Argosy All-Story Weekly, January 13, 1923 — page 38: what you’re looking at

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

ns ——= we f, aS . / J / re, - f \y } / / Li” 7% ‘ Be Sey ath / 4 ee —tf AM j ej i y lA 7) . q 7 4 4 By L. H. CHAPTER I. THE STAGE DRIVER. TEVE BROWN drove up to the Pal- S ace Hotel in one of Zeke Pelham’s mountain stages. A pair of city men there wished to be transported into the hills to Daniel Frazer’s ranch in South Boulton Canon. It was atrociously early. The last morn- ing star, doing a fade-out overhead, marked the end of the moving picture of the night. Sparrows in the maples tuned up jazzily for the day’s work, regardless of the con- tralto solo of a robin in the tall cottonwood across the way. Mountain water gurgled pleasantly in the street gutters. In the hotel doorway Lon Madigan leaned on a broom and yawned like an abyss. was struggling along at part time, and the ‘“Yeowp!” said he. “ Your people are irrigation project had collapsed. still feeding their faces. Want their On the vacant lot back of Pelham’s liv- trunk ?”’ ery barn the dump carts of the irrigation : 500 COMM|EMOOKS ROBBINS A NOVELETTE—COMPLETE IN THIS ISSUE The driver dragged out the trunk and roped it to the tail of the wagon. He shook the small stout wheels to test them, for it was a rough trip over the plateau to Frazer’s. Then he looked up at the waning star and pondered the hopeful: thought that the night was always darkest just before dawn. That was a dark time in the Colorado town of Boulton. The gloom from the big blow-up in Europe still clouded the sky and made it hard for young men to see jobs. When-Steve Brown came back from puri- fying the Argonne, he founc that the Honeyman Post-Hole Digger factory, where he had been salesmanager, had let its home fires go out. Half of the mines in the dis- trict were closed, too; the Boulton smelter (E@)