Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 25, 1924 — page 49: what you’re looking at

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

THE LOST ORANGE GROVE. I watched him go down the road toward the old Bell farm with a vague uneasiness. There was a grim determination in his bear- ing that did not bode well for the Pomeroys. A New Englander looking for the Pome- roys! Three years had passed since the Pomeroy flivver had taken the wrong road and been bogged down for the night in Little Cypress. In that time no visitors and no mail, save for an occasional parcel post shipment from the mail order houses, had come for them, and I had decided that Phil Pomeroy, if he had once been a convict, had served his time and was entitled to be as free as any man. A rank growth of straight black hair had taken the place of the close-clipped poll; his pallor had given way to a sun-baked brown; he was now but a younger edition of the elder brother. Lee Dimlock had been gone an hour when Dan Melville, a negro who was employed by the Pomeroy brothers to skin telegraph poles, came loping down the road to the commissary. He was, at first, incoherent with terror. I gleaned that there had been a fight, that Bert Pomeroy had shot and killed the stranger from the North. On our way to my house to get my fliv- ver, Dan spurted details. The Pomeroys were finishing lunch when Lee Dimlock arrived. There was a great deal of cursing, Dan said, and then a fight, starting at the porch steps and ending by the front gate. The Pomeroys had beaten the stranger al- most insensible when he drew a revolver. Bert snatched it from his hand and, as Dimlock staggered backward begging him not to shoot, had shot him in the chest. When I reached the Pomeroy house, the brothers were waiting on the porch steps. Bert Pomeroy stood up and said: “ We ain’t goin’ to give you any trouble. We'll go quietly.” The man from the North lay just inside the gate where he had fallen, and Suzanne was kneeling beside him. She was deathly pale and her dark eyes were enormous, but she smiled when I jumped down and came toward them. He was not dead. The bullet had gone in just above his heart, and the hole was bleeding a little, but not seriously. He was not quite unconscious, but his eyes were 39 glassy and he did not know me and could not speak, “We must get him to a hospital,” I said. “If he dies, this is going to be mighty serious.” The dark brothers gazed at me with a strange, dull curiosity almost childlike, as if they were trying to understand. “You had him licked,” I said. “ Why didn’t you Jet it go at that? Why-in the name of Heaven did you shoot him?” “T hated him,” Bert Pomeroy said sim- ply. ‘“ He had no right coming here this way,” Suzanne added in a low, lifeless voice. “ We’ve had enough to bear—without him.” I was too indignant to argue, and even when I learned the ugly part that Lee Dim- lock had played in their lives, I could not forgive such folly. Deliberately shooting a beaten man! Florida juries deal harshly with men who give way blindly to their passions, for Florida is wearying rapidly of her reputation as a backward common- wealth. The Pomeroy brothers went with me peaceably to the Majolica jail. Lee Dim- lock I left at Dr. Rawlins’s hospital and, in the dark, cool waiting room, while the operation was taking place, Susanne sat be- side me on a sofa and told me, in a monoto- nous, colorless voice, all about Lee Dimlock. VI. THE Porneroys and Lee Dimlock had owned adjoining farms near the village of Nardon, Connecticut. Lee Dimlock lived alone in an old weather-beaten house. He was a widower, without children, and one of the most successful farmers of the district. He was known everywhere as a thrifty man; a hard man in a bargain, a mean man to work for, a bad man to cross. He was, and had been as far back as Suzanne could remember, a selectman and a man promi- nent in church affairs. He and her family had -never been on very friendly terms. An incident occurred when Phil was ten or eleven which trans- formed this. old animosity into flaming hatred. Dimlock beat Phil almost insensi- ble with an oak stick for swimming in the COmiCLOoolks (E@)