Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 60: what you’re looking at

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

by T. $.MILLER ARMORER Author of “ The Fight Between The Bagle and The Swan,” etc. HE day came when the great central span was swung to its concrete pillars, and the Niger was bridged. The scream of pneumatic drill, the rat-a-tat-tat of rivet- ers and the shriek of block and tackle died away into the brooding silence that wrapped the shimmering lagoon and palmed shore. At five o’elock the siren over the boiler-house wailed its last “devil-scream voice.’ Tim Cole was the giant fore- man of the tool-sharpening smithery, but foreman in name only, for it was infi- nitely easier to jump to the job himself than to get it into the woolly heads of the six Sierra Leonese he caressed with inof- fensive oaths. Tim let drop a sixteen-pound sledge. and automatically relaxed. Usually his mind succumbed to a genial torpidity on hearing the five o’clock whistle, but not today. Avoiding the y-yieing mob _ that rushed to the wash-rooms, Tim took a crazy course toward the gates of the barracks-compound around a scrap-heap of hoop-iron from bolt and rivet kegs. With apparently idle playfulness he sailed a hoop through the air over the corru- gated-iron stockade and followed it with three others. Ostensibly there was no reason for his action, but Tim Cole knew full well that a certain troubadour, ancient, sun-burned to a cinder, a typical troubadour of Negro-land in big turban and volumi- nous burnoose, waited the other side of the stockade to grab the hoops, as he had every work-day at this time for the past week, There was no reason why Tim should not openly help himself to all the hoop-iron he wanted, only his coworkers might have become curious, and that would have entailed explanations and perhaps expose an exciting quest he had in mind and bring him into ridicule. Like all big fellows who are fond of their own little jokes, Tim was very sus- ceptible to jokes on himself and, being igiant-framed and ham-fisted, his suscep- tibility was respected.- None dared try to get a rise out of Tim. Disguising his excitement by a show of purposelessness, Tim passed out of the compound into the hut-village. As he went he viewed the blacks haunched around their communal supper pots with a disgust as keen today as it had been seven months ago when he had arrived with ideas of Africans founded on howl- ing dervishes and genuine imported sav- ages in genuine war-dances seen at the circus side-shows. Tim nursed an abused credulity of the torpidity and softness to which the sav- age succumbs under the protection of white man’s laws and police. He made the mistake of thinking that village a fair example of Africa in the lump. It had been a real relief when he found in the troubadour who went by the name of Issou, a “nigger”—Issou was not a negro, but to Tim’s simple ideas any black was “~ 4 - « ‘ : 2 $F a= ae (0) > n Be eceare G x Gi m Cc ss JN - i Pare : eel el ew ae rege “4 es 00KS:CO