Adventure Magazine Cover, October 10, 1921 — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

88 Knowlton detected a creeping, slithering sound which made him slip off the safety- catch of his heavy-bulleted pistol and peer at the hut where slept the crew. No man was moving there. Still the sound per- sisted. Lifting his net, he spied beyond the hut of the Peruvians a moving mass on the ground—a cylindrical bulk which Jooked to be two feet thick, and which glided past like a solid stream of dark water flowing along above the dirt. Its beginning and end were hidden in the bush, and not until it tapered into nothing and was gone did he realize fully that he had been gazing at an enormous anaconda. Then he kicked himself for not shooting it. But before long he congratulated himself for letting it go. Perhaps an hour later, the startled forest resounded with an agonized scream, so piercing and so appallingly human that all the camp sprang awake. The outcry came but once, sounding from some place not far off, near the water’s edge, and in the direction toward which the huge serpent had disappeared. Before the watcher had time to tell the others of what he had seen, one of the boatmen discovered the rut left in the soft ground by the reptile as it glided through the camp. Thereafter, Knowlton kept his own counsel, listening to the excited curses of the men and observing their pallor and their nervous scanning of the shadows. Jose said the screech undoubtedly was the death-shriek of some animal caught and crushed in the snake’s tremendous coil. McKay concurred with a nod. And when Knowlton casually said it was tough that nobody had been awake to shoot the thing as it passed the camp Jose emphatically disagreed. A bullet fired into that fiendish giant, he averred, would have meant death to one or more men; for the serpent’s writhing coils and lashing tail would have knocked down the sleeping-hut and shattered the spines of any men they struck. No, let Senior Knowl-ton thank the saints that the awful master of the swamps had gone its way unmolested. For the rest of that night Knowlton kept his watch openly, accompanied by Jose and three of the paddlers, who refused to sleep again until they should be miles away from the vicinity of that dread monster. Adventure KO) was aroused again. Tim alone saw the start of the disturbance and he kept mum about it because he did not choose to let the Peruvians know he had been on the alert. Out from the gloom and straight past the huts a thick-bodied, curve-snouted animal came charging madly for the river, carrying on its back a fero- cious cat-creature whose fangs were buried deep in its steed’s neck: a tapir attacked by a jaguar. With a resounding plunge the elephantine quarry struck the water and was gone. The tiger-cat, forced to relinquish its hold or drown, swam hurriedly back to the bank below the encampment, where it roared and spat and squalled in a blood- chilling paroxysm of baffled fury. And though every man was awakened, not one left the flimsy shelter of his net. Nor did any one so much as _ speak until Tim, wearying of the noise, announced his inten- tion to “‘go bust that critter in the nose and give him somethin’ to yowl about.” The proposal met with instant and peremptory veto. ‘“‘As you were!” snapped McKay. “Let him alone! You wouldn’t have a China- man’s chance in that black bush. A jaguar is bad all the time, and when he’s mad he’s deadly. Never fool with one of those beasts, Tim. I’ve met them before and I know what they can do.”’ To which Jose agreed with many pic- turesque oaths, declaring that a jaguar was no mere beast—it was a devil: Tim, grum- bling, obeyed orders. The jaguar, hearing their voices, stopped its noise and probably reconnoitered the camp. But no man saw the brute, and its next roar sounded from some spot far off in the jungle. Other things too passed within Tim’s range of vision frgm time to time in the moonlit hours: a queer bony creature which he took for some new kind of turtle, but which really was an armadillo; a mon- strous hairy spider which slid like a streak up his net, hung there for a time, decided to go elsewhere, and departed with such speed that the man inside rubbed his eyes and wondered if he was “seein’ things that ain’t;”” a couple of vampires which flitted in from nowhere like ghoulish ghosts, wheeled and floated silently on wide wings vainly seeking an exposed foot protruding from the hammocks, rested a moment on cCoOmicloooks TWO nights afterward the camp C@