Captain Caution Read Online Free PDF

and grape at close range. He groaned aloud at the recollection of the words Corunna Dorman had spoken to him when, by his quickness, death and destruction had been averted. "'Sneaking, cowardly, turn-tail ratl"' he repeated to himself. The words reformed themselves in his hot brain and spilled
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    unbidden from his parched lips. "Cowardly, sneaking, turn-tail rail" he muttered. "Turn-tail, cowardly, sneaking ratI"
    The voice of the sailing master roared at him from the hatch: "Well, for God's sake! Are you coming along, or are you thinking of taking a berth in the gun room?"
    "Could I have some water?" Marvin asked hoarsely.
    "Come down that ladder," the sailing master snapped, "or you'll get a musket-butt behind the earl"
    Marvin descended the ladder hastily, stooped to avoid the beams of the berth deck, and moved forward to a second hatch. As his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he saw, crouched on each side of the hatchway, two grotesque marines, looking, in that hot half light, like the guards of some dark inferno.
    Out of a small square hole in the hatch protruded a ladder, and from the hole there came the sound of many voices, and a stench as evil as it was powerful.
    "Down with your" the sailing master said with what almost seemed like enjoyment. "We'll be at the Cape Verdes before you know it."
    Seeing that there was no help for it, Marvin laid hold of the ladder to go down, but as he did so, a man rose through the hole in the hatch to block his way. He had a thin face, long and palely yellow, framed in lank black hair; a face that had, at no distant date, been cleanly shaved, but that was now shaded by a growth of black stubble. As he rose higher on the ladder his garments were revealed to be as darkly grey as a Quaker's coat. He glanced quickly at Marvin from under an eyelid that drooped heavily, but spoke to the sailing master in a hoarse voice that seemed to Marvin to have a singularly pleasing resonance.
    "I believe, sir," he said, "that unless you let some of us on deck you'll have a pile of corpses on your hands tomorrow."
    "You know the rules, Slade," Oddsly said brusquely. "Nobody goes on deck when we're hove to, or in chase of a sail. It's nothing you can't stand. You mustn't judge white men by the blacks you've carried."
    Slade looked carefully at the sailing master, tilting his head backward as though to see him more clearly from under his drooping eyelid; and Marvin saw that the greyness of the man's shirt was due to a crust of mud upon it.
    He turned to Marvin then. "You're joining us, I think. Lurman Slade, if you'll permit me, captain of the Graceful Kate brig."
    "SIaverl" Oddsly said scornfully.
    Again Slade tipped back his head to stare at the sailing master.
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    "You repeat yourself," he said. "I think this gentleman probably understood your first reference. He's not an Englishmanl"
    He smiled and nodded at Marvin, backing slowly down the ladder; and Marvin, after a final glance at Oddsly's grim features, followed Slade into a hot, foul blackness that seemed to rise about him like the steam from a witch's cauldron; then to close over his head as he descended.
    He stood, Marvin felt for in the darkness of the hold he could see nothing on a tier of water casks that had been covered with a layer of mud, so that a second tier of casks might be placed in it and prevented, by its stickiness, from shifting. The stench of the place caught him in the throat and the pit of the stomach, as if those outraged organs fought silently against the unendurable; and the uneasy swaying of the brig seemed suddenly to sweep off into enor- mous arcs that momentarily threatened to become dizzying revolutions. He caught at the collar of his shirt and heard it rip in his hand; then, choking, he turned and fumbled again for the ladder.
    A hand caught him by the arm. "No use to go up," Slade's hoarse voice told him. "The marines push you back. Lie down here between us. This corner of