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Newspaper Page Text
THE BROKEN WING. BY FREDERICK PALMER (Copyright, 1914, by the Newspaper Enterprise Association.) runabout was ascending they recog- "It's a beautiful day," said Apple ton who always stated the obvious in a confidential way after they were started for- the station. "Perceptibly soj" Alice Adamson responded absently. She was convinced that if any one said again that it was a beautiful day she tehould screamy Then she heard him saying: "We'll be away from New York just in time to escape the heat. Summer in Europe always, I should say, and fall and winter on the Hudson, wouldn't you?" It was talk quite" characteristic of their world a world gifted in the pleasant uses of wealth. Now, for reasons she could not explain to her self, she was rebelling against the diet of a lifetime. She wished that Mr. Edwin Shepperson Appleton and she could think of him only by his full name that morning had done something worth while. She wished, in her . awn words, that he were an italicized man, even at the expense of his delightfully languid manner. His mother and her own father and mother had overplayed their parts in behalf of the future of an only son and an only daughter. When the parental party went ahead in the tonneau and left the ob jects of their planning to follow in the runabout, this piece of characteristic strategy had revealed prophetically a'j line of torments yet to come. In pros pect was a three months' tour, tied, to a string of European hotels, under the chaperonage of three old con spirators. She was lost unless some thing happened to prevent their catching the Limited which connect ed with the steamer at New York. " She was about to make some ir relevant answer when the whir of a motor rising in cadence at double railroad speed attracted their atten tion. At the top of the hill' which the nized a sight not unfamiliar in the year 1912. An aeroplane, its great wings flashing a shadow over their faces, its propellers making a frothy swath of beaten light, swept by. "I wish I were aboard!" Alice thought wildly. "Whew! Must be the Bolt!" said Appleton. "Going too fast to be any other." The Bolt was Rodney Sharp's aero plane, and she felt a peculiar interest in Rodney Sharp's career. It was twelve years now since they had met. Prom her carriage she had watched him, a, youth of eighteen, take an ignominious, tumble on the . hillside back of the Methodist church to fhe guffaws of the local population. She bad spoken to him and he had smiled in answer to the little girl who was with her governess. The picture he made as, flushed and determined, he stood beside the wreck of his ma chine facing ridicule, had a romantic place in her memory. Soon afterward he had left Thomsonville. And now "that queer Sharp boy" had made the continents and the seas for he was the first to cross the ocean a moving picture under his feet. From the .Bolt she looked back at Appleton, who was about to take up the conversation where he had left it. It occurred" to her that he was posi tively inane. Must she dine with him, walk with him, talk with him all her life? she asked herself.- Good heav ens! They might even live ,to cele brate a;goiden -wedding! The prospect of 'that golden wed ding to her over-wrought nerves played' a controlling.part in the events which followed. Ahead on the silent road a man on horseback was ap- . preaching. .Evidently he was in a " hurry while he crossed the culvert over a small stream. As Appleton slowed down, Alice .suddenly saw to the situation the means to miss the