Adventure Magazine Cover, October 10, 1921 — page 97: what you’re looking at

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

The Pathless Trail Wherefore it had come about that at no hour of the twenty-four was every eye and ear closed. And the real reason why red Tim and blond Knowlton slept by day was that they thus made up the slumber lost at night. Not that either of them patrolled the camp in sentry-go. So far as the Peruvians knew, *they slept as soundly as McKay. But, lying in their hammocks, they divided the night-watches between them on a schedule as regular as that of a military camp—though the shifts necessarily were longer. As sunset came always at six o’clock and all hands sought their hanging beds two hours later, Tim’s ‘‘tour of duty” lasted until one in the morning. When the phos- phorescent hands of his watch pointed to that hour he stealthily reached out and jabbed Knowlton, sleeping beside him. When a match flared under the net and the former lieutenant’s cigaret began to glow Tim was officially relieved. NIGHT followed night, became a week, lengthened into a fortnight. Still, so far as the crew was con- at nothing happened. A little rough banter. among them as they smoked their last cigarets, then sleep and snores; and that was all until morning. Men less ex- perienced in night-vigils than the ex- soldiers would have abandoned _ their watches long before this—if, indeed, they had ever adopted thém. But these three were schooled in patience. Moreover, neither Tim nor Knowlton had ever before penetrated the jungle, and at times the light of the waxing moon re- vealed to their eyes strange things which they never would have seen by day. So the tedium of the long hours of wakefulness might be broken at any moment. Once they camped ‘close to a conical hillock of compact earth, some four feet high and almost stone-hard, from which radiated narrow covered galleries: the cita- del and viaducts of a community of termites. Tim, still harboring vivid recollections of his ant-battle at Remate de Males— though by this time he had trained himself to sleep in his hammock, where he was comparatively safe—looked askance at it when told what it was, and was only partly reassured by the information that termites were eaters of wood rather than of flesh. 87 After sleep had embraced the rest of the camp he still was uneasy, lifting his net at long intervals and squinting at the moonlit mound as if expecting a horde of pincer-jawed insects to erupt from it and charge him. And during one of these in- spections he saw something totally unex- pected. From the black shadows of the forest had emerged another shadow, so grotesque and misshapen that it seemed a figment of indigestion and weird dreams: a thing from whose shaggy body protruded what ap- peared to be only a long tubular snout where a head should be, and which looked to be overbalanced at the other end by a great mass of hair. It stood stone-still, and for the moment Tim could not decide which end of it was head and which was tail, or even whether it were not double- tailed and headless. Then, slowly, the ap- parition moved. Into that hard-packed earth it dug huge hooked claws, and from its tapering muzzle a worm-like tongue licked about, gathering the outrushing ants into its gullet. For minutes Tim lay blinking at it, wondering if he really saw it. Then, picking up his rifle, he slipped outside his net and ad- vanced on the creature. The animal turned, sat back on its great tail, lifted its terrible claws and waited. Six feet away, just out of its reach, Tim stopped and stared anew. Then he grinned. “You win, feller,” he informed the beast. ‘What the ye are I dunno, but any critter that’s got the guts to ramble right into camp and offers to gimme a battle is too good a sport for me to shoot. Help yerself to all the ants in the world, for all o’ me. r m aa back to bed. Bon sewer, monseer.’ Wherewith, still grinning but anit watching, he ‘backed until sure the big in- vader would not spring at him. Knowing nothing of ant-bears, he did not know it was hardly a springing animal. Its claws looked sufficiently formidable to disem- bowel a man—as, indeed, they were, if the man came near enough. But when Tim had withdrawn and the sluggish brute had decided that it would not need to defend itself, it sank to all fours and passed stiffly away into the shades whence it had come. On another night, when Tim slept, cComicoooks C@