Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 19, 1924 — page 121: what you’re looking at

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

GENTLE the wagon starts to jar the ears rolling away, I runs round to the rear of it and grabs the end gate. I would have made the jump all okay, only something broke, and I does a whirling act and picks myself up out of the dirty dust. : Nature is a funny thing, as you learns when you gets close enough to it. For a minute I thinks I has been court-plastered to a ambulance; but as I feels myself over and sees that I is all here, I begins to yell after the New Jersey wonder ridin’ off down the road on top of the circus wagon. He stops his horse with no difficulty, as [ guess that horse wouldn’t never move for nobody else but the nut directin’ its course. “Are you hurt?” the loose nut bawls back at me, startin’ to run back through the wagon. ‘JT just been slammed for a dust-fest!” T yells. ‘‘ Why didn’t you hold the train— I told you I was lookin’ for a guy like you.” “ Hurry on!” he howls. some trunks.” Runnin’ like a grasshopper, I makes the wagon, and the switchman wavin’ his flags reaches down and gets me by the arm. Now I has been hauled up into the air some in my time, but the way this baby zips me up offen the ground and into the back of that funeral car leads me to believe that if you ever saw him without his clothes on, the display of muscles he would offer might scare you out of your shirt and give you some cause to ponder over the histories of that gent named Samson. “Listen,” I hurls into his ear. ‘“ I’m goin’ to tag right after you, and when I gets through you is goin’ to have trunks—but you is goin’ to wear them in the ring!” “T got to get II. Now, I ain’t the guy to annoy nobody with a long speech regarding this here queer one, Joe Gender. The facts is, I has to hang round this town in New Jersey for three weeks tryin’ to pry him loose from his pen and inks and tryin’ to make him take me serious. I stakes him to a hundred good berries and induces him to stop runnin’ that wagon GENDER. round the city; and the minute he jumps offen the job, he takes fifty of the hundred berries I has give him and buys the horse which he says he loves. Then he takes this here world weary animal out of harness, and for the other fifty bucks, rents some room on somebody’s farm for him, where he says he can die in peace. surrounded by the green fields. You can figure it out for yourself that when he gets through find- ing a country home for the pony, he ain’t got nothing left for himself—and when I takes him to task for-his wild revelry, he does a gentle smile and says he will get along all right till he earns some more money. I turns it over in my mind should I slip him some more alfalfa; but I figures it out if I spoils him, this here horseflesh lover, right in the first round, they won’t be no joy left for him when he begins to rake in his share of the gate receipts. One night he invites me over to his house; and when we makes our torturous course there, I thinks he has led me out somewhere in the Jersey swamps to do me murder. What this here hard fisted boob’s home con- sists of is a old, falling down barn some place on the outskirts of the city—and if you was to ask me how to get there, | couldn’t never tell you, as it ain’t never been carded on the maps of the Malay archi- pelago. Tired as I is, I is forced to climb up a haymow ladder or something like that, and when we gets to the loft, this slugger tells me to stand still while he gets some lights. Then he fires up some two foot candles and I takes « long, hard look round his home- stead. “ This here is my studio,’”’ he say modest- ly, dropping into a broken-up chair which makes a noise like falling slats. Well, sir, the more I looks the more I is fascinated. This guy has jammed up a pretty cozy little corner in this livery stable, and the walls is hung full of Indian blankets, cowboy saddles, ten or fifteen guns, some cow ropes, or them things you lassos bulls with—a couple of short horn or long horn things Western cows wears for decorations, and some big pants with woolly hairs on them, some more made of soft shoe leather, (OMMIELNOOLKS 591 (S@) a Se a. eS