Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 13, 1925 — page 30: what you’re looking at

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

502 the quavering song serve as a lullaby. That was the last thing she remembered of the night, and through her dreams ran fantastic variations of the verses: Wa’al Joseph was an old man, An old, old man was he, When he wed ther Virgin Mary, Ther Queen of Galilee. Murrell had breakfast ready when Cynthia opened her eyes upon a depressing grayness of dawn-mists with the momen- tarily lost feeling of one who wakens in strange surroundings and is conscious only of bleak forebodings. Then as the train of events which had followed on a single moment of catastrophe trooped back to her memory her heart sank in a sickening depression. The first elation of escape had ceased now to be everything. Even if she were indeed safe from pursuit, she had bought her im- munity at the price of an exile that was hardly better. Heretofore, she had seen these mountains only from a train window or towering against the skyline from a city’s streets. Now, although the morning fog swallowed their parapets in a wet and dispiriting gray, she could feel them bleak, forbidding and monumental, appearing to crowd menacingly upon her and stifle her with nameless terrors. | Even the man whom she had seen last night by lantern light appeared changed in the gray dawn. He seemed more domineer- ing now and more wolflike in the certainty of his strength. It was as though, in his own habitat, he had expanded and thrown aff the humility of a strange environment. To her city eyes, this morning, he appeared rather the tyrant than the hero, and from his back-country roughness she recoiled in fastidious distaste. When the coffee and coarse corn-pone had been eaten the early mists had begun to lift, and the sun that had been a pallid disc had turned to rose, awakening patches of color amazingly delicate and beautiful. Over an infinity of peak piled upon peak the day was strengthening into a flawless clarity. To another eye there must have been ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. sublimity in the prospect of this immense unveiling. Ridges magnificently timbered to their tops and cloaked with blooming rhododendron; walls of cliff that had the splendor of palisades and the sparkle of water tumbling into long cascades made a majesty of beauty—but Cynthia thought of elevated railways and = sighed heavy- heartedly. These were the hills to which she had fled, but she found them unlike her preconceived ideas and vastly more terrifying. “God knows,” she told herself in bitter silence, ‘if I ever get back to New York again, I'll never kick at anything. Even the East Side and Harlem look pretty good to me now.” Loneliness like that of a child in an empty house laid its chill and cramp against her heart-~a heart that could beat comfortably only in the feverish excitement of crowds. Near noon Murrell pointed his hand from a hill-top to a scrap of ragged land in a hollow deep below, where stood a dilapi- dated building of tawdry meanness. ‘“Thet thar’s whar Tom Ike Quillen dwells at,” he informed her. ‘ An’ thet’s whar we stops at ter leave this hyar jolt- wagon an’ git our ridin’-critter. I reckon we'll eat us some dinner thar, too.” The young woman’s heart sank lower, and the only answer she could manage was a sullen nod of her unreconciled head. The wagon strained slowly down a bowlder-strewn way, rocking from side to side until the fagged team plodded into a creek bed and followed its course between rank screens and heavy foliage. Down there the air hung damp and stifling. Then the way straightened and climbed abruptly until it became a narrow, rutted strip of sun baked clay from which one could see, near at hand and with mere dispiriting detail, the structure which was their destination. It had not even the alleviating dignity of the pioneer log cabin, but stood gaunt and squalidly hideous with its exterior of un- dressed lumber in a yard area trampled bare of grass, but thriving in ragwood and jimson. The only paint this residence boasted showed on its door and window CoOnnicloool.