Adventure Magazine Cover — page 21: what you’re looking at

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

Plunder invested in brocades, decked with jewels and loaded down with gold. To Avary another vision came. A Mo- gul’s daughter! A dark-eyed maharanee, brown of skin but slender and well shaped of limb, voluptuous, regal. He saw himself riding in a lacquered and gilded howdah by her side upon a great elephant, while his retinue marched all about or rode on capa-: risoned steeds, the men turbaned, armored, bearing quaint but effective weapons— matchlocks and yataghans—salaaming him as potentate of some rich province. Son- in-law to the Great Mogul! There was a stake that appealed to him. The consent of the woman he barely reckoned with. By force of arms or by stress of sudden passion, it was all one. She would be in his power for ransom—and that _ ransom should be recognition of himself as her husband and high honors heaped upon him by the Mogul. There was much of Malvolio in Avary. His vanity kept stride with his imagination. But he said nothing of this plan. In- stead, he examined the natives, paid for news, sent out spies in various directions and compared notes until assured that the tale was true, even finding out the approxi- mate date of sailing. Then they set to sea again, cruising off Indus mouth twenty leagues from land—a reward of an extra quarter-share hung up for the man who first sighted their quarry—ranging off and on like hounds quartering a heath for scent. IT WAS Fulke’s sloop that flew the f welcome signal and, coming up, announced the glimpse of a great ne seen dimly in the mists of dawn, a mass of canvas, a ship with a towering poop, a tall and stately vesse] that looked at first to be an East Indiaman but, the fog lifting with the sun, resolved into a big dhow with all three masts lateen-rigged. The breeze was strengthening; and the three took position, a sloop to windward, another to leeward of The Duke, bearing down to where the canvas of Fulke’s dis- covery showed like a low-lying cloud. They . sailed on transverse course, the dhow com- ing on rapidly, showing her three-decked stern, the raking masts and great sails, the overhung prow and the open waists crowded with pilgrims. She was fairly bristling with guns. Avary estimated a hundred or more. “She'll carry a thousand or more aboard,” IS he said to Horton, focusing his glass as they gained on the chase that held its steady course, either lacking suspicion or unafraid. “What of it? Pilgrims and Moor mari- ners! A poor lot for fighting.” “Odds of ten to one.” ‘Ten sheep to every wolf of us! Best get below and get a bottle inside of you.”’ Horton swung away, tone and manner utterly scornful. It stung Avary, but he did not leave the deck to seek his usual buttress. In this difference of odds he saw a gap that he could not imagine bridged. Pilgrims could fight upon occasion, fight fanatically. The Mogul’s subjects were Mongols, wild men of Tartary, adepts with the knife. To board the dhow would mean that, even if their full hundred achieved simultaneous footing, each man would have a mob to fight, a mob used to short-range work with blades. His eyes dulled as the mate’s began to blaze. The flattened nostrils of the mate’s bashed-in nose distended, quivered with the lust of fighting and the hope of booty. Avary saw his men standing about, watch- ing the chase, eager, every man ready, girt with weapons, standing by their guns. But that to him did not make the risk less dis- proportionate. His dream of the Mogul’s daughter, of himself as. potentate, lost all form, all desirability. Horton bellowed an order. The ship rang with loud huzzas that were echoed back from the concavities of the sails. The black flag was being bent on a whip. It rose swift to the masthead in a confused mass, then flapped out on the wind, the skull and bones rippling to the flutter of the bunting. On both sloops the sable colors broke out. From the dhow’s maintopmast a heavy pennon caught the breeze and streamed in defiance—a flag of green bearing a crescent moon in silver, the flag of the Mogul. There were three rows of ports pierced in the dhow’s high poop; a ring of guns belted her. Puffs of smoke blew out from her side with stabs of flame back of them. Over the sea“came the boom of guns with round shot skipping toward Avary’s vessel, falling far short. The fight was on; the followers of Mohammed meant to protect themselves, and had shown their teeth. The gun-crews of The Duke crowded about their batteries; the gunner and his helpers were at the fore-chase. Bursts of cheering and wild yells showed the temper COMICLOOOKS (C@