Adventure, January 20, 1922 — page 119: what you’re looking at

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

Emperor of the Dragons first, go through him. Take everything he has, down to cigaret-papers. Find out who he is. Remember, if anything breaks, don’t wait for me. Get away. Go back to the at 117 car and get away, quick. You under- stand?” Silkeen grunted slightly and Billy said— “Sure t’ing.” TO BE CONTINUED Author of “Union is Strength,’ The Anti-Husilers,” etc. HE emperor was the sole sur- vivor of his mother’s house. One of his brothers had mur- dered a brother; the murderer had failed to recover from an argument with a sister; a second sister had craved a new dress, and died in the process of struggling out of the old one; a third sister had embraced a water boatman (who is an aquatic demon) and found she had em- braced death instead; yet another sister had got into a hole—in two senses—already rented by an eel, and had never got out again; several brothers and sisters had gone a-fishing, and had themselves been fished. And now only the emperor, as he was fated one day to be, remained, as unlikely looking an emperor as ever you set eyes upon. You see him stalking a tadpole, a cock- roach-like, obese accident, with pads where his wings one day would be, the face of a nightmare, goggle eyes in his head, his brain in his chest, and lungs in his several tails, and you may know him as a dragon- fly in the making, but at present only dragon without the fly. Further, he was one of the largest of several species of dragon-flies, a very king of his kind. Since the emperor only crawled slowly, however, and the tadpole swam hither and thither, it looked pretty safe for the tadpole. But the emperor could never have been meant to be an emperor had he not kept a few surprizes up his jointed sleeve. Suddenly the emperor shot all the water out of his lungs between his tails, as one squirts water out of a syringe, and the force thereof hurled him up through the water as if he had been fired from a spring. Smart it was, and a fine surprize, but it just failed to reach the fleeing tadpole by a quarter of an inch, a miss which you might think would be as good as a quarter of a mile. But what is a little thing like that to an emperor? This one kept his lower lip for contretemps of such a kind. The said lower lip was half as long as the whole beast, but folded up on a hinge. Let down, it again unfolded another hinge, and doubled its length. At the end were two claw-like hooks. And the emperor could: shoot the whole con- traption out with rather more speed than that revealed by a jack-in-a-box, and’no less suddenness. Thus, then, the tadpole was caught, just at the moment he had got clear away, and was hauled back to the real jaws in the emperor’s mouth, and—beheaded. The emperor, however, did not feed on his tadpole long. He dropped it, and, in a convulsion of fury, turned upon a worm that had dared to move in his sight, only the worm he did not kill, because the worm JOO COMMUC SS (C@