Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 27, 1925 — page 72: what you’re looking at

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

&64 charge. The two waited for an instant, then scurried in opposite directions. It was Small whom Murrell caught first. Cynthia Meade, lying on the bench where she had been placed, saw it all as ane sees the wild impossibilities of a de- lirtum. Her consciousness was fogged and distorted. Her senses played her queer tricks. The real and the unreal were in- extricably tangled and blurred. But she had the sense of lying on the outskirts of some lurid inferno, tom and echoing with howls and the crash of splintered wood. It seemed that men were being tossed about as chips are tossed on a whirlpool. They were rolling in confused masses. They were charging and giving back in an indescribable fury of onslaught and flight. Yet two were always in desperate retreat and one always in implacable pursuit. The teacher tried to climb out through a window, while Wade’s great shoulders heaved to a fusillade of blows driven volley- wise against the huddling and cornered fig- ure of Daws Small. Upset benches lay in 4 welter. Murrell left Small.and went charg- ing over the débris to drag Carmichael back by his frantically kicking feet. Then, through her stupor, the girl roused herself for a shriek of warning. Small had snatched up a heavy stool, and with it lift- ed at arm's length above his head, was scurrying across the room to floor his pun- isher from behind. Wade, admonished by that outcry, flung the captured teacher to the floor and wheeled. As be turned, the stool crashed down. The uplifted forearm of the rescuer caught at the thing and the rescuer dodged sidewise under its impact, but even that glancing blow was enough to send him down, and when he fell Cynthia saw the two hurl themselves on him with howls of brief triumph. With a chill of horror shaking her, she closed her eyes, and when she dared to open them again—her ears still full of clamor— she saw two men standing crouched and facing the aisle. The teacher was nowhere to be seen now, but Murrell and Small stood, both disheveled, both torn of clothing, both panting furiously, both bloody and bruised of face, glaring each ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. at the other. Small’s features were distort- ed now with a desperation that had cast aside fear—and he held a wicked, dirk- bladed knife in his hand. Once more she closed her lids, and con- sciousness left her. How long that lasted she did not know, but waking to sensibility again she looked up to see a sweat-grimed and bloody Wade Murrell standing over her. Toward the reopened door a six-foot, hundred-and-sixty-pound youth was pain- fully crawling. On the floor, in an excellent counterfeit of death, lay the tattered remnant of a man. Murrell lifted her into his arms again. “T'll aim ter tote ye es easy es I kin,” he said to her. “ An’ hit behoves us ter git home right soon.” Just before he reached the bend, which would give his own house into view, Wade Murrell halted. The salty sweat was streaming into his eyes and blood from a gash.across his forehead, which would’ leave him one more scar to tum white, was mingling with the sweat to blind him. Very carefully he laid the girl down on a grassy bank, and he saw that she knew nothing of what was going on. The flick- ering of consciousness and unconsciousness had made of her last half hour a series of Mental dots and dashes, of lurid impressions and blank gaps. Now the man straightened up and wiped the grime and wet away from his stinging face. Suddenly, with the poignancy of a sharp pain, the slim beauty of this creature from another world smote him, She lay there so frail and so pallid, yet to his inexperience exemplifying so much of the fineness of ‘a world of which he had only dreamed from afar off. She seemed to his eyes as fresh, as fragrant, and as altogether lovely as some dewy blossom of the laurel touched. into life—and now bruised again close to death. To him she was human delicacy, human refinement, and she had been stoned almost in the shadow of his own house, when he had promised her the protection of his strength and his roof. Once more the young mountaineer felt himself shaken and thrilled by her physical 4A COnniEaoo () SS Co