Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 168: what you’re looking at

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

150 “No, sir!’ contradicted Young. ‘“He’s playing a lone hand. He hid it while he was walking from forward to the bridge, under my eyes. You’ve simply got to let me hunt. Oh, I’m a —— of a detective!” “Hunt and be ——!” the captain acqui- esed. He liked Schwartz, and there was some- thing in this cat and mouse game, which won a man’s confidence only to betray it, which offended his sense of fair play. Smug- gler or not, Schwartz was a first rate sailor, and in his heart Willett did not think it such a very heinous crime to defraud the Government. Not one half so bad as being half a point off course whenever a watch officer’s back was turned. “Sure, hunt around,” he added more affably. Young rose with a sigh. “Tt’s so darned small, Captain!” he groaned. “I wish you’d help me, sir. Hf you find it you get a percentage of the fine, too. It’ll amount to two thousand or so.” In spite of himself Willett grinned at the detective’s lugubrious tone. He had not mentioned this reward until he had lost faith in his own ability to win it. “That'll pay off the mortgage,” he agreed with a cheerful nod, and promptly forgot all about the incident, for beginning with the third day out the Sachem started to make a flying passage home. me AN EASTERLY gale got under her jgoe stern and hung there. For five days it blew without a let up, rising to a moderate gale and sinking to a fresh breeze with the wind hauling and veering from east, northeast to due south. The sky was continually overcast, with only brief glimpses of a sun breaking redly through scudding clouds. Navigation was uncer- tain. The ship steered wildly, with a heavy following sea constantly under her quarter, so that dead reckoning was largely guess work, and the rain squalls that swept across the ship day and night set the men snarling at each other from the irritation that springs from wet clothes. Young’s days were pur- gatory. Schwartz’s friendliness was a thing of the past, and it was he who christened the detective ‘‘Pop Eye,” never passing him without a jeer. And indeed Young wandered around the wet decks like a homeless, bedraggled cur, coughing from the exposure and pale with Adventure the anxiety. Every morning when he passed the skipper for the first time he shook his head slightly in utter discouragement. He had asked to be assigned the duty of boat- keeper, and to the profane wonder of his officers, Willett allowed him to swab out the lifeboats and paw through their gear. With a wobegone, set, pale face he climbed the rigging. The engineer had to run him out of the fire room with a coal scoop, and roared that he’d bash his long nose in if he saw him below again as the little man scur- ried before him up the deck. Schwartz took to whistling impudently between his teeth, and dared to ask the detective if he’d lost anything. Then, a day out of New York, it came on to blow, and all hands had too much to do to bother with the worry-crazed quartermaster, who had only twelve hours more to find a tiny pebble on a large ship or to report failure to his chief. The glass began to fall in the forenoon watch, and all day long the wind increased steadily in force. The sea rose with it, and the long days of uninterrupted gale from the same quarter gave an ominous weight to the long, heavy combers that pushed by at ex- press train speed on the same course as the ship. The distance between the waves was twice that usual in a gale, so that a sloping gray wall of water forty feet from trough to crest and sloping back for fully five hun- dred feet would heave up mountainously under the Sachem’s stern, burying her nose deep in solid green water and stopping her dead. Propellers raced madly in the thin foam at the crest. The ship would be lifted like a skiff and hurled bodily forward, spout- ing water from the scupper ports in the well decks while the white wave crest would leap up and snatch at the dangling life boats and thunder by with a final snarling hiss along the ship’s side like the tearing of wet, heavy canvas. Then the bow would shoot into the air as the trough passed, the stern would drop, and it was all to do over again. Had the storm not risen so slowly Willett would have put his pride in his pocket and turned about to meet these seas head on. For even a ship as big as the Sachem was in genuine danger. To steer in a following sea is always difficult. The ship would not an- swer her rudder when her stern was in the air, with the buried prow checking her way. Continually the seas flung her off her course, yawing to port and starboard in spite of the MICLOOO (©