Adventure Magazine Cover, February 3, 1921 — page 167: what you’re looking at

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

The World’s Opinion He winced and cringed—and kept his post. He lost every ounce of blood out of his face from very fright—and kept his post. He opened his mouth and babbled like a scared child—but he kept his post. And when he was relieved at last, he wilted in his tracks, crumpled into a still heap under the very feet of the other men and, when they had dragged him to the ~ companion and down the ladder to his berth, wriggled to his elbow—out of a profound swoon, it appeared—and apologized most humbly. In two hours he was on deck again, quaking in his dread and yet offering to go aloft to snug a topsail newly blown out. ' In the din of the tempest and the swirl of pursuing green crests the world assumed most certainly a malignant and terrible aspect. Over the formless deep spread a devouring chaos full of seven-tongued fury. The driven ship moaned in all her timbers, shouted hoarsely at galley door and wheel- house and where the cuddy roof butted out of the after-deck, shrieked her agony of help- lessness from every stay and brace, wailed and sobbed amidst her top hamper; and fast upon her flying heels, swooping at her with white-plumed claws, fetching up under her and dragging her back, snarling, baying primordially, gnashing its teeth, driveling insanely, came the whole body of the sea with great smoothly timed pounces and a blinding mass of spray. aij quaking souls turn their eyes, de- scended no slightest ray of hope; a smoky cast it had, and all its immeasurably deep wind-caves were massed together, ob- literated, swept by a thin black scud. Wretched, hunted and haunted, the Jessica glistened in the weird light from stem to gudgeon, from wash-streak to trucks. At the summit of a forty-foot comber set like a wall to stop her, she shook herself and ran out the burden of water through her scupper-holes, only to freight herself anew with the next dizzy descent into greenish-black depths. Topgallantmasts bent forward so that the trunks of the lower masts against which the men crouched for protection from the biting spume thrummed to a ghostly pitch. The watch sought vainly to find the lee of any and all uprearing structure; there was no lee; the savage wind struck from every quarter and raked them mercilessly. 1i OUT of a firmament, toward which 161 Bedraggled, dull of eye, they capitulated at length, gripped whatever came into their hands and let the demoniacal seas tumble over them. And the forty-foot combers on the fourth day were fifty feet tall and full of a lurid glimmer all their own. That night the mainroyalmast snapped off. Arnie, clad only in his light-weight sailor’s garb, occupied a position amidships and, feet wide-planted, body stooping to meet the gale, stared aft through smarting eyes and gaged the velocity of the wind, making it fifty knots, 3 The night came down, blotted out the long vigil of twilight, blotted out wraith-like scud and lustrous emerald hills, blotted out man from the sight of man. Still Arnie stood, only now he listened, substituting his hearing for his sight. The thunder of a sea racing faster—faster than the blundering, yawing Jessica, broke with a nerve-shattering roar upon his ears and would have spun him as lightly as a chip out upon the yeasty turmoil had he not gripped a spike driven into the mast and heaved himself off his feet; even then he was deluged. And almost with the expiring of those bruising waters boomed yet another crash- ing wave. Down upon all fours he dropped and splashed and wallowed and crawled aft. His recklessness held the next sea in admir- ing abeyance; his head thrust in at the wheel-house door. He shouted a greeting to the two men there. “Got to come about!” he yelled at them. “Can’t make it! Sea’s too high!” One of them nodded; his gnarled fingers and his knees, too, held the wheel from spinning and hurling them all into eternity. He had nothing to say. The other turned his head and cried out a protest. This was the man Grant. Arnie scrutinized him. In the dim light flung upward from the binnacle Grant’s face showed ashen and given over to a nervous- ness that set it a-quiver in every muscle. He saw Arnie’s faded, stubborn grin and tried to match it. “M , sir, we can’t do that!” he blurted huskily. “We can’t—can’t!”’ “What’s to stop us?” Arnie questioned blankly. ‘“ ’Fraid, are you?” Fhe word acted upon Grant in an al- » together different manner than he had COMMICMOOOkKS (C@