H. De Vere Stacpoole
Satan
A Romance of the Bahamas
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066232245
Table of Contents
CHAPTER XI THE COMING OF CLEARY
CHAPTER XIV HANTS AND OTHER THINGS
CHAPTER XXV THEY FIRE THE FUSE
CHAPTER XXVIII TIDE AND CURRENT
CHAPTER XXIX SATAN IN PARADISE
CHAPTER XXX A SECRET OF THE SAND
CHAPTER XXXI THE GO-ASHORE HAT
CHAPTER XXXV THE VANISHED LIGHT
CHAPTER XXXVI THE WEDDING PRESENT
PART I
SATAN
CHAPTER I
PALM ISLAND
The sky from sea-line to sea-line was crusted with stars, a triumphant, cloudless, tropic night-sky beneath which the Dryad rode at her anchor, lifting lazily to the swell flowing up from beyond the great Bahama bank.
She was Skelton’s boat, a six-hundred-tonner, turbine engined, rigged with everything new in the way of sea valves and patent gadgets, and she had anchored at sundown off Palm Island, a tiny spot, gull haunted, and due west of Andros.
Skelton was a Christchurch man, Bobby Ratcliffe a Brazenose, and Bobby, tonight, as he leaned on the starboard rail smoking and listening to the wash of the waves on the island beach, was thinking of Skelton, who was down below writing up his diary. Before coming on this “winter cruise to the West Indies in my yacht” Bobby did not know that Skelton kept a diary, that Skelton was so awfully Anglican, so precise, so stuffed with the convenances, that he dined in dress clothes even in a hurricane, that he had a very nasty, naggling temper, that he had prayers every Sunday morning in the cabin which the chief steward, the under stewards, and the officers off watch were expected to attend—also Bobby. Two other men were booked for the cruise, but they cried