Adventure Magazine Cover — page 47: what you’re looking at

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

The Flies in Amber moved over and over, reading what was written on the back of it: Chelthan, my husband. “Siwash! Leper!” he yelled, grinding his teeth. She rose up and stretched out her arms to him. She begged him to have mercy, to have mercy on her, for Gail to have mercy— to kill her if he must. He only backed off from the bed as you might from a cage of snakes, tearing the photo into little bits with his strong fin- gers; and then ground them into the floor with his heel. “Your old man was dead right! I should have done the same,’ he said from down in the cellar of his soul. “I should have killed him, too!” She called Gail’s name, rising to seize him about the waist. He shook her off. The girl laughed and cried all at once. “How could I know you’d hate—father’d hate—me for marrying Chelthan? How’d I know what a despised crime it is? And when I first learned from father, and he wouldn’t speak to me, of course I stood by Chelthan. I saw we just came in here to get rid of him. But I’d never believe that father’d kill him till I saw the body. And then”’—she choked—“when you told me —aiter [I'd begun to love you—what— what a monster I was—of course I wanted to kill myself—in quick shame—they still had souls and were my flesh—and in love for you—so strong I hated you!’ “Why didn’t you kill yourself?” Gail sneered. ‘‘I wish you had!” She looked into his eyes a minute, where the whites had grown bluish and bulgy, and fell sobbing on his feet, twisting her- self about his ankles. He watched her a while, and then untangled his legs from her, and stepped over and away, as you might out of a quicksand. “T told you what you was,” said Gail, careless-like. ‘“‘You’re dirtier than any squaw-man, for you’re a woman! Keep in your pest-house here. Don’t you follow me!” She lay there, her long hair spread out on the floor from the black point of her widow’s peak. She lay still, having fainted. Gail stopped at the door, where he said that something seemed to burst inside his head. “Girl, good-by,” he told her very slowly. O1I “I guess the madness has got me, too. It ain’t my fault now, what I do, either, girl.” And he said he felt of his eyes, and found them all wet. HE CLOSED the door softly, and fell into his snow-shoes. Up to then he’d held himself in; now he broke loose. It was snowing, and in the North that change from the clear cold suffocates you. He hit up the valley on the run, past where he once had seen her measuring, and dashed out on the glacier. He didn’t know where he was going, nor why. But he steered straight for the place where she confessed she loved him. He was sure where it was, but couldn’t find the rock—the yellow rock covered with square holes, you remember. He couldn’t understand, either, how he found his way so easily and felt so safe in the storm. His mind was clear as ice. He started down the glacier, counting his strides out loud: “Four, five, six,’ —six feet to a step, you know. He must have missed the yellow rock long ago, the ice couldn’t have moved it so far in one day. ‘“‘Eight, nine and just then the snow boiled down from about his head, and the moon jumped out bright, making the mountain look like a lighted castle. And there was the yellow rock about a step in front of him! He calculated faster than he could help, he said, something like this: ‘That rock’s moved fifty feet in a day, out here in the middle where the ice flows faster, and we’ve been figuring on thirty—wrong all along. At that rate, it would mean the bodies’”— and he reckoned like lightning—“the bodies should be out at the pot-hole NOW!” He cut down to the moraine, wallowing through the fresh snow, sliding over the gravel cliffs, across the solid ponds. At the frozen hill where the river had boiled up, he scraped the snow from the top. The ice was clear, and he could look clean through it. Hesaw the thing, the Siwash, just as she said—like a fly in amber. He lay face up, an arm crooked over his head as if to ward off a blow, and the legs curved together, as a dead fish rests frozen in a pond. The face—Gail said its teeth showed in the cat-snarl you give when a man sneaks behind you and runs cold fingers down your back. But the fingers here were steel, and the grin so much the happier, for, touching the neck was a sort of scarlet globe, and I) Gomicdooksteo