Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 179: what you’re looking at

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

Seven Fools Cotton stopped and shouted up to them: “1’m going back. Can’t live in this.” The rest that he said was flung away by the wind. He started on. But instead of turning to the right to go the way they had come, he turned to the left, where the mountain pitched away. “Cotton! Cotton!” yelled Jones. He started impulsively down, but at the end of his space of rope Morton-Dyer jerked him to a standstill. Cotton stopped again, and gestured and shouted, and it seemed to them dimly through the storm that his face became a stubborn moon. Then he stumbled determinedly off to the left, the wrong way. Almost at once he disappeared. Jones slipped his arm out of the loop and ran down, while Morton-Dyer shouted pro- fane protest. But when Jones got to the lowest dip of the saddle Cotton could not be seen. He might be close by under a bank, or have got far down. Jones shouted at the top of his voice, shouted again and again, but there was no answer. He gave up. There was nothing else to do. He saw that Morton-Dyer was going on. He scrambled and hurried to catch up. The mixture of rain and snow and sleet made the sulfury clay and rocks slick and insecure. He slid and mired and fell, and it was some little time before he caught up with Morton- Dyer. “Vou’re a fool,”’ said Morton-Dyer, “for losing strength and time to look after that mule. Tell you, it’s the man that looks out for number one first that gets by. Ill be at the top when you’re lagging.”’ But despite this boast, or threat, they hooked up with the rope again. Sometimes one was ahead and sometimes the other, and the line frequently helped to steady them, but it was noticeable that Morton-Dyer would exert little strength to help Jones. The slope, they figured, was at an angle of . forty-five degrees in places, and steeper at others. Up and up they went, cursing, grunting, putting up a fight that in the morning they would have regarded as super- human. Morton-Dyer got out his watch and said it was two o’clock. Considering their rate of travel they had a long way yet to go. Morton-Dyer began to have the best of it. He would not hesitate to drag himself forward on the line when Jones was higher up, but when Jones pulled Morton- Dyer gave slack. 173 “You better keep alive!” he warned Logical. “I’m not going to waste an ounce of strength.” “You'll get no more help from me then!” “T don’t need it!” Once they rested behind a boulder, water- soaked, dilapidated beings, blue and shak- ing, Morton-Dyer with a mackinaw, Jones in shirt sleeves. As they sat or half-lay in the mud and running icy water their real inner human bitter selves crept out. 5 ‘‘Man’s a fool,” snarled Logical Jones. ~ |?? “Going through this for gold! “But if we get it!” Morton-Dyer chat- tered. “No more borrowing money and being dunned by cinchy acquaintances. No more dodging from one boarding-house to another, and from city to city, and afraid you'll meet the tailor you got a suit from on time. No more of that sort of suffering. Bachelor apartments, and a valet, and a car instead of bluff and trickery that ee gives a man spending money.’ “T’ve been wanting to start a polo pony farm in Oregon for five years,”’ Jones went on. “I’ve been gambling and _ peddling booze to get the money and I’m poorer than the day I started in at it. If I had taken a government claim and worked I’d be on my feet now, and not up here in the sky on the brink o’ hades.” “Bah, work! Ease, man. Los Angeles! Wine, women and money that will last. Mister Algernon Morton-Dyer, who owns a gold mine! That’s him by the fountain with the silk hat! See? Oh, boy, hear.’em talk about me. Gold does it.” Morton-Dyer sprang up. ““Let’s go!’ he shouted. “Get the stuff! Stake a claim!” They climbed on, and struggled—the in- sistence of life. They slipped and slid and fell and cut hands too cold to bleed and fought on and on. = can’t stop me!’ Jones muttered once. Morton-Dyer answered that they would go back by the buttes, where they could travel on the rock most of the way and miss the ice. After a time the blowing, howling storm slacked up sharply. That is, it lifted away from the mountain, so that the sloping sides to the eastward, the south, and the west- ward were revealed to them. Desolation, precipitous slopes, were all around. “Ugh!” Jones recoiled. Cotton went.” “Look where —-€O v.OOk