Adventure Magazine Cover — page 134: what you’re looking at

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

Baldy at the Brink By the Author of “Strange Fellers” and “The Legacy Mule” BEN WARE, whose ax boldly raised its voice above the moan of the deep-hidden waters, was an old man, too old, almost, to be laboring out there on that slippery granite shoulder, a hundred feet above white water. Above him the rock swelled sharply to the crest of the cafion rim, twenty feet up. Just below him it rounded off steeply until it overhung a hundred feet of nothing, with the brawling, seething rap- ids of the Snowbeard River at the bottom. Swiftly, mechanically, the ax rose and fell; the smack of the biting blade echoed and reechoed from the monstrous, disor- dered rock formations that towered over the worker, until the cafion seemed full of unseen axmen. Eben slipped; the steel of the ax rattled against the granite as he flattened himself on the rock. Cling as he could, only the rope about his waist, saved him. Old Pete, at the other end of the rope, hauled on it with an exaggerated flourish, and Eben slowly regained his feet. “Don’t do that!” Pete begged. gimme the jibbers.” “Vuh Alan LeMay “Ain’t goin’ t’ fall,”’ said Eben, resuming his work. ‘‘Ain’t worried about that. Go ahead an’ fall. What I’m worried over is the ax. Yuh near dropped it that time. You better take off the rope an’ put it on the ax.”’ There was no reply to this, and Pete’s eyes wandered over their situation. Only sixty or seventy feet from where he sat rose the farther wall of the gash from which came the steady dull roar of old Snowbeard. Only sixty or seventy feet! Yet the gap had never been crossed by man. Upon their ability to span it they were staking a for- tune dearer to them than life. A sort of crumbled notch bit part way into the wall opposite, as if a great stone ax had struck there, ages ago. The one hundred and twenty-foot pine they were cutting overhung the cafion rim, clinging precariously to the granite shoulder by gripping its roots deep into a great crooked crevice. Its top must lodge in that notch, seventy feet away, if they were to succeed. Elsewhere the cafion walls presented a precipitous barrier, harshly carved on a scale so huge that their tall tree was 132 DOO CO HANI KS (©