The Argosy, Vol. 76, No. 3 — page 225: what you’re looking at

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

Che aking ‘ HITEY ” was fast asleep in the shadow of a_tomb- _stone, with his head _ pil- lowed on a grass-covered mound of some long-forgotten citizen of In- diana. He slept there because the grass was heavy and soft, the June night was balmy, and, to the unafraid, a grave- yard has as many advantages as an open-air dormitory. It is quiet, rest- ful, secluded. And Whitey Boone was unafraid, because the little country cemetery had been as familiar to him through most of his eighteen years as the dusty road that led past it to the straggling town of Tolmans from the open country to the south, It was close upon midnight when Whitey crawled over the low stone wall and burrowed into the grass for a resting-place. He was two hours overdue at his own bed in the attic of Lem Applegate’s farmhouse, and he was quite well aware that getting into Lem’s house or barn or cow-stables after they were locked for the night would be a task only slightly less diffi- cult than entering the Farmers’ Trust Bank at Tolmans after midnight. Whitey had spent those stolen hours in the wild dissipation of walking around the scarred and moth-eaten Olly Frank X. Finnegan Martin pea pool-table in the bar of the Com- mercial Hotel with other gay young blades, it being the night that Apple- gate had grudgingly paid him his twenty dollars for a month’s work, and thereafter he needed the rest that he sought among the sagging head- stones. He was awakened by the murmur of voices, and his first sensation, when he realized that he was in the grave- yard instead of being in his own bed in Lem’s -attic, was the stiffening of the shock of blond hair that had given him his nickname. Voices in a cemetery at two o’clock in the morning are as out of place as Whitey knew himself to be, and it was by a most desperate effort that the boy opened his eyes several seconds after he was broad awake. What he saw did not tend to allay the terrors that had seized him in his waking moment. It was the flickering light of a lantern slowly moving down the aisle next to the one near which he lay, glancing off the white tomb- stones as it passed them one by one and showing dimly the outlines of two men who carried the lamp between them. After a time the dancing light stopped, and Whitey heard the mur- muring voices again as the men peered 695 cCoOmiiclbooks CO@