Adventure Magazine Cover — page 113: what you’re looking at

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

AThree-fart Story! > zero LA fins 4 > ‘\ “> Conefysion, Ay Charles Beadle hing i rs =Si : Author of “The Brothers,” “The Spell,” etc. The first part of the story briefly retold in story form. A80UT the first adventure [ can remember was with Fraser H. Thorpe, back in early school- days. It lasted sixteen rounds, and left me with a feeling of permanent disgrace—because I’d thought of Frazer as a sissy, a student, a bug-chaser, and not good ior anything except hunting beetles. And that shows how wrong a man can be! My name’s Tromp, by the way. What he did in the world I don’t know. Mv luck took me with other men. And the prince of them was Billy Langster, one of the wildest who ever hit the Barbary Coast. But Biily disappeared—to become respectable, I understood; while I found myself trekking through the big thirsts in Africa with an Africander named Ollendorff. We wandered all over the shop from Bulawayo to the Nile, where old Ollendorff kicked in—or, rather, was gored out by a buffalo. The last I recall of Ollendorf was when we ran into the safar7 of a Levantine who called himself Gandy, somewhere northwest of Lake Albert Edward. Gandy was beating up a woman with a sjambok; so we beat him up instead—and left him cursing us in languages we couldn’t recognize and could treat with contempt. The Mahdi got me shortly after this and kept me in a cage for a couple of years, dangling from dromedaries’ backs in the eastern Sudan. When I got free I settled down—and, to make quite sure, I got married. Fate dealt me another hand a few years later, when I[ found myself a widower, alone, smoking a pipe in the lobby of a New York hotel. One night I went down into the old Tenderloin looking for some excitement with Hardwicke, a young English- man I[’d picked up in Mexico. And we found it. When the fight was over, Hardwicke—hetween drink and gratitude—spilled the beans about an expedition that was on foot for Africa. Right away I horned in, and he introduced me to the leader. I took one look and recognized him. “Billy!” So old Billy Langster gave me the dope first hand. He’d been about everywhere! New York, Fast Africa—where he was very nearly scuppered by a “The Land of Ophir,’ copyright 1922, by Charles Beadle. gang who first worshiped him and then wanted to eat him—China, Peru, Brazil, and Africa again— Morocco, to be exact, where he tried his hand at making sultans. This sultan business naturally brought him up with fat Johnny Starleton. Every one knows Starleton—he really does make sultans! Through Starleton, Billy met another regular fellow, Field- morre, an impecunious Irish viscount, who had a hunch of his own. Between them they’d got hold of Sabah, a Syrian who had gone in with a syndicate some years before to exploit the territory back of Juby, just south of the Spanish line on the West Coast where the Sis ends in the sea. The syndicate had gone on the bum when an as- sistant funked his job, and the local sheik was made to pay damages by a British gunboat. But there were rich pickings there; and Fieldmorre took up where the old syndicate ended. With Sabah he went inland and visited the Shareef Ma-el-Einen, ruler of the entire district. They made friends with the skareef and a Frenchman, Captain Véron, who butted in while on an exploring- trip from Senegal. Véron warned them it was sure death to go farther inland; told of atrocities—missing men— and so forth. The latest relic was the journal of a man who had gone in and not come out. Véron had got the book from a coast Fantee. Well, when Billy gave me that line, I grinned. “All right, you cynic,” said he; and he produced the diary. This diary-writing adventurer gave a pretty straight account of hitting inland to Nsonnafo’s village; and from there on until he struck a city of “oriental magnificence’ and met the sultan. Then he began to gibber about subphratries of the Snake Society—and sacrifices—and that was all. The account ended right there. It was in- teresting, but not conclusive. I turned the book over—and a name almost slapped me in the face: FRASER HALDE THORPE 105 COMmicbooolk< C@