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Updated: April 30, 2025
I was awakened by a tremendous crash on the bridge-deck above my cabin, a heeling over of the ship that nearly dumped me out of my berth, and what seemed like a solid spout of water pouring in through my open weather porthole, with the wind howling a devil's death-song through the rigging and an uninterrupted smash bang! above my head.
There was the excitement too. The old bad Irish blood comes out in the love of a row. "In Buenos Ayres I had a letter from Aunt Rebecca. Rosa had a baby, but it was dead as soon as born. The old woman said I'd better come home. I remember walking up and down the bridge-deck that night, thinking things out under the stars. I knew Rosa would like to go to England.
Throwing on a rain coat over my pajamas, I went outside and up the ladder leading to the bridge-deck; and as head and shoulders rose above the deck level, a wall of hot, wind-borne rain struck me rain so hot it felt almost scalding that almost swept me off the ladder. If it had I should probably have become food for the fishes.
The warning had sounded for those going ashore, and the numerous gangways were crowded. Passengers lined the promenade-deck, shouting and waving to the crowd on the wharf below. From the bridge-deck the captain could be heard cheerfully swearing through a megaphone at the second officer below.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon and Kit Askew lounged in a chair on the bridge-deck as the Rio Negro steamed slowly across the long swell of the Caribbean. The wrinkled undulations sparkled with reflected light in a dazzling pattern of blue and silver, and then faded to green and purple in the shadow of the ship.
Now they were going south across the Caribbean on a business venture. By and by Adam came slowly along the bridge-deck. The three years had marked a change in him and Kit thought he did not look well. Adam suffered now and then from malarial ague, caught in the mangrove swamps. He was thin, his yellow face was haggard, and his shoulders were bent.
He went through his toilet with solemn deliberation, and then he opened the chart-house door and went out beneath the baking sunshine of the bridge-deck beyond. A cluster of Krooboys stood at the further end of it, cackling with talk, and at sight of him they called their friends on the main deck below, who began to come up as fast as they could get foot on the ladders.
All day long the sky was heavily overcast with dense, low-hanging, dark gray clouds, which, while wholly obscuring the sun, seemed to focus its rays upon us like a vast burning-glass; wherefore it was expedient for the two pajama-clad passengers to keep well within the shelter of the bridge-deck awning. Toward sunset, a dense black wall of cloud settled upon the western horizon, aft of us.
It was an affront to his dormant and masculine spirit of guardianship; it seemed a blow in the teeth of his nurturing instinct, an overriding of his prerogatives of a man and a husband. "While you're making love to him on the bridge-deck, on moonlight nights!" he flung back at her, bitterly. "Do you think I could?" she murmured, with a ghost of a sigh. Durkin emitted a little impatient oath.
Under this and the after deck were the engine-room and the galley, and forward of these were the cabin and two small staterooms. At the bow and in the stern were two tall slim masts that had been erected solely for the extension of a radio aerial. The hull was painted white with a blue stripe midway between the bridge-deck level and the water line.
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