Читать книгу The Castaways of the Flag: The Final Adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson онлайн

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“How is the captain?” the young man went on.

“Captain Gould, good man, is in bad case,” John Block replied. “How those blackguards knocked him about! The wound in his head makes him cry out with pain. And it was an officer in whom he had every confidence who stirred those wretches up! No, no! One fine morning, or one fine afternoon, or perhaps one fine evening, that rascal of a Borupt shall make his last ugly face at the yardarm or——”

“The brute! The brute!” the young man exclaimed, clenching his fists in wrath. “But poor Harry Gould! You dressed his wounds this evening, Block——”

“Ay, ay; and when I put him back under the poop, after I had put compresses on his head, he was able to speak to me, though very feebly. ‘Thanks, Block, thanks,’ he said—as if I wanted thanks! ‘And land? What about land?’ he asked. ‘You may be quite sure, captain,’ I told him, ‘that there is land somewhere, and perhaps not very far off.’ He looked at me and closed his eyes.”

And the boatswain murmured in an aside: “Land? Land? Ah, Borupt and his accomplices knew very well what they were about! While we were shut up in the bottom of the hold, they altered the course; they went some hundreds of miles away before they cast us adrift in this boat—in seas where a ship is hardly ever seen, I guess.”