Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 193: what you’re looking at

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

The Years Between nothing, and he promptly forgot that. And up on the side of the hill behind the shack a gray-fox pup stood and watched them. The next morning Noatuk came and sat on the river-bank to watch the swift cur- rent swirl down toward her. The next morning she came again, and the next. Every day for three weeks following the going of Sandy, she sat in the sand with Stringy’s Bible in her lap and watched the broken branches, and the bits of bark, and the dead leaves of the season that was gone, hurry by on the current; but Sandy did not come back. The tribe moved west; Noatuk was miss- ing the morning they struck camp. And up on the side of the hill the gray-fox pup peered through the bushes and watched them go. ie THE second time Sandy Dewar paddled up the Porcupine he was working for himself; that was in 1914, and Sandy was forty years an old man, full of bad whisky, and shiny-pated. There were two other men in the pros- pecting party, both with a greater respect for cold water, Providence, and gray-haired council showing in their bronzed faces, eager eyes, and silent attentive attention. So when Stringy Yolles heard that they were planning to start out so late in the season, and feeling that his age and experience called on him to try and dissuade them from such a foolhardy undertaking, he went to see them and advised them to wait till Spring. Sandy was drunk, ugly tempered, antag- onistic. Sandy had wallowed through his second score of years in Chicago. He pro- tested emphatically. “Stay here?’ he sneered savagely. “Hang around this little strip of the woods like a whipped cur, without enough of the needful to buy a jerk of gin? Huh!. Not any, Whiskers. I’m going to get right out and keep on digging as long as I can find the ground.” Stringy Yolles frowned; back in his mem- ory those puffed eyes, crooked features, and peculiar harsh voice were trying to as- sociate. with some section of his past, but Stringy’s hair was white, and only very im- portant events bridged that twenty-year gap. Then, too, those twenty years had made another face for Sandy. Stringy gave it up. -~ bys IQI *““You’d sooner take a chance on cheating the frost than on the charity of your fellow men?P” he asked. ‘‘You’d sooner be found blue-white and brittle in the snow than thank your natural brothers for your daily bread? For why?”’ “For why?” Sandy sat up and leered viciously at Stringy. “For why?” he re- peated. “Do you think I want to stay here till I croak in this devil’s dump? What in blazes do you think I am? For why a He drained the flask he had been waving in his hand and pitched it out the door. ‘‘What’s out there?” he snarled. “Swedes and Poles and Hunkys and Finns, Chinks and Niggers and Indians and dogs, night that’s half day, and fifteen dollars a quart for whisky. Whisky? Cold coffee, bed- bug poison, slimy, soak - your - feet - in - it, wash-on-Monday slop, without one punch in a whole —— demijohn! For why!” He sneered with a yawn of intoxicated exasperation, then stretched out on his back again and closed his eyes. “I’m not going to stay here like a crip- ple all Winter and beg my grub. That’s for why! You two can stay if you like, but I’m going out in the morning.”’ Stringy Yolles lit his pipe. The other two men sat down and looked at Stringy, but Stringy had finished. Stringy’s popu- larity at the Fort was due to his knowledge of men and occasions; he knew when it was time to quit talking. He had offered the advice of a life’s experience; if Sandy wouldn’t take it, it was no business of his if Sandy never came back. Somehow, as he left the three in the tent, Stringy wished Sandy had been sober, sober enough to answer a few questions about his past. Sandy’s peculiar harsh voice was still ringing in his ears, but he couldn’t re- member. Sandy made but twenty-five miles in the next three days. His whisky-soaked sys- tem protested against the long, continuous pull up-stream, so he drifted into the bank, and tying to a bush, stretched out for a sleep. When he awoke it was dark. Refreshed, and more nearly sober than he had been for weeks, he decided to paddle all night. There had been a couple of good strikes made in the Old Crow section; he’d go up there. When he reached the Big Black it was so dark he could hardly see it. Sum Crab’s COMmicloooks CO