Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 99: what you’re looking at

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

THE BUGLER and spread his shame through the length and breadth of the neighborhood. It was on his seventeenth birthday that Sadface’s hatred and scorn of Bill McCarty rose to its bitterest pitch. Through all the years that followed—years in which he never saw the McCarty face nor heard the McCarty name—it burned steadily. He did not forget it, nor did he want to forget. At that time Sadface was working on the night shift at the locomotive works, and he rose for breakfast at three o’clock in the afternoon, - He had a room on the third floor of a slab-sided house in Peregrine Street. It was a furiously hot day. The sun beat down in waves on the asphalt, where horses’ hoofs had made deep impressions. Nobody was about when he glanced carelessly out of the window. Only the blue shimmer at the river end of the street caught his gaze. Then, suddenly came a scream, a fright- ful shriek in the high voice of a woman —a voice goaded to the uttermost pitch of horror. For a moment Sadface was rooted to the floor. The scream had smeared a sudden icy streak along his spine. | He stumbled to the window and looked out. A woman was running up Peregrine Street, a fat, shapeless woman, whose sudsy skirts fluttered grotesquely about her thick, cotton stockinged legs. Her arms were out- stretched, the fingers twitching. And,-as she ran, she screamed. | Sadface watched her until she disap- peared around a curve in the crooked street, but still he did not move. He knew the woman. She was the mother of one of his pals, Whippy O’Brien. Why had she screamed like that? He waited. The minutes seemed to drag like hovrs. Presently a sad little party turned the curve in Peregrine Street. Two men held Mrs. O’Brien by her fat arms, and helped her along. She was crying hysterically. They disappeared in the house across the way. Again Peregrine Street was deserted—for a moment. Then, in the blazing sunlight, a man ap- peared, walking slowly. He carried a limp, wet figure in his arms—a dead boy—and 89 the boy was Whippy O’Brien. Very slowly he proceeded, the man and his burden, as though he were already marching behind a funeral cortége, and disappeared into the house across the street. Sadface was dazed. He went down into Peregrine Street in an aimless sort of shuffle, and asked the first person he met what had caused the tragedy. ‘*Qh, Whippy was playin’ around down be the wharf, flyin’ a kite or somethin’, an’ OF BELLEAU, crash, he went off the stringpiece. Bill Mc- Carty was down there, they tell me, an’ he stood lookin’ at the kid drown’d without tryin’ to save him. Bill can swim all right, but I just guess he didn’t have the guts to dive in.” . “Damn him! Damn _ him!” whispered in a broken voice. : He went into the house that had been Whippy O’Brien’s home, and mourned with the grieving mother. It was the first time that death had come so close to him, and the mystery of it awed and frightened him. He blamed it all on Bill McCarty, and, only knowing one way of meting out jus- tice and punishment he went looking for his enemy with his grimy hands doubled into fists. But he did not find him. 3 McCarty had gone. A month later a scribbled note let Peregrine Street know that he “ had gone for a soldier ”’—that he had enlisted in the Marines and was then on his way to a post in China. Sadface Whelen’s disgust and hate mounted to heights that were almost sub- lime. The crawling, yellow quitter! He hadn’t the courage to save: little Whippy O’Brien, strangling there in the water under the dock, and he did not have enough nerve to face the contempt with which Peregrine Street would wither him. The Marines, eh? A fine pass the corps was coming to when such whelps as Bill McCarty found it so easy to get in. And then, without any reason save a vague de- sire to beat McCarty at whatever game he attempted, Larry Whelen enlisted, too. In Sadface his dreams he became a man of authority; one who could give his enemy perpetually odious tasks as some small punishment for having allowed Whippy O’Brien to die. COMMicoookKks com