Adventure Magazine, Mid-September 1917 — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

The Ninth Man they would be good for packing the gold from the river bed when they found it. At this sally each laughed heartily although the thoughts of each had been on just this use for them. Hughie Gibbs grew more and more afraid as he saw the caution of the others increase. He saw them scan the jungles as they pro- ceeded, no word spoken but each man alert to whatever danger threatened and Gibbs’ eyes roved with an ecstasy of fear. At night when he saw them drag a barrier of stones together for a camp and watched them tramp the fire out before rolling in, he shivered with dread and tried to pick the safest spot to spread his blanket. The guard usually crept away for a few paces and lay prone upon the ground so that he could detect danger before it act- ually approached the camp. Thére was danger from prowling animals when the fire, which was put out so as not to attract the Indians, was not burning. But each man slept soundly knowing that the guard would do his duty and arouse them all at the signs of danger. That is, all but Hughie Gibbs did. He tossed and moaned and often lay awake for hours shivering with dread. | The antenne of his fear reached far out into the jungles and he sensed danger to which the others were oblivious. Or per- haps he felt an intuition, a foreboding, a premonition of red-handed danger which was to come. God only knows. V sites A THREE months had passed. The a Sfij pedometer of James Willis regis- SEEES tered over twelve hundred miles. He had been careful to lay it aside when pottering around the camps but a hundred miles could safely be subtracted for side moves and short-steps. This left about eleven hundred miles they had walked in a southerly direction. They were somewhere in Eastern Bolivia —yjust where no one of them had any idea— but possibly about due east of Lake Tit- icaca. They were fast approaching the watershed which turns the water north into the Amazonas or south into the Rio de la Plata. The forests were yet very dense. Down below, the first and wildest state of the Republic of Brazil was called Matto Grosso or Great Forest. There was still soe 67 hope in the faces of all. They were living on hope and traveling on hope. All but Gibbs. had become a pariah among them. He was part; yet not a part of the crowd. They had found him rotten to the core and had gradually left off saying anything to him. They had done him favors and he had re- turned evil upon evil. | He was like an ungrateful dog that snapped the hands that ministered to him. He had shirked and whined and made trou- ble until one by one they had left him strictly alone. He was selfish to the mar- row. The others co-operated to the last detail but Gibbs was for self and self only. He was strong, stronger than many of the party, but yet he allowed himself to be a parasite that grafted itself upon them and impeded their progress. He sat with them at the camp-fires, and ate what they cooked, he walked with them, and slept with them yet he allowed them to fetch and carry for him as if he were an invalid. He was in the shape of a man but he was not a man. Had he only tried and failed it would have been different. They would have moved heaven and hell for him—or if he had really been weak or sick. He could not fool these men. They knew by experience, by the stride of a man, how he picked up and set down his feet and the way he carried his head and body just how he was feeling inwardly. They did not hate him. He was beneath that. They despised him as unworthy of being a man. Gibbs must have felt this. have helped doing so. But he showed no resentment so long as he traveled light and ate and slept with less effort than they. Back home in the States these shortcom- ings would perhaps never have become apparent. He might have died of old age without any one suspecting him of bcing yellow. But on the trail, the proving ground of men, where each man reads plainly the soul of another, it could not re- main covered. It must out and show itself. They stopped one day on the brow of a cliff for lunch. The forest was thinner here and they could look far below into the val- ley where a small stream curved and twisted its way downward. After the meal they sat smoking. Harte walked out on the lip of the cliff and stood, shading his eyes with his hand as he studied the lay of the creek intently. His eyes puckered at the corners COmicloo He had given up. He He could not ~ C©