Adventure Magazine Cover — page 89: what you’re looking at

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

‘ ‘‘All that was wrong with the car,” in- terrupted Farney dryly, ‘‘was it hadn’t any brakes to speak of. Buck was takin’ chances he hadn’t ought to with poor brakes.”’ Painter shrugged his shoulders, and made as if to turn away. “All right,” he said, in a voice gone sur- prizingly shrill and unpleasant, “‘all right. ’Tain’t none of my put-in. If you’re so hard up you’ll take chances fer a four-bit pair of pliers picked up outa the dirt, all right!” James Farney, in patched overalls and a faded denim jumper, reddened under the slur in the remark. Hard up? Well, what dry-lander wasn’t, after two straight years of drouth? When wheat wouldn’t grow you had to scrimp and save and watch the pennies—and the half-dollars—or lose your homestead! Hard up? Of course he was! But he didn’t need any sympathy from soft- living town people. Or gossip about his actions either! He checked himself midway of his slowly forming decision to pocket his find and laugh in Painter’s face. The slack-mouthed fellow would be talking about the thing for months! Farney turned reluctantly, and tossed the pliers back where he had found them. They landed with a smothered plop, and sank almost out of sight in the heavy dust. He scuffed them over to bury the tempta- tion of their glitter. December 8th, 1926 B There was nothing to see now, and it was hot and close in the narrow coulee. The group broke up, and its members drifted across the road. Farney moved to his car to inspect the tire which had delayed him. It was soft again, and he dragged out a bat- tered pump and fell doggedly to work. The shabby automobiles around him shuddered to life, and coughed townward in swirls of leaden dust. When he had fin- ished and screwed down the cap, the last one had twisted from sight, and the road lay quiet and empty. Down in the coulee two magpies hopped about the crumpled mass of wreckage. In the parched air the stains on the post were already fading to a rusty brown. Farney wiped the perspiration from his eyes, and crossed the road slowly. He stooped and fumbled a moment in the dust. “A right good pair of pliers, a-goin’ to waste!” He slipped them into the hip-pocket of his dingy overalls. ORT BURTON grilled in fierce mid- HK day heat under her scraggly cotton- woods when Farney swung out of the mouth of the coulee, and headed back toward town. Heat waves shimmered over the naked earth before him, dissolving squat stores and houses into dizzy mirages. A gaunt grain elevator beyond the railway station COmiclboooks.c©