"A. E. Merritt - The Moon Pool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

"The sparkling devil took them!" Nay, he had been even more explicitЧ"The
sparkling devil that came down from the moon!"
Could it be that the Dweller had swept upon the Brunhilda, drawing down the moon
path Olaf Huldricksson's wife and babe even as it had drawn Throckmartin?
As I sat thinking the cabin grew suddenly dark and from above came a shouting
and patter of feet. Down upon us swept one of the abrupt, violent squalls that
are met with in those latitudes. I lashed Huldricksson fast in the berth and ran
up on deck.
The long, peaceful swells had changed into angry, choppy waves from the tops of
which the spindrift streamed in long stinging lashes.
A half-hour passed; the squall died as quickly as it had arisen. The sea
quieted. Over in the west, from beneath the tattered, flying edge of the storm,
dropped the red globe of the setting sun; dropped slowly until it touched the
sea rim.
I watched itЧand rubbed my eyes and stared again. For over its flaming portal
something huge and black moved, like a gigantic beckoning finger!
Da Costa had seen it, too, and he turned the Suwarna straight toward the
descending orb and its strange shadow. As we approached we saw it was a little
mass of wreckage and that the beckoning finger was a wing of canvas, sticking up
and swaying with the motion of the waves. On the highest point of the wreckage
sat a tall figure calmly smoking a cigarette.
We brought the Suwarna to, dropped a boat, and with myself as coxswain pulled
toward a wrecked hydroairplane. Its occupant took a long puff at his cigarette,
waved a cheerful hand, shouted a greeting. And just as he did so a great wave
raised itself up behind him, took the wreckage, tossed it high in a swelter of
foam, and passed on. When we had steadied our boat, where wreck and man had been
wasЧnothing.
There came a tug at the side Ч, two muscular brown hands gripped it close to my
left, and a sleek, black, wet head showed its top between them. Two bright, blue
eyes that held deep within them a laughing deviltry looked into mine, and a
long, lithe body drew itself gently over the thwart and seated its dripping self
at my feet.
"Much obliged," said this man from the sea. "I knew somebody was sure to come
along when the O'Keefe banshee didn't show up."
"The what?" I asked in amazement.
"The O'Keefe bansheeЧI'm Larry O'Keefe. It's a far way from Ireland, but not too
far for the O'Keefe banshee to travel if the O'Keefe was going to click in."
I looked again at my astonishing rescue. He seemed perfectly serious.
"Have you a cigarette? Mine went out," he said with a grin, as he reached a
moist hand out for the little cylinder, took it, lighted it.
I saw a lean, intelligent face whose fighting jaw was softened by the
wistfulness of the clean-cut lips and the honesty that lay side by side with the
deviltry in the laughing blue eyes; nose of a thoroughbred with the suspicion of
a tilt; long, well-knit, slender figure that I knew must have all the strength
of fine steel; the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps of
Britain's navy.
He laughed, stretched out a firm hand, and gripped mine.
"Thank you really ever so much, old man," he said.
I liked Larry O'Keefe from the beginningЧbut I did not dream as the Tonga boys
pulled us back to the Suwarna how that liking was to be forged into man's strong