Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 193: what you’re looking at

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

The River Trail to the floor with a ringing note. He glanced at it. The head was up. “One’s as bad as the other.” He would stay in the cabin. One little match! So small, yet meaning so much to him. But there was not even a particle of food in the cabin, much less a match. He wrapped the blankets from the bunk about him but the gripping chill per- sisted and his mind was becoming dulled. The cold was overpowering, terrific in its invisible force. He fought against a gradual languor, a vast drowsiness. Joe Moon felt like a fly, caught in a web of inexorable circumstance. If he had only stayed at Louis Buckshot’s cabin! He knew that a storm was approaching. If only he had not taken that last load of furs! Tf only he had paid heed to the warning of his dogs when they refused to go ahead, knowing somehow of the hidden danger. Then, when he sat down on the bunk again, cold consuming him, a great lassitude creeping over him, terror in his heart, the door swung suddenly open and Hugh Mun- roe strode across the threshold. He was covered with snow from head to foot, he carried a rifle, his face was that of a man who has been face to face with death, and to Joe Moon he was an avenging specter. Vil MONROE leaned against the closed door, too tired from his struggle eal. } through the storm to even feel the emotion of surprize at seeing Joe Moon confront him from across the cabin. He could hardly yet realize that he had indeed escaped the blinding, smiting fury of the storm, that the wild, interminable fight with those forces of wind and snow had ended in his favor. He leaned against the door, breathing heavily, but he was not so ex- hausted, not so chilled, as the shuddering man on the bunk. Joe Moon gazed at him, apathetically, open-mouthed, and then hope rushed back over him like a flood. To his dulled mind there came such a feeling of elation at seeing anotber human being in this place, a human being who would certainly have matches, that Munroe was not to him the factor of Wakina, the man he had so wronged and beaten; all those things seemed very trivial and far away in the overwhelming sense of his peril. ‘A match!’ gasped Joe Moon hoarsely, starting up. “I’m freezing to death—fell in the river—tight a fire ag Munroe fumbled at his mackinaw, and it dropped from his shoulders to the floor, and then he brushed the snow from his streaming face. He did not reply to Joe Moon, but his heart leaped as he realized the plight of his enemy. He flung his mittens. on the floor and sat dewn upon an empty box near by. He wanted to think. The advantage was in his grasp. How to use it? He was breathing heavily, as if emerging from a stupor. And a stupor it had been, a stupor of incessant, desperate struggling in a mael- strom of snow, a stupor of battling for progress through clouds, sheets, walls of beating snow, a stupor of resistance to mighty, cruhsing winds, a stupor that had seemed so interminable that when he closed his eyes he could still see the swirling snow before him and could almost feel again the buffetings of the wind. But he was safe. The discovery of Joe Moon’s sled had been his deliverance, and now he was in the cabin, the dogs in shelter outside. He had taken Joe Moon’s rifle from the sled, on impulse, before entering the cabin and this made him utterly master of the situation. Even without the rifle he felt that he would be the master, for the man across from him was not the power- ful brute who had beaten him back in the Nogassaw village, but an exhausted, weak- ened creature. “Don’t you hear?” Joe Moon was saying in a broken, unearthly voice. “I’m freez- ing, man. Light the fire—the fire.” He looked up and stared at Joe Moon, as if seeing him there for the first time. He saw his enemy hunched up on the bunk; he saw the frozen garments, the icy moccasins, the snowshoes, on the floor; he saw the stove, with fragments of dry birch bark and wood sticking out over the open top; he saw that the trader was shivering, and that his face was gray with cold. “T’ve no matches, don’t you understand?” Joe Moon’s voice was high-pitched, almost a cream; Munroe sensed the desperations and the tension behind the words. ‘For God’s sake light the fire. You must have matches!” A plan was forming in Munroe’s mind. Here was his opportunity. “Ves,” hesaid. “I have matches.” COMiICclooOo 175 (©