Adventure Magazine Cover — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

The Web of the Sun thereby dispersing any doubt as to their culture. . -So absorbed became the financier in this idea, that he would lose consciousness of his struggle upward, of his slippery charges up glazed redoubts, of his shovings at his mule’s flank. In imagination he would be floating in a Stendill air-liner high above these discomforts. The ant meditated wings. NN! party reached the level of the pass. Once up, their going was easier. Here the lava had weathered to a soil, and even a little grass broke out, like a sort of greenish skum on disturbed waters. The relief from climbing and the color of the sunset picked up the spirits of the expedition. Balthasar, at the flank of the lead mule, broke into whistling a gay incontinent fandango. He supplied the castanets by snapping his fingers, and then, charmed by his own music, fell to twisting and swinging his hips as he walked, or rather capered along. Birdsong, who followed the Colombian, stopped his hymn singing at this lickerish pantomime and watched his fellow mule- teer in righteous disapproval. Condemna- tion was written in the Arkansan’s very back and stride. Lassiter, who brought up the van, was tired from his climb, but this little dumb show amused him. - He walked beside his own mule with heavy legs.. Also he tilted his foot a little to one side, to protect a new blister that had formed on his Jeft great toe. However, the color of the dying day presently weaned his mind both from the little comedy and from the trifling dis- comforts of his own body. The sunlight streaming through the mountain defiles behind him gave him the impression of enormous hoses playing streams of gold upon the peaks ahead, while to the eastern sides of the mountains clung the night like a blue bubble. Presently Lassiter’s attention was drawn from this splendor by the sound of Bird- song exhorting Nunes in a queer mongrel of English, Spanish and Quichua. In the rarefied air, their voices came to him thinly. Like so many well-meaning persons, Bird- song had endured the dance, and _ had suppressed his irritation to the breaking point; it had now become impossible for NEAR sundown the _ exploring 17 him to request the Colombian courteously to stop. The first sentence Lassiter heard was Birdsong’s nasal éxplosion— “Look here, Brother Nunes, don’t you know the devil is firing up his grill this minute, for such sinners as you are!”’ The Colombian stared around at this thunderbolt. out of an evening sky. ‘“‘Why is he, Sefior Birdsong?” he inquired in a most amiable mood. “To roast them dirty dances out of you!” The Colombian drew a bit of shuck and tobacco from his green jacket and gravely began a cigaret. “T know persons, Sefior Birdsong, whom the devil himself couldn’t roast a dance out of ——” The colporteur looked at him hard. “Tf you are trying to throw slurs on my soupleness, Brother Nunes, T’ll have you understand there ain’t a man in Yell Coun- ty, Arkansas, that can tear dawn ‘Cotton- Kye Joe’ slicker than I can.’ “T’d enjoy seeing it done, wouldn’t you, Sefior Lassiter?”’ Lassiter was too wary to be led into the discussion. “Brother Nunes, I wouldn’t shake a leg in ‘Cotton-Eye Joe’ or ‘Turkey in the Straw,’ not for all the filthy pleasure this world can hold.” Nunes lit his cigaret and inhaled luxuri- ously. ‘‘Sefior Birdsone, ” he said, in a muffled voice, talking the smoke out ‘of his mouth and nostrils, ‘Sf you really could dance, you would not be so prejudiced against it. That is always the way. Fat men dislike the fandango; stiff men abominate the waltz; awkward men he “Look here, Brother Nunes, yan I say I can dance, T can dance.”’ “Still, it’s easier to talk than io dance.” The colporteur looked straight at the muleteer, seemed to make up his mind, and next moment began humming one of those monotonous jumbles of sound such as the fiddlers among the hill-folk of Tennessee and Arkansas evoke. Next moment he gave a whoop, leaped into the air, clicked his heels together three times and landed on the tufa in a southern backwoods break- down. Amid the majestic surroundings, DOOK his’ stocky dancing figure formed a grotesque, (C©