Gordon Young

“ When Ferdinand entered she said not a word. He entered cheerfully, as if blown in by a merry wind, and saluting her with a gay flourishing bow, wholly ignored her steady, oblique, sinister gaze. Ferdinand knew more about the good Doña than she knew of herself.
"Oh-ho-o-oh! What a day! I have seen the faithful deserted by their good father, the devil, who lets them get caught! Tut-tut-tut! How they hang men in this wicked country!" he said in Spanish. "But for a big man who talked like a priest on fire, there would be a feast for little crows! Ah, you look sick, most beautiful of women! ”

“ Mid-watch at sea are the hours of confessional, of confidences. A little craft, winged with white, floats over the black waters that are fretted with evanescent fires like myriad gems sparkling and vanishing; and the ship groans and moans and creaks so that a fellow if he has imagination at all must talk a bit to take his mind off ghosts and things.
Raikes said he went to sea at twelve. ”

“ Buckets of water thrown coolingly on the deck disappeared rapidly, leaving brine traceries. The sails, except where stained with tar streaks, were white as snow. Under the awning the women seemed to be stifling. Gorvhalsen appeared unaffected, though heat rose invisible shimmering waves. The stench of bilge-water was unescapable.
For days the sky, empty of everything but dazzling copperish fire, had pressed closer and closer. The nights were hot, and men crept about the deck, trying to find a place to sleep. The ship rose and fell on long sickening swells, with a west ward drift. ”

“ Ilona pushed off the covers with a flurry of movement and sat up. Her hair fell about her in a tangle of caresses, her eyes glowed with alarm.
"Why? Kredra, why does my father send at this hour! It is night!"
"When God has done a thing, one should not lie," said Kredra, adding simply, "He dies."
"He dies?" Ilona cried, merely blankly repeating the words she could not believe. "My father—dies? Kredra, oh, waken me! I dream that you say—Kredra, O Kredra, who—who would hurt my father? ”

“ Smith was at him with an oath and a flourish. Brundage, with a backward sweep of his left hand to clear onlookers, thrust out an arm and knife in a fending blow.
Voices cried protest. The glint of loosened steel makes a man's nerves rattle together, and in the sudden push to stand clear as blows flashed, the sailors jostled and shoved the fighters. The quarters were too close for men who, as much as they wanted to see the knife-play, dreaded the gleam of blades that might bite into them. A knife that wants blood has a wide mouth. ”

“ I felt that the man would never be brought on deck. Someway it seemed to me that, for one thing, Fate was too ironical to allow success to such overweening impudence from mere men. Fate might, in her cynical mood, bring our ship out of the night to sight the wreck; permit the incredible chance of hawser and wood to drift through a storming sea and reach that wreck; let one man of a score kick his fellows and Death, too, aside and beat through the waves to grasp that wood, and let him hang on until he was within reach of grasping, succoring arms—then pluck him off. ”

“ Smallpox crept into the city, terrifying everybody; Señora Eton's face was irreparably blighted; then the redoubtable woman who had taught her daughter to live, showed her how to die. Quite calmly, with a mirror in her hand, as if from it receiving the fatal sentence, Señora Eton drank a glass of poisoned wine, and so departed from a world where, according to her simple beliefs, a woman's face was more to be valued than her life.
The news of gold in California, at the time regarded as a Spanish country, had reached Havana when Elvira was ready to leave the city. ”

“ But she followed Dula. She knew, perhaps psychically, that Dula was strong and wise. For all of the forced blooming of the tropics, Eunice was little more than a child, and a handful of dirt spread out on an oceanic mountain had been her world. When a woman is utterly innocent she has little left besides the urge to be loved, guided, sheltered, and an eagerness to trust.
Dula stood there alert, tense, her eyes on Grahame in a fascinated sort of way—her whole being concentrated in a kind of agonized suspense as to what he would reply to Davenant. ”

“ Brundage lay wearily, back to bulkhead, arm extended with his cutlas still in his fingers. He was covered with the blood of many wounds from head to thigh. Men, dead where they had fallen, lay about beyond his feet. Still, numbers had butchered him.
The man stooped low, peering into the blood covered face, wrinkled, still grim, dead, but that was all, otherwise unchanged. He had gone out to meet whatever there was to meet as he had gone through life, unafraid and unhumbled. ”

“ Life had given her love, however brief, and she was of a race of women that asked nothing more of life. Her arms coiled about him, holding to him with the innocent unconsciousness of a child.
Words are not easily spoken when Death stands near, unfolding his long arms. Her eyes were bright as if with happiness. He stroked her hair. It was unjust that she should be tortured, then die. He felt bitter for her; his thoughts were vividly blasphemous, but kept in silence. ”

“ What fools were these gringos who thought that Spanish blood ever forgot or forgave the humiliating blow, or ceased to wait watchfully.
With such pleasant reflections to entertain himself, he rode on; and now and then he smiled in much the same way as smooth water is rippled without being broken.
Under the shadow of the oak before the rancho of El Crucifijo, Ferdinand stood in the road and cried his greeting to Pasquito:
"Ah-ho, Señor Pasquito, you are far, far out of your way, my good friend. But come, if you are hungry. There is coffee and meat, and the welcome of an honest man. ”

“ Hales reined back, glanced down, raised his whip. With a quick lunge he leaned far from the saddle, and as the lash fell on Fletcher's head a bullet passed over the saddle.
One of the Hounds, on horseback, summoning what boldness he could, had put his hand into his pocket and, waiting until Hales' head was turned, fired with a derringer. The bullet struck an onlooker. The crowd, as if the report was an explosion that sent them tottering backward, gave way, turning and stumbling to be clear of bullets.
Hales, with blow of spurs and jerk of reins, wheeled his horse and straightened up. ”

“ Grant wheeled and stood listening; but at that moment some people passed with much talk through the hall and he either forgot the noise that had attracted his attention or thought it had been made by those in the hall. He threw the gun dejectedly back into the drawer and slumped miserably into a chair—and there he sat, on and on.
Frances began to be alarmed, then weary. Her body ached from standing tense in a position that permitted little change and no rest. He would sit as if frozen for a half-hour, then stir slightly and again become immobile. ”

“ He boasted in the forecastle of what he had said.
A squall an hour long hit the Heraldr, and after that the wind blew steadily. The afterguard was under arms through the night and the word was “shoot to kill.”
It was near one o'clock in the morning that Brundage's name was whispered and there was a hand's touch to shoulder. His eyes opened into narrow watchful slits. He did not move; just stared into the blurred shadow of a face marked by the lantern's glow.
All about men, like the restless dead in a catacomb awaiting the last trumpet, breathed heavily, puffed, groaned, snored. ”

“ Nothing was visible except under the flashes of lightning, too often blinding; only there was occasionally the spectral white outline of a foam-crested wave that washed up out of the darkness. Wind, water and thunder filled the air; I doubted not that they filled the universe with stormy orchestration.
I tried to tell myself that death under the volleying thunders of Heaven's cannon, with the sea piling mountains of water for the grave-mound, with the epitaph scrawled in slithering foam, was death and nothing more or less than if one died abed. ”

“ At times I feel myself very clever. Guided a little, too, by her poised fierceness, the fierceness of eyes and voice, I surmised that she had no sympathy with doing anything for Williams.
For one thing, he had humiliated her father. I had no reason then for not supposing that Davenant was some one else. For a more important thing, Williams had treated her as if her cloak did actually confer invisibility; and, in my experience, nothing more enrages a woman than being ignored. ”

“ Men who had not been in bed at all walked along aimlessly, usually a little drunkenly, with money gone, strength gone, hope gone. Hundreds of miners, overheated by the hot sun and feverish work, chilled by the icy water and frosty nights of the mountains, sickened by rough food and rougher liquor, had crept back down from the diggings. There were many suicides every day, as if the crushed weaklings took themselves out of the way to make room for more boisterous and daring men. ”

“ In the midst of life we are in death——”
His voice was strong, hard, not loud. Each word fell carefully. He was no longer looking at any one around him, but far away where the sky bent down to touch the water as if whoever reached the horizon might easily climb into Heaven.
Then opening the book he read, glancing away from the page as when one reads something not unfamiliar:
“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God—”
Eve was sobbing. The strain of the night, the solemnity of the moment drew tears from eyes that had already wept themselves dry. ”

“ So it was that Martin O'Day was buried where at night the wind goes through the big trees like something that wears soft floating garments that do not catch on the branches, where the mountains stand with eternal vigilance, and the whirling river has the sound of foreign girls babbling with sweet mouths in an unknown tongue.
10 After they had returned to the cabin, Burton sat for a time on a bunk, repeatedly running his fingers through his tangled hair and glancing from one part to another of the room. ”

“ The black smoke of the now silenced guns drifted with slow whorling, weaving itself into a transparent, film-like shadow as it rose upward against the low ceiling; and the Magnolia was for a moment quiet as if all were dead.
Hales glanced at the caps on the chamber nipples of his revolver to see how many shots were left for what need he might have, and held the gun at his hip, muzzle up, thumb on the hammer, and peered watchfully through the smoke. The menace of his watchfulness kept men quiet and motionless as they waited, expectantly.
Don José slowly thrust his revolver into its holster. ”

“ Canvas flapped dispirited as the ship stirred on ground swells. It was very hot, as hot as the heat of the sun and the mirror of the sea could make it.
Juggins's hoarse voice bellowed with an effort at heartiness. ”

“ The man, looking across the skylight, said in a voice not loud, but sharp, metallic as the blow of iron on brass, propulsive as though the word was thrown:
“Gunmeyer!”
Mr. Butler, so he said, was about to spring with a punishing blow for such contemptuous and unseamanly approach of the captain; but he was turned to inaction by Gunmeyer's face. It exploded into fright. He sprang off the deck. His was a Smothered, inarticulate cry. The popping eyes thrust themselves forward, almost leaving their sockets. He screamed, but his hoarse voice cracked in the hopeless cry of, “Mein Gott! Mein Gott!” ”

“ The Duke was a good man with his fists, though in a fight to the finish Webster was the better. With the Duke, fighting was more than a science—it was an art.
For a moment Frank hesitated as one hesitates before something odd. But when he started he came headlong, with short neck shortened; and the Duke drove a right straight to his nose, starting the blood, then he stepped deftly aside as Frank's heavy fist whirled through the air. ”

“ I will, sir, undertake to see that any man is tried fairly according to the law, but may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and may my heart stop dead, sir, if I ever lift my voice to shield and acquit, sir, a man whom I believe to be guilty as charged!"
"I don't understand. I don't understand you," said Col. Nevinson, frowning blankly. "I am surprised at you, Deering. I am amazed! I thought you were a friend of mine, and I thought you had courage! But I see, sir, that since your masterful address on the Plaza, you have been reached, intimidated, sir! by that damn mob!" ”

“ Fool! You throw away what God has sent. Punishment will fall upon you! Go! In the midst of a thousand camps you are told where to find him, and you doze with song on your mouth! Up! Go!"
"God who knows all things will not be angry," said Ferdinand complacently.
So, almost every day Kredra spoke and Ferdinand answered.
This day, as they talked in the afternoon shadows of a crumbling building, Ferdinand sat upon a bench with legs crossed, guitar in his lap and strummed absently.
"Who idles when the Oath is sworn, dies!" said Kredra, who had kept the faith of her fathers. ”

“ A moment later he was being half-carried, half-thrust up the ladder by Cockney George and Raulson. They wanted the gin; but what they really wanted was to see Raikes tormented.
The schooner, like a derelict, rode the seaway, with the wind slapping her sails every which way, while the rudder played back and forth at any chance surge of a wave. A mad night on a crazy ship, it was; and Hawkins, reaching down with one powerful arm, literally lifted Raikes by the neck and planted him on the deck, where his legs gave way and he crumpled abjectly. ”

“ I doubt not but that He who knows all things, knows the inmost hearts of the wicked and loves them for what they might be if ever their hearts were struck open, as was the alabaster box of precious ointment of spikenard.
“Whom else,” I have asked bitterly of myself, “but some man fierce and stern could have struck fire from her—taught in the nursery to kiss a knife over which curses had been said?”
The very iron and flinty mold that gave her disturbing fear lest he could not be moved, made her love him. And now her hour had come for speaking out, even to his face. ”

“ Then, señor, if you would be treated like a devil-born gringo," said Don Gil with increasing anger, "whip a Spaniard! Steal their horses, pay men to kill them, harm their daughters, take their land, curse them for dogs, call them greasers! Does it mean nothing that I, I, Don Gil Diego, who hate all Americanos, have respect for you—and show it? Bah!" he cried, flinging his hands. "You, too, are a fool! I thought long and twice before I gave the gun back to you so that he might see and know you were my friend. ”

“ McGuire leaped and peered across her shoulder.
A little two-masted schooner was romping by with all sails set. Night distances on water are deceptive; he judged that she was something around a mile or more away, and she could be plainly seen, moving like a phantom over the dark water, silvered with moonlight.
Ships were not often in those waters; whalers came only rarely, with now and then a blackbirder. She had the cut of a blackbirder or trader and was sailing free on the starboard tack under the same good breeze that was slatting the Heraldr's canvas. ”

“ Clobb came to his feet angry as a man can be. He was furious that one fellow should be so baffling; and cursed. Malign luck seemed against him, making him futile, ridiculous, his hot temper boiled. Seizing a cutlas and tearing it out of a man's hand, Clobb cried:
“Rush him! Rush 'im—all o' you—on him!”
They pressed forward. They too were infected with desperation at Brundage. He seemed unkillable. A little more and they would have begun to be superstitious about him. But nothing is scarcely more enraging to men who are not in a mood for gallantry than to be opposed by one lone figure. ”

“ These two strange people of a strange blood that had emerged from the racially unknown thousands of years before, of a people that, defeated but never conquered, had for generation upon generation hugged the birth-soil of the Pyrenees, were touched with elemental fears and faiths almost as ancient as the Aryan camp-fires from which the races of the world took their departure before history found a tongue. ”

“ Though it was still day outside, the shadowing spread of canvas had increased the deck-house gloom, and a lantern threw off a dirty yellow glow. Brundage, his lean face outlined against the glow, looked down evilly.
Smith cursed him. The human animal, not less than the brute, must snarl and fight at the least hint of an offer if he would hold his place among the pack; and though men fight to the death for life, they throw their lives like dice at the flicker of an insult. ”

“ Childlike faith makes worthy hypocrites, sometimes. Men who may have no scruples against being evil are often not cruel; and often, too, they have become ennobled by trying to live up to the good thought of them. Her illusions about him, so frankly aglow in the light eyes, were a part of her beauty, like the cool blue gown with lace-like work of darker violets, like the warm cheeks and brightly blonde hair; and it would have been as cruel to destroy the illusions as to scar the cheek or tear the hair. ”

“ My luck runs that way.
Davenant walked off. Erect, with head well up, he stood perhaps watching nothing but his own thoughts. It was a comfortable gray day, with the sea tossing itself into crests that fell sizzling down the steep glassy sides of waves, and with the shrouds humming at times before the gusty blows of the wind.
I studied his back, tall and square and reserved in bearing. He had dignity, the dignity of manners. Williams had dignity of another kind—with the utter lack of manners; the dignity of a sheer, menacing personality. ”

“ Then, along comes a stranger. Love bursts open the heart of the petted woman, and out into the storm and mud, to be perhaps a lean alley-cat and grow gaunt and hungry, the woman goes. That is sin—and only the sinful know that fierce, heedless, sacrificial love-passion that in life is all that the poets claim for it in romance. So Dula Davenant loved.
For that reason she sat in Williams's cabin and watched beside the man Williams had pulled from the water, and perhaps stroked his hard, rough forehead and thought of Williams.
Red Shaylor was an oak of a man, gnarled and hard. ”

“ The wind swept her cloak from her side, flung back the crimson lining and revealed her hand, and in her hand a knife caught the faint transparency of the binnacle's aura. She half-turned, but did not look again at me so that the wind brought her cape about her.
I wished I had not been the subtle fool. After all I might have known subtleties are worthless against women. They are impenetrable—the women, I mean. It is like using loaded dice, then betting on the numbers, not top or bottom, but on the side. ”

“ As Hales walked from the room without another word or glance, she roused herself, pointed after him, shouted wildly:
"Coward! You coward!"
With a bang she shut the door of the sick-room and looked about with breathless fury, like one who searches for any weapon; then came at Ferdinand, seized him, held him with one hand while a finger of the other touched the bruise of her cheek:
"You, Ferdinand! Go—tell the de Solas! Tell them! It is Nevinson they want! It is he they want! They will come right into the city after him. Oh, I know Spanish blood! Ferdinand, go! Tell them that...." ”

“ Raffle was about the deck, under water. Rope-ends like long threshing snakes whipped about. Men in oilskins clawed themselves along their rigged life-lines, browsing tacks and hauling clewlines, tightening stays, wearily pulling themselves aloft.
That madman seemed determined to set every stitch of canvas. The confusion over the decks, the wind's howl and eldritch orchestration of rigging, the heeling and pitching of the bark, gave the im pression of impending disaster. Men expected the masts to go or at least that sails would cannonade off from bolt-ropes. ”

“ Clobb went forward with a cutlas poised across his breast ready to slash. Men cleared their throats nervously, moved, craned necks, but stood where they were. They wanted first to see what would happen before doing anything themselves.
Clobb advanced with head drawn in and shoulders rounded. His heavy face glowered, distorting his bruised features to strike terror—as an animal shows fangs, as the savage marks himself hideously. ”

“ Only the bad luck that an hones' man has when he speaks true! It was Señor Hales who came and saw and eased my neck with that good gun of his. He stands there. Ask!"
"Does this man lie to me?" Don Gil demanded of Hales.
"No, Don Gil. So far as I know, it is the truth."
Don Gil swore furiously. He forgot the horse in his rage:
"Gomez? Hang you? Why, Ferdinand? Ah-h-h, now I remember me that he did have his horse go lame yesterday when we rode this way! I will make a fire and put him to sleep on the coals! Why? He came with Americanos! I hate all Americanos! Why was he here, my Ferdinand?" ”

“ Why should Grahame have thrown himself back, his body writhing under the brown-stained coverlet, his lean fingers tearing at his breast, and his face twisted as if fighting with somebody, when nobody had touched him?
Dula swiftly reached him—and I gasped. But she did not strike. There was no knife in her hands. She talked to him rapidly. She was not angry.
It was hard to catch what she said, for Eunice was crying, with her eyes open; and sobbing something too. The innocent are always helpless in the midst of evil, being truly meant for Heaven rather than for earth. ”

“ The man who has no fear in him is a clod. And she was vibrant, strung taut, her black eyes widened into a kind of unaffected wonder.
A few times her hand flew to her ear to shut out the thunder that seemed striking the deck. At such stunning, deafening, ear-crashing peals, that came stroke on stroke like the ragged volley of monstrous cannon fired within arm's reach overhead, I flinched as from an impending blow. ”

“ Williams had an eye for boat-beauty, as other men have for the next most feminine thing, a woman.
I have a preference for the ark-like ship, high out of the water; and if it needs two guesses to tell her stern from her bow, I like her the better. She may ride the sea like a sailor on horseback and be stupid at her helm, but she won't be headstrong and full of the devil.
Sally Martin was reasonably behaved while she lay on the beach, turning from one side to the other like a lazy lady in the hands of slaves. ”

“ Eunice, with her hands to her ears, collapsed trembling into a chair.
Dula caught at Williams's arm.
Then there was revealed the woman within her, that mystic woman that had seemed to lurk under the black cloak, lined with crimson; that had nestled in the shadows behind the curtains of eyes, dark and impenetrable. How scant the line between crime and love; and often the line is erased. Her potentiality for either was great. It takes something of the recklessness of crime for a woman to break through the instinctive hesitancy of her sex and speak as Dula spoke—of love, to Hurricane Williams. ”

“ Williams again, was tense and active. His words cracked. Men jumped, not through fear but eagerness.
“Throw your weight to it, men. Heave-o! Now, altogether. Heave-o! Now—heave-o!”
And each heave-o was answered with a chorus of strained grunts. Hawkins, with a turn of the hawser about his enormous body, braced himself like an anchor with feet against the coaming of the companion and took up and held all the slack that came over the taffrail.
The spar now trailed dead astern, and we had passed the wreck. Williams stood first to the hawser, and after him a line of men like a tug-of-war team. ”

“ Raikes leaned nervously from side to side, his one glittering eye turning about like the gaze of a restless, trapped animal. From time to time he said it was “a hell of a night,” indifferent as to whether he was answered or heard.
All of us were soaked, for all had rushed on deck at the first arousing blast; and a thin sheet of salt water swashed about our feet. Hawkins lay in it, head on arm, indifferently. Though the night was not cold, we were chilled; a nervousness leaves one chilled.
Davenant was dressed, even to shirt and coat, but not collar. ”