Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 42: what you’re looking at

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

40 deep waters, whitefish, inconnu, silvery trout as big as salmon, sometimes a weighty sturgeon. Surplus fish, especially the whitefish, were dried for Winter dog feed, and when the nets yielded nothing the canoes went out at night with spearmen in the bows, bronze statues posing under the red flares in the iron baskets above them, darting their steel into the pitchy, flame-carmined water where the startled fish fluked in phosphorescent streaks. Bird life, too, was flocking for the Fall migration. Plover, snipe, terns, long-billed marsh wrens, yellow-headed blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, Sora rails filled the reedy labyrinths. Wood duck, ruddy duck, grebes, loons, coots, mallards, black duck covered the weedy channels, while day by day the rafts of gadwall, pintail, teal, scaups, scoters, redheads, canvasbacks grew greater and greater. Then down drove the wedges of ~wild geese, true harbingers of coming Winter, the Canadas from Hudson’s Bay, the wavies from unknown islands of the Arctic. Every day from sunrise to sunset the guns of the Indian goose hunters talked on the lonely shores, and by the hundreds they brought them in, to be eaten fresh or salted down in barrels, for Winter use. But white men quickly sicken of flesh alone and white women more quickly than men, and often Carlisle wondered how Joan was faring on the savage diet. He had not seen her since the Sunday morning she had fled from him. Her flowers were withered and dead, but he looked in vain for another meeting. All the week days there was practically no communication between the posts and on Sundays she never came any more to Andrews’ mixed services on the lake shore. He wondered if she were ill, and censured himself for pressing the trade war so bit- terly. Would Wayne perhaps save some staple provisions for such an emergency? But on second thought he knew Wayne was not the man to hedge ina fight. She would be living on the post diet, and he feared it did not agree. The idea harassed him continually, set him searching at nights for overlooked food among the shelves of his quarters till one night he came across his gear bag, thrown aside and forgotten since he had established himself at the post. In its bottom his groping fingers felt a Adventure bundle which he did not recognize at first but as he unrolled the oilcloth in which it was wrapped he suddenly remembered about it. It was a small reserve of pro- visions, stowed away there when he left Moose Factory in case of accident or emer- gency on the trip to Cumberland House. Kagerly he spread out its contents and eyed the articles with satisfaction—a tiny bag of flour, the same of meal, a tin of salted butter, a package of raisins, a little powdered chocolate. Delicacies for any- one in the North, a boon to Joan whether she was sick or not! And who was to see him if he tossed them by night over the pal- isades of Fort Wayne? niZ again in strong paper, wrote Joan’s name on the wrapper, slipped out of his house and through the stockade gate. The moment he left the stockade he caught it—the first tang of real Autumn, that indefinable feel in the air, something of coolness, something of dampness, a savor of falling leaves, white frost fogs, mournful winds and a world left desolate by fleeting migrant wings. The moon was nearly full, ghost-like, gibbous, pouring its radiance over the blackly silhouetted tree-tops upon Pine Island Lake beneath. A flux of molten silver Carlisle beheld the waters, broken only by the swimming musk- rats at the apices of their V-shaped ripples along the shores and by the huge rafts of ducks, huddled black as islands, quacking sleepily in mid-lake. Shore and open for- est aisles were bright as day, so the Factor edged into the trees and kept the shadows as he worked ’round to Fort Wayne. Velvet-footed on his moccasins he ap- proached the palisades, maintaining a sharp watch for riflemen who might fire first and challenge afterward, measuring his distance till he thought he was near enough to throw. As he swung back his arm, the creak of the opening stockade gate froze him in his tracks, and the next instant a woman’s figure came flying ’round the palisades on the trail that led to the water’s edge, almost colliding with him before she could come to a stop. “Paul!” ‘‘Where on earth were you going, girl, at this time of night?” “Aush, Paul!’? she whispered. ‘‘Mur- dock, the gate-keeper or some of the others HASTILY he wrapped them up COnniclooo S (C@