Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 60: what you’re looking at

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

a 916 played that pirate game in their wild cave together with such earnestness of imagery on the boy’s part and, on the part of the ‘man, such sympathy as the boy in him and his loyal affection for David combined to engender, that they had quite failed to no- tice the years pass by. Even now, in that place, they could find the spirit of boyhood - and win it back again. David stood in the entrance to. the cave, and he was cut clear from foot to waistline by the black shadow of the rocky wall be- hind him. On one side of him lay the dark, cool interior; on the other jagged and shat- tered walls of rock that crowded the floor of the cafion and made intricate corridors of stone which baffled search. In the thousand years before David and Aleck had come there no horseman had ever entered that mass of forbidding stone. David had clamberecd down from the cafion rim on the day he first discovered it, _ his lithe body wriggling heroically from. toe hold to hand grasp on the jagged surfaces. In the many mysterious games which fol- lowed he had come with Aleck as smuggler, pirate, Macedonian conqueror, or Indian scout, and they had devised many shifts of knotted ropes and flimsy ladders for the descent to the fantastic depths. It had been years before they worked out a path- way from the caiion’s mouth through which they might bring their ponies as a Kero of Arabian Nights adventure threaded the mazes of far dreams. And such was the gigantic litter of the shattered granite through which that pass ran; such was the varied pattern of the shadows which were cast, and so brilliantly deceptive were the patched colorings of the rock, that many horsemen might have threaded that maze at once and cheated the watcher from the cafion’s rim of any glimpse of a moving thing. “TJ told you that the Pirate’s Cave ’d turn out useful,” David gloated as he stood in: the entrance. Aleck grinned, remembering the good- natured ridicule with which he had often covered the protest his man’s mind had made against playin’ Injun with a kid. “You win, Dave,” he admitted. “ They wouldn’t no more find us here than a tick ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. in a tub of axle grease. Not unless they ride plumb over the edge. Then we eat hawse meat fresh instead of out o’ cans.” He was heating corned beef in a skillet over -@ fire that burned against naked rock and found vent for its smoke through a natural crevice. The third member of the party gazed from am obscure corner of the cave with a mixture of hunger and resignation. * E ain't kickin’ about the pirates,” com- piained Harper Preest, “ but I shore wished you left the centipedes out o” this yere cave.” ; He reclined upon an outspread tarpaulin, making no. move to assist his saviors with their housework, and his attitude appeared to be one of criticism:. His long and narrow face turned on @ neck of remarkable thin- ness as he looked about the cave. “‘ Are them hawses goin’ to be fed?” he asked. : They had ignored his first complaint, but | at this Aleck, while not acknowledging Preest’s presence in the tiny shelter, gave the matter consideration. : “When you an’ me was in the smugelin’ game, Dave,” he said, “it was shore re- grettable we didn’t smuggle in some hay. Them hawses will have to be fed in the — night.” “< An’ if we have to ride ’em to-day, they flop!” remarked Preest sardonically. David, whose dark eyes had been watch- ing Aleck’s movements without a sign that he had heard the remarks of either man, spoke with the reflective gentleness of a boy eighteen years of age, who is dreaming dreams. * You know, Aleck,” he said, ‘“‘ when you spoke about the time we was smugglers or pirates in this cave, it sort of bobbled me all up in my thinkin’. Because when you said that, I was standin’ here lookin’ out over the shadows on the rocks, an’—it’s sort of funny—but IE wasn’t anything else but just a kid agen, an’ that’s just what you an’ me was doin’—playin’ pirates to- | gether.” He peered into the cave of re- flectively. “ Lord, Aleck,” he said, “it don’t seem like there’s any time gone since then. It don’t seem like I was a man now, an’ them COMME HOO KS.(OLM