Page:Under three flags; a story of mystery (IA underthreeflagss00tayliala).pdf/20

 "Thanks. If I should run across the warden" and Ashley holds up the flask.

"That'd fetch him, I reckon," chuckles Mr. Howe. Ashley vaults over the bars and strides across the meadows.

Ashley is in high feather. "This air rather discounts an absinthe frappe for stimulative purposes," he soliloquizes. "Ah, here's the wood, there's the brook, and if I mistake not, yonder pool hides a whopper just aching for a go at the early worm." But it doesn't and Ashley enters the forest.

The farther he plunges into the spice-laden wilderness the more is he enchanted with his surroundings. Picture a cleft in the mountain whose sides drop almost sheer to a gorge barely wide enough to accommodate a wood road and a brook that parallels and often encroaches upon it. Tall pines interlace and shut out the direct rays of the sun and every now and then a cascade comes tumbling somewhere aloft and plunges into a broad, pebble-lined basin.

As Ashley sits by one of these pools, his wading boots plunged deep in the crystal liquid, and pulls lazily on a briar pipe, the reader is offered the opportunity of becoming better acquainted with him.

He is a prepossessing young fellow of something like 27, medium height and rather well built. Blue eyes and an aggressive nose, on which gold-bowed eyeglasses are airily perched, are characteristics of a face which has always been a passport for its owner into all society worth cultivating. A well-shaped head is adorned with a profusion of blond curls, supplemented by a mustache of silken texture and golden hue, which its possessor is fond of twisting when he is in a blithesome humor, which is often, and of tugging at savagely when in a reflective mood, which is infrequent.

Ashley is noted among his friends for chronic good humor and unbounded confidence in his own abilities. He is one of the brightest all-round writers on the New York Hemisphere, and he knows it. The best of it is, City Editor Ricker also knows it. All the office sings