Adventure Magazine Cover — page 77: what you’re looking at

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

The Skulkers — pity than an evil force to be pitted against his own life. He allowed his taut bow-string to relax. He couldn’t shoot at the thing while it remained in that position. He must give it a chance for its life. That was the White Man’s Burden. With his mouth open for a warning *“‘Halloa!’? Mayland grew suddenly cautious once more. The savage, sensing something foreign to the air of the forest, had turned his head and was looking behind him, away from Mayland on the cliff. His attitude was suggestive of a puma or leopard crouch- ing for the fatal spring. What lithe trim- ness must lie beneath the fibrous raiment! What latent speed and strength! What wonderful hair the creature possessed—blue- black, coiled upon his head, looped and fas- tened with briars like a woman’s——- May- land let the bow-string fall from his limp grasp. He had fought for his life against a woman! Parting the foliage, he uttered the only appropriate South Sea phrase he could call to his spinning mind, a phrase he had read in a book: “Manuia oe!” (Bless you). She turned like a startled gazelle. The face, nearly hidden by the coco-leaves, was not brown or yellow or olive. It was white! For an instant they faced each other, then the woman bounded nimbly into the jungle, disappearing before his unbelieving eyes. Mayland fell, bumped, rolled down the steep incline, shouting incoherently as he came. Scrambling to his feet, he plunged into the tangle that had swallowed his game. As he ran he called and yelped shrilly. On he ran, madly, blindly, sense- lessly, tearing his fragile raiment on branch and spine, leaping high above the bright, crawling things in his path, hardly realizing what he did. Then, as suddenly, he stopped short to curse his lack of judgment. The fact had dawned upon him that he had not uttered one word of coherent English, that he had given her no opportunity to see that beneath the uncouth head-dress was a white face. He had frightened her so outrageously that by this time*she might have plunged from some jutting headland into the sea. Fool— ass—idiot! He danced a wild fling of rage upon the shingle. His frenzy of rage, however, was followed by a mood of wild exultation, in which he laughed and shouted and clapped his hands 833 likeachild. He had frightened her with his silly behavior, of course; but the woman who had survived the chase in the forest and the fight in the rock lair would survive this latest folly. He would find a way to tame her. He would go about with his hair combed and his face clean and uncovered. He would carry a white flag of truce, if he could find one—or sing the Doxology or build a peace memorial on the beach. Ah, he would find a way! He hurried to a spring he had found and subjected his sun-browned skin to a thor- ough scrubbing. His face was covered with a silken yellow beard and he had no means of shaving, but he combed his long hair with his fingers and he removed the leafy garland that had concealed his features. After that, he strutted up and down an exposed portion of the beach. Nothing happened. in enacting a weird drama designed to show his civilization and gentility to a possible concealed, ultra-timid and suspicious feminine audience of one. He had never used his deep bass voice in musical endeavor, but now he sang, or yodeled, loudly and barbarously, fragments of the few things he could remember— ‘Rock of Ages,” ‘“Yankee Doodle,” ‘‘ Last Rose of Summer.”’ After singing himself hoarse, he used the remnants of his tattered voice in a series of bellowed sermonettes. Standing on a knoll and making a mega- phone of his: hands, he would bawl into the forest: ‘““My name is Jim Mayland; thirty-two years old; born in Beverley, Massachusetts. My father was Amos Mayland, a lawyer and a direct descendant of John Alden. married Martha Anne Quinby, a tea mer- chant’s daughter, in 1866.” Next he strode through the jungle shout- ing his name and accomplishments and cry- ing out that he would not harm her for the good, green world. But nothing answered save the forest whispering and the sea a-moaning, and he fell upon his knees and prayed—a kind of feverish, impassioned, semi-grotesque medley of ‘‘ Now-I-lay-me”’ and the Lord’s Prayer mingled with sundry improvisations. Finally he conceived a new idea. these words in the sand: I am James Andrew Mayland, of San Francisco, New York and Massachusetts— white—sane— ©) THE next three days Mayland spent COmiclbook He © Selecting a smooth area. he traced CO