ery page! He recalled with a
smile a heated argument which the fellows had got into on one of the
Varsity Areopagus Club nights, when Billy Thorpe had contended that
strange adventures were really occurring daily and nightly under the
multitudinous noses of the modern, work-a-day world. It was impossible
to be a student of history, argued he, without recognizing upon what
slender threads of hazard great issues often had dangled, or a reader
of the newspapers without admitting that mighty queer things were
creeping constantly into the experience of some men. It wasn't
necessary to seek these in the distorted perspectives of the criminal
underworld or the political intrigues of Continental Europe, for
ordinary people were just as liable to have adventures. The trouble
with most folks nowadays was that they had been trotting the
thoroughfares of every-day commonplaces so long they had got dust in
their eyes till they couldn't see the bridle-paths of the Unusual, but
that didn't prove that Romance wasn't doing business at the same old
stand.

And they all had laughed at Thorpe's bombastic figures of speech and
told him to go and talk to a credulous elevator boy somewhere, and
asked him if he had the girl aboard the lugger yet and Professor
Peabody had wanted to know seriously if he had found any traces of
pre-Shakespearian drama in East Lynne!

But by the shade of Sheherazade! Thorpe had been right and Phil hadn't
dared to tell him what had happened in the fog. "Bridle paths of the
Unusual" with a vengeance! He'd soon have all the ingredients to write
one of those wild yarns himself! He couldn't ask for a more beautiful
or accomplished heroine than Cristy, or a more interesting place to
start the love story than in a dense fog at three a.m. Then there was
this fifty thousand dollars vanishing so mysteriously and Podmore--with
a little polishing he would work up into a first-class villain; as he
stood he was a joke and it was impossible to imagine him even risking a
punch on the nose to capture the girl. Nickleby might be better for
the real dirty work--or Rives.

"Sixty Buckets of Blood or The Hobo's Revenge!" Phil smiled to himself.

In case Wade got back to Toronto before his new secretary's return from
this jaunt Kendrick had enclosed a note with the letter from Nat
Lawson, telling the railroad president where he had gone and why.

It was well that he had. For rapid events were to intervene and the
first