Adventure Magazine Cover, October 1911 — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

A Bit of Local Color headed and sunburned beyond belief—that’s all I remember about him, and I tell about him to prove he had an excuse for being on that steaner in the Celebes Sea. There isn’t any necessity to tell why I was there, but I was, if for no other purpose than to tell about it all. Anyway, it serves to refresh your geography and to make you remember where the Cclebes Sea is, which is a handy thing to know if you are going to pass an examination or draw a map of Malaysia for an Atlas of the World. So there we were, twisting ourselves through the water toward Jolo, and the mystery that had bothered us all the way from the Straits Settlements and across the equator, where it gets hot as Billy-be- Hanged, was solved. We had hinted and asked questions and Mrs. Halsey had gone through a regular campaign in the major tactics of satisfying curlosity, but Miss Foote had held out. Denhard had rechris- tened her ‘The Spinks.”” Denhard knew more about coconuts than Egypt or pro- nunciation, and one can’t find fault with fellow passengers in a Singapore steamer, because fellow passengers are scarceon those boats and a man would make friends with a bearded Malacca monkey after the first day out. First we thought she was going to teach school in the Philippines, but when Mrs. Halsey said she knew several American lady teachers in Mindanao, Miss Foote raised her eyebrows and said “Indeed” into hercanned soup. Then we discussed the possibilities of her coming out to get married. Mrs. Halsey skirmished with that idea until Miss Foote came out point-blank, so to speak, and de- clared she never intended to marry, and her tone closed the subject, and poor Mrs. Hal- sey, who had been egged on by Presho and me, fell back on finding fault with the Malay stewards, who would get their thumbs into the gravy. Presho kept telling me that he wasn’t the least curious about Miss Foote, and proved it by seizing every possible chance to talk with her. I told Presho I wasn’t concerned about Miss Foote’s private history or her business in the Orient, and hated him with a tropical seven-degrees-above-the-equator hate because he had the next seat to her at table. Denhard didn’t care much about her, but he’d like to know why she was out in that country and where she came from 965 and if she were rich. Then Mrs. Halsey refused to have anything more to do or say about the whole scandalous lot of gossip and asked why we men couldn’t mind our busi- ness. We couldn’t see why she should refer to it as gossip or scandalous. That’s the way the affair stood that night Presho came down aft to where we were burning our tongues with Singapore cigars, and, with almost as much satisfaction as if he had solved the mystery .of the origin of the Philippines, said ‘‘She’s a story-writer.”’ “Well,” said Denhard, after he had sucked at his cigar a minute, “‘Why did she come out here?”’ ‘Local color is what she is after.” ‘“‘What’s local color?” asked Denhard. “Out here,” replied Presho, with some asperity, “it Is natives and palm trees and chaps like you.” “Why didn’t she stay back in New Hamp- shire and write stories about turpentine camps and persimmons, instead of coming out here?” “They don’t have turpentine camps in New Hampshire,” said Presho. ‘Don’t they? Nohow, she won’t get no stories out here to write about—she can’t put palm trees and natives in stories.” “She might, at that,” said Presho, puffing rapidly at his cigar in an effort to control his temper. Then he turned to me, as if he would exclude Denhard from the conversa- tion. ‘“‘Local color is what sheis after. She has no relatives, so she saved up what money she could from teaching school and is out here to write stories about the Philippines. She thinks she can Kiplingize the Philippines— ‘do for the Philippines what Kipling did for India,’ I think she put it.” “That’s a big contract,”’ I said. ‘Who is Kipling?”? asked Denhard, and never knew how near we came to pitching him into the Celebes Sea; but of course a person can’t know all there is to know about coconuts and know much of anything else. hoa the conversation shifted to ) other things. That’s always the way with a mystery. You lose in- when you have worked out the Presho began asking Denhard terest puzzle. about volcanoes in Mindanao, craters, lava and so on, which was too hot a subject for me, considering my duck coat was stuck to the back of the chair. CO MICLOOKS CO