Adventure Magazine Cover — page 165: what you’re looking at

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

es The Dragon’s Claw THIRTY-SIX hours later McNeill seated in his room next to that of AJ Remsden whom he could hear im- patiently padding up and down, listened to a knock on Remsden’s door and to ‘Remsden opening it. Some one who talked in a voice of high pitch that was almost instantaneously hushed to a whisper, was admitted. McNeill rose and softly opened his own door to the corridor. Presently he heard the chink of gold and Remsden’s door reopening. He gilded to where his own entrance stood ajar, the light out in his room, and saw, gliding along the passage, the bowed form of an old Chinaman who was stowing away something in his capacious blouse. The face of wrinkled yellow skin, drawn tight asa drumhead over the skull, showed little, but the eyes, looking furtively from left to right, held the look of one who gloats over greed satisfied and is yet possessed with deadly fear. : Moreover, McNeill recognized the man as the master-craftsman of all Peking’s artificers in precious metals and gems, in pearl and ivory—Ling Yuan, the greatest connoisseur of all the Orient in such works of art. It seemed evident to him where the claw had been. For some reason Remsden had consulted Ling Yuan as to the authenticity of the claw, fearing perhaps that Fung-Ti had played him false, though the awful mementoes of that false priest had since furnished mute proof of his having really obtained the actual relic. Wondering a little what enormous sum Remsden must have demanded from Ling Yuan as pledge for the return of the claw, McNeill turned on his light and closed the barely opened door without noise. The next instant Remsden appeared in the entrance between the rooms. “T have the claw,” he said. Neill, and save Helen.”’ McNeill took it—a little thing to repre- sent the burning, mystical faith of the most mysterious nation of the world. The claw itself was black with age, and far longer than that of any animal that Neill had ever seen, sharply curved, set in gray translucent jade which was scaled where it gripped the claw and, above that, deep cut with hieroglyphs. He opened his belt and shirt and put the thing away in a pocket of his money belt. te “Take it, I5I “T shall find a better place for it pres- ently,” he said. Remsden sighed as he saw it disappear. “It was a costly experiment,” he said. “How early do you start?” “Immediately,” said McNeill. ‘There is not a moment to lose. We shall travel fast, but there may be delays. My men are waiting for me now.” CHAPTER IV OCCIDENT AGAINST ORIENT 48S temple of the Hoang Lung, the Shrine of the Dragon’s Claw, lies in a natural amphitheater, the buildings of stone and sun-dried brick standing in a horseshoe of steep hills that are honeycombed with caves and fissures, some of which are used as dwellings for the priests. The entrance to the horseshoe is winged across with stone walls that connect with high arches, also of stone and carved with weird representa- tions of the dragon gods and their lesser attendant divinities. There are three of these arches and they were undoubtedly built to serve as defenses against marauders from the north. They were built many hundreds of years ago, perhaps thousands, and their carvings are smudged with the rasp of wind and rain and desert sands, and there are deep interstices where once the stone blocks met with exact precision. A modern field gun would knock one to pieces in two shots; yet, inasmuch as field guns have never neared the shrine, they are still considered, in the light of legend and dim history, impregnable when the wooden gates, reinforced heavily with metal, are closed. At nightfall of the fifth day after their start from Peking, the seventh since the ul- timatum of the priests had been delivered © to Remsden, a party -of white men were camped in the hills some three miles from the town and temple of Hoang Lung. By the light of the fire about which they sat at a war-council with their pipes or ciga- rets going, they were a hard-bitten, lean and capable looking crowd, eighteen of them in all—volunteers under McNeill to get a white girl out of Hoang Lung. Engineers, prospectors, adventurers of sorts they were and all were known to Mc- Neill personally. They represented every Gomicbooks.co nm