Adventure Magazine Cover — page 160: what you’re looking at

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

150 The reloading of forty one-hundred pound sacks of ore, and lashing them in place with the cinch-ropes was a weari- some task, handicapped as the men were by working thigh-deep in soft snow. Sev- eral of the animals—including Injun— objected strenuously to the operation, adding immeasurably to their difficulties, but it was finished at last and the long line was winding down the trail once more. The rain continued without let-up, notwithstanding Mason’s optimistic pre- diction to the contrary. Bradley could tell by the labored movements of the loaded horses that even the hoof-packed snow beneath the slush had commenced to soften. Mason sang as he rode, his exuberant spirit undampened by the pelting rain, and his voice came faintly back to the man in the rear, whose face relaxed in a grin. His thoughts went back to their first meet- ing, twelve years before, in ’98, that had occurred in the soul-trying passage of White Pass, in the Klondike days. Mason had been singing then, as he toiled upward, burdened with a heavy pack which he later admitted to be a “sure enough man-killer.”’ .Side by side, since then, they had faced peril and hardship together through long years on the gold- seeker’s trails of all the West, from Alaska to Mexico. Throughout those years, Just as he sang today, Mason had sung his way through toil and danger, trouble and storm, on all the trails of life. His contagious happi- ness was a part of him, and had cheered and carried his older, more serious partner through many a dark, discouraging day. The tie between them had grown and rip- ened into something more than a mere partnership—something preeminently de- serving the title of brotherhood, so fine, deep and strong was it, and so unshakable. “He sure is a cheerful, happy-go-lucky cuss, if ever there was one,” Bradley mused> } “ Lindy, "Lindy, say you’ll be mine!”’ The words of the song drifted back, faint yet clear, above the splash of rain and hoofs and the sounds of swollen waters. “I cert’nly never seen. his beat. Now what d’you s’pose——” Bradley’s soliloquy and the other’s song ended abruptly and simultaneously as both riders turned in their saddles at a sound back along the way they had come—a Adventure crescendo of grinding crashes that arose and swelled to a thunderous roar, subsided into lesser, intermittent crashes, and died. Distant mountain walls flung back the echoes, time and time again. Bradley shook his head dolefully. “T knew it,” he sighed. “Plumb down into the timber that trip.” He waved his hand to Mason in a gesture which might have meant— “T told you so.”’ The other, returning the signal with one expressive of contempt and derision, re- sumed his interrupted rendition of ‘“‘Lin- dy,” proceeding to the end, which he fol- lowed with the melodious strains of ‘“‘Sweet Adeline.” About the second time that he pined for the fair Adeline a slide went out across the gorge of Thunder River, directly opposite them and less than a mile away. Bradley did not witness its actual beginning, but at the first sound of its passage he reined his horse and watched its mile-long plunge from the crest to the forests below. Small at first, it swiftly assumed terrify- ing proportions, and its thunderous crashes drowned the roar of the river. He felt the earth tremble beneath him, while queer, muffled concussions beat upon his ear- drums and violent air-shocks swayed him in his saddle. The dense mantle of fir and spruce below timber-line failed to check its rush, and down through the timber it swept, a ti- tanic agent of destruction, trailed by vast clouds of eddying snow, until it had cleared a swath a quarter-mile in width to the. banks of Thunder River. echoes of the final crash had died, an im- mense cone-shaped mass of snow and débris lay piled in the bottom of the gorge. Bradley found- himself sitting with clenched teeth and rigid muscles; he re- laxed and drew a long breath. He had witnessed slides and slides—but never such a one as this. Even Skyrocket was trem- bling and flinging his head around in quick, distrustful glances across the gorge. After that Bradley rode with uneasy up- ward glances at the far heights above him where the winter’s accumulation of snow lay piled twenty to thirty feet deep on the steep slopes. “She’ll slide, all right,’”’ he predicted. ‘“‘An’ here’s hopin’ we don’t happen to be in the way when she comes.” MICLOOOLK When the last ~ (C©