Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

20 arrange for a resumption of his business in the near future. But it was hard for him to get his mind off of the more fascinating problems that confronted him there in their camp. He leaned back comfortably in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, and went Over again in memory all of ‘the events which had led up to their present surprising situation. What puzzled him most, and, at the same time, appealed most strongly to his imagination was the unusual study present- ed by the charming but baffling personality of Nellie Blaydon. He admitted to him- self, alone in his tent, that he had been rather brutal in his attitude toward her since his discovery of her telephone trick and that this brutality was directly due to the fact that, in spite of all; he was con- scious that she was attracting him more than he liked to acknowledge. The spell that her beauty cast was indis- putable, but it was not her mere beauty that was the cause of this attraction. It was something underlying it all—some sense that she was helplessly floundering around, trying to find some means of escape from a predicament not at all of her own choosing or making. | He closed his eyes and recalled to mem- ory the varying expressions that he had seen in her brown eyes. There had been a change, he realized, since she had arrived at the yacht. All during luncheon, she had been very palpably a woman laboring under a great weight of distress and, as he now looked back upon it, he sensed the fine ex- hibition of self-control that she had given under such trying circumstances. She was “brave, there was no doubt of that. If, in- deed, she were innocent of all wrong, she was truly Spartan in her self-mastery. The silence of the night crept upon him as he sat there with his eyes closed, and his thoughts wandered. In five minutes, he was dozing in his chair. Suddenly he awakened and sat bolt up- right, listening tensely. Some sound from outside had disturbed him. He heard it again, the faint sound of scraping in the sand along the shore where Caprice was hauled out. He smiled easily and reassur- ingly to himself. “Only Phil,” he muttered, “scrambling down the ladder.” He turned his attention once more to the nyt! Chae Fs ig ated a Jo wy 7 nt Re EE pe ET aR 5 , peers Sey” 2, Ope a wy - * : * Adventure letters scattered upon the table before him, but again the sound came, this time louder and more definite. | “By gad!” he muttered. “That sounds like a scuffle of some sort. I wonder——” But, even as he was rising from his chair, he was electrified by a cry from outside— the voice of a man in distress, struggling hard to make himself heard. “Ward!” it called. “Ward—help!” Fenton sprang from his chair and rushed out of the tent, with terror spurring him on, brought by the fear that his friend had fall- en into the water and the knowledge that Conway was but a poor swimmer. But, al- most at the flap of the tent, the aviator stopped short in consternation. From there, he could see down the shore to where the white hull of Caprice gleamed in the moonlight. 7 It was no task in swimming that con- fronted him there. Almost alongside the yacht, he saw a knot of struggling men— five or six, he judged by his first quick glance, all apparently surrounding and at- tacking the man in the center, and that man he knew’to be Phil Conway. ‘With a leap, Fenton rushed into the other tent, groped at the head of Carl Loder’s cot and found the revolver that the mechani- cian kept hanging there. Out again he dashed and, heading for the fighting group, fired a shot into the air over their heads. The effect was even more startling than he had hoped. His thought had been to scatter the men, so that” he could shoot with more serious purpose and without the danger of hitting Phil. The attackers scat- tered with greater speed than he had anti- cipated. Instead of seeking positions from which to fight back, they turned with one ac- cordand fled around the stern of Caprice and disappeared beneath her protection. Before he could reach the yacht, he heard from the other side the roar of a quickly started, high-speed motor, the shouts of command in hoarse voices and then the swish of water as a boat shot out from be- yond the hull on shore, swerved sharply down the cove and disappeared around a jutting curve on the shore. He watched until he could see her no longer; then, without turning to help Phil, stood intently listening as the throb of the motor grew less and less distinct and he knew that the men had not Sore (E(0) aie » : aie TH o ‘ vr « r Wate ee ood 7 @ ¥ lM it } - t an * ee 4 ay = ad s tod » * > oJ