Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 195: what you’re looking at

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

e The Story of William Hyde > an inky smudge in the uncertain moonlight; but the outline of the head was a bit more distinct. That head was turned not toward me but toward Lip-Plak-Tengga. It was in profile; and therefore, profiled as it was against that white background of moon- washed space and stone, it was like a sil- houette cut in black paper. And just as with a silhouette, just so could I remark, after a fashion, the outline of most of the features of that head. And every feature of that head; which I could remark, seemed simian in characteristics, negroid, bestial, and primordial. The brow swept so sharply back from a protuberant brush of eyebrows there seemed to be no brow at all. The top of the head was flat, perfectly flat; it fell away: to the neck without bulge, without curve, if, indeed, it was only an elongation of that neck which had thickened and swelled, and somehow, as symmetrically, formed into frontal features. And those frontal features!. The eyes lit- tle and glittering; the jaws prognathous as a baboon’s; the nose a simous smudge, flat and wide-nostriled, like a negro’s; and the high cheek-bones and thick protruding lips, all just like a negro’s. In fact, though there were simian features about that profile, there were more features—in nose and cheek- bones, glittering eyes and protruding lips— characteristic of the profile of a negro. And that whole profile was black, as I said; black against that wash of moonlighted background—a thick deep black, as if the skin of his face were the skin of a negro. “But zs he a negro?” the doubt flashed through my mind. “Surely not a negro from Africa, for how could he come to be here in the heart of Borneo? No; if he isa negro at all he is one of the blacks from the islands adjacent to Borneo—New Guinea, perhaps—and he wandered into the Jallan Batoe somehow years before.” I did not know quite what to think, and I was thinking quickly, furiously. The blacks of New Guinea are a small race, I knew, a pigmy race; and yet this man seemed gigantic in height. Though his body was out of sight, hidden by the palm- trunks, hidden by the concealing shadows, he was*gigantic in height, to judge from the loftiness of his extended head. The only conclusion I could reach was that he was a paradox, a monstrosity, who had been born, strangely, in a pigmy race. * with such panicky haste. 193 “Such monstrosities do occur,” I said with certitude, “especially among races but slightly removed from the brute. And he is such a monstrosity. He is an abysmal black.” But I was wrong; I was horribly wrong. He was a more terrible monstrosity than any abysmal black. He was something nastier! I did not know that then. I only knew that he was the slave to Lip-Plak-Tengga. And I felt that he was the slave to her—a colossal man, the slave to the will of a feline - yet comparatively frail woman—because, as I knew was usual with such monstrosi- ties, he was either brutish as an animal of the wilds, or else dull-witted, lack-witted. And surely enough, his head for such a huge body was, as I said, small, meager, dwarfed. That, and the shape of it—or better, the lack of shape of it—showed that he lacked wits as well. And his eyes, now glittering out of the shadow from under their beetling bunches of eyebrow, were little and round and shiny as_ buttons; brutish, brainless eyes; eyes little and round, and malignantly shiny as a snake’s. I looked at him. He never moved, never blinked an eye. So, as I looked, slowly and covertly, my right hand dropped down to | that heavy .38 in my belt. He was the Monster Man. But Monster Man, though he was, he was now not nearly so dreadful a sight as had been the vague vision of his lurching terrible shape behind the old, old rug, or that feel in the dark of his huge hairy soft-palmed hand. To me now he was only a black, even though a gigantic monstrosity of a black. He was only some repulsive thing to be shot down like a mad dog in the road, tobe crushed under heel like a slimy snake. With a sudden steeling-of nerve and pur- pose, an incredibly swift action, I swung up my right hand. In that right hand was my long .38; and tightening upon the trigger of that .38, as my arm swung up, was my index finger. But I never shot. Indeed I no more than got that nine-inch barrel fully drawn from my belt; for my arm was stopped midway, ere completely it swung up. And it was not the High Priestess who stopped my arm It was my bride, my beautiful Golden Feather of Flame. “Don’t! Oh, don’t!” she whispered, her voice indescribable with a kind of horror. Eomrcbooks. (E(9) 27. . pg 1, 6 aed Ee : r / P 7 yf: < id ui . , . ; I. 1 Fon Se RR ee | ah TEE 0S AR ae PRES S/ £4 hl fe