Commodore Junk — page 157: what you’re looking at

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

150 COMMODORE JUNK. CHAPTER XVIL THE GIBBET SPIT. It had been a baking day in the town of St. George, British Honduras, and the only lively things about the place had been the lizards. The sky had seemed to be of burnished brass, and the sea of molten silver, so dazzling that the eye was pained which fell upon its sheen, The natives were not troubled by the heat, for they sought out shady places, and went to sleep, but the British occupants of the port kept about their houses, and looked as if they wished they were dogs, and could hang out their tongues and pant. St. George, always a dead-and-alive tropic town, now seemed to be the dead alone; and as if to prove that it was so, the last inhabitant secmed to have gone to the end of the spit by the marsh beyond the port, where every one who landed or left could see, and there hung himself up as a sign of the deso- lation and want of animation in the place. For there, pendent from the palm-tree gibbet, alone in the most desolate spot near the port, was the buccaneering captain, whose name had become a by-word all along the coast, whose swift-sailing schooner had captured vessels by the score, and robbed and burnt till Commodore Junk’s was a name to speak of with bated breath; and the captains of ships, whether British or visitors from foreign lands, made cautious inquiries as to whether he had been heard of in the neighbourhood be- fore they ventured to sea, and then generally found that they had been misled. For that swift schooner was pretty certain to appear right in their path, with the result that their vessels would be boarded, the captain and crew sent afloat in their Gomichbooksneo