United States or Belarus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was accepted as a somebody aboard the Karluk. Tamada cleared away swiftly, and Rainey felt for his own cigarettes. He hesitated a little to smoke in the cabin, thinking of the girl, wondering whether she was on deck, where he intended to go. Some one was snoring in a stateroom off the cabin, and he fancied by its volume it was Lund. It was a divided ship's company, after all.
"I'll answer the question, Lund. Yes, we're all equal. The world is not a democracy. Harris, so far, hasn't had a chance to get the equal share that belongs to him by rights. That's what I meant by saying that the Karluk was a little world of its own. We're all equal on board." "Except Rainey, Tamada an' Sandy. Seems to me yore argumint's got holes in it, Carlsen."
First touching the hatchery at Karluk and then the canneries at Uyak and Chignik, the mail boat visited the settlements on the Island of Unga, and thence covered swiftly the three hundred miles to Dutch Harbor and Unalaska. Again he was fortunate. Within a week he was berthed on a freighter, and on the twelfth day of June set foot in Nome.
Hansen had carelessly sailed too close. The momentum of the Karluk and its slight wave disturbance must have sufficed to upset the equilibrium of the berg, floating with only a third of its bulk above the water. And the displacement had narrowly missed the schooner's side. He got a cup of coffee after dressing warmly, and went up.
He gripped the spokes, and the men ran to the sheets at command while the Karluk shot off at right angles to her previous course, skirting the fog that blanketed the wind but yet allowed sufficient breeze to filter through to give them headway, gliding like a ghost on the new tack to the east. Rainey, tense from the explosion of the shell, jumped below at last and came back exultant.
"The same gentleman," went on Rainey vindictively, "who put chloral in my drink and deliberately shanghaied me aboard the Karluk, so that I only came to at sea, with no chance of return. He, too, was afraid I might give the snap away to my paper, though I would have given him my word not to.
And, out of the north, before the wind, the sea advanced in the long, smooth folds of a weighty swell over which the Karluk wore her way into the breeze, clawing steadily on to the Aleutians and a passage through to Bering Strait. At two bells the hunters began to come on deck for a breath or so of fresh air after the closeness of their quarters, as they invariably did following a poker session.
Without the counting, each would have deliberately waited for the most favorable moment when the schooner hung in the trough and the white can was backed by green water. As it was, it made a far-from-easy mark, slithering, lurching, dipping as the Karluk slid down a wave or met a fresh one, the can often blurred against the blobs of foam.
Tyee Klake said salmon used to come up this river in shoal sixteen miles long, and now Boston men take them all." "It does seem a pity that the Indians don't even have a chance to earn their living in the canneries," said Mr. Strong. "The largest cannery in the world is at Karluk.
She looked at him as if measuring his dependency. "I don't know," she answered dully. "I wish I did. Father's illness started with sciatica, through exposure to the cold and damp. It was better during the time the Karluk was in San Francisco though he had some severe attacks. He said that Doctor Carlsen gave him relief.
Word Of The Day