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean to tell me,” he asked, “that you posted
+that letter after Barton signed it?”</p>
+
+<p>“No. It was after John made his last trip to the
+post-office. When Mr. Barton had signed the letter
+I sealed it in the envelope, affixed the stamp, and
+placed it in the letter basket on my desk with other
+late mail.”</p>
+
+<p>“Humph! Did those letters go out that evening?”
+Mayberry asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No. John always takes them when he goes to
+early post—before I arrive at my desk.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then Frank could have regained the letter without
+your knowing it.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, Mr. Mayberry! surely he would have said
+something.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you sure? He was not in the habit of taking
+you—or even me—into his confidence in most matters,
+was he?” and Mayberry looked at the girl keenly.
+“Where’s the carbon copy of that letter?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>“I’ll get it,” she said, turning swiftly to the door.</p>
+
+<p>“And I say, Ethel!” he said. “Bring the Bogata
+Company’s letter as well, will you?”</p>
+
+<p>She resented his familiar way of speaking; but
+never had she been able to break Jim Mayberry of
+calling her by her given name. And he had, after
+all, known her when she was still a child. She was
+gone some minutes from the private office—long
+enough for Mayberry to smoke a second cigarette.
+She appeared with the proper drawer of the file cabinet
+and her countenance had fallen. She had run
+hastily through the Bogata correspondence. Here
+was the letter which had accompanied the order
+from the Bogata Company. The copy of the answer
+she had written at Frank Barton’s behest, and which
+he had approved, was not to be found.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not understand it, Mr. Mayberry,” the girl
+declared in a worried tone.</p>
+
+<p>“Pshaw! easily enough understood,” the superintendent
+rejoined. “He probably conferred with somebody
+who knew the Bogata people are as safe as a
+stone church. So he withdrew the letter from your
+mail basket after you went home.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Mayberry!”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure.” Mayberry laughed. “You’ve stirred up
+a mare’s nest. Don’t worry.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I can’t accept your assertion as at all plausible,”
+the girl said earnestly. “He surely would
+have spoken to me about it. The next day——”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>“His mind was full of army stuff. He did not know
+half the time what he was doing here for a week before
+he went.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel knew that was not at all true. But she was
+not here to quarrel with the superintendent. However,
+she said:</p>
+
+<p>“I remember clearly that Mr. Barton did not remain
+here later than I did that evening, Mr. Mayberry.
+I saw him on the street after I left the factory
+by the side gate.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh!” Mayberry’s cheeks suddenly burned again
+and his eyes glittered as he gazed loweringly upon
+her. “You seem to remember mighty well what happened.
+I remember that evening, too, come to think
+of it. I was waiting out in front for you in my car.
+You stood me up.”</p>
+
+<p>Scorn leaped suddenly into the girl’s eyes. “I do
+not understand you, Mr. Mayberry,” she said tartly.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! you don’t, hey?”</p>
+
+<p>“We are not discussing personalities,” she said,
+dropping her gaze and ignoring his ugly look. “This
+is business. I fear there has been a serious mistake
+made.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing of the kind, that <i>I</i> can see,” Mayberry
+rejoined. “Barton changed his mind. Why should
+you bother <i>your</i> head about it further?”</p>
+
+<p>His sneer bit like acid in a fresh wound; but Ethel
+checked her temper.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not mean to interfere in the slightest with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>
+your work, Mr. Mayberry. Mr. Barton brought me
+into the affair himself. I feel that all is not right.
+Let us communicate with Mr. Barton before this
+order for stock is sent. It may save the Hapwood-Diller
+Company several thousand dollars.”</p>
+
+<p>“It won’t save us a cent.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve got it all figured out. You see, I’ve had this
+on my mind a long time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, that may be true, still—”</p>
+
+<p>“It won’t save us a cent, Ethel,” the superintendent
+drawled again, having recovered his own temper.
+“This Bogata order’s got to be filled. It will do no
+good to delay the purchase of supplies. It’s Friday
+now. If we wrote to-night we could not expect an
+answer before Tuesday or Wednesday from Barton.
+And I can point out to you why even he cannot change
+matters now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?” she demanded sharply.</p>
+
+<p>He picked up the letter which had accompanied
+the schedule of the order from the Bogata Company
+of Norville. If he smiled Ethel did not see it, for she
+was eagerly scanning the paragraph to which Mayberry’s
+finger pointed:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Prices and terms as agreed upon in our last two
+orders. If we hear nothing to the contrary within
+ten days shall consider the order and terms accepted
+and will look for delivery of first quota of goods within
+ninety days.”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>“Actually,” drawled Mayberry, “this order was
+accepted by us more than a month ago. It was evident
+that Barton did not send the letter you wrote,
+and removed the copy of it from the file. The schedule
+came to me in the usual way. There is nothing
+more to be said about it, Ethel. I believe that Frank
+himself said something about The Hapwood-Diller
+Company never reneging on a job. It would be a
+bad precedent to do so when he is absent from his
+post.”</p>
+
+<p>He said it so that the girl actually winced. To
+think of Jim Mayberry pointing out to her the ethics
+of the matter!</p>
+
+<p>“The fact is,” he pursued, coolly, “I have got to
+get a hustle on to make the first delivery within the
+specified time. I have already arranged to increase
+the output of Shop Number Two in order to do this.
+We shall run four or five hours overtime five days a
+week, beginning Monday. We’re crowded with work
+as it is; and this Bogata order is a big one.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel listened to him in silence. She realized that
+it was useless to say anything more. Her heart
+pounded in her ears, but her countenance remained
+pale. She felt the approach of disaster when she
+turned away from his desk with the letter file-drawer
+in her arms.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t trouble your head about it, Ethel,” he
+called after her. “You take everything too blamed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>
+seriously—just as I told you before. It won’t get
+you anywhere——”</p>
+
+<p>But she had closed the door between them. Had
+she turned to answer she realized very clearly that
+she would have said something for which she might
+be sorry afterward.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER IX<br>
+
+<small>THE DUTY DEVOLVES</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ethel Clayton</span> felt the assurance of wrongdoing
+on the part of the superintendent of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company. Yet she could not tell why nor
+how.</p>
+
+<p>That the concern had been drawn into the Bogata
+affair by some trick was without question. Mayberry’s
+look and words alone would have proved that
+to her satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>She had a clear and particular remembrance of
+the circumstances surrounding the receipt of the
+order from the Norville company, Barton’s decision
+to refuse to fill it, his reason for so doing, and all.
+The way in which she had shown the general manager
+how to refuse the order without giving offence could
+not easily be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Barton had said that the running of the factory
+on double time, or crowding the shops with extra
+workmen, meant a distinct loss of profit rather than
+a gain for the Hapwood-Diller Company. The factory
+was not arranged for such increase of output.
+More than one concern has been ruined by such false
+prosperity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>Here Mayberry was planning to put into execution
+exactly the plan vetoed by the absent general manager’s
+good sense. Yet, knowing how the contracts
+for their product stood, Ethel believed that such increase
+in working hours would be necessary if the
+Bogata order was to be filled on time.</p>
+
+<p>There was a catch there. She felt it. She was
+convinced that the superintendent had more knowledge
+of the subject than he was willing to admit.</p>
+
+<p>It all puzzled the girl. Why should Jim Mayberry
+be so determined to balk Mr. Barton’s will? And
+in this particular instance?</p>
+
+<p>As far as she had been able to see the superintendent
+had done nothing in his conduct of the factory’s
+affairs which would have either displeased Barton or
+was contrary to the latter’s methods. Why was the
+superintendent so determined to favor the Bogata
+Company?</p>
+
+<p>She remembered clearly that the general manager
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company was positive of the
+irresponsibility of the Bogata people. There was no
+gainsaying that. She was positive he had not changed
+his mind, involving the destruction of the letter she
+had written and Barton had signed, the removal of
+the carbon copy from the files, and the filing of the
+schedule of the Bogata Company’s order.</p>
+
+<p>No! she would not believe Frank Barton had done
+all that and said nothing about it to either Mayberry<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>
+or herself. Yet, if the manager had not done it,
+<i>who had</i>?</p>
+
+<p>Who would be benefited by such a favor to the
+Bogata people? It might be actually disastrous to
+the Hapwood-Diller Company—and that thought
+frightened Ethel.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know what to do. That is, what to
+do to halt the line of conduct Mayberry had plainly
+determined to follow. She figured up the schedule
+for factory stock again. Between four and five thousand
+dollars for special grade raw material, useless
+except to the Bogata people, was included in it.</p>
+
+<p>Knowing well how carefully Barton had watched
+the outlay for stock for months—how narrow the
+line was between profit and loss in every department
+indeed—Ethel quite realized that this single purchase
+would make a very bad showing upon the books of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company, unless the Bogata
+order was finished and was paid for.</p>
+
+<p>If that contract was filled and was not paid for, a
+ruinous deficit in supplies and labor cost would face
+the factory at the end of the fiscal year. And in
+addition the general manager had assured her he
+figured overtime work or an increase of help in the
+shops as positively detrimental.</p>
+
+<p>This order for stock and factory supplies was supposed
+to go out at once. It was nearly time for John
+Murphy to make his last trip for the day to the post-office.
+There was absolutely nothing to hold the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>
+order back, and Mayberry, she knew, would take
+offence if the matter was retarded.</p>
+
+<p>It was true that five days must be wasted if Mr.
+Barton was communicated with by mail. And that
+joker in the Bogata Company’s letter seemed to be a
+barrier to any attempt to get out of fulfilling the
+contract at this late day. Would it do any good to
+disturb Barton about the matter at all now?</p>
+
+<p>If she could only see him! If she could discuss the
+point with him—tell him of her suspicions and fears.
+At least, some of her suspicions. Ethel scarcely admitted
+to herself that she positively identified the
+person guilty of juggling the letters and the Bogata
+order sheets. Merely she felt certain that Frank
+Barton knew nothing about it.</p>
+
+<p>He should know. He must know before more
+harm was done.</p>
+
+<p>The order for supplies was before her. She reached
+across the desk for the envelope in which to enclose
+it and her stiff linen cuff caught in the filigree work
+of the inkstand the office staff had presented to her.</p>
+
+<p>It tottered. In another moment the catastrophe
+had occurred—a deluge of blue fluid rolled across the
+desk and the papers on it.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel sprang up to escape the drip from the top
+of the desk.</p>
+
+<p>“Man overboard!” ejaculated Benway Chase,
+starting for the lavatory for a towel with which to
+mop up the ink.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>Little Skinner held the blotted order sheets gingerly
+by their corners, to drip over Ethel’s wastebasket.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee!” she said, hoarsely, “all them papers!”</p>
+
+<p>“Those papers, Mabel,” admonished Ethel involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p>For Mabel Skinner was like an actor afflicted with
+stammering in his natural character; when once in
+his part and on the stage he never stutters. So
+Mabel, nimble of wit, who was studying stenography
+at a night school, hoping to work up to a better position
+with the Hapwood-Diller Company, could take
+the small amount of dictation that fell to her reasonably
+well and could transcribe it into fair English:
+but she usually talked like a street gamin.</p>
+
+<p>“They will have to be recopied, Mabel,” Ethel
+said quietly. “Josephine has her hands full; will you
+do it for me?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” agreed Miss Skinner, shifting her gum.
+Then she cocked an apprehensive eye at the clock.
+“I—I got a date to-night, Miss Clayton; but I can
+go without supper——”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t wish you to finish it to-night, Mabel. Let
+me have it completed sometime to-morrow forenoon.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m on,” said the girl, and bore away the streaked
+and blotted papers to her machine.</p>
+
+<p>John was called in to clean up the muss, and after
+a while Ethel could resume her seat. Nothing of
+importance upon her desk had been spoiled by the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>
+ink but the supply order sheets, and fortunately
+Jim Mayberry did not come out of the private office
+until it was all over. It was Ethel’s business to see
+that the order was promptly sent. It was her fault
+that it was delayed.</p>
+
+<p>Never before in her business experience had Ethel
+Clayton deliberately done such a thing. She was
+acting upon her own initiative and in a way that
+scarcely measured up to her ethical standards. Yet
+how should she meet guile save with guile?</p>
+
+<p>On the way home that evening Benway was bewailing
+the fact that Mr. Barton was not in the office
+so that he could see how well he, Benway, was fitting
+into the routine of the office.</p>
+
+<p>“Even Mr. Mayberry admits I can do the work all
+right,” the boy said hopefully. “He said as much
+yesterday. But I don’t like the fellow, Ethel. I
+don’t like the way he looks at you.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘A cat may look at a king’, Bennie,” she said
+lightly.</p>
+
+<p>“But no dog like him should look at a queen,
+Ethel,” Benway Chase retorted with a smile and
+a little sigh. “They are all tarred with the same
+brush, Ethel. Every man that comes into the offices
+wants to hang over your desk and palaver.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hush, Ben! How you talk!” she exclaimed, a little
+flushed and annoyed. “I declare I’ll have you sent
+out into the shipping room to work if you watch me
+like that.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>“Pooh!” he laughed. “Is the honey at fault because
+the bees buzz around it?”</p>
+
+<p>“How poetical!” she scoffed. Yet she was secretly
+displeased. She did not like to think that the men
+she met in business hours gave her more attention
+than matters relating to business called for. The
+one man whose admiration she would have been
+glad to secure had never, while he was with them,
+shown any particular interest in her.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel was too introspective for her own comfort.</p>
+
+<p>She wondered all the evening if the thought that
+was budding in her mind was germinated by her desire
+to see Frank Barton. Was it for business reasons
+that she determined on her course? Or did she have
+another and more personal desire to speak with the
+general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company,
+face to face?</p>
+
+<p>However, she considered that the duty had devolved
+upon her to take a drastic course. The order
+for new stock for the factory could be delayed only
+forty-eight hours through the accident to the first
+draft of the schedule. Instead of its reaching its
+destination on Saturday, Ethel saw to it that it was
+not mailed until after noon on Saturday. Therefore
+it would not be received by the dealer to whom it was
+assigned until Monday. Meantime——</p>
+
+<p>She astonished her mother on Saturday evening by
+announcing that she proposed to go to Quehasset on
+the early train Sunday morning. By this time the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>
+railroad was running excursion trains to the officers’
+training camp on Saturdays and Sundays. Quehasset
+was becoming a popular week-end resort.</p>
+
+<p>“Not alone!” gasped Mrs. Clayton. “Never!”</p>
+
+<p>“I’d like to know why not?” her daughter asked,
+rather tartly. “I’ve been to Boston alone, and that’s
+farther.”</p>
+
+<p>“But it won’t look right—all those men, Ethel.
+You know some of them, too. There’s Mr. Barton!”</p>
+
+<p>“I expect to see him,” declared the girl composedly.</p>
+
+<p>“It—it doesn’t look right,” objected her mother
+more faintly.</p>
+
+<p>“I’d like to know why not? I should hope I was
+old enough to go about without a chaperon, or——”</p>
+
+<p>“Let Benway go with you,” urged Mrs. Clayton,
+hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>But that was exactly what Ethel did not wish to do.
+Indeed, if possible, she should have liked to keep the
+knowledge of her trip to Quehasset from her mother.
+She hurried away early in the morning, before most
+of the folk at that end of Burnaby Street were astir,
+and boarded the train which stopped but a minute
+at the Mailsburg Station at eight o’clock.</p>
+
+<p>She noted, as she passed along the High Street to
+the station, that more than the usual number of automobiles
+were abroad and most of them headed for
+the Creek Road which was the first lap of the driving
+highway to the training camp.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>The Fuller car was one of these she saw. Helen
+was driving and her mother and father sat in the
+tonneau. Her cousins gave Ethel Clayton not the
+slightest notice, but she could not help being somewhat
+disturbed by the thought that they were likewise
+bound for the training camp and that they
+would see her there with Frank Barton. At any rate,
+she hoped to arrive at the army camp first.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER X<br>
+
+<small>LOVE AND BUSINESS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Frank Barton</span> had been thinking but little of love
+and not much about business. His entire time from
+the bugle-blown:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="first">“I can’t get ’em up!</div>
+<div class="verse">I can’t get ’em up!</div>
+<div class="verse">I can’t get ’em up in the mor-r-rning!”</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>to tattoo at night was filled with thoughts military.
+In addition to the regular course in tactics, he was
+studying special branches, such as the science of gunfire,
+range finding, signaling, and the like, for he wished
+to be assigned to the Field Artillery branch of the
+service.</p>
+
+<p>His former experience in the Guard was of vast
+assistance to him, yet he found that even the brief
+campaign on the Mexican Border had greatly changed
+the drill and the training of both officers and men.
+New methods were being adopted all the time. He
+soon realized that a military formula based upon the
+experience gained by our War Department in the
+Civil War, and upon which basis the National Guard
+had been drilled in the past, was almost as old-fashioned
+as the rules for conducting a Field of Honor
+in the time of the Crusaders.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>The Great War has flung into the discard most
+established measures of warfare. Fancy, so many
+years after the tilting with spears, a fighting man
+wearing an iron pot on his head!</p>
+
+<p>Barton had little time for the social life of the
+camp nor interest in it. He was only interested in
+those men about him who were as sturdily in earnest
+as himself in learning and getting ahead. Some
+were getting into “this army thing,” as they called it,
+as a profession; some out of pure patriotism, even if
+they did not talk about it. In either case those who
+were not thoroughly in earnest did not last long.</p>
+
+<p>He was mildly surprised when Morry Copley and
+his friend Bradley arrived in camp—the former arrayed
+in a uniform cut by a fashionable tailor, Bradley
+slouching behind in his heavy way, and with a
+scowl. Why either of these fellows had come it was
+hard for Barton to understand.</p>
+
+<p>Reports from the factory encouraged Barton to
+believe that he might safely continue his training.
+Mayberry had driven over in his car once to see him
+and they had talked things over. Business seemed
+running on well-oiled gears. There had been nothing
+in Ethel Clayton’s brief letters to make him apprehensive.
+The factory and its affairs seemed far afield
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>The camp interests were so manifold that when
+even a short furlough was due him Barton did not go
+home to Mailsburg. Instead he went to New York<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>
+to confer with certain high officers of the Department
+of the East who he felt sure would bear him in
+mind if chance arose for an early assignment to the
+Front. If business matters remained as they seemed
+to be, he was determined to get “over there” as soon
+as possible. Pershing’s hundred thousand were on
+the scene; the engineers had marched through London
+and had arrived in France; now it was the Rainbow
+Division that was talked of as being almost
+ready to sail, and Frank Barton was eager to be
+assigned to duty with them.</p>
+
+<p>“Rest your mind easy, Barton,” Grandon Fuller
+assured him the first time he came over to Camp
+Quehasset with his daughter. “We stockholders
+appreciate all that you have done; the Board is more
+than pleased with your work. But you have trained
+a good assistant in Mayberry. He’ll do very well.”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe he will,” Frank Barton said heartily.
+He would rather, however, have had a reassuring
+word from Macon Hammerly upon this point. But
+Hammerly neither wrote to him nor came near the
+camp.</p>
+
+<p>Helen was full of her own plans, although she did
+not forget to show some interest in Barton’s affairs.
+She had become an active member of the Red Cross
+forces. Being amply able to pay her own expenses,
+and with health and freedom, she had the more easily
+secured permission to join the very next quota of
+Red Cross workers sailing from “an Atlantic seaport”—that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>
+in about six weeks. Her mother was
+to go with her and establish herself in Paris.</p>
+
+<p>“Really,” Barton thought, “it is brave of Helen,
+and wonderfully unselfish as well.” That the girl
+made a display of everything she did was not seen
+by his blinded eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Barton was expecting the Fullers over again in their
+car on this Sunday, and had accordingly polished his
+accoutrements and made his quarters presentable.
+He shared these last with three other men; but they
+were all off for the day, and he himself was duty-free
+until taps.</p>
+
+<p>So he was not at all surprised when he heard the
+rustle of crisp skirts and a light tapping on his open
+door. Before he could reply to the summons he heard
+Morry Copley’s high voice advising:</p>
+
+<p>“He must be there, Miss—ah—Really, I’m suah
+he’s not gone out of the street this morning. I’ll
+look around for him if I may?”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you,” said a very cool voice. Morry was
+evidently not being encouraged. And it was not
+Helen Fuller who spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Clayton!”</p>
+
+<p>Barton appeared with hand outstretched and a
+real welcome in his eyes. But Copley was not to be
+easily ignored.</p>
+
+<p>“I say, Barton,” he drawled, “I showed her over
+here from the camp entrance, knowing you were at
+home, don’t you know.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span>“Thanks, old fellow,” Barton said. “This is Miss
+Clayton’s first visit to the camp.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I knew that,” Copley agreed, boldly eyeing
+the girl and showing no desire to relieve them of his
+presence. One of Barton’s Western brother-rookies
+would have accused the young exquisite of “horning
+in.” “I’m suah if I’d ever seen—er—the lady here
+before I should have remembered her.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel was plainly ruffled; but Frank Barton burst
+into hearty laughter. He considered Morry quite
+harmless.</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Clayton, I am sure, will allow me to introduce
+you, Copley,” he said cordially, and then
+smiled at Ethel. “Mr. Copley comes from our town,
+Miss Clayton.”</p>
+
+<p>“Bah Jove! I saw you before in a tea room once,”
+Morry burst out. “Suah I did! I was with Miss
+Fuller, you know. I wonder I did not recognize
+you before. You weren’t dressed the same, you
+know.”</p>
+
+<p>“If it was on a working day I am sure she was not
+dressed the same,” Barton said, looking frankly his
+approval of Ethel’s Sunday appearance.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, as she stood bandying light conversation
+with the two men, Ethel Clayton was secretly hurt.
+Would Frank Barton have so casually introduced
+Helen Fuller, for instance, to any companion-in-arms
+who had forced himself upon them as Morry
+Copley had? The thought stung her pride.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span>Really Copley seemed more than a little interested
+in her. He rattled on boldly, and there was not a
+chance for her to divert his attention that she might
+speak seriously and personally to the man she had
+come to see.</p>
+
+<p>The latter was unfeignedly glad to see her; but he
+seemed to consider her visit merely a social one.
+And that did not altogether please Ethel Clayton.
+She had come strictly on business. At least, so she
+had been assuring herself. Yet all Barton seemed
+to care about the factory and its affairs was expressed
+in a perfunctory:</p>
+
+<p>“Everything going on all right at the works, Miss
+Clayton? Though of course that is a superfluous
+question with such capable people as you and Mayberry
+on the job. I knew it would be that way.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mr. Barton, you must not assume too
+much,” she hesitated, unable to approach clearly
+before Morry Copley the matter that so troubled her
+and that had brought her to Quehasset.</p>
+
+<p>“I say,” drawled the latter, “you don’t mean to
+say Miss Clayton is one of these really industrious
+people—like yourself, Barton? Is she, too, a prop
+and support of the Hapwood-Diller Company?”</p>
+
+<p>“She most certainly is!” smiled the general manager.
+“But I believe she brings me nothing but
+good news. How about it, Miss Clayton?”</p>
+
+<p>It was her chance—perhaps the best one she would
+have to get him away from this chattering, inconsequential<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span>
+Morry Copley. “I have one puzzle to consult
+you about, Mr. Barton,” she began, when, with
+a whir and clash of released gears, a big touring car
+whirled around the corner and halted almost directly
+before the shack.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Jimminy Christmas, see who’s here!” ejaculated
+Copley.</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Fuller! Welcome to our city!” joined in
+Barton, and hastily descended to the car.</p>
+
+<p>Morry Copley remained lounging beside Ethel,
+greeting the girl in the car with merely the semaphore
+sign of good comradeship. Helen was alone,
+having dropped her mother and father at the Staff
+Headquarters. As had been said, Grandon Fuller
+had once borne the title of “Colonel” and played the
+fact now for all it was worth.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t let me keep you, Mr. Copley,” Ethel said
+significantly.</p>
+
+<p>“No chance!” drawled Morry. “Miss Fuller has
+no use for me when Barton’s around. They talk
+nothing but war and nursing. Gee! I hate to think
+of folks getting all mussed up so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, for pity’s sake, did you ever join this
+camp?” Ethel asked, in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>“I rawther fancied myself in the uniform, don’t
+you know,” he declared, but with twinkling eyes.
+“I say!” he added, “they’re not going for a spin without
+us?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span>Ethel leaped to her feet and anger flashed from her
+eyes, although Morry did not see it. Miss Fuller
+was evidently trying to urge Barton to get into the
+car. She had punched her starter button and the
+car began to throb.</p>
+
+<p>But Barton turned back to the two on the plank
+porch of the shack. “Do come, Miss Clayton,” he
+urged. “I promised I would take luncheon with
+Miss Fuller to-day at the Mannerly Arms, and she
+has not much time. It will be quite all right, I am
+sure. If you have something to say to me——”</p>
+
+<p>“My errand is strictly business, Mr. Barton,” Ethel
+replied shortly.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure Miss Fuller will wait——”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, bring her along, <i>do</i>!” exclaimed Helen from
+the car and with impatience. “Come on, Morry.
+I know <i>you</i> are dying to take her. You’ll excuse me
+for not getting out and begging you myself, Miss
+Clayton,” she added carelessly. “I suppose it is
+sometimes necessary to mix business with pleasure.
+If you really <i>have</i> to consult Mr. Barton——”</p>
+
+<p>“I will not detain him long, Miss Fuller,” Ethel
+said, pale but firm. “I have neither time nor inclination
+to go to lunch with you—and Mr. Copley.
+She dismissed the latter with a curt nod, and he strolled
+down to the car, grumbling, while Barton, a little
+vexed, took his place beside the girl who he acknowledged
+was so capable an assistant in the factory office.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>“I am sorry to interfere in any way with your
+affairs, Mr. Barton,” Ethel hastened to say. “Had
+I not believed the occasion serious——”</p>
+
+<p>“Serious for me?” he asked quickly, eyeing her
+curiously.</p>
+
+<p>“Serious to the Hapwood-Diller Company,” she
+replied stiffly. “Of course I have a double interest
+in the welfare of the company. My mother’s income
+depends upon its profits.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know that your mother holds some of our stock,”
+he said patiently.</p>
+
+<p>“Therefore my particular interest may perhaps be
+excused.” Ethel could not help saying this, if it was
+a mite catty. She could not feel in any angelic mood
+at the moment. “In addition, Mr. Barton, you
+asked me to keep a watchful eye on things in the
+office.”</p>
+
+<p>“I did,” he said with gentleness.</p>
+
+<p>She flushed more deeply. It was plain that he
+was quite aware she had been hurt by Miss Fuller’s
+manner; and that but increased Ethel’s vexation.
+As though it really mattered what Helen Fuller did
+or said!</p>
+
+<p>He noted the flush and looked disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you not feeling well?” he asked kindly.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, I am perfectly well,” she returned quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“You look as if you might have a headache, or
+something like that.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>“It wouldn’t matter if I did have,” she replied,
+not knowing what else to say.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, it would. I don’t want you to work if
+you are not well.”</p>
+
+<p>“Here is the situation,” and she rushed on to state
+the matter of the Bogata order with her usual brisk
+explicitness.</p>
+
+<p>Barton now gave close attention, and his changing
+expression betrayed the value he put upon her story.
+At its conclusion he demanded:</p>
+
+<p>“But what’s the matter with Jim? He must know
+that we all agreed those people were not to be trusted.”</p>
+
+<p>“He did not agree to that, it is evident,” Ethel said
+dryly. “In fact, his remembrance seems to be hazy
+regarding the whole matter. Seems to think you
+would have spoken to him about it again had you
+not intended to accept the order.”</p>
+
+<p>Barton made an impatient gesture. “That’s Jim
+all over. Stubborn as a mule!” he exclaimed. “And
+yet that very stubbornness makes him of value in
+many circumstances.”</p>
+
+<p>It was plain he had no real suspicion of Mayberry.
+And Ethel was determined not to put forward just
+at that time her own belief in the superintendent’s
+treachery.</p>
+
+<p>“And what have you done about the matter before
+coming to me?” Barton asked with a curiosity
+that Ethel thought she understood. He was not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>
+at all sure whether she had the initiative to balk this
+thing which she believed was all wrong.</p>
+
+<p>“Something wholly feminine, I fear,” she replied,
+and told him of the accident to the order addressed
+to the factory supply people.</p>
+
+<p>Barton laughed shortly. Evidently he was not
+displeased.</p>
+
+<p>“I can see you have a very good reason for not
+quarreling with Mayberry. Quite right. Things
+would by no means go so smoothly if you two could
+not work together. You retarded the order so that
+you could see me to-day?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what do you expect me to do?”</p>
+
+<p>“If that Bogata order is not to be filled, you can
+telegraph the stock people to hold our order for correction.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right! You certainly have a grasp of the situation,
+as you always have, Miss Clayton,” he said
+promptly. “I will dictate that telegram. You
+can send it from the railroad station as you go back,
+if you will.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mr. Barton,” she responded, whipping out
+her book and pencil.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled covertly. She was all business now.</p>
+
+<p>“Your suspicions are quite correct,” Barton observed.
+“Somebody tampered with that letter and
+order. I did not see the letter or the carbon copy of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span>
+it after signing the former. The Bogata people must
+have a friend in our offices. Have you any idea——”</p>
+
+<p>“No!” she exclaimed almost harshly.</p>
+
+<p>If Barton could not see Jim Mayberry’s hand in
+the affair surely it was not her place to tell him. He
+seemed to ignore utterly the possibility of the superintendent’s
+being the person guilty.</p>
+
+<p>“The Bogata people cannot hold us to any such
+terms,” Barton went on to say. “We did not accept
+the order. Business—especially as important a
+matter as this—is not so easily done. Their letter
+was a good deal of a bluff as it stood. I should have
+felt justified in throwing it and the schedule of their
+order into my wastebasket. Jim Mayberry is green
+yet. I’ll have you take word to him——”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Barton! if you do that you will make my
+position terribly difficult,” she cried.</p>
+
+<p>“True,” he admitted. “I suppose that is so. I
+will communicate with Hammerly. He knows all
+about the affairs of the Bogata people. We will let
+him break the news to Jim,” and he laughed a little.</p>
+
+<p>“You see, Miss Clayton, we must expect such
+mistakes as this to creep in when a fellow is like Jim.
+He has all the knowledge of the business that is necessary,
+I am sure. But he is likely to make mistakes—at
+first.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at the manager in wonder. Was it
+possible that his old-time interest in Jim Mayberry,
+and the fact that they had been friends for so long,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>
+utterly blinded Barton to the superintendent’s faults?</p>
+
+<p>“You have a quicker mind than Jim,” went on
+Barton, easily, “and you haven’t his stubbornness.
+I really would not dare accept my lieutenancy and
+ask for active duty if Jim had not you at his elbow.
+I know you will not let him make any serious error.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, Mr. Barton!” she cried, under her breath,
+“you do not expect really to leave the country so
+quickly?”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps. I have offered my services. I have
+got my commission. Really, my work here has
+been somewhat like a review of former studies. And
+officers are needed——”</p>
+
+<p>“Not <i>over there</i>?” Ethel gasped.</p>
+
+<p>He did not chance to see her face as he replied
+quietly: “So we expect. We are not supposed to
+talk of it. Certain movements of the War Department
+are kept secret. But whatever happens to
+me I am confident you and Jim will conduct the
+affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company successfully.
+Why, this proves it! What he overlooks you will
+not miss. Now, will you take a letter to Mr. Hammerly?”</p>
+
+<p>She held her pencil poised in readiness and nodded.
+Surely at that moment she could not have uttered a
+word. He began to dictate, and the letter was
+couched in such terms as to show his belief that Jim
+Mayberry was perfectly innocent of all guile in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>
+matter. However, when it was concluded, Barton
+said reflectively:</p>
+
+<p>“But there is a traitor in the offices, Miss Clayton.
+That we know it must put you and Mayberry both
+on guard. I depend on you particularly to watch for
+the guilty party.”</p>
+
+<p>“And suppose I find him?” she demanded quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“If you cannot reach me,” Barton gravely told her,
+“then—then go to Mr. Hammerly. Cross-grained
+as he is, he is perfectly honest. Besides,” he added,
+“next to Mr. Grandon Fuller, he owns more stock
+in the Hapwood-Diller Company than anybody else.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XI<br>
+
+<small>WAR IS DECLARED</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">For pity’s</span> sake, Mr. Barton, <i>do</i> come away,”
+Helen Fuller cried at last. “We’ll <i>never</i> have time
+for luncheon.”</p>
+
+<p>“Beg pardon. Business must be attended to before
+we can take our pleasure, always,” and Frank
+Barton laughed.</p>
+
+<p>But Ethel’s countenance was quite composed again.
+She did not even glance in Miss Fuller’s direction as
+she closed the notebook and put it and the pencil into
+her bag.</p>
+
+<p>“Good-day, Miss Clayton,” Barton said, taking
+her hand. “I will not thank you for coming to me
+on this business, for I know your deep interest in
+the company’s affairs. That was merely your duty.
+But to see you again has been a pleasure. Even
+should I be assigned to foreign duty suddenly, I
+shall hope to see all my Mailsburg friends at least
+once before I sail. I send my regards to everybody
+in the office.”</p>
+
+<p>It was like that. He did not consider her call a
+personal one. Yet that was not altogether Frank
+Barton’s fault, for Ethel had made it plain that she
+had come only on business. The young manager<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company was no more dense
+than any other man.</p>
+
+<p>Helen’s voice, with a tartness in it that could not
+be mistaken, reached them again:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Do</i> hurry, Mr. Barton! I presume if you were
+fighting in the trenches it would all have to stop
+while you gave your attention to some factory matter.”</p>
+
+<p>He laughed and ran down the steps to the car.
+The engine of the latter began to roar again.</p>
+
+<p>“Coming, Morry?” Helen asked, as the wheels began
+to revolve.</p>
+
+<p>“Two’s company, three’s a gang,” he drawled,
+waving his hand. “Farewell. I am going to show
+Miss Clayton around the camp.”</p>
+
+<p>This he insisted on doing. After the brusk departure
+of Barton in the car Ethel was too proud to
+show any chagrin. Besides, Morry Copley was evidently
+desirous of pleasing her. She noted that he
+had assumed quite a military carriage and concluded
+that his few weeks in camp had done him a world of
+good.</p>
+
+<p>“Won’t you let me call on you when I come back
+to Mailsburg on furlough, Miss Clayton?” he asked,
+when he had showed her everything of general interest
+in the camp.</p>
+
+<p>“Most certainly not!” Ethel exclaimed bluntly.
+“You know very well Mrs. Copley would be horrified
+if you visited a working girl, Mr. Copley.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>“Aw, fiddle!” returned Morry in disgust, “I’m not
+half as much tied to her apron strings as you think.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps you should be,” Ethel laughed. “What
+will she say if you really are ordered to France?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mothaw really thinks this is all play. She has
+no idea we’ll really go. At least, not such fellows
+as Bradley and me.”</p>
+
+<p>“And—will you?” Ethel wickedly observed.</p>
+
+<p>“If I get my commission I’ll be off before she knows
+it—poor dear lady,” he declared. “Don’t you people
+in Mailsburg fret. There are some men in this camp
+besides Frank Barton.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel sent the telegram holding up the stock order
+as instructed by Barton, and when she arrived home
+late in the afternoon she transcribed her notes of the
+letter to Mr. Macon Hammerly and sent it to that
+gentleman by special messenger. The latter appeared
+in the offices of the Hapwood-Diller Company early
+on Monday morning. For once he seemed to wish
+to catch Jim Mayberry at his desk.</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s see,” scowled Macon Hammerly, eyeing
+the superintendent blackly, “have you managed to
+find a hat in town big enough for you, Jim?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have ’em made to order—and stretchable,”
+grinned the younger man, never at a loss for an answer
+when he met Hammerly, whom he just as cordially
+disliked as Hammerly disliked him. “What’s biting
+you now?”</p>
+
+<p>“A suspicion that you have a swelled head is eating<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>
+on me,” frankly announced the old grain dealer,
+his bushy eyebrows meeting again. “I’ve come to
+give you a mite of advice.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks!” returned Mayberry, encouragingly.
+“I’ve been expecting this visit ever since Frank went
+away. It must have pained you to keep away so
+long.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not exactly,” returned Hammerly. “It’s only
+surprised me that I haven’t had to come around before.
+I told Barton I’d keep an eye on you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks again,” growled Mayberry, and this time
+he did not look so pleasant. Hammerly was quite
+unmoved.</p>
+
+<p>“Here’s the trouble,” he said, quietly watching the
+superintendent. “Barton wrote me to look up the
+Bogata people again.”</p>
+
+<p>The hit was palpable. Mayberry jumped in his
+chair. He lifted his face to stare at the old man in
+open surprise.</p>
+
+<p>“Seems there’s an order kicking around the office
+here from them. Barton had his doubts about accepting
+it. Now there <i>is</i> no doubt. You’re not to
+do a stroke of work on those goods.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who says so?” snapped Mayberry. “Who’s in
+charge here, I want to know, Mr. Hammerly?”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>You</i> won’t be,” said the other softly, “if you don’t
+take well meant advice.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why! that order’s been accepted long ago. I’ve<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>
+ordered some of the stock. I’ve planned to begin the
+work this week.”</p>
+
+<p>“Change your plans, Jim Mayberry. Change your
+plans,” said Hammerly in a more threatening voice.
+“You’re not in power here. Barton may come back
+any day and polish you off. And this Bogata business
+is settled—for all time. Don’t make a mistake.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, we can’t——”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re right. You can’t fill the order. Pull in
+your horns. The Bogata Company are going to
+have a New Year’s present of a receivership. And
+I’m hanged if I’ll stand by and see them try to bolster
+up their rotten credit with the credit of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company. They don’t happen to owe this
+firm anything, Jim; but they owe everybody else in
+the world who would give ’em a cent’s worth of credit.
+You kill their order.”</p>
+
+<p>“I tell you it can’t be done,” muttered Mayberry.</p>
+
+<p>“If you don’t Barton will come here and do it himself.
+He’s already wired your supply people to hold
+that order you sent for correction. You’re not going
+to run this factory into debt one penny’s worth
+to aid the Bogata people.”</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry sprang up, his heavy face aflame. “If
+you were a younger man, Mr. Hammerly——”</p>
+
+<p>“Forget my age, Jim. I’ve never seen the day yet
+that I couldn’t handle a chap of your size and shape,”
+and he let his keen eye run over Mayberry’s obese
+figure. “You’re as stubborn as a mule. Perhaps<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>
+that’s all the matter with you. But you’ve got your
+instructions. All you need to do is to follow them.
+Write to the Bogata people and tell them this factory
+can’t fill their order.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see by what right——”</p>
+
+<p>“None at all. I’m butting in,” said Hammerly
+turning to the door. “But you’d better think it
+over.” He went out chuckling, and after a while
+Mayberry cooled down. He knew well enough
+Hammerly’s power on the board. He soon grew calm
+enough to study the thing out.</p>
+
+<p>Barton had called on Hammerly for advice again.
+How had Barton heard of the Bogata matter? Just
+one answer to that question. Ethel Clayton!</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry’s expression when he came to this conclusion
+boded ill for Ethel. He knew just how he
+stood personally with her. Not that he cared more
+for Ethel Clayton in the first place than he did for
+half a dozen other girls. Only it had piqued him
+that she should have been so disdainful of his advances.</p>
+
+<p>Now he had a real reason, he told himself, for considering
+Ethel in the light of an enemy. She had
+thwarted his intention of jamming the Bogata order
+through the factory before Barton became aware of
+what he was doing. The success of the scheme meant
+much in a financial way to the superintendent.</p>
+
+<p>Now he could not do it. It was true that he had
+got his orders from the old grain merchant. Hammerly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span>
+would surely keep his eye on him hereafter—if
+he had not already been doing so.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry knew he had a friend in Grandon Fuller.
+But he did not know yet just how much of a friend
+Mr. Fuller was. Nor why he was friendly with him!
+Mr. Fuller had not yet shown his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Fuller was the heaviest stockholder in the Hapwood-Diller
+Company and was, of course, on the
+board of directors. But it was doubtful if he could
+swing more votes than Macon Hammerly.</p>
+
+<p>Angry as he was, Mayberry felt that it would be
+the part of wisdom to keep from an open break with
+the grain dealer. Besides, Barton had not gone to
+France yet—if he ever did.</p>
+
+<p>A telegram came from the supply house:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“We hold your order as requested subject to correction.”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mayberry sent for Ethel.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you know about this, Ethel?” he demanded,
+glowering at her as she read the telegram.</p>
+
+<p>“Just as much as you do, Mr. Mayberry,” she declared,
+composedly enough.</p>
+
+<p>He thought that over a bit. Then he dictated a
+a letter to the Bogata Company bluntly refusing to
+fill their order and without even explaining or apologizing
+for the seeming delay in answering their letter.
+He had managed to do exactly what Barton had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>
+tried to avoid—giving the Bogata people offence.
+If the miracle happened, and the Bogata people
+“came back,” they would never feel friendly again
+toward the Hapwood-Diller Company.</p>
+
+<p>As for Mayberry and Ethel, war was declared between
+them. There could be no further doubt of it.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XII<br>
+
+<small>THE IMAGE HE TOOK AWAY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Although</span> Frank Barton was still manager of the
+Hapwood-Diller Company, he had turned his salary
+back into the treasury of the concern ever since joining
+the training camp at Lake Quehasset.</p>
+
+<p>It was not long after the flurry regarding the Bogata
+Company order that a suggestion was made in the
+directors meeting of the Hapwood-Diller Company
+that Barton be removed and Mayberry be put in his
+place as manager. The suggestion came from Grandon
+Fuller. Macon Hammerly opposed it.</p>
+
+<p>“I am told that Barton will sail shortly with a contingent
+of our brave boys for the other side,” Mr.
+Fuller declared pompously. “I fancy he has merely
+neglected to resign in the stress of other business.
+Mr. Mayberry has shown his ability and capacity for
+management. I do not see why Brother Hammerly
+should object.”</p>
+
+<p>“Patriotic reasons,” said the opposing member of
+the board dryly. “I object to kicking a fellow out of
+his job because he is going off to fight his country’s
+battles. Let things rest as they are, Fuller.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you mean all through the war?” demanded
+Mr. Fuller, with some heat.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>“Why not? Frank Barton pulled this company
+out of a slough of despond that pretty near swamped
+us. If he comes back alive I, for one, want to see
+him manager again.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what about Mr. Mayberry?”</p>
+
+<p>“How is <i>he</i> hurt?” snorted the old grain merchant.
+“He’s sitting here, tight enough, while another man
+is fighting in his place. The least he can do is to hold
+Barton’s job for him.”</p>
+
+<p>That killed the suggestion for the time being. The
+matter leaked out of the board room, however, and
+Ethel Clayton heard of it. She wondered if, after
+all, the Fullers were such good friends of Frank Barton
+as they seemed to be.</p>
+
+<p>Likewise she began to wonder what would happen
+to her if Jim Mayberry ever got the full power over
+the office force that he had in the factory. He might
+then discharge her on some easily trumped-up pretext.
+The thought was not a pleasant one.</p>
+
+<p>Of late, on several occasions Mayberry had criticized
+her work, especially her management of the
+office staff. He aimed some shafts of his rough wit,
+too, at Benway Chase, although he could find no
+complaint to make in the new clerk’s work.</p>
+
+<p>For Benway really showed a remarkable aptitude
+for his position. He was always energetic. When
+a member of the shipping room force was away for
+a while, Benway took on the duties of checker in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span>
+addition to his usual work, which latter he did not
+in the least neglect.</p>
+
+<p>When Mayberry noticed this he said:</p>
+
+<p>“So you are out to master the whole business, are
+you, Chase? Going to be the wheelhorse, driver and
+spotted dog under the hind axle.”</p>
+
+<p>“I told you, Mr. Mayberry, I was out for your job,”
+Benway said coolly. “Every little bit a fellow learns
+puts him so much farther ahead.”</p>
+
+<p>“Think so, do you?” sneered the superintendent.</p>
+
+<p>But Ethel knew Benway was getting a firm grasp
+on the details of the office work that made him exceedingly
+useful. He very quietly relieved her of some of
+the duties which had a way of falling upon her
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>Barton had been in the habit of depending on her
+bright mind and willingness to a great degree. Mayberry
+deliberately shirked much of the routine work as
+he could. And of course it all fell upon Ethel and
+made her burden the heavier to bear. Sometimes
+she was held at her post until long after the others
+were gone for the day.</p>
+
+<p>Benway Chase would have remained to help or to
+accompany her home on these occasions had she
+allowed him to, and she had fairly to drive Little
+Skinner home. The latter would have done all
+Ethel’s work for her had she been able.</p>
+
+<p>“Take it from me!” the slangy Mabel declared.
+“That Jim Mayberry lets you slave here while he’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>
+playin’ poker down to the Bellevue or runnin’ about
+the country in that flivver of his. I wish’t Mr. Barton
+would come back. He wouldn’t see you abused.
+Miss Clayton—’deed he wouldn’t!”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel had not heard from Barton since her visit
+to the training camp, although she wrote to him
+briefly each week as she had promised. Nothing
+special had arisen in the daily affairs of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company to cause her sufficient worry to
+bring it to Barton’s notice. And with the little
+trials, of course, she had no intention of troubling
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Mailsburg’s first quota of drafted men marched past
+the factory one day to the railway station. The
+streets were lined with silent people for the most part.
+But the buildings were cheerful with bunting and
+flags. It was Ethel who insisted that the factory
+front be decorated in addition to the great silk flag
+which Barton had raised first with his own hands and
+which John raised each morning and took in at night.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry grudgingly shut down the shops for an
+hour that the hands might cheer more than a hundred
+of the drafted men who had left the Hapwood-Diller
+Company to don the army khaki.</p>
+
+<p>Service flags began to appear all over the town
+after that. Mrs. Trevor, Barton’s former landlady,
+hung out one with a single star on it, and Ethel was
+told that the grim old woman kept Barton’s chair
+at the table for him and allowed nobody to sit in it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>Almost every day something happened to remind
+Ethel that the war was coming closer and closer to her.
+Her mother was knitting for the Red Cross. She
+did not say much about this work save to mention
+with a sniff that she hoped she could turn out as
+good work as those snips of girls she saw knitting
+in the cars and on the park benches.</p>
+
+<p>“And I expect to see them take those awful looking
+knitting bags to church with them one of these days,”
+was likewise Mrs. Clayton’s tart comment.</p>
+
+<p>One day Ethel saw Morry Copley in town. It was
+while she was out to lunch and, without seeing her,
+he bustled past so importantly that she could not
+escape the thought that there must be something
+afoot—perhaps some assignment of troops or officers
+that affected Frank Barton as well. Morry wore the
+insignia of a second-lieutenant.</p>
+
+<p>She hurried back to the office with the expectation
+of seeing Barton. Surely he would not come to town
+without looking in upon them! But the afternoon
+dragged by without his appearance. She said nothing
+to her office mates regarding her expectations.</p>
+
+<p>Each time the door opened she started and looked
+up, expecting to see him—tall and handsome in his
+khaki—enter the office. It made her nervous. There
+were mistakes in her work that put her back so she
+had to remain after hours again. When Benway
+wanted to help her she snapped at him and sent that
+surprised young man home “with a flea in his ear.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span>Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Barton had
+been cooling his heels in the Fullers’ reception hall.
+He had sent up his card to Helen and the maid had
+come down to say that the young lady was very busy.
+Would Monsieur wait?</p>
+
+<p>Monsieur would—most assuredly he would! He
+had not seen or heard from Miss Fuller since the Sunday
+on which both she and Ethel Clayton had chanced
+to come to Camp Quehasset. And now, save for a
+conference with Mr. Hammerly, he had sacrificed
+most of his time in Mailsburg to speak confidentially
+to Grandon Fuller’s daughter.</p>
+
+<p>He waited her pleasure with such patience as he
+could master. He had come to think of Helen during
+most of his waking hours. At least if his military
+duties and studies were to the fore, the thought
+of Helen was ever present in the back of his mind.</p>
+
+<p>She was going to France he knew; but he might
+never see her over there. Just now he was feeling
+very keenly the fact that he was assigned to the Front
+and that he might, within a very short period, be in
+desperate danger of death.</p>
+
+<p>A precious hour and more he waited. Occasionally
+he saw a soft-footed serving man or a maid
+pass his lonely alcove. Nobody spoke to him. Finally
+the noise of a car under the porte-cochère awoke
+hollow echoes. Immediately the sound of voices
+came from above. Down the broad staircase tripped
+Helen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span>“Oh, mercy <i>me</i>, Mr. Barton! Are <i>you</i> here? And
+waiting <i>all</i> this time? That stupid maid! I was
+so busy with my dressmaker that I could not possibly
+come. And then—the maid never reminded me.”</p>
+
+<p>She might have delivered him a physical blow in
+the face and he would have felt or shown it no more
+keenly. She was gorgeous in frock and hat, and she
+smiled upon him in her old alluring way. But his
+spirit fell from its heights. A dressmaker had been
+of more importance! She had depended upon her
+maid to remind her that he was waiting to see her!</p>
+
+<p>“I hoped to see you for a few minutes, Miss Helen,”
+he said quietly. “I am going away.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course! So am I!” she cried. “But I must
+be off now to the Northup’s dinner. The car is waiting.
+It’s too late for me to refuse, Mr. Barton.
+And there is a dance afterward that I positively
+<i>must</i> look in at. Dear <i>me</i>! I’ll really be <i>glad</i> to be
+over there and at work in a hospital. This running
+around to dinners and dances and what Morry Copley
+calls ‘tea-fights’, is just killing me.</p>
+
+<p>“Can’t I see you in the morning, Frank?”</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to tell her that in the morning he would
+already be at sea. But that was forbidden.</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid not. I have to go back on the eight-ten.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Not so <i>soon</i>! Really?” There was much lacking
+in her tone—much of warmth that he had expected.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>
+“Well, best of luck! Hope to see you ‘over there,’
+you know. Bye-bye!”</p>
+
+<p>She ran out to the car, turning to wave her hand
+as she got in. And that after he had waited an hour!
+Had Macon Hammerly been right after all? He had
+said:</p>
+
+<p>“The Fullers only want you for what they can get
+out of you. Grandon Fuller was never known yet
+to do anything without a purpose behind it. Look
+how he hung about Israel Diller—was right on the
+spot when the old chap died. You don’t suppose
+Diller made Grandon Fuller rich because he <i>deserved</i>
+riches, do you?”</p>
+
+<p>His wasted hour caused Barton to miss the office
+force at the factory; but he went that way to the station,
+hoping to see Mayberry at least. His mastery
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company’s affairs seemed a
+long way behind him now. Indeed when a man faces
+war the past grows small to him in any case. It is
+what is going to happen to him that completely obsesses
+his thought.</p>
+
+<p>Barton thrust his head in at the office door, having
+opened it softly. A single strong light was ablaze
+over Ethel Clayton’s desk. The remainder of the
+room was in shadow.</p>
+
+<p>The girl had evidently finished the task that had
+kept her so late, for her desk was cleared up and she
+sat back in her chair, dreaming. Her gaze was fixed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>
+on the door of the private office; but Frank Barton
+could not see her face until he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody here but you, Miss Clayton? I am certainly
+glad to see you. All the rest gone?”</p>
+
+<p>She turned her face toward him slowly, appearing
+not to be startled at all by his coming. “They are
+all gone, Mr. Barton,” she said quietly, and reached
+up quickly to turn the shade of the electric lamp so
+that the light no longer fell on her face.</p>
+
+<p>“Mayberry gone, too?” he asked, coming in with
+his hand held out.</p>
+
+<p>“He is out of town, I believe,” Ethel told him, her
+voice unshaken, rising to meet him.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sorry I missed them all,” Barton said, grasping
+her hand for a moment warmly. “You will
+have to give them my regards and best wishes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Will you not stay over night?”</p>
+
+<p>“I fear that will be impossible. I am on my way
+to catch the eight-ten.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are not going away <i>now</i>? Not for <i>good</i>?”</p>
+
+<p>Barton laughed. “I hope to come back safely,” he
+said. “But this is good-bye for some time, Miss
+Clayton——”</p>
+
+<p>He caught her arm and steadied her as she swung
+against the desk. Her eyes closed and he saw suddenly
+that she was very pale.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you faint? You’re working too hard!” he
+cried. “Look here, Miss Clayton, you must take
+better care of yourself. I shouldn’t feel half so safe<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>
+in going away if you were not right here on the job.
+You’ve got to be good to yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>“I—I was a little faint. It’s all right, Mr. Barton,”
+she murmured. “Nothing serious, I assure you.
+I’m not one of the fainting kind, as you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“No indeed!” he cried admiringly. “I bank on
+you and your very good sense, Miss Clayton. You
+are not like other girls. I did not know for a moment
+but that my announcement startled you. I should
+have been flattered!” and he laughed.</p>
+
+<p>She was silent. He could not see her face well, for
+she kept it turned from the lamp. Finally she said:
+“Naturally I am troubled that you should be going—so
+far away. Oh, this war is terrible, Mr. Barton!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. All wars have been terrible. The one that
+touches you nearest seems the most terrible. But
+after all, Miss Clayton, it doesn’t matter much how
+one dies as long as death is inevitable.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is fatalism! Perhaps it is the right soldier
+spirit,” she murmured. Then she turned to face him
+again and her countenance was quietly radiant. “But
+why should we who stop at home add to your burdens?
+We should send you away with a smile.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder!” he exclaimed. “I wonder if we fellows
+ought not to go away with a smile—to furnish those
+we leave behind with courage? Those we leave behind
+must do our work. War is waste, you know,
+when all is said and done. I leave you, Miss Clayton,
+to keep things straight here,” and he smiled<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>
+warmly again as his hand once more sought hers.
+“Write to me,” and he told her how to address him
+through the War Department. “Good-bye!”</p>
+
+<p>He wheeled swiftly and marched to the door. His
+upright carriage and squared shoulders made his
+back look almost strange to her. She stood before
+the desk leaning against it, her hands clinging tightly
+to its edge. Her knuckles were perfectly white from
+the pressure of her hands upon the wood—that grasp
+which actually kept her from falling.</p>
+
+<p>But her face showed none of her terror and weakness.
+He turned at the door to smile and nod to her again.
+The image he took away in his mind was of her perfectly
+composed, smiling face. And again it was the
+memory of Ethel Clayton, not of Helen Fuller, that
+he carried away as the Girl He Left Behind.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XIII<br>
+
+<small>THE AWAKENING</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Frank Barton</span> had gone to the Front. He would
+be where there was battle, murder, and sudden death!
+War had become a horrid, living reality to Ethel
+Clayton.</p>
+
+<p>She heard that Morrison Copley had been in
+town to bid his mother good-bye and had gone away,
+too, bound for the transport. Likewise that Charlie
+Bradley, that hulking fellow who had been so notorious
+about town, supposedly had sailed at the same
+time Barton had gone to France.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel had occasion to pass the Fuller house within
+the week. It was shuttered and empty looking.
+The <i>Clarion</i> had told, in a column and a half, of the
+last reception tendered Helen Fuller and her mother
+before their departure. Grandon Fuller was living
+at the Bellevue and seemed rather relieved than
+otherwise, so people said, that his wife and daughter
+had gone abroad.</p>
+
+<p>But Ethel did not scoff now—she had never done
+so openly—at the idea of flighty Helen Fuller settling
+down to Red Cross work. Secretly she wished that
+she, too, were on the way to France. Suppose Frank
+Barton should be wounded! Some woman would<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>
+attend him in the hospital. It might even fall to
+Helen’s lot. Had Ethel gone to France it might be
+her fate to nurse Barton.</p>
+
+<p>She felt a sudden and bitter distaste for her work
+in the offices of the Hapwood-Diller Company. The
+drab business affairs of every day disgusted her.
+Although she neglected nothing, Ethel had no satisfaction
+in what she did.</p>
+
+<p>The war filled more and more space in the daily
+papers. But there was no news of the Rainbow
+Division, with which it was believed Barton and the
+other young officers from Mailsburg had sailed.
+Everything was so secretly done!</p>
+
+<p>There was the story that sifted back from France
+to the families of some of the soldiers of the unit from
+the West, who thought they were bound for New
+York by train, but who found themselves alighting
+in New Orleans and going aboard the troop ships
+there, to sail for southern France by the way of
+Gibraltar.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that the country was honeycombed by
+German and Austrian spies, and by those whom the
+enemy’s money could buy, was becoming slowly a
+settled conviction, even in Mailsburg. Those of
+German birth and name would in time be ostracised.
+It could not be helped. It was in the nature of
+things.</p>
+
+<p>The man who in war time calls himself too broad-minded
+to hate the enemy is often one who has not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>
+yet awakened to the seriousness of war. The enemy-alien
+in our midst should tremble for his personal
+safety. Otherwise he becomes a menace.</p>
+
+<p>Just off Burnaby Street was a little shop where,
+ever since Ethel was a child, had sat a little old German
+cobbling shoes. He was a marked character
+in this part of the town where the residents were
+mostly of the old, native American stock.</p>
+
+<p>Somebody has said that the trade of tailor breeds
+socialists and pessimists. So being a cobbler used
+to breed philosophers of a kindly sort. Gessler had
+been wont to hand out bits of homely and comfortable
+philosophy with his mended shoes.</p>
+
+<p>The war had changed his attitude toward life, it
+seemed. Until the United States had got into it he
+had talked eagerly with everybody who would listen.</p>
+
+<p>The Kaiser he hated, for he was a “Prussian,
+arrogant and brutal.”</p>
+
+<p>“My father used always to say that there would
+be war if that bloodhound came to the throne!”
+he frequently said. But he likewise was proud of
+his race. “The whole world is fighting them and
+can’t beat them already!” he cried.</p>
+
+<p>Now that his adopted country was arraigned against
+the fatherland, Gessler was very glum and silent.
+He did not have so much work as before; but he sat
+all day on his cobbler’s bench, his hammer in his
+hand, often staring out of the window with empty
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>On her way to work one morning Ethel carried a
+pair of shoes to be mended. But when she reached
+the corner in sight of which the little German’s shop
+stood, she hesitated. How could she approach Gessler
+and speak to him with that pleasant familiarity
+that had been her custom.</p>
+
+<p>She could think of him only now as an enemy.
+Every German was an enemy! His countrymen in
+their terrible undersea craft might sink the transport
+upon which Frank Barton had sailed. The war had
+come home to Ethel Clayton! It was real to her at
+last, as it becomes real to everybody who has a personal
+stake in it.</p>
+
+<p>She took the shoes to another cobbler and went
+on her way to the office.</p>
+
+<p>These days Ethel was almost vexed with Benway
+Chase because he continued to be so enthusiastic
+about his work and interested in it. He never seemed
+to flag in his tasks; and he might really be, as he had
+laughingly said, fitting himself for Jim Mayberry’s
+position.</p>
+
+<p>He spent most of his noon hour talking with the
+foremen of the different shops. He learned much
+about the practical working of the factory system;
+yet he never neglected his own particular tasks.</p>
+
+<p>Mabel Skinner still considered Benway the most
+wonderful young man who had ever crossed her path;
+but she worshiped from afar. She did not dream
+of preening her poor plumage to attract his notice;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span>
+yet when he smiled at her in good comradeship
+Little Skinner was secretly in ecstasies.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee!” she confided to Boots, her errant brother,
+on one occasion, “when Mr. Chase asked me did I
+like flowers, an’ give me some of them late asters from
+his mother’s garden, I almost swallowed my gum!”</p>
+
+<p>“Cracky!” scoffed Boots. “That poor fish? Why,
+he ain’t got but one good wing!”</p>
+
+<p>“An’ he can put over a spitter with that that <i>you</i>
+can’t hit, Smartie,” retorted his sister vigorously.
+“And he’s a gentleman, Mr. Chase is!”</p>
+
+<p>“Cracky!” repeated Boots. “Seems to me, if I
+was a girl I’d fall for a feller that could gimme something
+besides a flower an’ a sweet smile. Like that
+Jim Mayberry. He’s got a flivver and could take
+you ridin’.”</p>
+
+<p>“He only took me once,” said Mabel complacently.
+“And I guess he must have give you a ride in his
+buzz-cart, too, that time, or you wouldn’t have give
+me that dream about Jim and Sam Blaisdell of
+Norville workin’ in cahoots against Mr. Barton.”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh! That warn’t no dream,” grumbled Boots.
+“You think you’re allus so smart, Mab Skinner. I
+heard ’em talkin’ all right ’bout how to do Mr. Barton.
+And it had something to do with the Bogata
+works down to Norville, just as I told you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, that egg never hatched, then,” declared his
+dubious sister.</p>
+
+<p>They might have suspected the incubation of another<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span>
+egg had she known how often Jim Mayberry
+was in consultation with Mr. Grandon Fuller these
+days at the Bellevue, although Mabel Skinner of
+course knew little about the inside affairs of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company. It might have aroused any
+person’s suspicions to mark the superintendent’s intimacy
+with the largest stockholder of the concern.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Fuller had not again suggested the removal of
+Barton and the appointment of Mayberry as manager.
+Indeed, with the former already out of the country
+and in the Service, that change did not seem necessary
+to the carrying to conclusion of any schemes
+Mr. Fuller might have.</p>
+
+<p>Not that there was anything wrong showing on
+the surface of affairs. The factory seemed to be running
+quite as usual. But as the end of the business
+year approached Ethel could not fail to note that the
+reports on output were not so favorable as they had
+been earlier in the year. As, of course, it was not
+really within the compass of her work she could not
+discover why this should be.</p>
+
+<p>From the very day Mayberry had been balked in
+his endeavor to put the Bogata order through, the
+tide of fortune for the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing
+Company seemed to have turned. The superintendent
+never spoke again about the Bogata Company
+to Ethel. The latter knew, however, that Hammerly’s
+prophecy regarding a receivership for that concern
+had come true—and that before the new year.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span>In the matter of the shop reports the girl was
+puzzled and alarmed. It did not seem to be anybody’s
+fault; certainly Mayberry did not neglect his
+supervision of the factory, and most of the foremen
+were old and faithful employees.</p>
+
+<p>The report of the corporation compared unfavorably
+with the last report. A good deal of money was
+tied up in raw material. Contracts unfilled and bills
+not yet collectible were items that bulked big on
+the wrong side of the ledger.</p>
+
+<p>The board voted the usual dividend; but the surplus
+was much reduced thereby. And then, suddenly
+and like the bursting of a bomb, trouble came.</p>
+
+<p>The Hapwood-Diller Company stock was listed in
+the market; that is, it was traded in by the curb
+brokers both in State and Broad Streets. One morning
+Hammerly came raging into the offices, his
+<i>Financial Gazette</i> in his hand, his spectacles pushed
+up to the line of his grizzled hair, and his eyes fairly
+snapping.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the meaning of this, I want to know?”
+he cried, shaking the financial sheet under Jim Mayberry’s
+nose as that young man appeared from the
+manager’s office. “Do you know anything about
+this?”</p>
+
+<p>“About what, Mr. Hammerly?”</p>
+
+<p>“This trading in Hapwood-Diller shares? It’s been
+going on for a week, I understand. Yesterday three
+hundred shares was sold for eighty-nine—eleven<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>
+points off. Never heard of such a thing! Who’s
+selling?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, bless your heart, Mr. Hammerly,” said the
+superintendent, “I don’t know. I own only fifty
+shares and I haven’t sold them, I can assure you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Some tarnal fool is dumping his shares on the market,
+and at a bad time. Right after such a poor showing
+as was made by our last report. If Frank Barton
+was on the job such a report would never have been
+made.”</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry flushed. “No man can make bricks
+without straw, Mr. Hammerly,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Huh?” snorted the grain dealer. “Who ever
+told you they made bricks of straw? That’s about
+all you know, Jim Mayberry. They make bricks
+with clay around these parts. You ain’t in Egypt.
+But that ain’t neither here nor there. This here
+selling of shares—and maybe these were only wash
+sales?” added the suspicious old man. “Here! let
+me see the stock book, Mayberry.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ask Ethel for that,” returned the superintendent
+sharply, and, turning on his heel, walked away.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hammerly looked after him with lowering
+brow. “Ha!” he muttered, “mighty independent of
+a sudden. Now, I wonder what that means?”</p>
+
+<p>But he was as pleasant as usual with Ethel. Macon
+Hammerly approved of her. He retired to a corner
+seat to study the list of names to whom stock, at the
+reorganization after Israel’s Diller’s death, had been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span>
+issued. Most of the local owners of the shares had
+clung to all their original allotment, even through
+the depression at the beginning of the war before
+Frank Barton had been elevated to the management
+of the concern’s affairs.</p>
+
+<p>The Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company had
+always been a very close corporation. There were
+some Diller and Hapwood heirs in the West and South
+who had traded off their shares in the corporation;
+but nobody knew better than Mr. Macon Hammerly
+just where those shares lay. At least, up to this date
+he thought he knew where the bulk of them were.</p>
+
+<p>The next shock to the working force of the Company,
+as well as to the board, was the turning back
+of the entire order billed to the Kimberly Binding
+Company. The order amounted to twelve thousand
+dollars. The goods were not according to specifications.</p>
+
+<p>Jim Mayberry denied all responsibility for this
+error. The Kimberly order had been received and
+the contract signed by Barton. Mayberry showed
+that the shop sheets covering the contract had been
+followed exactly by the workmen. The duplicates of
+these papers in the office were the same as the working
+plans in every particular.</p>
+
+<p>But the Kimberly Company produced its copy of
+the specifications with two differences in it, one of
+dimension and the other of quality, changes which
+made the finished product absolutely useless to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span>
+Kimberly people. Or for anybody else, for that matter!
+The product could merely go into the scrap
+heap.</p>
+
+<p>There was a live tilt in the board meeting that day
+between Mr. Grandon Fuller and his followers, and
+Mr. Macon Hammerly. Ethel was in and out of the
+room to take dictation, and to furnish books and figures
+when required, so she heard much of the wrangle.</p>
+
+<p>Jim Mayberry sat sullenly in his place at the table
+and had only one declaration to repeat: It was not
+up to him! Mr. Fuller did most of the talking.</p>
+
+<p>Barton’s name was signed to the Kimberly schedule.
+He had O. K.’d it. Two bad errors had crept
+into the specifications and the now absent manager
+had overlooked them.</p>
+
+<p>“And he was <i>absent</i>, all right, before ever he left
+here,” Fuller scoffed. “Absent in his mind if not in
+body. And his absent-mindedness has cost us a
+pretty penny. I can see right now that this board
+will have to pass the next dividend.”</p>
+
+<p>The very next day a block of five thousand shares
+sold in Boston for eighty-seven and a half and two
+hundred in the New York market for eight-seven flat.</p>
+
+<p>One evening Ethel came home from work to be
+greeted by her mother in a flurried state of mind.</p>
+
+<p>“Good land, Ethel! What’s the matter with the
+Hapwood-Diller Company now? I feared how it
+would be if Frank Barton went away.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel keenly remembered her mother’s expressed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>
+doubt of Mr. Barton’s having much to do with the
+prosperity of the concern. Now she asked Mrs.
+Clayton:</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think is the matter at the factory?
+I don’t know what you mean.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I want to know! And you working right
+there, too. Here this little lawyer comes around and
+offers me a ridiculous price for our shares——”</p>
+
+<p>“What lawyer?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know him. He says he’s from New York.
+Here’s his card,” and she handed to Ethel a card on
+which was engraved “A. Schuster, Atty.” and an
+address in a Wall Street building.</p>
+
+<p>“Anyway, he seems to think he can buy our stock
+for sixty-five dollars. That’s all he’ll offer and he
+just laughed and laughed when I told him the shares
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company had never been
+worth less than a hundred dollars apiece since they
+were printed.”</p>
+
+<p>“What did he say to that?” asked her more than
+curious daughter.</p>
+
+<p>“He declared sixty-five was better than it would
+sell in the market in a month, unless the company
+was reorganized and put on a paying basis. I wonder
+what Grandon Fuller or Hammerly would say
+to that? And you ought to know the truth, Ethel,”
+added the worried woman. “Aren’t things going
+right in the office now that Frank Barton’s gone
+away?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span>“There is nothing to worry over,” her daughter said
+stoutly.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, that’s what I told that little lawyer,” Mrs.
+Clayton declared. “I said we’d just got our dividend
+check same’s usual, and he said—What do you suppose
+he said?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea,” confessed Ethel.</p>
+
+<p>“That it would be the last one we’d get for many a
+long day. Can that be so, Ethel? I don’t know
+what we should do if our income from those shares
+your great-uncle Diller left us should be cut off.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shouldn’t worry, Mother,” Ethel said composedly.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this was only one of the many things she began
+to hear which suggested a coming catastrophe to the
+Hapwood-Diller Company.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XIV<br>
+
+<small>BENWAY’S DISCOVERY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Benway Chase</span> was to prepare a copy of the faulty
+specification sheet of the Kimberly Binding Company’s
+order, to be attached to the report on that
+unfortunate affair filed in the records of the board’s
+proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel had not discussed the unfortunate matter with
+Benway, or with anybody else. That Frank Barton
+could have allowed such an error—two such errors,
+indeed—to escape his notice was scarcely in accord
+with her belief in the general manager’s perspicacity.
+Her lips merely tightened when anybody mentioned
+the tragic happening within her hearing.</p>
+
+<p>For it was indeed tragic. Rumors that the factory
+output was falling behind and that the Hapwood-Diller
+Company was facing a situation similar to that
+which had threatened it when Frank Barton had first
+taken hold as manager, reached Ethel’s ears from all
+sides.</p>
+
+<p>Although she could not understand how this mistake
+in the Kimberly order could have happened,
+she accepted the claim of the ordering company as
+honestly made, and that without question. The
+Kimberly Company was not a second Bogata concern.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span>
+They wanted the goods ordered and were
+amply able to pay for them. The mistakes in the
+specifications made much trouble for the purchasing
+corporation as well as for the Hapwood-Diller Company.</p>
+
+<p>This schedule from the Kimberly Binding Company
+had been copied in duplicate in the Hapwood-Diller
+Company’s office, one copy with Frank Barton’s
+name upon it being returned to the ordering
+firm, the other filed where only properly accredited
+members of the Hapwood-Diller Company’s office
+force supposedly were able to get at it.</p>
+
+<p>The question as to how the two items on the schedule
+came to be different from those on the sheet sent
+back to the Kimberly Company bulked just as big in
+Ethel’s mind as the similar question regarding the
+Bogata Company’s order. She felt that the same
+treacherous hand was to be suspected.</p>
+
+<p>It was not Frank Barton’s fault. Of this she was
+confident. But she could not put an accusing finger
+on any person. That there was a traitor in the Hapwood-Diller
+office went without saying. This time
+Mr. Barton was too far away for her to discuss the
+point with him, and Hammerly gave her no opportunity
+of speaking her mind.</p>
+
+<p>Benway came with the copy he was making of the
+faulty schedule and placed it before her. He was
+transcribing the paper in his own very exact, upright
+handwriting. But he had made a mistake.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span>“Do you think that will be noticed, Ethel?” he
+asked with a measure of suppressed excitement that
+she did not at first notice. “See where I made a bull—and
+used the acid to take the ink out?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes, Benway; I see it—now that you call
+my attention to it. But really you have made the
+correction very neatly. I think it will be all right.
+The paper only shines a little on the surface where
+you erased the ink marks with the acid.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s just it, Ethel,” he hissed, close to her ear.
+“The erasing fluid leaves the surface of this sort of
+paper glossy. Now look at this!”</p>
+
+<p>He plumped the document he was copying—the
+schedule in which the two errors had been found—under
+her eye.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, what is it?”</p>
+
+<p>“See anything wrong about those two mysterious
+lines?” he demanded, and now she marked his excitement.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Benway! That’s been all gone over. You
+can see there have been no changes made in this
+original paper. There is no more shine to the surface
+where those two errors stand than elsewhere.
+<i>That</i> was taken up in board meeting. I heard them
+discuss it. And I studied it myself. No. There
+have surely been no erasures.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure?”</p>
+
+<p>“You are very obstinate, Benway!” exclaimed
+Ethel impatiently.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>“But look,” he whispered. “Here!” He snapped on
+the electric light over her desk. “Look at those
+places on the slant—with the glare of the light on
+them. Don’t you see that the paper has been roughened
+under those two faulty lines—and nowhere else
+on the sheet? And see again! Under the electric
+light the surface of the paper seems bluer at those
+places than anywhere else. That is a good quality
+of paper, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is—isn’t it a chance discoloration?” murmured
+the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you think that’s far-fetched?” demanded
+Benway. “Two blue blots—and just where those
+wrong items are written?”</p>
+
+<p>“Could they have been caused by drops of water?”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh! Drops of something!” growled Benway.
+“I own to that belief. But never water. Here!
+Use this reading glass. Don’t you see the raw fibre
+of the paper? The surface has been scratched just
+where those wrong items stand. Not by the sort of
+erasing fluid we use in this office; but by some means.
+What do you think?”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel passed the sensitive tips of her fingers lightly
+over the indicated spots on the sheet. It seemed to
+her that she could feel the slight roughness of the
+paper that Benway indicated so assuredly.</p>
+
+<p>“You go back and finish your job, Benway,” she told
+him finally. “Then bring me this original. Understand?
+Say nothing to anybody else about it.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>“Sure!” he returned, his eyes snapping.</p>
+
+<p>“Then if you are asked about it,” she added quietly,
+“you may say that you gave me the paper and know
+nothing at all about it.”</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her with more seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>“Say, are you figuring on getting into trouble
+with——”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel held up her hand. “You are not supposed
+to figure on this at all. Just do as I say, Benway.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! All right, Ma’am,” he said with a mocking
+little smile and a twinkle in his eye.</p>
+
+<p>Even he did not wholly understand the seriousness
+of the discovery; but Ethel appreciated it fully.
+When he brought the original sheet of specifications
+back to her she hid it in her dress and at noon instead
+of going to lunch she caught a southbound car and
+rode to the Stone Bridge.</p>
+
+<p>On either side of the creek there were docks and
+warehouses; but Macon Hammerly’s general store
+and row of storehouses for feed and grain and such
+other things as he dealt in were beyond the bridge
+and some distance along what was called the Creek
+Road. The Creek Road debouched into the fanning
+country that adjoined Mailsburg somewhat abruptly,
+at the south end of the town.</p>
+
+<p>Really, Mr. Hammerly was a country merchant,
+always had been such, and always would be. He had
+come into possession of his father’s store when he
+was a young man, and it was said that his grandfather<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>
+had first engaged in business—the trading of
+general merchandise for pelts and farm produce—on
+this very spot. However, the Macon Hammerly
+store and warehouses were well known over a large
+area.</p>
+
+<p>Being on the edge of the city the farming people
+were likely to trade with him largely. And yet he
+was not considered a “good fellow.” He was too
+sharp and severe in his business methods.</p>
+
+<p>To his docks the sluggishly moving canal-boats
+came bringing grain and feed and coal and other merchandise
+that he dealt in more largely. And he was
+a wholesale dealer in many articles that other merchants
+in Mailsburg sold at retail. For one thing,
+his was the largest seed house in the county.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel hurried over the arch of the Stone Bridge
+and down the narrow, bricked walk across from the
+head of the several docks and the doors of the warehouses
+upon them. This was an old, old part of
+the town; indeed, it had been known as Stone Bridge
+once; but Mailsburg had grown out to it and had
+all but enveloped it with new buildings and better
+streets. Only down the Creek Road the land still
+was checkered with open fields and patches of wood.</p>
+
+<p>Before the weather-beaten building in which was
+Macon Hammerly’s general store, was a wide, roofed
+porch. Several bewhittled armchairs, just “wabbly”
+enough to be comfortable, stood about upon the
+platform. Sometimes these were filled with Hammerly’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>
+ancient cronies—cynics of a former generation
+who had been in this world so long that they
+seemed to believe they knew better how to run it
+than Omnipotence!</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hammerly was alone at one end of the porch.
+This was egg-buying day, and as he dealt largely
+in eggs—shipping quantities to the larger cities—the
+old man usually looked after the buying while
+his clerks packed the boxes inside.</p>
+
+<p>Hammerly believed if a thing was worth doing
+at all it was worth doing well. Likewise he believed
+in that other old saw relative to a man’s doing anything
+himself if he wanted to be sure it was done
+right. He could not do everything of importance
+about his store and warehouses; but he could—and
+did—buy eggs.</p>
+
+<p>He watched the farmers and their wives cannily
+as they brought their baskets up to the platform.
+He handled many of the eggs himself. It was his
+inflexible rule to refuse all pullet eggs, and he had
+always in his pocket a wooden curtain-pole ring of a
+certain size. If an egg would slip through that, it
+was discarded.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel chanced to arrive at a moment when there
+was a let-up in the activities of egg buying. The
+grain dealer pushed up his spectacles with that
+familiar gesture of his and grinned at the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“You ain’t come away down here on no party
+call, Ethel?” he said questioningly. “You know I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>
+ain’t in the swagger set, and I don’t serve pink tea
+here.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir,” she said, smiling in spite of her serious
+mood. “I know you are a perfect barbarian.”</p>
+
+<p>The man chuckled, but said only:</p>
+
+<p>“Heard from Frank Barton yet?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no, sir!”</p>
+
+<p>“I got you beat, then,” he said, with twinkling eye.
+“Not direct; but from Washington. Got a friend
+there and he’s kept me posted. The troop ship
+<i>Tecumseh</i> got over safely—as they all did, in fact.
+Them German undersea boats seem to have been
+too far under the sea to catch ’em. Frank’s safe in
+France.”</p>
+
+<p>“Until he gets into the trenches,” said the girl
+bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you be like these other folks, Ethel. Grouchers,
+every one! Knocking the war, and looking on
+the black side of every cloud instead of on the silver.
+The good Lord knows I’m no optimist by nature; but
+these are the times when every one of us should
+stretch our cheerfulness to the breaking point.</p>
+
+<p>“Frank’s going to be all right. He’s going to do
+his duty, and he’s going through with it all and come
+back to us. That’s my belief, Ethel.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Hammerly! I hope you are right.”</p>
+
+<p>“If things go as smooth here with us as they do
+over there with him,” he added, with twinkling eyes,
+“I reckon all will be well.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>“Oh, Mr. Hammerly!” she exclaimed again, “things
+are not going smoothly here. At least, not with
+the Hapwood-Diller Company.”</p>
+
+<p>“So that’s what brings you down here? I ain’t so
+flattered as I was, Ethel,” he said good-naturedly.
+“Let’s hear your trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you mustn’t think I’m not glad to see you,”
+she said, hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>“O’ course you’re glad,” he said, with something
+of a grin on his wrinkled face. He stroked his chin
+reflectively. “Great times these, an’ no mistake.
+If I was only younger——”</p>
+
+<p>“You’d get into the war, I suppose.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certain sure, I would. An’ you would, too, if
+you was a young man.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps—I really don’t know—it’s all so
+horrible.”</p>
+
+<p>“So ’tis, an’ that German Kaiser has got a pile
+to answer for, believe me. But now to business.
+Tell me what’s wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not sure that it’s really wrong. But it looks
+queer to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see. Got some papers, eh?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s see ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>She displayed the specification sheet and explained
+hurriedly Benway’s discovery. The appearance of
+erasure in two places on the document seemed plainer
+to Ethel each time she looked at it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>“I dunno,” drawled Hammerly, at first doubtful.
+But the longer he looked at the two bluish marks
+the more deeply he was impressed with the significance
+of them. “Can it be that we’ve got him at last?”
+he finally questioned vigorously.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Him?</i>” repeated Ethel, curiously.</p>
+
+<p>“There’s a dirty traitor in this business, Ethel,”
+declared the grain dealer.</p>
+
+<p>“Who do you think it is? Jim Mayberry?” she
+asked outright.</p>
+
+<p>“He never did this,” declared Hammerly with
+emphasis. “He wouldn’t have brains enough. That’s
+scarcely seeable, that rubbing out. And see how
+close the handwriting has been copied.</p>
+
+<p>“I see. That is Josephine Durand’s work—the
+original writing of the sheet, I mean. We never use
+the typewriter on these specification papers, because
+of the uneven ruling. She wrote both this and the
+copy that went back to the Kimberly people with
+Mr. Barton’s name on it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know,” growled Hammerly, still staring closely
+at the paper.</p>
+
+<p>“And Josephine is perfectly trustworthy, I am
+sure. Besides, it does not seem possible that Mr.
+Barton did not closely compare the two papers.
+Those figures were changed, I am sure, after Mr.
+Barton left.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not a doubt on it! Not a doubt on it!” agreed
+Hammerly. “I’ve seen something like this afore,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span>
+he added, more to himself than to the girl. “You let
+me keep this paper, Ethel. We’ll see. How’s your
+ma?”</p>
+
+<p>“Worried a good deal, Mr. Hammerly. That lawyer
+who came around to buy her shares in the Hapwood-Diller
+Company really scared mother.”</p>
+
+<p>“What lawyer?” snapped Macon Hammerly, instantly
+interested.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel told of the incident and gave Mr. Hammerly
+the name and address of the attorney, Mr. Schuster.
+“I believe he did secure a few shares from some of the
+small stockholders,” Ethel said. “You know Abel
+Rawlins had seven shares and Mrs. Henry Cutt a
+dozen. They sold, mother says, and she is worried
+for fear the company is going to smash and we may
+lose everything.”</p>
+
+<p>“How many’s she got, Ethel?” asked the old man,
+a heavy frown on his brow. And when Ethel told
+him, he added: “So? Israel Diller ought to’ve done
+better by her than that. She was just as close’t
+kin to the old man as Grandon Fuller’s wife.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, we won’t talk about that,” said Ethel, with a
+gesture of dismissal. “What is done, is done.”</p>
+
+<p>“Humph! Mebbe! If it stays done!” grunted Macon
+Hammerly. “But it’s been ten years and more now,
+ain’t it? Well! Howsomever, you let me keep this
+paper a spell and see if I can make anything out of it.
+I want to compare it with something I saw once—an’
+had suspicions about.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>He bought no more eggs personally that day—and
+probably some of pullet size slipped by. Instead,
+when Ethel left him, he walked up into the business
+section of High Street and there, near the court-house,
+went into the office of Alfred Gainor, who, as Mr.
+Mestinger’s chief clerk, had fallen heir to most of
+his clients and their business when the older attorney
+died.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mestinger had been the legal adviser of Israel
+Diller and had drawn the latter’s will.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XV<br>
+
+<small>FROM “OVER THERE”</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ethel Clayton</span> went away from her interview
+with Macon Hammerly cheered upon one particular
+point at least. His outlook upon the chance for
+Frank Barton’s continued safety, even if he was in
+France, was helpful. And she knew the old grain
+merchant had Barton’s well-being at heart.</p>
+
+<p>Crabbed as he was with most people, Macon Hammerly
+had always betrayed his interest in the general
+manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company
+and his regard for him. He sometimes said,
+in his rough way, that he kept Frank’s welfare in
+mind because the young fellow did not know enough
+to look out for himself. Ethel knew, however, that
+Hammerly had not been speaking carelessly about
+the absent Barton.</p>
+
+<p>The latter was over the sea in safety, and the girl
+was devoutly thankful for it. Indeed she added
+that thanksgiving to her prayers before retiring. But
+she longed to hear personally from Barton. She had
+already written him three letters since she had last
+seen him, all addressed as he had told her; but they
+had brought no replies.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>As before, while he was in the training camp, her
+letters were mostly regarding office incidents which
+she knew he would be interested in. But she had
+said nothing about the threatened trouble and loss
+to the company through the mistake in the Kimberly
+Binding Company order. Let somebody else
+tell the absent soldier that misfortune. Ethel was
+determined to put nothing in her letters that was
+not cheerful.</p>
+
+<p>She learned very quickly, as thousands of other
+people were learning just at that time, how particularly
+hard it is to write cheerfully to the men at war.
+The very fact of sitting down to write to a soldier on
+active duty calls up before the mind a picture too
+terrible to be ignored.</p>
+
+<p>How do we know the letter will ever reach the one
+addressed? What peril may he not face before our
+written words reach France and be delivered to him?</p>
+
+<p>In Ethel Clayton’s case, too, the pang of jealousy
+was not lacking. She realized that her feeling for
+Frank Barton was not reciprocated. He had never
+given her the least cause to believe that he had other
+than the merest feeling of comradeship for her.
+Whereas it was plain that for Grandon Fuller’s
+daughter he experienced a much deeper regard.
+Nevertheless Ethel was jealous of Helen Fuller.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Clayton thought her daughter was working
+too hard, and that business worries depressed her.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span>
+Benway Chase, too, noted her wan look and increasing
+pallor.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re overdoing it, Ethel,” he said one bleak
+evening when they were walking home together.</p>
+
+<p>“Overdoing <i>what</i>?” and her tone of voice admonished
+him that she did not welcome his interference.
+Yet he persevered:</p>
+
+<p>“You needn’t get mad. You shoulder too much
+responsibility—and for that oaf, Jim Mayberry.
+Let him do some of his own work.”</p>
+
+<p>She became gentler at once. Ben did not suspect
+why she so willingly took upon herself the extra tasks.
+It was for the absent Barton that she worked so
+hard, not for the manager <i>pro tem</i>. If he was spared
+to come back to Mailsburg and the Hapwood-Diller
+Company, Ethel was going to do all she could to
+hold his job for him!</p>
+
+<p>“Somebody must do these things, Benway,” she
+said quietly. “I am in a responsible position. From
+the very fact I am a woman, more is expected of me
+if I would hold up my end of the work and satisfy
+everybody. And if I do not look after the tags of
+work in the office, who will?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Tags of work!’” quoted Benway with emphatic
+disgust. “If <i>that</i> were only it! Oh, Ethel! I wish I
+could do it for you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks, Benway.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you won’t even let me help,” he complained.
+“You don’t even talk to me about your troubles.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>
+Why Ethel! I seem even less your friend now that I
+am in the office with you than I used to be.”</p>
+
+<p>“Goodness, Benway!” she exclaimed with renewed
+impatience, “you can’t expect to take my personal
+troubles or my work on your shoulders.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” he demanded tenderly. “You know
+it’s what I’d love to do. Oh, I wish I had a million
+and could take you out of all this! That’s what I
+wish, Ethel.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, I don’t want to give up my work, Benway.
+Nor do I want to be rich. At least, I never have
+thought of being wealthy. And a million——”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’d get along with even less,” he admitted
+drolly. “All I really long for is a loaf, a jug of wine,
+a flivver, and thou.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear boy,” she declared briskly, “you’ll get
+your first three wishes much easier than you will
+your fourth. Leave me out of the category, please.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want to go off in a flivver with any man
+and a loaf of bread and a wine jug. I am wedded
+to my work. I love it. It’s just as much my life
+as it is yours. I have never looked upon my work
+as a mere stop-gap between high school or college
+and the wedded state—as is so often the case with
+girls. <i>This is my job</i>, and I have no right to expect
+you, or anybody else, Benway, to ease it for me.”</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her aggrieved. “Is it always going
+to be so, Ethel?”</p>
+
+<p>“I expect it will be always so,” she returned with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>
+less vehemence. “I am not a marrying girl, Bennie.
+I wish you’d get that into your handsome head. Get
+interested in some other girl—do!”</p>
+
+<p>“Pshaw! Who told you you were not a marrying
+girl?” he demanded, chuckling. “Wait till the right
+knock comes on the door.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shan’t hear it. I shall be too busy.”</p>
+
+<p>He was more serious for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps there is danger of that. I’ve been knocking
+myself ever since I can remember, and I get
+mighty little response.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t waste your time, Bennie,” she said bruskly.
+“I tell you frankly: Marriage is the last thing I expect
+to accomplish.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re wrong. It’s death that is the last thing
+for us all. But you can’t break down my hopes,
+Ethel. I shall continue to knock.”</p>
+
+<p>Somehow this insistence of Benway’s irritated Ethel
+more than usual. She was almost sorry she had ever
+urged Mr. Barton to take him into the offices, for
+the young fellow too plainly betrayed his interest
+in her.</p>
+
+<p>It was bad enough for Sydney and the others to
+note the fact that Benway was always ready to run
+her errands or otherwise be at her beck and call; but
+Jim Mayberry made his uncouth comments upon it
+too.</p>
+
+<p>“You have him trained like a little curly dog,
+haven’t you?” the superintendent sneered one day,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>
+when Benway had anticipated some need of Ethel’s.
+“He fetches and carries better than a retriever. Is
+he good for anything else?”</p>
+
+<p>“You had better ask Sydney if he does his work
+if you are afflicted with blindness yourself, Mr. Mayberry,”
+she said tartly.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I’m not too blind to see there are a good many
+things going dead wrong in this office,” Mayberry
+growled. “But I’m not having my way here. We
+are under petticoat rule, it seems.”</p>
+
+<p>Such hints as this had previously warned Ethel
+to keep still. Being unable to have his way with her,
+Jim Mayberry would be glad to find cause for bringing
+her before the Board of Directors for dismissal.
+She felt all the time that if he ever did have the backing
+of the Board members he would make quick
+changes in the office.</p>
+
+<p>She knew herself to be in an uncertain situation.
+Really, she would have done better for her future
+perhaps if she had looked about for another position.
+Her record with the Hapwood-Diller Company, if
+she left of her own volition, would obtain her work
+elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>But she could not do this. Tacitly she had promised
+to remain “on the job.” Barton expected it of
+her. He had frankly said he felt secure in leaving the
+company and going away because she would be there.
+She was “the girl he left behind.” He depended
+upon her to keep things straight. And perhaps,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>
+more than Frank Barton suspected, it was Ethel
+who could hold his position for him until he returned
+from France.</p>
+
+<p>If he ever did return! This thought scarified her
+mind continually. It seemed just as though every
+German gun and every German bayonet were pointed
+straight at the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company. How could he escape with his life?</p>
+
+<p>And then the letter came—the letter she had longed
+for. When John tumbled it out of his bag upon
+her desk with the others, Ethel could not suppress
+a little scream, for she saw it first of all. Little Skinner
+and Josephine heard her and came running.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it, Ethel?” demanded the latter.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a mouse, I bet!” said Skinner. “Some o’
+them boys been playing a joke on you, Miss Clayton?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, is it only a letter?” queried the other
+stenographer. “How you startled me.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s enough to startle anybody,” declared Ethel,
+making the best of a bad matter. “It’s from Mr.
+Barton.”</p>
+
+<p>At that announcement even Sydney left his desk
+to draw near. Ethel’s heart beat a warm alarm,
+but she could not get out of opening and reading the
+missive there and then. Of course he would say
+nothing in it that the office force could not safely
+hear. She knew it would be merely a kindly message
+for all. She wished—oh, how deeply!—that it might<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>
+be of so intimate a nature that she could not read it
+aloud to them.</p>
+
+<p>He was within sound of the guns at the Front
+already. No locality was particularized, for that
+would have been censored, but if he could hear the
+heavy cannonade from his training camp it would
+not be long before his battalion would be marching
+into the trenches.</p>
+
+<p>No fear for the future was breathed through Barton’s
+chatty, friendly letter. He gave such a picture
+of the camp, and the boys in khaki, and the
+people about them, that even Sydney—his face working
+spasmodically—clenched his fist and muttered:</p>
+
+<p>“By heaven! how I wish I was over there with
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>Benway’s eyes shone, too; and Mabel Skinner expressed
+for the hundredth time the desire she had to
+be a boy.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, I tell Boots that if I was him I’d run away
+and swear I was nineteen and enlist.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s tough on you, Skinner,” drawled Jim Mayberry,
+who chanced to be passing through and heard
+this outbreak. “Nothing but a pair of trousers between
+you and glory.”</p>
+
+<p>Little Skinner remembered that it was in office
+hours, so she made no retort. Otherwise Mayberry
+would never have got away with it, as she declared
+afterward.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>However, she was really trying to eschew rudeness,
+especially within the hearing of Benway Chase.
+Once or twice, as Ethel would not let him hang
+around for her after hours, Benway had walked along
+with Mabel. The girl had been delighted by these
+attentions. She began to dress more quietly and
+gradually the startled expression left her face, for
+she learned to arrange her hair more tastefully. Her
+improvement was marked enough for others besides
+Ethel to notice it.</p>
+
+<p>“By jove!” ejaculated Sydney, “our Skinner is
+coming into her own. She looks more like a girl
+should and less like a boy dressed up in girl’s togs.”</p>
+
+<p>It was only Ethel, however, who suspected why
+Mabel was changing both in manner and in appearance.
+That the girl worshiped Benway Chase from
+afar Ethel did not doubt; but at first she was not sure
+that she approved. Little Skinner came from such
+a very poor and “shiftless” family. Should Benway
+look on Mabel with favor, Ethel feared that his mother
+would be horror-stricken. Yet Ethel had told Benway
+she would be glad to see him interested in some
+other girl.</p>
+
+<p>If Barton’s letter did not cheer Ethel in large measure
+it linked her more closely to the war and its activities.
+Hard as she had to work in the offices, she
+found time to be active in the local Red Cross chapter
+to which she belonged.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>She insisted, too, in buying several of the second
+issue of Liberty Bonds, although Mrs. Clayton was
+not in favor of her so doing.</p>
+
+<p>“We have all the stocks and bonds and such things
+we can afford,” the troubled woman declared. “If
+the Hapwood-Diller stock is going downhill (and they
+tell me the Board will really pass the next dividend)
+we’ll have to dig right into our little bank account,
+or else live as poor as church mice.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, it’s not as bad as that, Mother,” the girl
+declared. “I have a steady income, you must remember—and
+that’s a good deal.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, but not as much as it ought to be. I declare,
+in these times, with prices of everything going
+up, wages should be about doubled.”</p>
+
+<p>“If we doubled on the wages, we’d have to close
+down.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you didn’t have to take more bonds.”</p>
+
+<p>“I thought it was our patriotic duty to do that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let them do it that have more than we have,
+Ethel.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think everybody ought to do all he or she can.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, maybe. But it’s hard on poor folks. And
+there’s another thing,” added Mrs. Clayton suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“What is that?”</p>
+
+<p>“I never did see such times! I couldn’t get sugar
+at all to-day; though that trouble’s ’most over, they
+say. And if we didn’t have coal in our cellar we’d<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>
+go without a fire, I guess. You’d better hang on to
+what money you’ve got, Ethel.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’d like to know who’s been talking to you again
+about the company being in difficulties!” her daughter
+said sharply. “It’s not so.”</p>
+
+<p>“They tell me the shares are selling as low as
+seventy-five in Boston. Flory Diller’s all of a twitter
+about selling. She wants to buy a piano player,
+anyway; and if she sells her shares the money will
+belong to her and never mind what John says, she’ll
+have that player.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is such foolish people as Flory that make all
+the trouble,” grumbled Ethel. “I wish you would
+not listen to them, Mother.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XVI<br>
+
+<small>THE CLOUDS THICKEN</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">News</span> of the first raid against American troops in
+the trenches appeared in the newspapers. There
+were but three deaths and a few captured and missing;
+but the fact that a part of the American contingent
+had been really in action could not fail to
+fire the imagination and swell patriotic hearts on
+this side of the ocean.</p>
+
+<p>But to Ethel, when she read, the three stark bodies
+laid to rest on November the fourth in a little French
+village far back of the lines loomed a more important
+thing than all else. To her troubled mind it was
+only pitiful—not great—that a French general should,
+standing at salute beside those graves, say: “In the
+name of France, I thank you. God receive your
+souls. Farewell!” Nor did it bring aught but tears
+to her eyes to read the translation of the inscription
+put at the foot of these graves:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“Here lie the first soldiers of the great Republic
+of the United States who died on the soil of France
+for Justice and Liberty, November 3, 1917.”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>No. She could not yet feel the exaltation of spirit
+that had seized Frank Barton and thousands of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span>
+others in these early months of the war. She had
+begun to feel her duty toward it, but she deplored
+the fact of war and could not yet believe in the necessity
+for it.</p>
+
+<p>It was all a horrid nightmare. The shocking fact
+that men were being shot down, killed or maimed,
+still usurped all other thought regarding it in her
+mind. Even Frank Barton’s letter, in which he pictured
+the conditions in France and something of
+what he had already seen of the effect of the German
+invasion, inspired Ethel with nothing but fear for
+his safety.</p>
+
+<p>He should be back in Mailsburg and at his desk
+in the Hapwood-Diller Company offices. That is
+the way she saw it. And especially now, for Ethel
+felt that there was some underhand work going on
+that she could not fathom.</p>
+
+<p>Since taking the Kimberly Binding Company schedule
+to Mr. Hammerly she had heard nothing from
+the grain merchant. Nor had she seen him. But
+Mr. Grandon Fuller came to confer with Jim Mayberry
+one day, and when the latter sent out for Ethel
+to come into the private office the girl intuitively
+knew that immediate trouble was brewing.</p>
+
+<p>But she entered the room with perfect composure.
+Fuller, lounging in his chair, looked at her with
+heavily lidded eyes. He left the talking at first to
+Mayberry, and the latter was brusk indeed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>“Where’s that specification sheet of the Kimberly
+order, Ethel?”</p>
+
+<p>“There is a copy of it attached to the report made
+for the Board, Mr. Mayberry,” she said quietly.</p>
+
+<p>“I want the original. I can’t find it on file,”
+snapped Mayberry.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know where it is,” she told him quite
+promptly.</p>
+
+<p>“What! You don’t know whether it is in the office
+or not?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is not in the office at present. Where it is I
+do not know. But the copy is exact. Isn’t that
+sufficient?”</p>
+
+<p>“You know well enough it isn’t what I want,” said
+the superintendent roughly. “You are taking too
+much upon yourself, Ethel. You gave that paper
+to Hammerly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why shouldn’t I?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Let me tell you that he isn’t manager here——”</p>
+
+<p>“Nor are you, Mr. Mayberry. I prefer not to be
+spoken to in this manner. I saw no reason to
+refuse Mr. Hammerly permission to examine the
+paper. If Mr. Fuller had asked for it I should have
+considered it quite proper to hand it to him.”</p>
+
+<p>She knew well enough by the expression upon the
+stockholder’s countenance that she had hit the bull’s-eye.
+But Mayberry, red-faced and blustering, declared:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>“You usurp too much power here, Ethel. It has
+annoyed me before. I may not be manager in name;
+but if I can’t be boss of the works without a girl’s
+interference, I’ll throw up the job entirely.”</p>
+
+<p>“No! Don’t say that, Mayberry!” interposed Fuller
+significantly. “Wait until the Board meets again.
+We will see then.”</p>
+
+<p>“You get that paper—get it at once!” ordered Mayberry
+in his very ugliest tone. “And don’t let another
+private paper of this company go out of the
+office—do you hear?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am not deaf, Mr. Mayberry,” she said tartly.
+“You need not roar at me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who are you working for, young woman?” Grandon
+Fuller asked, but in a moderate voice. “The
+Hapwood-Diller Company, or Macon Hammerly?”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>I</i> am working for the company,” she said with
+significance.</p>
+
+<p>“You will not be for long,” growled Mayberry.
+“Get that schedule back from old Hammerly——”</p>
+
+<p>“You will have to ask him for it, Mr. Mayberry,”
+she said. “If that is all you called me in for, I have
+plenty to do outside,” and she walked out of the private
+office.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel was quite sure that she could make herself
+no more disliked than she was already by both the
+superintendent and the principal stockholder. But
+whatever came of the incident she proposed to keep<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>
+her self-respect. She would not allow any one to
+bully her.</p>
+
+<p>It was open war now, however, between Jim Mayberry
+and herself. When Mr. Fuller had gone the
+angry superintendent strode out to her desk. He took
+no pains to smother his rage or his voice when he
+spoke to her.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll learn mighty soon, Ethel, that Frank
+Barton has lost his influence in this concern—and
+there’ll be no come back, either. He’s gone for good,
+whether the fool dodges a bullet or a bit of shrapnel
+or not. He’s through here.</p>
+
+<p>“And so you will be, and that very soon, if you
+don’t take a different tone here. I may lack power
+to discharge you right now, but I shan’t lack that
+power long. Then we’ll have a house cleaning,”
+and he glared over the office as though he felt the
+enmity of Ethel’s desk-mates.</p>
+
+<p>“Going to clean up for fair, are you, Jim?” asked
+Sydney, who felt secure in his position, for he had
+been bookkeeper for the Hapwood-Diller Company
+when the present superintendent was merely a boy
+in one of the shops. “You’ll have your hands full if
+you intend to run both the offices and the shops,
+won’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll show you as well as this blame girl——”</p>
+
+<p>Benway Chase slipped down from his stool and
+started toward the superintendent. Ethel stood up,
+her own hands clenched and her eyes aflame.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>“As long as I <i>am</i> at work here, Mr. Mayberry, I
+refuse to be insulted and browbeaten by you. If
+you have any instructions for me, let me hear them.
+I don’t wish to hear anything else.”</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry stamped out of the room. Mabel Skinner
+gave three cheers under her breath.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Miss Clayton! Ain’t you lovely! I’d have
+slapped his face!” she added in approval.</p>
+
+<p>This brought a laugh, and the office quickly simmered
+down. But Ethel knew the matter was not
+ended. She could not help feeling worried about
+the future. If Jim Mayberry had his way she would
+soon be out of a situation.</p>
+
+<p>Then at home her mother was forever talking about
+the decreasing value of the Hapwood-Diller shares.
+She heard of other friends selling out their stock at
+low prices.</p>
+
+<p>She set her lips more firmly and refused to believe
+that disaster threatened the concern that Frank Barton
+had all but sweated blood to put on a paying
+basis. Yet there were signs enough that affairs were
+not as they should be. There were little breakdowns
+in the machinery that never happened before. One
+shop was closed for two days and the work fell behind
+thereby. The profit was sliced completely from one
+job, she knew, because of these handicaps.</p>
+
+<p>And she was helpless to avert these crippling accidents,
+nor could she point out who was at fault.
+Certainly there was no happening wherein she could<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>
+honestly accuse Mayberry of guiltiness, no matter
+how much she may have believed him to be at the
+bottom of the trouble.</p>
+
+<p>He had a good and valid excuse to offer the Board
+of Directors when that body should investigate these
+petty affairs. Naturally he could not give his attention
+so closely to the workmen as before. The foremen
+ran their several departments more to suit themselves
+than when Mayberry did not have to do two
+men’s work. It began to be remarked by high and
+low alike that Jim Mayberry could not be expected
+to be both superintendent and manager of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company!</p>
+
+<p>And these whispers pointed to but one thing: The
+appointment of another superintendent and the establishment
+of Mayberry in Frank Barton’s place. The
+situation grew more and more difficult.</p>
+
+<p>The possible end of these things troubled Ethel
+daily and hourly. Not so much that she feared
+losing her own position. That would be sad, but
+not a catastrophe.</p>
+
+<p>Her main thought was for the future of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company. There was a conspiracy
+against the concern. Who fathered the traitorous
+design, and the object of it, she did not know. Jim
+Mayberry might be only a tool, for, with Macon
+Hammerly, Ethel considered the superintendent a
+weakling after all.</p>
+
+<p>She doubted and feared Grandon Fuller. Yet he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>
+was the largest stockholder in the concern—or his
+wife was, and he managed his wife’s affairs. Surely it
+could not be pleasing to him to see the shares of the
+company falling in the open market.</p>
+
+<p>These matters were really outside of Ethel Clayton’s
+province. Yet they would have been vitally
+troubling to Frank Barton were he at home and in
+charge of affairs. And Ethel felt herself to be on
+watch for him.</p>
+
+<p>If she might only confer with him! If she could
+tell him her suspicions and reveal to him her worry
+over the Hapwood-Diller Company! This longing
+obsessed her.</p>
+
+<p>Arriving at home one evening rather early she saw,
+before reaching the gate, a stranger leaving the premises.
+He was a small, black-haired man who walked
+briskly away from the Clayton cottage. Her mother
+met her at the door.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s been here again, Ethel!” she exclaimed
+tragically when her daughter ran up the steps.</p>
+
+<p>“Who has been here?”</p>
+
+<p>“That Schuster. The lawyer who wants to buy
+our shares of stock. But he won’t give us but sixty
+now. My dear! I am afraid something dreadful is
+going to happen.”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s something going to happen to him!” ejaculated
+the girl with emphasis. “Is that he yonder—that
+little runt?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. And he said—”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>But Ethel was down the steps and out of the gate
+without listening to further particulars. She saw
+the man turn the corner and walk quickly toward
+the car line. There was a path across the open fields
+past Benway Chase’s house that brought one more
+quickly to the car tracks. Ethel went this way.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s the only thing to do,” she told herself. “The
+only thing to do.”</p>
+
+<p>She was much disturbed in mind, and her course
+of action was by no means exactly clear to her, just
+yet. But she was doing some quick thinking.</p>
+
+<p>Ordinarily she would not have minded had she
+met Benway, but now she did not want to stop to
+talk, and so watched her chance to slip past the
+house unobserved.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps he’d try to help me, but I guess I don’t
+want his assistance,” she reasoned.</p>
+
+<p>She almost ran the distance. While yet some rods
+from the car line, she saw a car bowling along but
+a short block away. She waved her hand frantically.</p>
+
+<p>The motorman was not looking her way, and
+consequently did not see her. Then she called to
+him, and he braked up in a hurry.</p>
+
+<p>“Always willing to accommodate the ladies,” he
+remarked with a grin.</p>
+
+<p>She was already aboard the car, therefore, when
+the lawyer swung himself up on the step and entered.
+There were several passengers and he gave nobody<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>
+more than a cursory glance. Therefore (and Ethel
+was glad of the fact) he did not know her or suspect
+her identity.</p>
+
+<p>There was a scheme afoot either to ruin the Hapwood-Diller
+Company, or, more probably, to “freeze
+out” the smaller stockholders. Of this the girl was
+confident. She believed A. Schuster was doing the
+secret work for the plotters, and it might be that, if
+she trailed him, she could learn just who it was who
+was at the bottom of this dastardly conspiracy.</p>
+
+<p>If Frank Barton were here, and possessed her knowledge
+of affairs and her suspicions, would he not do
+the same? She believed so, and she believed the
+situation called her to the task.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XVII<br>
+
+<small>A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">At</span> just this point in Ethel Clayton’s business
+troubles, when she wished so heartily that she could
+have the benefit of Barton’s advice, the general manager
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company was thinking
+very little indeed of such tame affairs as those relating
+to the factory in Mailsburg.</p>
+
+<p>Like those other thousands who have a rendezvous
+with death on the battleline, the intensive training
+and preparation for that event was filling his whole
+thought, as well as taking up all his time. The regiment
+to which Frank Barton was attached had
+plunged immediately into such grilling work as many
+of the men had never in their lives experienced.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, Barton’s detachment was billeted
+in a little village which had before that day on which
+the American soldiery marched in, escaped all contact
+with the Yankees, or, indeed, any one outside
+its local confines. It was but a tiny collection of
+farm cottages and stables builded together far back
+in feudal times for protective reasons. Sanitation
+was an unknown word to the inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>Barton’s captain was taken down with pleuropneumonia
+almost at his landing from the troop ship<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span>
+<i>Tecumseh</i>, and was in a hospital. Barton as ranking
+lieutenant was in charge of the company of nearly two
+hundred men. With the medical major he had the
+well-being, both mental and physical, of these men
+upon his hands. It was a situation of responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>His second in command appeared before him on
+the first morning, saluted, and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Lieutenant Barton, I have to report, sir, that this
+place—er—really, Lieutenant, <i>it stinks</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“So my nose tells me, Lieutenant Copley. The
+doctor likewise agrees with us.”</p>
+
+<p>“Bah jove!” groaned Morrison Copley, who could
+not altogether cast his drawl on such sort notice.
+“What is to be done about it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Clean up!” announced Barton vigorously.</p>
+
+<p>And that was their first job. Precious piles of
+stable scrapings that had occupied the little courtyards
+before the farmers’ cots, or had been heaped
+in stable penthouses since time immemorial, were
+forked into carts and spread upon the fallow ground
+outside the village.</p>
+
+<p>It was a shock to the villagers, and at first they
+raised a great clamor, for custom was being vastly
+disturbed. But when they were made to see that the
+mules and horses of the American forces were adding
+daily to the fertilizer piles and that the Yankee boys
+in removing the manure to the fields were doing the
+farmers’ work, and that for nothing, objections died
+among the French population of the village, if not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>
+entirely among the soldiers themselves. But they
+made that village clean and kept it clean.</p>
+
+<p>Once Frank Barton burst out laughing and had to
+retreat to his quarters to recover. The thought had
+struck him suddenly that if Madam Copley—the
+haughty, somewhat snobbish Madam Copley—could
+see her son bossing a gang forking over steaming
+manure piles, she would probably swoon.</p>
+
+<p>It was rather startling, too, when one considered
+what a metamorphosis had come over Morry Copley.
+Even his voice had changed. Its shrillness had been
+modified and when he gave an order now it was with
+the snap of a whiplash in his tone.</p>
+
+<p>Morry was diplomatic, too. In the cleaning up of
+the village this ranked high, for he managed such
+French as he possessed most adroitly and made the
+peasants who first thought they were being robbed
+agree with him that it might be a good thing, once in
+a hundred years, to scrape the manure platforms—and
+even the cobbled village street—right down to
+the bone.</p>
+
+<p>From that first week of occupancy, when effectual
+sanitary measures were put into practice, right
+through the long season of trench training that followed,
+Barton and his detachment were never idle
+enough to suffer from homesickness.</p>
+
+<p>Although the training field and trenches for this
+American division were near enough to the battlefront
+for the big guns to be heard, they were well<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>
+hidden, and were defended from the enemy aircraft
+by a special squadron of French flying machines and
+sentinel airplanes.</p>
+
+<p>The plan of the German military leaders to bring
+some great disaster upon the first American troops
+to arrive back of the battlelines, was not yet accomplished.
+That the attempt would be made again and
+again until the catastrophe was assured was well
+understood by the Americans as well as by the allied
+training officers working with the division.</p>
+
+<p>“The Boche will get you if you don’t watch out,”
+became a byword in the Yankee camps. Perhaps the
+frequent cry of “wolf! wolf!” made the Americans
+at last somewhat careless. Men who have always
+joked about the lack of intelligence of German saloon-keepers
+and delicatessen shopmen are not likely to
+be easily impressed by stories of Fritz’s super-powers
+under the sea, on the earth, or in the air.</p>
+
+<p>Working with his men all day and studying at
+night made up the round of Barton’s existence during
+these first weeks in France. It was not often
+he gave much attention to outside matters, or thought
+upon anything but military tactics.</p>
+
+<p>It was true there was a desire in the back of his
+mind at first to learn how Helen Fuller was and where
+she was stationed in France—if she really had come
+over. He wrote a friendly note to her addressed
+in care of the Red Cross headquarters in Paris, but
+received no reply.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>Then arrived Ethel’s first three letters, all in one
+mail. The picture in them of Mailsburg and the
+affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company,
+pleased Barton greatly. He had not realized
+before how hungry he was for news.</p>
+
+<p>Jim Mayberry seemed to have forgotten him
+altogether. He was not so dense that he did not
+understand Mayberry’s character in a measure. Barton
+had never expected gratitude from the boyhood
+friend he had made superintendent of the factory.
+Ethel’s letters, however, hinted at none of the trouble
+Mayberry was making in Barton’s absence.</p>
+
+<p>They were just cheerful narratives of the daily
+happenings that she knew would interest the absent
+manager. He had already written one general missive
+addressed to her; but now he sat down and replied
+particularly to Ethel Clayton—a warm and
+friendly letter inspired by a feeling that he had not
+before realized he held for the girl whom he had always
+considered so “capable.”</p>
+
+<p>He remembered how she had looked at him from
+her desk on the evening of his final departure from
+Mailsburg. Actually he had never forgotten this
+picture of the girl he had left behind to watch over
+the affairs of the concern he had done so much for
+and which had meant so much to him. She seemed
+to mean a deal more in his thought, too, than merely
+a capable office assistant.</p>
+
+<p>And she was a pretty girl. That Sunday she had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>
+visited the camp at Lake Quehasset! There was no
+girl he knew who could look more attractive. Why
+had he never noticed it before that day? Hers
+was a less glowing, a less striking beauty than Helen
+Fuller’s, but it was a beauty that once noted never
+lost its attraction for the appreciative eye.</p>
+
+<p>The lonely man in camp or barracks is sure to contemplate
+the memory of his friends and acquaintances
+among womankind, and Barton’s mind dwelt
+as never before on the girls and women he knew in
+Mailsburg.</p>
+
+<p>“Why,” he thought, as he closed the long letter
+to Ethel, “I might have tried to make a friend of her.
+I wonder why I did not try? Miss Clayton is very
+much worth while.”</p>
+
+<p>The wound caused by Helen Fuller’s treatment of
+him at the last, was still raw. He felt that she had
+deliberately cultivated his acquaintance, had made
+him believe she had more than a passing interest in
+him, only to make the fall of his hopes seem the
+greater.</p>
+
+<p>He wondered if Helen had really had for him exactly
+the same feeling that she had for Morrison Copley
+or Charlie Bradley. Was she merely a coquette,
+playing with men as a fisherman plays a trout—and
+for the same reason? Was it merely for sport that
+she had exerted herself to charm him?</p>
+
+<p>Frank Barton felt all the hurt that a man of his
+kind does when he awakes to the fact that he has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>
+been made a fool of by a guileful woman. But he
+did not feel that pique which often turns a man
+from one woman to accept the salve of another’s
+sympathy. In thinking of Ethel Clayton and writing
+to her he had no such thought as this in mind.</p>
+
+<p>No. Instead he threw himself with all his strength
+into his work. He was acting ranking officer of his
+company, and he felt all the responsibility which that
+implies. He desired to have his boys show at inspection
+a higher degree of training than any other company
+in the regiment. He kept his brother officers,
+as well as the non-commissioned officers, up to the
+scratch by both example and precept.</p>
+
+<p>“Barton’s a shark for work,” they all said. “He
+just eats it up!”</p>
+
+<p>The notice of staff officers was drawn to his command
+and it brought Lieutenant Barton some special
+attentions. He was taken with a group of other
+advanced officers to the front line trenches and there
+learned much of the actual work of modern warfare—much
+that would help him when his brave boys “went
+in.”</p>
+
+<p>And then, back with his detachment once more,
+the men of which were “fit as a fiddle” and ready for
+any work, Frank Barton saw that day for which he
+had been preparing all these long weeks and months.</p>
+
+<p>It did not come just as he expected. He and his
+men were not moved to some sector of the front where
+they would slip into the places of wearied and mud-encrusted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>
+poilus at night. They did not go to the
+Hun in fact; the Hun came to them.</p>
+
+<p>The day began early indeed for Lieutenant Barton.
+He was up long before reveille, for there was a line
+of motor-lorries stalled in the mud just outside the
+village, that had been there half the night. Barton’s
+company was called on for help.</p>
+
+<p>For several days there had been a thaw and each
+night a thick and penetrating fog arose from the saturated
+earth, wiping out the stars completely and
+hanging a thick pall over the countryside.</p>
+
+<p>Under the oversight of the non-commissioned
+officers, the men began building miniature corduroy
+roads over the miry spots, and prying the lorries’
+wheels out of the mud so that they could get a start,
+one by one, and go on through the village street.</p>
+
+<p>Barton strode along the line of stalled trucks and
+their trailers to the very last one in the procession.
+Beyond, the forelights of a smaller motor-car showed
+in the mist. In curiosity he drew near to this.</p>
+
+<p>“Any chance of getting by the jam, Lieutenant?”
+demanded an unmistakably American voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Not, now,” Barton responded, drawing nearer.
+“You will have to wait for those trucks to get through
+the town.”</p>
+
+<p>“And how long will that be?”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot say. By the way, perhaps you had
+better let me see your passes. Save time. I happen
+to be in command here.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>“Oh, sure! Here you are, Lieutenant.”</p>
+
+<p>The driver of the car stepped out, pulling several
+papers from an inner pocket as he did so. Barton
+flashed the spotlight of his torch on them. At the
+same moment a clear and well remembered voice
+spoke from the tonneau:</p>
+
+<p>“Why, it’s Frank Barton! How very odd!”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Fuller! Helen!” ejaculated the officer in
+equal amazement.</p>
+
+<p>He turned his flashlight upon the occupants of the
+car. Two women in nurse’s cloaks and an elderly
+French citizen were Helen’s companions. She, too,
+was garbed as a Red Cross nurse.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, we shall be all right now!” the American girl
+cried.</p>
+
+<p>She explained to her companions in French, but
+spoke so rapidly that Barton could not follow her
+observations. The chauffeur, a keen-faced American
+lad, evidently college-bred, chuckled and returned
+the papers to his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>“You see, Mr. Barton,” she said to the lieutenant,
+“we are going to the base hospital on ahead—these
+ladies and I. Monsieur Renau goes to the village
+there on business. I engaged Johnny Gear and his
+machine to take us around this way because the railroad
+accommodations for civilians, as you know, are
+dreadful. And here you find us stuck in the mud,”
+she concluded dramatically.</p>
+
+<p>“I fear you will be stuck in the mud more than<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span>
+once if you follow this lorry train,” Barton said.
+“It has right of way and will leave an almost impassable
+mire behind it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now you’ve said something, Lieutenant,” agreed
+Johnny Gear.</p>
+
+<p>“But you can get us around it, of course, Frank,”
+said Helen confidently, and in the tone of an American
+girl to whom nothing is impossible if she has once
+made up her mind to get it.</p>
+
+<p>“Not by any near road, Miss Helen,” he responded.</p>
+
+<p>“Why! <i>there</i> is a track,” the girl cried, for through
+a sudden rift in the fog she could see a few yards.
+“Doesn’t that go around this village you say is just
+ahead of us?”</p>
+
+<p>“It leads into our training encampment. Nobody
+is allowed there without special permit.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, now, <i>Frank</i>——”</p>
+
+<p>“But there is a road,” he hastened to add. “You
+must turn back. Half a mile back you will find a
+road that encircles the whole field, and on which you
+will not be challenged. I’ll go with you if you can
+back and turn your car.”</p>
+
+<p>“You bet I can,” agreed Gear. “Look out for the
+mud, Lieutenant.”</p>
+
+<p>“Come and sit beside me, Frank,” the American
+girl said, quickly opening the tonneau door on her
+side. “How are you—and the other Mailsburg
+heroes? I’ve just lots and <i>lots</i> to tell you!”</p>
+
+<p>He slipped into the seat indicated and was introduced—after<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span>
+a fashion—to the French girls and to
+Monsieur Renau. Gear got his car turned about and
+they went lubbering on over the heavy road.</p>
+
+<p>It was daybreak now but still very dark, with the
+world completely smothered in fog. Almost by
+chance Barton discovered the entrance to the encircling
+track he had spoken of. It was a twenty-mile
+trip around the training field; but if he continued
+with them he was sure the party would make
+it all right.</p>
+
+<p>“And you <i>must</i> see that we get through, Frank,”
+Helen Fuller urged. “Really, you know, we’ve <i>got</i>
+to get to our destination to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>Barton smiled at her reassuringly. Her eyes were
+as bright as ever, her smile as alluring. He quite
+forgot how cavalierly she had treated him at their
+last meeting in Mailsburg.</p>
+
+<p>“Drive right ahead, Mr. Gear,” he told the chauffeur.
+“There is almost no heavy trucking over this
+road, and I think you will be able to get ahead of the
+lorry train.”</p>
+
+<p>Then he gave his attention to the girl beside him.
+She chattered in her usual magpie fashion; yet Barton
+loved to hear her. Naturally of a serious trend
+himself, Helen Fuller’s inconsequential talk had always
+amused him. And much that she told him
+now about her experience since coming to France
+was interesting.</p>
+
+<p>That she was quite as sure as ever that her interests<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span>
+and her activities were of more importance than
+anything else in the world, a listener could not fail
+to understand. When she asked him of his adventures
+she gave him no time for reply, but went on
+with her own story. Nobody in the world mattered
+so much as Helen Fuller. It began to irritate him
+after a while. It never had before.</p>
+
+<p>The car plowed on for some time; it was Barton
+himself who stopped it.</p>
+
+<p>“Wait!” he commanded. “What is that I hear?
+Shut off your engine, Mr. Gear.”</p>
+
+<p>Then they all heard it—the unmistakable roaring
+of a powerful motor. Moreover it was not on the
+road before or behind them. It was in the air.</p>
+
+<p>“An aeroplane!” cried Helen.</p>
+
+<p>“A very heavy aero—<i>hein</i>?” queried one of her
+fellow nurses.</p>
+
+<p>“And that’s right!” exclaimed the driver. “Foggy
+as it is I suppose there are plenty of flying men up
+yonder.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have never heard a machine just like that,”
+Barton said, in a puzzled tone. “I thought I had
+identified the sound of all these French machines—Great
+heavens!”</p>
+
+<p>A series of explosions interrupted his speech. Off
+to the left they were, in the direction of the village
+and the cantonments. Through the thick mist a
+flash or two was visible.</p>
+
+<p>“Shells!” yelled Gear.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span>“An enemy plane dropping bombs!” ejaculated
+Barton. “Must have got past the French escadrille
+in this fog.”</p>
+
+<p>A nearer explosion followed and the roar of the
+aeroplane’s engine seemed almost over their heads.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XVIII<br>
+
+<small>THE WRATH OF THE HUN</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">Oh! Oh!</span>” cried Helen, clinging tightly to Barton’s
+arm. “Let us turn back!”</p>
+
+<p>“What good’ll that do!” growled Gear, who heard
+her.</p>
+
+<p>One of the French nurses crossed herself and murmured
+a prayer as Barton could see by her whispering
+lips. He could not fail to note how much better the
+French girls were taking it than Helen. She had
+quite lost her self-control and was fairly hysterical.</p>
+
+<p>He could not afford to show any trepidation himself,
+even if he felt it. He was in the uniform of an
+officer of the American forces and there were French
+eyes upon him. In any case he must not show the
+white feather, and it stabbed his pride that Helen,
+an American Red Cross nurse, should do so.</p>
+
+<p>An aerial bomb fell nearer and almost deafened
+them with its explosion. Barton sprang out of the
+motor-car and aided Helen to alight.</p>
+
+<p>“Into the ditch—everybody!” he shouted. “Lie
+down!”</p>
+
+<p>He saw Renau and Gear spring to the help of the
+other women, then in a moment Barton was rushing
+toward the muddy sluiceway with Helen Fuller.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>“Oh, <i>don’t</i> drag me around so, Frank! I’m wet to my
+<i>knees</i>. Isn’t there some place—”</p>
+
+<p>The roaring of the powerful motor overhead
+drowned her further complaint. It was then that
+another shell fell.</p>
+
+<p>Had Barton not dragged the girl down with him—both
+falling flat into the bottom of the ditch—they
+must have suffered the fate of those who had not
+yet got away from the motor-car—the two nurses,
+Monsieur Renau, and poor smiling, reckless Johnny
+Gear, Johnny, who had run away from home to
+“see what the blooming war was like.”</p>
+
+<p>Overhead the aero engine moaned into the distance.
+Barton got to his knees and pulled the girl up beside
+him. It was light enough for them to see each other.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Oh! Take me away! I must go somewhere.
+Oh, Frank! I—I’m all <i>muddy</i>,” Helen, poor shallow,
+selfish Helen, wailed.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!” gasped Barton, unheeding. “They’re dead—dead!”</p>
+
+<p>He stood up and tossed back the thick hair from
+his brow. He had not his cap. He found his army
+pistol gripped in his right hand. His left was holding
+up the girl whom he clutched by the shoulder as
+carelessly as he might have held a half-filled sack of
+flour.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re not <i>listening</i>!” cried Helen. “Don’t you
+<i>hear</i>? Take me somewhere—take me where it is
+<i>safe</i>.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>He was listening, but not to her cries. That terrible
+thing in the air was coming back.</p>
+
+<p>The moan of the powerful engine was increasing
+again. A few guns in the distance began to pop.
+The Field Artillery was getting into action—<i>and he
+was not there</i>.</p>
+
+<p>What carnage might not have already been accomplished!
+This terrible thing in the air, swooping
+through the fog, might have brought havoc and disaster
+to the American forces.</p>
+
+<p>“Take me away! Take me away!” the girl cried
+over and over again, fairly clawing at his arm to
+attract his attention.</p>
+
+<p>“Where shall I take you? One place is as safe as
+another—until this raid is over.”</p>
+
+<p>It was growing lighter all the time. The fog was
+rapidly thinning. Suddenly Helen shrieked:</p>
+
+<p>“Where is our car?”</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing but a hole in the road where it
+had stood. Not a shred of it remained within their
+straining vision. Wiped out—like that!</p>
+
+<p>“Here it comes again!” shouted Barton.</p>
+
+<p>Through the dissipating mist the great sausage-like
+body of the German air-raider appeared. It
+was one of the newest and largest airships yet conceived
+and built. It drifted low—not two hundred
+yards from the earth.</p>
+
+<p>“Down on the ground!” commanded Barton.
+“If they spy us——”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe28_125" id="i_200a">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i_200a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="caption">He did fire—futilely, perhaps—as the great car
+circled clumsily above the spot.</p>
+
+<p class="right">(<i>See page <a href="#Page_201">201</a></i>)</p>
+</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span>The huge flying car swooped lower. It seemed to
+be heading directly for the two Americans in the
+muddy road. The lieutenant flung the girl down
+again, but stood erect himself, his legs astride, his
+head back, eyes glaring through the shreds of fog
+at the airship. He had involuntarily assumed an
+attitude of defiance and his pistol was raised at firing
+angle.</p>
+
+<p>He did fire—futilely, perhaps—as the great car
+circled clumsily above the spot. He emptied the
+weapon at the flying foe.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly—whether a chance bullet had hit some
+vital spot or not—a red flame leaped to life in the
+envelope of the huge bag. So low sailed the machine
+that Barton could see a man run along a narrow platform
+and shoot the spray of a chemical fire extinguisher
+up at the spreading flame.</p>
+
+<p>Only for a moment was this attempt continued.
+Then a second man appeared, and the usual high,
+staccato voice of a Prussian officer uttering a command
+sounded sharply through the rumble of the
+dying motor.</p>
+
+<p>The efforts of the man with the fire extinguisher
+ceased. Some catastrophe had overtaken the huge
+war machine. Her engine had lost its stroke. She
+was coming to earth—and that in enemy territory.
+The crew would destroy the ship as they always do
+in such instances.</p>
+
+<p>A wild cheer burst from Barton’s lips. Swiftly he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>
+reloaded his automatic pistol. The nose of the
+wabbly, creaking machine, so clumsy looking that
+Barton half wondered how it was ever lifted from
+the ground, plunged toward the earth.</p>
+
+<p>It passed directly over the road. The balloon
+envelope was afire in a dozen places. Barton could
+see the flash of an axe in the officer’s hands as he
+wrecked the mechanism of the still flying airship.</p>
+
+<p>There was a deafening crash when the car hit the
+ground. The American saw one man, turning over
+and over in the air, dashed forty feet at least by the
+force of the impact. Other figures climbed down from
+the crushed car on to which the balloon collapsed
+slowly, all afire.</p>
+
+<p>“Come on!” shouted the excited lieutenant, waving
+his weapon. “Now we’ve got ’em!”</p>
+
+<p>“Frank! Stop! Don’t you <i>dare</i> leave me!” wailed
+Helen Fuller.</p>
+
+<p>“Wait for me here, Helen——”</p>
+
+<p>“I tell you I <i>won’t</i>!” cried the girl. She stamped
+her foot in rage. “You take me right away from
+here!”</p>
+
+<p>“But I must round those fellows up. We’ve got
+’em—don’t you see? Wait here for me if you are
+afraid.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll <i>never</i> forgive you, Frank Barton, if you leave
+me! And I <i>won’t</i> go over there! Those—those men
+will kill us. Oh, Frank! Come back!”</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated but a moment to answer her. “I’m<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span>
+sure you wouldn’t want me to be a quitter, Helen,”
+he declared, and leaped the ditch to get into the field
+upon which the wrecked German airship had fallen.</p>
+
+<p>With a scream she followed him. She ran faster
+than he, and caught his right arm again just as he
+was rounding the rear of the wreckage. Before them
+stood fourteen men in the gray olive of the German
+uniform. The man thrown when the ship came down
+never moved.</p>
+
+<p>Barton saw instantly that the crew of the airship—even
+the commander himself—were unarmed.
+Good reason for that. Deep in the enemy’s country,
+without a possible chance of escape through the lines,
+a peaceful demeanor and appearance spelled safety
+for them.</p>
+
+<p>Barton raised his pistol, Helen still clinging to his
+arm. The Germans, or, at least, those in the front
+of the group, raised their hands in token of surrender.
+Even the commander called out: “<i>Kamerad!</i>”</p>
+
+<p>“Frank Barton! Take me away! Save me!” shrieked
+the hysterical girl.</p>
+
+<p>She hung, a dead weight, upon his arm and pulled
+down the weapon. One of the men in the back of
+the group had been stooping down, his hands on the
+ground. Now he stood up, stepped clear of his companions,
+and swung his right hand back.</p>
+
+<p>With the accuracy of a baseball player he flung the
+sharp stone he had picked up. Barton tried to fire
+and dodge, but Helen’s interference made both attempts<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>
+impossible. The stone struck him just above
+the right temple and glanced off, cutting such a gash
+that the blood poured down his face, blinding him.</p>
+
+<p>With a shout the Germans started for Barton and
+the girl. The lieutenant, feeling himself helpless,
+thrust his weapon into Helen’s hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Defend yourself!” he gasped, and then slipped
+slowly to the ground, crumpling in a senseless heap
+at her feet.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XIX<br>
+
+<small>UNCERTAINTIES</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Had</span> Ethel Clayton known how deep in wild adventure
+Barton was as she rode down town in the surface
+car watching the little lawyer, she would have been
+utterly disgruntled at the tameness of her quest.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it was with thought of Barton in her mind, as
+well as of her own personal interest and that of her
+mother’s, that the girl forged on. She believed that
+a conspiracy was on foot the intent of which was the
+ruining of the business structure Frank Barton had
+labored so hard to build and make secure. He had
+made the Hapwood-Diller Company a going concern.
+Somebody was now determined to make abortive
+all the general manger’s work and, as well, to ruin
+the smaller stockholders.</p>
+
+<p>Who that somebody was Ethel was not certain,
+although she had strong suspicions. She believed
+A. Schuster to be the link connecting her suspicions
+with the truth. She sat quietly in the car and did
+not even glance his way after her first hasty appreciation
+of the man when he had entered.</p>
+
+<p>In front of the Bellevue he left the car, but Ethel
+went on to the next crossing before alighting. She
+hurried back. Under the bunch of electric lights<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>
+before the main door of the hotel she saw A. Schuster
+pass in.</p>
+
+<p>She had expected this. Both Mr. Grandon Fuller
+and Jim Mayberry she knew to be habitués of the
+hotel. There was a public dining-room at one side of
+the front door and the lobby and office were on the
+other, with the smoking-room and café back of the
+clerk’s desk.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel had already made up her mind what she
+would do in this emergency. She mounted the broad
+steps briskly and crossed the lobby toward the small
+ladies’ parlor behind the stairway. A glance to the
+right showed her the black-haired lawyer approaching
+the desk.</p>
+
+<p>In one chair lounged the pursy Mr. Fuller. He
+vouchsafed Schuster no more than a glance. But
+Jim Mayberry, coming from the smoking-room, hailed
+the lawyer affably:</p>
+
+<p>“Hi, old man! going to have supper with me?
+Come on upstairs while I get into my best bib and
+tucker for the evening.”</p>
+
+<p>He clapped Schuster heartily on the shoulder and
+led him away toward the little elevator that wheezed
+upward asthmatically the next moment. Neither
+had looked at Grandon Fuller nor he at them.</p>
+
+<p>This fact was sufficient to have made Ethel Clayton
+suspicious had she not been so before. Jim Mayberry
+was always so very polite and deferential to
+Mr. Fuller when the latter appeared at the factory<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span>
+offices. It seemed now as though the superintendent
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company had ignored the
+presence of the chief stockholder too obviously.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel passed hastily on to the parlor; but nothing
+of this had escaped her quick eye and understanding.
+In the parlor she found a girl in cap and apron whom
+she knew. It was Eliza Boling, who presided over
+the linen room of the hotel and acted as a sort of
+floor clerk on the third floor. Ethel had gone to
+school with the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Ethel! come up to my desk so we can talk,”
+cried Miss Boling, when she caught sight of Miss
+Clayton. “I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel was nothing loath under the circumstances,
+and ran upstairs with her. The slowly moving elevator
+had scarcely more than deposited Jim Mayberry
+and the lawyer on the third floor. Ethel saw
+them approaching one of the doors.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t that Mr. Mayberry?” she asked her acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I suppose it is,” replied the other girl without
+looking up. “Don’t let him speak to you. He’s
+so awfully fresh!”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that his room?” Ethel asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Number Eighty? Yes. And I wish it was on
+another floor.”</p>
+
+<p>Eliza Boling was a somewhat attractive girl, and
+Ethel could understand easily that the superintendent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company would have made
+himself objectionable to her.</p>
+
+<p>The two girls talked of mutual friends and affairs
+of mutual interest for some time. Then the elevator
+door clanged again. Ethel looked quickly. The
+heavy figure of Mr. Grandon Fuller stepped out into
+the corridor. He did not glance toward the two girls.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Fuller walked straight to the door of Number
+Eighty. He rapped once and then entered the room.
+It was plain his coming was expected.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel had seen enough to assure her that Fuller,
+Jim Mayberry, and the sly looking Schuster were engaged
+in something that they wished to keep secret
+from people in general.</p>
+
+<p>She believed she had traced the conspirators. The
+reason for the largest stockholder of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company seeking to wreck that concern was,
+however, beyond Ethel Clayton’s powers of divination.</p>
+
+<p>For that was exactly the threat of circumstances as
+the girl saw it. The forcing down of the price of
+Hapwood-Diller stock must in the end ruin the credit
+of the corporation. She went home vastly puzzled
+by the whole situation.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother was utterly unstrung.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Ethel, I feel terribly condemned!” she cried.
+“Where have you been? I wish you had come in
+earlier so as to hear that Mr. Schuster talk.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want to hear him talk,” declared her
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>“It seems to me, Ethel,” complained Mrs. Clayton,
+“that you are siding against me—against your own
+interests. I suppose you call that loyalty to your
+employer. But Frank Barton isn’t there at the offices
+any more. He never ought to have gone away. I
+am convinced of that now. The business is on its
+last legs. You know it is, but you won’t admit it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know nothing of the kind, Mother!” cried Ethel
+with exasperation. “Why, you talk about the Hapwood-Diller
+Company as these pro-Germans do about
+the war! And just as unreasonably.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean—calling your own mother a
+pro-German?” demanded Mrs. Clayton. “I guess
+I’m just as good a patriot as the next one—and I knit
+as many socks and sweaters, too!</p>
+
+<p>“But about our shares of stock—that’s different.
+Since you’ve been away Amy Hopper’s been in
+and she’s sold her shares—she had ten—and has
+bought a Ford car. At least, she’s got something
+for her money, while we are likely to lose everything.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel was just completing her warmed-over supper,
+and under a steady dropping of her mother’s complaints,
+when the porch door banged open and Benway
+Chase rushed in.</p>
+
+<p>“Goodness, Bennie, how you scared me!” Mrs.
+Clayton ejaculated. “Sit down and have a piece of
+pie—do!”</p>
+
+<p>“No. But I’ll stand up and eat it—many thanks,
+Mrs. Clayton!” responded the young fellow, whipping<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span>
+the piece of pie off the plate she offered him and
+inserting it like a wedge into his mouth for the first
+bite. Somehow he managed to utter: “Fire at the
+factory, Ethel. Get on your hat and coat.”</p>
+
+<p>“No! Benway?” she gasped, starting up.</p>
+
+<p>“Surest thing you know! You can see the smoke
+from the street. I telephoned. It’s confined to
+Shop Four. The firemen are there. But let’s go
+down and see that nothing’s damaged around the
+offices.”</p>
+
+<p>She ran for her coat and hat and they sallied forth,
+Benway swallowing the last of the pie as they cleared
+the gate. “Gee! but your mother does make good
+pie crust, Ethel,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>His boyishness somehow troubled her more than
+it usually did just then. Perhaps because her own
+thoughts were so serious. He would make a good
+match for Mabel Skinner. He would never grow up
+enough for Ethel to consider him for a moment as a
+partner in life.</p>
+
+<p>The fire was under control when the two young
+people reached the factory. Nor had it done much
+damage. Moreover, it was well covered with insurance;
+but the delay in work under way would be considerable.</p>
+
+<p>“By jove!” said Benway, “the old H-D Company is
+up against it for fair. Everything is going wrong with
+it. You’d think the place was bewitched, wouldn’t
+you?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span>“Hush! Let us not talk about such things. John
+says it was faulty insulation. But how came there
+to be faulty insulation in that shop? Somebody is
+guilty of criminal carelessness. Oh, I wish Frank
+Barton were here!”</p>
+
+<p>This last wish she did not let Benway hear. And,
+indeed, what could Barton have done had he been
+on the spot? The Board of Directors met the next
+day and even Mr. Hammerly could find nobody to
+“jack up.”</p>
+
+<p>The grain dealer was in a fine rage, however. The
+meeting was as acrimonious a session as had ever
+been held since the reorganization of the corporation.
+Ethel was only called into the room once and then
+Hammerly did not speak to her. And after the meeting
+he pulled his hat down over his ears and stamped
+out of the offices without a word.</p>
+
+<p>She wondered what he had done with the paper
+she had given him—the specification sheet of the
+Kimberly Binding Company order. It seemed strange
+that he had never taken her into his confidence at
+all about that matter.</p>
+
+<p>It leaked out in some way, however, after this
+meeting, that the old grain merchant was beaten by
+Grandon Fuller and his friends and that Jim Mayberry
+was likely to be made manager in Barton’s
+place at the next quarterly meeting. She had noticed
+that the superintendent left the Board meeting
+with a smile. He had given Ethel a hard look, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>
+she was well aware of what awaited her in the near
+future if Mayberry had his way.</p>
+
+<p>There was a streak of fair weather for her in a day
+or two, however. Another letter arrived from France,
+and this time it was not merely an impersonal narrative
+of the absent’s manager’s adventures in uniform.
+There was an intimate note to the missive that
+warmed Ethel’s heart to a glow. Yet she realized
+that not a phrase went beyond proper friendliness.</p>
+
+<p>She read it all to the others in the office, although
+it was not just the same as his first letter had been.
+She did not let the sheets go out of her own hands,
+however. There was a personal atmosphere to it
+which made her fold the letter finally and hide it
+in her blouse. This betrayed a softness that would
+have angered Ethel had anybody accused her of it.</p>
+
+<p>Other people heard about the letter, however, and
+she was stopped for several days upon the street by
+friends of Barton asking after him. Secretly she was
+proud that it was she whom he had selected as a correspondent
+among all those who knew and were
+interested in him here in Mailsburg.</p>
+
+<p>Then Mrs. Trevor came to the office to see her.
+The boarding-house mistress who had housed and
+fed Frank Barton so long was a rather grim woman
+in an old-fashioned Paisley shawl and arctics. Her
+hands were red and gnarled and her back was as
+curveless as a ramrod.</p>
+
+<p>When she strode into the Hapwood-Diller offices<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>
+she was as stern as a grenadier. Her mere appearance
+quelled even Mabel Skinner. But when she
+came close to Ethel Clayton’s desk the girl saw that
+her eyelids were red-rimmed and that she had difficulty
+in keeping her lips from trembling.</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Clayton—you’re Miss Clayton, ain’t you?”
+she began. “Ethel Clayton?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” agreed Ethel. “You are Mrs. Trevor?”</p>
+
+<p>The woman nodded. Then said: “What do you
+know about Frank Barton? I hear you got a letter
+from him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Mrs. Trevor.”</p>
+
+<p>“When was it writ?”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel told her, understanding too well to consider
+Mrs. Trevor at all impertinent. She told her most
+of what was in the letter, too, for it was burned into
+her memory too clearly for her to forget what Frank
+Barton had said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said the woman, with a sigh, “I had to
+know. I expect I’m an old fool. But that boy was
+with me long, Miss Clayton.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I understand,” the girl said gently.</p>
+
+<p>“You see, I got to dreaming of him. Night afore
+last I had a terrible dream. I saw him with his face
+all bloody, his empty hands in the air—sort of clutching
+like—and him falling down just like he was
+dead. And there was smoke and fire all about, just
+as though he was in battle. It’s worried me a lot.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should think it would, Mrs. Trevor,” Ethel said.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>
+“But you know, they say dreams go by contraries.”</p>
+
+<p>“So they say, but I don’t know as it is always
+true. I’ve had dreams——”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you mustn’t let dreams get on your nerves,”
+broke in Ethel hastily.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, the dear boy meant so much to me. You
+can’t imagine what a good boarder he was—no
+trouble at all—leas’wise not alongside o’ some of
+’em. Lordy! what a lot of trouble some of ’em do
+make, to be sure. But Frank Barton—he’s one boy
+out of a thousand, yes, he is;” and the old boarding-house
+mistress bobbed her head vigorously.</p>
+
+<p>“You mustn’t worry. It will be all right, I’m
+sure,” answered the girl, but rather weakly.</p>
+
+<p>“You feel sure, Miss Clayton?”</p>
+
+<p>“You must look on the bright side. It will be
+all right.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I hope so!” The woman then tramped out
+of the office. She was plainly relieved and comforted.
+But Ethel was not.</p>
+
+<p>Of course she did not believe in dreams. But what
+Mrs. Trevor had said remained in the girl’s mind—stuck
+to her memory like a burr. She was constantly
+seeing Frank Barton falling down, his face
+masked in blood. She almost accepted Mrs. Trevor’s
+vision as prophetic.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the day when the Mailsburg <i>Clarion</i>
+printed an afternoon extra edition. Those in the
+office heard the boys shouting it under the windows<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>
+and Benway Chase ran out to buy a paper. Across
+the sheet was the headline:</p>
+
+<p class="center">GERMAN AIR RAID ON AMERICAN CAMP!<br>
+METEOR DIVISION BOMBED!</p>
+
+<p>The Field Artillery with which Frank Barton
+served was a part of the so-styled Meteor Division.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel Clayton realized this while the paper was
+still across the room from her. She sat perfectly
+still at her desk, clutching the edge of it to keep down
+the cry that rose to her lips.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XX<br>
+
+<small>SO FAR AWAY!</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Benway Chase</span> was looking at her and Ethel realized
+that in the boy’s eyes there was an expression of
+pain and despair that gave almost a tragic cast to his
+countenance. He had suddenly become aware that
+his old-time friend, the girl he had always worshiped,
+was given to the very last fibre of her being
+to another.</p>
+
+<p>His lips moved stiffly as he came nearer to her desk.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it Mr. Barton’s division!” he questioned,
+brokenly. “Oh, Ethel!”</p>
+
+<p>“His Field Artillery is a part of the Meteor Division,”
+she said, and was surprised that her voice was
+unshaken.</p>
+
+<p>“And you—” He did not finish the speech. His
+gaze dropped. The others gathered around to read
+the startling news in the <i>Clarion</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the headlines emblazoned across the page,
+there was not much to read. The War Department
+merely announced that it was reported—a report as
+yet unverified—that the Germans had raided the
+American camp. No casualties were announced.
+As previously declared, the Department would make
+all particulars public as soon as the undisputed facts<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span>
+were received from the officer commanding the division.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry must have heard the buzz of conversation
+from the private office. He appeared, an ominous
+scowl on his brow.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Is this
+all you people have to do? I believe the Hapwood-Diller
+Company could get along just as well with
+half the office force we have.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let you and me enlist, Mayberry,” suggested
+Sydney. “They could get along without us, that’s
+sure.”</p>
+
+<p>Little Skinner giggled. The superintendent, who
+had some fear of Sydney, strode forward without
+replying to the bookkeeper and took the paper out of
+Josephine Durand’s hand. He held some papers in
+a sheaf in his left hand and when he caught sight of
+the headlines he put his papers on the desk the
+better to handle the smutted newspaper.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel had not risen. In flapping open the <i>Clarion</i>
+Mayberry started a circulation of air that scattered
+his sheaf of papers. Ethel gathered them together
+and stacked them into a neat packet. But this
+time a different paper was on top of the pile. She
+saw that the top sheet was headed: “A. Schuster.”</p>
+
+<p>“What’s all this about?” Mayberry was saying.
+“Murder! Was Barton in it?”</p>
+
+<p>“His battalion is attached to that division, Mr.
+Mayberry,” Benway said.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span>“Well, maybe he’s seen some real fighting, then,”
+the superintendent said cheerfully. “That’s what
+he went over there for, I suppose.”</p>
+
+<p>He dropped the <i>Clarion</i> upon Ethel’s desk and
+picked up his papers. Seeing what lay on top he
+flashed the girl a sudden suspicious glance. But
+Ethel seemed oblivious of it.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it seemed as though all save the phlegmatic
+superintendent were too thoroughly disturbed to
+set their minds on office matters. Ethel betrayed
+less emotion than most of them, perhaps; but then
+it was her nature to hide her keener feelings.</p>
+
+<p>The few following days she found hard to live
+through. The strain upon her patience was great.
+The papers were filled with frothings and imaginations
+about the raid on the American camp. Then
+came the truth with the list of casualties.</p>
+
+<p>The list was small. One enlisted man killed, seven
+wounded and one missing. The huge German flying
+machine had been brought down, one of its crew
+losing his life, the other fourteen being captured by
+Second-Lieutenant Charles Bradley with a part of
+his company.</p>
+
+<p>With hungry eyes Ethel Clayton read the list of
+casualties. The last line yielded the news which
+she had feared all along:</p>
+
+<p class="center">“<i>Lieutenant F. Barton, Field Artillery, missing.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>There was a full account in the papers of the raid
+and the bringing down of the German raider. But<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>
+the single statement, that Frank Barton was missing,
+added a spice of mystery to the affair that created
+a good deal of excitement in Mailsburg.</p>
+
+<p>It could not be possible, if all the German raiders
+were captured or killed, that Frank Barton was himself
+captured and taken into the German lines. That
+seemed improbable. Yet the sinister report stood.</p>
+
+<p>What had happened to him? Would Ethel ever
+hear from him again? Was his fate to be one of
+those mysteries of war that are never satisfactorily
+explained? Of the three lurid headings of the casualty
+list, killed, wounded, missing, the last is always
+the most nerve-breaking.</p>
+
+<p>Just at this time, however, Ethel Clayton’s mind
+was scarified by other and serious troubles. She had
+decided that at last the evidence of conspiracy was
+sufficient to lay before Mr. Hammerly; and as the
+latter seemed to make no move the girl went to him.</p>
+
+<p>“The quarterly meeting is near. I understand that
+Mr. Mayberry is to be advanced to Mr. Barton’s
+position,” she said to the old grain dealer. “To me
+it looks like ruin for us all. My mother has some
+interest in it, Mr. Hammerly, so I am speaking for
+her, not for myself as an employee.”</p>
+
+<p>“Humph! No! You’d best keep out of it, Ethel,”
+said the old man. “Leave this to me. I’ve learned
+something about this Schuster, though I never saw
+him. If I need your evidence I’ll call on you in the
+board meeting. But I reckon I can link up A.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span>
+Schuster with the proper parties without your verbal
+testimony.”</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Jim Mayberry made himself as unpleasant
+around the offices as he could. He felt, it
+seemed, that he would soon have all the force at his
+mercy, unless it were Sydney. He would scarcely
+dare discharge the bookkeeper, who had been so long
+with the corporation.</p>
+
+<p>“Mayberry hangs the sword of Damocles over our
+heads,” Benway growled one evening to Ethel. “I
+can feel the breath of it on the back of my neck, at
+least. I might as well be looking around for another
+job.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel had no word of comfort for him. She did
+not see herself just how it was coming out. It seemed
+probable that Frank Barton would never come back
+now; so why should the stockholders keep his situation
+for him?</p>
+
+<p>The day for the quarterly board meeting arrived,
+and the board room buzzed like a hive of disturbed
+bees. Thoroughly in touch as she was with the reports
+from all departments, Ethel knew very well
+that the expected blow must fall.</p>
+
+<p>The usual dividend must be passed. The circumstances
+of the corporation would not allow anything
+else to be done. The last two quarterly reports
+showed a decline in profits, in production, and in
+value of plant, which fairly staggered most of the
+board members.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>“It stands to reason,” Grandon Fuller stated in his
+decided way, “that before he went away, Mr. Barton
+was covering up a good many things that he would
+better have given us notice of. We can excuse the
+enthusiasm and anxiety of the young, perhaps; he
+was very desirous of getting out of it all and putting
+on the army khaki. But now we have suffered
+enough—this corporation I mean—because of his
+mistakes. We must get back on a stable foundation.
+Somebody must get a firm grip upon the Hapwood-Diller
+Company.”</p>
+
+<p>“Suppose Brother Fuller tells us just wherein Frank
+Barton is to be blamed for our present situation?”
+suggested Macon Hammerly, with surprising gentleness
+for him. “We want facts, not allegations.”</p>
+
+<p>“You know very well how he bungled that Kimberly
+order.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have affidavits of a chemist and two handwriting
+experts here,” interposed Hammerly, shuffling
+the papers before him, “which state that two lines
+in the Kimberly Company’s schedule sheet were
+erased, and in the two interpolated lines an attempt
+made by somebody to copy the writing of the young
+woman who made the schedule. In other words a
+deliberate and successful attempt to change the substance
+of the Kimberly order was made after it passed
+out of Mr. Barton’s hands.”</p>
+
+<p>There was immediate uproar—denial by Fuller and
+angry talk by some of the other members of the board.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span>
+Hammerly grimly displayed his affidavits and proved
+his case to the satisfaction of most of the board of
+directors.</p>
+
+<p>“The fact remains,” cried Grandon Fuller, “that
+our shares are selling in the open market as low as
+sixty. The news has got out that the business is
+tottering for want of a strong hand to manage it.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll take that up, too,” interposed Hammerly.
+“I have here a list of shares and whom they were
+bought from by a man named A. Schuster. These
+shares have been thrown on the market by various
+brokers at ridiculous prices. They were all bought
+up again by A. Schuster! And this same tricky legal
+light has been the representative of a certain member
+of this board in New York for the past three years.”</p>
+
+<p>This remarkable statement produced a profound
+sensation. For a brief instant there was intense
+silence as the members of the board looked at each
+other. Then—</p>
+
+<p>“What are you saying?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s a grave accusation!”</p>
+
+<p>“Can you prove your words?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a crime to do what you’re hinting at, Hammerly.”</p>
+
+<p>“He can’t prove a thing!”</p>
+
+<p>“He don’t know what he’s talking about!”</p>
+
+<p>“Shut him up!”</p>
+
+<p>“He ought to be put out of the meeting!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span>“That’s the talk. He is going too far. This is
+a meeting of gentlemen.”</p>
+
+<p>Thus came the chorus of objections, not alone
+from Grandon Fuller. But Macon Hammerly’s
+scowl quelled the riot.</p>
+
+<p>“I know whereof I speak,” he said solemnly. “I
+have papers and witnesses to prove it. And I have
+reason to suppose, in addition, that Mr. Grandon
+Fuller has made some wash sales of his own shares
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company that in the first
+place bore down the price. Let him deny it if he
+dares!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XXI<br>
+
+<small>THE BURDEN</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> game of “freeze out” fathered by the heaviest
+stockholder in the Hapwood-Diller Company betrayed
+by Macon Hammerly’s confident statements
+was but an incident of that stormy meeting of the
+board. The latter was thoroughly reorganized before
+the end of the session. And that spelled utter defeat
+for Mr. Fuller’s plans.</p>
+
+<p>He held some of his friends on the board; but Hammerly
+was a shrewd politician. He voted more proxies
+than Fuller could assemble. The latter found himself
+ousted from the chairmanship; the grain merchant
+was voted into the vacant place by a satisfactory
+majority. The smoke of battle cleared away, leaving
+Grandon Fuller slumped down in his chair with
+a sour face and Jim Mayberry looking glum and at
+the same time half-frightened and half-dazed.</p>
+
+<p>“Send for Ethel Clayton,” ordered the new chairman.
+“We want stenographic notes of what goes
+on here. If any of our stockholders question what
+we do we must be able to spread before them an exact
+report of our actions. Under the old régime this
+was impossible. There was too much secret diplomacy
+here,” and he grinned.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span>Ethel realized the tenseness of the situation when
+she came into the board room, book and pencil in
+hand. She was given a seat at Hammerly’s right
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Now,” said the grim looking grain dealer, “you
+have something to say, I presume, Jim?” and he
+looked at the superintendent.</p>
+
+<p>“I say what I said before, Mr. Hammerly,” grumbled
+Mayberry. “If I can’t have a free hand I can’t
+undertake to manage the concern, and that’s all there
+is to it.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you can continue as superintendent, I presume?”
+softly asked Hammerly. “That job isn’t
+too big for you, is it?”</p>
+
+<p>The younger man’s face flamed and he answered
+angrily: “I don’t know what you mean. Nobody
+ever complained of my work before.”</p>
+
+<p>“While Barton was on the job to overlook you—no,”
+admitted the old man, his sarcasm biting.
+“True. But things have been going badly in the
+various shops. That fire in Number Four the other
+day, for instance.”</p>
+
+<p>“By thunder!” exploded Mayberry, “you can’t
+blame me for that! I can’t be in a dozen places at
+once.”</p>
+
+<p>“There have been quite unnecessary breakdowns,
+and work has been retarded. How do you explain
+these things?” demanded Mr. Hammerly.</p>
+
+<p>“I—I——”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span>“I don’t mean to say you are not a good man in
+your place, Jim,” said the grain merchant. “But
+Barton’s job is too big for you. I did not believe you
+could begin to fill his shoes at the start.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yet you agreed that Barton should go away?”
+questioned Grandon Fuller.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. He wanted to go. For patriotic reasons I
+could not thwart his desire. And in addition I knew
+that if Jim here fell down—as he has—we would not
+be helpless.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean by that?” asked Seville Baker,
+who owned a drug store and had several thousand
+dollars invested in the Hapwood-Diller Company
+stock.</p>
+
+<p>Jim Mayberry’s face was fiery again. Even Grandon
+Fuller sat up to stare at Hammerly. The others
+seemed as much amazed.</p>
+
+<p>The old grain dealer grinned for a moment rather
+sheepishly. Then a new expression came into his face,
+for he turned to look at the girl beside him. His
+gnarled right hand crept over her white and well
+shaped left. She glanced up from her book, startled.</p>
+
+<p>“I tell you what ’tis,” said Hammerly in his homely
+way; “if I was as blind as you other fellers are this
+board would be about as much good as an old women’s
+sewing bee! That’s what!</p>
+
+<p>“There’s been just one person that’s kept things
+going half smoothly in the Hapwood-Diller Company
+since Frank Barton cleared out to be a soldier. And<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span>
+that person had a good deal to do toward helping
+Frank when he was on the job.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you fellers know that Miss Clayton here
+was Frank’s right hand man? She knows all the ins
+and outs of things. It was her caught this poor fish,
+Jim Mayberry, selling us out to the Bogata Company.
+She’s been of much more importance lately, I can
+tell you. If we pull out of this hole we are in and
+pay a dividend again, it will be because of what she
+has done.”</p>
+
+<p>Grandon Fuller dragged himself to his feet. He
+had a power of repression scarcely second to Hammerly
+himself. But this was too much.</p>
+
+<p>“You old fool!” he shouted at the grain dealer.
+“You don’t mean to try to put a woman in charge of
+this business? It’s suicidal!”</p>
+
+<p>“I mean just that. I mean Miss Clayton’s able
+to fill the job, and Jim Mayberry ain’t. She’s a better
+man when it comes to business sense than any
+of us. I nominate her for the place of assistant manager,
+to hold the job till Frank Barton comes back
+to us—if the poor feller ever does come back.”</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t vote on such a fool proposition,” cried
+Fuller wrathfully, starting for the door.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t bother to, Grandon,” drawled Hammerly.
+“You’d be beat if you did—and you know it. I’ve
+got more proxies than you have.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe28_125" id="i_227a">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i_227a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="caption">“I nominate her as assistant manager, to hold
+the job till Frank Barton comes back.”</p>
+
+<p class="right">(<i>See page <a href="#Page_227">227</a></i>)</p>
+</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The door of the board room banged. Ethel Clayton
+had turned to speak, but Hammerly was scowling<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span>
+at Jim Mayberry, who had risen as though to
+follow his fellow-conspirator. “Spit it out, Jim. Tell
+us what’s on your chest.”</p>
+
+<p>“I—I——You old fool!” exclaimed the superintendent,
+“do you think I am going to work here under
+a <i>girl</i>? To be set aside for her?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; I don’t guess you will,” responded Hammerly.
+“We’ll give you a chance to resign if that’s what you
+want. And I guess your resignation will be accepted
+pretty nigh unanimous.”</p>
+
+<p>“But Mr. Hammerly,” begged Seville Baker,
+feebly, “what will happen to the works? Mr. Mayberry
+has been superintendent so long——”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s a good foreman in every shop who has
+been on his job longer than Jim Mayberry has voted.
+They’ve only been hampered by Jim—that’s the truth
+of the matter.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will be through at the end of the month, gentlemen,”
+said Mayberry, recovering his dignity. “The
+high hand Mr. Hammerly takes in this matter——”</p>
+
+<p>“Shoo!” exclaimed the grain merchant with grim
+pleasantry. “You’ll get through right here and now.
+I for one wouldn’t trust you to go out into the shops
+again. You go to Sydney and draw your salary to
+the end of next month. You broke your contract
+when you accepted the assistant managership and
+extra salary. Your dear friend, Fuller, or his legal
+henchman, Schuster, didn’t point that out to you,
+did they? Sydney’s got the money all in an envelope<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span>
+for you. Scat!” and he waved both hands at the
+angry Mayberry.</p>
+
+<p>“Now,” the old man added, turning to his conferees,
+“maybe you fellows think I’ve taken a high
+hand in these proceedings; but to tell you honestly,
+we ought to have both Mayberry and Grandon Fuller
+arrested. Only it would have created a scandal that
+the Hapwood-Diller Company couldn’t afford at this
+time.”</p>
+
+<p>“We don’t want any scandal,” came from the
+corner of the room.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ve had enough trouble as it is,” came from
+the other side of the place.</p>
+
+<p>“Let us get right down to a working basis—and
+let it go at that.”</p>
+
+<p>“What we want to do is to pull up and make
+some money.”</p>
+
+<p>At this last remark, Macon Hammerly turned to
+the speaker and smiled grimly. Then he went on:</p>
+
+<p>“There ain’t no use in denying that we’re in a bad
+hole. We’ve run behind for two quarters, and our
+credit’s hurt by those stock sales. It’s going to be a
+heavy burden upon this girl’s shoulders—as it was
+upon Frank Barton’s—to pull us out. But she’ll
+do it! Won’t you, Ethel?” he demanded heartily.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Hammerly,” the girl murmured.</p>
+
+<p>“Louder! Tell them ‘Yes,’” cried the grain merchant.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span>“I can only follow in Mr. Barton’s footsteps,” she
+stammered.</p>
+
+<p>“And good enough!” declared Mr. Baker.</p>
+
+<p>“If you can do half as well as Barton, Miss Clayton,”
+said another of the revivified board, “we shall
+have no complaint.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll be behind you, girl,” said Macon Hammerly.
+“Keep the wheels turning, speed up the output,
+and watch the outgoes as well as the incomes.
+That’s the secret of success in this business. And
+the Lord help you!” he added under his breath, but
+the excited girl herself did not hear his less jubilant
+tone.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XXII<br>
+
+<small>THE FIGHT</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">With</span> a reunited board behind her and canny Macon
+Hammerly to advise with, it might seem at the rising
+of the curtain on Ethel Clayton’s régime as <i>de
+facto</i> manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing
+Company that her course would be along pleasant
+paths.</p>
+
+<p>Instead she very soon found that she was walking
+over burning plowshares.</p>
+
+<p>That Grandon Fuller was beaten in his control of
+the board of directors did not make him amenable
+to the new policies of the Hapwood-Diller Company
+and the reign of a girl as manager of the business.</p>
+
+<p>He boldly stated that he considered the knell of
+the company had rung because of the situation in the
+offices. If a full-grown man like Jim Mayberry could
+not handle the business so as to make a profit, how
+could a girl be expected to do so?</p>
+
+<p>That Mr. Fuller’s intention was still to discourage
+the small stockholders so that he could buy up their
+holdings at a low price and finally control the corporation,
+could not be overlooked. Yet he was careful
+to do nothing now that would give Hammerly a legal
+hold on him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>Mayberry was out of it, or so it seemed. He went
+to work for the Mailsburg Addition Real Estate
+Company, of which Mr. Fuller was known to be the
+backer. It was a good deal of a come-down for Jim
+Mayberry.</p>
+
+<p>On that wonderful day when Hammerly had carried
+his point and had given the welfare of the business
+into Ethel’s hands, the foremen of the shops had
+been called in before the board and the situation
+explained to them.</p>
+
+<p>They were not asked to express their opinion of
+Jim Mayberry’s oversight of the factory, nor to explain
+their own apparent shortcomings and the failure
+of their several shops to keep up to the standard
+of output established by Mr. Barton.</p>
+
+<p>Merely they were asked if they would be loyal to
+the corporation, and if they were willing to work in
+harmony with Ethel Clayton until such time as a
+general superintendent could be found to take Mayberry’s
+place. These questions brought enthusiastic
+and unanimous affirmative responses.</p>
+
+<p>But a willingness upon the part of all the hands
+was not all that was needed. When a manufacturing
+plant, either in its mechanical part or in its working
+force, has been allowed to deteriorate, it is uphill
+work to get it back on a firm foundation.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel felt that with the good teamwork of the
+office force which she could depend upon, her burden<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>
+at that end would be light. In the factory administration
+lay her difficult problem.</p>
+
+<p>She depended on Benway Chase in no inconsiderable
+degree, as she knew he had gained a working knowledge
+of the factory affairs. Benway had continued
+to make himself acquainted with practical things
+and much shoplore. The foremen liked him, too,
+and would discuss things with the young fellow that
+they might have been chary of talking over with
+“the lady boss,” as they began to call her.</p>
+
+<p>There was not an ounce of business jealousy in
+Ethel Clayton’s makeup. She gave Benway all the
+encouragement possible, and after the first two weeks
+she reported to the board that she could not possibly
+carry on the work at all were it not for Benway, or
+somebody equally efficient and willing in his stead.</p>
+
+<p>Since the news of the air raid on the American camp
+in France, Benway had been even gentler and more
+considerate of Ethel than before; but there was, too,
+a certain aloofness in his manner which the girl quite
+understood.</p>
+
+<p>He had captured Ethel’s secret. His own love
+for her had given him an immediate key to her
+emotion when she first saw the headlines spread over
+the news sheet. Frank Barton’s peril had caused her
+to betray her feeling for him to the love-sharpened
+vision of Benway.</p>
+
+<p>Since that time no news save that he was still
+missing had come of Frank Barton. It was well<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span>
+Ethel’s mind was so filled with business matters and
+that her every waking hour was occupied by the
+affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company. She had
+no opportunity of dwelling in thought upon that
+line in the casualty list that had not been explained:
+“<i>Lieut. F. Barton, Field Artillery, missing</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>When the clergyman prayed on Sunday for those
+who had gone “over there” to fight in their country’s
+cause, Ethel thought of but one person. It seemed
+to her as though the whole war—the fate of a worldwide
+democracy—was as nothing compared to the
+mystery of what had happened to Frank Barton.</p>
+
+<p>She was not alone in this desire to know the fate
+of the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company.
+Mrs. Trevor came more than once to discuss
+the mystery with her. She began to learn how many
+friends Frank Barton really had in Mailsburg. His
+cheerful, kindly spirit had won him a following of
+which any man might feel proud.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Macon Hammerly had used his influence to
+make inquiry. But the War Department, like most
+large bodies, moves slowly. The questions from
+Lieutenant Barton’s friends were not the only fear-fraught
+queries that must be answered.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody in Mailsburg, it seemed, had heard from
+any of the town’s sons who had gone to France when
+Barton went. The boys drafted from the town were
+still in the training camps on this side of the water.
+As far as Ethel could learn no one had heard directly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span>
+from Morrison Copley or Charles Bradley since that
+tragic happening.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel’s pillow was often wet at night because of
+Frank Barton’s fate; but by day the business difficulties
+that faced her held her mind in thrall. She
+began to appreciate more than ever before what Barton
+himself had gone through when he had first taken
+hold of the job of putting the Hapwood-Diller Company
+on a paying basis.</p>
+
+<p>And she had problems to solve that Barton had
+not been obliged to consider. In two years and a
+half circumstances had greatly changed. The labor
+situation was one of the hardest of Ethel’s enigmas.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the hundred or more men who had been
+drafted from the shops, and others who had enlisted,
+many of the best mechanics had gone away to work
+in munition plants where the wages were vastly
+higher than the Hapwood-Diller Company could
+afford to pay.</p>
+
+<p>This had brought into the shops a class of workmen
+who were not, to say the least, high grade. There
+was unrest among them, too. Having no feeling of
+loyalty for the corporation, these new workmen were
+really a menace to the peaceful conduct of the business.</p>
+
+<p>Little troubles rose almost daily, many of which
+could not be settled by the shop foremen. After
+all, the absence of a strong hand over the factory as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>
+a whole, began to be felt. And Ethel realized this
+lack quite as soon as anybody.</p>
+
+<p>With the old hands she would have had some personal
+influence. With the new workmen—many of
+them foreigners—she could do little.</p>
+
+<p>Jim Mayberry was a burly man, and not afraid to
+“bawl a man out” if occasion arose. If he threatened
+to knock a man down he looked as though he could
+do it. That may not be the most approved way of
+keeping a lot of unruly workmen in order; but it is
+often efficacious.</p>
+
+<p>Benway Chase could merely be Ethel’s errand boy.
+Benway felt his limitations keenly. “If I only had
+a good right arm!” he groaned more than once.</p>
+
+<p>“No use worrying about that, Bennie,” she said.
+“We must find some way to manage besides knocking
+their heads together. There are only a few who
+make trouble. Don’t you think we can get rid of
+them?”</p>
+
+<p>But labor was so scarce and the factory was so
+crowded with orders that she shrank from such a
+drastic course. She had an intuitive feeling, too,
+that the discharge of certain trouble-makers would
+bring other trouble-makers to the surface.</p>
+
+<p>More than once she was stopped in front of the
+office or on her way home by some worker grown
+bold by the changed condition of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>“What about more wages, Miss?” one burly man<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span>
+asked her, quite abruptly. “If wages don’t go up
+soon, I quit.”</p>
+
+<p>“Everything is so high, my wife says I’ve got to
+earn more,” was what a tall, thin workman told her
+right in front of her own home. And two days later
+both of these men demanded their time and left.</p>
+
+<p>“It sure is getting worse every day,” was the way
+Benway Chase put it. “I don’t see how it’s going
+to end.”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe we’ll have to shut down,” Ethel answered.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you don’t mean that!”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I don’t. But there is no telling what will
+happen,” said the girl, soberly.</p>
+
+<p>She felt that poison was seeping into the working
+force from without. Nothing she could say or do
+would stop it. The foremen admitted that the tone
+of the shops had entirely changed. If they were
+able to get a fair day’s work turned out they were
+doing well. And many of the men did their stint
+grudgingly.</p>
+
+<p>The wages of all the hands had been advanced
+twice since Frank Barton had first taken hold of the
+corporation. Had business remained good and profits
+increased, it had been his intention, Ethel knew, to
+ask the board of directors for another advance at the
+end of the third year.</p>
+
+<p>But with affairs in the mess they were—a quarterly
+dividend passed and the output decreased—there<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span>
+would be no hope of following out this intention of
+the absent general manager.</p>
+
+<p>Many factories in neighboring towns had turned
+to war work of one kind or another. But the machinery
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company, built for
+special need, could not be used on any war work
+that Ethel had ever yet heard of.</p>
+
+<p>The factory of the defunct Bogata Company was
+being used for munition work. People from Mailsburg
+were flocking to Norville, attracted by the high
+wages. One by one the Hapwood-Diller Company’s
+best workmen left and went to work at the Norville
+plant.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel’s report to the board was sure to be a report
+of failure. She realized that she did not measure up
+to the demands of her position. To claim she was
+helpless would not absolve her from the fact she was
+a failure. That could not be cloaked.</p>
+
+<p>This was her job. She had accepted it. If she
+could not make good she should give it up. She
+began to feel that Ethel Clayton might be a good
+enough hack; but she lacked the ability necessary to
+carry her to the front in the business race. She
+was away back in the ruck.</p>
+
+<p>These were her feelings and meditations one evening
+when, after the others had gone, she still remained
+in the office, as she often did.</p>
+
+<p>Her work for the day was done. Hours of consideration,
+it seemed, would not aid her in making<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span>
+the figures on the credit side of the ledger add up to
+a larger sum than the figures on the debit side.</p>
+
+<p>She stood with her back to her desk, hands gripping
+its edge, her eyes emptily staring at the wall.
+Her mental vision was alert, not her physical.</p>
+
+<p>If Frank Barton could only return! If he would
+only walk in at that door—just to advise with her,
+to hearten her, to suggest to her agitated mind some
+scheme by which she might put life into this business.</p>
+
+<p>Would she ever see him again now that he had
+marched away? Her mind pictured the marching
+past of that host of high-hearted men and boys,
+bound for a foreign shore from which many necessarily
+would never return. And it seemed Frank
+Barton was one of the very first to be lost to the
+knowledge of his friends—lost to those who loved
+him!</p>
+
+<p>The outer door banged open heavily. She knew
+John Murphy had not yet gone home, and she looked
+up expecting to see his grizzled visage.</p>
+
+<p>Instead it was the sharp and eager features of
+Mabel Skinner. The younger girl came in like a
+whirlwind.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Ethel! Miss Clayton!” she gasped. “Guess!”</p>
+
+<p>“Guess what?”</p>
+
+<p>“Guess what I just heard down at Rhyncamp’s
+store! That Marble girl was there! You know—the
+Marbles who live right next to the Fuller house.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span>“I know. What of it?” asked Ethel, excited,
+though she did not know why she should be.</p>
+
+<p>“She’s chums with that Fuller girl. You know—Grandon
+Fuller’s daughter Helen. She went to
+France to join the Red Cross.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel’s clasped hands showed her interest. She
+could not speak. Her eyes searched the vivid face
+of Little Skinner pleadingly.</p>
+
+<p>“The Marble girl’s just got a letter from Helen
+Fuller. I heard her tell Mr. Rhyncamp. Miss
+Fuller is nursing in a hospital over there somewhere.
+She says her very first patient was Mr. Barton. He
+ain’t dead, then, Miss Clayton! He ain’t dead! He’s
+only wounded! Oh, Miss Clayton!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XXIII<br>
+
+<small>COMPARISONS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mabel Skinner’s</span> news was true. The letter Miss
+Marble had received told the story from Helen Fuller’s
+standpoint. But let the heroics in it be the nine
+days’ wonder of Mailsburg. Here are the facts:</p>
+
+<p>Frank Barton came to his senses slowly and found
+himself upon a cot, one of a long line, in a ward of
+the base hospital at Lovin, as the place may be called,
+without the first idea of how he got there. His last
+memory was of facing the crew of the German air-raider
+with Helen Fuller clinging to his arm and making
+it impossible to defend her or himself or to deal
+effectively with the enemy before them.</p>
+
+<p>“Where—where am I?” he stammered. “What
+happened?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Frank!” squealed a voice, and some one in
+correct nurse’s garb stood beside him. “You’re
+not going to die, are you? Isn’t that just <i>dear</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, heavens!” groaned Lieutenant Barton, in
+something like despair. “<i>You</i> here?”</p>
+
+<p>Were Frank Barton’s eyes at last seeing truly? It
+was, perhaps, the most impolite speech he had ever
+made. But he was very weak and still a little lightheaded.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>Had the quiet-faced French matron of the ward
+understood much English, she surely would have removed
+Miss Fuller from attendance on the lieutenant
+almost at once. As it was he had to listen to the
+girl’s fulsome praises and silly ejaculations.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until some time later that Barton learned
+just what had happened after he had been hit with
+the sharp stone and had handed his weapon to the
+distracted Helen.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, that Heinie used to pitch in one of the bush
+leagues,” Morrison Copley told Barton, when he
+came to see his lieutenant. “Lived ten years in
+America and then went back to fight for Kultur.
+Something’s going to happen to him, for the lieutenant
+in command of the airship declares all bets off. He
+had warned his men not to fight.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder what they had in their mind when they
+started for me. Going to kiss me, I suppose,” Barton
+suggested weakly.</p>
+
+<p>“Bah jove! that’s a good one,” said Morry. “I
+must tell that to Brad. Say, that lad got ‘mention’
+in general orders for capturing the gang. But he
+walks right up to the colonel, and says: ‘Colonel, it
+wasn’t much to capture fourteen men that were not
+armed. How about Lieutenant Barton who tackled
+them single handed and perhaps helped bring the
+old Zep down anyway?’”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s all right,” commented Barton. “Good of
+Bradley. But, really, I did no more than another<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[243]</span>
+man would have done. Those poor people in the
+car that were blown to bits——”</p>
+
+<p>“And it was a car that followed on behind that
+one that picked you and Mam’zelle Hélène up,”
+grinned Morry, “and brought you cross country to
+Lovin. That’s how you were lost trace of. Guess
+the folks at home must think you evaporated into
+thin air, Lieutenant. But they’ll know the truth
+very soon now. I’ve written home about you.”</p>
+
+<p>But that was not entirely satisfactory to Frank
+Barton. He wanted to write himself. He had a
+strong and particular reason for writing, and to a
+particular girl.</p>
+
+<p>Aside from the wound in his head—a wound which
+would always leave a scar—his right arm was strapped
+tightly to his side. He had a fracture of the shoulder
+that made a cast necessary and would entail a long
+convalescence. Frank Barton’s active military career
+was halted before it was much more than begun.</p>
+
+<p>The delayed report of his wounds did not officially
+reach Mailsburg until after both Helen’s letter to
+Miss Marble and Morrison Copley’s “open letter”
+to the Mailsburg <i>Clarion</i> were received. Barton was
+the first of the town’s boys reported under fire
+and the first to suffer injury in the war.</p>
+
+<p>A delayed letter from Ethel had reached Barton
+soon after he found himself established in the hospital
+ward with Helen Fuller hovering about him a good
+part of every day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[244]</span>“Business, I suppose, Frank?” she observed when
+she saw the name and address on the back of the envelope.
+“<i>Can’t</i> those factory people let you alone,
+you poor dear boy, even when you are <i>wounded</i> so?”</p>
+
+<p>Barton felt like speaking impolitely again. But
+he had command of himself now. Nevertheless
+Helen continued to rasp his nerves on more than one
+subject. Had he been blessed with another nurse
+he would have dictated an answer to Ethel’s letter.
+There was a tone to it—a wistfulness which the girl
+had been unable to hide—that deeply moved the
+wounded lieutenant.</p>
+
+<p>The missive was written before Ethel had been
+made assistant manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company;
+yet even then she felt the burden of her position
+and would have been glad of any bit of kindly advice
+he might have sent her. But for three weeks, at
+least, he must remain silent. He had never learned
+to write with his left hand like Benway Chase.</p>
+
+<p>He proved to be a patient <i>blessé</i>, and both the
+physicians and nurses praised him. That he had
+come to a French hospital was rather unfortunate, for
+Barton’s knowledge of French was slight. He had
+to make most of his desires known through Helen
+and therefore was at a disadvantage.</p>
+
+<p>She frankly encouraged the appearance of a closer
+association between them than was the case. A few
+months before Frank Barton would have been delighted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[245]</span>
+at such intimacy with Helen Fuller. But
+he was quite aware now of her shortcomings.</p>
+
+<p>Even her association with the Red Cross was a
+play. It was a part of her unquenchable desire to
+show off all the time. Had Barton been really left to
+her small mercies he realized that it would have gone
+hard with him. She kept her interest in him as a
+patient only because of the romance of their adventure
+together at the time of the air raid.</p>
+
+<p>He could not forget how small and light a part she
+had played at that time. He hoped that no other
+American girl in France would prove herself so great
+a coward as Helen Fuller had on that momentous
+occasion.</p>
+
+<p>He began to feel a distaste for her glowing beauty—a
+beauty of coloring and feature and texture of
+skin and hair only, without character or intelligence
+looking out of the eyes or showing in the face.</p>
+
+<p>In the warmth of the first few days of their sojourn
+at the hospital even so modest a man as Frank Barton
+saw plainly that he was being given the opportunity
+to declare himself. Helen was waiting for
+him to respond to her advances.</p>
+
+<p>When he did not respond she began finally to be
+piqued, then angry. She had herself transferred to
+another ward. Her absence did not increase Barton’s
+temperature, the chart at the head of his cot
+remained normal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[246]</span>This rift between them was noted and remarked
+on by some of the other nurses. At last Helen took
+offence, had her mother telegraph her from Paris,
+and obtained a furlough and departed from Lovin
+without bidding Frank good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>He did not miss her, save in a relieved way. He
+had compared her with another girl—another of
+whom he had never thought before as other than a
+business associate—and found that Helen Fuller was
+dwarfed in the comparison.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking of Ethel as he lay in his hospital cot, he
+was amazed to discover how much that was really
+worth while he knew about her. Important things,
+too—individualities and phases of character that now
+revealed Ethel Clayton as a girl eminently worthy
+of consideration.</p>
+
+<p>The girl he had left behind was all that Helen
+Fuller proved not to be. He was confident that
+Ethel would not have shown the white feather as
+Helen had at the time of the German air raid. No
+girl who had so courageously taken up the additional
+burden of responsibility in the Hapwood-Diller
+Company offices could be a coward in any particular.</p>
+
+<p>The vision of Ethel Clayton grew in his mind. His
+thoughts centered about her. He began to wonder
+what her attitude would be toward him if he should
+go back home and see her again.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[247]</span>It was not interest in the Hapwood-Diller Company
+that was drawing his heart to Mailsburg during
+these days. He did not give a fig for business.
+His heartstrings were attuned to a much tenderer
+emotion. He was gradually beginning to see things
+in their proper light.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[248]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XXIV<br>
+
+<small>OPENING THE WAY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ethel</span> heard of Barton in several ways during the
+next few weeks, but never by personal letter. She
+understood the reason for that, however, for Morrison
+Copley had quite freely explained the lieutenant’s
+wounds and his helpless condition in the <i>Clarion</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank the good Lord ’tain’t his legs nor his eyes,”
+Mrs. Trevor said. “When a man can’t see to read
+and he can’t get about on his own pins he ain’t no
+use to himself, nor to nobody else.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel did not fail to write to the wounded man,
+and that frequently. When these letters should
+reach Barton he would learn the particulars of the
+important changes in the Hapwood-Diller offices,
+and something, too, of Ethel’s troubles and perplexities.</p>
+
+<p>But she had no idea that it was something entirely
+different from office news that the hungry-hearted
+absentee wished for.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation of the mystery touching Frank
+Barton’s wounds and his confinement in the hospital
+relieved Ethel’s anxiety to a certain degree. But
+there was one thing that seriously pricked her thought<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[249]</span>
+at all times. Helen Fuller was with the wounded
+man!</p>
+
+<p>Miss Marble had made Helen’s letter broadly
+public. Other people in Mailsburg noted the fact
+that Helen’s first patient was the general manager of
+the Hapwood-Diller Company. It is the easiest
+thing in the world for gossip to put such a two and
+two together and make four.</p>
+
+<p>It was remarked that before Barton had gone to
+the officers’ training camp at Quehasset he had been
+seen much with Helen Fuller. His interest in her
+had been noted.</p>
+
+<p>Now the gossips declared their association on the
+other side could lead to but one conclusion. Somebody
+offered a bet in Ethel’s hearing, two to one,
+that there would be a wedding at the American Embassy
+in Paris just as soon as Lieutenant Barton was
+allowed to leave the base hospital at Lovin.</p>
+
+<p>However, relieved by her knowledge of Barton’s
+safety, Ethel Clayton tried to give all her attention
+to the task she had accepted when she was practically
+hoisted into Barton’s place.</p>
+
+<p>Hammerly and a few of the other directors cheered
+her; Grandon Fuller sneered and continued to acclaim
+openly that a girl at the head of the business spelled
+ruin for the Hapwood-Diller Company.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t mind that grouch, Ethel,” Macon Hammerly
+said. “We’ve put a ring in his nose, and like<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[250]</span>
+any other hog he squeals over the operation. But such
+squealing never yet did any hurt.”</p>
+
+<p>“It gets on one’s nerves most awfully, just the
+same, Mr. Hammerly,” the girl said with a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>She had not, however, come to the old man with
+any empty complaint. The labor situation at the
+factory was in a critical condition. The spoiled work
+being turned back by the inspectors and foremen had
+increased twenty per cent. Still the malcontents
+complained of low wages.</p>
+
+<p>“To protect the corporation and to answer the
+low wage complaint,” Ethel told Hammerly, “I have
+certain drastic changes to suggest. I admit they are
+diametrically opposed to the system inaugurated by
+Mr. Barton; but Mr. Barton did not have the same
+difficulties to deal with that we have now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ain’t it so?” agreed the old man. “In those times,
+Grandon Fuller was trying to rope Frank, just as he
+afterward noosed Mayberry. Go on, Ethel. You’ve
+got good sense, I know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you. At least, I have the interests of
+the corporation at heart. If I fail as manager I
+lose more than your good opinion, Mr. Hammerly.”</p>
+
+<p>“By Henry! you ain’t goin’ to fail, girl,” cried the
+man.</p>
+
+<p>“But I am desperate. Desperate enough to change
+the entire system of the factory if the board of directors
+will back me. Look at this, Mr. Hammerly.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[251]</span>She displayed her carefully drawn up plans. The
+important change was the shifting from a flat payment
+of labor at so much per hour, graduated according
+to the skill of the workmen, to a piecework scale
+of wages which she had scheduled with the assistance
+of Benway Chase.</p>
+
+<p>“I believe it will answer the complaint of low pay.
+Our best men will be encouraged to remain with us
+instead of going to the munition factories. The
+dissatisfied workmen will be those less skilled and
+we can the more easily replace them if they leave,”
+Ethel explained.</p>
+
+<p>Macon Hammerly’s approval was instant, and with
+his backing Ethel’s scheme was sure to be agreed to
+by the board. But to put it into force without opposition
+was more than could be expected.</p>
+
+<p>The better class of workmen in the factory when
+consulted quietly before the posting of the notices,
+were eager to give the plan a trial. Many of them
+owned their own homes in Mailsburg and had hesitated
+to leave their employment at the Hapwood-Diller
+factory despite the temptation of higher wages
+elsewhere. The chance to increase voluntarily their
+incomes by speeding up found favor.</p>
+
+<p>There were incendiary fellows, however, ready instantly
+to decry the change. They could see no good
+in it. It was a trick on the part of the corporation to
+underpay the bulk of the laboring force employed in
+the factory.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[252]</span>This cauldron of trouble continued to bubble and
+steam up to the very Saturday before the installation
+of the new system of payment. At closing time that
+afternoon it was already dark; but many of the workmen
+left the factory gate only to remain in the side
+street where they milled like cattle on the verge of a
+stampede. They talked in noisy groups. There
+was something on foot and whether or not they knew
+just what it was to be, both the satisfied workmen and
+the dissatisfied remained.</p>
+
+<p>An automobile with two sputtering gasoline torches
+in it appeared at last and drove slowly through the
+noisy crowd to the corner, where it stopped in view
+of both the door of the factory offices and of the workmen’s
+entrance gate. A burly figure in a greatcoat
+and goggles was behind the steering wheel of the car.
+In the tonneau was a little, black-haired, foreign looking
+man who stood on the seat to speak to the crowd
+that at once surged near.</p>
+
+<p>“That is Mr. Schuster!” Ethel Clayton ejaculated,
+looking from the office window that best overlooked
+the corner. She had remained after the bulk
+of the office force had gone; but Mabel Skinner was
+with her.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know who that one may be,” said the
+younger girl, “but it’s Jim Mayberry’s car and that’s
+Jim himself all camouflaged up with goggles and a
+long coat. Let’s go down there, Miss Clayton, and
+listen to what that crazy man’s saying. He waves<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[253]</span>
+his arms around like they was unhinged—just the
+same as his brain is.”</p>
+
+<p>The girls were about to leave the offices in John’s
+care when the street-corner forum convened. Ethel
+was worried.</p>
+
+<p>“Is the side gate locked, John?” she asked the porter.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t s’pose it is yet, ma’am,” he replied.</p>
+
+<p>“Go out and bar it and warn the night watchmen
+to be on their guard. Nobody must be allowed to
+enter the gate to-night—not even a foreman if one
+should return. And be sure the main door is locked
+after us.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, ma’am,” grinned John. “And will you call
+out the military?”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel feared, however, that it might be no laughing
+matter. Mabel Skinner was eager to go to the
+corner and hear what the man had to say; Ethel
+accompanied her, fearing the sharp tongue of the
+younger girl would get her into trouble in the rough
+crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Schuster was Mr. Grandon Fuller’s personal representative,
+Ethel was sure. And Jim Mayberry’s presence
+made certain the identity of the influence which
+was seeking to stir up trouble for the Hapwood-Diller
+Company and its girl manager.</p>
+
+<p>Jim Mayberry caught sight of Ethel almost as soon
+as the two girls reached the corner. He turned and
+called Schuster’s attention to Ethel. The fox-featured<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[254]</span>
+little lawyer instantly seized the opportunity
+for making a point in his speech.</p>
+
+<p>“Here you are, men! You fellows under petticoat
+government! Here’s your lady boss come out to
+laugh at you. You big, brawny, husky fellows ought
+to be proud of yourselves—bossed by a girl! Tied
+to her apron strings!”</p>
+
+<p>He added something more vulgar that drew a laugh
+from a certain portion of the throng. Jim Mayberry
+turned and pushed up his dust goggles, leering into
+Ethel’s white and disgusted face. Mabel Skinner
+quite lost her self-control.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re in nice work now, ain’t you, Jim Mayberry?”
+she scoffed at the former superintendent of the
+factory. Then she screamed at the crowding men:
+“You big galoots! You goin’ to let that little fice
+up there insult a lady like Miss Clayton? And don’t
+you see who’s egging him on—and egging <i>you</i> on to
+riot and trouble? He’s asking you to pull his chestnuts
+out of the fire. It’s Jim Mayberry—Mayberry,
+the man that’s sore because the board kicked him out
+as superintendent and put Miss Clayton into his
+place. Aw, say! You all know Jim Mayberry!”</p>
+
+<p>This raised a laugh which drowned out the lawyer’s
+vitriolic words. Mayberry reached for Little Skinner,
+his face inflamed and ugly.</p>
+
+<p>“You brat!” he growled. “I’ll teach you——”</p>
+
+<p>He did not finish the remark. As his clutching
+hand descended upon the girl’s shoulder a figure<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[255]</span>
+jumped upon the running board of the automobile
+on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>“Beating up a girl would be about your size, Jim
+Mayberry!” exclaimed Benway Chase, and with all
+the force of his good left arm he struck the former
+superintendent of the factory in the face.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry uttered an oath and swung around.
+Benway met him with a second blow—this time landing
+on the nose. In a moment the victim’s face was
+covered with blood.</p>
+
+<p>“Go it, Bennie! Hit him again!” shrieked Mabel,
+jumping up and down in her excitement.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel was horrified; but Little Skinner became the
+primitive woman cheering on her particular hero.</p>
+
+<p>Mayberry got up from behind the steering wheel
+and cast himself blindly upon the striking Benway.
+The latter gave ground, leaping back off the car.
+Mayberry plunged after him. In a moment they
+had clinched and were down in the street, striking at
+each other, Benway silent but Mayberry swearing
+and threatening.</p>
+
+<p>It was at this moment that Macon Hammerly
+appeared with a policeman. The latter refused to
+observe the incipient riot around the two men on the
+ground, but stepped up and tapped Schuster on the
+arm.</p>
+
+<p>“Hey, you!” he said to the little lawyer, “where’s
+your permit?”</p>
+
+<p>“‘Permit?’”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[256]</span>“Permit to speak on the street ’cordin’ to the city
+ord’nance made an’ pervided. Ain’t got none?”
+went on the officer. “Come along with me, then,”
+and he jerked Schuster off the automobile seat as
+though he were a child and started at once down town
+with him.</p>
+
+<p>“I reckon,” Hammerly said to Ethel with a grin,
+“that Grandon forgot that small point. There almost
+always is some vital point, Ethel, that a villain
+overlooks.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, you come on with me, girl. There’s something
+I want you to be in on. I was coming up
+after you when I saw this gang here and sicked the
+policeman on to that little Schuster. Come on.”</p>
+
+<p>The whirl of events had quite taken Ethel’s mind off
+of Benway Chase and his fight with Mayberry. But
+Mabel Skinner had darted around the car, vitally
+determined to lend her hero aid if he needed it.</p>
+
+<p>Benway needed no help. Had it been so, there
+seemed to be quite a number in the crowd disposed
+to be his friends.</p>
+
+<p>“Let the young boss alone,” one said. “It ain’t
+beef that counts. The young boss has got the spirit
+to lick his weight in wildcats.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Bennie! Oh, Bennie!” burst forth Mabel Skinner.
+“Don’t you let that big loafer hurt you!”</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t,” promised Benway, rising quite self-possessed
+and scarcely marred by the scrimmage.
+“He doesn’t want to fight.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[257]</span>This seemed quite true. At least, Jim Mayberry
+had very quickly got enough. He stood up painfully,
+climbed into his car awkwardly, and drove
+away, amid the jeers of the onlookers, without even
+an additional threat.</p>
+
+<p>The bubble of his reputation as a fighter was
+pricked. Some of the older workmen lingering near
+mentioned the fact that the ex-superintendent of the
+factory had been but a bag of wind after all. “The
+young boss,” as they had come to call Benway
+Chase, had “licked him with one hand.”</p>
+
+<p>The latter slipped out of the crowd as quickly as
+possible. Mabel Skinner was clinging to his good
+arm and it was not until they were a full dark block
+away from the scene of the disturbance that he discovered
+the girl was crying.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter with you?” demanded Benway,
+utterly aghast at the idea of self-possessed Little
+Skinner giving way to tears. “Are you hurt?”</p>
+
+<p>“No—no, sir, Mr. Chase. I ain’t hurt.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then why are you crying?” he demanded, snuggling
+the girl closer to his side.</p>
+
+<p>“I—I was afraid you might be,” she confessed.</p>
+
+<p>“But, I’m not! That big chump never hurt me a
+mite!”</p>
+
+<p>“Then I—I guess I’m crying for joy,” sobbed Mabel.
+“If he’d hurt you, Mr. Chase, I guess I’d have <i>died</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>“Huh! Why the ‘Mr. Chase?’ Wasn’t I ‘Bennie’
+a while back when you were rooting for me? Why,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[258]</span>
+Mabel, I couldn’t have lost out with you yelling
+your head off that way on the side lines!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Bennie!” she gasped.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very dark corner. When they strolled
+out into the next circle of lamp light, Benway’s arm
+was around the girl’s shoulders and she was looking
+up into his face with such an ecstatic expression on
+her own that had Boots Skinner seen it he certainly
+would have been held fast in his tracks.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[259]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XXV<br>
+
+<small>COMPENSATION</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Macon Hammerly</span> offered no explanation at all
+as he led Ethel in the direction of High Street, quite
+in the opposite way from her usual walk at this hour
+of the evening. But he was pleasantly chatty just
+the same.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of his gruffness and homely speech, if he
+liked the grain dealer could show a less prickly side
+to his character, and he always showed that glossed
+side to Ethel Clayton.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you make no mistake, girl,” he now observed.
+“Your plan is going to have a fair trial,
+and we’ll have no such riot scene staged again as that
+to-night. Maybe I ain’t got all the political influence
+Grandon Fuller blows about; but I’ve got him about
+sewed up in a bag and he ain’t going to trouble you—he
+nor his hirelings—much more.</p>
+
+<p>“He was trying to pull the wool over Barton’s eyes
+when Barton went away, I believe. I trusted to
+Frank’s natural horse sense to keep him out of any
+scrape with Grandon. But they do say he’s gone and
+fallen for that flibbertigibbet daughter of the Fullers.
+I expect those nurses have a great advantage over a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[260]</span>
+man. Like enough every one of ’em’ll be married
+to some poor sinner before this war’s over,” and he
+grinned.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Hammerly!” Ethel gasped. “Maybe I’d
+better go as a nurse,” she added, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>You?</i> Shucks! There ain’t no need for you to
+fish. The fellers will all be after you. I’m going to
+live ten years longer and dandle two or three of your
+babies on my knee. Come on! Here’s where we turn
+in.”</p>
+
+<p>He led her into the law office of Alfred Gainor.
+The attorney had a visitor who rose hastily to go
+when Hammerly, with Ethel behind him, entered the
+private office.</p>
+
+<p>“No, don’t run away, Grandon,” said the grain
+merchant in his very harshest tone. “I told Gainor
+to get you here for just this purpose.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean, Hammerly?” growled the
+other. “I have nothing to say to you at present.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I don’t expect you have. But I’ve got something
+to say to you, and you’d best listen.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you’ve come to me to plead for my favor on
+this girl’s behalf——”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing of the kind! Nothing of the kind!” reiterated
+Hammerly. “There won’t be no pleading on
+our side, I assure you, Grandon. And Ethel’s here
+because she’s got a vital interest in what’s going to
+be done.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t understand you.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[261]</span>“You will,” observed Hammerly grimly.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you expect to interest me in, man?”
+demanded Grandon Fuller with a less ruffled demeanor.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m going to interest you in two or three things,
+Grandon,” said the old man composedly, while the
+lawyer looked on as though he quite understood.
+“I’m going to interest you first of all in the specification
+sheet of the Kimberly Binding Company order.
+And then I’m going to link that up with a much more
+important paper that you ain’t seen for ten years,
+but that’s been on file here all that time since it was
+probated and recorded. I mean Israel Diller’s will.”</p>
+
+<p>At this statement Grandon Fuller leaped to his
+feet and advanced upon the old grain merchant with
+inflamed countenance.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean, you hoary-headed old scoundrel?”
+he shouted. “Do you mean to tell me——”</p>
+
+<p>He halted, licked his thick lips, and his flabby pomposity
+began to shrink. Hammerly nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s it. Give a calf rope enough and it’ll hang
+itself. I could sit here and bandy words with you
+long enough to make you give yourself clean away.
+For you ain’t a very brainy villain. Otherwise you
+wouldn’t have used a trick the second time that served
+you once—and that you had got away with, it seemed,
+without raising suspicion.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t understand you,” snarled Fuller. “What
+are you talking about anyway?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[262]</span>“I’m talking about forgery, Grandon—forgery and
+substitution. The chemists and handwriting experts
+are not alone able to swear to changes made on that
+Kimberly schedule; they will swear to changes made
+in the same way—and by the same hand—in Israel
+Diller’s will!</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down, Grandon! Don’t fall down,” advised
+Hammerly. “Mr. Mestinger, who drew Israel’s will,
+being dead, you substitute your wife’s name for that
+of Lorreta Clayton’s all through that instrument and
+made Niece Mehitable instead of Niece Lorreta, the
+principal legatee under the will.</p>
+
+<p>“I always had suspicions, but no proof. Not till
+Ethel, here, showed me that Kimberly company
+schedule and pointed out what that boy, Benway
+Chase, first saw in it.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re caught, Grandon! You’re caught just as
+hard and fast as I caught Boots Skinner the other
+night setting hooks in the creek against the law.
+I’m going to let Boots go this time, for he ain’t an
+all around bad boy. Boots’ testimony is all I needed
+to link up your principal henchman with your blackguarding
+of the Hapwood-Diller Company. Jim
+Mayberry’s a proved scoundrel as far back as that
+Bogata Company matter, and I’m going to run him
+out of town.</p>
+
+<p>“What I do with you, Grandon, depends entirely
+on how much restitution you are willing to make to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[263]</span>
+Widow Clayton and her daughter here. If we go
+to law about this it will cost a lot of money—and a lot
+of scandal. You’ve made a heap of money one way
+and another since you got those shares of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company that was meant for Mrs. Clayton.
+I’ll give you a chance.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll give those shares your wife got from the
+Israel Diller estate to Mrs. Clayton, with dividends
+and accrued interest to date. You’ll sell all your other
+holdings of the corporation’s shares to me, <i>and at the
+low price which you’ve hammered them down to</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>“W—What! Never!” groaned Grandon Fuller.</p>
+
+<p>“That will automatically put you out of the Hapwood-Diller
+Company’s affairs,” went on Macon
+Hammerly, not heeding the interruption. “And I
+guess that will help some; eh, Ethel?” he continued,
+turning to the much interested girl.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, is it true? Did he tamper with that will?”
+cried the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“He did.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s false! I never——”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t try to deny it, Grandon. It’s true.” The
+old grain merchant strode forward and towered
+sternly over the other man. “Come, what is it to
+be, a peaceful settlement or war?”</p>
+
+<p>“Gi—give me time to—to think.”</p>
+
+<p>“Time to play another trick, you mean. No, you’ve
+got to decide now, at once, right here.”</p>
+
+<p>“You—you are hard. I can explain——”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[264]</span>“No explanation is necessary. I’ve got you just
+where I want you. Will you settle or not?”</p>
+
+<p>Grandon Fuller arose to his feet. He was panting
+hard.</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t do it!” he began and then he shrank back
+before the steady gaze of Hammerly and Ethel.
+“I—I—” He suddenly dropped into his seat, his face
+a stricken gray. “Well, have your own way,” he
+mumbled. “You’ve got me cornered.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[265]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XXVI<br>
+
+<small>HIS AWAKENING</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> evening, some weeks later, Ethel found herself
+alone in the office. It was after working hours and
+the others had gone home. She had still to work
+late at times; but her plan of wage payment was already
+proving successful.</p>
+
+<p>There was a new spirit in the shops. Some of the
+old help were coming back for safety, and the possibility
+of an increased income with the Hapwood-Diller
+Company looked better to the married men, at least,
+than a bulky pay envelope and the danger of sudden
+death.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, for several weeks, since Grandon Fuller
+had been eliminated from the affairs of the corporation,
+Ethel had been able to prove her worth to the
+board of directors. The business was running
+smoothly. The girl had proved that sex was not an
+insuperable barrier in the conduct of such a complicated
+business as this of which she had charge.</p>
+
+<p>With the help of Benway Chase, who had been
+advanced to a minor governing position in the factory,
+Ethel was making good. She thought of this<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[266]</span>
+cheerfully on this evening as she turned to snap out
+the electric light above her desk, the last thing
+before going out.</p>
+
+<p>Her hand was stayed by the quiet opening of the
+office door. In the half-shadow of the entrance stood
+a tall figure, the face of which she could not see.
+Nor did she see but one hand when the visitor advanced
+into the room and closed the door. Was it
+a man with only one arm?</p>
+
+<p>Then she saw that the right arm was bandaged
+to his side by a black silk scarf. He was in uniform.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Barton!”</p>
+
+<p>“Ethel!”</p>
+
+<p>She was half way to him on flying feet when she
+realized what he had called her and how he had
+spoken. She halted.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Barton! How you startled me! How glad I
+am to see you!” she declared. “When did you
+arrive?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just now. You are the first person I have seen
+to speak to in Mailsburg,” he said, and strode forward
+to greet her.</p>
+
+<p>“Your poor arm!” she murmured when she took his
+offered left hand. Then she looked up and saw the
+grim scar on his brow. It gave an entirely different
+expression to his countenance. Indeed he seemed
+to be an entirely different man from the Frank Barton
+of old. He clung to her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“You—are you back for good? We have needed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[267]</span>
+you so! Now I can give the Hapwood-Diller Company
+back into your hands,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid not yet,” Frank Barton replied gently.
+“I have only a short furlough—till my shoulder completely
+heals. I came across hoping to be of some
+small help in recruiting or in Red Cross work while
+I am debarred from more active service.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Barton! you will not really go back
+again?” she cried, looking down at her hand still
+crushed within his own.</p>
+
+<p>“Unless the war ends very soon,” he laughed. “I
+know that you have been more than successful in
+my job. Mr. Hammerly wrote me all about Jim
+Mayberry and Grandon Fuller. I would not have
+believed it of Jim. You have had a hard fight here,
+Ethel; but you have overcome, you have succeeded.”</p>
+
+<p>She did not seek to draw away her hand, but still
+looked down, refusing to meet his gaze.</p>
+
+<p>“How did you leave the other Mailsburg boys?
+Mr. Copley, for instance?”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine!” he declared heartily.</p>
+
+<p>“And Miss Fuller?”</p>
+
+<p>“She and her mother returned on the <i>Lorraine</i>
+with me. They were called home, it seems, by Mr.
+Fuller’s business troubles. They have lost money,
+they tell me, and will have to give up their big house
+on the Hill.”</p>
+
+<p>“But that makes no difference to <i>you</i>, of course,
+Mr. Barton?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[268]</span>“Not the least,” he returned composedly. “I
+am afraid I shall never become a favorite of Miss
+Fuller’s. I could not stand petting while I was in
+the hospital at Lovin, and it rather piqued my nurse.”</p>
+
+<p>Ethel looked up at him quickly. There was that
+in his eyes she had never seen before. It held her
+gaze captive.</p>
+
+<p>His single good hand released her hand. But
+gently he drew her toward him, his hand behind her
+shoulder. Her form yielded hesitatingly to his urging.</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot claim that patriotism brought me back
+for these few weeks that I may remain, Ethel,” he
+went on in a voice that suddenly became strangely
+husky. “I wanted to see you—face to face.”</p>
+
+<p>There was an awkward pause. She felt his hand
+on her shoulder tremble.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t understand why it is that I never saw
+you in just the same light that I have since I’ve
+been away. But you have been in my thoughts
+continually—the girl I left behind!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, of course—the business—” she began flutteringly.</p>
+
+<p>“No, it wasn’t the business, Ethel. It was you!”
+he cried.</p>
+
+<p>“Me?” Her breast began to heave and her face
+glowed. He bent low that he might catch her eyes.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe28_125" id="i_268a">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i_268a.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="caption">“You have been in my thoughts continually—the
+girl I left behind.”</p>
+
+<p class="right">(<i>See page <a href="#Page_268">268</a></i>)</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+
+<p>“Yes, you! I guess I was asleep, but I’m awake
+now. We were so close day after day—and I was so<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[269]</span>
+wrapped up in business—that I didn’t realize how
+much you really meant to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!” It was the faintest kind of an exclamation.
+She wanted to speak, but for once the “perfectly
+capable person” could not say a word. Her heart
+was pounding.</p>
+
+<p>“But it came to me all of a sudden, while I was in
+the hospital and while that very fluttery Helen Fuller
+was trying to wait on me. Then I realized what a
+big difference there was in girls—and I realized that
+you were the only girl in the world for me—the
+only one!”</p>
+
+<p>Again there was a silence. But now she raised
+her eyes to meet his and they were full of glorious
+tenderness. He clutched her close to him with his
+one good arm.</p>
+
+<p>“I love you—oh, how I love you!” he murmured.
+“How I love you!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Bar——”</p>
+
+<p>“Ethel!”</p>
+
+<p>“Frank, then.”</p>
+
+<p>She spoke his name with such sweetness that it
+almost overpowered him. It was as if she had suddenly
+lifted the veil and was letting him look into her
+very soul. He still held her close. Now he suddenly
+kissed her, once, twice and again.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank God!” he said reverently. “Thank God!”</p>
+
+<p>In her soul she also thanked God for His goodness<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[270]</span>
+in bringing this man to her. But she could not speak.
+She could only cling tightly to him—and for a long
+while he felt her heart beating close to his own.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mrs. Trevor sat in a front seat in her shabby little
+hat and Paisley shawl and frankly cried outright
+during the ceremony.</p>
+
+<p>“But they’ll make a grand couple,” she sobbed.
+“A grand couple—both of ’em so smart!”</p>
+
+<p>Macon Hammerly occupied a seat further back.
+He sat with an expression of grim pride on his face,
+as though he considered himself in some way the
+father of this little romance.</p>
+
+<p>“My young folks—both of ’em,” he whispered to
+a neighbor. “Sweetest gal in the world, barrin’ none—an’
+a fine fellow, too, believe me!”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Clayton was there, of course, dressed in the
+best she had ever possessed. She felt like weeping,
+but she did not, for was she not a Diller, and had she
+not a family pride to maintain? Especially now,
+when their financial affairs were so greatly changed?</p>
+
+<p>“Not that I do not consider Mr. Barton a very
+fine man,” she confessed. “But I feel that Ethel
+might do so much better in a social way if she would
+only try. And really a soldier under orders has no
+right to marry—especially when he has to go away
+so soon. Worst of all, Ethel insists upon retaining
+her position as manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[271]</span>
+Well, now that we have such a large amount
+in the business perhaps that is as well. The shares
+are already at par again.”</p>
+
+<p>Benway Chase was there too and sat close beside
+Mabel Skinner—a new Mabel, full of ambition and
+who no longer chewed gum.</p>
+
+<p>“Some day we’ll do it too, Mabel,” he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you go on!” she answered, but looked immensely
+pleased nevertheless.</p>
+
+<p>The organ pealed forth and slowly the procession
+moved down the aisle of the church, the bride leaning
+lightly on the groom’s good arm. They came out
+into the sunshine of the late winter day and both
+Ethel in her veil and Barton in his khaki were glorified
+by it. The automobile that was to take them to
+the Clayton home was in readiness and they entered it.</p>
+
+<p>“Mine—mine at last!” he breathed, when they
+were safe from the eyes of the curious crowd.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s like a dream—it doesn’t seem real!” she murmured,
+with eyes that spoke volumes as she beamed
+on him.</p>
+
+<p>“Only a week before I have to go to the front
+again!” he groaned.</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s not think about that, Frank—let’s think
+only about how happy we are.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just as you say, Ethel.” He drew her closer,
+glanced hastily around to make sure they were not
+observed, and kissed her. “Wonderful, this getting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[272]</span>
+married, isn’t it? Beats business all hollow!” And
+he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him fondly, and suddenly a mischievous
+dimple showed in each cheek. “Well, I
+don’t know. If you have a perfectly capable person
+for an assis——”</p>
+
+<p>“Ethel! You’ve sprung that on me twice since we
+became engaged! Now as my wife you’ve got to
+cut it out.”</p>
+
+<p>“What? Cut out being capable? And yet remain
+manager while you are away?” And then, as she
+saw he was really hurt she added swiftly and tenderly:
+“Forgive me, Frank, that’s a dear! I’m so happy—so
+furiously happy—I don’t know what I am saying
+or doing!”</p>
+
+<p>He held her as close as he dared in such a public
+place. “Mine! mine! mine!” he murmured over and
+over again.</p>
+
+<p>Very softly she patted the free hand of the wounded
+arm. Then she suddenly pressed it to her lips
+and kissed it.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
+
+<p>Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
+
+<p>Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.</p>
+</div></div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75475 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #75475 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75475)