Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 197: what you’re looking at

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

A DREAM THAT WOULD NOT FADE. fierce face and black head concealed in a floating patch of yellow, bubbly weed, was contemplating the future, and giving no thought to the questing boat. The wreckage of the past was past, and he wasted no lamentation over it. He had been smashed financially before. But a million and a half sterling floated on the warm, still weed-grown sea ahead of him, and he was puzzling himself how to realize on it. He was working out also a scheme 571 to get once more in touch with Mary Arn- cliffe. But of. the two problems, I am afraid the one about Mary got most attention. Teach, with a jerk, recognized this, and cursed himself for puerile weakness. But after giving himself a thorough rat- ing, and after sticking out his ugly jaw in full resolve to let nothing interfere with business he—went on hammering at a plan to join up again with Mary. | bf Cleveland Edwards LONG the road, which wound like a ~ yellow worm across the flower-span- gled green of April prairies, crept an ancient, long-bodied, high-wheeled farm wagon with a vulture shape perched upon the tall seat. The road itself seemed alien to the verdant loveliness of the billowing landscape, but the grotesque object which crawled along its sandy windings was a re- pellent blot. Now and then a whistling, sombreroed cowboy galloped his quick-footed cayuse by it, or a man in a light motor-car passed, swinging wide as if to avoid its touch. Some stared at but none spoke to Simon Bent, whose taloned fingers held the lines slackly over a cowed, droop-headed team. Vulture, Simon Bent looked, and vulture the Sand Hill country regarded him. His Digitized by Go gle long, black coat, ridged into a hump at the collar and falling in flapping folds down his sides, required no aid of a disordered imagination to suggest the clumsy, hunched wings of a pesching carrion-eater. A shapeless, hoodlike black hat, the brim of which rested at the back upon the hump of his coat, obscured his small, too narrow head. His eyes were small, cunning, red- lidded, and were set wide upon either side of a long beak of a nose. A mouth that was a purplish gash in a wrinkled, sun- crimsoned face, steel-trap jaws from which the stringy flesh depended in wattles, a thin neck, crimsoned like the face, crook- ing into a protruding Adam’s apple, com- pleted similitude as abhorrent as it was ap- parent., For a quarter of a century Simon Bent _ ee clOOO Original from (G(O)[N1)} S (© THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY