Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 46: what you’re looking at

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

pi letky or 4 og st ae se 2, oe - Pele. ori oF Be a i 7° 6 ; GEOFFREY SOURTTOR ED | a ‘ But I kept on treating her as if she had just been let out of the rs convent school for a day with uncle. I must have convinced — ~~ eek ir 4 A et me = sigs | S ty oe a \ "s minh? ee aides ¢ ___ her in the end that I, at any rate, wasn’t hungry. x Suddenly she burst out: “I do not understand this place!” = ___-“‘ What’s wrong with it?”’ I asked. “ It’s as good a place as x there is till you get down to the Plata.” - “It’s not this way that a girl gets married,” she answered. One doesn’t like to be fooled. I’ve knocked around the caba- —s_— rets of two continents, and I expect you have, too. You never know what tricks those girls will be up to. I told myself firmly that I was not rich enough to be a senator, and was too-old to be | ae. sentimental. al _ “When did you leave the convent?” I asked, not making the _ érony too obvious. re ‘In May,”’ she said. ie It was a plain fact that she was stating. re D “And your parents? ” fail Then it all came out—so far as she herself was capable ofunder- _ standing what had happened to her. She had never cometo grips with everyday life at all, you see. The forest, her parents, her simple education—that was all her past. Re _ She was Paraguayan. Her parents, both of them, were of mixed Spanish and Indian blood. Humble folk, but true Ameri- cans and proud of it. They had managed to make a good living _ —and a little cash over—out of a remote holding up the river. No near neighbours but the forest Indians. As a matter of fact, their original farm was a part of this one. And it wasalot harder _ for them to reach by paddling than for you in your motor launch. _ When Rosalinda came home from the convent at Asuncion, she ‘ to settlement. So there she was. Relations, none. Money, none. Food, what there was on the place. And then some fool, wanting to get her a free passage—but as likely as not he had no money, either— __ put her on Don Luis’s launch as a first step towards returning her __ found that the land was going back to scrub, that the few peons had left, and that both her parents had been dead foroveramonth. __ Her brother, Hilario, was away in the Chaco, where the post was Og not nearly so reliable as word of mouth passed from settlement — oe _ € ° to civilization. “i Rs Luis was on his way down the Parana from Brazil, and he had some woman with him—I never found out who it was— that he passed off as his wife. Both of them, she insisted, were -_ angels to her. And when Luis suggested that, if she stopped __ off at Posadas, he would find her a husband, she believed him. ; a a comicbooks. com ’ nh, ee