All Sail Set. Armstrong Sperry
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Название: All Sail Set
Автор: Armstrong Sperry
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Морские приключения
isbn: 9781567925739
isbn:
The Flying Cloud, all glistening black and copper, lay at the water’s edge, alive, eager, straining for the sea. It was her time to go. Her destiny must be fulfilled.
Aye, it was a great day for us all. Donald McKay, with hollows under his sleepless eyes, watched the launch from a window in his office. As the ship slid down her tallowed ways and came to the staging’s end, the slash of a knife freed the figurehead of its cotton wrappings, and an exclamation went up from the spectators in a vast sigh. The figure of an angel seemed to float on outspread wings, rising slenderly out of the stem, while the sun struck against the gold of the trumpet at her lips like a ringing cry of triumph.
For myself, I knew only a feeling of sorrow as my ship took to water. As soon as her masts were stepped, she was to be towed away to New York. Grinnell, Minturn & Company of that city had purchased her from Enoch Train for $90,000. A sale which, be it said in passing, Enoch Train was never to cease regretting, although the croakers shook their heads in gloomy prediction that Grinnell was sailing both sheets aft for bankruptcy.
I doubted that I should ever lay eyes upon my ship again. No matter how many vessels I might see turned out of the McKay yards, no other would mean so much to me. She was my first love; puppy love, some thoughtless ones call it. No other love strikes its grappling hook so deep into the heart.
It was some weeks later, wnen the Cloud’s masts had been stepped and the riggers had done their work, that the tug Ajax nosed into the harbor. I wanted to shout out my protest! I hoped the tug might ram a rock and sink, and the Captain fall to a watery grave, and all the men be stricken with paralysis! None of these dire events came to pass. The Ajax meant business and she set about it.
As the Flying Cloud was towed out to sea, I stood on the hill behind Messina Clarke’s house, beside the towering figurehead, and wondered how the mermaid could blow her conch on such a mournful day.
“… They placed a silver coin under the heel of your mainmast step, Flying Cloud, to speed you on long voyages. Storms are waiting for you, and seas to batter you. Davy Jones will reach for you and every skeleton in his locker will rattle its bones. But there are spice islands in another sea, waiting for you, Flying Cloud. Only I won’t be there …”
And then I turned away, for I was a big lad by now, going on fifteen, and mighty near to blubbering.
“Cap’n,” I muttered, turning back to the old man, “Cap’n—” then stopped. For Messina Clarke, with the back of one hoary fist, was knuckling a tear out of his own eye!
Since that day, so long ago now, I have come to learn that there is no heart so soft as the sailorman’s, and none more filled with sentiment. Stout hearts, but never hard ones. So we stood there, under a gilded mermaid, an old man and a boy watching a ship being towed out to sea.
What was passing in the old man’s mind, I can never know. For myself, I felt that I had lost a friend.
CHAPTER III
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