Leatherbee's Luck

T’S no use, Talby,” Geneva Carbury insisted. “I admit I like you awfully well, but I can’t marry you, and you know why.”

“On account of your business, same as usual?” demanded Talbot Sears as they hiked along the serpentine path round the Reservoir.

“Yes, I’m attached to it, and—”

“So’s a convict attached to his business, when he’s in the chain-gang with an iron ball riveted to his leg. That’s no way to live! You can’t go on this way, Geneva. What’s a can-opener-manufacturing concern, compared to love?”

“Lots!” Her dark-brown eyes, which sometimes danced with laughter, now looked quite tragic and determined. “I’ve got to make a success of my business before I can think of trying to make a success of love. If I let Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, die, how could I ever be a successful wife to you? I just couldn’t!”

“Nonsense!” He slashed at the autumn leaves along the path with the stick in his gloved hand. She tilted up her chin, rather adorably.

“Thank you!” she answered.

“Oh, I—I don’t really mean that, you know,” he hedged. “I didn’t mean to be rude, and all that, but—”

“It’s all right, Talby; but I’ve got to make good, first.”

“Yes, and if you don’t? Hang it all, Geneva, isn’t my profession grinding out enough for two?”

“Oh, yes. But I didn’t take that commercial-efficiency course just to let my father’s business die in less than two years after he died himself. That business is all the memorial he ever wanted. He built it up for me, willed it to me and told me to carry on. And now you want me to drop it?”

“And marry me. Sure thing! And be my partner. Why not?”

HE shot at him one of those swift woman-glances that flash into a man’s soul while the man himself is asking himself the color of a woman’s eyes.

“No,” she decided. “You’re making a success of your game. I’ve got to, of mine. Will, too—when I get that improved machinery and put through those patents. After Carbury Can-Cutters, Incorporated, is on a paying basis and I’ve got an independent income of my own, well,”—and she laughed shortly,—“maybe I’ll offer you a partnership. Not till then. Now, let’s talk about the weather.”

HE whole situation is manifestly absurd,” Talbot complained to Robert Boardman, second, that night at the Circulatory Club. “Geneva’s absurd too.”

“Any man thinks any woman’s absurd when she wont have him,” Boardman affirmed. He slumped down angularly in the deep leather chair by the fireplace. “That’s part of man’s natural egotism. I never knew a fellow yet who ever heard about a man-hater without thinking that if she knew him—”

“None o’ your cynicism! Geneva’s not a man-hater, at all. It’s only that her perverse can-opening bug—”

“Loyalty to one’s father isn’t a bug.”

“Well—if she wasn’t so infernally obstinate!”

“You’re a fool to argue with a woman. Kiss her.”

“Can’t be did.”

“So?” Boardman fitted another cigarette to his amber holder, and lighted up. “Interesting!”

“Oh, you can afford to be patronizing, all right. But if your girl—”

“Ah, but I married my girl two years ago. I got her by working a little judicious jealousy into her cosmos. That’s good dope, Talby. Stay away from Geneva awhile. Let her miss you.”

“It wont work with her. She’s up to her pretty ears in can-openers, and till she makes ’em succeed—which they never will in a thousand years—”

“By the end of which time neither of you will be much. Make it sooner, old man. Help her succeed, pronto. After that, she’s yours. Simple, eh?” Boardman smiled dryly and blew smoke. “Boost her confounded can-openers. Then annex her. Slip me a few thousand, Talby, and I’ll resuscitate the dry bones of her company’s securities. I’ll make live stock of ’em. Make her company a blooming success. Then you nab her—and there you are!”

Talbot shook a mournful head.

“Your advice is no good, Bob. I don’t want a business woman for my wife, at all.”

“Well, then,” judged Boardman, “knife her company. That’s the only thing left to do. She’ll have to admit defeat, and then she’ll be yours. In a year she’ll have forgotten there was ever such a thing in the world as a can-opener. She wont even have one in your happy kitchenette. Nothing but canned-goods with keys to ’em. Can Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated. That’s the key to all your heartaches. Put the outfit on the blink.”

“There isn’t much of an outfit to put,” said Talbot, his eyes approving. “Only Geneva and old Ezra Litchfield, her inherited factotum.”

“Cinch. Smear ’em!”

“Is it etiquette to smear the lady you’re in love with?”

“Sure!” asserted Boardman. “It’s done in the best circles. All’s fair in love and war on can-openers.”

“It seems kind of a rotten thing to do,” hesitated Talbot, “but the ends justify being mean, and—”

“Being a broker, I’m a practical man. It’s your only chance.”

“How can you work it? Got any idea?”

“I’ve got millions of ideas, Talby. Billions! That’s what I live and move and have my beans on, is ideas. Now, in this particular case, I’ve got one of most particular brilliancy. Well?”

“Spill it!” commanded Talbot.

OARDMAN smoked contemplatively. “Did you ever hear of such a thing as a natural, born, invincible hoodoo?”

“No—not seriously, that is. Of course, there’s a lot of jokes about hoodoos, but—”

“I don’t mean any joke-stuff at all. I mean the real, simon-impure article. I mean a hoodoo that crabs everything from cradle to grave. A hoodoo marked with the Black Spot of the Cosmic Swat. Ever know a man like that?”

“No,” replied Talbot. “It’s all foolishness.”

“Not at all. Luck’s a solid fact. Some people turn everything they touch into cash. Others would queer the City of Gold if they owned a single lot in Angel Avenue. Every broker knows it. They’re marked men. Nobody will have ’em in their business. Most brokers wont even trade with ’em. It means ruin. Fact, old man!”

“By ginger, that’s odd. But admitting it’s a fact, what about it?-”

“Lots. I know a hoodoo.”

“Well?”

“His name’s Leatherbee—Jonah K. Leatherbee. He’s done more failing and messed up more businesses than any living man. As a false alarm, he’s sublime.”

“How does this apply to Geneva and me?”

“I’ll make it apply,” promised Boardman. “Thing is, do you give me the go-ahead signal?”

“Rather—just so I get the girl.”

“You’re on,” smiled the broker. “Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, is as good as dead already. I’ll interview Leatherbee tomorrow.”

“And what have I got to do?”

“Nothing—but order your wedding raiment. Get busy!”

OARDMAN interviewed Jonah K. Leatherbee next afternoon. He found him in a shabbily furnished room on Parkland Street, third floor, back.

“Hello, Leatherbee,” said he. “How’s tricks?”

“Hopeful, as usual,” Leatherbee replied. Leatherbee was a tall, asparagus-stalk-built man of forty-five, with mild blue eyes, stooped shoulders and an eyeshade. “I have several hens on. Even one hatching will fix me.”

“That’s good,” smiled the wily broker, sitting down. “I’ve got a fine tip for you. It’ll change your luck.”

“Glad o’ that!” smiled Leatherbee. “It could stand a lot of changing—like a thousand-dollar bill.”

“I know. You never have connected right, have you?”

“Not perceptibly.” Leatherbee folded himself in sections into a chair. “I know I’m a jinx, all right, but I’m long on hope.”

“Is it true,” Boardman asked, “that you’ve put your whole family on the blink?”

“Looks like it,” admitted Leatherbee, who appeared human and liked to talk. “When I was born, Saturn was in conjunction with the Seven Veils of Jinx and in opposition to everything in my luck-line. My folks were comfortably well off, though not as well off as they had been. My influence went back, you see, and even hit my innocent old grandfather.”

“Retroactive hoodooism, eh?”

“Something like that. Grandfather was worth a lot of money. He lost it in a big smash in the 40’s and in Ohio land-speculation. His son—my father—piled up a bit of property, but missed millions when he was in Chicago right after the big fire and didn’t invest there. Instead, he invested in a couple of Western boom towns. Both booms busted. I figure I’m responsible, even though I hadn’t been born then.”

EATHERBEE nodded, and lighted his pipe. Boardman asked:

“What then? I’d like to get your complete story, before I spill the tip I’ve got for you. After you personally arrived in this vale of tears, what happened to Saturn and the Pleiades?”

“Lots. But more happened to me. My father gave up the struggle and died, when I was only a youngster. A few days later our last piece of family property—a big brick block—was wrecked by a tornado. Then my brother and sister had to quit school, and we all struggled through soul-destroying shabby gentility—boarders, and all that. At five, I got a severe injury that made an outsider of me. You know how boys are, with a lame duck. I went in for study, as time passed, and did well. But when I graduated from high school and took a medal, I remember my only pants were patched with black velvet.”

“Well,” commented Boardman, “you can’t say you never had any velvet in your life.”

“Never any in my pocket. The velvet I refer to wasn’t there, but more to the southward. After that, I wanted to go to college, but instead I went to a factory, where I got asthma, a mashed hand and nine dollars a week. Then my sister married a highly prosperous business man. Right away his place burned, and he took to booze and went nutty. For twenty years he hasn’t earned a cent, and he’s kept the family in hot water all that time.”

“Hot water is a luxury, these days.”

“This was boiling. I broke away and into college, did all kinds of work and made the grade. Graduated with an M. A. degree, a Phi Beta Kappa key, a debt of four hundred dollars and nervous prostration from doing my own work and other fellows’ too—tutoring ’em, to help pay expenses. Just about that time my uncle, the only rich one in the family, had a tannery and a big general store. He got his hand chopped off in the tannery and lost his store in a panic. Uncle went in for politics and held a meeting in the tannery. Floor fell through, lot of people got hurt and Uncle had to pay damages. Besides that, the opposition slogan that, ‘His platform has fallen through,’ defeated him at the polls. Then the tannery burned, and Uncle—he was about sixty—had to hunt a job. Saturn and I finished him, all right.”

“I think you’re going to be just the man I'm looking for,” Boardman approved. “Anything else?”

ATHER!” smiled Leatherbee, through smoke. “My brother, a highly trained man, after twenty years’ hard work for a very big concern, had his salary cut a thousand a year and was buried alive in a small branch office while a relative of the president of the company got his job. Then my Aunt Elvira met an army officer who got engaged to her daughter and sold the old lady about twelve thousand dollars’ worth of gilt-edged securities. The officer turned out to be a fake and the securities all forged. Exit officer and kale. After that—”

“You’ll do, Leatherbee. Now listen.”

“Wait! I married, and right away after that developed T. B. Had to bury myself in the woods for several years, to save my life. I went through hell with my wife’s relatives, who—well, weren’t the kind of people one cares to know. I wanted a son, to help pull the family together. Of course, Saturn handed me a daughter. After that—”

“I did hear something about your getting a divorce.”

“Yes. Draw the veils, Infidelity, drugs and alcohol don’t make a pleasant story. The divorce cost me every penny I’d scraped together. At thirty-eight I had nothing left but a daughter with extravagant tastes. I continued to hustle, though. Went into an oil-company with good leases. Couple of days before I expected to clean up forty thousand dollars, some crooks wrecked the business. I got nothing. Later, tried oil again, in Oklahoma. Dry holes, every one.”

“Now, the proposition I have in mind—”

“Hold on! I want you to get me right. I scraped up a little cash, bought a place in Cuba and went in for fruit. Hadn’t been a cyclone in that town for seventeen years. The year after I started, a cyclone wrecked the place—backed up a river and flooded it, too. I lost my house and all my personal effects. Saturn and I put Las Palomitas on the eternal blink.”

“You were in politics for a while after that, weren’t you?”

“Yes. They ran me for Governor of a certain New England State, on a third ticket. I was defeated by the largest plurality ever given in the State. Then I undertook to edit a magazine, and the magazine died. I took to writing, but the soar in paper and costs cut down the book-market. I sold four movies; and right away the censorship K.O.’d the business Organized a movie-company of my own, It went blooey. I think if I’d gone into manufacturing coffins, Saturn would have stopped everybody dying.”

“Why didn’t you try that, Leatherbee, and become a great public benefactor?”

“No. Death’s a sore subject with me, ever since my niece, that I was struggling to put through college, died suddenly.”

“I see. Well—maybe it’s been your own fault, some way. Bad habits, or—”

“I never drank or gambled, Boardman. I belong to no clubs and waste no time. I smoke nothing but this pipe. I’ve made as good a fight as I know how. But Saturn has always knifed me. Every winner I’ve ever picked has become a loser. And I’ve dragged down lots of other people, too—that is, Saturn and I have.”

“You ought to have enlisted on the side of the Germans, in the war,” smiled Boardman.

“I would have, if I could have got to Germany. I’d have done just that, as a patriotic duty. Then the Kaiser would have been licked in three weeks. I can turn my hand to about any old thing, and I can hustle; but I’m always sat on by Saturn. Every time I get to Good Luck Junction, the train's just gone. If I caught that train, it would be wrecked at the first switch. Get me right, Boardman. Before you spill your proposition, let me warn you if it’s anything you’re expecting to succeed, don’t let me in on it.”

“It isn’t,” said the broker. “It’s something I’m expecting to fail. I want you to help me. Now, listen!”

ENEVA CARBURY, the desirable, came into the drab little office on South Exchange Street at ten minutes to nine, hung up her rain-cape and limpsy turban, and sat down at the old-fashioned black-walnut desk her father had once occupied. Old Ezra Litchfield, already puttering with file-boxes, gave her a solicitous good morning. In the gloom of that rainy, chill November day he squinted at her over his misty glasses.

“Well, what’s on for today, Ezra?” the girl queried briskly.

“There’s that Baxter note comin’ due this noon,” the old man mumbled. “An’ Caldwell was in already, this mornin’, to see about that bill. An’ I got a phone-call, just after I swep’ out, from Morrisey & Black. They say if we don’t—”

“I wish you wouldn’t bother me with unimportant details,” interrupted Geneva severely. Old Litchfield was good as gold. Consistent goodness is, at times, extremely trying. This was one of those times. In three weeks Geneva had had no word from Talbot Sears; and indirectly she had heard that he had twice taken Kay Montgomery out in his car.

Geneva looked up from th$ pile of letters on her desk—an even slimmer pile than usual, which was saying much. She regarded the faithful retainer of the besieged fortress with some irritation. His old-fogy ways and his solicitude were thorns in her young, fair and eminently lovely feminine flesh. Her brown eyes narrowed at Litchfield. Very much indeed she wanted to replace him with a hustler, a man of intelligence and pep. But men like that cost money. And old Litch could be—and often had been—hung up for his salary.

“And then too,” thought Geneva, “it’s my duty to keep him. Father always did. But, oh!”

When it came to trials, though, Litch wasn’t any more a trial than the out-of-date office equipment—or than the lamentable shares in Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, that nobody ever wanted to buy. And beside—but when Geneva let herself think about trials, why, there never came an end of them. So she only tightened her full lips, red as cinnabar, and turned back to the morning’s mail.

Just the regulation thing, as per usual:

“We are therefore returning the consignment—”

“Sorry to report that—”

“Kindly remit, or—”

“Regret that we cannot file your patent, in spite of its manifest excellence, until some further payment has been made on the bill now due—”

“Account overdrawn. Please deposit to cover, and avoid protest-fees—”

ENEVA laid down the mail, her pretty eyes dejected. A little of the November rain seemed to have got into them; but perhaps that was only an optical illusion. Something very like a sigh, however, made old Litchfield glance up from his puttering. He shook his bald head

“We can’t go on much longer this way, Miss Geneva,” said he. Ezra had known her since she was knee-high to a flounder, known her when she had used to come like a ray of June sunshine into that same shabby old office, and sit at the little side-table and cut out paper-lace with the office shears. So she never could be “Miss Thacher” to him. Nor could he hold back from her the griefs now corroding his withered but supremely loyal heart.

“We can’t go on,” he repeated. “Bank-balance at the Old Colonial is down to $47.86; rent’s overdue; an’ Comerford wont accept any more manufacturin’-orders till we settle that last bill o’ $197.25. Not a stock-sale from McCallum & Rice in three months, an’ how about that printin’ bill for letterheads? I’m not sayin’ a word about my pay, Miss Geneva, not one word! But this here typewriter’s just got to be fixed up some way. It’s all out o’ kilter. Take that there letter e, for instance—”

“I know all about that letter e,” she caught him up. Indeed she did know, only too painfully. She hadn’t used that balky machine for months; she hadn’t for weeks past doctored up that defective e with a pencil on every letter sent out, without knowing all about it. “But,” she concluded, “it wont do any good to the business and the machine to hang crape all over them.”

“That’s so, Miss Geneva, but—”

“There’s no but to it, Ezra. If we can hold on a little longer, and somehow get that patent of mine on the market, I know it’ll turn the tide. Millions of people use can-openers, and with this new multum-in-parvo device applied to ours—”

“You’ve said that so often, Miss Geneva,” answered the old henchman, with resigned incredulity. He hobbled over and stood beside her, his thin, brown-spotted hands clasped over his thin brown waistcoat. Anxiously he observed that Miss Geneva’s cheek had lost a very little of its fair, fresh roundness and color. That wounded Ezra to the heart of hearts. It would have wounded Talbot too, had he been able to see, would have made his enterprise of helping to wreck Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, all the more imperative.

Now Ezra boldly pleaded:

“Why d’you want to keep up a losin’ fight? It’s only discreditin’ your father’s memory—not helpin’ it a mite; an’ it’s wearin’ you plumb out. I aint speakin’ for myself. What happens to me don’t matter. I can go back to my brother’s, down to Eastham on Cape Cod. I’ll be all right there.”

‘Nonsense, Ezra!”

“But you, Miss Geneva—why, you’re growin’ that pickid! I’d ruther, a great sight, see you sell out for what the business an’ good-will might bring—mebbe almost enough to cover liabilities—an’ then marry some nice, good, hustlin’ young fella—”

“That’ll do, Ezra; that’ll do. You’ve got your work. Let me do mine!”

ECISIVELY she went on opening letters. This kind of talk, in her present mood, decidedly wouldn’t do. She swallowed hard, and ripped the disheartening envelopes with an energy quite disproportionate to the task.

At the third one she gasped, turned red, then pale. She sank back in the antique swivel-chair. The letter shook in her hand. A little slip of paper with a perforated end fluttered to the desk.

“Oh!” gasped Geneva.

Ezra turned.

“What now?” he anxiously queried. “Dear Miss Geneva, please listen to an old man, an’—”

Geneva’s eyes closed. Ezra thought she was fainting. But all at once she sat up very straight, and in a quivering voice exclaimed:

“Just listen to this!

Old Litchfield stood there, trembling, staring. He advanced to her, with hands outstretched.

“Miss Geneva! What—what?”

“We’ve done it, Ezra! We’ve pulled through! We—we’ve—”

Ezra turned and hastened toward the faucet over the little sink in the corner.

“I’ll get you a glass o’ water, Miss Geneva! There, there now, don’t cry—don't cry.”

Between the glass of water that the old man’s shaking hands slopped, and Geneva’s bright brown eyes brimming from a heart too long full, they had rather a moist time of it.

But with R. G. Thacher & Co. saved, what mattered a little moisture, either inside the office or outside? In spite of it all, the sun was shining as it never had, for Miss Geneva.

NOTHER month, rolling round as months—be they good or bad—always do, brought Christmas very nigh. But Christmas cheer was about the last thing in this world to fill the heart of Talbot Sears. A very great, consuming bitterness had crowded it all away—that and a heavy anger against Bob Boardman, stockbroker in his business-hours, dicer with Destiny outside of them.

“Nice, healthy dopester you are, you with your infernal hoodoo!” he gibed as, late of a December afternoon, Boardman and he sat together in Talbot’s bachelor diggings. “When you framed that little deal, you certainly pulled a bone. Surefire proposition, all right, only it shot the wrong way.”

Boardman looked chopfallen, under the light of the soft-shaded table-lamp.

“Damned sorry, old man,” he answered. “Of course you know I never meant to crab you. But I should have realized Shaw was right when he said it’s always silly to give advice, and fatal to give good advice.”

“Good advice! Yeah, great! But you’re bearing up, all right. Everybody’s got fortitude enough to stand the wallops their friends get. Where do I fit, now?”

“My motives were the best, Talby.”

“Well, you know what speedway’s paved with good intentions. Now see what you’ve gone and done!”

Boardman smoked in moody silence, and shook his head. At last he placated:

“I never knew anything like it, Talby. It looked to me like a positively sure shot. When I had the Simpson Peters Company take your anonymous thousand and buy those two hundred shares from McCallum & Rice, and give ’em to Leatherbee, how could I know his jinx had gone on strike? I never knew it was a union jinx! It had never shown any eight-hour, closed-shop principles, before. It was the most conscientious, open-shop jinx I’d ever known, and—”

“So it is, for me!” cut in Talbot angrily. “This Leatherbee hoodoo of yours has crabbed me just as he’s always crabbed everybody he’s ever had any dealings with, directly or indirectly. Why, you poor fish, see what’s happened now! With that thousand of my money—”

“Yes, I know all about it,” gloomed Boardman. “She’s gone and put her patent through, and got orders enough—”

“So she’ll never need me,” Talbot finished. “That’s a royal cinch. She’s launched a successful business career for herself with my mute, inglorious kale and a damn’ can-opener. From now on her motto will be: ‘Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, which I with Carbury’s Can-cutter, Incorporated, will open.’ Now you have gone and done it—you and your pet hoodoo!”

Again Boardman shook his head.

“No,” said he, “it doesn’t seem credible. With two hundred shares of Carbury, preferred, in his jeans,—the way it’s soaring now and bound to go,—Leatherbee’ll be fixed for life. It isn’t reasonable, Talby. It isn’t possible! It’s a slip of Saturn, a kink in the cosmos, or something. All his life, Leatherbee’s ruined everything he’s in any way been connected with. This Carbury Can-cutter business just simply can’t succeed, with Leatherbee in on it. The thing’s contrary to all the laws of nature and Einstein. There’s been a slip-up in the universe, somewhere.”

“The slip-up’s in your fool superstition, I tell you!” Talbot retorted. “Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, is going, and Leatherbee’s a made man, and—and Geneva’s ten million miles away from me, now. If you’d only let her plug the losing game a little longer, let her lose out in the natural course of events—”

A brrrrrr of the doorbell interrupted him. He got up and slatted to the door, in slippers. Boardman, his lean frame sunk far down in an easy-chair, looked after him with eyes of misery.

“The laws of probability were all against it,” he murmured. “Combinations and permutations all indicated—”

At the door, the Jamaica negro elevator-boy grinned and announced:

“Yere’s yo’ paper, Mr. Sears. An’ yere’s a letter jus’ come in, on de las’ mail.”

Talbot returned with letter and paper, to the living-room'. He looked a little pale.

“It’s from Geneva,” said he. “The final wallop! Everything’s all off, now—thanks to you and your meddling with hoodoos!”

Boardman framed no answer. The logic of facts had his theorizings beaten clean through the ropes. Moodily he lighted a cigarette and studied his boot-toes.

Talbot meantime held the letter in an unsteady hand, loath to open it and read his doom.

“Tough luck!” murmured Boardman as Talbot finally ripped the envelope. Through a certain instinct of delicacy, Boardman picked up the newspaper from the table where Talbot had thrown it, and with a face of commiseration began casually looking it over.

SHOUT, hoarsely and profanely jubilant, made him look up just as his eyes had focused on a paragraph that graced the bottom of page two.

“What’s the matter, old top?” he demanded. “Gone wrong in the bean?”

“She—hang it all, Bob—she’s—accepted me!” vociferated Talbot, with extravagant caperings. “She says—business judgment vindicated—fulfilled father’s wishes and carried on Carbury Can-cutters, Incorporated, to success—old family name honorably upheld—now merging with Can-opener Combine and selling patents for—independent income assured, and will retire from business—free to follow dictates of her own—and she’s mine, and—oh, joy! Oh, boy!”

“By Jove!” cried Boardman, jumping up. “All she wanted was success, and then you. And this item, here, explains how she could succeed, with Leatherbee in on it, and—”

“Oh, shake! Slap me on the back, Bob!” exulted Talbot. “Do something say something. Tell me it’s real! But how—how the devil can it be, with that hoodoo?”

“See here!” Boardman commanded thrusting the paper at his pal.

Talbot’s dizzied eyes read where Boardman’s finger pointed: