MARGO DOWLING 3 страница

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because the boys said they were starved. They had broiled
Florida lobster in a pink sauce and cold chicken and salad
and they drank champagne. Margo had never been so
happy in her life.

While they were eating the yacht started to move slowly
down the river, away from the ramshackle wharves and
the dirtylooking old steamboats into the broad reaches of
brown river that was splotched with green floating patches
of waterhyacinths. A funny damp marshy smell came on
the wind off the tangled trees that hid the banks. Once
they saw a dozen big white birds with long necks fly up
that Tad said were egrets. "I bet they're expensive," said
Queenie. "They're protected by the federal government,"
said young Rogers.

They drank little glasses of brandy with their coffee.
By the time they got up from the table they were all
pretty well spiffed. Margo had decided that Tad was the
swellest boy she'd ever known and that she wouldn't hold
out on him any longer, no matter what happened.

After lunch Tad showed them all over the boat. The
diningroom was wonderful, all mirrors paneled in white
and gold, and the cabins were the coziest things. The girls'
cabin was just like an oldfashioned drawingroom. Their
things had been all hung out for them while they'd been
eating lunch.

While they were looking at the boat young Rogers and
Queenie disappeared somewhere, and the first thing
Margo knew she and Tad were alone in a cabin looking
at a photograph of a sailboat his father had won the Ber-
muda race with. Looking at the picture his cheek brushed
against hers and there they were kissing.

"Gee, you're great," said Tad. "I'm kind of clumsy at
this . . . no experience, you know."

She pressed against him. "I bet you've had plenty."
With his free hand he was bolting the door. "Will you do
like the ring said, Tad?"

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When they went up on deck afterwards, Tad was acting
kind of funny; he wouldn't look her in the eye and talked
all the time to young Rogers. Queenie looked flushed and
all rumpled up like she'd been through a wringer, and
staggered when she walked. Margo made her fix herself
up and do her hair. She sure was wishing she hadn't
brought Queenie. Margo looked fresh as a daisy herself,
she decided when she looked in the big mirror in the up-
stairs saloon.

The boat had stopped. Tad's face looked like a thunder-
cloud when he came back from talking to the captain.
"We've got to go back to Jacksonville, burned out a bear-
ing on the oilpump," he said. "A hell of a note."

"That's great," said young Rogers. "We can look into
the local nightlife."

"And what I want to know is," said Queenie, "where's
that chaperon you boys were talkin' about?"

"By gum," said Tad, "we forgot Mrs. Vinton. . . . I
bet she's been waiting down at the dock all day."

"Too late for herbicide," said Margo and they all
laughed except Tad who looked sourer than ever.

It was dark when they got to Jacksonville. They'd had
to pack their bags up again and they'd changed into dif-
ferent dresses. While they were changing their clothes
Queenie had talked awful silly. "You mark my words,
Margo, that boy wants to marry you." "Let's not talk
about it," Margo said several times. "You treat him like
he was dirt." Margo heard her own voice whining and
mean: "And who's business it is?" Queenie flushed and
went on with her packing. Margo could see she was sore.

They ate supper grumpily at the hotel. After supper
young Rogers made them go out to a speakeasy held
found. Margo didn't want to go and said she had a head-
ache, but everybody said now be a sport and she went. It
was a tough kind of a place with oilcloth on the tables and
sawdust on the floor. There were some foreigners, wops ors

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Cubans or something, standing against a bar in another
room. Queenie said she didn't think it was the kind of
place Mother's little girl ought to be seen in. "Who the
hell's going to see us?" said Tad still in his grouch. "Don't
we want to see life?" Rogers said, trying to cheer every-
body up.

Margo lost track of what they were saying. She was
staring through the door into the barroom. One of the
foreigners standing at the bar was Tony. He looked older
and his face was kind of puffy, but there was no doubt that
it was Tony. He looked awful. He wore a rumpled white
suit frayed at the cuffs of the trousers and he wiggled his
hips like a woman as he talked. The first thing Margo
thought was how on earth she could ever have liked that
fagot. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Tad's
sullen face and his nice light untidy hair and the cleancut
collegeboy way he wore his clothes. She had to work fast.
She was just opening her mouth to say honestly she had
to go back to the hotel, when she caught sight of Tony's
big black eyes and dark lashes. He was coming towards the
table with his mincing walk, holding out both hands.
"Querida mia. . . . Why are you here?"

She introduced him as Antonio de Garrido, her partner
in a Cuban dance number on the Keith circuit, but he let
the cat out of the bag right away by calling her his dear
wife. She could feel the start Tad gave when he heard
that. Then suddenly Tad began to make a great fuss over
Tony and to order up drinks for him. He and Rogers kept
whispering and laughing together about something. Then
Tad was asking Tony to come on the cruise with them.

She could see Tad was acting drunker than he really
was. She was ready for it when the boys got up to go.
Tad's face was red as a beet. "We got to see the skipper
about that engine trouble," he said. "Maybe Señor de
Garrido will see you girls back to the hotel. . . . Now
don't do anything I wouldn't do."

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"See you in the morning, cuties," chimed in young
Rogers.

After they'd gone Margo got to her feet. "Well, no use
waiting around this dump. . . . You sure put your foot in
it, Tony." Tony had tears in his eyes. "Everything is very
bad with me," he said. "I thought maybe my little Margo
remembered . . . you know we used to be very fond.
Don Manfredo, you remember my patron, Margo, had
to leave Havana very suddenly. I hoped he would take
me to Paris, but he brought me to Miami with him. Now
we are no more friends. We have been unlucky at roulette.
. . . He has only enough money for himself."

"Why don't you get a job?"

"In these clothes . . . I am ashamed to show my face
. . . maybe your friends . . ."

"You lay off of them, do you hear?" Margo burst out.
Queenie was blubbering, "You should have bought us
return tickets to New York. Another time you remember
that. Never leave the homeplate without a return ticket."

Tony took them home to the hotel in a taxi and insisted
on paying for it. He made a big scene saying goodnight.
"Little Margo, if you never see me again, remember I
loved you. . . . I shall keel myself." As they went up in
the elevator they could see him still standing on the side-
walk where they had left him.

In the morning they were waked up by a bellboy bring-
ing an envelope on a silver tray. It was a letter to Margo
from Tad. The handwriting was an awful scrawl. All it
said was that the trip was off because the tutor had come
and they were going to have to pick up Dad in Palm Beach.
Enclosed there were five twenties. "Oh, goody goody,"
cried Queenie, sitting up in bed when she saw them. "It
sure would have been a long walk home. . . . Honest,
that boy's a prince.""A damn hick," said Margo. "You
take fifty and I take fifty. . . . Lucky I have an engage-
ment fixed up in Miami." It was a relief when Queenie

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said she'd take the first train back to little old New York.
Margo didn't want ever to see any of that bunch again.

They hadn't finished packing their bags when there was
Tony at the door. He sure looked sick. Margo was so
nervous she yelled at him, "Who the hell let you in?"

Tony let himself drop into a chair and threw back his
head with his eyes closed. Queenie closed up her traveling-
bag and came over and looked at him. "Say, that bozo
looks halfstarved. Better let me order up some coffee or
something. . . . Was he really your husband like he
said?"

Margo nodded.

"Well, you've got to do something about him. Poor
boy, he sure does look down on his uppers."

"I guess you're right," said Margo, staring at them both
with hot dry eyes.

She didn't go down to Miami that day. Tony was sick
and threw up everything he ate. It turned out he hadn't
had anything to eat for a week and had been drinking
hard. "I bet you that boy dopes," Queenie whispered in
Margo's ear.

They both cried when it was time for Queenie to go to
her train. "I've got to thank you for a wonderful time
while it lasted," she said. Margo put Tony to bed after
Queenie had gone off to her train. When they objected
down at the desk she said he was her husband. They had to
register again. It made her feel awful to have to write
down in the book Mr. and Mrs. Antonio de Garrido. Once
it was written it didn't look so bad though.

It was three days before Tony could get up. She had to
have a doctor for him. The doctor gave him bromides and
hot milk. The room was seven fifty a day and the meals
sent up and the doctor and medicine and everything ran
into money. It began to look like she'd have to hock the
ring Tad had given her.

It made her feel like she was acting in a play living

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with Tony again. She was kind of fond of him after all,
but it sure wasn't what she'd planned. As he began to feel
better he began to talk confidently about the magnificent
act they could put on together. Maybe they could sell it
to the cabaret she'd signed an engagement with in Miami.
After all Tony was a sweettempered kind of a boy.

The trouble was that whenever she went out to get her
hair curled or something, she'd always find one of the
bellhops, a greasylooking blackhaired boy who was some
kind of a spick himself, in the room with Tony. When
she asked Tony what about it he'd laugh and say, "It is
nothing. We talk Spanish together. That is all. He has
been very attentive.""Yes, very," said Margo. She felt so
damn lousy about everything she didn't give a damn any-
way.

One morning when she woke up Tony was gone. The
roll of bills in her pocketbook was gone and all her jewelry
except the solitaire diamond she wore on her finger was
gone too. When she called up the desk to ask if he'd paid
the bill they said that he had left word for her to be called
at twelve and that was all. Nobody had seen him go out.
The spick bellhop had gone too.

All that Margo had left was her furcoat and fifteen
cents. She didn't ask for the bill, but she knew it must be
about fifty or sixty bucks. She dressed thoughtfully and
carefully and decided to go out to a lunchroom for a cup
of coffee. That was all the breakfast she had the price of.

Outside it was a warm spring day. The sunshine glinted
on the rows of parked cars. The streets and the stores and
the newsstands had a fresh sunny airy look. Margo walked
up and down the main stem of Jacksonville with an awful
hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. She looked in
haberdashery store windows and in the windows of cheap
jewelers and hockshops and read over carefully all the
coming attractions listed at the movingpicture. houses. She
found herself in front of a busstation. She read the fares

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and the times buses left for Miami and New Orleans and
Tallahassee and Orlando and Tampa and Atlanta,
Georgia, and Houston, Texas, and Los Angeles, Cali-
fornia. In the busstation there was a lunch counter. She
went in to spend her fifteen cents. She'd get more for the
ring at a hockshop if she didn't barge in on an empty
stomach, was what she was thinking as she sat down at the
counter and ordered a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

NEWSREEL LVIII

In my dreams it always seems
I hear you softly call to me
Valencia!
Where the orange trees forever scent the
Breeze beside the sea

which in itself typifies the great drama of the Miami we
have today. At the time only twenty years ago when the site
of the Bay of Biscayne Bank was a farmer's hitchingyard and
that of the First National Bank a public barbecue ground the
ground here where this ultramodern hotel and club stands
was isolated primeval forest. My father and myself were clear-
ing little vegetable patches round it and I was peddling vege-
tables at the hotel Royal Palm, then a magnificent hotel set in
a wild frontier. Even eight years ago I was growing tomatoes

Valencia!

SEEK MISSING LOOT

WOMAN DIRECTS HIGHWAY ROBBERY

Lazy River flowing to the southland
Down where I long to be

RADIUM VICTIMS TIPPED BRUSHES IN MOUTHS

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this peninsula has been white every month though there
have been some months when West Florida was represented
as only fair

GIRL EVANGELS AWAIT CHRIST IN
NEW YORK

When the red red robin
Comes bob bob bobbin' along along

We Want You to Use Our Credit System to Your Ut-
most Advantage. Only a Small Down Payment and the Bal-
ance in Small Amounts to Suit Your Convenience.

There'll be no more sobbin'
When he starts throbbin'

URGES STRIKES BE TERMED FELONIES

When he starts throbbin'
His old sweet song
When the red red robin

bright and early he showed no signs of fatigue or any of
the usual evidences of a long journey just finished. There was
not a wrinkle on his handsome suit of silken material, the
weave and texture and color of which were so suitable for
tropic summer days. His tie with its jeweled stickpin and his
finger ring were details in perfect accord with his immaculate
attire. Though small in stature and unassuming in manner, he
disposed of $20,000,000 worth of building operations with as
little fuss or flurry as ordinarily accompanies the act of a pas-
senger on a trolley car in handing a nickel to the conductor.

THE CAMPERS AT KITTY HAWK

On December seventeenth, nineteen hundred and
three, Bishop Wright of the United Brethren onetime
editor of the Religious Telescope received in his frame

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house on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, a telegram
from his boys Wilbur and Orville who'd gotten it into
their heads to spend their vacations in a little camp out
on the dunes of the North Carolina coast tinkering with
a homemade glider they'd knocked together them-
selves. The telegram read:

SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL
AGAINST TWENTYONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL
WITH ENGINEPOWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH
AIR THIRTYONE MILES LONGEST FIFTYSEVEN SECONDS
INFORM PRESS HOME CHRISTMAS

The figures were a little wrong because the tele-
graph operator misread Orville's hasty penciled scrawl
but the fact remains
that a couple of young bicycle mechanics from
Dayton, Ohio
had designed constructed and flown
for the first time ever a practical airplane.

After running the motor a few minutes to heat it
up I released the wire that held the machine to the
track and the machine started forward into the wind.
Wilbur ran at the side of the machine holding the wing
to balance it on the track. Unlike the start on the 14th
made in a calm the machine facing a 27 mile wind
started very slowly. . . . Wilbur was able to stay with
it until it lifted from the track after a forty-foot run.
One of the lifesaving men snapped the camera for us
taking a picture just as it reached the end of the track
and the machine had risen to a height of about two
feet. . . . The course of the flight up and down was
extremely erratic, partly due to the irregularities of the
air, partly to lack of experience in handling this ma-
chine. A sudden dart when a little over a hundred and
twenty feet from the point at which it rose in the air

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ended the flight. . . . This flight lasted only 12 sec-
onds but it was nevertheless the first in the history of
the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised
itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had
sailed forward without reduction of speed and had
finally landed at a point as high as that from which it
started.

A little later in the day the machine was caught
in a gust of wind and turned over and smashed, almost
killing the coastguardsman who tried to hold it down;
it was too bad
but the Wright brothers were too happy to care
they'd proved that the damn thing flew.

When these points had been definitely established
we at once packed our goods and returned home know-
ing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.

They were home for Christmas in Dayton, Ohio,
where they'd been born in the seventies of a family who
had been settled west of the Alleghenies since eighteen
fourteen, in Dayton, Ohio, where they'd been to
grammarschool and highschool and joined their father's
church and played baseball and hockey and worked out
on the parallel bars and the flying swing and sold news-
papers and built themselves a printingpress out of odds
and ends from the junkheap and flown kites and tink-
ered with mechanical contraptions and gone around
town, as boys doing odd jobs to turn an honest penny.

The folks claimed it was the bishop's bringing
home a helicopter, a fiftycent mechanical toy made of
two fans worked by elastic bands that was supposed to
hover in the air, that had got his two youngest boys
hipped on the subject of flight
so that they stayed home instead of marrying the

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way the other boys did, and puttered all day about the
house picking up a living with jobprinting,
bicyclerepair work,
sitting up late nights reading books on aero-
dynamics.

Still they were sincere churchmembers, their bicy-
cle business was prosperous, a man could rely on their
word. They were popular in Dayton.

In those days flyingmachines were the big laugh
of all the crackerbarrel philosophers. Langley's and
Chanute's unsuccessful experiments had been jeered
down with an I-told-you-so that rang from coast to
coast. The Wrights' big problem was to find a place
secluded enough to carry on their experiments without
being the horselaugh of the countryside. Then they
had no money to spend;
they were practical mechanics; when they needed
anything they built it themselves.

They hit on Kitty Hawk,
on the great dunes and sandy banks that stretch
south towards Hatteras seaward of Albemarle Sound,
a vast stretch of seabeach
empty except for a coastguard station, a few fish-
ermen's shacks and the swarms of mosquitoes and the
ticks and chiggers in the crabgrass behind the dunes
and overhead the gulls and swooping terns, in the
evening fishhawks and cranes flapping across the salt-
marshes, occasionally eagles
that the Wright brothers followed soaring with
their eyes
as Leonardo watched them centuries before
straining his sharp eyes to apprehend
the laws of flight.

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Four miles across the loose sand from the scatter-
ing of shacks, the Wright brothers built themselves a
camp and a shed for their gliders. It was a long way to
pack their groceries, their tools, anything they hap-
pened to need; in summer it was hot as blazes, the mos-
quitoes were hell;
but they were alone there
and they'd figured out that the loose sand was as
soft as anything they could find to fall in.

There with a glider made of two planes and a
tail in which they lay flat on their bellies and controlled
the warp of the planes by shimmying their hips, taking
off again and again all day from a big dune named Kill
Devil Hill,
they learned to fly.

Once they'd managed to hover for a few seconds
and soar ever so slightly on a rising aircurrent
they decided the time had come
to put a motor in their biplane.

Back in the shop in Dayton, Ohio, they built an
airtunnel, which is their first great contribution' to the
science of flying, and tried out model planes in it.

They couldn't interest any builders of gasoline
engines so they had to build their own motor.

It worked; after that Christmas of nineteen three
the Wright brothers weren't doing it for fun any more;
they gave up their bicycle business, got the use of a
big old cowpasture belonging to the local banker for
practice flights, spent all the time when they weren't
working on their machine in promotion, worrying about
patents, infringements, spies, trying to interest govern-

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ment officials, to make sense out of the smooth involved
heartbreaking remarks of lawyers.

In two years they had a plane that would cover'
twentyfour miles at a stretch round and round the cow-
pasture.

People on the interurban car used to crane their
necks out of the windows when they passed along the
edge of the field, startled by the clattering pop pop of
the old Wright motor and the sight of the white biplane
like a pair of ironingboards one on top of the other
chugging along a good fifty feet in the air. The cows
soon got used to it.

As the flights got longer
the Wright brothers got backers,
engaged in lawsuits,
lay in their beds at night sleepless with the whine
of phantom millions, worse than the mosquitoes at
Kitty Hawk.

In nineteen seven they went to Paris,
allowed themselves to be togged out in dress suits
and silk hats,
learned to tip waiters
talked with government experts, got used to gold
braid and postponements and vandyke beards and the
outspread palms of politicos. For amusement
they played diabolo in the Tuileries gardens.

They gave publicized flights at Fort Myers, where
they had their first fatal crackup, St. Petersburg, Paris,
Berlin; at Pau they were all the rage,
such an attraction that the hotelkeeper

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wouldn't charge them for their room.
Alfonso of Spain shook hands with them and was
photographed sitting in the machine,
King Edward watched a flight,
the Crown Prince insisted on being taken up,
the rain of medals began.

They were congratulated by the Czar
and the King of Italy and the amateurs of sport,
and the society climbers and the papal titles,
and decorated by a society for universal peace.

Aeronautics became the sport of the day.

The Wrights don't seem to have been very much
impressed by the upholstery and the braid and the gold
medals and the parades of plush horses,
they remained practical mechanics
and insisted on doing all their own work them-
selves,
even to filling the gasolinetank.

In nineteen eleven they were back on the dunes
at Kitty Hawk with a new glider.

Orville stayed up in the air for nine and a half
minutes, which remained a long time the record for
motorless flight.

The same year Wilbur died of typhoidfever in
Dayton.

In the rush of new names: Farman, Blériot, Cur-
tiss, Ferber, Esnault-Peltrie, Delagrange;
in the snorting impact of bombs and the whine and
rattle of shrapnel and the sudden stutter of machine-
guns after the motor's been shut off overhead,

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and we flatten into the mud
and make ourselves small cowering in the corners
of ruined walls,
the Wright brothers passed out of the headlines
but not even headlines or the bitter smear of news-
print or the choke of smokescreen and gas or chatter
of brokers on the stockmarket or barking of phantom
millions or oratory of brasshats laying wreaths on new
monuments
can blur the memory
of the chilly December day
two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton,
Ohio,
first felt their homemade contraption
whittled out of hickory sticks,
gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement,
stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's
sewingmachine in their own backyard on Hawthorn
Street in Dayton, Ohio,
soar into the air
above the dunes and the wide beach
at Kitty Hawk.

NEWSREEL LIX

the stranger first coming to Detroit if he be interested in
the busy economic side of modern life will find a marvelous
industrial beehive; if he be a lover of nature he will take notice
of a site made forever remarkable by the waters of that noble
strait that gives the city its name; if he be a student of romance
and history he will discover legends and records as entertaining
and as instructive as the continent can supply

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I've a longing for my Omaha town
I long to go there and settle down

DETROIT LEADS THE WORLD IN THE
MANUFACTURE OF AUTOMOBILES

I want to see my pa
I want to see my ma
I want to go to dear old Omaha

DETROIT IS FIRST

IN PHARMACEUTICALS
STOVES RANGES FURNACES
ADDING MACHINES
PAINTS AND VARNISHES
MARINE MOTORS
OVERALLS

SODA AND SALT PRODUCTS

SPORT SHOES
TWIST DRILLS
SHOWCASES
CORSETS
GASOLINE TORCHES
TRUCKS

Mr. Radio Man won't you do what you can
'Cause I'm so lonely
Tell my Mammy to come back home
Mr. Radio Man

DETROIT THE DYNAMIC RANKS HIGH