Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 28, 1928 — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

SCISSORED. turned on his back, where he kicked and clawed like a helpless turtle. The gyve across his ribs tightened, and, horror-struck, he saw the Indian’s free hand close over the haft of his own knife, then, helpless to defend himself, he felt the sharp point break the skin just over his jugular. “ Quit it,” he wheezed with bulging eyes, “ I squeal.” “Will yer vamose?” ek Sg FOS... ‘“ And never come back?” “No! Lemme up!” “All right.” None too gently the big trapper yanked him to his feet, and his voice was potent with meaning as he said: “Ye’ve got an hour to buy a wangin and git. As ye said a minute ago, this region is too small to hold you and me, and if I ever come across yer trail, hell and high water ain’t goin’ to keep me off’n it till I rwn ye inter the ground.” Quinn said nothing, but his eyes shone malignantly, and as he chafed his hog-like neck, he muttered: “That goes double, Injun. Lew Quinn ain’t bruk so easy as this. Jest now yer top hand, but it’s a bum dead- fall as won’t ketch two kinds of a skunk, ye dam’ tricky son 0’ Squanto.”’ Less than an hour later, a heavy knapsack on his back, he swung into the old tote road that led downstream. At the edge of the wood he turned and shook a hairy fist at a stalfWart figure that had watched his every move since he had left Pierre’s ; while there spewed from his bulbous lips a stream of anathema. Then the wood swallowed him up; a_ sinister incarnation of aroused hatred that would be fed and magnified by the lonely wastes and con- tinued brooding, until it had grown into a festering sore in his brain. iil. A WEEK later, Nap Toon spotted out a thirty-mile trap line on the Up- per Cuperlax and proceeded to build a 499 new camp. He labored hard and long, and as he labored he sang. Not the deep booming songs of trail and trap, but soft crooning songs of love, for he envisioned a home. The days of Indian summer, merged into the crisp October nights, and Toon set out a few snares. Since the real trapping season had not begun, he was in no particular hurry; peltry would prime late and “blue” skins were almost valueless. But as he poled against the current, and paddled across the deadwaters of the Cuperlax, as he trudged over ridges and hogbacks, or dipped into the swales and swamps along his spotted trail, he was assailed with a vague, in- stinctive feeling that he was being watched; that unseen, inimical eyes peered at him from the boscage and boles. : He took to glancing behind him; even took short excursions beside the trail in an attempt to locate something tangible, with no result. Once he thought he glimpsed a shadow, and with an Indian imprecation he lunged the canoe ashore, caught up his rifle and searched the bank for half a mile. Save for a squirrel that scolded him irom a near-by tree, there was no sign of living thing. ‘Huh! No wonder the squirrels chatter at me; they think I’m nuts; but I’d have sworn—hell!”’ He shook his head. Again and again he investigated a hunch, and each time he met with noth- ing more than a prowling hedgehog or a whirring partridge. He tried to dismiss the feeling; to laugh it off; yet it persisted in obtrud- ing, and in the following weeks his boyish spontaneiety gave way to an ir- ritable brooding. <A trailing root that tripped, or a limb that flicked his face, was sufficient to send him into a quick, unaccountable anger, for which he was afterward ashamed. By the first of November he had completed his trap line. His water sets CORNICLOOOKS (E@)