Argosy, Vol. 123, No. 1 — page 25: what you’re looking at

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

By y y ki HERE was a patent music-box in Waldo Harrison’s parlor and the top of it was a highly varnished and pol- ished golden oak, a triumph of bourgeoise - art. : Comrade Leon Minsch, who was lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of a used one, deliberately laid the burning twist of tobacco and paper so that its glowing coal added the stench of bubbling varnish to the scent of cheap tobacco. | . : Zenia Kauffmann, legally and conven- tionally Mrs. Waldo Harrison, standing close beside him, merely smiled. Comrade Minsch seized her about the waist and drew her to him. “ You are my woman,” he whispered. “Dead certain, aren’t you?” Zenia mocked him, but she let the arm remain where it was. In those days—it was January of 1900 --Zenia Kauffmann had lost that youthful, willowly slenderness that had first captured the attention of Waldo MHarrison and tricked him into marrying his mother’s maid of all work. But she was still a strikingly handsome young woman with hair black as coal, snapping black eyes set off obliquely by her high cheekbones and a perfect, oval face. Her lips were full and very red and her mind was a fertile field within the devil, whose particular preference is idle women, had already sowed a bountiful crop of mischief. Like Comrade Minsch, Zenia’s birthplace fork, | by Jack Bechdolt Was Russia and they exchanged endear- ments in their native tongue.. Comrade Gerta Rhinebeck peered through her thick-lensed glasses at them. She was thin, was Comrade Gerta and she entertained a tenderness for big, whiskered Leon Minsch that brewed in her a jealous acid. | ‘Where is your husband, Comrade Zenia?” she asked with shrill significance. The other half dozen of the comrades, smoking, drinking beer and sprawling in Waldo Harrison’s little flat paused to hear the answer. ‘Who, the little bourgeois?” drawled Zenia. ‘‘ At his store earning the money that buys your supper, I dare say, my dear Gerta.” Zenia laughed unpleasantly. ‘ But why do you ask? Why think of him? Do not fear that he will disturb our happiness, Comrade Gerta. Waldo Harrison, pah! Self-satisfied, money grubbing, blind. A— an easy mark!” Leon Minsch laughed uproariously at the current slang. ‘‘ Easy Mark!” he roared. He snatched up a bottle of beer from the golden-oak center-table, knocked -off its neck with a skilled blow that left a splendid jagged scar in the shining varnish and held the foaming bottle aloft, dripping a puddle of slops on the Wilton rug in Waldo Harri- | son’s parlor. ‘‘A toast to our unseen host,” he proclaimed. ‘To Comrade Easy mark.”’ He drahk from the broken bottle and the 15 cComiclboooks ©