Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 53: what you’re looking at

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

SIX LEGS ARE WELCOME 53 fellows which you seem to have forgotten about for the moment; but they happened to be beetles—tfireflies. Beautiful? I don’t know whether it was or not. It was mad. I tell you that there wasn’t a cubic foot of air—literally—without a firefly in it. You couldn’t see. No wonder I thought I was fainting. It was like—well, I’ve often tried to describe it to myself. Imagine yourself infinitely small and suspended in a cylinder of gas. Imagine the hot molecules rushing about and cannoning into each other. No, it wasn’t beautiful. The three troopers on the left of the line had been following the bank of the creek. ‘They were now so close that we didn’t dare whisper. Not that they would have heard us. They were cursing and damning and waving their hats about. Quite useless, but it’s a human instinct to try and clear a space in front of the eyes. Their horses were nervous and giving any amount of trouble. I doubt if: they were in the least bothered by the fireflies; they had caught the exasperation of their riders, as horses always do. Hilario started to squirm forward foot by foot, and Rosalinda and I followed. You couldn’t tell where the police troopers were going, fighting their horses in that damned silly way instead of showing confidence. One of the poor beasts was just about to tread on me when it saw me. It shied, and its rider’s language was worse than ever. He didn’t look at the ground. He was trying to pierce the intolerable flickering on a level with his eyes. It was perfectly safe to stand up and run as soon as we were past them. At the head of the creek we took the track down to the sands, and reached Hilario’s canoe by swimming and wading. Of course, I can never go back to Argentina, but who cares? Three thousand acres I farm here. When Hilario showed me this place and its own private river with a flow of 300,000 gallons a minute and an even drop of twenty feet in half a mile, I saw what could be done in the way of power-plant and refrigeration. It wouldn’t suit everyone. But we often have visitors like yourself. And they are very welcome whether they have two legs or six. Hilario himself always preferred mining to farming. He’s done very well at it. Rosalinda? Well, they get a bit full in the figure, you know. But does that matter when the only face you ever want to look at is on top of it? comiclooks.comn