Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 126: what you’re looking at

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

124 some more. He found it, and straightened just as the six windows in the back room of the Broken Dollar sprang into dusty radi- ance and a line of light showed yellowly at the bottom of the door. “That door always did hang slanchways,”’ observed Johnny, and thoughtfully edged behind the freight-wagon. _ The door opened. For an instant the form of a woman was silhouetted against ae light within, then the door closed behind er. From the freight-wagon to the Broken Dollar was not more than seventy yards. Johnny heard the tink of a kicked tin can. A high heel clicked on a flat stone. A tri- angular splotch of white, gliding toward the freight-wagon, gradually took shape in the darkness. The white splotch reached the hind wheels, and Johnny heard the pleasant whisper of silk. Noiselessly Johnny scut- tled to the safer shelter of the corral stock- ade. Body flattened against the posts, he waited. | The white splotch appeared at the fore wheels of the freight-wagon, and bobbed up- ward as the woman swung herself into the driver’s seat. Followed then the scratch of a drawn match. Johnny stared. The woman was lighting a cigaret. The pulsing flame re- vealed the face of Slay’s sister, Mrs. Lotta Wallace. At this close range her extreme beauty was more than ever apparent. The black hair growing low in a widow’s peak on the forehead, the finely arched eyebrows, the long and curving eyelashes, the straight nose, the wide, full-lipped mouth, and the firm and pointed chin above the round, smooth throat and lovely shoulders, were individually sufficiently striking. In com- bination with each other the effect was bewildering. Yet Johnny was left cold. He remembered Scotty’s leopard and be- came colder. The situation was becoming impossible. The spark that was Mrs. Wallace’s cigaret was not twenty feet distant. At any mo- ment the lady might climb down, walk along the stockade and discover him. WNat- urally, she would think he was spying on her, and to be suspected of that by such an unknown quantity as Slay’s sister was un- thinkable. Why hadn’t he kept on going along the stockade when he had the oppor- tunity? Scotty was right. He was a fine Adventure detective, making mistakes this way. Johnny sweated clammily and breathed as little as possible. Suddenly he saw Mrs. Wallace’s cigaret describe a firefly arc in the air and strike the ground in a sputter of sparks. There was no sound of a movement on the driver’s seat. Wasn’t the woman ever coming down? A long minute’s silence, then a whisper— “My God, what a life!’’ The exclamatory sentence was followed by a pronounced sniffle, then more sniffles, and finally choky little sobs. It was evi- dent that Mrs. Wallace was striving to fight down her emotion. But her grief was too great to be stifled easily. “T wish I were dead!”’ she moaned, and began to cry quietly and steadily. Johnny, hating himself acutely, began to itch between the shoulders. The itch wore itself out after centuries of torture and a cramp fastened sullenly on the muscles of his left foot. Something alive and many-legged fell off the stockade and landed on his shoulder. The something crawled along the shoulder to his neck and tickled his ear. With infinite caution he raised a nervous hand, removed a night-riding spider and en- deavored to drop the loathsome thing at a distance. With the perversity of vermin it clung whole-heartedly to his finger, and he was forced to slat it off against a post of the stockade, detaching in the process a loose piece of dry bark. The bark fell with a rustle. Johnny caught his breath, and tensed his muscles for a flying start. But the sound of weeping abated not. Johnny took heart of hope and a long breath. The taking of the latter was inju- dicious. For many months dust of the cor- ral, stirred into action by the hoofs of the stage-horses, had been sifting and settling behind that loose piece of bark. The fall thereof released an atomic cloud that, at the intake of the long breath, promptly smote the sensitive membrane of Johnny’s nos- trils. Johnny gritted his teeth, violently rubbed his nose, and otherwise by main strength and a robust will contrived to suffocate the sneeze before it was born. He almost strangled in the effort, and was left with tear-wet eyes and throbbing temples. But he had made not the slightest sound. And Mrs. Wallace wept on forlornly. Johnny’s gambling spirit urged him to CORNIELO@OO SS (C@