Adventure Magazine Cover — page 54: what you’re looking at

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

Author of “Foreign Paris,” “Ordinary Men,” etc. MAY not be said that the day “Red” Carnahan was to hear the burro bells was woven into the fabric of his boyhood. He had not seemed of that stuff which the desert mercilessly sounds and finds to its liking. He had been a lean, smiling lad, somewhat gentle of manner, and given to books. Indeed, his older brother, “Butch” Carnahan, had not infrequently in their childhood thrust a shoulder bearing the proverbial chip under the nose of one mo- lesting Red. They had nothing in common, these boys, save that profound and reasonless love ofttimes prevailing between two men born of the same woman. While Red pored over “The Outcasts of Poker Flat’’ and the Ho- meric method of Tom Sawyer in getting whitewash on his Aunt Polly’s fence, Butch pored over holding his forefinger and his middle finger crooked in a certain way. Butch was pitching in a minor league, and on his way to the majors, when he was stricken with tuberculosis. Butch, the doer, could only lie and dream. Red, the dreamer, must do! That is how Red Car- nahan, who was-not conspicuously of the stuff which the desert finds to its liking, went to the desert. He acquired an antediluvian flivver, and he took Butch to Arizona. Arriving at Kingman, he established Butch in a hospital, and in the months that followed he laughed at the heat and the dust and wrung from the desert a living and hos- pital fees. A stroke of modest good fortune “Burro Bells,“ copyright, 1924, by Royce Brier. 44 in a mining claim aroused in him a certain pardonable contumely for desert traditions. “‘Where do you get this ‘Covered Wagon’ patter?” he would ask over a bottle of de- natured beer. “This is 1924. The old flats out there are a little drier than the prairie at Peoria, but about as many pink-toed tourists flow by, I observe. Why, your old desert is all gummed up with radios, four- wheel brakes and Mah Jong outfits. Show me a square mile between here and Custer’s Last Stand, and I’ll go out and pick up a 30X3)% casing on it.” Of course, Red’s complacency had been jarred upon an occasion or two. Once he had wilted for twenty-four hours because he drank from Yellow Bird Lake, which is an excellent disinfectant but an indifferent beverage. Once, when a clapper dropped from a burro bell, Red dropped extraneous affairs and walked five miles hunting the burro, which proved eventually to have been standing fifty feet from Red’s true pomt of beginning, as the surveyors put it. But these were episodes and of little ac- count in the vaster scheme—that of bring- ing health to Butch Carnahan. Nor did Red perceive that in these episodes the desert was gaging him, feeling with love- pats of its cushioned claws for his vulner- able spot, where it ultimately would strike to destroy him. The loss of the burro bell clapper was pre- cisely a love-pat from a cushioned claw. Red had heard of the burro bell tradition, NOOK 1@)