Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/97

 of premature decay. Furthermore, as he had suspicioned and now discovered, Regan wasn't the last word on women; not, perhaps, that Merla put firing before love, only she was uncommonly strong on firing. Spitzer was unhappy.

All things come to those who wait, they say. So they do, perhaps; but the way of their coming is sometimes not to be understood or fathomed. The story of a man who fell from the eighteenth story window of an office building, and, incidentally, broke his neck has no place here except in a general way. A friend who took a passing interest in the event was curious enough to investigate the cause, and he traced it back step by step, logically, surely, inevitably, beyond the possibility of refutation, to the fact that the second hook from the top on the back of the man's wife's dress—not the man's dress, the dress of the man's wife—was missing on the morning of the day of his untimely decease. The man—not the man's friend—was an inventor. But no matter. It just shows. Regan being still alive, the chances are better than a thousand to one that Spitzer would have known a cold and forlorn old age, as Robert Louis puts it, and Merla would never have had a second edition of herself if it hadn't been for a few measly, unripe crab-apples. What? Yes, that's it—crab-apples. That's the way Spitzer got where he is to-day—just crab-apples. Funny how things happen sometimes when you come to think of it, isn't it? Spitzer and the man who broke his neck aren't the only ones who've had their ups and downs that way, not by several. There isn't any moral to this except