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"Then, say what you will play for!" the great man roared, his face swelling with rage. "Thousand devils and all tonsured! I have a mind to win his life. What will you have against it?" "Against it?" "Ay!" "Yours!" said M. Berthaud, very softly. Bazan drew in his breath sharply: otherwise the silence was so intense that the fall of the wood-ashes from the dying fire could be heard.
So it was the next night, and so the night after that. When three successive days had passed without any manifestation the keen edge of the business became a little blunted and we declared that an end had been made. Ally Bazan returned to his bunk in the fo'c's'le on the fourth night, and the rest of us slept the hours through unconcernedly.
They give each other lick for lick as fast an' as steady as they could stand to it. 'Rastlin', borin' in, boxin' all was alike. The one was just as good as t'other. An' both willin' to the very last. "When Ally Bazan calls it a draw, they gits up and wobbles toward each other an' shakes hands, and Hardenberg he says: "'Stroke, I thanks you a whole lot for as neat a go as ever I mixed in.
He listened, who knew all the dark plans, all the scandals, all the jealousies, all the vile or frantic schemings of a court, that, half French, half Italian, mingled so grimly force and fraud. Nay, when all was told, when Bazan, passing lightly over the resolution he had formed to warn the victim instead of attacking him, came suddenly and lamely to a stop, he still for a time stood silent.
Certain of them spoke a macerated English, and through these Hardenberg, Ally Bazan and Nickerson Strokher remained on board to look after the schooner told to the "Boomskys" a lamentable tale of the reported wreck of a vessel, described by Hardenberg, with laborious precision, as a steam whaler from San Francisco the Tiber by name, bark-rigged, seven hundred tons burden, Captain Henry Ward Beecher, mate Mr.
Surely order would not issue from this chaos in four days' time with only three men to speed the work. But Hardenberg was reassuring, and little Ally Bazan, the colonial, told me they would "snatch her shipshape in the shorter end o' two days, if so be they must."
But for all our resolutions to say nothing to the others about the night's occurrences, we forgot that the tops'l and jib were both set and both drawing. "An' w'at might be the bloomin' notion o' setting the bloomin' kite and jib?" demanded Ally Bazan not half an hour after breakfast.
"My friend," he added, speaking to Bazan with earnest gravity, "I advise you to be quiet. If you do not we shall quarrel." His smile was as easy, his manner as unembarrassed, his voice as steady, as when he had entered the room.
We started and stared at one another, and I watched little Ally Bazan go slowly white to the lips. And even then no word of the ship, except as it might be this from Hardenberg: "What is it? Good God Almighty, I'm no coward, but this thing is getting one too many for me." Then without further speech he went on deck. The air was cool. The sun was not yet up.
And the skins o' sea-otters are selling this very day for seventy dollars at any port in China." "I s'y," piped up Ally Bazan, "I knows a bit about that gyme. They's a bally kind o' Lum-tums among them Chinese as sports those syme skins on their bally clothes as a mark o' rank, d'ye see." "Have you figured at all on the proposition, Cap'n?" inquired Hardenberg.
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