Adventure Magazine Cover — page 152: what you’re looking at

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

138 steers in town fairs. We dove under the house side by side. “That old bull-pup says bowie up above and they’s a chunk of lead as big and flat as a dollar digs a gopher hole between our heads, and they’s an aftermath of shavings and sawdust pours down on us. Nig rolls one way and me t’other and we hear three more shoots shot and the balls a-tearin’ out through the ceiling and the tin roof, and we know the old short nose is performing true to form. ‘At the fourth shot, whoever had the gun has throwed it from him, and it bounces out the door into the road. Nig claims he seen the hammer strike a rock, but from where I lay the gun appeared to twirl around and take due and deliberate aim at the upper left-hand corner of my shirt pocket. I seen the hammer raise, heard her click, and see her go off. She jumped three feet and a quarter in the air, and a Trinidad nigger in my gang says it knocked the bean pot square out of his female’s hand, just this side of the reservoir. “By the time we gets seated on the steps and I’ve taken out a deck of kyards, and begin dealin’ us a friendly hand of seven up, all of Gatun, New Gatun, half of Mindi, and a quarter of Mount Hope is foggin’ in - our direction. I reckon it’s a good thing that, although I’m a man of few words, I can hand out a good single-handed line of talk when I’m forced to. Adventure “T staved off the ambulance men who was for takin’ us to the hospital, the Z. P. who wanted to jug us, the sanitary inspector who wanted to lick us for tearin’ the screenin’, the colone! and the major who wanted to fire us, and our fellow house-mates who wanted to kill us. It took seven quarts of Sunnybrook before we. declared peace among ourselves and with the world in general at midnight.” Although I heard Big Medicine tell the yarn a dozen times, adding various new lights to it on each repetition, I never heard him mention how we found “Sinbad the Sailor,” a little hunchbacked New York Jew named Sindeband, at a late hour wedged in behind a clothes closet shivering and crving with fright, thinking he’d shot Nig Barberly in defending Flood from him. Sinbad thought the world of Big Medicine and many’s the tale Flood afterward spun for his particular benefit. Finally Big Medicine sprung the big sur- prize when Jumbo, the blacksmith, got on a rampage and climbed his frame down in front of the eating-house. Men who saw it claimed there never was such another fight south of the Rio Grande River, for they fought for an hour. Flood licked big Jumbo to a standstill, and the two of them went down into New Gatun to have a drink together. There’s exceptions to all rules and we had to acknowledge that Big Medicine was one of them. NIGHT ON THE DESERT : BY W. H. GARDNER An acrid hint of ozone, and far-flung The cold pure vault of heaven hung With incandescent worlds. A light keen breath of new-born breeze. "Twixt purple sky and purple plain a frieze Of bordering buttes. At foot, white sand all luminous—a dearth Of sound or life—a moon-like earth, An inorganic world. Eomicbooks (E(0) mM