Rudyard Kipling For Children - 7 Books in One Edition (Illustrated Edition). Rudyard Kipling

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СКАЧАТЬ the canvas that he might paint the tawny yellow desert under the glare of the sinking moon, the black shadow of a camel and the two bowed figures atop, that hand held a revolver and the arm was numbed from wrist to collar-bone. Moreover, he was in the dark, and could see no canvas of any kind whatever.

      The driver grunted, and Dick was conscious of a change in the air.

      "I smell the dawn," he whispered.

      "It is here, and yonder are the troops. Have I done well?"

      The camel stretched out its neck and roared as there came down wind the pungent reek of camels in the square.

      "Go on. We must get there swiftly. Go on."

      "They are moving in their camp. There is so much dust that I cannot see what they do."

      "Am I in better case? Go forward."

      They could hear the hum of voices ahead, the howling and the bubbling of the beasts and the hoarse cries of the soldiers girthing up for the day.

      Two or three shots were fired.

      "Is that at us? Surely they can see that I am English," Dick spoke angrily.

      "Nay, it is from the desert," the driver answered, cowering in his saddle.

      "Go forward, my child! Well it is that the dawn did not uncover us an hour ago."

      The camel headed straight for the column and the shots behind multiplied. The children of the desert had arranged that most uncomfortable of surprises, a dawn attack for the English troops, and were getting their distance by snap-shots at the only moving object without the square.

      "What luck! What stupendous and imperial luck!" said Dick. "It's 'just before the battle, mother.' Oh, God has been most good to me! Only"—the agony of the thought made him screw up his eyes for an instant—"Maisie..."

      "Allahu! We are in," said the man, as he drove into the rearguard and the camel knelt.

      "Who the deuce are you? Despatches or what? What's the strength of the enemy behind that ridge? How did you get through?" asked a dozen voices. For all answer Dick took a long breath, unbuckled his belt, and shouted from the saddle at the top of a wearied and dusty voice, "Torpenhow! Ohe, Torp! Coo-ee, Tor-pen-how."

      A bearded man raking in the ashes of a fire for a light to his pipe moved very swiftly towards that cry, as the rearguard, facing about, began to fire at the puffs of smoke from the hillocks around. Gradually the scattered white cloudlets drew out into the long lines of banked white that hung heavily in the stillness of the dawn before they turned over wave-like and glided into the valleys. The soldiers in the square were coughing and swearing as their own smoke obstructed their view, and they edged forward to get beyond it. A wounded camel leaped to its feet and roared aloud, the cry ending in a bubbling grunt. Some one had cut its throat to prevent confusion. Then came the thick sob of a man receiving his death-wound from a bullet; then a yell of agony and redoubled firing.

      There was no time to ask any questions.

      "Get down, man! Get down behind the camel!"

      "No. Put me, I pray, in the forefront of the battle." Dick turned his face to Torpenhow and raised his hand to set his helmet straight, but, miscalculating the distance, knocked it off. Torpenhow saw that his hair was gray on the temples, and that his face was the face of an old man.

      "Come down, you damned fool! Dickie, come off!"

      And Dick came obediently, but as a tree falls, pitching sideways from the Bisharin's saddle at Torpenhow's feet. His luck had held to the last, even to the crowning mercy of a kindly bullet through his head.

      Torpenhow knelt under the lee of the camel, with Dick's body in his arms.

      Captain Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks

       Table of Contents

       Chapter I

       Chapter II

       Chapter III

       Chapter IV

       Chapter V

       Chapter VI

       Chapter VII

       Chapter VIII

       Chapter IX

       Chapter X

      Chapter I

       Table of Contents

      The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet.

      "That Cheyne boy's the biggest nuisance aboard," said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. "He isn't wanted here. He's too fresh."

      A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: "I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should imbort ropes' ends free under your dariff."

      "Pshaw! There isn't any real harm to him. He's more to be pitied than anything," a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the cushions under the wet skylight. "They've dragged him around from hotel to hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning. She's a lovely lady, but she don't pretend to manage him. He's going to Europe to finish his education."

      "Education isn't begun yet." This was a Philadelphian, curled up in a corner. "That boy gets two hundred a month pocket-money, he told me. He isn't sixteen either."

      "Railroads, his father, aind't it?" said the German.

      "Yep. That and mines and lumber and shipping. Built one place at San Diego, the old man has; another at Los Angeles; owns half a dozen railroads, half the lumber on the Pacific slope, and lets his wife spend the money," the Philadelphian went on lazily. "The West don't suit her, she says. She just tracks around with the boy and her nerves, trying to find out what'll amuse him, I guess. Florida, Adirondacks, Lakewood, Hot Springs, New York, and round again. He isn't much more than СКАЧАТЬ