Adventure, August 1917 — page 142: what you’re looking at

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

140 revolved about the possessions of his Maj- esty the King. He had been praised for what he had done to further that cause. It was funny and he had to laugh. He had acted upon the impulse of chivalry and his achievements had been accepted as homage to her sovereign. “Tt is a funny old world,” Loudon told himself as the sergeant came up. “I would like to know just how she works inside. She seems to regard me as a fief or a vassal or whatever they call it. ‘You acted ex- cellently, Mr. Loudon.’ But she’s game.” Serena was coiled up beside her aunt when he reached the fire. His coat was about her, he noticed. Well, he decided, as he squirmed into the warmth, Queen Elizabeth was more grateful for Raleigh’s cloak. But then he was a knight and I am a commoner. No, I’m wrong, she knighted Raleigh for keep- ing the mud off her shoes. Oh, well. ... His thought ended in sleep that rushed upon him and held him bound until the ser- geant touched his shoulder. “Three h’oclock, sir, hand a rocket ’as just gone hup from the beach.” CHAPTER XIV THE AMBUSH HE INDIANS call the hour before the dawn, the ‘dead hour.” It is then that the life-tide is slack, the will withdrawn, the operator asleep at the tele- phone exchange of the brain and nerves. It is the hour of attack—both criminal and thieftaker know its advantages. Sudden awakening finds the subject lacking coordin- ation, it is a rare man who comes back to consciousness in the full possession of his faculties in this vacuum-time between night and day. And this in your own, familiar bed, not in surroundings strange and ominous. . The fires were burning low and the crater was filled with the deep breathing of men as Loudon sent the sergeant back to his post and walked over to where Rotorua lay by the dulling embers. The trade wind had subsided, the stars dripped radiance and the bowl of the crater seemed to hang between heaven and the world that spun on beneath it. Inside of two hours, at the most, they would be fighting for their lives in combat Adventure that the scarcity of guns and cartridges must soon make a hand-to-hand affair. The skirmish in the woods the day before had not affected him particularly, the bullets had flown high but with the exception of the scramble across the knife-edge, there had seemed very little danger. Now, however, things looked differently and he wondered how he would shape against Toruki’s islanders, trained in their primitive weapons, muscled for their use, lacking the imagination that painted for Loudon with a vivid brush all the hideous possibilities of defeat. For him it might mean a merciful blow with a club, for the women, shame and torture and then, the smoking ovens. Loudon had read up well in the literature of the South Seas—Stevenson, London, Osborne and Beck—now he devoutly wished that he had not. Three lines from Steven- son’s “Marquesan Manners” broke con- stantly through his thoughts and persist- ently projected themselves upon the screen of his mental vision. Once and again descended the murderous blow. Now smoked the ovens, and now, with the cutting lip of a shell, A butcher of ninety Winters jointed the bodies well. There was nothing extraordinary about Loudon. He was merely a clean-living, well-muscled, level-headed American, whose chivalry had tumbled him headlong into a sea of troubles, the chief of which were Serena and her aunt. At all hazards they must not fall into Toruki’s hands. In the eery, early hour the proposition made by Brewster seemed the only sensible move. He should have set aside the girl’s ideas of duty and asserted himself. The odds were tremendously against them. Rotorua was fighting for his regency, Serena was fighting for the fetish of duty to a far- off king who could only revenge and not protect her, and he—what the devil am I in this for, after allPp—he asked himself. | It was not easy to analyze the impulse after his original move to protect two help- less women who had turned out more than ordinarily well capable of looking out for themselves and who accepted his ser- vices as a matter of course. But, being in with the cutting lip of a shell, A butcher of ninety Winters jointed the bodies well. CoOMmiclsoo CO S|