Adventure Magazine Cover — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

LYLE p. Uy 7g SX San a SS NX SS NS & “54 b, eS. x ~ = 3 CAN —_ s S aS fe. BES, = “PRE , D hs i Ziekurseh Author of ‘John Blanket’s Lead Dog.” @}HE sun beat down like molten ; liquid on the alkali sand, a throbbing, searing heat that _ Wee) seemed to pulse with the knowl- edge of a diabolical power over the un- resisting silence of the desert. Vague dis- tances were lost in the purplish haze. One lone cactus broke the wastes. Gradually the cruel orb above slid downward into the west to droop behind the low horizon, dim with the heat mists. Then a sinuous white form appeared in the arroyo, and a pointed head with sharp ears and small eyes set wide in the thick, heavy skull, came to the edge, peering about. ~ The bull-terrier was ravenously hungry. The blackish water-hole in the arroyo alone had kept him alive. He was eight months old, and all of those eight had been lived here in the desert, two of them alone. So far life had been a harsh thing to him— and in his fierce brain was a deep hatred of man. His mother had been taken into the desert from the pits of Tiajuana by Joe Silva, gunman, itinerant prospector, gambler and even cattle-rustler on occasion. Mate to one of the mighty fighting dogs of the pits she had brought her progeny into the world here in the arroyo where Silva made his Q2 camp while burrowing in vain in the rocky strata that cropped out at the sides. There were signs of the red drift of copper, but Silva, with little love for the genuine toil of the prospector, dug only at intervals. Three whelps came to the female bull- terrier. Two of them, one a male and the other a female, throve even after the wean- ing, but the third sickened and became an object for surreptitious kicks and cruelties at Silva’s whims when it strayed away from the protection of the mother terrier. It was no good; it probably never would develop the powerful physique that had made its sire a champion of the bloody pits, for its sickness had made it a weakling. | Twice the pup, goaded by Silva’s brutali- ties, turned, silent and murderous, but im- mature and weak, to be flattened and beaten into submission. At last April brought its indications of the intense heat in the months to come. Silva worked less in the mornings and lazed about his camp in the afternoons, already beginning his task of training the healthy male pup for its grim profession. Then he broke camp, packed the outfit and tramped off to the southwest where the brutal miles of alkali sand ultimately ended at the edge of the desert. The mother terrier and two of the whelps, more ‘than DOOLK (©