With a cry like a beast, Gloom Achanna swung to one side, stumbled, rose, and leaped into the darkness.
For some minutes Sheumais and Katreen stood, silent, apart, listening to the crashing sound of his flight—the race of the murderer against the pursuing shadow of the Grave.
A BEWITCHED SHIP
BY W. CLARK RUSSELL
William Clark Russell, the son of Henry Russell, the composer of "Cheer, Boys, Cheer" and other songs, was born in New York in 1844. At the age of thirteen he entered the British merchant service and followed the sea till twenty-one, after which he devoted himself to story-writing. It is a common-place of criticism to say that no one writes better sea stories than the author of the famous "Wreck of the Grosvenor." Since 1890 he has lived at Bath, in the west of England. The present story is taken from a volume entitled "On the Fo'k'sle Head."
A BEWITCHED SHIP
By W. CLARK RUSSELL
"About ten years ago," began my friend, Captain Green, "I went as second mate of a ship named the 'Ocean King.' She'd been an old Indiaman in her time, and had a poop and topgallant forecastle, though alterations had knocked some of the dignity out of her. Her channels had been changed into plates with dead-eyes above the rail, and the eye missed the spread of the lower rigging that it naturally sought in looking at a craft with a square stern and windows in it, and checkered sides rounding out into curves, that made a complete tub of the old hooker. Yet, spite of changes, the old-fashioned grace would break through. She looked like a lady who has seen better days, who has got to do work which servants did for her in the times when she was well off, but who, let her set her hand to what she will, makes you see that the breeding and the instincts are still there, and that she's as little to be vulgarized by poverty and its coarse struggles as she could be made a truer lady than she is by money. Ships, like human beings, have their careers, and the close of some of them is strange, and sometimes hard, I think.
"The 'Ocean King' had been turned into a collier, and I went second mate of her when she was full up with coal for a South African port. Yet, this ship, that was now carrying one of the dirtiest cargoes you could name, barring phosphate manure, had been reckoned in her day a fine passenger vessel, a noble Indiaman indeed—her tonnage was something over eleven hundred—with a cuddy fitted up royally. Many a freight of soldiers had she carried round the Cape, many an old nabob had she conveyed—ay, and Indian potentates, who smoked out of jeweled hookahs, and who were waited upon by crowds of black servants in turbans and slippers. I used to moralize over her just as I would over a tomb, when I had the watch and was alone and could let my thoughts run loose.