The Fighter

He had always been fighting. The square jaw, the bull neck proclaimed him of the battling breed; even before one had scope to note the alert, light eyes, the tight mouth, the sh...

Conover lounged back and forth in the pretty little reception room of Desirée Shevlin’s house, halting now and then to glance with puzzled approval at some item of its furnishin...

Granite’s social life revolved about the Arareek Country Club. Granite felt a guilty pride when its more sensational preachers railed against the local preference for spending S...

“I suppose,” volunteered Caine, as he and Conover walked back to town together, “I suppose you know you behaved like a wild ass of the desert? That no man with an iota of breedi...

“Why folks should drink tea when they’re not thirsty, an’ gobble sweet crackers when they’re not hungry,” observed Conover, impersonally, as he balanced his cup and saucer on on...

The following Monday morning found Caleb at the Capital ready and waiting for the battle which lay before him. He had arrived from Granite late Sunday night; with Caine and with...

Just now he was fighting at long range. And all the complex system of the C. G. & X. railroad vibrated under his blows. A dozen rapid-fire orders had sent as many station offici...

Caleb Conover was finishing a solitary breakfast in his room; the morning after his return from the Capital. He had eaten heartily, even as he had slept well; and was neither ou...

Desirée was at the piano. Caleb Conover, whose knowledge of music embraced one Sousa march and “Summer Noon” (with a somewhat hazy idea as to which was which) lounged, sprawling...

Conover swung down the hill toward the valley in whose centre twinkled the lights of the Arareek Country Club. He was still buoyed up by the curious elation that was always his...

“I don’t know why we were all so carried away by it,” said Caine, reflectively. “I’ve been thinking it over. There was much more bathos than pathos; and a delightful absence of...

He had always been fighting. But to-night he must wield weapons whereof he had no experience; unskilled, must meet deft opponents on their own ground. The thought thrilled him,...

The musicale was over. The first floor of the Standish house looked as though a devastating army had camped there. Caine, who had lingered for a goodnight word with Letty, glanc...

The Fighter made life a burden, next day, for the office staff of the C. G. & X. An electric aura of uneasiness pervaded the big station--the indefinable, wordless something tha...

One morning, a week or so later, Caine strolled into Conover’s private office. Under the young newspaper owner’s customary jauntiness was a hint of something more serious. Conov...

Next morning, the Granite _Star_ made known to the world at large that grievous wrong had been done to the city and to its taxpayers when their two foremost public buildings had...

Almost everybody was out of town,--with the exception of some nine-tenths of the city’s total population. These unfortunate town-bound mortals sweltered and sweated in office, s...

Conover, during the month that followed, found time from his financial warfare to make three more calls at the Standish house. The soft-hearted Divinity of children and fools wa...

Conover woke from a quaint dream of being buried alive in an ill-fitting coffin. And dawning consciousness proved the dream to have been but a mild exaggeration. For he was ensc...

The ensuing fortnight was at once the longest and the shortest fourteen days Conover had ever known. So far as his companionship with Desirée was concerned, the hours had sped w...

A guide had started an hour earlier with the camping equipment and pack. Jack and Mrs. Hawarden led the way; Desirée and Caleb being delayed in starting by the vast pressure and...

The night train “out,” full of brown and disgruntled returning vacationists, drew away from Raquette Lake Station. Caleb, in the smoking room, his hat pulled over his eyes, his...

The sky was gray with morning as Conover stumbled into a sitting room of the little Magdeburg Hotel. Two men turned toward him. One of them, his arm in a sling--a great plaster...

Under the concentrated anguish of Conover’s gaze the girl’s long lashes seemed to flicker ever so slightly. Through the Gethsemane of the moment the impossible fancy that she li...