The Argosy, Vol. 81, No. 4 — page 102: what you’re looking at

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

668 “Come!” she ordered bruskly. “You jess show the way as fast as you can. Think with all this trouble between the big house and the Settlement and you ahangin’ in one place or the other, singing songs and overlistening to things you ain’t no right to hear that I don’t realize you for a foolish, dangerous person?”’ “T bet I’m no such thing,” muttered Jolly George, who grasped only a vague idea of the meaning of Mother Juliet’s tirade. “And it’s sure dangerous to be foolish, son,’ Mother Juliet mumbled, unheeding, as they went along, “but it’s more danger- ous to be dangerous in these days. Woful things are hanging above the island. “T can tell by the way the stars jump in and out of the sky at night, by the way the sun comes up skulking over the water in the morning, by the way the fire leaps on my hearth, and the way the pigeons’ flesh smells queer when it burns, and the way them conjure snakes of mine hiss flames from their mouths all the time folks here is asleep and think nothin’ is hap- penin’ at all. Huh!” She grunted a dismal break of a laugh. “T know! I know!”’ By now they had come to the lower end of the cliff, where there was a stiff climb over a jagged coral rock of about six feet in height. ‘Fold the umbrella,” Mother Juliet com- manded, ‘‘and throw it up above. Then, you, son, lend me a hand strong so’s I get up without breaking of my old bones.” In a second Jolly George folded the big orange and green umbrella and flung it dexterously to the shelf of the cliff. CHAPTER III. A THIEVISH SAMARITAN, OTHER JULIET’S motive in the present excursion was deeper than normal curiosity in so rare and grim a find on one of the beaches of Big Twin Island as the washed-in body of a man. The currents of the sea hereabouts and the scavengers of it usually obviated such dis- coveries. Unless a man were wrecked near the island, in her memory, he scarcely could be flung upon its shore. In this particular instance her curiosity was at fever heat. . Had she not been constantly sought by the leaders of the Settlement for advice in THE ARGOSY. their scheme against the members and ad- herents of the big house on Half-moon Bay at the westerly point? Did she not know of the insurgents’ plan to fetch from far Honduras a small boat- load of rifles and ammunition because all arms had been denied them or taken away by the tyrant Captain Neville and his min- ions of the big house? To attempt to approach the island in a boat of a size suitable to the vast and shifty track of water to be sailed would have been suicidal folly, it had been decided. To make the course in a small boat was doubly perilous in the journey, and not es- pecially easy. On all sides the sea was scanned nightly with a search-light from the Half-moon Bay section, the highest point of land, ever since suspicion had awakened there. A landing would necessarily be made on a misty night, and it might be at the east- erly end, amid the hidden reefs that flung themselves out to sea like parts of a great web from their beginnings in the lagoon between Big Twin Island and Little. The night before had been cloudy. The arrival of the boat from Honduras was due, even overdue, according to Mother Juliet’s information. The four men who had manned the boat she was acquainted with; and although Jolly George had assured her that he was positive the dead man hailed neither from the Settlement nor the big house she was far from accepting his assurance as final. In the first place the boy was scared out of the little wits he had, she argued to her- self, because he had touched the body. Also, it was not at all beyond possibility that the men of the boat, for reasons of their own, had persuaded a sympathizer from the mainland to join. If then mischance had befallen the craft, Mother Juliet should have first clue to the mystery surrounding its nonappearance and thereby gain additional credit for her pow- ers of divination. | Such ftfioughts as these she had been pondering ever since she. was convinced that Jolly George was not lying to her about the body on the beach. They flashed across her mind in an instantaneous and complete picture now that with a quick jerk of his arm he helped her mount to the top of the cliff. . The pink scallop of beach was spread in front of them and the insidiously smooth ” CORMICLOOOKS (C@)