The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 1: George Allan England. George Allan England

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СКАЧАТЬ a wholly other and more elegant Alpheus Briggs. Having changed his latitude and raiment, he had likewise changed his manners.

      He drained the pewter till light showed through the glass bottom—the bottom reminiscent of old days when to accept a shilling from a recruiting officer, even unaware, meant being pressed into the service; for a shilling in an empty mug was held as proof of enlistment, unless instantly detected and denied. Briggs smiled at memory of the trick.

      “Clumsy stratagem,” he pondered, “We’re a bit slicker, to-day. In the old days it took time to make a fortune. Now, a little boldness turns the trick, just as I’ve turned it, this time!”

      He rapped on the table for another pewter of Four-X. Stronger liquors would better have suited his taste, but he had certain business still to be carried out, and when ashore the captain never let drink take precedence of business.

      The second pewter put Captain Briggs in a reminiscent mood, wherein memories of the stirring events of the voyage just ended mingled with the comforting knowledge that he had much money in pocket and that still more was bound to come, before that day’s end. As in a kind of mental mirage, scenes arose before him—scenes of hardship and crime, now in security by no means displeasing to recall.

      The affair with the Malay war fleet had already been half-obliterated by more recent violences. Briggs pondered on the sudden mutiny that had broken out, ten days from Bombay, led by a Liverpool ruffian named Quigley, who had tried to brain him with a piece of iron in a sock. Briggs had simply flung him into the sea; then he had faced the others with naked fists, and they had slunk away forward.

      He and Wansley had later lashed them to the gangway and had given them the cat to exhaustion. Briggs felt that he had come out of this affair with honors. He took another draught of ale.

      Beating up the West Coast, he recalled how he had punished a young Irishman, McCune, whom he had shipped at Cape Town. McCune, from the supposed security of the foretop-gallant yard, had cursed him for a black-hearted bucko. Without parley, Briggs had run up the ratlines, and had flung McCune to the deck. The man had lived only a few minutes. Briggs nodded with satisfaction. He clenched his right fist, hairy, corded, and turned it this way and that, glad of its power. Greatly did he admire the resistless argument that lay in all its bones and ligaments.

      “There’s no man can talk back to me!” he growled. “No, by the Judas priest!”

      Now came less pleasing recollections. The slave cargo on the west-bound voyage had been unusually heavy. Ironed wrist and ankle, the blacks—men, women, children, purchased as a rather poor bargain lot from an Arab trader—had lain packed in the hold. They had been half starved when Briggs had loaded them, and the fever had already got among them. The percentage of loss had been a bit too heavy. Some death was legitimate, of course; but an excessive mortality meant loss.

      The death rate had risen so high that Briggs had even considered bringing some of the black ivory on deck, and increasing the ration. But in the end he had decided to hold through, and trust luck to arrive in Cuba with enough slaves to pay a good margin. Results had justified his decision.

      “I was right about that, too,” thought he. “Seems like I’m always right—or else it’s gilt-edged luck!”

      Yet, in spite of all, that voyage had left some disagreeable memories. The reek and stifle of the hold, the groaning and crying of the blacks—that no amount of punishment could silence—had vastly annoyed the captain. The way in which his crew had stricken the shackles from the dead and from those manifestly marked for death and had heaved them overboard to the trailing sharks, had been only a trivial detail.

      But the fact that Briggs’s own cabin had been invaded by vermin and by noxious odors had greatly annoyed the captain. Not all Doctor Filhiol’s burning of pungent substances in the cabin had been able to purify the air. Briggs had cursed the fact that this most profitable trafficking had involved such disagreeable concomitants, and had consoled himself with much strong drink.

      Then, too, a five-day blow, three hundred miles west of the Cape Verdes, had killed off more than forty of his negroes and had made conditions doubly intolerable. Once more he formulated thoughts in words:

      “Damn it! I might have done better to have scuttled her, off the African coast, and have drawn down my share of the insurance money. If I’d known what I was running into, that’s just what I would have done, so help me! I made a devilish good thing of it, that way, in the old White Cloud two years ago. And never was so much as questioned!”

      He pondered a moment, frowning blackly.

      “Maybe I did wrong, after all, to bring the Fleece into port. But if I hadn’t, I’d have had to sacrifice those hundred boxes of opium, that will bring me a clear two hundred apiece, from Hendricks. So after all, it’s all right. I’m satisfied.”

      He drained the last of the Four-X, and carefully inspected his watch.

      “Ten-fifteen,” said he. “And I’m to meet Hendricks at ten-thirty at the Tremont House. I’ll hoist anchor and away.”

      He paid his score with scrupulous exactness, for in such matters he greatly prided himself on his honesty, lighted a fresh cigar, and departed from the Bell-in-Hand.

      Cigar in mouth, smoke trailing on the May morning, he made his way to School Street and up it. A fine figure of a mariner he strode along, erect, deep-chested, thewed and sinewed like a bull.

      In under the columned portals of the old Tremont House—now long since only a memory—he entered, to his rendezvous with Hendricks, furtive buyer of the forbidden drug.

      And as he vanishes beneath that granite doorway, for fifty years he passes from our sight.

      CHAPTER XIII

      AFTER FIFTY YEARS

      If you will add into one total all that is sunniest and most sheltered, all that hangs heaviest with the perfume of old-fashioned New England gardens, all that most cozily combines in an old-time sailor’s home, you will form a picture of Snug Haven, demesne of Captain Alpheus Briggs, long years retired.

      Snug Haven, with gray-shingled walls, with massive chimney stacks projecting from its weather-beaten, gambreled roof, seemed to epitomize rest after labor, peace after strife.

      From its broad piazza, with morning-glory-covered pillars, a splendid view opened of sea and shore and foam-ringed islets in the harbor of South Endicutt—a view commanding kelp-strewn foreshore, rock-buttressed headlands, sun-spangled cobalt of the bay; and then the white, far tower of Truxbury Light, and then the hazed and brooding mystery of open Atlantic.

      Behind the cottage rose Croft Hill, sweet with ferns, with bayberries and wild roses crowding in among the lichen-crusted boulders and ribbed ledges, where gnarly, ancient apple-trees and silver birches clung. Atop the hill, a wall of mossy stones divided the living from the dead; for there the cemetery lay, its simple monuments and old, gray headstones of carven slate bearing some family names that have loomed big in history.

      Along the prim box-hedge of Captain Briggs’s front garden, the village street extended. Wandering irregularly with the broken shore line, it led past time-grayed dwellings, past the schoolhouse and the white, square-steepled church, to the lobstermen’s huts, the storehouses and wharves, interspersed with “fish-flakes” that blent pungent marine odors with the fresh tang of the sea.

      Old Mother Nature did her best, all along that street and in the captain’s garden, to soften those sometimes СКАЧАТЬ