"To thunder with the contract!" came the happy answer of Barstow. "If you had only answered the 'phone, you wouldn't be so much in the dark. What do I care about mail contracts now--with the best two lines in Missouri under my supervision? Don't you understand? This was the hole that I had prayed for this O.R. & T. bunch to get into from the first minute I saw that snow. They would have been tied up for a week longer--if it hadn't been for us. Can't you see? It was the argument I needed--that politics isn't what counts--it's brains and doing things! Now do you understand? Well"--and Barstow stood off and laughed--"if I have to diagram things for you, the money interests behind the O.R. & T. have seen the light. I'll admit it took about three hours of telephoning to New York to cause the illumination; but they've seen it, and that's enough. They also have agreed to buy the Ozark Central and to merge the two. Further, they have realized that the only possible president of the new lines is a man with brains like, for instance, Lemuel C. Barstow, who has working directly with him a general superintendent--and don't overlook that general part--a _general_ superintendent named Martin Garrity!" STRANGER THINGS By MILDRED CRAM From _Metropolitan Magazine_ We were seated in the saloon of a small steamer which plies between Naples and Trieste on irregular schedule. Outside, the night was thickly black and a driving rain swept down the narrow decks. "You Englishmen laugh at ghosts," the Corsican merchant said. "In my country, we are less pretentious. Frankly, we are afraid. You, too, are afraid, and so you laugh! A difference, it seems to me, which lies, not in the essence but in the manner." Doctor Fenton smiled queerly. "Perhaps. What do any of us know about it, one way or the other? Ticklish business! We poke a little too far beyond our ken and get a shock that withers our souls. Cosmic force! We stumble forward, bleating for comfort, and fall over a charged cable. It may have been put there to hold us out--or in." Aldobrandini, the Italian inventor, was playing cards with a German engineer. He lost the game to his opponent, and turning about in his chair, came into the conversation. "You are talking about ghosts. I have seen them. Once in the Carso. Again on the campagna near Rome. I met a company of Caesar's legionaries tramping through a bed of asphodels. The asphodels lay down beneath those crushing sandals, and then stood upright again, unharmed." The engineer shuffled the cards between short, capable fingers. "Ghosts. Yes, I agree; there are such things. Created out of our subconscious selves; mirages of the mind; photographic spiritual projections; hereditary memories. There are always explanations."