BLACK PAWL
BY
BEN AMES WILLIAMS
AUTHOR OF “EVERED”
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
Copyright, 1922,
By E. P. Dutton & Company
All Rights Reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA
BLACK PAWL
| CHAPTER: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII. |
CHAPTER I
SPIESS, a born lubber who would never learn the way of the sea, bungledhis simple share of the task of getting the mate’s boat away. BlackPawl, master of the schooner, was near by; and he cuffed the man. Thebuffet was good-natured enough, and Black Pawl laughed as headministered it. Nevertheless it knocked Spiess end over end. The mangot up, grumbling; and Red Pawl, the captain’s son and mate, saidsharply to his father:
“I’ll handle my boat and my men, sir. Let them be.”
Black Pawl laughed again. “Fiddle, boy,” he retorted. “If you knew yourjob, you’d have Spiess trained before this. He’s been thirty months onyour hands.”
“Keep your fists off my men,” Red Pawl repeated sullenly; and Black Pawlfrowned.{2}
“Get your boat away,” he ordered. “And stop your mouth.”
They had worked into the bay that morning, threading the intricatepassages between the islands and the reefs with a familiarity thatshowed Black Pawl knew his way about. Not that the passage wasdifficult. There was always room, and to spare; but an ignorant manmight well have taken a short way through blue water and piled up on aslumbering reef. Black Pawl was not ignorant, not ignorant where thesewaters were concerned. He had made this anchorage a full score of times,in his years upon the sea.
Where the schooner now lay, there was a beauty all about them, theunmeasured and profligate beauty of the tropics that appealed to everysense a man possessed. The eye was drunk with it; the air was richlyheavy with a fragrance that caressed the nostrils; the stirring currentsof this air brought faint, far bird-songs, and the musical tones of thenatives, and blended them in a symphony to which the murmuring sea lentundertone. The touch of the sun and of the sun-warmed wind was ascaress{3}ing as the touch of a woman’s han