The Argosy, Vol. 75, No. 4 — page 64: what you’re looking at

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

766 arms. ‘Then she slid out of them. She pushed him with all her strength and walked out alone into the moonlight. Big Red nearly fell over backward when he saw her. In his amazement he dropped his gun and her eyes blazed in the silver shine. “Why do you dare to run wildly ovaire my estate?” she demanded. Radford jumped as if he had stepped on a live wire. That quaint French accent had lingered in the background of his mind like a silenced melody just waiting some subtle inspiration to re- sound, Curious, excited, and because he could not see her face for the fall of her loosened hair, Radford sidled about till he stood in front of her. Large and brilliant eyes, smooth cheeks flushed to vivid scarlet, white teeth flashing like jewels between the parted curls of her scornful lips, he beheld a kind of glorification of the pale little girl he had seen at the door of his own room in his Fifth Avenue home. Two minutes before she had been shaking and sobbing in terror of these men who stared at her as if she were a ghost. Now she was calling them to account with an imperial dauntlessness that had the-charm which little women cay infuse into their expression of big emotions. Radford felt his blood leap. He reeretted as bitterly as the water of Apache Spring had tasted that he had not made more of his opportunity when she had clung and sobbed in his arms. He caught his breath. A young, love- ly girl seemed, in the man-populated world where he had been lately, the most beautiful thing that God ever made. “Shall you have the water of my spring? ’’ she questioned, while the men stood about in awkward silence. “TI tell you non!” And she did tell it. She said her negative with its French nasal so em-_ phatically that the men felt all the subtle forces, the strength of women a * THE ARGOSY.. which again and again turned their might of will and muscle to nothing. Big Red made an effort to combat her. He hfted his head and looked at the palpitating, wonderful little figure perched so firmly on a rock. ‘“ We—we got to have water fur the cattle,’ he managed to say. “Do your cattle like thees wataire? ” she asked,. leaning toward him with the slight, sure poise of a bird about to take flight. “ Some darn fool put something in the spring—” he began again. ‘“T am that darn fool, monsieur!” she interrupted, waving the stew-pan belligerently. “ But now I am come to be again the darn fool and put more of the bitter in the wataire. You shall not have one drop! Not one, I say! I weel find ways to keep you from eet. For what you have done to my Oncle Phillipe I weel punish you, you cow- boys beasts. I am Natalie le Fevre.” The announcement produced a pro- found impression. ‘“ Did you—wuz it you put somepin in the spring?” Big Red asked. She nodded, a vindictive little bob of her black head that shook her hair so that the breeze caught long tresses and. floated them out like filmy dark wings behind her. Radford, an observer of the scene, had never seen a woman so breath- takingly alive with radiant energy and life. She looked to him like a creature of the west wind and the silver moon- light. He began to think his head was sun-touched and suspected that the fever was merging into moonlight madness. “Ties eet not my spring?” she asked with an air of such delightful im- pertinence that Radford wanted to pick her up and run away with her where he alone, with his mind fired by hers and his heart pounding in a new way, could reap the wealth of her imagina- tion and her charm. He wanted to kick Red and his prac- tical-minded cow-punchers out of the way. The world was made of silver NOOLKS COMMUC ef. (E@)