Adventure Magazine Cover — page 105: what you’re looking at

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

UNION IS STRE i[/he is my a? GS F.ST.MARS Author of ‘““Haunters of the Heights,” “Chivalry of the Wild,” etc. C VEN in the faint light given off by the moonbeams it could be seen that the vast forest floor was bare—nothing but a hall of a thousand mighty, buttressed columns, shooting up almost out of sight to that wonderful overworld of the forest roof, where rain and vegetation, bird and insect, and light and, it might almost be said, life itself, have their existence alone. Be- neath, upon the spongy soil of ages almost nothing could grow because of the lack of light, and almost all the world was in the tree-tops, the tree-tops joined together by rope bridges of vines, by lichen and tree fern, and a very forest in itself, whose feet had never touched the ground for miles. The ocelot, that most beautiful of all the cats, a study in marbled black satins, gray silks and cream velvet, whose grace ex- ceeded even the wondrous grace of the leopard, could climb with an agility and ease almost bird-like, and in his treecraft was as perfect as the otter in streamcraft. But throughout that night all the perfec- tion to which Nature had brought him through eons of carefully selected ances- tors had not won him a meal. The ocelot had climbed, and hidden, and waited, and climbed, and hidden, #@md stalked, and waited again—all to no purpose. He had with smoldering eyes watched in silence the sloth swinging along, hung upside down beneath; but the leap was too long. If he missed, no power on earth could have saved the ocelot. Once, with almost bursting, suppressed 104 excitement, he had slid inch by inch to- ward a lesser ant-eater, only to be held at bay and forced, not willingly but spitting, to retreat along the vine-rope he was on, by a cohort of virulent ants in polished black armor. The ocelot stopped and snarled. He was over four feet long, not counting his fifteen- inch tail, which he lashed; he was more used to dealing out terror and death than to being played the fool with in this an- noying fashion. Moreover, his temper was short at the best of times, and just now the shorter because he was driven by an imperious necessity to find food for his mate as well as himself. Madame Ocelot was in a difficulty. With a thriving family to suckle, she had taken a hurt in dealing with, or trying to deal with, a lesser ant-eater, who had dealt her a claw-cut in the soft pad of her right forefoot. Those claws put an end to Mrs. Ocelot’s hunting for a week. Wherefore we find the ocelot hunting for the whole family. Not that cat husbands of any kind, from ‘“‘puss’’ to tiger, are addicted to looking after their wives very well, or at all, as a rule; but there are ex- ceptions—mostly old males—that prove the rule, and this ocelot was oné of the exceptions. THE miniature, funny, wild pig whose name was peccary, nosing about for cassia-nuts in the hollow, vaulted dark, had learned that “union is strength,” and that ‘‘good combination” is <SiiGO EOMIGdoOo