Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

_ His eyes glared glassily, and a thin foam gathered on his lips. - “It’s there!” he screamed, with the in- coherence of his dark emotion. “ It’s there! In his eyes! Still there!” and he tottered in his place as a tree totters before falling. He would have crashed as the tree falls, to the floor, had not David leaped forward and upheld him. Madge saw the boy do this, and she had looked upon the entire incredible scene, through the red mist of nightmare, and she saw the old man’s great hand clutch the boy’s shoulders, so that as David, wincing, upheld his father, the man’s hand was stained with blood. She saw that David desired to support his father to a couch and _ it released her from the horror that held “her like a spell. She stepped forward to help him; but _ David turned his dark eyes upon her, and _ his glance held her away, for his eyes con- tained an eloquence which was more moving than speech. “It’s my father,” he murmured. “It’s between us two. We can do all we have to do for each other alone.” With his tortured back still naked to the waist, his face wet with the perspiration of VALOR. his agony, and the lips she had seen so red in the sunlight now livid and twitching with great pain, David supported his father ten= _ derly to the couch against the wall. There he laid him down and bent for a moment over him. Then he arose to his full height and drew his torn shirt about his shoulders once more, quivering with the pain it caused him. This done, he paused for a moment and breathed deeply, then, reaching to his hip pocket he drew forth his father’s gun and gently placed it above the head of the unconscious man. When he spoke, he spoke with an even, low voice, and he ad- dressed the inert figure of his father with a queer confidence, as though he knew his words were heard. “ There was a time,” he said, “ when you was whippin’ me, that I wanted to kill you. T wanted to kill you, dad. An’ that, that’s the worst thing that you’ve done. ‘“¢ You made me so that I wanted to shoot you. But I ain’t holdin’ it agen you, dad—I—” He stood silent for a moment, contem- plating the drawn, gray face of the man. “JT ain’t,” he finished with a strange calmness in his voice. TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK U Ls} Ls) THE SHADOW “TWAS vespertide I idly dreamed Beside the summer sea. Out on the rocks the starlight gleamed, Where the mermaids used to be. I heard the dreamy lullaby The sirens used A shadow drifted Beneath the misty moon. to croon— through the sky, Fancy smote the bondman’s chain That linked me to life’s toil— That romance-tree bloomed once again In the dead years’ sacred soil. I breathed the balm of South: Sea isles In the tropics’ golden sheen— Then a biplane whistled through the miles, ’Mid the fumes of gasoline! 5 A Chart Pitt, iGbooks Conn com