Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 7, 1928 — page 102: what you’re looking at

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

92 flame in the form of a human being, delineated in the image of God. The flame burned into his brain. He saw red. He was gripped with an in- explicable anger, a fury, as if some one had taken from him the dearest possession in his life. What she was singing he did not know. It made no difference. He only knew that the girl who had taught him that “ goodness and mercy would follow him all the days of his life,’ was up there in front of these gamblers and thieves and drunkards, singing a beautiful song. A pearl had been cast before swine. This renegade gambler was a pe- culiar fellow. Like many men who consorted with the flotsam of gambling dives, he had an unreasonable convic- tion that human beings were either very good or very bad. This theory applied more especially to women. There were cantina girls, who be- longed in gambling dives, and there were angels who did not belong there. If angels were found there, it meant that the forces of hell were working overtime. It meant that a smirch was made across the battlements of Heaven. It meant that something holy was being debased. It meant that God was being dealt a cold deck. Before Priscilla had sung the first verse of her hymn she saw a tall figure, elbowing his way in powerful shoves through the gang of miners below her. He was head and shoulders above most of the crowd. And she could not have helped seeing him—even if, as the case was, she had not been look- ing for him. Abruptly the silken thread of her song was cut. She stood with flushed face, parted lips, eager burning eyes looking down to him. A dead silence gripped the packed dance hall of the Gold Rocker House. These men who were rudely elbowed out of the way growled sullenly but softly. They saw that the personal ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. affront had come from a powerful- looking stranger, one on whose Mephis- tophelean face there was the fore- shadowing of murder. Dorsey got to the row of bottles and lighted candles. Without so much as putting his hand on the edge of the stage, he bounded up. Then precipitously a hullabaloo of voices stormed upon him. He had seen a temple idol of his own violated, but he overlooked the fact that he was violating an idol of five hundred hot- blooded men. No one could make out the words of that shout, for they were stripped from many different vocabularies. ‘‘ Raus! Vamose! Kill!’ were the most out- standing cries. But whatever the na- tionality of this crazy stranger, the crowd saw that he did not understand the purport of their yells. They saw, likewise, that the idol her- self did not understand. And _ that was the most flabbergasting part of the scene. Instead of backing away or calling upon her audience for help, the songstress actually put out her arms, and threw them about the neck of this intruder. “Out with him! Lynch him! Mur-— der him!” But the cries petered out. Evidently they were looking upon an entirely different scene than they had anticipated. Probably the song bird had found her lover after traveling to this bar- baric shore from the edge of the earth. The years and the seas might have separated them. At least that was what the audience at the Gold Rocker thought when they saw the girl’s eyes, beaming like stars. Providentially they did not hear what he was saying to her. He spoke softly, but in a savage whisper. “Look here, you! What in the name of ten thousand devils are you doing in this pub?” He was holding her hands in a viselike grip. Her seraphic face, turned up toward him, had lost its calm serenity. Excite- Gomichbooks (E@)