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

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“Half-hanged call it,” said he, continuing to eye me sternly, and yet with a singular expression of curiosity too. “Gibbeted, I mean—triced up—cut down, and then suffered to cut stick on its being discovered that you weren’t choked?”

Weak as I was I turned of a deep red; I felt the blood hot and tingling in my cheeks.

“You’ll not ask me that question when I have my strength,” said I.

“You have been delirious, and nearly all your intelligible talk has been about a gibbet and hanging in chains.”

“Ha!” said I.

“I had learnt off Margate that a man had been hanged at Deal.”

I said “Yes,” and went on eating the sandwich I held.

“We picked you up off Ramsgate, floating on an oar belonging to a boat of one of His Majesty’s ships. Now, should I have found anything suspicious in that? Not at all. Your dress told me you were not a navy Johnny. There was a story, and I was willing to wait and hear it; but when, being housed in this hammock, you turned to and jawed about a gibbet and about hanging in irons; when I’d listen to you singing out for help to unhook the body, to stand clear of the lightning—‘Now is your time,’ you’d sing out; ‘by the legs and up with it,’ ‘’Tis for a poor mother’s sake,’ a poor mother’s sake—I say, when I’d stand by hearkening to what the great dramatist would call the perilous stuff which your soul or your conscience, or whatever it might have been that was working in you, was throwing up as water is thrown up by a ship’s pump, why——”