Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 105: what you’re looking at

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

THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL. Wilson!” she advised jeeringly. ‘ There isn’t any Golder’s Green nearer than Lon- don! Roll him out, Bert, and over the ditch through that opening in the hedge. There'll be a golfer or two around in the afternoon to find him, or a course keeper to-morrow. By-by, Philip, don’t pick up any strange girls in future!” Her gibe was lost as he was dragged from the car and bumped into the ditch, from which a hard boot prodded him through the hedge and rolled him to the shade of a tree near a bench on the course. He was lying on his face in the new, tender grass, but he heard the slam of the door and the woman’s triumphant laughter above the roar of the motor as the car sped off down the road. With a violent wrench Phil turned him- self over and heaved his body to a sitting posture, straining his eyes wildly for a sign of life about him, but the links were as deserted as the road upon which a little cloud of dust was slowly settling. There was no human habitation in sight on the other side of the road, and the clubhouse was too far away for a cry or gesture to have attracted attention, even had he been able to make one. The gag was an increas- ing torture and the slightest movement made the wires that bound him grind deeper into his flesh. But greater than his physical suffering was the humiliation of his predicament. To think that he, one of the slickest yeggs in the country had been kidnaped by two cheap crooks in broad daylight, trussed up and thrown here to await the problematical coming of someone to liberate him! Still, Scranton Lucy had been a full-fledged mem- ber of the redoubtable Dobson gang; she wasn’t exactly a tyro. There was some salve to his injured vanity in that. And if he was a bum amateur detective as she had called him, he’d show her up yet! The very fact that she had been at such pains to rid herself of him proved her complicity, if not in the actual murder, then in some- thing almost as bad that was going on. He’d get her before he was through! But how easily he had been trapped! Phil mentally writhed at the thought. He had asked for what was handed to him— “735 begged for it! If the other Shadowers were ever to know of this! How had she got word to her buddy, the young gangster with the camouflaged car, and planted him so conveniently to steer Phil to? What had Bert done with the garage man? Sent him off down the road somewhere on a towing job, probably, and offered to take charge till he could get back. She was a good actress, that Scranton Lucy. Her hesitation about the closed car and the story of her troubles told afterward to keep him from following the roads too attentively had been well put over consider- ing that he’d ought to have been leery, knowing what she was! A muffled groan forced its way through the gag. Would nobody ever come along? The sun wasn’t even nearly overhead yet, it couldn’t be more than ten o’clock, for they’d started pretty early. Phil remem- bered how narrow and rutted the road had been with no other car upon it since they left the last village except the one which passed while he lay helpless. It was no doubt a back way rarely used and there was no telling when anyone else would travel by, especially on a Sunday when the cars all flocked to the main turnpike. He’d never seen a golf course before without some cuckoo old guys chasing a ball around on it, but as he remarked to Lucy just before she stuck him up it was early in the season, and it would be like the way his luck seemed to be running now if he died there of starvation! The pangs of hunger were gnawing at him, making him lightheaded. Phil recalted that he’d had nothing to eat that day, not a morsel of food since the sloppy dinner at the hotel the night before. He’d give something for a cup of that weak, greasy- looking coffee right now! His throat was dry and swelling and his wrists and ankles felt as though those wires were red hot, searing into them! If only— All at once his heart missed a beat and then started racing again, for a little white sphere had come bounding over the top of a bunker and a young masculine voice reached him, a rather unpleasant voice, cultured but with a nasty, jibing note in it. However, no music could have been sweeter Comicoooks (S@)