Adventure Magazine Cover — page 122: what you’re looking at

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

Adventure dripping lashes. Then as Metztli swung about and with bare walnut-brown heels kicked the heavy bay into the lead, she resumed her story: ONE day in the early Spring of the present year the three pebbles arrived. 282 A nun glided along the corridor to Mariquita’s room and gave the bandanna- wrapped stones into her hand. “Ah, Mother of God!” the girl exclaimed fearfully. “Tt is the three pebbles of San Esteban! Oh, my poor father, the poor papacito of my soul!” The three pebbles were an old peasant sign | having reference to the stoning of St. Stephen or San Esteban. . Her father had thoutght of it because he had been born in the Tarragonian town of San Esteban del Piedros—St. Stephen of the Stones. Her poor father needed her. “But who brought them?” she inquired through her tears. “My father, Don Jorge, himself? But no! It must be some withered copies who will die now no doubt of the long ride!” The nun shook her head that was covered with the white starched headdress and long black veil of a medieval day. “None of them you think, my child,” she returned. “It is a young man in the moreno ~ uniform of the Carranzistas—a lieutenant with a little golden mustache and bright hair. “You are certain, guerida, these stones are a > > has ue) &. na ‘S ye - i “4 7+ <r! - reek ok sign from your padre? This teniente is pleasing, to the eye and I know in these troublous terrible ~ times the good Mother Superior will never suffer our little dove to go forth with him, un- less ‘she is very positive he comes as an em- powered emissary from the noble Don Jorge.” “Show him to the reception room, sister, please,” said the girl, her brown eyes misty and baffled. ‘And you must wait while I talk with him, so that we both can make sure he comes with the correct credentials. But y pues! how could any one surmise the sign agreed upon between my father and me, that old peasant sign of San Esteban? No; something dreadful has befallen mi pobre padre!” And she fell once more to weeping. The man in the khaki uniform of a lieutenant of Carranza’s army, smooth of cheek, waxed of small mustache, blond-headed, short and dap- per as a dancing master, proved to be none other than the arch enemy of her father, that renegade and soured one, Serafin Dicenta. “God of my life!” the girl cried shuddering, covering her -eyes with her hands. “My father! He is dead! Oh, the poor father of me!’”? And she Would have fled in blind ter- rible panic from the presence of the lieutenant had not the nun stood in her way, insisting that she hear the man out, and had not the man himself caught one of her hands from her eyes and, talking breathlessly, holding and stroking tenderly her hand, pleading and palliating, s E 7 vowed the constancy and fervor of his frien i a ship for herself and her father, his eternal contrition for anything and everything he : - might have done. He had sharply and altogether suddenly awakened to the savagery of those Colorados of bis, he swore. had joined the ranks of the Carranzistas ex- pressly to hunt down his former compadres because of their fiendish cruelties. He had heard that the barbarous ones had been harass- ing the good EI Cenizo. to El Cenizo*himself, in the uniform of the recognized government and learned the shock- ing truth. The very day of his arrival in Guadalupe y Calvo, on his way to the hacienda, @ troop of Colorados had swept into the town, burning and pillaging. El Cenizo had come down out of the hills with a small body of men. The men were killed or put to rout and El Cenizo, wounded severely, was captured. Shot through | fa the lung as he was, the frightful Colorados had slung up the hacendado, by his wrists, to a cross- beam in the charred skeleton of one of his own mills. They had warned the women of the town not to cut him down, nor to tell where he was hung. Then affrighted by some scare, probably the false report of a new levy of tenants coming down the hills, they had fled leaving the Ashy One to die by slow inches, of thirst, of torture and of his throbbing wound. Mariquita moaned through blanched lips and teetered back and forth on her feet. The nun, seeing her poor charge an agonized thrall to the man’s terrible words, slipped soft of foot down the hall to fetch the Mother Superior and at the same time in case of need, a glass of water. Through the morning, the merciless sun of noon, E] Cenizo had swung there until, about eventide, Lieutenant Dicenta had happened into the pueblo on his way to the hacienda and noticing the smoke of recent fires, the dumb fear of the women who fled to cover like stricken creatures at sound of his horse’s hoof- falls, he had forced them to reveal the truth. He himself had cut down the kacendado, had laved his sunken-cheeked gray face, washed his wound and squeezed water, drop by drop, upon his protruding swollen tongue. For minutes long as burning in purgatory, he had thought the Gray One dead; then, oh so feebly, there was a flutter of heart! Horror and great pity stayed, as in a frame, the Mother Superior and soft-footed nun in the doorway. The water from the glass in the nun’s trembling hand spilled a little on the rug but neither she nor the Mother Superior noticed. They had thought only for the distraught swaying girl whose eyes were like harvest moons in a bloodless face. Dicenta did not desire that El Cenizo should He had turned sick at it alland ~ Z COMMICLOolkKs (0) Whereforehehad gone — & i} py. PEAT PAS AS ay