Adventure, August 3, 1919 — page 125: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

wouldn’t. lis en rege Ashford began to groan again. ‘Finally h he broke down com- pletely. “Take me to Garrett Henry, ” he begged, “and I'll clear ye both. ‘It was me that robbed the safe. It was me that drapped the letter there at the safe, but I didn’t do it a-purpose. I never knowed Id lost it till Henry found it. I hid the six hundred dollars in the up-stairs o’ the boardin’- house. Nancy, she handed me that letter to give to you, Lonesome, and I—I “Opened it and read it,” ‘clipped Bentley, “like skunks allus does. Go on wi’ the cat-killin’s How did ye git in the safe, Gid?” “T watched Billy Allison when he put the money in it the night afore,” confessed the pain-wracked Ashford, “and he—I seed that the; oo] boy’d forgot to lock it!, Hurry, Lonesome, for I’m a-hurtin’ awful, and I’d ruther go to jail ’an to die out here in the cold.” “Well, by grab!” almost shouted Howling Jim Baskin as he knelt to fashion a blue bandanna tourniquet for Ashford’s torn and bleeding limb. While Baskin worked with the injuréd man, Lonesome took Nancy’s letter from his pocket, the letter that he had thought an old one, and read it by the firelight. In it Nancy declared that she had hardly slept since she had broken her engagement with him and asked him to forgive her, if he could, for having been such a fool. Bent- ley’s heart leaped almost to his throat, and his smile was broad as he remembered that he had once started to her to beg her for- giveness for that same white little sin. - Howling Jim’s Pal loggers over a trifle anxiously. FIFTEEN days later, more or less, there came a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon when the snow “was ail gone. Bentley and Nancy walked up the woods path that led from old Nathan Kirkland’s hewn-log cabin, entered the grassy Clearing that held the logging-camp on Big Brother Creek and went to the boarding-house porch. There they turned to face smilingly some thirty stalwart timberjacks who had just broken off their usual Sunday afternoon horse-play to watch them. “Boys,” began the strong young man on the porch, removing his broad-brimmed hat with a rather grandiose sweep of his right hand, ‘‘I beg pe’mission to interduce Missis Superintendent Lonesome Bentley. Wish us well, boys!” At first there was a mere murmur of sound among the loggers; then a ripple— then a wild and hearty yell rose from their throats and shattered itself against the two Bentley began to look the Where was Howling Jim? He had invited Baskin to be present at his wedding, but Baskin hadn’t promised. A hundred times before he had located his pal by merely listening for him; so now he raised a hand for silence, and silence came. From somewhere high on the laurel- covered breast of the everlasting Big Brother there came to the ears of those i in the valley a half-sad Voice lifted up in a sort of abandon: mountainsides. “Ye may break-a my bones with-a sticks ana stones— I’m a-goin’ to live, anyhow, till I die!’’ elle Bhi etl iit, ae oe eS a aa. an