Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 1, 1922 — page 153: what you’re looking at

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

By MILES OVERHOLT HERE ought to be a device of human torture invented that one man could operate—a kind of instrument that you could wind up and then go away and get a drink, or something. | I’m looking for a man-twister like that. IT want to fasten it onto a guy and render him totally unfit for publication. I am pining to break Jeff Parker up into little fragments of pain and anguish, and then oil up the bearings of the bonebreaker and light a cigarette and watch him suffer. _ That’s about all I want to do to Jeff. But even then I figger it won’t anyways near pay me for the mental and physical wreckage that person made of me just when the future began to look like it was all painted up in gaudy colors, and had a new engine in it and the carbon all cleaned out of its bearings. : | Jeff Parker is one of the promotingest guys that ever sold stock in a sweet pea cannery to widows and orphans, and when he came to see me just after I had acquired enough money to enable me to call a couple of head waiters by their first names and proposed a proposition, why, I didn’t have presence of mind in sufficient quantities to go and hide my head in the sand. I don’t know to this day how that cash hound scented out my financial statement, unless he just naturally has a roamin’ nose, because he was making his headquarters in Seattle and he trailed my wallet around and treed it in Tia Juana. Anyway, there’s where he found me and my purse, and where he unwrapped his proposition from its nice shiny covering of high class words in two and three syllables. ‘“‘ All we need,” he said “is a boat. I have already taken care of the cargo end of the enterprise. Every trip will net us,” he said in a nice, soft, cooey language, “one hundred thousand dollars!” 943 CO DOO C©