Adventure Magazine Cover — page 23: what you’re looking at

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

Forward promises which they would probably have been given at Kherson. They kept at the sweeps because the current was powerful here and other craft were about. One raft, smaller than ours, kept us company, the men on it sitting by bright fires and licking up vodka until my throttle ached. One of them was a giant with a hawk’s beak of a nose who sang like an angel out of paradise. They hitched their raft up to ours, to let our burlaks do the steering for them, and prepared to make a white night of it. Ekh, but it was a night, with the moon rising into a clear sky and the smell of the scorched steppe grass heavy in the wind! The two officers listened to the singing, and once John Paul struck up a chant and all the burlaks kept silence until he had finished. I leaned my back against the hut and thought that presently we could land and take to horse again. But Edwards and his servants were very weary, sleeping like dogs, and we had only three horses, which were also weary. So I listened to the wailing of an owl on shore, and the wash of the waves against the logs. We were in my country at last, and within a few hours I could round up a fine company of galliards, real fellows, and first rate horses and escort my admiral into Kherson. I was musing so when one of our burlaks gave accry. A splash sounded, and I saw that the other one, at the sweeps, had fallen into the water. While I looked the one who had cried out turned around on his feet and sat down. He grunted softly and all at once bumped down on the logs. The moon was behind the clouds just then and the flickering fires on the raft be- hind us made the blackness over the water as if a veil had been drawn around us. When the flames rose, the two rafts were ‘visible and the three men who sang and danced about the fire, but the surface of Father Dnieper was all the darker. ' My ears strained to catch the sounds of the night. Once more the owl wailed, and my Tatars snored, and the big dburlak chanted with a full throat: “Over little Father Dnieper the cocks will crow; ‘“‘Row down little Father Dnieper in the dawn.” Ekh mat A moment ago the two river- men had been standing at the steering sweeps; now they were gone. Every one else was asleep on our raft. Were they fools 2I to sleep so? Nay, when one has climbed out of the saddle the first time in ten days for more than an hour or so, drowsiness is like a plague. I started to crawl toward the burlak who lay still on the logs and just then—thuckk— came a long knife, burying its point deep into the timbers of the lean-to where my head had been. I dropped prone and grunted as the riverman had done. And out of the water a lance length from my eyes a head reared up. | A man swam silently to the raft, looked around and thrust an arm over the logs to pull himself up. For the third time the owl hooted softly, yet it was this man ahs uttered the call. The next moment one of my pistols roared in his beard and he fell back like a stricken water fowl. Now the night teemed with sound, al- though the song of the big burlak had ceased. Oars rattled in rowlocks and a long skiff entered the circle of firelight. My two Tatars and the last of the rivermen scrambled to their feet. The oars. were weighed in the skiff and musket barrels gleamed. I had drawn my saber, and when another swimmer came to the edge of the raft, I cut down at his head and needed not to look at him again, knowing well by the feel of the impact when a man’s skull has been opened up. Red fire flashed from the skiff, and a half- dozen muskets roared. One of the horses reared and screamed, and one of the Tatars leaped up and staggered to the edge of the raft, to throw himself into the water, having his death wound. The last burlak began to feel of his belly and presently groaned and fell on his knees. Smoke eddied over the raft as John Paul and the Englishman ran out with drawn weapons. The servant must have skulked in the hut, and this did him no good. Be- cause, led by the singer, the three rivermen on the raft that was tied to ours leaped over the gap and pressed on us with cutlasses that must have been hidden somewhere be- tween the logs oi their raft. And the skiff, bumping against our logs, disgorged a dozen foemen. “Sarin na kitchkal”’ The cry of the Dneiper pirates went up, and my last Tatar began to howl his death song, drawing a knife as he did so. One of the men from the skiff thrust a pistol close to his head and ended his life. DOOLK C© in