Adventure Magazine Cover, August 18, 1921 — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

16 bound them with practised dexterity and tied one behind the other with long ropes. “Mount!” Sir Giles ordered. “We have as many of them as we shall be like to get.” But before giving the word to ride, he made a slow circuit of the willows, directing the torchlight into every part of the grove. He was sorely puzzled. These men were on his land in some force, yet they were too pitifully few to have meditated an assault on High Tower. He could not make it out. The captives numbered eight; four had been killed in the first onrush and three more ridden down after Gerard had thrown the torchlight on them. Fifteen armed men lurking about his lands by night, yet not to assault the castle! More than fifteen. There was no knowing how many had slipped away in the darkness. Whatever had been their purpose, there was nothing on the plain to reveal it. He would have to question them, once he got them to High Tower. Now he must be gone, for outside the four stout walls of his keep there was little safety for a man envied by all his powerful neighbors. He was about to give the word, when his horse snorted and swerved violently to one side. At the same instant the light from his torch, now almost burned down, fell on something that lay in the ditch beside the road which ran between the willows. It was the body of a man, gleaming in fine chain mail, save for certain dark streaks that laced the hauberk and the pallid blur that was the face. Gislac sprang from his horse and bent over the body, his flickering light falling full on the features, white and flecked with blood. Then while his men started in dismay, Giles de Gislac broke into a flood of savage curses. Never before had these men heard b)las- phemy from his lips, but now the bitter words flowed in a stream that sent thrills of fear coursing along their backs. At last he ceased and knelt a moment in silence, then: “Here, Thomas, Joseph! Make a litter of your shields, quickly! Guillaume, you and André ride ahead with the prisoners; the rest will form the rear. How is it with Gerard?” ‘“‘Well, my lord,” the captain’s own voice answered. “A flesh-wound in the thigh, but that is nothing.” No man dared ask what had brought that surge of curses from their master’s lips; none was near enough to see. Yet they knew, as Adventure Thomas and Joseph ran the shafts of their recovered lances through their shield-straps, that he who was to be borne on that rough litter must be one dear to Gislac. They counted over their number. Though two horses were down, the men were all there. Sir Giles straightened himself, and they could feel his eyes upon them through the dark. “Geoffrey de Monrepaire lies here, foully murdered,’ he said, in tones that frightened them. ‘Slain here, on my land, within the very purlieus of my castle. Raise him, lads —tenderly, fools! Bear him home. , Oh, that I lay in his place and he were well and whole in my stead! Mercy of God!” So Sir Giles and his men went home. The body lay still on a low and narrow bed in the awful, quiet beauty of death. Sir Giles looked down upon it, his fine, sword-calloused fingers caressing the yel- low hair. In his eyes was the bleakness of sorrow, sorrow that drove out wrath, sor- row too great to share its place with any other passion. The room seemed already consecrated to Death, though the body had just been borne in. The smooth stone walls, the high, dim vault of the ceiling, the emptiness, the motheaten hangings—all breathed a calm- ness of gloom such as invests the sepulchre. The solemn silence was deepened rather than broken by the dying footsteps of the men-at-arms, carrying away the shields on which he had lain. Minutes passed. At length Sir Giles, feeling the presence of another, glanced up, to see the thin figure of an old man in the doorway. He was slight and shrunken, with gray cheeks and thin white hair. His coat of shabby velvet trimmed with fur seemed for all its poverty to invest him with a meager dignity. A servant followed him into the chamber, bearing towels, a basin and a small locked chest. “You are prompt, physician,” Gislac’s subdued voice greeted him. ‘Yet you come not in time. I have seen Death often, and you are too late.” The physician nodded and bent over the body. “Help me with his mail,”’ he said. In the presence of that which lay on the cot, he took on an access of strength, a com- manding force, not to be denied by power or the pride of blood. Sir Giles, kneeling, deftly unfastened the hauberk, slipped an COmiclboolks CO