Adventure, August 1917 — page 110: what you’re looking at

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

oN \\\y A " Ww AS ‘es we ‘i e an | Ay i, tii SH. 7 % MAL GL Cf. Hy 5 zp Py if a Sy WR .\ 1 ae \\ Author of “An Arizona Lochinvar.” EY take the devil seriously in China. Mike Flaherty had dis- covered this important truth, away back in Boxer days, when he floated into Pekin with Uncle Sam’s troops. ‘“‘This is one country where the devil stre makes his bluff stick,’”’ Mike was wont to declare. In fact, but for Mike’s intimate knowl- edge of the devil and his works, the pigtail town of Pao-ling up in the shadow of the Great Wall, might still be without train ser- vice, and Mike himself would doubtless be back where his railroad career started— driving spikes on the Texas Hookworm line. But he isn’t. Just because he understood the ways of the devil in China, Mike is mar- ried for life to a soft job with the American Construction Company—the same concern that used to fire him at least once every thirty days. Now from Shan to Pao-ling is an even hundred miles—miles of old mud-wall villages, forests of grave-mounds where countless ancestors lie buried—miles of ignorance and superstition, miles of Chinese as wild and primitive as in the days of Genghis Khan. Through this hostile region the Belgian syndicate had acquired its rail- road concession, and its track, just com- pleted, had been laid by the American Con- struction Company. It was to inspect the finished job that Big Bill Watts, president of the American Con- 108 struction Company, had come up from Pekin. With Temple, his chief engineer, Watts was to make the first official run over the new line, in company with two agents of the syndicate. Before the temporary terminal shed at Shan, an engine and private car stood ready. Riley, an American driver, sat in the cab pulling on a cob pipe. He became very busy with this pipe, as Watts and Temple walked past, so busy that he failed to return the condescending nod which Watts gave him. Among some of the men on the Amer- ican Construction staff, President Watts was not personally popular. While waiting for the Belgian agents to ar- rive at the station, Watts and Temple con- tinued their stroll about the littered con- struction yards, discussing the work. “What the devil is that?’ demanded Watts, pausing at sight of a grotesque ob- ject mounted on a flat car that stood under a shed of bamboo and straw mats. ‘“You guessed it,” chuckled a cheery voice, as Mike Flaherty himself rose from behind the hideous reptilian efhgy. “It’s a devil, all right, and a dandy, too. Wait till I make him wink.” And Flaherty, carried on the A. C. roll as track-gang boss, snapped an electric switch, turning a baleful red glare from the enor- mous eyes of the painted silk and wood dragon sprawled full length on the flat car. ‘“‘What’s it doing here?” growled Watts. Comiclook 5}