Adventure Magazine Cover, February 3, 1921 — page 166: what you’re looking at

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

160 —he wore a stern but more determined air and answered Japes— “Pm willing.” He was still fatalistic; he hoped for little. But Lelona, seated dreamily before the clerk’s desk in the dull and all but vacant hotel, thrust out her soft clinging fingers in the old way and told him that if he cared for her enough—carramba! what was there he could not do? He had a little vessel—ah, then there would be a bigger one “‘nex’ tam’, 9) possible in that case. Arnie was ashamed to confess to her how he had come by ‘this one, how little Frisco ship-owners trusted him, how slight were the chances. Instead, he said to Japes, “I’m willing,” and the mite of a cook—whose secret and burning ambition was for a bit of a cottage on the Maine coast and a smart little fishing- trawler all his own—grinned and bobbed off to éstablish financial basis for making the poor, dilapidated Jessica fit for sea. It was accomplished—this repairing and refitting and storing—in some manner, by very cheap labor and such materials as the prideless, unequipped Chilean town of San Carlos possessed. A mate even was found; a young fellow, no more than twenty-five years old, decent- appearing in face if not in clothes, a refined type by some whim of fickle Fortune and so quite incongruous aboard the Jessica. He had surprizingly good manners and ap- parently an equally good education; but he seemed glad of the berth—in his rather abashed, uncertain way. His name was Charley Grant. Japes, never otherwise than cheerful, grew radiantly optimistic and strutted the decks like a game-cock by reason of his part in bringing matters to their present situation. He forgot the cottage on the Maine coast and went about patting the various protu- berant parts of the Jessica as if she were the very trawler of which he dreamed. When the bowing and scraping port- official, full 6f admiration for the honesty that had made known the -crime of the Jessica’s former owner, proffered them a cargo of hides for the run northward, Japes’ pride became a warming glow. Arnie muttered, ‘‘Hides,”’ but ventured no protest. After all, there was no smell he had not smelled, and smells would not break one—or make one, either. and a big vessel—sz, it was all very | Adventure He stuffed bills and clearance-papers into his pocket and climbed the hill to the hotel once more. He thought vaguely—every- thing was very vague; expectations, creeds, purpose—that he was bidding farewell to more than he could rightly grasp, more than he would ever know. But Lelona, suddenly seized with a return of her quondam abandon, sent him away with a mad, blissful moment to keep his heart alive; the wind whined in the rigging; the greasy-haired official added to his god- speed a dirty sealed envelope, which Arnie stuffed away unread, and the Jessica rounded her buoy and put her bows seaward —a slight, miserable hope in a vast waste of doubt. had got fairly upon the course, the Sams wind veered, freshened and came down out of the northwest with a fury un appeasable. Into the teeth of it the Jessica beat on a taut bow-line for six and thirty hours, then finding herself imperiled by so much bravery and her sails in danger of blowing out of the gaskets, about she came and scampered fearfully southward. Arnie saw the mettle of his new-found mate when this time came. Charley Grant owned a physique no stouter—or scarcely stouter—than the little cook’s; but he fought the storm with a rather sublime strength that was ‘not in his body. Arnie watched him, white-lipped at the wheel, wondered what made his hands tremble on the spokes, perceived with dismay how his gaze roved to the huge seas piling up behind them, and tried to comprehend why this pasty-faced youth did not cover his eyes and have done with it. But he did not; he gripped the horribly convulsive helm, scanned the mounting combers hanging above the Jessica’s coun- ter, glanced wildly at the deepening troughs that hour by hour grew into churning valleys which the wind did not reach, gaped aloft toward the source of utterly un- earthly sound, bit his lip as he sucked it into his mouth, could not for the life of him keep his teeth from chattering, streamed with sweat never produced by physical ara, observed Arnie looking steadily at THEREAFTER, almost before they sand managed a_ high-pitched, abacked laugh. He was the queerest sort Arnie had ever known; there was no explanation of him. COMIC OOOKS (C@