Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 95: what you’re looking at

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

_ sary; for not a man was pulling. He had jumped up, and whipped a big _ tevolver out of his coat pocket. __—He had this in his right hand, and the bull’s-eye in his left. He stepped ' forrard smartly over the oars from thwart to thwart, till he reached the _ bows, where he shone his light down into the water. “My word!” he said. “Lord in Heaven! Saw anyone ever the like!” ___ And I doubt whether any man ever did see what we saw then; for the _ water was thick and living for yards round the boat with the hugest eels _ Lever saw before or after. : | _ “Give way, men,” said the Skipper, after a minute. “Yon’s no explana- tion of the almighty queer sounds out yonder we're hearing this night. _ Give way, lads!” os : | He stood right up in the bows of the boat, shining his bull’s-eye from side to side, and flashing it down on the water. . “Give way, lads!” he said again. “They don’t like the light, that'll keep _ them from the oars. Give way steady now. Mr. Andrews, keep her dead _ on for the noise out yonder.” We pulled for some minutes, during which I felt my oar plucked at twice; but a flash of the Captain’s lamp seemed sufficient to make the brutes loose hold. | 2 | _ The noise of the water running, appeared now quite near-sounding. _ About this time, I had a sense again of an added sort of silence to all the _ hatural quietness of the sea. And I had a return of the curious nervousness that had touched me before. I kept listening intensely, as if I expected to hear some other sound than the noise of the water. It came to me suddenly that I had the kind of feeling one has in the aisle of a large cathedral. There was a sort of echo in the night—an incredibly faint reduplicating of the noise of our oars. | | “Hark!” [ said, audibly; not realizing at first that I was speaking aloud. ~There’s an echo—” | — “That’s it!” the Captain cut in, sharply. “I thought I heard something — rummy!” 3 , ., + I thought I heard something rummy,” said a thin ghostly echo, out of the night .. . “thought I heard something rummy” ... “heard some- the night about us, in rather a horrible fashion. “Good Lord!” said the Old Man, in a whisper. We had all stopped rowing, and were staring about us into the thin mist that filled the night. The Skipper was standing with the bull’s-eye lamp heid over his head, circling the beam of light round from port to starboard, and back again. : : & _ _Abruptly, as he did so, it came to: me that the mist was thinner. The sound of the running water was very near; but it gave back no echo. “The water doesn’t echo, Sir,” I said. “That’s damn funny!” ee “That’s damn funny,” came back at me, from the darkness to port and 93° = | a thing rummy.” The words went muttering and whispering to and fro in COMME OOOKS (e(ollp ie