Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 50: what you’re looking at

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

- 860 Seven. Thirty-Seven came through at four o’clock and it would land them in Vingo a little after four thirty—still an hour on the safe side of daybreak. If she could only get into the house before old man Clayburn - woke up! Well, they pounded on the front door of my house at a few minutes to five, and they told me the story in shouts while I was warming up the flivver. The sun was just coming up when I let Christine out, a few hundred yards from the Clayburn house; and she slipped in and went to bed without being seen or heard. And that was er great adventure—/er long, sweet draft of romance. I suppose it was sordid—a little thing like her letting herself get drunk and then having two roughnecks fight over her. But love can do a lot of dolling up to an incident like that fight down at Mosquito Inlet. It wasn’t sordid to Christine. An innocent country girl was being lured to destruction by a cold-eyed villain and a big bronzed boy with a heart of gold had suffered agonies in a fight for her honor! On moonlit sands he had fought and torn her from the clutches of a beast in human form. Yes, sir! I called it pretty good romance then, and I still agree with myself. And a week after it happened, as soon as Ed Randolph was well enough to go to town—Christine was wearing the mate to Belinda’s genuine diamond chip set in real white gold! They were planning a double wedding, and old man Clayburn was simply tickled pink. He knew that the Randolph twins were steady, courageous, honest minded young fellows, and as sons-in-law they would make wonderful assets. He owned a, good sized farm and more acres of cypress and pine than you could tally. His own sons had grown up and gone out into the world, and he was perfectly willing for the twins to help him run the place. He was building a cute little bungalow for each couple on twin knobs of land overlooking the Tomoka, and they were to be wedding presents. Everybody was happy. The twins loved their girls, and the girls adored their twins. ‘It was like a happy holiday until suddenly, — ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. so to speak, a weird, low whistle was heard, — resembling no sound belonging to this earth, and there—there stood Alvina Barnes! TIT. SOMETHING less than forty hours after the beautiful, red-haired, white-skinned girl with the diamond eyes had come to Vingo, Belinda and Christine dropped into the commissary to do some shopping and have me make out money orders for certain pink and silken garments of one kind and another that every self-respecting young bride generally deems necessary for the great occasion. They en- riched Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward to the extent of some sixty dollars be- tween them, chattering like a pair of birds on a fence rail in spring; but when the money orders were made out, sealed in their en- velopes and put with the northbound mail, a silence fell and the Clayburn girls, after looking thoughtfully at each other, both turned and leveled their clear, direct blue eyes on me. They looked so solemn, both of them, that I stared. ‘“‘ Buck,” Christine said as we moved out toward the front of the store, “ what’s got into the twins lately?” | “And pa,” Belinda added. “Since the last couple of days,” Chris- tine went on, “ they’ve been acting like dif- ferent men.” “Maybe the bear’s got them,” I sug- gested, knowing full well it wasn’t “the bear,” which is the Florida backwoods way of referring to the summer heat. “The bear wouldn’t get all three of them at once,” said Belinda. ‘ And they haven’t got the symptoms.” “They mope,” Christine put in. She was the livelier one of the sisters, as you no doubt already have guessed, and the shorter by two or three inches. Belinda was, at least by contrast, serious. Christine’s eyes seemed always to be dancing, and with her little turned-up nose with its spray of freckles across the bridge, she reminded you of a spirited, mischievous child. Belinda’s traits were sweetness and gravity and sym- pathy. I liked them both impartially. “They sulk,” Belinda added. ‘““They’ve lost their pep,” Christine LI Eomichbooks (E@)