The Argosy — page 82: what you’re looking at

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

The Devil in Dunchester. 69 at intervals a few cold drops of rain, and it was no easy matter to struggle across the bare hill-side, encumbered as I was with a cloak and the head, which certainly was exceedingly difficult to hold. | But at length the worst of the struggle seemed over. I had crossed the open ground and reached the top of a narrow alley, whose darkness was made visible by the flicker of a few gas lamps, and was congratulating myself on the shelter it afforded, when suddenly a blast, fiercer than any of its predecessors, swept round the corner of a detached house. It caught the heavy folds of my cloak, and wrapping them about me, whirled me round and round again, seized the hat from my head, and would have driven it eddying away into infinite dark- ness, had I not involuntarily put up both hands to save it. There was a quick rustle, followed by the flapping of a loose sheet of news- paper, and I realised with a shock that the head was gone. Yes, there it was, painfully visible under those lamps whose obscurity I had a moment before mentally condemned; turning towards me alternately as it rolled and bounded from step to step of the narrow way, now the uncompromising blackness of its shaven scalp, now the livid gleam of its sinister countenance. A. little below me the alley took a sharp turn, and just at the corner a stream of light from an open door-way fell across the path. Even now in its wild career my twice ill-fated head was hurrying to the verge of this luminous streak, and in a moment more, as I sped with swift but cautious steps in pursuit, it appeared in bold relief against the wet pavement before the door. At the same instant the consolatory reflection flashed through my mind that, at the pace at which it was going, even if it were seen from within the house, it would hardly be recognised for the ghastly, improbable thing it was, and if it continued in its present course it must, according to the laws of mathematics, be shortly landed in the corner of a blind wall. But Jim, I might have remembered, had always preferred the circuitous and surprising to the direct course, nor did he habitually hamper his movements by any respect for any laws whatsoever. ‘There was a diabolical verve about the way in which his head, availing itself of a slight unevenness in the slope, dashed against the scraper, rebounded at a sharp angle, and bumping down the two descending steps of the threshold, rolled into the lighted room and out of sight. Fora moment I stood transfixed ; but to the first thrill of horror and amazement there succeeded an overmastering impulse to re-capture — at all risks this thing, this creature of mine, which thus openly and at once outwitted and defied me. | Pulling my hat over my eyes I strode boldly to the door. ‘There it lay, at the very feet of a solitary woman, who convulsively grasping the seat of her chair, leaned forward, staring at the ghastly intruder with a face as pale as its own—which was turned towards me with what seemed, to my excited imagination, a grin of impudent malice on sts livid features. I leapt into the room with a yell of mingled rage COMICOOOKS.EO