Adventure Magazine Cover, November 10, 1924 — page 37: what you’re looking at

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

The Casual’s Return cleared his head and brought strength to his muscles. He rose staggeringly to his feet and looked over the rolling sea, gray beneath a gray sky. The ocean was littered like an un- clean street. Boxes, blankets, spread and floating, empty rafts, an overturned boat, pails, life preservers, a mattress, an over- coat half submerged and barely visible be- low the surface. A little hurrying foam, a little cross chop from the bow wave of the destroyer rolled the coat over. There was a face at the upper end of it. Eadie’s knees refused duty after that. They mutinied and quit their job entirely, so that he slumped in a sick heap upon the deck. Two sailors came upon him before he could roll overboard and gathered him up. They smelled of stale wine and strong tobacco, but they bore the sergeant ten- derly, and he was only too glad to lay back upon one’s shoulder. 3 This man had a great chest, with a striped shirt on it, and a little tuft of hair stuck out of the neck thereof. He wore a sailor’s hat with a red tassel or pompom and a white cord over the top. He was a good guy, that sailor, and when he spoke to his companion, Eadie could see that he had lost two teeth on that side. The two sailors supported the sergeant along the deck, and lowered him down a hole, where another man took him and laid him with more of the rescued upon a grating. It was light in there, light to hurt the eyes. There was paint to smell and burned oil, and a vast amount of noise. But what delicious warmth! What glorious heat! It wrapped the men on all sides like a blanket, it bathed them like the waters of a steaming tub, it penetrated their soaked clothing and made the blood stir through their half frozen veins once more. The evil- smelling drink went around once more and Eadie relaxed into a stupor. A long time afterward Eadie awakened. He was very stiff and sore, for an engine- room grating is not the softest bed in the world. The other Americans were standing or kneeling, and a sailor in a red-tasselled hat beckoned them. They went after him and he led them through an extremely nar- row passageway into a room that had a table running down the middle. There was food on the table, and it needed no invita- tion to make those soldiers slide along the lockers that served as seats and prepare to wrap themselves around that stew and that 35 hard, tough bread, and to investigate the contents of those long black bottles. Eadie looked around the table. The res- cued were mostly soldiers and few of them had on more than an undershirt. Eadie wore his olive drab shirt and one man had a blouse. There were four American sail- ors, three of them in their jumpers and the fourth with no more upon him than his first father wore in Eden. The four sailors con- versed among themselves and commented upon the internal economy of the destroyer. Eadie looked beyond them, and then.gave a hoarse cry. That hairy frame could belong to but one man. “Jake!” he cried. The hairy man looked up and then with- out further word bounced upon the table and across it, for all the world like an agile baboon. When he and the sergeant be- came coherent again, Jake sat down, and they proceeded to work upon the goulash and onions. “‘What happened to you?” asked Eadie. “How did you get hauled aboard? The last I saw of you was when the raft turned over. I must say that those things are the product of a master mind. I wish the inventor had been with us on ours.”’ “T’ll tell yuh,” said Jake. ‘‘When that thing capsized, it capsized me. I was just about all in when I got to it and the last I remember I seen it go over. About ten guys fell on me an’ I thought we were poin’ right straight to the bottom. The next thing I woke up in this here engine room. Man, I ain’t kiddin’ yuh, I thought I was in —— for a minute.” They fell to upon the slum again. All the men about the table talked loudly and rap- idly, telling each other of their experiences, how this one had been in a boat that had swamped, another had slid down a rope and found nothing at the bottom but ocean, a third had spent himself trying to get on a raft and had awakened in the engine room, as Jake had. Two of the men had clung to the life lines on the boat that had sunk near Eadie’s raft. “The first thing I knew,” said one of these, “I was holdin’ that —— boat up like you’d carry a bucket. ‘Kid,’ I says, ‘I don’t think enough of my Uncle Sam to carry one o’ his life boats ashore, no sir, not me!’ So I let go o’ that rope, you bet- ter believe, and the boat went right to the - bottom, I got my chin over a couple o’ the Comicbook (© =