Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 7, 1928 — page 12: what you’re looking at

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

2 ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. flung up, which, as it cooled and crys- tallized, became a crag of porphyry, porphyry, hard and impervious as glass. A little spring high up on the moun- tainside, seeking an outlet for itself down to the lowlands and the sea, gradually cut a channel through the surrounding softer rock. But when it reached that jutting porphyry crag, it was forced to admit itself baffled, and had to flow around it. So it happened that when the early pioneers explored the deep rift which through centuries of effort the little stream had worn away, they came upon a peculiar bend, where the channel al- most doubled on itself. They paid slight attention to the cir- cumstance, beyond using it to supply a name for the cafion; and the men who later on laid the locality off into politi- cal subdivisions took no account of it at all. They simply laid a ruler on the map, and, drawing a straight line, wrote Bridger County on one side of it, and Los Chicos County on the other. And there the seeds of trouble were planted; for the result was, that, al- though the rest of the entire course of Hairpin Canon and the trickling brook at the bottom of it lay on the Bridger County side, the bend around the por- phyry crag extended for an appreciable distance over across the Los Chicos County line. Still for years the matter excited no especial interest. The rattlesnakes and tarantulas which ‘chiefly populated the section apparently cared little where the line ran; and the few listless, dis- couraged human inhabitants were al- most as indifferent to it. As for fighting over the question! What on earth, they would have asked you, was there in either Los Chicos or Bridger County worth fighting about? Doubtless the good Lord knew why He had created such a region; but nobody else had ever been able to figure out a plausible reason It looked like a portion left over from the time the earth was without form and void. ‘Tumbled hills of crumbling, black lava, fissured by sandy arroyos. Barren, windswept valleys with never a sprig of green. Soil like powdered bone dust. Air like the breath of a furnace. The dryness of a prohibitionist’s heaven. Outside of that tiny creek in the bed of Hairpin Cafion, not enough water in the whole five thousand square miles of it to fill a bird’s bathtub. Once, it is true, Los Chicos County had experienced a brief season of pros- perity. Dave Todd, an elderly prospec- tor, burrowing in the rocks up above Hairpin Cafion, had struck gold— enough to make him rich beyond his dreams, and bring a horde of other gold seekers flocking to the scene. The mining camp, named Rio Rita, which quickly sprang up at the spot, doubled its population almost daily, and beginning to assume an air of permanence, was made the county seat. Dave Todd, now the magnate of the place, built himself a great stone castle on the top of a near-by mountain, ran for Congress, and otherwise essayed the pastimes of the wealthy. Then he died, and almost simultane- ously the gold strike played out. ‘The gold hunters and the dance hall girls and the faro dealers vanished over- night ; and Los Chicos County speedily reverted to its primal, hopeless state. Rio Rita, although remaining the seat of local government, dwindled to a mere dead-and-alive, back country vil- lage. And so things continued until Molly Todd, Dave’s nineteen-year-old daugh- ter, and the sole heir to his fortune, re- turned to her childhood home after six years spent at fashionable Eastern schools and in travel. She was a young woman of modern ideas and with an overflowing energy, and the sight of the sterility and deso- lation all about sickened her. Thou- sands of acres belonging to her patri- mony were a mere desert waste, serv- EOPMIE MOO KS (E@)