Adventure Magazine Cover, October 1911 — page 4: what you’re looking at

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

INI long ago a sun-tanned, alert, sturdy young man walked into our office and sent his card in to ADVENTURE. Except for his bronzed face and his “‘young eyes” (if you don’t know what “‘ young eyes”’ means, read ‘The Skipper with the Young Eyes”’ in this number), there was nothing about ‘him much different from thousands of other presentable young men here in New York. That is, there were no signs of death by starvation anywhere on his person; no beast or reptile of the Jungle had left any visible marks upon him; nothing to indicate that he had ever fooled around with cannibals or eaten rats and monkeys and dogs. Yet the card he sent in to me bore the name “Russell B. Huffman” and he had come in reply to a letter saying we were much interested in an article he had sub- “ mitted, entitled “Through Perilous Peru.” That is, he fad eaten rats and monkeys— and been very glad to get ’em, too—and had done all the rest of it. I brought him back into our own room and we talked to him a long time. Partly because we wanted to make sure he was writing from his own experience, and partly because he was interesting and wholesome and jolly and we couldn’t help ourselves. Yes, it was all true. He had been the engineer in charge of a preliminary survey for a big American company that is now actually building a railroad into a piece of South America several times bigger than Pennsylvania that had never been even seen by a white man till Mr. Huffman and his companions starved their way into it and— some of them—out of it again. He gave us references and wanted us to decide about using his “‘stuff’? as quickly as we could, because he was expecting to go out again into the far Unknown Places almost any day. Well, wedecided. (You'll find‘‘ Through Perilous Peru” in thisnumber.) He came in to see us once more, afew days later, and then —he vanished. He’s gone from civilization once more. The Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, the mountains of Peru? I don’t know. But he’ll come back again—it’sa way they have, these world - prowlers — and walk in some day with another story of what he’s been doing in some out-of-the way corner. We never get tired of meet- ing them, these men who have “done things” and are still doing them, these real-in-the-flesh Adventurers from the far places of the earth. But sometimes when, here in New York and in our comfortable offices, I find myself greeting these men from the Great Out-of-Doors, shaking a hand whose fingers have pulled a trigger in an African war or grasped a knife some- where in the South Seas or strangled a throat in some forgotten corner of Asia, a certain envy and restlessness come over me. The Spirit of Adventure, I suppose it is, that calls now and then to all of us and makes us a bit dissatisfied with our quiet, sheltered existence. But they’re fine fellows, all of them. And interesting? You should have been in here one day last Spring and seen three of us standing (we forgot to sit down) for about two hours listening to Captain Fritz Du- quesne’s experiences in the Boer secret ser- vice and how he escaped from a British prison at eight in the morning when he was sentenced tobe shot at nine. You see, his jailer came in with a basin of water and a towel—but there’s no space for that now. By the way, there are some more of them in this number you’re holding in your hands —Wolcott LeCléar Beard, for example, who knows the South American Andes himself, -to say nothing of the wilds of Mexico and other places; Thomas Samson Miller, who knows what he’s writing about when he tells us stories of the inside of Africa; Frederick Arthur Dominy, who has served with the Life-Savers of our stormy Atlantic coast. Others, too, in this and every number. And they make good reading in the maga- zine, these real adventurers, don’t you think? All of us, no matter how bookish and cultured and refined, like a fresh breeze across our face and a few minutes with the men who have left our commonplace, hum- drum life and gone out into the mysteries and distances of that other world where real adventures happen. : THE EDITOR OF ADVENTURE. e George Graham Rice The next articlein Mr. Rice’s ““My Adventures With Your Money” will sppear in ADVENTURE for _. November. Watch for it. It’s worthit. CO CloOOLkKS 5}