Adventure Magazine Cover, June 20, 1925 — page 161: what you’re looking at

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

King the Husky it and exchanged it for his axe as a better and more dangerous weapon at close quarters. Then the wolves were upon them. They came silently but with terrible swiitness, falling as if out of the air. How many there were Shorty never was abie to tell, but there seemed hundreds to his excited vision. With his back to a tree, his axe gripped firmly in both hands and his dogs in a circle round him, he met them. The battle was joined. On the air rose a bedlam of snarls, yelps, howls, and a ghastly worrying noise. Shorty hewed and slashed madly in the midst of a mass of leaping, raving, gray demons. There were wolves everywhere. His dogs were buried under them, gnashing teeth menaced him on every side. A big wolf leaped full at his throat. He met it with a slash that split its skull in two halfs, and pivoted on his heel to sink his axe to the eye in the shoulder of another. A wolf sprang at him from the side and bore him to his knees. Only the collar of his heavy sheepskin jacket saved him from having his jugular torn out. Another wolf caught him by the shoulder. He thrust the handle of his axe between the open jaws of a third. A fourth landed upon his back. He felt that his end had come. In his extremity he lifted up his voice and called upon the one dog he felt could aid him. “King, O King,” he cried. And King heard and came. Though locked in a death grapple with a dozen wolves, by some miracle of strength and agility he wrenched himself free and sprang upon Shorty’s chief assailant who had him pinned by the neck from behind. Shorty struggled to his feet. He was blood-mad. Without attempting to de- fend himself, without any thought but to kill and kill until he was killed himself, he flung himself into the fray, hacking, kicking, cursing, panting, blinded with blood and sweat and fear and hatred andiury. Until upon a sudden he found none to oppose him. The attack had melted away as swiitly and as silently as it had come. SHORTY sank down dizazily, breathing in sobbing gasps, and gazed with woeful eyes on a “ig” scene of utter disaster. On the trampled and blocdstained snow lay a dozen dead or dying wolves and the mangled bodies of four of his own dogs. 143 survived, but he was in a piteous plight. He was covered with blood, one of his ears bitten off close to his head, and he lay weakly licking at a gaping wound in his shoulder. Shorty himself looked like a butcher in a shambles. The axe he still grasped was thick with matted blood and hair, and he himseli was splashed with crimson from moccasin to cap. His shoulders and the back of his neck ached from a dozen bites, and the calf of his right leg had been ripped open for three inches or more by a slashing bite from a dying wolf. Of his late assail- ants, however, nothing was to be seen, though a network of tracks, many splashed with red, led away in every direction. “Well, King, old scout, reckon we're up against it.” King slowly lifted his head and stared at him. There was no sign of weakness or softening in those flaming eyes. He had come to his owner’s assistance when called upon, not, it appeared, from any affection, but from noblesse oblige. Had the spirit of the haughtiest of the seigneurs of ancient France been re-incarnated in a dog, this black husky of the North were the fittest receptacle. Shorty was no match for him in aristo- cratic and unbending pride, but he was of sound, if plebeilan stock through and through. It was not in his nature to give up. Though every movement was an agony he soon had a good fire going, and made shift to dress his wounds. His back and shoulders he could do little for, but though painiully lacerated, the bites there did not seem deep. His leg was another matter, but he bound it up with a spare shirt he had in his pack. He would have tended King’s hurts too, but that the doe would not permit. He did not whine, or filnch, or snap, but he took Shorty’s hand gently but firmly in his great jaws and held tt fast, growling warn- ingly deep in his throat. “All right, you old crank,” agreed Shorty in affectionate exas speration. “Go ahead and lickit. Maybe you know best anyway.’’- Atter he had eaten and rested, the little man considered it time to be moving. There was not the least hope in the world of anybody passing. There probably was ne a human being within fifty miles, and the barren upland where he was lay far out King only -» of the usual travel routes. COMIGDIOOKSEEO