Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 75: what you’re looking at

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

THE ROARING HORN 69 CHAPTER II TO THE S’UTHARD NOW, sodden with a gray and pelting rain, spread its dour carpet.over the pier at Stapleton. The February day Jowered in consonance with the ugly drama now being there begun, as the China Girl—her cargo mostly second hand steel rails for the Minas de Juncal railway—put out to sea. Old Jason Mellish stood near the stringpiece of the pier, watching his last ship clear for what he felt was her last passage. In silence he waited with thin shoulders hunched up, an old wine colored tippet about his neck and chin, his thread wound spectacles blurred with rain. Did any emotion lurk behind that baggy and masklike face, no man could have fath- omed its tenor. There the old man watched, one of a little group of farewell sayers—a steve- dore, a couple of roustabouts, even a reporter who was getting a fairish story from this sailing of one of the very last skysail yarders. Unmoved he remained there, thinking: “That’s a proper good cargo I’ve got aboard her. They’ll rack her, the steel rails will. Lord bless me, rack her won- derful hard!” To his muffled up ears drifted the pluffy coughing of the tug that hauled his ship— how unwillingly she moved!—out toward the gray and rain scourged Channel. Before his eyes slowly passed and faded the black, wall sided bulk, the soaring masts and spreading yards of the old China Girl. Silent, he stared, and glum. Even a man like Jason Mellish, may he not find it grips his heart to send a one time gallant ship, at long last, out to her death? And what may his thoughts be, if any thoughts he have for them, about the doomed crew there aboard of her? Captain Isaac Bohannon, richer by twenty thousand dollars in yellowbacks— money that by hard shifts Mellish had raised for him—stood at the vessel’s star- board quarter; stood and glowered in silence at the old ship owner’s dwindling figure. Bohannon had received those yellowbacks from Jason’s mottled hand, in the cabin, some ten minutes before the old man had stiffly clambered down the gangway ladder. All the while Bohannon had watched the springs being taken in, forward and aft, the singling of the head and stern- lines, and then their casting off, the com- fortable bulge of that money in his breast pocket under his rain gleaming oilskins had given him good cheer. With the final “Let go forrard!” and the “Let go aft!’ he had felt the last bond severed, whereby any possible loss of that fortune might overtake him. Now the money was his, all his, irrevocably his; and he was rich! Richer than ever he had hoped to be! The hard heart swelled within him; and he smiled’ as a wolf, perhaps, might smile. “You'll get your money’s worth, you damned old son of a one!”’ he was thinking as the ship drew away. A very demon of malice gleamed in the pale blue of his eyes. “Your money’s worth, and then a lot. If you knew, if-you only knew—” He leaned elbows on the snowy rail, spat into the swirling, sullen water and sardonically grinned. **You’ll know soon enough, by gumbo, but not too soon,” the captain’s thought continued. “Not so soon that you can stop it happenin’!” : And with viperine relish he fell ponder- ing about a certain letter he had written old Jason; a letter he had left with a friend in Brooklyn to be posted one week later, not before. Thoughts of that letter must have given Bohannon extraor- dinary satisfaction, for they gendered in his bull throat certain hoarse rumblings that stood him in lieu of laughter. “You'll be all ends up, old boy, when you get that there letter!” the captain savored his reflections. “A little of the merry hell you’re ladlin’ out to others, you'll get it in your own dish, eh, what? Hove on your beam ends entire, that’s what you'll be. I reckon any score I got against you'll be all paid up. And you’ll be paid, too, for your murderin’ plot— comiclooolks.com