Adventure Magazine Cover — page 78: what you’re looking at

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

72 forest mesh, and she hunted wild turkeys with a bow while she waited for the black rage to leave Kirdy and the ascent of the Earth Girdle to end. At evening—for the Cossack pressed on, and cooked only one meal in the day—she plucked a turkey or roasted a deer’s quarter and made barley and cheese cakes for them both, while Kirby attended to the horses. Only once did he speak. . “This companion of Otrépiev—who is e?’ ) Nada, bending over the fire, made answer quietly. “One of the Tsar’s dogs.” Then Kirdy knew that the man with the false Tsar was an executioner—one of the torturers kept by the Muscovite lords. Otrépiev had chosen a motley court to go upon his exile, and now, except for the in- terpreter of dreams, only this man garbed in black and armed with a two-handed sword —Kirdy had caught a glimpse of him during the fighting in the Turkoman camp—re- mained at the fugitive’s side. Nada’s quick eyes missed nothing of the ascent. She knew when the birches and alders gave place to blue firs that they were near the end of the fayga and near the spot where the fire had been seen. Ahead of them the mountain slopes closed in, and down this gorge a bitter wind howled as if it were a watch-dog chained in the cut of the mountain. She knew when Kirdy found the scattered ashes of the fire two days old. For an hour he examined the earth in a wide circle about the spot, and though Nada could see nothing at all in the ground, a sudden tensing of his dark brow and flicker of the thin lips told her that he had made certain that Otrépiev had gone up the gorge. She had learned to read his face, if not his thoughts. “Sleep, Nada,” he ordered her. ‘We will rest and the horses will roll and graze.”’ By this she was aware that the fever had left him, and she did sleep, drawing her sheepskins about her against the chill breath of that wind—the sleep of the young and weary. But at times she heard the Cossack moving about, and the crackle of a growing fire, and the neighing of horses led to water. Near at hand a stream tore down the mountain side between black boulders—a stream that foamed, milky white. And Nada, who knew nothing of glacier-fed streams, was astonished because HAROLD LAMB this one had roared past when she lay down in the late afternoon, and did no more than murmur when she roused at sunrise. Kirdy, who never seemed to sleep—after that first night in the storm when she had held his head on her knee—led the way into the teeth of the wind. That day they left the last, sttinted trees behind, and the short grass changed to a mossy growth that clung to the rocks, and - the sides of the gorge became sheer cliffs that rose higher until the face of the sun was hidden. ‘They saw the bones of a horse, from which foul-smelling vultures flapped up lazily. Once they circled the pool under a thousand-foot waterfall—the source of the stream that had given them water for the last day. The sun’s rays reached the sum- mit of the narrow fall, and tinted the spray in an arc of color that made the girl gasp. Then, when the roar of the fall had dwindled to a distant reverberation, Kirdy heard her singing against the voice of the wind: “Tell me, brother Eagle, is it far to my home— Far to blessed Mother Volga’s shore? I am hungry, brother Eagle, hungry and cold. I will ride no more—no more!” And, though he pushed ahead without a word, he was troubled. ‘This was the song of Cossack captives, who went in chains to distant lands. He wondered why Nada had chosen it, and whether sickness had touched her. That night she slept like the dead, and Kirdy tended the fire at her feet—the glim- mer of a fire, fed by the wood one pony had packed up from the forest. And while he watched, he listened to the twin voices of the Earth Girdle—the strident cry of the wind gusts and the moan of the waterfall. In spite of the wind’s breath, the fire burned badly, unaccountably so. And when he filled the pot with water and tried to boil the Tatar tea brick in it, he could not do so. Kirdy set this down to the working of the evil spirits that must fre- quent such a place. Although he got up, to walk stiffly up and down between the boulders, drowsiness clutched at him and was not to be shaken off. So, when at last he seated himself by the unconscious girl, his head slipped for- ward on his chest. He had to struggle for breath. Almost at once the two voices of COMmMiCoooks C© 5}