United States or Martinique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It took some time for the sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley had knocked the lid off his barrel.
Upon the return from the wedding trip, the employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion, gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came.
And one night in Smith's cigar store, just to be talking, he said that he didn't get so much of Mrs. Worthington's money as people thought, for part of it had to go to "square old Charley Hedrick." Hedrick was John Markley's attorney, and he had taken an active part in helping the county attorney prosecute the street commissioners. Naturally Handy's remark stirred up the town.
Isabel sent the accounts of these affairs to the office for us to print, with the lists of invited guests, who never accepted. And the town grinned. At the end of two years John Markley's fat wit told him that it was a losing fight.
She bought John Markley's clothes, so that his Sunday finery contained nothing giddier than a grey made-up tie, that she pinned around the collars which her own hands had ironed. Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million, his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his girth stretched out to forty-four.
"But," chuckled the Colonel, "I notice old John hasn't got a corner on it yet, and he doesn't seem to have all he needs for his own use." The wrench that had torn open his treasure chest, had also loosened John Markley's hard face, and he had begun to smile. He became as affable as a man may who has lived for fifty years silent and self-contained.
Occasionally a young travelling man would be spoken of by these young people as Isabel Markley's fellow. Mrs. Markley began to make fun of her husband to the girls of the third-rate dancing set whose mothers let them go to her house; also, she reviled John Markley to the servants. It was known in the town that she nicknamed him the "Goat."
A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court which, under the circumstances, Mr.
He went directly to John Markley's back office, got the check that Markley had given to Handy, dictated a letter in the anteroom of Markley's office to a Kansas City plate-maker, inclosed fifty dollars as he passed the draft counter, and, as he swung by the post-office he mailed the Handy check with instructions to have ten photographic half-tone cuts made of the check and mailed back to Hedrick in four days.
Vernon Markley, and statin' that the Unexcelled Film Company was to have the courtesy of the grounds any afternoon between the 15th and 25th. "You see," explains Whitey, "we're staging an old English costume piece, and this Greek theater of Mrs. Markley's just fits in. Our president worked the deal for us. And we've got to do a thousand feet between now and five o'clock.
Word Of The Day