Adventure Magazine Cover, August 18, 1921 — page 177: what you’re looking at

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

Ghost-Pipes Yet had he listened he might have sur- mised long years before what was so clearly revealed to him now. Now he recalled having heard—and scoffingly jeered as “In- jun superstition”—tales of the powers of Black Kettle, the Apache wizard who, when all others failed, could make medicine that sent forth warriors to victory, turned them into fighting fiends, insensible to pain, fear- less of death, impossible of defeat in their own belief and too often victorious through that very conviction of infallibility. Below him in the cul de sac there were as many as three hundred Indians. The teepees were set along the walls of the cafion and formed a long V. Down the center there was a widening avenue between the teepees, and toward the base of it burned, in the middle, a fire. In front of the teepees were a number of old squaws, but no old men or children or maidens. This was a war-party. Around the fire pranced the bucks, hideously daubed with paint, wearing masks of animals’ heads, waving spears, knives, clubs, rifles, toma- hawks, and chanting in a subdued pitch the story of their past prowess, their invinci- bility against the whites and the toll of scalps they would bring back on the morrow. To the tune of the chant and the pad of moccasined feet on beaten earth, the voices and hand-clapping and drum-beating of the squaws mingled with the musical chink of the dancers’ trappings of silver and brass. “Nee-tak! Nee-toh!’? chanted the squaws in a flattened minor. “Hay-yah! Hay-yoh! responded the per- spiring warriors in hoarse gasps. But the eyes of Fergus of the Gairloch were fixed on one figure—that of Black Kettle, the medicine-man. The Apache wizard stood at the apex of the encampment’s V. He was a fright- .some apparition. His face was blackened with pot-soot. Red and white streaks painted enlargement of his mouth. Great yellow smears were about his eyes, and two horizontal lines of vermilion on his brow. His body was draped with a motley of skins, his head crowned with a pair of buf- alo horns, and from each bare arm and from his scrawny neck hung living, squirming, whirring rattlesnakes. But all this had Fergus seen and sneered at before. The thing that made his blood chill with awe and boil with rage was in the hands of Black Kettle. | 171 The medicine-man did not even know how to hold the thing. The leathern bag, puffed out, stood away at an angle, while the drones stuck out at others, like legs of some gigantic spider, held in relative position only by the old, faded, silken gathering-cord. The once gay tartan streamers drooped listlessly from the peaks of the drones as if feeling conscious of indignity and disgrace. The mouthpiece of the ancient instrument was bitten between the teeth of Black Kettle, whose pufied face, as he straining blew, streamed perspiration over his paint. In his ced hands was the ebony chanter, his untaught fingers on the holes. And the bagpipes that had once blown the glory of the Bonnie Prince emitted a savage wailing that was more. horrible than imagination can conceive. It was the “big medicine” of Black Ket- tle—the ‘Fighting Spirit” of the tribe—the revered and infallible fetish of the Apaches. The dance ended abruptly. Black Kettle gathered up his strange ‘‘medicine god” and disappeared within his teepee of mysteries; his work done, his charm spelled. The chief of the band, Yellow Dog, harshly ordered the squaws within, then held council with his warriors about the fire. By midnight the last embers of glowing greasewood were sanded to blackness and the camp of the savages slept against the fierce activity planned for the dawn. ON THE bluff overlooking the scene the Gila had lain for two hours his face framed between his hands, his old heart and brain wrought with many emotions and a thousand memories. The old madness was gone, the old hallu- cination dispelled forever. Only one thing was clear. His master, Young Roy of Arden-Keppel, was indeed dead—had been dead and his soul at peace these thirty and three years. The pipes he had heard were no ghost-pipes, but the old pibroch in the hands of savages! At first the disillusion hurt. Then a fierce satisfaction was born. It was not he, Fergus, that was living Nemesis for his master’s murder, but the pipes—the pipes of Arden-Keppel! They—and not the ghost of Young Roy—had called in the night, not to inspire savages to battle, but subtly summoning Fergus to their undoing! And by the hills of Gairloch, this night should honor that summons! © MICLOOOKS © 5}