Adventure, November 1915 — page 21: what you’re looking at

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

The Gold Lust on, so’s if anything was wrong we could fix it. She had got set in the idea that I hada curse on me somewhere; what with broodin’ over the kiddies an’ gettin’ sicker herself each day, it was no wonder. But I couldn’t find the switch to those brain-lights of mine. CHAPTER VI THE MAN WITH THE DRAGGING FOOT “ORE day a man drove up to the ranch in a buggy an’ asked forme. I was plowin’ an’ my wife come out an’ told me a man about thirty wanted to see me, a man with a dark fringe of beard an’ one foot that dragged, givin’ the name of Dave Henley. “Tt was just as if a bolt of lightnin’ had hit me when I heard the name. Everything seemed to come over me in a rush an’ I fell to the ground in a sort of afit. My wife was beside herself. The stranger come over an’ helped carry me in, but he didn’t leave. He said he was sure now I was the man he wanted. “‘When I come to an’ he came in the room I nigh fainted again, for he was the spit of his father as I had seen him on the schooner an’ dead in the boat. I closed my eyes an’ pretended I was still unconscious, thinkin’ all the time. The thoughts came clickin’ up like one of these movin’ picters, an’ soon I remembered everything up to the climbin’ of the cliff. “My first thought was that I was glad it wasn’t murder I’d done. Then I realized I’d have to get a grip on myself. I wasn’t goin’ to let Henley’s boy drive fear into me, a man grown, like his father did when I was a kid. So I set up at last and got up an’ shut the door on the two of us. “It was Henley’s boy all right. Dave, ' when he sailed ’round the Horn with us in fifty, left a wife, a girl two years old, an’ a comin’ boy-baby behind him. He didn’t say anything to us about it, any more than he did to her about leavin’. But she told the child when it grew up, an’ when he was about twenty-five he went out to Californy an’ tried to find out something of his father. It didn’t take him long to find those papers Mister Addams read you from, but beyond that he could trace nothing. The four miners were gone, clear. Nothing showed beyond the fact that we had got away an’ had never been heard of. “He quit tryin’ after a while an’ got to 19 minin’ himself. That’s how he got his lame foot—crushed by timbers. But he never made a strike, an’ there was that three- quarters of a million dancin’ in his dreams every once in a while. Then he heard my name accidental on the street in San Fran- cisco. It was the only one the papers men- tioned you'll recollect, outside Henley an’ Chappell and he remembered it. It wasn’t a usual one. In the combination my age *peared to tally up an’ off he come to see me an’ get his share of the gold. “T had my nerve back by the time he got through talkin’, an’ I just laughed at him an’ denied everything. He stuck it out, arguin’ I hadn’t had a fit for nothin’, but I got him away till the next mornin’. “T lay awake that night, pretendin’ to be asleep an’ sick, but thinkin’ hard an’ prayin’ between whiles. Next mornin’ I stood by my guns. Young Henley showed pretty plain he thought me a liar an’ said he’d dig up proofs that would force my hand to show him what became of his father an’ the gold. It was precious little he cared about the first—he was too much like the old man. His father had deserted his mother an’ him still unborn, an’ he wasn’t wastin’ tears or - trouble over him, dead or alive. But he went away at last an’ left me to face my wife. “T told her everything. She was just, I reckon, but mighty hard, considerin’ I didn’t know anything when I married her. But she blamed the kiddies’ deaths an’ her own-to-come on me an’ what I’d done, an’ I couldn’t disprove it. We tried every way to get some trace of the four miners, but couldn’t. Mary got worse all the time an’ died inside of a year. Towards the last we hardly spoke. That’s what I mean when I _ say there’s a curse on the gold. “An’ it was still workin’. Everything I touched went wrong, land, crops, specula- tions, till I was down to bed-rock; an’ the older I got the poorer I was. Five years ago I tried to get up an expedition to go to the island. I was sick an’ nigh broke an’ desperate. I figgered the curse had pretty near worked out, my share of it anyway, after sixty years. “But I didn’t look the part. I couldn’t well tell the real story of the thing an’ I guess they knowed I was lying. Of course I wasn’t goin’ to give up the real location till the last minnit or they’d have done me out of it. Mebbe I was wrong, I don’ know. But I couldn’t get the thing to goin’. Gomichbooks com