Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 161: what you’re looking at

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

The Letter of the Promise wizened old man, wearing a Moro turban wound round his head. His mouth was open in a friendly grin, disclosing two rows of blackened stumps, and from the cloth about his waist there protruded the handle of a Malay kris. To the last silver orna- ment on his shirt, he looked the renegade old pirate that he was. * “And so you have been up to your old tricks, have you, Ricardo?” said Cutter. Ricardo did not reply, but his grin wid- ened ingratiatingly. Suddenly Cutter started slightly and drummed for a moment on the top of his desk, then he turned to Pendelton. “Let me talk to him for awhile alone,” he said in an undertone. ‘I have an idea I may be able to get something out of him.” lock Ricardo up.”’ € They were at luncheon later in the day, and Pendelton had spoken to the major. With his knife, Cutter carefully dug the bones from a piece of fish impaled on his fork. “No,” he said casually. ‘He won’t run away. I have a sergeant keeping an eye on him. He has promised to help me round up some of his crowd. Why will Juan persist in getting fish that’s all bones?” Pendelton did not pursue the subject; the responsibility was not his. Yet: he would have staked his best revolver against a five- centavo piece that the Moro would give them the slip. It seemed strange that Cutter should not know it. Two mornings later, the sergeant re- ported that Ricardo had disappeared during the night, taking with him five of his henchmen. Cutter glanced at Pendelton, who had been present during the report. Then he turned furiously on the native and in a voice blazing with anger berated him for allowing the old smuggler to escape. Never before had Pendelton heard the older man give way to his unbridled anger; but the outburst left him cold. The escape was not the sergeant’s fault. He felt asud- den sympathy for the man who cringed under the lashing of the major’s tongue. And then he found himself wondering whether Cutter’s anger were real; somehow it did not seem so. At last, with a violent gesture, the major “RIDGWAY tells me you did not 159 dismissed the man and, stepping back to his desk, dropped into a chair. “T am sick of the whole business,” he said with a shrug, as he lit a cigarette and blew the smoke violently from his lungs. “Tt’s slave away year in, year out, with a bunch of incompetents, and at the beck and call of a lot of coffee-coolers in Manila. And where does it get you? Nowhere. You do the work, and somebody else gets the credit. Red-tape, favoritism, living in a hole like this—it’s a dog’s life. I want something big, something free, some place where a man can get what he earns without kowtowing to a lot of stuffed uniforms. And I'll get it too. I have a plan——”’ He checked himself, and dropped into a more casual tone. | “T’ll tell you about it one of these nights. You are in on it, Pen. You are entirely too good to waste your life at this.”’ Pendelton was embarrassed. Cutter had suddenly revealed a new side to his char- acter, a side which the boy could not under- stand. He wondered whether the major might not be working too hard. And for the next few days the sense of embarrassment increased. Cutter singled him out for his attentions, seemed to take it for granted that there was something, a secret, a common interest, which vaguely . set them apart from the other officers. Once or twice he sought the younger man’s advice on small routine matters; and several times Pendelton came upon him with his chin sunk down, gazing before him with a look of intense absorption. At last on a star-lit night, a week after Ricardo’s escape, Cutter took him down to the beach and unfolded to him the plan of which he had spoken. It had to do with getting control of the Island of Pucao which, he said, lay a couple of hundred ‘miles west of Borneo, contained one of the richest gold-mines in Asia, and was governed by a rum-drinking old sultan who had somehow managed to maintain his indepen- dence, Cutter’s plan was secretly to load the Government’s launch with arms, start ostensibly on an inspection trip down the coast, continue to Borneo, and in one of its out-of-the-way harbors recruit a score of fighting-men. With these men they would go to Pucao, and, by moral suasion backed by a show of force, get control of the sultan. “Will you go?” he asked when he had CoMmicboooks (CO