Adventure Magazine Cover — page 49: what you’re looking at

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

Two Fools four different angles and refused to move. Jem McClone picked up a handful of sand, put it in the donkey’s ear, and gave the animal a ringing slap on_.the rump with his hand. “‘Giddap, ye stubborn baste,” said Jem; and the donkey started off, shaking its head to dislodge the sand. “Do you get it?” asked Breen as Jem McClone passed out of sight. ‘“The stupid creature can think of but one thing at a time. That’s donkey psychology. Who would understand it better than an Irish- man? “But to get on—I don’t like to even think of diamonds when either of the McClones happen to be near. The transaction be- tween Hamilton, or Simmons, and the McClones, was supposed to be in secret, you understand; but Hamilton went to Port au Prince, to catch a New York steamer, and before he sailed he got drunk, and the secret was a secret no more. It was all over the south coast before sun- down. . i “The McClones said nothing, and no one broached it to them—at least, not openly— but we could see they knew the secret was out and were a bit chesty about it. They had put it over on an Englishman, and their manner as much as said— ‘Let’s see ’im get it back!’ “Now, here’s the funny part of it—funny at the time: A few days later the paper comes out and says that the rich English- man’s wife’s diamond had not been stolen at all! It had merely dropped out of its setting and rolled under the bed. A negro maid found it, and returned it, for a corking big reward. We found out later that Sim- mons, the secretary, had, by chance, picked that particular time to run off with a steam- ship captain’s wife. Coincidence. Hamil- ton turned out to be ‘Peg’ Hamilton, an English gambler. “We began to poke fun at the McClones. “ ‘Liar,’ they said. ‘The Englishman is a liar. He doesn’t want to admit his loss. The diamond -was stolen, and we—know ~ who has it.’ “A Panama boat made Port au Prince. There happened to be a diamond merchant aboard, bound from Australia to New York. The McClones went to the diamond mer- chant, ‘secretly.’ “*“What’s it worth?’ they asked, showing him the stone. 39 “The man cocked one eye at the thing, laughed, and said: ‘“““Two pounds. It’s paste.’ “The McClones put their twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth—or rather, nine dollars’ worth—of paste back in its cham- ois bag and said nothing. They were hit hard; not so much the money, though that was bad enough, but the shame. The fools they had made of themselves! We all Jaughed. We in Jacmel began to greet one another with, ‘Want to buy a diamond?’ I, being more foolish than the rest, said it to Jem—and got this.” He touched the scar on his head. “Yes; it was a great joke. We laughed and laughed. And the McClones got an- grier and angrier. They began to boast openly that they had the diamond. They insisted that the Englishman was a liar, that the diamond really had been stolen, and that they had it. That was the conceit of them coming out, you see. They wouldn’t admit that they had been cooked. Not they. One night they cleaned out the Amcrican Café when some one told of their visit to the diamond merchant—he had heard it from a stevedore foreman who had heard it from tne ship’s purser who had heard it from some one else. The story had drifted down from the ship’s captain, to whom it had been told by the diamond merchant himself. ‘‘They are big men, the McClones, and AL scrappers, as you may have noticed, and it wasn’t long before we began to think it better to laugh up our sleeves than openly. Besides, we all liked them, even after the fights. If they wanted to insist they had a stolen diamond, let them, we said. I don’t doubt that they began to be- lieve it themselves after a while. Well, and then came the serious part of it, the part that spoiled the joke. “There were a number of us in the American one night. Jem and Michael were there, and they had been drinking more than was their custom. ‘They weren’t drunk, but they were not sober, either. About midnight they got up to leave. As they left their chairs, something dropped to the floor and landed in the center of the room. One of them had dropped the “‘diamond.”” It was in its chamois sack, but we all knew what it was. A general laugh started; not open, hearty laughter, but chuckles behind the hand, sniggers, Go NOOK 1 O)