Читать книгу Ocean Tramps онлайн

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“Well, that wasn’t your song on the beach at Papaleete,” said Davis, “and seems to me you weren’t backward in making a grab for that gold at Buenodiaz.”

“Maybe I wasn’t,” replied the other, and the conversation wilted while on the tepid wind from the dark-blue sea came the sound of the bow wash answered by the lazy creak of block and cordage.

No longer steering west, but northward towards the line, the Douro brought them nights of more velvety darkness and more tremendous stars, seas more impossibly blue, till, one dawn that looked like a flock of red flamingoes escaping across an horizon of boiling gold, Bud, on the look-out, cried “Land!” and the great sun leaping up astern stripped the curtain away with a laugh and showed them coco-nut trees beyond a broken sea, and beyond the coco-nut trees a misty blue stillness incredibly wonderful and beautiful, till, in a flash, vagueness vanishing, a great lagoon blazed out, with the gulls circling above it, gold and rose and marble-flake white.