Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 12, 1927 — page 47: what you’re looking at

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

oS ween ec + Py pene or eS EO 1a, —™ Oar Ee ae aan THE MEANEST MAN. skeptical of his genuine meanness, and he realized that so far his efforts had failed to do more than mildly and quite tem- porarily irritate the morose Ernest. It was plain that nothing short of a high explosive would detonate him away from a place where he was so fatly comfortable. But if George’s own life was radically changed, so was that of practically every- body with whom he came in contact. With- in three days of his arrival it seemed as if every able-bodied man, woman, and child had contrived an excuse to call at the old Miller homestead. All were curious to get a sight of the run- away brother, so strangely returned after three decades. If possible, they wanted to talk with him; if not, then at least to talk about him. Of the callers, only a very few were in any sense dangerous. There were not over half a dozen who had ever beheld William Miller in the flesh. The boys and girls with whom he had played and gone to school had moved away from the village as soon as they were able to get a position out of town. The farms everywhere were being deserted by the younger generation. There were two very old women, and three men, who could dimly recall the handsome, vivacious younger brother of their fellow townswoman, Ellen. These all called as soon as the news came to them. Without a dissenting voice they expressed their sorrow and sense of shock that such a fine boy should have deteriorated into a fat, pasty, shifty-eyed and utterly unpre- possessing lout. Their opinions, over- heard or repeated to George, naturally irri- tated him. And when one of the old men, with whose children he had, so he was informed, been an especially cherished playmate, be- came querulous at his inability to recall any of them, or the little pranks they had played, or even the name of the school- teacher who had walloped William with a leather belt, buckle end foremost, the stranger himself flared up and asked how in Tophet he, who had circumnavigated the world nineteen times, and sailed more than two hundred thousand miles in every sort — z= - ~~ aw a le eg = eam ear ees 3 —\ Se ————s Ag ee =e 41 of a vessel from a catamaran to a liner, could be expected to recall such nonsense as the names of children he had played around with? : . “And as for being beat up with a belt strap, ain’t I been knocked cold with war clubs, stuck full of spears, shot with ‘most everything from birdshot to steel- jacketed bullets? I sure have, and that ain’t maybe!” | The ‘old man had betaken himself off, muttering. He later confided to his cronies that, in his best belief, this man was an impostor; but nobody paid any attention to him. His memory had been failing for years; he could be relied upon for nothing that had taken place within the past two decades, though, as is often the case, he was amazingly accurate in all sorts of trifling events that had happened in his youth. In general, George was accepted without question. It stood to reason that Ellen would not be deceived in such a matter. And above all, Ernest had resigned himself to the story his wife had told him. That was the main thing, after all. Ellen herself was changed, because this was her first real lie, and its very propor- tions subdued and almost stunned her. A sober, truthful, and reliable woman, she now found herself living day by day a colossal untruth. It was inevitable that she should appear distraught, absent-minded, worried. Ernest regarded it as a proof that she was secretly sorry that William had turned up; and this encouraged him to hope and _ believe that means would be found of getting him to shorten his stay. Jake, the hired man, was less concerned than anybody else. A man of little or no imagination, and no ambitions, his life went on much as before. He was contented in the same way that a house dog is when things are going well enough and there are plenty of bones, not too many fleas, and a few pats on the head, Still, even Jake responded in his own inarticulate way to the changed conditions. Somewhere in his soul, buried fathoms deep beneath layers of ignorance and disuse and unremitting toil, must have flickered an > ee ee ee Py ces : iin SpE Sa Se ee == ae - @ OO KO eo 2-2 oy