Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 105: what you’re looking at

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

The Seven Cities of Cibola “IT am well rebuked. Come on, Xicotl.” - And again they moved on into the lim- itless unknown. “Is this the country through which you traveled last year?” Andres asked | Fray Marco. The priest had been studying every feature of the land as they passed along it. His face wore the ptizzled look of one who is struggling to recall a thing which he has seen and forgotten. He had watched peaks and mesas and val- leys as they came to them, striving vainly to remember some salient feature of that terrible trip of his the year before. He nodded slowly. “T think it is the same country, but I can not be sure. The general slope of the land is about the same. It is very ‘curious, my son, but my memory is clean of the greater part of what took place. There should be a flat, sandy plain with a*range of red hills on the far side. They stand up sheer from the plain and have no foot-hills.” “Is that the sandy plain?” Andres pointed to the limitless expanse of sand ~-over which Mercedes had passed now spreading out at their feet. “Tt looks like the plain. Has Xicotl again picked up the trail?” Xicotl had never lost it, but now he stood tense and rigid as a pointer scent- ing a bird. “Something has happened out there, senor. Maybe—I cannot tell what it is. It may be a dead antelope.” He pointed to a brown spot on the yellow face of the desert, a few hundred paces away. Andres walked slowly toward it. Presently the two men saw him begin to run; saw him suddenly throw up his hands and fall on his knees by the dark object on the plain.. Xicetl reached him first and found the great scoutmaster, he ‘who as a boy had braved the terrors of the burning lava in Pope’s crater, crying like a child, for there at his feet lay the dead body of the red stallion. “Look new, father! How can we look © for more now than to find her own dead body? What have you to say now? Can all your piety or faith support you further?” “*Though He slay me yet will I trust QI in Him,’*’ muttered Fray Marco slowly. But his lips paled, for he knew well enough what the finding of the body of the horse vortended. “How long has the horse been dead?” “I can not tell, sejior. As you know, flesh dries up here in this sun and the buzzards have not left a great deal from which to judge. Look how they lie gorged in the bush!” Xicotl pointed to the bodies of a dozen great brown birds, gorged to repletion _ from their feast, utterly unable to lift themselves in flight. “We can follow easily now!” Xicotl was plainly exultant. ‘See now, Don Andres, we have been on the trail for nearly six weeks, yet we have never lost it entirely. Shall we despair now?” “A caballero of Spain may fail, Xicoth © but he never despairs!” Andres made answer, with that curious mixture of humility and arrogance that set the - Spaniard of those days a man apart from other men. It would have seemed bound- less conceit in an Englishman. In An- dres it seemed not a whit out‘of place. “Forward then!” And again they plodded on in the gathering dusk. HE two Spaniards could never have traced the girl across those sands, but the lynx-eyed Xicotl hardly wavered. Several times he paused and retraced his tracks a short distance, but he always picked up the trail again and led them unswervingly to the foot of the ridge, where he stood for a while, at fault. _Then he turned to the right and, at a slow trot now, led the way along the base of the great range. | “Look, sefores!’ He pointed to a mark across the desert’s dusty face, a ‘mark such as a great broom might have made in sweeping. The sand was heaped along a six-foot track. Andres looked his question. ‘““A tornado has left that—and here— something has happened here! Look!” The excited Xicotl seized something from the ground and held it out.to An- dres. Puzzled and utterly bewildered, the astounded Andres turned over in his hand the crumbling end of a stale tortilla! “A tortilla and made of finest maize— COMIC OOO KS (F@