They, the visitors, were the
officers of the relief-ship on the lookout for castaways and survivors.
But in the course of these preliminaries it became necessary to restrain
Nickerson--not yet wholly recovered from a recent incursion into the
store of Corean champagne. It presented itself to his consideration as
facetious to indulge (when speaking to the Russians) in strange and
elaborate distortions of speech.
"And she sunk-avitch in a hundred fathom o' water-owski."
"--All on board-erewski."
"--hell of dam' bad storm-onavna."
And he persisted in the idiocy till Hardenberg found an excuse for
taking him aside and cursing him into a realization of his position.
In the end--inevitably--the schooner's company were invited to dine at
the post.
It was a strange affair--a strange scene. The coast, flat, gray, dreary
beyond all power of expression, lonesome as the interstellar space, and
quite as cold, and in all that limitless vastness of the World's Edge,
two specks--the hut, its three windows streaming with light, and the
tiny schooner rocking in the offing. Over all flared the pallid
incandescence of the auroras.
The Company drank steadily, and Strokher, listening from the schooner's
quarterdeck, heard the shouting and the songs faintly above the wash and
lapping under the counter. Two hours had passed since the moment he
guessed that the feast had been laid.
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