Adventure Magazine Cover — page 65: what you’re looking at

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

The Ends of Justice vancement, one compensating virtue, like granite bedrock, underlay the barren levels of his life—a dog-like loyalty to his mas- ters, and a rigid, unswerving adherence to what he held to be his duty. Eben Burt had not exaggerated. Dick Toft had thrust his head into the fire before at the word of his superiors. In the great strike, when every wheel on the system was tied hard and fast by half a dozen words on a slip of yellow paper, he alone stood by the company, ran his engine through a yelling mob without the quiver of an eyelash, went down with her in the ruins of Dry Run trestle and was carried back to be pieced together by the company surgeon, uncom- plaining and looking for no reward. Two years later, when the fires were licking up the grass-lands between South Bend and the Magpie in hundred-acre mouthfuls, Number 24, Special East, two hundred thousand dollars’ worth between pilot and tail-lamps, with Dick Toft in the cab, halted abreast of a small slough with two walls of flame arching the track ahead, and another, half a mile wide, gal- loping like a race-horse to cut off her retreat. The train crew broke for water, but Dick, a spanner in his fist and words of wrath upon his lips, held his fireman to his shovel and brought his train through with the paint curling on the cars and the rails fairly buckling under the drivers. He went into hospital, looking like a singed cat, and came out a week later, to turn down the hand of his recreant conduc- tor, who had thought more of saving his own skin than the property of the company. “Old Faithful” he was called from one end of the division to the other, and the men, while they respected him for his devo- tion, regarded it tolerantly, as a mild form of mania. gi ~=SO DICK trudged back by the side Siig Of his superior and swung himself up the side of the huge shining machine, which throbbed with impatience at the de- lay, like a thing animate. ‘“‘Be careful, Dick,” said Stevens, as he hung on the engine step, “‘but not too—— careful, you know.” The old man grunted, and the flyer swept through the packed freight-yards and out into the gathering dusk on the plains. With twenty minutes to wipe off and a forty- mile tangent ahead of him, Old Faithful 629 opened her out and let her hum. Even to his seasoned experience there was a sense of exhilaration in the swift movement and the smooth following of that string of dark-blue cars, an agreeable variation from the rattle and bump of the freights he had been haul- ing aver the same track so many years. It was late Fall, and the sting of coming Winter was in the wind that whipped the cab windows; Dick thrust out his head and let it beat upon his forehead. It was full twenty hours since he last kicked the sheet off, and he was tired—dog-tired, but the company wanted him, and there was no protest, even in his mind. Presently the stars popped out, clear and unwinking, and the moon lifted herself, full-faced, above a ridge of scrub poplar, making the twin lines of steel shine like sil- ver ribbons. At the long curve which sweeps the base of Dead Squaw Hill, Dick checked her up a notch and looked at his watch. Five min- utes of the deficit wiped off. He held out the dial to the fireman. ‘““Good business!” roared the other. “We'll do it all right, all right.”” And he bent again over his shovel. But alas for man’s calculations! As the . Blue Racer leaped out upon the long tan- gent, a red light zigzageged frantically across the track a hundred yards ahead, and with something very like an oath Dick shut her off and threw the air hard. ““What’s up?” he asked sharply as the man with the lantern came running up. He did not notice two figures which rose up from the right of way and closed in on his train. The man sprang swiftly up the steps into the gangway and a pair of forty-fives cov- ered engineer and fireman. “Hands up!” he said with a coarse laugh. ““That’s what!” Under certain circumstances the interior of a forty-five revolver looks as big as the inside of a tomato-can, and the bravest realizes that he had best obey orders, so two pairs of hands were promptly raised aloft. The fireman was white with fear, but on the face of Old Faithful was a black scowl of wrath. The intruder was short of stature and strongly built. The upper part of his face was hidden by a mask, and the lower cov- ered by a coarse black beard and mustache. From the angle of the right nostril to the COMICLOOCKKS. ECO