Adventure Magazine Cover, November 10, 1924 — page 153: what you’re looking at

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

Chuckling Gold “Sid Hamed on the other. We will hold your wrists, and the cords, unostentatiously but firmly.” “And should we be—hm!—incommoded, no one would find the cords for quite a while. You would not, I think, be inter- ested in their discovery. Come!’’ He removed the key from inside the door, thrust back the bolt, opened the door a little and reinserted the key from the out- side. Then he opened the door and they stepped outside. Immediately they were cut from view by other beggars who rose up and came to the door, crowding about them. Behind this human ‘screen, Mo- hamed Ali closed and locked the door and put the key into his shakarah. Then, ina body, the dozen beggars, with the little red spots upon their shoulders, moved swiftly toward the city gates, passed them and their guards—Warzazi’s own men, now— and took the road which led into the wild hills. Among them, one of them, walked Sid Allal Warzazi. An hour’s walk, in a silence that weighed down the soul of the captive, and they stopped on a hilltop beneath a spreading argan-tree, where a dozen horses were teth- ered. Here the basha was relieved of his gag and his nooses and his tattered djellaba. * Walid.” He drew his knife and tossed it at the feet of the basha. Sid Hamed only nodded in reply. He removed his djellaba, drew his own kumiah from its’ sheath and stepped towards Warzazi. Facing him, he spoke. “T am going to kill you,” he said. up the knife and fight.” Warzazi looked once into the eyes of the Hamed Mortadi, his First Scribe. “He is yours,” he said, “because of “Pick He smiled with his eyes.: MOHAMED ALI looked at Sid 151 friend of Sid Walid, then stooped swiftly and seized the kumiah. Crouching, he circled his opponent, as one dog circles another, looking for a favorable opening, drawing closer. He sprang at last, his knife met the blade of Sid Hamed, twisted, and he jumped back. About them the other beggars had formed a big circle. Warzazi stood his ground against the approach now of Sid Hamed. He feinted, Hamed struck, and both knives found flesh, but only in the arms of the fighters. The yellow dust formed a mist about them. Beads of sweat were forming on Warzazi’s face. He fell back before the onslaught of his foe, dodged a blow at his neck, whimpered and thrust upward at Hamed’s bowels, and missed—and then the thing that was really the black Warzazi mastered him. He reached swiftly inside his silken vest—a small flat automatic flashed and spoke, and the knife flew from the hand of Sid Hamed. A shrill cry of anger came from the circle of spectators, but before any one of them could move from his tracks, Sid Hamed sprang like a tiger upon his treacherous enemy. He bore him to earth. He tore from his hand the pistol and flung it far. He set a foot upon the hand that still held the knife. And at Warzazi’s black throat he set his two hands in a grip of death. No word from his lips—only a low continuous growl of the animal that treachery had loosed within him. At last he straightened up, lifted by the neck the body of the black, and threw it from him. He gazed at his hands, curved and paralyzed for a moment by their effort, then straightened them. “‘Walid,’’ he murmured his dead friend’s name, over the body of the man who had killed him. “A life for a life. It is so ordered.”’ COMICIOOOKS.COR