The Argosy, Vol. 84 No. 2 — page 64: what you’re looking at

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

246 he would or could do, full only of mad re- sentment. The man he had just disarmed, taking his cue from his master, leaped upon Phil- lips’s back. Phillips turned, the pistol pointing from his hand, abundantly angry to shoot to kill. He pulled the trigger, pulled it harder. The pistol had been emptied. Phillips brought it down with a crash upon the fellow’s head. Then he went on after the big boss. Haggins had seen his quarry across the stockade and had broken into a run. And all the hot inward fury within Phillips turned to a colder, more terrible sense of amazed indignation which was ten times more furious than he could ever have conjured up over anything done to himself. A forlorn creature sat on the ground, frantically waving up and down a pair of hands whose torture seemed to madden him, while he stared at them and moaned between lips drawn in agony. Both hands had bleeding holes through the center! The sight sickened the more as Phillips comprehended that this. was the lesson one man had taken from the cheap crucifixes which the more religious of the peons wore. For a moment he paused under the im- pulse to do something—anything to re- lieve the horrible torture of the poor vic- tim. Then he hurried on after the man who had done the thing. Haggins had paused but a few yards farther across the stockaded grove where a number of as yet unpunished peons huddled in terror under the clubs and menacing pistols of the newcomers. To two of these last, who were beating up a shrieking late rebel, the man of terror spoke a sharp command which Phillips was not yet near enough to hear. The men obeyed. The victim raised one last shriek of abject terror as his arm was raised high over his head. Before Phillips could catch up, Haggins had fired his pistol at the back of the hand, the fingers of which had been vainly clutched as if to prevent a shot at the palm. THE ARGOSY. ‘The other!” snapped the inexorable boss, while the shriek of the victim turned to a howl of pain. Even the lips of the captors turned white, and Haggins had to repeat the word before they lifted the second hand to receive its piercing. And Phillips reached the spot. In his heart was a rage fully as mad and murderous as that of the other. With the emptied pistol he struck down the arm as it was raised for that second shot. Haggins had been so intent upon what he did as not to hear the swift run- ning behind him above the groans and cries that turned the whole camp into a bedlam. He had not seen the blow that sent his shot to the ground in time to ward it off. He wheeled about, his finger pressing the trigger again. And his pistol was empty too. With a fearful oath he sprang to the fight, some- thing in his enraged face showing he found more liking for the chance to beat Phillips to pulp than in any_of the other murderous punishments he had inflicted. “ You!—you white-livered coward!”’ he sang between his blasphemies. And he struck as Phillips had struck, with the palm of his hand holding the otherwise useless pistol. Phillips failed to dodge the blow. It laid his cheek open and rendered the pis- tol a shattered mass of broken steel and loose springs. Rocked by the terrific im- pact, he clinched with his adversary by instinct rather than by training, since his own size had made it difficult to find a sparring-mate for any practise in boxing in the college gymnasium. Big and strong as he was, Haggins was bigger and stronger. The ammonia on top of the previously taken brandy made a combination of powerful stimulant; but the best of stimulated strength is unequal to the same degree of natural strength. It lacks endurance. And Haggins’s first crashing blow had been a thing to take the strength away from a giant. Haggins freed his left hand. Phillips COMMICOOOKS (C@)