“That isn’t my way of doing things,” replied Trent with a frown.
Weems made a gesture of despair and resignation.
“That’s why you’ll always be poor. That’s why you’ll never have a grand piano and a Constable and a swell place up in Maine.”
Anthony Trent looked at him and smiled.
“There may be other ways,” he said slowly.
“You try ’em,” Weems retorted crossly. “Here you are almost thirty years old, highly educated, prep school and college and you make a week what I give my chauffeur.”
“I think I will,” Trent answered.
Weems attacked his salad angrily. If only Trent had been what he termed aggressive, an introduction could easily have been effected. Then Weems would have seen to it that he and Warren left the restaurant together. Some one would be bound to see them. Then, for Weems had an expansive fancy, it would be rumored that he, Horace Weems, who cleaned up on Steel, was friendly with the great Conington Warren. It might lead to anything!
“Well,” he commented, “I’d rather be little Horace Weems, who can’t tell a phonograph from a grand piano than Mr. Anthony Trent, who makes with luck two thousand a year.”
“I’m in bad company to-day,” replied Trent. “First Crosbeigh and now you tempting me. You know very well I haven’t that magic money making ability you have. My father hadn’t it or he would have left money when he died and not debts.”
“Magic!” Weems snorted. “Common sense, that’s what it is.”
“It’s magic,” the other insisted, “as a boy you exchanged a jack knife for a fishing pole and the fishing pole for a camera and the camera for a phonograph and the phonograph for a canoe and the canoe for a sailing boat and so on till you’ve got your place in Maine and a chauffeur who makes more than I do! Magic’s the only name for it.”
“You must come up and see me in Maine,” Weems said, later.
“Make your mind easy,” Trent assured him, “I will.”
CHAPTER IV
BEGINNING THE GAME
WHEN he left Weems, it was too late to start a round of golf so Trent took his homeward way intent on starting another story. Crosbeigh was always urging him to turn out more of them.
His boarding house room seemed shabbier than ever. The rug, which had never been a good one, showed its age. The steel engravings on the wall were offensive. “And Weems,” he thought, “owns a Constable!”
His upright piano sounded thinner to his touch. “And Weems,” he sighed, “has been able to buy a grand.”
Up from the kitchen the triumphant smell of a “boiled New England dinner” sought out every corner of the house. High above all the varied odors, cabbage was king. The prospect of the dinner table was appalling, with Mr. Lund, distant and ready to quarrel over any infringement of his rights or curtailment of his portion. Mrs. Clarke ready to resent any jest as to her lord’s habits. The landlady eager to give battle to such as sniffed at what her kitchen had to offer. Wearisome banter between brainless boarders tending mainly to criticism of moving picture productions and speculations as to the salaries of the stars. Not a soul there who had ever heard of William Blake or Ravel! Overdressed girls who were permanently annoyed with Anthony Trent because he would never take them to ice-cream parlors. Each new boarder as she came set her cap for him and he remained courteous but disinterested.
One of the epics of Mrs. Sauer’s boarding house was that night when Miss Margaret Rafferty, incensed at the coldness with which her advances were received and the jeers of her girl friends, brought as a dinner guest a former sweetheart, now enthusiastically patrolling city sidewalks as a guardian of the peace. It was not difficult to inflame McGuire. He disliked Anthony Trent on sight and exercised an untrammeled wit during the dinner at his expense. It was afterwards in the little garden where the men went to smoke an after dinner cigar that the unforgivable phrase was passed.
McGuire was just able to walk home. He had met an antagonist who was a lightning hitter, whose footwork was quick and who boxed admirably and kept his head.
After this a greater meed of courtesy was accorded the writer of stories. But the bibulous Clarke alone amused him, Clarke who had been city editor of a great daily when Trent was a police reporter on it, and was now a Park Row derelict supported by the generosity of his old friends and acquaintances. Only Mrs. Clarke knew that Anthony Trent on numerous occasions gave her a little money each week until that day in the Greek kalends when her husband would find another position.
Anthony Trent settled himself at his typewriter and began looking over the carbon copy of the story he had just sold to Crosbeigh. He wished to assure himself of certain details in it. Among the pages was an envelope with the name of a celebrated Fifth Avenue club embossed upon it. Written on it in pencil was Crosbeigh’s name. Unquestionably he had swept it from the editorial desk when he had taken up the carbon copy of his story.
Opening it he found a note written in a rather cramped and angular hand. The stationery was of the Fifth Avenue club. The signature was unmistakable, “Conington Warren.” Trent read:
“My dear Crosbeigh:
“I am sending this note by Togoyama because I want to be sure that you will lunch with me at Voisin’s to-morrow at one o’clock. I wish affairs permitted me to see more of my old Yale comrades but I am enormously busy. By the way, a little friend of mine thinks she can write. I don’t suppose she can, but I promised to show her efforts to you. I’m no judge but it seems to me her work is very much the kind you publish in your magazine. We will talk it over to-morrow. Of course she cares nothing about what you would pay her. She wants to see her name in print.
Trent picked up an eraser and passed it over the name on the envelope. It had been written with a soft pencil and was easily swept away.
Over the body of the letter he spent a long time. He copied it exactly. A stranger would have sworn that the copy had been written by the same hand which indited the original. And when this copy had been made to Trent’s satisfaction, he carefully erased everything in the original but the signature. Then remembering Weems’ description of the Conington Warren camp in the Adirondacks, he wrote a little note to one Togoyama.
It was five when he had finished. There was no indecision about him. Twenty minutes later he was at the Public Library consulting a large volume in which were a hundred of the best known residences in New York. So conscientious was the writer that there were plans of every floor and in many instances descriptions of their interior decoration. Anthony Trent chuckled to think of the difficulties with which the unlettered crook has to contend. “Chicago Ed. Binner,” for example, had married half a hundred servant maids to obtain information as to the disposition of rooms that he could have obtained by the mere consultation of such a book as this.
It was while Mrs. Sauer’s wards were finishing their boiled dinner that some of them had a glimpse of Anthony Trent in evening dress descending the stairs.
“Dinner not good enough for his nibs,” commented one boarder seeking to curry the Sauer favor.
“I’d rather have my boarders pay and not eat than eat and not pay,” said Mrs. Sauer grimly. It was three weeks since she had received a dollar from the speaker.
“Drink,” exclaimed Mr. Clarke, suddenly roused from meditation of a day now dead when a highball could be purchased for fifteen cents. “This food shortage now. That could be settled easily. Take the tax off liquor and people wouldn’t want to eat so much. It’s the high cost of drinking that’s the trouble. What’s the use of calling ourselves a free people? I tell you it was keeping vodka from the Russians that caused the whole trouble. Don’t argue with me. I know.”
Mr.