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Forward, a white man and two Siwash were standing about the windlass, and when the bows went up a dreary stretch of slate-gray sea opened beyond them, beneath the dripping jibs. The Selache was carrying sail, and lurching over the steep swell at some four knots an hour. Dampier stopped near the wheel, and glanced at Wyllard's oilskins. "You'll have to take them off.
And why did you speak to me?" The question was grave, with the charming gravity that was wont to cross his gayety as shadows chase each other across a sunlit pool. His lips were parted naïvely, his curious slate-gray eyes demanded the truth. The Irishman recognized the demand, and answered it. "Now that you put it to me," he said, thoughtfully, "I'm not sure that I can tell you.
Stern knew at last, with something of clarity, that he was floating easily along an oily current which ran, undulating, beneath a slate-gray mist; he realized that with one hand he was grasping the planks, with the other arm upbearing the girl. Pale and with closed eyes, she lay there in the hollow of his arm, her face free from water, her long hair floating out upon the tide.
I noticed it was the Widow McCabe, with her slate-gray eyes half-closed and gleaming brightly, who waited on Crabtree and heaped his plate with food. What with the interruptions and the nervous tension of the men it was after sunset before the roof of the fort was finished.
The sky was banked full of slate-gray clouds scudding low before a northeast wind that droned its melancholy song in the swaying spruce tops, a song older than the sorrows of men, the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences. A gray, clammy day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes.
Not red, either, or copper-colored. What color, then? For Heaven's sake, what?" He could hardly name it. Through the fog, it struck him as a dull slate-gray, almost a blue. He recalled that once he had seen a child's modeling-clay, much-used and very dirty, of the same shade, which certainly had no designation in the chromatic scale.
The same queer ecstatic brightness was upon his face and he was looking now, not at the grinning cherub, but at the distant horizon line of gray-green ocean and slate-gray sky. Cabot's grip on his shoulder tightened. "So you really want to marry her," he said.... "Humph!... Well, I'll be hanged! Loosh, you you well, you certainly can surprise a fellow when you really make a business of it."
Lavender, naturally enough, was in the highest of spirits, and nothing could exceed the lighthearted endeavors he made to amuse and interest and cheer his companions. Sheila, indeed, sat up later than usual, even although pipes were lit again, and the slate-gray silk likely to bear witness to the fact in the morning.
As chance would have it, just as our cavalcade had halted, and the instant before the volley was fired, I had half-turned in my saddle to gaze back, at the two-color effect of the slate-gray hills and lemon sky. Every other face was looking forward, and I alone saw a figure standing above, in the brief illumination of a rifle flash. It was the figure of Curt Dawson.
Their skins were slate-gray and rubbery, speckled with pinhead-sized bits of quartz that had been formed from perspiration, since their body-tissues were silicone instead of carbon-hydrogen. Their narrow heads were unpleasantly saurian; they had small, double-lidded red eyes, and slit-like nostrils, and wide mouths filled with opalescent teeth.
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