Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 29: what you’re looking at

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

Ambush THE transient light filtered through Carlisle’s bough shelter, _ LC®] touched his face, and receded again as the moon set behind theridge. But neither moonrise nor moonset served to waken him. Still he dozed, till the shght scuffle of a moccasin stirred him. Yet, true to his woodsman’s instinct, he stirred inwardly, not outwardly, giving no muscular response to the impression from without till he should have sensed whether friend or enemy wore the scuffling mocca- sins. His body retained its immobility. Only his eyelids parted, almost impercept- ibly, till he could glimpse the fire-lit en- trance where his mosquito smudge flared and smoked and hissed its defiance to the whining pests. Then he saw in their dainty materialism the moccasins that had wakened him, two tiny creations of elkskin, like Cinderella slippers of the forest, so small that they could have walked upon his outstretched (Fo) ‘a palms. They revealed the identity of his visitor. None but Joan wore such fairy footgear. He shifted his furtive gaze upward, to see her swelling-hipped, full-bosomed figure silhouetted in the ochre glow. He could mark the wonderful fairness of her skin, the sparkle of the lake-blue eyes, the shimmer of her hair that gleamed like a frosted web of fine gold threads with every flare of the smudge. “Paul, how does your wound feel now?” she asked. Some sudden, unaccountable whim kept Carlisle silent. Hesitatingly Joan stepped over to where he lay upon the balsam boughs. He seemed asleep, his eyelids closed. In the dim light of the interior she noted the bandage upon his stockinged leg and the discoloration of the bruise upon his temple, and a flood of mingled feeling rushed over her. All in an instant she was swept and shaken by the romantic glamor of their first meeting that eventful night at Grande Portage, by the sweet companionship of their days of wilderness travel, by the pas- sionate unbaring of Carlisle’s heart in the wild dash through the Rapide des Boisfranc. Standing over him, her own heart beat ina tumult, and though her intellect flashed a vague warning of restraint, it could not curb the impulsive surge of her emotion. Swiftly she stooped, pressed her warm lips 27 to Carlisle’s lips and fled back on silent winged feet to her own tent. His fibers all a-throb, Carlisle opened his eyes. Instinctively his arms went out, but Joan had vanished too quickly. Like a* wood nymph she had come and like a wood nymph she had gone, too ethereal for the human grasping. All Carlisle’s arms encircled was the empty air. All his wide-open eyes saw was the stoic Indians mending the six-fathom canoe. It lay on its side by the fire, one gunwale propped up with sticks, the yellow bark shining deep orange under the magic flames. Over the rents Missowa and Waseyawin were fitting strips of canvas while the mid- dlemen poured on the resinous pitch. A study in red, yellow, bronze, crimson, um- ber and orange they worked, ringed ’round by the velvet band of the forest starred here and there with the prying eyes of the watch- ers of the wild. Carlisle followed the shift of the eyes un- consciously, and by the eyes and the scurry- ings among the leaves he read the identity of each—a darting weasel or mink, a timid doe with her fawn, a porcupine running a log, a pack of full-bellied harmless wolves worming like dogs toward the fascinating glare. And in the trees above he read analogous sounds, the feathered wild things of the air going abroad with their kin of the earth, the plaintive whippoorwill, the rasping night hawk, the hooting owl on its noiseless pin- ions. All the wilderness had awakened with the moonset. The susurrus of the pine sang overhead lke passing winds, and winds themselves, arising no one knew how, dying no one knew where, came and went like unseen hosts on the march. Beaver slapped their pistol-like warnings in the ponds below the balsam ridge. Bull moose called from the thickets beside. Never for a moment was the night-world still. Yet, buoying all these noises, Car- lisle sensed an underswell of silence, the poise of the lonely land, passive, brooding, Nirvanic, the voiceless spirit of the North itself lying mute in its ambush, waiting to spring upon men in the unguarded moment of their weakness! The pale-yellow stars in the purple sky seemed planets appointed to another sphere, and the only gleam which showed in the dark, austere immensity of the earth itself GOmiicioo S (C@