Adventure Magazine Cover — page 78: what you’re looking at

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

68 through after—after she left Mr. Cardan— and a better woman doesn’t live! Let Gloria go to her, Mr. Heddon.” “No!” he said with somber finality. For a time they sat in silence amid the gentle creaking of timbers, as if the ship gave off little, not unaffectionate sounds under the heaving, enfolding caress of the water, and the wash of the water along the sides was not unlike the soft nuzzling of an eager lover. As he realized the sort of imagery along which his thoughts were creeping, Heddon shifted impatiently and scattered the thoughts from his mind. He took his hands from the water and began trying to dry them on a piece of brown toweling. “Let me,” said Margaret, rising, reaching to the towel. “No! Get away!” He held his hands and the towel to one side, and she saw how bruised and shape- lessly puffed his hands were, - particularly the right hand, which had struck the rock- like head of McGree again and again to blind him. “You are badly hurt!” “No,” he said irritably. get out of here!’ “You won’t let Gloria go to her mother, Mr. Heddon?”’ “No.” Then brutally: “You think her rich. You’ve seen the pearls—that’s why you want her!” “Mr. Heddon!” “Don’t try to be offended. Besides, Ben- nings’ pearls were made in France. False— like some other things in the world. You heard what Black McGree said. Saw how he flung them back to the Gloria. French pearls! The whole lot of them are worth nothing much. Do you suppose old Tom and I, and that young thief Raeburn, wouldn’t have whacked ’em among our- selves if they’d been worth stealing? You know men well enough for that!” Margaret gazed at him with startled in- tensity. Her slender body bent forward, and the clear white brow, itself of pearly luster with a mist of golden hair above it, wrinkled in tense scrutiny. “I do know men,”’ she said slowly, spac- ing the words. ‘You would not touch them, or let others!” Heddon laughed, forcing contemptuous sounds from deep in his throat, and glared. “T wish you'd Adventure Irritably, he wanted her: to hate him. He tried to hate her, to think ill of her, to be- lieve it was Gloria’s pearls she wanted. He resented the fascination that he pretended to despise; mere beauty—it was nothing! He called it mere beauty though had he closed his eyes he would vibrantly have felt her presence. He was like.a man entangled in the soft tenacity of gossamer. Her ex- tenuation of herself exasperated him. Be- hind the plausibility of what she had said was a simplicity of humiliation, like a con- ‘fessional made less to be heard than for the relief of telling. He was angered that little thoughts within his head tried furtively to shape themselve more favorably toward her:: A nervous and wilful antagonism filled him, though every fiber, in unidentified pain, mutely craved that he believe, yield, give in to her charm. Hunger was in him, and he called it hate. In perversity of impulse he wanted to make himself out as infamous, rather thar’ that she should think well of him. She didn’t, of course, really think well of him; that was part of her art, the woman of it, the seduc- tive, entwining, impalpable sinuous warmth of woman. Somehow it seemed to give her a sort of indefinable advantage as long as she be- ‘lieved or pretended to believe that he was incapable of the evilness to which he pre- tended. And he wanted to hurt her. He could not strike her flesh. Nature had not given him sufficient laxity of manhood to ease his torture in that sort of violence; but he could strike her eager hopes, defeat this warm artfulness, this confessional duplicity, with which she tried to get his sympathy. She had planned to coax him into letting her, and her mother, have Gloria. He would show her! “You know pearls, do your” “T have seen some,” she said doubtfully, as if a little on watch against being trapped. “You of course would know false from real ones. Most men don’t! Bennings kept French pearls to get even with traders that sold him rotten supplies. That’s his wealth—Gloria’s inheritance. Gloria her- self doesn’t know one from another. You come with me. I'll show you!” He got up impulsively. The bucket top- pled from the stool and gushed water over the deck. She moved quickly aside. “That’s nothing. Come on.” He could not open the door. His fingers NOOK 1O)