The nearest man cursed and made a lunge for the closest piece. Then they were all scurrying here and there about the road while the frail bills sailed and flickered in the gale, pirouetting like elves along the grass, bouncing and skipping from side to side in mad perversity.
From one side to the other they ran, Corcoran with them—crumpling the captured money into their pockets, then scattering always farther and farther apart in wild pursuit of the elusive beckoning symbols of gold.
Suddenly Corcoran saw his opportunity. Bending low, as if he had spotted a stray bill beneath the car, he ran toward it, vaulted over the side and hitched into the driver’s seat. As he plunged the lever into first, he heard a cursing cry and then a sharp report, but the warmed car had jumped forward safely and the shot went wide.
In a moment, his teeth locked and muscles tense against the fusillade, he had passed the stalled taxi and was racing along into the darkness. There was another report close at hand and he ducked wildly, afraid for an instant that one of them had clung to the running board—then he realized that one of their shots had blown out a tire.
After three-quarters of a mile he stopped, cut off his motor and listened. There wasn’t a sound, only the drip from his radiator onto the road.
“Hallie!” he called. “Hallie!”
A figure emerged from the shadows not ten feet away, then another figure and another.
“Hallie!” he said.
She clambered into the front seat with him—her arms went about him.
“You’re safe!” she sobbed. “We heard the shots and I wanted to go back.”
Mr. Nosby, very cool now, stood in the road.
“I don’t suppose you brought back any of that money,” he said.
Corcoran took three crumpled bank notes from his pocket.
“That’s all,” he said. “But they’re liable to be along here any minute and you can argue with them about the rest.”
Mr. Nosby, followed by Mrs. Bushmill and the chauffeur, stepped quickly into the car.
“Nevertheless,” he insisted shrilly, as they moved off, “this has been a pretty expensive business. You’ve flung away ten thousand dollars that was to have bought goods in Sicily.”
“Those are English bank notes,” said Corcoran. “Big notes too. Every bank in England and Italy will be watching for those numbers.”
“But we don’t know the numbers!”
“I took all the numbers,” said Corcoran.
The rumor that Mr. Julius Bushmill’s purchasing department keeps him awake nights is absolutely unfounded. There are those who say that a once conservative business is expanding in a way that is more sensational than sound, but they are probably small, malevolent rivals with a congenital disgust for the Grand Scale. To all gratuitous advice, Mr. Bushmill replies that even when his son-in-law seems to be throwing it away, it all comes back. His theory is that the young idiot really has a talent for spending money.
— ◆ —
“Not in the Guidebook.”
(Woman’s Home Companion, November 1925)
This story began three days before it got into the papers. Like many other news-hungry Americans in Paris this spring, I opened the “Franco-American Star” one morning and having skimmed the hackneyed headlines (largely devoted to reporting the sempiternal “Lafayette-love-Washington” bombast of French and American orators) I came upon something of genuine interest.
“Look at that!” I exclaimed, passing it over to the twin bed. But the occupant of the twin bed immediately found an article about Leonora Hughes, the dancer, in another column, and began to read it. So of course I demanded the paper back.
“You don’t realize—” I began.
“I wonder,” interrupted the occupant of the twin bed, “if she’s a real blonde.”
However, when I issued from the domestic suite a little later I found other men in various cafés saying “Look at that!” as they pointed to the Item of Interest. And about noon I found another writer (whom I have since bribed with champagne to hold his peace) and together we went down into Franco-American officialdom to see. We discovered that the story began about three days before it got into the papers.
It began on a boat, and with a young woman who, though she wasn’t even faintly uneasy, was leaning over the rail. She was watching the parallels of longitude as they swam beneath the keel, and trying to read the numbers on them, but of course the S. S. Olympic travels too fast for that, and all that the young woman could see was the agate-green, foliage-like spray, changing and complaining around the stern. Though there was little to look at except the spray and a dismal Scandinavian tramp in the distance and the admiring millionaire who was trying to catch her eye from the first-class deck above, Milly Cooley was perfectly happy. For she was beginning life over.
Hope is a usual cargo between Naples and Ellis Island, but on ships bound east for Cherbourg it is noticeably rare. The first-class passengers specialize in sophistication and the steerage passengers go in for disillusion (which is much the same thing) but the young woman by the rail was going in for hope raised to the ultimate power. It was not her own life she was beginning over, but someone else’s, and this is a much more dangerous thing to do.
Milly was a frail, dark, appealing girl with the spiritual, haunted eyes that so frequently accompany South European beauty. By birth her mother and father had been respectively Czech and Roumanian, but Milly had missed the overshort upper lip and the pendulous, pointed nose that disfigure the type—her features were regular and her skin was young and olive-white and clear.
The good-looking, pimply young man with eyes of a bright marbly blue who was asleep on a dunnage bag a few feet away was her husband—it was his life that Milly was beginning over. Through the six months of their marriage he had shown himself to be shiftless and dissipated, but now they were getting off to a new start. Jim Cooley deserved a new start, for he had been a hero in the war. There was a thing called “shell shock” which justified anything unpleasant in a war hero’s behavior—Jim Cooley had explained that to her on the second day of their honeymoon when he had gotten abominably drunk and knocked her down with his open hand.
“I get crazy,” he said emphatically next morning, and his marbly eyes rolled back and forth realistically in his head. “I get started, thinkin’ I’m fightin’ the war, an’ I take a poke at whatever’s in front of me, see?”
He was a Brooklyn boy, and he had joined the marines. And on a June twilight he had crawled fifty yards out of his lines to search the body of a Bavarian captain that lay out in plain sight. He found a copy of German regimental orders, and in consequence his own brigade attacked much sooner than would otherwise have been possible, and perhaps the war was shortened by so much as a quarter of an hour. The fact was appreciated by the French and American races in the form of engraved slugs of precious metal which Jim showed around for four years before it occurred to him how nice it would be to have a permanent audience. Milly’s mother was impressed with his martial achievement, and a marriage was arranged—Milly didn’t realize her mistake until twenty-four hours after it was too late.
At the end of several months Milly’s mother died and left her daughter two hundred and fifty dollars. The event had a marked effect on Jim. He sobered up and one night came home from work with a plan for turning over a new leaf, for beginning life over. By the aid of his war record he had obtained a job with a bureau that took care of American soldier graves in France.