Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 177: what you’re looking at

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

- - SSE ng te a a Si. > ay \ ~~ _,. “~s . pee. = ~ ae ee tity ae. oe ~ pa 3 Rea 1% — - . Author of “Godfather to Satan’s Kitchen,” “The Last Joke of Joker Joe,” etc. LL the cattle-ranches in the world are not in the western half of the United States, nor are all the pines and palmettos of the United States in Florida. You might keep this in mind. 3 : Connie Switser was a-crook, a thin and pale, cunning little crook, twenty-one years old. He had nicknames, half a dozen of them, but they need not be men- tioned here; all of them, however, sug- gested his likeness, in one way or an- other, to that member of the rodent family known familiarly as the rat. Con- nie always lived in the present; the past was forever gone, and the future was, to him, a distinctly uncertain quantity. At the moment, little Switser was lounging on a much-whittled wooden bench just under the open front window of the sheriff’s office in a small, pine- scented town named Dale. Unless it was because the vicinity of the sheriff’s office seemed safer for him than anywhere else, he had no special reason for befng at that particular place. Connie was almost too sick to get out of town. He hadn’t been well for a year, which explains the basic why of his sojourn in this land of gentle atmosphere and no twilight to speak of. The rays of the declining sun annoyed him and he sat up. At that instant his eye fell upon the lithe and rounded re of a young woman in the flower-filled front,yard of a cottage across the sandy street. She was gathering an armful of red and white roses. Connie Switser had always looked upon women as necessary evils, Itke big feet and chimneys, and he had always turned up his nose at them, but this one—he grudgingly told himself that this one was all to the mustard and he was in no way mistaken. He mever could understand his strange,.quick lik- ing for the rose lady, nor could anybody else, perhaps. If only he were a man as other men, he told himself, he—— “Say, you!” | A big and blue-shirted arm came through the open window behiad him, and a big and sun-browned.hand drepped to his shoulder. He turned his teusled head and looked straight into the serious blue eyes of heavily-built, middle-aged Sheriff Bill Maddon. “Dale,” Maddon went on, “ain’t never been fond o’ tramps and I sure ain’t in any prayerful humor. Where’s your visible means 0’ support?” we Connie sneered openly. Not that he minded being looked upon as a common tramp. In point of fact, it suited him very well to be looked upon as a tramp. It was in the blood and bone ef Connie Switser to sneer at officers. The com- 163 oe) s< (E@) (eo) nN