Adventure Magazine Cover — page 13: what you’re looking at

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

Two On Trinity help being struck by the regularity with which he beat himself. He tried checkers, with the same result. Luck and skill greater than his own seemed to direct the fall of the cards and the movement of the men against him, and so it was that Coulson came by degrees to realize that he was not alone on Trinity Island. Who his invisible opponent was on the other side of the table he could not guess, but he understood clearly that there was nothing supernatural about him. It was a man very like himself—indeed, he always thought of him simply as the Man—and Coulson recognized rather vaguely that it was in some way his own fault that he could not enter into closer relations with him. But the mere intangible presence of the Man afforded Coulson extraordinary pleasure. He knew by some instinct when he was present and when absent; he talked to him, and though he received no audible answers, he felt that he was understood. At last the greatly-desired consummation took place—he was able to see him. What he looked like, Coulson could hardly have said, for he did not pay much attention to either the Man’s appearance or dress. In fact, he had a confused idea that if he had met him anywhere but on this dreary island he would not have been able to see him atall. But this did not matter; it was with the mind of the Man that Coulson was chiefly concerned, and he no longer wondered that he had been beaten in every game when such a brain was against him. They talked together at length, or, rather, the stranger talked and Coulson listened with growing admiration of the command- ing forces of intellect and will that the Man displayed. As yet he knew nothing of the newcomer’s history, but he detected in his friend a bitterness against the world equal to his own; and he divined the existence of a vendetta that must end in a day of terrible reckoning. The Man was not a man to sit down tamely under injustice. The supply gunboat arrived, and its captain was apparently surprised to find Coulson healthy and moderately cheerful, though disinclined to talk much. During the vessel’s brief stay in the harbor the Man disappeared; Coulson easily understood that he preferred to remain for the present un- seen, and he said nothing to the crew of the gunboat on the subject. The steamer went back to the world O77 again; the Man returned from his hiding- place, and after this the relations of the two prisoners became more confidential. The stranger had been in every part of the world where Coulson had been, and he seemed to know everything that Coulson had particu- larly wished to know. A curious fact was that all this information was communicated in a way that made Coulson feel that he had learned it all at some previous time and afterward forgotten it. But their conversa- tion turned continually back to one subject —to the undeserved sufferings endured by both of them, and to the idea of retaliation. By degrees he learned his companion’s history. Like himself, the Man had en- dured ill-fortune in the southern seas. He had been persecuted by cabals and cliques of powerful enemies; he had been kidnap- ped, he had been imprisoned, and, finally escaping, he had fled to this loneliest part of the Pacific to mature his schemes for a triumphant return to the world. Reflecting with indignation upon this tale, Coulson recognized its similarity to his own experience. He, too, he seemed to remember, had been persecuted all his life; he, too, had been imprisoned upon Trinity Island, surely by no will of his own. He, too, had suffered injustice of every sort; he was the world’s creditor and, as he medi- tated, his bitterness grew to a quiet but flercely burning heat of anger against the powers that had cut him off from all the desirable things of life and marooned him upon this ghastly rock in the deep seas. The two men discussed these things and revolved plans of action. It would have suited Coulson’s spirit to return to London or Sydney and strew the streets with dyna- mite, or poison the water-mains; but these places were far away. So the outer world reposed in quiet, unconscious that an island in the central Pacific was fizzing and hissing with vengeance like a lighted bomb. Then came a novel disturbance. Across the water from the west boomed a sound as of distant thunder out of the spotless hori- zon. It was the war-ships of the Australian squadron at target-practise under the sky- line, and a little later a faint haze of smoke arose like a far-away sea-fight. Coulson listened to the noise, and hated it. There, out of sight, was the enemy, strong with his brutal ironclads, every one of which Coulson would gladly have seen at the bottom of the Pacific. All day long COmmiclboookkSs.CG©