Adventure Magazine Cover — page 46: what you’re looking at

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

Bey ay, ele a het - which said plainly, “I told you so! Red Saunders’ Protégé 45 “You shall see the Sultan Sadrash when your eyes grow as keen in the dark as mine,” mocked a voice. Something hard touched his breast. His hand, involuntarily seeking, touched the cold barrel of a rifle. “Trapped!” quoth Tod Carter, in a tone {?? “Stand fast, and don’t make any breaks,” Saunders ordered imperatively. “Mark time until we can see. Use your eyes, boys.” Soon the gloom seemed to lighten. In recesses all about the chamber lamps burned, and their wicks were being turned up gradually. As soon as eyes might see clearly the skipper and his men saw this: On a low, thickly cushioned platform, more than a dais but scarcely a throne, sat a thin little creature having an enormous head, dressed like some gorgeous pantomime travesty on royalty. His great skull was covered with a huge turban, jeweled and befeathered; his face was hidden, except for a pair of evilly brilliant eyes and an arched beak of a nose, in a beard of many hues which stuck out around him like a lion’s mane. A great curved simitar lay across his knees, naked and gleaming; in his eyes glittered cruelty and greed; maned like a lion, he made one shudder with the resem- blance he bore to a hyena possessed of a devil. And the dozen or so of nondescript white men standing around him were quite ob- viously scared to death of the little creature. There were a score of natives, too; and these were standing by like so many terrified sheep, trembling to be on the jump at the sultan’s least word; and this might have been expected in a place like Timor, where sultans and slave-owning chiefs probably flourished when China was struggling to learn its first ideograph. But for white men, beach-combers, ad- venturers, rascals undoubtedly, to serve a native sultan and stand frankly in fear of him was something so utterly unexpected that Saunders gave the little potentate more than a passing glance before he addressed him. “VOU’RE Sadrash, I suppose,” he said at length. “I’m Saunders, of the Black Pearl schooner. I want Anh my boy, Parchelly, and the contents of my safe. Out with ’em.’ .appeared to swell with fury. -sultan with his stolen loot. A concerted gasp of horror filled the chamber, the horror of the sultan’s men at the effrontery of the captive who refused to accept his position but addressed their chief rather like a captor. The sultan himself His eyes shot sparks, and his great beard bristled. With nervous hands clutching the handle of his simitar, and trembling with passion, he screamed in shrill, broken English: ‘“Parchelly is my slave! It is you who shall give him up! Your ship shall burn, and you shall burn too, if Parchelly is not before me this night.” “Burn?” laughed the skipper contemptu- ously. “You’re hot stuff, old boy, to talk of burning me. I came here to trade with you. You sent men to board my ship in my absence, and your Parchelly, who lured me to come to your pestilential creek, stole the contents of my safe and brought ’em to you. Now you produce or it’s you who’ll sizzle, no mistake!” “Vou lie! Parchelly came not to~me!’ the little sultan screamed, purple with fury. Then, half-rising, laying down his simitar the better to help himself up, he com- manded: “Seize them! Bind them! and fire their ship!” Scowling men, white and yellow and brown, closed in about the Black Pearl’s men, and Tod Carter spat on his hands. A rifle-barrel knocked his hands down as he involuntarily felt for his revolver; a Gilbert Islander stumbled under a blow on the head, Out with you dealt to persuade him to quit fighting. It- seemed as if at last Red Saunders had ven- tured into an inescapable trap, for his men were outnumbered two to one, and the two were armed. But what success he had achieved had not been won by slow wits. Like a flash the thought crossed his mind that perhaps he had misjudged Parchelly after all; that the boy had not come to the But the thought only induced the equally bitter one that his protégé could in that case only have stolen the pearls for himself. All this passed through his brain with the speed of light. As swiftly came the de- cision to prove the truth. “Stand by, Tod!” he snapped in his islanders’ native tongue. With the words he hurled two men aside who held his arms and leaped straight for- ward to pounce upon the half-risen sultan. Eomichooks7co