The Argosy, Vol. 76, No. 3 — page 200: what you’re looking at

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

ay in <a See aiaor by Patrick Gallagher ASILIO SALAZAR frowned B upon the Panguingue card, and intuitively his brown fin- gers caressed the blade of his bolo. The card lay on the soft, red earth, a few inches away from his unslippered, stumpy toes. The heavy knife—inseparable com- panion of the Filipino of the bosque —was balanced across one of his knees. The native was sitting at his ease on the rear steps of his American master’s bungalow. There was mur- der in his heart and in his eye. The card, with the three curiously colored cups painted upon its upturned face, represented the cause. Basilio had gambled and lost more than he could pay. The blue-bladed bolo represented the means of avoiding judgment by si- lencing his creditor. His mind made up, he slipped the knife, long as a sword and heavy as a_ butcher’s cleaver, down one of the legs of his loose pantaloons, left the bungalow, and went whistling up the trail. The brief dusk of the tropics was gathering over barrio and bosque, village and semiwilderness. He knew the habits of old Cospito, to whom he 670 owed the money he could not pay. Guardedly he approached the gam- bler-miser’s shack, sniffed about it like a hound on a hot scent; the silence told him that,.as he had expected, Cospito had retired early. The bejuco floor of thatched dwelling was propped high above the swamp and puddles upon which its bamboo pole supports raised their slender but strong columns at each corner. In the open space between the swamp and puddles and the interstices of the floor strips, mosquitoes buzzed and centipedes dropped from their nests. Into this space, bolo in hand, crept Basilio, one ear cocked close to the floor strips, brown fingers feeling for the depression made by the recumbent sleeper above him. Cospito, like his poorer compatriots, disdained the American or European luxury of a bedstead. The woven fiber petate, or sleep-mat, and the fragile floor, with its many gaps, alone separated his snoring bulk from the prowling man with the bolo. ' Fingers, ears, nose, soon located the precise position of the miser doomed the nipa- COIN Clooolks CO@