Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 61: what you’re looking at

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

Benefit of Doubt murdered! Say, they don’t understand that. You tell them, Ommony. One hundred of the swine for ie “Better give those men decent burial,’ Ommony suggested. “Do you know the funeral service?”’ “No. Good God! How does it begin? Any of you men know the funeral] service?”’ “Y’m sorry to say I know it by heart,” said Ommony. He turned on the Moplahs, resting the whip on his thigh and speaking as if disobedience were unimaginable. “Dig graves for those gentlemen!’ he ordered. The Moplahs demurred. They are not proponents of hard labor at the best of times. This was war—their war. ‘There had recently arrived hugely exaggerated ‘ stories of a British victory somewhere down between Ooticamund and the sea, in which a raiding party of Moplahs had left their own dead on the field. There wére stories that Hindus were burning the bodies by British order, and burning is everlasting shame and desecration to the Moslem. To be made to bury fallen British soldiers in the circumstances was something of an impo- sition, as they viewed it. But not for nothing had Ommony been unofficial judge of all that land for twenty years. In their own tongue he could rake their very consciences over the coals of Eblis better than their mullahs could. For every argument that they could hurl at him he knew ten texts—could cite ten instances where they had come to him for help and had received it. Besides, they were afraid of him, and he feared nothing but his own opinion of himself. THEY dug the graves—not one trench, but a separate grave for each dead man in a-row along the jungle lane; and Ommony recited the funeral service seated on his pony, who behaved as if he had attended that kind of ceremony scores of times—motionless until the end. “‘“__ them, they’ve got fire-arms! Let them salute my men!” exploded Linkinyear when Ommony had finished. Ommony looked at him a moment and decided on heroic means to prevent worse trouble later. “This was a horrible mistake,” he said to the Moplahs, who had stood viewing the performance sulkily, waiting to push in the covering dirt with their hands when oo Ommony should give the word. “Honorable men who make mistakes make just ack- nowledgment. How many of you bear a grudge against the dead ye killed?” - . That was the kind of Solomon-like ques- tion with which he always had his way with them. None answered. “Tf these men had come to fight, ye had a right to kill, But they came peacefully, observing peace. If they had died in fair fight, there would have been others of their own race, with fire-arms, to pay them final honors. But they died by your mistake, unfairly. Will ye rob as well as kill?” They, whose notion of life was organized robbery, denied that imputation hotly. _“But the dead are dead!” exclaimed one of them. “Ye can honor the dead lke honorable men, and so yourselves be honored!” an- swered Ommony. “How then?” He told them. So the unbelievable took place. Four and fifty Moplahs, some with the blood of murdered soldiers on their hands, fired a salute at the tree-tops, not knowing what it meant exactly but under- standing that in some way they were wiping out a stain on their own honor and a’ score that would otherwise have increased against themselves with interest. They fired across the graves exactly as Ommony told them, and the scared crows winging from a tree near by looked like the souls of dead men. Moslems—very ignorant Moslems—liv- ing among Hindus pick up by hearsay and observation innumerable Hindu supersti- tions, rail their mullahs how they may. The Moplahs glanced at the crows, met one another’s eyes and stared at Ommony with new respect. “By ! You know—by ! Isay— you tell them, will you, in their own con- founded bat—by right thing, please,’ demanded Linkinhurst. them! They’ve done the , decent thing!” But Ommony had not quite finished. He made the Moplahs fell two big trees straight across the path, so that all would go around in future, making a new track, and none would tread on the graves until the forest had blotted them out completely, along with the thousands of others that dot the earth unmarked. Then: ! Say that, will you, “ ! They’ve done the “Tonight I will write down how ye did,” | Gomichbooks (E(0)