Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 189, No. 4 — page 58: what you’re looking at

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

528 the kind of a girl that nothing ever hap- pened to? Presumably, she was snug in her house, preparing to repair the damage the storm had done, and quite unperturbed. She was, he thought, a solid rock against which the worst of hurricanes would howl in vain. That kind of girl did not know what defeat was; would always rise above it, And even while he reasoned thus, his common sense told him that no girl alive could successfully pit her stubbornness against such unleashed forces. Here, per- haps, was the opportunity to help her which he had been longing for. The continued menace of the sky and the uneasy silence hurried him. He slipped ‘into his clothes; put on his hip boots and waded out into the yard. Lodged against the stone foundation of the packing shed, whose superstructure was obliterated, he found the Captain Kiddo. She was floating in water where last night green turf had grown; scratched, but sound and seaworthy. Teddy dragged himself over the coaming into the cockpit, which was fortunately of the self-bailing type, and unhooked the door into the cabin. There were several inches of water on the cabin floor, but this he could get rid of with the bilge pump at- tached to the engine—if he could start the engine. Some ominous quality in the silence drove him to that task in a nervous panic. The self-starter was jammed; probably it was under water and short circuited. So he cranked the engine by hand. Gratitude for its thoughtful builder glowed in him as the exhaust sputtered and settled down to a smooth purring. Teddy Armbister looked up at the skid- ding, greasy clouds and threw in the clutch, The clouds were whirling and veering. There were tons of wind up there still. He had never been in a circular storm before, but he guessed, with fair accuracy, that the lull meant: only that the storm center had moved to this area and that more—and worse—was coming, probably from another quarter. He steered the Captain Kiddo out across the pond that had been his yard and into ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. the swollen river. All the familiar scenery was changed by the hurricane and the high water. He passed a giant alligator headed reso- lutely upstream. He passed at least a dozen dead hogs. That meant that Georgia’s land was immersed under so much water that there was no foothold for her pigs. The river was filled with rubbish;. planks, sides of barns, limbs of trees, whole trees. It meant careful navigation—he must not permit the Captain Kiddo’s propeller to -become fouled. His hands on the wheel were shaking. His eyes, as far as they reached, saw only desolation, greasy, yellow water, greasy yel- low sky, a world wet and yellow and ugly. He might have been the last man alive in a world completely destroyed. There was some kind of electric tension in the air which plucked at his nerves; made him shiver and want to hide—and there was no place in the world to hide. The sense of an awful, complete destruc- tion was so vivid that he was prepared, when he emerged from the last tangle of wreckage and trees that should have brought him in sight of Georgia’s home, to find himself confronted by nothing but foaming yellow water and a jackstraw heap of planks where her house had stood. A faint, warning sound was issuing from the sky again—a whisper from the return- ing destroyer. Where was the girl whom nothing could . Vanquish? The outlines of her dwelling were re- tained in a crazy caricature. Somewhere in that wreckage was Georgia Woodstock. He shouted her name and nosed the Captain Kiddo in close until it grounded on some object underwater. There was no answer, and the note of the returning storm came as a rising sigh. It was raining again—drizzling, as it had been by fits and starts since the silence began. “ Georgia!” He jumped ouf ona pile of sloping planks and made his way precariously to a fiat, shingled surface that had once been a slant- ing roof. 3A comicbooks (EO)