Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 198: what you’re looking at

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

B12 had dwelt im the sparsely peopled Sand Hill country, and for a quarter of a century his neighbors in the far-scattered farms and ranches had shufmed him. They had sus- pected him of cattle stealing, of highway robbery, and of murder, but had proved mone of these things. One death, indeed, they traced to his door. He had shot down a cowboy in his , but there had been no witnesses, and Bent had told a circumstantial aoty "of self-defense. Before this time there had disappeared from the Bent ranch, William, a boy of fourteen, whom Bent had called his nephew. At the age of four, or there- abouts, the boy had come in the night. In the night he had gone. Bent said that he had rum away. [Tew believed the story, but none could disprove it, so the matter remained a ntystery. There had been a Mrs. Bent, but soon after the boy’s disappearance she had fied. She had hailed the stage coach by the roadside in the open prairie, and had wept unceasingly until # had depositert her at _ the railway-station in Kiowa. She had boarded a train for the East, and the Sand Hill country had neither seen her nor heard gf her again. Only Mexicans, newly imported from the border, tended Simon Bent’s herds, or- plowed his lands for millet, alfalfa and corn. They came away, after a time, tell- ing strange tales, which were not to be be- hieved because the tellers were greasers, worthless, superstitious, and given to strange imagmings. Nobody, however, spoke to Simon Bent, except in the way of business, and then the words were few. in all that open land of sunshine and friendimess, he was the one human being who was friendless and shunned. As Simon Bent drove, he now. and agaim tumed his head with an awkward, wab- bling motion, and fixed his eyes upon the rear left wheel of his ungainly vehicle. The four-inch tire was bound at intervals with thi, pliable wire, such as is used m al- falfa balers. It was slipping to one side, nevertheless, and as he estimated the chances of its holdmg until he reached the v ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. weather-beaten, sun-whitened httle town, the pariah. rursed Jacques Duval, his black- smith’s artisanship and all his works. The tire held, however, and presently the drooping team drew the wagon lum- heringly mto the single dusty street of the village, past the forlorn line of general stores, past the one-story brick court-house, set in its carefully nursed lawn, to the cot- tosrwoods that flanked Duval’s smithy. No ome hailed the vulturelike driver, who looked neither to. the right nor to the left until he had brought the horses to a stop. ( Bent gazed for a venomous moment at the smithy, whence came the clamorous sound of hammer on iron. Then he clam- bered down, his mouth working loathsome- ly with mruttered blasphemes, and began to umhitch the horses. They shivered at his touch, as beasts do which have been cowed by the whip. A, young man who had been watching Simon Bent from the veranda of the Drov- ers’ Hotel, opposite the smithy, arose and passed down the street. This young man had become a sort of village mystery in his four days’ stay at the hotel. He had given no account of himself, and the village was wise enough im such matters to know that. the “yon Smith” that he had written upon register might stand for anything In the way of a name that the young man wished to conceal. He was not of the cow country—that much was plain from his citified clothes. He had spent most of his four days on the ramshackle veranda, looking at the whrri- ing dust devils of the street. . It was remembered afterward that he had always looked im the direction from | which Simon Bent arrived. He had seemed to be watching for some one; and when Bent’s wagon came into sight, his eyes fas- tened upon it. Nor did they leave 1 until he arose from his seat and started for the public garage, which had taken the place of the stage line’s livery stable when that y had given up horses fot motors. ‘‘ Tl take the runabout,” he said to the man in charge, “ and Jt drive tt myself. IH be gone abort three hodrs.” “Where yuh goin’?” GONMGOOo @ YN S Colin