Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 169: what you’re looking at

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

JOSH STEBBINS, ANTHROPOLOGIST. in front of me an’ rolled in the hole. [ looked up the way it come from an’ seen two big black shapes showin’ in the brush of a ridge half a mile away. I couldn’t see ’em very plain, but took it fer granted they was bears. ‘““* Thar comes a couple of bears,’ I hol- lered to my pardner, who was jest gittin’ straightened out, and his wind back, ‘ Let’s hide in thet blackberry patch an’ watch ‘em with our guns ready, ef they see us.’ We scooted fer the middle o’ the patch an’ hid, quicker’n hell could scorch a feather. Arter we got settled down in the thickest of the brambles I felt safer an’, stickin’ my head up, took another look at ’em with my binoculars. Fellers, what I seen got my goat right there! Ef there’d been a rabbit hole round there handy, I’da crawled into it an’ pulled it in arter me, fer they wasn’t bears like we thought, but a couple o’ the biggest, tallest things in the shape o’ human bein’s there is on the face of the earth.” “ Josh, how big were they?” asked Jeff Fisher. “ Wal, Jeff, I didn’t hev a yardstick along with me, an’ ef I’d hed one I wouldn’t a’ felt called on to use it. The more, ez I ain’t one o’ these scientific guys thet’ll risk their lives fer the sake of gittin’ exact scientific notes on their new diskiveries. All I ken say is, they was so big thet ef Jack Dempsey an’ Firpo hed stood along- side of ’em they’da looked like a pair of rat terriers smellin’ round a yearlin’ bull calf.” “Did you notice what clothes they wore?” asked Link Brown. ‘“No, I didn’t take much notice, ye see ‘safety first’ hez allus been my principles through life, an’ I was so flustered with figgerin’ how ter git outa the jack-pot we was in, thet all I kin say ez to what they wore, is, thet each one hed a shinny stick in his hands. “ Tt’s a cinch thet they was playin’ what I call ‘ Scotch Shinny ’ where ye aim to hit the ball a wallop thet’ll land it in a hole mebbe two hundred yards away, but these fellers was making longer shots accordin’ to their size, the holes bein’ laid out a good half mile apart. One thing I’m sure of is, 959 ef they’d been all dolled up in knee breeches an’ rolled top stockin’s, with can- vas shoes, like I’ve seen them city folk down at Factoryville in thet country club they’ve started thar, I’da noticed it, but I didn’t, an’ don’t know to-day whether they wore a gee string or a blanket.” “It must have been a primitive variety of golf that these giants were amusing themselves with; don’t you think Mr. Stebbins?” suggested the schoolmaster. ‘“ Mebbe it was purfessor, but it looked ter me ez ef it was what we called shinny when I was a kid an’ some of ’em called it hockey. ‘Wal, ez I was tellin’ you all, we lay scrouched down in them blackberry bushes like a pair o’ cotton-tail rabbits hidin’ from coyotes while them two giants come down to where their balls was layin’. Right there they started to argy; I reckon the question was whose ball hed dropped in the hole; anyhow, in a little they commenced scrap- pin’, when each one hed broke his shinny stick over the other feller’s head they went at it with their dukes. It was a purty fight while it lasted, but the shortest feller, who couldn’t hev been more’n eighteen foot high, but was broad shouldered an’ thickset, got in a blow under his belt that doubled up the tallest one like a jackknife, knockin’ him out fer the count. “While the winner was dancin’ round an’ blowin’ off steam over havin’ downed his man, we made a sneak, crawlin’ through the brush an’ down the bed of dry crik on our bellies; it was gettin’ dark mighty fast, so we hed to move lively; it got darker an’ €z we was slippin’ an’ slidin’ over the rocks, all to once our feet went out from under us an’ we fell head first into a hole in the crick bed thet was level full of crude petroleum. “We got out an’ made the beach where our dory was. When we told the deck watch what we’d seen an’ found they got cold feet. Crude oil an’ gold ledges, no matter how rich, didn’t cut no ice with them ef they hed to do business with Injuns twenty foot high, we’d better git away from where sech people growed pronto they said. So we h’isted our anchor an’ steered S.E.E. by the sun an’ stars ez near ez we could comiclbooks.c@