Adventure Magazine Cover — page 154: what you’re looking at

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

hy - if} a Sh) “Te * wy DR 4 \\ Y Hy ja, ’ Whee LO we Tied { i) ia yr Us Nas al 2) Sn ay A TEP ye we ? = = — ; * ee - 140 sa Adventure | asked me to tell them the way to the head- quarters of the Peccaries in Peru, so that he could lead a war-party there before the Yellow One should bring his men to attack their maleca with their guns and bullets. This I could not do—I tried, but they could not understand me well. So then I told them that as soon as I could travel again I would lead them there myself, and we would kill all the Peccaries in their own homes. At once he became more cheerful, and promised to make me strong as quickly as possible; and he gave orders to the old wo- man who seemed to know so much about curing hurts, and she nodded. Then every- body prepared for a great feast to celebrate the victory they had already won. All the men, and the women too, painted themselves anew with curving stripes of black and red, and the chiefs put on their finest feathers and squirrel-tail belts, and the others wore necklaces of the.teeth of animals. The women took the hands and feet brought back by the fighters, and stripped the flesh from the bones, and fried it in tapir-lard or boiled it in reddish pots. Much monkey-meat also was cooked, ~ and parrots, and fish and other things; and all that day there was much eating and drinking, and a sort of ceremony that I could not understand and did not try to. They offered me none of the man-meat, and I was glad, for it angers those people to re- fuse any of theirfood. I atesome monkey, and then tried to sleep and forget what they. were doing. For days I lay there while my hurts healed—and they did heal with surprising swiftness. For the old woman was by me day and pight, brewing different things in jars over a little fire and putting some of them on my injuries and giving me others to drink; and I grew strong and well much faster than I could have done otherwise. While I was recovering the Indians were not idle. Some got plants with blue blossoms and small pods and yellow roots, and crushed the roots into pulp, and went away into the jungle; and the old sub-chief told me that with that root-pulp they were poisoning all the streams for a long distance around, except those which they themselves used. Others went out and made man-traps, such as pits and spring-guns, to kill any one approaching the maloca. And those who did neither of these things worked on their weapons, fitting new cords to their great bows, or fastening barbed sting-ray bones on three-pronged spears, or testing the sharp jaguar-teeth set in big war-clubs, or dipping arrows and blow-gun darts into that brown poison which swiftly paralyzes and kills anything scratched by it. And while this went on the young war- chief sat with me at times and had me tell him about the Peccary village, so that he could get a clear picture of it in his mind and know what to do when we should reach it. ie 4 whole again. I asked for weapons, uv} and the war-chief gave a command, and men brought in all the guns and cart- ridges and knives taken from the Peccaries they had killed. From these I took the best rifle, and two revolvers, and cartridges, and a machete. =e I tried to have other men take the rest of the guns, but the chief would not have it so; for he said they were not skilled in the use of such weapons, and would do the expedition more harm than good with them. They did take the knives and machetes, however, for these they could use. And that night we all slept early, for we knew we had before us a long, hard journey with a death- struggle at the end of it. Before we slept, though, the fighting-men painted themselves once more. [ noticed thiat this time they added a new stripe—a broad whitish curve around their chests and collar-bones; and from the way they grinned at.it I thought they were not used toit. So I asked the old man what it meant, and learned it was a savage joke. Since’ the Yellow One’s band painted themselves like the white-lipped peccaries, he said, the wild men would make them- selves peccaries of the other kind—those with the white collars; and they would soon show that their teeth were sharper than those of the stinking pigs of the hills. _At dawn we were up and away. There were fully sixty of us, all hard, relentless men. I would have turned northward, whence I had come, but the war-chief shook his head and led the way straight to the west. When we should reach{the river, he told me, we should find there the Pec- caries’ own boats, which the Yellow One had intended for carrying away my rubber, but which now had been brought up-stream A THEN came the time when I was