Adventure by Jack London (best motivational books of all time .txt) đ
- Author: Jack London
- Performer: -
Book online «Adventure by Jack London (best motivational books of all time .txt) đ». Author Jack London
âYou see, I had read and dreamed about romance all my life,â she was saying, âbut I never, in my wildest fancies, thought that I should live it. It was all so unexpected. Two years ago I thought there was nothing left to me but⊠.â She faltered, and made a moue of distaste. âWell, the only thing that remained, it seemed to me, was marriage.â
âAnd you preferred a cannibal isle and a cartridge-belt?â he suggested.
âI didnât think of the cannibal isle, but the cartridge-belt was blissful.â
âYou wouldnât dare use the revolver if you were compelled to. Or,â noting the glint in her eyes, âif you did use it, toâwell, to hit anything.â
She started up suddenly to enter the house. He knew she was going for her revolver.
âNever mind,â he said, âhereâs mine. What can you do with it?â
âShoot the block off your flag-halyards.â
He smiled his unbelief.
âI donât know the gun,â she said dubiously.
âItâs a light trigger and you donât have to hold down. Draw fine.â
âYes, yes,â she spoke impatiently. âI know automaticsâthey jam when they get hotâonly I donât know yours.â She looked at it a moment. âItâs cocked. Is there a cartridge in the chamber?â
She fired, and the block remained intact.
âItâs a long shot,â he said, with the intention of easing her chagrin.
But she bit her lip and fired again. The bullet emitted a sharp shriek as it ricochetted into space. The metal block rattled back and forth. Again and again she fired, till the clip was emptied of its eight cartridges. Six of them were hits. The block still swayed at the gaff-end, but it was battered out of all usefulness. Sheldon was astonished. It was better than he or even Hughie Drummond could have done. The women he had known, when they sporadically fired a rifle or revolver, usually shrieked, shut their eyes, and blazed away into space.
âThatâs really good shooting ⊠for a woman,â he said. âYou only missed it twice, and it was a strange weapon.â
âBut I canât make out the two misses,â she complained. âThe gun worked beautifully, too. Give me another clip and Iâll hit it eight times for anything you wish.â
âI donât doubt it. Now Iâll have to get a new block. Viaburi! Here you fella, catch one fella block along storeroom.â
âIâll wager you canât do it eight out of eight ⊠anything you wish,â she challenged.
âNo fear of my taking it on,â was his answer. âWho taught you to shoot?â
âOh, my father, at first, and then Von, and his cowboys. He was a shotâDad, I mean, though Von was splendid, too.â
Sheldon wondered secretly who Von was, and he speculated as to whether it was Von who two years previously had led her to believe that nothing remained for her but matrimony.
âWhat part of the United States is your home?â he asked. âChicago or Wyoming? or somewhere out there? You know you havenât told me a thing about yourself. All that I know is that you are Miss Joan Lackland from anywhere.â
âYouâd have to go farther west to find my stamping grounds.â
âAh, let me seeâNevada?â
She shook her head.
âCalifornia?â
âStill farther west.â
âIt canât be, or else Iâve forgotten my geography.â
âItâs your politics,â she laughed. âDonât you remember âAnnexationâ?â
âThe Philippines!â he cried triumphantly.
âNo, Hawaii. I was born there. It is a beautiful land. My, Iâm almost homesick for it already. Not that I havenât been away. I was in New York when the crash came. But I do think it is the sweetest spot on earthâHawaii, I mean.â
âThen what under the sun are you doing down here in this God-forsaken place?â he asked. âOnly fools come here,â he added bitterly.
âNielsen wasnât a fool, was he?â she queried. âAs I understand, he made three millions here.â
âOnly too true, and that fact is responsible for my being here.â
âAnd for me, too,â she said. âDad heard about him in the Marquesas, and so we started. Only poor Dad didnât get here.â
âHeâyour fatherâdied?â he faltered.
She nodded, and her eyes grew soft and moist.
âI might as well begin at the beginning.â She lifted her head with a proud air of dismissing sadness, after, the manner of a woman qualified to wear a Baden-Powell and a long-barrelled Coltâs. âI was born at Hilo. Thatâs on the island of Hawaiiâthe biggest and best in the whole group. I was brought up the way most girls in Hawaii are brought up. They live in the open, and they know how to ride and swim before they know what six-times-six is. As for me, I canât remember when I first got on a horse nor when I learned to swim. That came before my A B Câs. Dad owned cattle ranches on Hawaii and Mauiâbig ones, for the islands. Hokuna had two hundred thousand acres alone. It extended in between Mauna Koa and Mauna Loa, and it was there I learned to shoot goats and wild cattle. On Molokai they have big spotted deer. Von was the manager of Hokuna. He had two daughters about my own age, and I always spent the hot season there, and, once, a whole year. The three of us were like Indians. Not that we ran wild, exactly, but that we were wild to run wild. There were always the governesses, you know, and lessons, and sewing, and housekeeping; but Iâm afraid we were too often bribed to our tasks with promises of horses or of cattle drives.
âVon had been in the army, and Dad was an old sea-dog, and they were both stern disciplinarians; only the two girls had no mother, and neither had I, and they were two men after all. They spoiled us terribly. You see, they didnât have any wives, and they made chums out of usâwhen our tasks were done. We had to learn to do everything about the house twice as well as the native servants did itâthat was so that we should know how to manage some day. And we always made the cocktails, which was too holy a rite for any servant. Then, too, we were never allowed anything we could not take care of ourselves. Of course the cowboys always roped and saddled our horses, but we had to be able ourselves to go out in the paddock and rope our horsesââ
âWhat do you mean by ROPE?â Sheldon asked.
âTo lariat them, to lasso them. And Dad and Von timed us in the saddling and made a most rigid examination of the result. It was the same way with our revolvers and rifles. The house-boys always cleaned them and greased them; but we had to learn how in order to see that they did it properly. More than once, at first, one or the other of us had our rifles taken away for a week just because of a tiny speck of rust. We had to know how to build fires in the driving rain, too, out of wet wood, when we camped out, which was the hardest thing of allâexcept grammar, I do believe. We learned more from Dad and Von than from the governesses; Dad taught us French and Von German. We learned both languages passably well, and we learned them wholly in the saddle or in camp.
âIn the cool season the girls used to come down and visit me in Hilo, where Dad had two houses, one at the beach, or the three of us used to go down to our place in Puna, and that meant canoes and boats and fishing and swimming. Then, too, Dad belonged to the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club, and took us racing and cruising. Dad could never get away from the sea, you know. When I was fourteen I was Dadâs actual housekeeper, with entire power over the servants, and I am very proud of that period of my life. And when I was sixteen we three girls were all sent up to California to Mills Seminary, which was quite fashionable and stifling. How we used to long for home! We didnât chum with the other girls, who called us little cannibals, just because we came from the Sandwich Islands, and who made invidious remarks about our ancestors banqueting on Captain Cookâwhich was historically untrue, and, besides, our ancestors hadnât lived in Hawaii.
âI was three years at Mills Seminary, with trips home, of course, and two years in New York; and then Dad went smash in a sugar plantation on Maui. The report of the engineers had not been right. Then Dad had built a railroad that was called âLacklandâs Folly,ââit will pay ultimately, though. But it contributed to the smash. The Pelaulau Ditch was the finishing blow. And nothing would have happened anyway, if it hadnât been for that big money panic in Wall Street. Dear good Dad! He never let me know. But I read about the crash in a newspaper, and hurried home. It was before that, though, that people had been dinging into my ears that marriage was all any woman could get out of life, and good-bye to romance. Instead of which, with Dadâs failure, I fell right into romance.â
âHow long ago was that?â Sheldon asked.
âLast yearâthe year of the panic.â
âLet me see,â Sheldon pondered with an air of gravity. âSixteen plus five, plus one, equals twenty-two. You were born in 1887?â
âYes; but it is not nice of you.â
âI am really sorry,â he said, âbut the problem was so obvious.â
âCanât you ever say nice things? Or is it the way you English have?â There was a snap in her gray eyes, and her lips quivered suspiciously for a moment. âI should recommend, Mr. Sheldon, that you read Gertrude Athertonâs âAmerican Wives and English Husbands.ââ
âThank you, I have. Itâs over there.â He pointed at the generously filled bookshelves. âBut I am afraid it is rather partisan.â
âAnything un-English is bound to be,â she retorted. âI never have liked the English anyway. The last one I knew was an overseer. Dad was compelled to discharge him.â
âOne swallow doesnât make a summer.â
âBut that Englishman made lots of troubleâthere! And now please donât make me any more absurd than I already am.â
âIâm trying not to.â
âOh, for that matterââ She tossed her head, opened her mouth to complete the retort, then changed her mind. âI shall go on with my history. Dad had practically nothing left, and he decided to return to the sea. Heâd always loved it, and I half believe that he was glad things had happened as they did. He was like a boy again, busy with plans and preparations from morning till night. He used to sit up half the night talking things over with me. That was after I had shown him that I was really resolved to go along.
âHe had made his start, you know, in the South Seasâpearls and pearl shellâand he was sure that more fortunes, in trove of one sort and another, were to be picked up. Cocoanut-planting was his particular idea, with trading, and maybe pearling, along with other things, until the plantation should come into bearing. He traded off his yacht for a schooner, the Miele, and away we went. I took care of him and studied navigation. He was his own skipper. We had a Danish mate, Mr. Ericson, and a mixed crew of Japanese and Hawaiians. We went up and down the Line Islands, first, until Dad was heartsick. Everything was changed. They had been annexed and divided by one power or another, while big companies had stepped in and gobbled land, trading rights, fishing
Comments (0)