Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 167: what you’re looking at

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

JOSH STEBBINS, ANTHROPOLOGIST. o’ scientific facks fer the information 0’ my feller members an’ friends o’ the Coon- burg Sportsman’s Club. It’s more’n likely that them wise guys from New York was so soused that they couldn’t see the holes in a ladder; I wanter say thet when I saw the Cardiff giant I hedn’t drunk nothin’ stronger’n circus red lemonade fer two days, an’ it was the finest sample of an oversized human putrefaction that was ever dug outa the ground.” : ‘““ Mr. Stebbins, have you read an account of the recently made discoveries of gigantic human footprints, as well as the tracks of huge horses and cattle on a limestone ledge in the Grand Cafon? These all go to prove the correctness of your theory of the exist- ence of giants at a comparative recent pe- tiod of the world’s history,” commented the schoolmaster. ‘“ Purfessor, I never read nothin’ an’ I ain’t got no theories, I am jest a diskiverer of facks of scientific value to them thet knows how ter appreciate what I hev risked my repytation fer voracity, an’ my life, ter see an’ find out; ye ken judge fer yerself after I tell ye something that happened to me an’ my shipmates, an’ what we seen ourselves. “ There was four of us sailin’ outa Dutch Harbor, in Alasky. We was owners of 2 little smack built in Gloucester an’ sailed round the Horn fifty years before we got hold of her; she’d seen rough weather an’ hard times ever since she was launched. We was general salt water hustlers an’ beach combers. Sometimes we fished on the banks fer halibut an’ cod, then we’d change off to take a cruise round the fur seal islands when we knowed the revenoo cutter was laid up cleanin’ her boilers, so we could pick up a few sealskins, or hunt sea otter in the kelp along the coast, ez well ez tradin’ hooch to the Eskimos fer furs an’ walrus ivory. We was makin’ money fast; once we got a sea otter skin wuth five hun- dred dollars from an old Injun, in trade fer a single barrel muzzle loadin’ shotgun. “But it was on a cruise when we got lost in the fog when we was after fur seals. We picked foggy weather on purpose, ez it was easy to get away from the guards on the island in a fog, only this time we got 957 more fog than we wanted, fer we couldn’t find the island, the air was so durned thick thet we couldn’t see the mainmast from the wheel. I’ve sailed the Seven Seas an’ I never saw it thicker in all my v’y’ges, but a Cap Cod man, thet was one of us, said he felt right to home on the Cape. He said that he remembered that his granddaday was shinglin’ his barn during a leetle extra heavy fog, an’ when the wind blowed the fog away it carried with it ten courses 0’ shingles thet he’d nailed onto it after passin’ the ridgepole without noticin’ it. But I al- ways allowed he was exaggeratin’. “Them Cape Cod men hev all got the name o’ bein’ the biggest liars afloat, an’ I never cared about bein’ seen talkin’ to one of ’em, fer fear o’ damagin’ my repytation ez a truthful man, fer ye know ‘A man is known by the company he keeps’ an’, ez ye all know, I allus strive ter be truthful an’ exact in all my statements, fer only by doin’ so kin I keep my repytation.” Pat McGoogle knocked the ash off his cigar as he interrupted Josh’s remarks with: “Josh, for the luvva Mike! We started off talking about the two biggest prize fight- ers there is before the public, and you have switched us off to seal hunting in a fog off the Alaska coast. I can’t see what that has to do with Jack Dempsey and Firpo; nor that big fraud, the Cardiff giant, neither.” “Lemme git started, Pat. I wanter start right an’ tell ye all jest what I have to tell, no more an’ no less. Ye see, the fog was so darned thick we didn’t dare carry more sail than jest enough to give us Steerage way, an’ besides the compass in the binnacle had got outa whack, so instead of givin’ us the right course it p’inted straight down fer Davy Jones’s Locker, leavin’ us without a compass in heavy fog to steer by, guess an’ trust to luck thet the fog ’d raise so’s we could get our bearin’s from the sun an’ stars; but we drifted fer weeks without seein’ a half schooner length ahead. Fellers, it was plumb redic’lous the way thet fog hung on! Sometimes we’d heard the breakers close by, but sheered off in time without seein’ them, though we could tell by the sound they wasn’t the length o’ the jibboom off our forrud beam, oO Comiclbooks.€©