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Large, massive men with drooping blond mustaches ideal characters for the roles of pirates tended to squeeze tears out of their eyes at odd moments. When the ship was twelve hours on its way, the atmosphere inside it was funereal. The spearmen did not even gorge themselves on the food with which the yacht was stocked. And when a Darthian gentleman lost his appetite, something had to be wrong.
So somebody might try to pick a quarrel under one of the finer points of etiquette when it would be disgrace to use anything but standard Darthian implements for massacre. Hoddan admitted that he did not feel quarrelsome. They rode on after a time, and in late afternoon the towers and battlements of the castle they sought appeared. The ground here was only gently rolling.
He had a good deal of confidence in it. It was the reason for his Darthian crew. Nobody'd expect such a thing to be tried, so it almost certainly could be done. But it did have the drawback that the yacht would have to be left behind, a dead loss, when the liner was seized. Hoddan thought it over soberly.
"You are wonderful!" she said with conviction. "I used to cherish that illusion myself," said Hoddan. "But nobody before in all Darthian history has ever fought twenty men, and then thirty men, and destroyed an ambush, and captured a castle, all in one day!" "And without a meal," said Hoddan darkly, "and with a lot of blisters!" He considered. Somebody came running with bread and cheese and wine.
Hoddan could guess that Ghek would have prepared something elaborate in the way of a trousseau for the bride he was to carry screaming from her home. Somehow it was the sort of thing a Darthian would do. Now Fani would enjoyably attire herself in the best of it while "Thal," said Hoddan, "help me get this character into a closet somewhere. He's not to be killed.
It was a request no Darthian gentleman, even in an act of piracy, could possibly refuse. They posed, making pictures of malignant ruffianism.
His seven Darthian crewmen, aware of coming action, dolefully sharpened their two-foot knives. They did not know what else to do, but they were far from happy. Hoddan shared their depression. Such gloomy anticipations before stirring events are proof that a man is not a fool.
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