Adventure Magazine Cover — page 125: what you’re looking at

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

nugh. Deep-sunk and rimmed with shadows brown eyes were black-and glassy as agates. She threw herself upon the bed and _ kissed ie stubbled lips, the ashy cheeks. Her body ook with long terrible sobs, she moaned, she uddered, and then at last she began to weep if she would weep forever. After a little she drew out of the abyss of _ despond and they talked. The white napery of the little table and stark effigy of the Man of Daeg _ Sorrows, hanging to a tiny ebon cross with _ realistic red wounds in hands and feet and side, aan showed plainly that the last rites had been per- -— formed and her father prepared for death. In a calm, resigned though breaking voice, __ the voice of one speaking up from purgatory, her father told her of the movable slab in the _ wainscoting of his bedroom, behind which, if ; as _ she would slide the panel back, she would find a ee _ black metal box. When she brought the: box __ tohim, he whispered that the key of its lock was 3 in the little scapula bag over his wounded ~ swathed chest. Within the box she saw a roll Se + papers, 4 bundle of folded documents, im- _ posing with gold seals, 2 number of small brown 3 and black books and a miniature salt sack that, when she lifted it, clinked metallically. = He had her hold up each document in the - wan light before his glassy eyes. The antique ing scrolls were the original deeds of patent to the hacienda, he explained, stamped and _ sealed = under the hand of Lerdo de Tejada, who pre- ‘ceded Diaz in the presidency. The paper - _ Written in Czech was the last will and testa- ent of her grandfather. That deed of gift, z ‘properly witnessed and sealed, but never re- & _ corded, was the evidence of the transfer of the estate to her which he had executed when she had left him that last time for the colegio. Ss = _. The brown and black leaflets were the s savings and check books on Mexican banks which no ___ Jonger existed, but which might be reestablished, '_ some happy day, and thereat liquidate their a3 - obligations. What gold he had been able to _ gather through the troublous times he had put . — into the small salt sack. Also, therein, in a tiny leather bag he had placed her mother’s pearl necklace and platinum-set diamonds, and the two keys to the family vault up the valley. ¥ She was to take the tin dispatch-box and all it contained. She was to flee with Serafin _ Dicenta as her escort across Chihuahua to the Rio Grande and that land of refuge, the Ameri- can States. Yes, he trusted Serafin now without ee wie ie reservation, implicitly. He only wished that, er? they undertook the perilous journey, the two might marry. ee “No, not that, my father; oh, not him!” _—. -Mariquita .cried out. She tried to say more; but her tongue filled her throat and she could only gasp shrilly and pant for breath, as she leaned close to catch his failing whispers. But yes, that’ would be the best thing. Toyama Mexico was a hideous place for an unmarried girl. much the same race as herself, her mother and her grandfather; and he had been the only one brave enough to cut her father down from his crucifixion. seen his little one, and hung there to become the torn contention of feathered scavengers. Yes, child, it would be best that they should Otherwise he might never have And Serafin was a good man; he was — marry. Then all the imagined wrong, the old -_ old wrong that had rankled down through ~— father and son, would be assuaged and righted. He had spoken to the priest who still clung on to poor Guadalupe, geod Father Pio Abogado, who had given him that day Extreme Unction, the final solemn rite of the church. He had instructed Padre Pio to‘teturn, that very after- noon, ready to perform the marriage ceremony. He would be willing to die then like Samuel of old, contented and at peace. Even as he spoke of the closely hovering blackness, strong Spanish jaw shockingly. ‘““Xina, I am dying!” he whispered hoarsely, clutching with long dry fingers at the wound in his bandaged chest, his eyes widening fright- fully. “My little one——” Grief struck the girl mad. Swiftly, fiercely, she crushed the trembling lips to. her own. a shudder shook through him, stretched and stiffening his lips, loosing his. Then, the taut eyelids pulling down as if under — the weight of some monstrous burden, she slipped off the bed and lay in a swoon of numb despair upon the floor. A CHAPTER XXIV . ‘ AGAIN THE SIGN OF THE MOUSE Now: as Mariquita visualized for me the tragedy of her father’s death ahd with the pity of it all, tears fmally misted the hot dry- ness of her eyes. We drew across the white dunes toward a swale of bottomi&nds set out like an unkempt orchard, with a low grove of mesquite and a bushy underwood of ashy-hued soap-weed. My pinto stretched his neck and shook his narrow head to loosen further the already slack reins and then of his own volition and with a certain enthusiasm increased his pace, as if he sensed ahead in the copse, a good feed on the mesquite pods or some pool of hidden water. We brushed through the oval-shaped gray leaves of the weeds, swept beneath the elongated mesquite pods and thorns, almost atop the tufted pastern-joints of the reddish cob on’ which Metztli ambled. All at once to the piping and shrill whir of disturbed quail, we broke out upon a little clearing, an open amphitheater, black with soft loam in which the canine spoor of coyotes was imbedded. Cutting the clearing almost * EOM|ElIO© S (C@ oe “= \