Adventure Magazine Cover — page 73: what you’re looking at

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

The Invincible Tradition 71 again and go faster, But soon their pace slowed once more. : Jim Knight smiled. There was no rifle! He might follow as he pleased and try to take them with his revolver. They might escape him with a counter revolver fire or by the speed of their dogs, once the ice was smooth and dry. - But he would know where he and Woods and the “deppity”’ were to seek them—and the loot. So, on he went, sloshing rapidly through water ankle-deep, imagining that where they could go with their sled he could follow with his two good feet encased in high, water-tight skin boots. _ Nagachuck would have steered, now, for the thin ice of the left channel, and, when the pursuer should attempt the crossing, would have shot him, trusting to the river water to complete the eating out of the new ice and carry the body down. But Holland was more careful. He took the lead, guided his victim with sinister, consummate cun- ning to a place where no rifle bullet would be needed to stop him. It was the splitting point of the two chan- nels. Nearer and nearer he drew toward that cul-de-sac of the forking channels where, as he knew, ice-bridges, still firm for a sled but fatal for a man, might always be found un- der the surface flow. Alternately slithering along on dry ice and sloshing through water came Jim Knight, gaining on them, his revolver in his hand, reckless with rage and the thought of victory. And when he saw the team dart- ing this way ahd that after the searching Holland he was sure they sought only a shal- low place to cross the line of water so that they might wet as little as possible of the ill- gotten contents of their sled. And he, caring little, now, for a wetting, forged straight toward them and was soon knee- deep in water. Holland, coaxing the dogs, slipped by them toward the sled—very cautiously, in reality, but this was lost upon Jim Knight. Then, holding to the sled, gaining thus the help of its wide bearing surface on the ice- bridge beneath, he and Nagachuck passed swiftly over, and, canting slightly upward from the channel, gained the firmer, though still surmerged ice. Knight, feeling the water rising upon him, followed the way of the sled. ‘This was easy, for the men he pursued had slowed— purposely, to guide him. Thus he came to the shallower part—the ice-bridge—chuck- ling to himself that he would dog their foot- steps to their land trail, might even capture them bodily. Suddenly in he crashed! It is a strange kind of “crash”—through rotten, submerged ice. It lacks the all-im- portant element of sound. But the startled, fear-sickened inner senses supply this; and Jim Knight felt flindering ice, heard the dry, almost metallic breaking through; and his heart contracted sharply at the going down, down of his leg! Ike Holland, his head partly turned, walk- ing slowly, his hand on the sled, saw the sud- den side lurch of the pursuing miner and knew it was the beginning of the end. He cried to his dogs and hurried away. For, lacking the animus of personal hatred the dregs of the humanity still in him made him reluctant to look upon the death-struggles of the ice-trapped man. IT WAS well for him that he ¢ moved rapidly; for Knight, in A leaping rage, thrust up his re- _ volver and shot at the scrawny white devil who was brisking away—a ges- ture of vengeance that seemed a precious moment wasted. Yet the effort, pitching — his slanted body over, plunged the hand with the revolver into the water to find the ice and thrust him straight again. He struggled to regain footing in the rot- ten stuff he could tread but could not see, flailing the water with beating arms and churning feet, upholding himself, moment after moment, by the mere strength and rapidity of these flailings, like a clock run- ning down. Nagachuck, forgetting momentarily that the stranger was their intended victim, looked with perplexity at the fleemg squaw- man. For this was not a time when natives flee. But at once he remembered their purpose—remembered his hate of these de- spoilers of the hunting and trapping and sealing grounds of his brethren. And he stood and looked on the work of himself and the squaw-man, unafraid to confront it. He even came nearer to the brink— near enough to see the piteous look of horror in the staring eyeballs of the doomed man. Then the centuries worked upon him— centuries of survival of a people isolated upon the rim of the world, in long darkness, desolate cold. <A people that had survived Eomicbooks.com