Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 123, No. 4 — page 97: what you’re looking at

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

SO ENDS THE DAY. Martin. “ After this, perhaps you’tl know that I’m master aboard this ship. I could have crushed’ you: like an eggshell in the fist. Get out!” | The mate gathered himself together, and obeyed, his head still fuzzy with blood pres- sure, his knees wabbly. His brain at once shouted for revenge and bade him go cau- tiously. He had met his master in fair fight, and he knew it. He slunk out of the cuddy like a whipped dog, with a snarl he took care the skipper should not see. Sere in soul and body, he finistied his bottle in his bunk. : The heat had flattened out the sea as an iron presses linen. It lay unwrinkled, with the barkentine in the midst of it, motionless as a toy model glued to canvas. The hori- zon was a sharp line of purple against the ‘lighter sky. _No bird vexed the windless air. Cleaving the surface of the water with barely a ripple, the simitar-shaped dorsals of two sharks kept patrol at the stern, pass- ing from quarter to quarter, ranging cease- lessly after possible scraps of waste. The hatches and bulkhead doors were open, for ventilation. Breakfast was a farce so far as eating was concerned, lacking even the pantomime of perfunctory performance. Samson did not appear. Neither Mary nor her aunt had caught any sounds of the fight, but both suspected that something of the sort had . occurred. Their eyes met and ex- changed ‘agreement concerning the skipper’s attitude. He was undeniably sleepy, and an- nounced his determination for a siesta. _ And he was also undeniably in a satisfied frame of mind. He even breathed like a man who has come up from close atmos- phere to free air. And the two women had not discussed between themselves the previous night’s incidents, yet, in their sex freemasonry, they traded semiconfidences. It was the first mate’s watch on deck, a perfunctory job under the circumstances, but none the less peremptory. He had opened a fresh bottle to aid him to ignore the bruise showing plainly on his cheek. 603 To him it seemed to blazon the fact of his encounter with the skipper. He himself would have boasted of it to the girl, had he been in the skipper’s shoes, and he could not convince himself that the captain had kept silence. He resented the covert looks of the crew, and he found them numberless tasks. They obeyed them in silence. One order, given through Badoun, was the flushing of the decks every hour with seawater drawn from overside in buckets, hauled in by ropes. In the cuddy, the skipper left for his ca- bin, to catch up his needed sleep. Miss Burton languidly asked for the punkah-boy, and took up her sewing. - The girl was too restless for any repose, still bothered with her own problem. She was dressed in the lightest of her tropic outfit, and she wan- dered out on the deck. The mate was the only white man in sight. He had his back turned to her, and kept it so, as if to avoid her. She saun- tered around the mainmast to confront him casually, piqued by his attitude. She was uncorseted, and the long curves and rounded swells of her almost perfeat body were covered, rather than clothed, by the thin Madras of her gown, and the light silks beneath. She became aware of a quality in the attitude of the Malays that offended her. They never seemed deliber- ately to look at her, but she was continu- ally conscious of glances shot from the cor- ners of long-slitted lids, glances that leered, sweeping her from head to foot. Once in a while she caught a confidential look pass between two of them, polishing brass or recoiling halyards, and felt that she was the subject. Once, as she paused by the rail; she noticed Badoun deliberately gloating over the sharp shadow of her pro- filed body on the deck. It sickened her, made her a little afraid. This had never happened before. It was as if she #ad been living among men now ‘suddenly revealed: as pit-devils, treacher- ous and lecherous beneath their light cop- per skins. Suddenly apprehension swept over her. Had she suddenly. fallen in the estima- tion of the Malays? She knew how lax was their own morality, their polygamous Origina an rN eal NGO) in c ER (C =) DOOK CO