Adventure Magazine Cover, June 20, 1923 — page 48: what you’re looking at

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

46 smothered beneath avalanche, smothered and rolled down bottomless crevasses, ele- phant and horse and man; there has never been an avalanche since but men remember Hannibal. Likewise the remembrance of drowned Atlantis is a terror to all proud cities by the sea. Doom Vale remembers its one flood, which drowned eight families in a night. Given the natural distrust of that little, ignorant, shut-in Doom Vale to all stran- gers, and you can understand the great hate it had for Nero Cram, who in his duty as State engineer built the great reservoir dam at Shadow Pond. It was like a pistol pointed at Doom Vale’s face, or a knife pressed to its throat. And if you had known Nancy Cass, you would have understood that hate against Cram even better. Doom Vale regarded her as its own property. What was she but the daughter of the gambler, of the owner of the Red House? All her girlhood Doom Vale had watched her grow, watched her ripen in womanhood and deepen in marvelous beauty, and it had wanted her, and thought she was its own. For she was only the gambler’s daughter, and Nebulus, the undertaker’s son, had been thought crazy when: he offered to marry her. Doom Vale felt it owned Nancy Cass. Even that unlovely town could lust for such unequaled loveliness. What right had she to say who should and should not have her? And then came Cram. You can understand now why Doom Vale men fought Nero Cram in every secret, dirty way they could while he was building the dam. They spiked his machinery, they burned his camps, they poisoned his mules. They would have shot him too; but his men had been picked ex-Army men, loyal and able to shoot in turn. Only when the dam was built, and his force disintegrated, did Doom Vale get its chance. And with Cram out of the way by due process of law as administered by Judge Purly’s court the hate of Doom Vale had fallen on Nancy Cass. One night at mid- night a mob came to Nat Cass’s house, Cass being away, and got her. With lusting hands they tore her clothing from her and tied her to a maple-tree on Black Street. It’s said old Nigus Cairnstone led the mob, but it may have been Harold Feraid. Nathan Cass cut her free; but he would net Adventure let her come back to him. And the cruel men of Doom Vale would not let her get away. For its sins, for its crimes unimaginable, for its cruelty surpassing the cruelty of beasts, Doom Vale lives in everlasting fear of drowning. But God has set His bow in the clouds, and His hand against the waters, and His heel on Doom Vale. The fire in the bow in the clouds is a warning, terrible and bright—Doom Vale will fall by fire. Yet there came that time of the dismal nights when it seemed all Doom Vale would perish by the rope. Strangling rope! Be- ware! The Fool Killer was in town. The rocky hills are stern and brave which strike upward and butt the cold west sky; and the river Hudson is lovely, though blacker than Cleopatra. Many other beau- ties, tremendous and titanic, are about Doom Vale; but Doom Vale does not see them. And other things the town does not see, or the Fool Killer would not have lived so long. Fog in Doom Vale, and rain and Winter wind from the notches of the hills, and rain again, and then the fierce Summer sun cracking the sod on lawns till great hell yawns. Shadow Stream is a sheet of sleet in January, in July a black trickle creeping through beds of ooze upon whose brown fissures arid water-spiders drag their with- ered, wooliy legs. In January Shadow Pond is also a sheet of sleet, but in July it is a black water, a hundred feet deep in its submerged valleys. Cold and heat, since the dam was built a year had gone by. But mud or ice, sleet or heat on the Shadow, forever there is the wide Hudson. Sometimes the river is brown, or red in the dawn, or dun or green or blue, or suffusing in the sunset’s coals, with a hundred colors humming in its downward tides. And many and many a midnight hour when Cram had sat beside it with Nancy Cass the river had been deep black, not mirroring stars. Then it was, at midnight, it seemed to remember its many drowned. The river murmurs of deep flood, of cata- clysm surpassing belief. Shadow Pond is an eternal threat of deep drowning from the hills. But the promise has been given. By the burning bow in the clouds, it is not flood but fire which shall consume Doom Vale. Rain and sun and flower and shadow. Now near a year since Cherry Sloane, the old marshal, led Nero Cram away. COMMICLOO® (C@)