Adventure Magazine Cover — page 132: what you’re looking at

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

arin) > as & THE DREAM'’S" END Author of “‘Not for a Thousand,” “‘El Capitén Arrnie,” etc. — tempest nor sunshine could reach it with the most attenuate finger to stir it ever so feebly, lay a ship that had carried a dream. Somewhere in a town on the Chilean coast lived and moved—with what languor- ous grace—a woman who had breathed upon that dream the enchantment of ripe bloom. Somewhere, everywhere; in the crates of the past stretched close upon eighteen years of sea service that had nursed and nurtured and led and starved that dream. And here in Frisco, surrounded by that wrecked ship’s company which—crude as those years of the past—had brought to that delicate dream its first whisper of reality, was the dreamer, Arnie Sondheim. Without ship’s instruments Arnie knew well within a minute of latitude and longi- tude just where that ship had made her bed, could visualize in detail the whereabouts and associations of that desirable Castilian woman, could recite each meaningless move- ment of those blear eighteen years—and for the first time now without rancor. But he could not tell even in the vaguest terms how, with that ship gone and that woman all but yielded up and the past ap- parently reproduced in its most starving mood, he grinned almost happily around upon these strong-smelling, weak-souled OMEWHERE in the broad Pacific : 4 Ocean, buried so deep that neither men whose needs had cheated him out of his: last great hope. Mental wonder though he was, he ad- mitted utter stupidity over the warm flow of satisfaction accompanying a situation which rendered him a pauper in heart and pocket. . He had given up everything he knew and all besides that he believed in to save ten more or less worthless human hides; and now he stood on shore shaking ten: horny hands and grinning and chuckling and breath- ing deep in the fashion of a contented man. Next he would be sitting in Jake’s place where liquor tainted the air, and until the . detested whisky lifted him ridiculously into unreality he would contemplate how com- plete a failure he was. Commen sailor slav- ing before the mast for seventeen years; second mate for a mere watch in the night; master of a bark—or it was more truthful to say, of a lugger—for less than three months. And now mast-hand again, a mast-hand without a job. A sudden light smote him. He thought he knew to what his contentment was due; he had accepted the tenets of fatalism, whereby reverses had no further power to disturb: him. Immediately his keen mind repudiated the theory, for the acceptance of fatalism might drug him as the whisky did, but it could not induce satisfaction such as he felt at the look and hand-grasp and rude comment of these men. “No money, boys,” he told them. ‘“Can’t pay you off. I’m cleaned. Give me the places you’re staying at, and I’ll divvy the first wages I get.” ““Ain’t in no ’urry, cap’n;” put on a large front to say. “Pigger tuh git on,” another mumbled without losing his wide grimace. “Enj’yed muself right up tuh the ears, thank ’ee. Sign on any time ’ith yuh, sir.” A third surmised he “‘allus did cal’late a decent skipper beat wages six ways. Never one of them I22 COPMICGLOOOKS (E@)