Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 25, 1924 — page 124: what you’re looking at

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

114 the ankle in mud across an open field, with only the pitch dark and the slanting rain around him. It cost him an hour of exhausting labor to find his way back. He had to guess the direction by remembering how the wind had been blowing that evening when it be- gan to roll up the clouds of this storm in the sky. Then, by the slant of the rain, he guessed at the points of the compass and started to explore for the inn. When he came to it, it was so late that he had to tap at the door and get mine host up, who grumbled and growled about “drunken fools serving great ladies” until he unbarred the door and saw Clovelly go past him, streaming mud and water as he stepped. Mine host was then too astonished to protest against the staining of his floor and he gasped as Clovelly went up the stairs. Clovelly was recalled from his reveries by the boring of the eyes behind him. When he whirled about suddenly and looked down, he saw the dismayed and suspicious face of the host. “T have played the devil with my sec- recy,” he said gloomily to himself as he went on toward the attic. “If there is the least chance of exposing us, mine host will do his best. He trusts me now as he would trust a tiger; he probably thinks that I have been out doing a murder.” There was nothing for him to do, how- ever. So he went straight on to the attic, took off his clothes, wrung the water out of them hard, and then put them on again, rolled himself in a blanket and in spite of his drenched skin went instantly to sleep with a faint, dreamlike recrudescence of the delicate savor of log wood blossoms in his nostrils. CHAPTER XXVII. MINX! T was a thread of sound as sharp as the edge of a Damascus blade; it not only awakened Michael Clovelly, but it brought him at once into a sitting posture and then upon his feet. His head rang and sang with it. But just what it had been ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY, he could not tell, for it had struck him, so to speak, in the very heart of his sleep, and he could not carry his understanding of it into his waking moment. The smoking light was still burning in the room, but now, as he looked about him, he saw that Dunbar was not in his place where he had been when he himself re- turned from the midnight walk. The wet clothes of that walk were growing icy cold upon his back and now a draft which stirred through the room made him shudder. It, at least, cleared his mind a trifle and he said to himself: ‘The rat has left me; he guessed that the ship was sinking.” The instant he had muttered that to him- self he was sharply aware that there was no one in the attic chamber to overhear him. He stared about him again. The ragged blankets lay here and there where the wretched grooms had lain in sleep. But they themselves were gone; there was not a man in the place, of all those who had been there earlier in the night. Now he was wide awake. ‘These move- ments of his mind had taken the space of a second or two only, but as full conscious- ness dawned upon him he knew the thing that had roused him from his sleep—it had been a scream. In the night a woman had shrieked as if in mortal terror or in an agony. At that, he was through the door and the rapier flashed into his hand. There was a chance, and it seemed a large one ta Clovelly, that the cry had come from the lips of the girl he had married. When he thought of that, he forgot all the disgust with which he had looked upon her before, remembering only her clear eyes, her beau- ty, and the sad sweetness of the fragrance of the logwood blossoms. He leaped down the narrow stairway to the first turning. As he swung around it, he heard a whisper like the hiss of a blade coming from its sheath. At his very feet he saw two bulky shadows crouched upon the stairs with the dull glimmer of steel in their hands and Clovelly, leaping back, swung his sword in a sharp circle before him. His speed of foot could not have saved him here, but that “universal parry,” as COmiclboookKks (C@)