II.

5 min read

THE MAN WHO WAS GOING NOWHERE.

The cabin in which I found myself was small and rather untidy. A youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist. For a minute we stared at each other without speaking. He had watery grey eyes, oddly void of expression. Then just overhead came a sound like an iron bedstead being knocked about, and the low angry growling of some large animal. At the same time the man spoke. He repeated his question,—“How do you feel now?”

I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I had gotthere. He must have seen the question in my face, for my voice wasinaccessible to me.

“You were picked up in a boat, starving. The name on the boat was the Lady Vain, and there were spots of blood on the gunwale.”

At the same time my eye caught my hand, so thin that it looked like adirty skin-purse full of loose bones, and all the business of the boatcame back to me.

“Have some of this,” said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff,iced.

It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.

“You were in luck,” said he, “to get picked up by a ship with a medicalman aboard.” He spoke with a slobbering articulation, with the ghost ofa lisp.

“What ship is this?” I said slowly, hoarse from my long silence.

II.

1 / 5

← → keys or swipe to turn pages