Adventure Magazine Cover, June 18, 1921 — page 172: what you’re looking at

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

162 This was his fifth; and,-though she was twenty years younger, I did not doubt that Simon would outlast her. “All right,” I agreed. ‘‘But you’ll have to fetch me out and back, or wait till I get a livery team. I’ve tired out four horses today.” “Dreadful bad roadin’,” Black. “Aw right, doc. Ready?” “Let me get my bag.” I hurried into the house, kissed Molly, who was aggrieved as always when I must be out of nights, snatched my medicine-case and went out again. - Simon was already in his buggy; I climbed up beside him, and we lurched off toward the valley. ‘Warren goin’ som/’ers?” inquired my host. : ‘Called off to another job.” “Ye-ah? An’ who’s goin’ down after their railroad, huh? ’Ve they sent f’r a dipsey diver?” “Oh, Lily-White Hand’s going to finish that, according to some newfangled notion he’s got. He’s in charge of the whole thing now.” I was thoroughly disgusted, and I ex- pected Simon to be likewise. But he vouchsafed me no word, either white or black. He spat mightily, and said, ‘‘Gid- dap!’ That was all. So we rode in silence down the Creek Road, across Canada Street and back north to the Black house; a big, rambling old place, which was yet dwarfed by the bulk of the cow-barn behind it. That was the pride of old Simon’s heart; a monstrous gambrel-roofed barn, almost two hundred feet long, with stanchels in its basement for eighty cows. and a sixty-foot bay, which could not con- tain the whole of Simon Black’s hay crop; and from its peak to the ground beneath was seventy feet in the clear. As always, Simon checked his horses briefly to gaze upon its splendors, blazing red, as all our barns are painted, beneath a new-risen moon. Then he pulled up at the kitchen door, dismounted and: kicked away a couple of excited cow-dogs. -*' I went in and saw the puny woman; for she was all of that—an old chronic cardio- nephritic, for whom I could do little enough. But I gave her some good advice and-a few pills, knowing that the former would be said Simon Tl fetch ye. It has an eighty-foot mow. Adventure neglected and scarcely hoping that the latter would do much good. Then I hooked my stethoscope into the armhole of my vest, closed my battered tablet-case and went out. Still mute—he was never a talkative man—Simon Black backed and swung his horses and drove out on to the road. But this time he turned north instead of south. I wondered why he went that way; both Canada Street and Center Street were main-traveled roads, and therefore equally sticky in Spring. But to go north from the Black farm and across Center Street was almost two miles farther. None the less, that way we went, splash- ing and wallowing through the mud while I dozed uneasily. The night was chill; there was a touch of frost in the air—noth- ing unusual for our country in April. And a crescent moon rode high, silvering the mud beneath us with its faint light. I dozed uneasily, I say; and after some time awoke with a start, missing the lurch of our progress. Old Simon had stopped his team just below the Ontario’s Camp One, which bordered the Black Quag on the north. I HE CLIMBED out silently, and F: i stalked south along the new railroad “ track. I followed, wondering. The grade, at ground-level here, rose slowly into an embankment as the land about it fell away to the Quag. Simon strode on for a quarter of a mile over this northern fill which the Black Quag had so far suffered to remain, and out upon the unburied trestle which was its southernmost end. Iam not normally superstitious—or not more so than most men—but a queer chill oppressed me as I hung back, watching him as Percival watched Sir Galahad striding along the Giant’s Causeway. The alep moon shone upon his huge figure, and made of his bared white head a glory more striking for the jet black of his beard beneath. At the trestle’s very end he stopped, and looked far out over the flat, then down to the Black Quag at his feet. And then he stretched out one great arm—though our farmers are sparing of gesture—and stood so, unmoving. In that moment there was about Simon Black something sacerdotal, like a Druid of old invoking unseen, malignant deities. His gesture {called for a hearing; would some Shape rise up to meet it? COmicloo oN ) (©