Adventure Magazine, Mid-September 1917 — page 136: what you’re looking at

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

134 the wails of human despair about her. Suddenly she lost her hold. When she again tried to bury her hands in the gravel, she felt a native writhing and squirming beside her. In one of his hands were several pieces of rope.’ Kalputa snatched the ropes and sprawled across the street toward the base of a coco- nut-tree. She clung there until the wind went down for several minutes. Then she clasped the trunk of the tree with her hands, pressed the soles of her feet against the bark and, being a Melanesian woman, perilously began to walk up the tree. At the top she tied herself securely among the windage. When the wind again hit her tree, the tree did not sway or bend backward and forward, but stood almost stationary, vi- brating like a piece of wire. The vibration made Kalputa dizzy, then sick. She expected the tree to snap at any moment. A tree across the street had just gone that way, throwing its occupants, two men and a woman, to the ground like ripe coconuts. Few trees could stand the strain of that hurricane very long. Late that night the wind was unbeliev- able. It was ascreaming fury. Kalputa’s tree was loosening at the roots. ‘There was no telling how much longer it could stand the strain. When the rain again struck the village, Kalputa thought that the wind had dipped up all the water in the lagoon and hurled it across the canefields. The rain hit her back and shoulders like leaden pellets. The tree swayed perilously as one of the roots tore loose. Kalputa doubled her body at the waist and clung tighter to the beaten- down leaves, sobbing. Again she wished something terrible would happen to the ‘‘touch of death” and Old Lu the sorcerer. For she was weakening like the tree. Her strength was running from her faster than she had ever imagined it could. It was the wind that was exhausting her. She could not endure its unceasing impact much longer. And the rain .. . It would be a night-long tumbling wall of water. It would sink to the very roots of the tree and tear them to pieces. Surely her tree would fall in a few minutes. But the tree did not fall. By midnight the hurricane lay with its backbone broken. Only a stiff breeze was blowing. The water wall lay crumbled in the village and the Adventure canefields. Except for the harsh animal- like groans of the villagers and the low crying of the sea, all was quiet. Kalputa stirred uneasily among the leaves. She was weak and weary. Both body and brain ached. She began to cry, then stopped suddenly to see if she was hurt. Her arm and shoulder were swollen con- siderably from the wound above the armpit. As she listened to the sounds of grief about her, she felt very lonely. Once she thought of Captain Barker, wondering what the hurricane had done to him and the trading station and the village in the rear of it. She quickly dismissed him from her mind. Presently she began to think of some one else. It was not about the “touch of death” or Old Lu the sorcerer. She was thinking of her thin little brown baby all alone in the grove of paw-paw trees in the rear of the station. She wished she could go to him. Again she started to cry. Soon the breeze went down. Every- thing became dead calm. The stars came out. They looked like big pearls pinned to a piece of blue cloth. Somewhere down the street a dog splashed in the water, howling mournfully. Kalputa dropped her head to her arms until the first shimmer of dawn crept up over the island. ) When she climbed down from the tree, she looked about her bewildered. The rain- filled street was cluttered with corpses. Some of the bodies lay half in the water and half out, battered and broken. Nota house was standing. Even the house of Old Lu, with all of its sorcery, was gone. Some of the house piles remained upright, with natives clinging to them, wet and mis- erable. There was but little wreckage of the houses. The fingers of the wind had hurled practically all of it into the cane- fields or down upon the beach where it was sucked into the lagoon by the undertow. But one palm-tree out of every ten was spared. ‘Two of these were wrecks, their windage shorn and their long trunks split half-way down. arn «4 THE sun was not yet up over the feed island when Kalputa found herself “ew on the edge of a flooded field, looking for a way down to the jetty. The field was draining slowly. It would be several hours, maybe evening, before the field would be. passable. COMmiclsoo ©