Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/339

Rh looked over clearance papers and health-billets, and boats coming from the Orient or from Spain, where cholera reigned like a King of Dahomey, were forced to anchor there for a week, the old Fort Frederic.

Already five boats were stationed there, motionless, sullen Leviathans, their fires out, their steam cut off, their smokestacks despoiled of their long banners of smoke. They flew the sinister yellow flag which cut them off, temporarily, from society, the only one which kept at a distance even the runners, who, however, were difficult to discourage.

But the pleasure was only deferred; it would be sufficient for the infected boats or those only under observation to finish their term of quarantine and draw in the sulphurous flag, for the swarm of ruffians who had been lying in wait for them, as a cat watches a bird upon which he cannot get his claws, and who had been made more avid for the prey by their long wait, to fall upon them with the inevitable despotism of a new scourge.

Until then, in order to keep themselves upon the alert, the runners had cast their choice upon The Dolphin, a great Australian three-master just in from the Dutch East Indies and Indo-China. A pilot-boat, profiting by the high tide, had been towing her up from Flushing to Antwerp and she was due to pass Doel at three in the afternoon.

While waiting for the promised ship to rise, from the direction of Bats, above the Polders, our scoundrels flung themselves down upon the grassy dike, behind and below which sank the placid village which they terrorized, like a descent of the Normans in the year one thousand.