Page:Argosy All-story Weekly v123 n04 (1920-07-31).djvu/7

 ARGOSY-ALLSTORY

W EF E K LY

} Vor. CXXIHI SATURDAY,

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CHAPTER I. THE ARRIVAL.

BERTRAM BANCROFT BOOM swung from the Limited to the sunbathed platform of the station. He dropped his suit-case to the warped, weather-eaten boarding, and as he looked about him, a scarcely audible groan escaped his lips.

His first impression of Selma, the small Arkansas village into which Fate—ably assisted by one Ellis Turner—had so unexpectedly precipitated him, was even less favorable than he had expected; and the weight of despondency that had recently lodged itself in his chest gained added poundage as he surveyed the portals of his new home.

The station was the first object to attract his unwilling gaze. It was a small wooden structure that leaned perilously to starboard, as if it had lunged after each westbound train that thundered past in a vain effort to follow it, and had succeeded only in rearing its left end and sinking its right. Its sometime coat of brilliant yellow

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JULY 31,

1920 NUMBER 4

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Raymond Leslie Goldman.

was now faded to a dismal drab, and what paint was left to it by the wind and rain had been converted into blisters by the sun.

Gathered about it, like a brood of chicks about the mother-hen, stood a number of smaller frame buildings in various stages of dilapidation, presumably warehouses of former and better days; and farther on, nearer to the glistening rails, a giant water- tank reared itself on trellised legs.

‘“A tank-town!” the young man mur- mured bitterly as his gaze swept across the cheerless panorama and then down the con- verging road- bed, over which hung thin- ning festoons of ‘smoke to mark the pas- sage of the train that had paused only long enough to allow him to alight and to eject his trunk from the baggage-car.

It was the latter part of September, but summer still reigned so supreme that its heat was visible. The murky interior of the station promised some relief from the scorching Sun, and Bert, who could not de- cide just what direction to take because it mattered so little which he should choose, gripped his suit-case and stepped through the open door,

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