Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 106: what you’re looking at

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

396 And then she says I was a mean, unerate- ful, jealous girl to talk like that after all she’d done for me, and I says, “ All you ever done for me was to get me stranded here in a tank town to keep you company while you hooked a fish!” And then she went and told Mrs. Gavin a lot of lies about me, and they both got mad, and I got mad, and I packed up my stuff and went down the street, and I met Louie Shuster standing on the corner. I told him about it, and then he told me about it, and then he says to me, “ How much money you got?” { told him I had one hundred and eighteen dollars, and he showed me his sav- ings bank book, and he had eleven hundred and seventy-five saved up. T says: “* Gee, that’s a lot of money, ain’t it?” And he says, ‘ Well, it might be more. What do you say we go around to the court- house and get a license and get married?” I says to him, “ Well, I ain’t doing noth- ing.” So we went, and we got married. And when we come out from getting married, I says to him: ‘‘ Well,” I says, “ what will we do now?” He says: “ Well,” he says, ‘we'll go down to the station and we'll wait there until a train comes through going East, and then we'll get on it,” he says, “and then we'll go on to New York,” he says, “ and see maybe can we look around and find a place and start a little delicatessen shop and maybe make some dough,’ ‘he says. “Listen Louie,” I says to him, “ ain’t we going to live here in Blueville?” “Did you think-we was?” he says. “‘ Sure!’ I says. “Do you want to live here?” he says. “Would you if I wanted to?” I says to him. * Sure!” he says. So I stopped and I kissed him right on the street, and I says to him, “ Louie,” I says, ‘‘I didn’t know you Joved me as much as that. Listen,” I says. “ Let’s hurry, because maybe a train would go through before we got there and we would have to wait here until another one comes mn ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY, So we come on back to New York, and we started a little place—a little delicates- sen shop on Amsterdam Avenue up above Seventy-Ninth Street. We didn’t do so bad for a while. We had pretty good cus- tomers and everything, only the shop was kind of little, and we was saving up to get a bigger place where we could make more money. . And then the baby come, and that cost a lot of dough, and after we paid for a doc- tor and a nurse and the hospital and every- thing we didn’t have enough left to move into a bigger place across the street in the next block that we wanted to get. So Louie got a tip on a horse that couldn’t lose from a friend of his and we talked it over, and we went out to the track and bet five hundred on the goat at eight to one so we could get enough to move into this other place and make some real dough. The name of this horse was Pumphandle, and they had been waiting for a year to find a place they could put him in where he would be sure to win. I guess he had been waiting so long he must have got nervous, because when the horses started he got his ends mixed up and was pointed the wrong way. If he had won that race the way he was pointed, he would have had to do it backing up. He run fine when they got him pointed right, but the rest of the horses was halfway to the finish line before he started to run in the right di- rection. : So I give Louie a good bawling out for gambling, him with a wife and a baby. And he give me a good bawling out be- cause he talked it over with me before, and I did not tell him not to, and we had a fight. When we got home we made up, and we counted all the money we had, and what we owed and everything, and Louie says, ““'Well, we’ll just stick here where we are unti] we make another stake, and by and by we can move into a real place and may- be make some dough.” And the next morning Marie du Claire come into the store to get a box of crackers and some cheese and some dill pickles, only of course she wasn’t Marie du Claire any more, she was Mrs. Farnsworth. conmiclctolks (CO)