Adventure Magazine Cover — page 54: what you’re looking at

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

“ ¥ —— = os _. a a og ee es $5 tas eae Te Be See heb ee ee Fo cn i ae . 3 Aa eres Po LS rine ee Pees a Agu r = os “ eS FSS em = ae Oa Sar. Sra Fo eo, “3 2 ? pe —— Pe ae - _ ‘F af ” Saget ag 5 =e of its being avoided, there was no telling what men might do while under the in- = 3 _ fluence of the blood lust. And if Hasbrouck should happen to be = % the victor—had Dal been betting on the issue his money would have been on the ~¢attleman—Vincie’s position would surely -.be perilous. Already Hasbrouck, a married man, had made the infamous proposal that the girl live with him—Dal discredited _ utterly Hasbrouck’s plan to commit bigamy _ » which had been implied in his offer of marriage. This was only an index to what might be expected from the man should the sheepmen be defeated. Dal cursed Bradley fervently. He had no personal animus toward the detective, but =e events had made Bradley practically. the sole protector of the girl, and he was keeping away the one man who would be willing to go to any lengths in her defense. Another thing which failed to make Dal - any more cheerful was the memory of Vic Sawyer’s attitude toward the girl. Dal had saad not to admit even to himself that he was really in love with her, or if the admis- Sion was unconsciously made he promptly: E genieiocd it as the supreme height of folly. aie = Her training, her education, her whole out- look upon life placed her definitely in a social stratum far above his attainments. Sawyer, however, had certain social graces 5 a in spite of his lowly occupation. His educa- = tion, though not erudite, was sufficient for him to pass as a gentleman when he wished to make the effort. He had a good posi- _tion—two hundred dollars per month and an interest in the business. Stranger things 2 happened than that Vincie, being thrown in his society continuously by the tnd 2 necessity of taking care of him, might tum- ‘ble into love with him. For some peculiar __ psychological reason Dal could face Vincie’s passing entirely out of his own life with much greater equanimity than he could if _ he knew her future was to be merged with Sawyer’ S. - Being stopped from going to Silver Zone _ Dal determined at least to take a little ride ne the edge of the mountains in the direc- ‘tion of Hasbrouck’s ranch. In dealing with _ the rancher there was always the possibility = = of stumbling onto some incriminating circum- stance, Dal reasoned, because Hasbrouck 28 = simply had to be doing something crooked. complexity to the situation. If there was actual fighting, and he could see no prospect Bee cea ee 34 Soe Adventure The skit of snow had disappeared on the tops of the hills and ridges where the wind could strike, but in the hollows it was still _ deep enough to leave a clearly defined hoof print. Dal, however, was paying little attention to this feature until suddenly he came upon the clean tracks of three horses, one of them shod. A careful scrutiny de- veloped that one horse carried a rider, but the other two were probably being led. Had they carried riders they would have traveled abreast. The tracks had been made the day before, and they had gone up into the mountains and returned over — the same trail. This indicated, of course, that there had been some definite terminal of the unknown horseman, Dal decided that it might be. worth his while to investigate the trail to where it ended. He was now well to the west of Silver Zone, not far from the place he had camped . after the shooting of Nevada. ‘The trail wound around to the northward for a mile, then veered sharply to the right straight over the face of a high-backboned, slate- covered ridge from which the snow had long since gone. The sharp, jutting rocks were hard on a horse’s feet and old Spot, being unshod, protested energetically against be- ing compelled to take them, Dal dismounted and looked around. The © tracks he had been following could no longer _ be seen, for no tracks. were left on the rocks. Abutting, fiint-covered ridges, wind-swept might travel for hours without finding a horse track even though he was an experi- _ enced tracker, which Dal assurediy was not. One fact, however, seemed fairly certain. The man, whoever he was, would not have punished his horses so by dragging them over the sharp stones without some well thought-out reason. And the most obvious reason was that he wished his trail to be lost. “TY know it’s ——, old man, but you got to take it until we ‘git to the top of this ridge an’ see if we can find where this hombre went,” Dal told old Spot, leading him reluctantly along behind. The keen, cold wind on top of the ridge made-the man shiver and the horse hump his back against it when they stopped. Dal knelt in front of the horse and applied the field glasses in a careful scrutiny of his sur- roundings. For a long time he saw nothing that promised anything of value, and was ‘about to put up the glasses when his eyes ‘comicbooks and lonely ran in every direction. A man ~ (E©)