Edgar Wallace

The Guv'nor Edgar Wallace

THE affair of Mary Keen was never forgotten by Robert Karl Kressholm. He was a good hater, as Mr. J. G. Reeder was to say of him one day. Yet it was an odd circumstance that Mary, dead and buried in Westbury Churchyard, should remain as a raw place in the mind of a man who was, to all appearance and certainly by protestation, madly in love with a child-she was little more-who was twenty years his junior. But Bob Kressholm was like that. He was vain, had complete and absolute confidence in his own excellences. He might congratulate himself that he was young at thirty-seven and looked younger; that he was good-looking in an instantly impressing way and looked little older than at eighteen, when Mary had chosen Red Joe Brady in preference to himself. Mary was dead of a broken heart-she passed three days after Joe had been released from a short-term sentence in Dartmoor. If Bob could have found her he would have offered consolation of sorts, but Joe had very carefully hidden her and his boy. Kressholm never went to prison. He was too clever for that. Banks and jewellers' stores might become impoverished in a night, but "the Guv'nor" could not be associated with the happening.