Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 97: what you’re looking at

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

The Seven Cities of Cibola Immediately, out of the hot blue sky above her, a buzzard dropped like a plummet, followed by another and an- other. VERCOME, Mercedes sat by the body of the horse, for hour after hour, in the blazing sun of the long after- noon. Her mind refused to act. She could not realize as yet what had hap- pened, nor the magnitude of her loss, for as yet she simply felt that-a personal friend had gone. The red stallion had been the one link that still bound her to civilization and now that link was snapped. “T must die here in the desert!” The thought lent terrors to her; sharp, poignant terrors that tore at her heart- strings. Then a great wave of resist- ance swelled and swelled. “No! God is good and the saints are kind. This is sent merely to try me. I. will go on.” Again she rose and moved off, more slowly now, toward that raw line of hills. But the desert heat, baking brain and blood and tissue, making the staring eye- balls ache with the stabbing pain of the white-hot rays that pierced like knife- blades, drove her to the shelter of a giant cactus. There was both food and water there if she had but known it. She did not know it and paid for her ignorance with physical suffering. Hour after hour passed, and when the cool of the evening twilight came, she moved on again. Her throat ached with thirst and her lips were cracked with the fierce reflected heat from the sand floor so that she could scarcely swallow. All that night she stumbled ahead in a trance, stopping from time to time to rest a while, and then on again till the sun, up-rushing from the plain, found her at the very foot of the hills that she had sought. Grim and forbidding they were, rising almost sheer from the plain. Look as carefully as she might, she could see no pass across those mountains,*and without a pass she felt certain that she could never hope to cross that craggy range. Even if she should pass them, where was home? Was she on the right path? All the terrors that she had felt during the previous nights of travel crowded 83 in upon her and oppressed her as she slowly turned eastward and went along the base of that formidable looking | range, seeking some easy slope by which she could reach the summit, for she felt very sure that once there she could see some sign of the land she sought. Even a smoke would be a sign of promise. Mile after mile she plodded painfully along. Perhaps that spot of white that she saw far up upon the hill to her left front was something full of promise! She looked again at it and watched it as she walked. It was a very small spot of white, per- haps a white rock upon the brown hill- side, but—as she watched it, it moved a little. Her heart almost gissed a beat. She moved again, keeping her eyes. constantly fixed upon that little spot. Again it moved. “What can it be?’ she asked the ques- tion aloud. The Indians had no horses or cows, but it might perhaps be a sheep or a mountain goat. Suddenly the thing disappeared and. her heart dropped with it. Then it came up again. Staring with her soul in her gaze, she suddenly realized that it had bent over and raised jtself again and that —it was a man. There is only one white object that bends over and raises itself up and that is—man. | Beyond all doubt it was a man and in white clothing! Then, her sight quick- ened by the joy of her discovery, she picked out on the hillside two smaller figures clinging to the face of the slope but higher up the hill. Clearly they were men at work of some kind on the mountain. She tried to. call out to them, but in- visible fingers seemed to close upon her throat and she gasped painfully with shortened breath as she ran forward. A breath of coolness passed, across the face of the desert; a slight cloud as of smoke blew athwart the sun. She never noticed it, but kept walking and ware her hand from time to time. A wind rose in the southwest and, gaining strength as it came, whirled across the flat plain that was almost red- ECOMIGE KOO KS