Pulp Fiction, 1928 · page 47 of 68
10-Story Book, February 1928 — page 47: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis This page displays the opening of a short story titled "Halcyon" by William Freeman. It features an illustration at the top—a line drawing of a seated woman in 1920s-style dress with wavy hair and beaded necklaces, credited to artist Hazel Goodman Keeler. The prose begins by introducing a female character whose birth name was Tahiri but who acquired the name "Halcyon" by accident. The visible text describes a setting in Yam Island and mentions a ship called the Luck of Samoa anchored offshore, with details about the tropical scenery and maritime activity nearby. The story appears to be adventure or tropical fiction set in the South Seas.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
My Mm hh en LU Al ZEL Y My Why By WILLIAM FREEMAN ing, so to speak, labeled herself. Her pukka name was Tahiri, with a string of syllables to follow. But neither was given her by her godfather or god- mother for she never had any. Our introduction wasn’t what you’d call conventional. We'd been loafing for a week off Yam Island, where the scen- ery—except when it rains, when it isn’t properly speaking, scenery at all—looks as though it had been painted for a big show at Drury Lane. There’s palms standing high among the jungle of hum- mocky green islands, and lagoons as still as slabs of looking glass, and an aching blue sky over an aching blue sea. S i: got the name by accident, hav- The old Luck of Samoa was anchored somewhere about the middle distance, with Sebastien smoking his everlasting cigar on the poop. Nearer shore I and a couple of Kanakas were fooling about with a home-made dredger—we’d no div- ing apparatus— in a small boat. The water there was deep and shallow in patches, with as fine a collection of un- charted rocks as you’d find in the South Seas, and only the month before the John M. Callingham had ripped herself open, and gone down with the Lord knew what in the way of cargo. There was no reck- oning what a lucky swipe along the san- dy bottom mightn’t bring up. (Continued on page 47) COniicoookks (C@)