Adventure Magazine Cover — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

The Great Todescan’s Secret Thrust the drooping spirit of fight. These are the lads to take up with you for the fame of Saviolo’s Academy!” Under the insolent look, the old man’s blood was fired again. He struck the table with his sound hand. “Good lack!” he cried testily. ‘‘Saviolo! Saviolo! I’ve a surfeit of the name!”’ As the words rang out, Master Beckett halted and faced the speaker. Then, with measured action, he unhooked his rapier and clapped it, still sheathed, on the table. Not brutally, mark you, but with that nice hint of declared hostility, as learned in the inner room of Saviolo’s Academy, where the more recondite points of honorable quarreling were studied. After which he sat down in silence, half facing this contemner of the revered master. Silence had fallen; even the drawer hung in the doorway to watch progress. A gleam of new appreciation appeared in the veteran’s solitary orb. For a while he gazed upon the Templar; then, slowly smiling, raised his tankard and saluted. ‘Twas right gallantly done, young sir,”’ he said. ‘Don Lewis Pacheco de Narvaez” —Spanish pronounced with exaggerated lisp—‘‘ Don Lewis, who follows the foot- steps of the great Carranza (mirror of cav- alier perfection), never put the counter- check quarrelsome with better grace! You mind me of him, fair youth,” he went on paternally. “Hast traveled, doubtless? Nay, Pll swear thou hast met him. None but your Castilliano, say I, to open a differ- ence with the right martial scorn.” “‘Sir,”’ retorted Beckett with some harsh- ness, giving his beaver, as he spoke, a belli- cose dent with his knuckles, “‘I claim no travels, and therefore no Spanish schooling. Nor have I known of a brighter mirror of honorable bearing than Master Vincent Sa- violo, whose loss we are lamenting.” “Why, ’tis as the burthen of a song!”’ ‘And this,” the young man interrupted, of a sudden overboiling, “I am ready to maintain with disputation, and eke with my body, against any soldado or captain who will walk!” “Well crowed for a cockerel, fair sir, since crowing there must be. Yet, mark me, somewhat too loud at first point of quarrel. Hast come to the challenge al- ready—and upon a lie circumstantial only? And as for thy retort, it lacks, first, element. ‘Nor have I known,’ say you. How could’st 581 thou know? Hast not traveled. Cockayne is fair enough—'tis not the world. How old are you, boy? Thinkest thou, because thou hast achieved fair London skill in thy rapier, could’st already have the whole art and mystery of fence under that saucy cap?— which same thou mayest as well remove at this stage, lad, for I will not fight thee.” ‘Nay, then, sir, ’twere fitter not to dis- pute when there is no readiness to prove.” The retort, given in a tone of dogged- ness, was capped dryly enough: ‘Aye, ’tis easy for April to challenge De- cember. Time was, look you, when I would have met this Saviolo in proper wrangle and disputation. Aye, I would have con- futed his passes with suitable blade logic! Wilt fight me for thy teacher’s sake?”’ He stretched out his left hand as he spoke and laid it, not unkindly but with some authority, on Master Beckett’s arm. Ere the lad could fling off the touch, he caught sight of the maimed stumps, and reddened. ‘“Aye,” went on the old soldier resignedly, “that was my dagger hand, a halbert at the infall of the Pamplona palisadoes. ’Tis gone, fit for naught but the holding of a pipe, or the ringing of a coin! And without your dagger, these days, your rapier’s best strokes in counter-time are naught. To such as me, your broad bilbo”’—he jerked his thumb toward the basket-hilt that hung behind him on the wall—“‘is your only thigh companion. Plain cut and thrust; and the less occasion for it the healthier. For, in all fighting—as one of your mastery, fair sir, full well knows—he who trusts long to mere defense waits but to be hit. ’Tis the on- slaught wins the duello; and to what man- ner of onslaught, think you, master, will this timber lead me against thy lusty legs?” He hoisted himself from the bench, thrus- ting his figure into a burlesque attitude of fence; and it became plain to all that his right leg was naught but a wooden stump. A murmur ran through the room, followed by a general shout of laughter; the old man struck at the wood with the knife he was brandishing and lumbered back to his bench. Then, after surveying the piteous make- shift for the missing limb with an air of melancholy philosophy, he turned his shrewd eye once more on the youth’s abashed face. ‘Time was!” he repeated, between a sigh and a laugh. “I be now but a hulk, towed into harbor at last, from long journeys, un- fit for fresh cruises. But what though? A GCoOmiGcdooksEeo