Project Gutenberg's The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton, by Louis Becke

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Title: The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton
1902

Author: Louis Becke

Release Date: April 5, 2008 [EBook #24999]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURE OF JAMES SHERVINTON ***

Produced by David Widger

THE STRANGE ADVENTURE OF JAMES SHERVINTON

By Louis Becke

T. FISHER UNWIN, 1902

LONDON

[Illustration: titlepage 010]

CHAPTER I

The night was close and stifling, and the dulled bellowing of the surf
on the weather side of the island told me that the calm was about to
break at last, and in another hour or so the thirsty, sandy soil would
be drenched with the long-expected rain, and the drooping palms and
pandanus trees wave their wearied branches to the cooling trade-wind
once more.

I rose from my rough bed of cane-work and mats, and, lighting my pipe,
went outside, walked down to the beach, and seating myself on a canoe,
looked out upon the wide expanse of ocean, heaving under a dark and
lowering sky, and wondered moodily why I was ever such an idiot as to
take charge of a trading station on such a God-forsaken place as Tarawa
Island in the Gilbert Group.

My house--or rather the collection of thatched huts which formed the
trading station--stood quite apart from the native village, but not so
far that I could not hear the murmur of voices talking in their deep,
hoarse, guttural tongue, and see, moving to and fro on the beach, the
figures of women and children sent out to see that the fleet of canoes
lying on the beach was safe beyond the reach of the waves which the
coming storm would send in sweeping, endless lines across the outer reef
to the foot of the coco-palms fringing the low-lying, monotonous shore.

The day had been a more than usually depressing one with me; and I had
had many depressing days for the last four months. First of all, ever
since I had landed on the island, nearly half a year before, I had
suffered from bad health. Malarial fever, contracted in the gloomy,
rain-soaked forests of New Ireland and New Britain, had poisoned
my blood, soured my tempe