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

SPIESS, a born lubber who would never learn the way of the sea, bungled his simple share of the task of getting the mate’s boat away. Black Pawl, master of the schooner, was near by; and he cuffed the man. The buffet was good-natured enough, and Black Pawl laughed as he administered it. Nevertheless it knocked Spiess end over end. The man got up, grumbling; and Red Pawl, the captain’s son and mate, said sharply 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 your job, you’d have Spiess trained before this. He’s been thirty months on your hands.”
“Keep your fists off my men,” Red Pawl repeated sullenly; and Black Pawl frowned.
“Get your boat away,” he ordered. “And stop your mouth.”
They had worked into the bay that morning, threading the intricate passages between the islands and the reefs with a familiarity that showed Black Pawl knew his way about. Not that the passage was difficult. There was always room, and to spare; but an ignorant man might well have taken a short way through blue water and piled up on a slumbering reef. Black Pawl was not ignorant, not ignorant where these waters 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, the unmeasured and profligate beauty of the tropics that appealed to every sense a man possessed. The eye was drunk with it; the air was richly heavy with a fragrance that caressed the nostrils; the stirring currents of this air brought faint, far bird-songs, and the musical tones of the natives, and blended them in a symphony to which the murmuring sea lent undertone. The touch of the sun and of the sun-warmed wind was as caress ing as the touch of a woman’s hand. And to the fifth sense of men hardened to salt-horse and the rough fare of the sea, the fruit the natives brought was delight unutterable. Beauty made for the eye, the ear, the nose, the hand, the tongue—this lay all about them.