Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 83: what you’re looking at

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

A, MERRITT 35 And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation— shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary. | : On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts—or so he thinks. Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and man’s little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest. But they are home to him! | Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation, some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the shelter of the obvious; finding in an intellectual environment that de- ‘mands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative, strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar. I crave pardon for this digression. I set it.down because now I re- member how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts occurred to me. , He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness that angered me until I realized his purpose. “Get up, Ruth,” he ordered. “He came back once and he'll tome back again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I’m hungry.” She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising. “Fat!” she exclaimed. “You can be hungry?” “You bet I can—and I am,” he answered cheerfully. “Come on; we've got to make the best of it.” a “Ruth,” I broke in gently, “we'll all have to think about ourselves a little if we’re to be of any use to him. You must eat—and then rest,” “No use crying in the milk even if it’s spilt,” observed Drake, even more cheerfully brutal. “I learned that at the front where we got so we'd yelp for food even when the lads who’d been bringing it were all mixed up init” She lifted Ventnor’s head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose, eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him. | “Oh—you brute!” she whispered. “And I thought—I thought—Oh, I hate you!” _ “That’s better,” said Dick. “Go ahead and hit me if you want. The -_ madder you get the better you'll feel.” | | For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her anger fled. 7 “Thanks—Dick,” she said quietly. 7 And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding re- GOGO (GO)