Adventure Magazine Cover — page 68: what you’re looking at

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

58 into the bows to keep his eyes on the crew of the boat that was in the water. Raeburn was near the mainmast, rifle in hand, ready to flash behind the mast and begin shooting. McGree, when ready to say what he wanted, did so bluntly: “You have two women on board, Will Heddon. Give to me now the one I want, and I will go my way. Then that Yankee gunboat will be looking for Salvador McGree—not you!” “T never yet saw women bad enough to be fit gift for you!” “Not even that fair one who made such a fool of Will Heddon in Washington?” McGree answered Jeeringly. He had learned the rampant gossip of Lianfo. Heddon scowled fiercely but did not reply. ‘And though they do make us such fools, we must have them, eh, Will Heddon?” Hed- don glowered. McGree was enjoying him- self. ‘The Yankee Dolphin and more than one ship is out looking for you. I come to help you. Give her to me. Let them hunt Salvador McGree!” “Keep off this schooner!” “As you got her, so I will take her, Will Heddon!” He was serious now; serious, not angry. “You know Salvador McGree as the man of his word! And we have old debts between us, Will Heddon!”’ “TI left an anchor in Lianfo Bay. If you want it—go fish it!” McGree laughed. There was something like real humor in him, for often he laughed when the joke had been against him, if it was a clever joke, worthy of the laugh. “Tt is not anchors I want, but pearls— aye, one that lives and breathes. I will be good to this one, Will Heddon,” he said with a kind of hungry earnestness, looking toward Margaret. He was not begging with Heddon, not trying to persuade him. He was putting his best words out for Margaret to hear. “TI have laid by a good fortune; I am leaving the sea. I go soon to some Spanish country in South America and live at my ease. She’ll be a lady with fountains and birds——” There was now an awkward earnestness about him. He was trying to speak per- suasively. He, the thunderous roisterer, wanted to appear in as fair a manner as he could before a woman whom he meant to take forcibly. He did want that she should admire him; he felt that she should, and would. He was no mere brute, totally Adventure indifferent to how a frightened woman felt. When he wanted a woman he wanted her love, the soft sweetness of her admiration, her caresses; not that the lack of these things would make him chivalrous, but the blood of two romantic races mingled strangely in his great body, and he did not like to have women afraid of him, at least not until he was tired of them. For years, whenever he had seen a woman who was at all pleasing to his fancy he had at once be- gun to think of her as the one who would be his “noble lady’”’ when he retired to the fanciful estates in Spanish America. “—all men will bow low to wife of mine or have their necks broke, so! I have lived the hard life and I have been that —— scoundrel, Black McGree. But there I will be Don Salvador. I have looked a long time forward and watched many women for the one to whom should be that honor. There is more to me than this—”’ He struck his chest. His face was darkly earnest— “If maybe there is trouble in that country I'll be presidente myself and have an army g Heddon loweringly watched him, and would have laughed but laughter was not the thing, though Black McGree, whom most men feared, was making a fool of himself because of darkly-blue eyes and a white skin, delicate as a pearl’s, and the soft shell-like ears that listened in benumbed amazement under the golden hair. He wanted to impress this woman, whose face was as the portrait that had maddened his sleep with dreams. He had seen her at Lianfo, too, but then she had seemed unat- tainably beyond his reach; but now she was at hand and he meant to have her; yet his romantic blood made him want to be admired, and with awkwardness he boasted. The ships had come together, magneti- cally, as ships do if near in a calm; rail to rail they lay. Men on the Loftus Mark stepped outboard and made fast to the outboard rigging of the Gloria: but no one tried to come on deck. ‘“—T have money. I will make a great lady of her. I will give her things, more than she can ask for ge “There she is, McGree. Ask her!’ Heddon said bitterly, with a slow look to- ward Margaret. McGree had mentioned money, and the things that money would buy. ‘Ask her!” he repeated harshly. McGree slowly closed and opened his comicloool< 1@)