Adventure Magazine Cover — page 137: what you’re looking at

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

Baldy at the Brink waters a hundred feet below, but Pete un- derstood and hurried ahead. pack cinches, and led her to the granite shoulder. The old pack mare was sure-footed, tough and wise; the short slide on her haunches to the base of the tree offered nothing new to her. A hundred times she had been asked to coast down similar faces, with nothing to O x Eben tightened Baldy’s stop her but a tiny crevice for her heel calks, and a thousand-foot drop into eternity just beyond. It was all in the day’s work to Baldy. Eben slid down the steep pitched bulge of the rock to the tree, and started across. He signed to Baldy to follow with encourag- ing waves of his hand, but he did not so much as glance back to see whether the horse was coming. He had led the way for her time and again, and she always had fol- lowed before. He was nearly across the chasm before he noticed that Baldy had not started. “Vuh old goat, come on!” he yelled, beckoning with a sweeping arm. Baldy pricked her blue roan ears toward him, and stared with mild eyes. Her broad white roman nose gave her a sheepish look as she gazed after him from the rock above. “‘She’ll foller when she thinks she’s gettin’ left,’’ Eben told himself. Striding on, he reached the end of the tree, and began to pick his way up through the broken rock masses of the notch. Pete now appeared, astonishingly far above upon an outstanding point. After looking downward for a moment like a scouting fox, Pete began to shout something, and wave his hands. Eben turned to see what was the matter behind. He suddenly broke into furious cursing. Baldy, instead of following, had disap- peared. With jaw grimly set, Eben hurried back across the fallen tree at a _bent-legged shamble. Below, a hundred feet down, old Snowbeard bounded and swirled; here the waters arched in furious swells like the backs of great bounding cats; there gouts of foam perpetually shot into the air from the watery battle with submerged rocks. Toa man of the flat country the hundred feet might have seemed a dizzy drop, but to Eben, accustomed to mountain chasms and precipices, the Snowbird was just another 135 creek, running along a few feet below. Far ahead, up a shallow cut so unmerci- fully steep that he touched the ground with his hands as he climbed, he could see Baldy’s blue-gray haunches, the muscles swelling as the horse toiled upward. “What the dingdoodle!”’ Eben marveled. So far as he could see, there was no earthly reason why any horse should go up such a formidable wash. At the top, he knew, there would be nothing but barren tables, a maze of chasmic cracks and a jumble of upthrust rock. He had never known Baldy to show so little sense before, yet there the old fool went, toiling up the futile steep as purposefully as if she were going some- where. He yelled at her at the top of his lungs, so loudly that his old voice cracked; and Baldy, swinging her sheep-like face around to look back, stopped and waited. Leading Baldy none too gently, Eben returned to the granite shoulder on the cafion rim. He slacked off the lead rope as he reached the final steep, and slid down ahead of the horse to the butt of the tree. There he turned and tried to pull Baldy after him. Deliberately, firmly, Baldy balked. Eben braced himself and pulled. He yelled, he wrapped his long legs about the horizontal trunk and heaved. It was of no use; the animal’s shod hooves slipped a little, inducing her to a mad scramble for footing, but that was all. Striding angrily across the tree came Pete. “Git out of the way, yuh long-legged old fool! Can’tchuh handle a hoss yet? Gimme that lead rope!” Eben surrendered the rope without argu- ment. “Did yuh find the way out o’ the notch?” “T done so!’ exulted Pete, momentarily diverted. ‘It all come back to me, jest like nothin’. Baldy can get through slick. We're a-goin’ to beat him, boy!”’ They precariously edged past each other on the smooth tree bole, Eben taking the lead. Pete spoke comfortingly to the horse above. “7Sall right, Baldy. Pete’s here. Ne’mind that stilty old fool that’s been haulin’ at yore head. Here, we go now. Jest foller Pete.” Tugging gently at the lead rope, merely as a hint of what he wanted, he turned his COMIC OOo Cc S (©