With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many-hours deep slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.

All night in the Blue Light Drug Store he waited at his duties for chance news of the tragedy, but none came.

At eight o’clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey started hurriedly for Mrs. Riddle’s to learn the outcome.  And, lo! as he stepped out of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing street car and grasped his hand—­Chunk McGowan with a victor’s smile and flushed with joy.

“Pulled it off,” said Chunk with Elysium in his grin.  “Rosy hit the fire-escape on time to a second, and we was under the wire at the Reverend’s at 9.3O 1/4.  She’s up at the flat—­she cooked eggs this mornin’ in a blue kimono—­Lord! how lucky I am!  You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us.  I’ve got a job down near the bridge, and that’s where I’m heading for now.”

“The—­the—­powder?” stammered Ikey.

“Oh, that stuff you gave me!” said Chunk, broadening his grin; “well, it was this way.  I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle’s, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, ’Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square—­don’t try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her.’  And I keeps the paper you give me in my pocket.  And then my lamps fall on another party present, who, I says to myself, is failin’ in a proper affection toward his comin’ son-in-law, so I watches my chance and dumps that powder in old man Riddle’s coffee—­see?”

MAMMON AND THE ARCHER

Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall’s Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned.  His neighbour to the right—­the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—­came out to his waiting motor-car, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace’s front elevation.

“Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!” commented the ex-Soap King.  “The Eden Musee’ll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don’t watch out.  I’ll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and see if that’ll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher.”

And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the door of his library and shouted “Mike!” in the same voice that had once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.

“Tell my son,” said Anthony to the answering menial, “to come in here before he leaves the house.”

When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth, ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and rattled the keys in his pocket with the other.