Adventure Magazine Cover — page 62: what you’re looking at

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

52 His mother, a lovely woman, was sec- retly so weary of the corset-like stiffness and austere supervision of the Richmonds that she would gladly have bolted wifh him. ¢@e) ©O IT was that Jack Richmond, with something like two thousand hese af dollars currency in his pockets, a small amount of baggage and two large automatics tied to him, arrived in New York on a drizzling evening and wondered what to do with himself. If a policeman had noticed his bulging hips he would have been taken care of. Nobody but officers.is allowed to carry arms, or even own a revolver; which means that lawbreakers go as heavily armed as they ever did, and also have the additional assurance that no lonely pedestrian is likely to pull a gun just as the gaspipe is about to fall on his head. There is nothing that gives a crook more cockiness than the knowledge that his intended victim is unarmed. For all of its laws, policemen, sentences of judges and - howls of the public, crime was never so general and audacious in New York as in these days of legal severity. The Bowery has been fumigated; saloons wiped out; all the haunts and dens of vice opened to the personal inspection of Citizen Reformers; but the gangs are more numerous and not less successful than ever, though they use the same old tricks and stalls and grafts as those practised in the underworld of Babylon. Like almost everybody else that arrived in the city that Spring, Jack went to a hotel and calmly asked fora room. By the time he had gone to three hotels he began to realize that the clerks had a right to be impudent and superior. It wasn’t a matter of putting your name on a register and tip- ping the boy for showing you up. It was a matter of prepaid reservations, if not leases. He checked his baggage and started scouting for a place to sleep. He wandered far, up and down stairways even. It grew late and his feet were weary. He went into a telephone booth and lost his temper. The clerical voices were coolly disdainful of any unneeded patronage. He got so tired of the acquired English accent and boredom of tone that he wanted to shout, ““Hurrah for Ireland!” A strange city on a wet night is alwavs a dismal place; and there is about as little Adventure human warmth in New York for the stranger as on the snow-fields of Iceland. If a New Yorker is polite it is because he has either a gold-brick or a gaspipe up his sleeve; but it is the strange New Yorkeress who is preeminently to be shunned. That is, if one wishes to have any claim at all to wisdom. The best thing to do with a strange woman—in any city—is to leave your ccat- tails in her hand and flee. The more inno- cent she seems, the louder you should yell for a cop. Jack Richmond had much to learn, parti- cularly about women—either the strange or domesticated variety. Also he was serenely unaware of the fact that the newcomer to New York wears for a time a sort of dis- tinctive aura that is visible to the lynx- eyed prowlers of the street. Not until he has been knocked over by a taxi, gouged by a waiter, bilked by a rental agent, short- changed by a ticket-broker, or in numerous ways been cheated, flimflammed, nicked, picked and pecked, does he assume the outward aspect of a Gothamite. Jack came out of the telephone booth perspiring and ready to kill a couple of people. Any couple. He felt savage. There must be some sort of conspiracy among clerks that they were all agreed on the lie of “full up.” As he stood in the glow of the drug-store window, collar wp-turned. and brow studi- ously wrinkled under his back-tilted hat, the woman saw him. Hers were keenly apprais- ing eyes. Dark eyes, suggestive of moods and temper. She watched him indecisively for a time, hesitant because of his youth. Fat middle-aged men usually carry the wads worth going after; but pickings were slim. It was getting along toward midnight, and the dismal cafions that New Yorkers call streets were deserted except for scurry- ing figures here and there, and autos that seemed to be monstrous bugs with the headlights wavering sensitively over the wet street like luminous antenne. The woman stepped out of the shadows, appearing as if by magic up from the dark, wet pavement that was like a black mirror. Jack could not help but see her. She was young, also pretty in the bizarre way of girls that make their living through being noticed. That is, the effect was a little stagy. But Jack was green and impressionable. CO MICLOOKS C©