Argosy All-Story Weekly, May 5, 1928 — page 149: what you’re looking at

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

THE, FOXY GUY. front mule. “ Now I’ll go on ahead and yuh gotta follow.”’ V. THE next afternoon they arrived at the location marked on the map Smiling Jack carried. In a wide canon was a recently constructed lean-to shack, made of dry poles and thatched with alder shoots, set in a clump of oak brush, a few feet from running water. There was a little pile of rusted tin cans outside the door of the shack, a chopping log and an ax beside it. “ Well, we’re here,” Jack said quiet- ly. “ Dll unpack and I wish you'd take the ax, yonder, and go cut some dry manzanita for a cookin’ fire. Plenty of dead manzanita on the hillside.” The Fox went into the brush a little way. ‘Then he stopped and sneaked back until he could see Peebles. Some- thing told him he had been sent here merely to be out of the way. His instinct was right. Jack Peebles had abandoned the mule and was stand- ing a few feet from the shack, look- ing at a piece of paper in his hands. He glanced all round, looked up to- ward the brush where The Fox was hidden, and walked directly to an oak tree that had a blaze on its trunk, ten feet off the ground. He turned his back to this and be- gan pacing in a straight line to another oak. He paced the line, turned to the right and walked five steps toward the shack. ‘Then he made a mark in the ground with his heel and went and got a shovel from the pack. In a moment he was digging and the man peering from the brush felt his pulse beating like a trip-hammer as he watched the dirt fly before that shovel in Peebles’s hands. Then his eyes glistened as he saw Smiling Jack stop digging, stoop over and lift something heavy from the hole he had dug. The Westerner carried the object over toward where the mules stood, then returned and got another burden. 715 Next he took an old coat from one pack and carelessly dropped it over the objects he had brought from the hole. In a minute he was back at work, care- fully filling in the excavation he had made. The Fox grinned to himself. “ Pretty foxy himself,” he muttered. “That's pretty near a sure way to hide anything. [ s’pose he’d leave them there until to-night, then get them hidden in a pack and, in a day or so, we shove off, back to Purdy. Well, I’m some foxy guy m’self. Watch my sinoke.”’ He returned a few feet into the brush, then noisily came out again, call- ing to Peebles: “pay, Jack. I guess I’m_ kinda dumb, but I don’t know a manzanita bush from a spear of bullrush.”’ Jack turned and pretended to be sur- prised. “ Why, say, that’s right,” he smiled. “T plumb forgot about you bein’ a ten- derfoot when I sent yuh out for man- zanita. Well, I'll go get some. Wish yuh’d untie the ropes on the two packs. Just start at this end of the rope and keep on to the other end.” The Fox waited until Peebles was out of sight and then he stepped over to the spot where Jack’s old coat covered the bulging objects on the ground. He tossed the coat aside and fell to his knees before two burlap sacks and thrust his hands into them. He was trembling with excitement and his hands shook as they came out filled with dull yellow gold; two great handfuls of it. He played with the gold for a min- ute, like a miser with his yellow coins, running the nuggets through his fingers back into the sacks and scooping them up again. Then he realized the need for quick action. The sole thought in his gold- fevered mind was to get the gold packed on a mule and away from here before Smiling Jack Peebles returned. But he did not forget that if it came COMMU MOOS (E@