Adventure Magazine Cover, June 18, 1921 — page 104: what you’re looking at

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

94 Carter was still dressed in the dirty white clothes he had been buried in, and he stank of the grave. Stort was terrified of the leering, unsub- stantial face of his old crony, and beseeched Carter to leave him and go back to the earth. Carter grimaced and sneered, and spoke words that ate like strong acid into the drunkard’s brain. Carter jeered at the livid bruises upon Stort’s haggard face, at the finger-marks still visible upon his throat and at the craven spirit which suffered deep injury without effective resentment. “She was your woman,” said Carter. “That newchum, that milk-and-water nip- per, took her away from you. He robbed you. She was your woman; you could do what you liked with her; and he inter- fered. He wanted her for himself. He was too good to be friends with the likes of you, but he took your woman. He took her,into his house. She’s there now, leaning over his bed, stroking his forehead, looking into his eyes “Shut up!” cried Stort. He cursed and picked up his bottle and hurled it straight into the taunting face across the table. The bottle went right through Carter, and smashed against the farther wall. “He has robbed you,” went on Carter’s unperturbed voice. ‘‘She wants to stay with him. You'll never get her back. Unless i “ll get him! him!” raged Stort. “How will you get him?’’sneered Carter. “You haven’t got the guts to face Roper. Roper is on guard; Roper hates you; Roper would like to give you best. He’s taken your guns, your pistols, yourax. Youcan’t I swear to —— I'll get get by Roper. But Roper guards the door, the veranda. Have you forgotten the window? He sleeps beneath the window!”’ “Tt is too high from the ground,” ob- jected Stort. tried to crawl in. room with him!” Carter leaned across the table until his livid, bloated face was but a few inches distant from Stort’s fascinated and horrified eyes. “Do you remember how I died?” asked Carter. “Don’t—don’t talk about that!” pleaded Stort, in terror. “Roper would hear me if I And she—she is in the Adventure Carter grinned and his heavy chin dropped. There came out of his open mouth, not a tongue, but the loathsome head of a death adder. Stort screamed. He fell out of his chair and scrambled across the floor to a corner of the room. He crouched here for some time in a quaking fear, his face hidden. When he did look up, the sight and sound of Carter had left the room and returned to the mound upon the hillside. Hitherto, when Carter paid him a visit, Stort stopped drinking. The apparition was a warning to sober up. But this time his brain was too distracted with hate and grief to heed a warning. Indeed, he had already passed the border-line and become less a man than an embodied hate, sus- tained and fed by alcohol. When his fear passed and he felt himself alone again, his first act was to open the cupboard. The rest of the night he spent pouring arrack down his throat; and the fiery fumes swirled and danced in his head until there finally took shape before his mind’s eye a picture of his enemy writhing in a death agony—even as Carter had died long ago. It was a pleasing pieture; Stort gloated over it. His hate told him how to make the pic- ture come true. At first he thought of dropping a death adder in through the open window of Bruce’s hut. But the chances that the sluggish, short-fanged reptile would land upon his enemy’s bare skin and bite were not great—and besides, the thought of his having to handle a snake completely unnerved him. He thought of introducing the adder to Bruce’s bed, in the daytime, through the medium of Billycan,, who, he knew, was corruptible. But Roper and Marua both possessed sharp eyes and Billycan was clumsy; also, the native would demand pay in advance for so terrible a job, and, having drunk his pay, would more likely betray than obey him. Consideration of Billycan as a tool finally suggested to Stort’s mind the safe and cer- tain plan; the plan whereby Bruce would die Carter’s death, at Stort’s hands, and the latter need not touch the slimy, writhing instrument. It was a brilliant plan; the more he thought it over, the surer seemed its success. Bruce would certainly die— as Carter died. He would never live to enjoy Marua. What would happen to COmiclboo \ ) C©