Adventure Magazine Cover — page 142: what you’re looking at

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

132 locked; it came open, and a man sardonic and triumphant said with low-voiced menace— ‘Ket is I, Cabron!”’ And so it was. Bilis CABRON as usual was doing his saz) work with methodical surety. He was no lone-handed worker. A oe low-visaged individual sat with folded arms and a revolver dangling from each hand before the twin beds where Louden and his wife took their repose. Louden’s whiskers sensitively responded to the frightened quiverings of his jaw muscles. Another fellow with the face of a pirate and a gun large enough to command respect from any- body stood with back to the door of the butler’s room, into which had been herded, in breathless quiet on pain of their lives, the three or four servants in the house. Cabron was no petty pilferer of house- holds; but his friends did not object to carrying off whatever showed a tendency to stick to their fingers; and the Loudens were due to believe themselves cursed by the patron saint of thieves, for three times they had fallen foul of them. But on this final occasion their home was, in the par- lance of those who do such things, cleaned right. Cabron, erect, alert, sardonically pleased with himself, came through the door with a sort of inflexible air, his hard gaze fast on the terrified Burillo: and he looked neither to the right nor to the left, but closed the door behind him with a careless shove of his left hand. His right held an automatic, set at a deadly angle. Cabron was not a big fellow, and he looked as little like a gangster as a parson should. There was something, very much in fact, haughty about him. Why he had it or where he got it would be impossible to say. Perhaps some fiercely patrician strain had wandered and sifted down through loves and liaisons until without the title, but with unsubdued quality, it ap- peared in this curious Latin, gangster and grafter of the city’s Tenderloin. But pa- tricilans are all grafters, though the more euphonious ‘perquisites’ and ‘‘entailments”’ and “hereditary rights” soften the insult; so perhaps Cabron was only being true to the blood. Anyway, in any place, he would have been a man of distinction by his mere ap- Adventure pearance. He had the eyes of a fierce, untamed bird, direct as a beam of light. He carried his head up, and the thin fea- tures, sharp, firmly cut, gave an air of pride that was borne out by his manner and speech. There was no mercy and no scruple in that cold, fierce face. ‘‘Ah-ha,”’ he said with the cruel pleasure that some people have in playing with the mouse, “‘at last, is it? I confer the honor on you of making you the husband of my niece, and you go hide away where you can’t be found, and say that you are dead! Ab-ha, it will now be sure that you are.” Cabron felt something touch him in the side. It was the muzzle of Middleton’s gun. Cabron whirled; but his wrist was caught and the gun thrust upward while the mouth of Middleton’s nestled almost hungrily against the gang leader’s stomach. Cabron was as disarmed as if his gun had fallen.to the floor. But over the edge of his shoulder Mid- dleton watched Burillo and spoke in- cisively— “Keep your hands out of your pockets.” “Oh—w’y—ah—” said Burillo, jerking his hands from his body. “Tf I didn’t know your way of working— that you have the house full of crooks,” Middleton said easily to Cabron, “I would shoot now.” Cabron’s muscles contracted at the word as if he had received a blow. “Yes,” he went on, quietly, but hard of voice, “because sooner or later somebody’s going to have to shoot you. I might as well.” A curse hissed with liquid venom from between Cabron’s thin lips. “All right. Let up on that gun. I want it.” Middleton’s fingers crawled up along the wrist and closed on the gun that Ca- bron gave up, for muzzle-on the automatic pressed against his stomach; and he was face to mask with that Black Wolf. Ca- bron knew him by the cold, easy voice and half-bored, contemptuous manner. Middleton, having the gun, dropped it into his pocket, then with a swift gliding gesture thrust his hand up under Cabron’s coat on the left breast and drew out an eight-inch stiletto, sharpened to a needle’s point, flexible and strong, dangerous enough to have slain Goliath himself. “A. nice thing to prick a man’s heart NOOK (C@