Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 189, No. 4 — page 59: what you’re looking at

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

THE BULLY OF ‘Teddy found a shoe and almost cried aloud. The sigh of the coming wind became a moan. A torrent of rain fell. - “ Georgia!” Somewhere in this tangled wreckage he would find her. She would, he was certain, be alive. He couldn’t shake himself of the feeling, the belief, that she had driven * into him—that she was indestructible. The first blast of the wind came scream- ing through the rain. And suddenly, protruding fronmr under a plank, he saw a hand—a white hand, limp. A tiny trickle of blood ran from one de- jected finger tip. Teddy fell with fury at the planks which pinioned her down. He called her name repeatedly. He worked frantically. And the screaming of the wind went up and up. It appeared that she was somehow tan-— gled up in a thick rug—all but wrapped up in it. The rug he seized by one cor- ner. He jerked and pulled. If she were alive, that rug had probably saved her. Just then it did not occur to him to wonder whether she was alive or not. A woman unconscious had always terrified him beyond any kind of rational thought. He knew only that he must free her before the rising wind piled the water up deeper; must get her aboard the motor boat and somehow manage to convey her to safety. She was dressed in a gray flannel shirt and overalls, and she was soaked to the skin. How Teddy freed her he would never know. But presently he had moved the last plank which held her down and was stag- gering over the flat shingled surface through a blinding, horizontal rain toward the Cap- tain Kiddo. He carried her into the cabin, and was promptly assailed by the necessity of doing two things at once: to try all measures that might restore life to her, and to get the boat out of this dangerous open space. Teddy compromised by placing her in one of the bunks and pouring whisky into her mouth, then hastening to the wheel and getting the Captain Kiddo under way. The wind seemed fairly to lift her out of the water. Teddy put the wheel hard building up in the southeast. BISCAYNE BAY. 529 The hurricane was It would blow him approximately where he wanted to go—inland—away from the danger of whirlpools and bobbing tree trunks. A rowboat, bottom up, with bows stove in, floated past. Wind and rain flattened him against the wheel, all but drove the breath out of his lungs. Presently he was actually fighting for air. : Later he would learn, with some gratifi- cation, that the wind gauge in Miami had broken when it indicated one hundred and thirty-five miles an hour. The world—this was all he could grasp at present—had gone howling mad again; the wind, from the sound of it, was blowing harder than it had blown through the night. He was aware of this and he was aware that he must somehow bring the Captain Kiddo into.some haven of safety. , Then Teddy grew deeply concerned over the feeling of faintness that was creeping over him, that and a swimming blackness that came not from the shricking wind and rain, but-from within himself. It did not matter that he had withstood enough pun- over and ran with jt. ishment already to have worn out two or three normal men. He knew only that he must hang on; must not collapse. He felt dizzy and sick and weak, and his hands clutching the wheel were cold and numb and exhausted. He skirted trees that were lashing about dangerously. The shrieking of the hurri- cane seemed to diminish, but he knew that this was that rising weakness within him- self, shutting off his sensations. His last impressions were blurred, as if his ears were affected and his eyes had lost their knack of focusing. Consciousness had become dim and remote. Teddy slipped off from it in a state that was partly the sleep of utter exhaustion and partly a resignation on the part of a human mechanism that could endure no more of this screaming terror. XII. SUNLIGHT streamed into his face and the blissful silence of a world once more at < — comicboo