The Argosy, Christmas 1912 — page 151: what you’re looking at

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

FLIRTING WITH DESPERATE HAZARD. ‘Look, quick, across the street—there yoes Perkins, now!” Lewis, staring over the shoulders of the man in front of him at the window, saw a figure moving along the opposite pavement. Just then the pedestrian came under the rays of a lighted lamp- post—and, despite the changes the years since last they met had wrought in his boyhood acquaintance, the re- porter recognized him to be, indeed, no other than John S. Perkins. Back from the window Pete bound- ed at that moment. He collided with Lewis, knocking him from his path as he ran to the door. Apparently obliv- ious of the reporter’s existence, the fat.man turned the key and threw the portal wide—dashing out of the room and down the stairs, three at a time. It was only a second later that Lewis, recovering his breath, was through that same door. And he, too, made the descent of the stairs at the heels of his would-be murderer at breakneck speed. CHAPTER VIII. A BODY BLOW. LEWIS meant to put as much dis- tance between himself and that shabby room as the speed-law would allow. Following his former captor down the stairs, the noise of the fat man’s flight being sufficient to drown the sound of the reporter’s progress be- hind him, Lewis reached the ground- floor vestibule just as the coat-tails of the rascal ahead flapped out of sight through the street door. A moment the reporter hesitated there in the hall. But, no; he ought to be safe in making a break from the house at once. Brady and his com- panion would be engrossed with the pursuit of their quarry across the street. Even if they turned and saw him leave the building they would not dare risk losing the trail of the man they wanted by putting back after him. Striding to the front door, Lewis - bumped was a _ newsboy. 137 managed to open it. The free air blow- ing on his face was like a boon from heaven. He filled his lungs. Then, running down the stoop, the reporter turned and started off in the opposite direction from his two late captors as tight as he could leg it. A dozen yards and he brought up, with an explosion of pent breath, his hat jarred over one eye by the force of the collision, against somebody who had just then rounded the corner of the street toward which he was flying. “Extra! Read the extra! All about the murderer! ‘The darin’ es- cape of the murderer in the big shoot- in’ mystery! Escaped to-night, on his way to jail! Extra—paper, boss? ” The somebody into whom he had And the words he was crying—but Lewis was saved the necessity of trying to recall them from memory. Just then the lad stuck a newspaper under the reporter’s nose. ‘There, in heavy type across the top of the front page, as easy to read under the light of the adjacent lamppost as if the print- ing had been exposed in broad day, Lewis saw the record of his own es- cape from the police blazoned forth for the whole town to peruse. Swiftly he ran his eye through the detailed account that followed the bold scarehead. But of all the bare-faced, nervy jugglings with the truth that he had ever read—if this wasn’t the limit! No mention whatsoever was made of the two men who had liberated him at the gun-point. They didn’t figure in this account at all. It seemed that the two plain-clothes minions, having taken Lewis prisoner in the city room of the Meteor—ac- complishing his capture only after a struggle beside which every other des- perate hand-to-hand encounter known to history paled into sheepish insig- nificance—they had started with him toward the nearest lock-up, leading him handcuffed between them, through the crowded city thoroughfares, confident oO cComicbooks CO