Adventure Magazine Cover, October 1911 — page 149: what you’re looking at

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

ew WLONG a narrow path, cut like a shelf upon the flank of the fog- ! hung mountain just above the tees Valley, a man was walking. His rough suit of cheap tweed was muddied with the dust of long roads and splashed in yellow stains where the mist had soaked. On his back was a paltry canvas tramping- bag, in his hand a rude stock. Haggard and travel-worn, he strode with a set smile upon his sharp-featured face as one who knows the goal is just ahead. He came, at length, to a wide bend where the path swept, circling inward, hugging the dip of a broad, deep ravine. A tawny brook foamed and fumed down the rocky channel. The way led over a rustic bridge and there stood a sign post: HOTEL ZUM BRUGHORN, 2 kilometers The traveler stopped and read, leaning on ‘ his staff, and as he read he laughed, a strange, false, evil laugh. Very small, very helpless, was this man BY JOHN EDWARD RU/YELL against the dimmed, dripping immensity of the mountain—a fragile atom in a land of ruthless, brooding, latent power. And yet he laughed. And the laugh was lost, like a blasphemous whisper in the profundity of the fog. “Two kilometers,’ he said aloud. ‘So near? Have I come so near? Have I run the quarry to earth at last?” He looked about him. Where he stood, his bit of visible world was the brook and the bridge and the boulder-strewn sides of the ravine, curtained by the close, clinging mist. Some paces up the cut from the bridge, by the verge of the torrent, a flat rock, set in a patch of grasses, tempted his weariness. He climbed to it and flung him- self upon the damp surface. From where he sat he overlooked the path and the bridge as through a filmy veil. The restless stream beside him held his vagrant attention. “This shall be my Rubicon,” he mused, smiling at the conceit—an unpleasant smile. ‘When I cross it my empire shall fall to me. Not all the powers of darkness that seem to I0Q5 © MICLOOOKS © 5}