Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 97: what you’re looking at

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

The War Cats of Dugan O’Day lazy swell between the bark and the launch when next the man spoke, for the tide car- ried the oil straight out to the naphtha burner. ‘“‘This,” said the voice, “is deliberate thievery, O’Day. We would be within our rights if we boarded you by whatever means may be nec Bi “This,” said Dugan, “is thievery, but none of mine. By the time I count ten you will turn around and go, otherwise you will wish you had.”’ No answer from the launch, but just as Dugan said ‘One’ the man at her engine hooked her up, heading her straight for the Blackfish. Dugan counted no more. Leaping quick- ly to the shelter of the mainmast stump he touched a match to an oil-soaked torch of wood and sail cloth. Only his arm ap- peared in view as he threw it out on the kerosene covered water. Only his arm, that the torch light might not make him a target for lead. And he laughed. As the torch struck the surface of the glass-like bay great gorgeous flames shot up. Kerosene in those days was potent with gasolene, because of careless dis- tilling. A wall of flame rushed to meet the white launch; a lesser wall came back to flicker a moment against the hull of the Blackfish. A taste of hell, and a supernatural thing, that a torch thrown into water should ignite it; should make the bay a seething caldron of red-gold fire with billowing clouds of smoke! Three figures in the launch shrank back in terror; a pistol in the hand of one of them exploded. Twenty, thirty feet into the still night air soared the quick fire. In the space of a breath it covered an area of many hundred square yards, and in the center was the launch. Flames engulfed her; flames blackened her white sides; flames licked at her canvas awning. A rope end caught; the awning caught. Then the flames on the water died with the suddenness they had been born, and fran- tic hands aboard the launch beat at the burning rope; tore at the canvas and threw it overboard. The motor had stopped, and Dugan list- ened to the avid cursing of the trio; listened to the hiss with which burning canvas met 79 water. And the surf boomed dully from beyond the islands. Wild laughter, rising high above that surf roar, high above the voices of the men on the launch, high above the screaming of the startled gulls. Wild, eerie laughter from the dark deck of the Blackfish. Dugan laughed as he did all else; his heart was in it, and his lungs were very good. Abruptly he stopped and listened to the savage efforts to start the engine; no more heart had they for boarding the bark! Then it sputtered and caught; sharply the launch veered off and headed for the pass. And Dugan’s barbaric laughter sounded forth once more; the pine woods on the main- land returned it in echoes whose volume seemed scarcely less than the original. Many a woman in the village a mile away shud- dered at the sound, for theevening was very still. The laughter died, the echoes died, the gulls and pelicans and cormorants re- . turned to their sleeping places on low sand bars, but Dugan O’Day made coffee on the tiny stove he had set up in the saloon—the bearded fisherman had brought it as well as other things—and waited. For the popping of the naphtha launch’s engine had not grown fainter and fainter until it merged at last into the mellow beating of the surf. Instead, it stopped abruptly not so very far from the pass. A man to notice little things, this Juan Alvarez Dugan O’Day. At midnight the moon, being in the last quarter, peered above the fringe of pines behind Hell’s Kitchen, a broad, shallow basin of water adjacent to the bay. Hell’s Kitchen, because the prodigious number of Shell fish and horseshoe crabs therein brewed many a weary hour for net fisher- men. The wind had long since died; the tide turned, as a tide should, at moonrise. Dugan walked among his war cats, shifting this one and that one, admiring them immensely, fervently requesting that the saints grant him cause to use them. And marvels of ingenious simplicity and potential force they were indeed. It re- mained to be seen if they worked. The base of each machine was a great T of planks, and at the point where the long arm of the T joined the top of it an up- right was set, in each case a twelve foot two-by-twelve of hickory, secured with blocks, braces, and stays to the base. And CORnNICLO© (©