Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 18, 1925 — page 168: what you’re looking at

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

318 the confluence of the Missouri and the Kaw. He believed personal habits more disgrace- ful in his city than at points farther east or west; because it was a custom among visi- tors from both east and west to leave their faults at home in keeping of their friends and bring their manners with them. Had Jason penetrated this it might have worried him less—or more. Jason’s first attempt to raise the standard of common decency in Middleville came three years later. It was purely altruistic, in behalf of the public, in the name of sanitation. Praiseworthy in the extreme, it yet wrecked an early romance and alienated some half dozen of his friends. He was sitting in a movie house with his best girl. Her name was Letitia and her nose was the kind that is always getting in front of public mirrors for the purpose of chalking up defects. With Jason near by, however, the nose discreetly forebore this indulgence. Her mouth, too, forebore the luxury of its accustomed cud. , Letitia ad- mired Jason for his superiority, but never - felt snug in his presence. - Lolling near by in the cinema theater was a paunchy man with a greasy face, crooked, sarcastic lips. His specialty was spitting on the floor. Disgustedly Jason writhed as he watched him. Other patrons writhed, too, but said nothing. Jason said something, and the greasy man resented it. So Jason said something else. A fight started. Sev- eral persons were hurt. Letitia’s corn was milled. Jason got his man down and taught him ‘to spit on the floor.” Then got him up and arrested him. “Right!” said the judge, upholding Jason, as he imposed ten dollars and a lec- ture on the greasy man. Proud and vin< dicated, Jason bumped into more amaze- ment when Letitia stopped him at a frozen threshold. Declared he had disgraced her by dragging her to court to be a public record of the number of times a dirty Hunky had spit on the floor. He tried to explain that she should have felt honored, upholding the rights of society. She was soggy to his ideals. She didn’t give a hang about society, except the kind that threw parties and joy rides. Besides, her corn hurt. ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY, Disappointed in love, generally miscom- prehended, Jason bore up with the courage of conviction—the greasy gent’s conviction —until the night following, when he saw a similar gent at a similar place defy sanita- tion in a similar way with even more egre- gious abandon. Then he realized in a moral spasm, as men always realize great truths, what a futile thing was The Law. He wandered far into the suburbs of his unthinking city, seething with indignation. What was the answer to this problem of other people’s indecencies? Mothers and fathers took children by their shoulders and shoved them into the arms of the school teacher. The school teacher jabbered that two and two make four, X plus Y equals Z, amo-amas-amat ; then dumped them with a load of undigested morals over the cancelli of the district court. The court intoned, * Five and costs,”’ and went out to lunch; turning the offender loose to forget his finan- cial spanking in a day or two—not to men- tion the 999 equally offensive offenders whom nobody happened to hale into court. ““ Makes a man feel like taking the law into his own hands. Dirty, thoughtless muts—don’t realize other people have rights—I sometimes feel like—” Jason did not tell the listening landscape what he did feel like; but as he entered the door of his father’s slumbering cottage in the suburbs his mature eyes glinted omi- nously in the moonlight, while his nose, sharper and more projecting than ever be- fore, cast a prophetic shade over the dog- matic angle of his New England chin. TI. THE police of Middleville worked fast and scouted widely; but they were not able to keep up with the series of assaults that every night left from one to a dozen citi- zens lying bruised and befuddled at the edge of some unpatrolled sidewalk or stag- gering homeward with a throbbing head and a swelling jaw. The victims complicated the mystery by refusing to talk about their mishaps. One and all they insisted they could postulate no motive for the crime—murmured some- thing about mistaken identity, and showed (e(0) .DOOKS mie (E(0)