"We'll go at once as soon as we've found some coffee ... and I would
like another knife or two.... Look in that chest. Macro has opened it
for us.... And if you find any tobacco, I'll thank you," and he rooted
rapidly through one broken-open seaman's box, while she did the same by
another.
"Tobacco--I think," she announced presently, ... "and a knife and a
tinder-box."
"Another knife" was his find. "And we'll take these two coats----"
"Whatever for?"
"Well--if any of those screaming deevils, as the mate calls them,
should come after us as we go back, you feel them less through a coat
than on your bare skin."
"I don't think I'll come again."
"Oh, it's quite easy to avoid them, you see. And they soon go if they
find nothing eatable."
"Hideous things! ... Will those cases be coffee?"
"I think so.... We'll chance one anyway.... And those small casks are
rice. We're doing famously. Is there anything else you would like?"
"Heaps of things--spoons, forks, plates, stockings----"
"Here are stockings----" and he delved into his chest again.
"Truly--but twenty sizes too large. These boxes all seem to have
belonged to men. Let us get home before those awful birds come back."
So they returned to the raft and pushed it slowly along the pile, from
place to place, where the various portions of their cargo stood
awaiting them, and Wulfrey wrestled manfully with casks and barrels and
boxes in a way that would have astonished himself mightily three months
before. And The Girl, eager to help as far as she could--brushing
shoulders with him as they hauled and lifted, their hands overlapping
at times, their bare arms in closest contact as they struggled with the
insensate obstinacy of dead weights,--was very conscious of the play of
the corded muscles in his arms and back, and the energy and
determination of the quiet resolute face. And she was at once grateful
and exultant in the knowledge that all the powers this man possessed
were at her service, and that, if occasion should arise, they would be
expended for her to the uttermost and without hesitation.
She experienced sensations entirely new to her. She found them good.
They quickened her blood and stimulated her mind. She had seen much of
men, more perhaps than most for her years, but men of a very different
type,--unmuscular, powdered and peruked and befrilled, with airs and
graces and velvet coats which hid the lack of virility within, and did
duty for it to the world at large; men of wealth and highest culture
and too often of meanest heart, self-seeking, intent only on their
personal satisfactions, self-forgetful only in the pursuit of ignoble
ends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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