Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 158: what you’re looking at

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

= il 4 eT i 4 SoS wr Tate Ai) Asi i si NUR) { ‘gi “e rons % Ss a “in By RODERICK WILLIAM SILER “| ~HEESE!” As Conley came out of the deep sleep into which he had fallen after stopping O’Hern’s fist with his chin, this syllable, sibilant, and rather soft and sooth- ing at first, came to his ears. Considering the matter afterward, he dis- tinctly remembered that the sound was, to begin with, distant, soothing, impersonal. He had been reclining against the ropes in his corner of the ring when his eyes had opened, and then his ears. His eyes as- sured him that about the spacious hall of the Pastime Athletic Club were moving a great many bodies; not the constellations of stars which he had seen at the instant he interrupted the flight of that missile which had felt so surprisingly like a horseshoe im- bedded in a boxing glove, but rather bodies which moved with deliberation and grace, _and between whom and him there seemed to be not the slightest ill will. These bodies, he realized (considering the matter later), 314 constituted the crowd trying to get out of the Pastime’s lone entrance in time to catch last cars home. It was from the crowd that had come the syllable so sibilant and inof- fensive at first. Then out of that mass of bodies, so court- ly and courteous as he remembered them at the beginning, there had popped a face; and from between the lips of that face, dis- torted by wrath or mirth, he could not tell which, there had issued: “You cheese!” There was no mistaking. Hazy as Con- ley was and as inclined to float indefinitely in the ether, he realized that the stranger had likened him to a cheese, and not be- cause of admiration. There then appeared other similar faces; one, two, three, a score or more; all distorted offensively and all referring to the same dairy product. Nothing other than this experience could so quickly have brought him to his senses, not even the bucket of cold water with COMIGDOOKS.co