Adventure Magazine Cover — page 59: what you’re looking at

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

2 See SAS a a ne —— es prov ad aie. oe 4 man. Then ‘his head sagged and as I sobbed on his chest I felt _ him grow cold and knew he had taken the — long trail. “All through the night I sat there, dumbly sorrowful, brooding over the rough kindness _ this strange man had done me. Looking back, I saw many times I could have been a help and a real companion to him had my heart not looked with crooked eyes, and then my face was flooded with salty tears and my body racked with sobs. Around me strange animals lurked and peered at the body of my master with phosphorescent eyes as they sniffed ex- pectantly. “With the gray dawn thoughts that he must be buried came to me. I thought of the church in the village we had sighted from the hilltops, and I thought of him lying there in the churchyard with a tiny wooden cross planted at his head; and I knew that he had died as he had lived, bold and unafraid, and had he known he would have wished no churchyard for his last camp. “Thinking thus, I began to dig a grave at the foot of the cliff with my knife, scooping the earth out with my hands. My hands grew raw and my finger-nails bled; but I dug until evening, and the hole was as deep as my shoulders and.as long as his body.. Then, lifting him to the side of the grave, I got down in it and lowered him to rest. “Under his head I placed his blanket-roll and with my own blanket I covered him over. Then with tears blinding my eyes I began to scoop back the dirt which buried him forever. On top of the mound I rolled huge stones to keep off the coyotes ‘and the lobos. Then as the darkness fell I ran toward the village. “FOR days I hung around San Marcos like a dog that has lost | its master. The peons were not like my own kind now, but like a different race. I slept in the corrals in the straw where the pack-mules are fed for the night and where poor drivers slept after their hard oy S eh They kept silent, and sy tapped their foreheads that I was loco and without power of thought. “At last when I had grown lean and gaunt from the continued starvation I sought out a job with the owner of a -maguey plantation at nine Mexican pen- nies a day. All day I plowed yokes of oxen in the fields, turning over the packed soil for the young plants, “eating soured beans and musty fortillas with the other laborers. “For a month I stood this treadmill like . a work-beast in the yoke, like one of the mangy oxen I prodded to drag the plow. Then I stole a blanket from the line back of the planter’s house and crept out to take the stage-road for Guadalajara. ‘Down across the Isthmus of Tehuante- pec I came, through Central America. I worked on the canal with the silver-roll employees until I had money for clothes and a fine outfit. “TI heard men speak of Alaska, and I worked my way up the west coast and into the cold country of the north. I came back through the Canadian Klondike and ~ over the nine-hundred-mile trail to Edmon- ton. I came back down into the States and prospected in the Rockies. “T have traveled the North and South American country over from end to end. The spirit of the gringo has got into me. I peer into stream-beds and crush bits of stone; I look up and down cajfions for sign of a rich high bar. Unrest is in my heart. Some day I’ll strike it rich.” () at his cigaret as he looked across at No us. We stretched forth our hands and grasped both of his. “Mex,” I told him, ‘‘you are a true-blue guy and we are on the same mission. We can take another buddy into our crowd if it’s all the same to you.” I turned to look at Rodin, and deep down in throat he vouchsafed his assent.. Then the three of us turned into our blankets; for tomorrow was another day. THE greaser paused and flicked od uw al ~~ a “" > vy M4 . PLS OS OD TUPI) we ee . Mis