Adventure Magazine Cover — page 139: what you’re looking at

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

Battle of a Thousand Hoofs the village goat-herder going out to round- up his flock for the evening against milking- time. “‘Those donkeys like you, hey?” he called out to Joash in Mexican. ‘‘Maybe they beg you to subdue your ferocity and not kill them!”’ The man tittered. Joash, little as a jockey, tilted his old soiled Panama hat on one side of his sandy head and tried to laugh jauntily, but it was a weary attempt. ‘When will you slaughter, sefor?”’ asked the herder. ‘I wish a job.” | “Oh, soon; right away now,” declared the old man. “Tomorrow maybe?” ““Maybe, maybe. I'll see.”’ “I do not believe the tales the people tell, senor—that you are too chicken-hearted to have the slaughter.” The herder tipped his big sombrero, but a grin behind it changed the courtesy to an act of derision. The Mexican was hardly gone when Joash beheld a bareheaded and ragged man coming up out of a gully giving on the little plain where the corral stood. The old man stared and pushed his jaunty hat to the other side of his head. “Why,” said he aloud in surprize, ‘‘it’s Jim!” A young fellow in rags and tatters and dust, with a patchy beard, came forward, the picture of shiftlessness. ‘Gosh!’ exclaimed Joash. ‘‘Where’d you come from?”’ Rags and Tatters failed to show any gladness. _He seemed more weary and perplexed than the older man. “Come from down East,” he answered. Joash jumped to sharp interest. ‘‘Down East” was his native land. He shoved the hat to the other side of his head. ‘““You come from down East!”’ he echoed. “State o’ Maine?” “Might’ nigh it. ¢ ‘Huh!’ Joash was disgusted. He added scorn- fully— “Kansas City must be a tough place; rough on clo’s.”’ Jim looked down at his rags and dirt. “IT got these coming home through Mexico. But at that K. C. ain’t God’s country like this.” The young fellow let his gaze roam over the shaley hills, the herder’s white flock; Kansas City.” 129 over the distant mountain clumps that were purple or the blue-gray of a postman’s uni- form; over the yellow river and its emerald- green cottonwood-trees, over the vast emp- tiness of land and sky—utter desolation to many an eye, but to him, God’s own. “Coming home through Mexico?”’ de- rided Joash. ‘Maybe you come past Timbuctoo and Halifax and London Town also, coming home to Texas from Kansas City. “T came through Mexico after I got to the Rio Grande at Laredo. Wanted to see how it looked for work. Been sleeping under the brush and eating weeds. Wonder if we couldn’t go home and eat, Joash?” “‘Home’”’ was the adobe shack of the old man. Rags and Tatters, hardly more than a boy, was the protégé of the little man. They had been chums for a year, except on the boy’s trip with a train of cattle to Kansas City, which caused a month’s absence ending with his arrival now. “Eat!” echoed Joash. ‘Boy, the house is emptier than these burros’ bellies, and they ain’t fed since three days, when they had a wagonload o’ pasteboard packing- cartons.”’ Jim had been eying the corral and its occupants with a growing wonder. Now he spoke. ‘“What’n thunder is them for, Joash? Burros in a corral! More or less like raisin’ dandelions in the house up in Missoura.”’ “‘Them’s for profit, boy.” “Profit? You talking Dutch, old man. No profit in a burro.” “Didn’t ye ever hear tell about the doctor up at Mariposa? Bought up five hundred burros and slaughtered ‘em. He sold the remains in San Antonia and El Pasa, the bones for fertilizer, the hides for leather and hair, the hoofs for glue or paperweights or something, and the tallow which he rendered out, for soap. I’m wagging the same projeck. Some I bought, some I rounded up. They cost me four hundred dollars.” “The four hundred you been saving!” Yep’ And Joash danced a step or two to show how little he was concerned. ‘Ever’ cent I got is invested in them cunnin’ little things.” “Don’t like it.”’ Jim shook a doleful head. DOOK 1 @)