Adventure Magazine Cover — page 138: what you’re looking at

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

Tigsbwige 7 me iif, PE Zs, es eat Wg / hey Hp 4 4 (Lig (- thie eS. ‘ i Hi L, Wa } sama a Author of “Red Saunders’ Protégé,’ ‘The Burden Paternal,” etc HE last of the grand old fleet of square-riggers belonging to the Glasgow Line of Australian clip- pers was the full-rigged ship Hes- perides; and she carried to sea a queer crowd. All the sailormen had graduated into quartermasters or had taken the exams and secured tickets while the getting was good during the four-year feverish demand for ships and officers. About the only real blue-water boy among the lot was Micky Donlin, but he was the real thing without reservations. Another signed A. B. worthy of mention was “the Marquis,’ and he was _ note- worthy because he knew as little of the sailing branch of the sea as Micky knew much, There was the boy, Skimps, and for the rest they were twelve of the heart- breaking sort of misfits that turn good captains and mates into rotten farmers and truck-growers in self-defense. “Th’ lad looks loike he could dance, and he’s clane, anyway,” Mickey had decided about the dapper little Frenchman, whom everybody, even in the Shipping Office, at once dubbed the Marquis. It was not a very complete endorsement of a square-rig sailor, perhaps, but Micky Donlin was an exuberant young man of more than ordinary self-complacency, and he knew he could carry on two men’s work of sailoring if one of the two could come up to the scratch on the shore end. That any shore dance in Sydney was a possible ninety days distant mattered not a bit. 9 ‘“‘An’ sure, he’s clane, anyway,” was a bit of tribute which the Marquis earned from all hands, too. As a sailor he was about as useful as a whittled candle would be as a marlinespike, but as an ornament to any ship he was Well, ask yourself what any hard-bitten old time wind-jammer man would think of a pretty fellow about five-feet-six high, not more than a _hundred-and-twenty pounds weight, possessing glossy black curly hair, a face as smooth as a girl’s arm, teeth that really twinkled with whiteness, feet so small that no sea boot was ever made to fit them; who trod the deck with an air so lightsome as to seem never to touch the planks, who sang cheerful little French songs from morning to night, and who carried himself with the air of a Rus- sian duke making a duty visit to his hum- ble peasantry. “Bedad, he’s jist loike th’ ould squire’s daughter!’ grinned Micky happily. But Big Bill Chivers, the self-elected forecastle ruler—whom there had been no time yet either to depose or establish—had no soul for sheer ornamentation. He stopped kicking Skimps, the ship’s boy, whose duty it now was to fetch along the supper for all hands, pending the picking of watches immediately after, and swung the Marquis around with a vicious grip on the shoulder. “Hey, Cissy, trot along f’r the hash, or I'll put a head on yuh as big as a forty- gallon pot!” he growled. 132 EO HOO =) © (E@