Adventure Magazine Cover, June 18, 1921 — page 177: what you’re looking at

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

The Black Quag “You keep this quiet, Verne!”’ I warned him. “And, wait! Don’t say anything about shooting. Tell him this, instead.” I stopped to grin, recalling my afternoon’s ruse. “Tell him I’ve plenty of smallpox virus left, and that I’ve sent away for some cultures of bubonic plague—Black Death. Eyes on the Black Quag, tell him—or I’ll pour ’em both into his soup some night!”’ CHAPTER XI THE BLACK QUAG LEARNS TO BEAR WEIGHT Ne eee it was my warning, or whether, being sobered, the man’s pur- poses changed, from that time on Lily-White Hand regarded his work and naught else. He did more than keep the bounds I had set; after a day or two he moved from the Putnam House and established himself in the office shack at Camp Two, sleeping on one of the cots there. He drove his men remorselessly, so that they feared and hated him; but he drove himself as hard. He brought in pile- drivers, and they clanked and puffed and thudded night and day, creeping out along the Quag upon the causeway they built. And when the Quag, one night, swallowed up two of the clumsy machines, along with their finished work, he only grinned, Hoyt told me, and sent for more. And those new pile-drivers he mounted on scows, and floated them upon the bosom of the Quag itself, on the long lane of black, liquid mud which marked the grave of the former road-bed. And when the driven piles sank overnight and were lost, he ordered them spiked together with timbers, and built long cribs and bolted them end to end into a huge raft, thirty feet wide, asin my youth men laid corduroy roads across the swales. And so the days raced by, and a generous sun dried up the mud until I might turn out my horses and take to driving a car once more. And the newest railroad em- bankments crept closer and closer as April melted into May; and the Black Quag preserved a sullen silence, so that I began to wonder if it were tamed at last. On the twelfth of May the ends-of-track were joined, and the last rails spiked and their fish-plates bolted together. And that same night almost half a mile of finished road-bed at the southern end of the Quag 167 settled until the rails were flush with the ground and black ooze covered their ties. But Lily-White Hand was undaunted. He laughed thinly, they said, and spat into the morass, twitting the Black Quag for an almost-conquered foe. “Is that the best you can do, Puddle?” he asked. Thien he closed Camp One, at the north of the Black Quag, and shifted all its workmen to Camp Two. Ina day he had temporary spurs thrown out to tap the N. Y. & O. north and south of the Quag; and all day and all night long dirt-trains rumbled up from the south, dumped their loads upon the half-submerged grade and moved on to be shuttled around the flats and leave the way clear for other trains. During all this time Lily-White Hand lived with his work, and I saw. him not at all. But on the fifteenth of May, when I went down to the depot for the ten-fifteen, I found Hand there also, his colorless face impassive above gray-green khaki, his hands gloved as always. He did not glance toward Mary Belle, who was with me; but he greeted Warren Roberts before either of us. “There’s yqur railroad,”’ said he quietly, and gestured with a gloved thumb over his shoulder toward the Black Quag. “Good boy, Hand! Excuse mea minute.” Roberts clapped his shoulder and hurried past him toward Mary Belle, both hands outstretched. Lily-White Hand shrugged indifferently, smiled his pale smile, and strolled away with his gloved hands idle at his sides. And so Warren Roberts greeted his lady- love, and gave me a pleasant word or two, and was off to inspect the completed work; for that night Stuart MacKenzie, the Ontario System’s first vice-president and head of construction and maintenance of way, would come to Black Valley in his private car, for which a siding was already cleared. And tomorrow he would make his official inspection of the new division; and when he had pronounced it good the camps would be closed and all the con- struction forces would have their final pay- day, and bonuses would be districuted. Mary g@elle Hume sighed plaintively at this desertion; but the eyes with which she followed her lover were moist with pride. “There, Monty!” she whispered. ‘‘Isn’t this better than as if you’d stirred up all that trouble?” ; COmicloo CN Vp) CO