Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 63: what you’re looking at

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

ie oa him, with a full swing of her open hand that would have knocked most men down. It rang across the street like a gun shot and he nearly fell, staggering back to keep his balance. ~ The loafers stiffened against the wall, and a dozen curtains quivered in the windows along the street. ‘This was the moment they had been waiting for. This was the moment when Fran of the red hair and the pride and the swagger would be broken. Whatever the stranger did, she would be broken. But they hoped that he would strike her back before he left her, so that they could have the symbol as well as the reality. And he did strike her, sliding across the road with his dancer’s, fighter’s lightness, lifting his hand and then chopping her down with a horrible, chunky little blow that knocked her in a sprawl at his feet, her red hair tumbled in the dust, her arms flung sideways, her green dress like a leaf broken from the tree and fallen. He stirred her with his foot and laughed, one hand to his own cheek where she had hit him, and he grinned round at the men watching. I'll give them grace that some of them looked uncomfortable, but none of them stirred—none of them said a word that a stranger had struck a girl of their own village in front of them. Some of them even laughed. I couldn’t see or think for a moment, and when I came to myself I was halfway down the stairs with a blackthorn stick in my hand. But I didn’t run. I was too sure to need to run. I was going to break him. Break him as he had broken Fran. I walked quite slowly, limping up the street, looking at his yellow hair in the sunlight, his wide shoulders, and the one hand at his cheek. And at Fran, gathering herself onto her knees close to his feet, almost as if she were kneeling to him, looking round as though she couldn’t quite believe that she had no friend at all, no one who’d so much as lift his voice for her. I was behind her and she never saw me coming. Neither did the stranger at first. It was the men along the wall who saw me, and their eyes turaing told the stranger that _ the thing wasn’t over yet. He looked up when I was quite close to him and grinned a little awkwardly. ** Get a stick,” I said, and one of the men that had a blackthorn threw it to him. There was more fighting in those days than there is now, and neither of us needed to say anything: He kicked Fran away from him, the way you'd lift a kitten on the point of your shoe, and swung the stick in his two hands, getting the weight of it. The street started filling, quietly but quickly, until there was a ring of men. No women, but they a DUEL 63 comiclooks.comn