Golden Treasure 777

Golden Treasure 777 Online Casino Experience: The Perfect Combination of Tradition and Innovation! CHAPTER IX MOVING THE MENAGERIE,Through the dusky twilight, soft with woodland dews and sweet with odor of ferns and wild flowers, Billy walked slowly. For the first time in long days his heart felt at peace. The canker of loneliness that had gnawed at his spirit was there no longer. It was a pretty good old world after all.,Billy was standing up now, his perplexed face turned questioningly on his chums.,"Here is her dog anyhow!" exclaimed the Admiral, as the little animal marched into the room and stood near Lucy's chair with fore-foot lifted as though she awaited her mistress.,"Oh, I must say that Willium does do somethin' worth while, once in a long while," returned her neighbor, grudgingly. "But Anson, now—"，"But," said Captain Acton, who was perhaps helped to a display of comparative composure of mind by the Admiral's reception of the news, "though if possible we shall sail to-morrow evening or the following day in pursuit, my opinion is, sir, that even if Mr Lawrence were left to his own shifts he would never be able to compass his undertaking. First of all, he has a highly respectable man, who has proved a good servant to me, to deal with in his mate. Will Mr Eagle permit him to carry the Minorca to Rio? Will the crew have nothing to say? What will be thought by all hands when it gets about that my daughter is on board, a prisoner in confinement in the cabin? And is my daughter so enamoured of Mr Lawrence that because he has placed her in a highly equivocal[Pg 222] situation she will be willing to marry him, or to have anything to say to him on their arrival at Rio?"，"Yes, sir," answered Pledge.，He unclasped his hands and buried his purple face, and stood rocking and reeling as though he were about to fall in a fit, and sobbed twice or thrice with that dreadful note of grief in his dry-eyed agony, which makes the fearlessness of manhood in suffering one of the most pitiful, painful and pathetic of spectacles. Captain Acton laid his hand on the Admiral's shoulder.It might be thought that the first person[Pg 420] in the group this gentleman's eyes fastened upon was Lucy. She would be held to appeal in her sweetness, colour, freshness, and youth to a sailor as a nosegay of lovely flowers to a lover of flowers who for months has lived forlorn in a desert of sand. But instead of looking at Lucy, the lieutenant stared at the Admiral with a very great deal of visible speculation in the screwed-up cock of his eye, till his face relaxed with these words: "Pray, sir, did you ever hear of Billy Lawrence?"

"Anse!" she snorted. "Who's talkin' about Anse? It's Croaker I mean. Look here what that darlin' crow brought me jest a few minutes ago.","Oh, I have no taste for acting. I have no ambition to be an actress. This effort was forced upon me. How was I to disgust him, sir?","No use tryin' to wake Maurice," she said as she turned to go. "As well try to wake the dead. Remember, you boys get up when I call you.",Croaker hopped to a lower branch and peered in after his master. Then, catching sight of a doughnut which had spilled from Billy's pocket, he fluttered down to the ground, and with many caressing croaks proceeded to make a meal of it.,Mr Lawrence easily perceived that he didn't,[Pg 154] and went on his way always hunting with his eyes. Past the bridge he met another old man, a peasant with silver hair, fit, dressed as he was, to walk upon any stage, and immediately take part in any performance that included a peasant, a foster-child, and a baron. This white hair gave him a reverend look, and his legs were strangely bandaged round about, and his smock was a gown in which he could have preached a sermon without exciting much suspicion as to the propriety of his dress.,"Don't enter the cabin for half an hour. Then go in and clear up. And if she speaks, make no answer, and take no notice of her, but clean up the mess.",But the essential object of Captain Weaver and the very first desire of Captain Acton and the Admiral was the overtaking of the Minorca, her capture, and the rescue of Lucy. To this end it was extremely necessary that they should speak ships to ascertain if the barque whose rig would make her remarkable had been sighted or spoken, and if so when and where? They had fallen in with two or three vessels which after very careful inspection they had considered safe to speak. But they could obtain no information. Nothing answering to a ship rigged as the Minorca was had been sighted. So Captain Weaver stuck as best he could to his course for Rio, though much hindered by opposing winds. It was to be hoped if the Aurora lay fair in the wake[Pg 346] of the Minorca that the winds which had delayed the schooner had also baffled the barque.,He strayed into the beech grove sighing, striving to realize all that had suddenly happened to him. Never in all his dreams had he imagined such a face could belong to mortal girl. He must see her again—yes, he must see her soon again—perhaps speak with her. The very thought of it made him dizzy.,"The Aurora," cried the Admiral with a sudden elation, which might have passed as the flare-up of a man in his cups who has sat for a while in maudlin dejection. "By heavens, Acton, you have hit it! where should I find such a vessel for this purpose? Why, aboard of her in a few days you would be alongside the Minorca, if you are fair in the scent of the trail of her wake, and wanting that, why, your noble and beautiful little clipper will have been at Rio a fortnight before the barque heaves in sight. May I accompany you?—but you must allow me to do so. You must permit me to be your companion, for, by God, Captain Acton, it is for you to recover your daughter and your property, but it is for me to greet that malefactor, my son.",Captain Acton left the room to refresh himself with a change of apparel, and returned after a brief absence. He was a man of considerable but not powerful self-control. He entered the room with a face that indicated a certain resolution of mind, and said to his sister: "I have been thinking, perhaps, that we have been unnecessarily flurried and somewhat hurried in our conjecture and efforts. I believe I have done well in giving all possible publicity to the fact that Lucy left her home this morning and has not returned. But when I come to reflect that even now it is not twelve hours since she started on her early walk, I consider that she has not been long enough absent to cause us the bitter anxiety we have felt and are feeling. Suppose after visiting the person from whom she received the letter, she breakfasted with a friend on the other side of Old Harbour Town. This friend may have induced her to stop to dinner; a drive might follow. There are hundreds of things in this business which when explained would seem perfectly reasonable, so that at any moment she may turn up and tell us the story of her day's outing, and wonder that we should be so troubled because of an absence that she makes perfectly comprehensible. I shall hold[Pg 201] to this view," he continued firmly, "until the night is advanced. If she does not return to-night then we must take further steps to-morrow.",Then Maurice Keeler whistled. "Whew! Ain't he the old human icicle?" he asked.,The Admiral sat at table before a meal that betokened total neglect on his part of all thought of digestion. The dinner in short, so far as it had been served, consisted of a round of boiled beef, carrots and turnips, and a dish of potatoes smoking in their jackets, a stout loaf of black crust, a dish of fine yellow butter, and at Sir William's elbow was a silver mug with a thick glass bottom, just filled foaming to the brim from a cask of the very best ale at that time brewed in England, and in those days a glass of fine ale was a more delicious draught, more thirst-quenching, more appealing to all the secret feelings of the interior than the finest liquor that has been drunk since, call it what you will..