Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 25, 1924 — page 31: what you’re looking at

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

Nhs ! i Se Hi AN eS; Sac HE ANY, i mks mili Wi ¢ \ By LORING BRENT Author of ‘‘ Vingo’s Roving Romeo,’’ ‘‘ Ain’t Women Peculiah ?”’ ete. A NOVELETTE—COMPLETE IN THIS ISSUE S a hiding place for hunted people, for A fugitives from justice, for men who wished to forget the world or to be by the world forgotten, Vingo could not easily have been improved upon. I thought so in the very beginning, when I first took over the Vingo commissary, and to-day, some years later, I still think so. Vingo, what there is left of it, occupies a little clearing on the main line of the railroad. On one side of the tracks are a dozen negro shanties, and on the other side are my house, the commissary, and a hand- ful of tumble-down dwellings which are, from time to time, occupied by transients. They are ownerless houses, technically owned by the State because of unpaid taxes. Twenty-five years ago Vingo started out with brass bands and speeches to become an agricultural Utopia, but the project failed, and the weeds, so valorously beaten down, have sprung up again. Out of sight in the jungles and hammocks, from a mile to three’ miles away, are the industries which pre- vent Vingo from perishing entirely—the two rock quarries, tie camps, a shingle mill, “‘ cracker ” farms and turpentine stills. In Vingo, a wanted man has only to step off the back porch of the house he is tem- porarily occupying and he is embraced by a wilderness of jungle and swamps which automatically render him as difficult to find —and sometimes as dangerous—as a water moccasin concealed in a patch of broom ECORMICLOOO© S (F@