Adventure Magazine Cover — page 57: what you’re looking at

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

Silver Zone and cold. He wondered vaguely why he had been so foolish as to fall asleep in the desert without his blankets. His head hurt, and he felt of the sorest»place with gentle, exploring fingers. and dug it off. It was a flake of dried blood. Instantly the events of the night before rushed back in his memory. He got to his feet with difficulty and stared around. Something seemed to be missing from the landscape. At first his brain was not clear enough to grasp it directly, then his eyes rested upon a smouldering heap of ashes from which occasional spurts of flame shot up. The cabin had been burned. Silver Zone was now indeed a place of ruin. Dal staggered over to what had once been the home of the Bentlys and con- templated it grimly. Where was Vincie? The question beat upon his mind inces- santly. All his _self-deceiving sophistries _ about his interest in the girl being only an impersonal one dropped from him. An- other woman had disappeared with her, but the fate of that other woman was secondary for the time. Where the pole bed had stood in one corner of the bedroom was the burned skeleton of a man. Unquestionably it was the body of Samuel Bently. The old assayer had died in the nick of time. Dal found a _ pole and poked gruesomely through the hot ashes until he convinced himself that there were no other bodies. His mind did not dwell long upon un- pleasant contingencies. Any number of ' disagreeable things might have happened to 7 the girl, but she had not perished in the cabin so there was still some need for action, And then, too, where were Vic and Bradley? It seemed impossible that Vic, wounded as he was, could have escaped, and as they were not around, it was likely that they had been taken away —perhaps to decorate some tree. Dal walked deme: to the spring, plunged his bloody head into the cold water and felt greatly relieved, and found his thinking apparatus more pliable. It occurred to him as being strange that Hasbrouck had not made sure of killing him. But Hasbrouck had undoubtedly been aften the girl and he may have been in a hurry. And having once got her he was possibly too busy to go back and finish the job. Besides, Has- brouck had probably figured that the one He felt something sticky. blow was enough; andhaditlanded squarely = it no doubt would have been. Being essentially a cowboy with all of the breed’s habits and prejudices, Dal had to look for his horse as a preliminary mea- sure, as even his thoughts came more freely _ on a horse than on the ground. He went to the place where he had left old Spot but the old pinto was gone. Dal knew that not even an earthquake could scare the old horse into breaking loose. Some one had untied him so it was obviously a waste of time to look farther. » Feeling more than ever helpless Dal re- turned to the spring. To walk back to Sorensen’s sheep camp to get his other horse would be to waste many hours of valuable time, and besides the hours it would take him to walk there, it would probably take other hours to find the horses. He dismissed the plan as imprac- ticable. . The best bet seemed to be one of Sawyer’s camps. The nearest one was only a mile and a half away and Dal struck out for it. ~Before he reached the camp he began to find dead sheep. He had a presentiment of what he would find before he reached the ~ place where the camp should have been, so > he was not surprized to find only warm ashes and the twisted irons of the camp which fire could not destroy. In the ashes lay the charred body of a man where he had evidently been shot while his figure was outlined through the thin, canvas wall of the camp. Out in the brush a hundred feet Dal found another body. Little bunches of frightened, herder- less sheep huddled here and there. The. cattlemen had made a clean sweep. Quite — obviously the Sheepgrowers’ Association was not néarly so powerful as Vic Sawyer had fondly believed. Dal knew it would be a waste of time to look for help here. All the sheepherders for miles around Silver Zone would be in a state of panic, and they would be hiding out in the brush with their dogs muzzled to keep them from bark- Range war history proved that the victorious side was always as relentless as wolves in running down and murdering the defeated. Returning to the spring Dal was aston- ished to see a human being coming in from the desert, weaving on its feet like a drunken man. Some wounded sheepherder, perhaps, he thought; but as the man came closer f EOPMIC OO KS