Arthur Stringer

“ I demanded in whispering horror. For I understood enough of the law of the land to know that a speeder who flees from the victim of his carelessness is technically guilty of manslaughter.
"A man I know, named Crotty, helped carry the body back to his house. Crotty's just told me about it."
My face must have frightened Latreille, for he covered his movement of catching hold of my arm by ceremoniously opening the car door for me.
"Sit tight, man!" he ordered in his curt and conspiratorial undertone. "Sit tight—for it's all that's left to do!" ”

“ It was necessary to think a good deal about Alaska in those days, for after I had acquired my house I also had to acquire a man to run it, and then a couple of other people to help the man who helped me, and then a town car to take me back and forth from it, and then a chauffeur to take care of the car, and then the service-clothes for the chauffeur, and the thousand and one unlooked for things, in short, which confront the pin-feather householder and keep him from feeling too much a lord of creation. ”

“ It occurred, oddly enough, on Hallow-e'en night, when the world is supposed to be given over to festivity. Latreille had motored me out to a small dinner-dance at Washburn's, on Long Island, but I had left early in the evening, perversely depressed by a hilarity in which I had not the heart to join. Twice, on the way back to the city, I had called out to Latreille for more speed. We had just taken a turn in the outskirts of Brooklyn when my swinging headlights disclosed the figure of a man, an unstable and wavering man, obviously drunk, totter and fall directly in front of my car. ”

“ I still hoped against hope, however, trying to tell myself that it is no easy thing to knock the life out of a man, passionately upbraiding myself for not doing what I should have done to succor the injured, then sinkingly remembering what Latreille had mentioned about the weight of my car. ”

“ But my interest in Latreille about this time became quite subsidiary, for something much more important than cars happened to me. I fell in love. I fell in love with Mary Lockwood, head-over-heels in love with a girl who could have thrown a town car into the Hudson every other week and never have missed it. She was beautiful; she was wonderful; but she was dishearteningly wealthy. ”

“ So for recreation I had Latreille take me out in the car, when a feverish thirst for speed, which I found it hard to account for, drove me into daily violations of the traffic laws. Twice, in fact, I was fined for this, with a curtly warning talk from the presiding magistrate on the second occasion, since the offense, in this case, was complicated by collision with an empty baby-carriage. Latreille, about this time, seemed uncannily conscious of my condition. More and more he seemed to rasp me on the raw, until irritation deepened into positive dislike for the man. ”

“ And I continued to cling hungrily to Mary's hint about doing work, gloriously big work.
But gloriously big work, I discovered, was usually done by lonely men, living simply and quietly, and dwelling aloof from the frivolous side-issues of life, divorced from the distractions of a city which seemed organized for only the idler and the lotos-eater. And I could see that the pay-dirt coming out of Alaska was running thinner and thinner. ”

“ While this was taking place, something even more important was taking place, something which finally brought me in touch with Mary Lockwood herself. It was accident more than anything else, I think, that first launched me in what is so indefinitely and often so disparagingly known as society. Society, as a rule, admits only the lions of my calling across its sacred portals. ”

“ TO begin with, I am a Canadian by birth, and thirty-three years old. For nine of those years I have lived in New York. And by my friends in that city I am regarded as a successful author.
There was a time when I even regarded myself in much the same light. But that period is past. I now have to face the fact that I am a failure. For when a man is no longer able to write he naturally can no longer be reckoned as an author.
I have made the name of Witter Kerfoot too well known, I think, to explain that practically all of my stories have been written about Alaska. ”

“ For Latreille was as efficient, in his way, as Benson himself. He understood his car, he understood the traffic rules, and he understood what I wanted of him. Latreille was, after a manner of speaking, a find of my own. Dining one night at the Peytons', I had met the Commissioner of Police, who had given me a card to stroll through Headquarters and inspect the machinery of the law. I had happened on Latreille as he was being measured and "mugged" in the Identification Bureau, with those odd-looking Bertillon forceps taking his cranial measurements. The intelligence of the man interested me ”

“ And in the Klondike and this same British Yukon there is a Firearms Act which makes it against the law for any civilian to tote a gun. And that law is sure carried out. Fact is, there's no need for a gun. ”