Adventure Magazine Cover, June 20, 1925 — page 40: what you’re looking at

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

22 He crawled up the rushes a way, though it was terribly. hot and the rushes like so many knives slashing at his face, and when he sounded cautiously with his leg, he found a ford, sure enough. ‘There must bea bar there going diagonally across to the far bank. It was not very wide, though, and it petered out a little when it got to the other bank, but it was a good place to know about, and Nell tied a strip of bandana handker- chief to a bunch of rushes so that he could find the ford again if he were returning in a hurry. li he had been a more experienced soldier, that is, more experienced fighting machine- guns, he would have looked very carefully for strings or wires near that ford, that would give the alarm to guarding machine guns, but he did not look for them, and even when he saw a piece of broken string floating in the current on the far side of the ford, he thought nothing of it. ~ When Nell came under the shelter of the other bank he removed his helmet, put his arm through the chin strap, and unslung his rifle. “Now then, forward the light brigade,” said he, and gritting his teeth and pushing his rifle ahead of him, he eased his way slowly into the rushes, and as the ground be- came firmer and rose higher, he bent lower and lower until he crept along on his stomach. _ He was in a field of uncut wheat here, nearly breast high. He passed a lane, a place in the wheat where some one had cut a swathe, seemingly clear through the field. It went nearly a hundred yards in one direc- tion and in the other ended at the riverbank. “Now what the is that for?” thought Nell. ‘It must be a path for those squareheads to go down to the bank and back on.”’ ' THE path was a fire lane cut by f aude the Boche for their machine-guns and so constructed that a man crossing it at night, a man or a rat even, would be silhouetted against the sky at the far end and the wary gunners at the other end could make a sieve out of him. The former cavalryman, however, went unscathed. He began to grow confident and to forget that he was on a very danger- ous mission. The wheat was thick and he could not see the death that was all around him. Suddenly he came upon a place Adventure where another man had crushed the wheat down as he crawled. Aha! The hunter hunted! Who had done it, German or Yank? Nell would discover. He listened. No sound of move- ment or of breath. He drew one knee under him and straightened it. Nosound. Again he drew up his knee and shoved his body forward. Silence. He rolled upon his stomach and stiffened as if an electric cur- rent had passed through him. ‘A Boche!”’ his brain howled. Outwardly he held his breath. In front of him, scarcely four yards away, he could see through the stalks of wheat the broken outline of aman. The man was clad in gray, a dirty gray that was almost black. He lay on his stomach, his feet out of sight in the wheat on one side and his head out of sight in the other. He must have been the man who had made the track that Nell was following. Nell hesitated to attack this man. He might give away the fact that there were Americans in the wheat. In addition, this Boche might be the point of an advance guard, or a flanker for a company. On the other hand, it would not be wise to leave him unmolested, to go back and report. It he was a connecting file, a flanker or a scout, the battle would be on, but that was a chance that Nell must take. He began to crawl, dragging himself with his elbows ‘‘A Boche!”’ - closer and closer to the German. It was five yards to where the German lay and Nell proceeded at the rate of a yard.a minute. He could swear, however, that it took him an hour to get close enough to the Boche to see the barrel of a light machine gun. Nell thereupon estimated the situa- tion, as the books say. He had a yard to go. The Boche was facing away from him, his head resting on his arm, squinting along the barrel of his gun. Nell could rush the last yard and bayonet the other man before he could have time to swing the gun about to bear on Nell. Here, without waiting for command from Nell’s brain, his legs gave him a tremendous heave forward, his bayonet flashed in the sun and zipped into the ground under the German’s arm, as clean a miss as ever red flag waved for. Nell felt as if a bucket of ice water had been dumped over him, and letting go his rifle and still moving with the momentum of his rush, he leaped upon the German’s back and seized the other about COMIGDIOOKSEEO