Adventure Magazine Cover — page 150: what you’re looking at

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

136 a fighter by his silence more than Flood did by his words. He passed no wink but he often turned and listened gravely with a half sneer on his lips when Flood made some particularly bald assertion in regard to some fight or other, and it seemed that fighting had become the theme of the majority of Big Medicine’s tales with himself the fight- ing son of a gun from way back. Those who saw he doubted Flood’s stories had little use for him. They, them- selves, looked on them as things to be taken with a sprinkling of bichloride of sodium in spots; but he was a good entertainer. He was a sort of vaudeville performer, and no one expected the exact truth to the letter. No man ever went to a picture show in the Y. M.C. A. while Flood lived in House 68. Flood wasn’t afraid of this newcomer’s opinion, or didn’t appear to be. He would tell some outlandish story of fighting and gun-play where he was the big It and then he would rear back in his chair and peer through the bunch to see how the crane- man took it. He told us in a loud aside that the stranger was “Nig” Barberly, an ex-tinhorn from Salina Cruz, and that he was “pizen and meaner’n a kyotie.”’ Further, he said little in answer to whis- pered queries other than that they had never been good friends and had had words on the job over the work, and that some day he reckoned he would empty a gun into Nig’s carcass so fast it would ‘“‘cut him right off at the top of the pockets.” Barberly heard this and walked into his room, soon to return with a bristling cartridge-belt buckled around him. Every man in the crowd noticed this, but Flood was in the midst of a yarn that required all his attention when Barberly reappeared. From this time on we noticed that the ill feeling seemed to grow more pronounced on both sides, Flood raising his voice many times for Barberly’s particular benefit, Barberly growing more silent and sneering in his solitary chair at the other end of the porch. These porches, by the way, were four rooms long and were heavily screened with bronze mosquito-wire. The screen door was just opposite the door to the house in the center—information little required by men who know Gatun and the road that wound around the top of the hill to New Gatun. Asa rule Flood’s end of the piazza was crowded with men who either lived in Adventure House 68, or neighboring quarters, or paused on their pilgrimage to New Gatun and re- mained to get an ear-full. ONE evening after supper we fore- ‘ i eaheree as usual. It was during the dry season and the red sun hung aaa a few feet over the Caribbean down beyond Colon, for the sun sets in the At- lantic from the C. Z. It was hot and some men lolled in pajamas and some in gaudy silk kimonos they had won in Chinese raffles. Flood had pulled his leggings and shoes off and sat in his shirt sleeves with his heavy braces thrown down from his shoulders. Hotter than the setting sun were his yarns of battles on blackbirders down in the South Seas when he was the bosom pal of old Cap. Durfee. Blood flowed, snarling lipped men sprang upon each other and beat and mauled and slashed to a fare-ye- well. Desert sands glowed white under the boiling sun, and along trails dotted with human skulls daring men ventured, with Flood usually in the lead; bands of swash- buckling revolutionists attacked and smashed the enemy, fighting valiantly and sapping their way through intervening buildings. Through mad stampedes in the far North we surged, flogging the lagging huskies with the singing whips. Sheath knives gleamed greasily in the murky light cast by swinging forecastle. lamps as with a table leg we met the onrush of pockmarked Portuguese sailors. We shivered and munched gum drops and ate dried pemmican at the two poles of the earth. The ice groaned and upheaved beneath us, and outside our igloos of snow the wolf dogs howled mourn- fully. Flood painted with a lavish brush. But colder than the arctic or ‘antarctic wastes sat Nig Barberly at the other end of the porch, swarthy faced, silent and sneering. At the conclusion of one of Flood’s nar- ratives he took his feet down from the rail- ing, cleared his throat, spat through the screening and turned his chair half around in our direction. He expelled the air from his lungs in a contemptuous grunt. Flood reared up and looked across at him for a few seconds like an angry lion. Then he began telling about beating up a certain individual in Salina Cruz. He took great pains on the personal description of this individual, painting him as a tall, lanky Gomichoo “S nm (E(@)