Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 43: what you’re looking at

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

SIX LEGS ARE WELC OME | _ BY GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD — T’S no good waving at them. ‘Take this one, for example! - She'll get bored with crawling up my arm ina moment, and fly off. For twenty-seven days in the month there’s just the usual mixture of insects, and on the twenty-eighth, for no reason at all, _ one species gets completely out of hand and fills up all the avail % able air. ES _ No, I don’t know what these are called—apart from their - Indian name. Odd-looking creatures, aren’t they? Six legs. | _ Red and black Asdic. And about an inch and a half of torpedo _ _ tube in the stern. That’s only a flying ant in your gin. Just pick itout. There you are—neither of you one penny the worse! be We'll go inside in another half-hour when the mosquitoes come on duty. But you needn’t pay any attention at all to these fel- lows. They’re just satisfying their curiosity, with only one day to do it in perhaps. Well, yes, there are limits. I quite agree. I don’t hold with those Buddhist chaps who won’t squash a - cockroach in case it turns out to be their defunct mother-in- law. Ive no fellow-feeling for any of the little pests. “Z _ But if it hadn’t been for them I should be halfway through a _ life sentence now instead of farming this wonderful place. Aman _ can never quite forget a bit of luck like that. It’s bound toin- fluence him. Let me get you another glass. That one’s drowned herself. Weak heart, probably. Live and let live—that’s all I say. This bit of Paraguay ‘belongs to them quite as much as to me. I’d better tell you the story. I haven't listened to myself speaking © my own language for more than a year. And it will stop you imagining that something is crawling down the back of your neck, when all you need—like the rest of us—is a haircut. I was a mechanic in Argentina then—repairing tractors and | managing the power- plant and refrigeration on a big estancia up — in the north-east corner of Corrientes. That’s a strip of real — ___ white man’s country—in between the marshes of the Parana and © the forests of Misiones. I liked the life and the people. Tookto it from the start, like so many other Englishmen. , . Ws :,. oi ei a, 8 comlicbooks.com