Adventure Magazine Cover — page 138: what you’re looking at

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

bY BARRY SCOBEE Author of ‘‘The Price of a Horse,” “Bandit’s Glory,” etc. OWN here, once in a while, one will hear some superstitious old Mexican saying that buzzards smell a battle days before it is fought and flock to the feast. Seventeen or eighteen buzzards floated in a circle above the Texas town of Rodela del Sol—Target of the Sun—and its cousin the Mexican village on the southern side of the Rio Grande. The birds lay high in the frosty blue reaches of the atmosphere. In imagination one could feel their coat of rusty feathers cold to the back of the hand. The keen eyes looked down upon a hot and ashy land set with gray mountain clumps and divided in two by the twisting, yellow river, and upon the two scattered adobe villages set opposite to each other, motionless and lazy as sunning lizards. Down on the earth, in this near-empty country, two men glanced up once or twice at the floating specks. One grinned sinis- terly to himself; the other shuddered. He who grinned was the Mexican border faider nicknamed “the Straddler.” He sat cross-legged in the shade of an adobe house in the Mexican village oiling his ivory-butt revolvers, and he kept looking across the yellow river to Rodela del Sol with the hungry eyes of a buzzard. The man who shuddered was old Joash, nondescript. He sat on the top rail of a corral on the rocky slope above Rodela del Sol, looking at the Mexican village, looking at Target of the Sun’s scattered, sleepy houses; looking at the buzzards, and finally at the two hundred fifty burros in the corral, that regarded him unblinkingly. In little old Joash’s mind not buzzards and battle but buzzards and burros were connected, for he had corralled the animals to slaughter them. Now he did not have the heart to kill, nor the courage to turn the long-ears loose and lose his last penny that he had invested in them. In this vacillating attitude the whole vil- lage was making sport of him and calling him chicken-hearted. Even the buzzards mocked with their presence and reminded poignantly of the butcher’s task before him. He slid miserably from the fence and be- gan to circle the pen. Every eye followed him hungrily, heads swinging slowly on necks, hoofs shifting. There were black burros and gray burros, dun and mouse- colored; little and big, gaunt and fat burros; and one and all they eyed the little man with expectant, accusing gaze. For an instant Joash was tempted to open the gate and let them out, to go scattering in the four directions. It would lift the horrible burden of cutting their throats from his mind; but it would add two other bur- dens—financial crash, and verification of the charge of chicken-heartedness so that he would never hear the end of it. Not an eye wavered; every ear pointed at him. In sudden anger he cried out testily: “Quit! Quit eying me! Shoo!” He flung his arms and stamped a foot to break their hypnotizing stare. A chuckle sounded behind him. It was 128 comiclboool< C@