Adventure Magazine Cover — page 150: what you’re looking at

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

148 “He hath not seen Francesco today!” says Stella. “Ts it thy wish that he _ should, Francesco?” ‘My eyes met the sergeant’s, and I saw he knew much, if not all; then I turned to face the wall. “Nay. Tico stood fidgeting. “Thou’lt not rise, then?” | “Nay. Iam ill.” So he took his departure, graver than when he came, and walking more slowly. He carried apprehension in his heart, and he left blind terror in mine; terror of what the duke would respond to this defiance; of what should befall Stella whenas I was in a dungeon or in the grave. And I call the terror blind because I never saw that since I must leave her at best, I might bet- ter leave and live; nor that, though I might prefer a jail to her parents’ house, she might prefer their home to mine; until— Until at the break of the afternoon, when the dusk was beginning to creep up our street, and the mist to rise from the fields around the city, Stella brought me a letter handed in at the door by a scrubby boy; he was gone; he had not known from whom it came; it contained one word and half a dozen hairs. The hairs—some red, some graying— were from the beard of Lucio di Caporetto. And the word, traced by one who could scarce write, was— I sent Stella, weeping and terrified, to her father’s house, there to stay until I should be established in some other city; I took my sword; the duke’s armor I would not touch, but I stole a horse that was tied outside a tavern near the West Gate; and I fled. Strange! That with princely vengeance soon to be loosed at my heels; facing an inhospitable world but lightly armed with experience or weapons and naked of that only sure armor, money; nevertheless my heart should be lighter as I rode toward that quenched sunset of purple and yellow, my courage higher than ever since I left my father’s house. And that, though I grieved for Stella as never had I grieved for anything, my mind should seem, for the first time, to be at F, R. BUCKLEY CAMPAIGN CHAPTER X OF PIETRO UCCELLO T WAS mine intention—and long have I thought before abandon- ing it—here to make as it were a leap through time to the place whereat my path of life forked again; one branch (the which I took) leading hither; and the other leading, God knoweth where. It is not to be forgotten that, so far from a chronicler vaunting bloody deeds, Tama man at work on the salvation of his soul; perhaps also the assistance of some soul not yet imprisoned in the flesh; and so me- seemed it was scarce fit to recall and to limn the next three years; whereof the thought maketh me to tremble with a secular de- light, and even to walk in the quadrangle so forgetful of custodia oculorum as to be staring high heaven out of countenance. Yet—I lived those years just as much as I lived those others which are to be con- sidered edifying; and who am I to decide what is edifying, and what not? Ere now, I have seen a man saved by the novelle of Giovanni Boccaccio, and another driven toward damnation by the “Imitation of Christ.” He was in my troop, that first named; yea, when he had thus| learned to laugh I made him lieutenant. And what- ever lieutenants in other bands and in these other days may be (I think little of them)— the lieutenant in the condoitieri of Francescc Vitali was of necessity an admirable man; yet when first I saw him, this one oft of- fended both God and man by his way of life. He had lost a woman by death; and to prove his great love he was turning himself into a dunghill to raise as a monument in her honor. The proceeding is not uncom- mon— Now that I remember, ’twas him I met first of all the band, that night on the road to Venice; I overtook him near-by to mid- night in the pitchy dark and the driving rain, and asked him how far was it to the border. Sure between Rometia and Venice itself, we were the only riders on the road at that hour; and as I accosted this fellow, I wondered what might. be his need for haste; whether perchance it might not clash with mine own. Accordingly, I had my sword drawn; and in some stray light, he saw it gleam. DOOLK (C@