All-Story Weekly, Vol. 112, No. 1 — page 30: what you’re looking at

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

20 rivers—flood out the white man and all his works. - It looked that way. The country was empty. The tragedy that always stalks beauty in nature was there. ~ It was there in more tangible form -at times. This was when the automobile left some bit of meadow for a plunge through a shadowy slough—where the water still stood deep, where the ghostly cypress pressed close, where the sun never shone, where the moccasins and the alligators lurked, where strange birds flitted like shadows, where the quivering deer came to hide themselves when hunters were about. Shuiski and his chauffeur had just trav- ersed a place like that—and something of the spell of it was on both of them, per- haps, to judge by their silence—when the chauffeur broke the silence with a sharp cry: . - “ Carlo!” Carlo, who had been hiding behind a clump of palmetto, emerged into fuller view —a gaunt and swarthy young man, dressed like a swamper and carrying a gun, but looking as one might upon whom the swamp had put the seal of death. “Carlo!” echoed Shuiski. ‘What has happened?” The car had stopped and Carlo came stumbling forward. As yet he had not spoken. Shuiski jumped from the car and took a couple of steps to meet him: ‘“‘'What’s the matter?” _ Carlo gave a despairing glance in the di- rection of a small hammock-island across the plain. “The girl—” On the edge of the distant ‘sland a camp was visible. It was a camp that had been established there years ago by some enthu- siastic cowman (long since dead and buried) who had sought to make this wet wilderness his cattle range. Shuiski druled a curse. He suspected the And then: worst, but he did not dare come out with it. ‘“* She killed herself?” “Escaped! Ran off! Got away!” * ‘You damned—”’ “ Basta!” Carlo hissed savagely, as he ALL-STORY WEEKLY. swung his gun around. “I’ve been through hell. But I’ve found her again. I know where she is.”’ CHAPTER XII. THE LONG NIGHTMARE. HERE must have been elements of all _this in the delirium of Muriel Sangree as she lay there in Tommy Tigertail’s ruined camp on the edge of the Everylades. First there had been that drift with her father—from St. Augustine to Palm Beach, from Palm Beach to Miami; aimless, so far as she was concerned, and a trifle bore- some, with the round of gaieties that were all alike;. dinners, dances, flirtations, morn- ings on the beach, afternoons of laziness and tea, more dances, more flirtations. But just as the late John Muir pointed out that there is an intelligence back of the drift of every snowflake sent down to carve a mountain, so evidently there must have been an intelligence back of this seemingly idle drift of hers. Not until Miami had this purpose ap- peared, however; and that was when An- thony Lathrop had taken her aloft for a flight in his sea-plane. A winding ribbon of white beach with a fringe of forest and a few red specks that were roofs; and all this set between the three infinities of sky, ocean and Ever- glade. There had been two other infinities in the girl’s thought that day—the infinite past and the infinite future. Out of the infinite past she and Anthony Lathrop had wandered, preordained, to this, their meet- ing-place. Henceforward and forever to- gether now they would follow the aerial path into the infinite future. A mere fleeting thought that had come to her as the sea-plane coasted into the depths of the blue! Why hadn’t she told him of this thought that second night he had called on her? He must have guessed it. There was a good deal of the seer about him. There must have been. He was not like any other youth she had ever met. Least of all was he like the male flirts and idlers, the gamblers and socia] pirates who swarmec cCoOmiclbooks C©