Argosy, Vol. 117, No. 2 — page 11: what you’re looking at

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

THE ARGOSY Vol. CXVII SATURDAY, oer LTR “il =e SANS or JANUARY 31, 1920 No. 2 | a POSSVPOG A SEQUEL TO “LUCK” CHAPTER I. DESTINATION—THE WORLD. = OW much hell can this fellow raise?” inquired a stranger in Guadalupe, after being regaled at some length by a tale of the manifold exploits of Dix Van Dyck. And the answer was: much hell is there?” Yet many held that there was nothing malicious about Dix Van Dyck. It was simply the spirit of what had been mischief in his boyhood. -Now that he had passed the period of fisticuffs andeentered that of six-guns, his pranks had serious conse- quences quite frequently, but his heart had not changed a whit. Formerly a fist fight satisfied all the yearnings of his hungry soul, but.snow that he stood something over six feet and weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds of kard, fighting, lean-drawn muscle, an encounter with the brown fists of Dix Van Dyck was hardly perferable to a gun fight. In another environment Dix ‘caste ably might have led a harmless and, in time, useful existence, but unfortunately he was born in the Land of Little Rain and Many Greasers. 1 ARGosy “Partner, how John Frederick | Author of “ Luck,"”’ “The Hammer," etc. The latter are framed by the deity to irritate white men and tempt them to deeds of violence. Dix being of a temperament which required little tempting, the results were highly disastrous. Other men in the Southwest have taken their little outings, and no one thinks the less of them because they placed the period at the end of the lives of a few greasers. Dix, however, lived in a State where some eighty per cent. of the population is Mex- ican, where the laws of the Legislature are printed in Spanish first and afterward in Mexican, and where a greaser considers himself of a strata a few degrees above that of any white man. The term “ white man” is used advis- edly, because it must be known that the Mexican is over eighty per cent. pure In- dian in blood. He is not the half-Spanish product which most people imagine. Take an Apache Indian, water his blood with a mixture of negro, Spanish, and Eng- lish, and the resultant will be a fairly close representation of the Mexican—that is, if your imagination does not explode before you have completed your compound. It goes without argument that in such an environment Dix Van Dyck found a plen- teous field for mischief, and he harvested his crop of deviltry with the most painful hus- r61 ) COnMiICloooks (C@