“Ah!” he sighed. “Some class!” He set the bottle in the rack and breathed deeply. “Nice little berths, eh? Laura—she’d look fine here. She’d fit great, as crew. And if she gave me any of her lip, then—”
His fist, doubled, swayed under the lamp-shine as he surveyed it proudly.
“Great little boat,” judged Hal. “She’ll outsail ’em all, and I’m the boy to make her walk!”
Huge, heavy, evil-faced, he stood there, swaying as the _Kittiwink_ rode the swells. He cast open his reefer, took out pipe and tobacco, and lighted up. As he sucked at the stem, his hard lips, corded throat and great jaws gave an impression of brutal power, in no wise differing from that of old Alpheus Briggs, half a hundred years ago.
“Make me go to school and wear a blue ribbon,” he gibed, his voice a contrabass to the shrilling of the wind aloft in the rig, the groaning and creaking of the timbers. “Make me go round apologizing to drunken bums. Like—hell!”
A gleam of metal from the opened suit-case attracted his eyes. He took up the kris, and with vast approval studied it. The feel of the lotus-bud handle seemed grateful to his palm. Its balance joyed him. The keen, wavy blade, maculated with the rust of blood and brine, and with the groove where lay another stain whose meaning he knew not, held for him a singular fascination. Back, forth he slashed the weapon, whistling it through the air, flashing it under the lamp-light.
“Fine!” he approved, with thickened speech. “Glad I got it—might come handy in a pinch, what?”
He stopped swinging the kris, and once more observed it, more closely still. Tentatively he ran his thumb along the edge, testing it, then scratched with some inchoate curiosity at the poison crystallized in the groove.
“Wonder what that stuff is, anyhow?” said he. “Doesn’t look like the rest. Maybe it’s the blood of some P. I., like McLaughlin. _That_ ought to make a dirty-looking stain, same as this. Maybe it will, some of these days, if he crosses my bows. Maybe it will at that!”
Hal tossed the kris into the berth, and was just about to reach for the bottle again when a _thump-thump-thumping_ along the hull startled his attention.
“What the devil’s that, now?” he growled, stiffening. The sound of voices, then a scramble of feet on deck, flung him toward the companion-ladder. “_Who’s there?_”