Adventure Magazine Cover — page 168: what you’re looking at

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

The Mahog any Garden by. Frank Stanton Jr. CHAPTER I A KNIFE IN THE DARK HASKELL bent his head not an instant too soon, not a second too late. The steel blade of the hen- me equen sword swept a whistling arc above him and the heavy hooked tip missed his neck an inch—perhaps two inch- es. His fingers itched to twitch the blue- barreled magazine revolver away from his hip and end this thing. Twice now within ten minutes some one had stooped down from the stone gallery around the patio and tried to snip his head from his shoulders, and though the soft swish of the blade spoke a malice and wickedness that sprang from some most murderous purpose, Haskell had not the remotest conjecture to offer as to why any one should wish to kill him, a stranger, in this strange land. A month before he had left the mining camps and gone to Denver for his vacation, only to be handed a telegram from the sen- ior member of the great engineering firm with which he had been under contract since he had left Yale, a firm that guided all the mining operations, devised all the irri- gation and lumbering systems and surveyed and superintended all the railroad, tramway power-plant, dock and warehouse construc- tion for a powerful Wall Street group with money to invest anywhere in the world that one dollar would make another. The tele- gram had been brief but specific: Robert Haskell, Hotel Oxford, Denver, Col. MclIrnery down with typhoid. Go via Mexico City, Vera Cruz, to Progresso, Yucatan, then in- land to hacienda of Calderon y Ortegas family beyond Valladolid. Instructions going by Ward Line mail. JouNn R. PETERS. That was all. That wasenough. He had caught the evening train for the land beyond the Rio Grande and, save for the days lost by missing the boat at Vera Cruz, he had traveled with the haste of a king’s messen- ger. That was a standing rule among 132 COMICLOOCKKS. CO