"WEST FROM SINGAPORE" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

The climate is hot and subject to tropical rains. The products were largely wax,
skins, tortoise shell, and forest products. Europeans were predominantly Dutch, with
a few Englishmen and the usual scattering of other nationalities. Around the waterfronts
of this and other such ports are usually a few drifters, vagabonds of the islands,
of various or mixed nationality.
It's been fun for me to go back over these stories in preparing this book for publication.
The world may have changed a good deal since I first wrote them, but a lot of those
ports where the stories took place haven't changed a bit. And I'll be glad if they
never change much.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
GORONTALO
The river is deep and the anchorage not very good. At the time of the story the town
of Gorontalo had a population of about six thousand-a picturesque little port on
the south side of a long peninsula. As in most of these small ports there was, aside
from the local people, a certain number of drifters, adventurers, treasure hunters,
ship's officers out of a job, and men tramping the island for one reason or another,
most of them hoping to pick up an odd dollar here or there.
John Russell has written well of these islands, and so has Somerset Maugham.
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EAST OF GORONTALO
P onga Jim Mayo leaned against the hogshead of tobacco and stared out at the freighter.
His faded khaki suit was rum
pled, his heavy jaw unshaven. The white-topped cap carried the label "Captain" in
gold lettering, but Ponga Jim looked like anything but a master mariner, and felt
even less like one.
Being broke was a problem anywhere. In Gorontalo it became an emergency of the first
water. Everything he owned in the world was on him, from the soft, woven-leather
shoes on his feet to the white-topped cap to the big Colt automatic in its shoulder
holster.
Jim pushed his cap back on his head and glanced at Major Arnold, sitting on a bitt
at the edge of the wharf. In his neat white drill and military mustache he could
have been nothing but a British officer.
"Tell me, William," Jim said, "just what brings a big-shot intelligence officer to
Celebes? Something in the wind?"
"You get around a lot, don't you?" Major William Arnold lighted a cigarette and glanced
up at Jim.
"Yeah, when I can." Ponga Jim grinned. "Right now I'm on the beach, and it looks
like I'm not getting off for a while. But there isn't much in the Indies I don't
know."
Arnold nodded. "I know. You might do me some good, Jim. If you see anything suspicious,
give me a tip, will you? There's a rumor around that while England's busy in Europe,
there
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Louis L'AMOUR
will be a move to pick up some of her colonies in the Far East. This is a Dutch colony,