Adventure Magazine Cover, June 20, 1925 — page 64: what you’re looking at

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

46 the céiling. There was a shriek that all the clamor in the street could not drown. The hard-boiled man leaped in air and clung to his rifle like an ape, but the bayo- net was wedged too tightly in plank and lath—and something else—and would not come out. ‘The trembling stopped and the hard-boiled man let go his rifle and dropped to the table. “The gun! They'll fire through the ceil- ing!” he cried to Nell. With the words there was a roar, plaster flew down, and a cloud of dust leaped up- ward from the floor. The hard-boiled man gave a leap and dived through a window by the fireplace, taking sash and broken glass with him. Nell went through the back of the house, where a shell had broken in the wall. He was in a garden, a tiny enclosure with well kept rows of vegetables. The Boche had been caring for that garden all sum- mer. ‘The noise from the street came faint- ly here, but beyond the next row of houses men ran hither and yon, and smoke rose above the roofs. ‘““Gee, it’s dark,” said Nell. be late.”’ He was surprized that the twilight had come so soon. He looked up at the sky to assure himself that the sun was really setting and that it was not his imagination that made the air so gloomy. The high white clouds were pink and their edges blue with shadow. A great black shape passed swiftly over- head, just above the trees. Two more followed, and then three. Nell crouched against the wall of the house. On the wide- flung wings of those fearful things he had seen the thin arms of a cross and knew the enemy airplane, although he had never seen one before. “It must CRASH! Nell’s wits were some time in returning after the heav- ens had fallen that way, and when they did, he found he had turned and run back between the houses almost to the street by which he had first entered the town. The dead lay in that street like leaves, and white-faced men, German and American, fled together under the trees. Another bomb, anda house crumpled in upon itself like a structure of cards. Nell turned away. There was a German Adventure machine-gun crew lying in a heap on their overturned gun, almost at his feet, and among them was the hard-boiled man, one hand grasping the hilt of a hidden trench knife and the other upon the handle of the gun. Bombs rained down, one on the heels of another, on Boche and Yank alike, but Nell waited. His rifle was gone long ago, and he was unarmed, but he wanted to make sure he could not help his comrade. It was im- possible. The other had been shot through and through by the machine-gun in the room above, but yet had taken toll of the gun crew outside the window before he died, as he had lived, a hard-boiled man. And the rest of the gun crew must have been dead when he had leaped on them, or had been killed soon after, for he lay as he had come from the window. | Nell found himself running, as does a man in a dream. Four Germans passed him within arms’ length, and though they saw him clearly, they made no sign, but kept on their way. Nell ran along, going sometimes through one wall and then the other of a shattered house, skipping over shattered limbs of trees, going through the gate of a barbed-wire barricade, a gate with the saw-buck affair that closed it, swung wide as it had been to let the retreating Germans through. He came at last to a great wide street, silent and deserted. He ran down this, paying no heed to distant firing, nor the sounds of men running by him in the dark- ness. When the street ended at the river, he stopped, but seeing the fragments of the shattered bridge below him, he jumped down with the courage of desperation, and slipping and sliding from one block of cement to the other, got across to where some machine-gunners on the other side helped him to shore and gave him a blanket to put over his head, and in which he might stifle his sobs. There was a fearful calm along the riv- er now. The machine-gunners whispered among themselves, but their gun was silent. No lights went up when darkness fell, for the enemy knew there would be no more attempts on the town that night. The corporal of the gun-squad finally detailed two men for duty with the gun, and he and two others crawled into the hole where Nell lay, and prepared to sleep. | “Better take a little rest,” said the COMmiclboookks.CO