The Argosy, Vol. 76, No. 3 — page 228: what you’re looking at

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

698 there was poor old Martin, layin’ in the middle of the worst of it, right in- side the door, with the fire all around him. “Of course I tried to get him out of it right away,” Lem went on, while his hearers crowded around on one another’s shoulders to follow the startling relation, “ but the fire was so blamed hot right there I couldn’t get near him for a while. “T wrapped my coat around my head finally and crawled in a ways, Mrs. Nash screamin’ and yellin’ her head off all the time, and at last I dragged him out. But the poor old feller was so burned you wouldn’t know him only for his clothes. | * By that time my man Boone was there, and the folks come across from Dow’s place to help, but we couldn’t do nothin’ to save the barn. She went up in smoke, and if the wind had ’a’ been the other way the house would a gone too. “We carried Martin into the house, and I telephoned to Ridley for the coroner to come, knowin’ it was a case for him. I tell. you, I don’t never want to see anything like that again.” It was two months after the funeral of Martin Nash that a land-buyer ap- peared in the Tolmans neighborhood, making inquiry for farms that were on the market at reasonable prices. His name was J. Derrick Green, and he represented a Chicago syndicate which, he said, intended buying up large tracts of farming property for speculative purposes. Mr. Green talked lightly of the millions that were behind him in his conferences with the bankers and farmers of the district, and he was surprised to find prices holding firm in the face of his tenta- tive offers. | Tolmans was willing to sell, but Tolmans wanted its price, and Mr. Green regretfully concluded he could not do much business in that particu- lar section of Indiana. But before he abandoned the field he called at the Nash farmhouse to THE ARGOSY. make a bid for the property. It was on the market, he had been told by half a dozen neighbors, and incident- ally the story of the Nash tragedy had been detailed to him in all its high lights by several willing narrators, in- cluding Lem Applegate himself, chief actor in the drama. Mrs. Nash and the boys were anx- ious to leave. The shadow of old Martin’s tragic death hung over the farm, they had told the neighbors in effect, and they wanted to get away from it. They had collected some insurance on Martins’s life, and this, with a fair price for the farm, would enable them to start afresh in some distant com- munity where they would not have constant reminders of the tragedy. All this had been told to J. Derrick Green befofe he drove up to the Nash place in his bright, red-wheeled buggy and went in to make a proposition for its purchase. And all this he was busily revolving in his mind when Mrs. Nash, alone in the old farmhouse, showed him into the dim, close-smell- ing parlor and went down into the fields to call her son Joel. Green looked around the old-fash- ioned room curiously. It was fur- nished with the red-trimmed haircloth chairs and sofa that Martin Nash had bought forty years before when he fitted up the place for his bride. In the corner stood a walnut what- not, its shelves loaded with shells and curios, and a red plush photograph album rested on the center table. The room was typical of the parlors in the older farmhouses of the neighbor- hood, but something on the wall caught and held the attention of Mr. Green as he sat waiting. It was a crayon portrait of a man close to sixty years old, sparse of hair and with the chin~-whiskers that marked the farmer. That it was a picture of Martin Nash the visitor did not doubt. It was a badly executed enlargement of a photograph, and after looking at it COMicdoo S CO@