Adventure Magazine Cover, February 3, 1921 — page 163: what you’re looking at

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

Goomasaka Makes Good did not come back, and that a rat took a swim across that same creek, and never got to the other side; except for these things nothing particular happened in that place to show whether Goomasaka re- mained in that lugubrious place or not, or if she were dead or alive. Then, upon a day when all the world — seemed to have gone to sleep or expired via heat, the snub, scaly nose of our heroine ceased to be a piece of floating wood any longer and came up out of those unspeak- able waters to her rubbish-heap. Nay, she did more. Gracious, yes. The horrible thing seemed to have gone what the new elite describe as “potty.” She tore her nursery to pieces. It had caked hard out- side, and she broke it open; she crawled | inside—inside that natural steaming oven, mind. And, my! How hot it was. If it had not been so wet, it would have caught fire from spontaneous combustion. Noth- ing but a cold-blooded reptile could have stuck to it. Finally Goomasaka crawled out again, covered all up as before, and dragged her- self back to the water. Yea, “‘covered all up as before,” but with this difference. That heap of heated herbage had been empty when Goomasaka: visited it; not after. After, it contained eggs, eggs of the alligator, thirty exactly, to be precise, white but dirty like hens’ eggs, mainly rough shelled and granulated, weighing each roughly about three ounces—eggs, in short, of Goomasaka. Thereafter two and a half months dragged sweltering, stifling by. But this time there ~ was no- need to inquire for Madame Gooma- saka. She was there on hand at her post. Not on view exactly. I defy you to have found her with any amount of searching, but she would have found you, if you had approached her rubbish-heap nursery at any time of darkest night or brightest day, without any searching whatever. First a grunt and then a hiss and then a charge. This also others, who were not humans, discovered, for there is always somebody watching in the wild. One day it was an enormous lizard, very long and whippy, a regular giant-killer of a lizard, who reck- oned himself official collector of alligators’ eggs. He got as far as making a hole in the crust of the heap, and then Goomasaka, propelled as if by motors—and with much the same noise—got as far as him. Fol- 157 lowed a crack like a pistol-shot in the het- house silence, which was the lizard’s tail across Goomasaka’s back, then a scurry, then a rush, then a splash, then silence again. But the lizard had left .his tail! Upon another day it was a mongoose, that little, lithe, weasely cat, or catty weasel, just there from nowhere, silent as a big bristle-brush, digging away gaily. He, though he: was taken completely unawares, jumped clean over Goomasaka’s plated back as she hurtled by underneath. Only —he forgot the tail! Quick and quicker to move, sharp and sharper to dare—he forgot the tail. He never had the chance to remember it after. He was dead. Upon yet a third day it was a yellow- tailed snake. But that snake was an ama- teur. It never got any farther than the outer caked wall of the nursery. It could not dig. Nor could it jump, but went up a tree instead, with Goomasaka’s jaws snap- ping at its yellow end. Then, after two and a half months of weary waiting, watch- ing, perhaps—for even an alligator may have feelings, it seems—longing, the won- derful thing happened. a That precious heap by that time, thanks to the natural dampness of the place, the fierce rains and fiercer sun, had become pretty well “hard bake,” and how ‘the nightmare brood when it hatched was go- ing to break its way out before it stifled or stewed to death seemed a mystery the in- scrutable Goomasaka alone could solve, which is just what she did. Whether she could hear the faintest of faint grunting squeaks through the oven- walls or whether she could count the days or whether she had some other means of divining the truth by her own devil’s de- vising—who can tell? The fact remains, however, that upon a day she came up and sprawled herself all over the nest and re-~ fused to go off, even at the invitation of a lithe, lean, painted young jaguar, for hours. Then she finally got off and in a hurry began to tear through the crust as only those terrible ‘teeth could tear through things till she came unto those precious eggs. The first one she touched she rolled out, It was yellow, which means addled. She rolled it back and gently with her snout rolled out another. It was pinkish and quite smooth. Moreover, there was no doubt here. The pip-squeak within spoke in a tiny voice through his nose and that CORMICLOOOkKS (C©@)