Adventure Magazine Cover, June 18, 1921 — page 156: what you’re looking at

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

146 but in all that three square miles there is no tree to shade a rabbit. The Quag will not tolerate a tree. And men building fence dig their post- holes shallowly and with caution; and to every post, at ground level, a wide board is fastened flatwise on either side. Our people have lived with the Quag this hun- dred years and more; they have heard its voice in many a Spring night. And despite its frank and open face, they know it for a treacherous, secret morass with the maw of a Moloch. _ Sixscore years ago, when Valley Forge was not yet fully history, but a raw scar in the mind of many a living man, old Simon Black—young Simon then—came westward through the Holland Patent. He carried a long squirrel rifle, I suppose, and wore a coonskin cap; and his moccasined feet trod virgin forest hereabouts. His, they say, was the first eye to see our valley save as a hunting-ground. Here Simon halted. Here was cleared land in plenty; three square miles without a tree. I can imagine him kneeling, all ignorant, upon the very bosom of the Quag, stag-horn knife in one hand, a square of thick sod in the other, gloating upon the fat, bared earth. Simon Black preempted the valley and gave it his name; a name more fitting than he knew. He would be huntsman no longer, but a freeholder in his own right. He laid aside the rifle for the ax, hewed a wagon-track through the forest to this oasis, threw up a temporary shack and then hurried back to the settlements. Another Spring, and he returned, more slowly now, and goad in hand, on the nigh side of his own ox-yoke. He was a proud man then, I make no doubt, and his thoughts raced ahead of the sedate draft-oxen and back to the creaking wain beside him, wherein his good wife sat upon a pile of household goods, nursing Simon junior. He headed a- little caravan, for sundry bold neighbors had been caught by his urgings. Why not? There was land enough for all. He would found a settlement of his own, would Simon Black. And so in the late Summer they reached what was already named Black Valley. And here they outspanned and fell to work, rolling up log houses at the forest-edge. But Simon himself had a bolder plan. His was the best land; was he not the Adventure pioneer? Let others live in shacks; Simon would build himself a house, right in the heart of his fat acres. All that Fall he felled great trees and shaped them; and when sleighing came his oxen snaked hewn logs down to a growing pile at the creek- side, in the very heart of the Black Quag. ~ The Seneca Indians had a long house thereabouts; young bucks came to watch, shook their heads and went away. And then a chief came; an old man, arrow- straight, with a seamed, wise face. These Indians had no feud with the settlers; after due pause, the chief ‘addressed Simon Black gravely and in friendly wise. THIS was his message, conveyed 2 § between the Seneca tongue, broken a English and much sign-talk: that a devil abode beneath the flats; a very bad Manitou; that the white man must build upon the hillside and not here, or the devil would be angry and cry out. And then— He finished with a curious gesture of joined flat hands, palms down, which spread apart and came _ together again silently. “Hau!” said the chief. “I have spoken.” Simon laughed, being a hardy man who feared no devils; and he went on Lreng? all that Winter. _ Spring came; the snows melted and the ground gave up its frost. Simon Black named a day for his log-rolling; he shot wild turkeys and set aside much corn whisky. The neighbors came from fifty miles around; the women brewed and baked and roasted turkeys and venison, and the men worked and drank—both mightily. So in three days the Black house went up; a mansion. It was a double log house, with a covered passageway between two huge rooms, and a lean-to kitchen at the back; men marveled at such luxury and made rude jests and finished the whisky and rode away, each with his wife and children. As they went, the ground moved briefly beneath them, as a horse moves his skin in fly-time, and they heard a horrid sub- terranean rumbling, like Satan playing at bowls in hell. Being well filled with corn whisky, they laughed, Simon loudest. But more than one woman rode for long with chin on shoulder, recalling the Indian’s tale. Simon Black built three chimneys and daubed them well with mud, and roofed his new house with shakes and floored it COmicloo ZN ) CO