Adventure Magazine Cover, October 10, 1921 — page 65: what you’re looking at

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

The Picture “T can’t say I’ve seen the place, no,’ I said. “Why do you draw it?” “Can’t help it,” he said weakly. ‘‘May- be I’m out of my head, but I draw that pic- ture—or the pencil does—every time I come up this coast in the night. I guess you’ve heard about the Creole Queen—and the girl - I was going to marry. There’s talk enough about it—and me—and this—in Manila.” I admitted I’d heard. “When did this begin?” I asked. ‘Months ago,” he said wearily, passing his hand in front of his brow. “TI couldn’t sleep. I was off the land about in the same place we are to-night, and couldn’t sleep. I’d not been able to get the sun the day be- fore and it was a black night. I figured over my dead reckoning, and was on the same course we're on tonight. My pencil began to quiver, and it drew over my fig- ures this picture I didn’t know what to make of it—but we nearly went ashore, be- cause when I got on deck, the land was dead ahead and breakers under our bows. We hauled out just in time.”’ “It’s that rotten compass of yours!’’. I said. “The compass is all right—and the com- pass doesn’t make these pictures,” he an- swered. “You ought to get off this coast, sir.” “T make it my business to stay on this coast. That’s why I ferry hay up here for the government. I’m going to stay with this thing and see if I can’t make it out. Wait! I want to show you something— you’re not like the others. They all got scared stiff. You’re the first I ever let see the drawing done, but the others got wind of it. “‘Sollars stole the one I made the last trip he had with me, and that was it he left in the Shipmasters Club. I ee you'd been talking about it to Fearoyd, so\I knew you wouldn’t mind to see it done. But I want to show you the others.” He stood up and stepped to his cabin. He was back in a minute with some twenty- odd sheets of paper, and on all of them drawn in the same faint lines, the picture of the shore line, the big rock with the blasted top, and the three palm trees with one of them crossed on the others. “That’s the lot—except for one or two that I threw away, and the one Sollars took,’’ said Gibbins. I didn’t know what to say, but I had to 59 calm him with something, so I remarked that it was all something that he’d got fixed in his mind, and drew the picture by habit. I told him about the master that got so wound up with calculations about the star Arcturus which is twenty-five hundred bil- lions of miles away, that he came within an ace of piling his ship up on a reef that was under his nose. But when I got done Gib- bins shook his head, and sighed. “T can sleep now, Mr. Wilks,” he said, turning to his cabin.” ‘““That’s all—don’t let this thing worry you. If it wasn’t that I think you’ve got more sense than the others, I’d not have shown you this.” So I went back on deck. The next day Gibbins was no different than usual, though he looked more puzzled, perhaps, than was common with him. He went about his work without a word of what had come up in the night. I saw that he wanted to keep off the subject so I kept still. On the passage back to Manila he spent the whole of every day on deck with an old- fashioned telescope, studying the shore line of the Zambales coast. And we held in close to the land—closer than I thought safe with the set of the currents and the periods of calm we encountered. Several times we were drifting to landward without breeze enough to give us steerage way. In Manila I had a compass adjuster tinker up the mess of junk we called a com- pass. When [I told him the trick it had played on me, he grinned and went on whistling softly, as if he felt that there was a lot I didn’t know about compasses. But I'll wager I knew as much as he did, for all his know-it-all way. THERE’S a lot to be learned about compass variation, I’ll admit. It’s a puzzle to science, in spite of the theories about polar currents of magnetic fields and all that. Ona chart of the North Pacific, for instance, you will find a black curve that sweeps from Kamchatka and out to seaward far below Japan, where it cuts across the northern coast of Luzon and swings in toward China, going ashore in the vicinity of Canton. On that line there is no variation of the compass. But to the east and west of this no-varia- tion line, you will find faint lines drawn all over the Pacific which reveal zones of varia- tion, Increasing at irregular distances from the no-variation line. When you get into cCoOmicoooks C@