Adventure Magazine Cover — page 31: what you’re looking at

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

The Web of the Sun dawned upon him. By this time he had stepped into a refractive angle where he saw still another pair of sparks glittering at him from the blackness. The Stendill agent stopped stock still. A curious tickling sensation flowed from his scalp to his toes. With much crisper steps he got back to Birdsong and the light. He reached out and took the Arkansan by the arm. LEG ae “Veh. 99 “Did you know there was something else . . . something : “Yeh, I see its eyes.” “What is it, Zeke?” asked Lassiter ner- — vously. stock——”’ “Something layin’ flat on that old mule’s neck.” “But what?” | “TI got to ketch her and see,’’ whispered the man from Yell, and next moment he strode briskly forward. At Birdsong’s approach the glints with- drew at the rate of the man’s approach; then a strange thing happened. A heavy bumping and thumping set up not at the glints at all, but about ten feet to one side of the stalkers. Lassiter was startled. Birdsong switched his light on the commo- tion. Next moment, in the harsh ance and white light appeared the body of the third mule dragging and bumping over the stones. At the same instant Balthasar opened fire with his automatic. Its spurt of flames stabbed the darkness, and by the position of each flash, Lassiter saw the Colombian was charging whatever man or creature lay before him. The promoter shouted a warning about the cliff. At that moment the automatic was exhausted. An abrupt silence took the place of its hard chatter. Lassiter stood staring into anole blackness, shivering violently. “Balthasar!” he called. “Balthasar!” Birdsong whisked the light about and after a few seconds picked up the Colombian on his knees, jamming cartridges into his pistol’s butt. He suddenly began cursing a string of Spanish oaths. ‘“What’s the matter?” cried the Stendill agent. “He tried to lariat me, —— him! “You—you understand about He 21 threw me down! I’d have got hin, sefior! I’d have got the devil himself, him!”? | The two men ran up, and sure enough there was a rope around Balthasar’s legs. © He got out with some difficulty. Then they took the flashlight and examined the edge oi the abyss for eighty or a hundred yards up and down in front of their tent. It was quite empty. They went back to the rope which had tripped Balthasar. It was heavy silk. Then they walked over to the body of the third mule, and found a similar cord attached to it. This must have been a sort of tow rope used to drag the brute’s carcass toward the abyss. The mule itself was quite dead. A little further investigation showed the other two mules had also been killed. IV ON THE following morning, the Py three men held a sort of. inquest / i } over the dead mules. Lassiter ex- amined the top side of one of the brutes, the men then heaved the body over and the promotor set to work on that side. He made a minute examination, brushing the hair the wrong-way to get at the skin. He did not find a single cut or puncture or scratch. The three mules lay intact. After some half hour’s investigation, he glanced up as Nunes— “What about strangulation?” “Not that, sefor, its tongue is in its mouth, its eyes are in their sockets, there are no marks on the neck.” Lassiter arose stiffly, brushed his palms together in an effort to rid them of the film of oil left by touching the animal. “Suppose they were poisoned?” “A mule will not eat at night, sevor.” “Then what could have killed them?’’ The Colombian stared. “Perhaps they were scared to nS Seftor.’ Lassiter looked up at the muleteer to see if he were jesting, ‘What could scare the life out of a mule?” | The Colombian shrugged—_ “Outen sabe, senor.” Ezekiel Birdsong, who was over among the mule packs reassembling his Bibles into man-sized bundles, called out— “Tt must have been a man with a lariat, brothers, a man on horseback. We saw that much.”’ MICLOOOK C@