Adventure Magazine Cover — page 107: what you’re looking at

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

TREASURE it out into a beard; and the cast-eyed slant of his gaze lingered on her face. Madame even smiled a little, so well did she know of what he was thinking: In Paris, with wealth, and none to know that he was Julien Vioux, escaped convict. og ary? “rf LSP, ' tA Tyr he Uy Vig 7 F A net ay “dV yh [vx calm did not break, would not break; men who had sailed around the world grew queasy on the ship that lay as if at anchor, throbbing to the toss of mile- deep swells. The surface of the ocean was like molten glass, melted by the sun; the deck like a great griddle on which all were being roasted for their sins. At times through the day riffles ran over the sea, but these died away before they came on board, as if the ship, accursed, was never again to feel God’s breath. “Jonered, by ——!”’ said men, gasping, angered, uneasy. Some had pressed their noses against the port glass of Madame’s room and stared within at the great serpent which seemed ever to lie with eyes fixed on them, at times to lift its head watchfully, as if listening. They talked among themselves, wonder- ing how to rid the ship of the thing. No wind would come with it on board. Pelew said that the lady, meaning Madame, had said she could not get the python to return to its box; it was wise (she said) and knew men hated it; knew, too, they hoped to throw it and the box overboard. “Lady, them fellers are goin’ crazy,” said Pelew, who as much as any man hated the snake but he had the feeling that Madame was a woman a man should help any way that he could. Madame shrugged her shoulders and spread her hands in an expressive gesture of helplessness. The men forward brooded gloomily, got panicky at talk of cholera, were sickened by the heat and stale water. They threw food IOI overboard with a feeling of spiting some- body, since they could not eat; and Woo Lung, as if he knew nothing of calm, or queasy stomachs, cooked the same amount every day and much the same kind of mess. “Tt’s whisky we want!” they begged. Though even the stock that Walscher had had stored on board was beginning to run low. Heddon poured enough from time to time into the scuttle butt to flavor the putrid water. Though he felt and said it served ’em right, he got no pleasure out of seeing the men suffer. But of all who suffered, Denasso was tortured most, for now the opium and pipe were gone, and for him the very breath of life must be smoke-flavored. He begged the men with pathetic mildness to tell him who had hid the pipe, and suspected Pelew; but Pelew, with a staring look that suggested honesty, said: “What the would I want with your old suck-stick! I never touched it. Wouldn’t touch it. Smoke yourself to death for all I care. Get to away from me. You stink o’ the stuff now.” Woo Lung, being a wise man, had never given himself sufficiently to the habit to be tortured by not smoking. “Hab got tim be lazee, now—then smo- kum littee. No-hab tim, all litee. Wun tim moon-pidgen, maskee!”’ If he had the time to be lazy, he might smoke a little; if not, all right; if only once a month, that was all right too. But Denasso was eaten through and through with downright pain. He dragged himself about the deck, searching, unable to remain quiet, hoping that whoever had played the trick would see how he suffered and be merciful. He suspected, now this person, now that. Heddon felt sorry for the poor devil, but T’eeay Layeen regarded him with a pitiless gaze. IIT VENING was coming on; the sun, red as a red-hot plate, was slipping down behind the ocean; and such was the heat of the hour, the redness of the sun, that an imaginative fellow might listen for the sizzle as the fire-ball seemed to move down into the water. Denasso, who knew now by whom he was being tortured, but not yet why, came once more to Madame who sat apart on the deck, COmiclbooks.c©