Adventure Magazine Cover — page 137: what you’re looking at

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

The Long Traverse eR eDramming Grouse’s eyes followed hers and encountered a dark blotch rising and falling on the waves off toward Kettle Island. To the uninitiated it might have been a floating < = log or a flock of wild fowl, but the girl’s trained eyes had marked it as something else, and she pointed with her finger for the Cree bowsman to verify her judgment. _ “A canoe, Drumming Grouse?” she ques- tioned. _ Drumming Grouse stared, scrutinizing the blotch not for its vague outline but for its : Sate motion up and down. “Ae, a paddled craft,” he decided, “but we can not stay to see whose it is. Your father = _ sent me to find you and fetch you to him.” “My father? Where is he?” asked Clara. Ee: “He is still in council,” the Cree told her. : “And what is the summons about, Drum- =: ming Grouse?” she demanded, trying to read his surface-lighted eyes as they climbed down to the lower shore-line. The bowsman stalked in silence for a little __ way. He was not supposed to know the mat- _ ___ ters debated in council at Norway House, yet in his subtle way he did know. back over the waters of Great Playgreen where _ the girl had been keeping vigil, where his,own eyes along with hers had marked an incoming canoe which he knew to be one of Henderson’s He pointed “Tt is about your Free Trader they are hunt- _ ing over Great Playgreen,” he intimated. es The girl gave a low exclamation. “And what do they wish of me?” she asked. apprehensively. * “Flow would a bowsman know that?” Drum- ‘ming Grouse evaded. They were at the veranda steps, when a = babel of Indian dialects broke out behind them on the shore where the brigades were encamped, jangling Iroquois, lisping Ojibway, hissing Cree, and with one accord the two shot glances - over their shoulders as they ascended the steps. They could glimpse the canoemen gathering at the water-line as if to meet an incoming - craft, and Clara Travis realized that the canoe ‘she had marked out in the lake must be beach- ing. She gazed keenly to catch its outline as Drumming Grouse opened the door of the council room, but the crowd was too great for that. They walled the craft in. It was im- possible to identify it at the moment, and the next moment Drumming Grouse led her into the council room. Instantly the men about the council table were upon their feet, Governor Burnham bow- ing and greeting her with his old-world grace, the others giving her the brief unconventional | salute of the North. And the marvel of it was | that there was something deferential, almost apologetic, in the manners of the assembled officials. - With only themselves i in grim ¢onclave it was , quite casy for Burnham to send forth a com- mand that Clara be summoned, but with Clara here in the flesh it was quite another matter to make her the subject of an examination. For. hers was the beauty that sways the grimmest of men; hers the magnetic personality that shakes the soundest judgment. “Over the company she faced lay the con- straint of the feminine presence imposed on men accustomed only to contact with men, and where Governor Burnham himself would not have felt the constraint in an English drawing-room he felt it here, thousands of miles from civilization, in the council room of Norway House. Like the other men he found himself staring. at the wonder of the smooth flushed girlish. face among the faces of wrinkled bronze, at the miracle of her soft, youthful eyes among the steely eyes of the wilderness-hardened post keepers. Burnham stared and could not begin framing the questions for which he had sum- mond her, and, sensing his momentary ~per- turbation, Clara looked inquiringly from him to her father. | ; “What is it, father?”’ she murmured. “Tt is about this man Steene they are hound- ing over Great Playgreen,” her father explained in a hard, mechanical voice. ‘‘I have just told the governor that I have had no communica- tion with Steene and that I do not know where he might be hidden, yet he and Henderson think Steene has had communication with the other member of my family. In short, Clara, they want to know of you-——”’ Travis stopped short, wheeling from his place at a knocking that threatened to hammer in the council-room door. From the outside sounded a crash and a tattoo as if a man had thrown himself bodily against it in his haste and, hardly able to restrain himself from tear- ing it open in his impatience, was pounding with both fists. DRUMMING GROUSE, the keeper of the door, who had closed it from the inside behind Clara Travis and waited to conduct her out again, stood by the jamb like a stone image hearing nothing till Jacob Travis, listening calculatingly, raised a hand to him. “Open, Drumming Grouse,” he ordered. At once the Cree bowsman swung the door back, and in burst a short broad man, swarthy- skinned, black-haired, in the costume of a voyageur. “Tt’s my head post runner, Henri Dalmas,”’ : , bog at nN BM > { J } i“ ‘ oe Dah ' ? ¢ Phe? A 4 i: Ly * ole : a 4 Lies 4 i vis Ay a th 1a) . ™ fod COmiclboooks Pita, o a = a = a =