Adventure Magazine Cover — page 90: what you’re looking at

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

84. Harry Huse was all a-wriggle against the dusty sky. Even the heavy old wooden-trussed bridge spanning the Missouri trembled uneasily above the sullen water. Main Street, at the far end of the bridge, lay curiously deserted and empty. There had been, Farney recalled, talk of an imme- diate inquest, and presently as he clattered over the loose planks he could see the cars which had preceded him clustered on a side street where Lawton had his Mortuary Parlors. The pool-hall, fortunately, was aban- doned and quiet. Only Tony Minotti lounged in his barber chair in the front cor- ner, gazing idly out into the hot, empty street. Farney drew up at the curb and slipped across the glaring sidewalk. He had been resigned to forego his one luxury, were Painter’s establishment thronged and buzzing with gossip. But the long low room held no one but the little barber. Farney settled gratefully into the chair, and passed a calloused hand over his week- old beard. He was stretched on his back, face masked with lather, when Painter and the others swarmed in from the inquest. The pool- hall keeper was still importantly busy with his story of the driver impaled upon the post. Farney tried to ignore the tiresome prattle, but the insistent voice jangled in his ears. Painter dragged out the last morbid de- tail of his discovery, then swung rantingly to the theme of the evil lurking in the effects of those who have suffered violent death. Farney fidgeted uncomfortably. Tony had finished stropping his razor, and stood waiting for his customer to settle down. “The sunburn on the neck, it smarts a little from the lather?” he suggested. ‘Somethin’ in my overalls gougin’ into me,” mumbled Farney in reply. He slid a hand under his hip, and eased the con- tents of the pocket higher up. ‘““—nd he sez here’s a right good pair of pliers a-goin’ to waste, ’nd I sez yeh, I see "em when I first come, ’nd I let ’em lay. T let ’em lay, I sez, ’cause I see with my own eyes what happened to Buck ’nd him not cold yit—” Farney had to listen now, or scrape the mask off his face, and get up and say some- thing. : “‘’nd he laughed like he was ’shamed of hisself ’nd dropped ’em back all right I kin tell you ’nd scuffed ’em over with dust, ’nd they’re layin’ there yit ’nd everybody a sight better off—”’ Painter’s voice ceased abruptly. Tony had finished shaving one side of Farney’s face, and was slapping his razor briskly on the strop. Some one laughed nervously. Farney lifted his head, and saw in the mirror that he had suddenly been recog- nized. He squirmed uneasily, undecided what to say or do. As he wriggled, something slid from the chair beneath him, and fell to the floor with a faint metallic clash. There was a startled gasp from Painter. Then Tony stooped over and straightened up. “The automobile pliers,” he remarked, brightly, “they fall out of the overalls pocket. The nice, new automobile pliers— I put them here by the mug till I finish the face and you get up.” AMES FARNEY had spoken the truth J when he said he was not superstitious. Yet he came away from the pool-hall filled with a vague uneasiness. He cared not a snap of the fingers for any one’s forebodings. His days were too crowded with sod-breaking, chores and ‘batching it” in a shack on the face of the prairie for speculation on the occult or the supernatural. He struggled against elemental forces and was accustomed to mishaps. He took them as things to be expected in a new country where the grass of centuries yielded only sullenly to dry-land wheat. Others might shake their heads ominously over cows struck down by lightning or work-horses bitten by rattlesnakes. Farney accepted such things, when they came his way, as annoying but natural, and went thriftily ahead, improvising makeshifts, working hard, not worrying about things he could not see or feel. Eventually he would get on, and getting on was the only important thing to James Farney. It meant some one from back home in Iowa to do his cook- ing and share his loneliness. He was not superstitious, but he was sensitive. For all his diffidence he had a deep and stubborn pride. Painter had turned his first gasp of chagrin into a “dead man’s luck,” uttered in a hollow voice with eyes averted. Then he had pulled away silently with the others to the rear of the long room. COnmiclboooks.c©