The Saint E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

He was smiling continually, with such an air of removal above the concerns of ordinary mortals, with such an upward lifting of the head, that his fellows in the boat had called him, from the first day of labor and thirst, „The Saint.” This novelette filled with excitement, suspense, good guys and bad, and plot twists aplenty! Brand is a masterful story teller, slowly revealing his main characters’ unique idiosyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses that make them both human and admirable. Frederick Schiller Faust was an American author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary Westerns under the pen name Max Brand. Faust also created the popular fictional character of young medical intern Dr. James Kildare in a series of pulp fiction stories.

Leseprobe

Contents

I. INTRODUCING THE SAINT

II. SPOILS OF SPAIN

III. "BOARDERS AWAY!"

IV. QUARRY

V. BOOTY FOR ENGLAND

I. INTRODUCING THE SAINT

HE was smiling continually, with such an air of removal above the concerns of ordinary mortals, with such an upward lifting of the head, that his fellows in the boat had called him, from the first day of labor and thirst, “The Saint.”

By the second day they used the name rather in irony than in praise, for they observed that the smile of The Saint–or “Saint George” as some called him–was merely the veiling of a nature bright and hard and cold and edged like Spanish steel.

He was far from a handsome man, for he had a long face, strong in the cheekbones and the jaw like some pharaoh of early Egypt whose portrait comes to us by a sculptor who knew his ruler was a god and therefore endowed him with the greatest strength of flesh and bone, together with the quiet cruelty of an immortal. At a glance, he seemed an old man, for his blond, sun-faded hair made a silver contrast with the ingrained and weathered darkness of his skin. He was not above middle height, but seated on the rowing bench, with only the weight of his shoulders and the flowing power of his long arms visible, his bearing still made him seem loftier than his fellows.

Except for a single rag of cloth, he was as naked now as he had been three days before when he left the piece of wreckage and climbed like an active sea-beast over the side of the canoa. Whatever his ship’s name–and he was silent about it–he was the sole survivor. No doubt the vessel had been flying before the same hurricane that had whipped and staggered the Mary Burton across the Gulf of Mexico; no doubt it had smashed on the same reef that ruined the Bristol ship; but the light canoa, sliding over the teeth of the rocks that sank the Mary Burton, had picked up thirty of the crew of the big merchantman and then, ten leagues beyond as the storm died, the sea gave them this single relic of a dead ship.

He had with him only one item from the wreck, and that was his rapier, which lay now on the floor of the canoa between his feet. For three days the long arms and the hard hands of The Saint swayed an oar, while thirst whitened his lips and fixed the smile upon them, for the sea had spoiled the water which the canoa carried. In the three days he did not speak three words, but his silence and his labor and that sword between his feet had won the respect of his rescuers.

Even Captain Harry Dane, who commanded the canoa and to whom men were merely so many hands to level guns or to hold cutlasses, looked upon The Saint with a considering eye, and so did Harry Dane’s crew. There were twenty of them and hardly two of one nationality, but all were strong, all were lean and fit for trouble as hungry cats.

If they were cats, one could imagine what mice they expected to catch at sea. In the reign of jolly Charles II, even the merest landlubber would have known what to think if he had seen, slipping among the islands or along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, a fifty-foot boat hollowed by fire from the trunk of one enormous tree, manned by a nondescript crew, with a single light cannon in the bow, and plentifully supplied with long-barreled muskets, pistols, knives, cutlasses, and axes. He would have said: “Here is a precious group of those sea-devils and man-quellers, the buccaneers–and God have mercy on my soul!”

These fellows had looked with wonderful scorn on the human driftage which they had picked from the waves. More than once, during the three terrible days of sun and thirst, they had seemed about to pitch the rescued back into the sea from which they had come; but now all the men in the boat, from the Mosquito Indian in the bows to the least of the men of the Mary Burton, were on their feet agape and staring. Some rubbed their dry throats, and some held out their hands as though to invite the mercy of heaven, and into the reddened eyes of all came a bright glimmer of hope. For over the edge of the horizon, blue as the sky but glinting with white like a cloud, loomed a big three-master, hull down, and laying a course well south and east of the canoa.

“Down, down!” shouted Captain Harry Dane. “And spring on the oars, every man of you. Maybe she means silks and wine for all of us and pieces of eight in every man’s purse. Maybe she means that our voyage is made, but at the least she means a cask of water!”

Now their lives lay in the grip of their hands and the strain of their own backs. They bent the oars and set them groaning. They pulled with their heads dropped on their shoulders, their eyes blind, their lips stretched until they cracked to the blood, and the light canoa began to leap on the waves like a fish.

“Steady and easy!” roared Harry Dane. “She sights us! She turns to us! She changes her course! Elia, what do you make of her?”

The Italian left the sweep at which he was working and stood up to peer from beneath his hands.

“She don’t sit down in the sea like an Englishman,” he said. “Her sails are cut too loose and full to be a Frenchman. She’s a Spaniard, signore.”

FROM fifty throats came a groan of misery. The rowing fell away to a futile splashing of the water. And The Saint, as he looked toward the blue-white sails of the stranger, leaned and gathered his rapier into his hand.