Adventure, December 1914 — page 101: what you’re looking at

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

Immediate Lee comment upon the lack of action, and with laughter and shuffling of feet the gathering went back to play. pak KENTUCK HURLEY stopped mx ese outside and glared balefully into the starlit night. His pony whinnied at the tie-rail, unnoticed. Through the open door coarse gusts of laughter reached him, and as if each was borne to him with personal significance his jaws corded in bitter animus. He swayed on his heels a little at first, but the clean air of the night refreshed and steadied him. Presently the project which he had been formulating took definite shape. He went to his saddle, jerked loose his coiled riata and strode up the deserted street, beyond the crowded shacks and on to where an overhanging sycamore darkened the road- way at the edge of the town. There he swung and skilfully threw the hurtling rope several times at an imaginary object; but after three or four trials he impatiently snatched the loop back and muttered. “Slow, slow. God! Can’t I move any more at all?” : Suddenly he stopped coiling the rope, glanced quickly up the road, then knelt in the deep dust. Adjusting the running- noose in a wide circle he laid it out care- fully across the beaten trail and covered it with the powdery sand. After roughly erasing his tracks with his hands he stepped back within the shadow of the tree and crouched beside it, waiting. — Za by IT WAS perhaps an hour before max anything of further interest to Kentuck Hurley transpired. The leaves of the sycamore muttered drowsily overhead; the night sounds of the bare, stark land contrasted decorously with the man-made clangor in the distance. Fi- nally the song of a lone man singled itself from the unsteady hubbub. It was then that Hurley fingered the rope in his hand and resettled himself against the tree. se her throat was like the swan, And her face it was the fairest That e’er the sun shone on.’’ To Immediate Lee the tune was not essential—he rendered it with variations; the sentiment was the thing and it made a never-tiring appeal to some spiritual sense within him. “Annie Laurie” was a recog- 99 nizable part of him, like the shape of his hat. The song came closer and clearer, and it was directly under the sycamore that he concluded, devoutly— “‘And for bonnie A-a-annie Laurie I ’ud lay me doon un’ dee.” He halted there and cupped a match to a cigarette, with his hands before his face and with arms snugged close before him. In that moment, like a coiled snake about his feet, the rope ring leaped from the dust and with a stinging ‘‘whit’? enwrapped his arms and shoulders. Hand over hand Hurley came lunging down the tightened line to pounce upon the convulsed, twisting man whose face furrowed the choking sand in the road. Cinching it tight at the back, Hurley deftly looped the rope and bound the thrashing feet; then he lashed the wrists with the man’s neck-scarf. As an added precaution he slipped the gun from the weighted holster, pausing in interest to note the smoothly filed, sightless tip of it before he cast it into the brush. BESIDE a clump of mesquite Os yy Kentuck dropped the bound man i’ ~from across his saddle and removed the gag. ‘You couldn’t guess what’s goin’ to happen to you now, you quick young feller,” he remarked derisively. “Could you?” “Let’s have it. I’m all of a twitter,” was the drawling reply. “T don’t like the way you laugh. You don’t show yer teeth. You grin too damned narrow and modest.”’ With a swift movement he plunged upon his knees, seized the upturned face with his burly fingers and pressed his own ma- lignant visage snarlingly above it. “You tin-horn lady-killer!”’ He knelt back and leered menacingly down upon the silent, observant figure between his knees while he fumbled in his pocket for a heavy-bladed clasp knife. “I’m goin’ to present you with a real laugh—a nice wide grin, man’s size. One you kin take home an’ show the folks.” With two quick passes he cut a running gash back from each corner of Lee’s mouth, leaving the cheeks divided and quivering. “Now grin, you coyote! Have a good laugh.” . Rising, Hurley gazed stupefied at the white, mutilated object lying in the pale MICLOOOK C©