Adventure Magazine Cover — page 82: what you’re looking at

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

80 beau ideal, and funnily enough she said you and the Lama Tsiang Samdup must have been twin brothers in a former incarna- tion! She told me you and he have never met each other, although you are co-trus- tees with her under Marmaduke’s will. It sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan. I didn’t see the lama, but I did meet some one else who is quite as interesting.” McGregor crossed his legs and blew smoke at the ceiling. “How well do you know Miss Sanburn?” asked Mrs. Cornock-Campbell at the end of a minute’s silence. She was watching Diana, stretched out on the bearskin, hunting gloriously in a dream Valhalla. If she saw Ommony’s face it was through the corner of one eye. “Oh, as well as a man can ever hope to know avery unusual woman,” said Ommony. “That doesn’t go deep, does it? I admit I suspected you at first. Then I remem- bered how iong I have known you and—well —you’re unorthodox, and you’re a rebel, but—I couldn’t imagine you leaving a child nameless.”’ “What on earth do you mean?” asked Ommony. “So I suspected Marmaduke—naturally. But all sorts of dates and circumstances turned up quite casually, which eliminated him. I was at Tilgaun a whole month before I was quite sure that Miss Sanburn isnotamother. I was almost disappointed. She is such a dear—I admire her so much— that it would have given me a selfish satis- faction to know such an abysmal secret, and to keep it even on a death bed! ‘“‘However, the child is not hers. She calls her an adopted daughter, though I doubt that there are any legal papers. ‘The girl is white. She’s about twenty. The strangest part is this: That she appears and disappears at intervals.” ‘“‘This is all news to me,”’ said Ommony. “Mac said something, but gs “Tt isn’t news, you iconoclast! It’s a most romantic mystery. The girl was there when I arrived. She wouldn’t have been; but you know what a business it is'to get to Tilgaun. I was supposed to wait for ponies and servants from the mission; they didn’t come, and as there was a party of the raja’s people going, I traveled with them. ‘“‘They were in a hurry, so I reached the mission quite a number of days before I was Adventure expected, and I met the girl on the far side of the rope bridge just before you reach Tilgaun—you remember the place? There’s a low, steep cliff with only a narrow passage leading out of it. She was sitting there nursing a twisted ankle—nothing serious— but she couldn’t get away without my see- ing her; and of course it never entered my head to suspect that she would want to avoid me. She told me her name was Elsa.” . “That was my sister’s name,”’ remarked Ommony, who had an old-fashioned way of growing sentimental when that name cropped up among intimates. “T lent her a spare pony, and she rode up to the mission with me. Jolly—she was the jolliest girl I have ever seen, all laughter and intelligence—with strange, sudden fits of demureness—or perhaps that isn’t the right word. Freeze isn’t the right word either. She would suddenly lapse into si- lence, and her face would grow absolutely calm—not expressionless, but calm—like a Chinese girl’s. It was as if she were two distinct and separate women. But she’s white. I watched her fingernails.” “Might be Chinese,” Ommony suggested. “They’re given to laughter, and their finger- nails don’t show the dark lunula when they’re pressed. Hannah Sanburn receives all comers at the mission.”’ “TI am absolutely certain she is English,” Mrs. Cornock-Campbell answered. ‘But as far as I could judge she speaks Tibetan and several dialects perfectly. Her English hasn’t a trace of Chi-chi accent. “She has been wonderfully educated. She has art in every fiber of her being— plays the piano fairly well—mostly her own compositions; and you may believe me or not, they’re fit to be played by a master. “‘And she draws perfectly from memory. That night at supper and afterwards she talked incessantly and kept on illustrating what she meant by drawing on sheets of paper—wonderful things—not caricatures— snapshots of people and things she had seen. Wait; I’ve kept some of them. Let me show you.” She found a portfolio and laid it on Om- mony’s lap. He turned over sheet after sheet of pencil drawings that seemed to have caught motion in the act—yaks, camels, oxen, Tibetan men and women taken in midsmile, old monastery doorways, flow- ers—done swiftly and with humor. MICLOOOK C@©