Argosy, Vol. 123, No. 2 — page 101: what you’re looking at

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

PRIDE OF TYSON. seeing a primitive Indian showing mercy to a wounded creature. Tyson caught his breath. He stooped and raised her to her feet. “ After all, there’sino harm done. You were only trying to frighten me; you would never have used the knife, eh?” “TI don’t know,” she sighed. “ That in- stant I hated you, Seftor Tyson.” “Nonsense. You would have stopped at the last moment.”’ “ Perhaps.” She looked wistfully at him. “TI wonder if God will think that, too?” she murmured. Tyson had to struggle to keep from laughing aloud. ’ “Well,” mourned the girl, “ when the Padre Miguel hears of this I shall have six months of prayers and fastings. Be- cause of you!” . She stared at him in gloomy anger. “Why are you walking on with me? There is nothing to carry forme now. And if you go on, I may be wicked again. I feel something very bad in me.” - He stopped. ‘““Do you want me to leave you, and go back?” “No, no!” she cried suddenly. ‘I had forgot. JZ am not going to take the blame for breaking the bottle. Come; hurry! You shall face my father and tell him what has happened.” In the quickly coming dusk, they were almost upon the cabin before Henry Tyson noticed it. First they crossed a little rivu- let lined with willows which looked like giants with enormous heads in the semidark, and when Tyson looked up, the cabin lay a few steps away. The wall of the valley rose here in almost a cliff, and into an angle of this the cabin snuggled, protected from the wind on two. sides by a natural wall. Tyson made out the obscure, ragged out- line of the house, and a crooked joint of stove-pipe twisting above it. As _ they stepped into full view of the place he found one small window, faintly illumined, and the door sketched in roughly by a rectangu- lar crack of light. 293 On this the girl knocked once, and then threw it open. | “Go in,” she said to Tyson, and he stepped into the house. It consisted of two rooms, or rather, one room and a wretched little cubby- hole of a lean-to curtained off from the main apart- ment by sacking, which was now drawn aside. It revealed what must have been the girl’s sleeping-place, for Tyson saw through the low aperture a flash of color on the fur-. ther wall—perhaps a bright-colored calen- dar—and the gleam of a mirror. Then, as if she resented the direction of his glance, the girl stepped across and jerked out the sacking, effectually blocking his vision. The other and main room evidently served as living-room, dining-room, and kitchen. A wrecked table staggered against the wall on one side; opposite it, half a dozen ancient books lay on a small shelf; there in the corner was the roll of bedding, covered with a tarpaulin, where the father ‘Slept; and at the farther end stood the most important article of furniture—a rust- reddened stove. These things Tyson observed in a single glance. He had no time for more, since the occupants of the place took his atten- tion thereafter. They were, in the first place, the man of the wolf-grin which had haunted his sleep since the first day he met Rona Carnahan, a big, gaunt man whose face was covered with an unrazored mass of shaggy hair; a man with uneasy, big brown eyes, which flashed a glance at Tyson and then flick- ered away and kept an outlook of suspicion upon him from the side. The other wore the vesture of a religious order, and Tyson put him down at once as the Padre Miguel himself. He was a little, broad-shouldertd man with a pale, ugly face. He looked more Trish than Spanish or Mexican.- The keen sun of the southwest had not been able to tan his skin, the lichen whiteness of which suggested a lifetime spent in dungeon dark- ness. For the rest, a negligible nose turned up in a truly Celtic fashion, and there was an equally Irish mouth, with the long upper lip. On the whole, Padre Miguel might have COMmiclboo S C@