Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 38: what you’re looking at

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

36 BILL BARNES man. “Belcher cables that dunderhead Kurtz got himself killed trying to lo- cate the papers. Now he cables that Hortsmann and Kiel got themselves shot out of the air by this fellow Barnes when they tried to kidnap Hassfur- ther!” “If the fools had planned night they would have succeeded,’ agreed Hans Zimmerman. “These half-baked kids of to-day do not know the meaning of the word efficiency as we knew it in our youth. They do not know how to withstand hardships or act on their own initiative.” He drank deeply from his seidel and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His narrow, pig eyes were alive with contempt and der1- sion. “We must do something,’ Boettner said. “We have trained an army of natives and they are waiting for us to put the descendant of their queen back on the throne so that they can throw off the yoke of France.” Zimmerman chuckled deep down in his chest, a noise that rolled out of his mouth to keep time with his bobbing stomach. “Your niece,” Zimmerman said, with a curious light in his eyes, “will make a charming queen, although she 1s a lit- tle too fair to play the part of a Mala- gasy.” Adolph Boettner’s face became pur- ple again. He pointed a finger at his friend. His eyes were mere slits in his face. “You get the idea of my niece out of your head!” he roared. “I brought her out here to play the part of the granddaughter of the queen the French exiled. And you are not to be the king! You get such ideas out of your head !”’ Zimmerman shrugged his shoulders and picked up his seidel again. All that can wait, he thought. We will see who will be king. “Let's not fight among ourselves,” he said, suavely. “The thing we have to do is put Cistra on the throne and drive out the French. With the weapons we have smuggled in and the men we have ‘trained it should not be hard. Once we have a foothold we will have’’—he lowered his voice to a whisper—‘‘power- ful weapons and money behind us. The French will not dare to attack us if we can take the island, using the natives as a smoke screen. “But now the French are suspicious of us. Their secret service is working on us constantly. They know we are up to something. They know we have massed the Hovas and Sakalavas and other natives behind us. They have in- vestigated the deeds to our property carefully. They think there is a fly in the ointment, but they aren’t sure. If they knew we had bribed men to falsify the tax records and commit forgery they would slit our throats and throw us to the crocodiles.” “As we slit the throats of the men we bribed,’ Boettner growled. “Such men are better dead,” Zim- merman said calmly. “But what are we going to do now?” Boettner asked. ‘We must get the rec- ords straight until we have our army thoroughly trained. With this fellow Barnes and his men on their way here anything might happen. They must know something. Hassfurther must have remembered something vitally im- portant to start them off on a fifteen- thousand-mile journey.” “Hassfurther remembers what his major*told him seventeen years ago,” Zimmerman said. ‘His major’s parents have written to him about the disap- pearance of their youngest son. We know that. Barnes is up to his old tricks. Sticking his nose in other peo- ple’s business.” “When he sticks his nose in this business he'll get it bent,’’ Boettner said. “When he gets here I'll slit the pig of a Yankee’s throat myself.” CO clo@olx< (C@