Adventure stories; Gold mines and mining -- Fiction; Love stories; Mutiny -- Fiction; Sea stories
Now he knew that his ignorance was colossal. Such men were not complex,
they moved by instinct rather than reason, they were not guided by
conscience, the values of right and wrong were not intuitive with them,
muscle rather than mind ruled their universe.
Yet Rainey could not solve them, and Lund knew them as one may know a
favorite book.
Lund had brains, cunning, brute force that commanded a respect not all
bred of being weaker. In a way he was magnificent. And Rainey vaguely
heralded trouble when Captain Simms was at last given to the deep. He
felt certain that the hunters under Deming were hatching something but,
in the main, his mental prophecy of trouble coming was connected with
the girl.
Lund had shown no disrespect to her, rather the opposite. But the girl
showed hatred of Lund and, in minor measure, of Rainey. Some of this
would die out, naturally. Rainey intended to attempt an adjustment in
his own behalf. But he held the feeling that Lund would not tolerate
this hatred against him on the part of the girl. Such scorn would arouse
something in the giant's nature, something that would either strike
under the lash, or laugh at it.
Dimly, Rainey saw these things as the giant gropings of sex, not as he
had known it, surrounded by conventionalities, by courtesies of
twentieth-century veneering, but a law, primitive, irresistible,
sweeping away barriers and opposition, a thing bigger even than the lust
of gold; the lure of woman for man, and man for woman.
Both Lund and the girl, he felt, would have this thing in greater
measure than he would. He shared his life with too many things, with
books, with amusements, with the social ping-pong of the level in which
he ordinarily moved.
There had been once a girl, perhaps there still was a girl, whom Rainey
had known on a visit to the camp-palace of a lumber king, high in the
Sierras, a girl who rode and hunted and lived out-of-doors, and yet
danced gloriously, sang, sewed and was both feminine and masculine, a
maddening latter-day Diana, who had swept Rainey off his feet for the
time.
But he had known that he was not up to her standards, that he was but a
paper-worm, aside from his lack of means. That latter detail would, he
knew, have bothered him far more than her. But she announced openly that
she would only mate with a man who had lived. He rather fancied that it
had been a challenge--one he had not taken up. The matrix of his own
life just then was too snug a bed. Well, he was living now, he told
himself.
On the border of dreams he was brought back by a strange noise on deck,
a rush of feet, many voices, and topping them all, the bellow of Lund,
roaring, not for help, but in challenge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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