Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 123, No. 4 — page 127: what you’re looking at

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

GOTHAM’S WIFE. The girl rushed to him. She looked up fearfully into his eyes and then put her bare, cool arm about his neck. “What do you mean, Gary! There’s nothing to worry about now. It’s all over! Everything is all right now!” She looked up eagerly but could see the flame coming back into his eyes. ‘‘ What do you mean by saying that—” she cried—“ that he’s going to pay?” “‘He’s going to—I—” Duane’s sentence broke and he looked at his wife with a sud- den bewilderment. ‘“ I am going to—”’ “To what?” Oo | He released himself. ‘“ Well, I can’t tell you now.” He took his hat and hurried out. Judith heard the elevator bell and the clicking of the iron filigreed door. She thought her husband had come to a sudden enraged decision. But it was not a decision; it was a conflict—a baffling, in- soluble conflict: Chantry, a debauchee, had attacked his wife in a cowardly, under- handed way, and had succeeded just far enough to ruin her name—the name of Duane. That was enough to make any man fly into a passion. It was certainly not a state of affairs productive of cool de- cisions. In that first sudden spasm of anger Du- ane .felt that Chantry should pay in the dearest way—the just way. But how? What could that mean—“ the dearest way, the just way?” Both men were in the cen- ter of New York. Their ways were the ways of New York. Duane was surround- ed by walls, by men, by laws. As he stalked into the great cafions of buildings he suddenly came to himself. It was the first time in his life he had felt the impulse to kill. It crashed into a thousand other instincts which the ages had raised and strengthened. For a block of rapid, jostled walking he analyzed it with comparative calm and realized that he had made a resolve which fought against every element of that scene: every gigantic building, every stone wall, every iron gate, every thundering machine, every man. His whole intent, sudden, impassioned, feverish as it had been, suddenly floundered. He must make Chantry pay, he said to himself, but how? How could a civilized man meet a civilized enemy? If he did meet him, what could he do? “I must think first,” Duane kept mum- bling to himself. ‘“ I have a great thing to do. But I must do it—as it should be done here in the heart of New York.” When he took the subway to his club, he felt as he rode that he was being hurled along an iron-bound, man-beaten track. He looked out of the window at the black, rushing walls, and against the pane he could see his own face. Of all those adamantine man-made things, the iron, the fetters, the scream- ing tannels, there was one little flash of an age-old primitive freedom. He saw it in the pane; the heavily shaded eyes, the firm mouth and the set jaw of his own face. “I must protect her,” he affirmed reso- lutely. ‘She is an innocent, childlike woman who knows nothing of the danger she is in. I must do something definite— great—it is demanded of me!” If it had been the plain old triangle, Duane argued to himself, the problem would be easily settled. A decree made by man, sanctioned by the world, would settle it. But this problem could not be settled by a divorce court. It was a. primitive problem of a beast attacking a man’s mate. He remembered a sketch his wife had at home of a caveman and his mate. It was into that world that Duane had suddenly projected himself. But in his club he smashed again into a monument of civilized elegance. ‘I will think here,” he had resolved. But his con- fusion was more complete—more baffling. He was tormented by the green shaded electric lights, the mahogany tables, the dim Italian ceiling. If he looked through the lace curtains it was to see crowded omni- buses, high-powered cars, elegantly clothed people moving along. ‘““T must stay away from Chantry!” he told himself.. “But then—’ He drifted into the quiet gloom of the dining-room where a soft-footed butler and waiter put steaming dishes before him; there was a bird, sizzling, done to a turn, the odor of which evoked no hunger so strong as the other insatiable hunger within him. He noticed that right in that darkly pan- Origi na ror 633 . GO Eeoook