Adventure Magazine Cover — page 142: what you’re looking at

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

136 av ye don’t shtoprraggin’ the min, Skimps,”’ Micky told him one wild afternoon when the watch came below after a hard bout with a split mainsail and found no hot tea. Skimps had answered their protests with cheerful profanity, and only Micky’s enter- ing the forecastle for a muffler prevented Big Bill thrashing the boy. “Go hon wiv yer!” Skimps retorted, dodging under Micky’s warning slap. ‘‘I ain’t scared. You ain’t crool enough to beat a boy like me, Micky, an’ none ov the rest dares to, see? You go hon teachin’ yer frog-eater to darnce wiv ’is ’ands and fight wiv ‘is feetses, see, and leave me——”’ Micky stopped the argument by catching and cuffing the imp of mischief before he said something which must bring results more grievous from others; but others besides Big Bill promised the boy sure and certain retribution before the voyage was up, as soon as Micky went on deck. Even the Marquis began to fret under the continual chafing Skimps gave him over his boxing methods. “Ha, eet is ze know-nossing of ze petit garcgon!”’ he cried, gesturing hopelessly with -his hands. “Some day Skeepms shall have ze bloody noz’ and ze peeper zozr, yes! :He is too mooch vat zey call pzquant, parbleu!” Whatever was in store, Skimps was still intact when the ship reached the vertex of her Great Circle track, and sailed foul of the bitterness of a week-long fifty-mile blizzard. That was a time to try the toughest. The fat little skipper seemed to be im- pervious to cold, so blubbered in fat was he, so well fed, and so snugly clothed; but even so he proved his right to command, and stood more hours of the piercing gale than his two mates combined, tough and able though they were. In the forecastle misery was predomi- nant. The Hesperides belonged to a splen- did class of ship, her weatherliness and ability to carry on under evil circumstances was a proverb among seamen, but she was built in a day when sailors’ comfort was left out of the building plans; and the tiny iron bogie stove, which was either cold or red-hot, did no more than fill the chilly iron cavern of the men’s living quarters with noisome steam which presently con- densed and fell upon the just and the just- dry alike in creepy drops of cold water. Adventure Through it all the men cursed, growled, cuffed Skimps, and worked like the un- couth heroes they were, sleeping in sodden clothing, eating damp hardtack and half- cooked mahogany salt-horse, never, during the worst of it, getting so much as a panni- kin of hot tea or coffee simply because the Doctor could keep no fire in his. galley stove regularly enough to bother with any- thig except the barest of necessaries for the cabin and the shortest of short whacks for the crowd. : The greatest sufferer was the Marquis. His frail; unseasoned frame was _ ill- adapted to the life of a sailor in the best of circumstances: In the cold and wet, hun- ger and thirst of that passage, though it was nothing unusual, he wilted and collapsed like a frost-bitten lettuce plant, and only his indomitable spirit sustained him. That was what satisfied Micky. Watching him every minute when both watches were on deck, the capable Irish- man saw a body all but beaten, fired and kept going by a soul too great to accept defeat. Micky stole below when he came from the wheel at midnight, after a freezing spell in which the perspiration induced by the strenuous fight with the wheel of the running ship froze on him. He went to draw solace from a dhudeen- ful of stout plug tobacco, and as he passed to his bunk, stealthily as all good seamen used to pass when their opposite watch- mates slept, he struck a match and peered down at the uneasily sleeping Marquis. “Begob, there ain’t a wisp av the poor little feller!” he muttered. The Marquis’s face was white as death, his eyes were ringed with dark blue, his lips were no longer vividly red, and the slim, blue-veined hands on his breast barely moved to his faint breathing. Micky stripped the blanket from his own bed, laid it with the gentleness of a mother over the shivering form, and went back on deck munching a cold chew» because the rummaging for his pipe, and the lighting of it, might awaken the lghtly sleeping man. beg It was the worst experience the skipper had had in thirty years of running the Easting down, and real hard- ship began to be felt. Even the water tanks were impregnated with brine; it was THE weather hardened. COMIC IOOKXS (GO)