Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 4, 1925 — page 118: what you’re looking at

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

By PAUL DERESCO AUGSBURG k: ancestral estate of J. Trowbridge Farnsworth had dwindled to one small room over the Four Deuces Bar. Within its soiled, gray walls were gathered, as he himself would have put it, the surviving Lares and Penates of a family once proud, pecunious and well escutch- eoned. They consisted of three venerable tintvpes, a yellowed parchment proclaim- ing in Latin that J. Trowbridge Farnsworth was this day awarded a degree in law, a paper-backed copy of Vergil’s “ £neid,” and twenty-two pawn tickets. The reason that the entire estate had not been converted into pawn tickets is mani- fest. Try as he might, J. Trowbridge Farnsworth had never been able to per- suade a usurious money lender that the ancestral tintvpes, the elaborately _let- tered diploma, or the rhythmic chronicle of AEneas’s wanderings were worth a nickel as security. All the logic which J. Trowbridge Farnsworth could muster, all the eloquent quotations in the original Greek and Latin, al! the arguments from authorities both sacred and profane had no effect upon the glittering-eyed uncles behind the counter. They would waggle their heads disdainfully and order him from their shops. How J. Trowbridge Farnsworth ever got to Pacific Street none of its sorry citizens knew or cared. To the Barbary Coast came strange men and women from every corner of the world—men like the last of the Farns- worths, whose birth had been high and proud; women like Two Step Lou, whose childhood had been spent God knows how Or where. There in the demimonde of San Francisco’s colorsome past they met in sor- did equality: sailor and soldier, miner and gambler, fallen duke and unregenerate gen- tlemen, shadowy sisters of the old world and the new. Life moved fast in Pacific Street. The music beat its quickening rhythm, then rum flowed swift, the shrieks and laughter grew in hilarity through the 908 (© GIOok