The captain, dapper in his gold-braided uniform, stood over the body as
it lay on the plank from which it was to descend into the sea. In a
high, clear voice he read that beautiful burial-service for the dead ...
an upward tilt of the board in the hands of two brown-armed seamen, the
body flashed over the side, to swing feet-down, laden with shot, for
interminable days and nights, in the vast tides of the Pacific.
No one reached quickly enough. The Union Jack went off with the body,
like a floral decoration flung after....
* * * * *
We drank the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy,
monosyllabic silence. Immediately after, the cattle were to water and
feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appetites,
with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the
confined existence that was theirs--such an abrupt transition from the
open range--they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed
mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous,
pleading faces....
* * * * *
If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a
few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else
surviving a day's work in the hold.
For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew .
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