Frank Merriwell's Marriage: Inza's Happiest Day

“I would give ten thousand dollars to know Frank Merriwell’s secret,” declared Wallace Grafter, sitting in a comfortable “Old Hickory” chair on the veranda of the Eagle Heights clubhouse and watching the Albany boat, which was passing on its way up the Hudson.

“It would be worth it, my dear boy,” yawned Philip Phipps, a youth from Poughkeepsie, as he snapped a half-smoked cigarette over the rail and drew out his handsome watch, at which he casually glanced. “But do you think he has a secret?”

“Of course he has!” exclaimed the first speaker decidedly. “His record proves it. What time is it?”

“Ten-twenty,” answered Phipps.

“He’ll be here in forty minutes,” said Grafter. “I’m curious to see him.”

Farley Fisher, straight, square-shouldered, military in his bearing, not over twenty-four years of age, standing at a corner of the veranda, smiled a bit scornfully.

“It is amusing to me, gentlemen,” he observed, “to think that any fellow can keep up a fake as long as Merriwell has.”

“Fake?” cried Phipps, excitement bringing a touch of falsetto into his voice.

“Fake?” questioned Grafter, moving his chair to face Fisher more squarely. “What do you mean by that?”

“Just what I said—no more, no less. I am satisfied that Merriwell is a faker.”

Inside an open window of the reading room, which was close at hand, Hobart Manton had been glancing over the pages of a magazine. The words of those outside reached his ears. He dropped the magazine and leaned on the window ledge.

“I agree with you, Fisher,” he said. “Merriwell is the biggest faker in this country, and in many ways the cleverest. You know I’m a Yale man. At college I heard so much of Merriwell and what he had done while there that I grew sick and disgusted. He was successful in fooling almost everybody, it seems.”

Grafter rose to his feet. He was a well-built fellow, nearly six feet tall, with splendid shoulders and carriage. He was the son of Mike Grafter, the well known Tammany politician, familiarly called “Reliable Mike” by his associates in New York. Although young Grafter had never been guilty of doing a day’s work in his life, he had inherited a splendid physique from his parents and had made athletics his hobby, beginning with the days of his baseball playing on the open lots in Harlem. Like his father, he was generally well liked, although it was claimed that, with his sturdy frame he had also inherited some of old Grafter’s ideas of winning in any contest by whatever method possible, either fair or otherwise. Like his father, he was also able to cover his tracks so completely that nothing crooked had ever been proved against him, and he was prompt to vigorously resent any insinuation or hint of unfairness.