Free Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) by Henry S. Whitehead, David Stuart Davies Page A

Hospital – my mother very nearly died. She was not a very big or strong person, and I was – er – rather a good-sized baby – weighed seventeen pounds or something outrageous at birth! Queer thing too – I nearly passed out during the first few days myself, they say! Undernourished. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. Yet, that was the verdict of three of New York’s foremost obstetricians who were in on the case in consultation.
    ‘Well, it seems, when I was about ten days old, and out of danger, my father came around in his car – it was a Winton, I believe in those days or perhaps, a Panhard – and carted me off to be baptized. My mother was still in a dangerous condition – they didn’t let her up for a couple of weeks or so after that – and chose that name for me himself, so “Williamson” I’ve been, ever since!’
    We had a really very pleasant time together. Morley was popular with the St Thomas crowd from the very beginning. He was too sensible to mope, and while he didn’t exactly rush after entertainment, we went out a good deal, and there is a good deal to go out to in St Thomas, or was in those days, two years ago, before President Hoover’s Economy Program took our Naval personnel out of St Thomas.
    Morley’s geniality, his fund of stories, his generous attitude to life, the outstanding kindliness and fellowship of the man, brought him a host of new friends, most of whom were my old friends. I was delighted that my prescription for poor old Morley – getting him to come down and stay with me that winter – was working so splendidly.
    It was in company with no less than four of these new friends of Morley’s, Naval Officers, all four of them, that he and I turned the corner around the Grand Hotel one morning about eleven o’clock and walked smack into trouble! The British sailorman of the Navy kind is, when normal, one of the most respectful and pleasant fellows alive. He is, as I have observed more than once, quite otherwise when drunk. The dozen or so British tars we encountered that moment, ashore from the Sloop-of-War Amphitrite , which lay in St Thomas’s Harbor, were as nasty and truculent a group of human-beings as I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. There is no telling where they had acquired their present condition of semi-drunkenness, but there was no question whatever of their joint mood!
    ‘Ho – plasterin’ band o’ brass-hat — — !’ greeted the enormous cockney who seemed to be their natural leader, eyeing truculently the four white-drill tropical uniforms with their shoulder insignia, and rudely jostling Lieutenant Sankers, to whose house we were en route afoot that morning, ‘fink ye owns the ’ole brasted universe, ye does. I’ll show ye!!’ and with that, the enormous bully, abetted by the salient jeers of his following which had, somehow, managed to elude their ship’s Shore Police down to that moment, barged head first into Morley, seizing him first by both arms and leaving the soil-marks of a pair of very dirty hands on his immaculate white drill jacket. Then, as Morley quietly twisted himself loose without raising a hand against this attack, the big cockney swung an open hand, and landed a resounding slap across Morley’s face.
    This whole affair, of course, occupied no more than a few seconds. But I had time, and to spare, to note the red flush of a sudden, and I thought an unprecedented, anger in Morley’s face; to observe the quick tightening of his tremendous muscles, the abrupt tensing of his long right arm, the beautifully-kept hand on the end of it hardening before my eyes into a great, menacing fist; the sudden glint in his deep-set dark-brown eyes, and then – then – I could hardly believe the evidence of my own two eyes – Williamson Morley, on his rather broad pair of feet, was trotting away, leaving his antagonist who had struck him in the face; leaving the rest of us together there in a tight little knot and an extremely