Adventure Magazine Cover — page 119: what you’re looking at

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

118 * the east was crimson when he woke at the sound of approaching footsteps. It was his own band and they were coming up from the village. Some of them were reeling, though not from fatigue, and their breath was heavy with olives and wine. They looked back over their shoulders and grinned uneasily when they met his eye. ““We’ve taken the Moors’ foad,”’ boasted one fellow. “It’s their own law, methinks. ‘An eye for an eye. They'll remember us.”’ Michael glared. These were common men, very different from the belted knights who had sometimes visited his mother’s home in Brittany. She had hoped that he would be a knight. Instead, he had led a rough life and had toiled against hardships until—this. ‘<____ what fools! That was a Kurdish village, and the men have good eyes and horseflesh. Well, I must bide with you, for you have named me leader. Come.”’ They ran sturdily through the dawn. Months of trotting beside the nobles of the Osmanli had schooled them to this. By midday they were above the fields in a place of gray rocks and red clay. In front of them a half-dozen bowshots away a great gully between mountain-shoulders showed the blue of the sky. “The Gate of Shadows,” they cried. And with the words riders came out of the woods behind them. Michael measured the distance to the gully, glanced back at the shouting Mame- lukes, and shook his head. He pointed toa mound of rocks near by and led his five men there. “Tis the gate of heaven you will see,” he grunted. “No other, and not that, if you can not die like Christians,”’ And the five, to give them their due, fought desperately, using the few weapons they had carried from the Turkish camp, and eking these out with stones. The Mamelukes, reenforced by Kurds from the hill village, tried at first to make them yield themselves prisoners. But the captives knew what manner of death awaited tham at Bayezid’s tent and hurled their stones. The big Portuguese went down with an arrow in his throat. The Genoese leaped among the horses, knife in hand, and struggled weakly even when his skull was split with a mace. The rearing horses stirred up a cloud of dust that covered the mound. Into this Adventure cloud Michael strode, swinging his half-ax. The first rider that met him was dragged from saddle and slain. Michael went down with a Mameluke on top of him and neither rose, for Michael’s left hand had sought and found the other’s dagger in his girdle. When the last Christian had been shot down with arrows, the Turks dismounted and proceeded to pound the skulls and vital parts of the bodies of their victims with rocks. If any of the men of El-Arjuk had been in the party Michael would have suf- fered the-fate of his comrades. But the Mamelukes had neglected to give him the coup de grace owing to the body of — their warrior that lay upon his. When they lifted up their dead they saw only a pros- trate Frank besmeared with blood—not his own—and with a swollen, bruised right arm that looked as if it had been crushed with a stone. The senses had been battered out of Michael by the mace of the dead Mameluke and it was a fortunate thing for him. Be- cause by the time he crawled to his feet there were no Turks within view. Instead, black-winged birds casting a foul scent in the air hovered over his head. The vultures had been descending on the bodies of the five men when Michael Bearn stood up. > Now they circled slowly in the air or perched on the rocks near by patiently. Michael looked at them long, and then at the bodies of his comrades. The five had not been brave men, but they had died bravely. Michael walked slowly away from the knoll toward a rivulet issuing between rocks in the mountainside that rose mightily above him. He knelt and drank deeply. Then he dipped his head in the stream, wiping sway the dried blood. The flap- ping wings of the vultures impelled him to look up. His glance penetrated straight down the ravine that was called the Gate of Shadows and he studied thoughtfully the vista of brown plain that lay beyond. Once within the pass he knew that he would see no more of the Turks. The evening before he had been told when he visited the Kurd village that the rock plateau in front of the pass had been the scene of a massacre by the Turks. lt The skeletons of the dead were in the pass and a superstition had arisen that the souls <SiiGO (Eon AICELOCYo)