The Argosy, Vol. 75, No. 4 — page 123: what you’re looking at

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

MESQUITE RANCH. The horror of listening had gotten on Red’s nerves so that he felt he must have an opinion on what he had tried to solve for himself and could not. Silsby made no reply. It seemed to him, as the sounds came nearer, that there were too many of them for a man to make. Four feet it would sure- ly take to produce the noise they heard. But he could think of no four-footed thing that would move with such an amount of racket. The velvet paws of mountain lions or the soft pad of a bear’s feet never could have made the noise to which he gave such an atten- tive ear. Suddenly Red put an end to the sus- pense. The creature or whatever it was would be on them in a few min- utes, and he proposed to get an idea of what to expect. As he opened his mouth and yelled “ Hi, there!” a sec- ond thought darted into his mind and he responded to it. “ Radford, is that you?” he called. The sounds ceased. It seemed to Silsby that they might have been made by Radford if his leg had gone back on him and he was making his way over the trail with the aid of a stick. But there was no answer. “Holy smoke! That’s funny!’ Red muttered after they had waited for a reply till the great awful silence of the night grew so oppressive they felt as if something sat heavily on their lungs. It was not funny, and Red did not mean it literally. It was hideous. It was maddening. ‘To sit there on that narrow ledge, with eternity yawning just beyond your boot-heels and infin- ity gulping at you from above, waiting for an answer you did not get from a thing you could not see, was a strain on the nerves that made a straight-out leap into the abyss to get it over seem a kind of relieving change to contem- plate. “You confounded fool, why don’t you talk?’ Red suddenly demanded, and the wild echoes wranged and yapped at and with his words till he 825 could have choked himself for speak- ing. And still that mysterious thing that had climbed the mountain path toward them gave back neither speech, nor howl, nor roar, nor sound of moving in its place. It seemed to have frozen in the silence and space of the heights. Red twisted as if he meant to rise and go along the trail. “Lay down, ye eedjit! Ye have to git shoved off into the gulch ur shot aT” It was not easy what to predict as the probable end of the man who rash- ly put himself between something he could not see and the edge of the trail. Red sank back in his place and con- tinued to stretch his ears till they ached for some sound that would give a hint of what or who might be their neigh- bor on the trail. But none came. One hour length- ened into two. The pale sheen from the moon began to silver the thick black moss that hung from the sky. Gradually the two men could see that they were just the usual kind of clouds. The light was brighter. Then the peaks of the mountains sil- vered and the moon sailed. out from among the veils she had worn as she rose. White, wonderful, revealing, she shed her light. But look as they would along the trail from whence the unexplained sounds had come, they could see nothing that might have made them. Sheer rock fronts, without a cranny in which a beast or bird or man might hide, rose at the right of the trail as far as they could see. And at the left - the edge of the narrow way shone with bald and suggestive cruelty. Nothing could hide or cling or cringe along it without being hurled into the cafion below. “Well, I be lassoed and larruped! ” Red’ exclaimed, too completely non- plused at what they had heard and at what they did not see to speak exten- sively. This “Come on. Le’s git along! Gomichbooks (E@)