Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 7: what you’re looking at

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

Days of Morgan the free-thinking world, and driving the fol- lowers of the Protector to despair and pov- erty. Colonel Chillingworth’s own estates in Devon had been declared forfeited, and had been bestowed upon Don Luis de Espinosa, a Spanish nobleman, who had been one of the royal refugee’s suite in Flanders, and, his wife having early left him a widower, with an only child, he had joined in Paris the colony of the revolutionists who waited there for the storm at home to blow over, or else plotted for the overthrow of the crown. At the French capital he had resumed his friendship with Sidney, which had been in- terrupted when Algernon had decided not to throw in his lot with Oliver Cromwell, and once again they became inseparable companions, as they waited and watched the course of events in England. Early in the year King Charles had an- nounced to Parliament his negotiation of a triple alliance between England, Holland and Sweden, which caused great rejoicing in England. Secret agents at Versailles, however, had just given to Colonel Chilling- worth and General Sidney positive informa- tion that Charles was even then negotiat- ing a clandestine treaty with Louis, which would make England the catspaw of France, and that the dissolute monarch was leading his life of debauchery in London on money secretly supplied to him by the French king. . It was to carry tidings of this treachery to Colonel Chillingworth’s kinsman, Captain Hazzard Mountford, then living quietly in London, that Nancy had been chosen, for that they were so surrounded by spies they durst not trust to any messenger, save one in whom they could repose the completest faith, so grave a secret, and one so full of peril to so many of their friends. The three had left Paris quietly a week before, and had come to Lille, which was as far as the two men had thought it prudent for them to accompany the girl. The final stages of the journey, to Calais, and from thence across the Channel to England, she must make alone. Mistress Nancy had entered into the scheme with enthusiasm. She had long sensed, rather than really known, that her stern soldier-father had always cherished in his heart a deep regret that his only child had not been a boy, and now that an oppor- tunity offered, she was willing and eager to prove that a girl could serve her country and her cause as boldly and sagaciously as a boy. A Devon girl, reared in the very hotbed of Puritanism, at a time when all England was torn by civil wars, could not very well escape those influences which make for rug- gedness of character, and Nancy Chilling- worth was a Devonshire girl to the tips of her fingers. She had spent much of her childhood in Plymouth, while her father was at the wars in Scotland, with her maiden aunt, Mistress Faith Cruller, who proved so inadequate to the task of rearing a high- spirited girl that Nancy grew up as little spoiled by the gloom of Puritanism as any girl in England. She spent her time in the shipyards, in a nest of chips and shavings, watching the men lay down the keel of some vessel, or fashioning with plank and spar a great ship, that she was later to see drop down the Catwater, and so sail away to the distant seas. On the docks, when barks dropped an- chor, battered by storm, or showing the scars of the fights they had been in, she would listen with shining eyes to the stories the mariners told of their adventures. She loved to go into the deep-bellied merchant- men, or the men-of-war, lying in the harbor, until she came to be as much at home on shipboard as in her aunt’s front yard. Sometimes she would spend hours sprawled upon the deck, absorbed in ‘“‘Master Tapp’s Sea-man’s Kalender,”’ for books, in her home, were scarce; and her eager mind drank up all the knowledge of the sea thus spread before her—how ships are built and rigged and victualed and sail- ed, so that she might have got a berth on any vessel out of Devon had she not been a girl. Boys were her companions, and she en- tered into all their sports and games, and by the time she was fifteen could sail a boat with any of them. As these sturdy lads grew up and went off, one by one, in some splendid ship, with their bundles on their backs, they would leave her weeping on the quay, straining her eyes after their dimming sails, and raging at the fate that kept her from going, too. And so, when her father had come for her one night, hard pressed, with Royalist soldiers close at his heels, and searching the town for him high and low, Nancy had gloried in the suit of boy’s clothes in which she had been smuggled CoMmicboooks 5. CO