Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 59: what you’re looking at

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

Benefit of Doubt King was this kind of man: He would either break the weapon or make it as near perfect as he could. He cleaned it—made it as sharp as a razor—within half-an-hour; tested it a time or two by hacking at the door until the cheap lock came in pieces; scratched on the blade with the sharpest file and the smallest letters he could com- pass, ‘To Mahommed Babar from A. K. with compliments’; returned it to its scab- bard, stood it in the corner, and walked out. It was no use closing the door; the frame and lock were smashed too noticeably. An hour later the mullah, returning with four chosen sycophants, discovered the bird flown but the saber leaning upright in a cor- ner, clean and sharp. He did not examine the blade beyond testing of its sharpness with his thumb. And he had this element of greatness—he could see the uselessness of crying over spilt milk. “Go and look for him!’ he ordered. “Find him, be polite to him, but bring him back and keep him in here!’ Then he went to deliver the saber to Mahommed Babar, for-that was urgent. He delivered it in presence of all the elders, who were suitably and flatteringly jealous. Mahommed Babar did examine the blade— every inch of it—seemed able to read the inscription on it—possibly the maker’s name. He looked pleased, and yet not pleased as he nodded and slung the saber at his waist. A ‘strange, uncommunicative, puzzling sort of man, Mahommed Babar. CHAPTER XIII + “Tonight I will write down how ye did.” [E WAS no mean accomplishment that Ommony had undertaken. Among those rival and fiercely jealous Moplah villages he himself could probably go unchallenged at any time. But it was ‘another thousand of bricks” to take with him an officer and eleven men—even an unarmed officer and men on good behavior, with full permission granted by three chiefs. The trouble was that the chiefs’ authority was largely local. Their influence, and Ommony’s own, varied with the points of the compass. With distance from their village theirs diminished, although Om- mony’s actually increased in some respects as he went further from his home. Locally they knew him as a friend through thick and 53 thin, fire, drought and famine—a mediator between them and the Government—a scof- fer like themselves at lawyers’ law, but a masterful upholder of first principles. At a distance he was‘less well known but more rumored about. Men came from a long way off to submit their quarrels to him rather than go to court and be ruined with fines and fees, and they, returning well content told stories about him, invented mainly on the way home, that made King Solomon of legend seem in comparison rather a cheap and silly potentate. In far outlying villages Ommony was almost a myth. They used his name to frighten children with and as a threat conclusive when the younger members of the village council would not see sense. So, although the chiefs provided an escort of four men whose business was to empha- size the sacredness of the flag of truce under which the party marched, and although they all carried little white flags nailed to sticks, it was Ommony’s person that was really sacred. The white flags did not mean much, and the chiefs’ representatives meant less and less as they drew near rival villages. Entered another distinction, with its fine edge widening progressively. Ommony had lived among them for more than twenty years, through internecine outrage and oc- casional rebellion, with never an armed man to protect him. There had never been a man in uniform attached to Ommony’s scant staff. He had been policeman, lawyer, | judge, adviser, forest king and friend so intimately and with so little friction that he was in a class by himself, apart from the military arm—which to the Moplah is in- comprehensible if not a direct invitation to fight. words worked either way. And the ways of a rumor are wonderful. It turns on itself like a whorl of smoke - blown in the wind, until the outside be- comes the inside and sense is nomsense. Moreover, it grows, even as smoke grows, covering more ground as the particles of fact grow thinner. And in a forest that is even more the case, because the range of view is limited and the eye can seldom check up what the ear exaggerates. So word was sent echoing from tree to crag by the Moplahs’ outposts, and it be- came known for a fact in the village where Mahommed Babar was busily evolving his plan of campaign that Ommon-ee was a pris- oner of war, and was being marched through Gomichooks Soldiers fight—fight soldiers—the | (Eo) ; [7 Pa