Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 128: what you’re looking at

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

758 The rules agreed upon by Solemn and Dirty Shirt were simple: ~Each was to stand on an opposite side of the circle the spectators would form in the center of the room, dump their respective gladiators onto the floor and let them go to it. “Ready!” Solemn yelled. “ Fire!” Dirty Shirt echoed. Out of Dirty Shirt’s sack Angel slid. A light of unimpeachable murder was in his eyes, Simultaneously something skidded with a squashy thud out of Solemn’s sack and hit the floor on the other side of the human ring. Spectators caught their breaths in hor- ror, many of them thinking it had come at last and they were seeing things that were not, when they got the first glimpse of Old Bob, superimposed into a cross between a bird and a cat. Old Bob himself felt queer as the mis- chief—and looked more so. But he saw Angel, that despicable rooster, standing be- fore him and all of Old Bob’s desire for revenge, all his ambition to eat rooster and get even for indignities heaped upon him during the last several days flamed in- stantly into a seething conflagration. Old Bob squatted, arched his back, started to spit and swear in low guttural accents and began to swell up—his plum- age, from the small pin-feathers behind his ears to the large cluster adherent to his inch-and-a-half ‘tail, sticking out in terri- fying disarray. At first Angel thought that he also was seeing things. A second look convinced him that his first impressions were right; there wasn’t any such a thing as that thing in front of him! Still it was something. What it was, Angel tried hard to figure out. It looked as if it might be a rooster; it re- sembled cat; perhaps it was both! Angel had fought virtually every animal and ‘fowl mentioned in the zoological vernacular, but never anything which looked like this. He wondered if that last shot of ege and cayenne, plus the other stuff Chico had put in it had affected his im- agination. Then a sudden, unholy joy took possess- ion of Angel. He saw through it all: This new device inviting destruction before him ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. was a sort of epitome of the total animal and fowl creation! The whole works, in some strange man- ner, had been conveniently resolved into a single specimen, the sole purpose being to facilitate Angel’s feverish passion to kill @ couple of multitudes of things all at once, at one operation, without hesitation. Proceeding on that theory, Angel’s head lowered threateningly, the two plumes in his tail were elevated, his neck stretched forward, the sinews of his legs became taut and the feathers along his backbone bristled upward as if each were a saw-toothed bayo- net thirsting to stab the life blood out of some cringing wretch. Twelve pounds of hungry, insulted, feather-decorated cat hurtled through the air, aiming to land on top of Angel and start to eating rooster. Old Bob was dis- appointed. Angel wasn’t there. Midway in the journey something sounding like Angel had passed overhead, flying low, and kicked Old Bob twice on the side of the neck as it went by. Old Bob himself was reasonably quick, and twisted a hind leg up in time to rake a bunch of feathers off of Angel’s wishbone. “This is goin’ to be good!” Colonel Spilkins exclaimed: “Who said ‘ goin’ to be?’” the crowd yelled. Old Bob and Angel were not wasting time telling what was “ going to be.” They were busy making it happen. Old Bob swung a front paw for the white meat of Angel’s bosom; Angel side- stepped and countered with right and leit spur jabs to the region of Old Bob’s appendix. Old Bob reversed his mode of attack and leaped again for general assault, but went bottom side up so all four feet as well as teeth would be available for action when the bombing plane named Angel scooted over him. Angel nose-dived to the left and spotted two inshoots of his bill under Old Bob’s ear. But Old Bob was busy, too; he shot out his right front paw and as Angel tilted for altitude he connected with the rooster’s secondary Adam’s apple and where two tail feathers grew before there wasn’t any any- COPMIE OOKS4e©)