Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 23: what you’re looking at

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

TUNED OUT. sumably been built by an eccentric. Its site was a pocket that formed the termina- tion of a deep bottled gulch in the moun- tain. The pocket originally had been the base of a waterfall which had dropped a height of a hundred odd feet or so from the top of the perpendicular cliffs above. The builder of the shack had diverted the stream on the summit that had fed the falls ‘by means of a rock wall. He had switched it into another bed which caused the stream to spill its falls at a point a hundred yards farther up the gulch. The builder had then utilized the three walls of the original base of the falls for the rear and ends of his shack. Their tim- bers fitted snugly against the smooth rock and the roof sloped steeply at an angle up from the low front of the shack to the rear wall of the pocket. The sole approach to the shack’s door was a narrow, bracken impeded pathway that struggled to it alongside the stream from the mouth of the bottled gulch. The path was about two miles in length. The stream that carried off the falls was quite deep in places, and its pools were well stocked with trout. It was an ideal re- treat for a hermit or for a sportsman. The steep and, in places, inaccessible walls of the gulch were covered with a dense growth of underbrush and timber, and the air was ever redolent with the clarifying, pungent odor of pine. It was equally an ideal retreat for a scientist whose métier consisted in ex- periments which, with the accidental or injudicious passage of hairs-breadths, ter- minated in cataclysmic explosions. Fur- thermore, no habitation stood within many miles of the shack, so that if the worst should occur and Ramier’s atoms should find themselves unequal to the task of bear- ing the strain that would be put upon them, no one but his assistant and himself would be injured. It was Drusilla herself who insisted upon being Ramier’s assistant. She announced this decision shortly after she and Ramier had become engaged. They had plighted their troth in the grotto at the base of the new falls. 818 Nor is that plighting a matter to be breezily passed over with few or with care- less words. It was much too unique for that. CHAPTER V. SKEWERED, BELIEVE that Cupid, when given a man | and a girl, a sylvan retreat, and a sum- mer’s moonlight night, has little to do beyond shooting two arrows and then trotting on about his business to other couples less fortunately surrounded by the trappings of romance, So the celestial child must have thought on the evening when Ramier and Drusilla plighted their troth; for having shot his darts, he at once decamped without wait- ing to see whether or not they had taken effect. One can scarcely hold Cupid to blame for this, for the summer is admit- tedly his open season and he undoubtedly has more jobs on his hands than he can manage with any sort of efficiency at all. A look-—a dart—a target—then he must beat it and rush on to his next victims. “Ah!” murmured Drusilla, as the moon at its full shook free from the fingers of tall pines, and swam indolently up above the crest of the gulch and out ‘upon a starry sea of deep mauve. “T beg pardon?” said Ramier, twisting to a less. comfortable position on the top of the large bowlder from where they were watching the falling waters. Drusilla pointed a slim finger skyward. ‘“‘’The moon,” she said. Ramier regarded the satellite with dis- tracted eyes. He was feeling uncomfort- able; more so than he had ever felt before in his whole life. Ramier’s discomfort had arisen from the moment, then a half hour past, when Drusilla had invited his assistance by giv- ing him her hand as they had mounted the bowlder. The action had surprised Ramier, as he knew as well as she did that her feet, when engaged in climbing, were as agile and sure as are those of a chamois. ‘You feeling all right?” he had mum- bled, after Drusilla had at last succeeded ComiclbooksS.se©