Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/342

314 rowing; they bent backward and forward spasmodically, the tholes moaned at each stroke of the oars, and the water dropping from the blades dragged over the surface of the water a trail of carbuncles.

From the vessel, the point aimed at by this passionate regatta, they had seen the coming of this flotilla which, from a distance, looked like a bank of migratory fish, so compact and close-formed was it. A crowd hurried to the deck. The captain and the crew suspected and smelled in these devilish rowers emissaries from the shopkeepers and purveyors of the port.

The captain, for whom this was not a first encounter with these landsharks, changed color and commenced to swear like a devil. The sailors, although they had plenty of ground for bitterness against the race, pretended anger, but only grumbled with their lips; they were intrigued by the idea of the pleasures, paid for at usurious rates, but so copious and so intense withal, procured for them by these middlemen.

At a cable's length from the boat the first canoes hailed the captain, who greeted their overtures with a recrudescence of oaths and even threatened, if they did not decamp quickly, to shoot them like a flock of wild ducks. But the runners, incomparable dodgers, possessed their maritime code. They avoided its penalties as adroitly as they shunned the rapids and shoals of the Scheldt. The commands of the Englishman were pure rhodomontade! He would take care not to get into a nasty scrape. No Belgian law protected him from having his boat invested by victualer's clerks.

Thus, strong in the connivance of the law, the rascals pretended a wheedling conciliation in proportion as the raging man hurled them, in default of other shot, the largest projectiles from his arsenal of oaths.