Adventure Magazine Cover — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

The Web of the Sun ‘““Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” 265, THE manner in which Charles is x Lassiter came to know Ezekiel ss Birdsong is a case in point. In New York the South American agent had few acquaintances, because he was in that city only once or twice a year, and in New York an acquaintanceship seldom per- sists for more than from ten minutes to fourteen or fifteen days. So Lassiter al- ways found himself alone in New York, the city of his birth. To amuse himself he usually strolled (Sh a little after dinner up and down Broad- | way or Fifth Avenue, watching the dinner parties, the theater-goers, the crowds. To the theaters themselves he did not go because, like most men with a touch of romance in their make-up, the drama is too fore-ordained, its movement too metro- nomic, its action too logical. When logic comes in at the stage door, romance takes to its wings. After the hour of dinner and theater movement, Lassiter liked to sit in Bryant Park. This is an impersonal bit of pave- ment with a few iron benches, and hopeless tees, where of Summer evenings office men, newspaper hacks, lawyers, yeggs, Chinese laundrymen, Jap curio dealers and vaude- villians come out and sit for a while to breathe the air. ; The presence of the library gives this park a certain informed atmosphere. Loiterers here are knowing gentlemen who discuss the topics of the earth—bolshevism, the secret treaties suppressed in the Evening Post, the Egyptian art of preserving mum- mies, the vice problem, the best methods of blowing safes, the composition of the varnish on Cremonas, whether Dr. Cook reached the pole. High against the sky-scrapers flash and fade acres of electric signs advising the midget philosophers below to “Smoke Madelains,” ““Eat Whateley’s Wheat Waf- fles,’”’ “Chop Suey,’ “Tell Her With Flowers,”’ ‘“‘Goldstein’s Detectives Never Sleep.” Motors and trucks honk; the beetle creeps down an antiquated street car track; the snore of the subway trains rises to buried thunder; the pavement trembles, the benches quake, the fetor of dust, oil and breathed air floats up out of its man- 7 holes. The skyscrapers pulsate heat. The crowds flow past in well-defined drifts. Bryant Park always appealed to Lassiter as the first movement of some great con- fused drama that would never know a curtain. muni) ON THE evening before he was to sail for South America, Lassiter aa’ strolled down to Bryant Park and fone a seat in this air-hole of the crust of New York. The bench-mate chance dealt to the promoter was a short sturdy man in a black suit, which needed pressing, who wore a felt hat with a brim a trifle wide for Broadway. He was sunburned, and presently, when he took off the hat on account of the heat, Lassiter noticed he had a suit of jet-black hair oiled down to a piano finish over the left side of his head, while on the nght side it was piled up in large, exact, scroll-like curls. It was the coiffure of some rustic Brummell. The man himself had the look of a youth who had ridden his years into hard places. As Lassiter absorbed these details, his bench-mate turned to him with perfect spontaneity and asked the name of the Bush Terminal Building. His voice had the slurring, nasal twang of an uneducated Southerner. The promoter gave the infor- mation with a faint sense of amusement. The man drew a deep breath, made a move with his hat as if to fan with it, but seemed to apprehend some social mistake and restored it to his glossy head. ‘“‘New York may be a way up north,” he volunteered, “but it appears about as hot as Arkansas to me.” “Come from Arkansas?”’ “Ezekiel Birdsong, from a town of the same name.’ He used the phrase with a patness that suggested many repetitions, at the same time he turned and held out a gand to Lassiter. This seemed to be in the nature of an introduction. The South American agent shook hands, gave his own name, then asked a little uncertainly— “Do you mean you live 1 in a town named Birdsong?”’ “That’s right—Birdsong, Yell County, Arkansas. Named after my daddy. He moved us out there from Blue Ridge, Ten- nessee, Sequatchie County when I was MICLOOOK C©