Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 36: what you’re looking at

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

34 set the longboat adrift. A man who had been swimming in their wake as they had rowed out to the ship came up as the bar- kentine got under way, and, grasping the trailing rope-end, hauled himself aboard. His head showed for an instant against the skyline as he climbed, dripping and bedrag- gled, over the rail, a pasty-colored, almost fleshless head, like a raw skull, in which two eyes gleamed as brilliantly as burnished gold. “Look, Barney! See there!’ whispered Nancy. “Faith! Let me go and pitch him over- board,” he answered softly, while the hair on Three-legs’ neck bristled, as he growled and showed his fangs. ‘“‘Let him be, lad,’”’ advised the girl. ‘We shall know how to attend to his case later on. I would not take a human life but to save my own, or my country.” She stayed the Irish boy with a hand upon his sleeve, and Barney, who was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, put his pistol back into his shirt. So Yellow Eyes went in peace, slinking along the deck, and dived into the forward scuttle, and they stood there and let him pass. And neither of them knew what they had done that night. CHAPTER Ix A BAD NIGHT’S WORK HE clouds which had covered the moon and all the stars, and screened their escape under a mantle of black, now came rolling up out of the northeast more thickly than ever, and with incredible swiftness, hanging so low that they seemed to engulf the whole ship, blotting her out from all the rest of the world. And the wind moan- ed a mournful croon in the rigging. The maintopsail was split to ribbons al- most before they had it bent, and, wet with the rain which now came down in a solid wall of water, flapped with a deep-toned wail, tugging to get clear of the groaning yard, till finally it was carried away. Above the roar of the squall which seem- ed at any moment like to send the ship on her beam’s end, Nancy could hear the reso- lute voice of her countryman shouting or- ders to the men, who obeyed his commands as if they had been accustomed to do it. She wondered if he was their captain, but of this she could not be sure. Adventure She and Barney clung to the helm, but she felt that their strength was inadequate, and was about to shout for help, when she felt a strong hand close over hers, and heard a voice out of the darkness saying— ‘‘Well done, Devon!”’ And then the vaulted dome of night was split from zenith to horizon, and in that vivid instant, when it seemed as if the door of Heaven had been opened wide to show the flaming glories of eternity itself, she saw him for the first time, standing there on the gale-swept deck, a big blond giant of a young man, a weather-beaten, storm- soaked Saxon, with a stubby growth of yel- low beard and a great shock of tawny hair matted upon his head, and the blue eyes of a Viking. As the thunder fell upon them with a concussion that made the Baptiste tremble in every plank, darkness again, darkness so thick it crushed with its tre- mendous weight. She felt the light bark stagger beneath her as it was lifted upon the crest of a mighty wave, and shiver again, and sigh and groan in its extremity as it slanted down into the trough of the boiling sea, rail under water and the decks awash. God’s mighty voice spoke again across the world, and a flood of brilliance, brighter than a lifetime of days, deluged them with a celestial radiance. She saw the boy at her side clinging to the helm with all his strength, his freckled face gone pale as death and glistening with the spume, only the red rag of his tongue, curling out of the corner of his hard-set mouth, making him look like his natural self. Beyond him the round-house covered with débris, the canvas struggling tobe free, and the men laying out in the yards, and beyond all a waste of frantic water, moun- tain high, a seething caldron of waves, their tops torn off by the hurricane and flung about as by a giant madman. The awful grandeur of it brought a gasp to her lips, a cry more of astonishment and wonder than of fear. The Baptiste reeled, and then, before she knew what had hap- pened, she slipped, a strong arm encircled her waist and she was in the arms of the man she did not know, whom she had seen but once, strained against his breast, and he was kissing her and saying in a roar against the fury of the storm: ‘I love you! I love you!” in a voice that came to her out of the gale as faintly as a baby’s whisper. CoOMmichoooks (©