Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 55: what you’re looking at

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

DUEL BY BRIAN CLEEVE HE wasn’t the girl to be in a small place at all. There was | too much swagger about her entirely; red hair like chestnut __ _ leaves falling in the autumn, and so long and thick that a man could have filled his two hands with it and felt it spilling over his wrists like warm silk. And her face, white and sullen, with est the tinge of her blood colouring the skin. Dark eyes and full lips, and her body supple as a whip. Almost like a boy’s a “ Edy, with long, straight legs and fine shoulders. And yet you __ knew it was a woman’s body the second that you put your arms al round her, the way I did one night coming back from a dance in the next village. Be _. There was a whole crowd of us; Padraic, and Michael who’d a been in England, and my cousin ‘Sean and I, and a few more; and, of course, the girls, all in a bunch at first, carrying their pe & dance slippers and giggling together. But not Fran. Not ee _ Francesca. You see, even her name was wrong. Maire, or Sheila, or Mary Ann, or Siobhan—it could have been almost anything, and at 4 least it wouldn’t have made things worse for her. But Francesca. Even if she hadn’t looked as she did, a name like that would | _ have done her no good. ___ It had a foreign sound about it that made a man shy of saying ‘ a it. And to make it worse, she got mad if you called her Fran. _ Francesca, it had to be, or nothing, and so, for most of the men in the village, it was nothing. You see, we were a big enough village for the men to pick and choose. Not a town, but maybe a thousand inhabitants, or very near it; a couple of hundred houses and a dozen or so small shops caught in a fold of the mountains. And most of the best- 4 looking men left before they were old enough to get serious _ about a girl. __ They went to England, or Australia, or America, or just to ____ Dublin, and sometimes they came back for a week or two, and sometimes they didn’t come back at all. Which meant that unless a girl followed them she was hard put to it to find a husband. wih - comicbhooks.cOm: