Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 65: what you’re looking at

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

Ambush clouds painted with the eeriest sight North- em eyes may see. Joan was the first to notice, straying to the door of the Factor’s house while her father, Andrews and Carlisle talked and smoked the bright evening away before the fireplace in the council room. Now the sun set late. Jealous daylight claimed many hours of the former dark, and upon this evening the low sun was screened behind a fan of ground fog shoot- ing up a half-circle of crimson spokes rimmed by a golden felloe. Yet it was not the fantastic sunset but the weird sky itself that called forth Joan’s excited cry and brought the others to her side. ‘Look!’ she murmured in a tone of awe. “Did you ever see such unnatural beauty?” “By heavens, a mirage!’ exclaimed Car- lisle. ‘‘A mirage of the South!” For before their uplifted eyes, as if it lay out yonder upon the bare snows or just over the needle-tufted pines, stretched the Open waters of the Great Lakes and the verdant land to the southward. What a charm of color, what a mellow sweep of warmth they beheld! Chrysoprase green the waters shimmered, frothed with the crests of the surges, edged with the pearly foam of pounded beaches, while afar spread the silver ribbons of rivers, the fat, grassed fields, the groves of leafed trees, the acres of orchard bloom. Almost could they hear the cries of children at play under the showering petals, catch the drone of the hived bees, feel the hot-lipped South- etn winds kissing their faces like the pas- slonate caress of their own febrile Chinook. “Tt’s Spring!” declared Carlisle. ‘‘It’s blossomy Spring down there.”’ “Ves, it’s Spring on the Wyoming Valley —see!”’ urged Wayne, his fawn-green eyes burning raptly, his abnormally long arm pointing out his homeland in the sky pic- ture as one would lay a finger upon an un- rolled map. “It’s Spring, and it’s a sign. By the Doom, a sign that I’m going back!’ Carlisle and Andrews were silent. The tears flooded to Joan’s eyes. They all stared mutely while the mirage faded as quickly as it had appeared and somber clouds slipped over with the motion of a hand wiping away the drawing from a slate. Wayne’s eye went dark with the sky. He groped for the doorway as they turned inside and sat down in his chair before the 63. fireplace, his head in his hands, gazing into the glowing embers as one who sees old scenes in pageant. Within an hour the rain came, the warm, steaming, smiting rain that had lurked for weeks in the purple cloud banks, and all night it poured, gushed, fell in torrents, sweeping the snows like a magic broom, brimming ice-bound lake and river with the leaping waters of life. Companioning it, came the Chinook, stealing a march in the dark, ravishing the naked woods, stirring the pulse primordial in the heart of the waking earth. Morning revealed a world aflood, the ice jams flying, the Saskatchewan in rampage, hurling the glut of a thousand streams down to Lake Winnipeg. Spring! It burst like prison doors for prisoners long confined. It came like a swift reprieve to mourners of one doomed. Spring! The air was one vast flyway of wildfowl winging north. As rivers run to the sea, as men seek their own hearth fires, so these whizzing wedges returned to the nests that fledged them, the ducks to their million marshes, the Canada geese to their Hudson’s Bay shores, the wavies to their nameless Arctic islands. While the ice runs reeled along, the wil- lows budded beside them. While the mus- Kegs shed their frozen skins, the wild rose clothed their starkness. While the melting snows uncarpeted the forest floor, the nymph-like flowers spread over it their rugs of matchless hue. Spring! The incompar- able thrill and verve and urge of it! It surged in all living things from the human occupants of Cumberland House to the singing bluebirds in the tree tops and the whining mosquitoes in the swamp. ~— THE breaking of the forest trails BSS | meant the cutting off of all commun- ication in the Northland till the floods had subsided sufficiently for the frail canoes to breast them. Carlisle had had no word from James Bay. If word had not been sent out by trippers before the snows broke, it might not arrive in time to let him know the situation in the other dis- tricts. The lack of such knowledge was a severe handicap. The governor always kept his promises strictly, and he wondered what had hap- pened to prevent a message getting through. But even while he worried, a lone Indian canoeman, daring the running ice, drove Co JOO ANG So(CO)