Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 11, 1925 — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

% ie) A. ee ¥ Might 2 AY nt i ees 8, i ae ite id . ? ie oN: o | ADA AGA SSATP AMES 252 He could not escape the thought of how slight and childish she had looked in there, sitting with the curve of her small chin on her hands and with the firelight dancing on her face. Her defenselessness had been dis- concerting, too, when she came to her feet with terror burning in her eyes. “Bosh and nonsense,” he mentally ex- claimed, contemptuously. “It’s just be- cause I was fool enough to fall in love with her—if one can call it love. Yet, if there wasn’t a trace of anything better than passion in that love, it was because that was all she could call out. I'd rather have had the real thing—spirit as well as flesh. The vulgarity and ignorance could have been cured. developed her, but you can’t put a moral backbone into a moral invertebrate.” He arose and shook his head. “Yet,” he admitted dismally to himself, “T felt a brute when she didn’t spit fire at me and blackguard me—in the old way— when she just stood there and looked piteous. ‘The hardest of them can be so damned soft.” ~ The next day when Carroll came back from a morning of rail splitting Cynthia was nowhere to be seen. Aunt Erie said she had gone off on some expedition of her own and might not be back for several = hours. SS, “ All right,” laughed Carroll. “ I’m out of a job this afternoon, and since Miss Stokes wouldn’t go with me, I think Ill climb Old Shaggy alone, but T’ll do it on foot instead of horseback. I'll take the steep wee trail.” som It was stiff going up the sheer front of = Ss the mountain that raised its head loftily Fe above its neighbors; stiff going that sent a ee man’s blood pumping vigorously through his veins and burned into muscular fatigue ase the restlessness of new doubts. = To one who had lived in shoulder touch ____ with orderly multitudes it was an education, too. Here, looking down on a wildness that seemed to cry defiance on man’s amendment, one could realize how sporadic must be man’s effort to overlay this lawless- ness of untamed ages with his own prim, ___ ethical miniatures. 3 ‘Here were Sires of matted forest and poe Studs i . I’d have worked with her and ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. acre upon acre of rhododendron thickets through which a bear could hardly worm its way. Here were glimpses of cliffs poroused with caverns that opened chamber upon chamber, and of gorges that gathered © up and held mighty handfuls of shadow. No wonder that in such a country a man could “take leg-bail” and hide out. <A battalion, it seemed, might disappear in such a place and remain indefinitely con- cealed. ‘Stacy Carroll began to wonder whether one could draw a sharp line between the counterfeit and the geunine in human affairs. The colors and spaces of that high cloud-land seemed to impart themselves to a man’s thoughts and to change with the course of the sun. Here he seemed to be divided into two identities. One of them was sitting on a moss-covered rock and looking with a cold impartiality on the other, who had hitherto been himself. And the man on the rock felt like shouting at the other man, who had been himself: “You poor counterfeit—you flawed reflec- tion of uncertain values! Who are you to sit in judgment?” Finally, he rose from the place where he had rested and went on. It was half way up the mountain that he hitched his way around a sharp abutment of stone, holding to the jutting root of a wind-crippled pine, and saw on a rock shelf fifty yards away the seated figure of a girl. “Now how the devil did she get here?” he asked himself, a little piqued that Cynthia had made the ascent upon the ac- complishment of which he had been rather pluming himself. His second thought was: “Now we can finish the little interview that was interrupted last night.” He smiled as he reflected how footless it would be for her to shout to Wade or Aunt Erie for rescue up here, almost in grasping distance of the lowest trailers of - cloud. The opportunity for which he had been waiting had seemed to drop from the sky— and yet unaccountably, with the end at hand, he hesitated. He had made it plain to the ri ‘nic the first that all he needed, or asked, was five minutes alone with her. In that Ste minutes 3 yi ot a ee 5 se = ae ea " ome = “ La vi =. —, . > ~ > —_— > et ee COMICDNOOKS. - * : ~~“ > Se er >= eZ > iu ~ > mS ns, a — oe . a = vy ad % < =~ = =r — ‘