The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Make-Believe Man, by Richard Harding Davis

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Title: The Make-Believe Man

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Posting Date: October 23, 2008 [EBook #1823]
Release Date: July, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Don Lainson

THE MAKE-BELIEVE MAN

By Richard Harding Davis

I

I had made up my mind that when my vacation came I would spend it
seeking adventures. I have always wished for adventures, but, though
I am old enough--I was twenty-five last October--and have always gone
half-way to meet them, adventures avoid me. Kinney says it is my fault.
He holds that if you want adventures you must go after them.

Kinney sits next to me at Joyce & Carboy's, the woollen manufacturers,
where I am a stenographer, and Kinney is a clerk, and we both have rooms
at Mrs. Shaw's boarding-house. Kinney is only a year older than myself,
but he is always meeting with adventures. At night, when I have sat up
late reading law, so that I may fit myself for court reporting, and in
the hope that some day I may become a member of the bar, he will knock
at my door and tell me some surprising thing that has just happened to
him. Sometimes he has followed a fire-engine and helped people from a
fire-escape, or he has pulled the shield off a policeman, or at the bar
of the Hotel Knickerbocker has made friends with a stranger, who turns
out to be no less than a nobleman or an actor. And women, especially
beautiful women, are always pursuing Kinney in taxicabs and calling upon
him for assistance. Just to look at Kinney, without knowing how clever
he is at getting people out of their difficulties, he does not appear
to be a man to whom you would turn in time of trouble. You would think
women in distress would appeal to some one bigger and stronger; would
sooner ask a policeman. But, on the contrary, it is to Kinney that women
always run, especially, as I have said, beautiful women. Nothing of the
sort ever happens to me. I suppose, as Kinney says, it is because he was
born and brought up in New York City and looks and acts like a New York
ma