Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 40: what you’re looking at

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

38 Nancy and Barney worked with the rest, fetching and carrying for the men. And the Captain, as she called him, was worth a dozen, what with the wisdom of his advice, the brawn of his mighty arms, and the en- couragement that he gave to them. The three of them had drawn away from the others for a spell of rest in the shadow of the round-house, or great cabin, when there was a commotion forward, and Jim Rimble’s voice bellowing: “T’ve got him! I’ve got him! He’s a whale!’ And then, as they started down the deck on the run, ‘‘Sail ho!’’ ‘“‘Where away?” shouted the Captain. “Two points off the larboard bow, sir.”’ ‘‘What do you make her out?” *“‘Can’t say yet, sir.” THE men dropped their work, and rushed pell-mell to the forecastle. Ramil Away off to the west, so low down that she could scarcely be seen, they made out the topsails of a ship. But what man- ner of ship she was none could tell. The men lined the storm-shattered bul- warks, their eyes alight with eagerness. Jim Rimble’s fish, in the excitement, made its escape. He went from group to group, bemoaning his ill luck and describing the size and beauty of the prize which had eluded him at last. ‘Now, lads,” cried the Captain, ‘“‘don’t stand gaping there as if you’d never seen a to’gallantsail before. Is this the time to idle, with a fine ship coming up and the longboat not yet ready to go over the side?” Nancy saw a glance full of meaning pass between the men, but its significance she did not fathom then. The men did, how- ever, and back they went, tumbling aft so eagerly that they fairly fell over each other in their haste; and presently the noisy ship- building chorus rose again, the clang of ham- mer and anvil. Jim Rimble, the great an- gler, joined his shipmates for the first time that day, and stepped the mast himself, his husky voice rising above the music of tools and timber: “Twas I that paid for all things, ’T was others drank the wine! I can not, now, recall things; Live but a fool, to pine. *T was I that beat the bush; The bird to others flew, For she, alas, hath left me. Falero, lero, loo!” Adventure There was no grumbling, no lack of en- ergy now. The men worked like demons, as if their lives depended upon their exertions, as, indeed, they knew very well they did. Before the dark night of the tropics sudden- ly dropped upon them, they had finished her. She was rough, but the Captain, who had superintended the work from keel to carlins, was satisfied. Nancy, no mean expert her- self, by reason of her long association with ship-builders when she was a child in Dev- on, inspected it with a criticism that won the admiration of the men. She had want- ed to tell the Captain how she approved of his design and the skilful workmanship, but there was a reserve in his manner toward her now that made her avoid him. He did not return again to the incident of the night before, when he had held her in his arms on the storm-swept deck, but the words he had spoken to her, above the roar of the tem- pest, were ringing still in her soul, and she knew that never would she forget them as long as she might live. To a Puritan girl, reared as she had been, such words could mean but one thing. He loved her. Therefore, she would be his wife. She had decided-that irrevocably when he had first spoken them to her against the fury of the hurricane. As for that, she had resolved it in her mind that she should wed him when first she had heard the deep, vi- brant voice of him answering her call in the dungeon of d’Ogeron’s castle, before she had seen him, even faintly i in the darkness, before she had looked upon his face in that first flood of radiance from on high. But while her heart was won, and she made no concealment of it to her conscience, she had determined that she herself would not be lightly taken. All the suppressed ro- manticism of her nature, the part of her, handed down from some ancestor who had played his part upon the stage before the gloom of Puritanism had engulfed so large a part of England, that had not been crush- ed out by the strictness of her religious training and the simplicity of her life among the followers of the Protector, was awaken- ing under the magic touch of love. She was alive, for the first time in her life, her blood ran faster through her veins, her soft eyes had taken on a luster they had not known before. She had become a wom- an in that one great instant when Heaven itself had been rent in twain by God’s thun- derbolt to show her the glories of Paradise. COMmMicboooks (©