Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 65: what you’re looking at

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

DUEL 65 You can hurt even a big man with a blackthorn stick. Hurt him very terribly. And worse than terribly if you know how to use it and where to hit. He knelt down like a tree falling, and by the grace of these things he knelt down in front of Fran. She herself was still kneeling, only half risen from where he had sent her sprawling when the fight started, the grey dust _ of the street scattered on her green dress and chestnut hair, the side of her face a sullen, darkening red where he had struck her. I hit him a last time and he fell down on his face in the dust, the blood running in a thin crimson ribbon out of his mouth. “Ts this your man?” I said to her. “Is this your lover?” And she looked at me very strangely across the fallen bulk of the great hero, the woman-pleaser, with his town clothes and his spending money, and his hunger to be admired. I can be sorry for him now. I was almost sorry for him even then. But Fran was all that I cared about, and I had a terror that out of some idiot pride she would cling to the man just because he was fallen. As if he would thank her, or stay with her. But I couldn’t plead. “Is he yours?’ I repeated, and was afraid to look at her, afraid of the answer I would see in her eyes before I heard it ‘in her voice. And slowly, very slowly, she shook her head, and smiled, a queer, heart-broken little smile, as if, quite suddenly, she had learnt a lot of things, and found them too sad for weeping. But all she said was my name, very softly, so that no one in the crowd about us could hear. “‘ Jamie the Book,”’ she said, with a funny kind of tenderness in her voice. ‘‘ Jamie the Book.” I lifted her to her feet, and we walked down the street together, the ring opening for us. And I tried not to limp, tried not to know what they were thinking, that Fran was a girl who'd go with the man who beat her lover, just because he beat her lover. But even though I knew what they were thinking, I didn’t really care, because I knew that it wasn’t true. I knew it from the way she had smiled at me, half ashamed, half kindred, the two of us together—the red-haired one, and Jamie the Book who half killed the poor stranger. And suddenly I laughed, thinking of what they’d say. I laughed aloud, for all the pain in my hip and the shame of everything. And beside me, Fran threw back her head and laughed as well, laughed at herself, laughed because the sun was shining, laughed because we’d found each other, the odd ones out. You comiclooks.conn