Officer 666

Excerpt

A GRAPEFRUIT PRELUDE.

Splash! The grapefruit hit her in the eye!

Splash! His psychic wave was dashed to smithereens!

“Oh! Oh!” the two girls screamed in unison.

“D–––!” the young man sitting near ejaculated.

For ten minutes there in the Oak Room of the Ritz-Carlton he had been hurling across the narrow intervening space this mental command to the girl facing him:

“Look here! Look at me! Let me see your eyes! Look here!”

For half that time she had been conscious of his insistent gaze and his message. But with as much will power as he himself displayed she bent her head over her plate and sent back along his telepathic transmission this reply:

“I won’t! I won’t!”

But she was weakening.

“Sadie,” she said to her companion, “I do awfully want to look up. I want to see who is looking at me so fiercely. I can just feel it all through me. Of course it wouldn’t be proper, would it?”

“Well, that all depends on who is looking at you, dear, doesn’t it? If it were some horrid old man”––

“No, it doesn’t feel a bit like that, Sadie. I don’t know just how to explain it––really it isn’t unpleasant at all.”

“Why, Helen! And you engaged and going to elo”–––

“Hush, Sadie, you mustn’t say that in here. Somebody might––but I positively cannot keep my eyes down another moment. I’m”–––

Then splash!

A vicious little jab of the spoon and there followed a disastrous geyser––a grapefruit geyser.

With a smothered little cry of pain Helen’s eyes shut tight and she groped for her napkin. And to make a good job of it the Fates dragged in at that moment Helen’s guardian aunt, the tall and statuesque Mrs. Elvira Burton of Omaha, Neb.

The young man who had failed so signally in what was perhaps his maiden effort at hypnotism viciously seized all the change the waiter proffered on the little silver tray, flung it back with a snarl, got up and stamped out of the room.

He was a mighty good looking chap, smartly attired, and if you care for details, he wore a heliotrope scarf in which there gleamed a superb black pearl for which he had paid a superb price.

“Can you beat it!” he muttered as he climbed the stairs to the lobby and mingled with the throng that stood about in stiff groups, idly chattering and looking as if they bored one another to the verge of desperation.

“Can you beat it!” he exclaimed again, fairly biting off the words.

So vehemently occupied was he with his chagrin and annoyance that he stamped heavily upon the pet corn of a retired rear admiral, rudely bumped a Roumanian duchess, kicked the pink poodle of a famous prima donna and brought up with a thud against the heroic brawn and muscle of the house detective, who stood as solidly in the middle of the lobby as if he had taken root somewhere down in the foundations.

“Can I beat what?” asked the house detective frigidly.

My, but he was an angry young man, and he fairly snarled at the magnificent individual he had collided with:

“Beat a drum, beat an egg, beat around the bush––go as far as you like––beat your grandmother if you prefer!”

The granite faced house detective was not used to that sort of treatment; furthermore it distinctly galled him to be asked to beat his grandmother, whom he recalled as an estimable old lady who made an odd noise when she ate soup, owing to an absence of teeth....