Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine, Vol. 107 No. 3 — page 77: what you’re looking at

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

ALIAS THE ANGLEWORM. the other players, as Marshal Tredway 's official hand fell on the door with its un- Official signal. CHAPTER XIV. PROVING ‘‘ BOBBY BURNS ”’ WAS “ RIGHT ”’} door opened. HE T Marshal Tom walked in first. Jimmy followed, and the door closed. The man who had openesit did not even glance their way. Nor did any of the players. Around the circular table, with its green- baize top and its seven niches for chips, were the faces of three men that Jimmy confronted, quarter-profiles of two more, and the backs of two more. In the center of the three who faced Jimmy was Mr. Bugbee. On Mr. Bugbee’s right hand sat the 6s bantam. >) On Mr. Bugbee’s left sat the man calling himself Norman Baldwin, but in the six weeks that had elapsed since Jimmy had set eyes on him, he had undergone an astonishing metamorphosis. His mustache was a very lusty infant for that age, and the barber who now shaved him stopped when half-way up each cheek, as if to encourage the hair on the temples by not further intimidating it by proximity to a razor. He also wore a pair of horn spectacles containing lenses of very low magnifying power. Jimmy waited, wordlessly. So did Mar- shal Tom, much to his surprise, until he re- membered the unwritten law of poker-play- ers. No man in a pot must have his at- tention distracted. Mr. Bugbee appeared slightly abstracted, when his protagonist, with the spectacles, kept coming back at him, iterating his ‘‘once more” with nefarious surety. The bantam and the others were also mere spectators, but no less intent on the outcome. Mr. Bugbee rubbed his chin. ‘“ Take the golden fleece, Jason,” said he with mythical politeness. ‘Tim, may I speak to you in private jest 419 a minit before you chip in the next pot?” asked Marshal Tredway. Mr. Bugbee got up and started around the poker-table. The light over it was hung very low to hide faces and reveal hands, cards, and chips. Mr. Bugbee, therefore, did not see Jimmy, who was standing to the left of and a little behind Marshal Tredway. Neither did the bantam who, with the other play- ers was watching the winner rake in a goodly store of chips, without taking the trouble to stack them. Instead, he smiled, in a self-complacent and superior ‘way, as if Coalport sports were, indeed, only an imitation of those from whom he had gathered fleece in the city where Jimmy had last seen him. Half-way around to the marshal, espying Jimmy for the first time, Mr. Bugbee screeched: ‘‘ Well, well, well! How’s the stranger? So, you got tired of golf and come down to set in a little while, did you? Here’s a telegram that come after you went out—I mean to bed.” Jimmy took it, shaking his head and Keeping his eyes on the winner of the last pot. rifts of events and the curious eddies of human lives, aside from his own, he could not conjecture. He was in as utter igno- rance of this visit or why Bugbee, accord- ing to the marshal, had insisted that it be made by both Vivian and himself, as was the winner of the last pot that he was no longer to be considered anything save a twin brother to the North Star—in Jimmy’s esteem. Whereupon, then and there, everything that had occurred before or since Jimmy Stuart came to Coalport which concerned these matters seemed immediately to vindi- cate the remark of Burns about the “ best laid schemes 0’ mice an’ men,” and seemed to ‘“ gang agley ” at the same time. And, it wasn’t really “ good form.” For there were so many things in- volved—animate and inanimate, elements, events, emotions — that it was much the same.as if everything and everybody had been eating TNT all along, and had all de- cided to explode together. Just what lay behind so many cross- Co NOO S (C(O) mM