Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 5, 1921 — page 3: what you’re looking at

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

ARGOSY-ALLSTORY W EF EB K LY 4 VoL, CXXX SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1921 NUMBER 3] _Pawned i ". by Frank L. Packard Author of “ From Now On,” “The Sin That Was His,” “ The Mirecle Man,” etc. FIRST PROLOGUE Her Story HANSOM cab, somewhat wobe- A gone in appearance, threaded its way in a curiously dejected manner through the heart of New York’s East Side. A fine drizzle fell, through which the street lamps showed as through a mist; and, with the pavements slippery, the emaciated- looking horse, the shafts jerking and lift- ing up at intervals around its ears, ap peared hard put to it to preserve its foot- ing. The cabman on his perch. drove with his coat collar turned up, and his chin on his breast. He held the reins listlessly, per- ‘Mitting the horse to chose its own gait. At times he lifted the little trap door in the roof of the cab and peered into the in- terior; occasionally his hand, tentatively, -hesitintly, edged toward a bulge in his coat pocket—only to be drawn back again in a sort of panic haste. ‘The cab turned into a street where, in spite of the drizzle, hawkers with their ‘push-carts under flaring, spitting gasoline banjoes were doing a thriving business. The horse went more slowly. There was very little room. With the push-carts lin- ing the curbs on both sides, and the over- flow o: pedestrians from the sidewalks into the street, it was perhaps over-taxing the horse’s instinct to steer a safe course for the vehicle it dragged behind it: Halfway along the block a wheel of the hansom bumped none too gently into one of the push-carts, nearly upsetting the latter. The hawker, with a frantic grab, saved his wares from disaster by an uncomfortably narrow margin, and, this done, hurled an impassioned flood of lurid oratory at the two- wheeler. The cabman lifted his chin from his breast, stared stonily at the hawker, slap- ped the reins mechanically on the roof of the cab as an intimation to the horse to proceed, and the cab wended its way along again. At the end of the block, it turned the comer, and drew up before a small build- ing that was nested in between two tene- ments. The cabman climbed down from * Copyright, 1921, by Frank L. Packard. - LA 289 oO cComiclboOoks.€@