Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 96: what you’re looking at

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

78 Then he ripped the knife from his belt, slashed the lashings which bound the drums, and laughed. Three drums he rolled to the port rail and three to the starboard; from the carpenter’s chest he brought a wrench and loosened the screw plugs until they turned readily in his fingers. He returned to the plans for his cats. Dim memories of school days in New Orleans came to him; memories of plates in histories which pictured war machines of the Romans, machines for hurling huge masses of rock or mighty spears. Names escaped him, but it didn’t matter. Throwing off the afterhatch covering, he drew out piece after piece of ash and hickory planking. Selected lumber, it was, billed to a wagon works in Tampa. With the lowering of the tide the water had drained off so that it bothered him not at all. Until an hour of sunset, equipped with more tools from the carpenter’s chest, he sawed and hammered mightily. Then he found a hacksaw and a cold chisel and fell to work cutting ten foot lengths from the -anchor chain. Slow work, of course. Pass- ing small boats spoke to him, but he an- swered not at all, or at most very shortly. Rather a one-track mind had Dugan O’Day, and he was given to throwing all his energy into one thing at a time. All his energy, either mentally or physically, was rather more than the ordinary, too. In the light of the setting sun he strained and labored with a block and tackle and Spanish windlass, and by dusk three cats were ready to spit and strike. Dugan looked at his work and called it good. Fitfully he dozed that evening and night, sitting bolt upright on the poop, arousing to every splash of a leaping mullet and every cry of a suddenly awakened gull. Once a pompano struck the side below him, and for thirty minutes he searched the sea with night glasses. Very firm-fleshed is the pompano, king of food fishes; his body strikes wood with the thump of a brick. Dugan had as yet much to learn of the ways of the Florida coast. Monday dawned with all the brilliance a day may begin, and at sunrise Dugan was again at work, hammer and tongs. Visitors in plenty, that day, for the story of the Blackfish had spread, but except for the black-bearded fisherman Dugan kept them all off. He mistrusted them; since time Adventure was there has been between shipwrecked mariners and inhabitants of the coast, at best, only armed truce. NEAR dusk, when the naphtha launch appeared, a dozen of the cats in all were done, nine lining the star- board rail, which lay quartering toward the pass, and three assembled on the poop. Dugan sat on a cleat, watching the gor- geous colors of the sunset, when the-faint popping of the exhaust of an unmufiled naphtha enginecame to his ears. Forerunner of the gasoline launch was the naphtha burner. Louder and louder grew the sound, and then he saw the craft in the pass, making slow headway against the outgoing tide. It halted fifty yards from the Blackfish. Evidently the men in the launch had heard tales. “Blackfish ahoy!” “Launch ahoy, and stay where you are,” returned Dugan. “You are Dugan O’Day, first mate?” questioned the man standing in the bow of the launch. In the gathering dusk Dugan could barely see him. “And if I am?” “Tt am from the Atlantic and Pacific Marine Insurance Company. We are will- ing to consider your salvage claim on the Blackfish. My tug will pull her off at high tide tonight.” The voice was neither that of a seaman nor a man of the coast. And not a pleasant voice, by any means. “You are willing to consider what?” asked Dugan. “Your salvage claim,’ returned the launch’s spokesman. “ ’s bells, man, don’t you know that anybody who saves a wrecked vessel has a salvage claim? Or did you think you could keep her for a play house?”’ “You,” said Dugan pointedly, “may be from St. Peter’s pearly gates, but you can go to ! Or try to board my play house, if you think you can handle my toys.” The launch fell away a little, apparently for a consultation, nor did the men aboard her seem to notice that the water between them and the Blackfish grew strangely calm, as if oil had been poured upon it. Dugan emptied one drum, then another, and another, and there was only a glassy, CORnNICLOe (C©