The Real Man

Оглавление

Lynde Francis. The Real Man

I. Host and Guest

II. Metastasis

III. The Hobo

IV. The High Hills

V. The Specialist

VI. The Twig

VII. A Notice to Quit

VIII. Timanyoni Ditch

IX. Relapsings

X. The Sick Project

XI. When Greek Meets Greek

XII. The Rocket and the Stick

XIII. The Narrow World

XIV. A Reprieve

XV "Sweet Fortune's Minion"

XVI. Broken Threads

XVII. A Night of Fiascos

XVIII. A Chance to Hedge

XIX. Two Women

XX. Tucker Jibbey

XXI. At Any Cost

XXII. The Megalomaniac

XXIII. The Arrow to the Mark

XXIV. A Little Leaven

XXV. The Pace-Setter

XXVI. The Colonel's "Defi"

XXVII. Two Witnesses

XXVIII. The Straddler

XXIX. The Flesh-Pots of Egypt

XXX. A Strong Man Armed

XXXI. A Race to the Swift

XXXII. Freedom

XXXIII. In Sunrise Gulch

Отрывок из книги

It was ten minutes of eight when J. Montague Smith, having picked up the salesman's sample cases at the town hotel, set Debritt down at the railroad station and bade him good-by. Five minutes later he had driven the runabout to its garage and was hastening across to his suite of bachelor apartments in the Kincaid Terrace. There was reason for the haste. Though he had been careful, from purely hospitable motives, to refrain from intimating the fact to Debritt, it was his regular evening for calling upon Miss Verda Richlander, and time pressed.

The New York salesman, enlarging enthusiastically upon the provincial beatitudes, had chosen a fit subject for their illustration in the young cashier of the Lawrenceville Bank and Trust. From his earliest recollections Montague Smith had lived the life of the well-behaved and the conventional. He had his niche in the Lawrenceville social structure, and another in the small-city business world, and he filled both to his own satisfaction and to the admiration of all and sundry. Ambitions, other than to take promotions in the bank as they came to him, and, eventually, to make money enough to satisfy the demands which Josiah Richlander might make upon a prospective son-in-law, had never troubled him. An extremely well-balanced young man his fellow townsmen called him, one of whom it might safely be predicted that he would go straightforwardly on his way to reputable middle life and old age; moderate in all things, impulsive in none.

.....

It was at the hesitating instant that Debritt's curiously prophetic words came back to him with an emphasis that was fairly appalling: "To-morrow we may both be asking for a hand-out, and inquiring, a bit hoarsely, perhaps, if the walking is good. That is just how thin the partitions are." With one glance over his shoulder at the darkened front windows of the bank, Smith began to run, not toward the police station, but in the opposite direction – toward the railroad station.

This was at nine o'clock or, perhaps, a few minutes later. Coincident with J. Montague Smith's dash down the poorly lighted cross street, a rather weak-faced young man of the sham black-sheep type of the smaller cities was lounging in the drawing-room of an ornate timber-and-stucco mansion on Maple Street hill and saying to his hostess: "Say – I thought this was Monty's night to climb the hill, Miss Verda. By Jove, I've got it in for Monty, don't y' know. He's comin' here a lot too regular to please me."

.....