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Long, however, it did not last: I could not have been twenty miles from Dover when, on a long reach of straight lines, I made out before me a tarpaulined mass opposite a signal-point: and at once callousness changed to terror within me.
Benton had turned hermit and withdrawn to the most isolated space the vessel provided. It was really not a deck at all only a space between engine-room grating and tarpaulined lifeboats on what was properly the cabin roof. Here, removed from the burnished and ship-shape perfection of the yacht's appointment, he lay carelessly shaven and more carelessly dressed.
He went on to the end of the platform where the planks sloped gently down to a wilderness of sheds, coaling stages and sidings; he could just make out the bulky forms of some tarpaulined cattle-vans and open coal-trucks standing on the lines of metals which gleamed in the scanty gaslights.
After all, what was life but a means whereby to give one's spirit play? And yet again and yet was he no more than a brute himself? What was the use? What good would it all do? And suddenly he loosed his grip, and the inert body of the bosun rolled down the tarpaulined hatch and onto the steel deck. Noyes found himself gasping, almost as if he were in the fight himself.
He wondered what they were about, for the tanks of an empty oil ship are usually left open in fine weather. Presently he heard one of the men say to another as they stamped down the tarpaulined hatch, "There there's as good a prize ring as a man'd want." And then he began to understand. He stayed aft, while through the smoke of one long cigar he thought it out.
Tarpaulined, fastened together by ropes, and guarded from damp by planks laid below them, were some hundreds of kegs and packages all, so far as I could see, marked with curious signs, and in some cases the names of places.
Three men, in the dark, woollen smock and tarpaulined hat of coast fishermen, approached him and, in answer to his inquiry for the master, told him, in an unintelligible mixture of Dutch and German, that he had gone ashore. "His name?" "Maaning Brandelaar." "What is the name of this vessel?" "Bressay."
The greenish pallor and the sweat of mortal agony are upon the face of Beauvayse, thrown back upon the pillow, and looking upwards to where the deluging rain makes thunder on the tarpaulined roof. The atmosphere is heavy with the sour-sickly smell of blood, and lamp-fumes; he draws each breath laboriously, and exhales it with a whistling sound.
Tarpaulined porters swung themselves on to the carriage-steps as we drew up at Dover pier, and warned us not to leave the train, as, owing to the storm, the Calais boat would be an hour late in getting alongside. The Ostend packet, lying beside the quay in full sight of the travellers, lurched giddily at her moorings.
"About midnight the wind began to shift about and came in squalls so hard that we could scarcely stand, so we took in the jib and mizzen, and lay to under the foresail. Of course the hatchways was battened down and tarpaulined, for the seas that came aboard was fearful. When I was standin' there, expectin' every moment that we should founder, a sea came and swept Fred Martin overboard.
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