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

unpleasant position on that corner. And then – well, the crisp ‘quarter-deck’ tones of Commander Anderson cut through that second’s amazed silence which had fallen. Anderson had seized the psychological moment to turn-to these discipline-forgetting tars. He blistered them in a cutting vernacular in no way inferior to their own. He keel-hauled them, warming to his task.
    Anderson had them standing at attention, several gaping-mouthed at his extraordinary skill in vituperation, by the time their double Shore Police squad came around the corner with truncheons in hand; and to the tender mercies of that businesslike and strictly sober group we left them.
    We walked along in a complete silence, Morley’s conduct as plainly dominating everything else in all our minds, as though we were five sandwich-men with his inexcusable cowardice blazoned on our fore-and-aft signboards.
    We found him at the foot of the flight of curving steps with its really beautiful metal-wrought railing which leads up to the high entrance of Lieutenant Sankers’s house. We went up the steps and into the house together, and when we had taken off our hats and gone into the ‘hall’, or living room, there fell upon us a silence so awkward as to transcend anything else of the kind in my experience. I, for one, could not speak to save my life; could not, it seemed, so much as look at Morley. There was, too, running through my head a half-whispered bit of thick, native, negro, St Thomian speech, a dialect remark, made to herself, by an aged negress who had been standing, horrified, quite nearby, and who had witnessed our besetting and the fiasco of Morley’s ignominious retreat after being struck full in the face. The old woman had muttered: ‘Him actin’ foo save him own soul, de mahn – Gahd keep de mahn stedfas’!’
    And, as we stood there, and the piling-up silence was becoming simply unbearable, Morley, who quite certainly had not heard this comment of the pious old woman’s, proceeded, calmly, in that mellow, deep baritone voice of his, to make a statement precisely bearing out the old woman’s contention.
    ‘You fellows are wondering at me, naturally. I’m not sure that even Canevin understands! You see, I’ve allowed myself to get really angry three times in my life, and the last time I took a resolution that nothing, nothing whatever, nothing conceivable , would ever do it to me again! I remembered barely in time this morning, gentlemen. The last time, you see, it cost me three weeks of suspense, nearly ruined me, waiting for a roughneck I had struck to die or recover – compound fracture – and I only tapped him, I thought! Look here!’ as, looking about him, he saw a certain corporate lack of understanding on the five faces of his audience.
    And, reaching up one of those inordinately long arms of his to where hung an old wrought-iron-barrelled musket, obviously an ‘ornament’ in Sankers’s house, hired furnished, he took the thing down, and with no apparent effort at all, in his two hands, broke the stock away from the lock and barrel, and then, still merely with his hands, not using a knee for any pressure between them such as would be the obvious and natural method for any such feat attempted, with one sweep bent the heavy barrel into a right-angle.
    He stood there, holding the strange-looking thing that resulted for us to look at, and then as we stood, speechless, fascinated, with another motion of his hands, and putting forth some effort this time – a herculean heave which made the veins of his forehead stand out abruptly and the sweat start up on his face on which the mark of the big cockney’s hand now showed a bright crimson, Williamson Morley bent the gun-barrel back again into an approximate trueness and laid it down on Sankers’ hall table.
    ‘It’s better the way it is, don’t you think?’ he remarked, quietly, dusting his hands together, ‘rather than, probably to have killed that mucker out of Limehouse