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GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON
Young Rossiter did not like the task. The more he thought of it as hewhirled northward on the Empire State Express the more distasteful itseemed to grow.
"Hang it all," he thought, throwing down his magazine in disgust, "it'slike police work. And heaven knows I haven't wanted to be a cop since welived in Newark twenty years ago. Why the dickens did old Wharton marryher? He's an old ass, and he's getting just what he might have expected.She's twenty-five and beautiful; he's seventy and a sight. I've a notionto chuck the whole affair and go back to the simple but virtuousTenderloin. It's not my sort, that's all, and I was an idiot for mixing init. The firm served me a shabby trick when it sent me out to work up thiscase for Wharton. It's a regular Peeping Tom Job, and I don't like it."
It will require but few words to explain Sam Rossiter's presence in thenorth-bound Empire Express, but it would take volumes to express hisfeelings on the subject in general. Back in New York there lived GodfreyWharton, millionaire and septuagenarian. For two years he had been husbandto one of the prettiest, gayest young women in the city, and in the latterdays of this responsibility he was not a happy man. His wife had fallendesperately, even conspicuously, in love with Everett Havens, the newleading man at one of the fashionable playhouses. The affair had beengoing on for weeks, and it had at last become the talk of the town. By"the town" is meant that vague, expansive thing known as the "FourHundred." Sam Rossiter, two years out of Yale, was an attachment to, butnot a component part of, the Four Hundred. The Whartons were of the innercircle.
Young Rossiter was ambitious. He was, besides, keen, aggressive, anddetermined to make well for himself. Entering the great law offices ofGrover & Dickhut immediately after leaving college, he devoted himselfassiduously to the career in prospect. He began by making its foundationas substantial as brains and energy would permit. So earnest, sosuccessful was he that Grover & Dickhut regarded him as the most promisingyoung man in New York. They predicted a great future for him, no smallpart of which was the ultimate alteration of an office shingle, the nameof Rossiter going up in gilt, after that of Dickhut. And, above all,Rossiter was a handsome, likable chap. Tall, fair, sunny-hearted, wellgroomed, he was a fellow that both sexes liked without much effort.
The Wharton trouble was bound to prove startling any way one looked atit. The prominence of the family, the baldness of its skeleton, and thegleeful eagerness with which it danced into full view left but little formeddlers to covet. A crash was inevitable; it was the clash thatGrover & Dickhut were trying to avert. Old Wharton, worn to a slimmerfrazzle than he had ever been before his luckless marriage, was determinedto divorce his insolent younger half. It was to be done with as littlenoise as possible, more for his own sake than for hers. Wharton was proudin, not of, his weakness.
It became necessary to "shadow" the fair débutante into matrimony. Afterweeks of indecision Mr. Wharton finally arose and swore in accentsterrible that she was going too far to be called back. He determined topush, not to pull, on the reins. Grover & Dickhut were commanded to getthe "evidence"; he would pay. When he burst in upon them and cried in his