Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 38: what you’re looking at

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

36 rival companies met on a common ground of worship, some out of genuine desire, others out of curiosity, more out of sheer idleness. Richelieu himself arrived with his black beard newly trimmed and his resplendent uniform cleaned and polished. Despite the _ peaceful appearance of things he had a bodyguard along, and he chose his place on the other side of the throng from Carlisle, giving him, with exaggerated courtesy, his ramrod bow from the hips while the sar- donic laugh of the devil lurked in his black beard. For Wayne or Joan Carlisle looked in vain, and a disconcerting qualm disturbed him inwardly. All the busy week he had had no glimpse of her, and today he had hoped—but yonder! Was the flash of a woman’s dress flitting over from Fort Wayne? He stared, and his heart leaped. It was Joan and she was coming alone. Gone were her trail garments, the gray wool canoe skirt and the mosquito veil. She walked bareheaded, a jewel at her throat, clad in a clinging silk dress of cham- pagne color with new, snow-white doeskin half moccasins peeping from underneath. A moment he drank in the vision of her, all unflawed fairness in the full blaze of the sun, all rose and golden as Wayne had said of her mother, before she sat down upon a boulder on the outskirts of the crowd. With prayer and oration in Cree the brief service went on, Andrews towering in his black cassock upon the rock altar above his motley congregation, his strong voice sound- ing sonorously from the water-line to the rim of the large gathering. To the cadences of the waves breaking upon the beach and the breezes playing through the pines they _ sang their hymns, chanting in many lan- guages, crying to their divers gods. Then with a benediction Andrews dis- missed them, and the adherents of each post began to gravitate slowly toward their own precincts. Carlisle, Sa saw that Joan did not go back directly. As if loath to leave the fresh sweetness of the morning, she slipped from the crowd and loitered up one of the forest aisles between Cumberland House and Fort Wayne. For a moment he hesi- tated, made as if to follow Andrews inside the stockade and then turned off up the ferny avenue Joan had taken. A little farther on he caught sight of her Adventure wandering amid the jumble of rock ridges and grassy hills that fringed the woodland. All the hollows were splashed with the hue of berries, red raspberries, golden goose- berries, blueberries, the profligate wild black currants. All the hills were ablaze with flowers, waves of bluebells, tangles of wild pink roses, patches of vivid lilies, a largess of yellow daisies running riot everywhere. Joan was idling along, bending here and there with the supple ease of the wilderness trained, gathering what pleased her fancy, but at the sound of Carlisle’s feet in the briers she whirled swiftly, poised at her full height in the fashion she had inherited from her father. In a flash Carlisle sensed the change in her! She was the same yet not the same woman as before her father’s revelation the night of their arrival on Sturgeon Lake. That revelation seemed to have thrown her back on herself, stamped her more def- initely as a Wayne. In the very accentu- ation of her father’s mannerism Carlisle read a strengthening of her loyalty to that father, and deep loyalty to Wayne could mean nothing but deep antagonism to him. With something of the same feeling he had experienced when he feared she was going to be absent from the congregation of the Pine Island Lake shore, he stopped before her without a greeting, seats her face with his eyes. “Paul, Paul,’ she cried ere. first to break silence, ‘“‘who ‘gave you leave to follow me here?” “Nobody, but I took it,” he answered boldly. “I took it, as men must always take the things they wantin this Northland.” “But you had no right!” “Ah, but I have the right! A wood nymph came to me one night on the Winni- peg River and gave me that right. Do you remember?” “No, I don’t remember.” “Joan, you mean you don’t choose to remember.”’ “Well, then—I don’t choose to remember!” eam, FACE to face with him she stood, 2 2 defiant, imperious, her arms full of eS the gathered wild flowers but sham- ing the flowers in all their fairness, far sweeter to Carlisle than the honeyed blos- soms, far more haunting than the languor- ous perfume they breathed. “But you must, Joan!” he cried almost COnniclooo® S (C@