Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 7, 1922 — page 124: what you’re looking at

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

By HE Society of Ancestral Loss cleaves with relentless ferocity to its law. And that law demands the life of the man or woman on the ninth day after the branding of the ancestral tomb that marks upon the voluntary victim’s breast its livid record of the sale of the soul within. Twice had I come into knowledge of the working of this law. Lieutenant Buckley, of the little gunboat Wilena, had told me of how he had first heard of the society. And after his warning, with my own eyes I had seen Tuck Cheong, on the ninth day, throw himself into the Sea of Ancestral Fire to atone for the barter of his soul, and to drown in the oblivion of the waters of the Yangste the remorse that gnawed at his heart. Thus was the law carried out—even if not 270 PHILIP M. FISHER, JR. by the society’s relentless knife, at least by _ the operation in the victim’s own mind of its inexorable demand. The casual passenger on the ferryboat running past Alcatraz from the city of St. Francis to that of the Little Willow on the white bluffs on Marin remarks upon the twoscore lateened fishing craft beating through the Golden Gate. In Manila the tourist marvels at a hundred spider-legged bancas seemingly bent, under huge-bellied sail, for destruction on the rock of Corre- gidor. But in the ower Yangste even the imagination gasps for breath. | From forty miles south of the Saddle Group our column steered not so much to run a course as to avoid by countless zigzags the bamboo-buoyed fishing nets that COMICLOo SS C©