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The lecture was absorbing; and absorbed in the book Lucretia still was, when she heard Dalibard's voice behind: he was looking over her shoulder. "A strange selection for so fair a student! En fant, play not with such weapons." "But is this all true?" "True, though scarce a fragment of the truth. The physician was a sorry chemist and a worse philosopher.
She stood up over her anchors like a piece of architecture, poising like a tower; the sailor in him paid tribute to the builders who had conceived her beauty. They had devised a ship: it needed Mr. Fant and his colleagues to degrade her into a sea-going prophet and give aptness to her by-name of "Hell-packet."
Fant whirled on his heel, and a fist took Goodwin on the edge of the jaw and sent him gasping and clucking on to his back; while, with the precision of a movement rehearsed and practiced, Mr. Fant's booted foot swung forward and kicked him into the scuppers. He lay there on his back, looking up in an extremity of terror and astonishment at the unmoved face of the mate.
"Get up, Smith," commanded Mr. Fant. Goodwin obeyed, scarcely conscious of the pain in his face and flank in the urgency of the moment. "Now you get the bucket, same as I told you, and when you've freshened yourself come aft an' I'll start you on a job. See?" "Aye, aye, sir," responded Goodwin mechanically, and started for-ard.
The next spring the line-back steer was a five-year-old. Three winters in that northern climate had put the finishing touches on him. He was a beauty. But Abner Taylor knew he dared not ship him to a market, for there he would have to run a regular gauntlet of inspectors. There was another chance open, however. Fant, Taylor's employer, had many Indian contracts.
Fant sent him, Goodwin had presently a view of the captain's wife. She came to the poop from the cabin companion-way and leaned for a while on the taffrail, seeming to gaze at the town undulating over the hills, dwarfed by the distance.
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