All-Story Weekly, Vol. 112, No. 1 — page 25: what you’re looking at

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

THE ONE GIFT. but mentaliy. Physically, he was rather under the average—not very tall, slender, soft-spoken; he wore glasses; he had a dread of firearms, of noise and violence in any form. But mentally, an intelligent brute. The dowager on the porch was mistaken when she hinted that his main inspiration in life was money. The thing that moved Enoch Sangree was a talent and a thirst for battle. He had to fight, and win, and organize his victory. No matter who suf- fered, he would have his. way. It was that way in this Florida project. Into this waste place of the country he would move his colonists. These first colonists would be ruined. Their women would go crazy. Their children would die. But others would follow. When the first line dies, move up your reserves. Gradually, as in other waste places of the world, the battle would be .won—scent-laden gardens and cultivated fields would wipe out the graves of the pioneers. = But that Muriel, his only child, should be a victim! He had never thought of that. It filled him with a wordless horror. The horror was all the greater in that he was incapable of giving it outward expression. She had been the only person in whom he confided. Now she was gone. He was all alone. He was all alone, although there were people about him. He was the sort of man who is always the center of human activity. Put one such in the center of the Sahara and he will soon have a crowd about him. It was that now. When the Semiramis III came to the head of this uncharted and unnamed river less than a week ago, the wilderness about it appeared to be empty. It was an empti- ness that spread to the wide horizons of cy- press swamp and everglade, under a sky all blue and blinding gold. It had been a loneliness like that of midocean—only, here the ocean had gone absolutely still, the surface of it had been spread with a cover- let of grass and wild-flowers, and there had been an emergence of tropic islands, near and remote, widely scattered, like a promised land still void of people. — — Now the people came. 15 “In a way other than I looked for,” said Enoch Sangree to himself. He stood on the deck of his house-boat and looked away hungrily. Far out in the direction of the Everglades he could see two reeling specks which he knew to be airplanes. They were like gnats in that vast expanse of empty landscape and sky. ‘‘ And as useful as gnats,” he said in his heart. Even from the comparatively slight ele- vation of the house-boat’s upper deck he could see half a dozen camps scattered about the country. At two places on the horizon there were faint pillars of smoke showing the location of other searching- parties. He seized a pair of field-glasses that hung about his neck and examined the camps and the smoke pillars again. “My tragedy makes sport for them,”’ said Enoch Sangree. -And it may have occurred to him that these others were as indifferent to the pos- sible death of Muriel as he would have been to the death of some first-line colonist. The searchers could find an abundance of turkey and deer at any rate, while Enoch Sangree, who was rich, paid all expenses, offered bigger, then bigger rewards. A faint confusion of sound and movement from a clump of blue-flag on the river’s edge near the house-boat’s stern caused him to turn his glass on the spot. The lenses ‘showed him a coiling snake with a fluttering bird in its mouth. He looked at this minor tragedy with a degree of satisfaction that ‘bespoke his personal interest in the spec- tacle. To his imagination the bird was Muriel; the snake was this wilderness— perfect, beautiful, deadly. But while the snake, with leisurely grace and strength, was still trying to improve its hold on its victim, the tragedy took a wholly unexpected turn. There was a stir and a swift commotion. Then it was the bird that was free and the snake that was caught. Sangree had seen the whole thing—the -head of an alligator suddenly emerging -from the secretive water, the snap of the alligator’s wide mouth as it closed on a coil of the snake, the snake’s swift spasm of defense. Then, there were the muddy rip- cCoOmiclbooks C©