Adventure Magazine Cover — page 65: what you’re looking at

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

The Marriage March surface, letting down a stream of silver and gold; saw her duck under again, a great lu- minous globule, and thinking nothing wrong, or reckless because she was looking on, he broke surface, too, after a dive lasting one hour and eighteen minutes. He had not time to see much, or to realize much more. His little, kind eyes back of his mouth—not so kind as the eyes of most whales, perhaps—may just have seen the huge bodies of other whales—sperms, too— all about, and to have known that this was the “school” of his kind from which the “cow” must have dived and now returned to. Just time, perhaps, to realize the boat that was almost atop of him. Then the harpoon struck. HE FELT the bite of it like a &3 needle of fire in his back; and swerved, swept aside with a flourish of his fifteen-foot tail that all but abolished the boat; and ran almost headlong into the “cow” sperm hemmed in and attacked by three boats. Now, ninety-nine times out of a hundred he would, upon being struck, have “sound- ed” some thousands of fathoms to the utter- most depths. It was the one method he used to get away from his very few enemies, the tactics he had employed against the killers. But this was the hundredth time. That cow whale must be saved. ’Twas the traditional chivalry of the sperms to help a companion. And never hesitating, ap- parently, the bull sperm acted. Those who saw, caught sight of him sud- denly begin really to move, slipping along beneath the surface, faster and faster and faster, the rope on the end of the harpoon fast in his back, fairly hissing out astern of him. Straight at the three boats round the cow whale he headed, his seventy-ton bulk gain- ing momentum every moment as he drove with all the force of his great flukes, with the many hundreds of horse-power, possibly, he was capable of. Then he leaped. Right from under one boat he leaped, capsizing her in his own wave as he shot from the swell, cleaving the azure deep asunder, and at an angle of forty-five de- grees, going up ten, fifteen, twenty feet— clear into the air. There was one momentary chaos of » 59 amazed confusion, snarling of falling waters, hiss of foam, beating of oars, shouting of men, and curses. Then he turned partly over, rolled pon- _derously upon his side—the way he always fell—and came down again—smash! All in a heap he fell, not diving, not curving, or anything of the kind, but flat—falling as a seventy-ton gun might fall, and with a thunder that a seventy-ton gun, ex- ploding prematurely, even, might not be ashamed of. One boat, having no time to get out of the way, was under him as he fell, not after. Nothing at all was to be seen of it after but the bobbing heads of two men out of the six that had manned her, and a few floating jagged bits of wreckage broken into match- wood. But that was not all. Occasionally a sperm, one here and there, when his blood is up, sees red and goes “‘all out.” One of the three boats attacking the cow whale, was capsized by the bull as he leaped, one was smashed by him on falling, and one was fleeing fast across the silky waves back to her parent ship, the whaler. One there was, however, that had followed involun- tarily, the boat whose harpoon was fast in the bull whale’s back. He had towed her at terrific speed, and now, sliding forward, backing water, but un- able to check momentum fast enough, she was the only boat he could see with his little, angry eye as he surged about, in mighty waves of his own making, to do battle for his life. There was no pause. His enormous flukes beat the water into a boiling mael-. strom of white. His head shook clear of the streaming waters, open-jawed. He was upon the boat before any one could do more than yell. Then his cavern of a mouth shut, and— that boat which caught the “bull” sperm caught him no longer. There was no boat. Men, boat, ropes, harpoons, fourteen-foot lances, oars—everything vanished in one en- gulfing, whirling smother of spray and spume and water. The fight was over, fin- ished, cut short, wiped out in a—in a scrunch! Half an hour later, hull down, the sails of the whaling ship and a thin wisp of smoke could be seen vanishing over the horizon. She had a leak and a bad list to port, for the bull had charged her, too, or collided with (E@) COMMICGLOOOKS