Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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“If that beast doesn’t belay his jaw, stuff his mouth full of shingle and gag him.”

I guessed that this gang were satisfied with picking up three men that night, for they looked neither to right nor left for more, and headed on a straight course for their boat. After the ruffian astern of me had been thumped into silence scarce a word was uttered. The sailors seemed weary, as though they had had a long bout of it, and the officer, perhaps, was too sensible of being under the influence of drink to venture to define his state by more words than were absolutely needful. I had heard much of the brutality of the press-gang, of taunts and kicks, of maddening ironic promises of prize money and glory to the miserable wretches torn from their homes or from their ships, of pitiless usage, raw heads, and broken bones. All this I had heard of, but I witnessed nothing of the sort among the men into whose hands I had fallen. In silence we marched along, and the tramp of our feet was returned in a hollow echo from the houses we passed, and the noise, of our tread ran through the length of the feebly lighted street, which the presence of the King’s seamen had desolated as utterly as though the plague had been brought to Deal out of the East, and as though the buildings held nothing but the dead.