Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 February 1912 — THE GIRL from HIS TOWN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE GIRL from HIS TOWN

By MARIE VAN VORST

Illustrations by M. G. KETTNER

> SYNOPSIS. Dan Blair, the, 22-year-old son of the fifty-million-dollar copper king of Blairtown. Mont., is a guest° at the English home of Lady Galorey. Dan’s father had been courteous to Lord Galorey during his visit to the United States and the courtesy is now being returned to the young man. The youth has an ideal girl In his mind. He meets Lily, Duchess of Breakwater, a beautiful widow, who is attracted by his immense fortune and takes a liking to her. When. Dan was a boy, a girl sang a solo at a church, and he* had never forgotten her.-. The Galoreys, Lily and Dan attend a London theater where one Letty Lane is the star. Dan recognises her as the ,girl from his town, and going behind the scenes introduces himself and she remembers him. He learns that Prince Ponlotowsky is suitor and escort to Letty. Lord Galorey and . a friend" named Ruggles determine to protect the westerner, from Lily and other fortune hunters. Young Blair foes to see Lily; he can talk of nothing ut Letty and this angers the Duchess. The westerner finds Letty ill from hard work.

CHAPTER IX.—Continued. But Dan hesitated, looking at thebit of humanity thait he had laid wlthi great gentleness on the divan covered with pillows. Letty Lane lay there, small as a little child, Inanimate as death. It was hard to think the quiet little form could contain such life, fire and motion, or that this sense 1 ess little creature held London with her vdTce"anirgrace?Hrgginskneltdown by Letty Lane’s side, quiet, capable, going about the business of resuscitating her lady much as she laced the singer’s bodice and shoes. “If you would be so good as to open the door, sir, and send me a call page. They’ll have to linger out this entr’acte or put on some feature.” r “But,” exclaimed Blair, “she can’t go back tonight?” “Lord, yes,” Higgins returned. “Here, Miss Lane; drink this.” At the. door where he paused, Dan saw the girl lifted up, saw her lean 6n Higgins’ shoulder, and fissured then that she was not lifeless in good truth, he went out to do as Higgins had asked him. In a quarter of an hour the curtain rose and'within half an hour Dan, from his box, saw the actress dance to the rajah her charming polka to the strains of the Hungarian Band.

chS»ter X. The Boy From My Town. He went the next day to see Letty Lane at the Savoy and learned that she was too ill to receive him. Mrs. Higgins in the sitting-room told him - goj; Dan liked the big cordial face of the Scotchwoman who acted as companion, dresser and maid for the star. Mrs. Higgins had an affable face, one that welcomes, and she made it plain that she was not an enemy to this young caller. The visitor, in his blue serge clothes, was less startling than most of the meh that came to see her mistress. . “She works too hard, doesn’t she?” “She does everything too hard, sir;” “She ought to rest.” *T doubt if she does, even in her grave,” returned Higgins. “She is too full of motion. She is like the little girl in the fairy book that danced in her grave.” Dan didn’t like this comparison. “Can’t you make her hold up a little?” Higgins smiled and shook her head. Letty Lane’s sitting-room was as full of roses as a flower garden. There were quantities of theatrical photographs in silver and leather frames on the tables and the piano. Signed portraits-from crowned heads; pictures of well-known worldly men and Women whom the dancer had charmed. But a full-length picture of Letty Lane herself in one of the dresses of "Mandalay” lay on the table near Dan, and he picked it up. She smiled at him encbantingly from the cardboard, across which was written in het big, dashing hand: "For the Boy from my Town. Letty Lane.” Dan glanced up at Mrs. Higgins "Why, that looks as though this were for me.” 5 The dressing woman nodded. “Miss Land thought she would be able to see you today.” The picture in hit hand,.Dan gazed at it rapturously.. ’> from Blatttown.. Montana, where she came froß ” “So she told me, sir.” He lald the picture back on the table t and Higgins understood that he wanted Miss Lane to give it to him herself. She led him affably to the door and affably smiled upon him. She had a frill in her bandit thimble on her finger, and a lot of needles tn her bodice. She looked motherly

and useful. Blair liked to think of ber with Letty Laue. He put his hand in his pocket, but she saw his gesture and reproved him quietly: “No, no, sir, please, I never do. I am just as much obliged,” and her face remained bo affable that Blair was not embarrassed by her refusal. His parting words were: “Now, you make her take care of herself.” —— Andto please him, as she opened the door, she pleasantly assured him that she would do her very best. Dan went out of the Savoy feeling that he had left something of himself behind him in the motley room of an actress with its perfumed atmosphere of roses and violets. The photograph which he had laid down on the table seemed to look out at him again, and he repeated delightedly, “That one was for me, all right! I’m the ‘boy from her town’ and no mistake.” And he thought of her as she had lain, lifelessly and pale on the dressingroom sofa, under the touch of hired hands, and how, no doubt, she had been lying in her room when he called today, with sbades drawn resting before the long hard evening, when London would be amused by her, delighted by her, charmed by her voice, by her body and her grace. He had wandered up as far as Piccadilly, went into a florist’s and stood before the flowers. Her sitting-room had been full of roses, but Dan chose something else that had caught his eye from the window—a huge country basket of primroses, smelling of the earth and the spring. He sent them with

his card and wrote on it, "To the Girl from My Town,” and sent the gift with a pleasure as young and as fresh as was his own heart. He got no note of acknowledgment from his flowers. Miss Lane was evidently better and played every night; no mention was made of her indisposition in the papers. But Dan couldn’t go to the Gaiety or bear to see her make the effort which he knew must tire her beyond words to conceive. After a few days he called at the Savoy to get news of her. He got as far as the lift when going up in it he saw Prince Ponlotowsky. The sight affected Miss Lane’s townsman so forcibly that Instead of going up to the dahcer’s apartment Dan took himself off, and anger, displeasure and something like disgust were the only sentiments he carried away from the Savoy. He sent her no flowers, and gave himself up unreservedly to Joshua Ruggles and to a couple of men who came in to see him by appointment. And when toward four o’clock he found himself alone with Ruggles, Dan threw himself down in a big chair and looked intensely bored. “Well, I guess we don’t need to see any more of these fellows for a week, Dan,” Ruggles yawned with relief. “I’m blamed if it isn’t as hard to take care of money as to get it. I was a poor man once, and sb was your father. Those were the' days we had fun? //'■ Ruggles took, out » Mg cl S ar , struck a match sharply, and when he had lit his Henry Clay he fixed his gaze on the flying London fog, whose black curtain drew itself across their window. “There's a lot ot excitement,” Ruggles said, “in not knowing what you’re going to get; may turn out to be anything when you’re young and on the trail. That’s the way your father and me felt. And when we started out on the spot that’s Blalrtown on the map today, .your father had forty dollars a week to engineer a busted mine and to pull the company into shape.” < . Dan knew the story of his father's rise by heart, but he listened. ’

“He took on with the mine a lot of discontented half-hearted rapscallions —a whole bunch who had failed all along the line. He didn’t chuck ’em out. ‘There’s no life in old wood, Josh,* he said to me, ‘but sometimes there’s fire in it, and I’m going to light up,’ and he did. He won over the whole lot of them in eighteen months, and within two years he had that darned mine paying dividends. Meanwhtle“s6methfng came his way and he took it"

From his chair Dan asked; "You mean the Bentley claim?" • “Measles,” his friend said comically, with a grin. “Your father was sick to death wUh them. When he was sifr ting up for the first time, peeling in his room, there was a fellow, an Englishman, a total stranger, come In to see him. ‘Better clear out of here,’ your father says to him. ‘l’m shedding the damnedest disease for a grown man that ever was caught’ ‘l’m not afraid of it,’ the Englishman said, ‘l’m shedding worse.’ When your father asked him what that was, hs said the idea that he could make any iftoney in the West. —He toid your father that he was going back to England and give up his western schemes, and that he had a claim to sell, and he told Blair where it lay/ ‘Who has seen it?’ your father asked. ‘Any of my men?’ And the Englishman told your father that nobody had wanted to buy it and that was why he had come to him. He said he thought his only chance to sell was to hold up some blind man on his dying bed and that he had heard that Blair was too

sick to stir out of his room and to prospect. Your father liked the fellow’s cheek, and when ne found out that he had the maps with him, your father bought the whole blooming sweep at the man’s price, which was a mere song. “Your father never went near his purchase for a year or mpre, and when'he had turned the mine he was managing over to the original company, with me as manager iif his place, at a salary of twenty thousand dollars a year, he said to me one day, ’Ruggles, you’ll be sorry to know that the fun is all over, I’ve struck oil.’ But the oil was copper. The whole blooming business that he’d bought of that Englishman was rich with ore. Well, that’s the story of Blalrtown,” Ruggles said. “You were Dorn there and your mother died there.” Dan said: “Galorey told me what dad did later for the man that sold him the mine, and it was just like everything else he did, for dad was all right, just as good as they come.” Ruggles agreed. He left his reminiscences abruptly. “Your dad and me had the fun in our time; now you are going to get the other kind; you’re going to make the dust fly that he dug up.” . ..... And the rich young man said musingly: “I’ll bet it isn’t half as good at my end.” And Ruggles agreed: “Not by a jugful.” And followed: “What’s on tonight? “Mandalay?” Dan’s fury at Prince Ponlotowsky came back. “I guess you thought I was a little loose in the lid, didn’t you. Josh, going so often to the same play?” “You wouldn’t have been the first rich man that had the same disease," Ruggles answered. "There is nothing the matter with Mandalay,’ but I’m not gone co any actress living, Josh; you are in the wrong pew.” (TO BE CONTINUED.) ' If the noise of your neighbor’s lawn mower disturbs you the best remedy is to get out your own.

“I’m From Blairtown, Montana, Where She Came From."