Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 9: what you’re looking at

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

Days of Morgan fat, paunchy landlord of the inn to inquire about the seat in the coach that had been bespoken for her, she swaggered like some duchess’s page, or the valet of a fine gentle- man out for a lark. But reaching the landlord, she quickly found, was to be no easy matter. In tight- fitting green breeches, and a brown smock that reached to his knees, both plentifully sprinkled with grease by reason of his fre- quent trips to the kitchen to turn a goose or a saddle of mutton upon the spit, this per- sonage, who reflected his importance in every crease of his shiny face, that looked as if it had been freshly larded, held in his hand a small bit of board upon which he kept a record of the passages engaged, writ- ten in a sprawling hand with a chunk of red chalk, so that betwixt the clumsiness of his fingers and the awkwardness of his mate- rials, he was frequently at as great a loss to read what he had written as he had been at first to write it; the more so since he was being well-nigh jostled off his feet by a crowd of drovers, teamsters, wool-buyers, soldiers, torn and ragged, and limping from their wounds, and tipsy seamen, on their way back to the fleet from a spree, and most of them, in consequence of the good times they had had, without the price of the fare, and all the more clamorous, and noisy, and profane, for that reason. Nancy waited impatiently at first for a chance to claim her seat in the coach for the north, and then, observing that she could not hope to accomplish her purpose by such modest tactics, she placed herself behind a rotund little French monk, who was worm- ing his way toward the landlord, butting those about him with his head, clawing and scratching at others who stood in his way, or shoving them aside with a pair of enor- mous shoulders which made him seem al- most as broad as he was long; and soon she had the satisfaction of perceiving that she was slowly but surely approaching the cen- ter of the landlord’s magic circle. She was just congratulating herself on her shrewdness when a gigantic Norman pike- man hurled her aside, that he might take her place in the wake of the energetic little friar, so that she reeled backward and would have gone sprawling if a strong hand had not grasped her by the cravat and whirled her, spinning, back upon her feet. “Merci, Monsieur,’ she gasped, and looked into a pair of merry blue eyes that 7 twinkled in the face of a red-haired lad whose countenance proclaimed his nation- ality as unmistakably as if a map of Donegal had been printed upon it. It was so full of freckles that it would have been difficult to say whether there were a million of them, or just one large one. His nose turned up at such an angle that one would have wagered he found it necessary to stand upon his head to blow it; but it was his mouth that made Nancy feel that she had known him all her life; such a laugh- ing, whimsical mouth it was, with red lips parted to show two rows of glistening teeth, and a carmine rag of a tongue that curled out of the corners on the slightest provoca- tion. “Faith, Monsieur!” he said with the rich brogue of a North-of-Irelander, “you could better dance a minuet than the step you need to fight your way in there. Are you by the Brussels coach?” “For Calais,” answered Mistress Nancy in English, and pulling her hat down fur- ther over her eyes. ‘My seat has been en- gaged these two days gone, but I wish to see that no mistake has been made, and claim my place.” “English you are? Faith, and I took you for a Pollyvooer, I did. Heed a word of wisdom, sir, and claim your seat yourself, while the pickin’s good. It’s filling up in- side, and you'll have to be quick to get a place. And get inside—it’ll be airish toward the coast tonight, I’m thinking.” ‘‘Are you by the Calais coach?” she asked him, hesitating. “Tf I can work my way,I am. They usu- ally need a hand with the horses at the last minute, and it’s my meat this night if I have to commit a murther to get it.”’ ‘Should I get in at once then?”’ demanded the girl, moving toward the coach, and then stopping, in doubt. ‘Sure, and I would,” and with this he pulled open the door of the coach and gave her a “leg up,” hurling her bodily within, just in the nick of time to rob a portly sheep- dealer, who otherwise would have secured the last of the coveted places, but who proved no match for Nancy’s enforced agility. Wedged in between the little monk, whose energy had rewarded him, and who snored already, like a trooper, on the one side, and a wheezy tradesman on the other, who coughed, and choked, and spluttered and CoOMmicboooks CO