Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

oe, = ( “ RL P = Lie Z ~ Siem - = 5 roel . ‘<. a A i il —_ By KENNETH PERKINS Author of ‘‘ Jungle Test,'’ ‘‘ The Bull-Dogger,’” etc. CHAPTER If. A STRANGE TRIO. LAXTOW BAYOU was navigable for F deep sea vessels a good thirty miles inland. They could haul in under the lee of a pile dike and, by a constant use of the lead, navigate the ship channel, five fathoms in depth, now sandy ground, now ooze. Barges, with their lading of bales of cot- ton or sacks of wheat flour, had plenty of water. Freighters had not. When they steamed up into the foul reaches beyond tidewater they were apt to find themselves horsed up on mud lumps. There were plenty of these in Flaxtow Bayou—some of them dry for a whole season before flood- time. Pelicans used them then for breed- ing grounds which looked like fields of cot- ton because of the fluffy white fledglings. The channel itself was a long strip of steamy, stench-ridden water. Foul mists rose in feathery wreaths, enveloping the masts and stays of the freighters and min- gling in with the black smoke of their stacks. On either side of the water was a rich, almost tropical, verdure of sycamores, pepperwoods, banana trees and swamp pal- mettos. Into this scene came a rusty, red stained, weed slimed iron hulk called the Orinoco. Out of ballast she was a gaunt, narrow- bowed tramp, with a good fathom showing between the water line and the yellow sur- face of the channel. Brine and barnacles mottled her hull, her paint was blistered, bleached yellow in vertical lines from scup- pers and hawseholes. The one stack, scal- ing off its paint, belched a black cloud into the still air which mounted in a slow verti- cal whorl. The fainter copper colored mists of the channel wreathed about this mass of smoke like vine tendrils about an oak trunk. ; In that silent deserted berthage the ship 643 Gomichboo (C@