Argosy All-Story Weekly, May 17, 1924 — page 79: what you’re looking at

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

SOMETHING SMALLER THAN GOD, trot across the street and nose about for scraps of cheese, cigarette stubs and other delicacies under the café tables, The Serbs encourage this practice by dropping tidbits from their plates. They love their pigs as they love their prunes and peppers; as the Tartars love their yaks. Michael Farley did not resent the pigs scratching their spiney backs on the under side of his chair, but he strenuously ob- jected when one of them attempted to climb into his lap. He cursed the pig, and the pig, with a snort of disgust, withdrew to more companionable quarters. The Great Rhoda was sitting at a table in a shadowed corner drinking a large stein of peeva. He unfolded his gangling length and moved over to where Farley was angri- ly brushing mud from his freshly laundered white duck trousers. The tobacco buyer looked up into hollow, startling black eyes. “There’s only one country in the world where the word damn implies so much,” Rhoda said with a strange, rumbling laugh. “The first time I was attracted. The second time my doubts began to slip. And the third time I was convinced. My name is Rhoda. I am generally known as the Great R-r-rhoda.”’ He rolled his eyes with his r’s. ‘I hail from San Francisco. It is a pleasure to meet a fellow countryman in this insufferable Balkan hole.” The Great Rhoda was perhaps forty, per- haps fifty. His suit of bog-green tweed seemed to be draped in loose folds upon his lanky frame. All the lines of his face ran downward and were carved deep.. His black eyes dreamed out from the crumpled folds of their lids under brows black and brushlike. Clumps of thick black hair, pep- pered with gray, trailed out from under his sun helmet. The impression he gave Michael Farley was one of fierce nervous energy and brooding melancholy. He shook the man’s cold, large hand, said that he was killing time in Nish at the expense of the Interstate Tobacco Company of New York and Virginia, and wondered why it was that the Americans one en- countered in out-of-the-way places were often such freaks, 229 Rhoda’s companion joined them. She had been sitting in blue shadow, and. when the young American glanced away from Rhoda and saw her standing beside him, his voice stopped and his mouth dropped open with incredulity. He had never, he exclaimed to himself, beheld such appealing sorrow in a girl’s looks, or such vital beauty. Large dark eyes interrogated him sadly from a slender face that recklessly reminded him of alabaster and rose petals. Her teeth later made him think of pearls, her hair of drawn copper, and her eyes of bottom- less moonlit pools, There was very little of the poet in Michael Farley, but the little. there was came singing to life in the moment that his eyes first rested upon Marcene. From his amazed tanned face the girl glanced stealthily at Rhoda. Her hands were small and strikingly white. They moved restlessly. They seemed to flutter, They reminded Farley of something im- prisoned; moths fluttering against a. wall seeking some avenue of escape. The im- pression was somehow painful to him. The great sad eyes, the unhappy mouth, the fluttering hands shocked him. No woman had ever moved him so. He heard Rhoda informing him that this was his daughter, Marcene, but his cam- araderie of a moment ago was gone. He was not proud, as any father might well have been, to present a daughter like Marcene. Resentment roughened his voice, and there was disapproval in his attitude, The dark eyes slid back with their tragic appeal to Farley’s. She did not smile or move to offer him her hand. He was grin- ning boyishly now and blushing with em- barrassment. Marcene Rhoda’s lips were set, as if a seal had been placed upon them, She looked up at him and did not even murmur. It was embarrassing, He uncomfortably asked her to join them, but she turned slowly away and, without glancing again at her father, started toward the hotel. Farley did not stir until she had vanished beyond a brick wall. Then he sank limply into his chair, conscious that his forehead was prickling with perspiration and that the Great Rhoda was studying him with bril- liant, hostile eyes. COnmiclbooolx (C@