Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 111: what you’re looking at

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

The Last Run weapon, and he megaphoned with his hands— “How many?” ‘A dozen!” “Twenty here!” “Butcher! Give ’em a chance!’ *“No; we want ’em all!”’ Andrew skated closer to the island, and the dog ran ahead of him, growling threat- eningly. Just inside the shore line a young gray marauder sprawled in the snow, sorely wounded but with head up. The black dog dashed in, evaded a rapier- like thrust of the fangs and seized the wolf by the top of the neck. He shook the life out of it as a terrier would a rat. “Hey, Johnny!” West shouted. ‘‘Go to the head of the island and shoot ’em on the ice while Pinch and I drive ’em out.” He began to yell and to thump on the tree-trunks with a stick, in the approved manner of beaters after the royal Bengal tiger, but soon desisted when he saw that the malemiut had radically different ideas of driving wolves. The dog went forward circumspectly, step by step, testing the air all about him. One young wolf was located in the mid- die of a thick-growing bush and died there with a bullet through the head. A large, dark-gray one was buried to the ears in a snow-bank. He never moved after the rifle spoke. McKee also did some shooting down both sides of the island, and shouted encour- agingly: “Good work! Show some speed; it’s get- ting dark.” On the opposite side of the island, braced against the butt of a tree, was a large wolf. Shot through both hips he waited with open jaws, but West finished him before the dog could close. “Don’t want to lose you the first day of your return, Pinch!” he explained, and the discomfited malemiut abruptly changed from a roaring fury to a silent stalker as they passed the dying beast. Then they found the shambles and what remained of the bull moose. It hardly seemed possible that two score wolves, even when famished, could devour so much of the huge animal in so brief a time. Even his antlers were split and frayed where some of the pack had taken hold in the general rush to bring him down. 105 McKee joined West now and they made a joint search of the island, kicking up a lurk- ing young wolf and downing him and put- ting out of misery two wounded ones. “‘T call it a clean-up!” Johnny announced. *“Where’s our mutt?” “My dog was just ahead of us a minute ago,’ Andrew answered. ‘Here, Pinch! Here, Pinch!” But the malemiut was not there, and when the two riflemen broke through the underbrush to the ice they understood why. A half-mile out toward the eastern shore of the lake the dog was galloping away into the dusk alongside a wolf nearly as tall as himself. McKee raised his rifle. “Aw, don’t!” West objected. “You called it ‘good work,’ didn’t you? That’s the big gray side-partner of the black fel- low. Let ’em go!” “All right,” Johnny agreed. “But your ‘reformed character’ has gone bad again. Back to the rest camp for us. ‘Tomorrow is skinning day and the next morning we travel.”’ Andrew gazed after the malemiut that by now was disappearing with the wolf into the evening haze. “T’d have bought him a dandy collar with brass tacks on it!” he said. “TI wouldn’t have taken a hundred dollars for him just as he stood, bump on the head and all!” “You can’t trust a German police-dog!” Johnny reminded him. They slowly skated the three miles to their cabin and, after eating the eternal flap- jacks until they nearly were as torpid as the wolves had been, idly discussed the finish of the Forty Thieves. “Tf T hadn’t sent out the ‘S O S’ what’d you have done when night came on?”’ An- drew inquired. “Well, I'd have taken my rifle and the electric torch and followed your ski trail until the tracks of the bull moose and the wolves showed on it,” Johnny replied. “Then, I’d have picked up‘your skate marks and made the rescue.” “And I imagine my black wolf-dog would have struck you down about a mile out on the ice,” Irby suggested. “At dawn the gray wolves on Bottle Island would relish a change in their diet—and leave nothing of your handsome corpse {but the skis and — the spotlight. .Then they’d wait under the fir until I went insane and jumped down Eomicbooks (Eo) “a