Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 13, 1925 — page 91: what you’re looking at

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

BLACK OR BLUE, “You're jealous!” she cried. “Tm not!” he retorted. “Vou are! You're afraid that you can’t stand beside him when it comes to facing trouble!” Poor Bud was dumfounded. It was as though his house crumbled beneath his feet. “Vou think he’s a better man than I am?’ he cried. “ You don’t know what I think,” Marion spoke with a sudden softness. And, gazing into the changing lights of her gray eyes, Bud knew that she spoke the truth. He realized that she had something in her mind that was, for him, unfathomable. “Tf you knew what I think,” she laughed mischievously, ‘‘ or if you weren’t so silly, and could see it for yourself, you’d do what J tell you.” ‘Oh, and what’s that?” Again she laughed, then became suddenly and intensely serious. She became so serious in fact that for a moment Bud was alarmed. | It seemed as though, abruptly, some tragic thought had occurred to her. ‘What is it, Marion?” he cried. “You must do this,” she told him. “Vou must do it for the sake of every- thing I mean to you, and everything you mean to me! Buddy, there is something I know. I haven’t got any reason for it, but I kxow it. You’ve got to do just what Mr. Fenton suggested, Bud. It’s the most important thing in the world for you and for me!” Bud’s castle had fallen. It fell with her words, crashing down about him as she spoke; and he stood, as it were, wreathed in dust, half buried in debris; astounded, appalled, incapable of thought or reason. This girl to whom he had looked for solace was urging him to champion James Fenton. To vindicate the crazy “ theories ” of that repellent Easterner who had “ talked her round,” ‘And how about sim? _ him, too, I suppose?” ‘ Buddy,” she replied, and laid one hand on his shoulder. ‘ Buddy, we've got a long way to go together.” He had never been able to withstand this sort of thing. ‘“ And you must trust me. You’ve got to believe. Buddy, I wouldn’t ask you.” Important for 563 What need to follow them further? Such moments of confidence and intimate asso- ciation worked an incredible magic upon his mind. Before he left her he had agreed to try out the plan of the insufferable Fenton. VI. But Marion did not really win him over. There was something in Bud Halliday which was wise and cool; which did not surrender reason to the incomprehensible emotions with which this girl bound him. Something which was not romantic. He had agreed to adopt Fenton’s subterfuge because she had imposed it upon him by the power of the emotion she could arouse within his breast. But away from her that cooler, more sensible part of him had its way. It would be madness, said this reasonable self, to intrust the company’s money and his good name to a woman’s whim. And there was the further unsavory considera- tion that the whim in question was not for him. But Halliday would, in short, be hung, drawn and quartered before he would see the thing through. So he turned his pony back again toward the Grover housé, steeled to tell her that if she clung to this whim—he would remember that word, “ whim,” and use it—-if she clung to this whim, their ways must part. That, too, appealed to him as a good way of putting it. “Our ways must part,” he would say. He prayed that she might not be so alien- ated from the love they had so far shared between them as to hold him to that sentiment; but if she was, he would stick to it. He rode out to the edge of the town for the second time that day, and his chin was firmly set, his heart steeled to contend with her whims, Presently he drew in his pony to watch a slim horseman who rode like a swaying reed in the saddle of a lithe animal that sped deetly away from the town toward the distant hills. For he recognized in that horseman Pat Grover, Marion’s brother. There was no mistaking the perfect poise with which the boy sat in the saddle, or the mop of tow hair which was agitated in the EO OO CO