Adventure Magazine Cover, June 18, 1921 — page 162: what you’re looking at

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

152 Verne Bookmiller on the green bench out- side the hotel door and dropped down be- side him to smoke before my office hour. We sat shoulder to shoulder, silently, as old friends do in the country. And then to us came Lily-White Hand, silént also, and shadowy-gray and neutral so that we scarcely noticed his coming. He sat at the other end of the bench, and his gloved hands rolled a cigaret so deftly that I wondered at their skill. Presently Mary Belle Hume came stroll- ‘ing by, arm in arm with June Burlingame, hoping for a glimpse of Roberts, no doubt. These two were greatly in love; they were to be married in the Summer—as soon as the Black Quag should be tamed. The girl spoke demurely to me and to Verne, whom she had known all her life. Her big blue eyes quested the porch for her lover, and instead rested briefly upon Lily- White Hand. The fellow straightened, giving her eye for eye in a bold, blank stare. Mary Belle shivered and turned pale; she wrenched her gaze away, as by an effort,,and hurried on. Hand turned to me, there beside him? His thin lips curled back into an avid, ugly smile. “‘So-ome_ pippin! me?” | I looked at him in distaste, seeing again that murky flame behind the ice of his pale eyes. I am an easy-going man, and slow to anger, but temper began to stir in me. “No!” I answered flatly; and at the continued insolence of his stare my hands began to tingle for his corded throat. I could feel my face flushing, for I am of a full habit. “No! And look here, my man; in Black Valley our girls are not stared at in that fashion.” Beside me, stout old Verne Bookmiller grunted inarticulate approval of my words. Say, doc—introduce Hand rose slowly, lithely, and looked down: at me while his gloved hands opened and closed like claws. He was quite white; a flame danced behind his eyes. For a moment he stood thus, and my - mounting temper prayed that he might resent my rebuke. His eyes ran calculat- ingly over my bulk and met my own again. Then he relaxed. I do not think he was afraid; he feared neither man nor devil. It was only that Adventure he reckoned up his chances and, not liking them, set down a score against me to be evened at some future date. Now he only shrugged, gave his thinly ringing laugh and turned away. I spat disgustedly at the memory of that lidless stare. “Verne,” said I, “that person and I are due for a clinch some day.”’ “Leave him be,” counseled Bookmiller wisely. ‘“‘He’ll get. his come-uppance— you see!” CHAPTER V THE QUAG SPEAKS Bet I must not waste time upon minor things, such as the relations, between us human puppets, while the Black Quag waits. I promised that Mary Belle should be my heroine; and if she is not, I have none. But beauty and laughter and love, and the dreams of innocence, have little place in such a somber tale as mine. The next day, then, was an easy one for me; strangely, because it rained and the roads were hub- deep rivers of thin mud. And on such days, as every doctor knows, “men, women and children take to bed and send out hurry calls for help, and every seasoned invalid runs over his stock of well-worn symptoms and furbishes them up against the doctor’s demanded coming. None the less, that morning I was free, and I savored my ease as only a country doctor can. In the post-office, waiting for the ten-fifteen mail, I came upon Simon Black, who might have signed himself “Simon Black III,” if such refinements of family pride had been known in our valley. He was the son of a father in full age; latest born of a man who, in his own in- fancy, had ridden an ox-wain over Cran- berry Hill into a virgin valley; who, still in his mother’s arms, had been hardly saved from the Black Quag’s maw when the new house of Simon Black the First was swallowed up. And now, himself well past threescore and ten, Simon the Third still tilled the fat acres which had been his grandfather’s and his father’s before him. The Black farm ran straight across the Quag; full four hundred acres, on which this man was born, on which he had lived for seventy- three years. No wonder if Simon knew COmiclboo oN ) CO