Adventure Magazine Cover — page 42: what you’re looking at

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

¥ Lm Vins POV PRSIEMTY ypc ey we Ms your betters?” Adventure “Master!” It was the exclamation of a man bereft of faith in the one eye that Cesar’s torturers had left him. Love-and-run in half the ports of the Levant was Conops’ history, brief interludes of lazy days and tavern- haunting nights between long spells of hard- ship and service to Tros on land and sea. Loose, superstitious morals for himself but rigorous aloofness for his master from all worldly ways, was his religion. He had but one eye because he had dared to rebuke Ceesar for insulting Tros. He rubbed the Other one, crestfallen, as if the Tros he knew were gone and some one substituted whom he could not recognize. Tros with a girl in his arms? He could not believe it. He came and glared, the tassel of his red cap down over his empty eye; the long tooth sneering through the slit in his upper lip; blood on his nose from yesterday. He fingered his long knife. He sidled three-quarters of a circle around Helma as if looking for an un-witch-pro- tected opening through which to drive his knife. “Master! And your father not buried!” he said, hardly reproachfully, rather as if he did not believe his senses. He was jealous—jealous as a harbor- Strumpet of a rival light o’ love. The slobber blew in bubbles on his lean lips. , “Dionusus!”’ Tros was in no mood to be reproved by a servant. He let out a lick with his fist— caught Conops on the ear and sent him sprawling between the oar-benches. “Dog!” he thundered. “Will you judge ‘Conops did not oS that. He lay hug- ging his bruised head, grateful for it, glad of anything that drove the greater anguish out of mind, rocking himself, moaning, knees and elbows bunched. Angry—for emotions such as Tros had come through turn to anger as the sour milk turns to whey—Tros swung his hands 2 behind him and stood breast out, grim chin high, staring at the shore, ignoring Helma. she was the real irritant. He told himself it was not born in him to love a woman. If he had thought he loved her—had he?— that was only the emotion of a drunken sailor. Worse! it was sordid backsliding. A descent from his own Olympian heights of manhood to the common level of un- moral fools like Conops! What would old Perseus have said to it? Hah! Old father Perseus did the same thing, didn’t he? Tros wondered who his own mother had been, and by what means she had wheedled a middle-aged saint into the snares of marriage! . Tros knew she had died when he was born, but others had told him she was a royal woman, born of a line of kings whose throne was overturned by Rome. Perseus had forbidden speech of her, and as usual Tros had obeyed, only listening when other men dropped information. Her death, as far as Perseus was con- cerned, had closed a life’s chapter; thence- forth he had preached celibacy, not failing to instill into his son a wholesome—was it wholesome?—dread of women, or rather of the love of women and of the loss of spiritual vision that ensued from it. “Yet here am I!” said Tros, his hands clenched tight behind him. “But for Perseus and a woman, I should not have been! I live! By Zeus and the immortal gods, I laugh!” But he did not laugh. It irked him that Helma’s eyes were on his back. He wished he had struck Conops harder. He wished all Lunden would awake and come down to the waterside. He would have welcomed anything just then, anything to save him the necessity of speech with Helma. He hated the girl! She and destiny between them had made a fine fool of him! Yet as he turned to meet her gaze,a new shame reddened his cheeks under the bronze. He realized he did not hate her. He knew he would be ashamed to withdraw the un- spoken pledge he had made when he took her in his arms. She was his wife! He wished he had killed Conops! —= HE HELD out his hand to her +4i—= with astubborn gesture, drew her beside him, made her stand hand- : in-hand with him there on the ship’s stern, gesturing to Olaf Sigurdsen to rouse his Northmen. And when they had rubbed sleep out of their eyes they stood up, grinning, until it dawned on them that something else was due. Sigurdsen led the cheering then shaking his great battle-ax; and the din carried over- water to the houses near the riverbank, so that a dozen Britons came to stare, hitching their ungainly looking trousers. Presently—being Britons, who would EGomicbooks.com