Adventure Magazine Cover — page 149: what you’re looking at

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

The Winning Chance of the crowd had got well under way. He wasted no time, but got his thousand fect at once. Then, with the nose of the ship pointing into the wind, he cut the motor. Still the nose stayed up, and lazily the ship began to float downward in a stall. Three hundred feet, and then it swooped down, the singing of the wires plainly heard by the breathless, expectant mass of humanity below. A half-turn, and the ship was pointed south, once again fluttering down in a beau- tiful level stall, still almost directly above the mark. Another three or four hundred feet, and it swooped again, gained flying- speed, and then up came the nose in another stall as the ship became almost motionless before it began to settle. This time it turned slowly. The flyers watching liter- ally held their breaths. He was only a hundred feet high now, with no motor to give him a possible chance if his ship lost balance. It dived again, curving around the mark, until at fiftv feet it was directly over it, banked to the left. Tex was craning over the left side, in plain sight of the onlookers. Like a flash the nose came up again, and in a slow but almost vertical sideslip the ship dropped. Once it got too much speed, and with bottom rudder he checked it. While ‘the crowd, as if turned to stone, watched helplessly they saw the lower wingtip drive itself directly through the little one-foot center circle. In a cloud of dust the great ship crumpled up in a crackling mass, as wing-struts and ribs broke. Before the stunned crowd had recovered, Tex, grinning through the blood which smeared his face from a slight cut on the head, was out of the wreck and had a cigaret going. 139 ‘He deliberately sideslipped into the ground—and hit the mark plumb in the eye!” gasped Captain Kennard. ‘‘Flying—plus guts!”’ said the major rue- fully. : They shoved their way through the crowd toward the ship. “Don’t worry about me,” they heard MacDowell’s voice saying. ‘“That’s what I had the cushion for.”’ : The wrecked ship completely covered the little spot that marked the exact center of the. mark. ‘Who wins, major?” yelled Captain Ken- dall of Marfa and a chorus echoed his in- quiry. The major looked at the ship, and then with a slow grin raised twinkling eyes to meet MacDowell’s. He shook his head sadly, reached for his check-book, and amid a growing gale of hilarity made out a check and handed it to Captain Kennard. “T bet on Scarth,” he announced. Dumpy, actuated by real sportsmanship plus the theatricalness that was a part of him, climbed to the top of the tilted fuse- lage. ‘There aren’t any pikers at Marfa,” he shouted. ‘If my opinion is wanted on pay- ing bets, I'll say right here that deliberately doing what Tex did would come pretty near taking all the honors that are; and when he put his wing right through that mgrk he did the best piece of accurate shooting I ever saw. Marfa!” , The answering cheer told two things— that the crowd agreed with Dumpy, and that the defeated rival was retiring from the field of conflict in a blaze of glory, which helped his injured self-esteem immeasur- ably. CO Pay McMullen, ' MICLOOOKS C©