Adventure Magazine Cover, October 30, 1924 — page 87: what you’re looking at

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

Skipper 77 higher. Tons of water in a mass would detach themselves from the top of a wave and hurtle through the storm. When they struck the ship, they did damage. The boats went first, helped along by a half dozen barrels of oil that had been lashed to the engine-room grating. Sort of a silly joke, Mr. Hawkins thought, couldn’t use them now anyway! Inside the wheelhouse, there was a curi- ous quiet, and an extremely high atmos- pheric pressure. The skipper’s ears rang; he thought his nose would bleed; his mouth was dry and tasted of salt; and he could barely lift his feet as he held on to the rail. Day was proclaimed by a grayness that made the fury outside all the more appalling. Finally the plunging foc’sle head, thirty yards away, was visible, and as the skipper made it out, he groaned — almost. He turned to the A.B.’s who sat silent on the deck, staring at nothing, stunned by the aphasic wind. Their mouths were open slightly, and they did not move till the captain had finished speaking. ‘Look alive, you, Berry, Petro, and you Svenska, there. Come on, the three of you. The cap’s off the for’d ventilator for number one hold; knows how long—and another’s got to be put on—or we'll fill up for’d. The bosun put a couple extra ones in the mess room. Fix it; and I hope one of you can get there. Lively, now!” Not a great deal of sentiment about sending a man out to die horribly in a gray hell like that! But they got up; and as languidly, as if told to swjz the mess room on a warm, calm day. They were sailors. Svenska dived down the ’way to the mess room and came back with the round, wood- en plug. Without .even the usual ‘‘Yes, sir,’ Berry, leading the other two, forced open the port wheelhouse door enough to slide through, and the door slammed sharply on his scream, heard faintly, though he was but a few feet away. The skipper swayed to the side of the house, and tore down the flag from the nearest window. Pressing his face to the thick glass, he peered through the outside port into the dark of the storm. As he did so, Berry’s white face, six inches away, gasping, with desi upon him, slowly passed the captain’s range of vision. He was spread-eagled, flat against the smooth steel side of the house, and was being forced to the rear rail of the bridge deck by the sheer force of the wind. Slowly he moved, and desperately he fought, grasping rivet heads and plate in- tersections, but the hurricane won easily. It seemed that he gave up the. struggle, for he at once tripped back a few paces, as grotesquely dainty as if he were attempt- ing a dance with the wind, hit the waist high rail, and executed a very neat back somersault, landing heavily on his feet on the midships deck, a dozen feet below. Dazed ani shocked, he was pushed back again for a few more ghastly, mocking, mincing steps, till a gray wraith of flying water lifted itself from the sea beside the ship, and swept across the deck; and when it had passed over, Berry was no longer there. The whole thing was much the same as an angry school teacher erasing with one stroke from a blackboard the writ- ten insolence of a child. The ventilator still had to be capped, and Svenska and Petro made a successful dash for the top of the ladder, descended to the deck, and thence to the well deck. Came the struggle along the edge of the port bulwark to the foc’sle head. Pounded by tons of water, thrown cruelly against steel, cut, and all but drowned, they ar- rived, after a mercifully dim nightmare of combat, at the ventilator. Somehow they capped it; and, as if waiting, the bow took a sudden dive, far down, and buried itself. Green water rushed over Petro, swept him back against the railing, and held him there, forever it seemed. It rushed past his ears, roaring, filled his mouth and nos- trils, burning and choking him. He felt his eyes bulge, until, after centuries, the bow came up, and the stinging slap of the cold wind brought him suddenly into com- plete consciousness. He looked for Sven- ska, and when he saw only Svenska’s finger, caught somehow in a wing nut on the ventilator, he didn’t care to bother to fight his way back. Nor did he. As care- lessly as if he were walking down a country road, he sauntered crazily through the clutching blackness of the hurricane, and entered the wheelhouse, seeing nothing, and unable to even realize that he had come back from a passage with death. Without a word he resumed his place on the deck, staring, his mouth open slightly. The man at the wheel, who was his friend and bunkmate, had fainted from the cComiclbooks.c© inn