Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 27, 1925 — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

FLIGHT. TO women. She thought her unpainted cheeks, as given back by her mirror, were ghastly pale, and that her lips were dead as veal. ‘‘T’m made up for a backwoods jane, and I1’ll tell the world I look like a wreck!” she exclaimed to herself, and yet she said it with surprising cheerfulness. ‘“ Not a ray or a glimmer of looks left, but a person can’t have everythin# and, thank God, I’m not in jail!” Yet had she known it, she was slim and fresh enough to stand as nature had fash- ioned her. Had she been able to read her- self aright, her beauty was now for the first time clean and unflawed by a cheap gro- tesquerie. Her skin held the dewey fresh- ness of the laurel bud instead of the over- done flamboyance of the make-up box, and the curves of her young body were dryadlike under the crispness of yellow gingham. She longed to relieve what seerned to her a deadly plainness by just a touch of lip- Stick and rouge. She hesitated and reso- lutely shook her head. ‘ You’re on proba- tion, deary,” she told herself, ‘‘ and to-these saps a little decent make-up is the brand of scarlet sin.” Wade had disappeared when Cynthia came out to breakfast, and to all her sug- gestions that she be made useful, Aunt Erie had turned a deaf ear. “ After ye’ve done got sottled down,” she decreed, “‘ thar ’ll be a lavish plenty ye kin do. I reckon, by rights I’d ought ter pay ye wage money, but I don’t want ye under- foot terday. Jest santer round an’ git used ter things. That’s always what a cat does in a new place. Jest wanders an’ snifis— an’ then he feels plumb at home.” So Cynthia wandered. She inspected the bee gums and Lake’s “ lily gyarden,” and after that she aimlessly followed the rutty road that ran along a creek bed, shaded by paw-paws and locusts, noisy with waddling geese. Suddenly she came on a tumble-down building that was palpably a schoolhouse. It sat near the road and its children were shouting and screaming about the bare, tramped inclosure. It was recess time. In the open door of the place leaned a disheveled young man whom she at first took for a gawky, overgrown pupil, but whom she decided, at second glance, was the teacher. Down there by the creek bed stood a half dozen boys whom one would have judged to be men, by their stature. Physi- cally, they were full grown; mentally, per- haps they would never be grown. Some of the younger of these were pupils. Two or three of the older were merely loafers. As Cynthia came near she felt that they were staring at her with a disconcerting and hostile directness, but that seemed an atti- tude to which she must accustom herself, She strode on, and as she came abreast of the group she nodded. “ Hello, boys,” she said. There was no answer save that one of the young louts made an exclamation that sounded like “Sooey! Sooey!” and the others laughed. With angrily flaming cheeks, the girl passed on, and in her path wallowed a razor- backed hog. A small, tow-headed girl came across the way just then, and also encoun- tered the hog. Promptly she kicked it with her brown, bare foot and yelled: “ Sooey, ole sow. Sooey!” At once Cynthia realized the import of thé insult that had been offered her a few steps back. ‘ Sooey ” was the word with which humans said “ begone ” to hogs! She paused involuntarily and turned to look back. The group of man-sized boys had drifted along after her, and as she paused, one of them yelled out in an ugly Stridency of passion: “ Rock ther strumpet! Rock ther strumpet!”’ With an appalled shock of realization the girl knew that she was in actual dan- ger of a rough hazing, but she had a vein of iron in her and she could not believe that she was threatened with anything worse than verbal insult. So looking over toward the schoolhouse door, where the teacher still slouched, she called out in a peremptory and disdainful tone: “You'd better teach these young rough- necks manners, I should say.” The teacher must have heard. He was near enough to hear, but he made no re- sponse, and to her terror Cynthia saw a stupid-faced lout of a youth reach down to the creek bed for a stone. EO 1A@OO () SS Co