Adventure Magazine Cover — page 181: what you’re looking at

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

180 had and J have never seen it fail. Asa matter fact, the poison of rattlesnakes is not deadly if the ordinary precaution is taken soon after the bite. In this connection I wish to say that I shall be glad to make our place a Camp-Fire Station and should be more than pleased to meet any wanderer who may come this way and swap experiences with him. Would be pleased to hear more from you on this subject —W™. STROVER. The above are only a few, merely to show the spirit in which the Keepers offer their Stations to all of us. You will find that most of them have “hit the trail’ them- selves and that the real wanderers among us are likely to run into some interesting swap- ping of experiences when they drop in. If you are so situated that you can offer a Station to your comrades, come forward. At Camp-Fire we'll be glad to have any sug- gestions for building up the Stations into the possibilities open to them. There are already some new ideas to be discussed and we'll have them up soon for discussion. The Station plan is here to stay. your share toward it. Do Some interesting facts from Captain Dingle about the real man back of his Red Saunders stories: Bermuda. Red Saunders was areal man. He’s dead now, or at least I believe he is, because some seven years or so back I heard that he had been killed up the Ma- lindi River in East Africa while on one of his cus- tomary expeditions to grapple with anything look- ing like a grafter, for the enforcement of a divvy-up of the graft. FIRST met him in Mahe, in the Seychelles Is- lands, and made a two-handed voyage with him in a little eighty-ton schooner, the Black Pearl of my stories about him, to the Crozets, in search of specie in a sunken ship, the Strathmore. We found the ship, but not the specie. Anyhow, during that voyage, I found a treasure greater than specie, for I got to know Kenneth Beauclerc Saunders, Eton and Oxford man, genial giant, terror to crooks and pompous petty officialdom alike, and a man who should have had his name near the top of any Roll of Fame his country had to inscribe, had he not been unfortunate enough to cause the death (in pure acci- dent) of some society lizard during a house party horse-play. Saunders, Red Saunders to all who knew him, pos- sessed no supernatural powers; but he possessed a splendid body, with a splendid mind, and courage that I have never seen equaled. His one great power, instinct, merit—call it what yow’like—lay in the uncanny knack he had of snatching oppor- tunity. And| he» never in his life quit trying while a mate, Whether he liked him or not, was in danger. He’d save a man of his crew at risk of his own life and liberty, and then whip the oakum out of the man if he had been guilty of transgression against the simple ethics of the schooner. Adventure W ILE I knew him T have had him pick me up by the neck in one hand, kick the eternal tar out of my bottom for some fool mistake, then stand two watches in one and make the coffee while I got over it: And now Iam retaliating by writing him up for a bunch of Camp-Fire boys whom he would have been glad to bust in among with his big, genial smile and his whole man personality to take a back log beyond the blaze and listen to the yarns that are spun, I have used him in many yarns now, and every one has made friends for him, though I believe most of the readers of these Saunders stories have no notion that they are reading about a real man, and- none of them knows that every one of the stories in which he figures is molded around a real event in the fife of Red Saunders.—A. E. DrNcre. ERE are the results of the readers’ vote on the ten most popular stories in Adventure during 1920. As in previous years, we give also the ten ranking next in the vote. (S) stands for “serial,” (N) for ‘complete “novel,” (n) for complete novel- ette, those unmarked being short stories. Of course a vote of this kind is only a partial expression, being cast by only a minority of the total number of readers, but nevertheless it is both interesting and decidedly useful in helping us in the office fill the magazine with the kinds of story our readers like best. 1920 VOTE S—Serial. N—Complete Novel. s—Short Stories. n-Novelette. - r Witp BLoop - * S 5535 Gordon Young 2 THE BUSHFIGHTERS . N 4311 Hugh Pendexter 3 StoRM ROVERS .. N 4104 Gordon Young 4 THE CuRVED SworpD N 3509 Harold Lamb 5 L'’ATLANTIDE , S 3495 Pierre Benoit 6 KINGS OF THE Missourr § 3457 Hugh Pendexter 7 A Scout FoR VirGintA . S 3186 Hugh Pendexter 8 THE MASTER PLOTTER. 5s 3133 Edgar Young 9 THE Law ComMEsS TO aS ING RIVER . ? N 3051 Rovert J. Horton 10 THE LonG TRAIL N 20981 J. Allan Dunn 11 THE GaTE THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN : S 2781 Hugh Pendexter 12 THE War-CLOTH N 2487 J. Allan Dunn 13 Man TO Man S 1008 Jackson Gregory 14 HASHKNIFE—PHILAN- THROPIST . n 19072 W.C. Tuttle 15 THE McINTOsH n 1813 Charles Beadle 16 THE MESSENGER . n 1517 W.C. Robertson and EE Bedford- Jones 17 THE ARMADILHO . s 1513 Arthur O. Friel 18 THe SuN-Gop TraIL ._ s 1459 Edgar Young I9 WOLVES OF THE AIR. . N 1404 Ranger Gull 20 THE pepe eRrIECE OF PeATH }. . N 1370 Harold Lamb Of course there a good many factors that play a part in such a ranking of stories. A story read a month ago leaves on the mind a more vivid impression than does an equally good story read eleven months ago. A long story has the big advantage of size and weight over a short one. A story read next to an unusually good one is likely to suffer by comparison more than it deserves. Connie acre Se)