Argosy, Vol. 118, No. 4 — page 46: what you’re looking at

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

516 fainting—fainting. The falling fist began to dissolve in the haze that came before her eyes. Blindly she jabbed the pin into his neck. How deep it went she did not know, but while his snarl of agony resounded the arm he had about her relaxed. The hand that had been lifted to fell her went instead to pull out the pin that she had left sticking in his flesh. When it failed to strike, the girl’s brain reacted. A wave of exulation revived her as she com- prehended that his clasp about her body had loosened. She thudded her fists on his face and kicked him; then with a quick wrench she was free. “ Jacqueline!” The wailing cry from Dorothy told her which way to flee, for Dorothy had reached close to the face of the rock up which she could climb. Jacqueline heard it, and-she believed she placed its direction. With a bellow the tramp was rushing upon her. She had no time to look, to make sure of where she was going. Her only thought was to remain out of his de- filing hands. Dorothy’s voice had come from there, be- hind her—she was sure of that. Nothing, then, stood between her and safety if she but ran fast enough. Whirling about as the man lunged for her, she ran—eyes unseeing, trusting to the guiding voice of her chum. But there her overstressed senses proved traitor. The cry that rose once more— ‘* Jacqueline! ” Ifcame not from behind her, but from the side. She never knew. For at her sec- ond flying step she went hurtling far into the gorge—her shriek of terror echoing to the skies—down, down, down, seventy feet. to where the stream broils and crashes and whips itself to foam! A foot from the brink the man who had driven her to death stood. watching her tumbling body. For a long minute he was there, bent and peering, stunned and frightened by that shapeless thing that was flung against a rock by the waters only to ~ be snatched back and cast into an eddying pool, where it spun endlessly round and round. _ sure of time to make his escape. THE ARGOSY. Then he turned and ran—ran blindly, as Jacqueline had run to her death. He recoiled as Dorothy rose before him on top of the rock. He could have crum- pled her between his hands, but with the picture fresh upon him of what was down there in the chasm, the plaything of the stream—of the girl who,-: through his act, had been, in the space of a breath, trans- formed irito an inanimate, broken bundle of clay—he was afraid of the child who faced him. The back of his hand rubbed over his mouth, and he wet his lips, not in pleasure- able anticipation, as he had done when Jacqueline had seemed to be his to do with as he would, but because they had suddenly become dry and caked with the pious that the girl had drawn. ‘‘ Where—” Dorothy’s widening eyes cov- ered the summit of the rock and came back to his face—‘‘ where is—Jacqueline?” She had heard Jacqueline’s dying shriek, but she shut from her numbed mind the > vision of what it meant. She wanted to hear from this man. | “Out the way—” He cowered, wiping his mouth again. “Out the way—” He fingered the wound on his neck, the raw tear on his cheek. These had him marked —he had to get away quickly. Had the coward in him not prevailed he would have killed Dorothy, too, and made Instead, he whimpered when she advanced on him —whimpered a threat which, with his mind _ fixed on the one idea that he must flee, he had not the power to execute. It was an impossible contest that the girl offered, yet she went at it bravely, with a calm resolution to lose her life, if that were demanded, with the chum she might have aided had her courage come a few minutes earlier. Actuated by only one thought, flight, the man shoved her aside. As she stumbled he went past her. She leaped after him. He struck her down senseless, and fled into the gathering darkness. That was the hour—and why shouldn’t the natives know, for they were about the place before, and have been since—that the (S| Q) nn DOOK