“But what’s this?” he queried, the next instant, his face going serious.  “You’ve said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that’s one of the points of the feature.  I expressly mentioned it, if you’ll remember.”

“It will never do,” he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had explained.  “You simply must collect that money somehow.  Let me see.  Let me think a moment.”

“Never mind, Mr. Irwin,” she said.  “I’ve bothered you enough.  Let me use your ’phone, please, and I’ll try Mr. Ernst Symes again.”

He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver.

“Charley Welsh is sick,” she began, when the connection had been made.  “What?  No I’m not Charley Welsh.  Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?”

“Tell Charley Welsh’s sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew his own pay,” came back the manager’s familiar tones, crisp with asperity.

“All right,” Edna went on.  “And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne’s pay?”

“What’d he say?  What’d he say?” Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up.

“That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot.”

“One thing, more,” he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous visit.  “Now that you’ve shown the stuff you’re made of, I should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the Intelligencer people.”

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS

Wade Atsheler is dead—­dead by his own hand.  To say that this was entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea.  Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way.  Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the time.  This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble.  I use “great trouble” advisedly.  Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to complain of fortune’s favors.  Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow.  We had watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and parching drought.  Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity—­who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell?  At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with some unknown danger.