Argosy, Vol. 120, No. 1 — page 135: what you’re looking at

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

and reluctant. His mind, loath to face the cold reality of the cabin, tugged back to linger among the warm dream pic- tures of the night before. These memories were like dancing shadows for their vague- ness, but brightly tinted as fancies of lights and beautiful women. For the first time in the weeks of his imprisonment, Bardwell had had company. There had been laughter, songs, carousing— the noise of voice and footsteps not his own. Many other pleasant things, too hazy to identify, were jumbled in, the whole widen- ing out into a sea of recollections, in which there swam together mistily the stranger, the food that he had brought, the drink, the many blazing candles, the glowing stove-top. Out of this maze of bliss, however, stood two objects that did not waver, about which the rest revolved, like the blazing circum- ference of a pin-wheel around its center; they were the stranger’s eyes, blue as the light in fathomless iceberg caverns, steel- pointed and unlaughing. Bardwell stirred, twisted in his bunk, and was neuralgically aware of a sensation, once familiar, but now for weeks untold, a Stranger. Hands pressed to his throbbing temples, he swore, craned his neck over the bunk edge, and peered into the powdery blackness that filled the room. Gloom and headache notwithstanding, an Bana retuctan awakening was gradual - uneasy feeling had laid hold upon him; that he had slumbered long, extraordinarily long, Rae and within the tiny room, all was not as he had left it. . The place had been circum- scribed enough before, but square and four- bunked. Now it assuredly held but a single pair of sleeping lofts, one of which he occu- pied with the other directly overhead. And to the best of his jaundiced vision, whereas it had measured about twelve by twelve, it was now oblong. The fire was out. Lacey. For perhaps five minutes ‘Bardwell lay motionless, after he had eased himself back, Nothing to be seen of trying to pin his skipping fancies down to . some kind. of orderly chronology. Going for wood—seeing the fellow down on the river —and hustling up the bank— Suddenly he started to his elbow. From somewhere a curious sound had broken forth. It was mellow, soft with sad lament. It made the gloom and solitude thrilling with weird suggestions. .Presently as he listened with bated breath, he managed to identify it—the moaning of a violin.. It came from beyond the wall. The fellow had lugged a fiddle along with him up into the frozen hell and was outdoors in the cold and dark, playing to himself. Bardwell staggered to his feet and lurched across the room. His hands fell upon the jogs and gripped them or he would have crumpled. For a full minute he clung, amazed at what he found. The timbers his fingers clutched were wet and cold. Instead of running horizontally, there were set ver- 125! COMmicboo S C@