Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 84: what you’re looking at

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

&6 stuff. Meantime she lay there safe with nothing to show nosey interferers where she is.”’ When the victim sank Leep understood why the mast had been chopped off. Noth- ing remained above the surface to mark the location. The Sea Horse raced on. The stormy night faded in a short time, and with the coming of a gray light Leep, gawking about like any landsman at sea for the first time, saw that they were approaching an island. Not a thing was visible on it in the way of habitation. It was scarcely more than a rock. Surprizingly, when Vike had run the speed boat in, there was a narrow, hid- den anchorage among the shore rocks. While Vike was making fast with pad- locks and chains set into the stolid stone, Zuanich ordered the men into the cabin, and there, one at a time, he swiftly and effectively felt over them for arms. He re- moved two revolvers and three knives, the Chinese chattering protest, and locked them in a steel wall locker. “Me, Zuanich, I carry the gun in this crowd,” he said, patting a big automatic pistol on his belt. At the pirate’s orders the gasoline stove from the galley, various supplies, and blankets were lugged on shore and taken to a crude little shanty back in a cleft of the rocks behind a screen of brush and fir trees. The shanty, built of sea drift, had a little window in one end and a rickety door in the other, and the thirteen men that comprised the party well filled it, save for one corner that Smith the cook preempted for his own. Zuanich, feeling fine, kept booming around. While breakfast was going for- ward he had the liquor carried and stacked behind the shack, a dozen quart bottles to each thick burlap sack. Goodfellow-like he opened a bottle and, drinking first to show that he wasn’t afraid of it, passed it around to the bewhiskered immigrants and their companions, to the Chink and the Hindu and all the rest before he at last handed it to Leep. Without touching it to his lips, Leep stooped and cracked the bot- tle to smithereens on a boulder. Zuanich’s good humor turned into a snarl. “For why you do that?” he sang out. “Think I’d drink after a foreigner?” re- torted Leep. Adventure “No? Vell den, you no eat wit’ for- eigners, either. You eat like dog—after gentlemens have finished.” Zuanich was getting worked up. ‘Tonight you git the baddest work lifting that cargo of whisky. You'll like foreigners yet. ’Fore we git t’rough wit’ this job you'll be on your knees to ’em.” Zuanich’s fists were weaving before Leeper’s face. Leep did not flinch an inch, but he grated out savagely in the dark, thick face: “Don’t you touch me! can!’’ And because Leep somehow was mighty in his personal racial sanctity the hijacker was bluffed—bluffed by something that he did not understand but was willing to let pass if he could save his face. He dropped his fists and stepped back. “You'll eat after the gentlemens finish,” he said loudly. Leeper had the shrewdness to see that Zuanich was giving in and the good sense to let him salvage his pride. He turned his back. The little crisis was past. The island, as Leep discovered while the others were eating, was nothing but a point of rock thrust up. There was no beach save where the Sea Horse was shack- led. From the peak forty feet above the water there was visible slaty gray channels whipped to whitecaps and seething waters, and wooded islands all around in the hazy, rainy distance; but he could not have sig- naled a boat had one been in sight, for a fringe of tree tops surrounded the peak, growing out beyond his reach. He could see out but could not have been seen. After breakfast the gang slept somewhat in the shack, this extending through part of the forenoon, but as a whole the day went along miserably. The shack was warmed only by the gasoline stove from the speed- boat’s galley. Zuanich would not allow a fire in the crude fireplace because of the telltale smoke. The air was stale. Some of the foreigners played queer games of cards that the Missourian knew nothing about. The Hindu and Chinamen kept passively aloof, even from each other, gazing at nothing. Zuanich and his four immigrants hobnobbed and gabbled in their foreign tongue, and judging by their laughter ex- changed many a brutal and obscene story. But there was something worse than I’m an Ameri- GOMIGDOO CO