Argosy, Vol. 123, No. 1 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

THE PROGRESS were all that possessed me as I dashed the blood from my eyes and prepared to re- new battle! CHAPTER II. ENTER THE GREAT INSTRUMENT. LJOW it would have fared with me I sur- mised only too well. But all at once a new voice was added to the uproar. The mob split in two. Through a swiftly formed lane plunged the figure of a six-foot, big-boned, red-haired, red-faced trooper who announced his arrival with a succession ef mighty roars like the bel- lowing of an enraged bull. ‘“Avaunt, ye devils!’ he thundered, whirling a great sword about his head. “ Get ye behind me, minions of Satan! By Gog, Magog, and the Archangel ‘Gabriel, I'll spit ye all like pheasants on one skewer if ye ‘Whether the mob feared there were more troopers behind this red-haired thunderbolt, certainly all fell back, Master Slythey being the first to make retreat. But before he had gone six steps the big-boned ‘trooper » sheathed his sword, sprang after the preacher, seized him by the collar, and dragged him back to the well parapet where I leaned, not sure whether I ‘was quite alive or on the-point of death. Through a red haze I witnessed the next development of the untoward business. Against the parapet Hobgoblin Jack— for there was no mistaking that roaring voice—jammed the sleek Master Slythey, while the two women held me up from falling, and one of them—Mistress Joyce, I believed and hoped—wiped the blood from my face. “ Ha, Master Turncoat!” bellowed Hob- goblin, shaking his man in his mighty grip. ‘“* So tis thee, painted hypocrite! I thought I knew thee. Th’art that same _ Jonas Slythey of my own village of Elstow in Bedford; that same shedskin lizard who served as an officer of royalists at. Edge- hill, and was expelled from their company for sinfulness e’en ¢#ey could not brook!” Master Slythey, his eyes popping from his head, inarticulately gurgled. Again the OF, J. BUNYAN, 5 choking grip shook him so that his brains must have rattled like peas in a dry pod. “Master Jonas Slythey—ha? Ye do not deny it—/a? That same slithering Slythey who came back to Elstow and set up as a doctor of medicines, but could not forswear his old habits—drinking and gambling and worse—and was turned out by the righteous fathers? “By Gog, Magog, al the Archangel Gabriel! And now Master Slythey turns up in Naseby with his coat of many colors turned to godly hue! Setting up ‘to doctor souls and condemn this to the everlasting, pit and that to the ducking-pond! Tsou that art thyself destined to sulphur, brim- stone, and the lake of burning pitch!” And with this the brawny, red-haired trooper, still holding Master Slythey by the throat with his left hand, seized him by the seat of his breeches with his right, lifted the preacher clean above his head and hurled him into a figurative lake of burning pitch—the duck-pond behind the well! — The mob which had followed Slythey, as black sheep their shepherd, now began to laugh at the preacher’s sudden discom- frture. ‘Slythey could swim a little, and managed to extricate himself from deep water, but he feared to come to land while yet our new champion held the ground. The sleek one presented a ludicrous spec- tacle, sitting up to his chin in the muddied water, which plastered his hair over ‘his eyes. And then the real rescuer of the ladies and their would-be champion did a most imexpected thing. ‘Regardless of his victim in the pond, he turned upon the mob and made an amazing speech, the mam burden of which was that he, Hob- goblin Jack, was a very wicked person! “My name,” he roared, as if he chal- lenged contradiction, ‘‘ my name is Master Badman’ I am an offshoot of the very devil himself. I am a drunkard, a har, a gambler, and a swearer of vile words. .I glory in all carnal sinfulness! “You laugh! ‘You deny it? Be not de- ceived In yourselves, or me. That I wear a Puritan soldier’s armor is but proaf that 1 am .a painted hypocrite! I am seep in wickedness and ‘sleth! You— Ccomiclboooks ” he broke off, turning to the C©