The Argosy, Vol. 84 No. 2 — page 128: what you’re looking at

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

ONC Norcross Forbes SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS ALREADY PRINTED. HILE traveling in Egypt, Gerard Derby receives a letter from his father, in reply to one from the son in which he has mentioned his enjoyment of the society of Gladys Hayden. The father makes it quite plain that henceforth the son must shift for himself, all that he can expect to receive being a thousand shares of the I. O. U. mining stock, one of the few bad investments the elder Derby ever made. states that only misery, in her mind, can follow marriage with a poor man. He tells Gladys frankly his prospects, and she as frankly So he sets sail for the United States, and after various vicissitudes and in spite of a warning against certain mysterious Vampas in the neighborhood, he determines to look up his I. O. U. mine for himself. Meanwhile, Nancy Gale, whose father has left her in the hope of raising money to hold the mining claim he had staked out, is without word of him, and is rescued from the clutches of West Symmonds, of the neighboring Esperanza mine, by Derby, who arrives on the scene in the nick of time. He thereby makes an enemy of Symmonds, but determines to protect Nancy to the death. Her father, it appears, owns the other shares in the I. O. U. mine, and in exploring the workings, Derby drops into a mysterious passage, where he is set upon from behind and felled by a sweeping blow from a three-foot drill. CHAPTER VIII. BY A HAIR’S BREADTH, LOWLY consciousness returned to Gerard. He had lost all sense of time. It might be minutes or hours since he had been felled. His first feeling was of irritating nausea; quickly this was predominated over by the throb- bing ache of his head and the duller ache of bruises on his body. His eyes slowly opened and gazed un- comprehendingly at the rocky wall beside which he lay. He raised himself on his elbows and, pressing his knuckles to his temples, fought with the haze that crowded his brain for the clue of memory that would tell him where he was and what had happened. Everything still whirled about him; fragments of his past life hummed in his mind with ludicrous lack of connection; incidents of years before stood out clearly as though released by the blow from the storehouse of memory. He lay back and closed his eyes This story began in the November Argosy. 310 COMMCOOOLK (C@