Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 52: what you’re looking at

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

_ pass. 38 ~ Adventure _ Hasting set down the light jug of water without wetting his lips and looked rather blankly at the gray haze. “Y’m goin’ with the wind now to see if that don’t bring tis in sound of a fog- horn somewheres.” Purdue explained what Hasting prob- ably would not have noticed anyhow. “We ain't exactly provisioned for crossin’ the ocean.” After a few moments of silence Has- ting got out his. cigaret-case. As ever, he held it‘out to Purdue, then helped him to a light before lighting his own cigaret. Then he inhaled three or four deep draughts of the smoke. His eyes went back again to the water-jug. “Can’t stand that,” he said suddenly, flinging the half-finished weed from him. “Only makes me thirstier.” Purdue agreed with him and followed his example in getting rid of the cigaret. He, too, had to endure some _ thirst, though he had drunk all he wanted and eaten his fill during the night. Before he could get another real drink, he must have carried out his program with Has- ting, and that required a sight of the sun. ORLORN, silent hours followed. The haze thinned a little. “Hold the wheel a minute. I got a sextant aboard, if I ain’t got a com- If that sun comes out we'll know where we are in a hurry.” He got out a blackened box containing a sextant and other instruments, the pur- pose of which Hasting could only guess. At length the gray disk of the sun be- came distinguishable, faded before Pur- due could adjust the sextant, and then appeared again. This time he made the motions of getting a sight. He took a book of navigation tables from the box. With a pencil he figured on the seat be- side him. “My God!” he gasped effectively. | What—what—” Hasting stammered. “Wait till I c’n do that again,” Purdue bade him. e€ was accomplishing a splendid imi- tation of worry in look and voice. Has- ting lost some of his healthy. color. Purdue again went through the mo- tions of shooting the sun, as seamen call it, and again he figured. “But it can’t be,” he muttered just loud - enough to -seem to talk to himself and yet to be distinctly heard. ‘What time you got?” he asked aloud, with a well- managed tremor in his voice. Hasting looked at his watch, “Twelve to ten,” he replied. “Sure?” urged Purdue. Hasting looked again and a hopeless expression crossed his face. . “I forgot to wind it last night,’’~he spoke despairingly. “It’s stopped.” Purdue had known that the watch had not been wound during the night, other- wise he might have omitted that detail of the program. “It’s twelve minutes after two,” he said positively. “That wind’s only a p’int from due west, but it must have been east most of the night. knows how we’ve got here.” “Where?” Hasting inquired fearfully. “They’s a chart-in the cabin. I'll tell you in a minute,” he said. Something in his tone conveyed that he wanted to put off the telling. He came back from the cabin with the chart already unrolled. He flattened it further across the bench. His black finger-nail indicated a point far over to the right of the map. “There’s where we are—” he spoke with a sort of awed fierceness—“right there. Forty-two, twenty, north and sixty-six, fifty-one west. We've come a hundred and fifty mile away from any land as straight as we could make it. The nearest port’s Yarmouth. This here is one of them regular west blows we get about three times a Summer. It’s good for no less’n three days, an’ that means we got to*beat as much of the way home as we ever live to make.” The real truth was that it was then half past ten in the morning, the wind was eastward and the real reason for Purdue’s hasty turn-about was the fear that the whoop of the Machias Seal Island whistle might reach Hasting’s ears at any moment, or that a sudden rift in the fog should reveal that they were near the shore of Manan Island. Still graver was the danger that some other vessel’s horn should start Hasting shouting for aid. Purdue had made no real attempt to learn anything by his view of the sun, taken with neither time nor compass, with- out one or the other of which his instru- GComichooks Even at that, God :