Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 13, 1925 — page 121: what you’re looking at

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

HONEST FOOL, so doing the cleverer man would have lost himself in a fog. © Mumphy, not clever enough to guess that Jeff was already jealous of his prospects as a professional strong man, hit on the greater truth by missing the lesser. Had he been cleverer, he would have realized that the Hercules of Little Musquash might be any one of a hundred powerful bushwhackers—but in believing Jeff’s pretended ignorance to be an attempt to shield a friend from trouble, and a proof of the recognition of a danger against which he had _ been Mumphy felt convinced that the man who had made so light of the big spruce was no other than Jules d’Ance. It is sometimes a mistake to be clever. Luck and the better part of valor are the horses to lay your money on. Not until hours later did Mumphy refer again to the strong man of the Little Mus- quash; and that was in his own room in his fourth-rate hotel, long after dinner, when the air was blue with tobacco smoke and the Scotch whisky in the bottle from the nearest government store had ebbed to within three inches of the bottom. And more had happened than the passing of time, the burning of tobacco and the consuming of whisky. Mr. Mumphy had achieved a notable piece of penmanship on two large sheets of legal looking paper, and a clever bit of spell-binding; and two employees of the hotel, in consideration of a cigar and a drink and a quarter apiece, had penned their names on both sheets as witnesses to the sienatures of Dills Mumphy and Jeffrey Stalvart; and Mr. Mumphy had slipped his fee of sixty dollars into his pocket. Mumphy had tried for one hundred, but Jeff had sworn loudly and violently that sixty con- stituted his entire capital. The documents had been folded, and one had been tucked away against Jeff's heart and the other against Mumphy’s. Jeff felt fine. Mumphy felt very well. Jeff felt the world at his feet and a future of carefree swagger and easy money before him. Mumphy felt Jeff at his feet, to be used or discarded as circumstances might suggest. Jeff talked loudly and boastfully. Mumphy spoke softly. The ego of each was expanded and warmed. Jeff told of 8 A warned, — 093 some startling feats of strength which he had performed. 1’) bet a dollar he ain’t any stronger’n you,” said Mumphy. “Who ain't?” asked Jeff, pausing in the middle of a heroic scene. ‘“ That feller you told me about. Louis, or Pierre, or Jules you called him. Some- thin’ hke that. Some French name. But I bet a dollar he wasn’t as strong as you, Whatever his name might be. You're too modest.” | “He ain’t as big as me, that’s a fact,” returned Jeff. ‘‘ But he’s real powerful. sqooze my hand till I hollered.” He paused uncertainly and stared owlishly at his companion. It was quite evident to Mumphy that Jeff was trying to think; so he emptied what was left in the open bottle equally into the two glasses, and produced a second bettle from) under the table and uncorked it. Jeff drained his glass, blinked, pasped, nodded his head. ‘ Jules is strong,” he continued weightily, ‘but maybe we kinder overrated him at first because he was a stranger. I wouldn’t wonder, An’ he was smart. Maybe J was jist as strong—but Jules was slick. He’d snap into it. That was his way.” ‘And ours, too, Jeff,” said the genial Mumphy, ‘ There stands a bottle waitin’ for you to snap right into it.” Two hours later, Jeff retired. His retire- ment was not an elaborate performance. It consisted of nothing more than a slow and gentle slide, in the second stage of which his back rested on the seat of his chair, in the third stage his shoulders, and in the fourth the chair was entirely vacated and he te- clined full-length on the floor with his face to the ceiling. Mumphy fetched a pillow from the bed and placed it beneath the unconscious head of the TaH Timber Terror. Mumphy’s dealings with the second bottle had con- sisted almost entirely of generous gestures. He bathed his brow and eyes and the back of his thick neck with cold water and felt almost as good as new. For a little while he sat on the edge of his bed and thought hard. He knew a good deal now about the recent career of his lost Hercules of the CONMUC DOOLK