Adventure Magazine Cover — page 93: what you’re looking at

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

eR SE id | eee ) hate ' “) rie ye . : - Ol Makaw Saratoga trunk, capable, I tell you, of chopping any little thing like a boat or a lion in half as we chop a biscuit. And it was the mouth that did it. Indeed, when you come to think about it, it had to be. Yet people seem to have over- looked the fact. Nature did not give Ol’ Ma- kaw a mouth like that—it-seemed too heavy and out of proportion even for his gigantic bulk —just to eat grass with. Howcould she? No, it was there for a purpose, tusks—which really looked like gigantic front teeth—and all, and that purpose appears to have been the discour- agement of crocodiles. Ol Makaw stumped back to the river, grunt- ing. He pounded out a peculiar double track, feet deep, with a ridge in the center like unto the track’ of no other beast, by reason of his great weight, his stumpy legs that took such absurd little fat strides, and the shortness of the same. Half-way to the river Ol Makaw stopped. Sight, hearing, smell were all super-sharp with him, but it needed no particularly quick ears, nor ‘specially sharp eyes, to hear the ominous growl, to see the smoldering eyes, that barred his path, that signaled “No road” dead ahead of him. Ol’ Makaw stood quite still, almost meekly, and without a sound, his gigantic mouth resting on the ground, as was his custom, as though it were too heavy for him. But most people stop when they hear that growl at night, anyway— the growl of a hungry lion. Cats, however, make some silly blunders sometimes, and the lion is the king of all the cats. This one had somehow got between Ol’ Makaw and water, barred the old giant’s pass- age along his own beaten road to the river—his river, that “his” being fulfilled; and you can take it from me that the beast that can do that, and stick to it, and live, does not exist. Ol Makaw’s patient quiet was quite misun- derstood by Leo Rex, however, who like all. cats,;was a mighty bluffer himself, and expected others to be also. He could not understand a straightforward character, but—he got it, four tons of it, mouth open like a red cave, tusks gleaming, ground-rocking, roaring grunts deaf- ening as earthquakes. What is more, he got it quick, too, for the speed of monstrous OI’ Makaw’s charge was only one degree less sur- prising than its suddenness. It was over in a jiff—just a rush like a landslide, and—gone. But, on the word of one who has had to face it, it was terribly disconcerting. And that rush caught that lion in his weak spot—his heel of Achilles, so to speak. © All cats get rattled when they are hustled; the lion no less, because He does not expect to be hustled. The lion lost his head. For one brief fraction of a second he tried to go every way at once, so tosay. For one minute space of time he failed to exert that almost miraculous quickness of movement for which he was famous. And the result was absurd. He got his lithe body out of the way all right, but not his tail! Ol’ Makaw trod on his tail—stamped it into the soft ground about a foot deep, as if smitten under a pile- driver. Of course Ol’ Makaw did not know— or care if he had. What is a tail more or less to four living tons of pachyderm anyway? He had aimed to chop Leo Rex into two pieces, not tread on his caudal appendage. OV Makaw passed straight on. So did the lion, and the thunder of his re- marks shook the night. Intensely sensitive to pain—like all his highly , strung tribe—the king flung himself in an ex- tremity of rage upon the old bull “hippo” as he passed; and like a burr and all cats, when they are really “het up,” where he landed, he stuck. OV Makaw stumped on. Ol Makaw was a remarkable beast; his naked browny skin—pink like piggy under the arm-pits—was inches thick. No one from the listening camp could find any blood on his trail next day; yet who else, who, I - say, could carry that terrible jockey—and live? Ol Makaw, still keeping to his own-made path, came in quick time to his own-made, slip- pery, muddy chute down the steep river-bank; and still going at full plod, and in pitch dark- ness, Ol’ Makaw shot his chute, as a few tons of cliff slides into the sea—splosh! It really was most stupendous, and the waves he kicked up were great. The lion came up grandly on the top of one wave, spitting and swearing like ten thousand cats rolled into one—scandalized, undignified, annoyed beyond words. ‘What is more, though I, and he even, would have said it could not be done, he got up that steep overhanging bank— without any “take off’? mind—in one convul- sive spring. © Like the dingo in the story. The beggar could not climb, but he got up the tree. He had to. The dogs were after him. In other words, Leo’s tail bled, and the scent of blood brought the, till then, apparently non-existent crocodiles on to the spot before you could yell, “K nife!’”’ After that the lion retired into the dark, dark bush after the manner of a receding thunder- storm, and the old bull hippo taunted him in the voice of a fog-horn as he went. _Then OP? Makaw, whose temper had been very violently upset, sank like a stone, and still bellowing—you could hear him right through the water from the depths of the river, which always struck me as a peculiar thing—galloped along the bottom with his yawning cavermof a mouth open, and chased the crocodiles. Truly few things are faster under the water than a crocodile chasing, but one of them is a crocodile being chased; and the extraordinary rapidity with which there became a dearth of crocodiles in that place was a wonderful exhibition of the cunning of those horrible saurians, for one thing, COMmMiCMOoolks CO Np foun