The Argosy, Vol. 76, No. 3 — page 187: what you’re looking at

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

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW. found Daisy Fancher. Her limp hands were crossed in her lap. She was very erect and motionless. She did not turn her glance when the colonel entered. Her face was wiped clean of expres- sion, except that her eyes, those round, china-blue eyes of a child, were fixed on some such far-off vision as the chil- dren of Hameln must have seen when they followed the Pied Piper into the mountain. Her lips were slightly parted. She was gone. She was no more there than was little Buzzy. The colonel watched her face for a moment, and then he led Fancher outside. “Tm going to turn out this regi- ment,” he said. “Ill bring in every- thing that walks on two legs in Moro- town. If that baby isn’t in his mother’s arms by midnight, I’ll show these devils frills to the juramentado game that they never dreamed of.” There was nothing of bluster and bluff in the colonel’s grim face, and Fancher had forgotten his theories of the power of mind. “Bobs, I must help,” he begged. “TI must do something. I can’t sit there, - Let me go.” The men of the Thirty-first had seen their dead, as the soldier saying is. They had sat in raging silence while the murderers, protected by some fiction of diplomacy beyond the ken of the troopers, went unhung. Little Buzzy had been in the barracks more than was good for most children, and the soldiers idolized him. The dismounted troops, rifles slant- ed across swinging shoulders, car- tridge-clips clinking in their bandoliers, trotted out through the gate at a thud- ding double., It was the chance they had awaited. They surrounded the town. ‘Soon the dark streets were filled with a disturbed populace in an exodus toward the post. The reconcentration was effected with a rough thorough- ness that left no doubt in the minds of the reconcentrated concerning the se- rious intentions of their captors. 657 Like some sinister magistrate of the Inquisition, the colonel sat at his desk in the room that had once belonged to the warder of the wall-dungeons, a flaring coco-oil lamp at each elbow throwing into deep relief the heavy lines of his seamed and set old face. As each sullen tribesman was brought before him he made his lugu- brious promise and threat in person, and with such picturesque- wording, such wealth of vigorous gesture, that the interpreter was an unnecessary for- mality. Behind him Fancher, pacing rest- lessly across the flags, halted as each questioning went forward, waiting anxiously for a word of hope that never came. At first the imprisoned Moros squatted defiantly in the cell corners; but as the dungeons packed, they con- gregated in stifling groups, talking ex- citedly. At eleven o’clock a dismounted troop marched past the smoky lanterns of the sally-port and grounded arms with a rattling bang on a concrete walk, in plain sight of the cell gratings. They stood at ease in ranks, talking in low tones or gesturing (as, being soldiers, they were bound to do) in un- mistakable prophecy of what was going to happen at midnight. The whispering in the cells became more excited, and once a headman held all attention for a full five minutes in a gibberish of speech. “The Americans have turned Mo- ro,’ was part of it. “ The colonel- headman has promised to do to us pre- cisely as we would do to him and with as much mercy. If any have knowl- edge, let him speak.” Never since the awful day when an outraged Spanish comandante un- loased a gunboat, stricken, he averred, with the prevalent Moro murder-mad- ness called juramenitado, its weapons trained without mercy on the town— never since that day had the Moros seen the white men in so dangerous, so fatal a mood. COMicdoo S CO@