Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 144: what you’re looking at

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

018 long time, but they’d fixed him up to come into a bunch of kale when he got to be about thirty, said frog-skins to be his if he’d made something of himself by that time. But he had a taste for booze. It ran in the family like a wooden leg, and he thought that was why his folks had put the age limit on his collecting the pile, thinking if he kept away from the demon rum till he was that old he’d never have no great yin for it later on. And he kept away pretty good: in fact, he said he’d never really been lit up until just a short time before he joins on with us. 7 He had a girl, and the wedding bells was -to tear loose at an early date. The girl was the one in the picture, and her first name was “ Hope.” He was practicing law, all nght; coming along pretty fair for a be- ginner, with his friends handing him a job whenever they could. Then. he gets a streak of bad luck; losing one case after another till he gets afraid to do anything, for it seems everything he tackles gets the skids slipped to it and goes on the tobogan. Now, when things is coming soft for a guy, and all of a sudden they turns the other way, it brings out what’s in him, and in Hooch there was a desire to mop up all the booze there was in the neighborhood. He proceeds to do this to a fare-you-well, going down, down, down till he gets hang- ' ing round the barrel houses and his friends pass him up. Then one night a guy hands him some rough talk, and he beans the mutt with a beer bottle and beats it out of the dump. | | Just as he gets out of the joint, stagger- ing along, a glare of light from an auto catches him fair and square, and as he blinks at the light, the car stops and his girl opens the door and comes toward him. Then he hears the girl give a scream and fall down, and her driver jumps out and runs to pick her up, and Hooch runs, too, but just as he starts, something hits him over the head and he goes down and out. He don’t know nothing until next morn- ing, when he wakes up in a box-car, and finds all his own clothes gone, and a bunch of somebody’s duds alongside him. The train is rattling along so he can’t get off, and he goes to sleep again, and when he ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. does finally hit the grit he finds himself in the East St. Louis yards. He finds a couple of dollars in the clothes, and he also finds he’s got a nasty cut on his head. He picks out a cheap flop, washes up, gets his scoffings and goes over to St. Louis and gets a home-town paper. It cheers him up a lot to read that he’s set down as dead; cut all to pieces by a freight train in the yards of his home town. He dopes it out that the guy who rolled him for his clothes took all the other things and then got run over and was identified as him © by their finding the papers and junk on the body. And he also reads that his aunt, who was in bad health at the time, is dead from the shock, and that his girl was all broken up. All around, the poor lob is in pretty bad, but he says he felt that it didn’t make no difference—felt kind of nutty someway or other, and he goes out and gets soused, then. gets vagged, does a stretch in the Works, and when he gets out he hits the road, and soon he meets up with us. It’s sure enough some yarn, though I don’t get it all at once on account of the nurse not letting him talk very much. But I gets it all in a few days, and wants him to wise me up some more so I can wire his friends. But there’s nothing stirring, not one little thing, and he won’t tell me what his town is, or nothing about his friends, and when I tells him what he ought to do, he gets sore and the nurse ties a-can on-my coming around for a week. I gets Tommy .to stick around, but I promised Hooch not to say anything, so I can’t wise Tommy up to the planf. And all I’ve got to go on is the name of a photographer, which happens to be on the picture, but that’s all—no name of a town or anything but the photographer’s name and what the girl wrote on it herself. But I thinks I can make it at that. Before I gets busy I has a talk with the head of the hospital, and he tells me Hooch had something pressing on his brain, a “blood clot,” he calls it, and that they’d fixed it up so it wouldn’t bother him no more. The doc asks me if I’d ever noticed anything out of the way with my friend, and I tells him about Hooch rubbing bis GORGE OOO Ss GOL