Adventure Magazine Cover — page 66: what you’re looking at

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

56 sky, bare of clouds, and searched the glassy surface of the water. There was not a rip- ple anywhere. The wind was dead, as if the maker of winds had died. The Gloria could outsail the Loftus Mark in heavy wind or ight; but there was not a breath. The ocean moved with a sleeping pulse, heaving its breast faintly in vast, league- long breadths that did not stir the blue- greenish mirror into which the sun stared. & Mark was less than a half-mile off. McGree and other men were plainly seen on deck, standing about watchfully. His great body towered as if he had pig- mies near him. Now and then he raised’ a telescope. “You shoot ‘im, Will! You shoot him when he gits clost enough,’’ Wateman urged in a kind of crabbed nervousness. ‘We ain’t a chanct. Twenty-two o’ them I counted, an’ four o’ us—with them there two girls to make it worse. That Oxey feller ain’t a whole man, an’ Jack is half a kid, so we ain’t even four agin ’em. That crew ©’ his is sweepin’s from the beach. It’s him that’s dang’rous. They wouldn’t do nothin’—be all scared with him down. You shoot him, Will!” Heddon turned and with sullen directness eyed the two women who, with Oxenham by them, stood aft and watched the coming of the Loftus Mark and her boats. Gloria thought that since the day her sister had fallen overboard Heddon had changed, incomprehensibly. He had _ be- come more sullenly aloof, hardly speaking, even when spoken to, and looking at her, and at Margaret, with a dark-eyed moodiness. What Margaret thought, she did not say. Her effort to thank him had been rudely BY A little past noon the Loftus repulsed: “Why thank me? You fell overboard. I fished you out. You ought to be sorry!” She had heard from all of them what he had done, and she had come to him almost humbly; but on his saying that in the half- mocking way that he did say it, she replied with sudden flash of eyes and quick lift of head: “J am not sorry. I look forward with great curiosity to the interesting experience that awaits me at Kulico!” She turned with an air of proud uncon- cern, rather suggestive of triumph, and left him glaring after her. She had let him Adventure know that she was no longer intimidated by his manner, or uneasy over his threats. After that Heddon grew darkly sullen, brooding in a kind of baffled, inert anger. She, with intuitive penetration, saw at least partly through his jeermmg and seeming dis- like of her, and dared to taunt him. That was the woman of it, race-old, new-born in each girl babe. “What ye goin’ to do, Will?” Wateman nagged. “Twenty agin four. Shoot ’im, why don’t ye—like he done Bennings!”’ Wateman’s red-rimmed eyes, in a face browned, burned, wrinkled like a withered potato, glared up at Heddon. “Yes. If he tries to get aboard us, shoot.” “But that'll be too late. O’ course he’ll try it. What else is he comin’ for? He’s tried agin an’ agin to catch the Gloria off her guard. Alus we’ve had a deck full o’ men—so he’s been hearty, as if it were a joke, him hangin’ in our wake. But we’ve knowed he was waitin’ for a chanct, jest to catch us off somewhere like now, with nobody lookin’ on to tell what he’s done or how he done it! Now he’s got us!” “You're right. This time, he’s got us.” “But what are ye goin’ to do?” “T don’t know. There are twenty-some men—’’ Heddon glanced down at the half- dozen rifles and bucket of shells on the deck near his feet—“twenty-some men there, and”’—he half-turned and looked over his shoulder, aft—‘‘and two women here. I’ve been a —— fool, Tom.” “Aye,” said old Wateman quietly. Heddon reflected on many things he might do, or try to do, but there was fu- tility in all of them. He might open fire on the boats as soon as they came within range, and stop the towing; but those on the Loftus Mark would then also be in range of the Glorta—and ships in a calm, somehow, if anywhere near, nearly always drift together. Besides, to start shooting would be to make the meeting deadly, whereas Black McGree, who had queer ideas of what made fun, might not be angry enough to start blood flowing. Besides, to open fire on twenty men who would soon be rail to rail with the Gloria was folly. Heddon simply did not know what to do. It was not as if he could put up a losing fight and make the best of an inevitable defeat—there would remain the two women after the defeat. Go NOOK 1@)