Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 189: what you’re looking at

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

The Years Between here a particularly solid passer-by trod on ‘Miss Dem’s toe, and in the subsequent an- guish she dropped the superior legal style, and finished hastily—‘‘all it was cracked up to be.”’ She leaned toward Falworth and thrust a pencil into his hand. ‘Sign this in your best writin’!’”’ she com- manded. Falworth glanced at it, and purpled with rage. “The I will!’ he mouthed huskily. Miss Dem sat back on her heels, prepared to fight the matter to a finish. But the Hot Dog, stowing his precious notes away, and buttoning his coat over them, caught the paper out of Miss Dem’s hand and read it. ‘‘Good!”? he commented, and shoved a lean fist under Falworth’s nose. “I may be a bum b-business m-man,”’ he observed, “‘b-but I’ll push your nose b-back into your c-collar-button if you don’t sign this!” These honeyed words induced Falworth, ° q of 4 - 2.4 Ld Sipe uh, "3 JAeYEA a o ! J 7” ? on SS BETWEEN 187 shaking with nervousness over the past revelation and the wreck, to come up to time. He scrawled his name viciously and threw the paper and pencil at Jimmy in a rage. “‘There! you!” he snarled, and turned his back on them both. It was late that night when they got home. Over a peppery oyster stew they talked jubilantly of Jimmy’s new prospects. Then Miss Dem pushed her plate away, and leaning both elbows comfortably on the table, surveyed the Hot Dog in a specu- lative way that made him smile. In fancy she beheld him, a wealthy inventor, estab- lished in a fine house, and married to a nice girl. Mentally she ran over all the pleas- antest girls she knew, till she happened on the right one. She rose, triumph in her eye, and tapped | the object of her matrimonial schemes on the arm. “T must get on home, Jimmy,” she said. ‘Run in tomorrow at five and take tea with me—I might have a friend in to meet you.” 6y GEORGE L.CATTON 66 UM CRAB?” waited. For twenty years Sum Crab sat in the sand all Summer and picked out the pin-points of gold that came down the river with the running ice in the Spring. For twenty years she sat there in front of her cabin and stopped every man that came up the Porcupine. “You see um Sundy?” she would ask, and always the prospector, chechako or sour- dough, would reply — ‘‘Who’s Sundy?e”’ ‘“Sundy,” she would answer, pulling out a strand of her greasy hair, “um huir gold.” Then, if the traveler attempted to ques- tion her further, she merely grunted. If he persisted, she raved. Andcurse! Stringy Yolles, the oldest trapper in Fort Yukon, said she had a worse tongue than any man he had ever heard. “Whoever taught her English,”’ he would say, “must have taught her with a dog- whip.” Then, as he turned away, he would add as an afterthought, ‘And he didn’t use no Bible neither.” So, as no one knew her name, and she resented every question asked her, they nicknamed her ‘‘Sum Crab.” When she had been there ten years she CoOMmichoooks CO