Adventure Magazine Cover — page 153: what you’re looking at

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

et ols and when —— The Peccaries- <— laid me down and brought me water in big leaves, and gave me ‘to drink. They did even more; they got certain herbs from the forest, and crushed them, and placed them on my wounds; and before long the cruel pain of those hurts grew less, so that I could lie still and not twist and writhe. Then they swiftly made a crude bed of branches and vines and leaves, and put me on it, lifted it, and started straight away through the bush. They marched a long time—so long that once when they paused to drink I asked them what they had been doing so far from their village. They said they were hunters, and had been following a tapir’s track. Then they lifted me and were off again. It was nearly night when our journey ended at a cleared place, in which stood a great round house about forty feet high, its sides made of palm-trees and its roof of palm-leaves—the maloca where my rescuers and some two hundred other Indians made their home. There my carriers laid me down and left me while they crept through the one low door of the house to report to their chief. Men and women and children crowded around me as I lay there, and I thought how different was my first arrival among them. Then I had come fighting, hating and despis- ing them as eaters of men. Now, after what I had just gone through, they seemed friends and decent people; for I knew they ate only their enemies, and that the eating was due not so much to savagery as to some obscure religion; and I knew also that they washed themselves daily, and that a man who allowed himself to stink like the Peccaries would quickly be punished or banished. I saw, too, that they seemed sorry for me in my present condition, and felt that they would be kind” to me. And it was so. - Soon the hunters came out again, and with them their chief and two lesser chiefs, painted red and black, and wearing blue and red feathers bound on their heads, shoulders, and loins. The chief, who was a powerful . young fellow, I did not remember; but one of the sub-chiefs was the crafty old man who once had saved my life, and the only one in all the tribe who spoke any words of my language. _ This old man looked at me and nodded and talked to the other two. And I was e thorns were out they lifted again by the hunters and convied in ee : = through the little door and put in a ham- mock, where women soon brought me a gourd of broth that strengthened me much. And then I told my tale to the head men of the tribe. They listened in grim silence, except when I told of the murder of the young girl. Then a growl ran among the men around me, and the three chiefs snarled in rage. When I was through I felt sick, and my wounds burned again, and I gave no more attention to the chiefs or any one. But soon an old woman came with two younger ones, and they put a thick, dark liquid on my injuries which stung like fire for an instant, but which soon eased my pain wonderfully; and then they gave me a drink of some sweetish stuff, and before long I fell into a deep sleep. ; WHEN I awoke the sun was glaring down through the big smoke-hole in the roof, and women were cooking at their little fires scattered through the maloca. At once I was offered food by the old wo- man, and as I ate it I noticed that the tall young chief was gone. The old sub-chief was there though, and he came and sat by me and told me that the Peccaries already were being huntec down. The big chief and twenty of his best fighters, with the two hunters to guide them, had taken the trail at the first light of dawn. He added with a frightful grin that to- morrow much peccary-meat would be eaten here, and that if I did not care to taste it I should have the head of the Yellow One to kick about when my legs healed. He was not quite right; for the wild men were gone two days instead of one, and when they came they did not bring the head of the yellow demonio nor any other part of him. But they did bring with them the hands and feet of all the rest of that brutal gang—even those of the Indian carriers. They had ambushed the raiders in the act of carrying my coronel’s rubber to their boats, and in a swift fight had killed them to a man—except the leader. How that cun- ning devil had escaped they did not know; he had been there, and then he was not there, and they could find no trace of him after that. They were angry over this, and all the more so because before he disappeared he shot three of their mates; and the chief A) ‘eboo k GO) IN a - I vie Oa 42°75 - - Yea 4 VA ty a is ith iA ; esi hi ule Mesto SONI EP Re ee Lh ACS Oe, Lok © Ren AYE) CL) ALP anda RT PO / Bh) wf + el ¥ my Sarre a