



Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
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[The chapters in the original book pass from CHAPTER FIVE to CHAPTER
SEVEN; there is no chapter numbered SIX. A list of typographical errors
corrected follows the etext. (note of etext transcriber)]




UNDER COVER

[Illustration: HE FOUND DENBY'S GUN UNDER HIS NOSE.

Frontispiece. _See page 266_.]




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BY

ROI COOPER MEGRUE

NOVELIZED BY WYNDHAM MARTYN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
WILLIAM KIRKPATRICK

[Illustration]

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1914

_Copyright_, _1914_,
BY ROI COOPER MEGRUE AND
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

_All rights reserved_

Published August, 1914

THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. SIMONDS CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


HE FOUND DENBY'S GUN UNDER HIS NOSE _Frontispiece_

HE TURNED TO AMY. "YOUNG WOMAN, YOU'RE UNDER ARREST" PAGE 105

"DO MAKE ANOTHER BREAK SOMETIME, WON'T YOU--DICK?" 186

"NOW WE UNDERSTAND ONE ANOTHER," HE SAID. "HERE'S YOUR MONEY" 288




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CHAPTER ONE


Paris wears her greenest livery and puts on her most gracious airs in
early summer. When the National Fete commemorative of the Bastille's
fall has gone, there are few Parisians of wealth or leisure who remain
in their city. Trouville, Deauville, Etretat and other pleasure cities
claim them and even the bourgeoisie hie them to their summer villas.

The city is given up to those tourists from America and England whom
Paris still persists in calling _Les Cooks_ in memory of that
enterprising blazer of cheap trails for the masses. Your true Parisian
and the stranger who has stayed within the city's gates to know her
well, find themselves wholly out of sympathy with the eager crowds who
follow beaten tracks and absorb topographical knowledge from
guide-books.

Monty Vaughan was an American who knew his Paris in all months but those
two which are sacred to foreign travelers, and it irritated him one
blazing afternoon in late July to be persistently mistaken for a tourist
and offered silly useless toys and plans of the Louvre. The _camelots_,
those shrewd itinerant merchants of the Boulevards, pestered him
continually. These excellent judges of human nature saw in him one who
lacked the necessary harshness to drive them away and made capital of
his good nature.

He was a slim, pleasant-looking man of five and twenty, to whom the good
things of this world had been vouchsafed, with no effort on his part to
obtain them; and in spite of this he preserved a certain frank and
boyish charm which had made him popular all his life.

Presently on his somewhat aimless wanderings he came down the Avenue de
l'Opera and took a seat under the awning and ordered an innocuous drink.
He was in a city where he had innumerable friends, but they had all left
for the seashore and this loneliness was unpleasant to his friendly
spirit. But even in the Cafe de Paris he was not to be left alone and he
was regarded as fair game by alert hawkers. One would steal up to his
table and deposit a little measure of olives and plead for two sous in
exchange. Another would place some nuts by his side and demand a like
amount. And when they had been driven forth and he had lighted a
cigarette, he observed watching him with professional eagerness a
_ramasseur de megot_, one of those men who make a livelihood of picking
up the butts of cigars and cigarettes and selling them.

When Monty flung down the half-smoked cigarette in hope that the man
would go away he was annoyed to find that the fellow was congratulating
himself that here was a tourist worth following, who smoked not the
wispy attenuated cigarettes of the native but one worth harvesting. He
probed for it with his long stick under the table and stood waiting for
another.

The heat, the absence of his friends and the knowledge that he must
presently dine alone had brought the usually placid Monty into a wholly
foreign frame of mind and he rose abruptly and stalked down the Avenue.

A depressed-looking sandwich-man, bearing a device which read, "One can
laugh uproariously at the Champs Elysees every night during the summer
months," blocked his way, and permitted a woman selling fans of the kind
known to the _camelots_ as _les petits vents du nord_ to thrust one upon
him. "Monsieur does not comprehend our heat in Paris," she said. "Buy a
little north wind. Two sous for a little north wind."

Monty thrust a franc in her hand and turned quickly from her to carom
against a tall well-dressed man who was passing. As Monty began to utter
his apology the look of gloom dropped from his face and he seized the
stranger's hand and shook it heartily.

"Steve, old man!" he cried, "what luck to find you amid this mob! I've
been feeling like a poor shipwrecked orphan, and here you come to my
rescue again."

The man he addressed as Steve seemed just as pleased to behold Monty
Vaughan. The two were old comrades from the days at their preparatory
school and had met little during the past five years. Monty's ecstatic
welcome was a pleasant reminder of happy days that were gone.

"I might ask what you are doing here," Steven Denby returned. "I
imagined you to be sunning yourself in Newport or Bar Harbor, not doing
Paris in July."

"I've been living here for two years," Monty explained, when they were
sheltered from interruption at the cafe Monty had just left.

"Doing what?"

Monty looked at him with a diffident smile. "I suppose you'll grin just
like everybody else. I'm here to learn foreign banking systems. My
father says it will do me good."

Denby laughed. "I'll bet you know less about it than I do." The idea of
Monty Vaughan, heir to the Vaughan millions, working like a clerk in the
Credit Lyonnais was amusing.

"Does your father make you work all summer?" he demanded.

"I'm not working now," Monty explained. "I never do unless I feel like
it. I'm waiting for a friend who is sailing with me on the Mauretania
next week and I've just had a wire to say she'll be here to-morrow."

"She!" echoed Denby. "Have you married without my knowledge or consent?
Or is this a honey-moon trip you are taking?"

A look of sadness came into the younger man's face.

"I shall never marry," he returned.

But Steven Denby knew him too well to take such expressions of gloom as
final. "Nonsense," he cried. "You are just the sort they like. You're
inclined to believe in people too much if you like them, and a husband
who believes in his wife as you will in yours is a treasure. They'll
fight for you, Monty, when you get home again. For all you know the trap
is already baited."

"Trap!" Monty cried reproachfully. "I've been trying to make a girl
catch me for three years now and she won't."

"Do you mean you've been finally turned down?" Steven Denby asked
curiously. It was difficult to suppose that a man of his friend's wealth
and standing would experience much trouble in offering heart and
fortune.

"I haven't asked yet," Monty admitted. "I've been on the verge of it
hundreds of times, but she always laughs as I'm coming around to it, and
someone comes in or something happens and I've never done it." He sighed
with the deprecating manner of the devout lover. "If you'd only seen
her, Steve, you'd see what mighty little chance I stood. I feel it's a
bit of impertinence to ask a girl like that to marry me."

Steven patted him on the arm. "You're just the same," he said, "exactly
the silly old Monty I used to know. Next time you see your charmer, risk
being impertinent and ask her to marry you. Women hate modesty nowadays.
It's just a confession of failure and we're all hitched up to success. I
don't know the girl you are speaking of but when you get home again
instead of declaring your great unworthiness, tell her you've left Paris
and its pleasures simply to marry her. Say that the Bourse begged you to
remain and guide the nation through a financial panic, but you left
them weeping and flew back on a fast Cunarder."

"I believe you are right," Monty said. "I'll do it. I ought to have done
it years ago. Alice is frightfully disappointed with me."

"Who is Alice?" the other demanded. "The lady you're crossing with on
the Mauretania?"

"Yes," said Monty. "A good pal of mine; one of those up-to-date women of
the world who know what to do and say at the right moment. She's a sort
of elder sister to me. You'll like her, Steve."

Denby doubted it but pursued the subject no further. He conceived Alice
to be one