Page:'Twixt land and sea - tales (IA twixtlandseatale00conr).pdf/257

 stared at him thoughtfully, with his fingers over his lips. Here he was, the favoured vagabond, the only man to whom that infernal girl was likely to tell the story. But he would not find it funny. The story how Lieutenant Heemskirk No, he would not laugh at it. He looked as though he would never laugh at anything in his life.

Suddenly Jasper locked up. His eyes, without any other expression but bewilderment, met those of Heemskirk, observant and sombre.

“Gone on the reef!” he said, in a low, astounded tone. “Onthereef!” he repeated still lower, and as if attending inwardly to the birth of some awful and amazing sensation.

“On the very top of high-water, spring tides,” Heemskirk struck in, with a vindictive, exulting violence which flashed and expired. He paused, as if weary, fixing upon Jasper his arrogant eyes, over which secret disenchantment, the unavoidable shadow of all passion, seemed to pass like a saddening cloud. “On the very top,” he repeated, rousing himself in fierce reaction to snatch his laced cap off his head with a horizontal, derisive flourish towards the gangway. “And now you nay go ashore to the courts, you damned Englishman!” he said.

affair of the brig Bonito was bound to cause a sensation in Makassar, the prettiest, and perhaps the cleanest-looking of all the towns in the Islands; which