Adventure Magazine Cover — page 55: what you’re looking at

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

HREE large, evil men lolled in sultry shade of “Spade” Gowdy’s Nugget Saloon, watching one mmm small, righteous man at work in the sun. It was far too hot to work, but Obadiah Higgins toiled painstakingly with the resiny pine planking of the curb over the newly dug saloon well. The three onlookers had struck a bargain with Oba- diah and were only awaiting the completion of the task to enjoy seeing Obadiah take his strange payment. The wait was not irksome, for Obadiah was a deft workman; besides, he had been working on that well-curb since early morn- ing, and it was now nearly noon. Obadiah drove the last nail as carefully and surely as he had the first. Skillfully he planed down imperceptible rough spots; carefully he hung the new pulley-wheel in the exact center of the frame. In fact, it was a well-curb fit to grace any well in the little Eastern hamlet that had been his home town, instead of being set over a saloon well, a mere unpainted pine necessity in a - squalid little gulch town like El Oro. Obadiah paused a moment to inspect his handiwork. Obadiah was scrawny. Yes, Obadiah Higgins was scrawny. He couldn’t have tipped the scales over one hundred and twenty at his prime—if he ever had any prime—and now he was well past his prime—fifty at least, gray, with a smoothly shaven face pleasantly furrowed. Cheery little wrinkles played about the corners of his eyes and humorous, up-turned ones were etched where his lips met in their not too firm line in front of his toothless gums. His nose was thin, too, like the 4I omaine #H. 5 ga , Lowdermilk rest of him, and ended in a little hook. His eyes—his wistful gray eyes that had always trusted everybody and just couldn’t get over their puppylike faith in the good- ness of everything—looked out hungrily on a world they seemed never to understand. ~-- Obadiah had been cheated. He—he was —well, possibly there was something lack- ing. Forty years he had endured the rail- lery of thoughtless citizens of the little home town -back East—forty years of satirical gibes that alone would have been enough to shift the balance of a stronger mind than his. Finally one of the younger generation openly called him a fool. Obadiah, with a childlike faith that he could go “out West” and make good, summoned all his courage and bid the town good-by. Ten years Obadiah pitted his frail strength against the stern odds of the gold country. Finally he drifted to El Oro. He could have been a skilled worker in fine woods elsewhere, but in El Oro he was a carpenter. While it was pitifully apparent he had been a failure all along, he still harbored eternal hope that he could, before the end, go back home and show them that he had “‘made good.” ES |EVIDENTLY Obadiah decided the job was satisfactorily done, for he AMput away his tools and proceeded to reap his reward. Taking from his tool- kit a tomato can half filled with a black fluid composed of lampblack and a dash of the camp’s meager supply of kerosene, Obadiah knelt stifly before the curb and stirred expectantly with the caked brush that was mostly handle. Then, with infinite Eomichboo (€ cS (E(@)