Applause Edited by Burt L. Standish

“YOU want me to be a crook?”

Grant Seward’s jaw squared, as he shot this from between his set teeth, and there was a dangerous flash in his dark eyes.

“I wouldn’t put it that way, Grant.”

“There isn’t any other way. You don’t call it straight—do you?”

This was what Grant Seward replied to his unscrupulous employer, when the scoundrel wanted him to cheat the customers by filling up the five-gallon Beaver Spring water bottles with ordinary river water. There were other frauds suggested by the rascally storekeeper, too, which Grant spurned.

The upshot of it is that Grant Seward finds himself in the business of cutting ice on the St. Lawrence River, among the Thousand Islands, with the thermometer near the bottom of the tube, and winds that threaten to saw his ears off, even through his thick cap.

Besides battling with the ice and an arctic temperature, rather than be a party to the groceryman’s mean trickery, Grant has to fight several human enemies, who have a habit of “hitting below the belt.” You will read all this and much more in the new novelette,

A BATTLE BELOW ZERO, BY WELDON W. BRODERICK

to be published in the next issue. The story is full of thrilling adventures, with some novel and narrow escapes for this thoroughly American hero. He strikes all his own blows fairly and squarely, giving the other fellow always a fair show—often when he hardly deserves it. I can promise the novelette to be one of the breeziest, most convincing, and absorbing that has ever come from this author’s facile pen.

There have been many calls from readers for more stories from Cornelius Shea. In a recent issue, you were promised that this call would be answered. It has been, for Shea has just completed a serial which he has entitled

THE LOST PLACER

and it carries an appeal to every reader of fiction who has a drop of red blood in his veins. The first chapters of this serial begin in the next issue, and depict Western life in a manner that has made Shea famous as a writer of stories dealing with stirring doings on the borderland.

In the opinion of many, Leslie W. Quirk is the best writer of sport stories in this country. Certainly it is true that he is an authority on all sports, and you feel when you read his description of a contest of any kind that the author knows what he is writing about, that he has been right down there himself, and has not just sat up in the grand stand, or read about it the next day in the morning paper. Not only does Quirk know all sports, but he knows how to tell about them in a most interesting manner. His plot is always a good one, and he draws his characters so well that they “stick.”

THE YELLOW MORNING-GLORY

which you will find in the next issue, is, in my humble opinion, the best running story that Quirk has ever written. It is quite a long story, but, take my word for it, you will wish that he had made it twice as long.

There is a particularly well-assorted and well-written collection of short stories in the next issue. Let me hear what you think of my selection, and which of the stories you like best, and, what is of more importance, why?