Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 153: what you’re looking at

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

DESERT wholly aware. She merely guessed at a part of the truth; it had something to do with the deeth of John Denver. Added to this Fred Hayden had openly shown his desire to see Wyndham lynched after that travesty of justice in the barroom. He had, insofar as his own soul was con- cerned, committed murder. The rapid sequence of events after that tar and feather party in the Bowl Cafion had worked a pe- culiar havoc on the mind of Fred Hayden, and now when the girl humiliated him with her outburst of invective he turned upon her like a man bereft of all reason. “You will accuse me of murder, will you —you little catamount!” he shouted. “ Ill show you! Tell me now—tell me again! Accuse me again!” She could not answer him except with a frightened scream. “T’m not guilty, you little spitfire! No one has so much as dreamed I’m guilty— except you! Tl tear your tongue from your head—if you dare to so much as whis- per it!” She screamed, but her voice was pitiably small in that tumult. She fought—a weak, fragile thing against the strength of a big man. Her only hope was that Phil Wynd- ham could burst those rawhide bonds, fight off the score of men who were his captors and smash into the room. As she hoped desperately for this miracle another thing happened; something un- looked for, incomprehensible, appalling. The studs, braces and planking of the wall between that room and the bar twisted symetrically in the form of a cat’s cradle, then leaned over above her. Hallie Crockett had the definite impres- sion of Phil Wyndham standing bound on the other side of that wall exerting some sort of superhuman strength like a Hopi shaman moving the mountains with his will. It was not only an impression; it was a belief. Fred Hayden paled, his eyes widening as if he feared, as if he knew, he was going mad. His grip, which had twisted her wrists like a torturing rack, stiffened, but seemed to lose all conscious strength. She squirmed free. It was not like squirming from a man with taut muscles, but from a VOICES. 779 ‘powerful manikin that has no willful means of tightening its hold. The man gasped in fright. His finely chiseled nostrils quivering, his lips tight- ened over even white teeth. The next instant the roof, weighted down by many rotten old shakes, fell sag- ging in the middle. The window was cross- barred by two huge rafters falling down- ward. Hayden’s distracted gaze darted from the window to the roof, now suspended, then to the inclined wall and the half open door—the only remaining way of escape. The girl meant nothing to him—except, perhaps, an impediment to his escape. He whirled her bodily from him and sprang toward the door. What he saw there was considerably more appalling than the inclined wall, the suspended roof, or the barred window of Hallie’s little room. The whole roof of the Golden Cloud had fallen inward on the dance floor. Men were scrambling to save themselves. The light of day flooded in. Everywhere—in patches there seemed an unnatural near- ness of the flaming red sky. But these details were not what had terri- fied Fred Hayden. They were obliterated from his mind by the one important and horrifying fact that he found himself face to face with Phil Wyndham, who now was untrammeled either by bonds id by the débris of the room. Hayden recoiled, a strange seis of fear numbing his arms. He knew that in that little twisted room under the suspend- ed ceiling, behind the warped door, im- prisoned by the rafters across the window, he would have to give an account of him- self before Phil Wyndham and the girl. CHAPTER XXX. A BROKEN MAN. HE drama of the meeting in Hallie’s T room was not revealed to the eyes of those who were in the street. Doxey, the first to escape to the clear sparkling air of an Arizona dawn, was soon joined by Jen Parker and other women of the’ town. It took only a few minutes for “com cboo iS (9) co - < _ ‘ — a gs “a re ~ = . Te a rn > es - e = ow es Y v. ee < - Be = . ‘ 3 e ~ - oe a”