Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 50: what you’re looking at

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

36 _ front of him when he faced as they ran. He had caught the alarm in Purdue’s tone and he turned quickly. With an oath Purdue had leaped. He caught the wheel too late and tripped in the length of line which hung from his hand into the loose coil at his feet. The line was jerked from his grip. He recovered it and held it smoking on the skin of his hand, ‘but not until half its length had been shot through the pulleys, and not until the jerk of the boom was timed exactly with the thud of the centerboard below them on the edge of the rock. There was a crash for- ward. The mast had snapped off at the deck like a pipe-stem. The great sail flattened over the water. The Jessie P. was still upright, her ‘centerboard probably badly splintered at the bottom and forward edge, but her. hull as sound as the day it had been built. Only her power to move was gone. There was, even here, enough of the tide current to catch the heavy keel and what remained of the centerboard and set the boat, slowly at first, then more and more swiftly, moving away from the land toward the wide-open mouth of the Bay of Fundy. During the first instant of wild rage at the failure of his scheme, the damage to. his boat and the startled wonder at it all, the two school-ma’ams on the shore had shouted their willingness. to run for help. His mind was not sufficiently ad- _ justed to the lightning change in the situ- ation to realize that he wanted help, that it would be an hour before they could get down to the next village and start a launch in their direction. “We're all right,” he had sung back at them, carefully smothering the oaths of fury he had been on the point of venting. “Won’t need no help!” They had barely drifted far enough to make calling ampossible when he saw a swiftly approaching bank of fog which, inside half an hour, might shut their predicament from the view of the world. Gone now was all pretense of friend- - ship; he gave vent to the vast hate-his sullen nature had accumulated within him, vented it in torrents of vile epithet while he began to busy himself with sal- vaging the sail and the two unbroken > = ss >. — ee ee ee ae... Fe eee ase 3S Adventure spars. At+the worst there was no serious danger, and he knew it. There wefe tins of food in a little locker in the cabin, kept there against more usual emergen- cies. Beside the jug of water drawn from a spring just before they had started, a big cask lay on the under-deck before the cabin. That he filled reli- giously with fresh water once a week, and its contents were but three days old now. | Their gravest danger was no more than that of staying out all night, Even that might be avoided. For two strong men, a very few hours would suffice for removing the butt of the mast and step- ping what was left of it to carry a reefed sail. His hate, however, saw an opportunity to torment his rival with fear. Hasting, aware that he had provided plenty of excuse for exasperation, was taking the rabid invectives in the apolo- getic manner of one all but impossible to anger. = “Go ahead and cuss me,” he advised with imperturbable good humor, “Any man who’s idiot enough to make a break like that can’t be sufficiently cussed. He deserves more cussing than there is.” . Hasting might have explained; Pur- due knew the explanation himself. — It was pure tact that simply .waited for wrath to cool. -“When you get out of breath, tell me, and I'll do some cussing myself. I picked up some rather good ones over in France. Not quite good enough for me, but they'll help. Only, if there’s anything you can tell me in words of one syllable, I'l] be glad to help with that mess.” “Help! Help !” shrilled Jess Purdue’s harsh voice. “Think I’d let you touch a line now? You You’ve helped enough! I got plenty of time to do everything myself. See that fog-bank yonder? Well, that’s good for about three days, and this current will take us about a hundred miles off shore and out of the run of everything, in that time. No need for any of your help— or your lip. Just sit there and keep your mouth shut. Don’t dry it in the air. We only got that little jug of water between us >? ‘ Hasting looked at the bank of fog. COMME OOS <> s ae 27 - yt Jae =e = = 2 ; | ee eee < es E e ae Pome See iS ee ee ae a ee ne ee a ~