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Updated: June 10, 2025
The voice faded as he gained the churchyard wall. The dark thing huddled at the foot of the easel was the painter's dead body. On his discoloured throat there were the marks of fingers. Mechanically Uniacke turned his eyes from those purple and red marks to the picture the dead man had been painting. He saw the figure of a boy in a seaman's jersey and long sea-boots dripping with water.
A queasy odor of drainage stole up from the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a coming and going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling of chains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden silences of trampling sea-boots.
I was so horribly frightened as to be almost paralysed by the sight of that flickering stretch of yellowish light, sparkling and leaping as it swept under the lower bunks and came racing back again to the bulkhead with the windward incline. I fell to stamping upon it in my sea-boots, little fool that I was, hoping in that way to extinguish it.
The flags in the kitchen were strewn with broken plates, and the front kitchen door swung loosely on its hinges. He called Bess, but there was no answer! He went into her room, the bed was untouched since day! Then he pulled on his great sea-boots and cap and went out to look for her. The day was dawning when they brought her in and laid her on the bed of her little room more dead than alive.
For my knowledge of his wealth, the picture of him as he sat in his great sea-boots and coarse seaman's vest, as though it was the most natural garb in the world, and his easy discourse about those far African rivers, made a veritable jumble of my mind. To add to it all, there was the mystery of the shuttered house.
The other made off at a lumbering gait along a second and even narrower passage branching at right angles from that in which the scuffle had taken place. The clatter of the heavy sea-boots died away in the distance.
Then he turned to the side of the mantelpiece and took the church keys from the nail. For everybody knows where everybody else keeps his keys in Farlingford. He forgot to shut the door behind him, and River Andrew, pessimistically getting into his sea-boots, swore at his retreating back.
Besides, those long sea-boots, reaching to the hips and buckled to the leather strap about the waist, held a strange and wonderful fascination for them. They did not know that 'Frisco Kid did not possess such things as shoes that the boots were an old pair of Pete Le Maire's and were three sizes too large for him. Nor could they guess how uncomfortable they were to wear on a hot summer day.
Last night the old Commander might have been a Channel pilot, in his rough sea-jacket and sea-boots. Today he was a King's officer, fighting a King's ship; and no mistaking it. There was a change in his face too: something subtle, almost spiritual, that the boy could feel although he could not define it. In fact the explanation was very simple.
Both watches toiled under both mates, and Captain West strolled the poop in his usual casual way, and gave no orders at all, save in low conventional tones, when Mr. Pike came upon the poop and conferred with him. Miss West, having deserted the scene five minutes before, returned, a proper sea-woman, clad in oil-skins, sou'wester, and long sea-boots.
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