Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 88: what you’re looking at

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878 Here the narrator paused and pointed to Olivetta. She held out her cupped hands with the piled jewels and the great pearl on top. “There it is! With this light on it, it looks fair enough; it looks the sort of thing that empires buy for their emperors, eh? But I give you my word that when I picked that pearl out of the wood pulp, it looked brighter te me than it does now—it looked like a lump of the moon, the way the moon seems when it is hanging in the center of a blue-black sky!” Olivetta drew closer, so that the light could fall more amply on the pearl. The others followed in, to look at it, all saving John Hodge, who hung in the background. His whole manner was full of the indiffer- ence of one who listens to a twice-told tale. Then Olivetta, like the others, forgot that John Hodge was in the room. They were entranced by the narrator, and the narra- tor was wholly wrapped up in his story. CHAPTER XIV. BY RIGHT OF FORCE. ‘AS for the six,” said Logan, ‘“ they were like wild men. One would have thought they were to share alike with Lajpat Rani and me in the profits. And poor Lajpat was like a man demented. He raised his hands to the heavens and wrung them. He dropped on his knees and beat his forehead on the heaving deck. ‘“T say the deck was heaving. In fact, by this time the little boat was fairly stand- ing on her head, what with the wind whoop- ing up and the waves beginning to smash at her. ‘We started to run in for the harbor, picking up the three anchors which had moored us during the search for the box. With the engines of that honest little boat going full blast, making her quiver from bow to stern, we were barely able to make a walking gait into the teeth of wind and current and beating waves. “ Still, we were getting on fairly enough, and the harbor was hardly a mile away, when the captain stuck his head out of the cabin and began to scream and point. I ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY, could barely hear his words, like a whisper in the yell of the wind. But his pointing directed us to take notice of a black cur- tain which had dropped from the sky to the sea across the horizon from which the storm was whooping it up. “It spread wonderfully fast. It came running over the sea at us, blanketting out everything behind and with a long line of white at its feet. I was enough of a sailor te know that that wall of blackness meant the very devil turned loose on the water. ‘“We would have been far wiser to have laid at anchor and ridden out the storm. I remembered, then, that the captain had begged us to do it. But I was too eager to get ashore with the treasure, and the rest of the men were mad, too. Now the storm was too close on us to allow anchors to be dropped and well secured. But we anchored for all that. Two anchors were thrown out from the bows of the boat. ‘In the meantime a hope of rescue came shooting up behind us. It was a long, low ship steaming at a good clip in spite of the head wind. One glance told me that it was the ship of Commodore Dascom, his yacht Elise, in which he’d combed the South seas and the ports of the Orient. And I never felt my heart go out to any man as it went out to the commodore at that moment. ‘“He had a stanch craft in that Elise. She cut through that storm like a warm knife through butter. She was walking right up to us, also, as though she meant to find out if we were in need of help. But before she could hail us, or put a line aboard us, the storm struck, “Tt was all over quickly. But in the few seconds that it took to pass my mind was moving quickly. A hand strikes in a tenth of a second, but a quick moving brain will see every slightest move of every finger on the striking hand—the hand will seem to be hanging a perceptible time in the air. “Tt was that way with me in the striking of the storm. ““T remember that it first beat down the bows of the boat as though a ten-ton ham- mer had struck the poor little craft. Then it gave a kink and twisted the boat to the side with a jerk. We were held on the lines from the anchor, and while those lines were Ccomiclbooks CO