Adventure Magazine Cover — page 48: what you’re looking at

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

38 Cleaver, and you’re made. Stick to owners like that. Run your ship to orders, keep your record clean, and when ye’ve got pas- sengers aboard remember they’re but woolly lambs in your tender care and bear with their whims and their grouches and their sometimes dum foolishment as you would toward children. : “But above everything else, Billy, keep clean hands and a clean record. That’s about the only thing the owners are flint- hard about. They never give a man an- other chance who turns a bad trick on ’em. If I lost this ship, and the court decided against me, good-by to me, that’s all. If the decision said ’t wasn’t my fault, my job would be waiting for me whatever the _ world said about the case. Oh, they’re the men to tie to, Billy!” The old man had waxed quite enthusias- tic in his warmth, and for once in a long time I saw him go to his late train with a lighter step and a smoother face. Every night he went to his suburban home, where his fine old domestic partner awaited him all through his long voyages, hoping for that day to come when she need no more can the maritime news for reports of his movements. The imminent realization of that high hope would help.wonderfully to offset the sorrow she had suffered through Dick. Oh, no doubt the old man carried home that night a heart full of cheer. NEXT morning I stepped outside | the dock-gates to buy my morning paper before breakfast, and the news was burned into my brain even as I took the damp sheet. Headlines, they were; big, black, appalling to me who was inter- ested more than a little. : STEAMER’S LIFEBOAT PICKED UP IN BAY oF Biscay. CAPTAIN AND FOUR MEN SAVED. VESSEL, THE S. S. Hispaniola, STRUCK ON ROCK IN THE NIGHT. “His paniol.z!” { muttered unbelievingly. “Dick’s new ship? Can’t be!” I hurried aboard and propped the paper against the stanchion of the table while I ate. The details were meager; just the names of the survivors and the very scanty report made by the skipper himself to the man who picked him up. But right there beneath the main item of interest was Adventure another bit which started my thoughts whirling and kept them whirling all day. AEROPLANE FLYING FROM CADIZ TO BREST WITNESSES WRECK OF STEAMER. AVIATOR MAKES STARTLING REPORT. Only to give the casting away of the Hispaniola its due importance in the story, it suffices to say that Dick Basil’s step into foul business proved disastrous. When he became foolish, taking silly of- fense at his father’s reprovings, and joined in with a crooked gang of ship-murderers he overlooked the fact that the air has been conquered. The old man fought hard to save him at the inquiry, engaging counsel without re- gard to cost; but that aviator’s evidence damned the lad in the eyes of the grim old seamen who sat in judgment. They could not see any reason why a steamer, under control, due west of the Chausée de Sein and bound from Huelva for the Channel, should be steering a few degrees south of east, even allowing for the seventeen de- grees of variation in that region and any possible deviation the ship herself might have. 3 “Ticket suspended for one year,” the old man told me when all was over. His eyes glistened suspiciously. “And I heard ’em saying, Billy, when they didn’t think I could hear, that he’d | have been broke fer good only they felt sorry’ for me! D’ye hear that, Billy Cleaver? Sorry for me, so they let him down easy! They think they can make me feel it less, the disgrace of it!” We loaded and sailed for Australia, and only once, just after dropping the pilot off Dungeness, did the skipper mention Dick to me. It appeared that, besides his other follies, Lick had become entangled in an affair with a barmaid in London and faced a paternity case. I heard very little about it, except that it had, coming a-top of the casting away of his ship, aimost killed his mother. The only saving circumstance in the whole messy business seemed to be that when, Dick started for Australia, passage paid by the old man, to seek a fresh start, the lad had stood by the girl, married her honestly and insisted upon taking her with him. For the rest, the old Murmurous slogged her way around the world again, discharged ‘comicbooks — (E@)