Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 121: what you’re looking at

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

By EARL WAYLAND This is the first of five short stories concerning the rapid, roaring, desert metro- polis of Red Bluff. You will meet herein in consecutive weekly issues: (1) a fighting rooster that barred no hold from anybody or anything; (2) a professional footracing horntoad; (3) the municipal polecat; (4) that phenomenon, the deceased mule; and (5) the unromantic non-flopping flapjack. These are veracious tales of the West. Read "em and weep—iears of joy.—THE EpITor. “This is the song of a rooster— When roosters were eager to fight; Ere laws got so thick they made us all sick, But nothin’ ain’t never just right!” —Songs of the Shaky Sixteen. ORE years ago than some of us care Mi to remember, two aged prospectors, accompanied by a small mouse- tinted, long-eared burro named “ Versus,” toiled patiently across the vast expanse of the primeval desert stretching from end to end of the uttermost appendix of south- BOWMAN western Nevada and extending over the edge into the borders of the lovely and un- usual climate of southern California. The desert still stretches and extends, but it is no longer primeval. Civilization has wrought changes; time has effaced the solitude in spots, and where once was heard only the shrill staccato yelp of the prowling coyote, there now sounds the sputter of radio outfits, the incongruous backfire of automobile trucks, et cetera. The prospectors were “‘ Solemn ” Johnson 75« <S' (C@) EOMIGdoOO