Adventure Magazine, Mid-September 1917 — page 142: what you’re looking at

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

Ghe TENT a7 —- MALLER EYaucH s MILLER SOLITARY tree, with crooked trunk and limbs twisted and warped grotesquely as by pain, stood re- vealed in the breaking dawn. In the softer moonlight it had been a fantastic, silvered figure, solemnly brandishing ghostly arms and unobtrusively affecting the simple airs it could assume only when its deformities were mercifully veiled. Beneath it stood a man. He was good to look upon, with cleanly molded face, hard, brown forearms, and broad chest crowding a gray shirt. Belted riding breeches hung loosely from a flat waist, and a bulging holster reposed snugly against his thigh. He paid no attention to the shifting colors in the east, the scampering blue haze, or the chorus of chattering birds in the mallee scrub behind—all heralds of the new day—but kept his eyes on a camp in the clearing at his feet. The lifting light revealed no sign of life there—just the tent, almost new, but powdered with the fine dust of the Western Australian bush; at one side a shelter frame- work of poles and branches roofed with grass; a few articles of clothing on the tent’s sloping side; and, hanging on a pole, a tin dish-pan which, as day came on, flashed mirror-like in the Summer breeze. Higher rose the sun, and harder it pumped its heat in the man’s face, but he made no movement other than to pull down his hat to shade his eyes. A long time he waited. At last the flap of the tent was throw back and a young woman emerged. She had on something blue and silky, soft, fluttering and dainty, and because it was so much out of place, so hungry for the sun- beams and so scintillant and palpitating, it reminded the watcher of a jewel pulsing and glowing with life. In all that great flat monotony it was the only spot of color. She moved timidly. Once when a rat scur- ried away before her and rustled through the scrub with a noise that sounded in the stillness like the crashing of trees, her hands went to her throat and she was on the point of going back to the tent. She gathered a few twigs, laid them on the ashes of a dead fire, and made a half- hearted search for matches among the sup- plies under the grass shelter. Failing to find them, she took out a tin of meat—the man could see the gaudy red label—and looked at it with evident misgivings. She was so like a child, so little like a grown woman, so much in need of help. The man swore gently under his breath. But in that vast silence sound travels easily. She heard it, looked up, and turned to run, but the bush frowned on her and re- pelled her. In an agony of fear she shrank back against the tent and watched him. So he came forward. **Marian!”’ he said. She stared at him incredulously. “It’s all right!” he protested. “Don’t you know me?” “Max! Isit really you? I—’’ Her voice broke and she began to laugh excitedly be- 140 tween wholesome sobs of relief. “I thought COMmicOolkkS.COm