Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 25, 1924 — page 33: what you’re looking at

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

THE LOST ORANGE GROVE. 23 This one stopped at the foot of the porch steps and continued slapping mosquitoes. ‘““ What town is this?” he called up in a gruff, tired voice. A wide-brimmed black hat made it impossible for me to see his face; but his accent was not Southern. It had a nasal twang. I suspected New Eng- land. “ Vingo,” I told him. “Never heard of it,” he said promptly. * Ain’t on the Dixie Highway, is it?” “ You’re off the road five miles,” I said. He cursed in a weary, irritable voice. “We're bogged down in a_ swamp. Water’s up over the exhaust. Wheels are hub deep. How’re the chances to get some- body around here to give us a pull out?” “Tl pull you out with my mules in the morning,” J answered. He looked up at me for some seconds in silence, absently whacking mosquitoes. The screen between us reduced his face to a vague, pale spot. I felt, rather than saw, his hot black eyes glaring at me. Tourists always glare at the innocent bystander who corrects their mistakes, as if he were per- sonally to blame. “ T’ll give you five bucks to pull me out to-night,” he snapped. “That swamp,” I replied, “is full of touchy alligators and irritable water moc- casins. I wouldn’t tow the queen of Bel- sium out of that swamp to-night. .You’d better come inside the screen. Some of those mosquitoes are malarial, and the rest are dengue.” He hesitated, then climbed the steps; and I held open the screen door for him, brushing him off with a palmetto frond as he came in, and waving the mosquitoes back. The big black hat gave a somewhat des- perate note to an otherwise ordinary tourist get-up. He wore a khaki shirt and khaki pants, both stained with the grease of auto- mobile travel and gray with dust. His face was gaunt and pale, hairy with a ten-day growth of beard; and his eyes were set in powdery dark sockets. His pallor alarmed me, for it was the waxen pallor, the un- mistakable pallor of a jailbird. His bloodshot black eyes darted about the porch and into my sitting room before he swung them around to my face, as if he might be estimating what was worth steal- ing. Then, when he stared hard at me, I became still uneasier. My shotgun, loaded, was standing just inside the door; and I was tempted to walk past him and get it, to let him see that I was not to be trifled with. He jerked a dirty thumb over his shoul- der without removing his staring, blood- shot eyes from my face. ‘You own that store back there?” I nodded. His dusty eyelids seemed to lower a little. He was young, not more than twenty-five or six; but the scraggly beard on his face made him look older. ‘ Well,” he said irritably, ‘“‘ I can’t leave them sitting out there eaten up by these damned mosquitoes. Where can we put up for the night?” “The nearest hotel,” I told him, “is twelve miles away. Majolica.” Again his glance roamed into the sitting room; and I knew, of course, what was in his mind. The laws of hospitality in places of Vingo’s character are rigid. You wel- come the stranger at your gate unquestion- ingly, but this stranger—and his friehds—I could not take in. I always kept the com- missary and post office money in the house; and I decided, looking at those staring, bloodshot black eyes and h‘s prison pallor, that he must have got wind of it. There was a disquieting note in Phil Pomeroy’s bearing that cannot be put into words. My instinct, right or wrong, simply warned me that he was a bad egg. The next development caught me unpre- pared. After glancing for a second time into the sitting room with that unspoken thought in his mind, he opened his thin, anemic lips and took a sudden step to- ward me. A thick gurgling sound issued from deep in his throat. He lifted his arms as if he were about to embrace me; fell for- ward to hands and knees, rolled over loosely on his back and lay still. I have seen poleaxed cattle go down like that, but never a man drop, literally from exhaustion, as if he had been blackjacked. His eyes had told me that he had been driving himself inhumanly, but, as I looked at him lying there, I could not feel sorry COmicloooks (E@