Adventure Magazine Cover, August 18, 1921 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

18 The girl turned to him, her fathomless eyes filled with a strange light. “No!” she cried, and her voice rang like a breaking harp-string through the room. “No! I will not have him die!” She gathered the inert shoulders in her arm and bent down close to the torn breast. Her hair fell in a cloud about her lover’s face, and tears were falling between the black strands upon his cold flesh. Sir Giles turned away with a sob that wrenched his bosom. Then suddenly, while her grief plucked intolerably at their hearts, the two men heard her laugh, softly, joyfully. _ ‘“‘We must get her away; she will go mad!” the physician whispered; but across his words her voice thrilled happily: “He lives! He lives! See—he is not dead!” The men stared, incredulous; but she was right. Across the still face, so grave but now in the majesty of death, a faint smile hovered. The eyes opened slightly of their own will. There was no color still, but life faintly stirred there. The physician touched Margaret’s shoulder and gave her the second vial. “Not more than three drops,” he cau- tioned. In that moment Margaret showed herself indeed a Gislac. Torn as she was with grief and joy, her nerves quivering with emotion too strong for a weaker will to endure, she was of a race whose women faced despair and widowhood as often as their men left their sides. The constant imminence of death, the menace of ambush, of merciless odds, of poison and the knife hung close about them, visiting the great as often as the humble, steeling their hearts to endure until they broke. Nor was she weaker than those other women in a hundred other castles up and down the land. Rather her father’s blood was in her veins, a proud blood that feared nothing, hoped on to the end. Her fingers never faltered. Holding the vial steady, she poured just three drops between her lover’s lips. The physician once more tested his pa- tient’s pulse, holding the inert wrist long. At last he smiled. “Tt had thought he had bled to death,” he said. “But the great arteries are un- severed, and the windpipe is not cut. He is strong; he may live.” Adventure THE day was bright outside, but the sun’s rays could not penetrate the thick walls to cheer de Gislac’s dungeons. Their damp darkness was brok- en rather than lighted by the red glare of many torches, set in iron claws that reached out writhing tentacles from the massive pil- lars. Beyond these the occasional glint of dull metal hinted at iron bars or hanging chains; ugly shapes some long and angular, some fitted with terrible contrivances of brown-blotched steel, were pregnant with untold tales of human anguish. The air was close and musty, sour with evil smells. More terrible than iron bars, more merci- less than the mighty, oppressive walls, more ruthless than those deadly, brown- stained instruments of torture, was the man who sat enthroned at the end of a long, open space in the dungeons’ very center. Before him, in the full glare of the torch- light, stood eight disheveled men, bound, hemmed in by harsh-featured guards with drawn swords. They could not see the man who sat in judgment on them. Not his figure, that is, for the shadow beyond the flaring lights concealed all but the dim patch that was his face, and the two unrelenting eyes that glared upon them. But upon their sullen faces the lights cast a full gleam, exposing them pitilessly to his gaze. For more than an hour they had stood thus, bearing the stare of those eyes, bear- ing his searching questions in resolute si- lence. At any moment he might weary of their obstinacy and give them over to the tortures. They did not know that Gislac never tortured. He did not find it nec- essary. Not knowing this, they faced his bale- ful eyes and his stabbing questions still, till that happened which he had foreseen. Unable to endure longer, one ran forward several paces, wrenching at the straps which bound his wrists. His will, which would not bend, was shattered by those awful eyes and that steady, overbearing will. “Kill us!” he cried, his voice high- pitched with the agony of his overwrought nerves. ‘Torture us, but make an end of this mockery. Ye say we slew him, ye heap slander on the head of our lord. But I tell you, lord of Gislac, that you are his murderer. Not we, not Sir Richard, but you, Giles de Gislac, treacherously slew CoMmicbook CO