"I damn ye!" he cried, raising his arms wildly. "Yes, by the Lord, I
damn ye up and down. May you burn as I burn, where the worm dieth not,
and the fires are not quenched."
So saying, he set his foot down deliberately on the first of the light
footprints she had made in springing from his side--as if he might as
easily as that blot out the memory of his enslavement.
Thereafter the Customs House twitted him, as if it knew the full extent
of his shame. Zinie Shadd called after him to know if he had heard that
voice from the sea yet, in his comings and goings.
"Peter Loud was not so easy hung by the heels," that aged loiterer
affirmed, "shipping as he did along with the lady herself, as bo's'n for
Cap'n Sam Dreed."
Jethro Rackby took to drink somewhat, to drown these utterances, or
perhaps to quench some stinging thirst within him which he knew not to
be of the soul.
When certain of the elders asked him why he did not cut the drink and
take a decent wife, he laughed like a demon, and cried out:
"What's that but to swap the devil for a witch?"
Others he met with a counter question:
"Do you think I will tie a knot with my tongue that I can't untie with
my teeth?"
So he sat by himself at the back windows of a water-front saloon, and
when he caught a glimpse of the water shining there low in its channels
he would shut his lips tight.
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