Adventure Magazine Cover — page 153: what you’re looking at

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

Author of ‘‘Death’s Carpenter,” ‘The Pearls of Paruki,” etc. CHAPTER I THROATS IN PERIL HE puzzling, intermittent flashes came again, distinctly, as Neill McNeill, with his back to the eum =sun that was just lifting above the horizon that rimmed the golden-brown desert, gazed with a troubled forehead at the spot where the phenomenon had ap- peared. He did not like it, he told himself, even while he strove to find some natural explanation for the dazzling streaks that came, irregularly enough, yet with a pre- cision that hinted at some systematic method of production, flickering like minia- ture lightning from the low western hills whence their little caravan had recently ~ emerged. It might be caused, he thought, by the level rays of the rising sun shot back from the shoulder of a ledge heavily flaked with mica, shifting from the various facets with the changing angle of the golden beams, but he had not noticed any indications of mica in those sandstone hills and he was apt to notice such things. It was his business as a professional traveler.and adventurer to do SO. Another series of the flashes started and flickered out, and McNeill shook his head slightly. “l’m hanged if I like it,’’ he said just above his breath. “Looks as if some one were signaling in Morse, though if it were Morse I could read it; it may be a Chinese code at that. If so, who are they talking 120 to? There’s something fishy about this hurried return trip. The old boy was in too much of a hurry to get back to Peking and—I wonder!”’ His gaze wandered over the sleeping camp. Two mangy camels, sulky even in their sleep, lay with their heads stretched out on snaky necks. A dozen pack and saddle horses, dwarfed and shaggy, stood dejectedly about at the end of their pickets. By the side of his own dog-tent was the humped canvas where Howard” Remsden snored on one side of a primitive screen while, on the other, his stepdaughter, Helen, slumbered far more gracefully and easily. Spoked out around the ashes of last night’s fire sprawled half a dozen Mon- gols. As McNeill looked keenly at these, counting them, first one and then another writhed and twisted in the sleep that was already beginning to be disturbed by the sun. There had been a long érek the night before, and man and beast had been ex- hausted before the dry camp had been. pitched. Suddenly McNeill gave vent to a short exclamation and swiftly, silently passed over the sand, soft and fine as ashes, closer to the fire and the sprawling Mongols. His lips. parted in a smile as he peered closely at the nearest figure—lifeless, a huddle of clothes and dirty sheepskin. “Neat trick that,” he told himself. “Slipped out of his duds. Now then——” His practised eyes easily picked up the trail of sandal-prints that led from the group, over low waves of sand that so Gomichooks.co