Adventure Magazine Cover — page 147: what you’re looking at

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

Big Medicine .of the Spider, which had long been growing in her, flamed out in the fury that destroyed him. She had no love for him, but had been sold to him by her people, whom he had met by chance in the jungle before he came back to the river and made his Jair. He gave the headman his rifle for her, she said, and, though he had used up all his cartridges so that the gun was useless, the headman made the trade because women were plenti- ful in his tribe but guns were very scarce, and he might be able to get cartridge. She told us also that her people knew where there was gold, and that the Spider had planned to get much of this gold in trade for the supplies he took from our men. Thus, in time, he hoped to become very rich,“and then, perhaps, would make his way into Peru, where he was not known, and where he tould enjoy the wealth ses oe = 133 gained through the deaths of honest men. So you see, senhores, it was as I told you at the beginning—this man lived like a spider and he died like one. If you know spiders, you know that the female is larger and stronger than the male, and that often she turns on him and destroys him. The - thing that destroyed this Spider was the fact that he did not know this big, hand- some woman's heart. Though I do not claim to know much of women, yet I have observed a few and I have noticed that when a man treats a woman as something bought and paid for, the time may come when he had best be- ware of her. J have noticed, too, that when women meet men for whom they care, it makes little difference whether they are fine ladies from Rio, or humble maidens of the village, or savage women of the jungle— at heart they are all the same. BIG SY iy Ie, OBEN \ Author oy “The No-Good Guy,” “The Streak of Lean,” etc. OM FLOOD was the windiest man in Gatun. He hadn’t hit town but a few days when some emma one allowed that he “sure was ‘big medicine’ to hear him tell it.” “Ala- bam” Goodloe, who hailed from Kentucky and talked like a coon, bet a five-dollar gold piece on Flood’s “come-out”’ that night in a crap game down in House 68 on the New Gatun road. Flood threw the double six, the double ace and the ace deuce the first three shots, which, in the natural consequence of things, cost Alabam thirty-five dollars, for he was He then bet forty and Flood threw the double deuce, doubling his bet each time. little Joe, for a point. The crowd laughed at this mess of “‘slow craps,” for there are more sevens on a pair of bones than there are fours, O my brothers. Goodloe passed the dice back to Flood with anything but hope written in his face, and, as Flood shook them and pounded them against his head for luck, Alabam, in that pleading tone peculiar to a “nachel bohn”’ crap-shooter, had called on him as follows: “Looky hyeah, Big Medicine, you bettah had make that ah-uh joah! Shake, rattle and roll ’°em way out!’ Sundry other re- marks followed in crap-shooter jargon. — The faders shouted with laughter. Some Gomichbooks: co %