"London, Jack - Adventure" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

accepted the additional reward with a non-committal grunt and went
away down the path to his canoes. Under Sheldon's directions the
house-boys handcuffed the prisoner, by hands and feet, around one
of the pile supports of the house. At eleven o'clock, when the
labourers came in from the field, Sheldon had them assembled in the
compound before the veranda. Every able man was there, including
those who were helping about the hospital. Even the women and the
several pickaninnies of the plantation were lined up with the rest,
two deep--a horde of naked savages a trifle under two hundred
strong. In addition to their ornaments of bead and shell and bone,
their pierced ears and nostrils were burdened with safety-pins,
wire nails, metal hair-pins, rusty iron handles of cooking
utensils, and the patent keys for opening corned beef tins. Some
wore penknives clasped on their kinky locks for safety. On the
chest of one a china door-knob was suspended, on the chest of
another the brass wheel of an alarm clock.

Facing them, clinging to the railing of the veranda for support,
stood the sick white man. Any one of them could have knocked him
over with the blow of a little finger. Despite his firearms, the
gang could have rushed him and delivered that blow, when his head
and the plantation would have been theirs. Hatred and murder and
lust for revenge they possessed to overflowing. But one thing they
lacked, the thing that he possessed, the flame of mastery that
would not quench, that burned fiercely as ever in the disease-
wasted body, and that was ever ready to flare forth and scorch and
singe them with its ire.

"Narada! Billy!" Sheldon called sharply.

Two men slunk unwillingly forward and waited.

Sheldon gave the keys of the handcuffs to a house-boy, who went
under the house and loosed the prisoner.

"You fella Narada, you fella Billy, take um this fella boy along
tree and make fast, hands high up," was Sheldon's command.

While this was being done, slowly, amidst mutterings and
restlessness on the part of the onlookers, one of the house-boys
fetched a heavy-handled, heavy-lashed whip. Sheldon began a
speech.

"This fella Arunga, me cross along him too much. I no steal this
fella Arunga. I no gammon. I say, 'All right, you come along me
Berande, work three fella year.' He say, 'All right, me come along
you work three fella year.' He come. He catch plenty good fella
kai-kai, {2} plenty good fella money. What name he run away? Me
too much cross along him. I knock what name outa him fella. I pay
Seelee, big fella master along Balesuna, one case tobacco catch