Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 178: what you’re looking at

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

172 snow and ice as huge as box cars and tug- boats hurtling through the air. Jack fell. The loop was jerked from his arm. He strove to get it back. In his terror, and blinded by the driving rain, he lost his footing and stumbled over the edge of a sloping crevasse. He started down with a scream, but almost at once caught a pro- jection with his hands. “Hold on! Hold on!’ they shouted at him. Jones and Cotton drew together, dropped down on their fronts and tried to shake the loop of rope down to him. “T’m doomed! I’m doomed!’’ the sailor moaned. “You fool, take this rope!” The ice hold began to crumble under the sailor’s fingers. He scratched and scram- bled. His toes would not take hold. He would not reach out and try to seize the cotton line. Jones tried to shove it down to him on the end of the alpenstock, but the wind kept twisting it back. The sailor could have caught the rope had he tried. But he did not try. He only scrambled and scratched and howled with a superstitious glaze in his eyes. And all at once he let go and slid downward out of sight. “‘Foreweakened!”’ shouted Jones above the storm. The mighty avalanche was now all but upon them. Morton-Dyer had been tugging at the rope and hurrying them, regardless of Jack’s position. Now they got to their feet and fled along the ridgepole-like ice wall between great crevasses. 4 They had got to a slightly wider place in the crevasse field when the first leaping masses of the avalanche reached them. Be- cause there was nothing else to do they dropped down on their faces. A block as large as a cottage roared overhead, leaving a snowy tail like a comet. Others thundered all around. One mass struck the side of the crevasse in front of them. It was burst, and it burst the solid wall of ice, hurling the men backward into the crevassé on their other side, gouging them out again, rolling and flinging them on, tangled in the cotton line. The avalanche no longer came in de- tached masses, but a solid flowing, undulat- ing field. They did only one thing con- sciously; scrambled to stay on top so that they might breathe. ~ at least two were. Adventure THREE men, dripping wet, bare of head, crouched miserably out of the storm behind a low wall of rock and rusty mud. No shelter was overhead, and the mushy, snowy, sleet settled on them. “Fifteen hundred feet further,’ said Morton-Dyer for the dozenth time, “and hell nor heaven can stop me! Fifteen hun- ‘dred feet between me and gold. Then this struggle for existence I’ve endured forty years will be over.”’ Despite the dull misery of them their eyes lighted. They were indomitable, or Cotton had nothing optimistic to say. He shook from the cold— the greatest demoralizer for some men. “Gold,” he snarled. ‘Wish I’d never heard of it!” “You fool!” And Morton-Dyer repeated ecstatically, “Gold! Gold!’ Jones cleared his throat and repeated the verse from the Book, paraphrasing one word: “ “He that loveth “gold” shall not be satis- fied with “gold.’? That is also vanity.’ ”’ “Tf it comes to that stuff I can say it too,” declared Cotton. ‘Better is an handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.’ Dve heard my old dad say it a hundred times.” ‘“What’s this?’ protested Morton-Dyer. “Camp-meeting? Come on, let’s go get the gold. Ease and good times, and women and fast cars!” They got up. Jones ran his hand under a mass of soggy snow on the back of his neck and threw it off. Their heads above the bank, the storm slapped them. The wind took their breath. They scrambled up to the hogback that led straight to the top at a terrific slant. They could face the awful wind and wet that combed this ridge just here but a few seconds at a time, when they would have to fling their backs to the pressure and gasp for breath. Jones realized unexpectedly that Cotton was no longer ahold of the rope. He jerked Morton-Dyer and they stopped to look back. Cotton had turned himself loose and was scrambling back down the slope. He was then actually on the narrow divide between the side of the mountain they had come up and the other side that seemed to be a vast drop-away of the world. “Hey!” shouted Jones. ‘“What’s the matter?” Gomichbooks EO!