Adventure Magazine Cover — page 51: what you’re looking at

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

Morgan Srinemetz : Author of Conuerbing oils? “The Ne o-Good Guy,” EAVING Rio - Janeiro on foot for Sado Paulo, we passed a dark-skinned man with an over- alls pack on his back. He _ gave us a sidewise glance and bowed his ~ head without speaking. We were dressed in the latest Ouvidor styles, but not one ' milrei did we have in pocket. We had no outfit, nothing but the clothes we wore on our backs. Our stay. in Rio had cost us at the rate of a thousand dollars a month; and cheap at the price, for Rio is a city of enchantment. To a casual observer Eugene Rodin and I would have appeared as two gentlemen out for a stroll instead of being vagabonds en route to a city four hundred and eighty miles away. That night we slept in a fence-corner somewhere between Rio and Belem; and, walking down the track the next morning, we found five wood-choppers eating a breakfast of black beans and farinha meal -a short distance from where we had slept. They stared at our high silk hats and clothing when we -begged them for some- thing to eat, but they dished out a supply of food and gave us each a cup of black coffee. As we ate, the man with the pack passed us. He looked surprized when he recog- nized us as the men who had passed him on the road the previous afternoon, but he went on by without stopping. We had time to note that he wore a pair of blue overall trousers, a heavy woolen shirt and a strong pair of shoes with thick soles. The ropes on his pack were tied and knotted snugly and the pack set correctly on his shoulders, showing him to be a man of both neatness and experience. This we knew by having hit trail with men who judge another by such items as this. Leaving Barra do Pirahi a couple of days later, we saw him ahead and, hasten- ing rapidly, we soon passed him and left him behind. We thought little of him un- til he got by us when we climbed over the top of the Tunnel Grande. The tunnel is something over a mile long and the clear- ance very Close if a train passes. When we had again gained the railroad track he was out of sight ahead of us. Late that» afternoon we came upon a Swedish section foreman, a man who had deserted a ship in Rio twenty years before, sitting in front of his house, which faced the track, entertaining several of the prominent citizens of the small village with sandwiches of Minas cheese and fiery cachasa.. Hearing us speaking English, he called to us to come back and join them and, taking us aside, asked us if we cared to sell our clothes. ee ee ee an