Adventure Magazine Cover — page 55: what you’re looking at

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

Silver Zone . _ chaparral. rested upon something down in a cafon far below him and back to his left toward the place he had started from that interested him. He had looked at the same place before without seeing anything out of the ordinary, but as he kept the glasses focussed there he was quite sure he had found some- thing important. The entire slope of the cafion was thickly covered with chaparral so dense that at first glance it seemed impossible to get a horse through. Being protected from the wind the snow still stuck to the tops of the bushes, and the thing that had arrested Dal’s attention was a long, thread-like strip through it which showed faintly green as though the snow had been brushed off the bushes by some passing object. Arising, Dal led.his horse carefully along the backbone of the ridge, all the time keep- ing a careful look-out for horse tracks en- tering the chaparral. Finally, following a rocky spur ridge, he found what he was iooking for—an old sheep trail through the Brush roots covered the ground like a net so that the tracks made by the horses were never plain, but the strip of green where the rider’s stirrups had brushed away the snow on the brush wrote a plain message, one that he would never have read, however, in the first place, without the aid of the field glasses. At the bottom of the cafion the brush -ended, but Dal picked up the trail easily in the snow. It wound crookedly back and forth up the slope of the next mountain, but there was a dim trail that had evidently been used for a number of years. The un- known had evidently trusted entirely to his tracks being lost upon the slate-covered ridge. At last the trail went over the top of the mountain and began to wriggle down the slope on the ofher side. Vertical rows of cliffs ran clear across the break of this mountain making it impossible to bring horses up that way. Dal began to wonder ii he was not wasting his time, and that the fellow had taken the roundabout way he had simply because there was no other way to go. This seemed more dhain ever probable when he reached the bottom of the cafion and found himself just above an abrupt break-off of at least a hundred feet, running clear across the cafion and joining one of the vertical cliffs on either side. The trail he had been following veered suddenly away to the right and entered a small grove of = En- = = Jack-pines in a pocket in the cafion. tering the grove Dal was astonished to see a small, half cabin, half dugout built into the steep face of the mountain. He stopped his horse and contemplated | the cabin calculatingly. It was built in a triangular pocket with the only mode of ingréss through the grove of Jack-pines. It looked almost as if it had been built — 3 there for defensive purposes. More careful scrutiny disclosed the fact, however, that if such had been the idea of the builder his judgment was poor. True enough it would be hard for others to get in, but much harder for the besieged to get out. Dal scaled the cafion walls above the cabin with his eye and decided that a man, by being very careful, might descend on foot to the roof of the cabin; but that it would be well nigh impossible to climb up from - ‘the bottom. Though reasonably certain that whoever had been there before him had gone back Dal approached the door cautiously. The door was latched, and there was also a heavy wooden bar placed across the out- side. He removed the bar, raised the latch and entered. A damp smell greeted him as he stepped on the dirt floor. There was no window whatever and it was a moment before he could accustom his eyes to the poor light. When his vision cleared he saw a typical prospector’s cabin. There was a small sheet- iron stove in one corner, a bunk in another, a rude table in the center, and a rough cupboard against one side. Piles of débris and bits of old, rusty prospecting paraphernalia were scattered around the room. It was evident that this stuff had not been touched for months. | Not everything, however, was mildewed with age. fresh bedding; new cooking utensils hung behind the stove, and several cases of groceries were stacked under-and upon the table. But search as he would Dal could find no clue to the identity = the man who had put them there. There was a hole, or door, in the back of the cabin that led into a sort of cellar. Dal “discovered here some mouldy, whitish sprouts growing from a pile of débris which he quickly decided had once been a sack of potatoes. There was nothing else of interest here sq he returned to the main ae : The bunk was covered with comicbooks: co