Melville Davisson Post

“ He looked out, a moment, at the woolly Highland cattle in the distant meadow, at the age-old beech-trees and the dark, swift, silent water, and then the upper part of his big body settled in the chair.
“I thought it was a slick trick, but maybe it was God Almighty. Anyway when the thing was pulled off I slid up to Bar Harbor and set down in a hotel. I figured it out like this—you look for a crook in the places that crooks go, and you look for a gentleman in the places where gentlemen go. I’ll switch it. ”

“ Shortly after the thing had happened, Lord Westridge returned to England. He had come to visit some rich Americans, and there was a rumor that some adventure had befallen him. Nothing definite ever came to me, and I liked the man too little to inquire; all the blood from the original Glasgow solicitor would “bite a shilling.” But again I replied as though I were in his secret.
“What happened to Westridge?” I said.
The man twisted around in his chair.
“Friend,” he said, “you’ve got a head full of brains or you wouldn’t be Chief of the United States Secret Service ”

“ This little Westridge was forty; he’d never change; and the girl was at the age when the things he was dangling were all mixed up with moonshine. He might win, and if he did she was headed for hell.
“I saw it all clean out to the end.”
He moved in the chair.
“I used to set about, and look at her, and it made me cold all over. The devil was on the job right here just as he was in the Tenderloin. He was working on a higher-class line, but it was only a different sort of road to his same old hell.
“It would be a heavenly angel flung to a wolf no matter how you dressed the situation up ”

“ Westridge,’ I says, ‘don’t you get a wrong notion in your head; I’m not a-goin’ to let you take any risk on this. I’m a-goin’ to take the risk; there ain’t none, in fact; the stuff’s got to bounce back. It’ll go to the sky when the steel bunch get all they can grab of it. ”

“ The devil’s got a set of traps for any kind of a layout!’”
He lifted himself on his great hands and turned the whole of his body toward me.
“Now,” he said, “what’s the difference how you ruin a woman? ”

“ Her father, a lawyer in the South, was dead. She had only the old Boston grandmother (I heard the talk among the women) and the coin was getting scarce. Your little Englishman played in form, every point correct, and he was goin’ to get her.
“I seen it!
“She was standing before the hotel desk with the bill that the clerk puts in your box at the end of the week, when his big motor snorted in against the wooden steps. Your little Westridge understood it for the grin started. It was the same old grin that goes with the job—I’ve seen it on all of ’em. ”

“ The big creature turned heavily toward me.
“With little Westridge?” There was deep irony in his voice. “I didn’t need any help to handle him. That was ABC stuff. The big trouble was ahead.”
“With the girl?” the query escaped me.
“No,” he replied; “that was my job too. You listen. I’m comin’ to it. ”

“ And right there is where this real bunch has got the goods! They don’t let down because they do some things that would make you cross your fingers on the other set.”
He leaned back in the chair.
“Well! I got to watching her and your Englishman. I watched them dancing in the hotel, and riding, and playing tennis at the Casino—I’d never seen any people like them.
“And pretty soon I got on to something; this Westridge gentleman was trying to buy the girl, but he didn’t want to pay for her. ”

“ I went on just as if he hadn’t said a word.
“‘Women’s got no sense about business—she’s agoin’ to lose it?’
“‘Lose what?’ he says.
“‘Rotten the way they bring girls up,’ I says, the same as if he hadn’t spoke. ‘Here’s this steel bunch beating the stuff down ”