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Colonel Sommerton saw this, and it added an enfeebling increment to his mental torpor. "Fellow-citizens," he presently roared, in his melodious bass voice, "I am proud of this honor." He was not sure of another word as he stood, with bagging trousers and sweat-beaded face, but he made a superhuman effort to call up his comatose wits.
They merely paused long enough to draw one shirt sleeve across the sweat-beaded foreheads it was a very early spring in Manhattan and the first heat was hard to bear and went at their task harder than ever. Hogarty had one other reason that morning which accounted for his absolute serenity.
An oath burst from him, but it did not move his great, immobile face into betraying lines. Yet when he tried to speak his voice trailed off in an unmeaning rattle. He tried twice, and his hands were sweat-beaded. Then he heaved his great bulk upward and stood over me, his baboon arms reaching for my throat. "The marriage was honest? Speak." I could respect that feeling.
And the pine-needles and soft moss were very red, in spots. Stern had his pistol out too, by now. For behind and on his flanks, like ferrets hanging to a hunted creature, the swarm was closing in. The engineer, his face very white and drawn, veins standing out on his sweat-beaded forehead, heard Beatrice cry out to him, but he could not understand her words.
It was close to midday and the heat, gathered in the rocky ways, was like a heaviness in the air itself. The Tatars had shucked their heavy jackets and rolled the fur brims of their hats far up their heads away from their sweat-beaded faces. And at every halt they passed from hand to hand the skin bag of kumiss.
But he had no inclination to laugh at the staggering figure, with the haggard, sweat-beaded face and furious eyes. "I said it was long, but we're gettin' there. We're halfway acrost now," his little pipe, mellow-sweet, was in strange contrast with what had come before. "You're a liar, a damnable liar. You've led me into the middle of this place that you don't know any more of than I do."
The captain mounted the gangplank with a steadiness that disproved my first suspicion of his having been on a drunk. He glanced aloft, cast a speculative eye on the stevedores trooping across the waist of the ship, and ascended to the quarter-deck where the mate stood leaning over the rail and uttering directed curses from between sweat-beaded lips.
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