Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 71: what you’re looking at

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

THE WHISPERER. but it cut off the speech of the district at- torney like a hot knife going through a piece of cheese. -“ * What’s there?’ said the district attor- ney. “But the gent that got the paper, he just passed it on to the gent next to him, and that one turned sort of green and sick- looking and moved it on to‘the next. And so it went all through the jury-box. “The district attorney finished up; the jury went out and came back in five min- utes, saying: ‘ Not guilty!’ Yep, it was a unanimous verdict, and afterward every one on that jury went around telling the boys in a loud voice that he had voted to acquit Goggles, and that he’d like to have the word passed on.” ‘““It was the paper?” asked Patricia. “It sure was. There was writ on it: ‘Boys, I’ve got all your names. If you hang Goggles you'll have to tell me why later on.’ ‘And underneath, the paper was signed: ‘The Whisperer. Now you know why ‘Goggles ain’t been touched by the law and why it ain’t possible to get a jury in these parts to convict him. MHere’s the paper. I got a hold of it and I’ve always kept it with me.’ He drew it from a vest-pocket and handed -it to Patricia—a little scrap torn roughly ~ from a larger sheet, and the words on it were scrawled clumsily in back-hand, like the writing of a child of seven. “The Whisperer!” frowned Patricia. “ Who is he?”’ “Don’t you even know that?” asked Ugly Joe, in disgust. ‘“ Well, you'll hear a pile about him before you been in these . parts long. He’s a lone rider who hangs out somewhere in them hills. Nobody knows just where; about a’teen posses have hunted for him and never got on his trail. They lay a lot of things to the Whisperer; some of them may be lies, but a pile of them ain’t. I know! He’s a sort of a ghost, the Whisperer is. He rides a white horse that can go like the wind; and he wears light~ gray clothes, and a white handkerchief all over his face like a mask.. Nobody has ever seen his face, but when he shows up he’s known by his voice. It ain’t any com- 445 mon voice. It’s a sort of a husky hissing, like something had gone wrong with his throat. It takes the heart out of a man to just hear that voice.” “Yes,” murmured Patricia, “it’s ghost-_ ly; it’s horrible! But are you sure that it was really the Whisperer who threw that paper through the window?” ‘That’s what a lot of people wanted to know, and particularly Lew Lauriston—you know him—old Mort’s brother. He didn’t think the Whisperer had anything to do with the case. So he got Porky Kennedy, the two-gun man, to go on the trail of Goggles and put him under the sod. There wasn’t much of a secret about it. Every- body in Eagles knew that it was about time for Goggles to move on his way, be- cause Porky Kennedy had a long line of killings to his credit already. “ Porky went to Eagles; but Goggles didn’t show no special hurry about leaving. Finally Porky went to Widow Morgan’s | house for supper one night. Everybody sat around the table scared stiff, because they knew that as soon as Goggles came in there’d be a killing and one foreign English dude less in the world. But Goggles didn’t come in. They began to think that the fool dude. had finally got some sense behind them glasses of his and left for parts ‘un- known. But about the middle of the meal, while Porky was telling a long story, the door opened and the wind blew the flame jumping up and down in the chimney of the lamp. “And from the door there was a whis. per: ‘Kennedy!’ And when they looked up, there stood the Whisperer with his white mask and his gray clothes and his voiceless voice. Kennedy pulled his gun, but his hand was shaking so that the gun fell out of his hand and rattled on the floor, and Kennedy dropped on his knees against the wall and covered up his face in his arms, moaning like a sick kid. “But the Whisperer hadn’t come for a killing. He just vanished out the door. Pretty soon in comes Goggles and cocks an eye over to Kennedy as calm as you please. But Kennedy wasn’t interested in any kill- ing just then. He ups from his chair and climbed through the door in about two GOMLGDOO (CO