Argosy, Volume XXIII — Index Page, 1897 — page 165: what you’re looking at

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

HOODOO SAM. 735 and sullen. ‘‘If you loved me you would come with me,’’ he said ; and she answered, as she had many times before, ‘‘ I can never leave Rob.’’ ‘That brat !’’ he exclaimed passionately. ‘‘I count for nothing with you alongside of him. I wish he was dead.’’ ‘‘ Shame on you to say such a thing! I will never speak to you again, Hardy Brock,’’ flashed Hetty, turning sharply from the window, on the sill of which her sweetheart leaned. When she looked toward the window again, he was gone. She sat down and hada hard cry; then she bathed her face and went back to pie making—one’s work must go on, no matter how one’s heart is aching. Nearly an hour had passed since she had put a hot cake in Rob’s chubby fist and sent him away to play. At first; she was scarcely uneasy. He was asleep somewhere, she thought, or mischievously hiding from her. But when she failed to find him after running here and there about the cleared ground, looking behind the hen house and the banks of sweet potatoes, her nlisgivings increased and the tones in which she repeated his name had a quaver of keen anxiety. ‘““The Sink,’’ she thought presently. ‘‘ He may have gone to the Sink, Yes, his fishing rod is missing; he is there !” The Sink was a mile from the house. It was a funnel shaped hole half filled with the black waters of a lagoon which made out from the San Lucia River. The lagoon sank into the earth through this sink, the bottom of which had never been found. Such sinks abound in Florida, underlaid as the peninsula is with the porous concrete of shells called “rotten limestone. ”’ In some of the sinks, the water rises and falls at regular intervals, showing subterranean connection with the ocean. Hetty ran all the way to the Sink, looking right and left through the open pine woods, and occasionally sending her cry of ‘‘Rob!’’ across the level waste of scrub palmetto and wire grass. ‘The loose sand of the path could hold no print of the little bare feet. She saw no trace of the child, until she reached the Sink. ‘There, on the bank under an overhanging live oak, was his fishing rod; near it lay a small catfish, its tail still feebly flaping. . But Rob was nowhere to be seen. Hetty rushed to the edge of the steep bank and looked down into the Sink. The black waters were motionless ; the dead leaves floating on it did not stir. But, as she looked, the waters suddenly became disturbed, the dead leaves whirled around an instant, bubbles rose and burst, and from the black depths came the gurgling sound which had helped to put the ban of ‘haunted ’’ on the Sink. | ‘Tt is the Bad One laughing to himself,’’ the superstitious said. The ‘‘ Bad One,’’ who had his habitation in this gloomy hole, was sup- posed to hold the shape of a huge alligator, so old and tough that his moss grown hide was bullet proof. He had often been seen and shot at, but he still lived ; calves and pigs that had disappeared were believed to have been devoured by him in his inaccessible den—a great hole in the bank below the water. 3) (E(o) Eomichbooks