Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 6, 1923 — page 47: what you’re looking at

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

SO THIS It took the stranger just two hours to exhaust the diversions of Wedlock, because he was leisurely about it. After breakfast he wandered down to the Four Corners, dis- covered that the general store kept the ciga- rettes he smoked, but charged three cents more for them than he had paid at the cut- rate city shops, looked into the blacksmith’s, where a morose man was straightening an anchor fluke, located the barber-and-under- taker’s little place, and the notion store. For perhaps a mile, he wondered up the shore line. Here and there were men at work repairing fish nets, or pushing out in their dories to make the rounds of their lobster pots. One was digging fat white clams from the sand. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry; the village was full of a sedate and leisurely industry. He was conscious of a furtive scrutiny from old eyes and young. Those inhabi- tants he met directly nodded to him without speaking. When, having seen all of Wed- lock there was, he glanced at his watch, and then compared it with the clock in the village steeple, he discovered to his sur- prise that it was just after nine, and so far as he was concerned, there was nothing to do till to-morrow. He found that the Bangor papers did not arrive until noon; and when they came, there were no items regarding his city, save the failure of a great Wall Street concern, and the statement that Mr. and Mrs. Waldo P. Skillings, of Bangor, were spending a few days at the Hotel Wallingford. So he climbed the stairs to his room. His big bed was already made up, the pitcher fresh- ly filled with well water. He shaved, and then sat down to write a letter to Rhino Bennet asking him to send him the evening paper he always read back home, and tell- ing him to take it out of his monthly allow- ance. But when it began to arrive, it was always at least a day late, and the news seemed stale and unprofitable to him. After dinner, a meal of unbelievable heartiness, he set out to walk to the next town, three miles away. Unused to the heavy, cloying sand, he was thoroughly tired when he arrived at a village which differed from Wedlock in no respect save that the general store was on the opposite IS WEDLOCK! 829 side of the street, and the church was Methodist instead of Congregational, and had one more elm in front. Thereafter he explored the country no more. There was a bold and heartening beauty in the masses of rock jutting from clean white sand out into the green-blue of deep water, but it made no appeal to him. They had caught him too late in life; and the lack of crowds, of stirring incident, of noise even, made him as homesick as a Swiss torn from his eternal peaks to dwell in some endless plain. In the days which ensued the feeling grew. Each seemed a week long; days filled with nothing. There were young fel- lows his own age in Wedlock; but they had no hang-outs, no resources so far as he could see. Of an evening they hung list- lessly about the entrance of the store, and sometimes they pitched horseshoes. There was some feeble skylarking, they joked one another, using phrases meaningless to the Slapper, and he could not say that they were actually unhappy. But they might as weil have been buried in the rocky little yard back of the church, with its empty graves of sailor folk lost at sea, and others whose dates indicated the astonishing lon- gevity of Wedlockers. ** Just dead from the necks up,” the Slap- per dismissed the younger generation. They lacked headstones; that was all. From sheer boredom he went fishing once or twice with Tucker or some of his neigh- bors; but fishing had not been included in his education. Here, it was stripped of all joyousness; it was as methodical as digging clams. One went out after a dinner; and when enough cod or haddock had been taken, one rowed home, cleaned and later ate the catch. No skill was required, the fish not entering into the game at all, seem- ing apathetic. After the first week, he did not go out again. Looking drearily ahead, the visitor felt that he would have had a far better time at Dannemora. The air would not be as good, but the social advantages would be incomparably better. There would be at least a baseball game Saturday afternoon, and betting on it; and more or less surrep- titious conversation all the time. on topics COMmiclooe (©