Adventure Magazine, December 10, 1924 — page 90: what you’re looking at

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

68 Snowzer rolled over three times and up on to his legs, and bounded three yards clear from the hissing, pounding race of the next breaker, which seemed to want him badly. The rest was scrambling, sliding, slipping, scratching, scraping, slithering, over wet rocks covered with rotten sea-weed. Then through still pools, where one lobster and one octopus tried to persuade him to stay, and the octopus got the tip of one tentative tentacle snapped cleanly off for its horrible pains. And so through and over, mostly flying over, gray mud sucky as the “fat ooze” of Letter’s Wharf, and quicksand which, like lobster and octopus, would fain have made him stay. Then, farther up, over a white and driven strand of shells mashed finer than salt and as white, to a cliff path, steep as a roof and steeped in misty, driven spray, where seafoam drenched his short, stiff, brindled coat, and his feet sank in byssus and thrift as it were a costly carpet. Soon he was out on to the velvety springy turf of the overhanging upper-cliff, far above the tremendous trample of the waves, where his nose smelled the cocoanut paste of gorse and the soft hint of heather, and the clean, fresh, salt-laden sou’ wester went romping inland with a rushing song. Snowzer had shaken himself twice as he walked, so to speak, over that wonderful shell strand, but he had not stopped to really address himself to the task of getting dry till now. Now, however, he properly shook, and nearly shook himself over the edge of the cliff, so that he removed swiftly fifty yards back on to the moor and there rolled and scrubbed, and scraped, and shook, and scratched. -_ DOGS appear to be able to see in va the dark quite well enough to carry on with, although cats have for some reason grabbed for themselves the reputa- tion, as if they owned sole patent rights to it; and Snowzer seemed to have no difficulty, as he stood, wolfish, lean and furtive, on the top of the cliff, in getting the hang of his surroundings. Snowzer, be it known, was what ordinary people call a gipsy mongrel, dog fanciers term a lurcher, and the fraternity, from whose rough bosom he came, a “‘long dog.” Long dog, by the way, having nothing at all or soever to do with that other long— not “long’”—dog, the dachshund. He was Adventure not long that way, but upwards, in the leg. In other words he was a greyhound all but, the all but being represented by one of his grandparents who had been a bulldog. Snowzer’s first impression of this, to him, new world of great adventure must have been that he was in the menagerie whose tents, pitched on the edge of town, he had furtively peered into and smelled round when little more than a pup. As he set to, with his springy long walk, that looked as if he had little springs under the pad of each neat foot, as he set to, J say, and searched alongshore for Young Bill —a lifelong habit, I guess, learned by the aid of many kicks — he came first upon a long, low, gray, bear-like smudge that turned into a beast with many grunts and a badly eroded temper; next upon a red form, smelling abominably, and yapping like a lost terrier with a bad cold, and lastly, wet and glistening, but hauled up all nice and dry above the pulverising waves, a six foot, blotchy, torpedo-shaped, bloated mass that roared at him hoarsely be- tween jaws full of perfectly atrocious teeth. Snowzer did not know that in one round he had come upon the old man badger and the rusty cuss fox of the upper, and the great gray seal of the lower cliff. He only knew that, for the first time in his life, without receiving orders to await return, he could not find Young Bill—whom many fourth rate prize rings allowed was quite nifty with his mitts—and that, failing to find Young Bill, and without any visible means to date of ever so doing, he, Snowzer, was thrown upon his own resources. And Snowzer cast adrift from the fleet, so to say, and maneu- vering upon his own was some dog, I want to tell you—he was not just a mere poodle. His first effort was to deliver a silent deadly streaking ultimatum upon the great father of gray seals. Failing to produce any visible effect beyond clashing teeth, twenty stinks of twenty kinds of fish, and not quite twenty hoarse and repelling roars from that huge, bloated bulk of a beast, he sought the fox, and the fox, with Snowzer in swift silence reaching for his brush tip, sought the background in one doubling race. Finally he interviewed friend badger, but though he finally induced that sour tem- pered patriarch to seek the depths of his cavernous abode, he came away with a quite lively respect for badgers as a class, and with a red gash on his flank that represented CoMmicbook A) (© =