Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 6, 1923 — page 146: what you’re looking at

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

ple. _ wire cage burned the candlenut flare. darkness, his glance fixed on the can- dlenut flare in midstream. Now the darkness of Beetle Creek, at midnight, was enough to make a Chinaman blink and fum- of mangrove forest. Not a star gleam pene- trated the quiltlike roof of dripping foliage. — Qut in the black scum of the river floated From the top of this Four a barrel-shaped cage. oes stakes driven into the mud held the cage in position. For years little Kum Ling had sat thus, peering through the Stygian gloom, listening to the chut-chut of the Papuan poison drip, oozing from every root and oe reef that bordered the impenetrable swamp. - And always with the same happy result. For out of the mud and slime of innumerabie ‘centuries came that which Kum Ling most needed, money and gifts, light and opium. Also it brought him the love of his children and the blessing of his aged father in Soo Loon. Above his head was a solid canopy — By ALBERT DORRINGTON ee | iTTLE Kum Ling sat cross-legged in the Yet in a little while he would be free to pass his evenings on the divan of fat Ming Boh at Samarai, where the smoke of heaven > smoothed the warps and stifled the five squealing devils in-a man’s heart. — Suddenly the flare on top of the cage in midstream began to jazz and shiver in the sheer joy of metion. Kum batted his eyes and grinned. The jazz motion increased to a frantic, witchiike dance. It was as if a thousand horses were straining to snap the cage from its moorings. Up and down and round it ~ milled in a whirlwind of mud and white fire. — Kum’s legs had warped like Cupid’s = through watching the face of the creek. Kum crouched low to avoid the blasts of “water and stomes showered to the bank. In a little while the flare grew steady enough to reveal a twelve-foot alligator floating dead on the surface of the creek, — its great snout imprisoned in the pee shaft of the barrel-like cage. With a long boathook Kum unbitched the cage from the four stakes and drew the huge saurian to the bank. Always these monsters of the mud were _ altace = his: et fiares.. And see 8 AU S ricGooks