Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 19, 1924 — page 152: what you’re looking at

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

me your maw says when you hain’t only twelve years old that you shouldn’t ought to never marry no man. {It hain’t right, little matey, for no party to chart so far ahead a course for another human soul, even your maw. It hain’t night. Your maw couldn’t tell what wind and weather of fortune you’d encounter. All men hain’t wicked. No. Besides, matey, how do I know that Ya-ada Indian didn’t lie a whole lot. Anyway, them limitations hain’t in reason, or right. I was laying here half dreaming, kind of drowsy thinking like. I thinks—I—” Abruptly Dode Bradbury ceased speak- ing. One less innocent, guileless than Olo Carling might shrewdly have conjectured what Dode was thinking. But if she did suspect, she gave no outward sign. “YT know yowre not a wicked man, Dode,” she said, coming to him, trustingly placing her hand in his. “If you were to tell me all, the very all about yourself, why there wouldn’t be anything so very wicked in it. Would there?” For an instant Dode averted his gaze, eave his head a dubious shake. “ No,” he answered, “‘ not so downright, scandalous wicked at that. Us whalers hain’t perlite maybe, and we hain’t lahdeda. They’s drink- ing among whalers, and cussing, and some whalers is bilge rats, and some hain’t. Far as I’m concerned personal, Olo, just don’t think of what’s went before. Just you give me a chance and you keep lookout on what I do from now.” “T will, Dode, I will. Let me go, just a minute. This would look funny through the window, you holding one of my hands, and me with a big silver salmon in the other. Wouldn’t it?” A grin overspread the broad countenance ef the whaler. “It might. But hurry on back. I’d rather gab with you than eat even silver steak. Hurry back.” Olo ran to the kitchen, piled the big silver in a dishpan, hastily washed and dried her hands and returned. “ What hap- pened to you, Dode?” she asked drawing a chair up beside his bed. “This here I make out is Cape Flattery, hain’t it, American side, far point of the State of Washington?” he asked. ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY, Olo nodded her head. “Then I drifted a fairish way, he con- tinued. “We was whaling off Barclay Sound, Vancouver Island. It’s a good fifty mile from here. You see the gunner had harpooned a big blue, vitaled him we thought. The old man sent me overside in a work boat, to haggle a hole in the blubber and make fast the hook to hoist the blue alongside for flensing. But this whale he wasn’t dead. No. He makes a side wind at me with his flipper, and he busts me and my boat complete. First thing I knowed I kind of come to, and I was hanging to the keel of my boat, and the whaler was fifty, maybe a hundred fathom on, tearing after the blue to get in another shot. I yells, but my cry is weak. Thinking me a goner, the boat went on, kept going. JI picks up some drift, tied it to my boat keel with trawl line, and then I paddles and drifts, paddles and drifts, and makes harbor here final. That’s all.” Olo listened with wide eyes to the simple, epic tale. She clasped and unclasped her hands. “ Dode, I’m so glad you made it, safely, to—to this very beach here. What if you had landed somewhere else, some place far off? I’m so glad.” ““Matey, glad! glad!” This time he possessed himself of both her hands. Slowly he drew her toward him. A little she resisted. Finally he relaxed his hold. “Little matey,” he said earnestly, “even if this Ya-ada didn’t lie, that about you, what your mother said, hain’t right, Olo. Now is it?” This time she understood the thought that traversed the simple mind of the big whaler and her face flared crimson. With- out a word she rose to her feet, turned, fairly rushed into the kitchen and slammed the door after her. For a moment she stood in the middle of the floor, looking about her. Then, unaccountably, she burst into tears. Hf. StowLty Dode Bradbury recovered his strength. The mauling administered by a seventy-five ton blue whale, the salt water that he had drawn into his lungs, the long Eomichbooks (©)