Adventure Magazine Cover — page 102: what you’re looking at

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

Oe Ng I H Ay iy (j hy if ‘ Wp é te } iy, rf; fh D 7 22, ‘ Ved ; ‘Sg y fi aM ’ é 1A et gf? CHA pe , g. ve , fit by Conroy Kroder ‘70 e le \' yy! os A, YnO 4, E; Author of ‘Trouble in Company D,” and ‘‘The Ghost Intrigue.” OT! Say, at eleven o’clock at “8 night it was still so darn hot that the stars seemed swimming in a sort of milky steam, which same was old Manila’s sweat evaporated. It was that sticky sort of heat that makes you want to yell or fight or else get drunk; but of course there wasn’t any yelling or drinking either one for Martin or me that night, we being out to get Rounce good and plenty, and at last. Though I could see Martin’s personal feelings about Rounce were still interfering a lot with his sense of duty in that direction. Rounce—Rounce—sure, now you’ve got him. Used to be artillery captain and es- caped a G. C. M. and a grand kick, with a few years of barred sunlight to meditate in, just by good nature or bad judgment of the examining board. Short in mess funds was the charge, with drunk on duty and A. W. O. L. added as minor embellishments. And allowed to resign! Lucky guy, I’ll say. Eh? If he’d worn stripes instead of shoul- der-straps. Say, he’d be wearing ’em yet, zebra brand. And he took his resignation in the Islands. That télls you something, does it? Sure, a woman! Well, no, you could hardly call him that. She was a mestizo, and with not much more brown in her skin than the sun had put there. And a beauty, if you didn’t notice how her eyes narrowed when she thought about dollars Mex. Probably Rounce never noticed it, being taken up with their Romance, which a man like him would naturally spell with a capital R. Well, she capitalized it too, so that’s even. Yes, I saw her often, and in line of duty too, because she stayed with him for some time after he resigned, and even after he took to signing chits, and dodging the un- fortunates that accepted ’em for cash, and wearing linen that wasn’t quite white. But don’t put that down to.woman’s constancy. It wasn’t that. .. _ The fact is, a man’s never broke as long as he’s got something to sell; and she knew as. well as Rounce that he had something that he could sell big. She knew it as well as the Government, and as well as Martin and me. You’ll know something of it, too —though not all—when I tell you that Rounce spent the last six months of his ser- vice helping add, to the heavy guns on Cor- regidor Island, which guards Manila and But I suppose as the weeks went by with no incoming dinero she must have got tired of waiting, or else concluded he was straight on that one point—anyway, she flitted. Martin and I might have got tired and quit too, only it was our job to keep track of him as long as he was in the Islands; and be- sides, when Muller horned in on the game, interest revived immediately, so to speak. Because Muller was one dangerous hom- bre that we had orders to run out of Uncle Sam’s possessions if we could; he had a rec- ord up in China that wasn’t sweet; and 96 oO COmiclbook G S|