D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 112: what you’re looking at

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

The Third Lash. 10! caught blindly at trailing ropes and were caught by them, like serpents, and were dragged under. The giant of storms, which the first Portuguese navi- gators saw off the Cape of Good Hope, had struck again with his cat-of-a-thousand lashes, and the XipMias was no more. One would have thought the supercargo’s death was avenged. “Is it possible it 1s you?” gasped D’Artagnan, nearly nude, and lacerated and stripped as if really from under a flagellating frrar’s whip. ‘That was a buffeting!” In a creature, stripped likewise, but for the struggle of one against the elements, coated with green slime from the bottom of the Xzphias, which, in rolling, had given him a keelhauling, D’Artagnan recognized Pedro; but his voice was just a voice, expressing nothing of the joy he should have felt at mere existence. “Never did I hear of the like since Hercules split the mountains between Spain and Africa and made those pillars bearing his name!”’ “It is nothing,’ replied the impassable sea rover. “Wait for the third stripe!” “TI prefer not. But I am afraid we cannot change our eh as easily as the members of the Parliament of aris.” “T feeltas if I had gone round a water wheel of Segovia Aqueduct,” groaned Pedro. “T have ceased to ache! I could not feel a whip of scorpions! I shall never need body armor! Iam proof! The worthy court doctor to His Majesty, King Louis XIII. once told me that in every man is the ‘witch’s spot’ —you may stick a bodkin in it and the victim is insensible to pricks—well, I am one whole spot like that! Pinch me, brother, that you may test the story!” In this instant he made no secret that he enjoyed the intimacy of court functionaries. Pedro did not heed his complaint or request, he was looking, with the good captain’s fatherly eye, upon the three masts clinging together and bearing only these two corpse-resembling men. “Not a man left!” moaned he, looking further as well as the spray would allow, floating thickly in the agitated Eomichooksnco