Adventure Magazine Cover — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

7a) HE bullet went out through the open window at my elbow and doubtless it startled the fish at the top of the water in the moon- light out there in the Bay of Panama. The smoke floated up from the muzzle of the Mannleicher till it struck the ceiling of Jimmie Hope’s lounging-den and then it umbrellaed out till it mingled with dense blue vapor ascending from the cigars and cigarettes of the twenty adventurers, fili- busters, beachcombers and other human rag-tags and bob-tails gathered in the place. Not a man stirred. No one said anything. Bob Cespinoza, playing chess with Gold- tooth Naegel, advanced the queen, after glancing up. Yet they say the tropics get your nerves. The man who held the Mannleicher that had let out the splurging roar was a bit unsteady on his legs and was very white as he looked around expecting some one to fall, but he was an Englishman arrived that day. He handed the piece he had acci- dentally discharged to Jimmie Hope, who had been showing him his collection, bits from various revolutions he had had a hand in, and Jimmie, instead of hanging it up once more, looked at it with a grim smile and passed his cognac bottle to the Englishman, saying to me half-dolefully, half-quizzically: “Tf that had killed you, Captain, it would have been the biggest joke in Panama.” “Oh, it would, would it?” said I. ‘““How’s that, Jimmie?” asked one of the boys. Jimmie Hope leaned back against the table, drew up one knee and broke the piece, then held it up to the light. “See what it is? Smooth as the cheek of a Yucateco baby. An old-fashioned Bel- gian nigger-killer, mighty nearly open at both ends. That old smooth-bore has been through one war, a coup d’état with some shooting, and several other occasions when it might have been used, and yet, never dreaming it was loaded, I hung it up there with the very load in it that I put in it twelve years ago—see the copper shell and that nick on the welt—when I first handed it to one of the Smooth-bore Her- manos.” ‘““Haw-haw-he-he! I seen them guys,” laughed McTighe. ‘‘Say, was that you that had ’em, Jimmie? I'd like to hear the straight of it.” “Well, they are so tangled up with the history of a president or two still kicking that you fellows won’t mind if I skip a name now and then. [I landed in New York by way of Antwerp one day with forty-two cases of Mausers and all that goes with them down in the pelvic regions of the same ship that brought me. They were invoiced as ‘angles,’ meaning small structural steel parts, and they were sure enough struc- tural when we got through with them— the best republic-builders I ever saw. “T got them through customs and over to Brooklyn to storage alongside the Erie Basin where a schooner by the name of the Fortuna lay freshly scraped and dressed as if for a wedding. General Mena-Mena— the fellow that ran Carteret through for 633 cComicoooks.G©