When Judge Priest, on this particular morning, came puffing into his chambers at the courthouse, looking, with his broad beam and in his costume of flappy, loose white ducks, a good deal like an old-fashioned full-rigger with all sails set, his black shadow, Jeff Poindexter, had already finished the job of putting the quarters to […]

I In the aching, baking middle of a sizzling New York’s summer, there befell New York’s regular “crime wave.” When the city is a brazen skillet, whereon mankind, assailed by the sun from above and by the stored-up heat from below, fries on both sides like an egg; when nerves are worn to frazzle-ends; when […]

Until now Trencher–to give him the name by which of all the names he used he best was known–had kept his temper in hobbles, no matter what or how great the provocation. As one whose mode of livelihood was trick and device outside the law it had behooved him ever to restrain himself from violent […]

In our town formerly there were any number of negro children named for Caucasian friends of their parents. Some bore for their names the names of old masters of the slavery time, masters who had been kindly and gracious and whose memories thereby were affectionately perpetuated; these were mainly of a generation now growing into […]

How Ethan A. Pratt, formerly of South New Medford, in the State of Vermont, came to be resident manager and storekeeper for the British Great Eastern Company, Ltd., on Good Friday Island, in the South Seas, is not our present concern. Besides, the way of it makes too long a tale for telling here. It […]

Somebody said once that facts are stubborn things, which is a lie. Facts are almost the most flexible things known to man. The historian appreciates the truth of this just as the fictionist recognises and is governed by the opposite of it, each according to his lights. In recording the actual, the authentic, the definite, […]

Spy stories rather went out of fashion when the armistice was signed. But this one could not have been told before now, because it happened after the armies had quit fighting and while the Peace Conference was busily engaged in belying its first name. Also, in a strict manner of speaking, it is not a […]

We were sitting at a corner table in a certain small restaurant hard by where Sixth Avenue’s L structure, like an overgrown straddlebug, wades through the restless currents of Broadway at a sharpened angle. The dish upon which we principally dined was called on the menu Chicken a la Marengo. We knew why. Marengo, by […]

CHAPTER I The Grill is the club most difficult of access in the world. To be placed on its rolls distinguishes the new member as greatly as though he had received a vacant Garter or had been caricatured in “Vanity Fair.” Men who belong to the Grill Club never mention that fact. If you were […]

I THE JAIL-BREAKERS For a long time it had been arranged they all should go to the Harvard and Yale game in Winthrop’s car. It was perfectly well understood. Even Peabody, who pictured himself and Miss Forbes in the back of the car, with her brother and Winthrop in front, condescended to approve. It was […]

PART I The junior officers of Fort Crockett had organized a mess at the post-trader’s. “And a mess it certainly is,” said Lieutenant Ranson. The dining-table stood between hogsheads of molasses and a blazing log-fire, the counter of the store was their buffet, a pool-table with a cloth, blotted like a map of the Great […]

I The greatest number of people in the world prefer the most highly civilized places of the world, because they know what sort of things are going to happen there, and because they also know by experience that those are the sort of things they like. A very few people prefer barbarous and utterly uncivilized […]

Young Van Bibber came up to town in June from Newport to see his lawyer about the preparation of some papers that needed his signature. He found the city very hot and close, and as dreary and as empty as a house that has been shut up for some time while its usual occupants are […]

There had been a dance up town, but as Van Bibber could not find Her there, he accepted young Travers’s suggestion to go over to Jersey City and see a “go” between “Dutchy” Mack and a colored person professionally known as the Black Diamond. They covered up all signs of their evening dress with their […]

It was very hot in the Park, and young Van Bibber, who has a good heart and a great deal more money than good-hearted people generally get, was cross and somnolent. He had told his groom to bring a horse he wanted to try to the Fifty-ninth Street entrance at ten o’clock, and the groom […]

Miss Catherwaight’s collection of orders and decorations and medals was her chief offence in the eyes of those of her dear friends who thought her clever but cynical. All of them were willing to admit that she was clever, but some of them said she was clever only to be unkind. Young Van Bibber had […]

Young Harringford, or the “Goodwood Plunger,” as he was perhaps better known at that time, had come to Monte Carlo in a very different spirit and in a very different state of mind from any in which he had ever visited the place before. He had come there for the same reason that a wounded […]

The “trailer” for the green-goods men who rented room No. 8 in Case’s tenement had had no work to do for the last few days, and was cursing his luck in consequence. He was entirely too young to curse, but he had never been told so, and, indeed, so imperfect had his training been that […]

Rags Raegen was out of his element. The water was his proper element– the water of the East River by preference. And when it came to “running the roofs,” as he would have himself expressed it, he was “not in it.” On those other occasions when he had been followed by the police, he had […]

He came down the steps slowly, and pulling mechanically at his gloves. He remembered afterwards that some woman’s face had nodded brightly to him from a passing brougham, and that he had lifted his hat through force of habit, and without knowing who she was. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, and stood […]