Palm Beach by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr

Author:Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590775134
Publisher: M. Evans & Company
Published: 2015-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

FOUR hours later, dreaming that he was waiting at the altar for Marjorie, who was waling down the aisle to him with Fitz-Hamon, who seemed to be her father, Goose woke with a start.

Someone was pounding and shouting vociferously at the door.

“Lemme in. Lemme in!” cried the well-known voice of Josh Huntington.

Furious at being aroused so soon from his slumbers, Goose stumbled to the door, unlocked it, and tumbled back into his bed. He was pulling the covers back over his ears when Josh, attired in a soft boiled shirt, and a melted winged collar, lunged into the room.

“Jumping Jehoshaphat! What a night. I want you to get Murphy, that piefaced flat-footed bum detective, fired off the force. And I want you to pin the dirtiest scandal in Palm Beach history on Charles Hamilton Gibbons. I don’t care whether it’s true or not. Get your dirty tabloid to think up something rotten and I’ll pay. I’ll pay any libel suit Gibbons brings. I’ll pay anything.” And, as an after-thought, “If it takes my last cent I’ll pay.”

Reluctantly Goose sat up in bed, rubbed his eyes. “Didn’t you see the sign on the door? I’m trying to sleep.”

“Sleep! I’ve had none at all. I’ve been in the Main Street hoosegow all night, and it was a real Palm Beach Main Street and a real jail and no party.”

Goose was wide awake now. “Say it again and say it slow.” He was tanking what a swell yarn this would be. God was too good. Josh Huntington, oil magnate, in a Palm Beach hoosegow, suspected by Charles Hamilton Gibbons, one time competitor in the harness business back in Topeka, Kansas, of participation in a jewel robbery!

But Josh again rudely interrupted his calculations. Nor was Josh yet quite sober.

“There was I,” he began heatedly, “looking for the butler’s pantry because the tight-fisted old hypocrite had forgotten to feed us. I was just on the track of it when the lights went out. Fumbling in my pants pocket for a match when another door swung open and a fellow almost knocked me down. I took one look at him, and nearly dropped dead. It was the same guy that swiped my pile at Bradley’s. The same guy in the rum runners’ boat that almost drowned us at the Puritan.

“Maybe I’d had a drop too much. I made a lunge for him and he gives me a poke in the stomach and goes out the window. I was just going out after him and I would have caught him, when that bum detective named Murphy makes a flying tackle for my foot and begins to blow his whistle like he’s lost his mind.

“Right away a whole mess of fellows come running, and that old addlebrained fool Gibbons. And instead of telling them to let me up, even if he didn’t like me, he begins a cock-and-bull story about me being an accomplice in a jewel robbery going on in the parlor!”

Josh sat down and wiped his brow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.