Adventure Magazine Cover — page 36: what you’re looking at

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

\ y a OUD T i BZ (as CLZLZ UI IIT DIOFF 7 LL, Ga _> I Sw ZZ COUNT ES: AAI Uf ae ul ARS Vat) Author of ‘‘At Dead Horse Gully,” “The Spirit Availeth,”’ ete BOBODY could use a fiddler who Hy: played with his fiddle against his stomach; no one wanted to buy safety razors; so after trying all the big hotels and theater orchestras north of Canal Street and all the cafés and pen- stons in the Vieux Carré, Donald Stewart decided to call it a day. He had no pedler’s license to sell his ra- zors on: sidewalks; fiddling in Carondelet Street merely brought an audience of penni- less quadroons, a voice from a jalousie, a thrown dime which the quadroons attached themselves to before he could, and a sleepy voice bidding him, “‘Cessez, cessez.”’ So nat- urally—as he would have at home—he drifted ‘‘down shore”’ to the wharfs to rest and commune with running water, to gaze at the muddy but majestic Mississippi on her last lap to the sea. His northern speed faded under the low, hot verandas of Canal Street; when he left these for the cobbles to the wharfs Louisi- ana had steeped him in her languors; when he had propped himself in the shadow of a freight shed he concluded that New Or- leans was a stony-broke’s Paradise. People worked here of course; his fat lit- tle landlord, Louis Brigard, never left his desk; Francois never stopped opening oys- ters; here steamers were unloading, pulling out, coming in—ocean liners, coasters, wet- tail steamers thrashing their paddles aft— ** Judique on the Floor,”’ 7 ae fa. ‘a copyright, 1924, by J. H. Greene. 34 factories smoked across the river in Algiers. But the tropic tempo-.of the place was andante, not the Chicago furioso of the North; the diners at Brigard’s took an hour sipping the black, treacly coffee as if it were a liqueur. Where palm trees grew between trolley lines, where back yards were gar- dens with fountains and statues, where the dead were buried above ground in old tombs that Donald thought like circus floats, where the laziest lot of water he had seen since the big Jakes and the harbors back home ran its oily five miles an hour, this Blue Nose grandson of an Argyle High- lander yielded to the latitude and slowed down. Back home you had to be busy; in sum- mer you had to fish; in winter it was too cold to keep still; in the cities you were hounded by police, high prices and the iron Jaw of being well dressed; small towns were closer corporations to break into than a profession, for you had to pass the examina- tions of the neighbors; so Donald sat with his back to the whole exacting, exasperat- ing north watching the river drift south. His arms rested on his fiddle case; some day and soon he would follow that river to where the palms grew fruits, to a farther and even freer south. He watched a fat rat trying to get past the guard on the hawser of a steamer. Turned back from its piracy by the circle Co TOO C©@