Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 6, 1923 — page 29: what you’re looking at

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

. DESERT tears until you have heard the real music stored in this old box. Melba will sing in this desert! The Valkyries will ride on the winds that whirl down from the Granite ‘Wash. There will be a ‘Spring Song’ heard when the palo verde blossoms and the Papagos burn their palo santo incense. “ All the voices of the world will sing in this dry skeleton of a house! They will clothe it with its old glory. They will resurrect it. It will live. It will be a ~ temple!” Hallie was too enchanied with the har- mony of the negroes to reply. “I’m a-comin’, comin’, comin’, as the angels cleah the way Farewell to that ole Kentucky shore!” CHAPTER LV = KEEP YOUR JAWS TOGETHER! WENTY miles from Sun-up was the ~ seven C’s outfit, irrigated by a creek -which on the United States Geologi- cal Survey maps was represented by an in- definite dotted line disappearing into a des- ert: In this country of thin, sparkling air, fragrant with pronged cactus, productive of scrub cattle, copper and sold, was situated the rundown ranch which Dan Crockett, vagabond and gentleman, had left to his widow and daughter. While Hallie Crockett was starting in on her career in Sun-up with a blithesome and childlike conviction that she could recoup the niggard fortunes of her mother, the lat- ter remained on the cattle farm. | The Widow Crockett was a brown, onarled little woman, with eyes in which there was a peculiar smoldering fire. There was nothing about her person—her hands like twisted roots, her wrinkled face from which all expression had been blasted by the Arizona sun, the brown gingham ‘skirt and alpaca jacket, the napatan boots turned up at the toes and many times re- soled—nothing to set her apart from the ordinary desert ranch wife. Except those eyes. There was a vivid imagination there— something that saw beyond the red Harcu- var mesas to the north or the yellow tables VOICES. Su of the Granite Wash to the south.- = The | ae Widow Crockett’s imagination was, short, far more powerful than the diet up = = : little body broken by ranch toil. - It liberated her from that body. While Se she was doing the work, preparing the meals for her small retinue of ranch hands, superintending the cleaning of the bunk houses, the branding of calves, the cutting out of the beef critters from her small herd, she imagined herself in another life. she imagined herself rich with her many years of toil—suddenly rich—with the tri- umph of the Comanches who had discov- ered oil, with the abandon of pocket hunt- ers elie: had struck a fortune in copper, of : = — muckers who had found gold. Rich, riding in a carriage, or better, a = high powered car that had: no alkali pow- dered over its hood or misting its glass — windows! — Living in a house on Slag Street — = opposite to the saloon where her husband =< = . had gambled away his money! Despite year after year of cattle pianie- the dwindling remuda of cow horses, the blizzard, the bandits, the Widow Crockett dreamed. that when the heel-flies came again and the spring round-up was finished, the — debts of the winter paid with the money — Hallie promised to send from town, pros- — perity would come. _ And others—her foreman, Phil Wy md-— Bouse—encouraged: her dreams. winter brought no more unforseen tragedy, ham, a cattle buyer, a veterinary from == = Tf=that- = = the ranch would pay. The cattle were = healthy; they would, it must be admitted, cut up to patchy meat, but there would Bex. a good sum of money. The fall round-up would bring more. The following year—provided a dozen for- tuitous circumstances came to pass- —the- Widow Crockett might _ taste that Jong = —— dreamed of thing—luxury. - But one of the very men who sointed out the innate possibilities of Widow Crock=__ ett’s beef herd—the veterinary—also was the bearer of another sort of tidings. - Old Doc Winkler, called in to diagnose an ill- - ness with hich the widow was stricken, an- = nounced in his frank, almost brutal, sor ee of way, that she had better call a regular doctor and: a send to ‘Sun-up for her Eomichooks