Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine, Vol. 107 No. 3 — page 79: what you’re looking at

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

ALIAS THE ANGLEWORM. —and whose nerves since coming to Coal- port had been taut and strained rather badly. And he had shot with the same pistol which the marshal of Coalport, who had known he had it, had searched and failed to find; and who had, thereafter, watched him like a hawk to see that it hadn’t sub- Sequently been retrieved—for the marshal was ‘an old bird.”’” Being such, he now ignored Jimmy’s miracle in his behalf, as if he had never sought that weapon, at all. Came a shower of.tattoos on the door, signifying that open-sesame had exploded, too. . Marshal Tom raised a warning hand. The stillness of death already hovered over the room, suffused with the acrid stench of gunpowder. ““ Norman, open the door!” came a wom- an’s voice, anxious yet not panicky. ' Marshal Tredway looked reproachfully at Mr. Bugbee. ‘“‘ Take back them bees you give me out’n your name a while back ‘nd gimme the bugs, instead. I like ’em better. And I need ’em. I told Viv where to stand but not where to stay.” His voice trembled a little.: Either the push-button controlling the lock on the door next blew-up or some one leaned on it, for in came Vivian. Directly opposite her was the wounded man, toward whom Mr. Bugbee was looking without re- plying to Marshal Tom’s request. CHAPTER XV. PROVING MIKE BURNS WAS “ WRONG.” R. BUGBEE seemed to need a little ‘ inspecting ” himself. At least his eyes wandered over to the craven leaning against the wall, with a pis- tol lying at his feet, who was moaning like a mewling,kitten while trying to bandage a slightly-injured hand which bled freely, when he should have been giving thanks that he had not murdered another in an ignorant rage bred of a total misapprehension of the facts and the appearances. Toward him Vivian glanced casually, lifting her shoulders in the slightest of shrugs as if such a thing was to be ex- pected, and then she looked over toward Jimmy with the recent anxiety in her eyes dying before a diviner emotion. At which, the bantam, himself hun- grily seeking a second glance from her, turned livid. Beads of sweat sprang out under the crest of reddish hair on his nar- row forehead, brushed back ridiculously like a bantam cockerel’s ‘‘ comb.” Mr. Bugbee seemed unable to forget what had been told him in a spirit of levity earlier that evening, in spite of what had happened so utterly antipodean, an instant before. Mr. Bugbee seemed to insist on taking Jimmy Stuart’s lecture on’ “ hand- writing ” seriously, in spite of having: just before already “ blown the whole works ” with nothing stronger than his good inten- tions. | Jimmy wasn’t so sorry, for it served to divert, for the nonce, his need of looking at Vivian Baldwin after shooting her brother in the hand to keep him from shooting Marshal Tredway. As Mr. Bugbee, therefore, spoke again, Jimmy Stuart tore open and read his tele- gram. : ‘Fer Gawd’s sake, Jason,” sepulchrally whispered the Mansion House clerk to the craven with the bleeding hand, ‘“ what do you want to pull a gun on your uncle, Marshal Tom, for? Ain’t he raised you from a baby? Ain’t he fed ye, clothed ye, and bore with ye, year after year? Your Uncle Tom wasn’t after that golden fleece you got—Z/ was the one!” Just here two things struck Jimmy Stuart more forcibly than had his discovery of the shoes behind the world’s best literature in Vivian Baldwin’s office. One was the name on the register at the Mansion House, which had inspired his own “ lecture” on handwriting to Mr. Bugbee—the name written there as Jason Tredway. The other was due to the telegram which he had just read. In fact, things cleared up like magic, since the sooty mist that had beclouded Coalport since his arrival had evidently left for some other old port. The man he had supposed, all along, to be Norman Baldwin was not Norman, at all—he was the marshal’s own nephew— 421° (C(O) LNOO S (CO) mM