Adventure Magazine Cover, August 18, 1921 — page 161: what you’re looking at

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

The Throwback Very gingerly, painfully, the white man stepped past the mummies and toward the rav of light in the side of the vault. Pain- fully he stooped and quietly investigated it. “Clear as day,” he went on, again in English. “Our two-toed friend must have found this passageway years and years ago, ‘and here he’s been living ever since. Living with his forebears and on the hoard of his forebears of five thousand years ago. A throwback to those forebears. Living with them and: jealous lest any one should find them. I think I see now why he tried al- most successfully to lose me. And why he’s Jost at least one other man before.” The curious smile grew wider. “Must have been in there all the time we were digging. Bolted out just as the cover was pushed aside and came in through the tower to get me behind. Ten to one that’s why the other Kafms kept up such a howling after they got clear away.” The girl, listening patiently, moved aside and, stooping picked up the carefully colored meerchaum. With modest, girlish wistfulness she handed it shyly to the white man. And with a sensation he Some- how scarcely understood he took it from her. “T wish you’d always be around to hand that to me when I needed it—Mary,” he said without knowing exactly why. Together the two moved over to the little pile of diamonds. Luxuriously, fas- cinatedly, Charlie picked them up and ‘Charlie broke out suddenly. 155 dribbled them through his sore fingers into his hat, the girl’s eyes gleaming as she watched him. “Be enough to last the two of us for all our lives?” he asked in Kafir. Smiling, the girl was silent. “Not enough? Not even with these two?” Hastily his hand went inside his shirt and came out again with a belt. Excitedly he unfastened rag after rag, rag after rag. “Not even with these two?” he asked again as he held’ up the diamonds. “One of them is yours anyway.” Hesitatingly the girl turned and looked at the brown man lying motionless, then looked questioningly back into the face of the man beside her. “Hang it, I see what you’re thinking,” “Why, only these two diamonds belong to us after all! All the rest and even my old pipe peions to Two Toes.’ Jumpily the white man stepped over to the motionless Kafir. Almost sorrowingly he bent down and gently shook ham. Again he shook him, then felt his chest. With a queer catch in his still aching throat he straightened himself and held out a hand to the brown girl. “We'll go out by the private entrance, girlie. And we'll put the cover on again,” he said very seriously. “It seems old Two Toes has come home for good.” COmiclbook ©