Adventure Magazine Cover, August 18, 1921 — page 101: what you’re looking at

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

To Shed Blood helped me get into the new clothes. I was pale and drawn. “Look out for yourself,”’ the Gipsy teased me good-naturedly. “You are so pale the Tatars here might take you for a woman dressed in man’s clothes.” I wrote home to my mother a few days later and rode to post the letter in the near- est post-office, in Chilia, some twenty miles from where we had camped. Ileanarodenear me. She was afraid Costa might attack me and I was not well enough to fight him. “But do you think he is such a disgust- ing coward?” I asked the girl. ‘‘He loves me, scribbar; he loves me,” she repeated. “And he would do anything. Wouldn’t you?” We rode in silence the rest of the way and back again. I thought of the life people live in towns. The prisons people call homes, the intrigues, the superficialities, the formalism and the whole fabric of the rela- tion between civilized man. I thought of all that and compared it to the free, simple and beautiful life of the Gipsies. What was the other one, Rita, in compari- son with Ileana? Shallow and treacherous. She had intimidated me so that I had never dared declare myself and while flirting with me, without regard, withoutshame, she had worked upon my brother’s sentiments. But the simple child of the open was open- hearted. It had been entirely my fault, I reflected, blinded by mv training and edu- cation as I still was, that I had not “‘seen”’ her and responded to her love the moment she had first looked at me. Let him have Rita; let him have the house and its walls I knew better. I was strik- ing a better bargain with life. Murdo was right. Houses were prisons. And Ileana was beautiful. A thousand times more beautiful than any other woman I had seen. I only began to appreicate the cleanliness of her thin limbs and the smooth roundness of her brown arms. And that delicate roundness of her small breasts that held away the shirt from the powerful throat that blended so swiitly to the sharp line of her chin! Where was there a woman to com- pare with her? Those eves! The long eye- brows and the luscious velvety lashes that Shaded them. And the lips, the teeth! I’d fight a dozen Costas for her. A dozen or a hundred. I put my arms around Ileana, who rode near me, and wanted to kiss her. 95 “Not before you have fought Costa,”’ she told me, drawing away. “But, Ileana! Don’t you love me?” “Ves, scribbar. But there is Costa—and you are careless.”’ I understood. Ayiea) AT THE end of that week Murdo Ren looked at my wound and declared it ——<% had healed completely. “We must go away from here. The Tatars have no money to buy horses and want too much money for their animals,” Murdo told me. “Well, what prevents us from going? I am well again.” “Ves, but there is Costa!” “Well? What of him? I am not afraid.” “You shall have to fight it out again. It’s better you should finish vour quarrel here, before we leave. Here no one inter- feres. There are no gendarmes, no police. I must think of my tribe, scribbar. Let’s see your dirk. Good!” Then he left the wagon to make arrange- ments. A few minutes later Ileana came. “Tonight. On the rock that rises from the river. Come with me to see it now.” The top of the rock rising from the river was about a hundred feet over the water— the top was smooth as a table of stone. It formed a rough platform of about fifteen feet each way. “You must come early in the evening and choose your position. You must not have the moon in your face. It will blind you,” she told me. She nestled close to me, kissed me and cried, “Oh, why after you had beaten him with bare fists did you not tell me vou fought because of me? Why? Why? It would have been all over then. You had beaten him and I was yours. Now it is as if vou had never beaten him for I told him that vou had fought only because he had insulted vou.” According to the Gipsv code my quarrel with Costa really dated from the Sunday in which I had broken into the dance. Murdo kept me near him the rest of the afternoon. He talked to me of future plans, of fitting out a wagon for me and Ileana, of letting me handle the money and making me chief because there was no issue of his loins alive. “T want vou to know all the good things you are fighting for. The stake is not only a woman. It is a kingdom. For we reign C© MICLOOOKS CO 5}