Adventure Magazine Cover — page 165: what you’re looking at

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

Gilford the Gifted “In the course of his investigations he—I mean, as he was looking around, passing from one dingy, narrow street to another along the—er—waterfront, he suddenly found himself in the middle of a scrap be- tween the badly mixed crews of two dirty little tramp steamers belonging to a couple of rival East India companies in Bombay or Madras—TI forget which. “Chip was not keen about getting the details of the business. He wanted to get out of there as quickly and as safely as pos- sible. So he didn’t stop to inquire what the scrap was all about. He was getting out pretty nicely, too, when some one caught him suddenly from behind and something that, for a second perhaps, felt like a piece of silk-covered wire touched the sides of his neck. ‘A second later—well, you’ve never seen @ grocer cut a cheese with a thin piece of wire fastened to two sticks. But that’s what Chip thought was happening to his throat and neck. That is, as long as he was conscious enough to know anything. “Then, he felt himself slide off into no- where and everything was black.” Gilford paused. Soliden was attentive enough but bewildered. His grasp of the details was too confused to make him a very encouraging listener. Therefore, Gilford, who was Jealous of his climax, tried to make it easier for him. “Do you know what a violin or a fiddle is?” ‘“Vessah. Mista’ MacGregor at Seg- wanga has a fiddle.” “Right. Ever look at the strings of a fiddle?” ““Yessah.” “Well, there’s a class of people in India called Thugs who take long fiddle-strings and put a noose on them and drop the noose around the necks of people they don’t like. Then they pull the noose tight and——’”’ Gilford pantomimed the rest. Soliden threw his head back, opened his mouth wide and filled the swiftly falling darkness with laughter that was loud and long. ‘“‘Well,”’ Gilford went on, “that was what happened to Chip.” “He daid!” “No. But he doesn’t know why he isn’t. When he woke up he was on board, his own ship, but for days he was quite a bit out of his head. Nothing could convince him that 159 his head hadn’t been separated from his body. His throat was all bound up, of course, and he had a wild notion that the bandages were all that kept his head on his shoulders. ; “In other words, he felt sure that he had been beheaded the way a grocer splits a cheese and that if he moved the least little bit his head would roll away from his body. Of course, it was only imagination, but to this day, all the way around Chip’s neck, there is a thin hair-line mark. And it isn’t red. It’s black.” Soliden did not appreciate it. He had never seen a cheese just after the wire cutter had passed through it. So that Gilford, whose camp bed had been put up in an empty hut adjoining, sought sleep early that night with a depressing sense of disappointment upon him, mutter- ing something about pearls and swine. SOLIDEN had little to say to Yuleela for the greater part of the evening, and she marveled somewhat at his unusual reticence. Asarule, when he knew that she was discouraged or appre- hensive about anything, his methods of tormenting her into anger so that he might enjoy the pleasure of subduing her again, were more than usually devilish. And he knew that she was disappointed in her failure to borrow the necessary oil from Myoka so that she might become the wife of Hoduna the axman. In fact, Soliden liked to think that Yuleela wanted to marry Hoduna, and could not. He liked even better to know that the axman was one of his own headmen, compelled to listen and sometimes actually to witness Yuleela’s pain and degradation without being able to move hand or foot. In Whitechapel or Fifth Avenue, it is not good to interfere between a man and his wife. It is something akin to suicide in the mud-built villages of the Niger swamps. Yuleela would not have permitted it or understood it in any case. Soliden, therefore, tortured two souls and laughed while the want of a puncheon of golden yellow oil stood between them and their desire. But, this evening he did not laugh. He sat under the light of a stand lamp and played with a piece of thin, black rosined string—the kind that was used for binding broken adze or ax handles. CoOnnicloool C@