Adventure Magazine Cover, February 3, 1921 — page 162: what you’re looking at

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

156 with mocca-mocca arum-lilies and green scum, squirmed a circle of glistening and grunting female alligators. They may have ranged from three to five feet long. In the middle of the circle, lying out along the surface, miscalled water, floated a great. bull alligator, whom the jostling ladies were all admiring with upturned eyes together. He was not lovely; they were not lovely; and he differed from them only, so far as main essentials go, in the fact that he was perhaps ten feet long. He said nothing, did nothing—just laythere soullessly, as if dead looking at them or at nothing. Then came Goomasaka, full steam ahead, grim and deadly. Goomasaka was a beau- tiful specimen of her sex, though not a beauty. She must have been over five feet long. And Goomasaka snapped, like lightning, right and left, and lo, as if she had broken some awful evil spell and let out all the furies on cinders, the whole scene dissolved amid throes into chaos. What transpired exactly perhaps the bull. ’gator may have known. To us, in the quarter-light and the shadows, it looked like the raving of insensate devils—an in- -extricable whirl of foam, flying water, Jash- ing tails, clashing jaws, grinding plated bodies, hissing compared to which the hiss- ing of a snake, even, is sweet and mild. It is a frenzy-seizure almost, peculiar to but not altogether uncommon in alligator- dom and crocodile society. Even quite young alligators em masse are subject to these berserk attacks, a sort of crowd fury, which seizes upon them like a raging fire and consumes lke a raging fire, too, for the matter of that, for the damage done is often terrible. Out of the living boiling volcano of strife was saved, by Fate, Goomasaka—whole, if not unscathed. Her jaws were red truly, but not with her own blood, and for the rest, she had given more than she took. She had dived and come up close to the bull. For ten seconds he looked at her, or he did not look. Upon my soul, one can not tell what-these cold-blooded nightmares see or think. Then he winked one horny eyelid and the two sank out of ‘sight to- gether. So far, so good. That was the end of them and their April madness, one might have thought, and good riddance to un- holy horrors. But it was not the end. It was only the interval. Adventure @é THE place was damp, the air was ein dank, the ground was damp and dank, and the thick waxy foliage and the fleshy fungi, the fantastic-shaped mosses and the smothering lichens were damper and danker still, and dripping. Shaded even at noonday with a deeper than religious gloom, fateful in its cathedral silence, that was the only thing religious about it. - Otherwise it was-no place for Christians, and the heat was most unholy. One was just beginning to think that if anything lived therein it must be demons ~ to match the heat, when Goomasaka came up. Through brightest green scum she came up, and with the leaf*of a giant water-lily plastered over one eye and water- weed obscuring the other, she did not look likely to win that “golden apple.” But some people say that a true woman’s place is in her home, working, not gadding about _at dances, looking beautiful. Well, Goomasaka was all that, and one better. She was building her home, or her nursery rather, in a sun-bar. Her ugly, long snout was as full of the most beastly mess of decaying vegetation as ever it could hold, and there was a heap of the same to prove it. Goomasaka deposited her load upon the heap. It was hers, all her very own, and she had made it. This was her last load. She had, as it were, “put the roof on,” torn, mouthful by mouthful from vile, scum- choked sloughs, and the whole affair was beginning to rot. It was already hotter inside to the touch than even the outside stewing air. Then Goomasaka retired stealthily, sink- ing back into the coffee-colored water, and for about three weeks was no more seen— but she was there, or thereabouts, and came stealthily to that secret place o’ nights. Oh, yes! And, by the by, there was no sign of the terr-foot monster hubby; neither then nor thereafter was there so much as a hiss of him. But what can you expect of a fellow so ludicrously lionized and ab- solutely run after as he? Perhaps he had long since bigamously gone off with some other scaly charmer-or charmers. Th’ blackguard! And that was in May. Three weeks passed and except for the fact that a cavy—which is the father of the Guinea-pig—went to drink in the creek be- side that rotting heap of vegetation and COMmMicloooks COL