Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 37: what you’re looking at

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

MOONING AMONG MOONSHINERS., shad fishing jaunt to Dutch Gap, leaving me to swim ashore. Probably they knew I could do it. Even a Southern jury will not countenance careless murder like that. In a way poetic justice had asserted it- self. The place where I had thus unwisely drawn the gang’s attention to the nation’s arid condition was exactly off what was, in the days before any of us began acquiring savings bank accounts, known as the Beer Garden. It was a picnic ground of the gone but not forgotten past. A grove of little pines grew close by the water’s edge, with a ramshackle old slab building looking down over the river. Once the boards of its veranda were smooth enough for danc- ing. A little farther back in the pines was a clearing, with a dilapidated platform in the center that once had been used for prize fights. Off at the side were a couple of little buildings where the fighters dressed and their managers matched coins to see which one should win, this time. I knew the place perfectly for I'd been there plenty of times before our national squabbles took me off, first to the border and then overseas and the military life knocked a little sense into me. I saw the gang intended to leave me here until they came back the next morning. I knew it first on general principles, because, distinctly, I knew I deserved it. Secondly, because a little down stream the launch steered in close to the bulkhead and the gang tossed over onto the bank one of the baskets of provisions, tooted the fog-horn twice, and headed the leaky old tub of a launch down stream again. There I was, sitting on the bank, drip- ping James River mud and trying hard to feel indignant. But all the time I was real- izing the justness of the retribution drop- ping me in this particular spot for singing the particular song I had. There was nothing but lonesomeness and bum fishing ahead of me for about eighteen hours. Of course, I could if I felt like it hike twelve miles back through the woods and catch an electric car to the city. When I got there I could answer a lot of fool questions as to why I quit the party. I decided to stay where I was. To-morrow morning I would be taken off 663 by the gang, who would have big strings of fish and bigger strings of lies and I’d hate myself for a month thinking of this wasted holiday. Meanwhile, if the mosquitoes did not de- vour me alive during the night, I was in for a tiresome siege of myself. Philosophy, after a hand-to-hand struggle with im- patience, during the time I was drying off on the bulkhead, won out and I voted a negative on the idea of walking out. So I arose and hustled down to retrieve the lunch before it was discovered as manna from Heaven by some industrious ant. The basket wasn’t there. If it had not been for the mark in the mud where it hit, I would have suspected myself of seeing things in imagining it was pitched off. But there was the mark in the soft mud. And there was likewise the print of a bare human foot; not a large one. ‘Some pickaninny is having the spread of his young life,” I reflected and turned Indian trailer. 3 This beat fishing four ways from the ace, because there weren’t any fish in the river here anyhow. I had conclusive evidence that my kind of game was somewhere among the trees, but I couldn’t follow the tracks far. They beat off into the grassy woods. It must have been an average small dark- ey, I figured, because the footprints were small and anybody knows how tiny a coon must be to have a foot to which that word can be applied, even in infancy. For an hour or two I wandered around the woods, took a look at the clearing and the two little cabins there. They did not seem to be fall- ing to pieces as much as the big front build- ing. The doors were padlocked. If I had been less intense in my search for the edibles I’d have investigated the cabins further. But from being a pastime this thing of hunting for my grub had be- come a life interest. I must either locate the little smoke before he ate up all my sup- plies or I must walk those twelve miles to the electric line, unless I could locate a white folks’ house nearer. Something was going to happen to that thief, I kept telling myself. Mighty slim comfort it was, too, with me getting more emaciated as time elapsed. GomiGchbooks (C@