Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 57: what you’re looking at

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

DUEL 57 But we just walked. And I thought about the evening and the three or four dances I’d had with Fran until the stranger cut in on us, I knew most of the men over in the next village, but I hadn’t known him, and I hadn’t liked to ask who he was, when he was dancing with my girl. At least, any of the fellows I could have asked would have thought that Fran was my girl, and they’d have wondered what class of a man I was, to be letting someone I didn’t know cut in on me. As if Fran would have let me object. She had come alive when he danced with her, and when you saw them together on the floor they looked as though they’d been born to dance with each other. He was a big man, not so tall, maybe, but wide and thick in the shoulder, and yet light as a feather on his feet. Yellow, wavy hair and a brown, handsome face, and he held Fran as if she belonged to him. I went out and walked up the street and along the open hill- side for maybe half a mile, but when I came back she was still dancing with him. And now, walking home, I thought of the way she had looked at him, her eyes alive and her mouth waiting as if she was asking him to kiss her, and him a black stranger to her. I thought of the way he had held her, close in to him so that she seemed to be bending back a little over the hand at her waist: | Suddenly I couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘‘ Fran,” I said, and I caught her by the arm and swung her round to face me, and that same moment the moon came out, and the empty fields were like silver on either side of us, and the road stretched like a white river behind us, empty as the fields. I could see the way her eyebrows curved like bird’s wings and the dark glisten of her mouth, and I forgot what I was going to say and put my arms round her and kissed her. For a moment her breast was soft against my body and her mouth soft and warm against my mouth. Maybe if I had done that long ago, things would have been different. Maybe, for all the swagger of her, she needed a man to master her. Maybe she’d always despised me because I was too much in love with her and too afraid of her to try. But it was too late now. I felt her stiffen, and then she drew her head back and pushed me away from her, so suddenly that she caught me off balance and sent me staggering across the road. I caught my heel in the grass at the road’s edge and fell into the hedge. - : 2g comiclooks.comn