Explore "Honor of Thieves" by Cutcliffe Hyne on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Windless swell and a burning sky. Ahead, broken palings of mop-headed tree-trunks growing straight across the sea; on one beam, scattered patches of white, where the surf crumbled over hidden coral reef; on the other, the bright blue water of the Mexican Gulf, with its yellow floating tangles of weed. A steamer lunging through the rollers at a small six knots.
On her decks was visible one man, and one alone, and he was on the upper bridge, with his fists on the spokes of the steam steering-wheel. He was swaying with weariness, his eyes were dull and leaden, his cheeks were of an unwholesome yellow, because the tan would not let them turn pale white. Yet his task was one which put to the strain every piece of his alertness. He was taking a steamer drawing nineteen feet through a channel of whose very existence no man on earth besides himself had ever guessed; and already he was deep in sea-territory which the charts of 1893 still mark as "unsurveyed. " He had vaguely found the channel some months before in an open boat, and written cross compass-bearings on the back of a crumpled envelope. These he carried in his head now, and used as the sea-marks closed; but they were a frail reed for much dependence.