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Thriller is a genre in literature. Thriller completely independent genre. Books of this genre are available now for your attention. We add new Thriller books to our e-library every day every day. Always interesting and instructive to read using our elibrary.
Only occasionally does a rather skillfully tailored product come off this “conveyor line” that really has any merit in order to stand out from the basically homogeneous literary mass. Our electronic library is full of thriller highlights.
“Thriller” is a modern term.
This genre is classified by causing a sudden outburst of emotion in the reader.
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Reading books RomanceReading books romantic stories you will plunge into the world of feelings and love. Most of the time the story ends happily. Very interesting and informative to read books historical romance novels to feel the atmosphere of that time.
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Critics will say that romance is too predictable. That if you know how it ends, there’s no point in reading it. Sorry, but no. It’s okay to choose between genres to get what you need from your books. But in romance the happy ending is a feature.It’s so romantic to describe the scene when you have found your True Love like in “fairytale love story.”



Reading thrillers facilitates to the formation of a person's sense of danger and makes him avoid such situations in every possible way in real life. At the same time, the reader can use the example of books to form his own line of behavior in real situations. Thrillers contribute to the development of the sixth sense - intuition. The reader will definitely remember the heroes of thrillers, because they operate in extreme circumstances and must include all means for survival. Filmmakers are always on the lookout for new releases in thriller. Scripts are created every day, that are even more sophisticated and dynamic. Based on these scenarios, new films will be screened, that attract tens of thousands of fans thriller genre. Therefore, each reader will be interested in how it was possible to embody the complexity of the plot on the screen, which is described in the original book. The great success of thrillers on the screen, the basis will still be a book.



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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bandbox, by Louis Joseph Vance

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: The Bandbox

Author: Louis Joseph Vance

Illustrator: Arthur I. Keller

Release Date: January 19, 2010 [EBook #31021]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BANDBOX ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Walt Farrell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)






THE BANDBOX
BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE The Bandbox
Cynthia-of-the-Minute
No Man’s Land
The Fortune Hunter
The Pool of Flame
The Bronze Bell
The Black Bag
The Brass Bowl
The Private War
Terence O’Rourke
“Now, sir!” she exclaimed, turning

“Now, sir!” she exclaimed, turning

Frontispiece. See Page 83

The Bandbox

BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

Author of “The Brass Bowl,” “The Bronze Bell,”
“Cynthia-of-the-Minute,” etc.

Decoration

With Four Illustrations
By ARTHUR I. KELLER

A. L. BURT COMPANY

  Publishers                                                 New York  

Copyright, 1911, 1912,
By Louis Joseph Vance.
———
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian


Published, April, 1912
Reprinted, April, 1912 (three times)

TO
LEWIS BUDDY III

CONTENTS Chapter Page I Introducing Mr. Iff 1 II The Bandbox 14 III Twins 26 IV Queenstown 43 V Ismay? 65 VI Iff? 87 VII Stole Away! 109 VIII The Wrong Box 128 IX A Likely Story 158 X Dead O’ Night 177 XI The Cold Grey Dawn 194 XII Won’t You Walk Into My Parlour? 216 XIII Wreck Island 233 XIV The Strong-Box 254 XV The Enemy’s Hand 275 XVI Ninety Minutes 295 XVII Holocaust 312

THE BANDBOX

I INTRODUCING MR. IFF

At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in the month of August, Mr. Benjamin Staff sat at table in the dining-room of the Authors’ Club, moodily munching a morsel of cheese and a segment of cast-iron biscuit and wondering what he must do to be saved from the death-in-life of sheer ennui.

A long, lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast: he was not only unhappy, he looked it. He was alone and he was lonely; he was an American and a man of sentiment (though he didn’t look that) and he wanted to go home; to sum up, he found himself in love and in London at one and the same time, and felt precisely as ill at ease in the one as in the other of these, to him, exotic circumstances.

Inconceivable as it may seem that any rational man should yearn for New York in August, that and nothing less was what Staff wanted with all his heart. He wanted to go home and swelter and be swindled by taxicab drivers and snubbed by imported head-waiters; he wanted to patronise the subway at peril of asphyxiation and to walk down Fifth Avenue at that witching hour when electric globes begin to dot the dusk of evening—pale moons of a world of steel and stone; he wanted to ride in elevators instead of lifts, in trolley-cars instead of trams; he wanted to go to a ball-game at the Polo Grounds, to dine dressed as he pleased, to insult his intelligence with a roof-garden show if he felt so disposed, and to see for himself just how much of Town had been torn down in the two months of his exile and what they were going to put up in its place. He wanted, in short, his own people; more specifically he wanted just one of them, meaning to marry her if she’d have him.

Now to be homesick and lovesick all at once is a tremendously disturbing state of affairs. So influenced, the strongest men are prone to folly. Staff, for instance, had excellent reason to doubt the advisability of leaving London just then, with an unfinished play on his hands; but he was really no more than a mere, normal human being, and he did want very badly to go home. If it was a sharp struggle, it was a short one that prefaced his decision.

Of a sudden he rose, called for his bill and paid it, called for his hat and stick, got them, and resolutely—yet with a furtive air, as one who would throw a dogging conscience off the scent—fled the premises of his club, shaping a course through Whitehall and Charing Cross to Cockspur Street, where, with the unerring instinct of a homing pigeon, he dodged hastily into the booking-office of a steamship company.

Now Mystery is where one finds it, and Romantic Adventure is as a rule to be come upon infesting the same identical premises. Mr. Staff was not seeking mysteries and the last rĂ´le in the world in which he could fancy himself was that of Romantic Adventurer. But in retrospect he can see quite clearly that it was there, in the humdrum and prosaic setting of a steamship booking-office, that he first stumbled (all unwittingly) into the toils of his Great Adventure.

When he entered, there was but one other person on the outer or public side of the booking-counter; and he, sticking close in a far corner and inaudibly conferring with a clerk, seemed so slight and unpretending a body that Staff overlooked his existence altogether until circumstances obliged him to recognise it.

The ignored person, on the other hand, showed an instant interest in the appearance of Mr. Staff. You might have thought that he had been waiting for the latter to come in—absurd as this might seem, in view of the fact that Staff had made up his mind to book for home only within the last quarter-hour. None the less, on sight of him this other patron of the company, who had seemed till then to be of two minds as to what he wanted, straightened up and bent a freshened interest on the cabin-plot which the clerk had spread out upon the counter for his advisement. And a moment after Staff had audibly stated his wishes, the other prodded a certain spot of the chart with a thin and fragile forefinger.

“I’ll take this one,” he said quietly.

“Upper’r lower?” enquired his clerk.

“Lower.”

“Then-Q,” said the clerk....

Meanwhile Staff had caught the eye of an impregnable young Englishman behind the counter; and, the latter coming forward, he opened negotiations with a succinct statement:

“I want to book on the Autocratic, sailing tomorrow from Liverpool, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Quite so,” said his clerk, not without condescension. “For yourself, may I awsk?”

“For myself alone.”

“Then-Q.” The clerk fetched a cabin-plot.

“I’m afraid, sir,” he said, removing a pencil from behind his ear the better to make his meaning clear, “there’s not much choice. It’s quite late to book, you know; and this is the rush season for westbound traffic; everything’s just about full up.”

“I understand; but still you can make room for me somewhere, I hope.”

“Oh, yes. Quite so, indeed. It’s only a question of what you’d like. Now we have a cabine de luxe—”

“Not for me,” said Staff firmly.

“Then-Q.... The only other accommodation I can offer you is a two-berth stateroom on the main-deck.”

“An outside room?”

“Yes, sir. You can see for yourself. Here it is: berths 432 and 433. You’ll find it quite cosy, I’m sure.”

Staff nodded, eyeing the cubicle indicated by the pencil-point.

“That’ll do,” said he. “I’ll take it.”

“Then-Q. Upper’r lower berth, sir?”

“Both,” said Staff, trying not to look conscious—and succeeding.

“Both, sir?”—in tones of pained expostulation.

“Both!”—reiterated in a manner that challenged curiosity.

“Ah,” said the clerk wearily, “but, you see, I thought I understood you to say you were alone.”

“I did; but I want privacy.”

“I see. Then-Q.”—as who should say: Another mad Amayrican.

With this the clerk took himself off to procure a blank ticket.

While he waited, Staff was entertained by snatches of a colloquy at the far end of the counter, where the other patron was being catechised as to his pedigree by the other booking-clerk. What he heard ran something to the following effect:

“What did you say the name was, sir?”

“The name?”

“If you please—”

“What name?”

“Your name, sir.”

“I didn’t say, did I?”

“No, sir.”

“Ah! I thought not.”

Pause; then the clerk, patiently: “Do you mind giving me your name, sir, so that I may fill in your ticket?”

“I’d r’ally rather not; but seein’ as it’s you and you make a point of it—Iff.”

Pause.... “Beg pardon?”

“Iff.”

“If what, sir?”

“I-double-F, Iff: a name, not a joke. I-F-F—William Howard Iff. W. H. Iff, Whiff: joke.”

“Ow-w?”

“But you needn’t laugh.”

With dignity: “I was not intending to laugh, sir.”

Staff could hardly refrain from refreshing himself with a glance at the individual so singularly labelled. Appraising him covertly, he saw a man whose stature was quite as much shorter than the normal as his own was longer, but hardly less thin. Indeed, Staff was in the habit of defining his own style of architecture as Gothic, and with reasonable excuse; but reviewing the physical geography of Mr. Iff, the word emaciation bobbed to the surface of the literary mentality: Iff was really astonishingly slight of build. Otherwise he was rather round-shouldered; his head was small, bird-like, thinly thatched with hair of a faded tow colour; his face was sensitively tinted with the faintest of flushes beneath a skin of natural pallor, and wore an expression curiously naïve and yet shrewd—an effect manufactured by setting the eyes of a child, round and dimly blue, in a mask of weathered maturity.

Now while Staff was receiving this impression, Mr. Iff looked sharply round; their glances crossed. Primarily embarrassed to be caught rudely staring, Staff was next and thoroughly shocked to detect a distinct if momentary eclipse of one of Mr. Iff’s pale blue eyes. Bluntly, openly, deliberately, Mr. Iff winked at Mr. Staff, and then, having accomplished his amazement and discomfiture, returned promptly, twinkling, to the baiting of his clerk.

“Your age, sir?”

Mr. Iff enquired in simple surprise: “Do you really care to know?”

“It’s required, sir, by the—”

“Oh, well—if I must! But, mind you, strictly as man to man: you may write me down a freeborn American citizen, entitled to vote and more ’n half white.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I say, I am an adult—”

“Oh!” The clerk wrote; then, bored, resumed: “Married or single, please?”

“I’m a spinster—”

“O-w?”

“Honestly—neither married nor unmarried.”

“Then-Q”—resignedly. “Your business—?”

But here Staff’s clerk touched the exasperated catechist on the shoulder and said something inaudible. The response, while equally inaudible, seemed to convey a sense of profound personal shock. Staff was conscious that Mr. Iff’s clerk glanced reproachfully in his direction, as if to suggest that he wouldn’t have believed it of him.

Divining that he and Mr. Iff were bargaining for the same accommodations, Staff endeavoured to assume an attitude of distinguished obliviousness to the entire proceeding; and would have succeeded but for the immediate and impatient action of Mr. Iff.

That latter, seizing the situation, glanced askance at dignified Mr. Staff, then smiled a whimsical smile, cocked his small head to one side and approached him with an open and ingenuous air.

“If it’s only a question of which berth,” said he, “I’m quite willing to forfeit

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