Argosy All-Story Weekly, March 15, 1924 — page 40: what you’re looking at

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

6638 gers of her right hand around it. She done it as good as one of them French aristocrats could: have done it, I’! wager. “* Favor?” says ehe: “Do I seek favors, Mr. Tom Hill?” I set still in my chair, looking off into the soft, springtime dark. “The thing I want you to do is this,” she says. ‘I want you to watch that girl for the next two months or so. and report to me just what she does.” I set so still I guess she must have thought I had fell asleep. I had to set still or begin cussing, and of course I wouldn't cuss when a woman was right ‘there on my stoop, even if she had offered me a deadly insult, | “TIT will pay you fifty—I will pay you a hundred dollars a month,” she says. I turned around then and looked her full in the face. | “ Lizzie,” says-I—we used to call her that when she was a farm girl—“ Lizzie,” _ I says, dignified, “‘ do you know to whom it is you are talking?” ‘‘ Lizzie?”’ she snorts; and I expected fire to come out of her nostrils. “ Lizzie? Do you know to whom you are speaking, Hill? I thought you were a detective.” “Who? Me?” I says, and I had to laugh. ‘“ Lordy, no, I ain’t no detective.” “T should think not,” she says, and she ~ flounced off. She come back, Time and again she. come back. Always she was asking me to find out something about that girl. She was asking me to snoop around to get some- thing on Sadie. Course I wouldn’t do it. I wasn’t no snoop. Besides, I liked that little lady. To me she seemed to be a nice, bright, colorful sort of a young wife. And that’s what I told Elizabeth. And— Well, here she is again, and I expect she is going to ask me the same thing. I hope T don’t get mad. Getting mad when you are past sixty is bad business. T tucked my toes deeper into my carpet slippers and got up and bowed and motioned her to have a seat. She didn’t sit, not at once leastways. Standing straight up like an avenging angel or—or—well, standing up straight and stiff, she says to me in a voice full of sharp tacks: ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. “Mr. Tom Hill, that girl has run away from my son. She has deserted him. The ship of their marriage has crashed on the rocks of disaster. F told you.so, Mr. Tom Hill! I told you so. Shame upon you, Mr. Tom Hill! Shame, shame upon you!” “You better set down, Lizzie,’ 2 says I. “I’m goin’ to.” And I declare my voice was such a muf- fled, husky Kind of a thing that I scarcely knowed it was my own. CHAPTER II. LITTLE RIFTS. ET me give you'a few preambles or whatever you call ’em, before me and Elizabeth takes up this here matter of Sadie’s vamosing. It’s truly wonderful how wise a man can be after something happens. -He can take two and two and put them together, and, lo and- behold, there is a four right under his eyes. Be- fore anything happens he can have two and" two, and he don’t know that they even make four, or else he is too darned lazy to add ’em up to find out what they: do make, Now as I sat staring into the dark that hung low over my front yard, I seén that I had “had a whole basketful of twos to add up; and I had added nary one. A couple of little things popped into my head. A few weeks before this, I recalled, I had met Sadie on the street. Me and her had got to nodding to each other -and to stopping to have a little chat now and then as I got, first and last, to nod to and chat with about everybody. that come to live in our village. Sadie I felt a kind of a streak of bright- ness run through me, she was so kind of chipper and gay looking; but on this morn- ing I didn’t get that feeling at all. First glimpse of her I see that she was sort of down in the mouth. She wasn’t stepping out free and easy like she always done. As I come close to her I see that her mouth was droopy and there was a cloud in her eyes. Pale and wan she looked, as the poet says. Course I stopped. DP’m sufficient buoyant my own self to CONMUCLe es eae a Always ‘when I met ° hand on (CLO)O)O)