Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

hj hi | | Vif if ey ia “a od 3 \ eye wn , i , ~~‘ \\ WAR Aj By J. ALLAN DUNN Author of ** Fortune Unawares,’’ ‘* Fool’s Gold,’’ ete. » A NOVELETTE—COMPLETE IN THIS ISSUE | Vila Trading Company, sat on the veran- da of his shack looking across the lagoon to the spouting breakers on the barrier reef and, beyond that, through the reef gate, to the infinite blue of the sea and the infinite blue of the sky. The bay curved like the horns of a carabao and his view was framed with vivid masses of green, mangroves, screw pine, coco palm, flaunting banana, breadiruit, candlenut and lesser growths that thrust and twined and clung, flourish- ing under the equatorial sun, fanned by the never failing trades. The island of Twenty-Stick, so ran the story, had once been purchased from the Joier THORPE, storekeeper for the chief who claimed to own it for twenty sticks of tobacco. It lay twelve degrees south of the line and, approximately, a hun- dred and fifty degrees east from Greenwich. It might, Jimmy sométimes thought, as well have been in space, so remote was it from human intercourse and activity. In the old days when savages, naked save for paint and barbaric ornament, went hunting for heads and bokolo—which is the native word for human flesh—when traders went blackbirding to supply labor for the sugar plantations in Queensland and Ha- wall, the site of Jimmy Thorpe’s station had been known—with reason—as Trouble Bay. It still retained the title, but nowa- days, in-1922, it was apt to be intolerantly placid. There was no plantation at Trouble Bay. Jimmy’s mission—at the princely salary of sixty dollars a month and board himself from the stores at wholesale prices—was ase COMME OOO;KS (E©)